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Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen
Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen
Book Chapters
Jeremy Bentham famously insisted on the separation of law as it is and law as it should be, and criticized his contemporary William Blackstone for mixing up the two. According to Bentham, Blackstone costumes judicial invention as discovery, obscuring the way judges make new law while pretending to uncover preexisting legal meaning. Bentham’s critique of judicial phoniness persists to this day in claims that judges are “politicians in robes” who pick the outcome they desire and rationalize it with doctrinal sophistry. Such skeptical attacks are usually met with attempts to defend doctrinal interpretation as a partial or occasional limit on …
Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen
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 …
Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen
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 …
Beccaria's On Crimes And Punishments: A Mirror On The History Of The Foundations Of Modern Criminal Law, Bernard E. Harcourt
Beccaria's On Crimes And Punishments: A Mirror On The History Of The Foundations Of Modern Criminal Law, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
Beccaria’s treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764) has become a placeholder for the classical school of thought in criminology, for deterrence-based public policy, for death penalty abolitionism, and for liberal ideals of legality and the rule of law. A source of inspiration for Bentham and Blackstone, an object of praise for Voltaire and the Philosophes, a target of pointed critiques by Kant and Hegel, the subject of a genealogy by Foucault, the object of derision by the Physiocrats, rehabilitated and appropriated by the Chicago School of law and economics — these ricochets and reflections on Beccaria’s treatise reveal multiple dimensions …
An Informal History Of How Law Schools Evaluate Students, With A Predictable Emphasis On Law School Exams, Steve Sheppard
An Informal History Of How Law Schools Evaluate Students, With A Predictable Emphasis On Law School Exams, Steve Sheppard
Steve Sheppard
This story of the evolution of legal evaluations from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth depicts English influences on American law student evaluations, which have waned in the twentieth century with the advent of course-end examinations. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English examinations given to conclude a legal degree were relatively ceremonial exercises in which performance was often based on the demonstration of rote memory. As examination processes evolved, American law schools adopted essay evaluations from their English counterparts. Examinees in the nineteenth century were given a narrative, requiring the recognition of particularly appropriate legal doctrines, enunciation of the …
A New Image Of The Slave Auction: An Empirical Look At The Role Of Law In Slave Sales And A Conceptual Reevaluation Of Slave Property, Thomas D. Russell
A New Image Of The Slave Auction: An Empirical Look At The Role Of Law In Slave Sales And A Conceptual Reevaluation Of Slave Property, Thomas D. Russell
Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship
This legal history article presents a new understanding of the nature of slave property. Slave property was divided and fragmented into many different interests including those with application to real property such life estates, remainders, shifting and spring interests, and leasehold interests. With regard to these interests, the article overlays the first-year, law-school property course onto slaves as property. Property interests in slaves were also divided by credit mechanisms including mortgages and secured credit transactions. Warranties are another example of divided property interests in slaves.
The fragmented, Hohfeldian nature of slave property distributed the stake that southerners had in the …
From Blackstone To Bentham: Common Law Versus Legislation In Eighteenth-Century Britain, James Oldham
From Blackstone To Bentham: Common Law Versus Legislation In Eighteenth-Century Britain, James Oldham
Michigan Law Review
A Review of The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth Century Britain by David Lieberman
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 …
English Common Law In Virgina, William Hamilton Bryson
English Common Law In Virgina, William Hamilton Bryson
Law Faculty Publications
By statute the common law of England is the basis of the common law of modern Virginia. This reception statute refers to the customary, unwritten law of the kingdom of England, but only that part which was general and common to all parts of England. That the English common law is the foundation of the law of Virginia is a matter not merely of a modern statute but also of history and reason.
The History Of Legal Education In Virginia, W. Hamilton Bryson
The History Of Legal Education In Virginia, W. Hamilton Bryson
University of Richmond Law Review
The English Inns of Court in London had ceased to perform their educational functions in the middle of the seventeenth century. For the next hundred years or so, there was no formal or organized instruction of the English common law. Lawyers, both barristers and solicitors in England and in America, learned their profession as best they could in unstructured situations. They learned by serving as apprentices or clerks to practicing lawyers, by the independent reading of law books, and by observation in the courtroom itself.
Seagle: Men Of Law From Hammurabi To Holmes, Merrill N. Johnson S.Ed.
Seagle: Men Of Law From Hammurabi To Holmes, Merrill N. Johnson S.Ed.
Michigan Law Review
A Review of MEN OF LAW FROM HAMMURABI TO HOLMES. By William Seagle.
The Popularization Of Law, Huntington Cairns
The Popularization Of Law, Huntington Cairns
Michigan Law Review
Law has been a major interest of the Western, and particularly the European, mind. Like physics it has provided a subject matter upon which many of the resources of the human intellect may be tested. It has yielded to many methods and, as a specialty with a circumscribed body of material, it has demanded the formulation of clear ideas so that interconnections are manifest and irrelevancies eliminated. Its great reward is the bestowal of the sense for style, which Whitehead has termed the ultimate morality of mind, and which is the product of specialization alone.