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Articles 1 - 30 of 34
Full-Text Articles in Law
Why Study Tax History?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Why Study Tax History?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Reviews
Since the beginning of this century, John Tiley organized an annual tax history conference at Cambridge, a tradition that was continued after his death under the leadership of Peter Harris. These are the papers from the ninthCambridge Tax Law History Conference, held in July 2018. In the usual manner, the papers have been selected from an oversupply of proposals for their interest and relevance, and scrutinized and edited to the highest standard for inclusion in this prestigious series. The result is an outstanding book, with many high quality contributions to historical tax research.
The Elephant Problem, Richard Primus
The Elephant Problem, Richard Primus
Reviews
In their new book, "A Great Power of Attorney": Understanding the Fiduciary Constitution, Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman argue that, as a matter of original meaning, the Constitution should be understood as analogous to a power of attorney, that interpretive devices applicable to powers of attorney should therefore be used in constitutional interpretation, and that interpreting the Constitution that way would produce results congenial to modern libertarian preferences, such as the unconstitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the invalidity, on nondelegation grounds, of much of the federal administrative state. But the book fails to carry any of its central …
Review Of South Sudan: A Slow Liberation, Laura Nyantung Beny
Review Of South Sudan: A Slow Liberation, Laura Nyantung Beny
Reviews
This is a remarkable book. It offers a complex and nuanced analysis of South Sudan's prolonged and troubled march to political liberation—first from Anglo‐Egyptian colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then from hegemonic Arab rule in post‐independence Sudan [1956‐2011], and now from South Sudan's internal political and economic contradictions.
Gideon V. Wainwright A Half Century Later, Yale Kamisar
Gideon V. Wainwright A Half Century Later, Yale Kamisar
Reviews
When he was nearing the end of his distinguished career, one of my former law professors observed that a dramatic story of a specific case "has the same advantages that a play or a novel has over a general discussion of ethics or political theory." Ms. Houppert illustrates this point in her very first chapter.
Review Of The Making Of Tax Law: The Development Of The Swedish Tax System, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Review Of The Making Of Tax Law: The Development Of The Swedish Tax System, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Reviews
Imagine that a single person had been responsible for all U.S. tax reforms enacted from 1974 to 2012. That was the position of Sven-Olof Lodin, the former president of the International Fiscal Association. For more than 40 years, professor Lodin was the most influential voice in Swedish tax policy. This was not in a single, official governmental capacity, but rather as a member of more than 20 government commissions and working parties on taxation, which were responsible for all the major changes in Swedish tax law in recent decades, including the "Tax Reform of the Century" in 1991. In this …
Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson
Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson
Reviews
Observing these significant legal-political debates in the Chinese press and academy in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we might think they concern battles started only in the last decade and a half of Reform-era China. Now Professor Xu Xiaoqun reminds us that these struggles have a much longer pedigree, stretching back to the end of the nineteenth century and China's first fraught encounter with "the West" and one idea of "modernity."
Review Of Napoleon And The British, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Napoleon And The British, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Was he fascinating or repulsive? The bold courier of republican liberty under law or the scabrous carrier of lethal Jacobin corruption? Heaven-sent deliverer or providential scourge? Even his name was up for grabs: was it Bonaparte or Buonaparte? One need only dip into contemporary sources to realize that the British were obsessed with Napoleon. Stuart Semmel has done a first-rate job combing through those sources and using them to illuminate political culture. (Semmel does not offer the primary quotations I will use here. I offer them for fun, or to pile on with glee, and not at all to reproach …
Forum, Donald J. Herzog
Forum, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Psst: here’s my secret wry suspicion. Political theorists are allergic to facts. They feel entitled to firm beliefs—about state-building, modernization, the rise of the bourgeoisie, you name it—because they’ve read some fancy theory books. So a lot of theory reads like a conceptual shell game, with various intoxicating abstractions shuffled about. I’m enough of a vulgar pragmatist to think that theory isn’t what you get when you leave out the facts. So I found Wahrman’s Making of the Modern Self sheer joy, from start to finish. The bottom line first: this is a mustread across the humanities and humanistic social …
Tax Stories And Tax Histories: Is There A Role For History In Shaping Tax Law?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Tax Stories And Tax Histories: Is There A Role For History In Shaping Tax Law?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Reviews
The teaching of law is usually rather ahistorical. Teachers commonly focus on current doctrine and policy debates, discarding on the "garbage pile of history" any law that has been repealed or superseded. And yet, much of law teaching is still based on reading cases. And cases are by definition historical artifacts - they arise from a specific time and place, and reflect a frequently long-gone historical context. Thus, it is hard to imagine a modern law course completely devoid of history, even if the history gets short shrift. A constitutional law course, for example, will likely include some discussion of …
Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
