We are living in an age of political turbulence, social division, and resistance. The resistance that formed in reaction to the election of Donald Trump styles itself a force to defend constitutional rights, democratic norms, and the rule of law in the United States. Perhaps the New Republic best explained its advent: the Resistance had been born of partisan—that is, Democratic—fury after “liberalism had been dealt its most stunning and consequential defeat in American history.” “For the first time in decades, liberalism has been infused with a sense of energy and purpose,” with millions of people devoted to a singular cause: resisting Trump.

This article analyses arguments used in an 1866 Brazilian freedom suit to highlight a substantive legal perspective. Historians of Brazilian slavery law have given attention to the politics of freedom suits, largely disregarding the role of law in their origins, developments, and outcomes. By looking at legal arguments, we show how law and political views mutually framed each other. We focus on the impact of 19th century legal modernizations in the distinction and contradictions between the law of status and property law, the legal translations of freedom, and the uses of arguments based on codes, natural law, and pragmatic considerations about the judiciary's role in a slave society. This is a micro-history of a suit that, with the help of other 19th-century freedom suits and legal doctrine, allows us to move up and down different historical scales to understand law's centrality in the political perpetuation and demise of slavery in Brazil.

Writing for his fellow military officers in early 1903, United States Army Major C.J. Crane reflected on the recent Philippine–American War. The bloody struggle to suppress an insurgency in the Philippines after the United States had annexed them from Spain in 1899 had officially concluded the previous July. The war had been accompanied by fierce racist sentiments among Americans, and in keeping with these, Crane described his foes as “the most treacherous people in the world.” But Crane's discussion drew as much on concepts of law as it did on race. The average American officer, Crane argued, had “remembered all the time that he was struggling with an enemy who was not entitled to the privileges usually granted prisoners of war,” and could be summarily executed, without benefit of “court-martial or other regular tribunal.” If anything, the Americans had been too generous. “Many [American] participants in the struggle,” he maintained, “have failed to fully understand that we were practically fighting an Asiatic nation in arms and almost every man a soldier in disguise and a violator” of the laws of war. But what did those laws mean to the United States during the conflict, and what does this indicate about the broader history of international law's relationship to empire?

In the wake of the Civil War, Columbia Law School professor Francis Lieber, architect of some of the Lincoln administration's most important legal strategies, set out to write a definitive text on martial law and the emergency power. Lieber's text would have summed up his view of the legal lessons of the Civil War. Lieber died in 1872, leaving an unfinished manuscript to his son, Guido Norman Lieber, soon to become the Judge Advocate General of the Union Army. Norman Lieber worked on the manuscript but never finished it. Hidden deep in the younger Lieber's papers in the National Archives, the manuscript summarizes a strand of thinking about constitutional emergencies that first emerged in the controversies over slavery, then animated Emancipation and the broader legal strategy of the Lincoln White House, before running headlong into the post-war backlash signaled by the Supreme Court's 1866 decision in Ex Parte Milligan. Building on debates over martial law in Anglo-American empire, the Liebers’ thinking embraced a forceful but constrained approach that made a cabined form of necessity the central principle of emergency governance in the modern state.

This article examines the jurisprudence of the Swedish Supreme Court during WW2 in disputes between exiled Jewish business owners and the Nazi-appointed administrators of their companies over the rights to the enterprises’ assets in Sweden. Contrary to assertions in previous scholarship, this article argues that the judgments of the Supreme Court were dictated neither by moral indignation in the face of the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich, nor by political considerations in a time of war. Instead, they were based on principles of private international law that predated, and outlived, the Third Reich. The outcome of the cases hinged upon whether the claim to Swedish assets arose before or after the date when the enterprise was placed under forced administration. If before, the claims of the Jewish owners were in principle successful; if after, they were not. This reasoning was well in line with both previous and subsequent case law on confiscations effected abroad. The article therefore concludes that the Swedish Supreme Court's judgments on Jewish assets in Sweden should be viewed not as outflows of extrajudicial considerations, but rather as failures to recognize political or ethical responsibility.

Early one Sunday in 1948, Frederic Vercoe set out from his home in San Marino, California, for a speaking engagement in downtown Los Angeles. Perhaps he took the Arroyo Seco Parkway, which had opened for drivers 8 years before, linking the city more tightly with its “vast agglomerate of suburbs.” Although the roads may have changed, Vercoe had been making some version of this commute for decades. He had recently retired after a long career with the Los Angeles County Public Defender—13 years as a deputy, followed by 19 years as head of the office—and now maintained a small private law practice downtown. Many mornings, Vercoe would have had business at the Hall of Justice, the ten-story box of “gray California granite” that housed the jails and courtrooms. On this particular morning, he was headed instead to Clifton's Cafeteria at Seventh Street and Broadway. Perhaps, as he drove the dozen miles west into the city, he admired the “geraniums, cosmos, sweet peas, asters and marigolds” that lined the “gardens, parkways, and driveways,” or perhaps he was used to the foliage by now. Vercoe had lived in California for more than 30 years, making him, by West Coast standards, a real “old-timer.”

Justice Frank Murphy once wrote that two aspects of World War II could only be forgotten at our peril. One was the indiscriminate incarceration of Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans. The other was 4 years of martial law in Hawai'i. We have cried “Never Again” to the first but forgotten the second. Therefore, it is at long last that the legal scholars Harry and Jane Scheiber have excavated why and how an unprecedented military rule occurred and how stubbornly it clung to power.