Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- Comparative and Foreign Law (11)
- Constitutional Law (6)
- Supreme Court of the United States (6)
- Law and Philosophy (5)
- Courts (4)
-
- Criminal Law (4)
- Criminal Procedure (4)
- International Law (3)
- Jurisprudence (2)
- Legal Writing and Research (2)
- Litigation (2)
- Bankruptcy Law (1)
- Common Law (1)
- Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law (1)
- European Law (1)
- Judges (1)
- Jurisdiction (1)
- Labor and Employment Law (1)
- Law Enforcement and Corrections (1)
- Law and Politics (1)
- Law and Society (1)
- Military, War, and Peace (1)
- Natural Law (1)
- Religion Law (1)
- Rule of Law (1)
- Tax Law (1)
- Keyword
-
- History (23)
- England (8)
- Constitution (5)
- United States Supreme Court (5)
- Philosophy (4)
-
- Change (3)
- Constitutional interpretation (3)
- Crimes (3)
- Criminal justice (3)
- Essays (3)
- New Deal (3)
- Records (3)
- 18th century (2)
- 19th century (2)
- China (2)
- Crime (2)
- Great Britain (2)
- Homicide (2)
- Law reform (2)
- Medieval law (2)
- Monarchy (2)
- Police (2)
- Political philosophy (2)
- Political theory (2)
- Rhetoric (2)
- 17th century (1)
- America (1)
- Analysis (1)
- Anthropolgy (1)
- Anthropology (1)
Articles 1 - 30 of 34
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Marshaling Mcculloch, Richard A. Primus
Marshaling Mcculloch, Richard A. Primus
Reviews
David Schwartz’s terrific new book is subtitled John Marshall and the 200-Year Odyssey of McCulloch v. Maryland. But the book is about much more than Marshall and McCulloch. It’s bout the long struggle over the scope of national power. Marshall and McCulloch are characters in the story, but the story isn’t centrally about them. Indeed, an important part of Schwartz’s narrative is that McCulloch has mattered relatively little in that struggle, except as a protean symbol.
Why Study Tax History?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Why Study Tax History?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Reviews
Since the beginning of this century, John Tiley organized an annual tax history conference at Cambridge, a tradition that was continued after his death under the leadership of Peter Harris. These are the papers from the ninthCambridge Tax Law History Conference, held in July 2018. In the usual manner, the papers have been selected from an oversupply of proposals for their interest and relevance, and scrutinized and edited to the highest standard for inclusion in this prestigious series. The result is an outstanding book, with many high quality contributions to historical tax research.
The Elephant Problem, Richard Primus
The Elephant Problem, Richard Primus
Reviews
In their new book, "A Great Power of Attorney": Understanding the Fiduciary Constitution, Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman argue that, as a matter of original meaning, the Constitution should be understood as analogous to a power of attorney, that interpretive devices applicable to powers of attorney should therefore be used in constitutional interpretation, and that interpreting the Constitution that way would produce results congenial to modern libertarian preferences, such as the unconstitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the invalidity, on nondelegation grounds, of much of the federal administrative state. But the book fails to carry any of its central …
Review Of South Sudan: A Slow Liberation, Laura Nyantung Beny
Review Of South Sudan: A Slow Liberation, Laura Nyantung Beny
Reviews
This is a remarkable book. It offers a complex and nuanced analysis of South Sudan's prolonged and troubled march to political liberation—first from Anglo‐Egyptian colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then from hegemonic Arab rule in post‐independence Sudan [1956‐2011], and now from South Sudan's internal political and economic contradictions.
Review Of Sovereign Defaults Before International Courts And Tribunals, John A. E. Pottow, Emily Iversen
Review Of Sovereign Defaults Before International Courts And Tribunals, John A. E. Pottow, Emily Iversen
Reviews
This book review probes Michael Waibel’s new book, Sovereign Defaults Before International Courts and Tribunals. Waibel's project is ambitious, exploring international attempts to address sovereign defaults over the past century and a half. Through painstaking and comprehensive historical analysis, Waibel shows how we've been here before -- a sober reminder for those thinking Argentina is simply part of a new fad in financial default. With the UN now turning its attention to sovereign debt issues, this study is especially timely. Although somewhat disappointing in the lightness of its normative content, the book should nevertheless prove helpful to those considering the …
Gideon V. Wainwright A Half Century Later, Yale Kamisar
Gideon V. Wainwright A Half Century Later, Yale Kamisar
Reviews
When he was nearing the end of his distinguished career, one of my former law professors observed that a dramatic story of a specific case "has the same advantages that a play or a novel has over a general discussion of ethics or political theory." Ms. Houppert illustrates this point in her very first chapter.
