In colonial Hispanic America, widows and widowers were in an unfavorable position if their spouse died without a will, only inheriting from them if the deceased left no blood relatives to the 10th degree of kinship. This article examines the extent to which the intestate position of the surviving spouse improved in the new civil codes of the sixteen republics, and how their approaches were influenced by the circulation of ideas. It finds that in all except one the spouse came to be favored over the extended family. If the deceased left children, two approaches developed with respect to the inclusion of spouses: where they obtained an unconditional right to an inheritance share equal to a child, and where their inheriting depended on their relative poverty or need. These reforms took place in concert with the rise of the centrality of the conjugal unit as the focus of affection, loyalty, and responsibilities, and prior to such reforms in Europe. The countries that went furthest in elevating the position of spouses, Venezuela and Argentina, were those most deeply influenced by the ideas and changes fostered by liberalism.

Legal centralization in British America was characterized by the passing of arbitration from the community level to the colonial courts. As a consequence, when the 1765 Stamp Act raised the cost of court business, colonists were at a loss for alternatives. This paper addresses the question of why, at this point, colonists did not return to earlier, non-state forms of arbitration. It offers an explanation by providing a detailed empirical study of an alternative American legal forum: the Philadelphia Quaker monthly meeting. While busy arbitrating disputes in the early colonial period, it declined from around 1720. Contrary to what might be expected, this decline was not the consequence of state efforts to marginalize competing institutions. Rather, the local Quaker population abandoned their community legal forum in favor of the public courts. This was likely due to the Quaker court's reliance on reputation-based instruments for enforcement. As Philadelphia's population grew, the meeting's practice of pressuring culprits into compliance through public shaming lost its edge. Accordingly, Friends moved their legal business to the public courts. The paper contributes to the debates on the legal pluralism of empires, the history of arbitration, and state formation in the Atlantic.

This article analyzes how the multidirectional movement of legal and popular printed texts, newspapers, letters, and citizens contributed to the political and legal influence of individual lawyers across the Atlantic. It is based on a case study of leading common law barrister and Whig MP Thomas Erskine (1750–1823). It examines the dissemination of Erskine's legal and political arguments, and other publications in support of freedom of the press and the constitutional importance of trial by jury in libel trials. Erskine's Country Whig politics, key role in the passage of the 1792 Libel Act, and support for American independence were admired by American lawyers, diplomats, and politicians. His disinterested public service as an advocate meant he personified the ideal of a patriot lawyer that underpinned the classical republican model of law, citizenship, and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Erskine's powerful, often emotive forensic rhetoric was equally admired as part of a shared transatlantic legal culture, linking law, politics and literature. The speeches were reprinted and widely circulated in edited collections, texts on oratory, trial reports, newspapers, and periodicals; key arguments were also referenced in legal treatises on libel. Hence, parts of his most significant speeches in English libel trials came to be regarded as “usable” legal texts studied by students and re-cited by American defense lawyers in court.

This article focuses on the movement to reform legal education in early national Virginia, offering a fresh perspective by examining the connection between legal education and society and culture. It challenges the notion that constitutional ideas were the primary driving force behind reforms and argues that social status and “manners” played a more significant role. Wealthy elites in Virginia associated manners with education, sending their sons to college to become gentlemen, as it secured their aspirations to gentility and their influence over society and politics. Reformers sought to capitalize on this connection by educating a generation of university-trained, genteel lawyers who could lead the state's legislature and its courts. In this sense, educational reform was genteel rather than democratic in its basic assumptions. The article examines the central figure of George Wythe and explores his influence on Virginia's leading men, including Thomas Jefferson and St. George Tucker. It delves into the student experience in Wythe's law office and at the College of William and Mary, the success of educational reforms in the central courts, and the effects on Virginia's constitutional development. The college-educated lawyers who came to dominate the legislature in the early nineteenth century used their training for politics. As these lawyers sought to strengthen the institutions their party controlled, they drove the development of constitutional doctrines like federalism and separation of powers.

