Legal History

In the UK, we have some bizarre laws that have littered the statute books of our sceptred isle throughout history. Not all of them have been repealed over the centuries. Some of them made perfect sense at the time they were introduced but seen through modern eyes, now appear archaic and draconian. Despite the great efforts of the Law Commission in England and Wales to review and recommend reforms for many of these outdated laws, there are centuries of law that must be painstakingly gone through.

In the UK, we have some bizarre laws that have littered the statute books of our sceptred isle throughout history. Not all of them have been repealed over the centuries. Some of them made perfect sense at the time they were introduced but seen through modern eyes, now appear archaic and draconian. Despite the great efforts of the Law Commission in England and Wales to review and recommend reforms for many of these outdated laws, there are centuries of law that must be painstakingly gone through.

In the UK, we have some bizarre laws that have littered the statute books of our sceptred isle throughout history. Not all of them have been repealed over the centuries. Some of them made perfect sense at the time they were introduced but seen through modern eyes, now appear archaic and draconian.

Have you ever heard a bizarre law and thought, that can’t possibly be true? Is it genuine? Was it ever in existence or just an urban myth that became so embellished over time? There are surprisingly, a great many laws still in existence on the statute books today that would make your jaw drop. Whilst bizarre as these laws may now seem to us, it begs the question, are we in fact, unknowingly breaking these laws on a regular basis?

In The Majesty of the Law, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explores the law, her life as a Justice, and how the Court has evolved and continues to function, grow, and change as an American institution. Tracing some of the origins of American law through history, people, and ideas...

Morgan Siler is one of Washington, D.C.'s most powerful K Street law firms, its roster of clients stocked with multibillion-dollar corporations. The obsessive efforts of its senior partner, Peter Morgan, have transformed it from an old-fashioned business into a veritable Goliath. As Peter...

By the early 19th century, several European nations had banned slavery, but while the United States had banned the international slave trade, slavery was still legal in the country itself. As a result, there was still a strong financial motive for merchants and slave traders to attempt to bring slaves to the Western hemisphere, and a lot of profits to be gained from successfully sneaking slaves into the American South and the Caribbean by way of locations like Havana, Cuba.

The defense of human rights is often marked by ethical dilemmas, which are especially acute in Israel, where lawyers have for decades sought redress for the abuse of Palestinian rights in the country's High Court - that is, in the court of the abuser. In The Wall and the Gate, Michael Sfard chronicles this struggle - a story that has never before been fully told - and in the process engages the core principles of human rights legal ethics.

For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War as the world's most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others retained much of their previous legal regimes.

This is the story of how, in Titanic's loss, 1500 souls were sacrificed to the "settled science" and "scientific consensus" of marine engineering. It is also the story of how the US and British loss enquiries were shaped by party politics, corrupted by corrupt politicians and the Marconi Scandal, tainted by the politics of Irish Home Rule, and - finally - salvaged by Oliver Wendell Holmes and the US Supreme Court, and by Lord Mersey's judgement in the Board of Trade Enquiry and the subsequent International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea.

Margaret A. Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in harrowing cases between 1920 and 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system of the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the line from slavery to the legal structures of this period—and through to today.

Un libro narrado como crónica periodística sobre historias donde el Derecho tuvo que reinventarse para poner llevar a cabo juicios. Son 7 casos judiciales que marcaron la historia. Es un libro que cuenta cómo 7 casos jurídicos que se dieron en determinados momentos de la historia tenían vacíos legales y eso llevó a crear precisamente leyes y decisiones que pudieran resolver futuros conflictos similares. Son historias amenas, a manera de crónica, que cuentan lo que increíblemente no se podía juzgar cuando todo parecía claro en su momento: desde los juicios de Nuremberg hasta la demanda de indígenas en Ecuador a Chevron.

Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection treats the legal culture that informed the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and its trials. Linda Myrsiades examines conflicts between state and federal courts and the judicial philosophy of Federalist judges, as well as grand jury charges, law reports, judges' bench notes, and defense notes for the trials, to develop a portrait of the hegemony of official interpretations of the law. At the same time, the book illuminates popular attitudes about the courts and the law and explores the nature of extralegal courts operated by the people.

Much has been written about America's war in Vietnam, and an enduring and troubling subtext is the composition of the body of soldiers that made up the US troop deployment: from the initially well-trained and disciplined group of largely elite units that served in the mid-sixties to what has been termed an "armed mob" by the end of that decade and into the early 1970s.

In the past few years, liberals concerned about the prospect of long-term conservative dominance of the federal courts have revived an idea that crashed and burned in the 1930s: court packing. Today's court packing advocates have run into a wall of opposition, with most citing the 1930s episode as one FDR's greatest failures. In early 1937, Roosevelt—fresh off a landslide victory—stunned the country when he proposed a plan to expand the size of the court by up to six justices.

In Policing the City, Harris seeks to explain the transformation of criminal justice between the 1780s and 1830s in the City of London. As utilitarian legal reformers argued that criminal deterrence ought to be based on certain and rational punishment rather than random execution, they also had to control the discretionary authority of enforcement. This meant in theory and practice the centralization of policing in the 1830s, and the end of local policing, which was seen as corrupt, inefficient, and unsuitable for rational criminal justice.

Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender is a recent invention with a surprisingly contentious history - one that offers insights not only about the "carceral state" but also about the contours and compromises of 20th-century liberalism.

This is the first book to trace the fascinating parallel history of law and science from antiquity to modern times, showing how the two disciplines have always influenced each other - until recently. In the past few years, the scientific paradigm has shifted dramatically, from seeing the natural world as a kind of cosmic machine to understanding it as a network of fluidly interacting communities. But law is stuck in a mechanistic, 17th-century view that the world is made up of discrete individual parts.

In the second thrilling novel in New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline’s Rosato & Associates series, a successful lawyer now finds herself on the opposite side of the bench when she’s framed for murder. Benedetta “Bennie” Rosato is a maverick lawyer who prosecutes police...

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST FOR THE KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARD A powerful meditation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law, from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence...