Fifty-seven men of color were sentenced to death by the courts of England and Wales in the twentieth century and were less likely to receive mercy than white contemporaries. Though shocking, the data is perhaps unsurprising considering institutional racism and unequal access to justice widely highlighted by criminologists since the 1970s. We find discourses of racial difference were frequently mobilized tactically in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and Wales: to support arguments for mercy and attempt to save prisoners from the gallows. Scholars have identified historically and culturally contingent narratives traditionally deployed to speak to notions of lesser culpability. These mercy narratives reveal contemporary ideals and attitudes to gender or class. This article is original in identifying strategic mercy narratives told in twentieth-century England and Wales that called on contemporary tropes about defendants' race. The narratives and cases we explore suggest contemporary racism in the criminal justice system of England and Wales has a longer history than previously acknowledged.

In early sixteenth-century England, the presence of ecclesiastical sanctuaries in the legal, social, and religious landscape was a matter of great controversy. Any English church could offer temporary sanctuary to an accused felon, a privilege that expired after about forty days, following which the felon had to abjure the realm. More contentiously, by the late Middle Ages a number of English religious houses used their status as royally-chartered liberties to offer sanctuary permanently, not only to accused criminals, but also to debtors, alien craftsmen, and, especially during the civil wars of the fifteenth century, political refugees. These ecclesiastical liberties, small territories that exercised varying extents of juridical and political autonomy, considerably complicated the jurisdictional map of late medieval England. London in particular, with its host of liberties and peculiars, constituted a patchwork quilt of legal jurisdictions. Although the mayor and aldermen of London were wont to say that the “chyeff and most commodyous place of the Cytie of London” constituted “one hoole Countie and one hoole Jurisdiccion and libertie” over which its citizens ruled, saving only the authority of the king himself, this confident as-sertion of the City's jurisdiction over the metropolitan square mile was constantly belied by the presence of these liberties. The most notable—and for the City, the most troubling—was the sanctuary at St. Martin Le Grand, a sizeable area within the bounds of the City, before 1503 governed by the dean and canons of the College of St. Martin, after 1503 absorbed into the lands attached to Westminster Abbey and ruled by the abbot. For about two centuries before St. Martin Le Grand was dissolved in 1542, its precinct was home to a thriving population of debtors, accused felons, and perhaps most numerously alien craftsmen, all seeking for various reasons to avoid civic or royal jurisdiction.5 The dissolution of religious houses which accompanied the English Reformation greatly lessened, although did not altogether eradicate, the privileges of St. Martin's.

Over the past decade, state agencies throughout Brazil have launched initiatives that aim to defend children's rights to their father's name. These initiatives take the form of discrete programs in different states, all of which seek to identify children who lack a paternal last name—an estimated 10–25 percent of all Brazilian children —in hopes of finding their fathers and encouraging or obligating them to legally recognize their paternity and inscribe their names on the children's birth registries. Project staff also sometimes formalize child support arrangements, although this is not the primary objective. Instead, Responsible Paternity projects (as most of them are known) seek to free children from the social stigma of illegitimate birth, thus protecting their constitutional right to equality and human dignity.

The decades following the American Revolution witnessed major changes in American society. As traditional means of social control eroded, an increasingly secular society turned to lawmakers—both judicial and legislative—to craft new norms. Nineteenth-century legislators and judges actively promoted new visions of the economy, politics, and society. No area of social concern escaped their attention. Recent scholarship focusing on women and the family has explored how lawmakers transformed pre-Revolutionary legal concepts in reaction to changes in the nature of the family itself. This article examines the legal response in one narrow intersection of law and society: the law of sexual slander.

During the past twenty years historical investigations of crime and criminal justice have increased considerably. This new subfield has been hailed enthusiastically by many of its practitioners: Douglas Hay considers it one that offers a key to ‘unlocking the meanings of eighteenth century social history.’ John Styles and John Brewer view the study of crime and law as a ‘point d'appui for a social history approach that embraces both the history of society and the issues of power and authority, an approach, in other words, that resolves the “crisis of social history.”’ Moreover, Marzio Romani describes this research as one that utilizes crime as a 'symptom,’ as a link between ‘conjuncture’ and ‘structure.’

