Legal History Commons^™

Introduction (Excerpt) In Justice Bertha Wilson: One Woman's Difference, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Bertha Wilson was the first woman to be appointed to Canada's Supreme Court in 1982. Her appointment capped off a career of firsts. She had been the first woman lawyer and partner at a prominent Toronto law firm and the first woman appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Her career and passing in 2007 have provoked reflection on her contributions to Canadian society and caused many to reflect on the question she herself posed: what difference do women judges make? What follows is an excerpt from the introduction to the book. The chapters of the book explore a broad …

The Sit-Ins And The State Action Doctrine, Christopher W. Schmidt

All Faculty Scholarship

By taking their seats at “whites only” lunch counters across the South in the spring of 1960, African American students not only launched a dramatic new stage in the civil rights movement, they also sparked a national reconsideration of the scope of the constitutional equal protection requirement. The critical constitutional question raised by the sit-in movement was whether the Fourteenth Amendment, which after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) prohibited racial segregation in schools and other state-operated facilities, applied to privately owned accommodations open to the general public. From the perspective of the student protesters, the lunch counter operators, and …

The Status And Future Of Government Documents, James T. Shaw

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Depository libraries have traditionally enjoyed a pretty sweet deal—we receive free copies of documents in return for space, processing, and staff to help people use them. Depository libraries have served as key players in two areas of public policy: 1) public access to government information for the needs of today; and 2) widespread distribution of documents helps them survive to form a historical record.

Echoes Of The Impact Of Webb V. Mcgowin On The Doctrine Of Consideration Under Contract Law: Some Reflections On The Decision On The Approach Of Its 75th Anniversary, Stephen J. Leacock

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hope In The Law, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. 1805), one of the most commonly assigned cases in the first-year Property course, was a dispute over the ownership of a fox discovered at large “upon a certain wild and uninhabited, unpossessed and waste land, called the beach.” For a very long time, all that was known about the case, other than the report itself, was a vivid but antiquarian account published in the Sag Harbor Express of October 24, 1895, by the judge and local historian Henry Parsons Hedges (1817-1911). Hedges claimed to have met Jesse Pierson (1780-1840) and Lodowick Post …

Mothers And Sons: The Lloyd Schlup Story, Sean O'Brien

Faculty Works

This article tells the back story of the near-execution of Lloyd Schlup, condemned to die in Missouri for the 1984 murder of fellow Missouri State Penitentiary prisoner Arthur Dade, Jr. Mr. Schlup came within hours of execution before the Supreme Court granted certiorari on his case to decide whether a prisoner who is probably innocent can avail himself of the habeas corpus remedy. Mr. Schlup's and Mr. Dade's mothers played pivotal roles in the ultimate outcome of Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298 (1995). Dedicated to the memory of Nancy Slater.

Bankruptcy Phobia, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

As the recent economic crisis has unfolded, bankruptcy has offered possible solutions at several key junctures. The first of these solutions, often referred to as mortgage modification, was geared toward homeowners who faced the loss of their homes in the months—now several years—since the start of the subprime crisis On the corporate side, Chapter 11 was an obvious alternative when large nonbank financial institutions like Bear Stearns and AIG stumbled in 2008. But regulators repeatedly balked, and the one exception to the avoidance of bankruptcy at all costs—Lehman Brothers—was anomalous. This aversion to bankruptcy, which seems to pervade all sides …

A Historical Overview Of The Fair Labor Standards Act, Pamela Newell

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Development And Outcomes Of Investment Treaty Arbitration, Susan Franck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The legitimacy of investment treaty arbitration is a matter of heated debate. Asserting that arbitration is unfairly tilted toward the developed world, some countries have withdrawn from World Bank dispute resolution bodies or are taking steps to eliminate arbitration. In order to assess whether investment arbitration is the equivalent of tossing a two-headed coin to resolve investment disputes, this article explores the role of development status in arbitration outcome. It first presents descriptive, quantitative research about the developmental background of the presiding arbitrators who exert particular control over the arbitration process. The article then assesses how (1) the development status …

Arsenic And Old Chemistry: Images Of Mad Alchemists, Experts Attacking Experts, And The Crisis In Forensic Science, David S. Caudill

Working Paper Series

Drawing on research into the use of experts in early 19th-century criminal trials, the image of mad alchemists in popular culture representations of science, and the distinction between empirical and contingent “interpretive repertoires” in the discourse of scientific controversies, this article explores the controversy over arsenic-detection technologies prior to the Marsh test. In addition to noting the predictable criticism of incompetent expertise in the service of law, this article highlights implied accusations of hubris and amorality on the part of over-confident experts, both in the early 19th-century and in today's crisis of forensic science.

Abortion Across State Lines, Joseph W. Dellapenna

Working Paper Series

In this Article, I propose to analyze conflicts of law precedents and theory to explore the extent to which a state can apply its law on abortion to abortions performed outside the state but bearing a significant connection to the state. In attempting to resolve such questions, we enter into the domain of choice of law, part of the field of conflicts of law. This domain is notoriously unstable and contested. This instability allows legal commentators to project their attitudes towards abortion (and many other matters) in analyzing and construing the relevant authorities to resolve choice of law issues. I …

Dan Freed: My Teacher, My Colleague, My Friend, Ronald Weich

All Faculty Scholarship

At a recent meeting of the National Association of Sentencing Commissions, Yale professor Dan Freed was honored during a panel discussion titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Sentencing Giants," Dan Freed is indeed a sentencing giant. but he is the gentlest giant of all. It is hard to imagine that a man as mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and self-effacing as Dan Freed has had such a profound impact on federal sentencing law and so many other areas of criminal justice policy, Yet he has.

