Legal History Commons^™

Lawyers And Biblical Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer

Thomas L. Shaffer

This is part of a broader exploration of the suggestion that the biblical prophets-Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Nathan, and the others-are sources of ethical reflection and moral example for modern American lawyers. The suggestion appears to be unusual; I am not sure why. The Prophets were, more than anything else, lawyers-as their successors, the Rabbis of the Talmud, were. They were neither teachers nor bureaucrats, not elected officials or priests or preachers. And the comparison is not an ancient curiosity: Much of what admirable lawyer-heroes have done in modern America has been prophetic in the biblical sense-that is, what they …

From Bone Gap To Chicago: A History Of The Local Government Article Of The 1970 Illinois Constitution, 9 J. Marshall J. Prac. & Proc. 697 (1976), Joan G. Anderson, Ann Lousin

Ann M. Lousin

No abstract provided.

The Environmentalist Attack On Environmental Law, John Copeland Nagle

John Copeland Nagle

This essay reviews two books written by leading scholars that express profound dissatisfaction with the ability of environmental law to actually protect the environment. Mary Wood’s “Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age” calls for “deep change in environmental law,” emphasizing the roles that agency issuance of permits to modify the environment and excessive deference to agency decisions play in ongoing environmental destruction. Wood proposes a “Nature’s Trust” built on the public trust doctrine to empower courts to play a much more aggressive role in overseeing environmental decisionmaking. In “Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law …

Auctioning Class Settlements, Jay Tidmarsh

Jay Tidmarsh

Although they promise better deterrence at a lower cost, class actions are infected with problems that can keep them from delivering on this promise. One of these problems occurs when the agents for the class (the class representative and class counsel) advance their own interests at the expense of the class. Controlling agency cost, which often manifests itself at the time of settlement, has been the impetus behind a number of class-action reform proposals. This Article develops a proposal that, in conjunction with reforms in fee structure and opt-out rights, controls agency costs at the time of settlement. The idea …

A Process Theory Of Torts, Jay Tidmarsh

Jay Tidmarsh

No abstract provided.

The Court-Packing Plan As Symptom, Casualty, And Cause Of Gridlock, Barry Cushman

Barry Cushman

This essay, prepared for the Notre Dame Law Review's Symposium, “The American Congress: Legal Implications of Gridlock,” considers three ways in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 Court-packing bill was related to the phenomenon of gridlock in the 1930s. First, as FDR's public remarks on the subject demonstrate, he believed that the early New Deal was a victim of partisan gridlock between the Democrat-controlled political branches and the Republican-controlled judiciary. Moreover, he did not believe that the impasse could be overcome through an amendment to the Constitution, for he regarded Article V's supermajority requirements as virtually encoding gridlock into the …

Lost Fidelities, Barry Cushman

Barry Cushman

Owen Roberts was accused of a variety of things in 1937, but “fidelity” was not among them. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and Professor Felix Frankfurter were among many who accused Roberts of performing, as Frankfurter put it, a jurisprudential “somersault” “incapable of being attributed to a single factor relevant to the professed judicial process.” To Frankfurter, it was “all painful beyond words,” and gave him “a sickening feeling which is aroused when moral standards are adulterated in a convent.” Yet when Roberts announced his retirement from the Court eight years later, Chief Justice Stone, along with now-Justices Frankfurter and Robert …

From Reconstruction To Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, And Community Through Partition Sales Of Tenancies In Common, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

This article considers one of the primary ways in which African Americans have lost millions of acres of land that they were able to acquire in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning part of the twentieth century and the sociopolitical implications of this land loss. Specifically, this article highlights the fact that forced partition sales of tenancy in common property, referred to more commonly as heirs' property, have been a major source of black land loss within the African American community. The article argues that involuntary black land loss has had a significant negative impact upon …

The Alien Tort Statute And The Law Of Nations, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia

Anthony J. Bellia

Courts and scholars have struggled to identify the original meaning of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). As enacted in 1789, the ATS provided "[t]hat the district courts...shall...have cognizance...of all causes where an alien sues for tort only in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." The statute was rarely invoked for almost two centuries. In the 1980s, lower federal courts began reading the statute expansively to allow foreign citizens to sue other foreign citizens for all violations of modern customary international law that occurred outside the United States. In 2004, the Supreme Court took …

Precedent And Reliance, Randy J. Kozel

Randy J Kozel

Among the most prevalent justifications for deference to judicial precedent is the protection of reliance interests. The theory is that when judicial pronouncements have engendered significant reliance, there should be a meaningful presumption against adjudicative change. Yet there remains a fundamental question as to why reliance on precedent warrants judicial protection in the first place.

