Kenneth Ledford has provided an insightful commentary on the two articles on Catalonia. He generously notes their contribution to debates on normativity in the history of civil law codification, for which I thank him. More important, Ledford raises several questions that need to be addressed before we can be convinced that “the Catalan experience can be used to refine and reshape assessments of any general European phenomena regarding civil law codification” (Ledford, 390). I shall use this space to briefly address each of his three questions.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that during his 1018 meeting in Oxford with the leading English ecclesiastical and lay authorities, roughly one year after his accession to the throne in England, Cnut agreed to uphold “the laws of Edgar” during his reign. The ultimate outcome of this and subsequent meetings is the code issued at Winchester in 1020, referred to by editorial convention as I and II Cnut. This code contains, respectively, the religious and secular laws of England promulgated under Cnut. The code is contained in four manuscripts in Old English. The earliest are British Library, Cotton Nero A.i and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 201, both dated to the mid-eleventh century; the latest, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 383 and British Library, Harley 55, belong to the early twelfth century. Cnut's code reappears in three twelfth-century Norman Latin tracts intended to acquaint French authorities with English law, the Instituta Cnuti, Consiliatio Cnuti, and Quadripartitus. The Leges Henrici Primi, prepared by the same author as the Quadripartitus, also draws heavily on Cnut's legislation.

In February 1915, non-citizen teachers throughout California abruptly learned that they would soon lose their jobs when state officials announced that local and county governments were required to enforce a long-forgotten anti-alien public employment law. In response, one Canadian immigrant teacher, Katharine Short, launched a diplomatic, legal, political, and public relations campaign against the policy. Earning the support of powerful (Anglo-)Canadian nationalists in wartime and a favorable depiction in California news coverage as a “practically American” Canadian woman, Short’s efforts culminated in an exemption for most immigrant teachers from the state’s nativist public employment policies. This article recovers, recounts, and contextualizes the California Alien Teachers Controversy of 1915 at the center of transformations in the political development, law, and politics of American citizenship and citizenship rights from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It testifies to the growing power and powers of state governments to shape immigrants' lives and livelihoods via alienage law long into the mid-twentieth century, the rhetorical strength and courtroom limits of “right to contract” arguments in the context of anti-alien hiring and licensure disputes, and the disparate impact of these nativist laws on immigrants owing to inequalities of race, gender, and class and how those inequalities shaped the less-than-inclusive aims and strategies of Katharine Short in her campaign to alter the state's nativist public employment policies.

One of the most important legacies of the American Civil War, not just in the re-united States of America but also in the nineteenth and twentieth century world, were the new laws of war that the conflict introduced. “Lieber's Code,” named after the man who authored it for the Lincoln administration, was a set of instructions written and issued in April 1863 to govern the conduct of “the armies of the United States in the field.” It became a template for all subsequent codes, including the Hague and Geneva conventions. Widely understood as a radical revision of the laws of war and a complete break with the Enlightenment tradition, the code, like the war that gave rise to it, reflected the new post-Napoleonic age of “people's wars.” As such, it pointed forward, if not as the expression of the first total war, then at least as an expression of the first modern one, with all the blurring of boundaries that involved.

Kunal Parker's “State, Citizenship, and Territory” can be read in at least two ways. Read one way, it tells an important story about how regulation of the poor was driven upward in Massachusetts during the nineteenth century, from the localities to the state. In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts had imposed primary responsibility for care of the poor on its towns. But during the eighteenth century, with the growth of a landless, wandering population, town poor relief budgets came under increasing pressure. The towns responded by lobbying the Massachusetts legislature to pass a series of statutes that made it more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement. People who fell into need in Massachusetts but who had not acquired a town settlement became state paupers for whom the state, rather than any town, was fiscally responsible. As it became more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement, the number of state paupers increased, shifting a portion of the fiscal burden of poor relief from the towns onto the state.

On March 16, 1801, President Jefferson issued commissions to fifteen men to serve as justices of the peace for the County of Washington in the District of Columbia. Thirteen of the fifteen were among twenty-three justices of the peace who had been nominated by President Adams and confirmed on his last day in office. Benjamin Moore was one of two original Jefferson appointees; among the Adams appointees left off the list was William Marbury. Thus were set in motion two cases in which the Supreme Court would have an opportunity to address issues central to the great controversy over repeal of the 1801 Judiciary Act. In both cases, the Court ducked.

Charles Evans Hughes's career ran along the fault lines of most of the major political events of his lifetime. Muckraking catapulted him to fame. He governed New York during four key years of the Progressive era as an effective administrator and earnest reformer. He stayed with the Republican Party when the Progressives bolted in 1912. He ran for the presidency in 1916 but missed the prize, albeit by a narrower electoral college margin than any other contender until the very end of the century. He was instrumental in negotiating the international naval disarmament accords of 1921–22, landmarks of progressive internationalism in their day that fell under sharp criticism a decade later. He presided over the U.S. Supreme Court during the key years of the New Deal, though in most histories of the 1930s Court he comes across as something of an also-ran behind its more memorable shapers: Brandeis, Cardozo, Sutherland, Black, even Roberts. Hard to pin to any achievement or distinct idea, slipping in and out of the dramatic movements of his day, he was the kind of man who makes history but easily falls out of the history books.

