When women contracted German measles in early pregnancy, they were “entitled” to therapeutic abortion, according to one 1959 magazine. Williams Obstetrics, the standard medical textbook, advised doctors that therapeutic abortion was “justifiable” in such cases if the pregnant woman and her husband decided upon it. German measles (also known as rubella) was first recognized as a teratogen by an Australian ophthalmologist in 1941. Exposure to the disease in early pregnancy could damage the developing fetus, causing deafness, blindness, heart defects, and mental retardation in newborns as well as miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths. Aware of the disease's effects, thousands of pregnant women who contracted German measles avidly sought abortions. Yet, as many learned in the 1950s and 1960s, the decision to carry a possibly affected pregnancy or have a therapeutic abortion was not clearly in their hands at all. Physicians refused to perform therapeutic abortions, their legality was uncertain, and hospital policies were designed to limit their numbers. An unknown number of women who knew they had contracted the disease and understood the implications were denied therapeutic abortions, and later gave birth to severely harmed children. Some of them sued their doctors for malpractice. Barbara Stewart and Sandra Gleitman, with their husbands, brought two early cases, Gleitman v. Cosgrove (1967) and Stewart v. Long Island College Hospital (1970 and 1972).

In early sixteenth-century England, the presence of ecclesiastical sanctuaries in the legal, social, and religious landscape was a matter of great controversy. Any English church could offer temporary sanctuary to an accused felon, a privilege that expired after about forty days, following which the felon had to abjure the realm. More contentiously, by the late Middle Ages a number of English religious houses used their status as royally-chartered liberties to offer sanctuary permanently, not only to accused criminals, but also to debtors, alien craftsmen, and, especially during the civil wars of the fifteenth century, political refugees. These ecclesiastical liberties, small territories that exercised varying extents of juridical and political autonomy, considerably complicated the jurisdictional map of late medieval England. London in particular, with its host of liberties and peculiars, constituted a patchwork quilt of legal jurisdictions. Although the mayor and aldermen of London were wont to say that the “chyeff and most commodyous place of the Cytie of London” constituted “one hoole Countie and one hoole Jurisdiccion and libertie” over which its citizens ruled, saving only the authority of the king himself, this confident as-sertion of the City's jurisdiction over the metropolitan square mile was constantly belied by the presence of these liberties. The most notable—and for the City, the most troubling—was the sanctuary at St. Martin Le Grand, a sizeable area within the bounds of the City, before 1503 governed by the dean and canons of the College of St. Martin, after 1503 absorbed into the lands attached to Westminster Abbey and ruled by the abbot. For about two centuries before St. Martin Le Grand was dissolved in 1542, its precinct was home to a thriving population of debtors, accused felons, and perhaps most numerously alien craftsmen, all seeking for various reasons to avoid civic or royal jurisdiction.5 The dissolution of religious houses which accompanied the English Reformation greatly lessened, although did not altogether eradicate, the privileges of St. Martin's.

From 1843 to 1943, the regime of extraterritoriality in China operated to exempt not just diplomats but also other citizens of Western empires from Chinese law and jurisdiction without granting the Chinese in the West reciprocal privileges. This was a milestone in international law and relations; it also had a long-lasting impact on the trajectories of modern Chinese history. On the one hand, the Treaties of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1842 and Bogue (Humen) in 1843, signed in the aftermath of the First Opium War (1839–42), marked the first institutionalization of British extraterritorial privileges in East Asia. Through treaties in 1844, the United States and France also secured such privileges in China and established their imperial prestige in the Asia-Pacific. These practices prompted revision of international law treatises and set the pattern for Western dealings with Asian countries for the century to come. On the other hand, from the late nineteenth century on, attempts to abolish foreign extraterritoriality continued to be a most powerful rallying call among the Chinese to “modernize”/“Westernize” their legal and political systems to regain sovereignty and international respectability.