The explosion of primary texts from seven- teenth-century England continues to trigger an explosion of scholarly treatments today. For good reason, too: Lots of the primary texts are amazing, and not just those tired old warhors- es, Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise. As fun and challenging as the primary texts are, you are forgiven a touch of skepticism if you wonder just what the latest author has to add to our understanding. You might redouble your skepticism if you just glance at Mark Stephen Jendrysik's table of contents, offering chapters on Winstanley, Milton, Cromwell, Filmer, and Hobbes, and zeroing …
The Canon Has A History, Richard A. Primus
The Canon Has A History, Richard A. Primus
Reviews
Legal Canons, edited by J. M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson, is a collection of fourteen essays on subjects related to canonicity in law and legal education. Balkin and Levinson have two principal aims. One is to expand the category of things that can be canonical: not just texts, they say, but also arguments, problems, narrative frameworks, and examples invoked in conversation or teaching. In their view, what makes something canonical is its ability to reproduce itself in the minds of successive generations.' If generation after generation of legal academics argues about the countermajoritarian difficulty, then the countermajoritarian difficulty is a …
Why Tax The Rich? Efficiency, Equity, And Progressive Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Why Tax The Rich? Efficiency, Equity, And Progressive Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Reviews
In Greek mythology, Atlas was a giant who carried the world on his shoulders. In Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Atlas represents the “ prime movers”—the talented few who bear the weight of the world’s economy.1 In the novel, the prime movers go on strike against the oppressive burden of excessive regulation and taxation, leaving the world in disarray and demonstrating how indispensable they are to the rest of us (the “second handers” ).
...A Rendezvous With Kreplach: Putting The New Deal Court In Context, Richard D. Friedman
...A Rendezvous With Kreplach: Putting The New Deal Court In Context, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The Supreme Court of the New Deal era continues to captivate lawyers and historians. Constitutional jurisprudence changed rapidly during the period. Moreover, some of the most significant changes seemed--whatever the reality--to result from pressure imposed in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Court. The structure of constitutional law that emerged within a few years of Roosevelt's death remains intact in significant respects today.
Cardozo The [Small R] Realist, Richard D. Friedman
Cardozo The [Small R] Realist, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
In Part I of this Review, I will discuss aspects of Cardozo's life and character. In Part II, I will discuss Cardozo's jurisprudential theory as revealed in his lectures and essays. In Part IlI, I will suggest how we gain a better perspective on his judicial opinions by understanding not only that theory but also the man and his life.
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The New Deal era is one of the great turning points of American constitutional history. The receptivity of the Supreme Court to regulation by state and federal governments increased dra- matically during that period. The constitutionalism that prevailed before Charles Evans Hughes became Chief Justice in 1930 was similar in most respects to that of the beginning of the twen- tieth century. The constitutionalism that prevailed by the time Hughes’ successor Harlan Fiske Stone died in 1946 is far more related to that of the end of the century. How this transformation occurred is a crucial and enduring issue in …
Review Of The Repeal Of Reticence: A History Of America's Cultural And Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, And Modern Art, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of The Repeal Of Reticence: A History Of America's Cultural And Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, And Modern Art, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Our public sphere, which should have displayed and preserved the grandeur and beauty of our civic ideals and moral excellences, is instead inane and vacuous when it is not utterly mean, ugly, or indecent (p. 4). Troubled by the tawdry nonsense circulating in the public sphere-and she wrote before learned enquiries into whether the President's genitals had any distinguishing characteristics- Rochelle Gurstein turns to history to understand how we arrived at such a sorry destination. Hers is a tale of decline: The Victorians "we moderns" so routinelyd eridef or theirP uritanicalr epressivenessu nderstoodf ull well that certain things have to …
Beyond The Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, Margo Schlanger
Beyond The Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, Margo Schlanger
Reviews
In 1955, in its second decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court suggested that federal courts might be called upon to engage in long-term oversight of once-segregated schools. Through the 1960s, southern resistance pushed federal district and appellate judges to turn that possibility into a reality. The impact of this saga on litigation practice extended beyond school desegregation, and even beyond the struggle for African-American equality; through implementation of Brown, the nation’s litigants, lawyers, and judges grew accustomed both to issuance of permanent injunctions against state and local public institutions, and to extended court oversight of compliance. …
Review Of Authority: Construction And Corrosion, William I. Miller
Review Of Authority: Construction And Corrosion, William I. Miller
Reviews
This is in many ways an engaging book, written in a refreshingly direct and unobfuscatory style. Its chief problem is living up to the rather grand expectations raised by the title, expectations that the author half-way through the enterprise admits he did not mean to evoke (p. 74). What the reader will find is less a systematic essay or sustained treatment of authority than several penetrating readings of intense conflicts dealing with a substantially narrower issue: controlling who gets to speak in public settings that are authority conferring - in councils, senates and law courts.
