The importance of voluntary associations is apparent to all who study the development of American society in the nineteenth century. Observations made by the perceptive nineteenth-century traveler Alexis de Tocqueville have become an obligatory cliché in historical writing on the subject:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies,… but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

In August 1677, the Genevan consistory, a church court preoccupied with regulating sexual sin, summoned Louise Bouffa. Louise was a single woman recently hired by the wealthy Sarasin family as a wet nurse, an occupation that signaled to the consistory that she had recently given birth. The pastors and elders wanted to know who the father was and where the child was now. Louise was at first evasive. She claimed not to know the name of the father, although she did admit that the man with whom she had had sex was “very well dressed.” She said that she had given birth not far from Geneva, in the village of Gy, where the baby had been baptized and then had died. These claims turned out to be false. The Genevan consistory contacted the pastor in Gy who denied that her child had been baptized there. Summoned to tell the truth, Louise admitted that she had given the baby away to a man named Bertet to present as his own child for baptism, although she added that she was aware he had not done so. She also revealed that the father of the infant was a well-respected Genevan citizen and lawyer, Léonard Revillod, in whose household she had been working when she became pregnant. The consistory admonished Louise for lying about the baptism and sent her and her master to the criminal court to be prosecuted. This court, an elected body called the Small Council, duly fined Léonard for having had sex with his servant and for having “obliged her to give the baby to a stranger.” As for Louise, she was merely sent back to the consistory, which excluded her from participating in communion. No further investigation of the fate of the infant ensued.

“The Contradictions of Reform” analyses the complications of reform of legislation regulating punishment for women convicted of infanticide in Connecticut between 1790 and 1860, within the context of broader social, cultural, and legal understandings of the crime within the US. These changes are investigated through a close reading of petitions for clemency to Connecticut's General Assembly in which women convicted of the crime petitioned the state legislature seeking reduced sentences. The article argues that although the nineteenth century opened with legislation that promised death to all women convicted of infanticide, in practice courts and juries never imposed the penalty. Instead, juries proved reluctant to convict and/or death sentences were not imposed, even if juries found women guilty. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Connecticut Assembly reformed existing infanticide law in response to a number of social debates about the merits of the death penalty, particularly for women. The article argues, however, that these reforms counter-intuitively resulted in less favorable outcomes for those convicted of the crime, as they found themselves facing lengthy prison sentences. Such an outcome was unlikely in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The article, therefore, demonstrates, the “contradictions of reform.”

Susan Reynolds has written a typically wide-ranging, and thought-provoking, article about the process of transition from what she calls “the diffused, undifferentiated, customary law” that was characteristic of Western Europe in the early medieval period to the various different forms of “professional law” that were characteristic of the higher courts of Western Europe in the later middle ages. This is a process that she characterizes, surely correctly, as an “important stage of legal history,” for it was only as an end result of this process of transformation that there emerged law courts and legal procedures and substantial bodies of legal rules that are recognizably the distant ancestors of their modern European and American counterparts. It was also this process of transformation that changed for ever the relationship between law and the society that this law regulated and in which it was embedded in Western European societies. Her article makes no claim to be a definitive study of this process. It is more a pointer to the work that still needs to be done to enable full transnational comparisons to be made between the different ways the process happened within different legal systems and between the different systems that were created through these changes. She does, nonetheless, state some tentative conclusions and point to what she sees as some of the prime factors in bringing about the transformation.

In 1794, the Russian Empire convened the first high admiralty court for appeals to review petitions of merchants and privateers embroiled in the second Russian–Ottoman war of Catherine II's reign (1787–91). The Commission for Archipelago Affairs, as this admiralty court was called, decided more than 170 cases on the basis of Russian maritime law and its interpretation of the law of nations concerning commercial navigation and privateers. A year into its work, the commission determined that one case sat at the center of most disputes that pitted merchants against Russian-flagged privateers: the affair of Lambros Katsonis. The commission's decisions for most of the cases on its docket rested on its determination of Katsonis's standing in the Russian Empire. Once decided, the outcome of the matter went on to define the distinction between Russian privateers and naval officers in Russian law: precedents that shaped Russian naval practices for the next 50 years.

Impersonation and then identity theft in America emerged in the legal space between a civil system with a high tolerance for market risk and losses incurred by impostors, and a later-developing criminal system preoccupied with fraud or forgery against the government. Negotiable instruments, generally paper checks, borrowed from seventeenth-century England, enabled a geographically far-flung commercial system of paper-based but impersonal exchanges at a time before widespread availability of centrally-issued currency or regulated banks. By assigning loss rather than catching criminals, the “impostor rule” made and continues to make transactions with negotiable instruments valid even if fraudulent. This large body of commercial law has stood essentially unchanged for three hundred years and has facilitated a system rife with impersonation which criminal and federal laws did not address until the late 20th century. English common law, American legal treatises, court cases, law review articles, and internal debates behind the Uniform Commercial Code tell the story of a legal system at the service of commerce through the unimpeded transfer of paper payments. Combining the fields of legal history and criminal justice with the approaches of emerging research in both identification and paperwork studies, this article explains the ongoing policy problems of identity theft.

