From 1843 to 1943, the regime of extraterritoriality in China operated to exempt not just diplomats but also other citizens of Western empires from Chinese law and jurisdiction without granting the Chinese in the West reciprocal privileges. This was a milestone in international law and relations; it also had a long-lasting impact on the trajectories of modern Chinese history. On the one hand, the Treaties of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1842 and Bogue (Humen) in 1843, signed in the aftermath of the First Opium War (1839–42), marked the first institutionalization of British extraterritorial privileges in East Asia. Through treaties in 1844, the United States and France also secured such privileges in China and established their imperial prestige in the Asia-Pacific. These practices prompted revision of international law treatises and set the pattern for Western dealings with Asian countries for the century to come. On the other hand, from the late nineteenth century on, attempts to abolish foreign extraterritoriality continued to be a most powerful rallying call among the Chinese to “modernize”/“Westernize” their legal and political systems to regain sovereignty and international respectability.

The Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) is widely acknowledged to have made important contributions to an influential doctrine of individual natural rights. In this article I argue that Grotius developed his rights doctrine primarily out of normative Roman sources, that is to say Roman law and ethics. If this Roman tradition has been as central to Grotius's influential writing on natural rights as I claim, why has it not received more scholarly attention? The reasons lie in the view that while rights are constitutive of modern liberty, they were unknown in classical antiquity.

Within the last decade there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Mexican legal topics that relate to the Porfirian (1876–1910) and Mexican Revolutionary (1910–1940) periods, an especially formative time in the history of modern Mexican law. As Peter Reich has recently written, the great merit of this new literature has been to treat the law in its “social context,” a commonplace of legal studies in the United States, but one not typical of traditional approaches to modern Mexican legal history, which have “focused narrowly on code or other legislative changes.” Unfortunately, these methodological gains of recent years have not yet been applied to the history of Mexico's Supreme Court or its system of judicial review. One of the barriers to renewed interest in this area as a legal-historical topic, no doubt, has been the characterization of supreme courts in Latin America in general, and Mexico in particular, as “dependent, weak, parochial, conservative and decisionally unimportant.”

“Take the census; make the country. Let's do both together!” “Hacer censos, es hacer Patria. Ayúdenos a hacerlos” cajoled one bold, bright poster in the days before May 15, 1930 when census takers dispersed across Mexico to count its inhabitants. Other placards similarly played on multiple meanings for the verb “hacer”—to make or to do: “Taking a census will make the country …” “Hagamos censos y haremos patria…” At the same time, within that collective nation-building, a census jingle affirmed individual importance: “A census is a count. He who is numbered, counts. And he who counts, succeeds.” “Un censo es una cuenta. El que censa, cuenta. Y el que cuenta, acierta.” In government propaganda, the 1930 census made Mexico and drew its inhabitants into the national fold, an ongoing, delicate project after the fratricide of the 1910 Revolution.

Discoveries in history occur in lots of different ways. Every once in a while we come across some forgotten documents—a photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg, a trial transcript, other long-neglected court records, or a family archives. At other times we learn something new by just looking in old books while asking questions that we have not previously asked (or approaching those questions with skepticism) or by looking again and more deeply at published reports.

Pierson v. Post is usually used in law school classrooms to introduce law students to the complexities of establishing possession in property law. The published appellate-level opinion is widely available from commercial judgment database services and has been reproduced in countless law school casebooks, with a first-page pride of place given to the case in such collections since at least 1915. In the words of one scholar, “[m[ost [property law] casebooks begin at the beginning by considering the original acquisition of property. Almost all books suggest possession is the root of title … A favorite place to start is the old case of Pierson v. Post.” According to another, Pierson v. Post is “the perfect case for giving students a taste of what it means to ‘think like a lawyer.’” It is an “old chestnut” if ever there was one. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the case has been the subject of scholarly commentary.

Those who work with the papyri or stone inscriptions from the ancient world frequently are faced with incomplete texts. Papyrologists or epigraphers will attempt to fill in the missing parts of the text, relying on their knowledge of what similar documents say. Sometimes a later find will provide a missing piece. Experience with such finds has been that an expert reconstruction normally will get the basic sense of the document right, but rarely gets the exact wording right when anything more than a few letters needs to be filled in.

Most court opinions are like actors: the older they get, the less people pay attention to them. For instance, the case immediately after Pierson v. Post in volume 3 of Caines's Reports is called Hollingsworth v. Napier. It was an important case in its day, much more important than Pierson v. Post, because it involved a recurring question of commercial law: what rights, if any, did a seller retain in goods stored in a public warehouse after he had delivered a bill of sale to the buyer? Hollingsworth went on to be cited in forty court opinions distributed fairly evenly through the 1870s, but then its career was over. It was cited twice in the 1880s, once in 1892, and never again.

Unlike Professors Fernandez, Banner, and Donahue, I am not a legal historian; like them, however, I am much interested in the comings and goings of the famous old case about the fox. It figures significantly in my course on property and in my co-authored book on the subject. The background of the case is noted in the book and will be updated in the next edition to take account of Fernandez's discovery of the hitherto lost judgment roll in the case. Her find yields many facts, but, in my judgment, virtually no information. Facts are necessary to information, but not sufficient. A fact without purpose is useless; coupled with purpose, it becomes information. The information itself might be trivial, as it is in trivia games. Suppose you are playing a game, a trivia game, where stating the right fact wins you points. Suppose the name of William Blackstone's tailor was Jonas Maybird, and this is a fact you happen to know. Suppose you are asked, What was the name of William Blackstone's tailor? You answer correctly and win points. Outside the game, the name of Blackstone's tailor is just a fact; inside the game, it is information. Change the game to a scholarly one concerned with illuminating Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, and we are back to the name of Blackstone's tailor being just a worthless fact. For purposes of understanding Blackstone, I presume that to know the name of his tailor is to know a fact that carries no information; it has no purpose in the enterprise. Change the game again, to a study of famous tailors in eighteenth-century England, and then once again the Maybird-Blackstone connection is not just a fact, but a piece of information. So it all depends on the game.