Legal History Commons^™

Complicated Lives: Free Blacks In Virginia, 1619-1865, Sherri L. Burr

Faculty Book Display Case

Would the United States have developed differently if Virginia had not passed a law in 1670 proclaiming all subsequently arriving Africans as servants for life, or slaves? What if the state had not stripped all Free Blacks and Indians of voting rights in 1723, or outlawed interracial sex for 337 years?

Complicated Lives upends the pervasive belief that all Africans landing on the shores of Virginia beginning in late August 1619, became slaves. In reality, many of these kidnap victims received the status of indentured servants. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of free African Americans in the South and North owned …

Gendered Law In American History (2016), Richard Chused, Wendy Williams

Books

Gendered Law in American History is a remarkable compendium of over thirty years of research and teaching in the field. It explores an array of social, cultural, and legal arenas from the turn of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, including concepts of citizenship at the founding of the republic, the development of married women’s property laws, divorce, child custody, temperance, suffrage, domestic and racial violence before and after the Civil War, protective labor legislation, and the use of legal history testimony in legal disputes. It is both an invaluable reference tool and an important new teaching …

Verdict According To Conscience: Perspectives On The English Criminal Trial Jury 1200-1800, Thomas A. Green

Books

This book treats the history of the English criminal trial jury from its origins to the eve of the Victorian reforms in the criminal law. It consists of eight free-standing essays on important aspects of that history and a conclusion. Each chapter addresses the phenomenon that has come to be known as "jury nullification," the exercise of jury discretion in favor of a defendant whom the jury nonetheless believes to have committed the act with which he is charged. Historically, some instances of nullification reflect the jury's view that the act in question is not unlawful, while in other cases …

British Statutes In American Law, 1776-1836, Elizabeth Gaspar Brown

Books

When a dependency severs its formal connection with the mother country - irrespective of the century in which such severance occurs - the act of independence can neither eradicate the past nor solve all problems of the future. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the United States of America discovered that independence from Great Britain in itself did not abolish the need for rules and regulations by which men could anticipate with some degree of certainty the consequences of particular actions. Wholesale adoption of such English statutes as were suited to their condition offered a solution to the …

Legal Education At Michigan, 1859-1959, Elizabeth G. Brown

Books

First opening its doors in 1859, the University of Michigan Law School has now accumulated a full century of experience in educating young men and young women for the practice of law. Two years ago, the law faculty, taking note of the approach of the Centennial year, established a research project under the financial auspices of the William W. Cook Endowment Fund, in order to engage in a serious study of all aspects of the school's activities down the years, and to prepare a complete and definitive report on this first century of history. In charge of the project and …

The Equality Of States In International Law, Edwin Dewitt Dickinson

Books

The author has attempted in this volume to present the equality of states as it appears in the theory of international law and also as it is affected by common usage. Theoretical aspects of the subject are considered in chapters dealing with the sources of the principle, its origin, and its significance in the writings of modem publicists and in illustrative documents. The opinion that Grotius first established the principle in international law is examined and evidence is adduced which indicates that the opinion is erroneous. The equality of states as affected by common usage is really their inequality or …

Law Abridgment: Closing Address Delivered Before The Graduating Law Class Of The University Of Michigan, March 20, 1879., James V. Campbell

Books

We hear on all sides complaints of the increasing mass of printed Reports and text-books, which it is said the lawyer must find some means of mastering, but which no life is long enough to read. The young lawyer, as he scans the dreary catalogues, and wonders what Croesus can buy or what brain can learn all this lore, is sorely puzzled what books to choose from the thousands that have found printers. And when a few years of practice have shown him how small a share of these books have done any good in the world, he is forced …