Legal History Commons^™

The Racist Roots Of The Death Penalty, Ngozi Ndulue

Journal Articles

Published in Inquest, a publication of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration.

Adapted from The Slow Death of the Death Penalty: Toward a Postmortem, edited by Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen and Mary Welek Atwell, reprinted with permission from NYU Press.

Creating U.S. Catholicism, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Reviewing, The World and Work of Father John J. Burke: A Mystic in Action by Douglas J. Slawson, St. Augustine's, 600 p, $36.

Populist Secularism, Seval Yildirim

Journal Articles

This article argues that in the context of a developing democracy, the rise of religiously oriented parties should be viewed contextually as part of an ongoing process of democratic negotiation and consolidation. Using Turkey as a case study, this article argues that religion and secularism are best viewed as parts of a symbiotic relationship, informing each other’s identity, and defining characteristics through an ongoing process of negotiation.

The article discusses commonly used concepts relevant to secularism in general and argues for the need to distinguish between the secular, secularism, and secularization as a governance project. Through a historical survey of …

Genteel Culture, Legal Education, And Constitutional Controversy In Early Virginia, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This article focuses on the movement to reform legal education in early national Virginia, offering a fresh perspective by examining the connection between legal education and society and culture. It challenges the notion that constitutional ideas were the primary driving force behind reforms and argues that social status and “manners” played a more significant role. Wealthy elites in Virginia associated manners with education, sending their sons to college to become gentlemen, as it secured their aspirations to gentility and their influence over society and politics. Reformers sought to capitalize on this connection by educating a generation of university-trained, genteel lawyers …

Festschrift Symposium: Honoring Professor Sam Pillsbury, Michael Waterstone, Guyora Binder, Mary Graw Leary, Deborah W. Denno, Stephen J. Morse, Scott Wood, John T. Nockleby, Gary C. Williams, Samantha Buckingham, Samuel Pillsbury, Kevin Lapp

Journal Articles

The Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review is pleased to publish this Festschrift Symposium Honoring Professor Samuel Pillsbury. The following is an edited transcript of the live symposium held at LMU Loyola Law School on Friday, March 25, 2022.

The Story Of Beauharnais V. Illinois, Samantha Barbas

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Humor, A Meditation, John Henry Schlegel

Journal Articles

Republished at 47 Dalhousie J.L. 1 (2024).

The Rise And Fall Of Group Libel: The Forgotten Campaign For Hate Speech Laws, Samantha Barbas

Journal Articles

It is well-known that there is no “hate speech” law in the United States. This has been criticized, especially given the existence of robust hate speech laws in other nations. The absence of hate speech laws in American law has been attributed to legal, cultural, and historical factors, including speech protective First Amendment jurisprudence and long-standing skepticism of group reputation as an interest worthy of legal protection.

This Article presents another reason for the absence of hate speech laws in America: the failure of a large-scale social movement in the 1940s to pass hate speech laws or “group libel” laws, …

Citizenship, Race, And Statehood, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

This Article will discuss the interplay between citizenship, race, and ratification of statehood in the United States, both historically and prospectively. Part II will discuss the development and history of the Insular Cases and the creation of the Territorial Incorporation Doctrine (“TID”), focusing on the Territory of Puerto Rico and how the issues of citizenship, race, and statehood have evolved in shadow of empire as a result. Part III will look back on the admission to the Union of New Mexico and Arizona—the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states—and discuss the substantial difficulties these territories had in getting admitted for statehood due …

A New Report Of Entick V. Carrington (1765), Christian R. Burset, T. T. Arvind

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court has described Entick v. Carrington (1765) as “the true and ultimate expression of constitutional law” for the Founding generation. For more than 250 years, judges and commentators have read that case for guidance about the rule of law, executive authority, and the original meaning of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But we have been reading a flawed version. This Article publishes, for the first time, a previously unknown manuscript report of Entick v. Carrington. We explain why this version is more reliable than other reports of the case, and how this new discovery challenges prevailing assumptions about …

Our Imperial Federal Courts, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This essay is a response to Christian R. Burset, Advisory Opinions and the Problem of Legal Authority, 74VAND.L.REV.621(2021).

