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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Infinity Within The Brackets, Annelise Riles Aug 1998

Infinity Within The Brackets, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The ethnographic subjects of this article are UN-sponsored international conferences and their legal documents. Drawing upon fieldwork among Fiji delegates at these conferences, in this article I demonstrate the centrality of matters of form, as distinct from questions of “meaning,” in the negotiation of international agreements. A parallel usage of documents and of mats among Fijian negotiators provides a heuristic device for exploring questions of pattern and scale in the aesthetics of negotiation.


The Structure Of Blackstone's Commentaries, Alan Watson Apr 1998

The Structure Of Blackstone's Commentaries, Alan Watson

Scholarly Works

Duncan Kennedy's view of Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England as the first systematic attempt to present a theory of the whole common law system is interesting but wrong. Blackstone himself listed his predecessors, "those who have laboured in reducing our laws to a System": Glanville, Bracton, Britton, the author of Fleta, Fitzherbert, Brook, Lord Bacon, Sir Edward Coke, Dr. Cowell, Sir Henry Finch, Dr. Wood, Sir Matthew Hale. Certainly their arrangements are not free from defects. In particular, as Blackstone pointed out, the arrangement of Fitzherbert and Brook was alphabetical, and Bacon purposely avoided any regular …


Recent Publications: Puerto Rico, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus Jan 1998

Recent Publications: Puerto Rico, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Ask yourself why you are reading a review of a book about a colony called Puerto Rico in a journal on international law. Isn't Puerto Rico a self-governing Commonwealth? Isn't it part of the United States? If you decide to buy the book, ask yourself where in the bookstore you should look for it. In the international relations section? The U.S. history section? A turn-of-the-century Supreme Court case analyzing the status of Puerto Rico (and other territories "acquired" by the United States in 1901) may provide some guidance: Puerto Rico is "foreign in a domestic sense."' Perhaps the bookstore has …