Legal History Commons^™

A More Perfect Union: The Emoluments Clause, Grant C. Rasak

Pepperdine Law Review

America’s Framers crafted the Emoluments Clause to preserve institutional integrity, mitigate undue influences, and best serve the American People. The Emoluments Clause influenced the course of the Constitutional Convention, as the Pennsylvania Delegation championed resolute reforms. Benjamin Franklin, working alongside James Wilson, advocated for strengthening domestic and international practices by crafting the Emoluments Clause. The Framers proposed a system of self-government which sought to establish public trust, mitigate corrupt practices, and promote institutional integrity. The Pennsylvania Delegation summoned Wilson, under the tutelage of Franklin, to champion the Emoluments Clause. Wilson proposed a new notion of national unity by placing profound …

Finding The Sovereign In Sovereign Immunity: Lessons From Bodin, Hobbes, And Rousseau, David Schraub

David Schraub

A Government Of Laws Not Of Precedents 1776-1876: The Google Challenge To Common Law Myth, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

The United States, it is said, is a common law country. The genius of American common law, according to American jurists, is its flexibility in adapting to change and in developing new causes of action. Courts make law even as they apply it. This permits them better to do justice and effectuate public policy in individual cases, say American jurists.

Not all Americans are convinced of the virtues of this American common law method. Many in the public protest, we want judges that apply and do not make law. American jurists discount these protests as criticisms of naive laymen. They …

The Metamorphoses Of Reasonable Doubt: How Changes In The Burden Of Proof Have Weakened The Presumption Of Innocence, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

The standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is commonly thought to be an important benefit to the accused. The history of the standard is much more complex and demonstrates lesser commitments to the truth and to the defendant.

This article develops the history of the reasonable doubt instruction in the United States and its English antecedents. Examining the development of the instruction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its evolution through the nineteenth and twentieth, this history reveals the dual nature of the instruction. It both encapsulated a theory of knowledge and articulated a level of confidence in …

The Rhetorical Constitution Of "Civil Society" At The Founding: One Lawyer's Anxious Vision, Stephen A. Conrad

Indiana Law Journal

Symposium: Law and Civil Society

Civil Society And The American Foundings, Jack P. Greene

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

James Wilson's "Assimilation Of The Common-Law Mind", Stephen A. Conrad

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Metaphor And Imagination In James Wilson's Theory Of Federal Union, Stephen A. Conrad

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.