Legal History Commons^™

Theaters Of Pardoning: Tragicomedy And The Gunpowder Plot, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the dramatic character of King James I’s reaction to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot - the first act of terrorism in the West - and his attempts both to inscribe the unprecedented crime within the conventional structure of revenge tragedy and to interpret the event according to a model of tragicomedy indebted to John of Patmos' apocalyptic Revelation. On account of applying these cultural and religious paradigms, the King suggested that Parliament be entrusted with judging the conspirators, thus imaginatively displacing his sovereignty onto it.

Playing With Fire, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Getting Right With The Great Chief Justice, R. Kent Newmyer

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Another Place Beyond Here: The Death Penalty Moratorium In The United States, Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Terrorism And The Bill Of Rights, Rodney A. Smolla

Law Faculty Publications

This year is the Tenth Anniversary of the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, and the Journal is very fortunate and honored to have Professor Rodney Smolla publish an article in this year's volume. Professor Smolla played an integral role in the founding and organizing of not only the Journal, but also the Institute of Bill of Rights Law at William & Mary Law School. The J oumal extends its most appreciative thanks to Professor Smolla for all his help.

In this Article, Professor Smolla examines the right to free speech in the context of Black v. …

Myth, Reality Past And Present, And Judicial Elections, Roy A. Schotland

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why do we have judicial elections? A democracy without elections for the legislature and executive (or, in parliamentary systems, for the executive as the leadership of the elected legislators), would be simply inconceivable. But no one would deny that eleven of our states, or many other nations, are democracies even though they do not elect judges. It might follow from that irrefutable, fundamental difference between elections for judges and for other offices, that judicial elections should not-or more to the point, need not-be conducted the same as other elections. Before we soar into debate, let us lay a foundation with …

The Discretionary Power Of "Public" Prosecutors In Historical Perspective, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Norms urging prosecutors to seek justice by playing a quasi-judicial role and striving for fairness to defendants are often assumed to have deep historical roots. Yet, in fact, such a conception of the prosecutor's role is relatively new. Based on archival research on the papers of the New York County District Attorney's Office, "The Discretionary Power of 'Public' Prosecutors in Historical Perspective" explores the meaning of the word "public" as it applied to prosecutors in the nineteenth century. This article shows that, in the early days of public prosecution, district attorneys were expected to maximize convictions and leave defendants' rights …

Western Water: The Ethical And Spiritual Questions, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Trial Of Galileo, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 - the same year that Shakespeare was born and Michelangelo died. From an early age, Galileo showed his scientific skills. At age nineteen, he discovered the isochronism of the pendulum. By age twenty-two, he had invented the hydrostatic balance. By age twenty-five, Galileo assumed his first lectureship, at the University of Pisa. Within a few more years, Galileo earned a reputation throughout Europe as a scientist and superb lecturer. Eventually, he would be recognized as the father of experimental physics. Galileo's motto might have been follow knowledge wherever it leads us. In the 1633 …

The Trial Of Jesus: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

Providing an account of the trial of Jesus presents challenges unlike that for any of the other trials on the Famous Trials Website. First, there is the challenge of determining what actually happened nearly 2,000 years ago before the Sanhedrin and the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate. The task is daunting because almost our entire understanding of events comes from five divergent accounts, each of which was written by a Christian (who did not witness the final days of Jesus directly) for a distinct audience from fifteen (at least) to seventy years after the trial. Second, there is the …

Tradition, Principle And Self-Sovereignty: Competing Conceptions Of Liberty In The United States Constitution, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The “liberty” protected by the United States Constitution has been variously interpreted as the “liberty” of thinking persons to speak, worship and associate with others, unimpeded by onerous state law; the liberty of consumers and producers to make individual market choices, including the choice to sell one’s labour at any price one sees fit, free of redistributive or paternalistic legislation that might restrict it; and the liberty of all of us in the domestic sphere to make choices regarding reproductive and family life, free of state law that might restrict it on grounds relating to public morals. Although the United …

Those Who Remember The Past May Not Be Condemned To Repeat It, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

