Together Cæsar and Cotton left an immense trove of English state papers on all matters of subjects. While Cæsar spent much of his lifetime as an officer of state, e.g., Master of the Rolls, they both devised innumerable works of great value. For instance, both he and Cotton expounded upon the issue of the post-nati and other arguments made in the conferences on the union with Scotland in Parliament. With their cessation in 1607, Cæsar undertook his most significant follow-up work: “That neither any General Statute nor Nativity only make a Man (whose Parents were Strangers) to be a Natural Subject in any Country.” Later duplicated by Cotton in Titus, F. IV., the intricacies of its two pages remained long-guarded in the private possession of such great men as Lords, Secretaries of State, and Prime Ministers. Only two centuries after Cæsar commenced its work did it come full circle to the British Museum—itself, ironically, formed from the seized library of Cotton. As for legal precedent, it is unique in that its broad historical scope predated the complexities of England's permanent royal colonies in America. During this period, every regnant—except for Charles I and James II—would assent unto major naturalization or alien statutes during their reign, all of which remained common law throughout England, the Empire, and America until, at the least, 1863.

This study is the first to explore the creation of the Tribunaux repressifs indigènes (Native repressive tribunals, TRIs), a novel jurisdiction of exception promulgated at the turn of the twentieth century in colonial Algeria. The TRIs were the product of several intersecting historical processes that took shape over the last quarter of the nineteenth century: first, this period witnessed intense settler security panics marked by genuine anxiety that Algeria might succumb to uncontrollable banditry and mass uprisings. During this same period, colonial “sciences” couched in burgeoning race theory intersected with juridical knowledge-production to form a new legal discourse on assimilation. The TRIs were advanced using this new grammar of race-bound legal relativism, reimagined as consistent with republican universalism. This ascendant juridical epistème dovetailed with debates over the both indeterminate and overdetermined nature of sovereignty in Algeria, whose land was juridically and administratively “Frenchified,” yet whose Muslim (by definition non-citizen) colonial subjects remained excluded from access to civil rights or protections. A doctrine of racialized exception was invented and codified in the unfolding of an impassioned juristic and public debate. The TRIs were legitimized—and endured—thanks to a doctrinal rationale applied retroactively: that for Muslim colonized subjects, exception was the rule.

In English testamentary history, there is a clear divide between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman testamentary practice, with the primary difference being that in the latter case, heritable land could not be bequeathed. Once the transfer of land required the livery of seisin, a practice introduced during the reign of Henry II (1154–89), it was not possible for a gift of land to take effect upon the death of the owner, and the royal courts did not consider the intention to dispose of a tenement, as expressed in a will, sufficient in itself to complete the transfer. Nonetheless, an examination of extant wills from the period 1180–1300 demonstrates that some testators (or indeed beneficiaries) may have thought that bequests of land were possible or even enforceable. How do these wills fit into the legal framework of the time? If a bequest could not be enforced in the royal courts, what reasons might someone have for attempting to make one, and how might they try to ensure that the bequest held?

In 1788, Andrew Jackson acquired an enslaved woman named Nancy. According to most accounts, Nancy followed Jackson from Jonesborough, Tennessee to Nashville and lived out the rest of her days at the Hermitage. Except she did not. A close review of the legal record suggests that Nancy never made it to Nashville and either left Jackson somewhere along the Wilderness Road or died at his hands trying to escape. Her act of resistance, this article posits, may have profoundly affected Jackson's views of race and sex on the southern frontier.

The article was inspired by Justice Alito's selective and often misleading use of the medieval history of abortion law to justify the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Hoping to offer a corrective view of the larger conversation about abortion during the premodern era, this article hopes to drive home a number of points. First, modern authorities need to acknowledge that the word “abortion” (aborsus) meant something different then than it does now. Second, at its origins, abortion was conceived as a crime against husbands, and thus it falls into a larger body of misogynous law designed to protect men and their heirs from women who exploited their reproductive potential to trick men out of their rightful inheritance. And third, medieval laws against those who provided abortions labeled them as witches or poisoners. Medieval laws about abortion are thus intertwined with fears of the devil and of the woman's body as poison.

The analysis delves into the complex legal intricacies surrounding the establishment of South Slavic state entities post-World War I, as international law of the time didn't fully encompass modern legal instruments defining international relations subjects. Nonetheless, legal arguments affirm the statehood of the State of SCS, formed within the former Austro-Hungarian Empire through legitimate representative bodies, despite lacking formal international recognition. The Croatian state transitioned governance under the National Council of SCS without abolishing its institutions. The analysis of the “December 1st Act” highlights procedural violations during the forming of the Kingdom of SCS, indicating a deviation from authorized scope, though it did not render the new state's government illegitimate. The negotiating process favored Serbian authorities, evident in the “Vidovdan” Constitution, yet it doesn't suffice to claim the State of SCS was annexed by the Kingdom of Serbia. Legally, there's little ambiguity, but disputes in international legal rulings and interpretations uncover internal political tensions and external pragmatic influences.

