Legal History Commons^™

"Compromise With Lawlessness": The Relationship Between Lynching And The Death Penalty In Arkansas, 1895-1925, Michael Lynch

The Ozark Historical Review

“Compromise with Lawlessness”: The Relationship between Lynching and the Death Penalty in Arkansas, 1895–1925 examines the complex relationship between extralegal lynching and state-sanctioned capital punishment in Arkansas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While existing scholarship often characterizes the decline of lynching and expansion of capital punishment as a straightforward substitution, this article argues that the Arkansas experience was more dynamic, with lynching and legal execution functioning as competing and sometimes complementary mechanisms for satisfying demands for racialized justice and social control. Through an examination of the 1898 lynching of Bud Hayden in Texarkana and the 1901 execution …

Shanghai In The 1930s, The German Civil Code And The Tragic Story Of A Brilliant Legal Mind, Lutz-Christian Wolff

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The History Of The Constitution Is Our Future., Maggie Blackhawk

Michigan Law Review

The Constitution of the United States establishes a government; it also stands as the fundamental law of a people. It shapes daily life, distributes power, and sets a direction for the future. And yet when we ask about the reach and meaning of the Constitution, we are increasingly told to look backward. The answers to our future are said to lie in the past.

The Hypocrisy Of The Wizards—A Proposal To Correct Incentives In Higher Education Loan Financing, Caden Benedict

School of Public Policy Capstones

This paper explores the origins of the student loan debt crisis and proposes tying university incentives to graduates' repayment plans and disclosing median earnings for degrees before students apply. Specifically, while there are numerous factors explaining why the price of education has increased dramatically since the 1970s, this paper proposes solutions that will specifically target university moral hazards by requiring universities fund: (1) the current subsidies to federal student loan repayments under income-driven plans as the House of Representatives intended before the Senate removed "risk-sharing," and (2) bankruptcy law discharge amounts. Moreover, requiring universities to disclose the median earnings of …

"Under The Fig-Tree": Anti-Federalist Conceptions Of American National Identity, Clara Kernodle

Tenor of Our Times

The constitutional convention of 1787 gave America some of her most energetic and exciting few months in American history. The Federalists proposed the Constitution as a replacement for existing government, opposed by Anti-Federalists on principled grounds. Thus ensued a mountain of political writing and propaganda that historians still study today. The Anti-Federalists lost the debate, and then were lost to history. Few Americans have even heard of the Anti-Federalists and even fewer scholars study their writings. But reading and evaluating Anti-Federalist writing is an important part of studying the Founding era and Constitutional debates. The Anti-Federalists, as much as their …

A Comparative Legal Analysis Of The English And Scottish Reformations, Erin Hanson

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the legal and institutional mechanism that contributed to the decline in Catholicism in early modern England and Scotland during the Reformation period. By analyzing statutory developments, ecclesiastical court structures, and enforcement practices, it compares how each kingdom implemented religious reform and regulated religious conformity. Rather than focusing solely on theological differences, this study emphasizes the role of legal structure and legal institutions in shaping religious governance.

Chapter I outlines the historical and legal background of the English and Scottish Reformations. Chapter II examines prior literature, and Chapter III states the methodology used in this study. Chapter IV …

Austrian Again Book Talk, Cardozo Law Institute In Holocaust And Human Rights (Clihhr), Anne Hand, Evelyn Konrad

2025–2026 Flyers

The Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights hosted a special book talk featuring author Anne Hand, discussing her memoir Austrian Again. In her book, Hand explores her journey to uncover her family’s hidden history during the Holocaust while pursuing Austrian citizenship, tracing her Austrian and Czechoslovakian roots through personal stories and historical records.

The program also featured Evelyn Konrad, Cardozo alumna and Holocaust survivor, who joined the conversation and shared her personal reflections. Moderated by Konrad, the event examined themes of identity, migration, heritage, and historical memory.

