The legal and social implications of Hardwicke's Marriage Act, passed in 1753, were of the utmost importance in England. From 1754 onwards a marriage, in order to be recognized as legal, had to be carried out in a very specific, circumscribed manner, ending a period during which “irregular” or clandestine marriages proliferated. Although Lord Hardwicke had been agitating for such legislation for years, it was one case in particular, a Scottish action, which had been appealed to the House of Lords, that precipitated the Act.

Restrictions in law upon the power of testators to devise chattels were the norm in the days both of Glanvill and of Bracton. As Holdsworth put it:

If he [the testator] left a wife alone she took a half; if a wife and children they took, the wife a third, and the children who had not received an advancement from their father in his lifetime a third; … it was only the half or the third which remained over that a man was free to dispose of as he pleased.

The first amendment prohibits Congress from making any law that abridges the right of the people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This clause reflects many years of practical experience with petitions, both in England and in the American colonies. Unlike the right of free speech, which has attracted much scholarly attention, the right of petition has received little scrutiny from commentators or judges. The scope of the substantive right embodied in the clause is still a matter of dispute.

This article explores a key incident in the history of the right of petition—the congressional imposition in the 1830s of a “gag rule” to prohibit the reception of petitions related to slavery. This restriction on petitions was a turning point both for a change in the meaning of the right and for the procedures permitted by Congress to give it expression. The gag rule effectively quashed the right to petition as it had been exercised for centuries—as a means of communicating the people's grievances to government. Although the right still exists, its traditional usage and meaning “disappeared” in the 1830s.

In September of 1953, eight months before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas would be decided, the Topeka Board of Education voted to abolish segregation in its schools. Some Topekans thought it curious that the school board would vote to abolish segregation when its case defending segregation was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. When Edward Goss of the Topeka Civic Club asked the board why it hadn't waited for the Court's decision, board member Harold Conrad responded: ‘We feel that segregation is not an American practice.’

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 are often seen as the product of Western European design and liberal humanitarianism. Based on a collection of Western and Soviet archival materials, this article reveals the Soviet delegation's mixed but critical legacy in developing the Conventions. The Soviets, acting in surprisingly close cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), were essential for supporting a range of groundbreaking plans to end ‘inhumane’ measures in war, from unrestrained colonial warfare to inhumane treatment. They made however some of these protections vulnerable due to their opposition to accepting stronger enforcement mechanisms, such as allowing the ICRC and Protecting Powers to visit their Gulag archipelago. By doing so, the Soviets helped to create the foundations for both the successes and failures of the Geneva Conventions.

In the autumn and winter of 1648, England descended into a domestic political crisis unparalleled at any time in the country's history before or since. At Newport on the Isle of Wight, representatives from both Houses of Parliament straggled to conclude a treaty with their king that would end years of civil war and restore some semblance of political order. But many Englishmen trembled to contemplate the consequences of negotiated settlement with a man who had caused so much chaos and bloodshed, who had contrived the violent incursion of a Scottish army onto English soil in the summer of 1648, and even now continued to pin his hopes on an invasion of Catholic forces from Ireland. The officers and men of the New Model Army and their radical supporters in the country at large called for an end to negotiations. They also demanded retributive justice on all those, “from the highest to the lowest,” who had almost drowned the nation in innocent blood, lest they seize the opportunity to finish the job. When the army placed the king himself under physical restraint, MPs proceeded regardless to declare themselves satisfied that the search for peaceful settlement ought to continue. The army now purged the House of Commons of the supporters of the Newport treaty. Many of its officers were eager enough to reach some kind of an understanding with the king themselves, but rather than negotiate, they preferred to dictate terms. When the king refused those that the earl of Denbigh purportedly took to him at Windsor Castle late in December 1648, the officers and their allies in the Rump House of Commons prepared to put Charles on trial instead. Justice would at last be done, and it would be seen to be done.

