Elias Berdos had not yet reached the age of fourteen when he arrived in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. Three weeks after debarking, he applied to Tremont and Suffolk Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts and was put to work in the textile factory's spinning room, tending the mules as many boys his age did. Inexperienced at factory labor and unable to speak English, he ventured forth into the helter-skelter world of a cotton mill. About four weeks later, Elias stood in the spinning room, waiting for the workday to begin. With his back turned to the machinery, he rested his hand on a guard that covered the spinning frame's gears. When his hand slipped into the rotating metal, Elias joined the tens of thousands of workers injured in the process of American industrialization. Like many of those workers, Elias and his family sued the company for damages, but unlike many of his fellow laborers, Elias relied on Massachusetts's statutory prohibitions against child labor to maintain a cause of action. Losing in the lower courts, Elias appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. His case led the court to examine the development of child labor law in Massachusetts, looking into both its statutory genesis and legislative intent.

In his thoughtful and informative article on the twelve judges and judicial review, James Oldham illuminates an important if little-studied corner of eighteenth and nineteenth-century judicial practice. For centuries judges in criminal (and civil) cases had reserved questions that presented peculiar difficulties related to procedure or the interpretation of statute to the consideration of their colleagues. We seldom glimpse much of the substance or form of these deliberations. They were private and informal discussions, although by the eighteenth century the participants in these meetings observed well-understood conventions. Oldham outlines what these rules and practices involved. Decisions, for instance, did not have to be unanimous. The majority opinion took on the force of precedent, even though the deliberations often survived only in unpublished notes or the memories of the judges. Oldham gives a strong reading to this practice. Judges not only determined which cases would be referred to their colleagues, they exercised considerable discretion in ruling on the objections that had been raised. He views this process as offering another example of the power of the judges to shape the character of legal proceedings in early modern England. They were not only correcting procedural mistakes that arose during a trial; they were actively interpreting statute. In doing so, they demonstrated their decisive role in controlling the operation of criminal justice over the long eighteenth century.

The shortest trial report in the Old Bailey Proceedings is precisely eight words in length. In February, 1685:

This study examines how law, custom, and social norm interacted in civil justice in Qing and Republican China by looking into 152 civil cases tried in 1912, right after the founding of the Republic of China, and a body of legal interpretations from the Supreme Court during 1912-1929, and certain provisions in the Civil Code of 1929-30--the very first one in Chinese history. It shows that both law and custom were invoked by judges within their moral universe or social norm. It traces how the Supreme Court allowed local customs to be a legal ground for rulings in certain civil disputes, and which customs in civil matters in the Qing and the early Republic were, and which were not, “hardened” into the Civil Code. The interplay between law and custom, mediated by judges with their normative sense of right and wrong, constituted both continuity and change in civil justice between the Qing era and the Republican period. Ultimately, the issues addressed here speak to a larger question of how Chinese jurists, within their judicial discretions, tried to strike a difficult but necessary balance between “law-on-books” and “law-in-action,” while law on the books was undergoing important revisions.

A fixed legal age of consent is used to determine when a person has the capacity to consent to sex yet in the late Victorian period the idea became a vehicle through which to address varied social concerns, from child prostitution and child sexual abuse to chastity and marriageability of working-class girls. This article argues that the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) 1885, the Act that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, and its application were driven by constructions of gender in conjunction with those of social class and working class family. The article firstly argues that CLAA 1885 and related campaigns reinforced class boundaries, and largely framed the working class family as absent, thereby, requiring the law to step in as a surrogate parent to protect the girl child. Secondly, the paper focuses on narratives emerging from the archives and argues that while narratives of capacity and protection in particular were key concepts behind reforms, the courts showed limited understanding of these terms. Instead, the courts focused on notions resistance, consent, and untrustworthiness of the victim, even when these concepts were not relevant to the proceedings due to victims' young age.

After several decades of intellectual labor invested in the Tannenbaum debate—a long and exhausting controversy well summarized in the first part of Alejandro de la Fuente's article—I am wary at the prospect of opening a new round of this “many-headed-hydra” debate. Aside from the conceptual limitations of the (overly ambitious) thesis and the reins it can impose on fresh formulations of research agendas, there are other reasons why it may be wise to put Tannenbaum to rest. His thesis is burdened with a series of charged subtexts that surreptitiously make their way into the discussion and inflect the terms of the debate. Some of these subtexts carry long (and polemical) histories behind them that are difficult to obliterate.

