Legal History Commons^™

Introduction: Situating, Researching, And Writing Comparative Legal History, John G. H. Hudson, William Eves

Other Publications

This volume is a selection of essays taken from the excellent range of papers presented at the British Legal History Conference hosted by the Institute for Legal and Constitutional Research at the University of St Andrews, 10–13 July 2019. The theme of the conference gives this book its title: ‘comparative legal history’. The topic came easily to the organisers because of their association with the St Andrews-based European Research Council Advanced grant project ‘Civil law, common law, customary law: consonance, divergence and transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries’. But the chosen topic was also …

United/States: A Revolutionary History Of American Statehood, Craig Green

Michigan Law Review

Where did states come from? Almost everyone thinks that states descended immediately, originally, and directly from British colonies, while only afterward joining together as the United States. As a matter of legal history, that is incorrect. States and the United States were created by revolutionary independence, and they developed simultaneously in that context as improvised entities that were profoundly interdependent and mutually constitutive, rather than separate or sequential.

“States-first” histories have provided foundational support for past and present arguments favoring states’ rights and state sovereignty. This Article gathers preconstitutional evidence about state constitutions, American independence, and territorial boundaries to challenge …

The Support-Or-Advocacy Clauses, Richard Primus, Cameron O. Kistler

Articles

Two little known clauses of a Reconstruction-era civil rights statute are potentially powerful weapons for litigators seeking to protect the integrity of federal elections. For the clauses to achieve their potential, however, the courts will need to settle correctly a contested question of statutory interpretation: do the clauses create substantive rights, or do they merely create remedies for substantive rights specified elsewhere? The correct answer is that the clauses create substantive rights.

Man’S Best Friend? How Dogs Have Been Used To Oppress African Americans, Shontel Stewart

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The use of dogs as tools of oppression against African Americans has its roots in slavery and persists today in everyday life and police interactions. Due to such harmful practices, African Americans are not only disproportionately terrorized by officers with dogs, but they are also subject to instances of misplaced sympathy, illsuited laws, and social exclusion in their communities. Whether extreme and violent or subtle and pervasive, the use of dogs in oppressive acts is a critical layer of racial bias in the United States that has consistently built injustices that impede social and legal progress. By recognizing this pattern …

Herein Of 'Herein Granted': Why Article I'S Vesting Clause Does Not Support The Doctrine Of Enumerated Powers, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Article I of the United States Constitution begins as follows: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States[.]” That text is sometimes called the Vesting Clause, or, more precisely, the Article I Vesting Clause, because Articles II and III also begin with Vesting Clauses. And there is a feature of those three clauses, when compared, to which twenty-first century constitutional lawyers commonly attribute considerable significance. Although the three Clauses are similar in other ways, the syntax of Article I’s Vesting Clause is not fully parallel to that of the other two. The Vesting …

Discerning A Dignitary Offense: The Concept Of Equal 'Public Rights' During Reconstruction, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

The mountain of modern interpretation to which the language of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been subjected tends to overshadow the multiple concepts of antidiscrimination that were actually circulating at the time of its drafting. Moreover, as authors on race and law have pointed out, Congress itself lacked any African American representatives during the 1866–68 moment of transitional justice. The subsequent development of a “state action doctrine” limiting the reach of federal civil rights enforcement, in turn, eclipsed important contemporary understandings of the harms that Reconstruction-era initiatives sought to combat. In contrast to the oblique language …

Marshaling Mcculloch, Richard A. Primus

Reviews

David Schwartz’s terrific new book is subtitled John Marshall and the 200-Year Odyssey of McCulloch v. Maryland. But the book is about much more than Marshall and McCulloch. It’s bout the long struggle over the scope of national power. Marshall and McCulloch are characters in the story, but the story isn’t centrally about them. Indeed, an important part of Schwartz’s narrative is that McCulloch has mattered relatively little in that struggle, except as a protean symbol.

Winks, Whispers, And Prosecutorial Discretion In Rural Iowa, 1925-1928, Emily Prifogle

Articles

Through the eyes of Charles Pendleton’s memoirs, this article walks through a rural community with a county attorney to consider how race, religion, gender, and sexuality influenced rural prosecutorial discretion in the early twentieth century. Rural communities like those in Buena Vista County, Iowa, where the article is centered, experienced “the law” through distinctly isolated geographies and social networks that lacked anonymity and thus shaped available methods of conflict resolution. But anonymity did not mean homogeneity. Ethnic, racial, and religious diversity created divisions within a community where social distance between individuals was small. Both onymity and diversity shaped who should …

Reassessing Aspects Of The Contribution Of African States To The Development Of International Law Through African Regional Multilateral Treaties, Tiyanjana Maluwa

Michigan Journal of International Law

For decades, debates about Africa’s contribution to the development of international law have been dominated by two opposing schools of thought. First, that European colonial powers deliberately erased Africa and Africans from the history of the creation and use of international law. Second, that, on the contrary, over the last six decades (since the emergence of the newly independent African states in the late 1950s and early 1960s), Africa has contributed to the making of international law and has not been merely a passive recipient of a Eurocentric international law.

This article underscores the role of the postcolonial periphery in …

Fascism And Monopoly, Daniel A. Crane

Michigan Law Review

The recent revival of political interest in antitrust has resurfaced a longstanding debate about the role of industrial concentration and monopoly in enabling Hitler’s rise to power and the Third Reich’s wars of aggression. Proponents of stronger antitrust enforcement argue that monopolies and cartels brought the Nazis to power and warn that rising concentration in the American economy could similarly threaten democracy. Skeptics demur, observing that German big business largely opposed Hitler during the crucial years of his ascent. Drawing on business histories and archival material from the U.S. Office of Military Government’s Decartelization Branch, this Article assesses the historical …

Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott

Michigan Law Review

The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined …

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Michigan Law Review

Review of Jonathan Gienapp's The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era.

