The Origins of Modern American Legal History

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...

At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...

This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...

offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...

The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only...

Sandy Levinson has always taken secession arguments seriously. This is, in my eyes, one of his great virtues. There are very few scholars who would be...

It was 1804, and Thomas Ruffin, future Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, was having doubts about slavery. Ruffin was a young student...

IN DECEMBER, 1999, after William E. Jackson's death, members of his family found, in a closet of his Manhattan apartment, a folder labeled “Roosevelt...

This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...

Analysis based on Hohfeld’s analytical system shows that liability rules, as defined by Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed, are a false category...

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld is well-known for maintaining that various terms in law – “rights,” most prominently – confusingly designate a number of quite...

Co authoring saved me. Literally.  But for the fact that my senior colleagues at UCLA did not care whether I ever wrote anything sole authored, I don...

In the period immediately preceding the Constitution’s adoption, New Yorkers engaged in a spirited debate over whether a proposed delegation from the...

After reading “Four Fragments,” I returned to the journal I kept as a requirement of Dirk’s course. There, in the very first entry dated February 6...

For two surreal days this week, I sat next to the family of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during hearings on her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court...

In Soccer in American Culture: The Beautiful Game's Struggle for Status, G. Edward White seeks to answer two questions. The first is why the sport of...

This symposium about the future of legal pedagogy could not be more timely. Its four thought-provoking papers raise a constellation of questions about...

This Essay reports the first comprehensive network analysis of legal scholars connected through co-authorship. If legal scholarship was ever a...