In The Hague, Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for crimes committed in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia; in Arusha, Tanzania, Jean Paul Akayasu, a Rwandan bourgmestre, was convicted of genocide; in London, Augusto Pinochet was detained and adjudged amenable to an arrest warrant issued by a Spanish magistrate for acts of torture carried out in Chile; in Belgium, a Hutu Roman Catholic former mother superior was convicted of complicity in the Rwandan genocide; and in Rome a treaty was signed commencing the process that will result in the creation of the International Criminal Court ("ICC"). All these events underscore the startling …

The Contested Right To Vote, Richard Briffault

Michigan Law Review

For those who believe the United States is a representative democracy with a government elected by the people, the events of late 2000 must have been more than a little disconcerting. In the election for our most important public office - our only truly national office - the candidate who received the most popular votes was declared the loser while his second place opponent, who had received some 540,000 fewer votes, was the winner. This result turned on the outcome in Florida, where approximately 150,000 ballots cast were found not to contain valid votes. Further, due to flaws in ballot …

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: An Historical Analysis Of Copyright Liability, Matt Jackson

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Mr. Dooley And Mr. Gallup: Public Opinion And Constitutional Change In The 1930s, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

Scholars interested in the development of political and constitutional culture during the 1930s sometimes draw inferences about popular preferences on various issues of social and economic policy from the results of presidential and congressional elections. A review of contemporary public opinion polls taken by George Gallup for the American Institute of Public Opinion and by Elmo Roper for the Fortune Magazine survey offers a more granular understanding of popular views on the public policy issues of the day. This article canvasses all of the public opinion polls taken by Gallup and Roper between 1935, when they began publishing their results, …

The Promise Of A Post-Genocide Constitution: Healing Rwandan Spirit Injuries, Adrien Katherine Wing, Mark Richard Johnson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article hopes to extend Critical Race Theory's social construction of race theory by emphasizing ethnicity as well as race. The Rwandans are undoubtedly within the so-called "Black race." Historically, they have also been socially constructed as consisting of different races and ethnicities, even though many scholars and Rwandans do not see ethnic, much less racial, distinctions. Some of these Rwandans who did see such differences participated in the genocide.

Innovating Copyright, Lawrence Lessig

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Working people and disfavored groups were central concerns of Frank Murphy, the last Michigan Law School graduate to sit on the United States Supreme Court. In the pages of this Review, just over a half century ago, Archibald Cox wrote of him: "It was natural ...th at his judicial work should be most significant in these two fields [labor law and civil rights] and especially in the areas where they coalesce."' In this Essay, after a brief overview of Murphy the man, his days at the University of Michigan, and his career prior to the Court appointment, I shall review …

Reverberations From The Collision Of Tort And Warranty (Products Liability Law Symposium In Memory Of Professor Gary T. Schwartz), James J. White

Articles

In his famous Stanford Law Review article, When Worlds Collide,' Professor Marc Franklin foretold the troubles for American law in the impending collision of the tort of strict liability with the warranty of merchantability.2 We daily suffer the reverberations from that collision as courts struggle with the proper application of strict tort liability and breach of warranty in products liability cases. Lawyers who have not studied Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code (U.C.C.) are surprised to learn that virtually every buyer who has a strict tort claim for an injury caused by a defective product also has a potential …

A Midrash On Rabbi Shaffer And Rabbi Trollope, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thomas Shaffer is the most unusual, and in many ways the most interesting, contemporary writer on American legal ethics. A lawyer impatient with legalisms and hostile to rights-talk, a moral philosopher who despises moral philosophy, a Christian theologian who refers more often to the rabbis than to the Church Fathers, a former law school dean who is convinced that law schools have failed their students by teaching too much law and too little literature, a traditionalist who' wholeheartedly embraces feminism, an apologist for the conservative nineteenth-century gentleman who describes his own politics as "left of center," Shaffer is a complex …

Joining Forces: The Role Of Collaboration In The Development Of Legal Thought, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For every reason to believe that collaboration has been influential... there is a countervailing reason to believe that it has played a minor role in the evolution of legal thought. It may be easy to bring to mind a handful of prominent collaborations, but most law review articles seem to be written by one author (notwithstanding their lengthy acknowledgment footnotes, suggesting that even single-author works are shaped by the insights and input of multiple scholars). And while it is true that legal scholars often collaborate on their practically oriented works, scholarly articles might not be well suited to collaboration.

