On Good Friday of 1973, members of San Francisco's homosexual community staged a public demonstration amidst the skyscrapers in the business district. Shen Hayes, described as a “frail nineteen-year-old,” claimed to embody the suffering of the city's gay population. Hayes dragged a telephone pole “cross” on his back while throngs of protesters cheered and chanted. The local minister leading the action likened gays’ lack of rights to murder, and the caption accompanying Hayes’ photo in the newspaper claimed that he and other gay Californians had been “crucified.” Despite, despite the protest's religious intensity, its objective was secular. Activists had convened to oppose discrimination against those workers whom Pacific Telephone & Telegraph (PT&T) had labeled “manifest homosexuals”: employees and job applicants who either claimed or seemed to be gay.

It is frequently claimed that adjudication before a court of law and historical adjudication are two entirely different tasks. The methods and techniques employed by judges and historians contrast sharply. The judge faces many constraints, in terms of choice of subject matter, the arguments to be considered, the evidence to be evaluated, the procedural steps to be followed, the substantive rules to be applied, and the time available to reach a decision; historians, by contrast, are relatively free to choose their field of research, manage their own time, gather the evidence, evaluate it, decide when findings are ready to be published, and reexamine them.

“Enclosure” has long been shorthand for describing the exchange of scattered strips of land and common rights for cohesive plots in premodern and modern England. Proprietors who farmed long strips of land throughout a village or released cattle on unused waste would receive at enclosure regular plots commensurate in value with earlier interests. The process of enclosure in a village could be gradual, as it predominantly was for much of the premodern period. Alternatively, as increasingly occurred in the modern era, the proprietors could enclose their lands in concert. Figure 1, two maps of Helmdon in Northamptonshire, depicts the vast change in holdings that could occur through enclosure.

James Oldham and Su Jin Kim write about the acceptance of arbitration in the early United States in their article, “Arbitration in America: The Early History.” They correct a misperception that stretches back at least to Justice Joseph Story's 1844 opinion in Tobey v. Bristol that said equity did not enforce arbitration awards. Oldham and Kim recover a robust culture of arbitration in the early United States and thus correct the received wisdom, which led Justice Kennedy to remark in 2001 that American courts were historically hostile to arbitration. Perhaps this newly recovered history will add support for the acceptance of arbitration in the federal courts. Oldham's and Kim's article is, therefore, part of an emerging and sometimes controversial trend in legal history to speak to contemporary issues. It is also the first of an occasional series for Law and History Review on “applied legal history.”

On June 29, 1789, Zephaniah Turner of Charles County, Maryland, wrote to President George Washington and observed: