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This study analyzes discourse about journalists' privilege and libel law from 1894 to 1897 to explain how the press articulated the public policy rationale for legal protection at a pivotal moment in journalism history. To illuminate the relationship between emerging professional values and ideas about law, it applies the analytical lens of institutionalism. The study argues that the public policy rationale that appeared in the legal discourse surrounding these key legal issues was both a function of principled professional identity–building and a means of "institutional maintenance" intended to protect the press's social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a government policy regulating the timing of daylight during the summer months. While DST's existence is taken for granted in modern American life, the adoption and expansion of the policy was heavily debated, with strong opposition that persists to the present day—a full century after its inception as a World War I energy‐efficiency program. After reviewing the history of DST, we analyze the political economy of congressional vote choice on DST policy. Method: We analyze votes of members of Congress on all DST‐specific roll calls between 1918 and 1985, assessing whether members voted to expand or reduce DST. Results: We find that ideology, party, geographic location, and the portion of a constituency made up by farmers all strongly predict member support for adopting and expanding DST—and that each of these effects is durable over time. Digging deeper, we find significant evidence for local representation on DST votes, as constituency‐specific factors are more strongly associated with congressional vote choice than partisanship or general ideological preferences. Conclusion: Overall, our results provide an original empirical assessment of the factors that drove the adoption and revision of a contentious and significant government policy that endures today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of the 1215 Magna Carta on the U.S. Supreme Court throughout history from 1790 through the 2010. An overview of the citations of the Magna Carta in Supreme Court judgments and opinions for actions and defense cases, including in the Supreme Court case "Kerry v. Din," is provided.

This Note challenges William Blackstone's modern position as the "oracle of the law" in the eighteenth century. In a time when the status of legal doctrines at the Founding is of renewed significance in interpreting the Constitution, it is especially important to ensure that the sources of these doctrines comport with historical practices. This Note looks beyond the usual story of Blackstone's influence, as told by the significant circulation of his work. It turns instead to the work's practical significance for legal education in the decades preceding the Constitutional Convention. By using curricula and student notes¾referred to as commonplace books¾to discover what was actually considered influential in the legal profession of the period, a more comprehensive perspective of eighteenth-century legal thought is uncovered. While Blackstone was apparently known to these late colonists, his work was far from "the most widely read law book in eighteenth-century America." Instead, more traditional treatises and English reporters dominated legal learning until at least 1787. It is these admittedly more impenetrable works which should inform our understanding of the common law as it existed at the Founding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Congress enacts command-and-control regulation, it chooses between implementation through litigation and courts, through bureaucracy, or through a hybrid regime. Since the late 1960s, the frequency with which Congress has relied on civil litigation for frontline enforcement of statutes grew dramatically, and with it grew rates of federal statutory litigation and the role of courts in federal regulatory policy. By the late 1970s, and with increasing intensity over the decades, a critique of these developments emerged that included two core themes. Relative to administrative implementation, direct enforcement through civil litigation (1) weakens democratic control over public policy because litigants and federal judges are harder for the elected branches to control than bureaucracy, and (2) degrades the quality of public policy because the judiciary is a less capable policy-making infrastructure than bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a queer, transnational account of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1965 articulation, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), of a constitutional right to privacy. The right in question trumped a Connecticut statute prohibiting contraceptive use even by married couples. But historians emphasizing its emergence from tort privacy and criminal procedure law have neglected an alternative source of its articulation beyond obvious jurisdictional and sexual borders: Britain's 1957 Wolfenden Report on homosexual offenses and prostitution. The government-commissioned report famously recommended the decriminalization of gay sex on the basis of "a realm of private morality and immorality which is. . . not the law's business." In doing so, it not only captured the attention of U.S. homophiles and advocates, who had particular interests in overturning state sodomy laws, but also inspired transatlantic reportage and legal debate that helped to make a sexual privacy right conceptually legible and politically realizable. Elaborating the connection between Wolfenden and Griswold, this article probes the resonance between the Supreme Court's attention to "penumbras" and the insights of queer history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historical aspects of the boundaries of law in places such as America as of 2017, and it mentions the history of legal theory, the influence of English judicial decisions on U.S. law, and information about the changes involving the boundary between law and non-law. The case method of teaching that was used by the late Harvard Law School professor Christopher Columbus Langdell is examined, along with legal judgments, judicial opinions, and primary sources of law.

