Legal History Commons^™

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

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This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Second Redemption, Third Reconstruction, Richard A. Primus

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In The Accumulation of Advantages, the picture that Professor Owen Fiss paints about equality during and since the Second Reconstruction is largely a picture in black and white. That makes some sense. The black/white experience is probably the most important throughline in the story of equal protection. It was the central theme of both the First and Second Reconstructions. In keeping with that orientation, the picture of disadvantage described by Fiss’s theory of cumulative responsibility is largely drawn from the black/white experience. Important as it is, however, the black/white experience does not exhaust the subject of constitutional equality. So in …

The New Labor Law, Kate Andrias

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Labor law is failing. Disfigured by courts, attacked by employers, and rendered inapt by a global and fissured economy, many of labor law’s most ardent proponents have abandoned it altogether. And for good reason: the law that governs collective organization and bargaining among workers has little to offer those it purports to protect. Several scholars have suggested ways to breathe new life into the old regime, yet their proposals do not solve the basic problem. Labor law developed for the New Deal does not provide solutions to today’s inequities. But all hope is not lost. From the remnants of the …

The Meaning Of Race In The Dna Era: Science, History And The Law, Christian Sundquist

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The meaning of “race” has changed dramatically over time. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, moral and physical values to perceived physical differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-white persons. Nazi Germany applied these understandings of race in a manner which shocked the world, and following World War II the concept of race increasingly came to be …

Tax As Urban Legend, Anthony C. Infanti

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In this essay, I review UC-Berkeley history professor Robin Einhorn's book, American Taxation, American Slavery. In this provocatively-titled book, Einhorn traces the relationship between democracy, taxation, and slavery from colonial times through the antebellum period. By re-telling some of the most familiar set piece stories of American history through the lens of slavery, Einhorn reveals how the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again about taxation and politics in America are little more than the stuff of urban legend.

In the review, I provide a brief summary of Einhorn's discussion of the relationship between slavery and colonial taxation, …

Corporate Governance Reform And The 'New' Corporate Social Responsibility, Douglas M. Branson

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The history of corporate governance "reform" begins with Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means's "The Modern Corporation and Private Property," first published in 1932. That book posited the "separation of ownership from control," discussed in the first section of this essay.

The subsequent history of corporate governance reform has been the postulation, by academics and others, of solutions to problems posed by the separation of ownership from control.

One subset of proposed reforms, those of the 1970s, formed the "corporate social responsibility movement." During that era, reformers urged governmental intervention which, as a matter of general corporate law, would expand corporate …

The Trouble With Hairdressers, Donald J. Herzog

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Why should hairdressers, of all unlikely candidates, have come to exemplify equality, to be a cultural obsession of sort? Suffice it to say that hairdressers happened to occupy a social position that made it possible to demonize them.

The Romance Of Revenge: Capital Punishment In America, Samuel R. Gross

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On February 17, 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive terms of life imprisonment for killing and dismembering 15 young men and boys (Associated Press 1992a). Dahmer had been arrested six months earlier, on July 22, 1991. On January 13 he pled guilty to the fifteen murder counts against him, leaving open only the issue of his sanity. Jury selection began two weeks later, and the trial proper started on January 30. The jury heard two weeks of testimony about murder, mutilation and necrophilia; they deliberated for 5 hours before finding that Dahmer was sane when he committed these …

Ordeal In Iceland, William I. Miller

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Ordeal holds a strange fascination with us. It appalls and intrigues. We marvel at the mentality of those cultures that officialize it; we feel a sense of horror as we imagine ourselves intimately involved with boiling water or glowing irons. And we don't feel up to it. So our terror and cowardice becomes their brutality and irrationality. I am not about to urge to reinstitution of ordeals, although most practicing lawyers will tell you that that is still what going to law is, a crapshoot they say. What I want to do is call attention to the difficulty of not …

Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies In The Negotiation And Classification Of Exchange In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller

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Near the end of Eyrbyggja saga Porir asks Ospak and his men where they had gotten the goods they were carrying. Ospak said that they had gotten them at Pambardal. "How did you come by them?" said Porir. Ospak answered, "They were not given, they were not paid to me, nor were they sold either." Ospak had earlier that evening raided the house of a farmer called Alf and made away with enough to burden four horses. And this was exactly what he told Porir when he wittily eliminated the other modes of transfer by which he could have acquired …