From Dred Scott To Barbara: Birthright Citizenship, Racial Exclusion, And The Enduring Promise Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Jenna A. Milbrodt

CMC Senior Theses

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause has guaranteed birthright citizenship to all children born in the United States for hundreds of years. Yet, President Trump’s January 20, 2025, executive order threatens to strip that right from children born to parents unlawfully in the country and temporary visitors. This order, if permitted to stand, would change the definition of US citizenship and render countless children stateless persons without citizenship rights. This paper examines whether birthright citizenship in the US, properly understood, extends to children of unlawful immigrants and temporary visitors. To answer this question, three time periods of change in citizenship rights …

Beyond Judicial Intent: The Agency Of The Defense Counsel In Ozawa’S And Thind’S Supreme Court Cases, Bret K. Luchs

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

This thesis seeks to examine how specific legal strategies by the defense counsel in Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922), and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), compelled the Supreme Court of the United States into a reactive and contradictory position. A re-examination of Ozawa and Thind delves deeper into the legal briefs and arguments made by Takao Ozawa and Bhagat Singh Thind, alongside their legal teams. These briefs, opinions of the court, past lower court cases, and personal statements by Ozawa and Thind demonstrate how they did not surrender to the confines of …

The 1935 Nazi Nuremberg Laws In Historical And Legal Context, Menachem Z. Rosensaft

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

The core ideology of Hitler Germany — of the Third Reich — was the hardcore, unremittent antisemitism that in short order permeated German society and the German legal system before creating the necessary conditions for the genocide of all Jews under Nazi control.

Two preliminary observations. First, should we view the 1935 Nuremberg laws and other German anti-Jewish laws and measures of the 1930s as the first stages of a process designed culminate in the annihilation of Jews, or were they drafted and enacted by individuals who, at that point in time, were not envisioning a “Final Solution of the …

Law As A Tool Of Empire: A Transhistorical Comparison Of Mandate Palestine And Ancient Rome, Will L. Hisle

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

Through a comparative analysis of Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine by Assaf Likhovski, and A Legal History of Rome by George Mousourakis, this essay demonstrates that law was crucial to the expansion of empire. When read in tandem, these monographs provide a transhistorical framework for viewing law outside of itself, as a mechanism of colonial and imperial domination.

Access Denied: The Poor's One-Hundred Year Long Fight For Judicial Equality, Austin Jones

The Ozark Historical Review

This work discusses Reginald Heber Smith's Justice and the Poor and the framework that is described within to provide equal access to the judicial system. The writer posits that this goal has yet to be reached.

Tradition, Critque, And The Modern Moral Lingua Franca: A Lutheran Articulation Of Human Rights Language, Christian B. Dollar

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

The language of subjective, individual rights has become the primary way of speaking about the rights and wrongs of human life together. Since the end of World War II, one subset of this language—that of human rights—has achieved a global influence. The various Christian traditions of the west have, in large part, adopted this language of human rights to articulate and supplement their assorted social teachings. Yet, the adoption of human rights language has been contested by a dedicated cadre of Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians concerned about the potentially anti-Christian implications inherent in the grammar of rights. Christian rights …

Staff Development Day 2025: Topics On Jewish Law & Culture, Ellen Drucker-Albert

Library Staff Presentations

This presentation was delivered by Ellen Drucker-Albert, Head of Reference & Faculty Services, during Staff Development Day 2025 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. It explores key aspects of Jewish law and culture, including the sources and development of Halacha, intersections with U.S. civil law, Jewish holidays and food customs, denominations of Judaism, and symbols like the mezuzah.

The Rise And Fall Of The Contagious Diseases Acts: An Examination Of The Legislative Influences, Medical Discourse And Repeal Arguments, Elizabeth Henderson

All Theses

The Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) were the most important legislative intervention concerning sexuality in the nineteenth century. The CDA was a public health measure passed to address the spread of venereal disease amongst the British Army and Navy, and targeted Britain's most vulnerable women – sex workers – because they were blamed for being the presumed cause and primary mode of spreading venereal disease. This resulted in the legalization of what critics of the CDA would call surgical assault, or instrumental rape, of working-class women suspected of being sex workers. Historians who study sexuality and sex work in Britain have …

New Zealand Security Agencies’ Secrecy, Accountability, And Transparency In The Modern Era, Ben Amata

Secrecy and Society

New Zealand’s security agencies need to balance conflicting missions of secrecy, accountability, and transparency in conducting national security government operations. Citizens expect protection without violating their liberties and for security agencies to act effectively and legally. From public revelations about the agencies and government reform efforts, the agencies evolved from almost total secrecy to greater accountability and transparency since World War II. This study employs a historical methodology, which examines primary source documents to reveal the history of secret behavior and to reform the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau.