The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, arguably the most hotly debated in recent decades, has produced an impressive body of historical scholarship. The leading histories have focused on the evolution of the arguments and alliances that shape abortion debate today, rights-based prolife and pro-choice arguments, alliances between women's rights leaders and public health advocates, and the adoption of pro-choice positions by the Democratic Party and pro-life positions by the Republicans. This orientation is unquestionably a sensible one; rights-based arguments, in play before Roe, have come to dominate the debate after the decision. However, by emphasizing rights-based debate before the decision, the current scholarship has mostly missed a significant change in the rhetoric and coalitions on either side of the debate that was partly produced by Roe itself.

The Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) is widely acknowledged to have made important contributions to an influential doctrine of individual natural rights. In this article I argue that Grotius developed his rights doctrine primarily out of normative Roman sources, that is to say Roman law and ethics. If this Roman tradition has been as central to Grotius's influential writing on natural rights as I claim, why has it not received more scholarly attention? The reasons lie in the view that while rights are constitutive of modern liberty, they were unknown in classical antiquity.

In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story. Charles Fanaye had served with Napoleon's armies in Egypt. Chased by Mameluks, he was rescued in the nick of time by a black Ethiopian woman and hidden in her home. Threatened in turn by the Mameluks, Marie-Hélène (as the woman came to be called) threw in her lot with the French army and followed Fanaye to France. The couple then sought to wed. They easily overcame religious barriers when Marie-Héléne was baptized in the Cathedral of Avignon. But another obstacle was harder to overcome: an 1803 ministerial decree banned marriage between blacks and whites. Though Fanaye and Marie-Héléne begged for an exception, the decree would plague them for the next sixteen years of their romance.

Within the last decade there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Mexican legal topics that relate to the Porfirian (1876–1910) and Mexican Revolutionary (1910–1940) periods, an especially formative time in the history of modern Mexican law. As Peter Reich has recently written, the great merit of this new literature has been to treat the law in its “social context,” a commonplace of legal studies in the United States, but one not typical of traditional approaches to modern Mexican legal history, which have “focused narrowly on code or other legislative changes.” Unfortunately, these methodological gains of recent years have not yet been applied to the history of Mexico's Supreme Court or its system of judicial review. One of the barriers to renewed interest in this area as a legal-historical topic, no doubt, has been the characterization of supreme courts in Latin America in general, and Mexico in particular, as “dependent, weak, parochial, conservative and decisionally unimportant.”

In February 1704, a Boston laborer named Thomas Lea found himself surrounded by townspeople as he lay on his deathbed. These spectators had gathered hoping to hear a much anticipated confession of the crimes they believed Lea had committed fifteen years earlier during the Dominion of New England. In Suffolk County, many townspeople had long maintained that Lea and others had used the confusion and chaos generated by the unsettling political and legal transformations introduced to New England during the 1680s to surreptitiously gain legal title to the estate of a prosperous Braintree, Massachusetts, landowner named William Penn. Standing by Lea's bedside, one witness, who believed Lea had perjured himself at the 1689 probate administration of Penn's estate, demanded: “Thomas can you as you are going out of the World answer at the Tribunal of God to the Will of Mr Penns, which you have sworn to[?]” “Was Mr Penn living or Dead when this Will was Made?” In the presence of assembled witnesses, Lea acknowledged, “he was dead.” Other townspeople pressed Lea to reveal the role he played in what many believed had been a murder for inheritance scheme. They reminded Lea that Penn's corpse had been found covered “in blood, in his own dung” with “a hole in his back, that you might turn your two fingers into it” and, even more disturbing, “one of his [Penn's] stones in his codd [scrotum] was broken all to pieces.” Averting the onlookers' gaze, Lea “turned his head aside the other way, saying what I did I was hired to do.” For these witnesses, the death-bed confession confirmed the rumors of Lea's crimes and strengthened their belief that a wave of corruption introduced in the 1680s had sabotaged New England's distinctive Puritan jurisprudence. Indeed, townspeople had labored for years to overturn the 1689 probate of Penn's estate in an effort forestall the crown's efforts to bring New England into political and legal conformity with the dictates of the growing English empire.

