Law Commons^™

Higher Law And Lincoln's Antislavery Constitutionalism: What It Means To Say The Civil War Was Fought Over Slavery, Joel A. Rogers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The US Civil War was fought over slavery. But what do we really mean when we say that? This paper examines that question, first by exploring the idea of “higher law,” which gained tremendous traction in American society starting around 1850. Proponents of the idea claimed that laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act are immoral; that the immorality of such laws is self-evident, and that such immoral laws should be resisted—sometimes even with violence. Meanwhile, opponents of the idea of higher law were not necessarily in favor of slavery, but they opposed the use of extra-Constitutional means to bring …

Legislating Against Liberties: Congress And The Constitution In The Aftermath Of War, Harry Blain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How far can a democracy go to protect itself without jeopardizing the liberties upon which democracy depends? This dissertation examines why wartime restrictions on civil liberties outlive their original justifications. Through a comparative historical analysis of five major American wars, it illustrates the decisive role of the U.S. Congress in preserving these restrictions during peacetime. This argument challenges the prevailing consensus in the literature, which identifies wartime executive power as the main threat to postwar freedoms. It also reveals broader narratives of American constitutional development, including the rise and fall of intrusive congressional investigations, the decline of sedition legislation since …

El Caso De Mateo Alemán: La Interaccion Entre El Derecho Y La Literatura En El Informe De La Mina De Mercurio De Almaden Y El Guzman De Alfarache, Cristina Morales Segura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1593, the Judge Mateo Alemán was in charge of inspecting the quicksilver mines of Almadén in Spain to report on the situation of its workers, prisoners of the Crown, and galley men forced to work in the mercury exploitation. After one month of work, the assignment was cancelled, Alemán was forced to retire from his research, and his work was lost in the archives of the Habsburgs. A few years later, in 1598, Alemán published his famous best seller, El Guzmán de Alfarache.

Alemán’s legal Report, finally found and published in 1966 by Germán Bleiberg, is a narrative text …

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 …

Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a conceptual history of Egypt’s national formation between the 1880s and the 1930s. This period involved the convergence of nationalism, colonial rule, missionary activity, and new modes of governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on state and missionary archival material, periodicals, legal compendia, laws, and parliamentary transcripts, and adapting methods developed by Reinhart Koselleck, I trace shifts within Egypt’s socio-political lexicon through processes of translation and demonstrate their effects upon social experience and political aspiration. I focus on a set of liberal-secular concepts critical to national politics—religious freedom, public interest, nationality, and the minority—as they …

The Legacy Of Slavery And The Continued Marginalization Of Communities Of Color Within The Legal System, Julia N. Alvarez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis paper is to demonstrate how the history of slavery in the United States continues to marginalize communities of color. The history of slavery in America was the result of various factors. Some of these factors included but were not limited to; economic, legal, and social. Slavery provided a reliable and self-reproducing workforce. The laws enacted during slavery ensured the continuation of the social order of the time. This social order was based on the generalized understanding that blacks were born into servitude. Those born into slavery were not given the same legal or economic status …

Capitalism And Unfreedom: Louis D. Brandeis And A Liberty Of The Left, Eric L. Apar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The American Right features a well-developed—and well-heeled—infrastructure for promoting a conception of freedom as inextricable from capitalism. The American Left, by contrast, has seemed content to cede the territory, abandoning the ground of freedom for the terrain of “equality,” “justice,” “fairness,” and “prosperity.” This paper is an effort to address this asymmetry in the public discourse over the meaning of freedom. Its principal objective is to capture the vision of freedom embodied in the political and economic thought of Louis D. Brandeis, one of the American Left’s ablest expositors of freedom.

In addition, the paper has three subsidiary objectives. The …