In 1773, with the empire on the brink of revolt, the Privy Council gave the final ruling in the case of the Mohegan Indians versus the colony of Connecticut. Thus ended what one eighteenth-century lawyer called “the greatest cause that ever was heard at the Council Board.” After a decades-long battle for their rights, involving several appeals to the Crown, three royal commissions, and the highest court in the empire, the Mohegans' case against Connecticut was dismissed. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (~20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Crown for redress. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.

This article studies the rise and fall of the first liability insurance cartel in the United States. In 1886, insurance companies in America began selling liability insurance for personal injury accidents, primarily to cover business tort liability for employee accidents at work and non-employee injuries occasioned by their business operations. In 1896, the leading liability insurers agreed to fix premium rates and share information on policyholder losses. In 1906, this cartel fell apart.

On a hopeful September day in 1912, Gim Pon, a twenty-five year old Chinese man from Canton, boarded the steamship Siberia in Hong Kong harbor to sail west across the Pacific. The Siberia docked briefly in San Francisco, but Gim Pon's destination, and that of seven fellow Chinese travelers, was not California but the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In the early twentieth century, thousands of men like Gim Pon immigrated to Mexico, boosting the Chinese population there from slightly over 1,000 in 1895 to more than 24,000 in the mid-1920s. Sonora, which hugs Arizona at the United States/Mexico border, was a popular destination, and hosted the largest Chinese population of any Mexican state through the 1920s. Once in Sonora, Gim Pon adapted to life in Mexico: he changed his name to Francisco Gim, learned Spanish, and became naturalized as a Mexican citizen on February 27, 1920. Most importantly, he formed a family with Julia Delgado.

In recent years, the conspicuous advance of globalization has inspired many historians to rethink the past in cross-national and comparative terms. Frustration with the limits of traditional, national approaches to history has spawned interesting comparative work in such fields as women's history, labor history, economic history, and imperial history. Although legal history tends to be somewhat parochial by tradition, it, too, has taken a cross-national and comparative turn.

On January 24, 1913, the trustees of the Dalcho School, a segregated, all-white public school in Dillon County, South Carolina, summarily dismissed Dudley, Eugene, and Herbert Kirby, ages ten, twelve, and fourteen, respectively. According to testimony offered in a subsequent hearing, the boys had “always properly behaved,” were “good pupils,” and “never …exercise[d] any bad influence in school.” Moreover, the boys’ overwhelmingly white ancestry, in the words of the South Carolina Supreme Court, technically “entitled [them] to be classified as white,” according to state law. Nevertheless, because local whites believed that the Kirbys were “not of pure Caucasian blood,” and that therefore their removal was in the segregated school's best interest, the court, in Tucker v. Blease (1914), upheld their expulsion.

In April 1929, an unremarkable man—a local entrepreneur and defendant in a minor lawsuit—entered the High Court of Nyasaland (contemporary Malawi) and made a remarkable gesture. The son of an Indian immigrant and an African woman, Suleman Abdul Karim declared himself a “non-native” and that he should consequently be tried as such. The lawsuit brought against him concerned the ownership of a Ford truck for which he had failed to complete payment. Approximately ten months earlier on June 28, 1928, Ernest Carr of Blantyre, Nyasaland—a local auctioneer and businessman who frequently ran advertisements in The Nyasaland Times during the 1920s—had sold the Ford to Karim with a written agreement that it would be paid for with £30 as a down payment, £20 on July 31, 1928, with the remaining £50 to be paid in monthly installments of £10 starting August 31, 1928. All told, this business transaction was intended to be resolved expeditiously, with its completion by the new year of 1929. However, the minor expectation that this contract had promised was not fulfilled. Two payments were made, an initial one on the day of sale for £30 and a second several months later on November 16, this time for £8. Karim defaulted on the remaining amount. Furthermore, he failed to make an insurance premium payment of £10 to the African Guarantee and Indemnity Co. Ltd., for which Carr was a local agent. Despite these defaults, Karim had not returned the Ford. Consequently, after several more months elapsed, a claim against Karim came before the High Court on April 11, 1929.

