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Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage Of The Public Service Corporation, Evelyn Atkinson Jun 2023

Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage Of The Public Service Corporation, Evelyn Atkinson

Michigan Law Review

At the turn of the twentieth century, state courts were roiled by claims against telegraph corporations for mental anguish resulting from the failure to deliver telegrams involving the death or injury of a family member. Although these “telegraph cases” at first may seem a bizarre outlier, they in fact reveal an important and understudied moment of transformation in the nature of the relationship between the corporation and the public: the role of affective relations in the development of the category of the public utility corporation. Even as powerful corporations were recast as private, rights-bearing, profit-making market actors in constitutional law, …


Air Pollution As Public Nuisance: Comparing Modern-Day Greenhouse Gas Abatement With Nineteenth-Century Smoke Abatement, Kate Markey Jan 2022

Air Pollution As Public Nuisance: Comparing Modern-Day Greenhouse Gas Abatement With Nineteenth-Century Smoke Abatement, Kate Markey

Michigan Law Review

Public nuisance allows plaintiffs to sue actors in tort for causing environmental harm that disrupts the public’s use and enjoyment of the land. In recent years, state and local governments have filed public nuisance actions against oil companies, hoping to hold them responsible for the harm of climate change. Since no plaintiff has prevailed on the merits so far, whether these lawsuits are worth bringing, given the other legal avenues available, remains an open question. This Comment situates these actions in their appropriate historical context to show that these lawsuits are neither unprecedented nor futile. In particular, it examines the …


Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke Apr 2012

Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke

Michigan Law Review

Some intellectual concepts once central to America's constitutional discourse are, for better and worse, no longer part of our political language. These concepts may be so alien to us that they would remain invisible without carefully reexamining the past to challenge the received narratives of America's constitutional development. Should constitutional theorists undertake this kind of historical reexamination? If so, to what extent should they be willing to stray from the disciplinary norms that govern intellectual history? And what normative aims can they reasonably expect to achieve by exploring ideas in our past that are no longer reflected in the Constitution's …


From Blackstone To Bentham: Common Law Versus Legislation In Eighteenth-Century Britain, James Oldham May 1991

From Blackstone To Bentham: Common Law Versus Legislation In Eighteenth-Century Britain, James Oldham

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth Century Britain by David Lieberman


Review Essay: Sunstein, Statutes, And The Common Law--Reconciling Markets, The Communal Impulse, And The Mammoth State, Peter L. Strauss Feb 1991

Review Essay: Sunstein, Statutes, And The Common Law--Reconciling Markets, The Communal Impulse, And The Mammoth State, Peter L. Strauss

Michigan Law Review

The following pages principally address Professor Sunstein's basic argument for building on, rather than defending against, legislative judgments, and so virtually ignore the details of his proposals for statutory interpretation. Part I outlines Sunstein's case for some regulation - the necessary failures of market ordering and the consequent need for a mixed economy in which government regulation intervenes in important ways. Part II addresses Sunstein's decision to tie his analysis to the public law innovations of the New Deal, and suggests ways in which the analysis might be strengthened by attention to earlier struggles and changes - changes in common …


Critical Legal Studies, Michael F. Colosi May 1990

Critical Legal Studies, Michael F. Colosi

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Critical Legal Studies by Allan C. Hutchinson


Antitrust's Protected Classes, Herbert Hovenkamp Oct 1989

Antitrust's Protected Classes, Herbert Hovenkamp

Michigan Law Review

For purposes of argument, this essay assumes that efficiency ought to be the exclusive goal of antitrust enforcement. That premise is controversial. Nonetheless, several economic and legal theorists, primarily among the Chicago School of economics and antitrust scholarship, have developed an Optimal Deterrence Model based on this assumption. The Model is designed to achieve the optimum, or ideal, amount of antitrust enforcement. The Model's originators generally believe that there is too much antitrust enforcement, particularly enforcement initiated by private plaintiffs. I intend to show that, even if efficiency is the only antitrust policy goal, a broader array of lawsuits should …


The Political Theory Of The Federalist And The Authority Of Publius, Michigan Law Review Feb 1985

