“In the article I examine the historical moment of the press’s move from one problematic structure of knowledge production to another: from dependence on political patronage, to dependence on market patronage.”
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A “Peculiar Institution”: The Global and Southern Reach of the Second Bank of the United States, 1820-1840
Introduction During the course of President Andrew Jackson’s political conflict with the Second Bank of the United States—the famous “Bank War” that helped define Jackson’s presidency and contributed to the development of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs—many of Jackson’s allies argued that the Bank was ultimately harmful to the economic interests of…
Slandering “God, or the Religion Establish’t”: Taylor’s Case and Secularization in 17th Century England
“Hale claimed that, as Christianity was part of English law, offences against God ‘are as punishable as to the King, or any common person.’ In sum, Hale modified common law defamation to present Taylor as having uttered insults against God that threatened temporal damage.”
Administrative Constitutionalism and the History of the Administrative State
Editor’s Note: On October 19 and 20, 2018, University of Pennsylvania Law Review hosted a symposium on administrative constitutionalism. In the last ten years, a field of scholarship has developed that sheds new historical and theoretical light on interlocking issues of administration and constitutional law. Gathered under the moniker administrative constitutionalism, these scholars study the…
Married Women’s Property: A Medieval Perspective
Cordelia Beattie‘s article, “Married Women’s Wills: Probate, Property, and Piety in Later Medieval England,” appears in the latest issue of Law and History Review. Below, she explains some of her main insights into married women’s property in medieval England. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which gave wives the right to own their…
A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge: An Interview with Kimberly Welch
Kimberly Welch examines the diaries of William Johnson, a free black barber in antebellum Natchez, Mississippi to understand his efforts to best use the law to safeguard his rights and property.
The Law of Race and Freedom: An Interview with Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente
The fact that slaveholders across our jurisdictions complained bitterly about the rights enslaved people carved out for themselves in suing for freedom suggests that they felt threatened by these claims.
“The Great Humanitarian”: Soviet Influence on the Geneva Conventions
“When combining my records from Eastern and Western archives, I recognized a much richer history of international law than I had ever imagined before.”
Formulaic Emotions and Why They Matter in Historical Research
Merridee Bailey argues that formulaic language should be understood not as ritualized and empty but potentially reflective of strategic use of the late medieval and early modern chancery court system to seek redress.
The Jury Franchise and Ideals of Citizenship in Interwar Britain
In my article in the Law and History Review, I chart a series of reforms to the rules used for identifying people qualified as jurors in England and Wales during the 1920s. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 ended restrictions on women acting as lawyers, as judges, and as jurors, and so, as the…