Law Commons^™

International Law And The Balfour Decision, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

The Balfour Declaration had enormous political significance, but did it have any legal force? Was it legally binding, exposing Britain to legal remedies for its breach, or was it merely an expression of policy that could be disregarded without legal consequences? These questions are of intense interest to legal historians, but they also have contemporary political relevance. The issue is not so much whether Britain might be liable to the Palestinians for failing to safeguard the “civil and religious rights” of non-Jewish residents of Palestine, though that is a theoretical possibility. Instead, the question is whether the Declaration is legally …

Protestant Ecclesiastical Law And The Ius Commune, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

Protestants almost never called their ecclesiastical norms ‘canons.’ When Protestant jurists or theologians wrote ‘canon law’ (Ius canonicum) in their works, it was clear to their readers that they meant Roman canon law. Surprisingly, Protestant jurists often cited Roman canon law and its jurisprudence long after Martin Luther burned books of Roman canon law at the Elster gate in Wittenberg. These jurists also continued to teach courses at the universities that treated the Ius canonicum. Consequently, an essay on Protestant canon law must confront the question: how much Roman canon law and the jurisprudence of the medieval …

Glimpses Of Marshall In The Military, Kevin C. Walsh

Scholarly Articles

Before President John Adams appointed him as Chief Justice of the United States in 1801, John Marshall was a soldier, a state legislator, a federal legislator, an envoy to France, and the Secretary of State. He also maintained a thriving practice in Virginia and federal courts, occasionally teaming up with political rival and personal friend Patrick Henry. Forty-five years old at the time of his appointment to the Supreme Court, Marshall has been serving his state and his country for a quarter century before he took judicial office. Marshall is an exemplar of professional excellence for all lawyers and judges. …

Reform In 1215: Magna Carta And The Fourth Lateran Council, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

By 1215 King John had lost almost all of his northern continental possessions. The core of the Angevin empire, Normandy, was lost. Anglo-French barons who still held lands in Normandy owed their primary allegiance to King Phillip Augustus, not to King John. The barons and churchmen who remained under his sovereignty chaffed under his rule. It is clear from the document that the barons forced John to sign when they met with John on Runnymede in 15 July 2015, they intended to impose reform on the king. We might sum up their objectives as being the administration of justice and …

The Fun Of Teaching American Legal History, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

I teach a pair of two-credit legal history courses: History of Early American Law and History of Modern American Law. I teach a variety of other courses, but none is more fun to teach than legal history.

Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

This paper reflects critically on what is the near-universal contemporary method of conceptualizing the tasks of the scholar of criminal punishment. It does so by the unusual route of considering the thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a towering figure in English law and political theory, one of its foremost historians of criminal law, and a prominent public intellectual of the late Victorian period. Notwithstanding Stephen's stature, there has as yet been no sustained effort to understand his views of criminal punishment. This article attempts to remedy this deficit. But its aims are not exclusively historical. Indeed, understanding Stephen's ideas …

Forty Years Of Originalism, Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

While Professor Noah Feldman has underlined the role Justice Hugo Black played in the development of modern originalism, it was not until Bork's article in 197 1 that the modern originalist movement took flight. [...]having just passed the 40th anniversary of that landmark essay, it is appropriate that we survey how modern originalism began, how it has changed, and what challenges lie ahead. According to Bork, judicial review by the Warren Court was founded on a flawed premise: that courts must "'make fundamental value choices' in order to 'protect our constitutional rights and liberties.'" But if the Constitution already makes …

The Vanity Of Dogmatizing, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

The year 1661 saw the publication of Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of Dogmatizing, a polemic advocating an intellectual break from Aristotle and the Schoolmen in favor of the sort of empiricism that eventually came to fruition in the philosophy of David Hume. Glanvill was deeply irritated by what he perceived as the encrusted academic orthodoxies of his age: "The Disease of our Intellectuals," he railed, "is too great, not to be its own [evidence]: And they that feel it not, are not less sick, but stupidly so.' What was needed was a skeptical cast of mind- thinkers who would shatter …

Lex Naturalis And Jus Naturale, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

After the air attacks of September 11, 2001 the United States government decided to fortify all public government buildings and spaces of importance in Washington, D.C. that might be targets of future attacks. The expenditures for these projects ran to millions of dollars and included the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. These extensive fortifications were inspired by widespread fear at all levels of the American government that extreme measures were needed to protect themselves and government buildings. This culture of fear quickly became an accepted part of American political discourse. Fear was no longer cowardly; it became a …

Innocent Until Proven Guilty: The Origins Of A Legal Maxim, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

The maxim,' Innocent until proven guilty', has had a good run in the twentieth century. The United Nations incorporated the principle in its Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 under article eleven, section one. The maxim also found a place in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights in 1953 [as article 6, section 2] and was incorporated into the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [as article 14, section 2]. This was a satisfying development for Americans because there are few maxims that have a greater resonance in Anglo-American, common law jurisprudence. The Anglo-American …

The Ius Commune, Suretyship, And Magna Carta, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Due Process, Community, And The Prince In The Evolution Of The Ordo Iudiciarius, Kenneth Pennington

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No abstract provided.

Learned Law, Droit Savant, Gelehrtes Recht: The Tyranny Of A Concept, Kenneth Pennington

Scholarly Articles

I would like to make several points in this essay. First, the historians of national legal systems are still, by and large, balkanized. They study, explain, and trace the history of their legal systems with only a cursory nod in the direction of the Ius commune. Second, within the Ius commune, some historians still approach a topic as if its various parts can be studied in isolation. A Romanist will study a doctrine of Roman law as if canon and feudal law had only tangential influence on the development of the thought of the civilians.

