Legal History Commons^™

The Commonwealth Of Puerto Rico: Trying To Gain Dignity And Maintain Culture, Arnold Leibowitz

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Original Meaning Of "God": Using The Language Of The Framing Generation To Create A Coherent Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Michael I. Meyerson

Marquette Law Review

The Supreme Court’s attempt to create a standard for evaluating whether the Establishment Clause is violated by religious governmental speech, such as the public display of the Ten Commandments or the Pledge of Allegiance, is a total failure. The Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been termed “convoluted,” “a muddled mess,” and “a polite lie.” Unwilling to either allow all governmental religious speech or ban it entirely, the Court is in need of a coherent standard for distinguishing the permissible from the unconstitutional. Thus far, no Justice has offered such a standard.

A careful reading of the history of the framing …

Constructed Constraint And The Constitutional Text, Curtis A. Bradley, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, constitutional theorists have attended to the unwritten aspects of American constitutionalism and, relatedly, to the ways in which the constitutional text can be “constructed” upon by various materials. This Article takes a different approach. Instead of considering how various materials can supplement, implement, or interact with the constitutional text, the Article focuses on how the text itself is often partially constructed in American constitutional practice. Although interpreters typically regard clear text as controlling, this Article contends that whether the text is perceived to be clear is often affected by various “modalities” of constitutional interpretation that are normally …

The Original Meaning Of "God": Using The Language Of The Framing Generation To Create A Coherent Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s attempt to create a standard for evaluating whether the Establishment Clause is violated by religious governmental speech, such as the public display of the Ten Commandments or the Pledge of Allegiance, is a total failure. The Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been termed “convoluted,” “a muddled mess,” and “a polite lie.” Unwilling to either allow all governmental religious speech or ban it entirely, the Court is in need of a coherent standard for distinguishing the permissible from the unconstitutional. Thus far, no Justice has offered such a standard.

A careful reading of the history of the framing …

The Rejection Of Horizontal Judicial Review During America's Colonial Period, Robert J. Steinfeld

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

From The Shoals Of Ras Kaboudia To The Shores Of Tripoli: The Tunisia/Libya Continental Shelf Boundary Delimitation, Donna R. Christie

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

In Search Of The Real Roberts Court, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Reddall V. Bryan And The Role Of State Law In Federal Eminent Domain Jurisprudence, Shannon Frede

Legal History Publications

Prior to 1875, the standard federal takings procedure had been for state governments to condemn property on behalf of the federal government. As a result, the majority of interpretative work in the early history of eminent domain jurisprudence was undertaken by state courts. In 1853, the Maryland General Assembly granted the United States Government the power to condemn land in Maryland for an aqueduct across the Potomac to supply water to two District cities. In Reddall v. Bryan, the Maryland Court of Appeals upheld the aqueduct supplying the city of Washington with water as a public use. The Court …

John Merefield's Common Pleas Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

John Merefield of Crewkerne, Somerset, was admitted to the Inner Temple on 14 February 1612, and he was called to the bar on 15 October 1620. He gave readings in 1621 and 1641; on 4 November 1638, he was called to the bench. Merefield was created a serjeant in October 1660, and he died in October 1666.

Originalism As A Theory Of Legal Change, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

Originalism is usually defended as a theory of interpretation. This Article presents a different view. Originalism ought to be defended, if at all, not based on normative goals or abstract philosophy, but as a positive theory of American legal practice, and particularly of our rules for legal change.

One basic assumption of legal systems is that the law, whatever it is, stays the same until it's lawfully changed. Originalism begins this process with an origin, a Founding. Whatever rules we had when the Constitution was adopted, we still have today -- unless something happened that was authorized to change …

Magna Charta: The Charter Of The Forest, And The Prerogatives Of Kings, Allen E. Shoenberger

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought, Justin Deystone, Duncan Kennedy

Publications

This is a co-authored foreword to a symposium in Law & Contemporary Problems titled "Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought." It includes a discussion of the background of the project, a brief summary of the articles included in the issue, and a very short statement from Desautels-Stein and Kennedy on the "loss of faith" indicative of Contemporary Legal Thought.

