Böcker i Studies in Legal History-serien

King Alfred's domboc ('book of laws'), the most ambitious legal text of the Anglo-Saxon period, combines translated biblical laws with Alfred's own ordinances and those of the early West-Saxon King Ine. This edition and commentary - the first in over a century - will interest all students of English history and law.

In medieval England, a defendant who refused to plead to a criminal indictment was sentenced to pressing with weights as a coercive measure. Using peine forte et dure ('strong and hard punishment') as a lens through which to analyse the law and its relationship with Christianity, Butler asks: where do we draw the line between punishment and penance? And, how can pain function as a vehicle for redemption within the common law? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book embraces both law and literature. When Christ is on trial before Herod, he refused to plead, his silence signalling denial of the court's authority. England's discontented subjects, from hungry peasant to even King Charles I himself, stood mute before the courts in protest. Bringing together penance, pain and protest, Butler breaks down the mythology surrounding peine forte et dure and examines how it functioned within the medieval criminal justice system.

"This book charts the history of execution laws and practices in the era of the "Bloody Code" and their extraordinary transformation by 1900. Innovative and comprehensive, this work will find an audience with scholars interested in the history of crime and punishment in England"--

"After examining more than 700 lawsuits decided by the supreme courts of former slave states, Giuliana Perrone asserts that slavery remained actionable in American law well after its ostensible demise. An important study for scholars of slavery and the US Civil War"--

Monitoring American Federalism examines some of the nation's most significant controversies in which state legislatures have attempted to be active partners in the process of constitutional decision-making. Christian G. Fritz looks at interposition, which is the practice of states opposing federal government decisions that were deemed unconstitutional. Interposition became a much-used constitutional tool to monitor the federal government and organize resistance, beginning with the Constitution's ratification and continuing through the present affecting issues including gun control, immigration and health care. Though the use of interposition was largely abandoned because of its association with nullification and the Civil War, recent interest reminds us that the federal government cannot run roughshod over states, and that states lack any legitimate power to nullify federal laws. Insightful and comprehensive, this appraisal of interposition breaks new ground in American political and constitutional history, and can help us preserve our constitutional system and democracy.

In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio's analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

Michael Lobban examines the use of detention without trial in the British African Empire, evaluating the various legal powers used to facilitate imperial expansion. An essential text for lawyers and historians, Imperial Incarceration demonstrates the importance of context in understanding the law's effect.

Becoming Free, Becoming Black offers the first comparative study of law, race, and freedom in the Americas from the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Slaveholders linked blackness and slavery in the law, but by the mid-nineteenth century the social meaning of blackness varied over time and under different legal regimes.

Drawing on a wide array of sources, including plea rolls, guides for confessors, and popular literature of the era, this book argues that issues of mind were central to jurors' determinations of whether a particular defendant should be convicted, pardoned, or acquitted outright in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England.

During the Antebellum era, thousands of free black sailors were arrested for violating the Negro Seamen Acts. In retelling the harrowing experiences of free black sailors, Moral Contagion highlights the central roles that race and international diplomacy played in the development of American citizenship.

Almost Citizens traces the struggles over citizenship waged between US officials and Puerto Rican individuals, which led to a seismic constitutional shift away from citizenship, rights, and statehood, and toward racist imperial governance.

Examines Europe's first significant national policies on social welfare in the late nineteenth century, which saw regulation focused on workplace accidents and had major implications for state-society relations. Ideal for scholars in history and law with an interest in the welfare state, labor regulation, and occupational health.

Jessica K. Lowe tells the story of Commonwealth v. Crane, exposing deep rifts in post-Revolutionary Virginia and using it to unearth Revolutionary America's gripping debates over justice, criminal punishment, and equality before the law. She shows how post-Revolutionary Virginia was gripped by the question of what it means to make law 'sovereign'.

Birthright Citizens examines how black Americans transformed the terms of belonging for all Americans before the Civil War. They battled against black laws and threats of exile, arguing that citizenship was rooted in birth, not race. The Fourteenth Amendment affirmed this principle, one that still today determines who is a citizen.

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.

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.