Legal Commons^™

Associational Republicanism: Antifederalism In Context, 1790 - 1830, Ashley Jordan

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Judicializing History: Mass Crimes Trials And The Historian As Expert Witness In West Germany, Cambodia, And Bangladesh, Rebecca Gidley, Mathew Turner

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Henry Rousso warned that the engagement of historians as expert witnesses in trials, particularly highly politicized proceedings of mass crimes, risks a judicialization of history. This article tests Rousso’s argument through analysis of three quite different case studies: the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial; the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia; and the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh. It argues that Rousso’s objections misrepresent the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, while failing to account for the engagement of historical expertise in mass atrocity trials beyond Europe. Paradoxically, Rousso’s criticisms are less suited to the European context that represents his purview, and apply more …

Did Hollywood Take Theatre "By Hook Or By Crook?", Catherine S. Wright

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Hollywood and Theatre have been partners in producing entertainment for over 100 years. The relationship was fruitful for both parties, but Hollywood moguls and playwrights battled over ownership of the work and crafting of its creative nucleus, story and character. Theatre was the dominant entertainment right before the rise of motion pictures. Once Hollywood’s talkies closed the curtain on silent films, playwrights had a high creative worth to movie makers. In the cinema, story and dialogue were essential for its survival and growth. Playwrights were courted by the Hollywood studio heads but were not offered equal partnership as they were …

Re-Playing Maimonides’ Codes: Designing Games To Teach Religious Legal Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for

Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of

Technology MAGIC Center.1 The series teaches medieval

religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games

of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of

processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning.

It includes the background leading to the author's work

in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for

the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind

working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then

discuss the …

The Origins And Uses Of The Three-Fifths Clause Related To Slavery And Taxation, William F. Hughes

Masters Theses

The Three-fifths clause of the 1787 U.S. Constitution is noted for having a role in perpetuating racial injustices of America’s early slave culture, solidifying the document as pro-slavery in design and practice. This thesis, however, examines the ubiquitous application of the three-fifths ratio as used in ancient societies, medieval governments, and colonial America. Being associated with proportions of scale, this understanding of the three-fifths formula is essential in supporting the intent of the Constitutional framers to create a proportional based system of government that encompassed citizenship, representation, and taxation as related to production theory. The empirical methodology used in this …

Jerome Lefkowitz: A Pragmatic Intellect And Major Figure In Taylor Law Historytaylor Law History, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This article examines the professional career of Jerome Lefkowitz, a central figure in the history of the Taylor Law, New York's public sector collective bargaining statute. Mr. Lefkowitz helped draft the Taylor Law, and served as the first Deputy Chairperson of the New York State Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) from 1967 until 1986, and the agency's fifth Chairperson from 2007 until 2015. PERB is the state agency responsible for administering the provisions of the Taylor Law. Between his two tenures at PERB, Mr. Lefkowitz was Deputy Counsel for the Civil Service Employees Association, Local 1000, AFL-CIO. The article examines …

Merchant Seamen, Sailortowns, And The Shaping Of U.S. Citizenship, 1843-1945, Johnathan Thayer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that merchant seamen, because of their inherent transience, diversity, and the unique nature of their work, occupied a marginal position in U.S. society, and that that marginalization produced a series of confrontations with shoreside people, communities, institutions, and the state, most specifically over the nature and definition of citizenship. This argument is developed through examination of a series of encounters and negotiations that merchant seamen provoked from the piers, back alleys, and boardinghouses of the nation’s “sailortowns” from the 1830s through World War II, including: 1) nineteenth century maritime ministry projects in the Port of New York …

Guest Editors' Introduction To The Special Issue, Diversity In Aquatics, Angela K. Beale-Tawfeeq, Steven N. Waller Ph.D., Austin Anderson

International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education

This is the introductory editorial leading off the special issue, "Diversity in Aquatics."

To Forgive Or Not To Forgive? A Reappraisal Of Vietnam War Evaders And Deserters In President Gerald Ford's Clemency Program, Courtney Carver

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In 1974, President Ford began the arduous task of healing the wounds sustained by the United States during the Vietnam War. His controversial clemency plan gave those who had either deserted the military or those who evaded the draft the chance to earn their way back into American society. President Ford was willing to face this opposition to move the country closer to resolving an issue that was tearing the nation apart. In the applications to Ford’s Presidential Clemency Board, thousands of deserters and evaders reveal their motivations, and in doing so present a large body of evidence that contradicts …

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

Reshaping A Fractured System: Arlen Specter’S Footprint On The Criminal Justice System In The U.S., Kaitlyn Brown

Arlen Specter Center Research Fellowship

The criminal justice system in the United States of America has been in peril since the beginning of the 1960’s, spiraling downward as the rates of crime shot upward across the country. Such drastic changes to a major system within the United States brought the issue of criminal justice to the forefront of nearly every political agenda of politicians in office. This paper examines the work one such politician, the late Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, performed in his fight against the crippling system. This paper evaluates the actions and policies Specter introduced, from his controversial Armed Career Criminal Act to …

The Nuremberg Trials Project At Harvard Law School: Making History Accessible To All, Judith A. Haran

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article is primarily a case study of the Nuremberg Trials Project at the Harvard Law School Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It begins with an historical note about the war crimes trials and their documentary record, including the fate of the several tons of trial documents that were distributed in 1949. The second part of the article is a description of the Harvard Law School Nuremberg project, including its history, goals, logistical considerations, digitization process and challenges, and resulting impact. The structure and function of the project website is described, followed by a description of a typical user experience, the …

A Kentucky Town Votes Against A Culture War Rematch, Campbell Robertson

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Caudill To Face Davis This November, The Morehead News