Translating The Constitution, Jack M. Balkin

Michigan Law Review

Review of Lawrence Lessig's Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution.

What Is Remembered, Alice Ristroph

Michigan Law Review

Review of Sarah A. Seo's Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.

Coin, Currency, And Constitution: Reconsidering The National Bank Precedent, David S. Schwartz

Michigan Law Review

Review of Eric Lomazoff's Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic.

Of Bodies Politic And Pecuniary: A Brief History Of Corporate Purpose, David B. Guenther

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither …

Segregation In The Galleries: A Reconsideration, Richard Primus

Michigan Law Review Online

When constitutional lawyers talk about the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as applied to questions of race, they often men-tion that the spectators’ galleries in Congress were racially segregated when Congress debated the Amendment.1 If the Thirty-Ninth Congress practiced racial segregation, the thinking goes, then it probably did not mean to prohibit racial segregation.2 As an argument about constitutional interpretation, this line of thinking has both strengths and weaknesses. But this brief Essay is not about the interpretive consequences, if any, of segregation in the congressional galleries during the 1860s. It is about the factual claim that the galleries …

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.

Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai

Michigan Law Review

Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

Of Bodies Politic And Pecuniary: A Brief History Of Corporate Purpose, David B. Guenther

Law & Economics Working Papers

American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither …

New Textualism And The Thirteenth Amendment, Leah Litman

Articles

Michele Goodwin’s piece raises important questions about whether troubling modern-day labor practices in jails and prisons are consistent with the Thirteenth Amendment. In Goodwin’s telling, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment formally ended the institution of slavery, but the Amendment allowed practices resembling slavery to continue, perhaps reflecting the extant stereotypes and racism that formally amending the Constitution cannot root out. Indeed, Goodwin excavates historical materials that suggest the people who drafted and ratified the Amendment understood and expected that it would allow the perpetuation of slavery in another form. As Goodwin explains, most historians have argued that the Thirteenth …

Article Ii Vests Executive Power, Not The Royal Prerogative, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

Article II of the United States Constitution vests “the executive power” in the President. For more than two hundred years, advocates of presidential power have claimed that this phrase was originally understood to include a bundle of national security and foreign affairs authorities. Their efforts have been highly successful. Among constitutional originalists, this so-called “Vesting Clause Thesis” is now conventional wisdom. But it is also demonstrably wrong. Based on an exhaustive review of the eighteenth-century bookshelf, this Article shows that the ordinary meaning of “executive power” referred unambiguously to a single, discrete, and potent authority: the power to execute law. …

Second Redemption, Third Reconstruction, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In The Accumulation of Advantages, the picture that Professor Owen Fiss paints about equality during and since the Second Reconstruction is largely a picture in black and white. That makes some sense. The black/white experience is probably the most important throughline in the story of equal protection. It was the central theme of both the First and Second Reconstructions. In keeping with that orientation, the picture of disadvantage described by Fiss’s theory of cumulative responsibility is largely drawn from the black/white experience. Important as it is, however, the black/white experience does not exhaust the subject of constitutional equality. So in …

Reading Terminology In The Sources For The Early Common Law: Seisin, Simple And Not So Simple, John G. H. Hudson

Book Chapters

According to F. W. Maitland, ‘the treatment of seisin in our oldest common law must be understood if ever we are to use the vast store of valuable knowledge that lies buried in the plea rolls and the Year Books’. In The History of English Law, Maitland stated firmly that ‘Seisin is possession’, and that ‘When we say that seisin is possession, we use the latter term in the sense in which lawyers use it, a sense in which possession is quite distinct from, and may be sharply opposed to, proprietary right.’ He added that ‘The idea of seisin …

The Confrontation Right, Richard D. Friedman

Book Chapters

This chapter examines the right of criminal defendants to be confronted with the witnesses against them. It first provides an overview of the nature, purposes, and costs of the confrontation right before discussing the history of the confrontation right. It then considers a range of issues that may arise in any jurisdiction (or in some cases, any common law jurisdiction) with regard to the confrontation right, using as a touchstone the current status of the right in the United States. In particular, it describes situations in which the question of whether a statement is testimonial typically arises, such as fresh …

Review By Justice John Paul Stevens (Ret.), John Paul Stevens

Michigan Law Review

Review of Noah Feldman's The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.

The Outcome Of Influence: Hitler’S American Model And Transnational Legal History, Mary L. Dudziak

Michigan Law Review

Review of James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.

Failed Protectors: The Indian Trust And Killers Of The Flower Moon, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Michigan Law Review

Review of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

Looking Backward And Forward At The Suspension Clause, G. Edward White

Michigan Law Review

Review of Amanda L. Tyler's Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay.

The Progressive Idea Of Democratic Administration, William J. Novak

Articles

The first thing to acknowledge about administration is that administration is coincident with governance. Far from being a modern invention or some kind of radical departure from an original political or legal tradition, administration is among the oldest practices of governments. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of government without administration. Laws need to be enforced, legislation needs to be implemented, and collective goods need to be secured. Governance is mostly a matter of actions and practices, making administration perhaps the most truly reflective aspect of legal and political culture.