Review Of Understanding Labor And Employment Law In China, By Ronald C.Brown, Nicholas C. Howson
Review Of Understanding Labor And Employment Law In China, By Ronald C.Brown, Nicholas C. Howson
Reviews
Any attempt to analyze China’s comprehensive labor reform over the past three decades faces at least two dilemmas. First, the analyst must confront the task of describing how the Chinese state has dismantled the “work unit” (or danwei)- based “iron rice bowl” employment and entitlements system, replacing that comforting but low-production employment and social security scheme with formally-proclaimed legal rights and institutions apparently designed to protect employees in a functioning labor market. Second, the analyst must track how the state’s commitment (at all levels of government) to implementation of proclaimed legal and institutional protections has waxed and waned, based upon …
Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson
Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson
Reviews
Observing these significant legal-political debates in the Chinese press and academy in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we might think they concern battles started only in the last decade and a half of Reform-era China. Now Professor Xu Xiaoqun reminds us that these struggles have a much longer pedigree, stretching back to the end of the nineteenth century and China's first fraught encounter with "the West" and one idea of "modernity."
Review Of Napoleon And The British, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Napoleon And The British, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Was he fascinating or repulsive? The bold courier of republican liberty under law or the scabrous carrier of lethal Jacobin corruption? Heaven-sent deliverer or providential scourge? Even his name was up for grabs: was it Bonaparte or Buonaparte? One need only dip into contemporary sources to realize that the British were obsessed with Napoleon. Stuart Semmel has done a first-rate job combing through those sources and using them to illuminate political culture. (Semmel does not offer the primary quotations I will use here. I offer them for fun, or to pile on with glee, and not at all to reproach …
Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
The explosion of primary texts from seven- teenth-century England continues to trigger an explosion of scholarly treatments today. For good reason, too: Lots of the primary texts are amazing, and not just those tired old warhors- es, Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise. As fun and challenging as the primary texts are, you are forgiven a touch of skepticism if you wonder just what the latest author has to add to our understanding. You might redouble your skepticism if you just glance at Mark Stephen Jendrysik's table of contents, offering chapters on Winstanley, Milton, Cromwell, Filmer, and Hobbes, and zeroing …
The Constitution And The New Deal, Richard D. Friedman
The Constitution And The New Deal, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The Supreme Court of the New Deal era continues to captivate American lawyers and historians. Constitutional jurisprudence changed rapidly during the period. Moreover, some of the most significant changes appeared - whatever the reality - to result from pressure imposed in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Court with Justices amenable to his programme. The structure of constitutional law that emerged within a few years of Roosevelt's death remains intact in significant respects today.
...A Rendezvous With Kreplach: Putting The New Deal Court In Context, Richard D. Friedman
...A Rendezvous With Kreplach: Putting The New Deal Court In Context, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The Supreme Court of the New Deal era continues to captivate lawyers and historians. Constitutional jurisprudence changed rapidly during the period. Moreover, some of the most significant changes seemed--whatever the reality--to result from pressure imposed in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Court. The structure of constitutional law that emerged within a few years of Roosevelt's death remains intact in significant respects today.
Beyond The Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, Margo Schlanger
Beyond The Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, Margo Schlanger
Reviews
In 1955, in its second decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court suggested that federal courts might be called upon to engage in long-term oversight of once-segregated schools. Through the 1960s, southern resistance pushed federal district and appellate judges to turn that possibility into a reality. The impact of this saga on litigation practice extended beyond school desegregation, and even beyond the struggle for African-American equality; through implementation of Brown, the nation’s litigants, lawyers, and judges grew accustomed both to issuance of permanent injunctions against state and local public institutions, and to extended court oversight of compliance. …
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The New Deal era is one of the great turning points of American constitutional history. The receptivity of the Supreme Court to regulation by state and federal governments increased dra- matically during that period. The constitutionalism that prevailed before Charles Evans Hughes became Chief Justice in 1930 was similar in most respects to that of the beginning of the twen- tieth century. The constitutionalism that prevailed by the time Hughes’ successor Harlan Fiske Stone died in 1946 is far more related to that of the end of the century. How this transformation occurred is a crucial and enduring issue in …
Liberalism Stumbles In Tennessee, Donald J. Herzog
Liberalism Stumbles In Tennessee, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
The Scopes trial will never be the same. I mean the trial immortalized in Inherit the Wind,' with its Southerners clutching in vain to their cozy scientific illiteracy and mechanically literal faith in the Bible, its idiotic intolerant Southerners destined to fall to the gale winds of modernity, liberalism, secularism, and skepticism embodied by a heroic ACLU and the inimitable Clarence Darrow. So what if Scopes got convicted? Surely the trial made a laughingstock of everything Tennessee stood for in banning the teaching of evolution from the public schools. And in a touch worthy of a gruesome morality play, William …
Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
In the 1960s, Quentin Skinner wrote a series of polemical if terse papers arguing that the conventional approach to the history of political theory was confused. Using Hobbes as something of a vehicle for his position, Skinner enunciated what is now well known as the "Cambridge" approach to political theory. He urged that we situate authors in their intellectual contexts so that we can isolate what is distinctive, perhaps subversive, in their use of language: only then, he argued, can we have any valid historical understanding on what they are doing in writing these weird books in the first place. …
Review Of Authority: Construction And Corrosion, William I. Miller
Review Of Authority: Construction And Corrosion, William I. Miller
Reviews
This is in many ways an engaging book, written in a refreshingly direct and unobfuscatory style. Its chief problem is living up to the rather grand expectations raised by the title, expectations that the author half-way through the enterprise admits he did not mean to evoke (p. 74). What the reader will find is less a systematic essay or sustained treatment of authority than several penetrating readings of intense conflicts dealing with a substantially narrower issue: controlling who gets to speak in public settings that are authority conferring - in councils, senates and law courts.