This Article explores the dynamics and implications of precedential reliance. It contends that the case for protecting reliance on precedent is uncertain. There are several reasons why reliance might potentially be worth protecting, but all are subject to serious limitations or challenges. To bolster the …

Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for …

The Letter Of Richard Wyche: An Interrogation Narrative, Christopher G. Bradley

Christopher Bradley

This is a translation, with introduction, of the Letter of Richard Wyche—one of only two heresy interrogation narratives from medieval England written from the perspective of the accused heretic. The Letter is an autobiographical account of Richard Wyche’s interrogation, in 1402-1403, at the hands of church officials. Wyche originally composed the Letter in (Middle) English but it survives only in a Latin translation, alongside other forbidden texts in a manuscript now in Prague. Wyche wrote and covertly sent away this Letter to an audience of intimates sympathetic to the cause (the so-called Wycliffite or Lollard heresy) before his interrogations ended. …

Legal Research And The World Of Thinkable Thoughts, Robert C. Berring

Robert Berring

It is difficult to properly describe technology’s impact on legal information. The impact created a generational gap between those who learned their research skills before the change and current students. The habits of the new generation of legal researchers point toward a change in the way that we can think about the law.

Colonialism And Constitutional Memory, Aziz Rana

Aziz Rana

The United States shares a number of basic traits with various British settler societies in the nonwhite world. These include longstanding histories in which colonists and their descendants divided legal, political, and economic rights between insiders and subordinated outsiders, be they expropriated indigenous groups or racial minorities. But Americans rarely think of themselves as part of an imperial family of settler polities and instead generally conceive of the country as quintessentially anti-imperial and inclusive. What explains this fact and what are its political consequences? This Article offers an initial response, arguing that a significant reason is the symbolic power of …

Charter Constitutionalism: The Myth Of Edward Coke And The Virginia Charter, Mary S. Bilder

Mary Sarah Bilder

The Hughes Court Docket Books: The Early Terms, 1929-1933, Barry Cushman

Barry Cushman

For many years, the docket books kept by a number of the Hughes Court Justices have been held by the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court. Yet the existence of these docket books was not widely known, and access to them was highly restricted. In April of 2014, however, the Court adopted new guidelines designed to increase access to the docket books for researchers. This article offers a report and analysis based on a review of all of the docket books that the Curator’s Office holds for the early Hughes Court, comprising the 1929-1933 Terms. Only one of …

The Refracted Constitution: Classical Liberalism And The Lessons Of History, 101 Iowa L. Rev. Online 97 (2016), Samuel R. Olken

Samuel R. Olken

As a prism refracts light, bending its rays in different directions and revealing its many colors, the Constitution also refracts the myriad perceptions of its interpreters. The debate published last fall in the Iowa Law Review between Professors Herbert Hovenkamp and Richard Epstein over whether the Constitution is, in the words of Professor Epstein, “a classical liberal document,” reveals divergent perspectives about the role of history in constitutional interpretation. Professor Epstein, who for much of his career has analyzed constitutional issues through the lens of law and economics, is primarily a legal theorist for whom history provides examples of how …

What Notice Did, Jessica Litman

Jessica Litman

In this article, I explore the effect of the copyright notice prerequisite on the law's treatment of copyright ownership. The notice prerequisite, as construed by the courts, encouraged the development of legal doctrines that herded the ownership of copyrights into the hands of publishers and other intermediaries, notwithstanding statutory provisions that seem to have been designed at least in part to enable authors to keep their copyrights. Because copyright law required notice, other doctrinal developments were shaped by and distorted by that requirement. The promiscuous alienability of U.S. copyrights may itself have been an accidental development deriving from courts' constructions …

Understanding Crime Under Capitalism: A Critique Of American Criminal Justice And Introduction To Marxist Jurisprudence, Steven E. Gilmore

Steven E Gilmore

Between Black And White: The Coloring Of Asian Americans, 14 Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev. 637 (2015), Kim D. Chanbonpin

Kim D. Chanbonpin

As in other ethnic and racial groups, colorism plays a significant role in the social interactions in and among Asian Americans. Investigating colorism in the Asian American community provides insights into how group members construct their own racial identities in relation to the broader race-stratified society. A colorism inquiry is a necessary intervention into the existing discourse of Asian American identity construction because it complicates common understandings of the Black/White binary in ways that shed new light on inter- and intra-racial relationships. This article addresses colorism in the Asian American community, and demonstrates both how Asian Americans have been racialized …

Balzacian Legality, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Thomas Carbonneau

