Can the concept of law be indiscriminately extended to times and places in which it did simply not exist? Such an extension is at best useless and at worst misleading. Producing an intelligible jurisprudence of the concept of law means keeping it within the reasonable boundaries of its contemporary common-sense understanding: positive law. Parallel to Western societies in which it firstly emerged, the concept of positive law developed in many places, including countries characterized as Muslim. There, it faced other existing normativities, like customs and the Sharia. This book aims, from the Muslim world's perspective, to clarify the uses of the concept of law and the ways of studying it, to describe some of its historical developments, including the ideas of constitutional law, customary law and forensic evidence, and to describe present-day practices, including reference to law sources, rules and interpretation.

Six decades before Rosa Parks boarded her fateful bus, another traveller in the Deep South tried to strike a blow against racial discrimination-but ultimately fell short of that goal, leading to the Supreme Court's landmark 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Now Williamjames Hull Hoffer vividly details the origins, litigation, opinions, and aftermath of this notorious case. In response to the passage of the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890, which prescribed "equal but separate accommodations" on public transportation, a group called the Committee of Citizens decided to challenge its constitutionality. At a preselected time and place, Homer Plessy, on behalf of the committee, boarded a train car set aside for whites, announced his non-white racial identity, and was immediately arrested. The legal deliberations that followed eventually led to the Court's 7-1 decision in Plessy, which upheld both the Louisiana statute and the state's police powers. It also helped create a Jim Crow system that would last deep into the twentieth century, until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and other cases helped overturn it. Hoffer's readable study synthesises past work on this landmark case, while also shedding new light on its proceedings and often-neglected historical contexts. From the streets of New Orleans' Faubourg Treme district to the justices' chambers at the Supreme Court, he breathes new life into the opposing forces, dissecting their arguments to clarify one of the most important, controversial, and socially revealing cases in American law. He particularly focuses on Justice Henry Billings Brown's ruling that the statute's "equal, but separate" condition was a sufficient constitutional standard for equality, and on Justice John Marshall Harlan's classic dissent, in which he stated, "Our Constitution is colour-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens." Hoffer's compelling reconstruction illuminates the controversies and impact of Plessy v. Ferguson for a new generation of students and other interested readers. It also pays tribute to a group of little known heroes from the Deep South who failed to hold back the tide of racial segregation but nevertheless laid the groundwork for a less divided America. This book is part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series.

This book presents a broad overview of succession law, encompassing aspects of family law, testamentary law and legal history. It examines society and legal practice in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present from both a legal and a sociological perspective. The contributing authors investigate various aspects of succession law that have not yet been thoroughly examined by legal historians, and in doing so they not only add to our knowledge of past succession law but also provide a valuable key to interpreting and understanding current European succession law. Readers can explore such issues as the importance of a father's permission to marry in relation to disinheritance, as well as inheritance transactions and private, dynastic and cross-border successions. Further themes addressed by the expert contributors include women's inheritance rights, the laws of succession for the prince in legal consulting, and succession in the Rota Romana's jurisprudence.