This article discusses the enactment of the Jones Act of 1917, which granted United States citizenship to Puerto Ricans. The author comments on the role of U.S. policymakers and legislators in the Jones Act and also examines the impact of the U.S. entrance into World War I. The history of colonialism in Puerto Rico is also explored.

In 1948, Congress enacted corrective legislation amending the citizenship provisions of both the Jones Act of 1917 and the Nationality Act of 1940. Under prevailing naturalization laws, a person born in Puerto Rico who acquired a U.S. citizenship under the terms of the Jones Act was given a naturalized citizenship status. It followed that Puerto Ricans, like other naturalized citizens, who continuously resided or worked outside of the United States for five or more years were automatically denaturalized. The Pagán Amendment of 1948 sought to correct this problem by establishing that Puerto Ricans were not naturalized immigrants. Drawing on publicly available archival documents, this note explains the key debates shaping the legal contours of the Pagán Amendment of 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historical aspects of the Internet and its impact on the law and the legal systems in places such as the U.S., and it mentions law avoidance strategies, the book "Who Controls the Internet" by Jack Goldsmith, and an article in the current issue of the journal which deals with regulatory entrepreneurship. Cyberspace and territorial sovereignty are examined, along with the novel "Cryptnomicon" by John Perry Barlow.

The article discusses the tenure of Edward Terry (T.) Sanford as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1920s on the court of Court of Chief Justice William Howard Taft, including Sanford's involvement in U.S. Constitution First Amendment and public interest cases. An overview of Sanford's participation in concurring and dissenting judicial opinions on lawsuit cases, including on U.S. laws, is provided.

In this article, the author examines whether or not there is a constitutional right to a properly sworn jury in the U.S. Particular focus is given to the history of jury trials, which include elements from Roman law, Germanic law and Canon law. Additional topics discussed include the history of oaths in culture, including the first chapters of the book of Genesis in the bible, oaths from institutions including the Boy Scouts of America, and the 1970 court case Williams v. Florida.

An essay is presented on the question of patent-eligible subject matter as governed by title 35, section 101 of the United States Code (U.S.C.). It examines the history of section 101 jurisprudence, particularly the Patent Act of 1793 and the Patent Act of 1952, the functional and jurisdictional viewpoints of section 101, and argues that the threshold inquiry is the proper role of the section. It also discusses the U.S. Supreme Court cases Gottschalk v. Benson, Parker v. Flook, and Diamond v. Diehr.

Colonial women in North America did not enjoy more advantages and legal freedoms than their counterparts in England. The approximately 60,000 women who emigrated from England to the colonies between 1630 and 1700 left behind the benefits of a complex but comprehensive system of English law that protected and served their needs with a level of sophistication that the American courts lacked. Though Anglo-American culture remained fundamentally patriarchal throughout the early modern period, in the seventeenth century the English legal system provided women with more varied and robust methods of circumventing the law of coverture than did the colonial legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between U.S. law and international trade. Emphasis is given to topics such as the ratification of international trade treaties such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the influence of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, and debate over commercial treaties during the era of the Founding Fathers.