Ever since Charles Beard published his seminal work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in 1913, a vigorous debate has ensued among historians over the purpose and design of the Constitutional Convention. Was it, as Beard claimed, a Thermidorean counterrevolution, a reaction to the leveling propensities unleashed by the Revolution, or was it a conclave of patriots dedicated to the preservation of the Union and intent on strengthening the federal government so as to overcome the centrifugal forces tearing the confederation apart? For about forty years after its appearance, Beard's interpretation reigned supreme. It became the accepted wisdom that the Founders had acted out of selfish class interests in fashioning a constitution that would serve to protect the forms of property with which they were particularly associated. Subsequently, however, during the 1950s, Beard's analysis was subjected to more exacting scrutiny and found wanting. Vigorous challenges against his methodology and conclusions were raised by such writers as Douglass Adair, Cecelia M. Kenyon, Robert E. Brown, and Forrest McDonald. In the wake of their analyses very little of Beard's thesis was left intact.

The 1830s was Nova Scotia's “Age of Reform.” Although historians have documented the growing tensions between elected Assembly and appointed lieutenant governor and Council, the concomitant attacks on the established economic elite, and the rise of a distinct party in colonial politics, little attention has been paid to the role played by the colony's courts and judges in this crucial decade. This lacuna is surprising, because reformers were convinced that the judges of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court (NSSC) were bulwarks of the old order and barriers to progress, and as their movement gained influence in the 1830s it brought the judges and the court system to the fore. This period saw numerous proposals for reform to the colony's laws and legal system, some effected and others not. Here we examine those aspects of the reform platform that were most hotly contested precisely because they exemplified the ways in which controversies about the legal system both reflected and exacerbated broader political and social change. The most important issues were judicial fees and the role of the chief justice as head of the Tory-dominated lieutenant governor's Council. We also examine two other matters in which the judicial system was directly linked to reformers' general demands for a system of government more responsive to the needs of ordinary Nova Scotians: judicial salaries and the role of the lower civil courts.

Less than two years after Justice Harlan Fiske Stone reportedly advised Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor that “You can do anything under the taxing power,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Butler that Congress had no authority to create a system whereby farmers would receive subsidies for limiting production, with the funds coming from a tax on basic commodities. While Stone, along with Brandeis and Cardozo, voted to uphold this feature of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a majority led by Justice Owen J. Roberts declared that this particular scheme of taxing and spending interfered with the reserve powers of the states to control local manufacturing and agriculture. Roberts cited the great nationalist Joseph Story for the proposition that “the Constitution was, from its very origin, contemplated to be a frame of a national government, of special and enumerated powers, and not of general and unlimited powers.… A power to lay taxes for the common defence and general welfare of the United States is not in common sense a general power. It is limited to those objects. It cannot constitutionally transcend them.” The AAA was “a scheme for purchasing with federal funds submission to federal regulation of a subject reserved to the states. … If the Act before us is a proper exercise of the federal taxing power, evidently the regulation of all industry throughout the United States may be accomplished by similar exercise of the same power.”

What are we comparing when we compare law and race across cultures? This was once an easier question to answer. If we take “races” to be real categories existing in the world, then we can compare “race relations” and “racial classifications” in different legal systems, and measure the impact of different legal systems on the salience of racial distinction and the level of racial hierarchy in a given society. That was the approach of the leading comparativist scholars at mid-century. Frank Tannenbaum and Carl Degler compared race relations in the United States and Latin America, drawing heavily on legal sources regarding racial definition, manumission of slaves, and marriage. They were studying relations between “white people” and “Negroes,” as well as the possibility of an intermediate class of “mulattoes.” But once we understand race itself to be produced by relations of domination, through several powerful discourses of which law is one, we are up against a more formidable challenge. We must compare the interaction of two things—legal processes and ideologies of race—in systems in which neither is likely to have a stable or equivalent meaning. Because “law” is likewise no longer as clear-cut a category as it once was; in addition to the formal law of statute books and common law appellate opinions, we now understand “law” to encompass a broad set of institutions, discourses, and processes produced by a larger cast of characters than solely jurists, legislators, and appellate judges.

Married at the age of eleven, Rukhmabai refused to go and live with her husband who had filed a suit for restitution of conjugal rights against her in 1884. This paper analyses the transplantation of the notion of restitution of conjugal rights into Hindu personal law in India at a time when child marriage was rife and there was no minimum age of marriage. Within this context Rukhmabai's case symbolises an important interjection in its attempt to posit lack of consent to an infant marriage as a defence against suits for restitution of conjugal rights. This marked a shift from female consent being understood as a question of physical maturity alone, to a claim of intelligent consent and the capacity to withhold such consent within an unconsummated marriage arranged in the girl's infancy. While analysing these notions of consent within colonial law the paper also closely scrutinises Rukhmabai's public writings to recover one of the earliest published Indian female views on the need for marital consent.

