Legal History Commons^™

Remarks, Andrea Dennis

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Over the course of one week, the Michigan Journal of Law Reform presented its annual Symposium, this year titled Reimagining Police Surveillance: Protecting Activism and Ending Technologies of Oppression. During this week, the Journal explored complicated questions surrounding the expansion of police surveillance technologies, including how police and federal agencies utilize their extensive resources to identify and surveil public protest, the ways in which technology employed by police is often flawed and disparately impacts people of color, and potential reforms of police surveillance technology. Before delving into these complicated questions, I presented remarks on the history of police surveillance …

Enduring Exclusion, Daiquiri J. Steele

Michigan Law Review

Economic justice has long been a part of the civil rights agenda, and minimum labor standards statutes play a crucial role in eradicating the exploitation and subordination of historically marginalized workers. While statutes establishing labor standards are characterized as “universal,” their effect has been anything but universal. Racial and ethnic minorities, women, and those at the intersection experience disproportionate violations of labor standards laws concerning minimum wage, overtime, and occupational safety and health. Through legislative maneuvering dating back to the New Deal era, Congress carved out many female workers and workers of color from core protections of minimum labor standards …

Vesting, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." The Executive Vesting Clause is one of three originalist pillars for the unitary executive theory, the idea that the President possesses executive powers like removal without congressional limitations (that is, the powers are indefeasible). An underlying assumption is that "vest" connotes a formalist approach to separation of powers rather than a more functional system of Madisonian checks and balances. Assumptions about "vesting" for official powers are likely the result of semantic drift from property rights and ahistoric projections back from the later Marshall Court doctrine …

Unveiling Macau Gaming Inspectors: Functions, Conditions And Operations, Changbin Wang, Hong-Wai Ho

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Macau has seen the rapid development of casinos in the past two decades. Long-established regulatory control of the city’s gaming industry ensures compliance with the applicable regulations and standards. Among other regulators and staff, gaming inspectors are responsible for the first-line supervision of gaming operations across Macau casinos. This paper is the first attempt to review the casino regulatory inspection in Macau with a particular focus on the functions and practices of gaming inspectors stationed at casinos. Existing internal and external factors affecting the functions of gaming inspectors are identified and discussed in this paper. The authors of this paper …

The Dark Side Of Due Process: Part I, A Hard Look At Penumbral Rights And Cost/Benefit Balancing Tests, Joshua J. Schroeder

St. Mary's Law Journal

Due process is the fountainhead of legitimate government coercion. When an individual’s rights of life, liberty, or property are at stake, the government is meant to apply due process of the law or suffer reversal of its intrusions as a plain trespass. However, such reversals are merely theoretical, premised upon the willingness of federal judges to interpose their power for the protection of ordinary individuals.

The willingness of federal jurists to check the other branches of government for individual rights is transient at best. They do not usually check the global, dragnet United States surveillance programs that clearly violate the …

Revisiting The History Of The Independent State Legislature Doctrine, Hayward H. Smith

St. Mary's Law Journal

In hopes of legitimizing the independent state legislature doctrine, its proponents have recently made two claims with respect to history, which this Article refers to as the Substance/Procedure Thesis and the Prevailing View Thesis. The former admits that the original understanding was that state “legislatures” promulgating election law pursuant to the Elector Appointment and Elections Clauses are required to comply with state constitutionally-mandated “procedural” lawmaking requirements (such as a potential gubernatorial veto), but asserts that they were otherwise understood to be independent of “substantive” state constitutional restraints. The latter asserts that the independent state legislature doctrine was the “prevailing view” …

Disposable Immigrants: The Reality Of Sexual Assault In Immigration Detention Centers, Valerie Gisel Zarate

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming.

The Legacy Of Johnson V. Darr: The 1925 Decision Of The All-Woman Texas Supreme Court, Jeffrey D. Dunn

St. Mary's Law Journal

The Texas Supreme Court case of Johnson v. Darr,[1] the first case decided in any state by an all-woman appellate court, was a singular event in American legal history. On January 9, 1925, three women lawyers appointed by Texas Governor Pat Neff met at the state capitol in Austin to issue rulings solely on one case involving conflicting claims to several residential properties in El Paso. The special court was appointed because the three elected justices recused themselves over a conflict of interest involving one of the litigants, a popular fraternal organization called Woodmen of the World. The special …

Common Law With Uncommon Regulations: The Influence Of Legal Tradition On Campaign Finance Regimes, Sky Berry-Weiss

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Americans spent $11.4 billion in their last federal election cycle but collectively, the United Kingdom and Canada only spent a little over $550 million in their last general elections. These three states have similarities in democratic governance, economic legacy, and common law legal system grouping but how did they become so separated in campaign finance regulations? Prior research in the field of international comparative campaign finance law is limited and primarily focuses on using political theories to describe the movement of laws toward deregulation or regulation. This research seeks to find what influences the creation, preservation, and deregulation of campaign …

The Search For Neutrality: A Discourse Analysis Of Language Use In Higher Education Title Ix Sexual Misconduct Policies, Cristin Reynolds

Dissertations

Title IX, a federal law passed in 1972, was designed to ensure that equal access to any educational environment receiving federal assistance (20 U.S.C. § 1681). Title IX forced institutions of higher education (IHE) to address the pervasive nature of sex discrimination within their educational environments, prevent the recurrence of sex discrimination, and remedy any effects of sex discrimination. To do this IHEs developed Title IX sexual misconduct policies. These policies are required by federal law to be impartial, neutral, and equitable to all parties accessing or participating in the resolution process addressing sexual misconduct.