By the common law rules of inheritance women in English landed society fell into two classes. Some were altogether excluded from inheriting; others were entitled to succeed to the family estate. The woman thus entitled, the heiress-at-law, is clearly a figure due historical attention. Yet she has never been singled out for long-term consideration. Where she has been the main subject, discussion has always been chronologically limited, and her history has not been carried any distance through the course of legal changes that are relevant to it. Usually she has been discussed as but part of the family, and attention has been focussed largely on eldest sons and their relations with younger children, with younger sons or with daughters not heiresses, as the case may be. To focus on the heiress and to follow her history over the long run, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, is the purpose of this article.

Three themes crucial to understanding eighteenth-century British history converge when one writes about the country attorney: the professions, which had a remarkable development in Georgian England; the rural practitioner as distinct from his urban, principally London, counterpart about whom much more has been written; and the local economy in which attorneys performed as conveyancers, money lenders, managers of landed properties, copyhold court holders, and clerks—for justices of the peace, at the assizes, on turnpike, enclosure, and drainage commissions, for charities, and for law and order associations. Popular literature notwithstanding, country attorneys were not so often knaves using their skills to cheat unwitting clients as indispensable cogs in the rural economy where they served the interests of the landholding classes.

In January 1994, the Law and History Review published an interview of Willard Hurst by Hendrik Hartog. Michael Grossberg, as editor, introduced the interview as the first of “an occasional series of discussions with legal historians.” Over a decade has elapsed since that conversation. Willard Hurst was known both for his scholarship and his commitment to mentoring. Planning for the 4th Biennial Hurst Summer Institute at Madison in June 2007, I could think of no better way to conclude an Institute focused on nurturing legal historians at the beginning of their careers than with a conversation focused on a life in legal history.

Historians and legal scholars generally agree that during John Marshall's tenure as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, the federal judiciary expanded its power to interpret the Constitution and asserted with increasing force its authority to speak on behalf of the Union. This single story of judicial nationalism, however, contains two distinct and largely non-overlapping strands. Historians have tended to focus on the Supreme Court alone, to the exclusion of the lower federal courts, and have largely treated early national controversies over the lower federal courts as outgrowths of the political turmoil that accompanied the emergence of the first party system. Legal scholars in the fields of federal courts and constitutional law, meanwhile, have devoted significant attention to the lower federal courts but have largely neglected the history of how those courts developed beyond the key early moments of the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress.

This essay argues that the 1675 conviction of John Taylor by the Court of King's Bench for slandering God reveals Chief Justice Matthew Hale implementing a model of conjoint law-making between courts, Parliament, and crown that gave pre-eminent power to the common lawyers, and none to the Church of England. In doing so, it counters the prevailing literature on Restoration English law, which has treated the law as hierarchical, with the common lawyers subordinate to the sovereign. Rather than following statute or ecclesiastical law, which emphasised the spiritual nature of crimes like Taylor's, Hale located Taylor's offence in the exclusively temporal common law jurisdiction of defamation, which existed largely outside of monarchical purview. Hale's judgment reflected his rhetoric of judicial office outside the courtroom, where he argued the judiciary worked alongside King and Parliament in making law, but were not subservient to these institutions, for common lawyers relied on sources of law beyond sovereign-made statute. The language of sovereignty as hierarchical was thus a factional attack on an independent common law, an attempt to subordinate the common lawyers to the crown that was resisted by the lawyers like Hale in his rhetoric and exercise of office, and should not ground accounts of the Restoration regime.

In the fall of 1865, North Carolina lawmakers gathered in Raleigh to draw up a new constitution. Despite the absence of the most extreme secessionists, those in attendance were still a remarkably homogeneous group of planters, businessmen, and professionals—white men of the same wealthy families that had always governed the state. Yet faced with the sweeping changes wrought by war and emancipation, they anticipated a difficult session. Edwin Reade, who delivered the opening address, tried to set a positive tone, assuring the assembly that the future would be easy compared to the hardships of the past five years. The metaphor he chose was that of a homecoming. “Fellow citizens,” he intoned, “we are going home”: “Let painful reflections upon our late separation, and pleasant memories of our early union, quicken our footsteps towards the old mansion, that we may grasp hard again the hand of friendship which stands at the door, and, sheltered by the old homestead which was built upon a rock and has weathered the storm, enjoy together the long, bright future which awaits us.”

