Legal History Commons^™

The Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Archives And The Contemporary Researcher, John Jacob

John Jacob

No abstract provided.

Of Monsters & Lawyers, Milan Markovic

Milan Markovic

No abstract provided.

The Grand Experiment Law And Legal Culture In British Settler Societies, Hamar Foster, Benjamin Berger, A. Buck

Benjamin L Berger

In the late nineteenth century, the English legal historians Frederick Pollock and F.W. Maitland coined the phrase "the grand experiment" to describe the spread of English law throughout the British Empire. For Pollock and Maitland, this was an unequivocally positive process that would uplift settler societies. The work of recent legal historians, however, has alerted us to the more complex impact English law had on the peoples, both settler and indigenous, of those colonial societies. This "new colonial legal history" has revealed subtle and more ambiguous understandings of "the grand experiment." The essays in this volume reflect the exciting new …

A Mathematical Approach To The Study Of The United States Code, Daniel Katz

Daniel M Katz

No abstract provided.

Institutional Rules, Strategic Behavior And The Legacy Of Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Setting The Record Straight On Dickerson V. United States, Daniel Katz

Daniel M Katz

Why did Justice Rehnquist behave the way he did in Dickerson v. United States? As written, many prevailing accounts accept Justice Rehnquist's opinion in Dickerson v. United States at face value and disavow the potential of a strategic explanation. The difficulty with the non-strategic accounts is their failure to outline explicitly the evidence supporting the uniqueness of their theory. Specifically, these explanations largely ignore the alternative set of preferences which could have produced the Chief's decision. This is troubling because prior scholarship demonstrates that a chief justice possesses a unique set of institutional powers which provides significant incentive for him …

All Americans Not Equal: Mistrust And Discrimination Against Naturalized Citizens In The U.S., Alev Dudek

Alev Dudek

Dear Sir/Madam: The Lost Art Of Letter Writing, 19 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 62 (2010), Maureen Collins

Maureen B. Collins

No abstract provided.

Demonic Ambiguities: Enchantment And Disenchantment In Nat Turner’S Virginia, Christopher Tomlins

Christopher Tomlins

No abstract provided.

"Law As…": Theory And Practice In Legal History, Christopher Tomlins, John Comaroff

Christopher Tomlins

No abstract provided.

Foreword: “Law As . . .” Ii, History As Interface For The Interdisciplinary Study Of Law, Christopher Tomlins

Christopher Tomlins

No abstract provided.

What Would Langdell Have Thought? Uc Irvine’S New Law School And The Question Of History, Christopher Tomlins

Christopher Tomlins

No abstract provided.

Should Progressives Support The Constitution?, Steven Shiffrin

Steven H. Shiffrin

In the closing pages of Constitutional Faith Sanford Levinson asks himself whether he would have signed the Constitution in Philadelphia, warts and all. He concludes that he would have joined the signers primarily because of a progressive faith that the evils of the Constitution would erode with time. So too, Levinson's frequent co-author J.M. Balkin, asks in the midst of a symposium on fidelity in constitutional theory, whether the present Constitution deserves our fidelity. Balkin does not deny the presence of sanctioned evil under our Constitution. He suggests, for example, that the Constitution fails to protect the poor. In so …

Legal Aid 1900 To 1930: What Happened To Law Reform?, Mark Spiegel

Mark Spiegel

The Pre-Appointment Experience Of Supreme Court Justices: Response To Professor Barton, 64 Fla. L. Rev. F. 29 (2012), Timothy O'Neill

Timothy P. O'Neill

No abstract provided.

The California Public Defender: Its Origins, Evolution And Decline, Laurence Benner

Laurence A. Benner

No abstract provided.

The Paradox Of Parliamentary Supremacy: Delegation, Democracy And Dictatorship In Germany And France, 1920s-1950s, Peter Lindseth

Peter L. Lindseth

No abstract provided.

Principles For Constitutions And Institutions In Promoting The Rule Of Law, Jon Mills

Jon L. Mills

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Legal & Policy Issues in the Americas Conference (2003). Panel IV. Comparative Constitutional Approaches to the Rule of Law and Judicial Independence.

Charting The Influences On The Judicial Mind: An Empirical Study Of Judicial Reasoning, Gregory Sisk, Michael Heise, Andrew Morriss

Michael Heise

In 1988, hundreds of federal district judges were suddenly confronted with the need to render a decision on the constitutionality of the Sentencing Reform Act and the newly promulgated criminal Sentencing Guidelines. Never before has a question of such importance and involving such significant issues of constitutional law mandated the immediate and simultaneous attention of such a large segment of the federal trial bench. Accordingly, this event provides an archetypal model for exploring the influence of social background, ideology, judicial role and institution, and other factors on judicial decisionmaking. Based upon a unique set of written decisions involving an identical …

Compensation And Revenge, Emily Sherwin

Emily L Sherwin

No abstract provided.

Thurgood Marshall's Improbable But Brilliant Choice, Michael Meltsner

Michael Meltsner

No abstract provided.