The Political Theory Of The Federalist And The Authority Of Publius, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Political Theory of the Federalist by David F. Epstein and The Authority of Publius by Albert Furtwangler


International Law As Law In The United States, Louis Henkin May 1984

International Law As Law In The United States, Louis Henkin

Michigan Law Review

"International law is part of our law." Justice Gray's much-quoted pronouncement in The Paquete Habana was neither new nor controversial when made in 1900, since he was merely restating what had been established principle for the fathers of American jurisprudence and for their British legal ancestors. And Gray's dictum remains unquestioned today. But, after more than two hundred years in our jurisprudence, the import of that principle is still uncertain and disputed. How did, and how does, international law become part of our law? What does it mean that international law is a part of our law? What is the …


In Re Radical Interpretations Of American Law: The Relation Of Law And History, A. E. Keir Nash Nov 1983

In Re Radical Interpretations Of American Law: The Relation Of Law And History, A. E. Keir Nash

Michigan Law Review

This Article centers instead upon assessing two types of legal analysis - non-Marxist radical interpretation and "non-reductionist" Marxist theory - which, despite conspicuous differences, share the belief that understanding the American historical experience is a prerequisite to understanding American law. Both approaches also share two other important convictions. One is that a "consensual" or "liberal pluralist" version of American history has little explanatory validity, at least in regard to such major problems as the political and legal breakdown represented by the Civil War, and the law's role in American economic development. They also agree that historical explanations which downplay discussion …


Graves: American Intergovernmental Relations: Their Origins, Historical Development, And Current Status, Joseph E. Kallenbach Feb 1965

Graves: American Intergovernmental Relations: Their Origins, Historical Development, And Current Status, Joseph E. Kallenbach

Michigan Law Review

A Review of American Intergovernmental Relations: Their Origins, Historical Development, and Current Status. By W. Brooke Graves.


Torts In English And American Conflict Of Laws: The Role Of The Forum, S. I. Shuman, S. Prevezer May 1958

Torts In English And American Conflict Of Laws: The Role Of The Forum, S. I. Shuman, S. Prevezer

Michigan Law Review

''Private international law owes its existence to the fact that there are in the world a number of separate territorial systems of law that differ greatly from each other in the rules by which they regulate the various legal relations arising in daily life." Where the systems are those of member states of a federal union, there should be less difference in their laws than where they are those of sovereign nations divided by strong cultural, social and political barriers. Interstate conflicts and international conflicts are likely to give rise to somewhat different considerations and rules, and it is surely …


Full Faith And Credit To Judgments And Public Acts, Kurt H. Nadelmann Nov 1957

Full Faith And Credit To Judgments And Public Acts, Kurt H. Nadelmann

Michigan Law Review

Interest here is concentrated on full faith and credit for public acts. But what led to insertion of the command respecting public acts cannot be divorced historically from the study of the command of full faith for judgments. The whole field, therefore, has been included in the reexamination. Clarifications obtainable on the "judgments" side, it will be seen, help also on the "public acts" side. On both sides there are historical facts which deserve greater attention than has been hitherto given, and if, as a result, some of the myths surrounding the' Lawyers Clause are exploded, the rethinking may have …


Book Reviews, Nathan Isaacs, Horace Lafayette Wilgus, Arthur H. Basye, Leonard D. White, Victor H. Lane, Edwin D. Dickinson Apr 1922

Book Reviews, Nathan Isaacs, Horace Lafayette Wilgus, Arthur H. Basye, Leonard D. White, Victor H. Lane, Edwin D. Dickinson

Michigan Law Review

What does a judge do when he decides a case? It would be interesting to collect the answers ranging from those furnished by primitive systems of law in which the judge was supposed to consult the gods to the ultra-modern, rather profane system described to me recently by a retrospective judge: "I make up my mind which way the case ought to be decided, and then I see if I can't get some legal ground to make it stick." Perhaps the widespread impression is the curiously erroneous one lampooned by Gnaeus Flavius (Kantorowitz). The judge is supposed to sit at …