In eighteenth-century England, the law surrounding vagrancy was complicated, and practice stood in complex relationship to law. Drawing on extensive archival research and in-depth study of both statute law and local administrative records, this book examines the complexities of vagrancy law and the realities of its practice during the long eighteenth century. It shows how settlement law and poor law provision failed to address both the changing demographic situation and the impact of wars, leaving significant numbers without support. Focusing on the 1744 Vagrant Act, the study traces how and why the law evolved, from 1700 when vagrancy was first made a county charge, and what changes followed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It explores how vagrancy law was used and to what effect, how it was extended and adapted to plug gaps in both poor law provision and in dealing with petty crime not covered by statute law, and how law and practice intersected with social reality. Using the Quarter Sessions records of six counties: Westmorland, Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Lancashire and Middlesex, the book is able to give the first account of vagrancy law in provincial England, rather than focusing on metropolitan areas, thus also demonstrating the tensions between parishes, justices and counties over the use of law and its financial impact. By detailed reference to cases of individual vagrants, the book also shows what sorts of people were dealt with under vagrancy law, what happened to them, and how and why the justices discriminated between the unfortunate and the criminal elements among them. This analysis reveals the principal causes of the vagrancy problems and the misfit between the law and social reality, with particular emphasis on the impact of wars and immigration from Ireland and Scotland. As the first full-length study of vagrancy law and practice in the eighteenth century, this book will constitute an essential item in any collection of books on the old poor law.

A revealing look at the history and legacy of the "War on Drugs" Fifty years after President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs," the United States government has spent over a trillion dollars fighting a losing battle. In recent years, about 1.5 million people have been arrested annually on drug charges-most of them involving cannabis-and nearly 500,000 Americans are currently incarcerated for drug offenses. Today, as a response to the dire human and financial costs, Americans are fast losing their faith that a War on Drugs is fair, moral, or effective. In a rare multi-faceted overview of the underground drug market, featuring historical and ethnographic accounts of illegal drug production, distribution, and sales, The War on Drugs: A History examines how drug war policies contributed to the making of the carceral state, racial injustice, regulatory disasters, and a massive underground economy. At the same time, the collection explores how aggressive anti-drug policies produced a "deviant" form of globalization that offered economically marginalized people an economic life-line as players in a remunerative transnational supply and distribution network of illicit drugs. While several essays demonstrate how government enforcement of drug laws disproportionately punished marginalized suppliers and users, other essays assess how anti-drug warriors denigrated science and medical expertise by encouraging moral panics that contributed to the blanket criminalization of certain drugs. By analyzing the key issues, debates, events, and actors surrounding the War on Drugs, this timely and impressive volume provides a deeper understanding of the role these policies have played in making our current political landscape and how we can find the way forward to a more just and humane drug policy regime.

Intellectual property has become a dominant feature of our knowledge based economy in recent years, but how has property rights in intangible items developed? This book brings together for the first time exemplary scholarship with diverse approaches to the history of United States intellectual property protection, including trade secrets, trademark, copyright, and patent law. These articles, written by leading experts in the field and often challenging conventional narratives, underscore the importance of historical perspectives for understanding how an extensive, evolving framework for the regulation of knowledge emerged in the modern period. By tracing intellectual property from an historical perspective - not merely providing justifications in philosophy or economics in the abstract - this book draws upon the past to address contemporary debates over such varied topics as: access to knowledge; policing copyright infringement; whether employees should own the products of their minds; the role of national borders in an age of digital information; and the very future of intellectual property as stakeholders and consumers contest the extent of its legal protection.

A ground-breaking study of the lawbooks which were created in the changing social and political climate of post-conquest Wales. The Middle Ages in Wales were turbulent, with society and culture in constant flux. Edward I of England's 1282 conquest brought with it major changes to society, governance, power and identity, and thereby to the traditional system of the law. Despite this, in the post-conquest period the development of law in Wales and the March flourished, and many manuscripts and lawbooks were created to meet the needs of those who practised law. This study, the first to fully reappraise the entire corpus of law manuscripts since Aneurin Owen's seminal 1841 edition, begins by considering the background to the creation of the law from the earliest period, particularly from c.1100 onwards, before turning to the "golden age" of lawmaking in thirteenth-century Gwynedd. The nature of the law in south Wales is also examined in full, with a particular focus on later developments, including the different use of legal texts in that region and its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. The author approaches medieval Welsh law, its practice, texts and redactions, in their own contexts, rather than through the lens of later historiography. In particular, she shows that much manuscript material previously considered "additional" or "anomalous" in fact incorporates new legal material and texts written for a particular purpose: thanks to their flexible accommodation of change, adjustment and addition, Welsh lawbooks were not just shaped by, but indeed shaped, medieval Welsh law.

