Legal History Commons^™

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

St. George Tucker’S Second Amendment: Deconstructing ‘The True Palladium Of Liberty’, Stephen P. Halbrook

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St. George Tucker, known as “America’s Blackstone” and author of the first commentary on the Constitution in 1803, described the Second Amendment right of the people to keep and bear arms as “the true palladium of liberty.” In a recent symposium at the William and Mary College of Law, Prof. Saul Cornell presented Tucker as an adherent of the view that the Amendment guarantees a collective or civic right to bear arms in the militia, not an individual right to have arms for self defense or as a dissuasion to tyranny. In response, my article scrutinizes Tucker’s work in detail …

Winter For Purehearts, Michael Cavendish

ExpressO

The worst judicial opinion ever written issued from Florida on an anonymous day in 1864. The opinion discussed slavery. More accurately, it cherished slavery—lionizing the then extant practice in the way the British sing of the sea. As a legal precedent, it was a dangerous opinion because it was presented as something basic, fundamental and inexorable, something not to be questioned. It was dangerously simple when conveyed to accepting minds in the way a cold knife is dangerous in angered hands. The opinion, Miller v. Gaskins, is a vital study for researchers surveying the lines of human fallacy that in …

Radicals In Robes: A Review, Dru Stevenson

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This essay reviews and critiques Cass Sunstein’s new book about conservative activists in the federal judiciary. After a discussion of Sunstein’s (somewhat misleading) rhetorical nomenclature, this essay argues that Sunstein’s proposed “minimalist” methodology in constitutional jurisprudence is beneficial, but not for the reasons Sunstein suggests. Sunstein alternatively justifies judicial restraint or incrementalism on epistemological self-doubt (cautiousness being an outgrowth of uncertainty) and his fear that accomplishments by Progressives in the last century will be undone by conservative judges in the present. Constitutional incrementalism is more convincingly justified on classical economic grounds. While affirming Sunstein’s overall thesis, this essay offers an …

Criminal Law Beyond The State: Popular Trials On The Frontier, Andrea Mcdowell

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Before the civil war, “lynching” signified all forms of group-inflicted punishments, including vigilantism and mob killings. By this definition, lynchings happen in every country. Only in America, however, was lynching widespread and socially accepted. Scholars say this shows that the American commitment to due process often succumbed to “vigilante values,” that is, the desire for speedy, certain and severe penalties. They contend that vigilante values triumphed on the frontier, where courts were weak and vigilance committees strong. This article demonstrates that this view must be substantially qualified because due process was of great concern to Americans on the frontier, especially …

The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, & Sovereign Power, Juliet P. Stumpf

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This article provides a fresh theoretical perspective on the most important development in immigration law today: the convergence of immigration and criminal law. Although the connection between immigration and criminal law, or “crimmigration law,” is now the subject of national debate, scholarship in this area is in a fledgling state. This article begins to fill that void. It proposes a unifying theory – membership theory – for why these two areas of law recently have become so connected, and why that convergence is troubling. Membership theory restricts individual rights and privileges to those who are members of a social contract …

The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption Of American Indian Ancestry From Racial Purity Law, Kevin Noble Maillard

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“The Pocahontas Exception” confronts the legal existence and cultural fascination with the eponymous “Indian Grandmother.” Laws existed in many states that prohibited marriage between whites and nonwhites to prevent the “quagmire of mongrelization.” Yet, this racial protectionism, as ingrained in law, blatantly exempted Indian blood from the threat to white racial purity. In Virginia, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made exceptions for whites of mixed descent who proudly claimed Native American ancestry from Pocahontas. This paper questions the juridical exceptions made for Native American ancestry in antimiscegenation statues, and analyzes the concomitant exemptions in contemporary social practice. With increasing …

A Race Or A Nation? Cherokee National Identity And The Status Of Freedmen's Descendents, S. Alan Ray

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The Cherokee Nation today faces the challenge of determining its citizenship criteria in the context of race. The article focuses on the Cherokee Freedmen. As former slaves of Cherokee citizens, the Freedmen were adopted into the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War pursuant to a treaty with the United States, and given unqualified rights of citizenship. The incorporation of the Freedmen into the tribe was resisted from the start, and now, faced with a decision of the Cherokee Nation’s highest court affirming the descendents’ citizenship rights, the Nation prepares to vote on a constitutional amendment which would impose an Indian …

