Issue: Volume 7, Issues 1-2

As we approach the midway point of 2024, I wanted to take a moment to fill you in on some big changes at Law and History Review (LHR), and to glimpse at some big developments to come. First, I want to thank our readers for continuing to make The Docket such a success! We continue…

Robinson & Roberts v. Wheble (1771): A New “First” Trademark Case at Common Law The origins of trademark law have long been disputed; some legal scholars recognize JG v. Samford or Sanford’s Case (1584),[1] later described in Southern v. How, 79 Eng. Rep. 1243 (1618) as a case in which a clothier had misappropriated his…

In his majority opinion in Printz v. United States, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not compel state and local officials to perform background checks on people seeking to buy guns, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “Because there is no constitutional text speaking to this precise question, the answer to the…challenge must be…

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…

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…

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…