Legal History Commons^™

Beyond The Second Amendment: An Individual Right To Arms Viewed Through The Ninth Amendment , Nicholas J. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, the debate over the individual right to possess firearms has focused on the origins and meaning of the Second Amendment. Some constitutional scholars have dismissed the idea that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms. They argue that it only prevents the federal government from disarming states. Other scholars, focusing on the language of the amendment and its historical context, conclude that it does indeed establish an individual right to firearms. This article examines whether, even absent the Second Amendment, the Constitution restrains government from taking away what may be individuals' best tools of self-defense. The foothold …

Rouge Et Noir Reread: A Popular Constitutional History Of The Angelo Herndon Case, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1932, Eugene Angelo Braxton Hemdon, a young Afro-American member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was arrested in Atlanta and charged with an attempt to incite insurrection against that state's lawful authority. Some five years later, in Herndon v. Lowry, Herndon filed a writ of habeas corpus asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the Georgia statute under which he had been convicted. Two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, the Court, voting 5-4, declared the use of the Georgia political-crimes statute against him unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived Herndon of his rights to freedom …

Book Review: Slave Law In The Americas, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Half Century Of The Maryland Law Review, William L. Reynolds

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Impeachment Exception To The Exclusionary Rules: Policies, Principles, And Politics, The , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

The exclusionary evidence rules derived from the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments continue to play an important role in constitutional criminal procedure, despite the intense controversy that surrounds them. The primary justification for these rules has shifted from an "imperative of judicial integrity" to the "deterrence of police conduct that violates... [constitutional] rights." Regardless of the justification it uses for the rules' existence, the Supreme Court continues to limit their breadth "at the margin," when "the acknowledged costs to other values vital to a rational system of criminal justice" outweigh the deterrent effects of exclusion. The most notable limitation on …

Feminist Jurisprudence: Why Law Must Consider Women's Perspectives, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

A growing number of scholars are asking how the law would be different if it took women's points of view and experiences into account. Feminist Jurisprudence argues that we must look at the norms embedded in our legal system and rethink the law. It is about being inclusive of women, and of all people who differ from the norms of the law as it is today. The endeavor will necessarily shake up established relations between family, the workplace and the state. Lawyers, judges, and legislators should get ready for the changes.

Legal Process And Judges In The Real World, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

It is gratifying, reading through a paper and noting here and there points that you might like to make, to find that by the end the author has anticipated them and made them well. This paper sneaks up on you. If at the outset it seems to be accepting that Justice Scalia has a jurisprudence of statutory interpretation that coheres and restrains, by the end it has shown the self-contradictions and decidedly political and institutional stakes in the textualist position the Justice appears to have been carving out for himself.

I am not going to address Professor Zeppos's account of …

Sunstein, Statutes, And The Common Law – Reconciling Markets, The Communal Impulse, And The Mammoth State, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Cass Sunstein's new book, After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State, builds upon, and in important ways seeks to integrate, much of Professor Sunstein's work over the past several years. He has been one of our most prolific and influential writers on issues of governmental structure, approaching the subject both from more or less conventional administrative law perspectives and from the constitutional perspectives of separation of powers. His work has dealt with a tension often addressed in the literature, that between the eighteenth-century Madisonian constitutional engine of limited, internally checked government and the realities of our sprawling …

The Maryland Context Of Dred Scott: The Decline In The Legal Status Of Maryland Free Blacks 1776-1810, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Habeas Corpus And The Penalty Of Death, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A century ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., examined the history of negligence in search of a general theory of tort. He concluded that from the earliest times in England, the basis of tort liability was fault, or the failure to exercise due care. Liability for an injury to another arose whenever the defendant failed "to use such care as a prudent man would use under the circumstances.” A decade ago Morton J. Horwitz reexamined the history of negligence for the same purpose and concluded that negligence was not originally understood as carelessness or fault. Rather, negligence meant "neglect or failure …

"Were There No Appeal": The History Of Review In American Criminal Courts, David Rossman

Faculty Scholarship

The contemporary criminal justice system is guided, in large part, from the top down. A great deal of the force that drives the "terrible engine" of the criminal law is supplied by courts that consider cases on review after a defendant has been convicted.

Culture And Certainty: Legal History And The Reconstructive Project, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court Of Israel: Formative Years, 1948-1955, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

This article looks at the institutional and jurisprudential development of the Israeli Supreme Court in its early stages.