“The article is significant for the archival work alone. It is useful, as well, for the impressive synthesis of the existing secondary literature, collected in the footnotes, which makes a convenient reading list for us mere mortals. The argument of the article is ambitious. As the Table of Contents suggests, its structure is complex: the author asks us to visit three different jurisdictions (two British and one American, each thousands of miles apart), in three different decades, in three different political and …

If The Music Hadn’T Stopped, Or Reflections On The Great Kerfuffle: Historicism’S Continuing Grasp For Truth, John Henry Schlegel

Journal Articles

I was pretty indifferent to my undergraduate education, but I hated law school because it was full of things one couldn’t do. One couldn’t use a statute analogically, couldn’t take into account realpolitik when analyzing cases, couldn’t rethink legal education from the bottom up, and it was pretty much “out there” to count votes when predicting case outcomes. Six years later, when in 1973 I came to teach at Buffalo, I experienced a quite different world; there were all sorts of possibilities. The great intellectual kerfuffle that went by many names—structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, even Marxism and Critical Legal Studies (CLS)—burned …

Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset

Journal Articles

The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.

This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only …

Lessons From A Journey Through State Subnational Constitutional Law, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Convention And Constitutional Change: A Revisionist History, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

How do we change the Federal Constitution? Article V tells us that we can amend the Constitution by calling a national convention to propose changes and then ratifying those proposals in state conventions. Conventions play this role because they represent the people in their sovereign capacity, as we learn when we read McCulloch v. Maryland.

What is not often discussed is that Article V itself contains another mechanism for constitutional change. In fact, Article V permits both conventions and leg-islatures to be used for amendment, and, as it happens, all but one of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have …

Presidential Whim, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This article describes a new body of legal literature on the presidency. In contrast to older bodies of writing, which emphasize presidential independence, this body of writing emphasizes the dependence of the executive power, and a set of moral values associated with the office: faith, faithfulness, responsibility, honesty, due care, and professionalism, among others. The article considers prospects for enforcing this vision of the presidency in light of the particular problems posed by the Trump presidency. Many writers have complained of President Trump's leadership style, which is abrupt, reflexive, dissembling, and unilateral. I refer to this as the problem of …

Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian R. Burset

Journal Articles

This Article considers a puzzle about how different kinds of law came to be distributed around the world. The legal systems of some European colonies largely reflected the laws of the colonizer. Other colonies exhibited a greater degree of legal pluralism, in which the state administered a mix of different legal systems. Conventional explanations for this variation look to the extent of European settlement: where colonizers settled in large numbers, they chose to bring their own laws; otherwise, they preferred to retain preexisting ones. This Article challenges that assumption by offering a new account of how and why the British …

Fallen Woman (Re) Frame: Judge Jean Hortense Norris, New York City - 1912-1955, Mae C. Quinn

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Circuit Courts In The Formation Of United States Law In The Early Republic, David P. Waddilove

Journal Articles

The Role of Circuit Courts in the Formation of United States Law in the Early Republic: Following Supreme Court Justices Washington, Livingston, Story, and Thompson. ByDAVID LYNCH. [Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2018. xxi +233 pp. Hardback £70.00. ISBN 978-15-09910-85-4.]

The chosen justices were: Bushrod Washington, who served 1801–1829; H. Brockholst Livingston, 1807–1823; Joseph Story, 1811–1845; and Smith Thompson, 1823–1843.

The Security Court, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court is concerned not only with the limits of our government’s power to protect us, but also with how it protects us. Government can protect us by passing laws that grant powers to its agencies or by conferring discretion on the officers in those agencies. Security by law is preferable to the extent that it promotes rule of law values—certainty, predictability, uniformity, and so on—but, security by discretion is preferable to the extent that it gives government the room it needs to meet threats in whatever form they present themselves. Drawing a line between security by law and …

Book Review, Justin R. Huckaby

Journal Articles

In Conventional Wisdom: The Alternate Article V Mechanism for Proposing Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, John R. Vile discusses the thus-far unused Article V convention method of amending the U.S. Constitution. The book focuses on what an Article V convention could be and what parameters it might entail. Could such a convention be limited in scope, or must it be general in nature? Vile considers these questions and the literature behind them to develop his own interpretation of an Article V convention and how it should be implemented.