Inge Viermetz, Woman Acquitted At Nuremberg, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

Conventional narratives tend to represent the post-World War II international criminal proceedings as a men’s project, thus obscuring the many women who participated, as lawyers, journalists, analysts, interpreters, witnesses, and defendants. Indeed, two women stood trial before Nuremberg Military Tribunals. This article examines the case of the only woman found not-guilty: Inge Viermetz, who had been an administrator at Lebensborn, the Nazi SS adoption and placement agency. The article outlines the prosecution’s child-taking case against Viermetz, as well as her successful gendered self-portrayal as a conventionally feminine caregiver. With references to Professor Megan A. Fairlie, at whose memorial symposium it …

Life, Liberty And Property: Property As A Weapon Utilized Against Native Peoples And As A Tool To Strengthen Native Sovereignty In The Upper Midwest, Jacob R A Ludwig

HS 390 Primary Research Papers

While many Americans today recognize the continuing paternalism of the federal government towards Tribal governments, much still remains unknown to the public regarding the specific laws, policies and treaties that have provided the continuing legal authority for this paternalism. Throughout American history, the relationship between the federal government and Native American tribes can be seen through the use of violence both in law, and outside of it. Treaties, the basis for removal, have been used by both the federal government and subsequently tribal governments to assert their authority over land. In the Upper Midwest, various Anishinaabe tribes signed several treaties …

The Enlightenment In Early America, Annette Gordon-Reed

William & Mary Law Review

The founding of the United States of America is often said to have been the product of Enlightenment ideals that emphasized reason, individual liberty, and notions of progress. During this same era, however, racially based slavery, which confounded reason, denied individual liberty to millions, and challenged ideas about progress, existed in all of the colonies of North America.

The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, embodied this seeming contradiction at the heart of the American founding. The principal author of the American Declaration of Independence enslaved hundreds of people over the course of his long life.

This Article …

The Forgotten Fundamental Right To Free Movement, Noah Smith-Drelich

Northwestern University Law Review

There is a powerful fundamental right hiding in plain sight: the fundamental right to free movement. This right goes beyond the consistently acknowledged—though infrequently applied—fundamental right to interstate travel. The true scope of the Constitution’s protection of movement through substantive due process safeguards local, interstate, and international travel. Though overlooked today, the fundamental right to free movement has deep roots in history and tradition, and in the decisions of numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

This Article is the first to examine freedom of movement using the history and tradition test for unenumerated fundamental rights. This Article …

True Law As Genre: Narrative Nonfiction And The Law, Jorge L. Contreras

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

The Genome Defense, which offers a book-length narrative nonfiction account of the civil litigation that led to the elimination of patents on human genes in the United States, is a member of a distinct literary subgenre that I term True Law. Like the older and better-known True Crime genre, True Law narratives blend the conventions of journalism and novelistic writing to describe complex legal disputes in a manner that is engaging and accessible to the general public. True Law accounts, which have increased in number and popularity since the publication of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action in 1995, serve …

Fiscal Citizenship And Taxpayer Privacy, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

Should individual tax data be public or confidential? Within the United States, secrecy has been the rule since the Tax Reform Act of 1976. But at three critical junctures—the Civil War, the 1920s, and the 1930s—Congress made individual tax records open for public inspection, and newspapers published the incomes of the billionaires of the time. Today, Finland, Norway, and Sweden all mandate significant transparency for individual tax information.