The First Integration Of The University Of Maryland School Of Law, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Development Of The Nineteenth-Century Consensus Theory Of Contract, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

The consensus theory is well known. According to consensus theory, contract is the product of the consensus or "meeting of the minds" of contracting parties; if there is no consensus, there is no contract. Today, even after repeated challenges, consensus theory continues to be important and even essential in many approaches to contract.

The role of the parties' consensus was not always apparent in case law. Until well into the nineteenth century, the most important remedy for breach of contract in both England and America was the action for breach of promise known as "assumpsit." As a result, lawyers typically …

Bracton, The Year Books, And The "Transformation Of Elementary Legal Ideas" In The Early Common Law, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

The language of the common law has a life and a logic of its own, resilient through eight centuries of unceasing talk. Basic terms of the lawyer's specialized vocabulary, elementary conceptual distinctions, and modes of argument, which all go to make “thinking like a lawyer” possible, have proved remarkably durable in the literature of the common law. Two fundamental distinctions—between “real” and “personal” actions and between “possessory” and “proprietary” remedies—can be traced back to their early use in treatises of the first generations of professional common law judges and in reports of courtroom dialogue from the first generations of professional …

Enforcement Provisions Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1866: A Legislative History In Light Of Runyon V. Mccrary, The Review Essay And Comments: Reconstructing Reconstruction, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Comment is to examine the history of the enactment and early enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from the perspective of the remedies Congress sought to provide to meet the problems that necessitated the legislation. Its main foci are the statute's enforcement provisions and their early implementation, an aspect of the history of the statute that has not been fully considered in relation to section one, the provision that has received the most scholarly attention. The occasion of this study is the Supreme Court's reconsideration of Runyon v. McCrary' in Patterson v. McLean Credit …

Luther Martin, Maryland And The Constitution, William L. Reynolds

Faculty Scholarship

Reviews the life and contributions of Maryland lawyer and scholar Luther Martin (1748-1826).

An Astonishing Political Innovation: The Origins Of Judicial Review, Barbara Aronstein Black

Faculty Scholarship

It is a very great honor to be here today participating in the Third Circuit Judicial Conference and in the celebration of our two hundred years of government under the remarkable document that we call the Constitution of the United States. Philadelphia is indeed today the center of the universe and I am delighted to be here.

In addressing the topic assigned to me, "The Origins of Judicial Review," I will take my cue, in fact my text, from Judge Pollak, who, in a letter to me, suggested that I "draw in broad strokes the legal historical landscape in which …

Original Understanding And The Constitution, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Fiction, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pyrrhic Victory: Daniel Goldman's Defeat Of Zoning In The Maryland Court Of Appeals, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

Nowadays government regulation of the use of urban land is taken for granted. Such was not always the case. Some sixty years ago, the Maryland Court of Appeals held it unconstitutional for Zoning Commissioner J. Frank Crowther to deny a request for a permit to operate a tailor shop in the basement of a Eutaw Place home. This paper examines the case of Goldman v. Crowther. Goldman's story reads like a comic melodrama with a tragic ending. But the saga also illuminates the social condition - it sheds light and casts shadows on the practice of xenophobia, the nature …

Public Rights And The Federal Judicial Power: From Murray's Lessee Through Crowell To Schor, Gordon G. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Forgotten Era, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Congressional Power And Free Speech: Levy’S Legacy Revisited, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Revolutionary Constitutionalism In The Era Of The Civil War And Reconstruction , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The meaning and scope of the fourteenth amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 remain among the most controversial issues in American constitutional law. Professor Kaczorowski contends that the issues have generated more controversy than they warrant, in part because scholars analyzing the legislative history of the amendment and statute have approached their task with preconceptions reflecting twentieth century legal concerns. He argues that the most important question for the framers was whether national or state governments possessed primary authority to determine and secure the status and rights of American citizens. Relying on records of the congressional debates as …

Consensus And Objectivity In Early Constitutional Interpretation: An Unproven Thesis (Book Review), H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing Christohper Wolfe, The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law (1986)

Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dworkin: A New Link In The Chain, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

This book brings together nineteen of the articles published by Professor Dworkin over the last eight years, mostly in the New York Review of Books, but also in learned journals and collections. Three articles, none of them of major importance, have not been published before: Can a Liberal State Support Art? (pp. 221-36), On Interpretation and Objectivity (pp. 167-80), and Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest (pp. 104-18). Several pieces published during the last few years are not included, of which the most important is an article on equality.