In recent years the history of police and policing has become a key area of debate across a range of disciplines: criminology, sociology, political science and history. This authoritative series brings together the most important and influential English-language scholarship in the field, arranged chronologically across four volumes. The series includes articles on the shifting meaning of 'police', the growth of bureaucratic policing during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, consolidation in the twentieth century, and the international diffusion of export models and practices. The texts included come from a range of disciplines and chart the recent debates from traditional Whig history, revisionist work published during the last quarter of the twentieth century, and subsequent reassessments. Each volume is edited by a historian recognised as an authority in the area, and features an introductory essay which explains the key changes in the period and the significance of the selected articles and essays. The series provides a valuable resource for scholars new to the area as well as for those who may have overlooked an important essay or article published in an edited collection, or in a journal with limited circulation or from a discipline that they might not normally consult.

Globalising British Policing demonstrates how the policing system in place in Britain today has emerged from an historical overlap of two broad policing models: a civil (English) and a semi-military (colonial) tradition. Until relatively recently colonial policing received considerably less scholarly attention than the policing of mainland Britain. This volume comprises four sections: section I considers works on British colonial policing up until the Second World War; section II moves to post-war colonial policing through the era of decolonisation; section III looks more closely at the policing of Northern Ireland, and, section IV shows how the meshing of these policing systems are currently contributing to the globalisation of British policing today.

This volume is the first of four that will provide some of the most significant, English-language articles on the historical development of the police institution. The articles included in this volume are broadly of two kinds. The first introduce some of the theoretical outlines that have been suggested for the origins and development of modern police institutions across Europe. The second explore the systems of enforcement, and the criticisms of them, that had emerged on the eve of the revolutionary upheavals which convulsed Europe and inflicted a terminal blow to the ancien regime at the close of the eighteenth century.

In Judgment and Mercy, Martin J. Siegel offers an insightful and compelling biography of Irving Robert Kaufman, the judge infamous for condemning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for atomic espionage. In 1951, world attention fixed on Kaufman's courtroom as its ambitious young occupant stridently blamed the Rosenbergs for the Korean War. To many, the harsh sentences and their preening author left an enduring stain on American justice. But then the judge from Cold War central casting became something unexpected: one of the most illustrious progressive jurists of his day. Upending the simplistic portrait of Judge Kaufman as a McCarthyite villain, Siegel shows how his pathbreaking decisions desegregated a Northern school for the first time, liberalized the insanity defense, reformed Attica-era prisons, spared John Lennon from politically motivated deportation, expanded free speech, brought foreign torturers to justice, and more. Still, the Rosenberg controversy lingered. Decades later, changing times and revelations of judicial misconduct put Kaufman back under siege. Picketers dogged his footsteps as critics demanded impeachment. And tragedy stalked his family, attributed in part to the long ordeal. Instead of propelling him to the Supreme Court, as Kaufman once hoped, the case haunted him to the end. Absorbingly told, Judgment and Mercy brings to life a complex man by turns tyrannical and warm, paranoid and altruistic, while revealing intramural Jewish battles over assimilation, class, and patriotism. Siegel, who served as Kaufman's last law clerk, traces the evolution of American law and politics in the twentieth century and shows how a judge unable to summon mercy for the Rosenbergs nonetheless helped expand freedom for all.

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the present, the British police gained and to a large extent maintained a reputation as the 'best in the world', largely due to their ability to maintain order through consent rather than coercion. Much recent research, however, has pointed out that the label 'golden age' is an over-simplification of British policing in this period. This volume reprints a series of the most up-to-date and relevant articles which deal with: the ways that police organisation was structured and reformed; the nature of the policing task in this period; who carried this task out (with particular attention to the arrival of policewomen); and some of the crises and ongoing areas of concern (such as the policing of prostitution) which they faced.

The period 1829-1856 witnessed the introduction of the 'New Police' to Great Britain and Ireland. Via a series of key legislative acts, traditional mechanisms of policing were abolished and new, supposedly more efficient, forces were raised in their stead. Subsequently, the introduction of the 'New Police' has been represented as a watershed in the development of the systems of policing we know today. But just how sweeping were the changes made to the maintenance of law and order during the nineteenth century? The articles collected in this volume (written by some of the foremost criminal justice historians) show a process which, while cumulatively dramatic, was also at times protracted and acrimonious. There were significant changes to the way in which Britain and Ireland were policed during the nineteenth century, but these changes were by no means as straightforward or as progressive as they have at times been represented.

