When women contracted German measles in early pregnancy, they were “entitled” to therapeutic abortion, according to one 1959 magazine. Williams Obstetrics, the standard medical textbook, advised doctors that therapeutic abortion was “justifiable” in such cases if the pregnant woman and her husband decided upon it. German measles (also known as rubella) was first recognized as a teratogen by an Australian ophthalmologist in 1941. Exposure to the disease in early pregnancy could damage the developing fetus, causing deafness, blindness, heart defects, and mental retardation in newborns as well as miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths. Aware of the disease's effects, thousands of pregnant women who contracted German measles avidly sought abortions. Yet, as many learned in the 1950s and 1960s, the decision to carry a possibly affected pregnancy or have a therapeutic abortion was not clearly in their hands at all. Physicians refused to perform therapeutic abortions, their legality was uncertain, and hospital policies were designed to limit their numbers. An unknown number of women who knew they had contracted the disease and understood the implications were denied therapeutic abortions, and later gave birth to severely harmed children. Some of them sued their doctors for malpractice. Barbara Stewart and Sandra Gleitman, with their husbands, brought two early cases, Gleitman v. Cosgrove (1967) and Stewart v. Long Island College Hospital (1970 and 1972).

The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, arguably the most hotly debated in recent decades, has produced an impressive body of historical scholarship. The leading histories have focused on the evolution of the arguments and alliances that shape abortion debate today, rights-based prolife and pro-choice arguments, alliances between women's rights leaders and public health advocates, and the adoption of pro-choice positions by the Democratic Party and pro-life positions by the Republicans. This orientation is unquestionably a sensible one; rights-based arguments, in play before Roe, have come to dominate the debate after the decision. However, by emphasizing rights-based debate before the decision, the current scholarship has mostly missed a significant change in the rhetoric and coalitions on either side of the debate that was partly produced by Roe itself.

In April 1938 New York's first constitutional convention since 1915 convened in Albany. When it adjourned in late August, one of the amendments slated for a referendum that fall was an “anti-bureaucracy clause,” a provision that would greatly increase the New York courts' oversight of the state's agencies. Although voters rejected it, contemporaries saw the anti-bureaucracy clause as a harbinger of a national campaign against the New Deal. In September 1938 Charles Wyzanski, a former member of the Solicitor General's office, warned Attorney General Homer Cummings that the anti-bureaucracy clause was “the advance signal of an approaching partisan attack on a national scale.” Wyzanski was right: in early 1939 a bill endorsed by the American Bar Association's House of Delegates was introduced in Congress by Representative Francis Walter and Senator Marvel Mills Logan. Just as the New York provision “would have almost certainly destroyed the effectiveness of the state administrative agencies,” the New Dealer Abe Feller warned Cummings's successor, so would the Walter-Logan bill hamstring the federal government. When President Franklin Roosevelt vetoed the bill in December 1940, he declared it part of a national campaign that had begun with the anti-bureaucracy clause.

In mid-1950s Britain two significant events occurred in respect of the doctrine of judicial neutrality in that country. In the first, the Lord Chancellor of the day, Lord Simonds, had refused permission for the experienced and well-known senior judge advocate, Lord Russell of Liverpool, to publish his sensational history of Nazi war crimes, The Scourge of the Swastika, so long as he (Russell) continued to hold judicial office. For Simonds was insistent that the judiciary must keep their counsel on virtually any matter outside the courtroom, a view shared both by his immediate Labour government predecessor, Lord Jowitt, and by his Conservative government successor, Lord Kilmuir. After a public standoff when neither side would give way, the deadlock was broken when Russell, rather than risk being sacked for disobedience, chose to resign his judicial office to a fanfare of publicity in the press and duly published his book shortly thereafter. Moreover, what lent the Russell confrontation an added edge was not just Simonds's complaint that the book could be perceived as anti-German and, therefore, as political. It was that publication at that time could have a damaging effect upon Britain's policy of rehabilitating West Germany within the Western alliance.

It is a belief almost universally shared that the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 gave parents absolute control over the marriages of their minor children, and that a failure to obtain parental consent rendered a marriage void. For almost seventy years this Act was in force, from its implementation on March 25, 1754, until it was repealed by the Marriage Act 1823. In this same period historians have discerned the rise of the affective family, characterized by marriage for love and by equality between all members of the family. The tension between these two ideas has resulted in some rather tortuous explanations being advanced in an attempt to reconcile affective individualism and parental power. But was the period between 1754 and 1823 as distinctive as has been assumed?