Crucial to the implementation of the War Relocation Authority's (WRA) regulations of its detention camps for the uprooted Japanese American community of the West Coast were the WRA “project attorneys,” white lawyers stationed in the camps who gave legal advice to administrators and internees alike. These lawyers left behind a voluminous correspondence that opens a new window on the WRA's relationship with its prisoners, a relationship heretofore understood as encompassing coercion on one side and either compliance or resistance on the other. This article uses the voluminous correspondence of the project attorney at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming as a new lens for viewing the regulatory relationship between the WRA and the imprisoned community. It focuses on three of the many matters about which the project attorney gave advice: the design of the camp's community government, its criminal justice system, and its business enterprises. Evidence from this one law office suggests that on many key issues, the relationship between the WRA and the internees was marked not so much by coercion as by reciprocal accommodation, with each taking account of some of the preferences of the other. While the data are from just one of the ten WRA camps, they suggest a need to reconsider our understanding of how this American system of racial imprisonment operated.

In 1899, Levi Edwin Dudley, the American consul at Vancouver, complained about the ways that Canadian and American police officers enacted justice along their shared border. During one of Dudley's investigations into alleged abuses, he spoke with a Canadian officer about the ways that local agents on both sides of the border approached their jobs. The officer, speaking under conditions of anonymity, noted that “on the border here we must do things in an irregular way in order to preserve the peace.” The ability of criminals to move back and forth across the line forced American and Canadian officers to “‘stand in’ with each other, [or] we should have the country filled with desperadoes.” American officers transferred criminals over to Canadian agents without proper clearance and Canadian officers later returned the favor. This system of irregular justice utilized informal prisoner exchanges built on local understandings, professional courtesy, and mutual concern to circumvent the slow, uncertain, and expensive extradition process. For Dudley, this kind of behavior threatened the liberty of citizens in both countries. For the officers tasked with policing a region of bisecting jurisdictions, it was a necessary evil.

Over the past 30 years, a growing amount of scholarly attention has been paid to forms of constitutional interpretation other than judicial review, ranging from departmentalism to explicitly removing judicial review from the court's purview. As many of these works have recognized, such skepticism is not new, but has a strong historical tradition. What has not often been noted, however, is that differing conceptions of judicial review—even opposition to judicial oversight of legislative actions—existed nearly from the moment that Marbury v. Madison was decided. This article examines some of these divergent opinions on judicial review in the Early Republic by studying how it was perceived by the Old Republicans, the conservative faction of the Virginia Jeffersonians.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, English scholar James Bryce criticized Western railroad land grants as “often improvident” and as giving “rise to endless lobbying and intrigue, first to secure them, then to keep them from being declared forfeited in respect of some breach of the conditions imposed by Congress on the company.” Bryce also observed the extent to which grants of land to railroads allowed the beneficiary companies to exercise great power not only through their role as carriers of people and commerce, but also through their role as large landowners. This, he noted, brought them “yet another source of wealth and power” and “brought them into intimate and often perilously delicate relations with leading politicians.” From the perspective of the so-called “railroad tycoons” and their financial backers, the land grants became sources of wealth and power independent of and sometimes contrary to the interests of the railroad corporations themselves as carriers. Whereas Congress intended the railroad land grants to serve as a means to the end of railroad construction and the settlement of the federal government's expansive public domain, the railroads came to see them as an end in themselves: as independent sources of wealth and power.

Impersonation and then identity theft in America emerged in the legal space between a civil system with a high tolerance for market risk and losses incurred by impostors, and a later-developing criminal system preoccupied with fraud or forgery against the government. Negotiable instruments, generally paper checks, borrowed from seventeenth-century England, enabled a geographically far-flung commercial system of paper-based but impersonal exchanges at a time before widespread availability of centrally-issued currency or regulated banks. By assigning loss rather than catching criminals, the “impostor rule” made and continues to make transactions with negotiable instruments valid even if fraudulent. This large body of commercial law has stood essentially unchanged for three hundred years and has facilitated a system rife with impersonation which criminal and federal laws did not address until the late 20th century. English common law, American legal treatises, court cases, law review articles, and internal debates behind the Uniform Commercial Code tell the story of a legal system at the service of commerce through the unimpeded transfer of paper payments. Combining the fields of legal history and criminal justice with the approaches of emerging research in both identification and paperwork studies, this article explains the ongoing policy problems of identity theft.

If a German couple wanted to get married today, they would have to consult the German Civil Code, the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or BGB, for information on how to do so. From the BGB, they would learn that—provided that they are competent, more than 18 years of age, not related in a direct line or (half-) siblings, and not currently married—they can get married before the Standesbeamter or civil registrar. They would also learn that should they want a divorce in the future, any proceedings would have to be brought in the family court, which is a special division within the German civil courts of first instance, and that the judge hearing their case would be required to consider whether their marriage has “failed”: a state of affairs that that judge would be legally compelled to presume if one or both of them wanted the divorce (and they had lived apart for a prescribed number of years).

In the mid-1700s, the town of Mompox flourished in the Spanish viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada, today part of the Republic of Colombia. Built on the banks of the northern Magdalena River, an important waterway connecting the Andean interior with the Caribbean Sea, Mompox constantly buzzed with travelers and trade alike. Mompox was home to a community of merchants who profited handsomely from both legal trade and smuggling, their networks reaching places as far away as Lima in Peru and Cádiz in Spain. These merchants were frequently also slaveholders and landowners. On haciendas outside of town, slaves cultivated the land and tended large herds of cattle. They gathered wood and resins and hunted for game and jaguars (panthera onca) that preyed on livestock. Along with free people of color, slaves also worked as artisans, journeymen, and oarsmen on boats transporting goods and people up and down the river (see Figure 1).