On May 17, 1910, Donald C. MacPherson purchased a Buick runabout from the Close Brothers dealership of Schenectady, New York. The new rig sported a “four cylinder, twenty-two and a half horse power” engine, allowing it to reach a speed of fifty miles per hour. Its body had been painted “French gray” and a similar gray color coated the wooden wheels. The runabout accommodated two passengers in the front seat and one in the rumble seat. Though smaller and slower than other cars on the market in 1910, the Buick served MacPherson's purposes. During the summer and fall, he drove the machine to various places in the vicinity of Saratoga Springs for his business as a stone cutter who specialized in making grave stones.

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.”

In its controversial 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state sodomy laws as unconstitutional violations of the rights of consenting adults to have sex in private. These laws, still in existence in thirteen states at the time of Lawrence, were infrequently enforced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but were often used to justify and legitimate sexual discrimination in employment, immigration, marriage, the military, and other arenas of “private” and “public” life. In this sense, they functioned like state laws against adultery, cohabitation, and fornication. Rarely utilized and widely flouted, these prohibitions remained on the books, available for use in struggles over sex and sexuality and in debates about the parameters of sexual citizenship.

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.

…he [that] is judged mute, that is dumme by contumacie…his condemnation is to be pressed to death, which is one of the cruellest deathes that may be: he is layd upon a table, and an other uppon him, and so much weight of stones or lead laide uppon that table, while as his bodie be crushed, and his life by that violence taken from him. This death some strong and stout hearted man doth choose, for being not condemned of felonie, his bloud is not corrupted, his lands nor goods confiscate to the Prince…

Elias Berdos had not yet reached the age of fourteen when he arrived in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. Three weeks after debarking, he applied to Tremont and Suffolk Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts and was put to work in the textile factory's spinning room, tending the mules as many boys his age did. Inexperienced at factory labor and unable to speak English, he ventured forth into the helter-skelter world of a cotton mill. About four weeks later, Elias stood in the spinning room, waiting for the workday to begin. With his back turned to the machinery, he rested his hand on a guard that covered the spinning frame's gears. When his hand slipped into the rotating metal, Elias joined the tens of thousands of workers injured in the process of American industrialization. Like many of those workers, Elias and his family sued the company for damages, but unlike many of his fellow laborers, Elias relied on Massachusetts's statutory prohibitions against child labor to maintain a cause of action. Losing in the lower courts, Elias appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. His case led the court to examine the development of child labor law in Massachusetts, looking into both its statutory genesis and legislative intent.

The British treated Australia as terra nullius—as unowned land. Under British colonial law, aboriginal Australians had no property rights in the land, and colonization accordingly vested ownership of the entire continent in the British government. The doctrine of terra nullius remained the law in Australia throughout the colonial period, and indeed right up to 1992.

In 1813, James Stephen, Jr., a twenty-four-year-old lawyer, was appointed part-time by the British Colonial Office to write legal opinions on the validity of colonial laws. In 1825, he began working full-time as legal advisor to the Colonial Office and held this position until 1836 when he was promoted to the top-ranking post of permanent under-secretary of the Colonial Office, which he held until 1847. During these years, Stephen frequently played a key role in influencing the direction taken by policies and reforms initiated through the Colonial Office. In particular, his important role in shaping Colonial Office “native policy” after the mid-1830s has been documented by several historians, and much has been written about his connection—through his anti-slavery father, Stephen, Sr., and his uncle William Wilberforce—to the famous Evangelical “Clapham Sect” that took a leading role in promoting a number of different humanitarian and social reform causes in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Civil War, by abolishing chattel slavery, launched a revolutionary era in American constitutionalism during which lawmakers debated what liberty, dependency, and good governance would mean in the new nation. Although historians have made a convincing case for the significance of legal developments in the 1870s and 1880s, they have not focused much attention on the problem of children's rights in the age of slave emancipation. This is largely due to the assumption that the history of children's rights did not begin until the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decisions in Brown v. the Board of Education (1954) and In re Gault (1967). This article, however, builds on the work of scholars, such as Joseph Hawes and Mary Ann Mason, who have demonstrated that the ideas and practices central to the modern children's rights movement of the late twentieth century have deep roots in American history. I argue that a sophisticated conception of children's rights existed in the late nineteenth century and investigate how lawmakers in Illinois articulated it through their attempts to define the “rights” of “dependent children.”

