Girgis and George, JJ., dissenting.

We can dispose of the case in two sentences: The States’ marriage laws closely reflect normative and policy judgments about marriage that are reasonable in themselves and cannot have had their origins in bigotry. A ruling for petitioners requires replacing those judgments with alternatives of which our Constitution and legal tradition and two centuries of cases are all wholly innocent....

Author(s):  
Will Smiley

This chapter charts the “Law of Release,” a new system of rules that replaced the Law of Ransom. These rules were based on treaties signed from 1739 onward, but also on a variety of lesser agreements and unwritten understandings and the Islamic legal tradition. They were renewed frequently, and structured captivity as late as the 1850s. This chapter will explore the basic structures of the Law of Release—how captives were found, released, and sent home, and how slaveowners were convinced, coerced, or compensated to cooperate. I argue that while release was initially limited to Istanbul, and to the most visible captives, it extended both into elite households, and outward along the Ottoman corridors of power. This process tested the limits of the Ottoman state, forcing the state to cooperate with Russian officials for the benefit of both. They did so in the face of resistance from captors.


Author(s):  
Georgy Kantor

Roman concept of dominium has been fundamental in the formation of concepts of ownership in European legal tradition. It is, however, often considered outside the context of Roman imperial rule and of the multiplicity of legal regimes governing property relations in Roman provinces outside Italy. This chapter starts from the classic passage in the Institutes of Gaius, claiming that the right of dominium did not exist in provincial land, where it belonged to the Roman state. Gaius’ statement is often dismissed in modern historical scholarship as a ‘conveyancer’s fantasy’ (A.H.M. Jones). It is argued here that, on the contrary, this passage and other similar statements in Roman juristic literature and technical literature on land-measurement, show an important facet of Roman ideas of ownership as a socially contingent right, dependent on civic status of the owner, status of the territory within the empire, and Roman recognition of local property regimes.


Author(s):  
Asha Bajpai

Child sexual abuse and exploitation covers the sexual maltreatment of both children and young people. Part A deals with child sexual abuse (CSA) in India, its magnitude, and child sexual abuse in institutions. It deals with the national legal regime relating to CSA including the constitutional provisions, Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO). Law reform relating to some provisions in POCSO, child marriage laws, Right to Education Act and, and child victims and witnesses is recommended. Part B deals with commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking of minor children in the context of organized exploitation for commercial gain. The Indian laws dealing with commercial sexual exploitation and pornography are included. Important judgements and international instruments dealing with child sexual abuse and exploitation and the important role played by NGOs and government in dealing with cases of CSA and exploitation are included.


Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

The Introduction begins by exploring modern examples sanctioning the concept of the citizen enemy combatant, such as the War on Terror cases of José Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. It then suggests that the roots of this concept may be found in the World War II detention of Japanese Americans, including over 70,000 U.S. citizens. The Introduction continues by arguing that this modern conception of the citizen enemy combatant is impossible to reconcile with the historic understanding of the Suspension Clause and the habeas privilege that trace their origins to English legal tradition, an understanding that remained consistent well through Reconstruction. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book.


Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.


ORDO ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (70) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Cameron Harwick ◽  
Hilton Root

AbstractThis paper draws a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and ‘rationalist’ legal orders on the basis of the implied political strategy. We argue that the West’s solution to the paradox of governance – that a government strong enough to protect rights cannot itself be restrained from violating those rights – originates in certain aspects of the feudal contract, a confluence of aspects of communitarian Germanic law, which enshrined a contractual notion of political authority, and rationalistic Roman law, which supported large-scale political organization. We trace the tradition of strong but limited government to the conflict between factions with an interest in these legal traditions – nobles and the crown, respectively – and draw limited conclusions for legal development in non-Western contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-555
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Scarfi

AbstractThe Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a US foreign policy principle, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the interventionist policies of the US in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians and social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideologies, there was a distinct legal tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been overlooked by international law scholars and the scholarship focusing on Latin America. In recent years, a new revisionist body of research has emerged exploring the complicity between the history of modern international law and imperialism, as well as Third World perspectives on international law, but this scholarship has begun only recently to explore legal anti-imperialist contributions and their legacy. The purpose of this article is to trace the rise of this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition, assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine and its implications for current debates about US exceptionalism and elastic behaviour in international law and organizations, especially since 2001.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-253
Author(s):  
Emad Hamdeh

The Albanian scholar Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī (d. 1999) established a unique type of Salafism, a movement whose adherents follow a puritanical model of Muslim creed, exegesis, and conduct that is critical of madhhab Traditionalism. In this article I present an annotated translation of an audio lecture in which Albānī attempted to defend Salafism against its anti-madhhab image. I shed light on the religious and social climate that played a critical role in triggering Albānī’s disdain for Traditionalism and led him to discredit madhhab Traditionalist fiqh and replace it with his own interpretation of the jurisprudential requirements of Islamic scripture. Among the arguments I make is that Albānī’s claim to follow only the Qurʾān and Sunna is a rhetorical strategy designed to present Salafism as the absolute truth and distinguish it from being categorized as another madhhab or religious movement.



Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Linda K. Kerber

The old law of domestic relations and the system known as coverture have shaped marriage practices in the United States and have limited women's membership in the constitutional community. This system of law predates the Revolution, but it lingers in U.S. legal tradition even today. After describing coverture and the old law of domestic relations, this essay considers how the received narrative of women's place in U.S. history often obscures the story of women's and men's efforts to overthrow this oppressive regime, and also the story of the continuing efforts of men and some women to stabilize and protect it. The essay also questions the paradoxes built into American law: for example, how do we reconcile the strictures of coverture with the founders' care in defining rights-holders as “persons” rather than “men”? Citing a number of court cases from the early days of the republic to the present, the essay describes the 1960s and 1970s shift in legal interpretation of women's rights and obligations. However, recent developments – in abortion laws, for example – invite inquiry as to how full the change is that we have accomplished. The history of coverture and the way it affects legal, political, and cultural practice today is another American narrative that needs to be better understood.


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