Comparing The Two Legal Realisms—American And Scandinavian, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Past, Present, And Future Of Empirical Legal Scholarship: Judicial Decision Making And The New Empiricism, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Over the last century, empirical legal scholarship has joined the ranks of the mainstream within the legal academy. In this article, Professor Heise traces the history of legal empiricism and discusses its growing role within the legal academy. First, the article traces legal empiricism through the twentieth century from the legal empiricism movement of the early twentieth century, to post-World War II efforts to revive legal empiricism, including the Chicago Jury Project and large-scale foundational support for empirical legal research, through current support for legal empirical research from both the law schools and other research centers. The article then discusses …

Celebrating The 200th Anniversary Of The Federal Courts Of The District Of Columbia, Susan Low Bloch

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

February 27, 2001 marked the 200th anniversary of the Federal Courts of the District of Columbia, the courts we know today as the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The history of these courts is interesting, albeit somewhat confusing; their names changed no fewer than six times since their creation. Indeed, from 1863 until 1893, the two courts were joined and called the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Because of their location in the nation's capital and their unusual dual jurisdiction as both …

Stakeholder Protection In Germany And Japan, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

This Essay considers the stakeholder debate in the context of the German and Japanese legal systems. Although, nominally, corporations in those countries must operate in the interests of shareholders, in fact nonshareholder constituencies have considerable influence on corporate decision makers. Of equal importance, weak securities markets and ineffective or nonexistent legal protections for shareholders are also important factors in strengthening the position of nonshareholder constituencies and freeing directors to consider their interests. Thus, the stakeholder debate is more of an issue in the United States and Britain, where more shareholder-centic models flourish.

The Paradox Of Auxiliary Rights: The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination And The Right To Keep And Bear Arms, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

According to Locke's theory of the social contract, which was widely accepted by the Founders, political authority is limited by those natural moral rights that individuals reserve against the government. In this Article, I argue that Locke's theory generates paradoxical conclusions concerning the government's authority over civil disobedients, that is, people who resist the government because they believe it is violating reserved moral rights. If the government lacks the authority to compel the civil disobedient to abide by its laws, the result is anarchism: The limits on governmental authority are whatever each individual says they are. If the government has …

Federal Acknowledgement Of Indian Tribes: Current Bia Interpretations Of The Federal Criteria For Acknowledgement With Respect To Several Northwest Tribes, Rosemary Sweeney

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Seekin’ The Cause: Social Justice Movements And Latcrit Community, Steven W. Bender, Keith Aoki

Faculty Articles

LatCrit VII, held May 2-5, 2002, in Portland, Oregon, adopted the theme Coalitional Theory and Praxis: Social Justice Movements and LatCrit Community. The conference's opening roundtable set an activist tone by centering within LatCrit discourse several progressive movements for sociopolitical transformation existing in academia and beyond. This article embraces the conference theme as an opportunity to examine and compare the LatCrit scholarly movement with those beyond academia, particularly current and past sociopolitical movements originating in Latina/o communities.

After Intersectionality, Robert S. Chang, Jerome Culp

Faculty Articles

This essay is part of a symposium that looks at what Peter Kwan has described as post-intersectionality theory. It responds to the principal article in the symposium by Nancy Ehrenreich, Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support Between Subordinating Systems. While the authors applaud the effort by Ehrenreich to advance identity theory to account for multiple oppression, they suggest that Ehrenreich and other post-intersectionality scholars work to make these theories speak more directly to legal doctrine and legal actors.

When Interests Diverge, Robert S. Chang, Peter Kwan

Michigan Law Review

In her recent book Cold War Civil Rights, Professor Mary L. Dudziak, sets forth "to explore the impact of Cold War foreign affairs on U.S. civil rights reform" (p. 14). Tracing "the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy" (p. 17), she draws "together Cold War history and civil rights history" (pp. 14-15), two areas that are usually treated as distinct subjects of inquiry. In mixing the two together, she shows that "the borders of U.S. history are not easily maintained." Perhaps it is fitting that the field …