For historians and property law scholars, the abolition of the fee tail estate in land by many states during the American Revolutionary Period serves as a principal symbol of the power of republican ideology during the Founding Era. Political leaders of the Founding Era deplored the system of hereditary privilege that defined the European aristocratic political order. Property served as the foundation of that order: political, economic, and social privileges were associated with ownership of landed estates. Property and inheritance law enabled families to retain land, and, therefore, the privileges associated with landed estates, over the generations. Therefore, American historians celebrate the abolition of the fee tail estate and primogeniture by some states as a practical and tangible achievement of the Republican Revolution.

In 1860, unfenced land across the South was open to the public. No state criminalized trespass, and the range was closed in only part of one county. Elsewhere, some states had closed the range, but most unfenced land in the United States was open to the wanderer. In the former Confederacy, fresh elections were held in 1865, and legislatures moved quickly to criminalize trespass, restrict hunting and fishing, and close the range.

Since its introduction into North America in the late nineteenth century, direct democracy, particularly in the form of direct legislation, has periodically piqued the interest of legal scholars. A handful of studies have examined the history of direct legislation in the United States and in Canada; however, these studies often fail to examine how direct legislation was actually used. Brief references might be given to which initiatives the voters attempted to secure via direct legislation, but the actual mechanics of the vote, and questions such as what the ballot said, for example, are typically overlooked.

Germans have long prided themselves on their commitment to the Rechtsstaat, the state based on the rule of law. However, they have not agreed on what would constitute a Rechtsstaat. Recht can mean “law,” or “right,” or “justice,” leaving open what a Rechtsstaat ought to establish. Moreover, a Rechtsstaat could be merely formal, an independently adjudicated process of applying statutes equally binding for all, or substantive, a process providing “justice.” Formal processes should minimize capricious decisions but could, in particular cases, produce outcomes that citizens perceived as unjust, and people are generally most committed to outcomes they believe to be just or appropriate. Not surprisingly, a complex debate developed among jurists, across a century and multiple regimes, over what the Rechtsstaat and Recht might mean.

In December 1993, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in Pratt and Morgan v. The Attorney General for Jamaica that excessive delay in the enforcement of death sentences—defined with some caveats as more than 5 years from the time of conviction to execution—was “inhuman” and therefore unconstitutional. The Judicial Committee also reversed earlier rulings in finding that the 5 year time frame for appeals should include those delays that resulted from legal proceedings initiated by prisoners themselves. The result was to clear death row cells across most of the British Caribbean, with the capital sentences of more than 100 condemned prisoners commuted in Jamaica alone. Pratt also ushered in a new era of Judicial Committee activism in Caribbean death penalty cases that resulted in a series of further safeguards against executions, including the abolition of mandatory death sentences. The cumulative effect of these judgments is that there has not been an execution in Jamaica since 1988, even though capital punishment remains legal and, amidst persistently high rates of violent crime across the region, political support for a resumption of hanging is strong.