Anyone who lived and worked within range of Willard Hurst's benign, if also rather insistent, influence is necessarily somewhat disabled from detached assessment of his legacy. We owe him too much. Not just for the continuous rapid fire of comment, criticism, recommendation, and encouragement that rattled off the famous ancient typewriter; but also for his intellectual and moral example. He set himself long-range projects and finished them; he surveyed large themes and explored them to the bottom. He used his authority to try to get us both to read more broadly and get down into the details. We responded because we were touched that he thought our work might matter, and because he did not spare himself. Even when rebelling against that authority (as I for one often did), we wanted his attention and judgment even when we could not hope for his approval, and he gave them generously.

Beginning in the 1840s, high-ranking officials within the East India Company began a concerted effort to confiscate and annex princely states, citing misrule or a default of blood heirs. In response, metropolitan reformers and their Indian allies orchestrated a sustained legalistic defense of native sovereignty in the public sphere and emerged as vocal opponents of colonial expansionism. Adapting concepts put forth by both law of nations theorists and contemporary jurists, they sought to preserve longstanding treaties and defend the princes' exercise of internal sovereignty. The colonial government's failure to adequately define the basis of its modern “paramountcy” invited such creative maneuvering. Reformist opposition to the annexation of Awadh, the dispossession of the Nawab of the Carnatic, and the confiscation of Mysore demonstrates that international law did not simply function as a Eurocentric tool of subordination, but could also provide a bulwark against colonial depredations.

This article analyses the internal dynamics of online Islamic legal discourses embedded in their offline and multimedia contexts that use of a rich repository of legal texts composed over a period of about a thousand years. Through their vigorous and spirited engagements with these historical texts, contemporary Islamic jurists simultaneously create new digital platforms in mass and social media to disseminate their ideas. In so doing, they perpetuate a long textual legal tradition through hypertext commentaries and super-commentaries. The premodern texts are thus reborn through new forms of ḥāshiyas such as audio commentaries, video commentaries, audio-video commentaries and hypertext commentaries. These new developments from the age of new media contribute to the textual longue-durée of Islamic law. Tracking the peregrinations of three Islamic legal texts in the mass media and cyber world, I argue that the dissemination of premodern Islamic legal texts via cyber space has resulted in the “democratization” of a knowledge-system that was previously dominated by trained fuqahā and affiliated institutional structures and has enlivened the traditional school affiliations.

This article argues that Leibniz should be viewed as a predecessor of the idea of spatial justice and that Leibniz's heritage remains a valuable source for inspiration and critical reading of the contemporary literature on spatial justice. The article first demonstrates interdependency between Leibniz's conceptualisation of space and his conceptualisation of law and justice. This is the first time that this argument is made in relation to Leibniz, therefore significant space is devoted to justifying this argument. The article then proceeds to comparing Leibniz's views on space, law and justice to one of the most “spatial” contemporary articulation of the idea of spatial justice, namely that proposed by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. The article concludes by pointing out some aspects of Leibniz's thought that are most valuable for the further study of law, space and spatial justice in contemporary scholarship.

Peter Karsten asks why there might be a greater comparative propensity among CANZ historians than among those of the United States. Part of the reason may lie in the legal education many of us in Australia received, and in the formal legal status of many commonwealth countries until recently. As recently as the early 1970s, Australian law students were taught that English law was as significant as that made in the Australian courts. Appeals from the Australian Supreme Courts to the Privy Council were finally abolished only in 1986. From that time onward, there was a drive within the law schools to find differences from England, to look toward comparisons with other places than England.

In a well-known chapter in the book known as the Mirror of Justices, the anonymous author recounts King Alfred's drastic solution to the problem of misbehaving judges:

It is an abuse that justices and their officers who slay folk by false judgments are not destroyed like other homicides. And King Alfred in one year had forty-four judges hanged as homicides for their false judgments.

Unfortunately, as Maitland has conclusively demonstrated, we cannot rely on this passage as historical evidence of Alfred's reign. Nevertheless, the passage illustrates both a problem and a solution common in the Roman and medieval periods. The problem was judicial misconduct and corruption. The solution was to impose personal liability upon miscreant judges for their behavior.

In 1859, Cándido Xavier Azambuja appeared before officials in Salto, Uruguay demanding the return of an alleged fugitive slave, Pedro, pursuant to the terms of the 1851 Extradition Treaty between Brazil and Uruguay. According to Cándido's testimony, Pedro had fled from his brother Geronimo's estancia located near the Brazilian town of Bagé close to the Uruguayan border. Upon questioning, Cándido admitted that Pedro and Geronimo had been in the Estado Oriental briefly in 1851 in order to drive several herds of cattle back into Brazil, but argued that Pedro returned with his master and had never been to the Uruguayan Republic before or since. In response, Pedro argued that he was not a fugitive Brazilian slave, but rather a “natural of this republic.” Pedro claimed that he was born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, and promptly produced the baptismal records to prove it. Pedro went on to note that his entire family consisted of free Uruguayans like himself. He then claimed that Cándido had repeatedly attempted “to make him a slave,” going so far as to remove him forcibly from his home and carry him across the border into Brazil. He requested protection from these continued threats to his and his family's basic rights under Uruguayan law.

