James Oliver Robertson intended no sacrilege when he called the Declaration of Independence a sacred text, an essential component of what has become American “holy writ.” It is now venerated as a founding document of the national civil religion. The Declaration, Robertson emphasized, reflects an expectation that the new United States would become the nation among all nations. As celebrated now, independence then provided the political means to achieve a social end, that social end being a better life for Americans, their new nation acting as an exemplar for the larger world. Or, as Stephen E. Lucas put it, the Declaration of Independence went through an “apotheosis,” through which, over the years, Americans have come to “see its original purpose in universal terms almost wholly divorced from the events of 1776.”

This article situates the ‘personal law’ in late colonial India in the nineteenth-century genealogy of the idea of ‘family law.’ In doing so, it also looks at a case between Indian Muslim spouses before the judge and Islamic modernist Syed Mahmood. Involving the doctrine of the restitution of conjugal rights, the case was conducted in the shadow of a question about whether marriage was a status or contract that had a much wider resonance in the late nineteenth-century Anglo-common law world. The overall goal of the article is to critically reconsider a common view about legal modernization in the long nineteenth-century Islamicate world as a process of domesticating the Islamic sharīʿa tradition to the sphere of family affairs and personal status. Working along a distinct path from other new scholarship that is moving past this thesis, I suggest that domestication should be seen as part of what some have called the globalization of classical legal thought after 1850. Because the era of domestication continued to be an important point of reference for later exponents of political Islam the article also argues that seeing the categories of personal law and family law genealogically has implications for the problem of translation that has often made scholars reticent about striking an equivalence between ‘Islamic law’ and sharīʿa (or beyond the Islamicate world, between ‘modern law’ and Afro-Asian juridical tradition).

Crucial to the implementation of the War Relocation Authority's (WRA) regulations of its detention camps for the uprooted Japanese American community of the West Coast were the WRA “project attorneys,” white lawyers stationed in the camps who gave legal advice to administrators and internees alike. These lawyers left behind a voluminous correspondence that opens a new window on the WRA's relationship with its prisoners, a relationship heretofore understood as encompassing coercion on one side and either compliance or resistance on the other. This article uses the voluminous correspondence of the project attorney at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming as a new lens for viewing the regulatory relationship between the WRA and the imprisoned community. It focuses on three of the many matters about which the project attorney gave advice: the design of the camp's community government, its criminal justice system, and its business enterprises. Evidence from this one law office suggests that on many key issues, the relationship between the WRA and the internees was marked not so much by coercion as by reciprocal accommodation, with each taking account of some of the preferences of the other. While the data are from just one of the ten WRA camps, they suggest a need to reconsider our understanding of how this American system of racial imprisonment operated.

In 1899, Levi Edwin Dudley, the American consul at Vancouver, complained about the ways that Canadian and American police officers enacted justice along their shared border. During one of Dudley's investigations into alleged abuses, he spoke with a Canadian officer about the ways that local agents on both sides of the border approached their jobs. The officer, speaking under conditions of anonymity, noted that “on the border here we must do things in an irregular way in order to preserve the peace.” The ability of criminals to move back and forth across the line forced American and Canadian officers to “‘stand in’ with each other, [or] we should have the country filled with desperadoes.” American officers transferred criminals over to Canadian agents without proper clearance and Canadian officers later returned the favor. This system of irregular justice utilized informal prisoner exchanges built on local understandings, professional courtesy, and mutual concern to circumvent the slow, uncertain, and expensive extradition process. For Dudley, this kind of behavior threatened the liberty of citizens in both countries. For the officers tasked with policing a region of bisecting jurisdictions, it was a necessary evil.

Nowhere in legal history has the nexus between past and present received more attention in recent years than in the study of slavery. The memory of slavery has become a field of study in itself, and competing histories of slavery have animated contemporary legal and political debates. Today, new histories of capitalism have further illuminated the central role of slavery and the slave trade in building the modern Atlantic world. Across Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, new memorials, museums, and commemorations of slavery and abolition have brought new kinds of public engagement to the slave past. In the era of Black Lives Matter, understanding the connections between that past and the present day has never seemed more important, and historians are struggling with the question of how to engage the present in a historically nuanced way. One kind of engagement between past and present, among historians, lawyers, and activists, has been to draw connections between slavery in the past and in the present.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, state judges lost their long-held right to inquire into the legality of federal detentions, and habeas corpus—once almost solely the business of state courts—was largely transformed into a federal remedy. We argue that the wartime furor surrounding underage enlistees was a key factor in driving this legal change. Scholarship on the use of habeas corpus during the war generally concentrates on cases involving freedom of speech or political association, but thousands of parents and guardians also petitioned Union authorities and state courts to retrieve minor children who had enlisted without their consent. Angrily demanding that the military discharge such youths, they portrayed control over the personhood and labor of minor children as fundamental to American liberty. At the same time, state court judges fought to retrain jurisdiction over such cases as a critical check on federal and military power. We illuminate these conflicts by drawing on a rich array of sources that capture the competing perspectives of federal and state court judges, Lincoln Administration officials, elected representatives, military officers, parents and guardians, and minors themselves. In the process, we show the halting and contested transformation of habeas corpus, the outcome of which ultimately redefined the relationship between American citizens and their government, preventing aggrieved parents from using state courts to safeguard their rights against federal and military authorities, and blocking state courts from querying the legality of federal detentions of any kind.

