In 1858, Catharine Barr wrote to the Pension Commissioner in Washington, D.C., seeking reinstatement of her widow's pension. Barr explained that she had been married to two men who had died in the service of the United States: first to George Bundick, “a young and beloved husband” who had died in the War of 1812; then to William Davidson in 1835, who had died in 1836 of injuries sustained while serving on the USS Vandalia. She acknowledged that she was not, strictly speaking, a widow, as her current husband, James Barr, was still living and they were still married. She nevertheless sought reinstatement of the pension she had been granted as Davidson's widow. Pursuant to the terms of the relevant pension statute, Barr's pension had terminated upon her remarriage to James. However, as Barr explained to the commissioner, James “has neither been with me or given me one Dollar for my support since 1849, and I know not his whereabouts.” Having also lost her father in the War of 1812, Barr saw herself as particularly deserving of the federal government's assistance and believed that she and other widows in her position had a claim on the national coffers. “I for one,” she implored, “have no Dependence on Earth only what comes through my relations.”

In 1871, Mary Ann Harlan brought an unprecedented suit against her neighbors, Elliot and Mary Clark, before the Superior Court of Cincinnati. She alleged that they had “wrongfully and maliciously enticed away” her husband, Robert Harlan, from their home, thus depriving her of Robert's “society, protection, and support.” The common law had long given husbands the right of action to sue third parties who enticed away, harbored, alienated the affections of, or seduced their wives. In these types of marital torts, a husband sought damages for the loss of his wife's “consortium,” a term that expressed his property in her services and society. At the time of Mary Ann's suit, however, wives had no such reciprocal right. In part, this was an outcome of the common law doctrine of marital unity, or coverture, under which a wife's legal identity was merged into that of her husband upon marriage. Unable to sue or be sued, she had to be joined by him in a legal action. Courts were hardly amenable to the idea of allowing husbands to join in suits involving their own marital transgressions, where they would stand to profit from their misdeeds if any damages were awarded. More fundamentally, however, the limitation of wives' access to legal remedies was an expression of the hierarchical nature of marital unity. No less an authority than eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone, the most influential expositor of the common law, put the reason plainly: “the inferior hath no kind of property in the company, care, or assistance of the superior, as the superior is held to have in those of the inferior; and therefore the inferior can suffer no loss or injury.” According to this theory, a wife was not barred from bringing such a suit simply because of her legal disabilities under coverture; as a subordinate in the marriage relation, she lacked any reciprocal claim to her husband's society. Mary Ann's case, then, hinged on whether she had the right to bring her suit.

In his book The Dignity of Legislation, Jeremy Waldron bemoans the lack of attention legal philosophers have paid to legislatures and legislation. This oversight, Waldron suggests, has impoverished our understanding of legislatures as legal institutions, and has led jurisprudes to see only the “indignity of legislation.” Legal historians have hardly been more attentive, preferring to leave legislatures to political historians and political scientists. So although we have myriad studies of roll call votes, for example, we lack a genuine understanding of the legal history of legislatures or legislation. Our failure to appreciate the role of legislatures and legislation is especially characteristic of studies of the pre-Civil War period, a period in which the state has been famously described as a “state of courts and parties,” and characterized by the legislature's “decline of authority.” Even those who have uncovered a rich governmental theory and practice in the nineteenth century have focused more on courts and statutory interpretation. Willard Hurst criticized this inattention to the legal history of legislatures years ago, noting the “tendency to identify legal history with the history of courts and court-made doctrine.” Our court-centered approach has left us with only a partial understanding of the role of law in American history. “In order to see law in its relations to the society as a whole,” Hurst continued, “one must appraise all formal and informal aspects of political organized power— observe the functions of all agencies (legislative, executive, administrative, or judicial) and take account of the interplay of such agencies with voters and nonvoters, lobbyists and interest groups, politicians and political parties. This definition overruns traditional boundaries dividing the study of law from study of political history, political science, and sociology.”

The mid-1960s witnessed a landmark change in the area of civil rights policy in the United States. After a series of tortuous internal battles, with Southern legislators using all available procedural tools to maintain their states' discriminatory Jim Crow legal systems, the United States Congress adopted two statutes—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which insured civil and political equality for all Americans. The Acts of 1964 and 1965 were the culmination of a decade-long struggle by black Americans to secure the citizenship rights that had been denied to them for more than a half century. Beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision, the civil rights movement built momentum, as formal organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) grew in strength and informal (grass roots) organizations spread throughout the South and the Nation. As national public opinion shifted increasingly toward providing new civil rights guarantees for blacks, Congress responded with new legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (the first civil rights law since 1875), the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and a legislative proposal to prohibit the poll tax in 1962 (which would be ratified by three-quarters of the states in 1964 and become the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution).

“Enclosure” has long been shorthand for describing the exchange of scattered strips of land and common rights for cohesive plots in premodern and modern England. Proprietors who farmed long strips of land throughout a village or released cattle on unused waste would receive at enclosure regular plots commensurate in value with earlier interests. The process of enclosure in a village could be gradual, as it predominantly was for much of the premodern period. Alternatively, as increasingly occurred in the modern era, the proprietors could enclose their lands in concert. Figure 1, two maps of Helmdon in Northamptonshire, depicts the vast change in holdings that could occur through enclosure.

James Oldham and Su Jin Kim write about the acceptance of arbitration in the early United States in their article, “Arbitration in America: The Early History.” They correct a misperception that stretches back at least to Justice Joseph Story's 1844 opinion in Tobey v. Bristol that said equity did not enforce arbitration awards. Oldham and Kim recover a robust culture of arbitration in the early United States and thus correct the received wisdom, which led Justice Kennedy to remark in 2001 that American courts were historically hostile to arbitration. Perhaps this newly recovered history will add support for the acceptance of arbitration in the federal courts. Oldham's and Kim's article is, therefore, part of an emerging and sometimes controversial trend in legal history to speak to contemporary issues. It is also the first of an occasional series for Law and History Review on “applied legal history.”

On June 29, 1789, Zephaniah Turner of Charles County, Maryland, wrote to President George Washington and observed: