The interplay between the Roman economic and legal orders is one of the most important areas calling for research and analysis. There is no lack of excellent descriptions of the economic life of antiquity. In contrast, legal-historical enquiries into the legal-economic issues of Roman times are still in the initial stages. This dearth of research is mainly the result of the unsatisfactory state of Roman legal sources, which rarely deal with economic issues. It is a stroke of luck to find sufficient documentation on any specific topic. One such fortunate case, that of restraint of trade, exists. There are no fewer than seven Digest texts on the topic. These will be analyzed below, in conjunction with a comparative survey of the development of this aspect in modern law.

Scholarly treatments of the history of early federal copyright litigation have overlooked what may be the earliest and must certainly be the most interesting decision of the period—Morse v. Reid, decided in the United States Circuit Court for the District of New York on April 4 and 6, 1798. Absent its identification in Wilfred J. Ritz's invaluable American Judicial Proceedings First Printed Before 1801, Morse v. Reid would probably remain unknown.

On March 16, 1801, President Jefferson issued commissions to fifteen men to serve as justices of the peace for the County of Washington in the District of Columbia. Thirteen of the fifteen were among twenty-three justices of the peace who had been nominated by President Adams and confirmed on his last day in office. Benjamin Moore was one of two original Jefferson appointees; among the Adams appointees left off the list was William Marbury. Thus were set in motion two cases in which the Supreme Court would have an opportunity to address issues central to the great controversy over repeal of the 1801 Judiciary Act. In both cases, the Court ducked.

At the turn of the twentieth century, when highbrow political thinkers rebelled against the consensual epistemology and ethics of the Victorians, when they argued, as William James did, that “neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer,” when they declared themselves to be living in “a world where truth and justice are to be carved from culture rather than found already etched in reason,” they created an unprecedented problem in liberal political and legal thought. Previous thinkers could take the individual as the fundamental political unit and attribute to “him” a capacity for knowing and doing right that “he” shared with all God's children (as “commonsense” moral philosophy held) or all participants in a consensual, organically developing society (as historicist scholarship had it). Armed with such premises, they could confidently judge diverse social practices against universal standards of conduct.

Beamish Murdoch (1800–76) was a young man when the first of the four volumes of his Epitome of the Laws of Nova-Scotia rolled off Joseph Howe's press at Halifax in the spring of 1832. He was an old man when the first installment of his three-volume History of Nova-Scotia, or Acadie appeared under James Barnes's imprint in the spring of 1865. These two works have received surprisingly disparate attention in the century since Murdoch's death. Today it is Murdoch the historian who is well known: No treatment of nineteenth-century Canadian historiography would omit reference to his History. Murdoch's contributions to literary and political life, as editor of the Acadian Magazine and member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly from 1826 to 1830, have also attracted attention. Murdoch the lawyer and legal treatise-writer, by contrast, is virtually unknown in both professional and legal academic circles, even in his home province. Until recently the Epitome has attracted virtually no scholarly attention of any kind.

In late twentieth-century English-speaking western democracies, the petition is almost exclusively a sporadic, exceptional, and marginal mode of political expression, its legitimacy as an instrument and indicator of public opinion superceded by elected professionals and ubiquitous polls; a tenuous survival from its origin as the universal form of civic supplication. Part and parcel of the democratic revolution that reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, this transition may not have been neatly contemporaneous with the constitutional changes to which it seems collateral. In a recent article in this review, David C. Frederick posited that petitioning effectively disappeared in the United States after the imposition of a “gag-rule” by Congress, imposed in the 1830s as a response to anti-slavery agitation by petition.