In April 1938 New York's first constitutional convention since 1915 convened in Albany. When it adjourned in late August, one of the amendments slated for a referendum that fall was an “anti-bureaucracy clause,” a provision that would greatly increase the New York courts' oversight of the state's agencies. Although voters rejected it, contemporaries saw the anti-bureaucracy clause as a harbinger of a national campaign against the New Deal. In September 1938 Charles Wyzanski, a former member of the Solicitor General's office, warned Attorney General Homer Cummings that the anti-bureaucracy clause was “the advance signal of an approaching partisan attack on a national scale.” Wyzanski was right: in early 1939 a bill endorsed by the American Bar Association's House of Delegates was introduced in Congress by Representative Francis Walter and Senator Marvel Mills Logan. Just as the New York provision “would have almost certainly destroyed the effectiveness of the state administrative agencies,” the New Dealer Abe Feller warned Cummings's successor, so would the Walter-Logan bill hamstring the federal government. When President Franklin Roosevelt vetoed the bill in December 1940, he declared it part of a national campaign that had begun with the anti-bureaucracy clause.

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.

“Take the census; make the country. Let's do both together!” “Hacer censos, es hacer Patria. Ayúdenos a hacerlos” cajoled one bold, bright poster in the days before May 15, 1930 when census takers dispersed across Mexico to count its inhabitants. Other placards similarly played on multiple meanings for the verb “hacer”—to make or to do: “Taking a census will make the country …” “Hagamos censos y haremos patria…” At the same time, within that collective nation-building, a census jingle affirmed individual importance: “A census is a count. He who is numbered, counts. And he who counts, succeeds.” “Un censo es una cuenta. El que censa, cuenta. Y el que cuenta, acierta.” In government propaganda, the 1930 census made Mexico and drew its inhabitants into the national fold, an ongoing, delicate project after the fratricide of the 1910 Revolution.

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.

It is a belief almost universally shared that the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 gave parents absolute control over the marriages of their minor children, and that a failure to obtain parental consent rendered a marriage void. For almost seventy years this Act was in force, from its implementation on March 25, 1754, until it was repealed by the Marriage Act 1823. In this same period historians have discerned the rise of the affective family, characterized by marriage for love and by equality between all members of the family. The tension between these two ideas has resulted in some rather tortuous explanations being advanced in an attempt to reconcile affective individualism and parental power. But was the period between 1754 and 1823 as distinctive as has been assumed?

Discoveries in history occur in lots of different ways. Every once in a while we come across some forgotten documents—a photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg, a trial transcript, other long-neglected court records, or a family archives. At other times we learn something new by just looking in old books while asking questions that we have not previously asked (or approaching those questions with skepticism) or by looking again and more deeply at published reports.

Pierson v. Post is usually used in law school classrooms to introduce law students to the complexities of establishing possession in property law. The published appellate-level opinion is widely available from commercial judgment database services and has been reproduced in countless law school casebooks, with a first-page pride of place given to the case in such collections since at least 1915. In the words of one scholar, “[m[ost [property law] casebooks begin at the beginning by considering the original acquisition of property. Almost all books suggest possession is the root of title … A favorite place to start is the old case of Pierson v. Post.” According to another, Pierson v. Post is “the perfect case for giving students a taste of what it means to ‘think like a lawyer.’” It is an “old chestnut” if ever there was one. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the case has been the subject of scholarly commentary.

In January 1994, the Law and History Review published an interview of Willard Hurst by Hendrik Hartog. Michael Grossberg, as editor, introduced the interview as the first of “an occasional series of discussions with legal historians.” Over a decade has elapsed since that conversation. Willard Hurst was known both for his scholarship and his commitment to mentoring. Planning for the 4th Biennial Hurst Summer Institute at Madison in June 2007, I could think of no better way to conclude an Institute focused on nurturing legal historians at the beginning of their careers than with a conversation focused on a life in legal history.