Following the 1906 midterm elections, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge was excited to return to Washington to introduce a bill that would prohibit child labor in the nation's factories, mines, and mills. He hoped the bill would curtail the unpopular practice and help rebrand his Republican Party as the nation's progressive party. The Party's old guard, however, proved uncooperative. Recognizing the unpopularity of child labor, they fought the bill on constitutional grounds and challenged Beveridge with a parade of horribles. If Congress could constitutionally regulate child labor, they asked, could it not also regulate the hours or wages of adults? Could it not prevent a man from joining a labor union? Or require it? One would have expected Beveridge—who opposed such regulations—to blunt that criticism with some legal distinction. Instead, he embraced it. Would Beveridge go so far as to claim that Congress could prohibit the interstate shipment of cotton picked by children, asked one Senator. “Yes,” Beveridge retorted, “or [by] a redheaded girl.”

Twenty-something John Dunn remembered July 17, 1872 well. A witness for the defense in both a bastardy trial brought by 15-year-old Mary Morgan and a later seduction suit brought by her father, John would recount that summer day by drawing on the rough, sexual slang he likely used in conversations with male friends. After he was sworn in, John informed the legal participants and curious local spectators gathered at the Perry County Circuit Court that the July 17 buggy ride with young Mary had presented him with the opportunity to “feel of her titties and monkey.” John's testimony was hardly the most vulgar given during the proceedings. Another character witness, Robert B. Ward, disclosed a particularly salacious conversation he had overheard while in the “privy” behind a DuQuoin general store. Eavesdropping, Ward listened to two young men discuss Mary Morgan's “condition” with one another. The man Ward recognized, Thomas Williams, told his friend he would leave the state rather than marry a girl who “ran around screwing this one and that one,” if Mary did happen to “swear the child on him.” Thomas's buddy agreed that dodging the law would be preferable to matrimony with Mary for she had not “behaved herself.” “I have screwed her as often as I have fingers and toes, or oftener, and you know it,” he confided to Thomas. “Yes I know that,” Thomas replied, “She don't know more than a hog whose child it is.”

Students of Anglo-American criminal law, historians included, have traditionally had very little to say about criminal codes. This omission is startling in the face of ongoing efforts to codify criminal law since the late eighteenth century, not only in England and the United States, but also in Canada and India. The only historical study of criminal codification in the United States is a survey article that is, strictly speaking, not about codification at all, but about the great men who made codification possible, in particular the forefathers of Herbert Wechsler, the main drafter of the Model Penal Code. The Model Penal Code itself gave no clues as to its historical antecedents, if any. It is regarded, and portrayed itself, as having invented the wheel by starting from scratch, the raw material of the common law.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that during his 1018 meeting in Oxford with the leading English ecclesiastical and lay authorities, roughly one year after his accession to the throne in England, Cnut agreed to uphold “the laws of Edgar” during his reign. The ultimate outcome of this and subsequent meetings is the code issued at Winchester in 1020, referred to by editorial convention as I and II Cnut. This code contains, respectively, the religious and secular laws of England promulgated under Cnut. The code is contained in four manuscripts in Old English. The earliest are British Library, Cotton Nero A.i and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 201, both dated to the mid-eleventh century; the latest, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 383 and British Library, Harley 55, belong to the early twelfth century. Cnut's code reappears in three twelfth-century Norman Latin tracts intended to acquaint French authorities with English law, the Instituta Cnuti, Consiliatio Cnuti, and Quadripartitus. The Leges Henrici Primi, prepared by the same author as the Quadripartitus, also draws heavily on Cnut's legislation.

This article traces how Ottoman interpretations and uses of Islamic law adapted to deal with non-Muslim rebellions between roughly 1769 and 1830. Drawing on Ottoman fatwas (legal opinions), bureaucratic registers, sultanic decrees, and chronicles, as well as British diplomatic records, it argues that the Ottoman state actively reinterpreted its commitment to the Islamic legal tradition in order to forge the law of rebellion into a weapon against both foreign and domestic enemies. The Ottomans first used declarations of rebellion to mobilize military forces against its imperial rivals, then to discourage and suppress domestic dissent, and finally to deny rebels’ sovereignty under international law. In doing so, the Sublime Porte effectively redefined sovereignty by interleaving Islamic and international concepts. The article places this development in global context, arguing that it resembled legal moves made by Atlantic states as they dealt with the Age of Revolutions. At the same time, this story shows how the Ottoman state’s commitment to Islamic law, and its employment of officially authorized scholars to interpret that law, could both license and constrain state policy. The Islamic legal tradition was flexible, but also meaningful. Interpretation occurred at different levels, and was done by different actors. While the state had significant latitude, it faced limits arising from the substance of the law and the process of interpretation itself.

Since 1989, cultural expertise has emerged as a crucial factor in navigating Poland's communist past. The use of cultural expertise provided by historians was institutionalized in 1999, when the Institute of National Remembrance was created and charged with prosecuting Nazi and communist crimes, as well as assisting with the belated decommunization. Expert historians are requested by courts and other institutions to provide opinions in cases ranging from alleged collaboration with communist secret services, withdrawal of veteran status bestowed to soldiers of communist military units fighting the Polish resistance movement, awarding compensation to victims of German concentration and labour camps, to changing names of places named after prominent Party activists. Using this expertise requires the courts to understand the intricacies of recent Polish history, such as the operational methodology and archival practices of communist secret services, or the complex interplay of motives to collaborate (or not) with foreign oppressors. In this paper, the new salience of historical expertise for the Polish courts is analysed within the framework of Honneth's (1995) ‘struggle for recognition’ and Haldemann's (2008) work on the symbolic role of courts in transitional justice contexts.