Review Of Political Discourse In Early Modern Britain, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Political Discourse In Early Modern Britain, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
This is a festschrift for the indefatigable J. G. A. Pocock (indefatigable indeed: the volume closes with a daunting nine-page bibliography of Pococks work to date, a veritable flood of erudition that shows no signs of ebbing). The essays are better than what usually end up stuck in such volumes: better as a simple matter of scholarly quality, but better too as exemplary models of what is distinctive in Pocock's approach. I suppose that at this price, no one will consider asking impoverished graduate students to purchase the volume. But there are always reserve desks, not to mention xerox machines …
Review Of Kingship, Law And Society: Criminal Justice In The Reign Of Henry V, Thomas A. Green
Review Of Kingship, Law And Society: Criminal Justice In The Reign Of Henry V, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
Edward Powell's splendid study of Henry V's strategy for keeping peace among magnate and gentry factions represents an important contribution to the history of criminal justice. After providing a panoramic view of the machinery of criminal justice, Powell analyzes the extent to which that machinery was effective as between the Crown, at the center, and the upper echelons of society in the provinces. His conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the regular processes of common-law criminal administration could not easily be deployed at those levels. But Powell does not let the matter drop there. Kingship, Law, and Society presents a lucid …
I Hear A Rhapsody: A Reading Of The Republic Of Choice, Donald J. Herzog
I Hear A Rhapsody: A Reading Of The Republic Of Choice, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Readers coming to another volume by Lawrence Friedman might well expect a tightly crafted legal history. But this book is quite different. It offers a sweeping account of the transformation of modern law, a synoptic overview of what is finally distinctive about our legal culture, even a broadbrushed portrait of Western individualism. It does so breathlessly, in prose style and velocity. It's sometimes an engaging read, sometimes a distressing one, but-and here's what really matters-never a persuasive one. Or, worse yet, when it is persuasive it's because of its poetic and ideological features, not any kind of rigorous analysis.
Abstract Democracy: A Review Of Ackerman's We The People, Terrance Sandalow
Abstract Democracy: A Review Of Ackerman's We The People, Terrance Sandalow
Reviews
We the People: Foundations is an ambitious book, the first of three volumes in which Professor Ackerman proposes to recast conventional understanding of and contemporary debate about American constitutional law. Unfortunately, the book's rhetoricinflated, self-important, and self-congratulatory-impedes the effort to come to terms with its argument. How, for example, does one respond to a book that opens by asking whether the reader will have "the strength" to accept its thesis? Or that announces the author's intention of "engaging" two of the most influential works of intellectual history of the past several decades-and then discusses one in two and one-half pages …
Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Political theorists are almost always fond of giving each other home- work assignments but not generally fond of completing them. The opening salvo in a promised three-volume campaign to redefine the tasks of political theory, Transforming Political Discourse might seem to invite more weary shrugs. Surely, we have too many manifestos already. Well, yes -but this one, happily, is modest, sensible, and mercifully brief. Better yet, its brevity is positively austere in sketching the metadescription of what the promised land looks like. The argument actually hangs on a series of show-and-tell exercises, which are supposed to be applications of the …
Review Of Cardozo: A Study In Reputation, By R. Posner, Richard D. Friedman
Review Of Cardozo: A Study In Reputation, By R. Posner, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
Judge Richard Posner has written a genial book about one of our greatest judicial icons, Benjamin N. Cardozo.1 He seeks not only to assess the merits of Cardozo's writings, both on and off the bench, but also to measure, and determine the causes of, Cardozo's reputation. The book is an outgrowth of a lecture series,2 and it reveals its origins in at least two ways. First, the book attempts to reach a mixed audience, composed of both lawyers and laypeople, and in this aspect it is very successful. Nonlawyers, I believe, will have little difficulty following Judge Posner's essential arguments, …
The Supreme Court In Politics., Terrance Sandalow
The Supreme Court In Politics., Terrance Sandalow
Reviews