An intriguing insight into the politics of gender, family and religion in Elizabethan England. The marriage of Charles and Elizabeth Forth (c. 1582-1593) offers an intriguing insight into the politics of gender, family and religion in Elizabethan England. In this story, resourceful women play leading roles, sometimes circumventing or subverting patriarchal authority, qualifying our accepted image of the Elizabethan propertied family. Elizabeth's impoverished Catholic father took no part in making her marriage. Instead, Elizabeth and her mother seemingly enticed Charles, sixteen-year-old heir of a solidly Protestant Suffolk JP, into a clandestine match. When the marriage began to fail, Elizabeth turned to her mother and sisters as her principal sources of support and showed greater guile, determination and resilience than her husband in what became a protracted contest. Charles, convinced of his wife's infidelity, finally left England to travel as a voluntary exile, only to die abroad. Elizabeth and her kinsman Henry Jerningham emerged as victors in subsequent prolonged litigation with Charles's father. Drawing on extensive testimony and decrees in the most fully recorded case of its kind heard by the Court of Requests, as well as a wide range of other material from local record offices and the National Archives, this readable micro-history unravels the tangled story of two very different young people. It establishes the background of the marriage and its failure in the contrasting histories of the families involved and sets the story in its larger political and religious contexts. Anyone with an interest in Elizabethan politics, law and religion, or the family, women and gender, will find it fascinating. RALPH HOULBROOKE is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading.

From the ancient beginnings of Western legal tradition, law has been conceived as traversed by a fundamental tension between power (will) and reason. This volume examines the tension between these two poles, 'ratio and voluntas' in modern law. Part I focuses on three instructive phases in the history of the law's ratio. Part II examines the way legal scholarship, especially doctrinal research (legal dogmatics), can and should contribute to the law's coherence. Part III explores the role of constitutional law in managing the tension between law's voluntas and ratio. The final chapter discusses the implications the growth of transnational law may have on the relationship between ratio and voluntas. The study builds on the views of the distinctive features of the ideal-typical mature modern legal system as presented in the author's previous work, Critical Legal Positivism (Ashgate 2002).

This collection presents an innovative series of essays about the medieval culture of Feud and Violence. Featuring both prominent senior and younger scholars from the United States and Europe, the contributions offer various methods and points of view in their analyses. All, however, are indebted in some way to the work of Stephen D. White on legal culture, politics, and violence. White's work has frequently emphasized the importance of careful, closely focused readings of medieval sources as well as the need to take account of practice in relation to indigenous normative statements. His work has thus made historians of medieval political culture keenly aware of the ways in which various rhetorical strategies could be deployed in disputes in order to gain moral or material advantage. Beginning with an essay by the editors introducing the contributions and discussing their relationships to Stephen White's work, to the themes of the volume, to each other, and to medieval and legal studies in general, the remainder of the volume is divided into three thematic sections. The first section contains papers whose linking themes are violence and feud, the second section explores medieval legal culture and feudalism; whilst the final section consists of essays that are models of the type of inquiry pioneered by White.

In a stunning work combining historical memory, legal ambiguity, and profound issues of justice, J. Kenneth Brody provides a picture of France in World War II that continues to haunt the present. Architect in 1940 of Marshal Petain's Vichy French regime and its prime minister from April 1942 to August 1944, at war's end Pierre Laval was promptly arrested on charges of treason. This book tells the story of his trial. Did he betray France, or did he serve France under terrible circumstances? What was the truth of "collaboration"? This book considers the pretrial proceedings, or lack thereof, the evidence, and the arguments of the prosecution, as well as Laval's vigorous defense in the early days of the trial.

Because of irregularities in the preliminary proceedings, Laval's defense counsel declined from the outset to participate in the trial. For those reasons and because of the prejudicial conduct of the prosecution, on the third day of the trial, Pierre Laval also declined to participate further. What his defense might have been in a normal pre-trial proceeding and in a fair trial are matters of conjecture. What remains clear is that political trials are a unique form of law and moral judgment.

Trials and history share a common goal-the truth. Trial, judgment, and appeal are intended to produce finality. History, on the other hand, is never final. After its performance in the trial of Pierre Laval, the government of France continued its policy of concealment, even though the truth could no longer determine the outcome of the trial. Slowly, by persistence, courage, and loyalty, history's claims to truth were established. This book presents the defense that might have been presented and then relates the final judgment, its grisly execution only eleven days after the trial opened, and its aftermath.