Married women in the early nineteenth century United States were not permitted to own property, enter into contracts without their husband's permission, or stand in court as independent persons. This severely limited married women's ability to engage in formal business ventures, collect rents, administer estates, and manage bequests through wills. By the dawn of the twentieth century, legal reform in nearly every state had removed these restrictions by extending formal legal and economic rights to married women. Legal reform being by nature a public good with dispersed benefits, what forces impelled legislators to undertake the costs of action? In this paper, I argue that interjurisdictional competition between states and territories in the nineteenth century was instrumental in motivating these reforms. Two conditions are necessary for interjurisdictional competition to function: (1) law-makers must hold a vested interest in attracting population to their jurisdictions, and (2) residents must be able to actively choose between the products of different jurisdictions. Using evidence from the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts, I find that legal reforms were adopted first and in the greatest strength in those regions in which there was active interjurisdictional competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trust form may have afforded transaction planners all the incidents of so-called ‘corporateness' prior to the enactment of general incorporation statutes, but in England the Companies Acts hindered the development of the business trust, and in the United States, the inability of the common law to distinguish adequately between partnerships and trusts made its use uncertain. Whereas the common law in England charted a complicated path to circumvent prohibitions in the Companies Acts, undoing confusion in American common law, which relied on English precedent, required legislative intervention. This narrative complicates interpretations of the state's role in the development of organizational law. The state could help to break down intellectual barriers impeding the progress of the common law as much as the common law could seek out ways in which to circumvent the strictures of state-imposed regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Congressional delegation choices are widely studied, but scholars have overlooked the states as an inherent part of this process. How do members of Congress with state constituents delegate responsibility to the states? This article incorporates states and legislators with state-based interests in a theory of intergovernmental delegation and argues that members of Congress consider their relationship with their state government vis-à-vis their connection with the national executive branch as they make intergovernmental delegation choices. This theory is tested against current explanations of decentralization: Republican devolution, average partisan congruence between Congress and the states, and policy type using a novel data set spanning over 30 years, 30,000 provisions, and 197 significant laws. Not only is support for the theory of intergovernmental delegation found, but alternative explanations fail to explain the degree of responsibility delegated to the states in national law, demonstrating the importance of national and state political contexts on delegation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which discusses the U.S. Southern States prisoners' civil rights movement from the 1960s through the 1990s, commenting on the historiography of mass incarceration in the U.S. (referred to as the carceral state) and the legal struggles of prisoners. An overview of prisoners' lawsuits over their prison conditions, including the Texas prisoner class-action civil rights lawsuit "Ruíz v. Estelle," is provided.

The article discusses the lynching of African Americans in the South at the end of the 19th century, focusing on civil rights activist Ida B. Wells and the relationship between normative law and Lynch Law. Other topics include how racist cultural norms contribute to the rise in Lynch Law, Wells's efforts to characterize lynching as illegal, and how Lynch Law fit into the power struggle between local, state, and federal government.

The article discusses the role of politician Thomas B. Watters, his role a mayor of Klamath Falls, Oregon from 1953 until 1958, and his relationship with the Klamath Tribe of Southern Oregon. Other topics mentioned in this article include Watters' termination policy, Klamath member Wade Crawford, and U.S. law and lawmaking.

When the U.S. Supreme Court sits with an even number of justices participating, there is a risk that the Court will be deadlocked in a tied vote. While this outcome awards the individual respondent with a victory, it also preserves circuit splits and other ambiguities in the law. In this article, we examine the conditions under which an even-membered Supreme Court actually results in a tie vote. We argue that the Court recognizes the potentially damaging consequences of 4-4 rulings and seeks to avoid them when those consequences would be most severe. Consistent with that conjecture, we find that ties are less likely when a decision is necessary to resolve a dispute in the lower courts and when cases are important to the executive branch. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior literature suggests that presidents use signing statements to unilaterally move policy closer to their own ideal point after Congress has already voted on and passed a particular bill. Congress, however, retains the ability to revisit and amend the law by passing another bill. A presidential signing statement may thus make a law less durable and more likely to be amended in the future. To investigate this relationship, we examine all laws passed from the 95th through the 108th Congresses in order to demonstrate the specific influence of presidential signing statements on future congressional amendment activity. The results of our analysis lend support to the theory that laws receiving presidential signing statements are in fact more likely to be revisited and revised by Congress. These findings add to the literature both on presidential signing statements as well as the evolution of laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts Bd. of Retirement v. Murgia, specifically the division on the Court concerning the legal concept the rational basis test. The article also discusses the legal concept known as the equal protection doctrine, the majority opinion of then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., a dissent by then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and the role of then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. It also discusses the case United States Railroad Retirement Board v. Fritz.

The article discusses two schools of legal thought in Germany and the United States in the early twentieth century which both criticized the alleged formalism of classical nineteenth-century legal theory: the so-called Freirechtsbewegung (Free Law Movement) and Legal Realism, respectively. The author compares the two schools' approaches to the interpretation and construction of law and to legal normativity. In addition, she reflects on the interpretation of the two schools in the historiography of German and American jurisprudence, including in the works of legal historians David Rabban and Luigi Lombardi Vallauri.

