‘It may not be proper to announce it,’ said President Franklin Roosevelt on June 25, 1941, ‘but today the Supreme Court is full.’ Roosevelt had just witnessed the swearing in of Justice Robert H. Jackson who would now take his seat on the Court along with the President's other appointees—Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William Douglas, Frank Murphy, James Byrnes and Harlan Stone (promoted to Chief Justice).

Sometime in the later 1260s, Peter, the third abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Henryków in Silesia, wrote his remarkable history of the monastery's foundation and estate. The history is a series of stories about the individual holdings that the monastery obtained in the course of the thirteenth century. Apparently at a late stage of his life, Peter looked back at the preceding decades with considerable apprehension, and he explicitly cast his work as an exercise in reassurance.

This article responds to a debate about the clash between canon law and common law positions on whether married women in England could make wills and what freedoms they had in terms of bequeathing property. In particular, it revises the argument that wives largely ceased to make wills c.1450 by arguing that local customs should be given more attention. The article offers a detailed study of the surviving wills in the deanery of Wisbech 1465–77, its linked diocese of Ely 1449–1505, and the probate acta of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham 1483–97, in order to demonstrate that there was regional variation in the decline in married women's will-making. In particular, a focus on court books, which included visitation material alongside the enrolled wills and probate acta, enables more to be said about the kinds of married women who continued to make wills and their motivations. The article argues that in these areas, as well as a continued tendency for wives who had some land or buildings to make wills, married women who had close connections with men who acted as churchwardens or jurors in church courts were also more likely to have their wills proved, even when they had little to bequeath.

On June 29, 1789, Zephaniah Turner of Charles County, Maryland, wrote to President George Washington and observed:

In 1725, Jane Webb, a free woman of color, sued Thomas Savage, a slave owner and middling planter, in Northampton County Court, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Webb v. Savage was an unusual lawsuit, the culmination of over twenty years of legal wrangling between two parties who had an uncommon and intimate connection. The case originated in a 1703 contract between the pair, and at the time it was written, its terms, assumedly, were clear and mutually agreed upon. Two decades later, however, a tangled skein of circumstances obscured the stipulations of that original agreement. Over the course of those same years, the legal meaning of freedom for individuals like Jane Webb had fundamentally changed. Both fraught interpersonal relations and the evolution of race-based law mattered to the 1725 chancery case for one simple reason: Thomas Savage owned Jane Webb's husband. Despite the fact that Webb's spouse, named only in the records as Left, was enslaved, their marriage was legally recognized, and the seven children born to the couple, following the legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrum, took their free status as well as their surname from their mother.

Scholars have long asked to what extent there was a distinctive Puritan jurisprudence in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Purita n jurisprudenceis a shorthand that refers to those elements of seventeenth-century Massachusetts's laws and institutions designed or selected because of the early colony's religious commitments. Among the fundamentals of Puritan jurisprudence were the integrated and determined use of legal and ecclesiastical institutions to foster a godly community, the importance of the Bible as a touchstone for the legitimacy of rules, and a constitutional order restricting colony-wide voting and political office to regenerate members of covenanted churches. Some historians speak of “Puritan justice” or “Puritan legal culture” rather than “Puritan jurisprudence.” Differing in detail and emphasis, these formulations point to a core idea animating much writing about early Massachusetts: that the colony lived by a legal order distinctive by the standards of contemporary England and her North American and Caribbean colonies and strongly shaped by Puritan religious commitments and social thought.

Among the most long-lasting constitutional controversies in the antebellum era was the interpretation of the fugitive slave clause. It was the subject of repeated legislative and judicial construction at both the state and the federal level. It raised delicate questions about federalism and the balancing of property rights and personal liberty. Slaveholders and abolitionists brought irreconcilable constitutional positions to the table, ultimately dividing Northerners from Southerners. However, it was not just divergent political commitments that made it difficult to fix a stable meaning to the fugitive slave clause. The text itself was ambiguous enough to make it amenable to multiple interpretations. For precisely this reason, an examination of the changing interpretations of the fugitive slave clause uncovers antebellum constitutional praxis, allowing us to see how historical actors interpreted the Constitution and how those interpretations shifted over time.

