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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Legislation And Regulation In The Core Curriculum: A Virtue Or A Necessity?, James J. Brudney Jan 2015

Legislation And Regulation In The Core Curriculum: A Virtue Or A Necessity?, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

The first-year curriculum at American law schools has been remarkably stable for more than 100 years. Many would say ossified. At Harvard, the First-Year Course of Instruction in 1879-80 consisted of Real Property, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, and Civil Procedure. These five courses-focused heavily on judge-made common law-dominated Harvard's IL curriculum from the law school's founding into the 21st century. The same five subjects have long commanded the primary attention of first-year students at Fordham, founded in 1905, and at virtually every other U.S. law school throughout the 20th century. Starting in the 1990s, however, a growing …


Feminism As Liberalism: A Tribute To The Work Of Martha Nussbaum Symposium: Honoring The Contributions Of Professor Martha Nussbaum To The Scholarship And Practice Of Gender And Sexuality Law: Feminism And Liberalism, Tracy E. Higgins Jan 2010

Feminism As Liberalism: A Tribute To The Work Of Martha Nussbaum Symposium: Honoring The Contributions Of Professor Martha Nussbaum To The Scholarship And Practice Of Gender And Sexuality Law: Feminism And Liberalism, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I revisit and expand an argument I have made with respect to the limited usefulness of liberalism in defining an agenda for guaranteeing women's rights and improving women's conditions. After laying out this case, I discuss Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach to fundamental rights and human development and acknowledge that her approach addresses to a significant degree many of the objections I and other feminist scholars have raised. I then turn to fieldwork that I have done in South Africa on the issue of custom and women's choices with regard to marriage and divorce. Applying Professor Nussbaum's capabilities …


Straying From The Path Of The Law After One Hundred Years, The, Tracy E. Higgins Jan 1996

Straying From The Path Of The Law After One Hundred Years, The, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

What common ground can be found between modern feminist legal theory and a century-old essay advocating understanding the law from the perspective of the "bad man"? The question admits of no simple answer. Feminists, including myself, might agree with some irony that "[i]f you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man" but would add that this is precisely the problem. Of course, Holmes does not use the concept of the bad man in a feminist sense to suggest that the law empowers the bad man at the expense of women. …


Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1995

Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …