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2014

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Articles 1 - 28 of 28

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Settlers And Immigrants In The Formation Of American Law, Aziz Rana Dec 2014

Settlers And Immigrants In The Formation Of American Law, Aziz Rana

Aziz Rana

This paper argues that the early American republic is best understood as a constitutional experiment in “settler empire,” and that related migration policies played a central role in shaping collective identity and structures of authority. Initial colonists, along with their 19th century descendants, viewed society as grounded in an ideal of freedom that emphasized continuous popular mobilization and direct economic and political decision-making. However, many settlers believed that this ideal required Indian dispossession and the coercive use of dependent groups, most prominently slaves, in order to ensure that they themselves had access to property and did not have to engage …


Heuristics, Biases, And Philosophy, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski Dec 2014

Heuristics, Biases, And Philosophy, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Commenting on Professor Cass Sunstein's work is a daunting task. There is simply so much of it. Professor Sunstein produces scholarship at a rate that is faster than I can consume it. Scarcely an area of law has failed to feel his impact. One cannot today write an article on administrative law, free speech, punitive damages, Internet law, law and economics, separation of powers, or animal rights law without addressing one or more of Sunstein's papers. And his work is typically not a mere footnote. Sunstein has changed how scholars think about each of these areas of law. More broadly, …


'In The Time Of A Woman, Which Sex Was Not Capable Of Mature Deliberation': Late Tudor Parliamentary Relations And Their Early Stuart Discontents, Josh Chafetz Dec 2014

'In The Time Of A Woman, Which Sex Was Not Capable Of Mature Deliberation': Late Tudor Parliamentary Relations And Their Early Stuart Discontents, Josh Chafetz

Josh Chafetz

The English Civil War is one of the seminal events in Anglo-American constitutional history. Oceans of ink have been spilled in debating its causes, and historians have pointed to a number of salient divisions along economic, social, political, and religious lines. But a related, and equally important, question has gone largely ignored: what allowed the House of Commons, for the first time in English history, to play the lead role in opposing the Crown? How did the lower house of Parliament develop the constitutional self-confidence that would allow it to organize the rebellion against Charles I? This Article argues that …


Toward A United Ireland? The Northern Ireland Peace Process And The Devolution Of Powers From London To Belfast, Matthew G. Rooks Sep 2014

Toward A United Ireland? The Northern Ireland Peace Process And The Devolution Of Powers From London To Belfast, Matthew G. Rooks

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.


When Harvard Said No To Eugenics: The J. Ewing Mears Bequest, 1927, Paul A. Lombardo Jul 2014

When Harvard Said No To Eugenics: The J. Ewing Mears Bequest, 1927, Paul A. Lombardo

Faculty Publications By Year

James Ewing Mears (1838-1919) was a founding member of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery. His 1910 book, The Problem of Race Betterment, laid the groundwork for later authors to explore the uses of surgical sterilization as a eugenic measure. Mears left $60,000 in his will to Harvard University to support the teaching of eugenics. Although numerous eugenic activists were on the Harvard faculty, and who of its Presidents were also associated with the eugenics movement, Harvard refused the Mears gift. The bequest was eventually awarded to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. This article explains why Harvard turned its back …


Law & Order Made Amusing: A Selection Of Law Books For Children From The Collection Of Morris L. Cohen, Karen S. Beck, Mary Sarah Bilder, Ann Mcdonald, Sharon Hambly O'Connor Jun 2014

Law & Order Made Amusing: A Selection Of Law Books For Children From The Collection Of Morris L. Cohen, Karen S. Beck, Mary Sarah Bilder, Ann Mcdonald, Sharon Hambly O'Connor

Sharon Hamby O'Connor

Exhibition program from a Spring 1998 exhibit presented in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room at the Boston College Law Library. The exhibit featured selections from Morris L. Cohen's collection of law books for children.


Law & Order Made Amusing: A Selection Of Law Books For Children From The Collection Of Morris L. Cohen, Karen S. Beck, Mary Sarah Bilder, Ann Mcdonald, Sharon Hambly O'Connor Jun 2014

Law & Order Made Amusing: A Selection Of Law Books For Children From The Collection Of Morris L. Cohen, Karen S. Beck, Mary Sarah Bilder, Ann Mcdonald, Sharon Hambly O'Connor

Sharon Hamby O'Connor

Exhibition program from a Spring 1998 exhibit presented in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room at the Boston College Law Library. The exhibit featured selections from Morris L. Cohen's collection of law books for children.