Northern Brazil experienced consequential socio-economic and legal transformation by the mid-eighteenth century in the context of imperial reforms. If the region relied for decades on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans, the Portuguese crown banned the practiced in 1755. To develop a plantation economy, the monarchy created a trading company responsible for shipping unprecedented number of enslaved Africans. This article discusses ruptures and continuities on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans. It focuses on one city, São Luís, and makes extensive use of Catholic sources (baptisms and marriages), notarial records, and legal cases. The article analyzes the connection between mechanisms that allowed the resilience of slavery (or forms that resembled slavery) and attempts to claim and preserve freedom or autonomy, in this case the strategic use of the índio status. The article develops two of those mechanisms: social dependencies created within the households and the use of socio-racial classifications by the colonial society. I make two interconnected arguments. First, I propose a bottom-up process of Indigenous slavery abolition. Indigenous workers were savvy litigants and they fought for their place as mobile wage laborers within the city. Second, in that moment of socio-economic and legal transformations, slaveholders developed vernacular practices stressing black maternal origins to slaves.

James Hackney's article provocatively points our attention to very important and underexplored issues concerning the interplay of science and politics in the dramatic evolution of law and neoclassical economics since the Second World War. At the heart of his article is his rejection of any reductionist interpretation of the leading developments in this area. Modern law and neoclassical economics, he argues, cannot be accurately viewed either as merely a faithful, nonpoliticized application of modern social science or, alternatively, as simply a convenient vehicle for the promotion of particular contentious political beliefs. Hackney insists that law and neoclassical economics, both in general and in the specific doctrinal area he emphasizes, is about both science and politics. His article seeks to demonstrate this duality and, more broadly, to clarify the general nature and evolution of modern law and economics. Hackney highlights key general characteristics of twentieth-century intellectual thought and examines the influence of those characteristics, as well as the interplay between science and politics, in a series of landmark works on law and economics that have great relevance to recent debates over appropriate products liability standards.

I am a friend to the preservation of the rights of property…but I believe in the subordination of those rights to the public good…. I deny that the people of my Province are insensible to or careless about the true principles of legislation. I believe they are thoroughly alive to them, and I am content that my rights of property, humble though they are, and those of my children, shall belong to the Legislature of my country to be disposed of subject to the good sense and right feeling of the people of that Province.

Edward Blake made this declaration about property in 1882. Presumably his beliefs were widely shared by Canadian lawyers, for he was the leader of the Liberal party, the Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario), and one of the leading counsel. We seek to explore his beliefs and to reconstruct the understandings of rights in late nineteenth-century Canada, and especially the understandings of common-law lawyers.

On March 16, 1801, President Jefferson issued commissions to fifteen men to serve as justices of the peace for the County of Washington in the District of Columbia. Thirteen of the fifteen were among twenty-three justices of the peace who had been nominated by President Adams and confirmed on his last day in office. Benjamin Moore was one of two original Jefferson appointees; among the Adams appointees left off the list was William Marbury. Thus were set in motion two cases in which the Supreme Court would have an opportunity to address issues central to the great controversy over repeal of the 1801 Judiciary Act. In both cases, the Court ducked.

Shortly after the beginning of his reign in 1201, Duke Henry I the Bearded of Silesia confirmed the past acquisitions of two major Cistercian monasteries in his province—the houses of Lubiąż and Trzebnica—with three long charters in which he described and explained the past transfers of individual holdings to the abbeys, clarified doubts and controversies about them, and added endowment to the estates of each monastery. Both communities were endowed with wealthy areas of settlement and revenue that had prior to the creation of their estates been held under knightly, ducal, and ecclesiastical lordship.

History is a strange medium: it carries the most contemporary debates onto the most distant terrain. Both Bruce Mann and David Konig focus on the notions of change and context that undergird the forum essays. Those issues, more than any moment in early New York, link the articles and the comments. By exploring the way we defined “constitutions,” “constitutionalism,” and “constitutional history,” the commentators open up a large and current question. They invite a discussion about approaches to constitutional change.

I am glad that the Review has provided a Forum for advancing discussion of the “rapidly evolving field of Second Amendment scholarship,” as Richard Uviller and William Merkel so aptly describe it. The field is evolving so rapidly, in fact, that I had no chance to consult their excellent book on the subject when writing this article. Having now had the luxury—and great benefit—of reading it in preparing my reply to their comments, I can only cheer them on for the way that book and their remarks in the Forum advance the common goals we seek: to replace an ahistorical quotation-hunting with a meticulous examination of “the collateral expressions of the founders and their contemporaries to find the most likely purposes and assumptions underlying the text” of the Second Amendment.

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the role of Scots law in the development of the post-Revolutionary law and legal system of the United States. This neglect stems largely from the fact that Scots law has had little apparent permanent influence on American law. However, during the “formative era of American law” from the Revolution to the Civil War, a notable effort to introduce America to civil law concepts took place. Furthermore, the impact of the Scottish enlightenment on the fledgling United States in higher education, philosophy, and medicine is well documented. Scottish Enlightenment thought arguably had a significant impact on the Declaration of Independence, which was signed by at least two native-born Scots and an American who was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh.

The “who” of a lawsuit, who can sue and who can be sued, has long been a fundamental issue of process. Lengthy discussions of the issue are found in Roman law texts of eighteen centuries ago and in succeeding centuries in texts influenced by Roman law. In Roman law texts, the “who” of a lawsuit was discussed in the same context and, most importantly, with the same seeming concern as the fundamental issues of whether the court had authority over the parties and whether the court had competence over the subject matter. The same is true for many of the texts influenced by Roman law.