Sixteen-year-old Acre resident Mustafa Naif, suspected of having sex with another man, stated before the police investigator on June 30, 1943, “I know Mustafa Zaharan and is my friend and mate, I used to love him and he used to love me, and that this man had a sexual intercourse with me twice with my consent and free will, because he loves me and I love him.”1 By the time of his trial, approximately a month later, Mustafa Naif must have realized this was the “wrong” story to tell. He recanted his statement and denied knowing Mustafa Zaharan or having anything to do with him. His denial might have been another manifestation of love, as an admission of guilt would have led to his friend's conviction on a sex offense. For his lover's sake, then, Mustafa Naif might have renounced his original romantic version. Indeed, his friend was acquitted as a result of the contradictory statements; however, Mustafa Naif was charged with perjury and was convicted after pleading guilty.

Based on Carol Smart's observation that rape law reform as lobbied for by the feminist movement during the 1970s and 1980s failed to achieve any meaningful change, this article seeks to examine the nature and implications of rape law reform in the Republic of Ireland from the 1980s to the present day. During the 1980s the conceptualization of rape changed from a proprietorial crime to a violation of individual bodily integrity due to feminist lobbying efforts and the emergence of a victim-centered approach in the criminal justice system. Though this changing conceptualisation has led to significant attitudinal change, particularly surrounding the issues of acquaintance and marital rape, procedural change has failed to secure higher conviction rates. In particular, this article demonstrates that the legal reforms achieved in the 1980s potentially resulted in a 2% decrease in rape conviction rates by 2007. When compared to England/Wales, conviction rates as distinctive from prosecution rates in Ireland remain chronically low. This indicates that any legal reforms must take account of the institutional bias ingrained the Irish criminal justice system against female rape complainants, which has continuing relevance for Irish legislation pertaining to sexual violence such as the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, 2017. Overall this article suggests that rape is an exceptional crime and needs to be reassessed as such.

This article examines the Ottoman extension of rule and jurisdiction to the Beersheba frontier of southern Palestine. As part of its Tanzimat reform policies, the Ottoman administration founded the new town and sub-district of Beersheba in 1900, and sought to implement a legal reform. Deviating from the formal law that requires the founding of a civil-nizamiye court, the Ottoman instituted a form of legal exception and authorized the local administrative council to sit as a judicial forum and for its Bedouin Shaykh members to serve as judges. Studies of Ottoman Beersheba have typically focused on Bedouin autonomy and tribal law. The few studies that discussed the judicial order, have mistakenly assumed the Ottoman institution of a “tribal court,” and its persistence thereafter. Interestingly, what began as a simple grant of legal exception, justified by civilizational discourses of ignorance and savagery, grew into a judicial complexity. Very soon jurisdictional tensions arose, integrating questions across various webs of legal orders, jurisdictions, and political networks that shaped the reform in Beersheba and beyond. In following various legal disputes from Beersheba to Gaza, Jerusalem, and Istanbul, the article challenges some of the prevailing research categories, dichotomies, and approaches in the study of Ottoman legal history and tribal societies, including the concept of ‘legal pluralism.’

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.”

In the handbook for Cypriot police officers published in 1896 by the island's British colonial administration, there is a passage that appears at first innocuous but that had important resonances for the development of legal and political statuses in Cyprus of the period. Under the section “Police Duties” and the subheading “Constables,” the handbook notes that “[c]onstables are expected to possess such knowledge of the inhabitants of their District as to enable them readily to recognize them. They are to be instructed to watch unceasingly all persons having no visible means of support, and obtain knowledge of all suspected thieves, idle and disorderly persons, and disorderly houses.”

