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.

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.

The early Middle Ages produced a series of law codes for the new “barbarian” kingdoms of Europe, which succeeded the western Roman Empire. These law codes were often inspired by the precedent and sometimes the content of Roman vulgar law as well as the customs of the respective peoples for whom they were written and the interests of their rulers. The making of law could often play a vital role in the stabilization of kingdoms, especially under new rulers. Early medieval secular lawmaking falls into three broad periods: the early royal laws of the Frankish, Burgundian, and Visigothic peoples in the fifth and sixth centuries; the interrelated composition of Lombard, south German, and perhaps also early Anglo-Saxon law in the seventh and eighth centuries; and the writing up of the last “ethnic” laws for peoples subject to Charlemagne's empire, such as Frisians and Saxons, in order to accommodate them into a multiethnic empire committed to the principle of personality of the law. The subject of this article, the law of the Bavarians (Lex Baiuvariorum, hereafter abbreviated “Lb”), belongs to the second of these stages. However, scholars have never reached consensus as to the date of its composition nor where it was created. This has inhibited the use of the Lb for any but they most general discussion of Bavarian society. This article will review the evidence for the Lb's date and place of composition, to suggest that we can plausibly identify them more precisely than has been done, and therefore argue that the distinctive features of this text can be tied to specific political needs.

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.”

Researchers of the history of late imperial Russia quite often base their studies on the texts of laws as recorded in the official edition: the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). The laws were published there in chronological order for purposes of conducting inquiries; it was specifically the Complete Collection in which the original text of a decree approved by the emperor could generally be found.

Section 54 (11) of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 criminalized the act of a common prostitute causing annoyance by soliciting in public.2 For the police to implement this legislation was no simple matter, as no definition of “prostitute,” or indeed “annoyance,” was scribed in statute law. Although common law aided the interpretation of this offense—the case of Rex v. de Munck (1918): “We are of the opinion that prostitution is proved if it is shown that a woman offers her body commonly for lewdness of payment in return”3—in practice, identifying a “common prostitute” and defining “annoyance” was left to the discretion of the individual police officer. Although specific squads were deployed to target streetwalkers in West End police divisions, where the presence of prostitutes was more likely to cause public offense, a “blind eye” was often turned to women soliciting in the less salubrious streets of the metropolis. Local knowledge gained on the beat and the informal advice of colleagues shaped an unofficial police policy of containment and toleration.4

On May 2, 1771, John Hardaway of Dinwiddie County, Virginia posted a notice in the Virginia Gazette about a runaway slave. The notice was ordinary, blending in with the many advertisements for escaped slaves, servants, wives, and horses that filled the classified section of the Gazette in the eighteenth century. Like countless other advertisements posted in newspapers wherever slaves were held, Hardaway's advertisement read: “Run away from the subscriber, a dark mulatto man slave named Bob Colemand, 25 years old, tall, slim, and well made, wears his own hair pretty long, his foretop combed very high, a blacksmith by trade, claimed his freedom under pretense of being of an Indian extraction.”

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.

Historians and legal scholars generally agree that during John Marshall's tenure as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, the federal judiciary expanded its power to interpret the Constitution and asserted with increasing force its authority to speak on behalf of the Union. This single story of judicial nationalism, however, contains two distinct and largely non-overlapping strands. Historians have tended to focus on the Supreme Court alone, to the exclusion of the lower federal courts, and have largely treated early national controversies over the lower federal courts as outgrowths of the political turmoil that accompanied the emergence of the first party system. Legal scholars in the fields of federal courts and constitutional law, meanwhile, have devoted significant attention to the lower federal courts but have largely neglected the history of how those courts developed beyond the key early moments of the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress.

On January 24, 1817, Don Juan Stoughton, the Spanish consul in Boston, wrote to his colleague in Baltimore, Don Pablo Chacon, to thank him for his recent efforts in supplying Stoughton with information about the Mangore, a private armed vessel recently arrived in the Chesapeake. Stoughton believed that the privateer was responsible for the capture of a Spanish-owned merchant ship that had recently turned up in Massachusetts. Stoughton had recently filed suit in federal district court to recover the vessel and its cargo on behalf of the rightful owners, but to do so he had to establish that, in the course of its recent expedition, the Mangore had violated federal law prescribing American neutrality. In addition to providing intelligence in this matter, Chacon had secured local counsel to represent Stoughton at depositions of privateer crew members being taken in Baltimore.