Review Of Political Discourse In Early Modern Britain, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Political Discourse In Early Modern Britain, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
This is a festschrift for the indefatigable J. G. A. Pocock (indefatigable indeed: the volume closes with a daunting nine-page bibliography of Pococks work to date, a veritable flood of erudition that shows no signs of ebbing). The essays are better than what usually end up stuck in such volumes: better as a simple matter of scholarly quality, but better too as exemplary models of what is distinctive in Pocock's approach. I suppose that at this price, no one will consider asking impoverished graduate students to purchase the volume. But there are always reserve desks, not to mention xerox machines …
Review Of Kingship, Law And Society: Criminal Justice In The Reign Of Henry V, Thomas A. Green
Review Of Kingship, Law And Society: Criminal Justice In The Reign Of Henry V, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
Edward Powell's splendid study of Henry V's strategy for keeping peace among magnate and gentry factions represents an important contribution to the history of criminal justice. After providing a panoramic view of the machinery of criminal justice, Powell analyzes the extent to which that machinery was effective as between the Crown, at the center, and the upper echelons of society in the provinces. His conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the regular processes of common-law criminal administration could not easily be deployed at those levels. But Powell does not let the matter drop there. Kingship, Law, and Society presents a lucid …
I Hear A Rhapsody: A Reading Of The Republic Of Choice, Donald J. Herzog
I Hear A Rhapsody: A Reading Of The Republic Of Choice, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Readers coming to another volume by Lawrence Friedman might well expect a tightly crafted legal history. But this book is quite different. It offers a sweeping account of the transformation of modern law, a synoptic overview of what is finally distinctive about our legal culture, even a broadbrushed portrait of Western individualism. It does so breathlessly, in prose style and velocity. It's sometimes an engaging read, sometimes a distressing one, but-and here's what really matters-never a persuasive one. Or, worse yet, when it is persuasive it's because of its poetic and ideological features, not any kind of rigorous analysis.
Abstract Democracy: A Review Of Ackerman's We The People, Terrance Sandalow
Abstract Democracy: A Review Of Ackerman's We The People, Terrance Sandalow
Reviews
We the People: Foundations is an ambitious book, the first of three volumes in which Professor Ackerman proposes to recast conventional understanding of and contemporary debate about American constitutional law. Unfortunately, the book's rhetoricinflated, self-important, and self-congratulatory-impedes the effort to come to terms with its argument. How, for example, does one respond to a book that opens by asking whether the reader will have "the strength" to accept its thesis? Or that announces the author's intention of "engaging" two of the most influential works of intellectual history of the past several decades-and then discusses one in two and one-half pages …
Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Political theorists are almost always fond of giving each other home- work assignments but not generally fond of completing them. The opening salvo in a promised three-volume campaign to redefine the tasks of political theory, Transforming Political Discourse might seem to invite more weary shrugs. Surely, we have too many manifestos already. Well, yes -but this one, happily, is modest, sensible, and mercifully brief. Better yet, its brevity is positively austere in sketching the metadescription of what the promised land looks like. The argument actually hangs on a series of show-and-tell exercises, which are supposed to be applications of the …
Review Of The Province Of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Thomas A. Green
Review Of The Province Of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
David Lieberman's lucid and sure-footed reinterpretationof late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century jurisprudence is original, thoughtful, analytically acute, and a pleasure to read. Lieberman argues that Bentham's law reform ideas must be viewed in relation to earlier (and contemporary) reform traditions. Bentham's views were more complex than the long-held myth would have it, partly because they were more derivative, at least in his early enterprises, combining as they did a reception of earlier notions with the novelty for which he is usually credited. Blackstone and Mansfield, on this account, were not the match stick figures they are sometimes made out to be; the …
Review Of Culture And History In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Review Of Culture And History In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Reviews
