Legal History Commons^™

Between Dependency And Liberty: The Conundrum Of Children’S Rights In The Gilded Age, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

Although legal scholars often assume that the history of children's rights in the United States did not begin until the mid twentieth century, this essay argues that a sophisticated conception of children's rights existed a century earlier, and analyzes how lawmakers articulated it through their attempts to define the rights of dependent children. How to handle their cases raised fundamental questions about whether children were autonomous beings or the property of either their parents and/or the state. And, if the latter, what were the limits of parental authority and/or the power of the state acting as a parent? By investigating …

Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

This Article is an intellectual history of classical contracts scholar Samuel Williston. Professor Movsesian argues that the conventional account of Williston's jurisprudence presents an incomplete and distorted picture. While much of Williston's work can strike a contemporary reader as arid and conceptual, there are strong elements of pragmatism as well. Williston insists that doctrine be justified in terms of real-world consequences, maintains that rules can have only presumptive force, and offers institutional explanations for judicial restraint. As a result, his scholarship shares more in common with today's new formalism than commonly supposed. Even the under-theorized quality of Williston's scholarship—to contemporary …

Copyright And Free Expression: The Convergence Of Conflicting Normative Frameworks, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent attempts to expand the domain of copyright law in different parts of the world have necessitated renewed efforts to evaluate the philosophical justifications that are advocated for its existence as an independent institution. Copyright, conceived of as a proprietary institution, reveals an interesting philosophical interaction with other libertarian interests, most notably the right to free expression. This paper seeks to understand the nature of this interaction and the resulting normative decisions. The paper seeks to analyze copyright law and its recent expansions, specifically from the perspective of the human rights discourse. It looks at the historical origins of modern …

Law And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Two hundred years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall delivered an opinion that has come to dominate modern discussions of constitutional law. Faced with a conflict between an act of Congress and the U.S. Constitution, he explained what today is known as "judicial review." Marshall described judicial review in terms of a particular type of "superior law" and a particular type of "judicial duty." Rather than speak generally about the hierarchy within law, he focused on "written constitutions."

He declared that the U.S. Constitution is "a superior, paramount law" and that if "the constitution is superior to any …

A Cultural Tour Of The Legal Landscape: Reflections On Cardinal George's Law And Culture, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

When a ruling of the supreme court meets with Congressional disfavor there are several remedies available to Congress. If the decision is not on a constitutional level, a later statutory enactment will suffice to reverse or modify the ruling. If, however, the Court's decision is an interpretation of a constitutional mandate, such as the requirement of the fourteenth amendment that legislative districts be apportioned according to population, then a statute could not reverse the decision because the statute itself would be subject to that constitutional mandate as defined by the Court.

The obvious method of reversing a Supreme Court interpretation …

Law And What I Truly Should Decide, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

Suppose we tried to think about law without trying first to describe it or to work out what the concept of it is. Suppose we asked instead whether, and if so why, and when, we-or more precisely each one of us-should favor introducing, having, endorsing, maintaining, complying with and enforcing it. We would be trying to think about law, about something not limited to our own time and town, but as something that people of any time and place of which we are aware would, as we can understand, have the same or similar need for and reasons to comply …

Breaking The Mold Of Citizenship: The "Natural" Person As Citizen In Nineteenth-Century America (A Fragment), Elizabeth B. Clark

Publications

Mary Wollstronecraft once said, probably with a sigh, "I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behavior." Two centuries later, many groups in American political life are still caught in the same dilemma: hoping that a just society will take account of an essential characteristic -- race and sex spring to mind -- in ways that will benefit the group, while eschewing the potentially harmful characterizations that lie just on the flip side of the coin.