The criminals of medieval England are coming under increasing scrutiny. Predictably, the earliest attempts to illustrate criminality in this period have been anecdotal in approach. Predictably, too, the case studies are concentrated at higher levels in society, where criminals or their victims were sufficiently prominent to merit the attention of chroniclers or to leave heavy traces in the more accessible records of central government. Such studies have been useful in reinforcing the impression that organized crime enjoyed distinguished support and participation. For some time Sir John Molyns was able to shelter his persistent offences behind his political connection. Merchants robbed in Cannock Chase in 1341 found prosecution difficult; their assailants were knights from powerful midland families, conducting the robbery from Lapley priory. The Folville gang, led by members of minor landowning families, included various beneficed clergy and the constable of Rockingham castle. The Coterels recruited the sheriff of Nottingham and enjoyed the support of Lichfield chapter. The crimes were also at an exalted level: murdering a baron of the Exchequer, kidnapping a king's bench justice, extortion by threats from a mayor of Nottingham, or from one of the Luttrells. Even William Wawe, an Anglo-Irish thug of indifferent social standing, owes his immortality to the breadth of his operations and his preference for churchmen as victims.

At 10:00 AM on September 24, 1943, James F. Lincoln, the sixty-year-old president and owner of the Lincoln Electric Company of Cleveland, Ohio, entered a meeting with U.S. Navy officials who wanted to discuss his company's recent earnings. A former Ohio State University football team captain and active supporter of the Republican Party, the outspoken Lincoln had already made it clear that he objected to the whole proceeding. One of the nation's leading suppliers of welding equipment, Lincoln's company had seen its sales boom since the beginning of World War II, as shipbuilders, aircraft producers, and other prime contractors demanded more welding machines and electrodes. Now, after a year of correspondence and preparations, the U.S. Navy had asked Lincoln to come to Washington to discuss how much of the company's 1942 profits were fair, and how much should be returned to the United States.

If a German couple wanted to get married today, they would have to consult the German Civil Code, the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or BGB, for information on how to do so. From the BGB, they would learn that—provided that they are competent, more than 18 years of age, not related in a direct line or (half-) siblings, and not currently married—they can get married before the Standesbeamter or civil registrar. They would also learn that should they want a divorce in the future, any proceedings would have to be brought in the family court, which is a special division within the German civil courts of first instance, and that the judge hearing their case would be required to consider whether their marriage has “failed”: a state of affairs that that judge would be legally compelled to presume if one or both of them wanted the divorce (and they had lived apart for a prescribed number of years).

The preceding narrative is, in many ways, illustrative of the complex and contradictory phenomenon of infanticide in the district of Montreal during the first half of the nineteenth century. Although notices regarding the finding of infant bodies were frequent, discovery of twin infant bodies was not. This account was also unconventional in its tone: lacking the usual sterile narration typical of newspaper coverage of that topic, it cried out for the apprehension of the “perpetrator of so foul a deed.” Although the call for justice might have appeared strong, infanticide prosecutions were fairly rare and convictions rarer still. The prevalent view might have been to characterize the responsible party as an “unfeeling mother,” but the reality surrounding infanticide was altogether more complicated, yet fully as tragic.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, English scholar James Bryce criticized Western railroad land grants as “often improvident” and as giving “rise to endless lobbying and intrigue, first to secure them, then to keep them from being declared forfeited in respect of some breach of the conditions imposed by Congress on the company.” Bryce also observed the extent to which grants of land to railroads allowed the beneficiary companies to exercise great power not only through their role as carriers of people and commerce, but also through their role as large landowners. This, he noted, brought them “yet another source of wealth and power” and “brought them into intimate and often perilously delicate relations with leading politicians.” From the perspective of the so-called “railroad tycoons” and their financial backers, the land grants became sources of wealth and power independent of and sometimes contrary to the interests of the railroad corporations themselves as carriers. Whereas Congress intended the railroad land grants to serve as a means to the end of railroad construction and the settlement of the federal government's expansive public domain, the railroads came to see them as an end in themselves: as independent sources of wealth and power.