When it is said that a defendant to a criminal charge is presumed to be innocent, what is really meant is that the burden of proving his guilt is upon the prosecution. This golden thread…runs through the web of the English criminal law. Unhappily Parliament regards the principle with indifference—one might almost say with contempt. The statute book contains many offences in which the burden of proving his innocence is cast on the accused.

No principle in Anglo-American criminal law is more vaunted than the so-called “presumption of innocence”: the doctrine that the prosecution must both produce evidence of guilt and persuade the fact-finder “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The claim that “every man is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty” has been described as “dear to the hearts of Englishmen” and as an omnipresent feature of English criminal law. In 1895, the United States Supreme Court declared the “presumption of innocence in favor of the accused” to be “the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary”—a protection that “lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.” Befitting its lofty stature in Anglo-American legal culture, the presumption has become associated, over time, with that most famous of Blackstonean maxims: “[I]t is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”

The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings has long been considered one of the key political trials in the history of the British empire. It was the first major public discursive event of its kind in England, and arguably in Europe as a whole, in which the colonial ambitions and practices of European powers in the east stood exposed to a close and comprehensive critique. In addition, the legal and moral legitimacy of colonialism itself was thrown into question before the highest judicial body in Britain, the House of Lords. The fact that the prosecution was led by Edmund Burke, one of the most articulate and prescient political statesman of modern Europe, has only added to the trial's enduring significance as a moment of critical reflection on colonial practices. Indeed, it could be argued that it was on this occasion, and in this act of defending the rights of an alien population against coercive colonial rule, that some of Burke's long-held political and ethical convictions found their clearest expression.

On July 10, 1833, an aspiring young English lawyer named Thomas Babington Macaulay stood before the Parliament and presented an impassioned argument about the future role of British governance in India. Whereas in Europe, as Macaulay saw it, “The people are everywhere perfectly competent to hold some share, not in every country an equal share, but some share of political power,” in India, Macaulay asserted, “you cannot have representative institutions.” Thus the role of the British colonizers was “to give good government to a people to whom we cannot give a free government.” At the core of Macaulay's good but not free government stood what he saw as one of England's greatest gifts to the people of India: a rule of law.

Bruce Smith's article, “The Presumption of Guilt and the English Law of Theft, 1750–1850,” has a highly intriguing argument. While I do not agree with that argument, it is nonetheless very helpful in identifying questions fundamental to characterization of what Smith terms the “Bloodless Code”—the eighteenth-century laws authorizing summary conviction, laws that, as Smith states, were a striking feature of the Hanoverian legal regime.

In 1962, Francis Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor, recalled the “Roots of Social Security” for an audience of Social Security Administration staff members. The Committee on Economic Security, which had broad agreement on most issues, “broke out into a row because the legal problems were so terrible.” According to Perkins, the legal committee had deadlocked in the summer of 1934 over the crucial question of the constitutional basis for federal authority over unemployment and old age insurance. Then, as Perkins told the crowd, she paid a social call on Justice Harlan Fiske Stone's wife. The justice himself sat down to tea and asked how she was getting on. She seized the opportunity and laid before him the problem that was occupying the Committee:

Well, you know, we are having big troubles, Mr. Justice, because we don't know in this draft of the Economic Security Act, which we are working on—we are not quite sure, you know, what will be a wise method of establishing this law. It is a very difficult constitutional problem you know. We are guided by this, that, and the other case. [Justice Stone] looked around to see if anyone was listening. Then he put his hand up like this, confidentially, and he said, “The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power. You can do anything under the taxing power.”

Having long admired Norma Landau's pioneering work on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English magistracy, I am grateful to her for bringing her considerable expertise to bear on my article. Characteristically, Landau's criticism is extremely forceful. Unfortunately, the intriguing questions that Landau raises in her comment are obscured by a host of criticisms based on a misunderstanding of the claims that I advance. Landau attributes arguments to me that I do not make and ignores important ones that I do. In the process, she fails to engage with my central thesis: In summary proceedings that required suspects to “account” for materials found in their possession, the presumption of innocence did not exist.

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.”