The influence on the Canadian political culture of two conflicting tendencies in common-law constitutional thought, constitutionalism and legalism, merits attention. By constitutionalism, I mean a particular response to the apprehended infringement of civil rights and liberties by the state: an appeal to standards of state conduct that are supposedly sanctified by long usage, implied contract, or both. By legalism, I mean the justification of alleged infringements by invoking the lawfulness of the authority by which such actions are taken. These definitions deviate from common usage, but they serve to represent a dichotomy within common-law constitutional thought that has been crucial to the development of the English political culture and of cultures derived from the English.

Historians have long discussed the different ways in which the first professional lawyer to practice in Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Lechford, was at odds with colony authorities in his three-year stay there—from June 27, 1638 to August 3, 1641. Some accounts have focused on his religious views, since Lechford disagreed with the strict forms of church membership prescribed by the colony's religion, Congregationalism. When he returned to England, Lechford wrote a book called Plain Dealing in which he argued against this form of religious organization, claiming that he had received enough first-hand experience to recommend a return to the Church of England. This book has been an important source of information on religious and political arrangements in colonial Massachusetts, and so for many, the picture of Lechford as religious dissenter is familiar. Another important picture of Lechford, especially familiar to historians of the American legal profession, is Lechford the impecunious lawyer disbarred for the unethical practice of law. Lechford himself had written, “I am…forced to get my living by writing petty things, which scarce finds me bread.” He had been disbarred for “embracery,” pleading to a jury out of court, and it was assumed that this combination of circumstances forced him to return to England. James Savage wrote under his biographical entry for Lechford: “left here, aft. vain attempt to earn bread.” Other nineteenth-century scholars of colonial Massachusetts said much the same thing. William Whitmore, in an introduction to a collection of Massachusetts colonial laws, wrote that Lechford “was finally starved into returning to England.”

Public accommodations—hotels, trains, restaurants, steamboats, theaters, buses, motels, and the like—were for more than a century located at the epicenter of legal and political struggles for racial equality. From the age of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, civil rights in public places stood alongside voting rights, school integration, and equal opportunity in employment and housing as conditions that black people and their allies claimed as necessary attributes of a just society. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Supreme Court rulings in the Civil Rights Cases and especially in Plessy v. Ferguson were critical episodes in the career of Jim Crow in the nineteenth century, followed in the twentieth by the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

We think of James Madison as a political theorist, legislative drafter, and constitutional interpreter. Recent scholarship has fought fiercely over the nature of his political thought. Unlike other important early national leaders—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Edmund Randolph, James Wilson—law has been seen as largely irrelevant to Madison's intellectual biography. Madison, however, studied law and, at least in one extant manuscript, took careful notes. These notes have been missing for over a century, and their loss contributed to the sense that Madison must not have been that interested in law. Now located, these notes reveal Madison's significant grasp of law and his striking curiosity about the problem of language. Madison's interest in interpretation is certainly not news to scholars. These notes, however, help to establish that this interest predated the Constitution and that his interest in constitutional interpretation was an application of a larger interest in language. Moreover, Madison thought about the problem of legal interpretation as a student of law, never from the secure status of lawyer. Over his lifetime, he advocated a variety of institutional approaches to constitutional interpretation, and this comfort with nonjudicial interpreters, along with a peculiar ambivalence about the proper location of constitutional interpretation, may owe a great deal to his self-perception as a law student but never a lawyer.