The rising field of medical jurisprudence in common law from late eighteenth century has led to a rearrangement of authority and epistemic power between lay and expert witnesses, in favor of the latter. Although the law had long relied on testimony from members of the community to establish the legal fact of a person's sex, the legal procedure of fact-making started to rely instead on the opinions of doctors, surgeons, and medical practitioners. This article closely reads medical jurisprudence books, U.S. case law, and U.S. newspapers from the nineteenth century to describe this expansion of medical experts’ authority to establish the legal fact of sex in vague cases. The article describes the spread of medico-legal technics of sex classification in three arenas of U.S. law: the law of marriage and divorce, cross-dressing, and defamation. The practice of legal sex classification was thus absorbed into medical expertise, and the meaning of sex in the law transformed from a socio-physical construct to a medical one. The mid-nineteenth-century decline of medical jurisprudence subsequently pushed the practice of sex classification outside the realm of law and into the jurisdiction of the medical profession, thus leaving sex classification mainly to doctors.

This article examines the enforcement of anti-miscegenation law in Progressive Era Mississippi by focusing on a series of unlawful cohabitation prosecutions of interracial couples in Natchez. It situates efforts to police and punish mixed-race families within the broader legal culture of Jim Crow, as politicians, judges, and district attorneys sought stricter enforcement of morals laws, including those barring interracial cohabitation. This article argues that the historic prerogative of white men to choose their sexual and domestic partners undermined the illegality of interracial marriage. Lynching deterred Black men from cohabiting with white women, but prosecutions for “unlawful cohabitation” did not effectively punish white men and Black women who formed lasting partnerships. This article relies on extensive research in local court records that reveal that prosecutions of white men and Black women often resulted in fines and, in many cases, had little effect on these mixed-race families. In Natchez and elsewhere, eugenic ideologies of “white racial purity” were no match for a patriarchal legal culture that gave white men leeway to ignore the law when it suited them, even amid outward denunciations of miscegenation. In Mississippi, many white men did not view relationships between white men and Black women as a clear threat to white supremacy, creating space for some interracial families to survive into the twentieth century.

Colonial Latin America had the fame of being a land where lower-class people were forever suing their betters. To Latin America's popular classes, the law was an indispensable instrument for claiming rights, solving conflicts, and advancing interests. Fast-forward to the middle of the twentieth century, however, and Latin American law held a very different fame. The law was now something to be shunned. It was seen as an instrument of power, manipulated by the rich and influential. Public trust in the law was low, and support for alternative forms of justice, high. In comparison with the colonial era, we are faced with a baffling reversal. This article seeks to explain that reversal by elaborating three propositions: (P1) popular trust in the law declined because of the law's increasing formalism, particularly evident in the codification of civil and criminal law over the course of the nineteenth century; (P2) popular trust in the law declined because of the rise of patrimonial capitalism over the period of study; and (P3) popular trust in the law declined because a new generation of social rights became politicized, first under populist, corporatist regimes that arose in the region in the early and mid-twentieth century and then under the region's Cold-War military dictatorships.

Between 1870 and 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy provided uniquely broad legal protection to subordinates who perpetrated crimes under the orders of military superiors. Legal immunity was provided not only to soldiers who obeyed orders contrary to international law, but also to those who under orders violated domestic standing legislation of the Japanese Army. This gave rise to a so-called “paradox of obedience”: while disobedience among officers was rampant, their subordinates were expected to unquestionably obey their orders, even in rebellion against the Japanese government. This mix of blatant disobedience to the system at large on the one hand, and blind obedience to immediate superiors on the other, was a remarkable feature of the Imperial Japanese armed forces. Drawing on legal codes, court cases and juridic writings, we analyze how this “paradox of obedience” encouraged mutinies as well as atrocities, especially in the 1930s and during the Asia-Pacific War.