Legal History Commons^™

American Religious Liberty Without (Much) Theory: A Review Of Religion And The American Constitutional Experiment, 5th Edition, Nathan S. Chapman

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Book review of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 5th ed. By John Witte Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 464. $150.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $26.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780197587614.

The Clean Air Act Of 1963: Postwar Environmental Politics And The Debate Over Federal Power, Adam D. Orford

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This Article explores the development of the Clean Air Act of 1963, the first law to allow the federal government to fight air pollution rather than study it. The Article focuses on the postwar years (1945-1963) and explores the rise of public health medical research, cooperative federalism, and the desire to harness the powers of the federal government for domestic social improvement, as key precursors to environmental law. It examines the origins of the idea that the federal government should "do something" about air pollution, and how that idea was translated, through drafting, lobbying, politicking, hearings, debate, influence, and votes, …

Forgotten Federal-Missionary Partnerships: New Light On The Establishment Clause, Nathan Chapman

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Americans have long disputed whether the government may support religious instruction as part of an elementary education. Since Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court has gradually articulated a doctrine that permits states to provide funds, indirectly through vouchers and in some cases directly through grants, to religious schools for the nonreligious goods they provide. Unlike most other areas of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, however, the Court has not built this doctrine on a historical foundation. In fact, in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), the dissenters from this doctrine were the ones to rely on the founding-era record.

Intriguingly, …

The Trouble With Categories: What Theory Can Teach Us About The Doctrine-Skills Divide, Linda H. Edwards

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We might not need another article decrying the doctrine/skills dichotomy. That conversation seems increasingly old and tired. But like it or not, in conversations about the urgent need to reform legal education, the dichotomy’s entailments confront us at every turn. Is there something more to be said? Perhaps surprisingly, yes. We teach our students to examine language carefully, to question received categories, and to understand legal questions in light of their history and theory. Yet when we talk about the doctrine/skills divide, we seem to forget our own instruction.

This article does not exactly take sides in the typical skills …

Still Too Close To Call? Rethinking Stampp's "The Concept Of A Perpetual Union", Daniel W. Hamilton

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No abstract provided.

A Picture Of The New York Court Of Appeals At The Time Of Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Meredith R. Miller

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Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon is an enduring part of the Contracts canon. A symposium addressing the legacy of the case would be incomplete without a picture of the New York Court of Appeals at the time the case was decided and a discussion of the oft-neglected role that court rules and administration play in the development of the law. Thus, it is the aim of this short essay to place Wood in the context of the Court's history, and to explore how structural and jurisdictional changes to the Court could have had an impact on how the case was …

Between Dependency And Liberty: The Conundrum Of Children’S Rights In The Gilded Age, David S. Tanenhaus

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Although legal scholars often assume that the history of children's rights in the United States did not begin until the mid twentieth century, this essay argues that a sophisticated conception of children's rights existed a century earlier, and analyzes how lawmakers articulated it through their attempts to define the rights of dependent children. How to handle their cases raised fundamental questions about whether children were autonomous beings or the property of either their parents and/or the state. And, if the latter, what were the limits of parental authority and/or the power of the state acting as a parent? By investigating …

The Jurisprudence Of Action And Inaction In The Law Of Tort: Solving The Puzzle Of Nonfeasance And Misfeasance From The Fifteenth Through The Twentieth Centuries, Theodore Silver, Jean Elting Rowe

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No abstract provided.

One Hundred Years Of Harmful Error: The Historical Jurisprudence Of Medical Malpractice, Theodore Silver

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In this Article, Professor Silver examines the origins of present-day malpractice law. He begins by noting that negligence and medical malpractice as the common law now knows them made their debut in the nineteenth century although their roots lie deep in the turf of trespass and assumpsit. He argues, however, that toward the turn of the century several episodes of linguistic laziness purported to produce a separation between negligence and medical malpractice so that the two fields are conventionally thought to rest on separate doctrinal foundations. According to Professor Silver, historically based scrutiny of medical malpractice and its ties to …