Legal History Commons^™

Globalization And The Re-Establishment Of Women's Land Rights In Nigeria: The Role Of Legal History, Adetoun Ilumoka

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Much has been written on women's limited legal rights to land in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, which is often attributed to custom and customary law. Persisting biases against women in legal regimes governing land ownership, allocation and use, result in a situation in which women, in all age groups, are vulnerable to dispossession and to abuse by male relatives in increasingly patriarchal family and community governance structures.

This paper raises questions about the genesis of ideas about women's rights to land in Nigeria today. It is an analysis of two court cases from South Western Nigeria in the early …

Puerto Rican Women Nationalist Vs. U.S. Colonialism: An Exploration Of Their Conditions And Struggles In Jail And Court, Margaret Pour

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article examines the legal ramifications experienced by several women members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party as a result of their militant opposition to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. These women participated in the 1950 uprising in Puerto Rico or, in the case of Lolita Lebrón, the Nationalist Party's 1954 attack on the U.S. Congress. The article explores their sentences and conditions in prison from a gendered perspective. It also suggests that several of the women were tortured while in prison. The article concludes that the women drew strength from their political commitment to Puerto Rican independence and their …

Engendering The History Of Race And International Relations: The Career Of Edith Sampson, 1927–1978, Gwen Jordan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Edith Sampson was one of the leading black women lawyers in Chicago for over fifty years. She was admitted to the bar in 1927 and achieved a number of firsts in her career: the first black woman judge in Illinois, the first African American delegate to the United Nations, and the first African American appointed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sampson was also a pro-democracy, international spokesperson for the U.S. government during the Cold War, a position that earned her scorn from more radical African Americans, contributed to a misinterpretation of her activism, and resulted in her relative obscurity …

The Global "Parliament Of Mothers": History, The Revolutionary Tradition, And International Law In The Pre-War Women's Movement, Susan Hinely

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In spite of recent literature that examines late nineteenth and early twentieth century transnational movements in innovative ways, the largest transnational movement of that period, the women's movement, remains lodged in academic and popular memory as the "suffrage movement," a single-issue campaign waged by privileged Victorian women, a foregone development in the march of electoral progress that ended in victory with postwar enfranchisement. A fresh approach to the suffrage archive reveals instead a far more radical movement than conventional history suggests, one that explicitly linked its cause with both the revolutionary democratic tradition and with anti-colonial activism. Like the non-Western …

Women's Rights, Public Defense, And The Chicago World's Fair, Barbara Babcock

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Women were an important part of the great public meetings held in connection with the Chicago World's Fair. One of these "Congresses," as they were called, was devoted to the achievements of nineteenth century women, and brought together suffragists, club women, society ladies, and activists of all stripes from around the world. The Congress of Jurisprudence and Law Reform featured two American women lawyers holding their own on a platform with leading professors, judges and advocates. With an extraordinary speech based largely on her own experience in the courts, Clara Foltz launched the public defender movement.

Women Lawyers And Women's Legal Equality: Reflections On Women Lawyers At The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition In Chicago, Mary Jane Mossman

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In Chicago in 1893, for the first time in history, women lawyers were invited to participate with male lawyers and judges at the Congress on Jurisprudence and Law Reform, one of a number of Congresses organized in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. By the 1890s, women lawyers had achieved considerable success for at least two decades in gaining admission to state bars in the United States, and their success provided important precedents for women who wished to become lawyers in other parts of the world. Yet, as Nancy Cott explained, although women's admission to the professions had been seen …

The Possibility Of Compromise: Antiabortion Moderates After Roe V. Wade, 1973–1980, Mary Ziegler

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Leading studies argue that Roe itself radicalized debate and marginalized antiabortion moderates, either by issuing a sweeping decision before adequate public support had developed or by framing the opinion in terms of moral absolutes. The polarization narrative on which leading studies rely obscures important actors and arguments that defined the antiabortion movement of the 1970s. First, contrary to what the polarization narrative suggests, self-identified moderates played a significant role in the mainstream antiabortion movement, shaping policies on issues like the treatment of unwed mothers or the Equal Rights Amendment. Working in organizations like Feminists for Life (FFL) or American Citizens …

Adultery By Doctor: Artificial Insemination, 1890–1945, Kara W. Swanson

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In 1945, American judges decided the first court cases involving assisted conception. The challenges posed by assisted reproductive technologies to law and society made national news then, and have continued to do so into the twenty-first century. This article considers the first technique of assisted conception, artificial insemination, from the late nineteenth century to 1945, the period in which doctors and their patients worked to transform it from a curiosity into an accepted medical technique, a transformation that also changed a largely clandestine medical practice into one of the most pressing medicolegal problems of the mid-twentieth century. Doctors and lawyers …

Portia's Deal, Karen M. Tani

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The New Deal, one of the greatest expansions of government in U.S. history, was a "lawyers' deal": it relied heavily on lawyers' skills and reflected lawyers' values. Was it exclusively a "male lawyers' deal"? This Essay argues that the New Deal offered important opportunities to women lawyers at a time when they were just beginning to graduate from law school in significant numbers. Agencies associated with social welfare policy, a traditionally "maternalist" enterprise, seem to have been particularly hospitable. Through these agencies, women lawyers helped to administer, interpret, and create the law of a new era. Using government records and …