Whereas the rational choice approach to international law has been widely accepted in legal scholarship and international relations theory, challenges to the rational choice paradigm in economic analysis of international law have hitherto not been systematically explored. Nevertheless, behavioral law, economics and psychology have been successfully applied to national law constellations. Behavioral economic insights have furthermore been used in international relations scholarship under the heading of "political psychology," but international norms are neglected. Building on all those insights, this Article explores the potential and challenges of extending the behavioral law and economics approach to public international law and thus to further refine our understanding of international law. It looks specifically at treaty design problems and compliance questions. This ties in with increased use of empirical research in international law, a clear desideratum for evidence-based international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading Professor Obama mines Barack Obama's syllabus on "Current Issues in Racism and the Law" for evidence of his beliefs about race, law, and jurisprudence. The syllabus for the 1994 seminar at the University of Chicago, which provides the reading assignments and structure for the course, has been available on the New York Times website since July 2008. Other than a few responses solicited by the New York Times when it published the syllabus, however, there has been little attention to the material Obama assigned or to what it suggests about Obama's approach to the law and race. The class began with four weeks of foundational readings followed by four weeks of student-led class discussions. The readings started by discussing the malleability of racial categories and progressed to cases from the nineteenth century on Native Americans and on slavery. The second day's readings shifted to the Reconstruction era and changes in the Constitution and statutory law, as well as the rise of the "Jim Crow" system of segregation and the response of African American intellectuals. The third class covered the Civil Rights revolution and retrenchment. It included reading from such diverse figures as Robert Bork, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. The fourth class, "Where Do We Go From Here?," addressed some of the enduring issues of inequality facing our nation, the fragility of the African American middle class, continuing racism against African Americans, and a plea for more understanding. After the initial four class meetings, student groups selected additional readings and led class discussions on a variety of race-related topics. The syllabus has suggested topics for the presentations and brief discussion of those topics. The media has called attention to President Obama's public relationship with Derrick Bell; notwithstanding the option to read Bell's summaries of cases in lieu of the actual opinions, the readings have no overt endorsement of Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory ("CRT"), or Bell's Interest-Convergence theory. Obama included many critics of CRT and offered readings that seemingly demonstrate his hope for substantially more dialog and perhaps, ultimately, economic uplift of those labeled by some of his readings "the truly disadvantaged." Obama's use of the Martin Luther King, Jr.'s essay Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? as the title of the last group of readings suggests that Obama did not share Bell's vision of the unalterable nature of racism. The readings, while instructive, are just the starting point of our analysis. Obama's suggested topics encourage students to wrestle with the modern consequences of racism and to question its malleability. Thus, we suggest that the readings and group presentation topics reveal Obama, the teacher, as interested in, but not necessarily aligned with, many of the key questions of CRT. The syllabus fits with the story that Obama focuses on issues that unite Americans while he seeks equal treatment. This may reflect the future of constitutional doctrine related to race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy experts often trace the right to privacy to Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis's 1890 Harvard Law Review essay that called for judges to develop privacy law in the United States. Yet when those attorneys criticized the prying of newspaper journalists, they cited commentary by the Nation's Edwin Lawrence Godkin. Between 1880 and 1890, several periodicals published this leading nineteenth-century editor's press criticism, in which Godkin denounced the sensationalism and triviality of cheap newspapers that exposed domestic life to public scrutiny. This article argues that in his criticism can be found antecedents for American privacy law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. legislation on Christian organizations' property from the 17th century through the early 21st century, including the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court case "Watson v. Jones." An overview of the U.S. government's policy on charitable donations, including charities' qualifying for tax exemptions under the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's tax code, is provided.

Each of the Civil War Amendments vests in Congress the power to enforce its provisions by "appropriate legislation."¹ As late as the 1980s, it was generally accepted that the enforcement power, under any of the Civil War Amendments, was as broad as the implementing power of the Necessary and Proper Clause: Legislation was valid so long as it was rationally related to the substantive prohibitions of the amendment it sought to enforce.² By the late 1990s, this understanding was no longer settled. A series of cases³, culminating in Shelby County v. Holder,4 limited Congress's power to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, although no such development has occurred with respect to the Thirteenth Amendment. This asymmetry of the enforcement power is only tangentially addressed here; the principal focus is on Congress's power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. Is that power identical to the power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment? What does Shelby County mean for the remainder of the Voting Rights Act? Has Shelby County called into question the constitutional validity of other portions of the Voting Rights Act? Did Shelby County import to the Fifteenth Amendment the congruence and proportionality test from the Fourteenth Amendment and, if so, might that test gravitate to the Thirteenth Amendment? This essay seeks to answer these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of U.S. federal case law with a focus on the justiciability of claims involving foreign affairs and national security, with an emphasis on the U.S. Supreme Court case Baker v. Carr. The author surveys the history of the Supreme Court on earlier cases related to slavery, immigration, and Japanese internment. The decisions of lower courts are also considered as to the individual rights of claimants involving customary international law or foreign policy issues.

