Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is one of the few modern judges whose reputations have survived the twentieth century's culture wars relatively intact. Among his contemporaries Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand, Holmes was the first to become a judicial and cultural icon. Although Holmes's judicial reputation has fluctuated wildly since his death, his canonical status is unquestioned. His opinions, like those of Brandeis, are often quoted in high-profile Supreme Court decisions. Popular historians continue to be fascinated with his life story.

In 1859, after the death of his mistress, a slave named Mat Fine was taken to the Jefferson, Kentucky, County Court House “in the inventory of Lucy Fine's estate as her property.” There, he was inventoried along with her other possessions. Only a few years later, just after the Civil War, Fine returned to the local court house as a defendant in a civil case over the money his former mistress had left him in her will. There he stood before the civil court, as a person, rather than a piece of property, boldly laid out the terms of the will, and claimed his portion. Both the local court and state supreme court ruled in his favor.

In the middle of the second century CE, the satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. CE 125–180) composed a text known as the Bis Accusatus (“Twice Accused”) in which he describes a day of judgment. It begins with Zeus complaining to Hermes about the onerous nature of running the universe:

The basic colonial encounter involved a colonizing power and colonized locals. Some colonial situations were more complex, involving a third element: settlers of nonlocal stock originating in an ethnos, or nation, different than that with which the colonizer was identified. Two prominent examples from the annals of the British Empire are the French inhabitants of Nouvelle France after France ceded it to the British in 1763, and the Dutch inhabitants of the Cape Colony after the British conquest of 1806. The British typically permitted such settler populations to retain at least parts of the laws to which they were accustomed, which laws were often based on the laws of the settlers' jurisdiction of origin. As regards settler use of English law, the English sometimes provided for the application of parts of it to non-British settlers, while blocking such settlers' attempts to use other parts. The part of English law most commonly applied to non-British colonial subjects, both settlers and natives, was commercial law, in order to facilitate commerce between different parts of the Empire. The parts least commonly applied to such inhabitants were family law, land law, and the law of inheritance.

The early Middle Ages produced a series of law codes for the new “barbarian” kingdoms of Europe, which succeeded the western Roman Empire. These law codes were often inspired by the precedent and sometimes the content of Roman vulgar law as well as the customs of the respective peoples for whom they were written and the interests of their rulers. The making of law could often play a vital role in the stabilization of kingdoms, especially under new rulers. Early medieval secular lawmaking falls into three broad periods: the early royal laws of the Frankish, Burgundian, and Visigothic peoples in the fifth and sixth centuries; the interrelated composition of Lombard, south German, and perhaps also early Anglo-Saxon law in the seventh and eighth centuries; and the writing up of the last “ethnic” laws for peoples subject to Charlemagne's empire, such as Frisians and Saxons, in order to accommodate them into a multiethnic empire committed to the principle of personality of the law. The subject of this article, the law of the Bavarians (Lex Baiuvariorum, hereafter abbreviated “Lb”), belongs to the second of these stages. However, scholars have never reached consensus as to the date of its composition nor where it was created. This has inhibited the use of the Lb for any but they most general discussion of Bavarian society. This article will review the evidence for the Lb's date and place of composition, to suggest that we can plausibly identify them more precisely than has been done, and therefore argue that the distinctive features of this text can be tied to specific political needs.

Researchers of the history of late imperial Russia quite often base their studies on the texts of laws as recorded in the official edition: the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). The laws were published there in chronological order for purposes of conducting inquiries; it was specifically the Complete Collection in which the original text of a decree approved by the emperor could generally be found.