Legal History Commons^™

A Guide To American Legal History Methodology With An Example Of Research In Progress, Jenni Parrish

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democracy's Incursion Into The Eastern Shore: The 1870 Election In Chestertown, C. Christopher Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

By Reason Of Their Sex: Feminist Theory Postmodernism And Justice , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Both the Supreme Court's jurisprudence of gender and feminist legal theory have generally assumed that some identifiable and describable category of woman exists prior to the construction of legal categories. For the Court, this woman-whose characteristics admittedly have changed over time-serves as the standard against which gendered legal classifications are measured. For feminism, her existence has served a different but equally important purpose as the subject for whom political goals are pursued. To the extent that the definitions of the category diverge, the differences among definitions are played out in feminist critiques of the Court's gender jurisprudence, and, occasionally, in …

Toward A New Deal Legal History, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

With this article, Barry Cushman continues the project begun in earlier writings, leading ultimately to a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the legal history of the New Deal. The present work, perhaps the most important to appear so far, brings Cushman's evolving argument up against the most stable – if not altogether the most convincing – element of the traditional history of the New Deal Court. The "Constitutional Revolution of 1937" is now open for reconsideration or, more precisely, the famous "switch in time" that realigned the Supreme Court with the demands of the Roosevelt administration. Cushman argues powerfully – by and …

Two Social Movements, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Two social movements in the last fifty years have had a profound impact on our understanding of law and the role of the courts in our system of government. One is the civil rights movement. The demand for greater racial and gender equality and other civil rights has changed the face of the law in countless ways. For example, it has called into question – or at least required a fundamental revision in – the traditional understanding that the courts should interpret the Constitution and laws in accordance with their original meaning. Decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education …

Revolution And Judicial Review: Chief Justice Holt's Opinion In City Of London V. Wood, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

In 1702, in an opinion touching upon parliamentary power, Chief Justice Sir John Holt discussed limitations on government in language that has long seemed more intriguing than clear. Undoubtedly, the Chief Justice was suggesting limitations on government – limitations that subsequently have become quite prominent, particularly in America. Yet even the best report of his opinion concerning these constraints has left historians in some doubt as to just what he was saying and why it was significant.

The case in which Chief Justice Holt was so obscure about matters of such importance, City of London v. Wood, revived the …

Considering Zenger: Partisan Politics And The Legal Profession In Provincial New York, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

History is the narration of the past, and not all valuable history is true. When William Smith, Jr. first wrote his much-admired and widely distributed History of the Province of New-York, in 1756, he ended his narration twenty-four years before his own time, with the arrival of Governor William Cosby in New York on August 1, 1732. In justification of his abrupt termination at this particular point, Smith wrote:

The history of our publick transactions, from this period, to the present time, is full of important and entertaining events, which I leave others to relate. A very near relation …