Legal History category: 1513 books

Even as unemployment rates soared during the Great Depression, FDR’s relief and social security programs faced attacks in Congress and the courts on the legitimacy of federal aid to the growing population of poor. In response, New Dealers pointed to a long tradition—dating back to 1790 and now...

Rome was the law-giver for much of the modern world. She was also the greatest military power of antiquity, operating her military organization with remarkable efficiency and effectiveness throughout most of the then-known world. In view of the importance of both the legal and military aspects of the...

Intellectual property has become a dominant feature of our knowledge based economy in recent years, but how has property rights in intangible items developed? This book brings together for the first time exemplary scholarship with diverse approaches to the history of United States intellectual property...

Judge Richard Posner is one of the great legal minds of our age, on par with such generation-defining judges as Holmes, Hand, and Friendly. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the principal exponent of the enormously influential law and economics movement, he writes provocative...

From the École Polytechnique shootings of 1989 to the political controversy surrounding the elimination of the federal long-gun registry, the issue of gun control has been a subject of fierce debate in Canada. But in fact, firearm regulation has been a sharply contested issue in the country since...

This book discusses the history behind Oklahoma’s exemption laws (the laws that determine what property can a debtor keep safe from seizure by creditors), the current function of these laws, as well as suggestions for reform of both the homestead and personal property exemptions. This book would be of interest not only to lawyers but also to policymakers and legal historians.

Much has changed in the fashion industry since the end of World War II to require more highly developed legal skills and, happily, a much greater allocation to legal expense. The industry is entirely global and a surprisingly large number of members have grown into mega multi-nationals, with large...

Prepared to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the establishment of Nova Scotia's Supreme Court, this important new volume provides a comprehensive history of the institution, Canada's oldest common law court. The thirteen essays include an account of the first meeting in 1754 of the court in...

Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property...

The civil rights era was a time of pervasive change in American political and social life. Among the decisive forces driving change were lawyers, who wielded the power of law to resolve competing concepts of order and equality and, in the end, to hold out the promise of a new and better nation.             The...

The history and theory of international law have been transformed in recent years by post-colonial and post-imperial critiques of the universalistic claims of Western international law. The origins of those critiques lie in the often overlooked work of the remarkable Polish-British lawyer-historian...

With the passage into law of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, rights took on new legal, political, and social significance in Canada. In the decades following, Canadian jurisprudence has emphasised the importance of rights, determining their shape and asserting their centrality...

Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually part of a culture's way of expressing its sense of the order of things. In Law as Culture, Lawrence Rosen invites readers to consider how the facts that are...

In his new book, Lewis D. Sargentich shows how two different kinds of legal argument - rule-based reasoning and reasoning based on principles and policies - share a surprising kinship and serve the same aspiration. He starts with the study of the rule of law in life, a condition of law that serves...