A Revolution At War With Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences From Weber To Ricci, Sophia Z. Lee Jun 2014

A Revolution At War With Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences From Weber To Ricci, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Two aspects of the constitutional transformation Bruce Ackerman describes in The Civil Rights Revolution were on a collision course, one whose trajectory has implications for Ackerman’s account and for his broader theory of constitutional change. Ackerman makes a compelling case that what he terms “reverse state action” (the targeting of private actors) and “government by numbers” (the use of statistics to identify and remedy violations of civil rights laws) defined the civil rights revolution. Together they “requir[ed] private actors, as well as state officials, to . . . realize the principles of constitutional equality” and allowed the federal government to …


The Importance Of Interpretation: How The Language Of The Constitution Allows For Differing Opinions, Christina J. Banfield May 2014

The Importance Of Interpretation: How The Language Of The Constitution Allows For Differing Opinions, Christina J. Banfield

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.


Closing The Loop: "The Promise And Threat Of The Sacred" In Rian Johnson’S Looper, Brian W. Nail Mar 2014

Closing The Loop: "The Promise And Threat Of The Sacred" In Rian Johnson’S Looper, Brian W. Nail

Journal of Religion & Film

This article examines the ways in which Rian Johnson’s recent film Looper (2012) portrays the complex relationship between violence and the sacred in contemporary society through its exploration of the theme of retribution. Utilizing René Girard’s theory of sacrifice and Roberto Esposito’s explication of the immunitary logic of the sacred, this study argues that the film reveals the double nature of the sacred as a source of both life and death within society. Through an examination of crucial elements of Looper’s plot and setting, and in particular its enigmatic climax, I argue that as a religious film, Looper challenges its …


Every Law Tells A Story: Orthodox Divorce In Jewish And Islamic Legal Histories, Lena Salaymeh Mar 2014

Every Law Tells A Story: Orthodox Divorce In Jewish And Islamic Legal Histories, Lena Salaymeh

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.


Standing On Shaky Ground: Criminal Jurisdiction And Ecclesiastical Immunity In Seventeenth-Century Lima, 1600–1700, Michelle A. Mckinley Mar 2014

Standing On Shaky Ground: Criminal Jurisdiction And Ecclesiastical Immunity In Seventeenth-Century Lima, 1600–1700, Michelle A. Mckinley

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.


Demonic Ambiguities: Enchantment And Disenchantment In Nat Turner’S Virginia, Christopher Tomlins Mar 2014

Demonic Ambiguities: Enchantment And Disenchantment In Nat Turner’S Virginia, Christopher Tomlins

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.


A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer Jan 2014

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …


Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen Jan 2014

Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …


Critiquing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Frank's Plea And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli Jan 2014

Critiquing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Frank's Plea And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Carlo A. Pedrioli

This article explains how, from 1920 to 1960, the role, or persona, of the law professor in the United States remained the situs of considerable rhetorical controversy that the role had been in the fifty years before 1920. On one hand, lawyers used rhetoric to promote a persona, that of a scholar, appropriate for the law professor situated within the university, a context suitable for the professionalization of law. On the other hand, different lawyers like Judge Jerome Frank used rhetoric to critique, often in a scathing manner, the scholar persona and put forth their own persona, that of a …


Criminal Law And Technology In A Data-Driven Society, Mireille Hildebrandt Jan 2014

Criminal Law And Technology In A Data-Driven Society, Mireille Hildebrandt

Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter takes leave of the idea that lawyers can remain immersed in legal text. It takes a stand for a careful reflection on what data-driven architectures do to some of the assumptions of modern law that are mistakenly taken for granted. Merely enacting the presumption of innocence by means of legal code will not do in the present future. If the defaults of Big Data analytics all point in the direction of precrime punishment or the pre-emption of inferred criminal intent, we need to reconfigure the smart decision systems that progressively mediate the perception and cognition of law enforcement …


The Child Independence Is Born: James Otis And Writs Of Assistance, James M. Farrell Jan 2014

The Child Independence Is Born: James Otis And Writs Of Assistance, James M. Farrell

Communication

This chapter is a reexamination of the Writs of Assistance speech by James Otis. In particular, it is a reconsideration of the evidence upon which rests the historical reputation of Otis’s address. Are the claims by historians who credit Otis with sparking the Revolutionary movement in colonial America warranted or not? That reassessment begins with a detailed review of the nature and function of writs of assistance within the political, legal, and economic environment of colonial Massachusetts. It then turns to an analysis of the legal dispute over writs of assistance in the 1761 trial. From there we will reconstruct …


Book Review (Reviewing International Law In The Us. Supreme Court: Continuity And Change (David L. Sloss, Michael D. Ramsey, And Williams. Dodge Eds., 2011))., Jean Galbraith Jan 2014

