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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Law
Keynote Address: Judging The Political And Political Judging: Justice Scalia As Case Study, Richard L. Hasen
Keynote Address: Judging The Political And Political Judging: Justice Scalia As Case Study, Richard L. Hasen
Chicago-Kent Law Review
This is a revised version of a Keynote Address delivered at “The Supreme Court and American Politics,” a symposium held October 17, 2017 at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. In this Address, Professor Hasen considers through the lens of Justice Scalia’s opinions the role that views of the political process play, at least rhetorically, in how Supreme Court Justices decide cases. It focuses on Justice Scalia’s contradictory views on self-dealing and incumbency protection across a range of cases, comparing campaign finance on the one hand to partisan gerrymandering, voter identification laws, political patronage, and ballot access rules on the other. …
That Elusive Consensus: The Historiographic Significance Of William E. Nelson's Works On Judicial Review, Mark Mcgarvie
That Elusive Consensus: The Historiographic Significance Of William E. Nelson's Works On Judicial Review, Mark Mcgarvie
Chicago-Kent Law Review
This essay provides a historiographical context for Nelson’s work on judicial review. It argues that Nelson’s integration of intellectual and legal history not only rebutted the instrumentalist historiography that prevailed when he undertook his work on Marshall and judicial review, but also fostered an appreciation of the need to place legal actors in the intellectual context in which they acted. Highlighting the influence of Bernard Bailyn’s pathfinding work on popular sovereignty upon Nelson’s development of his consensus theory, the essay contends that Nelson’s work changed the course of academic readings of Marshall’s jurisprudence to be consistent with a broader acceptance …
Americanization Of The Common Law: The Intellectual Migration Meets The Great Migration, David Thomas Konig
Americanization Of The Common Law: The Intellectual Migration Meets The Great Migration, David Thomas Konig
Chicago-Kent Law Review
This essay is an appreciation of William E. Nelson’s Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (1975) and the complementary study published six years later as Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725–1825 (1981). The essay places Nelson’s research project in the immediate context of historical writing on colonial New England at the time of their publication but steps back from that narrow context to identify the significance of the book in the long trajectory of great legal historical writing on the Anglo-American legal tradition.
Law For The Empire: The Common Law In Colonial America And The Problem Of Legal Diversity, Lauren Benton, Kathryn Walker
Law For The Empire: The Common Law In Colonial America And The Problem Of Legal Diversity, Lauren Benton, Kathryn Walker
Chicago-Kent Law Review
In laboring to uncover the legal origins of the American Revolution, historians of law in early America often separated the field from the comparative legal history of empires. William E. Nelson does not explicitly set out to place American colonial legal history in a global context in The Common Law in Colonial America. But in analyzing legal diversity and identifying elements of early legal convergence, Nelson does address key questions within the comparative history of empire and law. This article surveys Nelson’s contributions and places them alongside two other approaches to the study of colonial legal diversity and the constitution …
William E. Nelson's The Roots Of American Bureaucracy And The Resuscitation Of The Early American State, Gautham Rao
William E. Nelson's The Roots Of American Bureaucracy And The Resuscitation Of The Early American State, Gautham Rao
Chicago-Kent Law Review
In 1983, William E. Nelson published The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900. Nelson traced the somewhat unlikely emergence and victory of the bureaucratic model in American political and legal thought. This article summarizes the book’s argument and describes its reception. It also seeks to assess the scholarly legacy of The Roots of American Bureaucracy. I argue that the book was ahead of its time because it contradicted prevailing scholarly trends in identifying a significant federal state in nineteenth-century America. In particular, during the past two decades, historians and political scientists have built on Nelson’s insights to develop a consensus about …
Original Intent And The Fourteenth Amendment: Into The Black Hole Of Constitutional Law, Paul Finkelman
Original Intent And The Fourteenth Amendment: Into The Black Hole Of Constitutional Law, Paul Finkelman
Chicago-Kent Law Review
This article explores and examines William E. Nelson’s masterful study of the origins and adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principal to Judicial Doctrine (1988). The article explains that a quarter of a century after he wrote this book, Nelson’s study of the origins and adoption of the Amendment remains the best exploration of these issues. His book illustrates the difficulties of determining the “original intent” of the framers of this complicated and complex Amendment. At the same time, however, Nelson demonstrates that for many issues we can come to a strong understanding of the goals …
Rejecting The Legal Process Theory Joker: Bill Nelson's Scholarship On Judge Edward Weinfeld And Justice Byron White, Brad Snyder
Rejecting The Legal Process Theory Joker: Bill Nelson's Scholarship On Judge Edward Weinfeld And Justice Byron White, Brad Snyder
Chicago-Kent Law Review
My contribution to this tribute places Bill Nelson’s scholarship about Judge Edward Weinfeld and Justice Byron White within several contexts. It is a personal history of Nelson the law student, law clerk, and young scholar; an intellectual history of legal theory since the 1960s; an examination of the influence of legal theory on Nelson’s scholarship based on his writings about Weinfeld and White; and an example of how legal historians contend with the subject of judicial reputation. Nelson was one of many former Warren Court and Burger Court clerks who joined the professoriate and rejected the legal process theory that …
Semi-Wonderful Town, Semi-Wonderful State: Bill Nelson's New York, Edward A. Purcell Jr.
Semi-Wonderful Town, Semi-Wonderful State: Bill Nelson's New York, Edward A. Purcell Jr.
Chicago-Kent Law Review
This article examines Bill Nelson’s two major books on the history of New York law and politics, The Legalist Reformation (2001) and Fighting for the City (2008). The former deals with developments in New York State from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century; the latter with New York City starting somewhat earlier but concentrating on the same later period. The Legalist Reformation argues that the election of Alfred E. Smith as Governor of New York in 1922 began a transformation of the state’s legal and political culture that brought new and more egalitarian social policies to the state …
A Response: The Impact Of War On Justice In The History Of American Law, William E. Nelson
A Response: The Impact Of War On Justice In The History Of American Law, William E. Nelson
Chicago-Kent Law Review
The foundational claim of this essay is that judges at most points in time should act with restraint and should not attempt to resolve contested issues of policy. They should incorporate new policies into the law only when the polity as a whole has already adopted a particular policy or when it is in the process of adopting one. The essay then maintains that there have been three periods in American history—the Revolution and the subsequent decades of constitution-making, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II and its aftermath—when the American public as an entity did adopt policies …