Notebooks written by students at the Litchfield Law School are among the primary sources for understanding the influence of English law in this country. The notebooks provide rich documentation of how the common law and elements of English law were presented, explained, and compared with American law in a formal classroom setting during the Early Republic. The digitization project described here, the first large-scale digitization initiative undertaken at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, with the cooperation of the Litchfield Historical Society, is intended to organize, describe, and analyze those notebooks with a web site containing a database, bibliography, inventory, and links to images. The Litchfield student notebook project was intended not only to create digital surrogates of important historical sources, but also to inform future digital legal history projects at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

This article analyses the place of the legal procedure known as requerimiento (requirement) in the social life of late medieval Castile. Drawing on archival sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it examines how Castilians deployed the requerimiento and what meanings and functions this procedure assumed, particularly in processes of conflict-management. While much has been written about the requerimiento as a ritual of conquest in Spanish America, the place of this procedure in the legal culture of late medieval Castile has received little scholarly attention. By examining how the requerimiento operated within the world of civic disputes in Castilian villages and towns, this study brings to light a rather unknown background for the more familiar requerimiento, the colonial ritual of the sixteenth century.

This article studies the registration practices of land and property on palm leaf deeds (olas) in Sri Lanka, in relationship to the advent of paper land grants (giftebrieven) under the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s rule in the long eighteenth century. A database of about 2500 Dutch land grant deeds and translated olas, ranging from 1685 to 1795 are contextualised via judicial records of Dutch civil courts, where (translated) olas were regularly used as evidence. Not only does this allow us to track the geographical encroachment of Dutch power over coastal Sri Lanka as part of a colonial transition, but at the same time shift the perspective to study which individuals and communities on the island engaged with Dutch land bureaucracy. In doing so, we showcase the continued importance of traditional ola deeds and (pre-)colonial registers for both local land owners and the colonial bureaucracy itself, regardless of the Dutch government’s push for paper, attempted to delegitimise the local ola recordings, and acts of symbolic violence to infringe on both the materiality as well as the perceived importance of palm leaf deeds. In the long eighteenth century several paper and palm leaf realities coexisted in Sri Lanka and at times conflicted, entangled, and convoluted within and outside the bureaucratic institutions to form what ‘material pluralism’ within a larger context of legal pluralities.

This article explores the legal and judicial vulnerability of male youth in Buenos Aires, Argentina between 1853 and 1912, years that correspond to the codification of criminal law and the passage of the first age of consent laws. Using 65 sodomy and rape cases, it traces the courts' changing treatment of males who suffered sexual assault. It argues that a traditional revulsion of sodomy, a cultural preoccupation with female sexuality, official concern with the social order, and the preoccupations of classical and positivist criminologists ensured the liminality of male youth in both the law and the courts. Judicial authorities only started to regard prepubescent boys as innocent in the first decade of the twentieth century. By highlighting how age, innocence and gender were only mutually constituted in the twentieth century, this article makes a significant contribution to literature on the emergence of modern notions of childhood and innocence. Historians have shown how categories such as class, ethnicity, filiation and natal status worked to include or exclude certain groups from this classification in modern Latin America, this work reveals how central both age and gender norms and expectations were to the belated integration of boys.

Atlanta's human rights community was buzzing, because the United Nations (U.N.) was coming to town. On Sunday, January 19, 1964, the front page of the Atlanta Daily World, the city's oldest black newspaper and the South's only black daily, announced, “United Nations Rights Panel to Visit Atlanta.” The U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (Sub-Commission), the Daily World explained, was a fourteen nation “body that surveys the worldwide problems of discrimination.” The Sub-Commission had been invited to Atlanta by Morris Abram, a former Atlanta attorney and the lone United States member of the Sub-Commission, to study first-hand the city's well-publicized, efforts to improve in race relations. Sunday morning's Daily World also noted that the U.N. delegation “composed of experts, mostly lawyers and jurists” was in the midst of drafting a global treaty designed to end racial discrimination, and the local paper highlighted Abram's role as the primary drafter of the race accord. “Mr. Abram, as the U.S. expert on the subcommission has proposed a sweeping eight-point treaty,” the article reported. According to the Daily World, the pending race treaty—the treaty that would ultimately become the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD or Convention)—would address “segregation, hate groups and discrimination in public accommodations.”

In August 1849, outspoken proslavery Missouri Supreme Court Judge James H. Birch sued Unionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri for slander because he had publicly accused Birch of having kept “his own negro wench” and whipped his wife because she had dared to complain about it. On first impression, the lurid accusation and resulting lawsuit might seem merely colorful window dressing for the virulent sectional politics of the late antebellum period. Benton's objectionable utterances certainly exemplify the verbal pyrotechnics that, after the Mexican War, often accompanied public debate over the question of whether African-American bondage was to extend across the continental United States. But the vituperation that gave rise to Birch v. Benton, in fact, marked the beginning of one of the most widely-publicized episodes in the struggle pitting the champion of Jacksonian democracy in the trans-Mississippi Southwest against a powerful cadre of proslavery leaders who sought to end his thirty-year career in the United States Senate. According to legal historian Gerald T. Dunne, the politicized nature of the case and its contentious appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court provided the critical catalyst for lawmakers in the state to amend its constitution in 1850 to replace lifetime tenure for judges with periodic voter choice. The landmark constitutional revision both instituted popular election of judges and shook up the composition of the proslavery high court, including the removal of Judge Birch.

Researchers of the history of late imperial Russia quite often base their studies on the texts of laws as recorded in the official edition: the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). The laws were published there in chronological order for purposes of conducting inquiries; it was specifically the Complete Collection in which the original text of a decree approved by the emperor could generally be found.

