Passed in June 1940, the Smith Act was a peacetime anti-sedition law that marked a dramatic shift in the legal definition of free speech protection in America by criminalizing the advocacy of disloyalty to the government by force. It also criminalized the acts of printing, publishing, or distributing anything advocating such sedition and made it illegal to organize or belong to any association that did the same. It was first brought to trial in July 1941, when a federal grand jury in Minneapolis indicted twenty-nine Socialist Workers Party members, fifteen of whom also belonged to the militant Teamsters Local 544. Eighteen of the defendants were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government. Examining the social, political, and legal history of the first Smith Act case, this book focuses on the tension between the nation's cherished principle of free political expression and the demands of national security on the eve of America's entry into World War II. Based on newly declassified government documents and recently opened archival sources, Trotskyists on Trial explores the implications of the case for organized labor and civil liberties in wartime and postwar America. The central issue of how Americans have tolerated or suppressed dissent during moments of national crisis is not only important to our understanding of the past, but also remains a pressing concern in the post-9/11 world. This volume traces some of the implications of the compromise between rights and security that was made in the mid-twentieth century, offering historical context for some of the consequences of similar bargains struck today.

Between 1300 and 1550, London's courts were the most important English lay law courts outside Westminster. They served the most active and innovative of the local jurisdictions in which custom combined with the common law to produce different legal remedies from those contemporaneously available in the central courts. More importantly for the long term, not only did London's practices affect other local courts, but they influenced the development of the national common law, and quite possibly the development of the legal profession itself. This 2007 book provides a detailed account, accessible to non-legal historians, of the administration of the law by the medieval and early modern city of London. In analysing the workings of London's laws and law courts and the careers of those who worked in them, it shows how that administration, and those involved in it, helped to shape the modern English law.

In this book, the ownership, distribution and sale of patent medicines across Georgian England are explored for the first time, transforming our understanding of healthcare provision and the use of the printed word in that era. Patent medicines constituted a national industry which was largely popular, reputable and stable, not the visible manifestation of dishonest quackery as described later by doctors and many historians. Much of the distribution, promotion and sale of patent medicines was centrally controlled with directed advertising, specialisation, fixed prices and national procedures, and for the first time we can see the detailed working of a national market for a class of Georgian consumer goods. Furthermore, contemporaries were aware that changes in the consumers' 'imagination' increased the benefits of patent medicines above the effects of their pharmaceutical components. As the imagination was altered by the printed word, print can be considered as an essential ingredient of patent medicines. This book will challenge the assumptions of all those interested in the medical, business or print history of the period.

Donald Lively brings a perspective upon constitutional fundamentals and racial reality that is both historical and forward-looking. It reflects a convergence of understandings and insights from a range of experience as a legal academic, historian, business developer, and community service organizer. He is the author of 12 books and over 50 articles, many of which relate to the interaction between the Constitution and political and social factors and circumstances. He has lectured both domestically and internationally. Three of his books have won national book awards. Lively writes in a style that captures complex and sophisticated subject matter and reduces it to accessible and understandable terms. It is extensively annotated to authoritative sources, transcends any ideological agenda, and introduces principles that make original constitutional premises relevant to evolving conditions. Among other things, he demonstrates how the nation's founding premises that were compromised by racism and its incidents have become relevant to reckoning with their legacy. This publication is particularly relevant at a time when racial dynamics are in flux and the law, particularly interpretation of the law, has become largely static. Accounting for the nation's legacy of discrimination has been sporadic and uneven. Reparations have been provided for the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but denied for African-Americans whose experience for most of the nation's history was defined by slavery and pervasive discrimination. Although the Supreme Court has acknowledged this legacy of societal discrimination, it has precluded generalized remediation pursuant to concern with negative collateral consequences. This book provides significant insights that increasingly will reflect understanding of racial reality in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates first a legacy of constitutional outcomes that, at their best, have been promising and profound in their symbolism but ultimately underachieving. The book also evidences that, for the first time in the nation's history, market forces are aligning in favor of diversity and multicultural competence. Along with changing demographics and globalization, these factors provide a powerful new force for reckoning with the nation's legacy of racial discrimination. Modern constitutional doctrine, which largely precludes raceconscious reckoning with this reality, constrain the market (both the public and private sector) from generating innovative and effective solutions. Lively maintains that by allowing more flexibility and being more deferential to innovation and experimentation, the Court can facilitate reckoning with historical reality and square the law in a way that is consistent with and even restores founding principles and also reflects how the future is evolving. Based upon its fidelity to original intent and responsiveness to changing societal conditions, this model offers a rare convergence of appeal to those who respectively advocate a more restrained and more active judiciary. This book is relevant to a variety of audiences including academics, students, and persons in both the public and private sector who seek a comprehensive yet accessible narrative and analysis upon the historical interaction between law and race and its likely evolution.

Prior to the 1950s, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest people for a wide variety of activities performed in the streets. Throughout the country, vagrancy laws were far-reaching and pervasive. Yet by the end of the 1960s, streets across America hosted both massive political protests and a cultural revolution that reshaped not only the nation's public spaces, but more broadly its public life. For the era or against it, virtually all agreed that America after the 1960s was starkly different than before it. What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff provides a truly groundbreaking explanation of the transformation. Focusing on Court decisions that loosened vagrancy laws and opened up the streets to Americans in all their variety, she shows how legal change helped fuel highly public social movements advocating everything from civil rights to peace to gay rights to cultural revolution. Indeed, increased access to the streets increased their public presence and thereby social power. The book is a brilliant example of how a seemingly small event -alteratations to the relatively minor crime of vagrancy-can contribute to a social revolution. Not only that, Goluboff powerfully demonstrates how the courts can advance social change-make history, so to speak. The vagrancy laws were that were on the books virtually everywhere in the 1950s served as a catchall device for police forces intent on establishing public order; you could be arrested for everything from causing a disturbance to behaving in a way contrary to the norm-fraternizing with a member of another race, for example, or publically preaching non-mainstream beliefs like communism. Given the very fluid interpretation of vagrancy, police inevitably abused it to the point where they could arrest almost any "nonconforming" person. Once the Supreme Court began invalidating these laws, it opened up public space to any manner of dissenter or nonconformist: hippies, war protestors, civil rights activists, interracial couples, gays, and, of course, vagrants-all the people occupying spaces previously off-limits to them. Goluboff's account is not just a investigation of the relationship between law and social change, however. It is also a ground-up history-from Skid Row to the Supreme Court-of the culture wars between the New Left and New Right. The results of these battles are abundantly evident today in both positive ways-like the increased openness to all in America's public spaces-and negative ways-especially the explosion of homelessness afterward. In sum, she shows that major societal changes can result not only from big waves, but from seeming ripples too.

A guide to the complex history of state laws and their importance to all Americans State laws affect nearly every aspect of our daily lives-our safety, personal relationships, and business dealings-but receive less scholarly attention than federal laws and courts. Joseph A. Ranney looks at how state laws have evolved and shaped American history, through the lens of the historically influential state of Wisconsin. Organized around periods of social need and turmoil, the book considers the role of states as legal laboratories in establishing American authority west of the Appalachians, in both implementing and limiting Jacksonian reforms and in navigating legal crises before and during the Civil War-including Wisconsin's invocation of sovereignty to defy federal fugitive slave laws. Ranney also surveys judicial revolts, the reforms of the Progressive era, and legislative responses to struggles for civil rights by immigrants, women, Native Americans, and minorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the 1960s, battles have been fought at the state level over such issues as school vouchers, voting, and abortion rights.