For over one hundred years—from the post–Civil War era to the post–Civil Rights era—the state of Alabama maintained a legal and social commitment to keeping blacks and whites from engaging in long-term sexual relationships with each other. Recent studies addressing the laws that barred miscegenation have shown that investigating governmental reactions to intimate interracial connections reveals much about the interplay between legal and social definitions of race as well as about the development of whiteness as a proxy for superior social, political, and legal status.

The least understood aspect of the punishment of crime in pre-nineteenth-century Spanish society is trial procedure. This is not surprising. Our misapprehensions and misinterpretations of the past are principally the product of eighteenth-century reality being sieved through an uncritical acceptance of nineteenth-century political criticism. The West inherits much of its modern paradigm from the Spain of 1808 to 1834, from Romantic images of Goya as the enlightened individual fighting obscurantism to portrayals of heroic guerrilla patriots seeking to wrest political reform from a reactionary central government. It also inherits, although less consciously, the political rubrics of liberal and conservative (and absolutist) from nationalist polemics during the 1808–1814 French occupation. When looking back half a century later, Spaniards wanted to distinguish themselves clearly from the past.

This article tries to answer two questions about the writ of covenant that have perplexed legal historians. Maitland noticed that the common law courts adopted a requirement that plaintiff produce a writing of the covenant under defendant's seal as proof of the covenant. When and why royal officials adopted this requirement continue to be the chief unanswered questions about covenant. Second, there is the matter of remedy. Some legal historians believe that the remedy in covenant changed from specific performance to damages. But what was the remedy in covenant? Did it change? If so, when and why did it change?

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had surprisingly little impact on women's citizenship or the American constitutional order. For seventy-two years, from 1848 until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, suffrage was the central demand of the woman rights movement in the United States. Women demanded the right to vote in the nineteenth century because they believed it would make them first class citizens with all the rights and privileges of other first class citizens. Both normatively and instrumentally, the suffragists believed that voting would secure equal citizenship for women by raising their civic status and allowing them to assert their political interests. Yet in many ways women were more politically efficacious in the years just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment than they were afterward. Further, their ability to claim rights from the courts and legislatures, on the basis of their new status as voting citizens, was limited.

The purpose of this article is to examine socialist justice “in action.”Specifically, it looks at the Comrades Law system established in 1920s Palestine under the auspices of the General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Palestine. It finds that, regardless of original intentions, the Comrades Law quite rapidly became a quasi-state apparatus, displaying a clear bias in favor of institutional interests over those of individual workers. The argument, therefore, is that rather than becoming a liberating, alternative form of justice, this form of socialist justice ended up reinforcing existing relations of power and working as a mechanism of bureaucratic control.

When industrial schools were initially proposed in late nineteenth-century Canada, they were perceived to be a common solution for the neglected and delinquent working-class boy of the urban slums and for the Aboriginal boy in need of similar education, discipline, and moral and vocational training. This undertaking briefly encapsulated the twinned aims of Canada's nation-building project: to civilize and acculturate both the poor and the colonized to middle-class, Western, white and Anglo norms. As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff remark of nineteenth-century British imperialism, the taming of the “uncivilised and immoral” indigenous African and British slum dweller were overlapping projects, with the “primitive and the pauper” seen as “one in spirit. …the sacred task of the colonizing mission was to reconstruct the home lives of both” by inculcating in their daily lives the bourgeois values of “modern domesticity.”

Even today, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949) strikes students of constitutional law as a vexing factual situation. The problems the case posed for the High Court are all the more daunting considering its historical context, directly following the nation's confrontation with Nazism and standing on the cusp of the Cold War against Communism. In the broader view, most observers would locate the decision within the ascendance of liberal protection for free speech rights occurring over the second half of the twentieth century. But progressive accounts should not be allowed to mask the contemporary momentousness for the justices hearing the case. Indeed, in this constitutional conflict over the speech of a rabble-rousing priest was lodged a sober question about the polity's health at that time and the preferred response to the nation's need.

In 1916, Charles Anderson Boston, one of the members of the first national Legal Redress Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke at the organization's board of directors meeting to endorse the use of new litigation strategies in the fight against racial segregation. The “proper presentation of the legal fight against segregation,” Boston urged, should focus on gathering “facts, not law” to demonstrate to the courts the law's “actual operation.”; Boston's emphasis on using facts to demonstrate the law's operation accorded with the NAACP's litigation strategy, which relied not only on gathering and presenting such facts but also on creating facts by carefully staging scenarios that would present the right test cases to the courts for adjudication.

By the close of the nineteenth century, most continental Europeans tacitly accepted, if they thought about it at all, the notion that a civil code governed multiple personal and familial relationships in their daily lives. Like so many legislative structures, intellectual suppositions, and cultural artifacts, what was once regarded as a novel or even a major break with the past came to be understood as one of the many requisites of modernity. Contemporary historians have adopted a similarly indifferent posture, their curiosity only piqued when encountering specific provisions entangled with other political issues. In a strikingly dissimilar approach to that adopted toward penal law, they have been disinclined to explore the relationship between civil legal endeavor and political culture or the history of ideas. Only with respect to Germany have scholars considered these topics worthy of in-depth analysis; in so doing, they have demonstrated that understanding juridical culture is fundamental to appreciating the textures and peculiarities of the liberal nation state.

