Legal History Commons^™

From Apology To Utopia's Point Of Attack, Justin Deystone

Publications

This contribution to the Symposium celebrating the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia explores the relevance of the book for contemporary theorists of the international world. In doing so, the article puts Koskenniemi's classic in a contest with John Yoo's recent book, Point of Attack. The purpose in doing so is three-fold. First, it is to illustrate the contemporary use of Koskenniemi's structuralist method. Second, it is to show how the use of the method, with its attendant reliance on modes of legal thought, might give pause to international thinkers seeking to reinvigorate particular structures of …

How Presidents Interpret The Constitution, Harold H. Bruff

Publications

No abstract provided.

The President's Faithful Execution Duty, Harold H. Bruff

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No abstract provided.

Criminal Labor Law, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article examines a recent rise in civil suits brought against unions under criminal statutes. By looking at the long history of criminal regulation of labor, the Article argues that these suits represent an attack on the theoretical underpinnings of post-New Deal U.S. labor law and an attempt to revive a nineteenth century conception of unions as extortionate criminal conspiracies. The Article further argues that this criminal turn is reflective of a broader contemporary preference for finding criminal solutions to social and economic problems. In a moment of political gridlock, parties seeking regulation increasingly do so via criminal statute. In …

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.

Did Multicultural America Result From A Mistake? The 1965 Immigration Act And Evidence From Roll Call Votes, Gabriel J. Chin, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Between July 1964 and October 1965, Congress enacted the three most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. As we approach the 50th anniversary of these laws, it is clear that all three have fundamentally remade the United States; education, employment, housing, politics, and the population itself have irreversibly changed.

Arguably the least celebrated yet most consequential of these laws was the 1965 Immigration Act, which set the United States on the path to become a "majority minority" nation. In …

The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence And The Failure Of Intervention, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Scholars and battered women's advocates now recognize that many facets of the legal response to intimate-partner abuse stereotype victims and harm abuse survivors who do not fit commonly accepted paradigms. However, it is less often acknowledged that the feminist analysis of domestic violence also tends to stereotype offenders and that state action, including court-mandated batterer intervention, is premised on these offender stereotypes. The feminist approach can be faulted for minimizing or denying the role of substance abuse, mental illness, childhood trauma, race, culture, and poverty in intimate-partner abuse. Moreover, those arrested for domestic violence crimes now include heterosexual women, lesbians, …

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

They Had Nothing, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Revoking Rights, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

In important areas of law, such as the vested rights doctrine, and in several important cases--including those involving the continued validity of same-sex marriages and the Affordable Care Act--courts have scrutinized the revocation of rights once granted more closely than the failure to provide the rights in the first place. This project claims that in so doing, courts seek to preserve important constitutional interests. On the one hand, based on our understanding of rights possession, rights revocation implicates autonomy interests of the rights holder to a greater degree than a failure to afford rights at the outset. On the other …

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.

My Coworker, My Enemy: Solidarity, Workplace Control, And The Class Politics Of Title Vii, Ahmed A. White

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No abstract provided.

"Greatest Good Of The Greatest Number In The Long Run": Tr, Pinchot, And The Origins Of Sustainability In America, Charles Wilkinson

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No abstract provided.

Cu Law Library Launches New Resource For Historical Colorado Statutory Research, Robert M. Linz

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No abstract provided.

Governing By Guidance: Civil Rights Agencies And The Emergence Of Language Rights, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this Article asks how federal civil rights laws evolved to incorporate the needs of non-English speakers following landmark immigration reform (the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act) that led to unprecedented migration from Asia and Latin America. Based on a comparative study of the emergence of language rights in schools and workplaces from 1965 to 1980, the Article demonstrates that regulatory agencies used nonbinding guidances to interpret the undefined statutory term "national origin discrimination" during their implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their efforts facilitated the creation of language rights, …

Workers Disarmed: The Campaign Against Mass Picketing And The Dilemma Of Liberal Labor Rights, Ahmed A. White

Publications

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, mass picketing, characterized by large numbers of workers congregating in common protest at or near their employers' establishments, emerged as a crucial weapon in a historic campaign by American workers to realize basic labor rights and build an enduring labor movement in the face of strident resistance from a powerful business community. So potent a weapon did mass picketing prove that these business interests, aided by allies at all levels of government, moved quickly to ban the tactic. From the real-world complexities of labor conflict, this coalition forged a simplistic, analytically dubious, but …

Law, Violence, And The Neurotic Structure Of American Indian Law, Sarah Krakoff

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No abstract provided.

