Approximately 50 years ago, R. R. Palmer published his two volume masterwork The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Designed as a “comparative constitutional history of Western civilization,” it charted the struggles after 1776 over ideas of popular sovereignty and civil and religious freedoms, and the spreading conviction that, instead of being confined to “any established, privileged, closed, or self-recruiting groups of men,” government might be rendered simple, accountable and broadly based. Understandably, Palmer placed great emphasis on the contagion of new-style constitutions. Between 1776 and 1780, eleven onetime American colonies drafted state constitutions. These went on to inform the provisions of the United States Constitution adopted in 1787, which in turn influenced the four Revolutionary French constitutions of the 1790s, and helped to inspire new constitutions in Haiti, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and elsewhere. By 1820, according to one calculation, more than sixty new constitutions had been attempted within Continental Europe alone, and this is probably an underestimate. At least a further eighty constitutions were implemented between 1820 and 1850, many of them in Latin America. The spread of written constitutions proved in time almost unstoppable, and Palmer left his readers in no doubt that this outcome could be traced back to the Revolution of 1789, and still more to the Revolution of 1776. Despite resistance by entrenched elites, and especially from Britain, “the greatest single champion of the European counter-revolution,” a belief was in being by 1800, Palmer argued, that “democracy was a matter of concern to the world as a whole, that it was a thing of the future, [and] that while it was blocked in other countries the United States should be its refuge.”

In the middle of the second century CE, the satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. CE 125–180) composed a text known as the Bis Accusatus (“Twice Accused”) in which he describes a day of judgment. It begins with Zeus complaining to Hermes about the onerous nature of running the universe:

One bright, sunny day in northern Italy, let us say in Bologna in the year 1275, a group of law students might have sat and listened to this case. A man named Seius slipped into a shed owned by his sworn enemy, Titius. A priest, a wealthy merchant, and a physician, all of them unimpeachable witnesses, saw Seius enter the shed with his sword drawn. A moment later they heard a man cry out. Then they clearly saw Seius, shaken and pallid, emerge through the doorway, bloody sword in hand. When Seius noticed the witnesses coming toward him, he fled. The witnesses found Titius in the shed, unconscious, dying from a sword wound. Upon investigation, the podestà, the magistrate charged with criminal investigations, discovered that Seius had recently sworn that he would kill Titius, and further, that everyone in town believed that he was guilty. The podestà ordered his arrest and, after a manhunt, Seius was captured before he could slip across the border to the neighboring city-state.

June of 1955 was a busy month for the NAACP. Throughout the country, members and officials used direct action and a variety of legal tools to further the organization's fight against workplace discrimination. At the NAACP's annual convention, the organization reaffirmed that it “vigorously supports the purposes of organized labor.” But it also urged that “[w]here labor unions still practice any form of racial discrimination,” its members should “bring all the pressure they can against these undemocratic and discriminatory practices,” including using publicity, filing complaints with President Eisenhower's Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC), and, “wherever possible, by court action.” The audience hardly seemed to need this reminder.

Most who study Roman law today do so as historians, not lawyers. History includes doctrine, but Roman legal doctrine is rarely used to solve modern problems. There are exceptions: Roman law helps to solve modern problems in certain jurisdictions and academic writing sometimes gives a Roman solution to a modern problem. But the time is past when Roman sources were routinely put to work in the world of affairs, and most would say codification is the main reason.

Between 1936 and 1939, American workers staged some 583 sit-down strikes of at least one day's duration. In the latter year, the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation, resolving the official legal status of the tactic. Fansteel made it clear not only that a state could punish sit-downers for violating trespass laws, but also that an employer could lawfully discharge them—even if that employer had itself provoked the sit-down by committing unfair labor practices in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

English common-law rules that transferred the property of women to their husbands upon marriage were part of the larger package of laws emigrants from England brought to Canada. These harsh rules left Canadian women in a most unenviable position—the equitable precedents that had evolved in England to prevent the most glaring instances of abuse had less impact in Canada where courts of equity developed slowly and sporadically, and many individuals had no practical access to their jurisdiction. The need for reform of married women's property law was made even more pressing because of an apparently high rate of wife abandonment, which left women without the benefit of matrimonial support, yet still subject to the disabilities of coverture.

