Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
John B. Nann ◽  
Morris L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
The U.S

This introductory chapter provides an overview of legal history research. An attorney might conduct legal history research if the law at question in a legal dispute is very old: the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are well over two hundred years old. Historical research also comes into play when the question at issue is what the law was at a certain time in the past. Ultimately, law plays an important part in the political and social history of the United States. As such, researchers interested in almost every aspect of American life will have occasion to use legal materials. The chapter then describes the U.S. legal system and legal authority, and offers six points to consider in approaching a historical legal research project.

The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B Nann ◽  
Morris L Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

The study of legal history has a broad application that extends well beyond the interests of legal historians. An attorney arguing a case today may need to cite cases that are decades or even centuries old, and historians studying political or cultural history often encounter legal issues that affect their main subjects. Both groups need to understand the laws and legal practices of past eras. Law plays an important part in the political and social history of the United States. As such, researchers interested in almost every aspect of American life will have occasion to use legal materials. The book provides an overview of legal history research, describing the U.S. legal system and legal authority. It is essential reference is intended for the many nonspecialists who need to enter this arcane and often tricky area of research.

scholarly journals LAW'S EMPIRE: ENGLISH LEGAL CULTURES AT HOME AND ABROAD

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARGOT C. FINN
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

Historical Research in Law

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ibbetson
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Rules And Principles ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law

Legal history is by no means a unitary discipline. A convenient and conventional division can be made between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ legal history. The former is the history of lawyers' law, of legal rules and principles. Its sources are predominantly those that are thrown up by the legal process: principally statutes and decided cases, supplemented where possible with lawyers' literature expounding the rules and occasionally reflecting on them. The latter is the history of the law in practice, of legal institutions at work in society rather than legal rules existing in a social, economic, and political vacuum. This article discusses the historical foundations of legal historiography, the professionalization of legal history, internal legal history, and external legal histories.

Why Go a Fiji Voyage?

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Nancy Shoemaker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The United States ◽  
China Trade ◽  
British Colonization ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The U.S

This introductory chapter discusses why, despite the negative assumptions regarding the islands of Fiji during the nineteenth century, Americans still went there. Indeed, several thousand of them voyaged to Fiji on merchant, whaling, and naval vessels in the decades before British colonization of the islands in 1874. And more than a hundred Americans lived and died there. From a macro perspective, explaining the American presence in Fiji seems simple. Their rationale was economic: Americans went to Fiji to extract resources to sell in China. Fiji became one leg in the U.S.–China trade and a source of great wealth for the American merchants who gambled their fortunes on it. However, a closer inspection reveals that the foot soldiers of early U.S. global expansion, the individual Americans who ventured overseas, did so for more complicated reasons. An assortment of personal ambitions impelled Americans to travel to distant locales. Their motivations, albeit multiple and divergent, often derived from a desire to be respected by others and thereby attain a sense of self-worth. Their strivings to rise in others' estimation influenced the course of Fiji's history and, albeit more subtly, the history of the United States.

Guantanamo

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-125
Author(s):  
Carl Lindskoog
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Guantanamo Bay ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prison Camp ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 5 examines the government’s first detention camp at the U.S naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the experience of the Haitian refugees—the original Guantanamo detainees—held there from 1991 to 1994. An important part of this history also involves the government’s detention of HIV-positive Haitians in the world’s first and only “HIV prison camp.” Examining the political and legal challenges to the government’s use of off-shore detention at Guantanamo, this chapter illuminates the history of the legal struggle over the government’s authority to detain in such extraterritorial facilities and debates over how far the U.S. Constitution might reach beyond the United States’ territorial boundaries, and when exercising the U.S. Constitution can lead to human rights abuses.

Thwarted Victors: Civil and Criminal Prosecution against Parliament's Officials during the English Civil War and Commonwealth

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Shedd
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Social History ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Criminal Prosecution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law

Whereas both Houses of the Parliament of England have been necessitated to undertake a war in their just and lawful defense … all oaths, declarations, and proclamations against both or either of the Houses of Parliament … or their ordinances and proceedings, or any for adhering unto them, or for doing or executing any office, place or charge, by any authority derived from them; and all judgments, indictments, outlawries, attainders and inquisitions in any the said causes … be declared null, suppressed, and forbidden. (From the first of nineteenNewcastle Propositions, July 1646; expanded from the first of twenty-sevenPropositions of Uxbridge, November 1644; repeated in the second ofThe Four Bills, December 1647)Indemnity Committee cases from the 1647–55 manuscripts indicate a widespread volume of suits pressed against parliament's Civil War and Commonwealth officeholders. Invariably, the officials petitioning the Indemnity Committee were under prosecution. Often they had been fined and even jailed. Also revealed in these papers is a public knowledgeable in the law and ready to wield its power in punishing an array of officials in London and the shires. Four broad conclusions are asserted here. First, the Indemnity Committee records reflect a massive legal assault on state officials from the beginning of the Civil War to the mid-1650s, a factor in the political, administrative, and social history of the period that has heretofore been ignored. Second, suits were lodged mainly as the result of actions stemming from fiscal innovations put into place by a parliament that pushed toward victory and then struggled to pay its war debts.

A Dirty, Half-Hidden War

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Colleen Woods
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

This chapter assesses the formation of a private paramilitary organization in the 1950s by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents who were associated with Edward Lansdale, as well as by a group of veterans from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). This “Freedom Company” was meant to transport the “lessons of the Huk campaign” to sites elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. As an organizing principle, the Freedom Company and its U.S.-based supporters assumed that U.S. colonialism had imparted “modern political knowledge” to Filipinos; as the most “politically modern” Asians, therefore, they were best equipped to “export democracy” throughout the region. The Freedom Company Philippines (FCP), staffed entirely by Filipinos in an effort to distance contemporary U.S. interventions from a history of Western imperialism, actively promoted the idea that the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines had succeeded, while European imperial practices had failed to develop Asian societies properly. Though steeped in racialized perceptions regarding the political capacities of colonized or formerly colonized peoples, anticommunists contended that U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and contemporary U.S. interventions demonstrated the United States' interests in liberating Asians from colonialism across the region.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Butler William E
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Russian People ◽  
Legal Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Issues ◽  
International Legal System ◽  
The Law

This introductory chapter briefly reflects on the history of the law of making treaties in Russia. Treaties constitute the earliest surviving documents by at least a century and perhaps more in not only the legal history, but the general history, of the Russian people. The chapter discusses multiple issues which were embedded in the treaties of the ninth and tenth centuries, such as the form and legal nature of the document, ratification procedures, and so on. It considers how these issues interact with the existence of an international legal system as well as a domestic one. The chapter also looks at Russia's especially post-Soviet Russia's-responses to these issues and expounds on the importance of addressing them.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Spencer W. McBride
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Discriminatory Effect

The Introduction to the book explains the reasons that Joseph Smith ran for president in 1844. Though electoral victory was extremely unlikely for Smith, his unlikely campaign is significant to the history of the United States because it encapsulates the discontent of thousands of Americans with the political status quo. The campaign also illuminates the political obstacles to universal religious freedom in nineteenth-century America. In particular, it demonstrates that political philosophies such as the states’ rights doctrine, which, on the surface, had nothing to do with religious freedom, had a discriminatory effect on religious minorities when implemented. Accordingly, Joseph Smith found himself on the vanguard of Americans calling for a stronger federal government, one that could enforce the Bill of Rights in individual states.

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