In 1773, with the empire on the brink of revolt, the Privy Council gave the final ruling in the case of the Mohegan Indians versus the colony of Connecticut. Thus ended what one eighteenth-century lawyer called “the greatest cause that ever was heard at the Council Board.” After a decades-long battle for their rights, involving several appeals to the Crown, three royal commissions, and the highest court in the empire, the Mohegans' case against Connecticut was dismissed. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (~20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Crown for redress. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.

So contended Edmund Burke in the House of Commons, during a May 1770 speech that ridiculed the government's American policy. It was not the first time Burke raised the subject of this 1543 statute. He had asked—rhetorically—during debates two weeks before, “The Act of Henry VIII. Did you mean to execute that?” He then answered his own question, the scorn beneath it probably apparent to all. “You showed your ill will to America, at the same time you dared not execute it.” Burke hoped that by shaming the ministry he might be able to push through a set of resolutions condemning its policies, which could open the way for a new approach to imperial management. He failed, but that did not mean he had been wrong about the futility of threatening to resurrect an old statute to intimidate protesting Americans.

The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.

In August 1945, Karl Loewenstein began work as senior expert advisor to the Legal Division of American Military Government (AMG) in Berlin. An eminent German-born and educated political scientist and jurisprudent, Loewenstein had come to assist in the “democratization” of his homeland's Nazified law and legal institutions. It was soon obvious, however, that in its crucial first phase the American legal mission in Germany was in disarray. The development and implementation of American law reform policy was being undercut by ill-prepared leadership, poor planning, and the scarcity of learning about German laws, lawyers, and legal history. By Loewenstein's reckoning, many American officers had been “set to work on problems of which they have not the slightest idea and very little professional qualification.” Critical law reform initiatives had been based upon expedient “over-simplifications” of Nazism and its eradication. By January 1946, his initial misgivings having given way to mordant despair, Loewenstein concluded that the American program for the democratization of the German legal system was irrevocably “lost,” a “failure which stinks to high heaven.” This article sets forth the theoretical and observational bases of Loewenstein's assessment and evaluates its cogency.

This article studies the rise and fall of the first liability insurance cartel in the United States. In 1886, insurance companies in America began selling liability insurance for personal injury accidents, primarily to cover business tort liability for employee accidents at work and non-employee injuries occasioned by their business operations. In 1896, the leading liability insurers agreed to fix premium rates and share information on policyholder losses. In 1906, this cartel fell apart.

“Two negroes hanged,” John Gabriel Stedman wrote in his Suriname journal for March 9, 1776, and then two days later, among his purchases of “soap, wine, tobacco, [and] rum” and his dinners with an elderly widow, he records, “A negro's foot cut off.” Stedman expanded on these events in the later Narrative of his years as a Dutch–Scottish soldier fighting against the Suriname Maroons:

The Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905), recently commemorated with several international conference volumes, is identified by a majority of contributors as the first modern, global war. In making such a judgment, these scholars note its scale, its nationalism, its colonialism and geopolitical repercussions. What is surprising, however, is that no one has remarked on another significance: it was the first war in which both belligerents pledged to adhere to the international laws of war. In that regard, the Russo–Japanese War marks a culmination of the tireless international diplomacy to secure legal limitations on warfare in the nineteenth century. In 1904, both Russia and Japan justified their operations according to international law, for the benefit of an international audience who had five years earlier celebrated some progress with the signing of The Hague Conventions in 1899.

A commentator noted in 1881 that Irishmen regarded jury service as “the greatest burden that can be inflicted upon them … they would be delighted if trial by jury was suspended tomorrow.” He later added, “[o]f course an enormous outcry would be raised about it in the national press, and in public meetings; but jurors … would give anything in the world not to serve … because it is the terror of their lives.” Much has been written about the poor state of the nineteenth-century Irish jury system, and it is certainly true that for various social, economic and political reasons, in comparison with that in England, the Irish system appears to have operated in a way that fell somewhat short of ideal. This article seeks to provide an understanding of the realities facing the jurors themselves, and will examine their experiences of the justice system before, during, and after the trial.

It is easy to imagine that on this early morning in 1395, Antonius, realizing the magnitude of his actions, had little time to fabricate a defense or construct a plan. In late fourteenth-century Reggio Emilia, flight was often the most desirable path open to those suspected of perpetrating felonies. Subsequent witnesses in this murder investigation speculated that Antonius fled the territory of the Villa de Vetto before the first light of day less to evade the law than to avoid the wrath of Caterina's relatives. Propelled by the need to escape retribution, Antonius, like almost half the defendants cited by the criminal court of Reggio Emilia, fled rather than appear before the criminal judge.

