Legal History Commons^™

Legal Epistemologies, Howard Schweber

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Concept Of The State In American History, William J. Novak

Book Chapters

Debates about the state rage in contemporary America. On the right, libertarian and tea party rhetoric fulminates about shrinking the state or shutting down the government, frequently in hyperbolic terms like the Americans for Tax Reform notion of" drowning it in a bathtub." On the left, concern about the fate of the welfare state and an ever-expanding warfare and penal state produces equally impassioned retorts. Discussion of the American state-its nature, its size, and its uncertain future-dominates the political landscape as perhaps never before.

Creating Kairos At The Supreme Court: Shelby County, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, And The Judicial Construction Of Right Moments, Linda L. Berger

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Canadian Constitutional Identities, Eric M. Adams

Dalhousie Law Journal

Constitutions are stories nations tell about themselves. Despite the famous declaration in the Constitution Act, 1867 that the "Provinces ofCanada...Desire...a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom," most of Canada's constitutional history can be understood as the search for a distinctly Canadian constitutional identity Canadians have always looked to their constitutional instruments to both reflect and produce a particular vision of the nation and its citizens. This article focuses on the search for Canada s constitutional identity during its first century as a nation, from Confederation until the 1960s. Drawing on a varied array of sources and …

The Ladies' Health Protective Association: Lay Lawyers And Urban Cause Lawyering, Felice Batlan

Akron Law Review

By examining the LHPA, this Article seeks, however modestly, to extend the Hurstian project. The Article argues that the LHPA, composed of a group of middle-class women interacting with their environment, neighbors, the courts, private businesses, and city and state officials, on a deeply local and quotidian basis, had a significant impact in shaping a multitude of New York City laws and law had a profound affect in creating and molding the work and identity of the organization.

Symposium: Union And States' Rights: Secession, 150 Years After Sumter, Preface, Neil H. Cogan

Akron Law Review

A preface to the four papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the Section on Legal History, American Association of Law Schools, held on January 7, 2011, in San Francisco.

Civil And Common Law: A Historical Analysis Of Colonial And Postcolonial Canada, Patrick S. Stroud

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Legal historians divide European law into two principal families: common law (British law) and civil law (continental European law). Common law judges favor cases; courts “discover” law on a case-by-case basis and those cases make precedents for future ruling. Civil law courts favor codes; courts compare cases to existing laws and those laws control judges’ rulings. The two rarely interact, save one prominent example: Canada. British common law supposedly superseded French legal traditions in colonial Canada. But is history so binary? Did British common law truly “conquer” French civil law? Through analysis of Canadian legal history, this article demonstrates how …

The Original Meaning Of "God": Using The Language Of The Framing Generation To Create A Coherent Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s attempt to create a standard for evaluating whether the Establishment Clause is violated by religious governmental speech, such as the public display of the Ten Commandments or the Pledge of Allegiance, is a total failure. The Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been termed “convoluted,” “a muddled mess,” and “a polite lie.” Unwilling to either allow all governmental religious speech or ban it entirely, the Court is in need of a coherent standard for distinguishing the permissible from the unconstitutional. Thus far, no Justice has offered such a standard.

A careful reading of the history of the framing …

Progressive Legal Thought, Herbert Hovenkamp

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Natural Resources Law: Private Rights And The Public Interest, Eric Freyfogle, Michael Blumm, Blake Hudson

Contributions to Books

This casebook offers a view of natural resources law rich in history, yet exposing students to the complexities of practicing natural resources law in the 21st century. Given that the focus of most Natural Resources Law casebooks is public lands and public law (often at the federal level), this casebook is unique in its primary focus on natural resource conflicts on private lands and its significant focus on private law (though public law is also a focus). While we include chapters on federal public lands and areas of federal primacy like wetlands regulation and endangered species protection, our focus is …

The Role Of Political And Social Movements On Women’S Entry Into The Legal Profession In Maryland (1902-1918), Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