The study of law and literature is an area of growing interest to legal scholars in the United States. Honore de Balzac incorporated in his works a panoramic view of the social reality of nineteenth century France. In this context, the fidelity of Balzac's plots and characters to their external models has been well-documented in a number of fields, including sociology, commerce, and finance. In addition to this penchant for realism, however, Balzac laced his novels with an equally evident moral content. This commitment to accuracy and morality also influenced Balzac's novelistic treatment of the law and lawyers. Balzac's work …

Law As Interpretation, Charles W. Collier

Charles W. Collier

In this Article, I shall trace out separate professional narratives in common law, constitutional law, and in legal cases turning on the distinction between community and society (Part III). But first I should like to situate these legal-professional narratives within a broader interdisciplinary framework (Part II).

Commentary, Critical Legal Theory In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal Spring Symposium, Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich

Sonia Katyal

The very definition and scope of CLS (critical legal studies) is itself subject to debate. Some scholars characterize CLS as scholarship that employs a particular methodology—more of a “means” than an “end.” On the other hand, some scholars contend that CLS scholarship demonstrates a collective commitment to a political end goal—an emancipation of sorts —through the identification of, and resistance to, exploitative power structures that are reinforced through law and legal institutions. After a brief golden age, CLS scholarship was infamously marginalized in legal academia and its sub-disciplines. But CLS themes now appear to be making a resurgence—at least in …

Notes Toward A Critical Contemplation Of Law, Sonia K. Katyal

Sonia Katyal

In this tribute to Professor Derrick Bell’s legacy, Professor Katyal reflects on one of Bell’s greatest gifts: the necessary, and perhaps unfinished gift of critical contemplation of law, along with its possibilities and its concomitant limitations. In her paper, Katyal reflects on two seemingly disparate areas of civil rights that might benefit from Bell’s critical vision: the area of LGBT rights and equality, and federal Indian law. Relying on some of Bell’s most valuable insights, Katyal calls for the creation of a “critical sexuality studies” and a “critical indigenous studies” that employs some of Bell’s groundbreaking lessons in reimagining broader …

3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom

Evan R. Youngstrom

Today, our society is on a precipice of significant advancement in healthcare because 3D printing will usher in the next generation of medicine. The next generation will be driven by customization, which will allow doctors to replace limbs and individualize drugs. However, the next generation will be without large pharmaceutical companies and their justifications for strong intellectual property rights. However, the current patent system (which is underpinned by a social tradeoff made from property incentives) is not flexible enough to cope with 3D printing’s rapid development. Very soon, the social tradeoff will no longer benefit society, so it must be …

Probability Theory Meets Res Ipsa Loquitor, David H. Kaye

David Kaye

Day in and day out, attorneys, judges, and jurors must estimate probabilities. To be sure, we rarely quantify such estimates of probability and almost never adopt the terminology and mathematics of probability theory to resolve matters. Nevertheless, the mathematical theory of probability can be applied to legal problems in various ways. This article uses probability theory normatively in an effort to clarify one aspect of the famous tort doctrine known as res ipsa loquitur. While not urging that jurors be instructed in probability theory or be equipped with microprocessors, it does seek an accurate statement of the res ipsa doctrine …

Graveyard Of Reputations: Writing Institutional History, Daniel R. Coquillette

Daniel R. Coquillette

From Rome To The Restatement: S.P. Scott, Fred Blume, Clyde Pharr, And Roman Law In Early Twentieth Century America, Timothy G. Kearley

Timothy G. Kearley

The Power Of Codification In Latin America: Simón Bolívar And The Code Napoléon, M C. Mirow

M. C. Mirow

Codification can be an effective means to centralize and to consolidate state power. The use of codification in this manner runs against the commonly perceived notion that it promotes republican and egalitarian values. As Simon Bolivar's dictatorship quickly crumbled around him, he turned to codification based on the Code Napoleon as part of an attempt to unify Gran Colombia. Factors leading him to this undertaking and source were the need for legal reform, his emulation of Napoleon, his exposure to the works of Jeremy Bentham, and, speculatively, the influence of Andres Bello. Boivar's attempt at codification was not to complete …

The Constitution Of Cádiz In Florida, M C. Mirow

M. C. Mirow

The article explores the vibrant constitutional community that existed in St. Augustine and the province of East Florida in the final decade of Spanish control of the area. Based on relatively unexplored primary sources, it reveals a great deal of unknown information about the importance of the Constitution in Florida immediately before the territory was transferred to the United States. The article provides full description of the Constitution's promulgation in 1812 and a second promulgation of the Constitution in 1820 (something unknown in the general literature). It also addresses the construction of the St. Augustine monument to the Constitution erected …