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Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

The Residential Segregation Of Baltimore's Jews: Restrictive Covenants Or Gentlemen's Agreement?, Garrett Power Sep 2009

The Residential Segregation Of Baltimore's Jews: Restrictive Covenants Or Gentlemen's Agreement?, Garrett Power

Garrett Power

No abstract provided.


Rights, Race, And Manhood: The Spanish American War And Soldiers’ Quests For First Class American Citizenship, Julie Novkov Jun 2009

Rights, Race, And Manhood: The Spanish American War And Soldiers’ Quests For First Class American Citizenship, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

Unlike the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Spanish American War and the Philippine Resistance were not accompanied by significant rights advances for people of color. Rather, rights continued to flow in retrograde, with increased political and cultural repression. Men of color contributed substantially and formally to the war effort, with companies of black and Filipino soldiers serving in combat and many individual Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian men and male descendants of Asians serving as well. Nonetheless, they were unable to leverage service into successful claims to the rights of manhood. This paper explores these dynamics in the context of …


Book Review: Reconstruction And Reunion, 1864-88, Part One, David S. Bogen Apr 2009

Book Review: Reconstruction And Reunion, 1864-88, Part One, David S. Bogen

David S. Bogen

No abstract provided.


Sacrifice And Civic Membership: The Case Of World War I, Julie Novkov Mar 2009

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: The Case Of World War I, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

In the Civil War and World War II, many men of color gained rights while women's rights were in retrograde. While World War I is not a perfect mirror image of the Civil War and World War II, it may make sense to think of World War I as reversing the polarities that were in operation in the two other major conflicts. To understand this dynamic, this paper will explore the kinds of claims that men of color and women made for rights based in forms of civic service and sacrifice, how those claims were met by various state actors, …


"Airbrushed Out Of The Constitutional Canon": The Evolving Understanding Of Giles V. Harris, 1903-1925, Samuel Brenner Mar 2009

"Airbrushed Out Of The Constitutional Canon": The Evolving Understanding Of Giles V. Harris, 1903-1925, Samuel Brenner

Michigan Law Review

Richard H. Pildes argued in an influential 2000 article that the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Giles v. Harris, which was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, was the "one decisive turning point" in the history of "American (anti)-democracy." In Giles, Holmes rejected on questionable grounds Jackson W. Giles's challenge to the new Alabama Constitution of 1901-a document which was designed to disfranchise and had the effect of disfranchising African Americans. The decision thus contributed significantly to the development of the all-white electorate in the South, and the concomitant marginalization of southern African Americans. According to Pildes, however, the …


Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson Jan 2009

Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson

Reviews

Observing these significant legal-political debates in the Chinese press and academy in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we might think they concern battles started only in the last decade and a half of Reform-era China. Now Professor Xu Xiaoqun reminds us that these struggles have a much longer pedigree, stretching back to the end of the nineteenth century and China's first fraught encounter with "the West" and one idea of "modernity."


Gabriel Franklin Hargo: Michigan Law 1870, Margaret A. Leary, Barbara J. Snow Jan 2009

Gabriel Franklin Hargo: Michigan Law 1870, Margaret A. Leary, Barbara J. Snow

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

A brief biographical sketch of Gabriel Franklin Hargo, the first African American graduate of the University of Michigan Law School.


Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford Jan 2009

Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Our book Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2009) highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impact tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume will provide an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It will be …


Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John D. Bessler Jan 2009

Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John D. Bessler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, a 26-year-old Italian, penned . The treatise argued that state-sanctioned executions and torture violate natural law. As we near the 250th anniversary of its publication, author John D. Bessler provides a comprehensive review of the abolition movement, from before Beccaria's time to the present. Bessler reviews Beccaria's influence on Enlightenment thinkers and more importantly, on America's Founding Fathers. The Article also provides an extensive review of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and then contrasts it with the trend in International Law towards the abolition of the death penalty. It then discusses the current state of the death penalty …


Jurisdiction Without Territory: From The Holy Roman Empire To The Responsibility To Protect, Anne Orford Jan 2009