The rise of women in the legal profession in Maryland was shaped by a wide range of factors, including national, state, and local political and social movements. As one scholar has noted, "[W] omen's lives are complex and .. . region, period, personality, and circumstance crucially influence what a subject is able to make of herself."' In this chapter, I explore how those circumstances-- personal and political-influenced the first group of eight women admitted to the Maryland Bar between 1902 and 1920. These women-Etta Maddox, Anna Grace Kennedy, Emilie Doetsch, Marie Elizabeth Kirk Coles, Mary Virginia Meushaw, Helen F. Hill, …

Contract Law And Fundamental Legal Conceptions: An Application Of Hohfeldian Terminology To Contract Doctrine, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Representing Interdisciplinarity, Kunal Parker

Articles

No abstract provided.

A War For Liberty: On The Law Of Conscientious Objection, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

One common understanding of the Second World War is that it was a contest between liberty and tyranny. For many at the time – and for still more today – ‘liberty’ meant the rule of law: government constrained by principle, procedure, and most of all, individual rights. For those states that claimed to represent this rule-of-law tradition, total war presented enormous challenges, even outright contradictions. How would these states manage to square the governmental imperatives of military emergency with the legal protections and procedures essential to preserving the ancient ‘liberty of the subject’? This question could be and was asked …

John Merefield's Common Pleas Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

John Merefield of Crewkerne, Somerset, was admitted to the Inner Temple on 14 February 1612, and he was called to the bar on 15 October 1620. He gave readings in 1621 and 1641; on 4 November 1638, he was called to the bench. Merefield was created a serjeant in October 1660, and he died in October 1666.

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 …

The Struggle For Administrative Legitimacy, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly forty years ago, Professor James 0. Freedman described the American administrative state as haunted by a "recurrent sense of crisis." "Each generation has tended to define the crisis in its own terms," and "each generation has fashioned solutions responsive to the problems it has perceived." Yet "a strong and persisting challenge to the basic legitimacy of the administrative process" always returns, in a new guise, to trouble the next generation. On this account, the American people remain perennially unconvinced that administrative decisionmaking is "appropriate, proper, and just," entitled to respect and obedience "by virtue of who made the decision" …

Structuralist Legal Histories, Justin Deystone

Publications

This is a contribution to a symposium titled "Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought." The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography.

Fourteen Cases From Herbert Jacob's Queen's Bench Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

Herbert Jacob was admitted to the Inner Temple on 3 June 1692, called to the bar on 28 June 1699, and called to the bench of the Inner Temple on 22 November 1721. He died in 1725.

Harvard Law School MS. 4081 [formerly MS. 2136] is a collection of Queen's Bench reports dating from 1702 to 1706. This manuscript consists of two books, which are attributed to Herbert Jacob, a barrister of the Inner Temple. The cases in volume one and volume two, ff. 1-71v, are the same reports as 2 Lord Raymond 755-1252, 92 E.R. 4-325. Volume two, ff. …

Thomas Bold's Chancery Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

Thomas Bold was born in 1695, the son of William Bold of St. Bride's Parish, London. He entered Westminster School in 1708 and Christ Church, Oxford, on 23 June 1713. Bold received his B.A. in 1718 and an M.A. in 1721. He was admitted as a law student at the Middle Temple on 15 June 1711 and called to the bar on 31 May 1717. He was admitted ad eundem at Lincoln's Inn on 23 November 1717.

Law In Ancient Egyptian Fiction, Russ Versteeg

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

That Elusive Consensus: The Historiographic Significance Of William E. Nelson's Works On Judicial Review, Mark Mcgarvie

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This essay provides a historiographical context for Nelson’s work on judicial review. It argues that Nelson’s integration of intellectual and legal history not only rebutted the instrumentalist historiography that prevailed when he undertook his work on Marshall and judicial review, but also fostered an appreciation of the need to place legal actors in the intellectual context in which they acted. Highlighting the influence of Bernard Bailyn’s pathfinding work on popular sovereignty upon Nelson’s development of his consensus theory, the essay contends that Nelson’s work changed the course of academic readings of Marshall’s jurisprudence to be consistent with a broader acceptance …

