Legal History Commons^™

International News V Associated Press: A Theme And Variations Over Four Days, Christopher Wadlow

Christopher Wadlow

A series of four classes at the University of Trier (Germany) for undergraduate law students, using the International News v Associated Press case 248 U.S. 215 (1918) to discuss some principles of unfair competition and copyright law, as well as some more fundamental doctrines from the common law, and American Constitutional law.

Liberdade, Ética E Direito, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

Further than Ethics concieved as mere obedience, Republican Ethics expresses the idea of duty for freedom and Liberty. After Law concieved as only duty and imperative norms from power to the subjects, there is the possibility of a fraternal law, in new patterns. This article explores several ways in a new ethics and a new law paradigms, after the objective Roman Law and the subjective modern Law.

Jogelmélet Jog Nélkül? [Legal Theory Without Law?], Péter Cserne

Péter Cserne

No abstract provided.

Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman

Martha M. Ertman

Legal doctrines banning polygamy grew out of nineteenth century Americans’ view that Mormons betrayed the nation by engaging in conduct associated with people of color. This article reveals the racial underpinnings of polygamy law by examining cartoons and other antipolygamy rhetoric of the time to demonstrate Sir Henry Maine’s famous observation that the move in progressive societies is “from status to contract.” It frames antipolygamists’ contentions as a visceral defense of racial and sexual status in the face of encroaching contractual thinking. Polygamy, they reasoned, was “natural” for people of color but so “unnatural” for whites as to produce a …

John Mccain's Citizenship: A Tentative Defense, Stephen E. Sachs

Stephen E. Sachs

Sen. John McCain was born a U.S. citizen and is eligible to be president. The most serious challenge to his status, recently posed by Prof. Gabriel Chin, contends that the statute granting citizenship to Americans born abroad did not include the Panama Canal Zone, where McCain was born in 1936. When Congress amended the law in 1937, he concludes, it was too late for McCain to be "natural born." Even assuming, however, that McCain's citizenship depended on this statute - and ignoring his claim to citizenship at common law - Chin's argument may be based on a misreading. When the …

Who's Presumptuous Now? Mccain Articulates U.S. Foreign Policy In Georgia Conflict, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

No abstract provided.

Enumeration And Other Constitutional Strategies For Protecting Rights: The View From 1787/1791, Mark A. Graber

Mark Graber

This paper interprets the constitution of 1791 in light of the constitution of 1787. The persons responsible for the original constitution thought they had secured fundamental rights by a combination of representation, the separation of powers, and the extended republic. The Bill of Rights, in their view, was a minor supplement to the strategies previously employed for preventing abusive government practices. Proposed amendments were less a list of fundamental freedoms than an enumeration of those rights likely to appease moderate anti-Federalists. That many vaguely phrased rights lacked clear legal meaning was of little concern to their Federalist sponsors, who trusted …

I Want To Be Too Big To Fail, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

No abstract provided.

The Roots And False Aspersions Of Shipowner's Limitation Of Liability, Graydon S. Staring

Graydon S. Staring

Limitation of enterprise liability is today so commonplace that we see notice of it all around us in the words “incorporated” and “limited” and their abbreviations, and take it for granted that any sizeable business and many small ones enjoy limited liability. It was not always so, and long before it became generally available ashore the pioneers of enterprise liability limitation were shipowners. That it has survived the development and ready availability of corporate limitation is at first remarkable but becomes quite understandable when its history, its foundations in the policy of maritime nations, its relation to modern commercial maritime …

Mestizaje And The Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There Is No Blackness, Taunya Lovell Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

Many legal scholars who write about Mexican mestizaje omit references to Afromexicans, Mexico’s African roots, and contemporary anti-black sentiments in the Mexican and Mexican American communities. The reasons for the erasure or invisibility of Mexico’s African roots are complex. It argues that post-colonial officials and theorists in shaping Mexico’s national image were influenced two factors: the Spanish colonial legacy and the complex set of rules creating a race-like caste system with a distinct anti-black bias reinforced through art; and the negative images of Mexico and Mexicans articulated in the United States during the early nineteenth century. The post-colonial Mexican becomes …

The Scope Of Section 1985(3) In Light Of Great American Federal Savings And Loan Association V. Novotny: Too Little Too Late?, Taunya Lovell Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

No abstract provided.