In its October term 1882, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision which aborted federal efforts to deal with anti-black violence in the states of the old Confederacy. At issue in the case of United States v. Harris was the constitutionality of a federal statute, Section 5519 of the Revised Statutes of the United States of 1874, which made it a crime for private persons to conspire to deprive other individuals of the equal protection of the laws. A group of white Tennesseeans had been convicted under the statute for assaulting and badly beating a group of black criminal defendants in the custody of local authorities. The court held that there was no foundation in the Constitution for the federal law and voided it, thus overturning the convictions. The 14th Amendment, the purported basis for the statute, was aimed, according to the court, at state action and did not empower Congress to legislate against purely private conduct. It was the same line of reasoning that would lead the court in its following term, in the celebrated Civil Rights Cases, to declare unconstitutional Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which established civil and criminal penalties for racially motivated interference with anyone's full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations and conveyances.

Discerning transitions in the emotional content of family relationships is a daunting task. In The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, Lawrence Stone has accepted the challenge exploiting ‘every possible type of evidence’ to detect an evolution in social attitudes. Reactions have generally been favorable; merits are thought to outweigh shortcomings. Even his most derisive critic concedes that the book is ‘important’ because it is of topical interest and attempts to illuminate an area of history which has previously remained obscure.

In 1916, Charles Anderson Boston, one of the members of the first national Legal Redress Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke at the organization's board of directors meeting to endorse the use of new litigation strategies in the fight against racial segregation. The “proper presentation of the legal fight against segregation,” Boston urged, should focus on gathering “facts, not law” to demonstrate to the courts the law's “actual operation.”; Boston's emphasis on using facts to demonstrate the law's operation accorded with the NAACP's litigation strategy, which relied not only on gathering and presenting such facts but also on creating facts by carefully staging scenarios that would present the right test cases to the courts for adjudication.

John Fielding succeeded his half-brother, the novelist Henry Fielding, as the leading magistrate in Westminster in 1754 in the midst of a crime wave in London. Over the previous six years, since the peace that had brought the war of Austrian Succession to an end, frequent reports of highway robberies around London and muggings on the streets of the capital had provided constant reminders, along with the high levels of executions at Tyburn, of the depth and seriousness of the crisis. Substantial rewards for the prosecution and conviction of robbers had failed to stem the tide. Nor had new legislation, deriving from the first enquiry ever held by a parliamentary committee into the problem of crime, diminished the danger on the streets. By the fall of 1753, with crime still apparently at an alarming height and a winter approaching that could only make things worse, the central government was ready to try new measures. It was in these circumstances that the Duke of Newcastle, the secretary of state, asked Henry Fielding to suggest what might be done.

It was the policy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) during the 1920s to contest only those obscenity regulations that were “relied upon to punish persons for their political views.” So stated a 1928 ACLU bulletin, reiterating a position to which the organization had adhered since its formation in 1920. For the majority of the ACLU's executive board, “political views” encompassed the struggle for control of the government and the economy, but not of the body. The early ACLU was not interested in defending avant-garde culture, let alone sexual autonomy.

In the last two decades or so, questions of law have moved back to the top of the research agenda in work on medieval English manor courts. This marks a shift away from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, when the historians on both sides of the Atlantic who established the court roll as the pre-eminent source for everyday life in the countryside sought inspiration from the social sciences rather than legal history. The court roll studies published in that period generated much methodological debate about use of these records to study peasants and their communities. Nonetheless, in most of those studies, consideration of the manor court as a legal forum first and foremost, or of the implications of reliance on a legal source to study social and economic history, was secondary to analysis of the data in the rolls. More recently, though, scholars have started once again to look at the court roll from the perspective adopted by Maitland in his Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seigniorial Courts. These historians are concerned with defining and characterizing “customary law”: that is, with the nature and principles of the law applied in manor courts; the extent to which those principles were malleable or unchanging; the relationship between the rulings pronounced in the manor courts and those recorded in other areas of the legal system, most importantly the common law courts; and the machinery of manor courts with respect to procedures, personnel, and record keeping.

