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Nelson Lichtenstein Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, xi + 336 pp. Nelson Lichtenstein's State of the Union is more than a history. It is a story of what [...]

In an important article published in 1988, Johan Van der Vyver challenged the prevailing reliance on Wesley Hohfeld’s taxonomy of rights. Hohfeld's division of rights into claims, powers, privileges and immunities, Van der Vyver stresses, is excessively concerned with "inter-individual legal relations” at the expense of the right-holder's relationship to the object of the right. Van der Vyver proposes instead that an assertion of right involves three distinct juridic aspects: • legal capacity, which is "the competence to occupy the offices of legal subject; • legal claim, which "comprises claims of a legal subject as against other persons to a legal object"; • legal entitlement, which specifies the boundaries of the right-holder's ability to use, enjoy, consume, destroy or alienate the right in question. This article applies Van der Vyver’s taxonomy to the operations of thirteenthcentury canon law, and demonstrates that Van der Vyver’s analysis provides greater depth than Hohfeld's, in that it considers both the relationship of the person claiming a particular right and the object of that right.

By Kenneth Pennington. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1993. Pp. xiii, 335. $40. INTRODUCTION Kenneth Pennington's(1) new book can fairly be called a tour de force. Pennington [...]

Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective. Edited by John Witte, Jr., and Eliza Ellison. [Religion, Marriage, and Family.] (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. xiv, 342. $34.00 [...]

Religious Expression and the American Constitution. By Franklyn S. Haiman. [Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series.] (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 254. Paperback.) Franklyn Haiman begins by [...]

This is an Article with a dual purpose. First, it is concerned with the process of law reform: how do we judge a given reform's success or failure? Do we adopt strictly linear metrics? Or do we look at nonlinear impacts? For example, in the campaign against tobacco, do we judge it a success because it has reduced cigarette smoking? Or because it reduced the political power of the tobacco companies? Secondly, in this Article, I apply this complex means of analyzing law reform to the Emperor Augustus's morals legislation. Legal historians have typically regarded Augustus's morals legislation as having achieved, at best, mixed results. These historians, however, have tended to perform a linear assessment of the legislation. Did Augustus achieve the results he professed to want; that is, were cases of adultery prosecuted more frequently? Was elite childbirth encouraged? I argue, in contrast, that the legislation must be seen against Augustus's larger political agenda, which was the subjection of elite families to the laws of the emerging Roman Empire. Seen in these political terms, I argue that the legislation can be judged in substantial measure as successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article focuses on the role of the Constitution in the 1830 congressional debate over the Buffalo-to-Washington-to-New Orleans National Road.' The piece takes as its inspiration David Currie's monumental study of the antebellum Congress as constitutional interpreter. It moves beyond Currie, however, in the intensity of its focus on a single congressional debate. The debate over the National Road was largely a proxy for the larger struggles over slavery and sectionalism. The Road's supporters generally represented northern or western states and took a nationalist view of the Constitution. These supporters understood the Union as an organic entity: a single nation comprised of a single People, united to attain large and shared objectives. They understood the Constitution as facilitating these objectives. They were bold in the various creative, if not novel, constructions they placed on the Constitution. They paid little heed to arguments about states ' rights or limited and enumerated constitutional powers. The opposition was centered in the South, although opponents also drew support from some northern sympathizers. The Road's opponents viewed the highway as a threat to the southern slave-based economy and mustered various constitutional objections to the Road's construction. The Constitution was one of limited and enumerated powers, they argued, and it did not include the authority to construct highways. Similarly, they argued, the Constitution created a loose "confederacy" of sovereign states, united for only a few specifically identified purposes. States ' rights were, under this analysis, the central organizing principle of the Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]