One of the most striking changes in the penal culture of fin-de-siècle Europe was England's reform of adjudication and punishment. In this “de-moralization of criminality,” the system began to shed its punitive sentencing, which often saw minor offenders imprisoned with hard labor for weeks or months, to adopt a more moderate system of penalties. These concrete changes were intertwined with a broader shift in British criminological thinking from a “classical” view to a “positivist” one. The former held offending to be a rational, individual choice that required severe deterrents, whereas the latter saw criminality as a product of harsh economic and social conditions. This shift in dominant understandings of criminality prompted reformers, judicial officials, police, and policymakers to refocus on the causes of crime and its prevention, the offender as a subject, and the potential for treatment and rehabilitation through state intervention. A central practice of the resultant “penal-welfare complex” was supervised probation as a substitute for imprisonment. Scholars of penal reform have argued that the passage of the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, which initiated the professionalization of the probation service, was a key moment in this transition. With it, such arguments hold, England took a substantial step from having a discretionary, moralized criminal justice system toward having a standardized, bureaucratic one.

This article draws on a variety of primary sources to first illustrate the rise of African abolitionism in the Fante region in the mid-nineteenth century and then situate local abolitionists in the context of colonial legal abolition in the Gold Coast. When the British abolished slavery in 1874, various Fante groups had been developing local anti-slavery views and strategies closely connected to the evolution of a Fante ethnic identity fashioned against the “barbaric” Asante. Tensions arose between the Fante intelligentsia, which spearheaded local abolitionism, and British colonial elites. The article examines the rise of local abolitionism among the coastal Fante through specific ideas, individuals, and events, and discusses subsequent dynamics in the “first age” (1874–1900) of colonial abolitionism in the Gold Coast. It shows that the 1874 abolition was opposed by members of the Fante anti-slavery movement not—as has been argued—because Fante intellectuals were pro-slavery or opposed to the idea of abolition, but because they held different visions of emancipation and were critical of British abolition laws that, unlike in the West Indies, did not compensate slaveowners.

David Konig has written an important article that makes a welcome contribution to the rapidly evolving field of Second Amendment scholarship. In the essay that forms the focal piece of this forum, Konig argues that two rival, hotly contested interpretations of the Second Amendment fail to recapture the original meaning of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. To Konig, neither the individual rights nor the states' rights model of the Second Amendment accurately reflects the conceptual universe shared by the drafters and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights. Neither model (and particularly not the individual rights model), Konig maintains, would have made sense to the persons who left behind a now familiar and much-discussed documentary record related to the call for amendments to the Constitution in 1788, the drafting of the Bill of Rights in 1789, and its ratification in 1791.

The language of the common law has a life and a logic of its own, resilient through eight centuries of unceasing talk. Basic terms of the lawyer's specialized vocabulary, elementary conceptual distinctions, and modes of argument, which all go to make “thinking like a lawyer” possible, have proved remarkably durable in the literature of the common law. Two fundamental distinctions—between “real” and “personal” actions and between “possessory” and “proprietary” remedies—can be traced back to their early use in treatises of the first generations of professional common law judges and in reports of courtroom dialogue from the first generations of professional advocates in common law courts. Together these distinctions give the clearest indications that the early common law professions borrowed the vocabulary and techniques of Roman and canon law. Moreover, they play an important role in the ongoing historical debate over English legal concepts of property ownership.

At 5:45 p.m. on Thursday, June 17, 1943, New Orleans police patrolman John Licali fatally shot 29-year-old Felton Robinson, an unemployed presser. A few minutes earlier, a neighbor had heard a disturbance in the backyard of Robinson's Loyola Street home and had alerted the Twelfth Precinct police station, which dispatched officers Licali and Emile Eskine to investigate. When they arrived, however, they found no signs of disorder. The policemen asked “was there any trouble,” and Robinson answered “no” and invited the officers to come to the back of the small house and “see my wife.” Veola Robinson, who was casually ironing clothes, explained that she and her husband (both of whom were African-American) had argued a short time earlier about purchasing an automobile. Felton Robinson, the woman added, suffered from “spells” and the effects of a “nervous breakdown,” and he had been “cursing and getting boisterous,” prompting the neighbor to summon the police. But the argument had quickly subsided. Licali and Eskine found Robinson to be quiet and peaceful, and the officers, persuaded that the minor domestic quarrel had ended, left the house. As Eskine entered the patrol car, Licali, a few steps behind his partner, turned to Robinson and admonished him “to keep quiet [because] if he talked loud again some of the neighbors might think he is fighting with his wife and call the police again, and they would have to come back again.” Then, according to the officers' report, “without provocation Felton Robinson suddenly attacked Patrolman John Licali,” grabbing the policeman's right arm, dragging him back into the house, hurling him to the floor, and throwing a glass bowl at him. When Robinson “went to the dresser and opened a drawer,” Licali believed that the violent, deranged man was securing a weapon, and the policeman drew his .38 caliber service revolver and fired three shots. In his report, Licali explained that he “was forced to shoot Felton Robinson in defense of his own life.”