Despite all that has been written about the bitter struggle initiated by President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to a seat on the Supreme Court, its most remarkable feature, that it was waged over a judicial appointment, has drawn relatively little comment. Two hundred years after the Philadelphia Convention, Hamilton's "least dangerous" branch - least dangerous because it would have "no influence over either the sword or the purse, no direction either of the strength or the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever"'-had come to occupy so important a place in the nation's political life …
Review Of Culture And History In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Review Of Culture And History In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Reviews
It is a common dysfunction of scholars, particularly medieval historians, to fear grand syntheses and all-encompassing explanations. This is less frequently a disease among anthroplogists, and in fact in anthropologists of a structural bent there is no reticence whatsoever, but positive delight in the big, the general, the quasi- and the just plain theoretical. And in the best French tradition they often construct their models per ecartant les faits. Kirsten Hastrup is a structuralist more influenced by Levi-Strauss than Evans-Pritchard; she is also a trained anthropologist. This is both good and bad news. The Icelandic materials are as well suited …
Review Of Disputes And Settlements: Law And Human Relations In The West, By J. Bossy, Editor., William I. Miller
Review Of Disputes And Settlements: Law And Human Relations In The West, By J. Bossy, Editor., William I. Miller
Reviews
Evans-Pritchard probably knew he was exaggerating, but not being able to resist the chance to repay a gift in kind, he reversed Maitland's dictum and claimed that history must choose between being social anthropology or being nothing. If we substitute "tedious" for "nothing" we would have a truer statement. Legal history, if not quite heeding Evans-Pritchard, has in the past decade begun to learn some lessons from legal anthropology and the sociology of law. Studies of bureaucratic development, forms of action, formulae and writs, while still flourishing in the hands of several brilliant practitioners, are tending to give way slowly, …
Review Of The Landrum-Griffin Act: Twenty Years Of Federal Protection Of Union Members' Rights, By J. R. Bellace And A. D. Berkowitz, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Review Of The Landrum-Griffin Act: Twenty Years Of Federal Protection Of Union Members' Rights, By J. R. Bellace And A. D. Berkowitz, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Reviews
In the innocent closing years of the 1950s, the American public fastened on union democracy as the most burning issue of the day. No other subject produced as much mail for Congress. The 229-201 count by which the Landrum-Griffin bill was substituted for the House Labor Committee's bill on labor-management reporting and disclosure constituted the largest total vote in the history of the House of Representatives. Significantly, however, that vote had little if any bearing on union members' rights. What distinguished Landrum-Griffin from the Committee's bill was its stiff new curbs on picketing and boycotts. As Senator John Kennedy's advisor, …
Review Of Wiltshire Gaol Delivery And Trailbaston Trials, 1275-1306, Thomas A. Green
Review Of Wiltshire Gaol Delivery And Trailbaston Trials, 1275-1306, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
Ralph B. Pugh's handsome edition of Wiltshire gaol delivery and trailbaston trial rolls for the reign of Edward I provides a valuable resource for scholars of medieval crime and criminal law. The period covered bridges the era of the infrequent general eyres and that of the frequent circuits to try those being held on criminal charges. This transition period saw the development of various institutions and procedures designed to deal with a decline in social stability and an increase in criminal activity. To date, most scholarship has focused either on the workings of the mid-thirteenth- century eyre or on the …
Review Of Crime In England, 1550-1800, Thomas A. Green
Review Of Crime In England, 1550-1800, Thomas A. Green
Reviews
Crime in England, 1550-1800, is the second collection of essays on the social history of crime and the criminal law in early modern England to appear in recent years. Together with the essays in Albion's Fatal Tree (1975),' these offerings advance our knowledge of the subject considerably. To be sure, as G. R. Elton cautions, there are methodological problems in a field so new, and Elton's "Introduction" will serve as an excellent starting point for readers concerned with such matters. We must nevertheless recognize the accomplishments of the new school of socio-legal historians. The essays in this volume deal with …