Developing Development Theory: Law & Development Orthodoxies And The Northeast Asian Experience, John K.M. Ohnesorge

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None of the orthodox theories about law and economic development produced in recent decades has been based on a study of the "miracle" economies of Northeast Asia, nor have any of these orthodoxies seriously been tested against the Northeast Asian experience of law and development. This article conducts such a test, finding that none of these orthodoxies fares well when its claims are tested against the Northeast Asian experience. Rather than using Northeast Asia's experience to produce yet another orthodoxy, however, this article instead proposes rethinking how we understand the task of legal technical assistance, a rethinking which is based …

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

The “Csi Effect”: Better Jurors Through Television And Science?, Michael D. Mann

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This Comment discusses how television shows such as CSI and Law & Order create heightened juror expectations. This will be published in the Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal's 2005-2006 issue.

Review Essay: Using All Available Information, Max Huffman

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This is a review essay entitled “Using All Available Information,” in which I review and comment on Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution, published in September 2005. Justice Breyer’s book, adapted from the Tanner Lectures given in 2005 at Harvard Law School, serves partly as a response to Justice Scalia’s 1997 volume A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. I review Justice Breyer’s book in part by comparison to and contrast with Justice Scalia’s. I propose that much about Justice Breyer’s interpretive philosophy, which centers on determining the “purposes” of texts and interpreting …

Before Competition: Origins Of The Internal Affairs Doctrine, Frederick Tung

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To the modern corporate scholar and lawyer, the internal affairs doctrine seems in the natural order of things. Corporate law is state law. Each corporation is formed under the law of its chosen state of incorporation. To ensure consistency and predictability, that law must govern the corporation’s internal affairs. Yet the origin of such a doctrine is puzzling. Respecting the firm’s choice of corporate law, the doctrine forces state legislatures into competition to attract incorporations. But how did legislatures come to concede their traditional territorial regulatory authority, and instead agree to compete? This Article solves this puzzle, offering the first …

Just Say "No Fishing": The Lure Of Metaphor, Beth Thornburg

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The phrase “fishing expedition” is widely used in popular culture and in the law. In the case of metaphorical “fishing” in the law, reliance on the metaphor can act as a substitute for rigorous analysis, disguising the factors that influence a result. When used by the court, it is uninformative. Worse, the fishing metaphor may itself shape the way the court thinks about the kind of issue or claim involved. Accusations of “fishing” also affect the language and position of the litigants. Parties arguing against pleadings or discovery use the metaphor as a rhetorical weapon, stigmatizing their opponents, instead of …

Poor Whites, Benevolent Masters, And The Ideologies Of Slavery: A Slave Accused Of Rape In The Antebellum South, Jason A. Gillmer

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This Article analyzes in detail a case involving a slave accused of raping a white woman in the 1850s to offer a fresh perspective on our basic assumptions about sex and race in the slave South. Joining a new group of “cultural-legal historians,” the author looks beyond the legal language of Southern legislatures and high courts, and focuses instead on the trial record of one case: State v. Pleasant. In doing so, the author uncovers the stories of ordinary men and women – the slave, his master, his accuser, his attorney, the jurors, and others – to see how the …

Justice And The Evolution Of The Common Law, Richard O. Zerbe

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Empirical evidence shows, and theory suggests, that the common law tends toward economic efficiency. While various theories attempt to explain this phenomenon, no single one is well accepted. This article provides a simple explanation. It suggests that efficiency arises as a matter of justice. Justice is sought because justice-seeking is a social norm with its own sanctioning force. Justice is sought and efficiency achieved because they substantially overlap. Limitations in the traditional definition of efficiency, however, ensure that efficiency is not congruent with justice. This paper suggests that it can be: the congruence of justice and efficiency will be greater …

Legislation And Legitimation: Congress And Insider Trading In The 1980s, Thomas W. Joo

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Legislation and Legitimation:

Congress and Insider Trading in the 1980s

Abstract

Orthodox corporate law-and-economics holds that American corporate and securities regulation has evolved inexorably toward economic efficiency. That position is difficult to square with the fact that regulation is the product of government actors and institutions. Indeed, the rational behavior assumptions of law-and-economics suggest that those actors and institutions would tend to place their own self-interest ahead of economic efficiency. This article provides anecdotal evidence of such self-interest at work. Based on an analysis of legislative history—primarily Congressional hearings—this article argues that Congress had little interest in the economic policy …