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Man Denied Marriage License By Kim Davis Loses Primary Bid, Will Not Face Her In Fall, Will Wright

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Gay Man Denied Marriage License By Kim Davis Loses Bid To Challenge Her For Kentucky County Clerkship, Mahita Gajanan

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Amy Schumer, Susan Sarandon Give Cqsh To Kim Davis' Would-Be Opponent, Andrew Wlfoson

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

At The Edge Of Humanity: American Indian Legal Identity And The Development Of American Citizenship, Zachary Charles Isenhower

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Civic standing in the formative era of the United States was defined by land ownership. Landless white Americans demanded access to western lands, while the American government regulated settler pressure on the borderlands in order to preserve peace, and maintain its authority over citizens. Simultaneously, the U.S. depended upon western lands for revenue and on settlers for expanding its domain. As acquisition of property by white Americans depended in very real terms on dispossessing Indians of their lands, justifying that dispossession became one of the most fraught intellectual processes in American thought.

This project explores how civic identity was not …

Kim Davis Denied His Marriage License. Will Voters Let Him Try To Oust Her?, Will Wright

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Instituting Protest (Film), Joshua Eisenberg

Theses and Dissertations

The road-trip story of one man looking at how first and fourteenth amendment rights have effected college campuses over time in the United States, while also looking at the possibility of revoking a diploma from a white nationalist for having different views than ones preferential to a certain college.

Candidate Forum: County Clerk, Brad Stacy

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Race For County Clerk Including Gay Man Denied Marriage License By Kim Davis Gets Lots Of Attention, Weku

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

The Juridical Communities Of Apulia: Communal Identity And Municipal Belonging In The Aragonese Kingdom Of Naples, Vincenzo Selleri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study intends to make a contribution to the debate concerning Jewish citizenship in Renaissance Europe by suggesting that de jure status does not provide sufficient information on the municipal belonging of individuals and groups. Citizenship in Renaissance Italy was an equivocal concept. Political rights were usually granted on the basis of wealth and “respectability” (measured in terms of lineage, and education). Jews, women, the poor, and “debased” groups may have not enjoyed such rights; nonetheless they were part of the social, economic, and cultural life of the Renaissance city.

Municipal belonging is better assessed by individuals’ de facto enjoyment …

Suing For Spanish: Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, And Legal Activism In The 1970s, Ariel Arnau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how the legal activism of a Puerto Rican group of activist-lawyers and community members contributed to the reshaping of voting law and language policy during the 1970s. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) coordinated a series of lawsuits in Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia during the early 1970s. The decisions in these lawsuits provided the legal framework to rewrite federal voting rights law during the Voting Rights Act (VRA) reauthorization hearings in 1975. These cases resulted in vastly expanded opportunity to vote for all language minorities in the United States. These civil rights …

The Unsuspected Francis Lieber, Richard Salomon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"The Unsuspected Francis Lieber" examines paradoxes in the life and work of Francis Lieber. Lieber is best known as the author of the 1863 "Lieber Code," the War Department's General Order No. 100. It was the first modern statement of the law of armed conflict. This paper questions whether the Lieber Code was truly humanitarian, especially in view of its valorization of military necessity. Also reviewed is the contrast between the Code's extraordinarily favorable treatment of African-Americans and Lieber's personal history of slave-holding.

Lieber's shift from civil libertarian to authoritarian after 1857, as exemplified by his support of Lincoln's suspension …

A Study In Sovereignty: Federalism, Political Culture, And The Future Of Conservatism, Clint Hamilton

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis confronts symptoms of an issue which is eroding at the principles of conservative advocacy, specifically those dealing with federalism. It contrasts modern definitions of federalism with those which existed in the late 1700s, and then attempts to determine the cause of the change. Concluding that the change was caused by a shift in American political identity, the author argues that the conservative movement must begin a conversation on how best to adapt to the change to prevent further drifting away from conservative principles.

Not All Art Belongs In The Living Room: The Tale Of Robert Mapplethorpe, Shelby K. Miller

Student Scholar Showcase

Following the death of Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989, a group of scholars put together a retrospective exhibition of his life’s work with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The subject matter, namely those in Mapplethorpe’s X and Z portfolios that included male nudes and depictions of sadomasochism, caused major controversy across the country. The presentation will cover Helms Amendment of 1990 and the obscenity trial that took place in Cincinnati in 1990 with a specific focus on the lasting impacts that these events have had on the NEA and the art world.

The Solid South: The Suffrage Campaign Revisited, Abby Lorraine Crenshaw

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This examination of the southern suffrage campaign focuses the movement through the eyes of three prominent southern women within the political movement: Kate Gordon, Sue Shelton White, and Josephine Pearson. The merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) planned and organized a focus on the South during the second half of the suffrage campaign, which presented new challenges. The Nineteenth Amendment passed through Congress in 1918 and consequently set the stage for a raging political battle between suffragists and anti-suffragists. The suffrage campaign prompted women to question how the political platform of suffrage should be addressed. Women argued over the …

Black Courts, Ernesto A. Longa

Faculty Book Display Case

Book Abstract:

Pushing past the conventional understanding of federal and state courts and the judicial system, this volume examines eight little-known Florida courts. Part 1 details general jurisdiction courts from 1513 to 1865 while part 2 profiles modern-era special jurisdiction courts.

Beginning with the state's colonial history, Florida's Other Courts challenges narratives that paint Spain's administration of its New World holdings as corrupt, inefficient, and tyrannical, using research into archival records scattered across Spain, Cuba, and other New World sites. Contributors to the volume also demonstrate how British authorities later molded the courts after their own justice system, introducing grand …

Writing To Save A Life: The Louis Till File, Chris Laico

The Primary Source

No abstract provided.