In 1871, Mary Ann Harlan brought an unprecedented suit against her neighbors, Elliot and Mary Clark, before the Superior Court of Cincinnati. She alleged that they had “wrongfully and maliciously enticed away” her husband, Robert Harlan, from their home, thus depriving her of Robert's “society, protection, and support.” The common law had long given husbands the right of action to sue third parties who enticed away, harbored, alienated the affections of, or seduced their wives. In these types of marital torts, a husband sought damages for the loss of his wife's “consortium,” a term that expressed his property in her services and society. At the time of Mary Ann's suit, however, wives had no such reciprocal right. In part, this was an outcome of the common law doctrine of marital unity, or coverture, under which a wife's legal identity was merged into that of her husband upon marriage. Unable to sue or be sued, she had to be joined by him in a legal action. Courts were hardly amenable to the idea of allowing husbands to join in suits involving their own marital transgressions, where they would stand to profit from their misdeeds if any damages were awarded. More fundamentally, however, the limitation of wives' access to legal remedies was an expression of the hierarchical nature of marital unity. No less an authority than eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone, the most influential expositor of the common law, put the reason plainly: “the inferior hath no kind of property in the company, care, or assistance of the superior, as the superior is held to have in those of the inferior; and therefore the inferior can suffer no loss or injury.” According to this theory, a wife was not barred from bringing such a suit simply because of her legal disabilities under coverture; as a subordinate in the marriage relation, she lacked any reciprocal claim to her husband's society. Mary Ann's case, then, hinged on whether she had the right to bring her suit.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small group of antiapartheid activists, led by the American Committee on Africa and chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa Rep. Charles Diggs Jr., launched a campaign against South African Airways' new flights into the United States. Using the legal and political strategies of the American civil rights movement, and the fragmentation of power within the American political system, activists tried to turn South African apartheid into an American civil rights problem that American government institutions could address. The strategy was indebted to the political and legal strategies of the civil rights movement, but framing demands around existing civil rights law necessarily limited what activists could ask for and what domestic institutions could provide. In practice, the campaign's successes were limited and legalistic; where domestic civil rights law directly conflicted with apartheid law, airlines could comply with the former without really challenging the latter. And the foreign policy context meant more failures than successes, as domestic legal institutions were reluctant to involve themselves with foreign policy concerns. Their successes and failures nonetheless tell us much about legal mobilization and institutional behavior in a period of globalization where sovereignty and jurisdictional lines were overlapping and conflicting.

Most court opinions are like actors: the older they get, the less people pay attention to them. For instance, the case immediately after Pierson v. Post in volume 3 of Caines's Reports is called Hollingsworth v. Napier. It was an important case in its day, much more important than Pierson v. Post, because it involved a recurring question of commercial law: what rights, if any, did a seller retain in goods stored in a public warehouse after he had delivered a bill of sale to the buyer? Hollingsworth went on to be cited in forty court opinions distributed fairly evenly through the 1870s, but then its career was over. It was cited twice in the 1880s, once in 1892, and never again.

In 1940, in the inaugural issue of its Bill of Rights Review, the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee expressed its conviction “that a distinct field of law—that of civil rights—[was] emerging.” From the standpoint of lawyers, judges, and scholars looking forward from that moment, the contours of the new field were largely unknown. In large part, that uncertainty was due to the Supreme Court's dismantling of the dominant doctrinal framework governing the relationship between individuals and the state in the 1930s.

Less than two years after Justice Harlan Fiske Stone reportedly advised Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor that “You can do anything under the taxing power,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Butler that Congress had no authority to create a system whereby farmers would receive subsidies for limiting production, with the funds coming from a tax on basic commodities. While Stone, along with Brandeis and Cardozo, voted to uphold this feature of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a majority led by Justice Owen J. Roberts declared that this particular scheme of taxing and spending interfered with the reserve powers of the states to control local manufacturing and agriculture. Roberts cited the great nationalist Joseph Story for the proposition that “the Constitution was, from its very origin, contemplated to be a frame of a national government, of special and enumerated powers, and not of general and unlimited powers.… A power to lay taxes for the common defence and general welfare of the United States is not in common sense a general power. It is limited to those objects. It cannot constitutionally transcend them.” The AAA was “a scheme for purchasing with federal funds submission to federal regulation of a subject reserved to the states. … If the Act before us is a proper exercise of the federal taxing power, evidently the regulation of all industry throughout the United States may be accomplished by similar exercise of the same power.”

Impersonation and then identity theft in America emerged in the legal space between a civil system with a high tolerance for market risk and losses incurred by impostors, and a later-developing criminal system preoccupied with fraud or forgery against the government. Negotiable instruments, generally paper checks, borrowed from seventeenth-century England, enabled a geographically far-flung commercial system of paper-based but impersonal exchanges at a time before widespread availability of centrally-issued currency or regulated banks. By assigning loss rather than catching criminals, the “impostor rule” made and continues to make transactions with negotiable instruments valid even if fraudulent. This large body of commercial law has stood essentially unchanged for three hundred years and has facilitated a system rife with impersonation which criminal and federal laws did not address until the late 20th century. English common law, American legal treatises, court cases, law review articles, and internal debates behind the Uniform Commercial Code tell the story of a legal system at the service of commerce through the unimpeded transfer of paper payments. Combining the fields of legal history and criminal justice with the approaches of emerging research in both identification and paperwork studies, this article explains the ongoing policy problems of identity theft.