As demonstrated in Part I, the question of Chancery reform before 1827 was much debated in party terms and focused largely on Lord Eldon's shortcomings as a decision-maker. After Eldon's departure, it largely ceased to be a party-political issue, although by 1830 law reform in general was firmly on the political agenda. With Eldon gone, there was much common ground on the outlines of Chancery reform. This can be seen from the plan proposed in the Commons by the conservative Sir Edward Sugden in December 1830. Sugden suggested creating a court of appeal for equity, on which the Lord Chancellor, Master of the Rolls, Chief Baron, and Vice Chancellor would sit. He proposed reforms in the masters' offices, under which they would be paid salaries rather than fees, and he wanted masters to sit in open court, with limited judicial functions. He also advocated retrenchment of sinecures and the removal of payment by fees. These ideas were all echoed in the new reformist Chancellor Brougham's proposals for the court, which he elaborated in the spring of 1831.

Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, provided the setting, in May 1912, for two widely publicized trials that highlighted the explosive fusion between race, gender, and class in early twentieth-century Canada. The prosecutions were based on a Saskatchewan statute passed several weeks earlier, “An Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities.” The first of its kind in Canada, this statute made it a criminal offence for “Chinese” men to employ “white” women. Quong Wing and Quong Sing, men who operated two restaurants and a rooming house in Moose Jaw's small but growing Chinatown, were charged with violating the new law. Between them, they employed three white women: Nellie Lane and Mabel Hopham as waitresses and Annie Hartman as a chambermaid.

In 321 B.C.E., a Roman army led by both that year's consuls was trapped near Caudium, in a defile named the Caudine Forks, the result of a clever strategem devised by the Samnite general Gaius Pontius. According to Livy, writing some three hundred years later, the Samnites had made no plan to capitalize on their good fortune, and so they sent to Pontius's father, Herennius Pontius, to seek his advice. “Let them all go unharmed,” he said. The messenger who returned with that advice was promptly sent back. “All right,” said Herennius, “kill every single one of them.” Unable to decide whether his father had lost his mind, the son had his father brought to the camp, where he gave the same two pieces of advice and justified each. But what would happen, he was asked, “if they are sent away unharmed and conditions are imposed upon them as conquered, in accordance with the law of war (ut et dimitterentur incolumes et leges iis ire belli victis imponerentur)?”1 That practice neither makes friends nor removes enemies, replied the father. Their humiliation will rankle them until they avenge it.

This article explores a core question in the law of slavery: how was an individual's status as slave or free socially discerned and formally adjudicated? Under the doctrine of “freedom by prescription,” a person who had in good faith “lived as free” could argue that the absence of exercise of ownership for a specified term of years extinguished a prior owner's title. In the medieval Siete Partidas of Alfonso the Wise, which continued as a legal point of reference in Louisiana well after the end of Spanish rule, both the law of status and the law of property confirmed this path to freedom. From 1808 onward, Louisiana jurists and legislators sought to eliminate the remnants of the doctrine, but it lingered in popular and even judicial consciousness. The 1853 kidnapping of a woman named Eulalie Oliveau, six of her children, and eleven of her grandchildren for sale in the New Orleans slave market brought the question of “freedom by prescription” back into the courts. The awkward resolution of that case, and the uncertain fate of Eulalie Oliveau and her children, foreshadowed Reconstruction-era struggles over the content of legal freedom and the rights that freedom might bring to those who had once been held as property.

…he [that] is judged mute, that is dumme by contumacie…his condemnation is to be pressed to death, which is one of the cruellest deathes that may be: he is layd upon a table, and an other uppon him, and so much weight of stones or lead laide uppon that table, while as his bodie be crushed, and his life by that violence taken from him. This death some strong and stout hearted man doth choose, for being not condemned of felonie, his bloud is not corrupted, his lands nor goods confiscate to the Prince…

In 1954, seventy-four years after the U.S. Supreme Court held that African Americans could not be banned from jury service by statute, and fifty-four years after it ruled that they could not be purposely excluded from venires due to their “race or color” through court, executive, or administrative action, the Court found that Pete Hernandez had been denied equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. His constitutional rights were violated because of the de facto, systematic exclusion of Mexican Americans from the pool of potential jurors—and thus juries—in Jackson County, Texas.