This Essay intervenes in the tax-confidentiality debate by building a new analytical framework of fiscal citizenship. Until now, scholars have focused on compliance—whether disclosure incentivizes honest reporting of income, and if it …

In Search Of A State, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a legal history of one of America’s earliest campaigns of state legislative resistance: the effort in Massachusetts to protest the national government’s perceived dismantling of an old Atlantic commercial order from 1803 to 1815. To date, scholars have either condemned this protest as a dangerous harbinger of the Civil War or vindicated it as an inevitable and salutary extension of the Founding. This article steers a different course. By focusing on the evolving language of protest and the complex hybrid of ideas and material realities from which this language emerged, this article illuminates how Federalist leaders who …

Recovering Constitutional Identity In Colonial South India: Sedition, Sovereignty, And Small-C Constitutionalism In Pudukkottai, Bharath Gururagavendran

National Law School Journal

Constitutional identity is easiest to identify when it has already been credentialed: by a constitutional text, constituent authorisation, or judicial recognition. What remains visible when those markers are absent? Through a historically grounded study of the ‘Little Kingdom’ of Pudukkottai, a princely state in colonial South India, this article examines whether constitutional identity can be recovered from the small-c life of a polity whose opportunities for formal constitution-making were structurally foreclosed. Pudukkottai had no big-C moment. Its constitutional life, if it had one, must be reconstructed from less authoritative materials. The article argues that the absence of a constitutional text …

Federal Election Commission And Indiana Secretary Of State Campaign Finance Information Resoures, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

This presentation covers campaign finance information resources produced by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and Indiana Secretary of State. It describes how these agencies began, details how they oversee and regulate U.S. federal and Indiana state elections, and documents contributions made by individuals, organizations, political parties, and political action committees to individual candidates and organizations. Reporting documentation on these election races is also included.

Settler Colonialism And Ecosystem Change: How Ideology Has Shaped Minnesota’S Environments, Sarah E. Hobby

History Honors Projects

The formation of a uniquely American land ethic—defined by European political history and Christian biblical doctrine and forged through systems of dispossession—is central to the creation of environments within the United States today. Using Minnesota as a microcosm to understand how settler colonial interactions played out all across the United States, this paper analyzes connections between violent dispossession of Indigenous people and the degradation of environments. By understanding how Ojibwe and Dakota people think about and have shaped Minnesotan lands throughout their history and comparing Indigenous land-ethics to the Euro-American-settler land ethic, this paper evaluates the role that ideology and …

Salafi Reformist Fatwas And The Challenge To Traditionalism In Egypt And Arabia, 1895 – 1930, Samuel Scurry

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Studies of the Islamic intellectual movement commonly known as Salafism have long focused either on the modernist reformers in Egypt and Syria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or on the far more austere and sometimes militant iterations of Salafism from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, often associated with Wahhabism. A handful of scholars have examined the links between the two and the transition from the earlier to the later Salafis, however many works which impacted the evolution of Salafism at the dawn of the twentieth century have been neglected, especially those which do not align …

Legislating Morality In The Gilded Age And Progressive Era: Moral Panic And The “White Slave” Case That Changed America, Nancy C. Unger

History

This article is based on the presidential address presented to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in 2023. Its focus is Maury Diggs and Drew Caminetti, two white men from Sacramento, California, charged with violating the Mann Act (known as the White Slave Trafficking Act) in 1913. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era obsession with white slavery, a phenomenon that has particular resonance in today’s climate, reveals the power of moral panics. Examining the steps, and missteps, that various legal, social, and political …

Searching Govinfo.Gov/, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

This U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) database provides access to information legal, legislative, and regulatory information produced on multiple subjects by the U.S. Government. Content includes congressional bills, congressional committee hearings and prints (studies), reports on legislation, the text of laws, regulations, and executive orders and multiple U.S. Government information resources covering subjects from accounting to zoology.

Grágás And The Legal Culture Of Commonwealth Iceland, William Ian Miller

Book Chapters

The subject of this chapter is Grágás, the compilation of the laws of Iceland in the Commonwealth period. The chapter begins by outlining the court structure of Iceland and the fundamentals of legal procedure, briefly discussing the importance of law to the conversion narrative in Íslendingabók and its account of the first decision to put Iceland’s laws into writing. It describes the distinctive concepts and customs which underlie the legal system of medieval Iceland, looking at the role of the búi (neighbour) in legal procedure, and explaining the key concepts of helgi (the right of inviolability), grið (domicile, or household …