This innovative and interdisciplinary book makes a major contribution to common pool resource studies. It offers a new perspective on the sustainable governance of common resources, grounded in contemporary and archival research on the common lands of England and Wales - an important common resource with multiple, and often conflicting, uses. It encompasses ecologically sensitive environments and landscapes, is an important agricultural resource and provides public access to the countryside for recreation. Contested Common Land brings together historical and contemporary legal scholarship to examine the environmental governance of common land from c.1600 to the present day. It uses four case studies to illustrate the challenges presented by the sustainable management of common property from an interdisciplinary perspective - from the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales, North Norfolk coast and the Cambrian Mountains. These demonstrate that cultural assumptions concerning the value of common land have changed across the centuries, with profound consequences for the law, land management, the legal expression of concepts of common 'property' rights and their exercise. The 'stakeholders' of today are the inheritors of this complex cultural legacy, and must negotiate diverse and sometimes conflicting objectives in their pursuit of a potentially unifying goal: a secure and sustainable future for the commons. The book also has considerable contemporary relevance, providing a timely contribution to discussion of strategies for the implementation of the Commons Act of 2006. The case studies position the new legislation in England and Wales within the wider context of institutional scholarship on the governance principles for successful common pool resource management, and the rejection of the 'tragedy of the commons'.

Since the beginnings of the oil industry, production activity has been governed by the 'law of capture, ' dictating that one owns the oil recovered from one's property even if it has migrated from under neighboring land. This 'finders keepers' principle has been excoriated by foreign critics as a 'law of the jungle' and identified by American commentators as the root cause of the enormous waste of oil and gas resulting from US production methods in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet while in almost every other country the law of capture is today of marginal significance, it continues in full vigour in the United States, with potentially wasteful results.

In this richly documented account, Terence Daintith adopts a historical and comparative perspective to show how legal rules, technical knowledge (or the lack of it) and political ideas combined to shape attitudes and behavior in the business of oil production, leading to the original adoption of the law of capture, its consolidation in the United States, and its marginalization elsewhere.

This book develops a historical concept of liberal democratic law through readings of the pivotal twentieth century legal theoretical positions articulated in the work of Herbert Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Duncan Kennedy, Rudolf Smend, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. It assesses the jurisprudential projects and positions of these theorists against the background of a long history of European metaphysics from which the modern concept of liberal democratic law emerged. Two key narratives are central to this history of European political and legal metaphysics. Both concern the historical development of the concept of nomos that emerged in early Greek legal and political thought. The first concerns the history of philosophical reflection on the epistemological and ontological status of legal concepts that runs from Plato to Hobbes (the realist-nominalist debate as it became known later). The second concerns the history of philosophical and political discourses on law, sovereignty and justice that starts with the nomos-physis debate in fifth century Athens and runs through medieval, modern and twentieth century conceptualisations of the relationship between law and power. Methodologically, the reading of the legal theoretical positions of Hart, Dworkin, Kennedy, Smend, Kelsen and Schmitt articulated in this book is presented as a distillation process that extracts the pure elements of liberal democratic law from the metaphysical narratives that not only cradled it, but also smothered and distorted its essential aspirations. Drawing together key insights from across the fields of jurisprudence and philosophy, this book offers an important and original re-articulation of the concept of democratic law.

From the 1880s until after World War I, Texas prosecutions for adultery, fornication, rape, seduction, and sodomy were many, but formal penal codes seemed much too merciful to suit most southerners, who believed in direct and personal redress of such wrongs."Unwritten law" seemed to justify the killing-or at least maiming-of almost anyone who by actual physical contact or inappropriate comment offended southern notions of female virtue, male honor, or the "sanctity of marriage." Illicit sex is the catalyst in all the Texas murder trials recounted in Sex, Murder, and the Unwritten Law. Bill Neal explores the imaginative machinations of defense lawyers who extricated obviously guilty clients when there appeared no legal basis upon which to peg a defense. The courtroom triumphs and underlying strategies detailed in this book are remarkable and entertaining for lawyers, historians, and laypersons alike.

The history of incorporations legislation and its administration is intimately tied to changes in social beliefs in respect to the role and purpose of the corporation. By studying the evolution of the corporate form in Britain and a number of its colonial possessions, the book illuminates debates on key concepts including the meanings of laissez faire, freedom of commerce, the notion of corporate responsibility and the role of the state in the regulation of business. In doing so, A Social History of Company Law advances our understanding of the shape, effectiveness and deficiencies of modern regulatory regimes, and will be of much interest to a wide circle of scholars.

