By the turn of the twentieth century the absence of codified law governing private economic transactions was a key target of foreign and Chinese critiques of the imperial legal system. Expectations ran high that China's first legal transplant, the 1904 Company Law, would lead to unprecedented public investment in large-scale industrial projects. Their disappointment, and the continued dominance of small business in the Chinese marketplace, has been attributed to factors ranging from Chinese cultural aversion to impersonal investment to shortcomings in the law itself. This study shifts our attention to the indigenous practices that company law was meant to supplant, examining the diverse sources of Chinese shareholding practices and the rich menu of options they provided investors. Most importantly, it argues that by the late imperial period shares were well-established as abstract income producing assets that could be bought and sold, creating the possibility of partnership relationships that could be both impersonal and long-lived despite the absence in China of a formal company law. That this tradition did not lead to the emergence of an analogue to the corporation in the West raises new questions about the demand for such entities and the role of transplantation in suppressing indigenous solutions to business problems.

Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. Despite the significance of their role, little is known about medieval matrons and what qualified them to sit on a jury. Were they mothers? Honorable wives? Midwives? The goal of this paper is to argue that matrons had training in obstetrics. This was particularly important for medieval matrons because the quickening (that is ensoulment, signaled by the first fetal movements) did not become the focal point of the matrons' assessment until at least 1348. Before this, the diagnosis was much more medically challenging as matrons had to determine whether a felon had conceived. Overall, the medieval records demonstrate great confidence in medieval matrons and their obstetrical expertise.

This essay argues that the 1675 conviction of John Taylor by the Court of King's Bench for slandering God reveals Chief Justice Matthew Hale implementing a model of conjoint law-making between courts, Parliament, and crown that gave pre-eminent power to the common lawyers, and none to the Church of England. In doing so, it counters the prevailing literature on Restoration English law, which has treated the law as hierarchical, with the common lawyers subordinate to the sovereign. Rather than following statute or ecclesiastical law, which emphasised the spiritual nature of crimes like Taylor's, Hale located Taylor's offence in the exclusively temporal common law jurisdiction of defamation, which existed largely outside of monarchical purview. Hale's judgment reflected his rhetoric of judicial office outside the courtroom, where he argued the judiciary worked alongside King and Parliament in making law, but were not subservient to these institutions, for common lawyers relied on sources of law beyond sovereign-made statute. The language of sovereignty as hierarchical was thus a factional attack on an independent common law, an attempt to subordinate the common lawyers to the crown that was resisted by the lawyers like Hale in his rhetoric and exercise of office, and should not ground accounts of the Restoration regime.

In the late eighteenth century, American law treated oath-taking as an invocation of divine vengeance for sworn falsehoods. Prospective witnesses who did not believe in God or hell were not allowed to testify. But this strict evidentiary rule survived only a few more decades. Gradually at first, and then with growing speed, the theological underpinnings of oath-taking eroded across the United States in the early nineteenth century. The story of this transition, only vaguely appreciated in the current literature, illuminates and weaves together several important strands of nineteenth-century social and legal history. The common-law rule, it turns out, came into escalating conflict with American religion, particularly after a liberal offshoot of Calvinism began rejecting the existence of hell. By prevailing founding-era standards, being unable to testify did not impede or punish the exercise of religion, allowing the rule to survive an initial volley of legal challenges. But as reform efforts mounted, a neutrality-based view of religious liberty and an egalitarian conception of civil privileges began to supplant the earlier constitutional settlement. By the mid-nineteenth century, evidence rules throughout the United States no longer required belief in hell, and almost half of the states allowed atheists to testify. This transition also prompted the first widespread rethinking of American evidence law, shifting its foundational principle from reliance on the inviolability of oaths to confidence in the jury's fact-finding capacity, and laying the groundwork for further liberalization in the 1850s and 1860s that allowed testimony from black witnesses and from interested parties. Moreover, the controversy about religion-based exclusions led to a new understanding that barring testimony from particular minority groups effectively denied those groups the protection of the law.

The politics of war severely divided the Virginia Southside during the American Revolution. Laborers, ship pilots and other landless men and women bitterly resented the efforts of the patriot gentry to stop trade with Great Britain and to establish a military force. Planters feared that the presence of the British Navy would encourage slaves to flee or attack their masters. What role did law play in the patriot response to these conditions? This essay uses the case of Josiah Philips, who led a banditti residing in the Great Dismal Swamp, to show how law intersected with class and race in patriot thinking. The gentry's view of the landless as dependent and lacking in self-control and its view of black slaves as posing a constant threat of violence supported the application of special legal regimes suited to these dangers. In particular, Philips was “attainted” by the General Assembly, a summary legislative legal proceeding traditionally employed against offenders who threatened government itself. While the attainder was uncontroversial when it passed, the significance of the Assembly's intervention changed over time. By the late 1780s, some among the state's legal elite regarded the Assembly as having unnecessarily interfered in the ordinary course of justice, which they were then seeking to reform. This opened the way to recharacterize the Assembly's extraordinary legal jurisdiction as an arbitrary exercise of lawmaking power.

In 1816, the mostly-American crew of a slaving brig bound from Cuba staged a mutiny before reaching West Africa, and then sailed on (without a captive cargo) to the antislavery republic of Haiti. Their voyage culminated in a remarkable prize case before the admiralty court at Port-au-Prince. The sailors claimed indignation at the “diabolical” slave trade, hoping to win profits from the condemnation of the vessel and to avoid future prosecution for enlisting in a slaving voyage that was illegal under U.S. federal law. Haitian prosecutors invoked the agreements of the Congress of Vienna, arguing that the trade had been prohibited by the laws of nations. It fell to the admiralty court to reconcile such aspirational claims with Haiti's ongoing struggle for political survival. The brig's journey between the United States, Cuba, Spanish Florida, Cape Verde, and finally Haiti reveals the ways in which slave traders calculated the relative risks of legal penalties against the possible gains from the trade. The records of the adjudication of the case show how Haitian officials developed their own legal strategies for the suppression of the trade, laying the foundations for an escalating campaign to police slaving traffic off of their shores.

Eugenius Aristides Nisbet played a critical role in Georgia's secession from the United States. Elected as a delegate to Georgia's 1861 secession convention, Nisbet introduced a resolution in favor of severing ties with the Union, and he led the committee that drafted his state's secession ordinance. Nisbet was a trained lawyer who had served on the Georgia Supreme Court, and his legal training shaped the way that he viewed secession. He believed that the Constitution did not give states the right to dissolve the Union; instead, this power rested solely in the people, and he framed the resolution and ordinance accordingly. Thanks in part to Nisbet, it was the “people of the State of Georgia” who “repealed, rescinded and abrogated” their ratification of the Constitution in 1788.

After WWII, a new form of Europeanism emerged in legal history that gained momentum from European unification. This article explores the emergence of this new narrative as part of the process of exile from totalitarianism and its connection with the reestablishment of the European intellectual and political order after the war. The purpose is to explore the parallel afterwar processes of narrative and normative change and the influences and connections between them. It focuses on a specific historical case, the turn toward Europe, its legal heritage and human rights in the post-war era writing of legal history, especially in the writings of Paul Koschaker, Franz Wieacker, and Helmut Coing, and its linkages to the simultaneous process of European integration. It explores a new argument about the interlinkage between narrativity and normativity as cognitive processes that rely on the creation and sustaining of belief, and the ideas of legitimacy and identity construction.