Every person has the right to free speech, including a franchisor's executives and its franchisees. But what of the economic interests of parties impacted by the controversial speech of their business associates? Despite the Constitutional right to speak, in practice, political or social commentary can be very costly for both franchisors and franchisees insofar as it impacts how consumers view the franchised brand. If it can be deterred or at least compensated, then the harm from this mixing of business and politics is a type of self-inflicted wound. Such unnecessary linkage of politics to a business brand may constitute a breach of duty to other business parties, who have rights to more ample disclosures, more robust remedies (such as counter statements), and other measures to protect the franchised network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the legal philosophy of former U.S. Supreme Court justice, attorney, and legal theorist James Wilson and his influence on American jurisprudence. It examines his political and constitutional theory and his conception of the U.S. Constitution, his intellectual differences with the "The Federalist" papers authors known as Publius, Wilson's thoughts about the American Revolution, and Wilson's jurisprudence and republicanism following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Seventy-two years ago the historians Irving Mark and Oscar Handlin typed up and published the manuscript notes taken at the renowned 1766 trial of the Dutchess County land rioter William Prendergast. Ever since, scholars of the Hudson Valley, of New York, of colonial America, and of American history more generally have relied on Mark and Handlin's version of this rich source to give voice to the historically silent, confident that the printed words are, as the editors wrote, ''exactly as they appear'' in the original document. Comparison of the two texts, however, reveals a plethora of errors large and small that, taken together, render the published account deeply flawed. After tracing these corruptions of the manuscript, this essay goes on to wonder how many of the other published annals of colonial records produced over the past two centuries, on which historians rely so heavily, similarly distort or otherwise obscure our view of early America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historiography of the 1866 U.S. Supreme Court case Ex parte Milligan. It examines the case's influence on historians, discusses the circumstances of the case, former U.S. Supreme Court justice David Davis, and discusses the scholarship concerning the case. It also discusses the legal concept of habeas corpus, Indiana attorney Lambdin Milligan, and the law during the U.S. Civil War.

In the Supreme Court’s most closely divided cases, one pivotal justice can determine the outcome. Given this fact, judicial scholars have paid substantial attention to the swing justice. This article makes two theoretical contributions to the study of the swing justice and this justice’s resulting influence on case outcomes. First, we show that in a substantial number of cases, the justice that casts the pivotal vote is not the median justice on the Court. Second, we argue that the swing justice will typically rely less on attitudinal considerations and more on strategic and legal considerations than the other justices on the Court. The analysis suggests that even among the Court’s most closely divided decisions, which are typically thought to reflect the Court’s most ideologically driven outcomes, the pivotal swing vote is significantly less likely to reflect attitudinal predispositions and more likely to reflect strategic considerations, such as the public’s preferences, and case-specific considerations such as the position advocated by the Solicitor General. The theory and findings suggest that a failure to consider the unique behavior of a pivotal actor—whether on the Supreme Court or any other decision-making body—can lead to incorrect conclusions about the determinants of policy outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the constitutional significance of the October 1963 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. According to the article, the Court heard cases on subjects in ares concerning constitutional law such as racial segregation and civil rights, the rights of accused criminals, and obscenity laws. The article discusses several cases heard by the Court such as NAACP v. Alabama, 'New York Times" v. Sullivan, and Aguilar v. Texas.

The article discusses the impact of the American Revolutionary War on colonial law and legal systems, focusing on the writings of artisan and state politician Benjamin Austin, Jr. who published a series of essays in the "Independent Chronicle" newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts under the pseudonym Honestus beginning in the spring of 1786. Shays's Rebellion and the 1786 Referee Act in Massachusetts are mentioned, along with English common law and the views of scholar Alexis de Tocqueville.

The article discusses the history of extraordinary rendition and extradition of alleged criminals from the late 18th century through the early 21st century, with a particular focus on the U.S. The U.S.'s use of extraordinary rendition to combat terrorism, including during the U.S.'s prosecution of its Global War on Terror during the 2000s, is discussed.