The Natural Born Citizen Clause As Originally Understood, Mary Brigid Mcmanamon

Mary Brigid McManamon

Article II of the Constitution requires that the President be a “natural born Citizen.” The phrase is derived from English common law, and the Supreme Court requires examination of that law to ascertain the phrase’s definition. This piece presents the pertinent English sources, combined with statements by early American jurists. Based on a reading of these materials, the article concludes that, in the eyes of the Framers, a presidential candidate must be born within the United States. The article is important because there has been a candidate that “pushed the envelope” on this question in many elections over the last …

The Great Alliance: History, Reason, And Will In Modern Law, Paulo Barrozo

Paulo Barrozo

This article offers an interpretation of the intellectual and political origins of modern law in the nineteenth century and its consequences for contemporary legal thought. Social theoretical analyses of law and legal thought tend to emphasize rupture and change. Histories of legal thought tend to draw a picture of strife between different schools of jurisprudence. Such analyses and histories fail to account for the extent to which present legal thought is the continuation of a jurisprudential settlement that occurred in the nineteenth century. That settlement tamed the will of the masses under the influence of authoritative legal thought, conceptions of …

Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, And The Rhetoric Of Interdisciplinarity, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article considers how lawyers and nonlawyers discuss the contribution of interdisciplinary scholarship to the law as a means of rethinking the relationship between these differences. The article first examines the arguments of the nineteenth-century lawyer Henry Maine and of the twentieth-century anthropologist Edmund Leach on the subject, and notes the difference between Maine's emphasis on "movement" from one theoretical discovery to another and Leach's emphasis on creating relationships between disciplines by exploiting a "space in between" the two. Then, turning to contemporary scholarship in legal anthropology, "Law and Society," and the sociology of law, the article critiques the rigid …

Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article takes anthropologists’ renewed interest in property theory as an opportunity to consider legal theory-making as an ethnographic subject in its own right. My focus is on one particular construct – the instrument, or relation of means to ends, that animates both legal and anthropological theories about property. An analysis of the workings of this construct leads to the conclusion that rather than critique the ends of legal knowledge, the anthropology of property should devote itself to articulating its own means.

Foreword: Transdisciplinary Conflicts Of Law, Ralf Michaels, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This introduction to our co-edited special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems addresses how interdisciplinary studies might contribute to the revitalization of the field of Conflict of Laws. The introduction surveys existing approaches to interdisciplinarity in conflict of laws - drawn primarily from economics, political science, anthropology and sociology. It argues that most of these interdisciplinary efforts have remained internal to the law, relating conflicts to other legal spheres and issue areas. It summarizes some of the contributions of these projects but also outlines the ways they fall short of the full promise of interdisciplinary work in Conflicts scholarship, and …

On The Very Idea Of Transitional Justice, Jens Ohlin

Jens David Ohlin

The phrase "transitional justice" has had an amazingly successful career at an early age. Popularized as an academic concept in the early 1990s in the aftermath of apartheid's collapse in South Africa, the phrase quickly gained traction in a variety of global contexts, including Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and Sierra Leone. A sizeable literature has been generated around it, so much so that one might even call it a sub-discipline with inter-disciplinary qualities. Nonetheless, the concept remains an enigma. It defines the contours of an entire field of intellectual inquiry, yet at the same time it hides more than it illuminates. …

Feminist Legal Theory, Feminist Lawmaking, And The Legal Profession, Cynthia Bowman, Elizabeth Schneider

Cynthia Grant Bowman

No abstract provided.

Killing The Non-Willing: Atkins, The Volitionally Incapacitated, And The Death Penalty, John Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson

John H. Blume

Jamie Wilson, nineteen years old and severely mentally ill, walked into a school cafeteria and started shooting. Two children died, and Jamie was charged with two counts of capital murder. Because he admitted his guilt, the only issue at his trial was the appropriate punishment. The trial judge assigned to his case, after hearing expert testimony on his mental state, found that mental illness rendered Jamie unable to conform his conduct to the requirements of law at the time of the crime—not impaired by his mental illness in his ability to control his behavior, but unable to control his behavior. …

The Transformation Of Trusts As A Legal Category, 1800-1914, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Sometimes we are least aware of that which most affects us. So it seems with respect to legal categories. Lawyers do not take legal categories very seriously today. But they should. Legal categories are central to legal reasoning; indeed it is almost impossible to imagine legal reasoning without the use of categories. Categorical thinking affects every area of law. The purpose of this article is to illuminate, through a case-study, the contingent and ideological character of legal categories. It focuses on the development of trusts into and then as a discrete legal category during the period between the beginning of …

Talking About Difference: Meanings And Metaphors Of Individuality, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

This paper discusses the relationship between communitarianism and difference theory. Specifically, it focuses on the rhetorical practices that have created an apparent conflict between difference theory and communitarianism. My purpose is to suggest why this conflict dissolves when community and difference are understood as strategic rhetorics that share a common political vision.