JonesMartha S., Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020) pp 339. US$30 (hardback). ISBN: 978-1541618619.

BartoszBrozekJuliaStanekJerzyStelmach (eds), Russian Legal Realism (Springer Nature, Cham2018) pp i–xi, 176 $117.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-3-319-98821-4.

American Journal of Legal History, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/njaa025.

LvovskyAnna, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp 360. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0226769783.

[The story of liability for ‘nervous shock’ begins with the Privy Council decision in Victorian Railways Commissioners v Coultas in 1888 holding that such damage was too remote—a decision soon rejected by courts in England and elsewhere (though it had considerable influence in the United States). Over the next hundred years, courts gradually extended the boundaries of liability for what is now called

di Renzo VillataMaria Gigliola (ed), Succession Law, Practice and Society in Europe across the Centuries (Cham, Switzerland: Springer2018), pp xxiii, 640, €228.79 (hardback). ISBN 978-3-319-76257-9.

KhorakiwalaRahela, From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India’s High Courts (Oxford: Hart, 2019), pp 296, £70 (Hardcover) ISBN: 9781509953554

LobbanMichaelWilliamsIan (eds.), Networks and Connections in Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. viii+344. £85 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781108490887

PriestClaire, Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021) pp 248. USD 39.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0691158761

Erasmo da Rotterdam, Prefazioni ai Vangeli. 1516–1522, Latin parallel text, edited by MenchiSilvana Seidel (Torino: Einaudi, 2021). Pp. XCII, 174. €24.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-88-06-23046-3.

AblavskyGregory, Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) pp 360. USD 39.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0190905699

GrinbergKeila, A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) pp 226. GBP 18.00 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-4696-5277-1.

Local by-laws were the primary tool for local governments in British-ruled Palestine to exercise their authority, and water was the paradigmatic subject for local legislation. Looking at the diffusion of legal norms in local by-laws in the 1930s and 1940s, the article examines the dynamics of lawmaking in a context characterized both by imperial rule and intercommunal conflict. The article asks two

MayeuxSara, Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Pp. 296. $32.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1469656021.

FrosioGiancarlo, Reconciling Copyright with Cumulative Creativity: The Third Paradigm (Cheltenham, United Kingdom, and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2018) pp viii and 390. GBP 110.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-78811-417-2.

This article examines the origins of the doctrine of puffery in Britain, in the first decades of its development during the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. The doctrine is a curious legal construct. Usually invoked as a defence, it identifies futile speech, typically of a seller, which does not give rise to liability. It operated, as it still does, in several fields of law. The analysis

The article offers a historical approach to one of the most understudied areas of international humanitarian law by focusing on the successes and shortfalls of the two international armed conflicts with the highest numbers of civilians interned in global history. Through the study of State practice during Word War I and Word War II, the author addresses the causes and justifications that led to massive

The mid-nineteenth century was the formative period of doctrines that dominated international law debates in Latin America until well into the twentieth century. José María Torres Caicedo (1830–89) is one of the least-known international law scholars from those years. Torres Caicedo’s vast experience as a diplomat provided him with a sharp political instinct, which nurtured his academic work about

GrossAriela J and de la FuenteAlejandro, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 281. $24.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1108480642.

AbstractThis article addresses the correctness of Samuel Moyn’s contention that the inclusion of ‘dignity’ in the Irish Constitution of 1937 reflects a particularistic, sectarian and conservative Catholic viewpoint, rather than (as some other scholars do) seeing the inclusion of ‘dignity’ as the first tentative step towards the instantiation of a universalistic, liberal human rights ethic into the

The winner of the Alfred L. Brophy Prize is Lea VanderVelde’s article entitled “The Anti-Republican Origins of the At-Will Doctrine.” A description from the prize committee reads:

AbstractThis article highlights the origin of the employment at-will rule by providing the contextual contrast of Reconstruction free labor republicanism. To date, no work has situated the doctrine’s emergence in the heady Reconstruction discussions of labor reform that immediately preceded it. This article briefly summarizes how the at-will rule functions to subordinate employees. The article then

ZieglerMary, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. xvii+ 312. $29.99 (paper). ISBN no. 9781108735599.

ZarnowLeandra Ruth, Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). Pp. x + 441. $35.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780674737488.