Book Review (Reviewing International Law In The Us. Supreme Court: Continuity And Change (David L. Sloss, Michael D. Ramsey, And Williams. Dodge Eds., 2011))., Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee Jan 2014

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …


Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen Jan 2014

Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen

Articles

William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is …


The Development Of Personal Status Law In Jordan & Iraq, Kelsey Cherland Jan 2014

The Development Of Personal Status Law In Jordan & Iraq, Kelsey Cherland

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores the historical development of personal status law, which governs a person’s marriage, divorce, and custody rights. It is significant because it is part of a framework that has defined women’s rights for centuries. I will argue that personal status law is a patriarchal framework that has been reinforced over time, leading up to the creation of nation-states in the Middle East. As such, this is the “institution” of personal status that will be traced using historical institutionalism theory. In this thesis I will argue that personal status has undergone a critical juncture, or crucial moment of potential …


Social Hierarchies And The Formation Of Customary Property Law In Pre-Industrial China And England, Taisu Zhang Jan 2014

Social Hierarchies And The Formation Of Customary Property Law In Pre-Industrial China And England, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually “despotic” towards the poor. Such assumptions are highly questionable: Quite the opposite, one of the most striking characteristics of Qing and Republican property institutions is that they often gave significantly greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable institutions in early modern England. In particular, Chinese property customs afforded much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land. In both societies, land-pawning occurred far more frequently among poorer households …


The National Security State: The End Of Separation Of Powers, Michael E. Tigar Jan 2014

The National Security State: The End Of Separation Of Powers, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Making Claims: Indian Litigants And The Expansion Of The English Legal World In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas Dec 2013

Making Claims: Indian Litigants And The Expansion Of The English Legal World In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

This paper explores the British Imperial legal world of the mid-eighteenth century. Within this period, the previously confined spaces of English law and legal institutions became open to an ever widening set of legal subjects, both people as well as places. The paper focuses on what was at the time perhaps England’s most remote and murkily defined legal space, the East India Company (EIC) settlements at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The paper shows how a series of legal actors: metropolitan judges, Indian litigants and elite lawyers, first bridged the legal worlds of England and the subcontinent. I argue that by …


Bending The Code Civil: Married Women, Their Capacity To Engage In Contracts And The Partnership Between Spouses (C. 1804-C. 1865), Dave De Ruysscher Dec 2013

Bending The Code Civil: Married Women, Their Capacity To Engage In Contracts And The Partnership Between Spouses (C. 1804-C. 1865), Dave De Ruysscher

Dave De ruysscher

It is surprising but true that in the course of the nineteenth century a more softened interpretation of the stubborn provisions of the 1804 Civil code with regard to married women, which imposed their general incapacity to sign contracts, mostly served economic goals. Judges in nineteenth-century Belgium paid much attention to the interests of creditors, who according to the Civil code could be confronted with husbands' rejections of contracts that had been signed by their wives. It was the acknowledgement of creditors' needs that had the indirect effect of expanding the contractual capacity of wives and not a search for …


Entender Los Males Económicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Católica, Brian M. Mccall Dec 2013

Entender Los Males Económicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Católica, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

In a general sense, St. Thomas Aquinas predicted the paralysis and chaos of the financial and economic systems in America and Europe which occurred in 2008, when he predicted that in a society where unjust exchanges dominate, eventually all exchanges will cease. St. Thomas also points out that although human law cannot prohibit all injustice, society cannot escape the consequences of transgressing the divine law which leaves “nothing unpunished.” Thus, at least part of the explanation for that crisis whose effects remain with us today lies in continuous violations of natural justice by our economic system. Neither one product nor …


Entender Los Males Economómicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Cátolica (Understanding Modern Economic Woes In Light Of Catholic Social Doctrine), Brian M. Mccall Dec 2013

Entender Los Males Economómicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Cátolica (Understanding Modern Economic Woes In Light Of Catholic Social Doctrine), Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

En sentido general, Santo Tomás Aquino predijo la parálisis y el caos del sistema financiero económico en Estados Unidos y Europa que ocurrió en 2008, cuando predijo que en una sociedad donde los intercambios injustos dominan, eventualmente todos los intercambios podrán cesar. Santo Tomás también señala que aunque la ley humana no pueda prohibir todas las injusticias, la sociedad no puede escapar de las consecuencias de trasgredir la ley divina que no deja nada en la impunidad. Así, al menos una parte de la explicación para esta crisis cuyos efectos permanecen con nosotros en la actualidad se encuentra en las …