Reasonableness In And Out Of Negligence Law, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

The word "reasonable" and its cognates figure prominently in innumerable areas of the law – from antitrust and contract law to administrative and constitutional law, from the common law of nuisance to an assortment of rules in statutes and regulations. While some thinkers have equated "reasonableness" with "rationality," others have looked to "justifiability," and others still have decided that "reasonableness" means virtually nothing at all, but serves the important function of allocating decisionmaking authority. The reality is that the term "reasonable" is both vague and ambiguous, and thus plays many different roles in the law. As with terms such as …

Structuralist Legal Histories, Justin Deystone

Publications

This is a contribution to a symposium titled "Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought." The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography.

Fourteen Cases From Herbert Jacob's Queen's Bench Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

Herbert Jacob was admitted to the Inner Temple on 3 June 1692, called to the bar on 28 June 1699, and called to the bench of the Inner Temple on 22 November 1721. He died in 1725.

Harvard Law School MS. 4081 [formerly MS. 2136] is a collection of Queen's Bench reports dating from 1702 to 1706. This manuscript consists of two books, which are attributed to Herbert Jacob, a barrister of the Inner Temple. The cases in volume one and volume two, ff. 1-71v, are the same reports as 2 Lord Raymond 755-1252, 92 E.R. 4-325. Volume two, ff. …

Thomas Bold's Chancery Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

Thomas Bold was born in 1695, the son of William Bold of St. Bride's Parish, London. He entered Westminster School in 1708 and Christ Church, Oxford, on 23 June 1713. Bold received his B.A. in 1718 and an M.A. in 1721. He was admitted as a law student at the Middle Temple on 15 June 1711 and called to the bar on 31 May 1717. He was admitted ad eundem at Lincoln's Inn on 23 November 1717.

The Keyes To Reclaiming The Racial History Of The Roberts Court, Tom I. Romero Ii

Scholarly Works

This Article advocates for a fundamental re-understanding about the way that the history of race is understood by the current Supreme Court. Represented by the racial rights opinions of Justice John Roberts that celebrate racial progress, the Supreme Court has equivocated and rendered obsolete the historical experiences of people of color in the United States. This jurisprudence has in turn reified the notion of color-blindness, consigning racial discrimination to a distant and discredited past that has little bearing to how race and inequality is experienced today.

The racial history of the Roberts Court is centrally informed by the context and …

A Tradition At War With Itself: A Reply To Professor Rana's Review Of America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This essay responds to Professor Aziz Rana's review essay, "The Many American Constitutions," 93 Texas Law Review 1193 (2015).

He contends: (1) my portrayal of American constitutionalism might contain a “hidden” teleological understanding of the development of constitutional law; (2) my notion of "conventional sovereignty" sometimes seems content-free and at other times "interlinked with liberal egalitarianism"; and (3) a focus on failed constitutions "inadvertently tends to compartmentalize the overall tradition."

I answer in the following ways: (1) I reject any sense that constitutional law has moved in an arc of steady progress toward Enlightenment and instead embrace a tradition of …

Time-Mindedness And Jurisprudence, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Analytic jurisprudence often strikes outsiders as a discipline unto itself, unconnected with the problems that other legal scholarship investigates. Gerald Postema, in the article to which this paper responds, traces this “unsociability” to two narrowing defects in the project of analytic jurisprudence: (1) from Austin on, it has concerned itself largely with the analysis of professional concepts, without connecting that analysis with other disciplines that study law, nor with the history of jurisprudence itself, nor with general philosophy; (2) analytic jurisprudence studies only time-­‐slice legal systems, rather than legal systems unfolding in history. He argues that a time-­‐slice legal system …

The Triumph Of Gay Marriage And The Failure Of Constitutional Law, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's much anticipated invalidation of gay marriage bans improved the personal lives of millions of ordinary Americans. It made the country a more decent place. Even Chief Justice Roberts, at the conclusion of his otherwise scathing dissent, acknowledged that the decision was a cause for many Americans to celebrate.

But although the Chief Justice thought that advocates of gay marriage should "by all means celebrate today's decision," he admonished them "not [to] celebrate the Constitution." The Constitution, he said, "had nothing to do with it".

