Legal History Commons^™

The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter

Michigan Law Review

On the night of September 17, 1998, someone called the police to report that a man was going crazy with a gun inside a Houston apartment. When Harris County sheriff's deputies entered the apartment they found no person with a gun but did witness John Lawrence and Tyron Gamer having anal sex. This violated the Texas Homosexual Conduct law, and the deputies hauled them off to jail for the night. Lawyers took the men's case to the Supreme Court and won a huge victory for gay rights. So goes the legend of Lawrence v. Texas. Do not believe it. …

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

The Historical Origins Of The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination At Common Law, John H. Langbein

Michigan Law Review

This essay explains that the true origins of the common law privilege are to be found not in the high politics of the English revolutions, but in the rise of adversary criminal procedure at the end of the eighteenth century. The privilege against self-incrimination at common law was the work of defense counsel.

Part I of this essay discusses the several attributes of early modem criminal procedure that combined, until the end of the eighteenth century, to prevent the development of the common law privilege. Part II explains how prior scholarship went astray in locating the common law privilege against …

Trial By Ordeal, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal by Robert Bartlett

Euthanasia For Sale?, A.W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Easing the Passing: The Trial of Dr. John Bodkin Adams by Patrick Devlin

The Lindbergh Kidnapping Revisited, John F. Keenan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann by Ludovic Kennedy

The Trials Of Israel Lipski, Blaine G. Renfert

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Trials of Israel Lipski by Martin L. Friedland

Conscience And The Law: The English Criminal Jury, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Verdict According to Conscience by Thomas Andrew Green

Cannibalism And The Common Law: The Story Of The Tragic Last Voyage Of The Mignonette And The Strange Legal Proceedings To Which It Gave Rise, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which it Gave Rise by A.W. Brian Simpson

Trials Without End: Some Comments And Reviews On The Sacco-Vanzetti, Rosenberg, And Hiss Cases, Terry A. Cooney

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Porter: The Never-Ending Wrong, and Meeropol & Meeropol: We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and Weinstein:Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case