In 1885, in the midst of the North-West Resistance in which Indigenous people took up arms against the colonial Canadian state, three Cree men executed an elderly Cree woman. At their trial for murder, the defendants were found guilty. They avoided execution because colonial authorities became convinced that they believed that their victim was a wendigo, a cannibal spirit. Killing a wendigo was justified under Cree law and so, argued one judge, the defendants lacked the mens rea necessary to sustain a murder conviction. The history of this case shows the limits of colonial legal jurisdiction and sovereignty. Scarce resources, hostile territory and Indigenous resistance hampered the colonial state's efforts to consolidate its legal control over the Canadian frontier. This essay notes the importance of these forces, but also argues that common law jurisprudence itself could impair the ability of the state to hold Indigenous defendants criminally responsible. Colonial officials regularly invoked the idea that Indigenous people adhered to different legal and normative orders in order to illustrate their supposed inferiority. However, this official recognition of the legal pluralism of the North-West could undermine a defendant's responsibility and cut against efforts to assert the exclusive jurisdiction of Canadian criminal law.

Some of the founding fathers of Israel's legal system were lawyers educated in Polish law schools. What was the impact of this background on their legal thought? There are few explicit references to Polish law in Israeli legal texts. However, indirectly, legal and constitutional ideas taken from Polish law did appear in Israeli law. This article focuses on the legal writing of four Israeli lawyers in the period immediately after Israel's independence in 1948, showing how Polish law was used by these lawyers as a source for occasional precedents, for critiquing Israeli law (dominated by English law), and, mostly, for constitutional precedents.

The relatively greater impact of Polish law in the constitutional realm can be attributed to the fact that Poland (like other new countries established in the interwar period in the periphery of western Europe, such as Ireland) offered Israeli lawyers constitutional models that were both more modern, and more relevant to the specific circumstances of the new state, where religion played an important role in defining the identity of the nation. The history of the impact of Polish law on Israeli law can thus serve as an example of interwar constitutional innovation in the European periphery, and its later impact on post-World War II constitutional law.

In July 2012, a landmark hearing before the High Court in London found that the British government had a case to answer concerning human rights abuses, including torture and rapes, allegedly perpetrated by British colonialists in Kenya, during the Mau Mau counterinsurgency of the 1950s. Among the four elderly Kenyan claimants in court that day was a Kikuyu woman, Jane Mara, whose testimony related the sexual abuses she had suffered. Jane had been only 15 years of age, in 1954, when she was accused of being a Mau Mau sympathizer, and along with other villagers, she was taken for interrogation. The experience Jane Mara recounted was horrific. Beaten repeatedly by her inquisitors, she was then pinned to the floor by four African guards who held her thighs apart, while another guard forced a glass bottle into her vagina, using the sole of his boot to direct the bottle deeply into her. The pain was excruciating, and Jane realized that the bottle had been heated. When this ordeal came to an end, she was compelled to sit and watch as the three other young women were subjected to the same torture.

Over the past decade, the United Kingdom has deprived an increasing number of British subjects of their citizenship. This policy, known as “denaturalization,” has been applied with particular harshness in cases where foreign-born subjects have been accused of terrorist activity. The increase is part of a global trend. In recent years, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands have either debated or enacted denaturalization statutes. But Britain remains an outlier among Western democracies. Since 2006, the United Kingdom home secretary has revoked the citizenship of at least 373 Britons, of whom at least 53 have had alleged links to terrorism. This is more than the total number of revocations by Canada, France, Australia, and Netherlands combined. These developments are troubling, as the right to be secure in one's citizenship has been a cornerstone of the postwar European liberal political order, and of the international community's commitment to human rights.

Historians have argued that sixteenth and seventeenth century English colonial charters claimed the lands of indigenous people on the basis of their discovery by Europeans. Examination of these charters, however, demonstrates that a charter authorized acquiring land from the indigenous population in a specific region, not seizing indigenous it, and regulating the entry of other potential settlers. Charters also regulated overseas relations among the European nations to reduce or prevent international conflict by recognizing similar claims to monopoly of access to lands claimed by other developing empires. Charters were rooted in a medieval legal tradition that included canon law commentaries that recognized the legitimacy of infidel dominium and papal bulls that sought to regulate fifteenth-century Iberian expansion in the Atlantic. English charters built on this legal tradition and were a stage in the creation of a European legal order for overseas expansion. The fundamental issue was regulation of the sea and sea routes to Asia and to the New World, not the acquisition and possession of indigenous land. The English charters should be understood as elements of the long-running debate about whether access to the sea was open to all or could be closed to outsiders.

Historically, the clear recognition by the courts that all adults in public intercourse owe a duty of reasonable care to avoid injuring others has been seen as an early nineteenth century development. Occasionally it is recognized that what is known about the emergence of the tort of negligence in English law comes almost entirely from the printed reports of civil (plea side) cases tried in the three common law courts (King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer). It was not until the 1790s that regular printed reports of jury trials (or nisi prius cases, as they were called) began, and even then, enlightenment from the nisi prius reports was limited. Most of those reports were sketchy, and very few included instructions given to the jury by the trial judge. More importantly, the reports covered only a small fraction of the jury trials that were conducted by the common law courts. The overwhelming majority of civil jury trials ended with the jury verdict (or an occasional nonsuit), with no post-trial proceedings, and what happened in many thousands of these plea-side jury trials in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been something of a black hole in the historical record.

Robert Gordon became the pioneering scholar of the history and historiography of American law with the publication of his first essays in the 1970s. His research and teaching have stimulated and guided the dramatic growth of American scholarship in legal history during the past four decades, much of it written by his own students and the many others whose work he has generously encouraged and engaged. Taming the Past combines the classic essays he has published in various journals and edited collections throughout his distinguished career alongside lectures that are printed here for the first time. Brief introductory notes place the essays in the context of their original appearance and often cite subsequent relevant scholarship. Gordon has also added a general introduction that provides a useful overview of the entire collection. The whole is much more than the sum of its impressive parts.