Historians have argued that sixteenth and seventeenth century English colonial charters claimed the lands of indigenous people on the basis of their discovery by Europeans. Examination of these charters, however, demonstrates that a charter authorized acquiring land from the indigenous population in a specific region, not seizing indigenous it, and regulating the entry of other potential settlers. Charters also regulated overseas relations among the European nations to reduce or prevent international conflict by recognizing similar claims to monopoly of access to lands claimed by other developing empires. Charters were rooted in a medieval legal tradition that included canon law commentaries that recognized the legitimacy of infidel dominium and papal bulls that sought to regulate fifteenth-century Iberian expansion in the Atlantic. English charters built on this legal tradition and were a stage in the creation of a European legal order for overseas expansion. The fundamental issue was regulation of the sea and sea routes to Asia and to the New World, not the acquisition and possession of indigenous land. The English charters should be understood as elements of the long-running debate about whether access to the sea was open to all or could be closed to outsiders.

Discussion and debate over the nature of federalism is one of the staples of American public discourse. Among historians and lawyers, politicians and judges this constant has remained. It is only the context of the discourse which has changed over time. Given the unusual framework of union provided by the Constitution it is hardly surprising that debate over its nature should continue for concepts of constitutionalism, federalism and law in American culture have melded into an alloy from which it is often impossible to determine which is the baser metal. Continuing inquiry over the proper balance between state and national authority and over the proper reach of federal jurisdiction has prompted as many scholarly endeavors as ever the quest for the Holy Grail led brave knights to their adventures. The endless searches among scholars, lawyers and jurists for ‘the original understanding’ of ‘the Framers’ has been an active industry for generations, seldom more so than in our own time. This is itself a striking cultural fact, and like the quest for the Grail, the center around which a huge corpus of legend, romance, learned scholarship and wishful thinking revolves.

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?

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the manor courts of medieval England were evolving into formal legal bodies with written records and standard procedures. An important reason for this development was that lords needed to protect their prerogatives, which were endangered from above by the king's increasing authority expressed in the royal courts and common law, and from below by peasants who actively sought greater freedom. Lords met these challenges to their authority by altering the law and practice of the manor courts to reinforce the institution of villeinage. This is particularly true of the land law enforced in the manor courts.

The Types Riot of June 8, 1826, is the most celebrated episode of conservative political violence in Upper Canada. It was directed against William Lyon Mackenzie, an immigrant from Scotland and a newspaper editor in York (Toronto) who had perfected a style of journalism characterized by scathing personal abuse of the colony's leaders. About a dozen well-connected individuals, most of them lawyers or law students, broke into the offices of Mackenzie's Colonial Advocate newspaper in its owner's absence. Terrorizing Mackenzie's mother, son, and assistants, the rioters wrecked the press and scattered the types, throwing some of them into the bay nearby. In a harbinger of what was to come, more than one magistrate looked on without interfering. The attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, neither disciplined the lawyers and law students among the rioters nor prosecuted them in the criminal courts.

By the turn of the twentieth century the absence of codified law governing private economic transactions was a key target of foreign and Chinese critiques of the imperial legal system. Expectations ran high that China's first legal transplant, the 1904 Company Law, would lead to unprecedented public investment in large-scale industrial projects. Their disappointment, and the continued dominance of small business in the Chinese marketplace, has been attributed to factors ranging from Chinese cultural aversion to impersonal investment to shortcomings in the law itself. This study shifts our attention to the indigenous practices that company law was meant to supplant, examining the diverse sources of Chinese shareholding practices and the rich menu of options they provided investors. Most importantly, it argues that by the late imperial period shares were well-established as abstract income producing assets that could be bought and sold, creating the possibility of partnership relationships that could be both impersonal and long-lived despite the absence in China of a formal company law. That this tradition did not lead to the emergence of an analogue to the corporation in the West raises new questions about the demand for such entities and the role of transplantation in suppressing indigenous solutions to business problems.

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.

State making in nineteenth-century colonial settings involved contests over the configuration of plural legal systems. Colonial powers limited the jurisdiction of colonial courts and adopted complex, shifting rules for the articulation of imposed and indigenous law. The politics of legal pluralism in such settings became tied to discourse about cultural difference as groups challenged or justified jurisdictional boundaries by reference to the cultural characteristics of various colonial constituencies. The process of ordering legal authorities and assigning political identities reinforced the authority of incipient colonial states and emphasized the differences between colonial and metropolitan law.