The Josiah Philips Attainder And The Institutional Structure Of The American Revolution, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This Article is a historical study of the Case of Josiah Philips. Philips led a gang of militant loyalists and escaped slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia during the American Revolution. He was attainted of treason in 1778 by an act of the Virginia General Assembly, tried for robbery before a jury, convicted and executed. For many years, the Philips case was thought to be an early example of judicial review, based on a claim by St. George Tucker that judges had refused to enforce the act of attainder. Modern research has cast serious doubt on Tucker’s …

Bills Of Attainder, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

What are bills of attainder? The traditional view is that bills of attainder are legislation that punishes an individual without judicial process. The Bill of Attainder Clause in Article I, Section 9 prohibits the Congress from passing such bills. But what about the President? The traditional view would seem to rule out application of the Clause to the President (acting without Congress) and to executive agencies, since neither passes bills.

This Article aims to bring historical evidence to bear on the question of the scope of the Bill of Attainder Clause. The argument of the Article is that bills of …

All In The Family: A Legacy Of Public Service And Engagement - Edward And Thomas Fairchild, R. Nils Olsen Jr.

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Inside The Taft Court: Lessons From The Docket Books, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

For many years, the docket books kept by certain of the Taft Court Justices have been held by the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court. Though the existence of these docket books had been brought to the attention of the scholarly community, access to them was highly restricted. In April of 2014, however, the Court adopted new guidelines designed to increase access to the docket books for researchers. This article offers a report and analysis based on a review of all of the Taft Court docket books held by the Office of the Curator, which are the only …

When Privacy Almost Won: Time, Inc. V. Hill (1967), Samantha Barbas

Journal Articles

Drawing on previously unexplored and unpublished archival papers of Richard Nixon, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the case, and the justices of the Warren Court, this article tells the story of the seminal First Amendment case Time, Inc. v. Hill (1967). In Hill, the Supreme Court for the first time addressed the conflict between the right to privacy and freedom of the press. The Court constitutionalized tort liability for invasion of privacy, acknowledging that it raised First Amendment issues and must be governed by constitutional standards. Hill substantially diminished privacy rights; today it is difficult if not impossible to recover against …

What Is Criminal Law About?, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg

Journal Articles

In a recent critique, Jens Ohlin faults contemporary criminal law textbooks for emphasizing philosophy, history and social science at the expense of doctrinal training. In this response, we argue that the political importance of criminal law justifies including reflection about the justice of punishment in the professional education of lawyers. First, we argue that both understanding and evaluating criminal law doctrine requires consideration of political philosophy, legal history, and empirical research. Second, we argue that the indeterminacy of criminal law doctrine on some fundamental questions means that criminal lawyers often cannot avoid invoking normative theory in fashioning legal arguments. Finally, …

A Defense Of The Corporate Law Duty Of Care, Julian Velasco

Journal Articles

Most people would acknowledge the importance of the duty of loyalty, but the same is not true of the duty of care. Historically, the corporate law duty of care has been underenforced at best, and arguably unenforced entirely. Some scholars do not consider the duty of care to be a fiduciary duty at all, and there are those who would do away with it entirely. In this paper, I intend to provide a comprehensive defense of the corporate law fiduciary duty of care. I hope to show that the duty of care is not simply an ill-fitting appendage to the …

The Rejection Of Horizontal Judicial Review During America's Colonial Period, Robert J. Steinfeld

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Facing The Ghost Of Cruikshank In Constitutional Law, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

For a symposium on Teaching Ferguson, this essay considers how the standard introductory constitutional law course evades the history of legal struggle against institutionalized anti-black violence. The traditional course emphasizes the drama of anti-majoritarian judicial expansion of substantive rights. Looming over the doctrines of equal protection and due process, the ghost of Lochner warns of dangers of judicial leadership in substantive constitutional change. This standard narrative tends to lower expectations for constitutional justice, emphasizing the virtues of judicial modesty and formalism.

By supplementing the ghost of Lochner with the ghost of comparably infamous and influential case, United States v. Cruikshank …