‘United to protect, not combined to injure.’ With these words in 1840 the United Society of Brushmakers, bore witness to a shift in the language of labor organizations. While community of experience and interests was always what held such groups together, there was uncertainty in the first part of the nineteenth century about what to call them. Their name in the statute book, dating back to the early eighteenth century, was ‘combination’. Some workmen proudly adopted the term: ‘by combination we shall succeed’ proclaimed the Amalgamated Society of Journeymen Cloggers. But ‘combination’ suffered by association with the ancient and pejorative word: ‘conspiracy’.

In 1929, when Lorna Parsons tired of her four-year marriage to a London, Ontario tailor, she decided to seek a divorce—in Reno, Nevada. Even though Lorna's divorce was not generally recognized in Canada, obtaining it was important to her and to the hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadians who similarly sought United States divorces at a time when Canadian law was extremely restrictive. The choices of Parsons and her compatriots should be of interest to legal historians. They problematize the idea of national legal history by reminding us that law does not always remain in the tidy jurisdictional containers constructed by legal authorities and academics. National boundaries are more porous, and the nature of law itself more fluid, than we often admit.

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.

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.

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.

In this comment on the special issue, Burton situates the essays in the scholarship of 1980s and 1990s as well as very recent scholarship on age of consent laws. She notes patterns — including processes of abstraction and transnational circulation — that shaped the cases gathered here. She points as well to the stakes of prioritizing gender and conjugality in scholarship on legal imperial regimes of all kinds.

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.

Two months after a mob in Alton, Illinois, killed abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy and destroyed his fourth press, a jury acquitted several assailants accused of rioting. By the time that the trials commenced in January 1838, the defenses had all been publicly aired; indeed, they had been rehearsed in print and at well-attended meetings long before the attack occurred. The mob's leaders had taken special care over several months to lay a legal foundation for their action; most notably, the Illinois attorney general led the pre-attack rhetorical justification and the post-attack courtroom defense. In the end, the jury found that resorting to forcible measures in such circumstances did not clearly fall outside the law.

On October 3, 1881, William Henry Rawle, the distinguished Philadelphia lawyer and scholar, addressed students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School hoping to illustrate, ‘in a very general and elementary way,’ the differences between the growth of English and early Pennsylvania jurisprudence. ‘It would have been more interesting and more broadly useful,’ Rawle apologized to his audience, ‘if the attempt could have been extended to embrace the other colonies which afterwards became the United States, for there would have been not only the contrast between the mother country and her colonies, but the contrast between the colonies themselves.’ Rawle was confident that such an examination would have revealed how ‘in some cases, one colony followed or imitated another in its alteration of the law which each had brought over, and how, in others, the law was changed in one colony to suit its needs, all unconscious of similar changes in another.’ ‘Unhappily,’ Rawle explained, ‘this must be the History of the Future for the materials have as yet been sparingly given to the world.’

Until assuming the violent form most strikingly exemplified in France by the explosions of 1789 and 1848, the century-long movement of resistance and emancipation of the European peasantry mainly occurred in the legal domain. The focus of opposition was towards the attempt to impose a normative system which sought to undermine the working rules of peasant communities. It was carried through, for example, by protesting against seignorial obligations or by asserting claims to the free use of forests and communal pastures. In such actions the peasant will, revitalized by periodic subsistence crises, tried to maintain control over legal institutions, and therefore to retain relative social autonomy.

History abounds with debates which turn on the seemingly innocuous question as to whether fundamental change did or did not occur in any particular period. Many such controversies are well-known: Was there or was there not a ‘Tudor revolution’? Was there or was there not an ‘agricultural revolution’? What about a ‘great transformation’? A revolutionary change in Canadian government in 1982? A ‘making’ of the English working class? A ‘transformation’ or ‘Americanization’ of American law? Are we or are we not at the present conjuncture in the process of a fundamental—and globe spanning—transformation to a dominant corporatist ideology? The examples of this sort of debate can be multiplied almost endlessly.

The legal history of the western Canadian frontier has received renewed attention in recent years. Much of the work readdresses the question of “law and order,” challenging older assumptions about Canada's orderly frontier culture—orderly particularly in contrast to the United States’ violent settlement of the west. At issue is not just a revision of whether violence occurred on the Canadian frontier but a fundamental reinterpretation of what the concepts of “law” and “order” had really meant. Indeed, conflict between legal cultures has become a major theme as historians attempt to rewrite the history of the Canadian west. They understand that this conflict—whether violent or not—shaped the formation of Canada's legal culture before 1870. Methodological prescriptions for writing this type of history have emphasized the need for historians to widen their base of sources, particularly to exploit “nonlegal” sources (such as diaries, journals, and letters), and to consider the workings of what Lawrence Friedman has called the “cultural” component of a legal system: what suits were brought to court, what notions came into play there, what expectations people brought with them. Important studies on the colonial settlement of British Columbia in the nineteenth century have focused on the relationships between the Hudson's Bay Company, colonists, and Natives to demonstrate that conflict over resources and competing definitions of liberalism and law often shaped legal discourse. These rich accounts have, among other things, called into question the idea of an orderly, peaceful Canadian frontier. They have also provided a much more complex picture of the interactions between Native and European, and the uses of law and the legal system by settlers, Company men, and Aboriginals.

In this brief reconsideration of the roles experts may play in legal proceedings - and concentrating on the role of social scientists in particular - it may, therefore, be useful to revisit some very familiar issues and to address some seemingly peripheral matters that are nevertheless quite central to the way we think about the involvement of experts in legal cases. For purposes of introducing some of these issues it may be helpful to focus on three interrelated concerns: the ascertaining of expert qualifications, the role of evidentiary procedure, and the extra-judicial use of social information.