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.

In 1860 and again in 1864, Alexander Spiers appeared before the insolvency court in Sydney, endeavoring to explain his failure in business. He was described as a milliner in the records but he had never made a bonnet in his life. The real milliner and businesswoman was his wife, Ann Spiers, who had been running her business since her marriage in 1846. She made purchasing and pricing decisions, managed staff, was the front person in the shop, and advertised in newspapers. She told the insolvency court in 1860 that her husband “used to keep the books and attend to the house business but he never sold anything in the shop. He used to mark the goods occasionally.” Alexander Spiers similarly distanced himself. “My wife put the value upon the articles in our stock,” he said. “She is much better acquainted with their value than myself.” In spite of this, it was Alexander Spiers' name that was on the insolvency papers. Under the law of coverture, he was responsible for his wife's debts and her business legally belonged to him.

Over the past decade, the United Kingdom has deprived an increasing number of British subjects of their citizenship. This policy, known as “denaturalization,” has been applied with particular harshness in cases where foreign-born subjects have been accused of terrorist activity. The increase is part of a global trend. In recent years, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands have either debated or enacted denaturalization statutes. But Britain remains an outlier among Western democracies. Since 2006, the United Kingdom home secretary has revoked the citizenship of at least 373 Britons, of whom at least 53 have had alleged links to terrorism. This is more than the total number of revocations by Canada, France, Australia, and Netherlands combined. These developments are troubling, as the right to be secure in one's citizenship has been a cornerstone of the postwar European liberal political order, and of the international community's commitment to human rights.

Over the last decade special attention has been accorded to the development of the trial jury. Historians have examined, within the context of the administration of justice and across a broad chronological span, the shifting character of English juries. Thomas Green himself has contributed much to our understanding of medieval jury behavior by synthesizing his own and existing research to form a useful working hypothesis and by highlighting in particular the practice of jury nullification. Yet there are still areas, particularly in the medieval period, that lack adequate definition and would benefit from the close attention afforded by more specific studies ranging over a limited time frame.

Over the course of the late winter and spring of 1933, the German Bar Association (DAV), along with most other institutions in Germany, submitted to “coordination” by the new National Socialist regime. Coordination in reality meant a takeover of the private legal profession by younger lawyers who were National Socialist activists, directed from Berlin. The traditional leadership of the German bar permitted itself to be replaced by newcomers, formerly far removed from the centers of power in professional institutions. Regional lawyers' chambers, despite minor delays and efforts to express solidarity with colleagues in leadership now defined as falling outside of the “racial community,” also succumbed. Within five months, a profession that nineteenth-century reformers had condidered a bulwark of civil soviety, and which had viewed itself as a rock of independence from both state and public, had bowed to the demands of a party whose leader viewed lawyers with contempt and valued race over right.

A number of works have recently been published that seek to re-narrate colonial histories, with a particular emphasis on the role of law in at once creating and marginalizing colonial subjects.1 Focusing on mid-twentieth century detention camps in the British colony of Kenya, this article illuminates a colonial history that was deeply buried in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) building for many years. As such, the analysis supports the revelatory work of David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, who highlighted the violence that underpinned British detention and interrogation practises in Kenya.2 In particular, the article explores recently declassified colonial files, and pieces together a picture of administrative subterfuge, suppression of facts, and whitewashing atrocities, threaded through with official denial, which long outlived its colonial genesis. Against the hypothesis that detention laws created an architecture of destruction and concomitant custodial violence in Kenya, the article establishes that an accountability deficit is the legacy of detention without trial as it was practiced in colonial Kenya. By untangling a complex web of colonial records and government papers relating to Kenya, this article reveals the often insurmountable pressure that was exerted to conceal evidence of detainee violence, and the role of a highly sophisticated propaganda machine that controlled the public narrative of a violent incident when outright denial was impossible.