Women And Poisons In 17th Century France, Benedetta Faedi Duramy

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article examines the involvement of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Catherine La Voisin, and the Marquise de Montespan, in the scandal "Affair of the Poisons," during the seventeenth century in France. Through such investigation, this article interrogates the discourse surrounding gender and crime in history, deepening the understanding of women's motivation to commit murder and the strategies they adopted. Moreover, the article examines how the legal system addressed women's crime, differentiated responses based on their class and social rank, and held women accountable for poisoning the country, thus failing to acknowledge the actual shortcomings of the French monarchy, the decline …

Yick Wo At 125: Four Simple Lessons For The Contemporary Supreme Court, Marie A. Failinger

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The 125th anniversary of Yick Wo v. Hopkins is an important opportunity to recognize the pervasive role of law in oppressive treatment of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also a good opportunity for the Supreme Court to reflect on four important lessons gleaned from Yick Wo. First, the Court should never lend justification to the evil of class discrimination, even if it has to decline to rule in a case. Second, where there is persistent discrimination against a minority group, the Court must be similarly persistent in fighting it. Third, the Court needs to take …

The Decline Of Oral Argument In The Federal Courts Of Appeals: A Modest Proposal For Reform, David R. Cleveland, Steven Wisotsky

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

A Short History Of "Intellectual Property" In Relation To Copyright, Justin Hughes

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

How The Movies Became Speech, Samantha Barbas

Journal Articles

In its 1915 decision in Mutual Film v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court held that motion pictures were, as a medium, unprotected by freedom of speech and press because they were mere “entertainment” and “spectacles” with a “capacity for evil.” Mutual legitimated an extensive regime of film censorship that existed until the 1950s. It was not until 1952, in Burstyn v. Wilson, that the Court declared motion pictures to be, like the traditional press, an important medium for the communication of ideas protected by the First Amendment. By the middle of the next decade, film censorship in the …

The Chill Of A Wintry Light? Borough Of Duryea V. Guarnieri And The Right Of Petition In Public Employment, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This article analyzes the Supreme Court’s decision in Borough of Duryea v. Guarnieri, which held that in order for a petition, grievance or litigation by a public employee to be protected against retaliation under the Petition Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution it must satisfy the public concern test applicable in retaliation cases alleging a violation of the Speech Clause. The decision was issued in the midst of a renewed contemporary debate over public sector collective bargaining and other statutory rights in public employment. The article analyzes the decision in the context of American public sector …

Restoring Restitution To The Canon, Douglas Laycock

Michigan Law Review

The Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment brings clarity and light to an area of law long shrouded in fogs that linger from an earlier era of the legal system. It makes an important body of law once again accessible to lawyers and judges. This new Restatement should be on every litigator's bookshelf, and a broad set of transactional lawyers and legal academics would also do well to become familiar with it. Credit for this Restatement goes to its Reporter, Professor Andrew Kull. Of course his work benefited from the elaborate processes of the American Law Institute, with every …

Regulating By Repute, David Zaring

Michigan Law Review

Is regulation a hopeless cause? Many thoughtful observers spend a lot of time enumerating all of the reasons why it is doomed to fail. The entire field of public choice, with impeccable logic, posits the likely corruption of every bureaucrat. And if corruption cannot explain the failure of regulation, the atrophy that comes from lack of competition-there is just one government, after all, and it does not have a profit motive-may be just as rich a vein to mine. It could also be that the legal system itself, with its myriad complexities, checks, and procedural requirements, may ossify to the …

Facades Of Justice, Norman W. Spaulding

Michigan Law Review

Representing Justice is a book of encyclopedic proportions on the iconography of justice and the organization of space in which adjudication occurs. Professors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis have gathered a provocative array of images, ranging from the scales of the Babylonian god Shamash-"judge of heaven and earth"-on a 4,200-year-old seal (pp. 18- 19 & fig. 23), and a 600-year-old painting of Saint Michael weighing the souls at the Last Judgment with sword and scales in hand (p. 23 fig. 25) to the tiny Cook County Courthouse in Grand Marais, Minnesota, 110 miles north of Duluth (p. 372 fig. 226), …

Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke

Michigan Law Review

Some intellectual concepts once central to America's constitutional discourse are, for better and worse, no longer part of our political language. These concepts may be so alien to us that they would remain invisible without carefully reexamining the past to challenge the received narratives of America's constitutional development. Should constitutional theorists undertake this kind of historical reexamination? If so, to what extent should they be willing to stray from the disciplinary norms that govern intellectual history? And what normative aims can they reasonably expect to achieve by exploring ideas in our past that are no longer reflected in the Constitution's …

Race And Constitutional Law Casebooks: Recognizing The Proslavery Constitution, Juan F. Perea

Michigan Law Review

Federalist No. 54 shows that part of Madison's public defense of the Constitution included the defense of some of its proslavery provisions. Madison and his reading public were well aware that aspects of the Constitution protected slavery. These aspects of the Constitution were publicly debated in the press and in state ratification conventions. Just as the Constitution's protections for slavery were debated at the time of its framing and ratification, the relationship between slavery and the Constitution remains a subject of debate. Historians continue to debate the centrality of slavery to the Constitution. The majority position among historians today appears …