The purpose of this study …

The Role Of Non-Governmental Organizations (Ngos) In Improving Human Rights In Iraq, Naser A. Yahya

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Iraq has had a long history of human rights violations since its inception as a modern state in 1921. This is true especially under the personalistic dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Under his regime, the Iraqi people suffered a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including political imprisonment, torture, and summary and arbitrary executions. This regime used a variety of mechanisms to squelch political dissent, including house-to-house searches; arbitrary arrests, often in large numbers; surveillance; harassment and questioning of family members; detention of targeted individuals, such as those returning to Iraq pursuant to amnesties, at unknown locations; …

The Meaning And Malleableness Of Liberty From 1897-1945, Quentin E. Smith

The Purdue Historian

This paper covers how the substance and meaning of liberty changed during the ending years of the Gilded Age (1870-1900) through the beginning ages of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). Economic liberty took shape in the cases Allegeyer v. Louisiana (1897) and Lochner v. New York (1905). Civil liberties would take several more years to come into the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. The case Gitlow v. New York (1925) began the establishment of incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states, otherwise known as our fundamental liberties (note: The Supreme Court used selective incorporation, however). In the case U.S. v. …

The Arkansas Ll.M. Program: Forty Years Of Leadership, Susan A. Schneider

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The University of Arkansas School of Law has been a leader in agricultural law education for over forty years through its innovative LL.M. Program in Agricultural and Food Law. This essay memorializes the history of this signature Program and charts its progress through the decades as agricultural law issues evolved and the discipline expanded.

Redressing The Past To Repair The Present: The Role Of Property Law In Creating And Exacerbating Racial Disparities In Wealth And Poverty In Nova Scotia, Melissa Marsman

LLM Theses

For over 200 years African Nova Scotians have been fighting to confirm legal title to the land on which their ancestors were settled. In 2020, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court remarked “the lack of clear title and the segregated nature of their land triggered a cycle of poverty for black families that persisted for generations.” Nova Scotia has a long history of obscure land titles; however, the ensuing cycle of poverty appears to have disproportionately impacted African Nova Scotians. This thesis reframes the African Nova Scotian land titles discourse into a broader understanding about systemic anti-Black racism and White supremacist …

The Skin, The Law, And Women In The United States From The 1600s To The 1960s, Hannah Knight

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

For a country that has been built on the legacy of freedom and the idea of individual rights, the United States has a history of legalizing oppressive policies and denying rights and freedom based on the color of one’s skin. As scholars take on the issue of Colorism within the American society, this thesis works to examine the origins of white supremacy and its legalization through the institutions of American enslavement and the era of Jim Crow. First examining the portrayal of those of African descent and its connection to white supremacy during the period of enslavement, this thesis relies …

The Future Of The Allen Charge In The New Millennium, Caleb Epperson

Arkansas Law Review

"In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same." Following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, social and political movements grew rapidly nationwide to combat the prevalence of police brutality against African-American communities. The impact of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement has been observed in both cities across the United States and in related movements internationally. This movement highlights the necessity for police reform and catalyzes the public’s growing call for greater criminal justice reform. To achieve the goals …

Arkansas Law Review's 75th Anniversary Remarks, Steve Caple, Erron Smith

Arkansas Law Review

It is an exciting time for the Arkansas Law Review, the School of Law, and the University of Arkansas. The journal is celebrating its 75th anniversary, the law school is approaching its 100th year of existence, and the university recently celebrated its 150th birthday.

Identity Documents For Transgender Texans: A Proposal For A Uniform System For Correcting Gender Markers In Texas, Lydia R. Harris

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Texas’s lack of a codified gender correction process is unjust, illegal, and against public policy. This comment highlights the injustice faced by transgender Texans without gender concordant identity documents. These injustices include discrimination based on gender stereotypes, violation of the transgender individual’s right to privacy, and violations of public policy. This comment explores possible solutions to the injustices faced by transgender Texans due to the lack of a codified uniform way to correct gender markers in Texas modeled on other jurisdictions’ approaches to this problem.

First, this comment traces the history of the recognition of transgender people and transgender rights …

Sexual Profiling & Blaqueer Furtivity: Blaqueers On The Run, T. Anansi Wilson

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

This article has taken some time to recollect. I have been struggling to find the grammar to communicate a phenomenon that is both central to BlaQueer life and beyond BlaQueer living. This difficulty, the silences, the gaps, the nonsensical and agrammatical nature of this phenomena—that of BlaQueer furtivity, the strict scrutiny of Black life and sexual profiling—are central features not only of this project but of the legal, extralegal and social logics and powers that mark, make and remake BlaQueer folks as always, already furtive, subject to strict scrutiny and necessarily sexual profiling. I have been struggling with whether to …

The Declaration Of Independence, Constitution, And Slavery, Johnny B. Davis

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

The paper address the nature of the principles of the Declaration and the Declaration's relationship to the Constitution and how these related to slavery. The argument is that the Declaration did stand for universal equality of the individual before God and the law and therefore its principles condemned slavery. The Constitution did not embrace slavery even though it failed to ban slavery but did set the foundation for the end of slavery.