Legal History Commons^™

The Evolution Of The Common Law And Efficiency, Nuno Garoupa, Carlos Liguerre

Faculty Scholarship

The efficiency of the common law hypothesis has generated a large bulk of literature in the last decades. The main argument is that there is an implicit economic logic to the common law; the doctrines in common law provide a coherent and consistent system of incentives which induce efficient behavior.

We start by observing that if the common law is overall evolutionarily efficient, we are left with no explanation for the important doctrinal differences across common law jurisdictions. The observation is more striking if we keep in mind that presumably the de jure initial condition was the same, namely English …

Notes Toward A Critical Contemplation Of Law, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

In this tribute to Professor Derrick Bell’s legacy, Professor Katyal reflects on one of Bell’s greatest gifts: the necessary, and perhaps unfinished gift of critical contemplation of law, along with its possibilities and its concomitant limitations. In her paper, Katyal reflects on two seemingly disparate areas of civil rights that might benefit from Bell’s critical vision: the area of LGBT rights and equality, and federal Indian law. Relying on some of Bell’s most valuable insights, Katyal calls for the creation of a “critical sexuality studies” and a “critical indigenous studies” that employs some of Bell’s groundbreaking lessons in reimagining broader …

Love And War, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Legal historians: Find a window to read Rose Cuison Villazor’s “The Other Loving,” published in the NYU Law Review last fall. Although Villazor, Associate Professor of Law at Hofstra, does not identify primarily as a legal historian, she has written more than one historical work well worth a read. An earlier article examined alien land laws in the United States, telling the story of Oyama v. California (1948), which held unconstitutional a provision of California’s Alien Land Law that discriminated against owners of property bought by parents who were ineligible to become U.S. citizens. This more recent article, in …

Legal Medievalism In Lex Mercatoria Scholarship, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

This short reaction piece to an article by Emily Kadens asks why a long-refuted story of an alleged uniform medieval lex mercatoria is still being maintained. The answer is that the story serves not as an actual history but instead as a foundation myth. Attempts to falsify the myth with historical data are therefore futile: the myth derives its value not from its truth value but from its symbolic power.

On The American Paradox Of Laissez Faire And Mass Incarceration, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In The Illusion of Free Markets (Harvard 2011), Professor Bernard Harcourt analyzes the evolution of a distinctly American paradox: in the country that has done the most to promote the idea of a hands-off government, we run the single largest prison complex in the entire world. Harcourt traces this paradox back to the eighteenth century and demonstrates how the presumption of government incompetence in economic affairs has been coupled with that of government legitimacy in the realm of policing and punishing. Harcourt shows how these linked presumptions have fueled the expansion of the carceral sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth …

No History, No Certainty, No Legitimacy . . . No Problem: Originalism And The Limits Of Legal Theory, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Martin H. Redish is on the warpath. Like General Sherman marching toward Atlanta (or Justin Tuck marching toward Tom Brady), Professor Redish, together with Matthew Arnould,1 lays waste to every constitutional theory that he encounters. Originalism, with its “belief that constitutional interpretation should be characterized exclusively by an effort to determine the Constitution’s meaning by means of some form of historical inquiry,”2 generates “an often contrived and opaque veil of historical inquiry”3 that provides “an ideal smokescreen behind which judges may pursue their personal[,] moral, political[,] or economic goals with relative impunity.”4 Nontextual theories, for their part, “permit[] selective …

From Racial Discrimination To Separate But Equal: The Common Law Impact Of The Thirteenth Amendment, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

Many forces produced the shift in the United States from the acceptance of slavery and racial inequality to the doctrine of separate but equal. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and authorized legislation to enforce that abolition, but these well-known direct effects are only part of the story. This paper examines the Amendment’s indirect impact on racial discrimination – furthering a standard of equality in public relationships without threatening the existing racial separation. The Amendment is evidence of a change in values that justified overturning prior decisions, and abolition created a new context for legislation and common law decisions. It reinforced …

Plus Or Minus One: The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Amendments, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

The consensus that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Thirteenth Amendment has come under sharp criticism in recent years. Several new works suggest that the Thirteenth Amendment, properly interpreted, protects some substantive rights not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Some of this scholarship is undoubtedly motivated by an effort to avoid hostile Supreme Court precedents. Nevertheless, more seems to be going on than mere litigation strategy. Scholars detected different rights and regime principles in the Thirteenth Amendment than they find in the Fourteenth Amendment. The 2011 Maryland Constitutional Law Schoomze, to which this is an introduction, provided an opportunity for law …

William Howard Taft And The Taft Arbitration Treaties, John E. Noyes

Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Essay explains Taft's interest in international law, placing it in historical context. Part II, outlines key features of the treaties and explores the debate over their ratification. Part III then reflects on the significance of the treaties.