This article analyzes the targets of papal policies on Christians' relations with non-(Roman)Christians contained in canon law's On Jews, Saracens, and Their Servants in a historical period that has attracted comparatively little attention: the mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth century. It argues the inherent ambiguity of the normative discourse on “proper” relations with “infidels.” On the one hand, popes and canonists faithfully preserved a taxonomy of otherness inherited from the church's ancient past. On the other hand, they often reduced all difference to the pastoral distinction between flock and “infidels.” The conflation of non-Christians occurred in multiple ways: through the explicit extension of a specific policy's targets, overt canonistic discussion, the tacit application of the law to analogous situations, or its simplification for use in the confessional. As a result, a number of policies aimed originally at a specific target were applied to all non-Christians. In the course of the later Middle Ages, a whole group of policies meant to define Christians' proper relations with others became potentially applicable against all non-Christians. In the words of a widely, if regionally disseminated, penitential work, all that was said of the Jews applies to the Muslims and all that was said of heretics, applies to schismatics.

James Henretta's “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America” takes up one of the most interesting and important interpretive questions in the history of American political economy. What explains the dramatic transformation in liberal ideology and governance between 1877 and 1937 that carried the United States from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism? That question has preoccupied legions of historians, political-economists, and legal scholars (as well as politicians and ideologues) at least since Hughes himself opened the October 1935 Term of the U.S. Supreme Court in a brand new building and amid a rising chorus of constitutional criticism. Henretta, wisely in my opinion, looks to law, particularly public law, for new insights into that great transformation. But, of course, the challenge in using legal history to answer such a question is the enormous increase in the actual policy output of courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies in this period. Trying to synthesize the complex changes in “law-in-action” in the fiercely contested forums of turn-of-the-century America sometimes seems the historical-sociological equivalent of attempting to empty the sea with a slotted spoon. Like any good social scientist, Henretta responds to the impossibility of surveying the whole by taking a sample. Through a case-study of the ideas, political reforms, and legal opinions of Charles Evans Hughes, particularly as governor of New York and associate and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Henretta offers us in microcosm the story of the revolution (or rather several revolutions) in modern American governance.

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.

Ariela Gross offers a thorough summary of points made in the two articles in this Forum, and integrates the articles well. As she notes, taken together, they provide an examination of the “other white” litigation strategy employed by Mexican American civil rights lawyers.

Historians and legal theorists have suggested a range of sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory reasons to explain why judges, prosecutors, and other officials of the German administration of justice proved willing both to persecute the various enemies of the Nazi state and to tolerate the many extralegal murders and lesser brutalities of other organs of the regime. One line of interpretation, dominant until the late 1960s, stressed the importance of the tradition of legal positivism. Believing themselves bound to the letter of the law, courts and prosecutors obeyed politically and racially repressive laws without asking moral questions. An alternative and opposing explanation emphasizes instead the justice administration's willingness to stretch the letter of the law to conform to “spontaneous popular sentiments of right.”

Sometime in the winter of 1839, Keziah Kendall, a thirty-two-year-old woman living with her two sisters on a dairy farm “not many miles from Cambridge,” heard from her “milkman” that a public lecture would be delivered on the legal rights of women. Kendall “thought [she] would go and learn,” but when she attended she found that she “did not like that lecture much.” The speaker was Simon Greenleaf, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University, who at the time was delivering lyceum lectures in eastern Massachusetts on the subject of women's rights. Not the least bit intimidated by Greenleaf's stature, Kendall wrote him a candid letter, expressing her disapproval of his talk: “[T]here was nothing in it but what every body knows. … What I wanted to know, was good reasons” for the rules governing the legal rights of women “that I cant account for. I do hope if you are ever to lecture at the Lyceum again, that you will give us some.” Kendall then proceeded to tell Professor Greenleaf the remarkable and poignant story of how her personal experiences had shaped her interest in her own legal rights.

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.

In eighteenth-century England the rule of law was “the central legitimizing ideology, displacing the religious authority and sanctions of previous centuries.” Arising out of struggles between the monarchy, Parliament, and the courts, the rule of law sought to protect individual liberty and private property by placing constraints on arbitrary authority. The ruling class used the rule of law ideology to enhance their power, but it also acted as a check on that power. All citizens from the monarch to the poorest citizen became bound by the rule of law and could settle their disputes in the courts presided over by judges, who were independent of manipulation.