How should the courts interpret “due process?” The Fifth Amendment indicates to the federal government that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, uses the same words, often called the Due Process Clause, to describe an obligation of the states. That amendment was…
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Sohum Pal reviews Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind
Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024). $45.00 (Cloth). 824 pages. Unlike France, whose common constitutional memory recognizes five separate republics, the United States venerates its first, rallying around the “Founding” in 1787 and heralding the US Constitution’s continuity as proof…
Cameron Sauers reviews Giuliana Perrone, Nothing More Than Freedom
Giuliana Perrone, Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023). $55.00 (hardcover). 316 pp. Giuliana Perrone’s Nothing More Than Freedom transforms scholarly understandings of the legal afterlife of slavery in American law. Slavery had been deeply embedded in American law. Abolition would have required legal change…
Ryan Reft–Library of Congress Sources on PGA Tour v. Martin
“I’m sorry Casey Martin has trouble walking, but he should not be given an advantage because of his disability,” David Cathey of Fayetteville, GA, wrote to Justice John Paul Stevens in May of 2001. “If he wants to play pro golf on his terms, then he should start a professional association that permits the use…
Professor Rabiat Akande discusses Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria
In May, 2020, Law and History Review published Professor Rabiat Akande’s article, “Secularizing Islam: The Colonial Encounter and the Making of a British Islamic Criminal Law in Northern Nigeria, 1903–58,” Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (May, 2020), 459-93. When we learned that Professor Akande’s book, Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria hit the shelves in 2023, we…
The Docket Interviews Ziv Bohrer and Danny Orbach
Ed. Note: In November, 2023, Law and History Review published an article by Professors Ziv Bohrer and Danny Orbach, “‘Let the Commander Respond’: The Paradox of Obedience in the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces,” Law and History Review 41, no. 4 (Nov., 2023), 817-839. Professors Bohrer and Orbach graciously took up The Docket on our offer…
Allen Boyer reviews Sir John Baker, Reports from the Notebooks of Edward Coke (2022-23)
Reports from the Notebooks of Edward Coke. Edited by Sir John Baker (Selden Society 136-140). London, 2022-2023. Volume I, 1572-1579, pp. ccxxxviii, 1-165; Volume II, 1579-1588, pp. xxxviii, 166-407; Volume III, 1594-1595, pp. xxxii, 408-659; Volume IV, 1596-1598, pp. xxxiv, 660-927; Vol. V, 1598-1600, pp. xxxv, 928-1240. £60 / $145 per volume. In 1972, as…
Saru Arifin–Coolie Ordinance 1880 in Colonial Indonesia: The Refinement of Slavery for Indigenous Laborers
Introduction The Dutch colonialists in the East Indies, presently known as Indonesia, relied significantly on agriculture as the primary pillar of their economic backbone.[1] In order to facilitate its economic activities, the Dutch government officially announced the change of the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.) from a merchant entity to a sovereign power, therefore expanding its…
Grace Mallon reviews Fritz, Monitoring American Federalism
Christian G. Fritz, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), ISBN 9781009325608, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325608. Hardcover, $39.99. Reviewed by Grace Mallon State resistance to federal policy has become a bogeyman of American history, and for good reason. Many of its great theorists and practitioners have been rabid supporters of…
Happy 6th Birthday to The Docket!
Five years ago, we took a leap of faith. Professor Sarah Barringer Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania and I had talked about it for a while, and we were willing to take a chance on a new, digital journal of legal history. The American Society for Legal History generously funded the idea and set…