Shouting "Fire!" In A Theater And Vilifying Corn Dealers, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Five years ago, Fred Schauer published an article with the intriguing title: "Do Cases Make Bad Law?" Playing off Holmes' observation that "[g]reat cases like hard cases make bad law," Schauer explored the possibility, as he put it, that "it is not just great cases and hard cases that make bad law, but simply the deciding of cases that makes bad law.” His concern, confirmed and deepened by his characteristically balanced inquiry, was that general principles forged in the resolution of specific legal disputes can suffer by virtue of that provenance. Because such principles by definition are meant to carry …

The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty

Property Rights In Land, Agricultural Capitalism, And The Relative Decline Of Pre-Industrial China, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Good Faith And Law Evasion, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

Laws imposing sanctions can be self-defeating by supplying incentive and guidance for actors engaged in socially undesirable activities to reshape conduct to avoid penalties. Sometimes this is deterrence. But if the new activity, as much as the old, contravenes the normative stance of the legal project, it is a failure of law. The problem of evasion warrants response in many fields - not least in criminal law despite the frequent and too simple assumption that legality-related values require narrow prohibitions that unavoidably permit evasion. Three common responses to evasion have serious deficits. Foregoing control of evasion is a mistake if …

Twenty Years Of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

This Article revisits the history of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through a prism that highlights its historical articulation in light of the emergence of postracialism. The Article will explore two central inquiries. This first query attends to the specific contours of law as the site out of which CRT emerged. The Article hypothesizes that legal discourse presented a particularly legible template from which to demystify the role of reason and the rule of law in upholding the racial order. The second objective is to explore the contemporary significance of CRT's trajectory in light of today's "post-racial" milieu. The Article posits …

A Foxy Hedgehog: The Consistent Perceptions Of Carol Rose, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

In a tribute like this, the question arises unavoidably: is Carol a fox or a hedgehog? That is, following Isaiah Berlin’s iconic distinction, does she know many things, like the fox, or, like the hedgehog, does she know one big thing?

It may seem strange that the ecosystem of legal scholarship should contain so little biodiversity; but the question engaged me. I started out thinking that Carol must be a fox, but I may have thought so for the wrong reasons: reasons of style, basically, having to do with her light-footedness, her deftness, and the recurrent sense that, just when …

Retail Rebellion And The Second Amendment, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

When, if ever, is there a Second Amendment right to kill a cop? This piece seeks to answer that question. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment codifies a natural right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. That right to self-defense extends to both private and public threats, including self-defense against agents of a tyrannical government. Moreover, the right is individual. Individuals -- not just communities -- have the right to protect themselves from public violence. Individuals -- not just militias -- have the right to defend themselves against tyranny. In McDonald …

What Happened In Iowa?, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Reply to Nicole Mansker & Neal Devins, Do Judicial Elections Facilitate Popular Constitutionalism; Can They?, 111 Colum. L. Rev. Sidebar 27 (2011).

November 2, 2010 is the latest milestone in the evolution of state judicial elections from sleepy, sterile affairs into meaningful political contests. Following an aggressive ouster campaign, voters in Iowa removed three supreme court justices, including the chief justice, who had joined an opinion finding a right to same-sex marriage under the state constitution. Supporters of the campaign rallied around the mantra, “It’s we the people, not we the courts.” Voter turnout surged to unprecedented levels; the national …

Privileges Or Immunities, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What was meant by the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause? Did it incorporate the U.S. Bill of Rights against the states or did it do something else? In retrospect, the Clause has seemed to have the poignancy of a path not taken – a trail abandoned in the Slaughter-House Cases and later lamented by academics, litigants, and even some judges. Although wistful thoughts about the Privileges or Immunities Clause may seem to lend legitimacy to incorporation, the Clause actually led in another direction. Long-forgotten evidence clearly shows that the Clause was an attempt to resolve a national dispute about …

Trust And Fiduciary Duty In The Early Common Law, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

Trust is an expectation that others will act in one’s own interest. Trust also has a specialized meaning in Anglo-American law, denoting an arrangement by which land or other property is managed by one party, a trustee, on behalf of another party, a beneficiary.1 Fiduciary duties are duties enforced by law and imposed on persons in certain relationships requiring them to act entirely in the interest of another, a beneficiary, and not in their own interest.2 This Essay is about the role that trust and fiduciary duty played in our legal system five centuries ago and more.