The 1892 collision between the British merchant ship Ravenna and the Japanese torpedo boat Chishima generated a three-year legal debate over jurisdiction in territorial waters. Challenging the conventional notion that the coastal State enjoyed full sovereignty over its maritime territory, this article argues that contested jurisdiction in territorial waters was ubiquitous at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to imperialism, which played a pivotal role in transforming the coastal waters of semi-colonial countries into overlapping legal zones, political speculations and the absence of a uniform legal standard also put the coastal State's assertion of maritime sovereignty into question. On the one hand, semi-colonial states, such as the Meiji government, sometimes strategically avoided asserting maritime sovereignty when they deemed it appropriate for national interests. On the other hand, there was also a wide cleavage of opinions among Western powers regarding coastal jurisdiction. Scrutinizing the entangled currents of imperialism, political speculations and maritime laws in the Chishima case, this article contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the polycentric oceanic world by displaying the rarely discussed contested jurisdiction in territorial waters before World War II.

In 1923, Haudenosaunee leader Deskaheh Levi General traveled to Geneva and launched a campaign for Indigenous statehood at the League of Nations. Drawing on a not-so-distant imperial past, the campaign was a novel attempt to use international law to assert Indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee claim hinged on a seemingly impossible conceit: that an independent native polity might persist within the borders of a settled state. The League of Nations’ primary institutional frameworks for grappling with other such problematic sovereignties were minority treaties and the mandate regime. But the Haudenosaunee case, which hinged on the persistence rather than the novelty of sovereignty, fit within neither paradigm. Their campaign illuminates a larger crisis of legal legibility that characterized Indigenous-settler relations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. By reading Indigenous history into international legal history, this paper shows how Haudenosaunee people leveraged older norms of imperial relationality in their engagements with international law. In doing so, it revises a persistent genealogical account of the history of Indigenous human rights in favor of a more capacious narrative of Indigenous internationalism.

The twentieth-century processes of legal modernization rendered transformations to the concept of authority and its public perception. This article builds on the complex Weberian articulations of these transformations to analyze a contemporary contentious debate concerning the establishment of a Rabbinical Court of Appeals, in Mandatory Palestine, between 1918 and 1921. This initiative, imposed by the British government and supported by non-religious Jewish leaders, raised a heated controversy between two rabbinical figures—Haim Hirschnson of Hoboken, New Jersey, and Ben-Zion Uziel of Jaffa. Based on a close reading of their texts, juxtaposing them to Weberian conceptualizations of modern authority, and contextualizing them in particular historical circumstances, I argue that both rabbis comprehended the appellate mechanism as transforming the concept of rabbinical authority. By instituting appellate courts, authority shifts from its “charismatic” or “traditional” form to a “legal” institutional-based form. They harshly disagreed, however, if this transformation is a positive development in the modernization of Jewish law, or, on the contrary, will have a detrimental impact on the public's trust in the judiciary. The rabbinical articulations of these Weberian themes, as I suggest to interpret their texts, shed light on the application of the Weberian theory of bureaucracy to the judicial system and legal profession and also provide illuminating insights into the analysis of current church-law relationships, in Israeli law and elsewhere.

Historians have long known that leaders of the American Revolution looked to the law of nations for insight into the rights and obligations of independent states. In so doing, Americans relied largely on the writings of European legal theorists, such as Hugo Grotius and Emerich de Vattel, whose treatises on the law of nations are regarded today as having laid the foundations of international law. As this article demonstrates, however, early modern statesmen did not base their conduct on such treatises, but on a customary law of nations that they derived from precedent and the text of earlier treaties. This article elucidates the distinction between the customary and theoretical branches of the law of nations. It then goes on to examine the law of nations’ impact on revolutionary-era diplomacy, drawing particular attention to a series of wartime negotiations over rights to the Mississippi River. As the article shows, most American emissaries lacked experience with the customary laws of diplomacy and struggled to use that law effectively in their negotiations. The most serious consequences were averted due in part to French legal advice, and because one American, John Jay, acquired enough competence in customary law to guide his colleagues toward an effective negotiation of peace.

In 1821, an expeditionary force of the Bombay Marine imposed an unequal treaty upon the imam of Sana‘a, sovereign of the Yemeni port of Mocha. Previous accounts, depicting the incident as a standard rehearsal of British gunboat diplomacy, have overlooked an important legal innovation enfolded in the treaty wherein the East India Company's claim for extraterritorial jurisdiction over British subjects in Mocha was expanded to include not only British European subjects of the Crown and certain native dependents of the factory, but also the entire Indian merchant population of the port. Bombay's claim stood on shaky ground, however, as the legal boundaries of British subjecthood in the Indian subcontinent were anything but clear, not least to colonial administrators themselves. Prosaically enough, the intervention was foiled by an inaccurate translation of the treaty from English to Arabic, demonstrating the extent to which Company officials were at the mercy of non-Western middlemen and translators who brokered between them and local rulers and administrators. A second line of inquiry in this article thus looks at the structural vulnerabilities of legal imperialism, reflecting upon the potential of contradictions and untranslatabilities between British-imperial and Arab-Islamic legal and epistemological assumptions in shaping the outcomes of the imperial encounter in the western Indian Ocean.

This essay brings to light a rare feature of the Stewart legal system. Grand jury charges remain understudied, partly for want of primary source materials. The brief historical and biographical sketches of the essay are appended by a unique and relevant artifact of the time: a preamble or exhortation to a grand jury charge, ostensibly delivered by a Justice of the King's Bench, John Dodderidge.