Historical inquiry into the character of local dispute resolution and the operation of customary law in medieval England begins in manorial courts, since it is from those local courts that the most abundant documentation survives. Were the judgments of these courts “principled” in the sense of being rooted in substantive legal rules that courts ordinarily followed, or were they ad hoc determinations based on factual circumstances invisible to the modern reader? Can historians extrapolate behavioral norms and shared cultural values from the manor court records that survive in increasing profusion from the second quarter of the thirteenth century?

Slave law in early Louisiana is of great interest because it was shaped by three major European legal traditions under the rule of France (1699 to 1769), Spain (1769 to 1803), and the United States (after 1803). In this article, the types and origins of slave laws in early Louisiana and their application in the slave society of New Orleans is examined. Several different imperial, local, and mixed codes were ordained in the colony to govern relations between masters and slaves, and these laws reveal either the political strategies of imperial policymakers or the social tactics of slaveowners, but very little about actual slave treatment. The administration of justice in New Orleans was mostly determined by the planters: local needs and ideals prevailed when they conflicted with those represented by the crown's laws, and the courts rarely interfered with the authority of indivdual slaveowners over their chattels.

The decades following the American Revolution witnessed major changes in American society. As traditional means of social control eroded, an increasingly secular society turned to lawmakers—both judicial and legislative—to craft new norms. Nineteenth-century legislators and judges actively promoted new visions of the economy, politics, and society. No area of social concern escaped their attention. Recent scholarship focusing on women and the family has explored how lawmakers transformed pre-Revolutionary legal concepts in reaction to changes in the nature of the family itself. This article examines the legal response in one narrow intersection of law and society: the law of sexual slander.

The Types Riot of June 8, 1826, is the most celebrated episode of conservative political violence in Upper Canada. It was directed against William Lyon Mackenzie, an immigrant from Scotland and a newspaper editor in York (Toronto) who had perfected a style of journalism characterized by scathing personal abuse of the colony's leaders. About a dozen well-connected individuals, most of them lawyers or law students, broke into the offices of Mackenzie's Colonial Advocate newspaper in its owner's absence. Terrorizing Mackenzie's mother, son, and assistants, the rioters wrecked the press and scattered the types, throwing some of them into the bay nearby. In a harbinger of what was to come, more than one magistrate looked on without interfering. The attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, neither disciplined the lawyers and law students among the rioters nor prosecuted them in the criminal courts.