Law in the United Methodist Church (UMC) is a product of democracy, written by elected delegates to a legislative body, recorded in a book entitled The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church. As “a Book of Law,” the Book of Discipline is “the only official and authoritative Book of Law of The Methodist Church,” according to the Methodist Church's Judicial Council in a landmark 1953 ruling. Despite this declaration, the Judicial Council had no idea in 1953 that it had addressed a question that in 20 years would divide not just the Methodists, but Americans and American Christians generally. In the last 30 years of the twentieth century, controversies over homosexuality led American Christians into debates over the role law should play in their churches, while Americans as a whole debated the role churches should play in their law. United Methodist conservatives discovered that by rallying populist majorities to rewrite church law, they could then use church trials to roll back what they saw as excesses from the 1960s still plaguing American society. Writing any law is necessarily a political process, but in the UMC, church trials became political battlegrounds as well, contests to determine if rank-and-file clergy approved church rules against anything resembling a same-sex marriage.

Scholars agree that medieval Jewish legal writers responded to “the needs of the times” in making their legal rulings, carefully choosing the legal sources and precedents upon which they relied, rereading or even rejecting those sources in light of their quotidian reality. Particularly in the Geonic Period, as Talmudic norms encountered a geographically expansive community experiencing radical social transformations in the engagement with Islam, as well as rapid economic development concomitant with the rise of the ʿAbbāsids, which urbanized and transformed the economic life of the Jewish community, classical sources of Jewish law faced new pressures. Geonic leaders responded to these pressures by making recourse to the traditional institutions of taqqana (Hebrew, “legislative enactment”) and minhag (Hebrew, “custom”). Therefore, it is widely accepted that the vicissitudes of daily life influenced both the responsa of the Geonim and their contributions to the expanding codificatory literature. On the other hand, the potential influence of Jewish legal norms upon daily life remains an unsettled area in the study of the history of the premodern Jewish community. A paucity of documentary or archaeological evidence complicates this problem, and edited literary texts of various genres remain themselves among the most important witnesses to Jewish life in the period.

When asked why he did not read over the loan documents before signing them, John Doherty explained: “I was anxious to get the money, I didn't bother about it.” In February 1910, the twenty-three-year-old railroad clerk walked into the offices of the Chesterkirk Company, a loan-sharking operation with offices in lower Manhattan. He was looking to borrow some money. Repayment was guaranteed by the only security Doherty had to offer: his prospective wages and, in his words, his “reputation.” After a brief investigation of Doherty's creditworthiness, the loan was approved. The office manager placed a cross in lead pencil at the bottom of a lengthy form and Doherty signed where indicated. He received $34.85 in exchange for his promise to repay the loan principal plus $10.15 in combined fees and interest in three months. The interest charged was significantly greater than the 6 percent per year allowed in New York State. Doherty's effective annualized interest rate, including fees, was over 100 percent.

In 1859, Cándido Xavier Azambuja appeared before officials in Salto, Uruguay demanding the return of an alleged fugitive slave, Pedro, pursuant to the terms of the 1851 Extradition Treaty between Brazil and Uruguay. According to Cándido's testimony, Pedro had fled from his brother Geronimo's estancia located near the Brazilian town of Bagé close to the Uruguayan border. Upon questioning, Cándido admitted that Pedro and Geronimo had been in the Estado Oriental briefly in 1851 in order to drive several herds of cattle back into Brazil, but argued that Pedro returned with his master and had never been to the Uruguayan Republic before or since. In response, Pedro argued that he was not a fugitive Brazilian slave, but rather a “natural of this republic.” Pedro claimed that he was born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, and promptly produced the baptismal records to prove it. Pedro went on to note that his entire family consisted of free Uruguayans like himself. He then claimed that Cándido had repeatedly attempted “to make him a slave,” going so far as to remove him forcibly from his home and carry him across the border into Brazil. He requested protection from these continued threats to his and his family's basic rights under Uruguayan law.

Among the most long-lasting constitutional controversies in the antebellum era was the interpretation of the fugitive slave clause. It was the subject of repeated legislative and judicial construction at both the state and the federal level. It raised delicate questions about federalism and the balancing of property rights and personal liberty. Slaveholders and abolitionists brought irreconcilable constitutional positions to the table, ultimately dividing Northerners from Southerners. However, it was not just divergent political commitments that made it difficult to fix a stable meaning to the fugitive slave clause. The text itself was ambiguous enough to make it amenable to multiple interpretations. For precisely this reason, an examination of the changing interpretations of the fugitive slave clause uncovers antebellum constitutional praxis, allowing us to see how historical actors interpreted the Constitution and how those interpretations shifted over time.