Collective Action Federalism: A General Theory Of Article I, Section 8, Robert D. Cooter, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

The Framers of the United States Constitution wrote Article I, Section 8 in order to address some daunting collective action problems facing the young nation. They especially wanted to protect the states from military warfare by foreigners and from commercial warfare against one another. The states acted individually when they needed to act collectively, and Congress lacked power under the Articles of Confederation to address these problems. Section 8 thus authorized Congress to promote the “general Welfare” of the United States by tackling many collective action problems that the states could not solve on their own.

Subsequent interpretations of Section …

Roll Over Langdell, Tell Llewellyn The News: A Brief History Of American Legal Education, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

The origin of this essay is a presentation the author made at the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Texas on December 10, 2008. This essay is derived from the author's presentation, which originally was entitled "A Brief and Highly Selective History of American Legal Education and Jurisprudence. " In this essay, the author provides an overview of the history and development of legal education in America, emphasizing the establishment and evolution of the case method of instruction in American law schools and focusing on the influence of American jurisprudence on the development of legal education in …

The Twist Of Long Terms: Judicial Elections, Role Fidelity, And American Tort Law, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The received wisdom is that American judges rejected strict liability through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To the contrary, a majority of state courts adopted Rylands v. Fletcher and strict liability for hazardous or unnatural activities after a series of flooding tragedies in the late nineteenth century. Federal judges and appointed state judges generally ignored or rejected Rylands, while elected state judges overwhelmingly adopted Rylands or a similar strict liability rule.

In moving from fault to strict liability, these judges were essentially responding to increased public fears of industrial or man-made hazards. Elected courts were more populist: they were …

Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

Legal doctrines banning polygamy grew out of nineteenth century Americans’ view that Mormons betrayed the nation by engaging in conduct associated with people of color. This article reveals the racial underpinnings of polygamy law by examining cartoons and other antipolygamy rhetoric of the time to demonstrate Sir Henry Maine’s famous observation that the move in progressive societies is “from status to contract.” It frames antipolygamists’ contentions as a visceral defense of racial and sexual status in the face of encroaching contractual thinking. Polygamy, they reasoned, was “natural” for people of color but so “unnatural” for whites as to produce a …

The Productive Tension Between Official And Unofficial Stories Of Fault In Contract Law, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

Officially Contract law ignores fault. However, an unofficial story complements the official one, and explains why fault occasionally slips into contract law through doctrines such as willful breach. This chapter of FAULT IN AMERICAN CONTRACT LAW (Omri Ben-Shahar & Ariel Porot, eds, Cambridge U. Press, forthcoming 2010) argues that the official and unofficial stories operate in productive tension to both facilitate ex ante planning and, when necessary, look backward at reasons for breach to reach a just result. The occasional presence of fault in contract law, in this view, represents merely one more instance of the common doctrinal pattern of …

Rereading Rauscher Is It Time For The United States To Abandon The Rule Of Specialty, Mark A. Summers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Rhetoric Of Catharsis And Change: Law School Autobiography As A Nonfiction Law And Literature Subgenre, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

To date, little scholarship, if any, has addressed the autobiographies of law students, which have appeared in law review articles and books since at least the late 1970s. This shortcoming of law and literature scholarship in the nonfiction genre of autobiography is problematic. In the interest of understanding diverse perspectives in the legal community, legal scholars with autobiographical interests ought to give attention to the autobiographies of different individuals in this community, including the law students who will be the future members of the profession. Also, this shortcoming leaves a gap in the narrative discourse of the law since lawyers …

The California Public Defender: Its Origins, Evolution And Decline, Laurence A. Benner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Nature: Climate Change, Environmental Law, And Democracy, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars’ discussions of climate change assume that the issue is one mainly of engineering incentives, and that “environmental values” are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the emerging crisis. This Article gives reason to believe otherwise. The major natural resource and environmental statutes, from the acts creating national forests and parks to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, have emerged from precisely the activity that discussions of climate change neglect: democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of citizenship, national purpose, and the role and …

Expectation Damages The Objective Theory Of Contracts And The Hairy Hand Case A Proposed Modification To The Effect Of Two Classical Contract Law Axioms In Cases Involving Contractual, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Undead" Wartime Cases: Stare Decisis And The Lessons Of History, Harlan G. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

References to the “lessons of history” are ubiquitous in law. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in recent debates over U.S. counterterrorism policy. In response to the Bush Administration’s reliance on World War II-era decisions - Johnson v. Eisentrager, Ex Parte Quirin, Hirota v. MacArthur, and In re Yamashita - opponents have argued that these decisions have been rejected by the “lessons of history.” They argue that the history of wartime cases is one marked by executive aggrandizement, panic-driven attacks on civil liberties, and overly quiescent courts - none of which should be repeated.

But what does it really …