Rejecting The Legal Process Theory Joker: Bill Nelson's Scholarship On Judge Edward Weinfeld And Justice Byron White, Brad Snyder

Chicago-Kent Law Review

My contribution to this tribute places Bill Nelson’s scholarship about Judge Edward Weinfeld and Justice Byron White within several contexts. It is a personal history of Nelson the law student, law clerk, and young scholar; an intellectual history of legal theory since the 1960s; an examination of the influence of legal theory on Nelson’s scholarship based on his writings about Weinfeld and White; and an example of how legal historians contend with the subject of judicial reputation. Nelson was one of many former Warren Court and Burger Court clerks who joined the professoriate and rejected the legal process theory that …

William E. Nelson's The Roots Of American Bureaucracy And The Resuscitation Of The Early American State, Gautham Rao

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In 1983, William E. Nelson published The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900. Nelson traced the somewhat unlikely emergence and victory of the bureaucratic model in American political and legal thought. This article summarizes the book’s argument and describes its reception. It also seeks to assess the scholarly legacy of The Roots of American Bureaucracy. I argue that the book was ahead of its time because it contradicted prevailing scholarly trends in identifying a significant federal state in nineteenth-century America. In particular, during the past two decades, historians and political scientists have built on Nelson’s insights to develop a consensus about …

Constitutional Exaptation, Political Dysfunction, And The Recess Appointments Clause, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

The so-called Recess Appointments Clause of the Constitution provides that: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”1 As of only a few years ago, I considered this clause so minor and quirky that I included it in a book about ten of the Constitution’s “oddest” clauses, right alongside such clearly weird provisions as the Title of Nobility Clause and the Third Amendment.2 Though I recognized that the Recess Appointments Clause was probably the least odd …

The Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Divide, Christopher W. Schmidt

All Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary legal discourse differentiates “civil rights” from “civil liberties.” The former are generally understood as protections against discriminatory treatment, the latter as freedom from oppressive government authority. This Essay explains how this differentiation arose and considers its consequences.

Although there is a certain inherent logic to the civil rights-civil liberties divide, it in fact is the product of the unique circumstances of a particular moment in history. In the early years of the Cold War, liberal anticommunists sought to distinguish their incipient interest in the cause of racial equality from their belief that national security required limitations on the speech …

Habeas Corpus Proceedings In The High Court Of Parliament In The Reign Of James I, 1603-1625, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Scholarly Works

English parliamentary habeas corpus proceedings have been neglected by scholars. This Article ends that neglect. This Article focuses on the parliamentary habeas corpus proceedings that occurred in the reign of King James. The Article corrects several misunderstandings relating to the history of the writ of habeas corpus in England and to the history of the English Parliament (which in the seventeenth century commonly was referred to as the High Court of Parliament).

Part I of the Article provides answers to questions concerning the historical background and context of the parliamentary habeas corpus proceedings in the High Court of Parliament during …

Beyond Backlash: Legal History, Polarization, And Roe V. Wade, Mary Ziegler

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Still Drowning In Segregation: Limits Of Law In Post-Civil Rights America, Taunya L. Banks

Faculty Scholarship

Approximately 40% of the deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were caused by drowning. Blacks in the New Orleans area accounted for slightly more than one half of all deaths. Some of the drowning deaths were preventable. Too many black Americans do not know how to swim. Up to seventy percent of all black children in the United States have no or low ability to swim. Thus it is unsurprising that black youth between 5 and 19 are more likely to drown than white youths of the same age. The Centers for Disease Control concludes that a major factor …

The Charter Of The Forest: Evolving Human Rights In Nature, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Carta de Foresta, the Charter of the Forest of 1217, is among the first statutes in environmental law of any nation. Crafted to reform patently unjust governance of natural resources in 13th century England, the Charter of the Forest became a framework through which to reconcile competing environmental claims, then and into the future. The Charter confirmed the rights of “free men.” Kings resisted conceding these rights. When confronted with violation of the Charter, barons and royal councils obliged kings repeatedly to reissue the Forest Charter and pledge anew to obey its terms.