In Seward's Law, Peter Charles Hoffer argues that William H. Seward's legal practice in Auburn, New York, informed his theory of relational rights-a theory that demonstrated how the country could end slavery and establish a practical form of justice. This theory, Hoffer demonstrates, had ties to Seward's career as a country lawyer. Despite his rise to prominence, and indeed preeminence, as a US secretary of state, Seward's country-lawyer mentality endured throughout his life, as evinced in his personal attitudes and professional conduct. Relational rights, identified and termed here for the first time by Hoffer, are communal and reciprocal, what everyone owed to every other member of their community. Such rights are at the center of a jurisprudential outlook that arises directly from living in a village. Though Seward was limited by the Victorian mores and the racialist presumptions of his day, the concept of relational rights that animated him was the natural antithesis to the theories and practices of slavery. In the legal regime underpinning the institution, masters owed nothing to their bondmen and women, while those enslaved unconditionally owed life and labor to their masters. The irrepressible conflict was, for Seward, jurisprudential as well as moral and political. Hoffer's leading assumption in Seward's Law is that a lifetime spent as a lawyer influences how a person responds to everyday challenges. Seward remained a country lawyer at heart, and that fact defined the course of his political career.

Since its Broadway debut, Hamilton: An American Musical has infused itself into the American experience: who shapes it, who owns it, who can rap it best. Lawyers and legal scholars, recognizing the way the musical speaks to some of our most complicated constitutional issues, have embraced Alexander Hamilton as the trendiest historical face in American civics. Hamilton and the Law offers a revealing look into the legal community's response to the musical, which continues to resonate in a country still deeply divided about the reach of the law. A star-powered cast of legal minds-from two former U.S. solicitors general to leading commentators on culture and society-contribute brief and engaging magazine-style articles to this lively book. Intellectual property scholars share their thoughts on Hamilton's inventive use of other sources, while family law scholars explore domestic violence. Critical race experts consider how Hamilton furthers our understanding of law and race, while authorities on the Second Amendment discuss the language of the Constitution's most contested passage. Legal scholars moonlighting as musicians discuss how the musical lifts history and law out of dusty archives and onto the public stage. This collection of minds, inspired by the phenomenon of the musical and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, urges us to heed Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Founding Fathers and to create something new, daring, and different.

For better and sometimes for worse, Congress is a reflection of the aspirations, wants, and priorities of the American people. It reflects the kaleidoscope of special interests and unselfish service to others, of favors sought and sacrifices made. During each two-year session of Congress, thousands of pieces of legislation are proposed, many hundreds are given serious consideration, but far fewer are eventually enacted into law. Most enactments have limited impact, affect few, and are quietly forgotten in the flow of legislative activity. However, a small number of laws have risen to the level of historical consequence. These are the laws that have shaped America, and they are the subject of this book.
Which pieces of legislation were the most significant for the development of the nation? Which have had an immediate or lasting impact on our society? Which laws so affected us that we could not imagine how our lives would be without them? Dennis W. Johnson vividly portrays the story of fifteen major laws enacted over the course of two centuries of American democracy. For each law, he examines the forces and circumstances that led to its enactment--the power struggles between rival interests, the competition between lawmakers and the administration, the compromises and principled stands, and the impact of the legislation and its place in American history.

This impressive volume is the first attempt to look at the intertwined histories of natural law and the laws of nature in early modern Europe. These notions became central to jurisprudence and natural philosophy in the seventeenth century; the debates that informed developments in those fields drew heavily on theology and moral philosophy, and vice versa. Historians of science, law, philosophy, and theology from Europe and North America here come together to address these central themes and to consider the question; was the emergence of natural law both in European jurisprudence and natural philosophy merely a coincidence, or did these disciplinary traditions develop within a common conceptual matrix, in which theological, philosophical, and political arguments converged to make the analogy between legal and natural orders compelling. This book will stimulate new debate in the areas of intellectual history and the history of philosophy, as well as the natural and human sciences in general.

When Carter Bryant began work on what would become the billion-dollar line of Bratz dolls, he was taking time off from his job at Mattel where he designed outfits for Barbie. Later, back at Mattel, he sold his concept for Bratz to rival company MGA. Orly Lobel reveals the colourful story behind the ensuing decade-long court battle. This entertaining and provocative work pits MGA against Mattel, shows how an idea turns into a product and explores the two different versions of womanhood represented by Barbie and her rival. Lobel's story is a thought-provoking contribution to the debate over creativity and intellectual property as American workers may now be asked to sign contracts granting their employers the rights to and income from their ideas.