Part I of this article quarrels with the Chief Justice's assertion that the …

The Legacy Of Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013): A Legal Theory And Methodology For Hedgehogs, Hercules, And One Right Answers, Imer Flores

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this paper the author addresses Ronald Dworkin’s work and assesses his legacy to legal, moral and political philosophy. And so, considers among its merits having developed an original legal theory with its distinctive methodology, which not only has transcended the Natural Law and Legal Positivism dichotomy, but also has reintegrated law into a branch of political morality and defended as a corollary the one right answer thesis. Hence, commences by identifying the dworkininan challenge; continues by introducing some basic definitions and distinctions between jurisprudence, legal philosophy (or philosophy of law) and legal theory (or theory of law), on the …

Law In Ancient Egyptian Fiction, Russ Versteeg

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Emergence Of Constitutionalism As An Evolutionary Adaptation, Fábio Portela L. Almeida

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The emergence of modern societies is an evolutionary puzzle. Homo sapiens is the only animal species capable of cooperating in large-scale societies consisting of genetically unrelated individuals. From a biological point of view, this feature leads to enormous questions. Social scientists typically assume that human life is lived in large-scale societies as a result of cultural, social and institutional history. In this perspective, social institutions such as law, economy and religion enhance cooperation to higher levels. Gene-culture coevolutionary theories have studied this issue in an integrated framework that accounts for social and biological theories of cooperation. These theoretical approaches have …

The Federal Rules At 75: Dispute Resolution, Private Enforcement Or Decisions According To Law?, James R. Maxeiner

Georgia State University Law Review

This essay is a critical response to the 2013 commemorations of the75th anniversary of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were introduced in 1938 to provide procedure to decide cases on their merits. The Rules were designed to replace decisions under the “sporting theory of justice”with decisions according to law.

By 1976, at midlife, it was clear that they were not achieving their goal. America’s proceduralists split into two sides about what to do. One side promotes rules that control and conclude litigation: e.g.,plausibility pleading, case management, limited discovery, cost indemnity for discovery, and summary …

Historical Antecedents Of Challenges Facing The Georgia Appellate Courts, Michael B. Terry

Georgia State University Law Review

The Georgia appellate courts face challenges common to many courts in these days of reduced governmental resources. At the same time, the Georgia appellate courts face unusual challenges that can be traced to their historical antecedents and one unique constitutional provision: the “Two-Term Rule.” Just as “[t]he law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries,” the current rules and practices of both the Supreme Court of Georgia and the Court of Appeals of Georgia embody the story of the development of those courts since their founding.

Several aspects of the history of the courts directly impact the …

The Jurisprudence Of The Hughes Court: The Recent Literature, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

The balance of this Article is devoted, after a fashion, to an exploration of the extent to which the recent literature on the Hughes Court seeks to incorporate the internal point of view. In Part I, I seek to identify the historiographical premises undergirding each author’s treatment of the subject. In Part II, I explore how those historiographical premises are reflected in each author’s treatment of the substantive development of constitutional doctrine during the period. In Part III, I examine the ways in which those historiographical premises inform each author’s analysis of the causal forces driving that doctrinal development. Part …

The Infringement Continuum, Bernard Chao

Cardozo Law Review

For many years, patent law has struggled with the issue of permissible claim scope. A patent's specification and its claims often suffer from a surprising disconnect. The specification generally describes an invention in terms of one or more specific implementations, suggesting a relatively narrow invention. But claims are drafted far more broadly. They frequently encompass unforeseen variations and even cover after-arising technology.

Although there are numerous existing doctrines that try to prevent claims from straying too far from their specification, these doctrines offer binary outcomes ill suited for patent law. Under these doctrines, as a claim encompasses subject matter further …

Analogical Legal Reasoning: Theory And Evidence, Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The paper offers a formal model of analogical legal reasoning and takes the model to data. Under the model, the outcome of a new case is a weighted average of the outcomes of prior cases. The weights capture precedential influence and depend on fact similarity (distance in fact space) and precedential authority (position in the judicial hierarchy). The empirical analysis suggests that the model is a plausible model for the time series of U.S. maritime salvage cases. Moreover, the results evince that prior cases decided by inferior courts have less influence than prior cases decided by superior courts.

The Age Of Constitutions In The Americas, M C. Mirow

Faculty Publications

The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been aptly called the “Age of Codifications.” The same period was also the Age of Constitutions. Although a great deal is known about the migration of prenational and transnational legal sources and ideas that led to national codes of civil and criminal law in Europe and the Americas, much less is known about similar processes on the constitutional level. Constitutional historians have been more parochial than their private law counterparts, most likely because of the relationship between constitutions and nations. In the light of independence, nations immediately needed constitutions to solidify gains and …

The Restatement (Second) Of Contracts Reasonably Certain Terms Requirement: A Model Of Neoclassical Contract Law And A Model Of Confusion And Inconsistency, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.