No term of the United States Supreme Court, in this century, has gone by without significant or dramatic cases. October Term, 1922 was no exception. The court was in transition. A new Chief Justice, William Howard Taft, had taken office in 1921; three justices retired in 1922. Late in the term, the court decided Adkins v. Children's Hospital. This was one of the cases which earned the Court a reputation for dark reaction; the Court voided a law which allowed the District of Columbia to fix minimum wages for women and children. In October Term, the Court also had one of its rare encounters with the constitutional aspects of eminent domain. The case was Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote the opinion. This case too disappointed the left, and gave comfort to conservative interests.

Cardin Le Bret, councillor of state during the ministry of Richelieu, is sufficiently distinguished to have merited two monographs in modern historiography. The basis of his renown is not his official deeds, however, but his political writings. Moreover, within the large corpus of those writings (630 folio pages, published three times), one treatise alone raises him from obscurity: De la Souveraineté du Roy, first published in 1632. And finally (to allot Le Bret the least that is due him), the fame of that treatise owes less to the perspicuity of its author than to the timeliness of its subject. It is one of the first comprehensive treatments of sovereignty to appear after Jean Bodin ‘invented’ that concept in his Six livres de la République (1576). Le Bret's treatise could thus provide important evidence of the status of ‘sovereignty’ in legal and political discourse two generations after Bodin.

More than half a century ago, Walton H. Hamilton recognized the dual economic and moral spirit of the nineteenth century's ‘sense of individualism’ when he wrote that the legal maxim caveat emptor ‘served well its two masters, business and justice’. However, recent scholarship has captured only half that spirit. Historians have concentrated on business and attributed the way judges shaped the law of the marketplace to their desire to promote economic growth. James Willard Hurst, in his seminal Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States, posits ‘the release of individual creative energy’ as the ‘dominant value’ in American law for the first half or three-quarters of the nineteenth century, pointing to such developments as the judicial embellishment of ‘procedures and instruments to promote dealing at a distance and on credit’ in response ‘to the needs of a growing commerce’. Lawrence M. Friedman states that nineteenth century contract law was ‘attuned to the needs of a growing economy, at least as the leading judges read those needs’. Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek credit the content of pre-Civil War contract law to the ‘developmental, entrepreneurial bias’ of antebellum judges. According to Bernard Schwartz, the job of American law, at least through the Civil War, was ‘to furnish the legal tools necessary for effective mobilization of the community's resources’. William E. Nelson, adding a class twist to the ‘developmental’ theme, writes that the law in the nineteenth century ‘came to be a tool by which those interest groups that had emerged victorious in the competition for control of law-making institutions could seize most of society's wealth for themselves and enforce their seizure upon the losers’.

The action of covenant before the reign of Edward III is a subject of considerable mystery. By the time that the Year Books come to the fore in the last decade of the thirteenth century, it has become a relatively scarce form of action in the royal courts, and consequently our sources of information are fairly scanty; in addition, by this time, the restrictions which limited the potential of covenant as a general contractual remedy are already firmly in evidence, with the result that the development of these restrictions is not easily visible. There is, though, a considerable amount of additional material in the rolls of the Justices in Eyre in the reign of Edward I, and in some of the multifarious tracts on pleading which proliferated in the later years of the thirteenth century and which have remained for the most part in manuscripts which have not been systematically examined by legal historians.

Whatever their other disagreements, most students of early modern judicial records agree that by the end of the sixteenth century England's criminal courts were busier than ever before. Studies by Joel Samaha, J.S. Cockburn, Keith Wrightson and J.A. Sharpe all point to an increase in the level of criminal prosecutions, and in particular to an increase in prosecutions for property crime. These changes in turn suggest a change in actual behaviour: apparently more people were stealing more often. Such a conclusion becomes more convincing when one recalls the state of the Elizabethan economy. By at least the 1580's the economic expansion of the sixteenth century was beginning to give way to crisis. England's society and economy suffered the combined effects of war, harvest failure, plague and industrial stagnation. Mortality and food prices rose, wages and employment opportunities shrank, and poverty became more pronounced.

The Supreme Court of North Carolina is an anomaly among state courts in the antebellum years. In a period dominated by democratic reforms of state government, the court did not merely survive unscathed it actually increased its independence. The remarkable success of this court is largely attributable to the personal reputations and political acumen of two of its judges, Thomas Ruffin and William Gaston. Without those two men it is likely that the Supreme Court would have been abolished in a wave of democratic reforms that peaked in North Carolina with the constitutional amendments of 1835.

Ninety-seven years ago, the English legal historian Frederic William Maitland gave a lecture called ‘Why the History of English Law is Not Written’. This essay has something of a similar theme, on a much more modest scale: ‘Why a recent, scholarly, relatively comprehensive history of medieval English law as it applied to women has not been written’. Its purpose is both to examine factors which may have deterred historians from undertaking such a project and to attempt an overview of the kind of work in women's legal history that has been, and is being, done.

The National Archives should make a scientific documentary examination of the Engrossed Declaration of Independence now on display in the Archives. It should use such techniques as will both insure preservation of the integrity of the document and will yield the maximum of information. Among the techniques that may be appropriate are ultraviolet and betaradiography and paleography.