Leading works published since the 1980s relating to law and the modern administrative state that privilege economy and politics—work by scholars like William Novak tracing the nineteenth-century common law roots of the modern regulatory state, Stephen Skowronek on the construction of a national administrative state, and Martin Sklar on the intersection of reform with the rise of corporate capitalism in reshaping the political economy of the American state—remain intensely engaged with the work of Willard Hurst. Leading works published in the same period relating to law and the modern administrative state that privilege gender—work by scholars like Kathryn Kish Sklar on Florence Kelley and women's political culture, Linda Gordon on the welfare state, and Leslie Reagan on abortion—do not cite Hurst in the footnotes or, for the most part, in their bibliographies. For that matter, those from one subfield do not cite the other and vice versa. There is a simple, innocuous explanation for these silences—we all have too much to read.

Donald Trump's administration has provoked crisis after crisis regarding the United States’ immigration policy, laws, and their enforcement. This has affected millions of immigrants in the U.S. and those hoping to immigrate. Stemming from this, immigration lawyers are providing extraordinary amounts of direct pro bono legal services to immigrants in need. Yet the history of the practice of immigration law has been largely understudied. This article closely examines Chicago's Immigrants’ Protective League between 1910 and 1940. The League provided free counsel to tens of thousands of poor immigrants facing a multitude of immigration-related legal issues during a time when Congress passed increasingly strict immigration laws. The League, always headed by women social workers, created a robust model of immigration advocacy at a time when only a handful of women were professionally trained lawyers. The League's archival documents, manifests how Trump's immigration policies have a long and painful history. U.S. immigration law and its enforcement have consistently been cruel, inhumane, arbitrary, and capricious. Told from the ground up and focusing upon the day-to-day problems that immigrants brought to the League, one dramatically sees how immigration laws and practices were like quicksand, thwarting the legitimate expectations of migrants. The League, in response, participated in creating what would become the practice of immigration law, engaging, and quickly responding to changing laws, rules, policies, and the needs of migrants.

It is a well-accepted postulate of Canadian constitutional history that, in the years following the confederation of the colonies of British North America in 1867, the law of the Canadian constitution did not concern itself with individual rights. Rather, constitutional law in the late nineteenth century involved the division of legislative powers between the federal and provincial governments—disputes that neither addressed claims to individual liberty nor the power of an unbridled state. If liberties were at stake, they were subsumed under arguments about which level of government was authorized to legislate on the specific subject matter at issue. In this way, Canadian constitutionalism resembled the “well-regulated society” of the antebellum United States: in the pursuit of the common good, public power was authorized to regulate liberty and private property to the fullest extent possible.

The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been aptly called the “Age of Codifications.” The same period was also the Age of Constitutions. Although a great deal is known about the migration of prenational and transnational legal sources and ideas that led to national codes of civil and criminal law in Europe and the Americas, much less is known about similar processes on the constitutional level. Constitutional historians have been more parochial than their private law counterparts, most likely because of the relationship between constitutions and nations. In the light of independence, nations immediately needed constitutions to solidify gains and to consolidate state power. The study of these processes becomes national narratives, often in conversation with the former colonial power, which are disconnected from more general or regional trends. As Linda Colley's article in this issue illustrates, it is important to step back to view the constitution-making process from an Atlantic perspective that ties the Americas, North and South, into the area of study. The Age of Constitutions in the Americas must include Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the 1950s, the National Association of Women Lawyers (“NAWL”) undertook what it considered its “greatest project,” the drafting and promotion of a model no-fault divorce law. It launched its campaign at a time when post-war realities and the law in practice were putting increasing pressure on the law on the books which lagged behind contemporary sensibilities. NAWL acted two decades before the no-fault divorce “revolution” of the 1970s. It did so in the 1950s when women were said to be both “domestic” and “quiescent.” The Article has three aims. First, it considers NAWL's project as a missing piece in the history of divorce law, the no-fault revolution, and the rise of mass divorce in mid-twentieth century America. Second, it reflects on the implications of NAWL's undertaking for the standard narrative of “domesticity” in the 1950s, an account that has been questioned in recent years. Last, it tells a story of women's activism in the depth of the so-called “doldrums” of the organized women's moveme