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.

This article examines the jurisprudence of the Swedish Supreme Court during WW2 in disputes between exiled Jewish business owners and the Nazi-appointed administrators of their companies over the rights to the enterprises’ assets in Sweden. Contrary to assertions in previous scholarship, this article argues that the judgments of the Supreme Court were dictated neither by moral indignation in the face of the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich, nor by political considerations in a time of war. Instead, they were based on principles of private international law that predated, and outlived, the Third Reich. The outcome of the cases hinged upon whether the claim to Swedish assets arose before or after the date when the enterprise was placed under forced administration. If before, the claims of the Jewish owners were in principle successful; if after, they were not. This reasoning was well in line with both previous and subsequent case law on confiscations effected abroad. The article therefore concludes that the Swedish Supreme Court's judgments on Jewish assets in Sweden should be viewed not as outflows of extrajudicial considerations, but rather as failures to recognize political or ethical responsibility.

Until recently there was a depressing consensus about Scottish legal history in the medieval and early modern periods. It was accepted that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Scots had gone some way to building a legal system on the model found in contemporary England, involving the holding of courts in the localities by sheriffs and justiciars on ayres, the use of royal writs or brieves to commence litigations, and the determination of cases by juries or assizes. The fullest account of Scottish law, Regiam Majestatem, was based on the twelfth century English text Glanvill. The wars and other skirmishes with England which began in 1296 and continued into the sixteenth century brought an end to the development of the ‘Scoto-Norman’law and legal system however. Cut off from its basic inspiration and lacking either a central court structure or a legal profession, Scots law regressed throughout the later middle ages. Demands for better justice led the king by the end of the fifteenth century to establish a group of royal councillors to hold judicial sessions or sittings at which such complaints might be heard. The councillors—the lords of council and session—might be either ecclesiastics or laymen; the former were more numerous and possessed greater legal skills. The procedure of the emerging court thus followed that of the ecclesiastical courts and the substantive law which developed was also canonical and civilian in character. By the mid-sixteenth century the Session was established as the main civil court in Scotland and Scots law had made a fresh start, severed from its original roots.

When Henry II (1154–1189) ascended the English throne, centralization of administration became a key theme of his government and judicial reform a key theme of centralization. Throughout his reign, Henry enlarged royal jurisdiction over pleas of land by providing, by means of royal writs, jury trial before the king's justices as an alternative to judgment in the seignorial courts. The assize of novel disseisin (1155 x 1166) led the way for the assizes utrum (1164), mort d'ancestor (1176), and darrein presentment (post 1179), and for the Grand Assize (c. 1179) and writs of dower. Henry also centralized and tightened royal jurisdiction over criminal pleas through the Assize of Clarendon (1166) and reform of the appeal of felony.

Susan Carle has given us a fascinating, thoroughly researched, and well-argued examination of the early history of the modern civil rights movement. She frames her inquiry of this rarely investigated period in terms of the tension between the NAACP's litigation tactics during the early part of the twentieth century and the professed ethics of the establishment lawyers who authored and approved these controversial measures. How, she asks, could leading corporate lawyers such as Charles Boston justify authorizing the NAACP's concerted campaign to solicit plaintiffs and create test cases while at the same time serving on ethics committees that expressly condemned such practices?

It was a simple tale of betrayal. In 1950, a Pennsylvania husband returned home from a business trip to find his wife—known to us today only by her initials CD—having sex with the female athletic director of a local school. This wife was only one of many women caught having sex with other women in the era following World War II. Although many closeted men and women enjoyed vibrant sexual and social lives in gay and lesbian communities, sometimes commanding officers, bosses, and police officers caught and punished men and women engaging in “deviant” sexual activity. Punishments ranged from arrests during a bar raid to a dismissal from a job. A double life in the public sphere was fragile. Scholars have paid less attention, however, to the insecure closeted lives of husbands and wives such as CD. Although certainly not all men and women who engaged in same-sex encounters entered traditional heterosexual marriages, many did. Their motivations for marrying ranged from the hope that marriage would cure same-sex desire to financial concerns. Sometimes, a husband or wife discovered his or her spouse's homosexual infidelity. A potential punitive outcome for this encounter was not an arrest, pink slip, or a dishonorable discharge; instead a spouse could end up in divorce court. Like the federal government, the military, the local police, and private employers, then, divorce courts also had to devise strategies and philosophies with which to deal with the problem of homosexuality.