As one who has suggested in print that Christopher Columbus Langdell was a loony, I am singularly pleased that Bruce Kimball has so carefully demonstrated that Kit was a regular guy just trying to teach his classes and learn some law. But this observation seems to me to be not particularly relevant to the debate about Langdell that I have mostly watched, but occasionally commented on. I shall try to recreate that debate as best I can, to show where it stands, and so, to identify where an understanding of Langdell's teaching places us.

This article explores Washington's annotated copy of the Constitution and the Acts of Congress (hereafter called the Acts of Congress to remain consist with the label Washington had placed on the front cover) to reveal new insights into his constitutional interpretation. Held in a private collection until 2012, this article is the first to examine Washington's notations in the Acts of Congress for their value as statements about political authority. Washington's comments in the margins of his volume suggest an evolving view of presidential power and constitutional limitations on the executive branch as early as January 1790. His margin notes on the Acts of Congress served as blueprint for his defense of presidential authority and the expansion of the executive branch in the 1790s. Finally, the annotated Acts of Congress inserts Washington's ideas about the presidency into the debate surrounding originalism by revealing how his analysis of the language evolved to meet the demands of governing, leading him to reject the delegates' intent for Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.

Originalism has long been criticized for its “law office history” and other historical sins. But a recent “positive turn” in originalist thought may help make peace between history and law. On this theory, originalism is best understood as a claim about our modern law--which borrows many of its rules, constitutional or otherwise, from the law of the past. Our law happens to be the Founders' law, unless lawfully changed. This theory has three important implications for the role of history in law. First, whether and how past law matters today is a question of current law, not of history. Second, applying that current law may often require deference to historical expertise, but for a more limited inquiry: one that looks specifically at legal doctrines and instruments, interprets those instruments in artificial ways, and makes use of evidentiary principles and default rules when the history is obscure. Third, ordinary legal reasoning already involves the application of old law to new facts, an inquiry that might otherwise seem daunting or anachronistic. Applying yesterday's “no vehicles in the park” ordinance is no less fraught--and no more so--than applying Founding-era legal doctrines.

During the 1830s, the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act were crafted to prevent crime, revolt and insurrection in the colony of New South Wales. These statutes contained exceptional methods to police and control colonial populations and suspended legal safeguards designed to protect the population from abuses of power. Supporters of the laws argued that extreme measures were necessary due to the emergency of the occasion. Understanding the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act’s enactment and operation, as well as the purposes they were designed to serve and the liberties they infringed to achieve these ends requires attention to local circumstance. A fine-grained analysis, rooted in the peculiarities of life in colonial New South Wales and anchored by the law’s operation on the ground is needed to understand the malleability of British law at this place and at this time. In this article, I argue that rather than a select criminal contingent, the New South Wales’ authorities increasingly feared that the composition of the colony threatened their colonial enterprise. The Bushranging Act of 1830 and the Vagrancy Act of 1835 contained wide coercive and discretionary powers to mitigate the extent of this threat.

In 1789 James Madison and Thomas Jefferson engaged in one of their many exchanges on constitutionalism. As with other Jeffersonian flights of philosophy, the younger Madison had to rein in the excesses of his senior partner and collaborator. The issue at hand was Jefferson's famous opinion “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” So confident was Jefferson in the truth of this idea that he called it “self-evident.” Their exchange has received insightful and comprehensive analysis, which needs no revisiting here. Adrienne Koch, whose treatment of this “intellectual reciprocity” is among our most careful, sees it as revealing the essence of the two men, pitting the “more speculative and more daring” Jefferson against “the more astute politician” Madison.

On Tuesday July 4, 1854, it was hot and humid at Harmony Grove; “the heat of the weather…was extreme.” But this did not deter a large audience from gathering at this location in Framingham, Massachusetts. This was the spot upon which many of them had assembled, under the organization of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, for the past 8 years. They came by crowded railroad cars (from Boston, Milford, and Worcester), and by horse and carriage from many other surrounding towns, eager to hear speeches by prominent members of the antislavery community. William Lloyd Garrison was not the first to speak, but his actions were the most memorable. Addressing the audience, Garrison held up, and systematically burned, three documents: a copy of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act; a copy of a recent court decision that ordered the free state of Massachusetts to use its facilities to assist in the capture of fugitive slaves; and a copy of the United States Constitution. This was no mere symbolic act; it conveyed an important part of the Garrisonian argument. Namely, that the Constitution was “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.”

“Liberalism! Not in all history has a word been so wrenched away from its true meaning and dragged through the gutter of defilement,” the Wilsonian Progressive George Creel protested angrily in a memoir of 1947: “Where it once stood for the dignity of man, … it now stands for the obliteration of individualism at the lands of a ruthless, all-powerful state.” For nearly fifty years, most scholars have given little heed to the rage vented by Creel and other critics of New Deal “liberalism.” Amidst the expansion of the American welfare state, the outlook and ideas of the anti-New Dealers seemed at best naively outdated and at worst positively pernicious. History—in the form of an increasingly massive, paternalist, neo-mercantilist, bureaucratic state—seemed to be firmly on the side of those who advocated the expansion of federal authority over more aspects of American life.