Legal History category: 1513 books
Sex and Punishment
Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire
Language: English
Release Date: April 12, 2012
From Mesopotamian adultery to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde: an “enormously informative and entertaining” history of Western sex laws (The Boston Globe).
The “raging frenzy” of the sex drive, to use Plato’s phrase, has always defied control. That’s not to say that the Sumerians,...
Murder Was Not a Crime
Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2010
Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder...
Declarations of Dependence
The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908
Language: English
Release Date: February 14, 2011
In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and petitions of ordinary North Carolinians, Declarations...
Dead Hands
A Social History of Wills, Trusts, and Inheritance Law
Language: English
Release Date: March 9, 2009
The law of succession rests on a single brute fact: you can't take it with you. The stock of wealth that turns over as people die is staggeringly large. In the United States alone, some $41 trillion will pass from the dead to the living in the first half of the 21st century. But the social impact...
Obligations in Roman Law
Past, Present, and Future
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2013
Long a major element of classical studies, the examination of the laws of the ancient Romans has gained momentum in recent years as interdisciplinary work in legal studies has spread. Two resulting issues have arisen, on one hand concerning Roman laws as intellectual achievements and historical artifacts,...
The Persons Case
The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2017
On 18 October 1929, John Sankey, England's reform-minded Lord Chancellor, ruled in the Persons case that women were eligible for appointment to Canada's Senate. Initiated by Edmonton judge Emily Murphy and four other activist women, the Persons case challenged the exclusion of women from Canada's...
Evolution of the Judicial Opinion
Institutional and Individual Styles
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2007
In this sweeping study of the judicial opinion, William D. Popkin examines how judges' opinions have been presented from the early American Republic to the present. Throughout history, he maintains, judges have presented their opinions within political contexts that involve projecting judicial authority...
Trial and Error
The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2003
Trial and Error traces the coverage or lack thereof, of evolution in textbooks used in American public schools from the mid-1800s to the present. While the teaching of Darwinian evolution was common and not controversial in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, the debates between...
An Indispensable Liberty
The Fight for Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century America
Language: English
Release Date: March 9, 2016
Most Americans today view freedom of speech as a bedrock of all other liberties, a defining feature of American citizenship. During the nineteenth century, the popular concept of American freedom of speech was still being formed. In An Indispensable Liberty: The Fight for Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century...
Public vs. Private
The Early History of School Choice in America
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2017
Americans today choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely lumped into categories of "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge in the first place, and what do they tell us about the more general relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise?...
Lincoln Apostate
The Matson Slave Case
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2011
In 1847, in a small rural courthouse in Coles County, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln represented a Kentucky slave owner named Robert Matson in his attempt to recover a runaway slave woman and her four children. Most Americans, even those with a penchant for the nation's history, have never heard of this...
Children of the Father King
Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2006
In a pioneering study of childhood in colonial Spanish America, Bianca Premo examines the lives of youths in the homes, schools, and institutions of the capital city of Lima, Peru. Situating these young lives within the framework of law and intellectual history from 1650 to 1820, Premo brings to light...
A Tragic Fate
Law and Ethics in the Battle Over Nazi-Looted Art
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2017
The organized theft of fine art by Nazi Germany has captivated worldwide attention in the last twenty years. As much as any other topic arising out of World War Two, stolen art has proven to be an issue that simply will not go away. Newly found works of art pit survivors and their heirs against museums,...
by
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2011
The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy features original contributions by international scholars on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lauro Martines' Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, which is recognized as a groundbreaking study challenging traditional...