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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

The Price Of Conflict: War, Taxes, And The Politics Of Fiscal Citizenship, Ajay K. Mehrotra Apr 2010

The Price Of Conflict: War, Taxes, And The Politics Of Fiscal Citizenship, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Michigan Law Review

This Review proceeds in four parts, paralleling the chronological organization of War and Taxes. It focuses mainly on the book's analysis of the leading modern American wars, from the Civil War through the global conflicts of the twentieth century, up to the recent war on terror. Part I contrasts the tax policies of the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War to show how the Lincoln Administration was able to overcome Yankee resistance to wartime tax hikes to wage a war against a Southern Confederacy that resolutely resisted any type of centralized taxation until, of course, it was too late. …


Saving The Constitution: Lincoln, Secession, And The Price Of Union, Craig S. Lerner May 2004

Saving The Constitution: Lincoln, Secession, And The Price Of Union, Craig S. Lerner

Michigan Law Review

The year is 1860. After failing to obtain, as he had expected, the Democratic Party nomination for President at its Charleston convention, Stephen Douglas abandons his candidacy. In the ensuing election, Democrat John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky edges Republican Abraham Lincoln. The official platform of the Democratic Party includes endorsement of the Dred Scott decision, slavery's expansion in the federal territories, rigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, and elimination of the tariff. Abolitionists in New England are inconsolable. For several years, Henry Lloyd Garrison had advocated Northern secession, denouncing the Constitution as a "union with slaveholders," and "a covenant …


Taking Aim At An American Myth, Paul Finkelman May 2001

Taking Aim At An American Myth, Paul Finkelman

Michigan Law Review

Every American had a musket hanging over his fireplace at night, and by his side during the day. Like Cincinnatus, time and again Americans dropped their plows to shoulder their arms, to fight the Indians, the French, the Indians, the British, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Indians yet again, and then, from 1861 to 1865, each other. American men were comfortable with guns; they needed them and wanted them. They felt at home in woods, in search of food, or in defense of their homesteads. It is a story as old as our first pulp novels and earliest movies. It …


The Second Amendment: Structure, History, And Constitutional Change, David Yassky Dec 2000

The Second Amendment: Structure, History, And Constitutional Change, David Yassky

Michigan Law Review

A fierce debate about the Second Amendment has been percolating in academia for two decades, and has now bubbled through to the courts. The question at the heart of this debate is whether the Amendment restricts the government's ability to regulate the private possession of firearms. Since at least 1939 - when the Supreme Court decided United States v. Miller, its only decision squarely addressing the scope of the right to "keep and bear Arms" - the answer to that question has been an unqualified "no." Courts have brushed aside Second Amendment challenges to gun control legislation, reading the Amendment …


The Law Of Belligerent Occupation In The American Courts, Morris G. Shanker S.Ed. May 1952

The Law Of Belligerent Occupation In The American Courts, Morris G. Shanker S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

This comment will investigate the extent to which the law of belligerent occupation has actually become a part of the American municipal law, and thereby attempt to determine whether it was properly applied in this case.


Constitutional Interpretation And Judicial Self-Restraint, Vincent M. Barnett Jr. Dec 1940

Constitutional Interpretation And Judicial Self-Restraint, Vincent M. Barnett Jr.

Michigan Law Review

The newly reconstituted Supreme Court of the United States has become the center of an earnest controversy with respect to the true role of the Court in constitutional interpretation. The general controversy is, of course, far from new. What makes it of more than ordinary significance is that the Court itself is revealing a tendency substantially to alter the extent, if not the nature, of judicial review. This tendency has not yet become clearly dominant, but it is apparent enough to shake the implicit faith in the Court of many of those to whom, before 1937, any criticism of the …


Freedom Of The Press And Of The Mails, Eberhard P. Deutsch Mar 1938

Freedom Of The Press And Of The Mails, Eberhard P. Deutsch

Michigan Law Review

It should be unnecessary to amend the Federal Constitution to accommodate the facilities of government to the needs of society, as those needs develop with the social and scientific advance of civilization. But the trend of legislative effort to reach beyond constitutional limits to satisfy fleeting economic or political expediencies, without regard for the vital distinction between sound and substance, and of courts to seek justification for such excursions, under the benefit of constitutional doubt due "solemn expressions of legislative will," may lead to highly dangerous situations. As this trend is permitted to reach extremes, the erasure of the well-defined …


Banking Reform By Statute, Robert G. Rodkey May 1934

Banking Reform By Statute, Robert G. Rodkey

Michigan Law Review

The lamentable failure of our banking system to function satisfactorily in the performance of its duties to the public raises at the outset two kinds of questions. Is there something fundamentally unsound about the structure of our banking machinery or does the trouble reside merely in a lack of understanding on the part of bankers of the proper management of the detailed activities in which banks necessarily engage? Or may the unsatisfactory result be ascribed to a combination of these two alternatives? The position taken in this paper is that the structure of our banking system is inherently unsound and …