On a hopeful September day in 1912, Gim Pon, a twenty-five year old Chinese man from Canton, boarded the steamship Siberia in Hong Kong harbor to sail west across the Pacific. The Siberia docked briefly in San Francisco, but Gim Pon's destination, and that of seven fellow Chinese travelers, was not California but the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In the early twentieth century, thousands of men like Gim Pon immigrated to Mexico, boosting the Chinese population there from slightly over 1,000 in 1895 to more than 24,000 in the mid-1920s. Sonora, which hugs Arizona at the United States/Mexico border, was a popular destination, and hosted the largest Chinese population of any Mexican state through the 1920s. Once in Sonora, Gim Pon adapted to life in Mexico: he changed his name to Francisco Gim, learned Spanish, and became naturalized as a Mexican citizen on February 27, 1920. Most importantly, he formed a family with Julia Delgado.

Ever since the official promulgation of the judicial reform statutes of 1864 in late imperial Russia, a scholarly commonplace has been the reform's contribution to the remarkable emergence of several generations of brilliant Russian trial lawyers and an internationally famous tradition of outstanding judicial oratory during the half-century preceding the Bolshevik revolution. This impressive display of judicial learning and courtroom artistry occurred in the context of Western-style trial by jury, the reform's most daring innovation. Introduced in 1866 after two years of energetic preparation, Russia's system of trial by jury bequeathed to scholars the most powerful emblem of the post-1864 Russian legal order: the courtroom confrontation between the defense attorney (zashchitnik) and the state's prosecutorial agent, the procurator (prokuror). In this judicial clash, the defense counsel has represented the eloquent, keen-witted, Western-educated champion of the individual and even the “defender of public interests.” The procuratorial representative has come to embody the interests of a regime whose relentless and often undisguised statism belied the reform statutes' open proclamation of the principles of legality and the “rule of law.”

In 1891, in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Mrs. Olivia Mayne brought an action for breach of contract against two brothers, theatrical entrepreneurs, James and Charles MacMahon. Mrs. Mayne claimed the MacMahon brothers owed her money for the hire of her property, a boxing kangaroo called “Fighting Jack.” The MacMahons contested her claim, hoping to avoid their obligation by disputing the legally binding nature of the agreement they had made with her. The argument became one about the contractual capacity of a married woman.

Historians of Latin American slavery will find de la Fuente's article to be a particularly trenchant and learned essay on familiar historiographic controversies. The archival research awakens anticipation for the author's in-depth study of the earlier period of Cuban slavery, much neglected in favor of the heyday of the sugar complex of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Concentrating on the law and “slaves' claims-making” (341) allows for an important entry into the subject, complementing recent studies of slavery in Spanish America that have focused on how slaves used the institutions of Spanish colonialism to gain freedom or greater autonomy. However, reviving the Tannenbaum thesis, even in the limited form of the law, inspires less enthusiasm. De la Fuente's interpretation of Cuban slavery, through his rereading of Tannenbuam, does not produce misrepresentations in his treatment of historiography or sources; rather, I sense in this work the static conception of New World slavery created by Tannenbaum's dichotomous vision, both among and within particular colonial and national slave societies.

Historical inquiry into the character of local dispute resolution and the operation of customary law in medieval England begins in manorial courts, since it is from those local courts that the most abundant documentation survives. Were the judgments of these courts “principled” in the sense of being rooted in substantive legal rules that courts ordinarily followed, or were they ad hoc determinations based on factual circumstances invisible to the modern reader? Can historians extrapolate behavioral norms and shared cultural values from the manor court records that survive in increasing profusion from the second quarter of the thirteenth century?