History is a strange medium: it carries the most contemporary debates onto the most distant terrain. Both Bruce Mann and David Konig focus on the notions of change and context that undergird the forum essays. Those issues, more than any moment in early New York, link the articles and the comments. By exploring the way we defined “constitutions,” “constitutionalism,” and “constitutional history,” the commentators open up a large and current question. They invite a discussion about approaches to constitutional change.

This article, part of the forum “The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal Spaces,” analyzes how Spanish law intersected with longue-durée Indigenous histories to pattern performative judicial violence in disputes over boundary lands separating Indigenous communities. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when population growth and expansion and commercialization of the livestock industry put pressure on Indigenous lands, Native judicial officers used their coercive power and symbols of judicial authority to physically enter boundary lands and shape the course of legal disputes. By combining legal and extralegal procedures, Native officials developed customary patterns of judicial practice and performance proper to their own jurisdiction in which objects invested with political, sacred, and quotidian meaning figured centrally. Staffs of office and whips wielded by Native authorities as emblems of Indian administrative and legal jurisdiction represented one category of the everyday materials of law. Clothing, farming implements, and livestock afforded other tools with which Indigenous farmers and authorities made legal claims. When reading land disputes alongside criminal cases of land invasions across Oaxaca’s judicial archives, it becomes clear that Native officials and farmers used these objects to struggle over territory and authority in cycles of litigation, land titling or contracts of joint-possession, and violence that often endured for decades or centuries, forming an enduring facet of agrarian custom in the region.

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.

In 1939, at the end of almost two decades of statewide want and despair, Oklahoma adopted the community property system “to save state residents on their federal income tax.” Between 1939 and 1947, Oklahoma and four other states openly and unabashedly exploited the Supreme Court's creation of what amounted to a tax loophole for the nation's wealthy; several more states seriously considered doing the same. In 1930, the Court had ruled that the community marital property regime of eight western states permitted their married couples to split family income between spouses, so that each spouse reported half of that income for federal income tax purposes. As a result of the federal government's progressive income tax bracket structure, in most cases this split meant that more of the family's income would be taxed in lower tax brackets. Thus, a property regime that was purely a creation of state law had the effect of reducing residents' federal tax obligations.

In belle époque France, criminal juries were criticized as too tolerant of crime and too lenient to effectively punish criminals. While the French institution of the jury was under attack by magistrates and other elites, mixed sex juries provided an alternative model. Jury reformers advocated the introduction of mixed-sex criminal juries in France in order to render better verdicts and reduce crime, especially in the areas of infanticide and abortion. The French National Assembly debates over proposed legislation, however, stalled over political concerns with women's truncated citizenship rights. Historical analysis of the types of arguments deployed in this jury reform debate (including archival documents, parliamentary records, and press sources) reveals that reform proponents argued that gender difference-especially in terms of morality and psychology-justified women's admission to juries, particularly in cases of infanticide and abortion. The operation of an unofficial “women's jury” (jury féminin) between 1905 and 1910 in Paris demonstrated women's judicial decision-making capacity. Analysis of this citizens' jury documents the development of a feminist critique of the legal treatment of domestic violence, reproductive freedom, and marriage law publicized in the early twentieth century. This research contribution posits grounds for the re-periodization of feminist legal history as viewed through this case study of women's claims to jury service in Third Republic France.

In “Mind of a Moral Agent,” Susanna Blumenthal elegantly limns the rise and partial fall of the common sense theory of moral responsibility in American law. As Blumenthal convincingly describes it, the problem for early American jurists was nothing less than to solve the paradox of determinism and free will. How can the law declare someone morally culpable unless we are free to choose our own ends?

The jurists of the classical period of Roman private law (50 B.C.—250 A.D.) encountered a variety of legal problems arising from the activity of those employed in the city's building industry. This segment of the Roman economy was prosperous and busy. Yet, despite the Romans' zeal for construction, a detailed description of how building projects were organized has proved illusive. This is the result of two factors. First, the Romans, unlike the Greeks, tended not to preserve on stone details about the actual construction of their edifices. A second, more general cause is found in the nature of construction as an enterprise. Although building furnishes a basic need, the demand for it is episodic and unstable. Forces of labor and supplies of materials are procured in response to specific commissions. In addition, there are many possible ways in which these productive forces can be organized, and building is typically characterized by a high degree of diversity in regard to methods of organization. For these reasons, builders and building have not been particularly accessible topics for researchers. It is only in the juristic sources that we get a relatively full picture of the activities of builders at Rome.

The “who” of a lawsuit, who can sue and who can be sued, has long been a fundamental issue of process. Lengthy discussions of the issue are found in Roman law texts of eighteen centuries ago and in succeeding centuries in texts influenced by Roman law. In Roman law texts, the “who” of a lawsuit was discussed in the same context and, most importantly, with the same seeming concern as the fundamental issues of whether the court had authority over the parties and whether the court had competence over the subject matter. The same is true for many of the texts influenced by Roman law.