I've been in many rooms with Dan Freed over the years — classrooms, boardrooms, dining rooms, and others. …

The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain …

St. George Tucker's Lecture Notes, The Second Amendment, And Originalist Methodology: A Critical Comment, Saul Cornell

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Judicial Independence In Excess: Reviving The Judicial Duty Of The Supreme Court, Paul D. Carrington, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Independence from extrinsic influence is, we know, indispensable to public trust in the integrity of professional judges who share the duty to decide cases according to preexisting law. But such independence is less appropriate for those expected to make new law to govern future events. Indeed, in a democratic government those who make new law are expected to be accountable to their constituents, not independent of their interests and unresponsive to their desires. The Supreme Court of the United States has in the last century largely forsaken responsibility for the homely task of deciding cases in accord with preexisting law …

Book Review: The Cambridge History Of Law In America Vol. 1: Early American (1580-1815), William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

The book under review is a survey of the influence of law on mainland British North America up to about 1815.

Bitter Knowledge: Socrates And Teaching By Disillusionment Appendix A - The Protagoras, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

It was been suggested (and here I am thinking in particular of comments made by Professor William Prior) that my book, Bitter Knowledge, would benefit from a more comprehensive attention to the argumentative details of the dialogues studied there. Professor Prior specifically suggests that, if we were to be given more of their argumentation, we might better appreciate the motivation or the disposition of the speakers in the dialogues under study.

The book as designed, as submitted in typescript, and as accepted for publication, included three appendices. These appendices comprised detailed outlines of the speakers and events portrayed in, respectively, …

Vico And Imagination: An Ingenious Approach To Educating Lawyers With Semiotic Sensibility, Francis J. Mootz Iii

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

Law is a specialized semiotic realm, but lawyers generally are ignorant of this fact. Lawyers may manage meaning, but they also are managed by meaning. Seemingly trapped by the weight of pre-existing signs, their attempts to manage these meanings generally are limited to technical interventions and instrumentalist strategies. Signs have power over lawyers because they are embedded in narratives, a semiotic economy that confronts the lawyer as ‘‘given’’ even though it is dynamic and constantly under construction. Most lawyers do not make meaning through legal narratives; rather, they parrot bits of the controlling narratives in response to certain problems. Because …

Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson

Reviews

Observing these significant legal-political debates in the Chinese press and academy in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we might think they concern battles started only in the last decade and a half of Reform-era China. Now Professor Xu Xiaoqun reminds us that these struggles have a much longer pedigree, stretching back to the end of the nineteenth century and China's first fraught encounter with "the West" and one idea of "modernity."

Kamisar, Yale, Jerold H. Israel

Other Publications

Kamisar, Yale (1929- ). Law professor. Born in the Bronx, N.Y., to an immigrant, working-class family of modest means and limited educational background, Kamisar received academic scholarships that enabled him to attend New York University (B.A., 1950) and, after enlisting in the army during the Korean War and winning a Purple Heart, Columbia Law School (LLB., 1954).

Gabriel Franklin Hargo: Michigan Law 1870, Margaret A. Leary, Barbara J. Snow

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

A brief biographical sketch of Gabriel Franklin Hargo, the first African American graduate of the University of Michigan Law School.

The Law Librarian Of The Twentieth And Twenty-First Centuries: A Figuration In Flux, Theodora Belniak

Law Librarian Journal Articles

Through inspection of scholarly writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ms. Belniak articulates the skill sets, knowledge areas, and personality characteristics of the archetypal law librarian over the last one hundred years.

Jamie L. Bronstein's Caught In The Machinery: Workplace Accidents And Injured Workers In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Robert J. Steinfeld

Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

The Story Of Bivens V. Six Unknown-Named Agents Of The Federal Bureau Of Narcotics, James E. Pfander

Faculty Working Papers

In Bivens v. Six Unknown-Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Supreme Court recognized the right of an individual to sue federal government officials for a violation of constitutional rights. Drawing on interviews with some of the participants, including Webster Bivens himself and one of the agents who conducted the search, this chapter in the forthcoming book Federal Courts' Stories describes the events that led to the litigation and the complex array of factors that informed the Court's approach to the case. After placing the Bivens decision in context, the chapter evaluates the competing narratives that have grown …

Robert George’S The Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, And Morality In Crisis, Jeffrey C. Tuomala

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Invention Of Legal Primitivism, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

This Article addresses a different sort of legal transplant - one in which outside legal doctrines are imported in order to be cabined, treated as normative counterpoints, and identified as the legal other. Legal primitivism is a kind of anti-transplant. It heightens the persistent differences between a dominant legal system and its understanding of primitive rules. An often ignored legal literature depicting legal primitivism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. Mapping the differences between America’s modern legal system and its antecedents, this immense literature, which included works by Oliver Wendell Holmes, …

Book Review: Henry J. Richardson Iii, The Origins Of African-American Interests In International Law, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

This short review evaluates Professor Richardson's book both as a contribution to the history of the Atlantic slave trade and as contribution to critical race theory.

Professor Richardson has read innumerable historical monographs, works of legal and sociological theory, international law and critical race theory. Armed with this store of knowledge, he is able to recount a detailed narrative of African-American claims to, interests in and appeals to international law over approximately two centuries spanning, with occasional peeks both forward and backward in time, from the landing of the first African slaves at Jamestown in 1619 to the 1815 Treaty …

Draining The Morass: Ending The Jurisprudentially Unsound Unpublication System, David R. Cleveland

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Internal Displacement, The Guiding Principles On Internal Displacement, The Principles Normative Status, And The Need For Their Effective Domestic Implementation In Colombia, Robert K. Goldman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.