Legal History Commons^™

The Potemkin Temptation Or, The Intoxicating Effect Of Rhetoric And Narrativity On American Craft Whiskey, Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson

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No abstract provided.

Book Review, Anna Spain Bradley

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No abstract provided.

Standing Rock, The Sioux Treaties, And The Limits Of The Supremacy Clause, Carla F. Fredericks, Jesse D. Heibel

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The controversy surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline (“DAPL”) has put the peaceful plains of North Dakota in the national and international spotlight, drawing thousands of people to the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers outside of Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for prayer and peaceful protest in defense of the Sioux Tribes’ treaties, lands, cultural property, and waters. Spanning over 7 months, including the harsh North Dakota winter, the gathering was visited by indigenous leaders and communities from around the world and represents arguably the largest gathering of indigenous peoples in the United States in more than 100 years.

At …

"At Bears Ears We Can Hear The Voices Of Our Ancestors In Every Canyon And On Every Mesa Top": The Creation Of The First Native National Monument, Charles Wilkinson

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Government Speech And The War On Terror, Helen Norton

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The government is unique among speakers because of its coercive power, its substantial resources, its privileged access to national security and intelligence information, and its wide variety of expressive roles as commander-in-chief, policymaker, educator, employer, property owner, and more. Precisely because of this power, variety, and ubiquity, the government's speech can both provide great value and inflict great harm to the public. In wartime, more specifically, the government can affirmatively choose to use its voice to inform, inspire, heal, and unite -- or instead to deceive, divide, bully, and silence.

In this essay, I examine the U.S. government's role as …

Class Actions, Civil Rights, And The National Injunction, Suzette M. Malveaux

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This essay is a response to Professor Samuel Bray’s article proposing a blanket prohibition against injunctions that enjoin a defendant’s conduct with respect to nonparties. He argues that national injunctions are illegitimate under Article III and traditional equity and result in a number of difficulties.

This Response argues, from a normative lens, that Bray’s proposed ban on national injunctions should be rejected. Such a bright-line rule against national injunctions is too blunt an instrument to address the complexity of our tripartite system of government, our pluralistic society and our democracy. Although national injunctions may be imperfect and crude forms of …

Book Review, Ahmed White

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No abstract provided.

Book Review, Anna Spain Bradley

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No abstract provided.

The Modern Class Action Rule: Its Civil Rights Roots And Relevance Today, Suzette M. Malveaux

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The modern class action rule recently turned fifty years old — a golden anniversary. However, this milestone is marred by an increase in hate crimes, violence and discrimination. Ironically, the rule is marking its anniversary within a similarly tumultuous environment as its birth — the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. This irony calls into question whether this critical aggregation device is functioning as the drafters intended. This article makes three contributions.

First, the article unearths the rule’s rich history, revealing how the rule was designed in 1966 to enable structural reform and broad injunctive relief in civil rights cases. …

Administrative Dissents, Sharon B. Jacobs

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Commissioners, like judges, dissent. They do so at length, with vigor, and with persistence. Yet while separate judicial decisions are the subject of a rich literature, their administrative counterparts have long languished in obscurity. A closer look is warranted, however, because studying administrative dissent can enhance our understanding of internal agency operations as well as the relationships between agencies and other actors. This Article presents the results of an original review of separate statements at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dating back four decades. It uses these findings to move beyond two common generalizations about …

Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over The Constitutional Meaning Of Equality, Helen Norton

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No abstract provided.

Re-Ordering The First Amendment, Melissa Hart

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A Context For Legal History, Or, This Is Not Your Father’S Contextualism, Justin Desautels-Stein

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This short essay attempts a systematic rehearsal of the structuralist approach to legal historiography.

The President's Faithful Execution Duty, Harold H. Bruff

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No abstract provided.

How Presidents Interpret The Constitution, Harold H. Bruff

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Criminal Labor Law, Benjamin Levin

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This Article examines a recent rise in civil suits brought against unions under criminal statutes. By looking at the long history of criminal regulation of labor, the Article argues that these suits represent an attack on the theoretical underpinnings of post-New Deal U.S. labor law and an attempt to revive a nineteenth century conception of unions as extortionate criminal conspiracies. The Article further argues that this criminal turn is reflective of a broader contemporary preference for finding criminal solutions to social and economic problems. In a moment of political gridlock, parties seeking regulation increasingly do so via criminal statute. In …

Tax Planning And Policy Drift, Sloan G. Speck

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This Article proposes a framework for analyzing how private-sector legal interpretations influence public policy. Political scientists and legal scholars use the terms “bureaucratic drift” and “legislative drift” to describe how administrative agencies and future legislative coalitions affect public policy enacted by Congress. This Article identifies a third category of policy drift: “planning drift.” Planning drift describes deviations from an enacting legislature’s policy preferences that result from private experts’ interpretations of existing law. After Congress enacts a statute, the first people to interpret and apply the new legislation generally are not regulators or judges, but instead are private experts, such as …

The Forgotten Core Of The Telecommunications Act Of 1996, Philip J. Weiser

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No abstract provided.