In the spring and summer of 1788, a master was prosecuted for the torture of two female slaves in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). The exceptional nature of the case was immediately obvious to the participants who lived through it. The governor and intendant of Saint-Domingue—in essence, the colony's chief military and administrative officers, respectively—described it as a “unique opportunity to arrest, by means of a single example, the course of so many cruelties.” In 1788, the most recent victims of this long eighteenth-century history of cruelties included two slaves known only as Zabeth and Marie-Rose, ostensibly tortured because they were suspected of having administered poison to their master and fellow slaves. This article tells the story of the prosecution of the master who tortured them, Nicolas Lejeune.

On a hopeful September day in 1912, Gim Pon, a twenty-five year old Chinese man from Canton, boarded the steamship Siberia in Hong Kong harbor to sail west across the Pacific. The Siberia docked briefly in San Francisco, but Gim Pon's destination, and that of seven fellow Chinese travelers, was not California but the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In the early twentieth century, thousands of men like Gim Pon immigrated to Mexico, boosting the Chinese population there from slightly over 1,000 in 1895 to more than 24,000 in the mid-1920s. Sonora, which hugs Arizona at the United States/Mexico border, was a popular destination, and hosted the largest Chinese population of any Mexican state through the 1920s. Once in Sonora, Gim Pon adapted to life in Mexico: he changed his name to Francisco Gim, learned Spanish, and became naturalized as a Mexican citizen on February 27, 1920. Most importantly, he formed a family with Julia Delgado.

Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), has puzzled scholars for generations. Law professor David Currie has called it “perplexing.” It is a case over which scholars have come to a wide array of conflicting conclusions.

At the Rhode Island Historical Society there is a copy of an amazing journal, kept by Henry Marchant (1741–1796) during his eleven-month sojourn in England and Scotland as a colonial agent for Rhode Island. He was a practicing lawyer who had the first-hand opportunity to observe law as it operated on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. He was not the only lawyer to do so, but his background as a trial lawyer made his perceptions differ substantially from those of the many colonial law students who received their legal educations in England. Dozens of young colonists ventured from home to London for the legal training and social polish twelve terms at the Inns of Court could provide; their legal notebooks record activities at the Westminster courts as students saw them, learning the law one case at a time, before they returned to the colonies and went into practice. A few more experienced lawyers, such as John Adams, likewise had the opportunity to visit Westminster Hall, but they typically went once or twice, and did not return.

In recent years, the conspicuous advance of globalization has inspired many historians to rethink the past in cross-national and comparative terms. Frustration with the limits of traditional, national approaches to history has spawned interesting comparative work in such fields as women's history, labor history, economic history, and imperial history. Although legal history tends to be somewhat parochial by tradition, it, too, has taken a cross-national and comparative turn.

The widow Drouillard de Volunbrun and her household boarded the brig Mary & Elizabeth in November 1796, only after many failed attempts to leave the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Like many others, they sought refuge from the violence and deprivation of the Haitian Revolution. In the party were the widow, her mother, a male companion, Marie Alphonse Cléry and, at best count, twenty enslaved people. Catastrophe struck November 18 when the Mary & Elizabeth wrecked on the west end of the Miguana Reef, off the Bahamas. The vessel and cargo were “totally” lost, but the captain, crew, and twenty-nine passengers, including the Volunbrun household, were “saved.” By the following April of 1797, the household was again at sea, bound for New York City. New York was, Shane White explains, “the center of the heaviest slaveholding region” in the North. Slaveholdings were small, with slaves a shrinking minority of the overall population. Still, one in five households held at least one slave. The household maintained a modest profile during their first four years in the city, moving to what was then the city's northeast periphery, Eagle Street near Bowery. Their neighbors were skilled workers, including butchers, masons, and men working the maritime trades. The widow put most of those she termed slaves to work manufacturing cigars.

It is conventionally believed that neutral legal principles required antislavery judges to uphold proslavery legislation in spite of their moral convictions against slavery. Under this view, an antislavery judge who ruled on proslavery legislation was forced to choose, not between liberty and slavery, but rather between liberty and fidelity to his conception of the judicial role in a system of limited government. Focusing on the proslavery Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, this article challenges the conventional view by arguing that the constitutionality of the fugitive act was ambiguous; meaning that neutral legal principles supported a ruling against the fugitive act as well as a ruling in favor of it, and that prominent antislavery judges were influenced to uphold the act by a belief that doing so was necessary in order to preserve the Union.