Freedom as Accumulation

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico

This chapter reassembles the immediate and concrete history of abolition after 1865, from the counter of the Southern country store to the international trade in cotton, as it sorts out the mechanisms of law and arrangements of political economy that chaperoned the tremendous value incarnated in slaves across the gulf of the Civil War. It explains how citizenship for the formerly enslaved was tethered to the racialization of debt and how the legal relations of formal abolition were actually economic relations of credit. This chapter analyzes the legal history of the Fourteenth Amendment and the interlocking forms of theft it enabled, from Southern sharecropping to New York corporations, from the Freedman’s Bank to the U.S. national debt, showing how liberalism is enmeshed with colonialism. Through a landmark Supreme Court case in 1897, this chapter describes how the personhood of the freed enabled the white accumulation of finance capital through global cotton markets, engaging with the theories of Giovanni Arrighi and world-systems analysis.

Author(s):  
Bennett Capers

This chapter focuses on a few issues related to video evidence and law, especially with respect to American law. The first issue is the history of the use of video evidence in court. The second issue involves constitutional protections regarding the state’s use of surveillance cameras. The chapter then turns to the Supreme Court case Scott v. Harris to raise concerns about the use of video evidence as not just proof but “truth.” These are of course just a sampling of the issues that the topic of video evidence could raise. The hope is that this chapter will spur further inquiry on the part of the reader.


2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1823) ◽  
pp. 20152334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher H. Martin ◽  
Jacob E. Crawford ◽  
Bruce J. Turner ◽  
Lee H. Simons

One of the most endangered vertebrates, the Devils Hole pupfish Cyprinodon diabolis , survives in a nearly impossible environment: a narrow subterranean fissure in the hottest desert on earth, Death Valley. This species became a conservation icon after a landmark 1976 US Supreme Court case affirming federal groundwater rights to its unique habitat. However, one outstanding question about this species remains unresolved: how long has diabolis persisted in this hellish environment? We used next-generation sequencing of over 13 000 loci to infer the demographic history of pupfishes in Death Valley. Instead of relicts isolated 2–3 Myr ago throughout repeated flooding of the entire region by inland seas as currently believed, we present evidence for frequent gene flow among Death Valley pupfish species and divergence after the most recent flooding 13 kyr ago. We estimate that Devils Hole was colonized by pupfish between 105 and 830 years ago, followed by genetic assimilation of pelvic fin loss and recent gene flow into neighbouring spring systems. Our results provide a new perspective on an iconic endangered species using the latest population genomic methods and support an emerging consensus that timescales for speciation are overestimated in many groups of rapidly evolving species.


Author(s):  
David George Surdam

This chapter traces the history of professional team sports in order to place the issues covered in the Congressional hearings in the proper context. It first considers the rise of baseball as America's national pastime and Major League Baseball (MLB)'s decision to maintain two separate leagues, the American League and the National League. It then discusses the dispute between MLB and the rival Federal League, along with the emergence of other sports that achieved Big League status, namely, football and basketball. It also examines the prosperity of the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the appearance of new challengers to their dominance after World War II. Finally, it looks at the Flood v. Kuhn, a Supreme Court case that challenged baseball's reserve clause, along with the rise of free agency.


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Novak

James Henretta's “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America” takes up one of the most interesting and important interpretive questions in the history of American political economy. What explains the dramatic transformation in liberal ideology and governance between 1877 and 1937 that carried the United States from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism? That question has preoccupied legions of historians, political-economists, and legal scholars (as well as politicians and ideologues) at least since Hughes himself opened the October 1935 Term of the U.S. Supreme Court in a brand new building and amid a rising chorus of constitutional criticism. Henretta, wisely in my opinion, looks to law, particularly public law, for new insights into that great transformation. But, of course, the challenge in using legal history to answer such a question is the enormous increase in the actual policy output of courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies in this period. Trying to synthesize the complex changes in “law-in-action” in the fiercely contested forums of turn-of-the-century America sometimes seems the historical-sociological equivalent of attempting to empty the sea with a slotted spoon. Like any good social scientist, Henretta responds to the impossibility of surveying the whole by taking a sample. Through a case-study of the ideas, political reforms, and legal opinions of Charles Evans Hughes, particularly as governor of New York and associate and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Henretta offers us in microcosm the story of the revolution (or rather several revolutions) in modern American governance.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mladen Medved

This article examines the potentials of world-systems analysis (WSA) and uneven and combined development (UCD) for the history of nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy by critically engaging with Andrea Komlosy’s account of the Monarchy, written from the perspective of WSA. It argues that Komlosy does not provide a consistent WSA interpretation of the Monarchy’s history by trying to analyze the Monarchy as a world-economy in its own right, thus excluding geopolitical dynamics and the world-economy. Furthermore, core-periphery relations within the Monarchy are dealt with in a contradictory fashion. Crucially, the quite anomalous state formation is not accounted for. The problematic account of state formation, it is argued, is due to the limitations of WSA. By taking a closer look at the genesis of the Austro–Hungarian Compromise, the article claims that UCD is better suited for explaining state formation in the Monarchy.


Author(s):  
Lisa Siraganian

The Introduction contextualizes the book’s broader legal and philosophical debates about corporate personhood, collective agency, and modernism. The book’s methodology and structure are explained using accessible modernist poems, political cartoons, and legal case studies to present to non-experts the key ideas and historical background of corporate personhood in the U.S., with its first life not after the U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United (2010), but after Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Beginning with an extended example from Muriel Rukeyser’s long poem, The Book of the Dead, the Introduction canvasses American literature from the nineteenth through the twentieth century to show how the book renders the field of modernist studies radically different, as modernism’s formal speculations emerge as deeply entangled with a range of social and political developments. Asking the question “Has a corporation a soul?” becomes a means to explore the aims of collective social agents, and to think through how collective forms produce meaning by their acts. Not until the postwar era did philosophy synthesize these ideas (on the possibility of corporate intention) being teased out in mostly prewar novels, poetry, and short stories. The third section situates this analysis within modernist literary studies as a field, culminating with a reading of an Archibald MacLeish poem in light of this focus on collective action and literary form and descriptions of each subsequent chapter.


2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 361 ◽  
Author(s):  
David V Williams

The English Laws Act 1858 declared the reception date for the arrival of English law and statutes of general application in New Zealand to be 14 January 1840. This Act was passed because the New Zealand Supreme Court had decided the Wills Act 1837 (UK) did not apply in New Zealand. New Zealand was annexed to the British Empire as a dependency of New South Wales with a reception date in 1825 or 1828. The Supreme Court case that so decided was McLiver v Macky (1856). The New Zealand Law Foundation's 'Lost Cases Project' ascertained that this judgment was fully reported in an Auckland newspaper – The Southern Cross. This article examines the facts of the case and the reasoning of Acting Chief Justice Stephen as to the basis for British sovereignty in New Zealand and the application of English law to British subjects here.


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