It is a common dysfunction of scholars, particularly medieval historians, to fear grand syntheses and all-encompassing explanations. This is less frequently a disease among anthroplogists, and in fact in anthropologists of a structural bent there is no reticence whatsoever, but positive delight in the big, the general, the quasi- and the just plain theoretical. And in the best French tradition they often construct their models per ecartant les faits. Kirsten Hastrup is a structuralist more influenced by Levi-Strauss than Evans-Pritchard; she is also a trained anthropologist. This is both good and bad news. The Icelandic materials are as well suited …
Review Of Disputes And Settlements: Law And Human Relations In The West, By J. Bossy, Editor., William I. Miller
Review Of Disputes And Settlements: Law And Human Relations In The West, By J. Bossy, Editor., William I. Miller
Reviews
Evans-Pritchard probably knew he was exaggerating, but not being able to resist the chance to repay a gift in kind, he reversed Maitland's dictum and claimed that history must choose between being social anthropology or being nothing. If we substitute "tedious" for "nothing" we would have a truer statement. Legal history, if not quite heeding Evans-Pritchard, has in the past decade begun to learn some lessons from legal anthropology and the sociology of law. Studies of bureaucratic development, forms of action, formulae and writs, while still flourishing in the hands of several brilliant practitioners, are tending to give way slowly, …
Review Of The Justice Of The Western Consular Courts In Nineteenth Century Japan, Whitmore Gray
Review Of The Justice Of The Western Consular Courts In Nineteenth Century Japan, Whitmore Gray
Reviews
Richard Chang attacks the generalization accepted by many historians that the Western consular tribunals in nineteenth-century Japan were so partial- toward West- erners and against Japanese-that they seldom rendered evenhanded justice. His study required two steps. First he tried to determine how many "mixed" cases came to trial-cases in which aJapanese brought a claim against a foreign resident in a consular court or was the complaining party in criminal proceedings against a foreigner. Between 1875 and 1895 there were five such cases that were widely reported and commented on at the time, and that have often been cited as examples. …
Miranda: The Case, The Man, And The Players, Yale Kamisar
Miranda: The Case, The Man, And The Players, Yale Kamisar
Reviews
On the eve of America's bicentennial, the American Bar Association told its members of a plan to publish a book about the "milestone events" in 200 years of American legal history, and invited them to vote on the milestones to be included. When the balloting was over, Miranda v. Arizona1 - "the high-water mark" of the Warren Court's revolution in American criminal procedure2 - had received the fourth highest number of votes.3 I venture to say that if members of the general public had been asked to list the "most regrettable" or "most unfortunate" milestones in American legal history, Miranda …
Review Of Wiltshire Gaol Delivery And Trailbaston Trials, 1275-1306, Thomas A. Green
Review Of Wiltshire Gaol Delivery And Trailbaston Trials, 1275-1306, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
Ralph B. Pugh's handsome edition of Wiltshire gaol delivery and trailbaston trial rolls for the reign of Edward I provides a valuable resource for scholars of medieval crime and criminal law. The period covered bridges the era of the infrequent general eyres and that of the frequent circuits to try those being held on criminal charges. This transition period saw the development of various institutions and procedures designed to deal with a decline in social stability and an increase in criminal activity. To date, most scholarship has focused either on the workings of the mid-thirteenth- century eyre or on the …
Review Of Crime In England, 1550-1800, Thomas A. Green
Review Of Crime In England, 1550-1800, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
Crime in England, 1550-1800, is the second collection of essays on the social history of crime and the criminal law in early modern England to appear in recent years. Together with the essays in Albion's Fatal Tree (1975),' these offerings advance our knowledge of the subject considerably. To be sure, as G. R. Elton cautions, there are methodological problems in a field so new, and Elton's "Introduction" will serve as an excellent starting point for readers concerned with such matters. We must nevertheless recognize the accomplishments of the new school of socio-legal historians. The essays in this volume deal with …
Review Of Society And Homicide In Thirteenth-Century England, Thomas A. Green
Review Of Society And Homicide In Thirteenth-Century England, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
JAMES GIVEN has produced the first systematic book-length treatment of the sociology of medieval English crime. His work does not pretend to be comprehensive: it deals only with homicide. Nor does it cover more than a century, the thirteenth; the author has wisely left the earlier system of criminal law, based on private compensation, to other scholars, and he says just enough about late thirteenth- and early fourteenth- century social and legal change to suggest he believes that that period, too, must await its own interpretation. Still, the social history of homicide in the thirteenth century proves itself fascinating terrain, …