AbstractThe City of Glasgow Bank’s collapse in 1878 was the largest bank failure of its time. The causes of the crash and its impact on joint-stock banking and the Scottish and British economy have been well-studied, but how its liquidation was concluded remains under-explored. At the same time, the legal and commercial milieu of nineteenth-century Britain spawned a new type of commercial entity—the

AbstractSwedish students commonly studied abroad, especially during the seventeenth century. This was true also for those studying law. This article examines the legal dissertations that Swedish students defended during their visits to foreign universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The universities of Greifswald and Leiden produced the most dissertations with Swedish respondents

In many constitutions, constitutional duties appear alongside constitutional rights. However, the history of constitutional duties, unlike the history of constitutional rights, is a neglected topic. This article is a case study of the history of constitutional duties in Israel. The article documents the appearance of duties in Israeli constitutional texts and debates in the 1950s and shows that the

This article focuses on the exceptional mildness of criminal punishments for alleged traitors in the wake of the American Revolution. American leaders were disinclined to inflict the death penalty on loyalists who supported British rule in the revolutionary war or on insurgents in the Shays, Whiskey, and Fries rebellions shortly after independence. In fact, the Founding Fathers and other first-generation

The Irish Free State came into existence in 1922 as a self-governing state with a substantial Catholic majority. This article examines the special constitutional provisions adopted in 1922 that were aimed at religious minorities in the new state. The Protestant community comprised the largest religious minority in 1922 and was particularly vulnerable as many of its members had opposed the foundation

The process of empanelling a jury in nineteenth-century England was controlled in most of the country by the County Juries Act 1825. At a formal level, the process was orderly and followed three stages: the preparation of a jury panel from the county jurors’ books, the summoning of the men on the jury panel, and the selection of the trial jury from the panel. In practice, the county sheriffs and undersheriffs

Why are the Black brownstone owners and landlords in Harlem and Brooklyn disproportionately West Indian? For students of housing discrimination, Black West Indian Americans have long presented a quandary. West Indian Americans generally own and rent higher quality housing than African Americans. These advantages began long ago. For example, when racial covenants, that is, restrictions barring certain

The Historical Logics of Work Accident Law Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 300. $59.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1108488709.

SchoeppnerMichael A., Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Pp. 264. $59.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1108469999.

McSweeneyThomas J., Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Pp. 304. £ 70 (Hardback). ISBN: 9780198845454.

In recent decades, accusations of partisanship by the U.S. judiciary have intensified. A consequence has been the erroneous framing of judges within the conventional, and some-times epithetical, political binary of liberalism and conservatism. This article argues that the application of such labels has distorted the full thrust of the complex individuals who have constituted the American judiciary

The US Army's war crimes trials of the hundreds of Japanese military personnel tried at Manila from 1945 to 1947 represent an opportunity to gain valuable insights into Allied 'justice' at a time when many aspects of war crimes jurisprudence were at a formative stage. Specifically, the Manila trials offer a unique portal into the jurisprudence of the doctrine of command responsibility. The 'command

The railways have been described as Britain's 'gift to the world'. The sheer scale, ambition and audaciousness of the engineering still inspires awe and reshaped the landscape forever. They brought towns and cities closer together and instigated irreversible economic, political and social changes. However, as is often the case with a new technology, the railways also brought negative side effects,

This article examines the life circumstances of the mid-Victorian women who petitioned for dissolution of their marriage by commencing proceedings for nullity or divorce at the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in two sample years, 1858 and 1868. The results of a longitudinal analysis of multiple source records relating to the women petitioners challenge currently accepted understandings of

Immediately after the Civil War, freedmen and freedwomen faced an uncertain legal landscape, caught between former owners, reactionary state courts, and a still-potent federal military presence. A system of federal Freedmen’s Bureau courts provided many freedpeople with a forum to seek justice outside of often-hostile state courts. A remarkably complete set of documents from one Bureau Court in Leon

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the setting up of university law schools in many African nations led to often bitter battles over the purpose of legal education. The stakes in these struggles were high. Deliberately neglected under colonial rule, legal education was an important focus for the leaders of new states, including Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana. It was also a significant focus

This study traces how Anglo-American legal thinkers used primitive law to develop their concepts of modern law in the century from Austin to Hart. It first examines how Maine developed his historical jurisprudence as a form of social evolutionary analysis of law. Next, it traces the development of legal anthropology as a distinct discipline combining the scientific method of participant observation

This article observes a little-noted proposal (the Landed Property of Intestates Bill) introduced into the British Parliament in 1836. It considers the debate upon it that ensued, and the accompanying pamphlet literature. The Bill proposed to alter the inheritance custom of primogeniture that directed the pattern of descent of freehold land in the absence of directions by settlement or will, and the

The grand jury of New Zealand existed for 118 years, but virtually nothing is known about its operation. This article shows that the grand jury of New Zealand developed from an imported institution in 1844 to one that somewhat more closely reflected New Zealand's needs. Nevertheless, from the first there were voices calling for its abolition and considerable diversity of opinion about its aims and