In Nazi Germany, integration into the community of the Volk, or exclusion and persecution, were determined by the regime's categories. As legal historian Michael Stolleis has noted, this new National Socialist terminology “quick[ly] penetrat[ed] … into the old conceptual world” of German jurisprudence and the country's court system. In line with the prescriptions of the political leadership of the Hitler state, bureaucrats of the Justice and Interior Ministries in Berlin drafted novel legislation that, once issued as new laws, judges, state attorneys, and lawyers readily interpreted and put into practice. With the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, the main racial designations evolved around a tripartite terminology of “full Jews [Volljuden],” “Jewish mixed breeds [Mischlinge],” and “persons of German and kindred blood.” In accordance with paragraph 5 of the first supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 1935, state authorities classified any descendant “from at least three grandparents who [we]re racially full Jews” as Jewish. Paragraph 3 defined Mischlinge of the first degree, introduced as a novel legal category, as Jewish Mischlinge with two grandparents “who [we]re racially full Jews.” The supplementary decrees did not explicitly delineate the term “person of German blood”, but the main commentary of the Nuremberg Laws loosely tied this term to the “German Volk” as a community comprised of six basic races, including the Nordic and East Baltic ones.

What are we comparing when we compare law and race across cultures? This was once an easier question to answer. If we take “races” to be real categories existing in the world, then we can compare “race relations” and “racial classifications” in different legal systems, and measure the impact of different legal systems on the salience of racial distinction and the level of racial hierarchy in a given society. That was the approach of the leading comparativist scholars at mid-century. Frank Tannenbaum and Carl Degler compared race relations in the United States and Latin America, drawing heavily on legal sources regarding racial definition, manumission of slaves, and marriage. They were studying relations between “white people” and “Negroes,” as well as the possibility of an intermediate class of “mulattoes.” But once we understand race itself to be produced by relations of domination, through several powerful discourses of which law is one, we are up against a more formidable challenge. We must compare the interaction of two things—legal processes and ideologies of race—in systems in which neither is likely to have a stable or equivalent meaning. Because “law” is likewise no longer as clear-cut a category as it once was; in addition to the formal law of statute books and common law appellate opinions, we now understand “law” to encompass a broad set of institutions, discourses, and processes produced by a larger cast of characters than solely jurists, legislators, and appellate judges.

Immigration histories typically endeavor to describe and hold a nation–state accountable not only for the laws and policies by which it admits some immigrants, but also for those by which it refuses, excludes, or deports other immigrants. This article explores immigration to Mexico and to the United States with attention to its implications for the status of persons, and also for the conventional historical narratives in each country. The article focuses on three techniques of governance that each country has engaged in regard to immigration. These techniques include: 1) the assignment of nationality as a singular attribute of personhood; 2) the use of demonstrable and documentable characteristics as criteria of admission; and 3) centralized registration procedures to monitor and control the immigrant population. The techniques are analyzed together because of their concurrent emergence in each country during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The techniques are also complementary. They form a set that, although not unique to the United States and Mexico, nevertheless illustrates parallels and an interplay between the two countries, and, more broadly, illustrates how immigration presents a common predicament across different times, places, and forms of government.

In 1929, when Lorna Parsons tired of her four-year marriage to a London, Ontario tailor, she decided to seek a divorce—in Reno, Nevada. Even though Lorna's divorce was not generally recognized in Canada, obtaining it was important to her and to the hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadians who similarly sought United States divorces at a time when Canadian law was extremely restrictive. The choices of Parsons and her compatriots should be of interest to legal historians. They problematize the idea of national legal history by reminding us that law does not always remain in the tidy jurisdictional containers constructed by legal authorities and academics. National boundaries are more porous, and the nature of law itself more fluid, than we often admit.