The central institutions of the Florentine criminal law system in the early fifteenth century were still the medieval courts of the three foreign rectors, the Podestà, the Captain of the People, and the Executor of the Ordinances of Justice, just as they had been throughout the fourteenth century. Similarly, criminal trials were conducted using inquisition procedure just as they had been from the late thirteenth century. Important changes, however, had taken place and were continuing to take place in the offices of the rectors and in inquisition procedure that greatly enhanced the effectiveness of this system. The fortuitous confluence of a strong state with improvements in inquisition procedure and the court system led to a strongly self-reliant court system that could, for the first time in the early fifteenth century, fully implement inquisition procedure by arresting criminals in flagranti, initiating cases through public initiation, gathering evidence independently, compelling witnesses, and successfully convicting. Because the political and social atmosphere influenced the effectiveness and the philosophies of prosecution of the criminal law system, a study of this system must include some consideration of political and social influences. Conversely, a study of the judicial system supplies a great deal of evidence about the government and society. When this interrelated sphere is regarded as a whole, the early fifteenth century is seen to be dominated by three closely related developments: the full implementation of inquisition procedure; the continued development of the territorial state, which made this possible; and the struggle between republican institutions and the nascent oligarchy.

In mid-1950s Britain two significant events occurred in respect of the doctrine of judicial neutrality in that country. In the first, the Lord Chancellor of the day, Lord Simonds, had refused permission for the experienced and well-known senior judge advocate, Lord Russell of Liverpool, to publish his sensational history of Nazi war crimes, The Scourge of the Swastika, so long as he (Russell) continued to hold judicial office. For Simonds was insistent that the judiciary must keep their counsel on virtually any matter outside the courtroom, a view shared both by his immediate Labour government predecessor, Lord Jowitt, and by his Conservative government successor, Lord Kilmuir. After a public standoff when neither side would give way, the deadlock was broken when Russell, rather than risk being sacked for disobedience, chose to resign his judicial office to a fanfare of publicity in the press and duly published his book shortly thereafter. Moreover, what lent the Russell confrontation an added edge was not just Simonds's complaint that the book could be perceived as anti-German and, therefore, as political. It was that publication at that time could have a damaging effect upon Britain's policy of rehabilitating West Germany within the Western alliance.

In 1795, a disgruntled George Wythe published his own edition of decisions from Virginia's newly formed High Court of Chancery, of which he was the sitting judge. Wythe's volume was replete with rebukes of his fellow justices in the court system for their lack of erudition and grounding in the distinctive principles and procedures of common law and chancery jurisdictions. His own copy of the volume, which, like many of his books that found their way into the library of his prize pupil, Thomas Jefferson, includes Wythe's handwritten appendix to the series of references he had made to classical literature and rhetoric in his own remarks, including several to the legal arguments of Demosthenes, and most strikingly to Sophocles' Antigone. Like much of their correspondence, their respective legal arguments as attorneys, and Thomas Jefferson's own massive commonplace books of common law and equity jurisprudence, Wythe's extensive commentaries signify not only the continued appeal and display of an early modern humanist legal and intellectual culture, but also the centrality and power of the idea of equity in that culture and for its successors acting in the Atlantic and imperial constitutional crisis of the second half of the eighteenth century.

On January 24, 1885, at 9:30 in the morning, a woman from the small rural village of Saint Laurent in East Flanders entered the Palace of Justice of Ghent. Pregnant with her eighth child, she had fled from her husband and was filing for a divorce. That morning, she was led to a small room—the office of the judge of the Regional Court—and was standing alone with four men whom she barely knew and did not understand because they spoke French. Her husband had only sent a lawyer to represent him. As the woman's “avoué” presented her complaints—abuse, threats, and finally her fear for the life of her unborn child that had forced her to leave the marital home—she could only hope he had correctly recorded her story and was representing it convincingly enough to take her case to the next level. Until then, her divorce had been a game between jurists in which she was not much more than a prop. After this reading of her complaints, however, the whole neighborhood was alerted to her failing marriage. Some neighbors even entered the courtroom with her to act as witnesses. Not only the judge, but the whole local community took up the task to decide if she had been the victim of a derailed husband, or had failed as a wife. And accordingly, it was decided if she was to become a “divorced woman,” with all the social stigmatization attached to that notion, or if she would be forced to return to her abusive husband again.

This paper revises current understandings of judicial edicts in ancient Rome—the annually published texts in which Roman magistrates set out the formulae according to which they would institute trials during their year in office. While standard accounts see these edicts as the work of legal specialists, heretofore neglected sources for how contemporaries talked about these texts suggest that they were indeed the work of the magistrates that issued them. At times these magistrates formulated new provisions; for the most part they selectively drew on past edicts, not least to accommodate the demands of their friends and clients. These patterns in compositional practice can only be understood within the framework of Roman political culture. More importantly, in their annually changing published form judicial edicts emerge as crucial objects in the construction of time in ancient Rome. Arguably, they constituted a legal practice that could encompass revolution—at least for a year.