Language Rights As A Legacy Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

The fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 offers an important opportunity to reflect on an earlier moment when civil rights evolved to accommodate new waves of immigration. This essay seeks to explain how civil rights laws evolved to include rights for immigrants and non-English speakers. More specifically, it seeks to explain how policy entrepreneurs in agencies read an affirmative right to language access.

Grazing In Wilderness Areas, Mark Squillace

Publications

Domestic livestock grazing is naturally in tension with wilderness. Wilderness areas are not truly "untrammeled by man" when they host managed livestock grazing. Yet the compromise that allowed livestock grazing in wilderness areas was surely one of the greatest in the history of the conservation movement. Without it, Congress might never have passed a wilderness bill or designated countless wilderness areas throughout the country. The grazing exception--and the Congressional Grazing Guidelines that afford specific protections for grazers--made it possible to secure bipartisan support for wilderness bills in even the most conservative western states.

Notwithstanding this success, the ecology of some …

Data Underlying "Living Death: Ambivalence, Delay, And Capital Punishment", Marianne Wesson, Amy Kingston, Jocelyn Jenks, Laura Mcnabb, Lauren Seger, Genet Tekeste, Edwin Hurwitz

Research Data

The documents here archived contain data compilations researched and recorded by me and my research assistants in connection with the article by Marianne "Mimi" Wesson, Living Death: Ambivalence, Delay, and Capital Punishment (Feb. 20, 2013), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2221597.

Our research investigated four study jurisdictions: Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Ohio. The data falls into two categories: analyses of reported appellate cases during designated periods in those jurisdictions; and investigations of the subsequent careers of every individual who resided on death row in one of our jurisdictions in April of 1995. The article further explains the impetus for these investigations, and the conclusions …

The Human Rights Of Indigenous Peoples: United Nations Developments, S. James Anaya

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In an effort to reexamine legal and political decisions about criminalization and the role of the criminal law in shaping American markets and social institutions, this Article explores the ways in which criminal conspiracy laws in the United States have historically been used to subdue nonstate actors and informal markets that threatened the hegemony of the state and formal market. To this end, the Article focuses primarily on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as illustrative of broader trends in twentieth-century criminal policy. Enacted in 1970, RICO provides criminal sanctions for individuals engaged in unacceptable organized activities and …

The Tragic Story Of The Federal Coal Leasing Program, Mark Squillace

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No abstract provided.

Never Construed To Their Prejudice: In Honor Of David Getches, Richard B. Collins

Publications

This article reviews and analyzes the judicial canons of construction for Native American treaties and statutes. It discusses their theoretical justifications and practical applications. It concludes that the treaty canon has ready support in contract law and the law of treaty interpretation. Justification of the statutory canon is more challenging and could be strengthened by attention to the democratic deficit when Congress imposes laws on Indian country. Applications of the canons have mattered in disputes between Indian nations and private or state interests. They have made much less difference, and have suffered major failings, in disputes with the federal government. …

Duncan Kennedy's Third Globalization, Criminal Law, And The Spectacle, Aya Gruber

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No abstract provided.

Mrs. Dred Scott: A Genre Bender?, Lolita Buckner Inniss

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No abstract provided.

Experimental Pragmatism In The Third Globalization, Justin Deystone

Publications

Pragmatism dominates contemporary legal thought, but knowing this isn’t knowing so much. Legal pragmatism means different things to different people, and as this essay argues, minimalist and experimentalist forms of regulation both share a broadly pragmatic sensibility about law and democracy. As a consequence, we need to tease out the various threads of legal pragmatism in the hope of distinguishing the pragmatisms that work from the ones that don’t, or less pragmatically, the ones that are just from the ones that are not. This knowledge will come from an ongoing assessment of the political stakes immanent in the pragmatisms, and …

Blue-Collar Crime: Conspiracy, Organized Labor, And The Anti-Union Civil Rico Claim, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article provides an historically-rooted analysis of a recent spate of civil RICO complaints arising from labor union organizing campaigns. The Article historicizes contemporary civil RICO suits against labor unions by analogizing to nineteenth century conspiracy prosecutions of unions. In tracing this history of organized labor’s social standing, the Article addresses the cultural framing of the union and its place in political and cultural discourse over the past century. The civil RICO complaints have received limited scholarly attention mainly focusing on issues of federal preemption; this Article argues for a broad reading of the cases as a way to understand …

Race As A Legal Concept, Justin Deystone

Publications

Race is a legal concept, and like all legal concepts, it is a matrix of rules. Although the legal conception of race has shifted over time, up from slavery and to the present, one element in the matrix has remained the same: the background rules of race have always taken a view of racial identity as a natural aspect of human biology. To be sure, characterizations of the rule have oftentimes kept pace with developments in race science, and the original invention of race as a rationale for the subordination of certain human populations is now a rationale with little …