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Ed. Note. The following article is a revised translation of Dr. Polzin’s chapter, “Carl Schmitt als Strafrechtler,” in A. Koch et al., Strafrecht zwischen Novemberrevolution und Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). The author would like to thank her former assistant Donat Danics for his invaluable help with the translation. The Beginning of the Search…

Jeffery Jenkins and Justin Peck kindly agreed to discuss their new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), with The Docket. They had previously published a major article in Law & History Review entitled, “Building Toward Major Policy Change: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1941-1950” (vol. 31,…

What do we mean when we say the secularization of law? What exactly becomes secular?  I puzzled over this question while researching the Bible War which began in Ohio in 1869 when Cincinnati’s public school board voted to end opening the school day with Bible reading. The board was trying to entice into the schools…

In the 2008 film, Frost/Nixon, James Reston, played by Sam Rockwell, looks into the camera and says of President Richard M. Nixon, “His most lasting legacy is that today any political wrongdoing is immediately given the suffix ‘-gate.’” Whether apocryphal or not, the quote is both incisive and superficial.[1] On the one hand, Reston was…

This past summer, The Docket asked Professor Cary Franklin to interview Professor Amanda Tyler about Tyler’s new book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021) which she coauthored with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court….