Bøger i Studies in Legal History serien

Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labour - labour that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon - Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of al labour agreements punishable by imprisonment.

Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analysing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighbourly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbours and strangers alike.

Shows how the Black Death triggered massive changes in both governance and law in fourteenth-century England, establishing the mechanisms by which the law adapted to social needs for centuries thereafter. Robert Palmer's book, based on all of the available legal records, establishes a genuinely new interpretation and chronology of these important legal changes.

This study refutes the vision of the USA's stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety and health, political economy and property, and morality. Challenging the myth of individualism, the author explores the commitment to public duty.

Of interest to both historians and legal scholars, this book shows how the choice of peoples themselves became a basis for the status of territory, instead of dynastic entitlement. This is a pre-history of national self-determination, one of the most important principles of the twentieth century.

This book focuses on the post-Civil War treason prosecution of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which was seen as a test case on the major question that animated the Civil War: the constitutionality of secession. The case never went to trial because it threatened to undercut Union victory.

This book analyzes the changing role of law and social norms in creating tax compliance in mandatory Palestine and Israel. It is of interest to legal, economic, social, cultural and political historians, historians of Israel and the Middle East, and tax scholars.

How could enslaved women assert legal claims to personhood, wages, and virtue when the law regarded them as mere property? Fractional Freedoms tells the story of enslaved legal actors within the landscape of Hispanic urban slavery, focussing on women who were socially disadvantaged, economically active and extremely litigious.

States of Dependency recounts the transformation of American poor relief in the decades spanning the New Deal and the War on Poverty. This history explains how public welfare became bureaucratized, centralized, and professionalized; how welfare rights claims materialized; and why, nonetheless, American citizenship does not guarantee a minimally adequate income.

Drawing on a vast array of archival, legal and official sources, the author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history while analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of that reform and its relationship to contemporary penal-reform movements abroad.

Distinguished legal historian Robert W. Gordon presents here, for the first time together, four decades of his field-changing scholarship on law and society, particularly as it pertains to questions of racial equality, gender equity, and equal employment opportunity.

From 1852, until the Mormon Church's decision to abandon the practice in 1890, the battle over polygamy redefined religious liberty in America. This book discusses the ""Mormon question"" and its legacy in constitutional law and political theory.

Today, most Americans lack constitutional rights on the job. Instead of enjoying free speech or privacy, they can be fired for almost any reason or no reason at all. This book uses history to explain why, taking readers back to the 1930s and 1940s when advocates across the political spectrum set out to enshrine constitutional rights in the workplace.

Captures the paradox at the heart of American constitutional history. This title argues that the revolutionary transformation did not, therefore, consist of a conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualised. Maria Agren chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex tale of unintended consequences.

Examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to ""try"" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media. This title argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in print.

Based on a detailed examination of New York case law, this text traces the efforts of citizens of diverse racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds to live together in the state between 1920 and 1980. It shows that a new legal ideology was created which aspired to liberty and equality for all.

A study of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. It demonstrates how he inherited certain traditions; how he reshaped them in the light of his experience as a lawyer, political candidate and judge; and how he justified the vision of the law he wrote.

In this first comprehensive study of women's property rights in early America, Marylynn Salmon discusses the effect of formal rules of law on women's lives. By focusing on such areas such as conveyancing, contracts, divorce, separate estates, and widows' provisions, Salmon presents a full picture of women's legal rights from 1750 to 1830.

Traces the development of law schools, the legal profession, and legal thought, relating their evolution to intellectual, political, and social trends. Stevens describes how the establishment gained power over education after 1920 and how, in the past two decades, both students and the practicing profession have questioned this authority.

Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878

Taking an approach to the history of the jury in modern France by investigating the legal, political, sociocultural, and intellectual aspects of jury trial from the Revolution through the twentieth century, this title demonstrates that these juries, through their decisions, helped shape reform of the nation's criminal justice system.

A history of German criminology from Imperial Germany through the Weimar Republic to the end of the Third Reich. Drawing on primary sources, it shows that German biomedical research on crime predominated over sociological research and thus contributed to the rise of the eugenics movement.

Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350-1550

This book re-examines fundamental assumptions about the American legal profession and the boundaries between 'professional' lawyers, 'lay' lawyers, and social workers. Putting legal history and women's history in dialogue, it details the history of the origins and development of free legal aid for the poor in the United States.

Stephen Robertson provides a study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence against children. His study, based on the previously unexamined files of the New York County district attorney's office, reveals the importance of child sexuality and sex crimes in twentieth-century American culture.

James Oldham reviews developments in English common law during the 18th century, particularly the influence of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, whose reforming work laid the foundations of modern English and American civil law.

Legal and political struggles in America redefined the place of agriculture in the industrial market. The author of this book aims to show that farms were adept at borrowing such legal forms as the corporate trust for their own purposes and obtaining legislative recognition of the new style.

An interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. The text argues that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class inheritance was the virtual exclusion of females from land holding.