Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset
Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset
Journal Articles
The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.
This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only …
Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset
Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset
Journal Articles
This Article considers a puzzle about how different kinds of law came to be distributed around the world. The legal systems of some European colonies largely reflected the laws of the colonizer. Other colonies exhibited a greater degree of legal pluralism, in which the state administered a mix of different legal systems. Conventional explanations for this variation look to the extent of European settlement: where colonizers settled in large numbers, they chose to bring their own laws; otherwise, they preferred to retain preexisting ones. This Article challenges that assumption by offering a new account of how and why the British …