Legal History

From the early sixteenth century, thousands of fishermen-traders from Basque, Breton, and Norman ports crossed the Atlantic each year to engage in ...

From the early sixteenth century, thousands of fishermen-traders from Basque, Breton, and Norman ports crossed the Atlantic each year to engage in ...

In preparing the long-awaited second edition of his well-liked text, Kent Newmyer consulted the best and most relevant of the recent scholarship on...

Should laws apply equally to everyone, or should some individuals and organizations be granted exemptions because of conflicting religious or moral...

In a series of fifteen vivid essays, this book discusses the contributions of great common-law jurists and singular documents—namely the Magna Cart...

Americans have long been obsessed with their images—their looks, public personas, and the impressions they make. This preoccupation has left its ma...

The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. When the Chinese emerged victorious with ...

Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate ...

Bridging law, genetics, and statistics, this book is an authoritative history of the long and tortuous process by which DNA science has been integr...

Conservative opponents of LGBT equality in the United States often couch their opposition in claims of free speech, free association, and religious...

The New Deal is often said to represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a century of precedent to permit an expanded f...

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exception...

“A wonderful excavation of the first era of civil rights lawyering.”—Randall L. Kennedy, author of The Persistence of the Color Line“Ken Mack bring...

Mixing idealism with violence, abolitionist John Brown cut a wide swath across the United States before winding up in Virginia, where he led an att...

The danger of deportation hangs over the head of virtually every noncitizen in the United States. In the complexities and inconsistencies of immigr...

Saving the Neighborhood tells the charged, still controversial story of the rise and fall of racially restrictive covenants in America, and offers ...

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: “We the People.” Robert Tsai’s gripping history of alternative constitu...

At a time when legal and social prohibitions on sexual relationships are declining, Americans are still nearly unanimous in their condemnation of a...

Stephen C. Neff offers the first comprehensive study of the wide range of legal issues arising from the American Civil War, many of which resonate ...

Richard Mendelson brings together his expertise as both a Napa Valley lawyer and a winemaker into this accessible overview of American wine law fro...

The Law Code of Viṣṇu (Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra) is one of the latest of the ancient Indian legal texts composed around the seventh century CE in Kash...

In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of men and women were sterilized at asylums and prisons across America. Believing that criminality and mental ill...

This in-depth examination of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 provides a chronological review of the events, ordinances, and pervasive attitudes t...

In this bold and timely work, law professor Jeffrey Shulman argues that the United States Constitution does not protect a fundamental right to pare...

  In America today, a public official’s lawful income consists of a salary. But until a century ago, the law frequently provided for officials to m...

A fresh assessment of the infamous murder case that exploded into an affair of international concern What began as the obscure local case of two It...

Making extensive use of archival and other primary sources, David Schorr demonstrates that the development of the “appropriation doctrine,” a syste...

This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive account of the juridiction consulaire, or Merchant Court, of eighteenth-century Paris. Dr...

Not just for lawyers, these illuminating histories of popular law-related expressions will delight anyone fascinated by words, by history, or by la...

The eight volumes of The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789 1800 gather together documents from the National Arch...

An interesting read for professional jurists, court administrators, and scholars concerned with lay adjudication or East German legal institutions,...

In the years before the Civil War, many Americans saw the sea as a world apart, an often violent and insular culture governed by its own definition...

Until the nineteenth century, the Russian legal system was subject to an administrative hierarchy headed by the tsar, and the courts were expected ...