On May 11, 1938, two New Orleans policemen entered the Astoria Restaurant, marched to the kitchen, and approached Loyd D. T. Washington, a 41-year-old African American cook. They informed Washington that they would be taking him to the First Precinct station for questioning, although they assured the cook that he need not change his clothes and “should be right back” to the “Negro restaurant,” where he had worked for 3 years. Immediately after arriving at the station house, police officers “surrounded” Washington, showed him a photograph of a man, and announced that he had killed a white man in Yazoo City, Mississippi, 20 years earlier. When Washington insisted that he did not know the man in the photograph, that he had never been to (or even heard of) Yazoo City, and that he had been in the army at the time of the murder, the law enforcers confined him in a cell, although they had no warrant for his arrest and did not charge him with any crime. The following day, a detective brought him to the “show-up room” in the precinct house, where he continued the interrogation and, according to Washington, “tried to make me sign papers stating that I had killed a white man” in Mississippi. As every African American New Orleanian knew, the show-up (or line-up) room was the setting where detectives tortured suspects and extracted confessions. “You know you killed him, Nigger,” the detective roared. Washington, however, refused to confess, and the detective began punching him in the face, knocking out five of his teeth. After Washington crumbled to the floor, the detective repeatedly kicked him and broke one of his ribs. The beating continued for an hour, until other policemen restrained the detective, saying “give him a chance to confess and if he doesn't you may start again.” But Washington did not confess, and the violent interrogation began anew. A short time later, another police officer interrupted the detective, telling him “do not kill this man in here, after all he is wanted in Yazoo City.” Bloodied and writhing in pain, Washington asked to contact his family, but the request was ignored. Because he had not been formally charged with a crime, New Orleans law enforcers believed that Washington had no constitutional protection again self-incrimination or coercive interrogation and no right to an arraignment or bail, and they had no obligation to contact his relatives or to provide medical care for him.

During the interwar period, the League of Nations led an international campaign against traffic in women. Although important research about the League's work has started to appear, historians have concentrated on the “white slave trade” in the decades before the First World War. From 1924 to 1926, the League conducted the first intercontinental study to determine the number of women caught up in the traffic, and to map the strategies and routes used by traffickers. Undercover investigators visited more than 100 cities across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas. The investigators talked to thousands of prostitutes, pimps, brothel-keepers, and others engaged in the sex trade. The “worldwide” investigation was not only the most significant aspect of the antitrafficking campaign in the interwar years, but also of the League's effort to build an international legal regime on a foundation of sociological jurisprudence.

In October 1934, agents from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service received a hot tip that an otherwise unremarkable village off the coast of Shandong was hiding valuable contraband. A search party dispatched to investigate verified the claim after raiding several homes and uncovering sixty-nine bags of sugar. Seeking to add to this already sizeable haul, agents then scaled the walls of another home and discovered ten more bags hidden in the backyard. This time, however, they were met by incensed homeowner Yu Guangbo, who charged at the intruders with a pitchfork and seriously injured an officer when he tried to seize a handgun. His resistance was fierce but, ultimately, futile. Outnumbered, Yu was quickly subdued, beaten, and bound. Left alone in the village temple, he untied himself the next day before reporting his harsh treatment to a local court and inaugurating a lawsuit that would last almost a decade.

Colonial regimes tended to change existing legislation and judicial structures, and to introduce new legal systems. When the previous legal system was partly upheld, and especially when a number of legal systems were already in effect, a complex and plural system would emerge, often with contradictory principles and normative assumptions. As a result, the colonial government faced inevitable dilemmas regarding the priorities it should grant to the different legal systems, and the means it should use to mediate conflicts among the different perspectives. Much has been written over the last few decades concerning the interrelation of colonial expansion and the transformation of law. The colonial government emphasized the necessity of changing existing legal systems, often portrayed as backward and unsuitable for the functioning of an empire and the global relations embedded in it. New colonial legislation was intended to achieve greater efficiency and the unification of colonial rule and to advance the “civilizing mission” by negating elements of existing traditions and introducing what the colonial rulers considered to be higher levels of morality. However, such changes ran the risk of being perceived as excessive intervention in the subordinated societies, and, therefore, might undermine the legitimacy of the colonial government.

Sweeping across the social and political landscape of the northeastern United States during the late 1820s and early 1830s, the Antimasonic Party has earned a modest immortality as the first “third” party in American history. In pamphlets, speeches, sermons, protests, and other venues, Antimasons lambasted the fraternal order of Freemasonry as undemocratic, inegalitarian, and un-Christian, reviling it as a threat to the moral order and civic health of the Early Republic. Because they believed that the fraternal organization largely controlled all levels of government, antebellum Antimasons first created a social movement and then an independent political party. Even before the full emergence of modern mass democratic politics, Antimasons demonstrated the benefits of party organization, open national nominating conventions, and party platforms. Scholars with otherwise different perspectives on the “party period” tend to agree that Antimasonry had an important impact on what became the first true mass party organizations—the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs—and helped push the political culture in a more egalitarian and populist direction.

Reformers in much of the common law world have recently turned their attentions to laws pertaining to murder and manslaughter; however, perceptions of the past maintain a hold. In England and Wales, the Coroners and Justice Act (2009) abandoned notions of provocation that developed in the seventeenth century, instead stipulating that “loss of control” would serve as the means of mitigating charges of murder to a lesser offence. If a person has reasonable grounds for losing control, of a sort that accords with contemporary norms and values, that loss of control can be adduced as a partial defense on a homicide charge. Concerns about blaming victims and gender bias have helped shape the shift away from provocation defenses. Whether a married woman's sexual infidelity might in some way serve as a partial defense that moderates her husband's killing of her from murder to something less serious has proven especially controversial. (The reverse, a wife killing an adulterous husband, receives far less attention, but then women kill their partners for any reason far less often.) Drafters of the 2009 act expressly abandoned the older notion that sexual infidelity constituted sufficient provocation to mitigate charges in a husband's killing of his wife. Angry, jealous men killing their spouses in revenge or a passionate rage might no longer cite infidelity as sufficient provocation to kill. Some people, including lawmakers and judges, expressed concerns about the change. One MP (and later attorney general) complained that “thousands of years of human experience and history should be jettisoned for a piece of political correctness.” He need not have worried: recently, the decision in R. v. Clinton (2012) reintroduced the substance of the defense in a new guise, seeing a wife's adultery not as provocation, but as a trigger for a husband's understandable “loss of control.” Among other factors, the Court of Appeal alluded to “experience over many generations” in treating a man's suspicion of his wife's sexual infidelity as reasonable grounds for mitigation.