International Legal Structuralism: A Primer, Justin Desautels-Stein

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International legal structuralism arrived on the shores of international thought in the 1980s. The arrival was not well-received, perhaps in part, because it was not well-understood. This essay aims to reintroduce legal structuralism and hopefully pave the way for new, and more positive, receptions and understandings. This reintroduction is organized around two claims regarding the broader encounter between international lawyers and critical theory in the ‘80s. The first was a jurisprudential claim about how the critics sought to show how international law was nothing more than a continuation of international politics by other means. The second was a historical claim …

My Coworker, My Enemy: Solidarity, Workplace Control, And The Class Politics Of Title Vii, Ahmed A. White

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No abstract provided.

They Had Nothing, Charles Wilkinson

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Cu Law Library Launches New Resource For Historical Colorado Statutory Research, Robert M. Linz

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Structuralist Legal Histories, Justin Desautels-Stein

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This is a contribution to a symposium titled "Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought." The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography.

Did Multicultural America Result From A Mistake? The 1965 Immigration Act And Evidence From Roll Call Votes, Gabriel J. Chin, Douglas M. Spencer

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Between July 1964 and October 1965, Congress enacted the three most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. As we approach the 50th anniversary of these laws, it is clear that all three have fundamentally remade the United States; education, employment, housing, politics, and the population itself have irreversibly changed.

Arguably the least celebrated yet most consequential of these laws was the 1965 Immigration Act, which set the United States on the path to become a "majority minority" nation. In …

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

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This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

Revoking Rights, Craig J. Konnoth

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In important areas of law, such as the vested rights doctrine, and in several important cases--including those involving the continued validity of same-sex marriages and the Affordable Care Act--courts have scrutinized the revocation of rights once granted more closely than the failure to provide the rights in the first place. This project claims that in so doing, courts seek to preserve important constitutional interests. On the one hand, based on our understanding of rights possession, rights revocation implicates autonomy interests of the rights holder to a greater degree than a failure to afford rights at the outset. On the other …

Foreword: Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought, Justin Desautels-Stein, Duncan Kennedy

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This is a co-authored foreword to a symposium in Law & Contemporary Problems titled "Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought." It includes a discussion of the background of the project, a brief summary of the articles included in the issue, and a very short statement from Desautels-Stein and Kennedy on the "loss of faith" indicative of Contemporary Legal Thought.

The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence And The Failure Of Intervention, Carolyn B. Ramsey

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Scholars and battered women's advocates now recognize that many facets of the legal response to intimate-partner abuse stereotype victims and harm abuse survivors who do not fit commonly accepted paradigms. However, it is less often acknowledged that the feminist analysis of domestic violence also tends to stereotype offenders and that state action, including court-mandated batterer intervention, is premised on these offender stereotypes. The feminist approach can be faulted for minimizing or denying the role of substance abuse, mental illness, childhood trauma, race, culture, and poverty in intimate-partner abuse. Moreover, those arrested for domestic violence crimes now include heterosexual women, lesbians, …

"Greatest Good Of The Greatest Number In The Long Run": Tr, Pinchot, And The Origins Of Sustainability In America, Charles Wilkinson

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No abstract provided.

Grazing In Wilderness Areas, Mark Squillace

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Domestic livestock grazing is naturally in tension with wilderness. Wilderness areas are not truly "untrammeled by man" when they host managed livestock grazing. Yet the compromise that allowed livestock grazing in wilderness areas was surely one of the greatest in the history of the conservation movement. Without it, Congress might never have passed a wilderness bill or designated countless wilderness areas throughout the country. The grazing exception--and the Congressional Grazing Guidelines that afford specific protections for grazers--made it possible to secure bipartisan support for wilderness bills in even the most conservative western states.

Notwithstanding this success, the ecology of some …