Jurisdiction Without Territory: From The Holy Roman Empire To The Responsibility To Protect, Anne Orford

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Essay focuses upon one contemporary manifestation of that ongoing battle over the relationship between jurisdiction and control over territory-the emergence and institutionalization of the "responsibility to protect" concept. The idea that States and the international community have a responsibility to protect populations has shaped internationalist debates about conflict prevention, the use of force, and international administration since its development by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001. The responsibility to protect concept is premised on the notion, to quote former Secretary- General Kofi Annan, that "the primary raison d'être and duty" of every State is …


Created In Its Image: The Race Analogy, Gay Identity, And Gay Litigation In The 1950s-1970s, Craig J. Konnoth Jan 2009

Created In Its Image: The Race Analogy, Gay Identity, And Gay Litigation In The 1950s-1970s, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

Existing accounts of early gay rights litigation largely focus on how the suppression and liberation of gay identity affected early activism. This Note helps complicate these dynamics, arguing that gay identity was not just suppressed and then liberated, but substantially transformed by activist efforts during this period, and that this transformation fundamentally affected the nature of gay activism. Gay organizers in the 1950s and 1960s moved from avoiding identity-based claims to analogizing gays to African-Americans. By transforming themselves in the image of a successful black civil rights minority, activists attempted to win over skeptical courts in a period when equal …


Crises, Congress, And Cognitive Biases: A Critical Examination Of Food And Drug Legislation In The United States, Sharon B. Jacobs Jan 2009

Crises, Congress, And Cognitive Biases: A Critical Examination Of Food And Drug Legislation In The United States, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

No abstract provided.


Microhistory Set In Motion: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott Jan 2009

Microhistory Set In Motion: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane is a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and his family. By contrast, Mintz’s Sweetness and Power gains its force from taking the entire Atlantic world as its scope, examining the marketing, meanings, and consumption of sugar as they changed over time. This essay borrows from each of these two strategies, looking at the history of a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the …


She...Refuses To Deliver Up Herself As The Slave Of Your Petitioner': Émigrés, Enslavement, And The 1808 Louisiana Digest Of The Civil Laws (Symposium On The Bicentennial Of The Digest Of 1808--Collected Papers), Rebecca J. Scott Jan 2009

She...Refuses To Deliver Up Herself As The Slave Of Your Petitioner': Émigrés, Enslavement, And The 1808 Louisiana Digest Of The Civil Laws (Symposium On The Bicentennial Of The Digest Of 1808--Collected Papers), Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Philosophically and juridically, the construct of a slave-a "person with a price"--contains multiple ambiguities. Placing the category of slave among the distinctions of persons "established by law," the 1808 Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Termtoiy of Orleans recognized that "slave" is not a natural category, inhering in human beings. It is an agreement among other human beings to treat one of their fellows as property. But the Digest did not specify how such a property right came into existence in a given instance. The definition of a slave was simply ostensive, pointing toward rather than …


Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott Jan 2009

Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

From French and Creole to Spanish, the domain of the Napoleonic Empire to the king of Spain, crossing the strait separating the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the Spanish colony of Cuba entailed a change of language and government. Some 18,000 people made that transition between the spring and summer of 1803 during the Revolutionary War in Saint-Dominque. Six years later, many crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to New Orleans and the recently acquired Louisiana Territory under the authority of a territorial governor and the United States Congress. What would these crossings lead to for those who had …


The Nobel Effect, Roger P. Alford Jan 2009

The Nobel Effect, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

For the first time in scholarly literature, this article traces the history of modern international law from the perspective of the constructivist theory of international relations. Constructivism is one of the leadings schools of thought in international relations today. This theory posits that state preferences emerge from social construction and that state interests are evolving rather than fixed. Constructivism further argues that international norms have a life cycle composed of three stages: norm emergence, norm acceptance (or "norm cascades"), and norm internalization. As such, constructivism treats international law as a dynamic process in which "norm entrepreneurs" interact with state actors …