On August 28, 1919, Brazil's most famous pediatrician, Dr. Carlos Arthur Moncorvo Filho, addressed his colleagues at the illustrious National Academy of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro, reminding them that consanguineous marriage was the topic of the moment. Dr. Moncorvo Filho's insistence that “everyone knew why” was a reference to a proposal made before the Senate just three months prior by Senators Eloy de Souza of the state of Pernambuco and Álvaro de Carvalho of São Paulo. The senators proposed that language prohibiting marriage between blood relatives in the recently ratified Brazilian Civil Code be amended to allow for special juridical or medical dispensation. Souza and Carvalho, with the backing of the Catholic Church and a minority of members of the Brazilian Institute of Attorneys, supported permitting marriage between third-degree relatives under special circumstances. At issue for the attorneys was how the law would deal with situations in which couples had a compelling need to marry within the third degree of kinship. A recent case of an uncle who had “deflowered” his niece and then offered to “remedy the damage” through marriage brought this issue to public debate. Marriages between uncles and their nieces and aunts and their nephews (third-degree relations) were traditional in Brazil, and Brazilian law had a long history of yielding to custom and context. However, under the new laws of the 30-year-old republic, this type of marriage was no longer legal, having been specifically prohibited by the 1916 Civil Code. Senators Souza and Carvalho, both lawyers by training, proposed reforming the Code, while their ultimately unsuccessful amendment sparked vigorous debate in both legal and medical circles on the validity of marriage restrictions within the third degree of consanguinity. As a result, physicians at Brazil's leading medical schools and their jurist counterparts at the law schools took sides on this critical issue, dividing themselves into rival camps of consanguinistas and anticonsanguinistas.

Although constitutional originalism has attracted a remarkable degree of public and professional attention over the past several decades, little research has been conducted on the intellectual roots of modern originalism. This Article finds that American law schools housed few originalist theorists through much of the 1970s and early 1980s. However, after Edwin Meese III became U.S. Attorney General in 1985, the Department of Justice constructed a vibrant academy in exile, with government lawyers leading the way in the early development, theorization, and exercise of originalism. In addition to becoming the official mode of constitutional interpretation for Meese and the DOJ, originalism started to gain followers on the federal bench and within conservative social movements during the second half of the 1980s. As constitutional originalism grew in influence and professional use, academic interlocutors began engaging with and reimagining originalism more intently.

During the first decade of his tenure as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) from 1870 to 1895, Christopher C. Langdell (1826–1906) produced closely related works on contracts and sales that exercised great influence pedagogically and jurisprudentially. Pedagogically, the casebooks on contracts and sales introduced case method teaching into American legal education. In jurisprudential terms, these works placed Langdell with Frederick Pollock and William R. Anson in England and Oliver W. Holmes, Jr., in the United States, as the leading theorists of contract during its “golden age” of “overwhelming predominance” in Anglo-American law.

Section 54 (11) of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 criminalized the act of a common prostitute causing annoyance by soliciting in public.2 For the police to implement this legislation was no simple matter, as no definition of “prostitute,” or indeed “annoyance,” was scribed in statute law. Although common law aided the interpretation of this offense—the case of Rex v. de Munck (1918): “We are of the opinion that prostitution is proved if it is shown that a woman offers her body commonly for lewdness of payment in return”3—in practice, identifying a “common prostitute” and defining “annoyance” was left to the discretion of the individual police officer. Although specific squads were deployed to target streetwalkers in West End police divisions, where the presence of prostitutes was more likely to cause public offense, a “blind eye” was often turned to women soliciting in the less salubrious streets of the metropolis. Local knowledge gained on the beat and the informal advice of colleagues shaped an unofficial police policy of containment and toleration.4

On January 24, 1817, Don Juan Stoughton, the Spanish consul in Boston, wrote to his colleague in Baltimore, Don Pablo Chacon, to thank him for his recent efforts in supplying Stoughton with information about the Mangore, a private armed vessel recently arrived in the Chesapeake. Stoughton believed that the privateer was responsible for the capture of a Spanish-owned merchant ship that had recently turned up in Massachusetts. Stoughton had recently filed suit in federal district court to recover the vessel and its cargo on behalf of the rightful owners, but to do so he had to establish that, in the course of its recent expedition, the Mangore had violated federal law prescribing American neutrality. In addition to providing intelligence in this matter, Chacon had secured local counsel to represent Stoughton at depositions of privateer crew members being taken in Baltimore.