The treatise of the Swiss philosopher and jurist Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations (1758), is well known in the United States and has attracted sustained scholarly atten- tion. Against the widespread assumption that the reception of The Law of Nations in America only started in 1775, this article establishes that Vattel's treatise was available on American soil already in 1762. This finding paves

This article presents the findings of an empirical study of the ways in which railroads and the individuals they killed or injured handled claims for compensation from the 1840's to the beginning of the twentieth century. These findings are based on original research in the papers and official records of a variety of railroads. The unpublished papers relating to personal injuries of several railroads

The emergence of a new form of originalism has sparked an interest in the theory’s past that is particularly welcome as developments on the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party unsettle the theory’s place in American law and politics. Our understanding of the theory’s development, however, has been limited by an unfortunate and unnecessary division between what are now two separate histories of

This article focuses on a concerted intellectual and political movement for the reform of the U.S. constitution, led by a constellation of radicals based in Philadelphia and inspired by the constitutional example of the French Republic. In response to what radical journalists like Benjamin Franklin Bache and Thomas Paine perceived to be the monarchial drift of the late Washington administration, they

This article studies the emergence of European law by exploring the life and career of Michel Gaudet, a French jurist who, behind the scene and out of the political spotlight, played a central role in fostering the European legal order in the 1950s and 1960s. As director at the legal service of the European Communities executives, Gaudet significantly contributed to the legal revolution that quasi-constitutionalized

Kevin Butterfield, The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2015). Pp. viii + 336. $40.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-226-29708-8. In The Making of Tocqueville’s America , Kevin Butterfield draws our attention to the fact that the founding generation feared unchecked private governance just as much as it feared unchecked federal

David Cole, Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law (New York: Basic Books, 2016). Pp. viii+307. $27.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-465-06090-0. David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown Law Center and, as well, a prominent civil liberties litigator, has written an excellent book about the role that “civil society groups” play in “shaping constitutional law” (p. 6)

Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball, On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Pp. xi + 688. $39.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-674-96766-3. This first of a two-volume bicentennial history of the Harvard Law School traces the institution from its founding in 1817 through the death of Dean James Barr Ames in 1909. The various

This article examines the development of the federal coercion power of the U.S. government during the period from the Declaration of Independence to the Civil War. Although unhappy with the states’ defiance of federal requisitions, the Founders agreed at the Constitutional Convention that the national government should not have the power to coerce individual states militarily to force them into compliance

Reuel Schiller, Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Pp. xv + 343. $29.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-107-01226-4. Forging Rivals is a creative, comprehensively researched, eminently readable work that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the late twentieth-century American liberalism. Schiller is a professor of

Melvin I. Urofsky, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court’s History and the Nation’s Constitutional Dialogue (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015). Pp. xiii + 528 $35.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-307-37940-5. Melvin Urofsky has written a wide-ranging and intriguing study of how the justices of the United States Supreme Court have dissented from majority opinions and how we should think about

One of the central problems of modern bioethics concerns the relative merits of medical expertise, legal authority and patient autonomy. This article examines the pre-modern conflict between these principles, revealing how the early tradition of Jewish law sustained different models of expertise, authority and personal autonomy. Rabbinic sources preserve opposed and contradictory voices regarding who

Karen L. Walloch. The Antivaccine Heresy: Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the Troubled History of Compulsory Vaccination . (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. 2015). Pp. x + 352. $125 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-58046-537-3. Jacobson v. Massachusetts is the Rorschach test of constitutional law. Ever since the Supreme Court issued the decision in 1905, jurists and legal scholars have cited it

Felice Batlan, Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Pp. xv + 238 pages. $32.99 paperback. ISBN 978-1-1074-4641-0. In 1950, Margaret K. Rosenheim, who was a lawyer but not a credentialed social worker, joined the faculty of the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. For decades, she taught a legendary course

In the early evening of November 23, 1770, a group of lawyers gathered at a tavern in lower Manhattan in New York City. Located on the lower part of Broadway, the King’s Arms was kept by Edward Bardin, who had been in New York since 1764.1 The lawyers, all men, met that night to launch a members only club dedicated to their professional interests, “Conversation, and…mutual Improvement.”2 The club,

Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Footnotes, Bibliographic Essay, Bibliography, Index. Pp. xii, 212, 29.99 (pb), ISBN: 9781107401341. Laura F. Edwards, Peabody Professor of History at Duke University, has prepared a thought-provoking assessment of how law affected the Civil War and Reconstruction and

Brian Phillips Murphy, Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 304 pages. $49.95, ISBN: 9780812247169. Brian Phillips Murphy’s impressive and richly documented account about the state and the marketplace in early republican New York will be of great interest to legal historians. Between the American Revolution and the