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventheenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude—slavery in the mid-seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry—English; her …

La Naturaleza Jurídica Del Distrito Federal. Historia, Actualidad Y Pendientes, Juan Pablo Pampillo Baliño

Juan Pablo Pampillo Baliño

No abstract provided.

Unchaste And Incredible: The Use Of Gendered Conceptions Of Honor In Impeachment, Julia Simon-Kerr

Julia Simon-Kerr

The American rules for impeaching witnesses developed against a cultural background that equated a woman's "honor," and thus her credibility, with her sexual virtue. The idea that a woman's chastity informs her credibility did not originate in rape trials and the confusing interplay between questions of consent and sexual history. Rather, gendered notions of honor so permeated American legal culture that attorneys routinely attempted to impeach female witnesses by invoking their sexual histories in cases involving such diverse claims as title to land, assault, arson, and wrongful death. But while many courts initially accepted the notion that an unchaste woman …

Mukasey's Defense Of Professional Irresponsibility, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

No abstract provided.

Searching And Researching Archives, Matilda Arvidsson

Dr Matilda Arvidsson

In this presentation I juxtapose two web pages, analyzed as archives: the Gertrude Bell archives (http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/), and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq official web page (http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/).

Following Jacques Derrida and Ann Laura Stoler, I argue that these archives should be researched not as sources of knowledge, but rather as the structuring and production of knowledge of law and colonial power. Researching law and colonial power in this way the similarities and dissimilarities in structuring the two archives as specifically online archives are analyzed in the presentation, pointing at the ways in which documents, texts, data is provided, presented …

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: Who Earns Rights, And When?, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

This paper considers two moments that scholars generally agree featured advances for African Americans’ citizenship – the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II and its immediate aftermath – and reads these moments through lenses of race and gender. I consider the conjunction of acknowledged sacrifices and contributions to the state, the rights advances achieved, and the gendered and racialized conceptions of citizen service emerging out of both post-war periods. This conjunction suggests that the kind of citizenship that people of color gained during and after wartime crises depended upon gendered and racialized hierarchies that valued …

The Trial Of Queen Caroline And The Impeachment Of President Clinton: Law As A Weapon For Political Reform, Daniel H. Erskine

Daniel H. Erskine

This article explores the calculated use of legal mechanisms to impact national politics and the effect such utilization had on accomplishing deliberate political reform. In answering why political actors use legal procedures as political weapons and whether such use is effective, this paper analyzes two historical examples to illustrate that law as political weapon is extremely successful in accomplishing political change. In the early 1800’s, England’s King sought to defrock his politically radical heroine Queen Caroline through the parliamentary mechanism of a Bill of Pains and Penalties, which caused a flourish of public criticism and call for political revolution. Public …

Teach Justice, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

Law schools must improve their preparation of students to practice law ethically. Current law school curricula focus on preparing students to analyze legal issues but not ethical issues. A curriculum that encourages students to distance themselves from their ethical instincts is dangerous. A value-neutral approach to the law eventually leads to distortions of the law. Lawyers will be left without a proper way to sense the purpose behind the law, and they will instead focus solely on what the law requires or allows. While law schools could choose from limitless lists of moral values to include in their curricula, this …

The “Institutional Turn” In Jurisprudence: Critique And Reconstruction., Andres Palacios Lleras

Andrés Palacios Lleras

This paper engages in a inquiry into the roles that courts play within the legal system, given that judges are interdependent interpreters of legal rules that are boundedly rational and, arguably, politically biased. Contemporary authors claim that, although these two conditions play an important role in interpretation, contemporary theories in jurisprudence have not addressed them properly. Their assessments raise legal issues that are very significant; given the fact that judges are boundedly rational and tend to display political biases, how should they interpret legal rules? Is it best for them to interpret these rules in a formalist fashion, without resorting …

