Legal History Commons^™

Justice John Marshall Harlan: Professor Of Law, Brian L. Frye, Josh Blackman, Michael Mccloskey

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

From 1889 to 1910, while serving on the United States Supreme Court, the first Justice John Marshall Harlan taught at the Columbian College of Law, which became the George Washington University School of Law. For two decades, he primarily taught working-class evening students in classes as diverse as property, torts, conflicts of law, jurisprudence, domestic relations, commercial law, evidence-and most significantly-constitutional law.

Harlan's lectures on constitutional law would have been lost to history, but for the enterprising initiative-and remarkable note-taking-of one of Harlan's students, George Johannes. During the 1897-98 academic year, George Johannes and a classmate transcribed verbatim the twenty-seven …

Justice John Marshall Harlan: Lectures On Constitutional Law, 1897-98, Brian L. Frye, Josh Blackman, Michael Mccloskey

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

From 1889 to 1910, while serving on the United States Supreme Court, the first Justice John Marshall Harlan taught at the Columbian College of Law, which later became The George Washington School of Law. During the 1897–1898 academic year, one of Harlan’s students, George Johannes, along with a classmate, transcribed verbatim the twenty-seven lectures Justice Harlan delivered on constitutional law. In 1955, Johannes sent his copy of the transcripts to the second Justice Harlan, who eventually deposited them in the Library of Congress.

To create this annotated transcript of Justice Harlan’s lectures, Professor Frye purchased a microfilm copy of Johannes’s …

The Dialectic Of Obscenity, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Until the 1960s, pornography was obscene, and obscenity prosecutions were relatively common. And until the 1970s, obscenity prosecutions targeted art, as well as pornography. But today, obscenity prosecutions are rare and limited to the most extreme forms of pornography.

So why did obscenity largely disappear? The conventional history of obscenity is doctrinal, holding that the Supreme Court’s redefinition of obscenity in order to protect art inevitably required the protection of pornography as well. In other words, art and literature were the vanguard of pornography.

But the conventional history of obscenity is incomplete. While it accounts for the development of obscenity …

The Peculiar Story Of United States V. Miller, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

On April 18, 1938, the Arkansas and Oklahoma state police stopped Jack Miller and Frank Layton, two washed-up Oklahoma bank robbers. Miller and Layton had an unregistered sawed-off shotgun, so the police arrested them for violating the National Firearms Act (“NFA”). Surprisingly, the district court dismissed the charges, holding the NFA violates the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court reversed in United States v. Miller, holding the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to keep and bear a sawed-off shotgun as a matter of law.

Seventy years later, Miller remains the only Supreme Court opinion construing the Second Amendment. …

The Historic Role Of The Supreme Court, John P. Frank

Kentucky Law Journal

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