Sometime in early 1434, two northern Italian counts, Francesco Pico della Mirandola and his brother Giovanni, sent a letter to Pope Eugene IV (r. 1431–47). Out of concern for their subjects, who had long suffered from a shortage of credit, Francesco and Giovanni had allowed some Jews to settle in their lands and lend at interest. In addition, the brothers had rented a house to these Jews for the purpose of moneylending. At the time, the noblemen stressed, they had not believed their actions to be unlawful. They had since come to fear, however, that they had inadvertently brought automatic excommunication upon themselves by violating the provisions of Usurarum voraginem, a decree first issued at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 that called on secular and religious authorities to refuse lodging to foreign usurers and, in addition, to expel such usurers from their lands. The brothers' uncertainty, the petition noted, reflected the varied opinions of contemporary jurists (presumably those at Bologna, a mere 60 kilometers away), who disagreed on whether the decree was to be understood in reference to Jewish as well as Christian moneylenders. Deciding to err on the side of caution, the brothers petitioned the Holy Father to grant them absolution, if they had indeed incurred ecclesiastical censure through their actions. In addition, they asked to be granted a dispensation allowing the Jews to remain in their lands, so as to spare their subjects from even greater economic misfortune.

On May 17, 1910, Donald C. MacPherson purchased a Buick runabout from the Close Brothers dealership of Schenectady, New York. The new rig sported a “four cylinder, twenty-two and a half horse power” engine, allowing it to reach a speed of fifty miles per hour. Its body had been painted “French gray” and a similar gray color coated the wooden wheels. The runabout accommodated two passengers in the front seat and one in the rumble seat. Though smaller and slower than other cars on the market in 1910, the Buick served MacPherson's purposes. During the summer and fall, he drove the machine to various places in the vicinity of Saratoga Springs for his business as a stone cutter who specialized in making grave stones.

Over the last few decades, scholarship on early medieval conflict has been driven and shaped by the kinds of sources that scholars have used. The different source genres offer their own characteristic pictures of the ways that people processed disputes in the early Middle Ages. Narrative sources, for example, such as chronicles or saints' lives, tend in the process of achieving their narrative orhagiographic goals to highlight violence, extra-judicial settlement, and the ritual or symbolic expression of disputes and disputeresolution. Normative sources, such as law codes or royal legislation (for example, the capitularies issued by Carolingian kings), naturally emphasize institutional tools for handling conflict, such as formal judicial assemblies and judicial procedures, royal judicial officials, and laws. Archival sources from the period consist primarily of charters, that is, records of rights or privilege ranging from diplomas issued by kings and emperors to the property records of churches andmonasteries. These tend to blend the images produced by the first two source genres. Often they record the formal resolution of propertydisputes in judicial assemblies headed by kings, counts, or their representatives; often they refer to laws or imply that the cases theydeal with were covered by some generally recognized set of norms. Charters also, however, provide a great deal of evidence for extra-judicial negotiation and settlement, as well as for ritual and public symbolic communication as a part of dispute processing.

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1965 (CERD), was negotiated at the United Nations (UN) during the years 1962–1965. At that period, the UN was an organization so highly politicized and split that it was almost paralyzed, operatively speaking. Human rights codification was a major field whose advancement came to a standstill as a result of the lack of cooperation between UN member-states. Nevertheless, the UN managed to unite around the denunciation of racial discrimination, and unanimously adopted CERD on December 21, 1965. Furthermore, the period of time that elapsed between the presentation of the initiative and the vote on the final version of the treaty was only 3 years; a rather short period of time, UN experience considered.

Atlanta's human rights community was buzzing, because the United Nations (U.N.) was coming to town. On Sunday, January 19, 1964, the front page of the Atlanta Daily World, the city's oldest black newspaper and the South's only black daily, announced, “United Nations Rights Panel to Visit Atlanta.” The U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (Sub-Commission), the Daily World explained, was a fourteen nation “body that surveys the worldwide problems of discrimination.” The Sub-Commission had been invited to Atlanta by Morris Abram, a former Atlanta attorney and the lone United States member of the Sub-Commission, to study first-hand the city's well-publicized, efforts to improve in race relations. Sunday morning's Daily World also noted that the U.N. delegation “composed of experts, mostly lawyers and jurists” was in the midst of drafting a global treaty designed to end racial discrimination, and the local paper highlighted Abram's role as the primary drafter of the race accord. “Mr. Abram, as the U.S. expert on the subcommission has proposed a sweeping eight-point treaty,” the article reported. According to the Daily World, the pending race treaty—the treaty that would ultimately become the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD or Convention)—would address “segregation, hate groups and discrimination in public accommodations.”

This paper relies on the narrative of a renowned historian of Qing law from China mainland who has been called by Hong Kong High Court in 2007, to witness as an expert in “Chinese customary law.” At the opening of the trial, he recognized one well-known and estimated colleague from Taiwan in the expert engaged by the other party. During one week, these two legal historians called up a vast array of knowledge in Chinese history, culture, and law, to ensure the triumph of their party. The contest opposed the representatives of two branches of a same lineage who claimed their right to manage the lineage common wealth. As both were collaterals with dubious link with the original lineage, experts engaged in sophisticated arguments to make their cause prevail. Successively were adduced lineage registers the tabooing of fathers and emperors' personal name in the Chinese tradition, the degree of kinships as represented by “mourning charts” included in the Qing penal code. Even though it was “privately settled” before any judicial decision, this case raises questions on the very nature of “Chinese customary law”, and the role of “cultural expertise” at Common law in a Chinese environment.