The Warren Court In American Fiction, Maxwell Bloomfield

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No abstract provided.

Creative Writers And Criminal Justice: Confronting The System (1890–1920), Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

By the early twentieth century the modernization of American criminal law had become an issue of widespread public concern, both in professional circles and in the popular press. Bar leaders, such as Roscoe Pound and William Howard Taft, proposed to improve the machinery of criminal justice by tightening procedural rules and enhancing the authority of trial judges. Their efforts at “scientific” law reform led to the creation of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1909.

Creative writers, on the other hand, influenced by the rise of literary realism, tended to produce popular novels and plays that sympathized …

Constitutional Values And The Literature Of The Early Republic, Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Marbury V. Madison, Lord Coke And Dr. Bonham: Relics Of The Past, Guidelines For The Present: Judicial Review In Transition?, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

It will be the purpose of this article to explore the modern significance of Coke's influence as analyzed and interpreted through the famous Bonham's Case and thereby to provide an insight into the development of our own concepts of judicial review, as borrowed from the English, in its original historical-legal perspective and as seen through the decision in Marbury v. Madison and applied modernly in the principal case of Baker v.Carr.

David Hoffman And The Shaping Of A Republican Legal Culture, Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

In recent years scholars have paid increasing attention to the concept of "republicanism" as a measure of cultural change in America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To the Revolutionary generation republicanism connoted most obviously a representative form of government, based upon popular sovereignty and limited in its powers by a written constitution. But republican ideology encompassed far more than the restructuring of political institutions. It called for a regenerated society as well, in which men should be encouraged to pursue their individual destinies with a minimum of interference from public authorities. Civic morality and self-determination were closely …

The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Searching For The Origin Of Class Action, Raymond B. Marcin

Scholarly Articles

Class actions today are largely the creatures of statute and rule. Extant statutes and rules can be divided by content into three types: (1) those which are patterned on the class action rule in the 1849 amendments to the New York Field Code, (2) those which follow the 1938 version of the federal class action rule, and (3) those which have adopted the 1966 revision of the federal class action rule. All trace their origins, however, to the unwritten practices of English Chancery at a time before the adoption of our own judicial system.

A History Of Connecticut's Long Island Sound Boundary, Raymond B. Marcin

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Lawyers And Public Criticism: Challenge And Response In Nineteenth-Century America, Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

In the folklore of American legal history the middle decades of the nineteenth century mark the nadir of professionalism in national life. While acknowledging the brilliant achievements of individual practitioners and judges during the years from 1830 to 1870, commentators from Charles Warren and Roscoe Pound to W. Raymond Blackard and Anton-Hermann Chroust have insisted upon the overall deterioration of the bar under the assaults of a militant democracy. The standard picture of professional development in the United States begins with a Golden Age of jurisprudence in the early Republic, fostered by a self-regulating fraternity of educated judges and lawyers. …

La Dolce Vita: Law And Equity Merged At Last!, George P. Smith Ii, Walter W. Nixon Iii

Scholarly Articles

Based upon an exegesis of the history of equity as a system of law, a comparison of Arkansas' present separate courts system with its own predecessors and with systems of other states, and, further, based upon an in-depth investigation of the practical and theoretical arguments-both positive and negative-concerning merger, it will be clearly seen that the merger of law and equity courts in the State would be neither a panacea for all judicial woes nor open a Pandora's box of abounding confusion. The merger, if effected, would present some operational difficulties in its inauguration, but it would ultimately ensure a …

Law Vs. Politics: The Self-Image Of The American Bar, Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

The advent of Jacksonian democracy in American politics coincided with a vigorous leveling movement in American law. In one sense the latter crusade was nothing new: hostility toward the elitism of the legal fraternity had been rife since the days of the Revolution. But whereas earlier critics had worked to simplify the content of the law, reformers in the 1830's and 1840's attacked the problem from a different angle. Eschewing substantive changes, they sought instead to bring the administrators of the law under more direct popular control. Their program embraced a wide range of legislative measures in which worried conservatives …

William Sampson And The Codifiers: The Roots Of American Legal Reform, Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

The transition from colony to nation involved difficult readjustments in the thinking and behavioral patterns of the American people, and nowhere were the inherent tensions more evident than in the field of law. Prior to the revolution, Americans had willingly accepted the legal principles and practices of the mother country, although modifying them somewhat to suit the more fluid social and economic environment of the New World. But the achievement of political independence from England soon led to demands that all other ties with the former metropolis be severed as well.

Radical agitators in various states thus urged the complete …

The Development Of The Right Of Assembly: A Current Socio-Legal Investigation, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

It will be the purpose of this article to assay the historical evolution of the freedom of assembly, noting first its development in England and later in America and finally its current position in the twentieth century. Even though the rights of free speech, association, and religion are inescapably drawn into case discussions of freedom of assembly, effort will be made to confine the consideration to the pertinent assembly problems. In addition to considering the fundamental legal propositions embodied in this right, as well as its raison d'etre, thought and discussion will be given to the sociological interpretations of the …

Dr. Bonham’S Case And The Modern Significance Of Lord Coke’S Influence, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

Dr. Bonham’s Case, decided by Edward Coke as Chief Justice of the British Court of Common Pleas in 1610, remains, to this day, the case acknowledging the supremacy of the fundamental (or natural) law interpreted and enforced as such by the judiciary and not a legislative body - here, Parliament. Coke’s idea of a law of nature superior to man-made law was not new. What was original, and even radical for the times, was the notion that the courts of law should be given the power and the right to interpret and enforce that law. This theory of judicial review …