On February 23, 1938, a Jerusalem Military Court convicted Mustafa Mansour of the unlawful possession of a weapon and for opening fire at a bus. The prosecution's key witness tying Mansour to the shooting was, however, not human but canine. Due to darkness the police could not pursue the “brigands” immediately following the incident. They returned at dawn accompanied by Doberman Pinschers. The dogs tracked footprints from the crime scene to the defendant's village, and then to his house, where the police discovered a few rounds of ammunition, some of which were spent.

This article explores a core question in the law of slavery: how was an individual's status as slave or free socially discerned and formally adjudicated? Under the doctrine of “freedom by prescription,” a person who had in good faith “lived as free” could argue that the absence of exercise of ownership for a specified term of years extinguished a prior owner's title. In the medieval Siete Partidas of Alfonso the Wise, which continued as a legal point of reference in Louisiana well after the end of Spanish rule, both the law of status and the law of property confirmed this path to freedom. From 1808 onward, Louisiana jurists and legislators sought to eliminate the remnants of the doctrine, but it lingered in popular and even judicial consciousness. The 1853 kidnapping of a woman named Eulalie Oliveau, six of her children, and eleven of her grandchildren for sale in the New Orleans slave market brought the question of “freedom by prescription” back into the courts. The awkward resolution of that case, and the uncertain fate of Eulalie Oliveau and her children, foreshadowed Reconstruction-era struggles over the content of legal freedom and the rights that freedom might bring to those who had once been held as property.

From the 1830s to the 1930s, elites across the United States increasingly privatized executions and standardized execution protocols. These changes reflected and reinforced a more bureaucratic image of the state as an abstract entity run by professionals operating in rule-bound roles rather than particular actors governing in an unsystematic way. After this period of change, the aesthetics of the execution ceremony had so thoroughly changed that the death penalty had the potential to inspire critiques of the modern state as cold, detached, and callous. It rarely did, however. Changes to state killing threatened to diminish the recognition of human dignity in the nation's execution chambers were countered by melodramatic popular renderings of executions that preserved their sacred, traditional character. Toward the end of this period of change, from 1915 to 1940, playwrights, screenwriters, and journalists maintained executions as events in which the humanity of the state that killed and the condemned who died was constantly foregrounded, even as execution modes and protocols became rationalized and machine-like. Reflecting this ethos, images of condemned men in the nation's collective imagination became disproportionately white.

Over the past 30 years, a growing amount of scholarly attention has been paid to forms of constitutional interpretation other than judicial review, ranging from departmentalism to explicitly removing judicial review from the court's purview. As many of these works have recognized, such skepticism is not new, but has a strong historical tradition. What has not often been noted, however, is that differing conceptions of judicial review—even opposition to judicial oversight of legislative actions—existed nearly from the moment that Marbury v. Madison was decided. This article examines some of these divergent opinions on judicial review in the Early Republic by studying how it was perceived by the Old Republicans, the conservative faction of the Virginia Jeffersonians.

Assessment and awarding of compensation to victims of injury and loss are among the main duties performed by courts in many different legal systems. In Western law, it constitutes a central purpose of tort law, which in itself is one of the fundamental branches of law. Did Chinese law have a specific approach to the question of compensation, which singularizes it from other legal systems? From the points of view both of statute law and judicial practice, my primary concern is to investigate whether compensation was granted to victims of injury or death under the Ming and Qing laws.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, English scholar James Bryce criticized Western railroad land grants as “often improvident” and as giving “rise to endless lobbying and intrigue, first to secure them, then to keep them from being declared forfeited in respect of some breach of the conditions imposed by Congress on the company.” Bryce also observed the extent to which grants of land to railroads allowed the beneficiary companies to exercise great power not only through their role as carriers of people and commerce, but also through their role as large landowners. This, he noted, brought them “yet another source of wealth and power” and “brought them into intimate and often perilously delicate relations with leading politicians.” From the perspective of the so-called “railroad tycoons” and their financial backers, the land grants became sources of wealth and power independent of and sometimes contrary to the interests of the railroad corporations themselves as carriers. Whereas Congress intended the railroad land grants to serve as a means to the end of railroad construction and the settlement of the federal government's expansive public domain, the railroads came to see them as an end in themselves: as independent sources of wealth and power.

The La Plata River Basin, bordering Uruguay and Brazil, was the site of constant disputes between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns into the eighteenth century. The conflicts dated back to the seventeenth century with the founding of the Colônia do Santíssimo Sacramento on the left bank of the river. Although both sides engaged in diplomatic efforts over the years, these were not enough to prevent war, and there were ongoing battles interspersed with short periods of calm until the end of the 1860s and the so-called Paraguayan War (1865–70).

One of the most important legacies of the American Civil War, not just in the re-united States of America but also in the nineteenth and twentieth century world, were the new laws of war that the conflict introduced. “Lieber's Code,” named after the man who authored it for the Lincoln administration, was a set of instructions written and issued in April 1863 to govern the conduct of “the armies of the United States in the field.” It became a template for all subsequent codes, including the Hague and Geneva conventions. Widely understood as a radical revision of the laws of war and a complete break with the Enlightenment tradition, the code, like the war that gave rise to it, reflected the new post-Napoleonic age of “people's wars.” As such, it pointed forward, if not as the expression of the first total war, then at least as an expression of the first modern one, with all the blurring of boundaries that involved.