The Indeterminate Side Of Constitutions As Precommitment Strategies, Andres Palacios Lleras

Andrés Palacios Lleras

This paper engages in a time-honored inquiry in American jurisprudence, an inquiry which continues to be invigorated by contemporary studies in Constitutional Law. It is an inquiry into the determinacy of the American Constitution as a legal text, taking into account that it was drafted and approved more than two hundred years ago with the purpose, arguably, to organize present and future political decision-making. Some contemporary authors claim that the discussion about the role of the Constitution is muddled, and that to acknowledge its authority does not necessarily entail a theory of constitutional interpretation. Furthermore, other authors have claimed that …

Droits De L'Homme, Droits Du Citoyen: Les Présupposés De La Jurisprudence Américaine Et Européenne, Gregory Lewkowicz

Gregory Lewkowicz

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of some rulings of the US Supreme Court and of the European Court of Human Rights. Reviewing cases related to international legal problems or using comparative legal reasoning, the paper suggests that the difference of attitudes between the two courts in human rights cases is embedded in the classical opposition between men and citizen.

Legal Process, Sandra Ruffin

Sandra Ruffin

No abstract provided.

Two Horwitzian Journeys, Assaf Likhovski

Assaf Likhovski

No abstract provided.

Women At Work: Towards An Inclusive Narrative Of The Rise Of The Regulatory State, Arianne Renan Barzilay Dr.

Arianne Renan Barzilay Dr. (J.S.D., New York University School of Law)

Abstract: This Article seeks to enrich what we know about the establishment of the regulatory state. It focuses on women’s contribution to the rise of the American regulatory apparatus. By looking at historical sources and archival materials, this Article illustrates how women reformers were central to the development of the regulatory state and how they were guided by an ideology that called for government regulation to provide decent standards of living. Through the example of the establishment of the Women’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor, the Article expands our understanding of the purposes of administrative bodies, and it …

Правовая Политика Cоветского Государства В Сфере Регулирования Научной Деятельности: Сущность И Нормативное Содержание, Leonid G. Berlyavskiy

Leonid G. Berlyavskiy

The article is devoted to the research of legal policy of the State in the sphere of scientific activity. It is defined as the complex of ideas, problems, purposes, programs, methods, orientations and also political and legal mechanism of regulation of the activity directed on reception and application of new knowledge at a certain stage of historical development of the society and the state. Theoretical approaches are presented on the empirical base of legal policy of the Soviet state in sphere of regulation of scientific activity that after October, 1917 differed considerable specificity

Roman Law Always Dies With A Codification, Tomasz Giaro

Tomasz Giaro

No abstract provided.

Why John Mccain Was A Citizen At Birth, Stephen E. Sachs

Stephen E. Sachs

Senator John McCain was born a citizen in 1936. Professor Gabriel J. Chin challenges this view in this Symposium, arguing that McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone (while his father was stationed there by the Navy) fell into a loophole in the governing statute. The best historical evidence, however, suggests that this loophole is an illusion and that McCain is a "natural born Citizen" eligible to be president.

On War As Law And Law As War, Ignacio De La Rasilla Del Moral, Francisco Contreras

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral, Ph.D.

A locus classicus of international law, the study of the regulation of the legality of the use of force has an unavoidable ring of tragic fanciness about it. War, as acknowledged by David Kennedy in the very first sentence of his book, is indeed ‘a profound topic – like truth, love, death or the divine’. A Pandora's box of multiple distilled intellectual emotions behind which lurk the horrid memories of its survivors, war only truly breathes in the mirrors of the mutilated, in the eyes of the tortured, in the memories of the displaced, in withering flowers over graves crowned, …

La Justicia Constitucional En México. Propuesta De Reformas A Los Artículos 94, 103, 105, 107 Y 116 De La Constitución Política De Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Juan Pablo Pampillo

Juan Pablo Pampillo Baliño

No abstract provided.