On The Evolution Of The Canonical Dissent, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Legal theorists increasingly have come to recognize and study the existence of a constitutional canon composed of highly authoritative legal texts that command special reverence in the law. Among these highly authoritative texts are a series of dissenting opinions—e.g., Justice Holmes's in Lochner v. New York, and Justice Harlan's in Plessy v. Ferguson—that ironically are more famous than the majority opinions in most other cases. This Article examines the evolution of the dissenting canon, seeking to explain both the methods by which various dissenting opinions became canonized and the motivating factors behind these canonizations.

Specifically, the Article argues that the …

Sovereignty, Compliance, And The World Trade Organization: Lessons From The History Of Supreme Court Review, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

One of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO's) more remarkable and controversial innovations is its mechanism for resolving trade disputes among member states. Traditionally, states have resolved such disputes in "pragmatic" fashion, through negotiation and compromise informed by the relative power of the parties involved. But no longer: the WTO's Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (the DSU) provides that disputes between member states are to be resolved in adversary proceedings before impartial panels of experts." Under the DSU, panels have authority to decide whether members' laws violate international trade norms; panel decisions are essentially binding, though …

Chapter 7 - Reflections On The Scholarship Of Elizabeth B. Clark, Kristin Olbertson, Carol Weisbrod, Christine Stansell, Martha Minow

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Clark's essays on early nineteenth-century reform movements make a compelling case that abolitionists and feminists alike understood individual rights from a profoundly religious perspective. Clark also demonstrates how these reformers advocated the protection of so-called "natural rights" for enslaved African-Americans and white women in the vivid and fervently emotional language of evangelical revivalism. Broader cultural and intellectual trends of resistance to governmental and clerical authority, trends rooted in liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Clark argues, helped fuel attacks on slavery and gender inequality. Rejecting other historians' portrayals of the antebellum reformers as primarily secular in orientation, Clark makes the arresting, …

The Street Locations: Downtown Cleveland, October 31, 1963, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

This appendix to Deciding the Stop and Frisk Cases: A Look Inside the Supreme Court’s Conference, 72 St. John’s L. Rev. 749 (1998), consists of a map drawn by Jill Dinneen (SJU Law '99), based on Sanborn maps from the 1950s and 1960s, photographs and eyewitness descriptions of downtown Cleveland then and now; and a key to marked locations on the map.

State Of Ohio V. Richard D. Chilton And State Of Ohio V. John W. Terry: The Suppression Hearing And Trial Transcripts, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

This appendix to Deciding the Stop and Frisk Cases: A Look Inside the Supreme Court’s Conference, 72 St. John’s L. Rev. 749 (1998), includes Biographical Information on the Participants in the Case; and transcripts of the complete pretrial and trial proceedings in the 1964 criminal prosecutions of Richard Chilton and John Terry, arranged by Prof. Barrett to create the organization reflected in the Table of Contents at the beginning of the appendix. Footnotes were added to provide citations and, in a few instances, to clarify the text. Bracketed material was added to correct obvious slips of the tongue or the …

Legal Fiction, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Natural Law Tradition", John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This "tradition of natural law theory" has three main features: First, critique and rejection of ethical scepticism, dogmatism and conventionalism; Second, clarification of the methodology of descriptive and explanatory social theories (e.g., political science, economics, jurisprudence .... ); Third, critique and rejection of aggregative conceptions of the right and the just (e.g., consequentialism, utilitarianism, wealth-maximization, "proportionalism"...).

Book Review, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Commercial Paper In Economic Theory And Legal History, Harold R. Weinberg

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Commercial-paper played a significant role in antebellum America by partially filling the void resulting from the shortage of gold and silver coinage and the absence of a reliable paper currency. Although most legal historians would agree with this premise, a controversy has arisen in recent years concerning negotiability, that collection of legal rules which greatly enhanced the usefulness of bills of exchange and promissory notes in commerce and finance.

Many scholars believe that negotiability, along with other pre-Civil War legal doctrines, was intended to facilitate the development of a national market system and economic growth. This view typically holds that …

The Essential Nature Of Law, Hugh Evander Willis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.