Susan Carle has given us a fascinating, thoroughly researched, and well-argued examination of the early history of the modern civil rights movement. She frames her inquiry of this rarely investigated period in terms of the tension between the NAACP's litigation tactics during the early part of the twentieth century and the professed ethics of the establishment lawyers who authored and approved these controversial measures. How, she asks, could leading corporate lawyers such as Charles Boston justify authorizing the NAACP's concerted campaign to solicit plaintiffs and create test cases while at the same time serving on ethics committees that expressly condemned such practices?

The defense of Catalan civil law against the introduction of the Spanish Civil Code in the late nineteenth century was the catalyst for a broad social movement that would be transformed into Catalan nationalism by the turn of the twentieth century. Lawyers were central to this development. They interpreted and popularized the danger codification presented for Catalan society and they were instrumental in making the civil law a central element in the construction of Catalan national identity. Taking their cue from the experience of other stateless nations in Europe, lawyers developed a principled argument for political autonomy that was institutionalized with the creation, in 1901, of Catalonia's first nationalist political party, the Lliga Regionalista. Between 1881 and 1901, Catalan lawyers would help found a series of social movements for the protection of Catalan culture and orient these movements toward the adoption of nationalist objectives. Finally, lawyers would form the majority of the Lliga Regionalista's electoral candidates and the core of the party's strategists, helping the party climb to a position of dominance in Catalan politics between 1901–1932.

Progressive legal scholars from the 1930s through the 1960s sought to explain why the Supreme Court had set itself in such bald opposition to the concurrent branches of the federal government. The Court seemed profoundly committed, even to the point of risking its very existence, to an ideology that, in Justice Holmes's famously understated phrase, “a large part of the country d[id] not entertain.” What had led to the union between jurisprudence and conservative reaction?

At the crossroads of sociology and history, scholars trained in different disciplines write legal history while engaged in a protracted guerilla war that focuses upon notions of normativity. Law and legal development as objects of investigation evoke in the sociology of law the very essence of normativity: what is law if not codified norms, and thus itself subject, perhaps, to norms of development or at least rationality? Conversely, legal historians trained in history departments, who subscribe to the particularizing norms cherished by that discipline, consciously pride themselves on their power to resist the temptations of normativity and, perversely in the view of some, insist upon examining, even celebrating, the deviant, the limiting case, the “exception to the rule.” At different times, one approach or the other has dominated the scholarly literature. Notoriously, the Parsonianism of the 1950s and early 1960s elevated a neo-Weberian normativity to hegemony in legal history as well as in social theory; now the chastened decades at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries have tipped the balance within legal history to social history's focus on people, ideas, and experience on the margin, a focus so full of potential to erode general schemes of normative development.

When James Coolidge Carter died at age seventy-seven in 1905, a front page article in the New York Times declared, “It was admitted everywhere that he possessed one of the most thoroughly equipped legal minds which this country ever produced.” His friend Congressman William Bourke Cockran eulogized him on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as “a man recognized all over the world as the leader of the American bar.” Lawyer and diplomat Joseph H. Choate, another longtime friend, remarked in his memorial address at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York that Carter “had become at the time of his death one of [this nation's] best known and most valued citizens.”

I was delighted to receive David Wilkins's kind comments about my article. Wilkins provides a cogent and pithy analysis of the relationship between the public interest and elite corporate bars. In so doing, he uses my article as a springboard for proposing a thesis more ambitious and general than mine, involving several propositions concerning what he terms the “odd alliance” and “enduring relationship” between elite corporate and public interest lawyers. Wilkins states that this alliance is related to: (1) the similar class origins of these two kinds of lawyers; (2) public interest lawyers' tendency to target defendants who do not threaten the interests of corporate lawyers' powerful clients; and (3) the class interests of the elite bar in bolstering an image of the legal profession as devoted to the pursuit of justice. On all of these topics, I have many points of agreement with Wilkins. I do, however, perceive some differences, which I will very briefly sketch in the limited space allotted me here.

Kenneth Ledford's thoughtful and poignant commentary has highlighted a number of intriguing theoretical issues that will be debated as the study of modern Catalonia continues to make inroads into various disciplines within the Anglo-Saxon academy. Acknowledging Ledford's observations, I limit my response to clarifying three points: (1) the degree to which the Barcelona legal profession was unified; (2) lawyers and liberalism; and (3) the challenge that Catalan exceptionalism poses to Weberian modernization. In order to address these issues, I expand the scope of this response beyond that of the original article.

In the last third of the twentieth century, the Progressive historians' account of Gilded Age law was overthrown by three interrelated strands of revisionist scholarship. One strand, which originated in work by Alan Jones, Charles McCurdy, and Les Benedict, thoroughly revised our understanding of Gilded Age constitutional development. Another strand, led by Robert Gordon, Thomas Grey, and Morton Horwitz, reformed our view of Gilded Age private law. The final strand, first elaborated by Duncan Kennedy, explored the unity of Gilded Age public and private law.