Mark A. Graber

A new interpretation of the constitutional law and politics of slavery. The Taney Court's conclusions that former slaves could not be American citizens and that slavery could not be banned in American territories was constitutionally sound. Dred Scott and the Lincoln presidency were concerned whether the original agreement that a bisectional consensus was needed to make slavery policy would be maintained or whether Americans would go to war to realize a 'more perfect union'.

William M. Wiecek

This is a history of the United States Supreme Court between 1941 and 1953. Its principal objective is to explain the major issues facing the Court in mid-century to a general audience that includes lawyers but is aimed at a wider readership. These issues include Japanese-American internment during the war, the rights of African-Americans as the old order of Jim Crow disintegrated, the definition of religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and protection for speech freedom amidst national anxieties spawned by global war and Cold War rivalries.

Richard B. Outhwaite, Foreword by Richard H. Helmholz

The first history of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England that covers the period up to the removal of principal subjects inherited from the Middle Ages. Probate, marriage and divorce, tithes, defamation, and disciplinary prosecutions involving the laity are all covered. All disappeared from the church's courts during the mid-nineteenth century, and were taken over by the royal courts. The book traces the steps and reasons - large and small - by which this occurred.

Chantal Stebbings

For most people today, a tribunal constitutes their only contact with formal legal adjudication. This book examines the origins and development of tribunals, showing how a lay, specialized, accessible and inexpensive body was a response to the social and economic challenges of the industrial revolution to implement the extensive state regulation of various activities. It shows how the tribunal drew on a number of existing legal traditions, combining them in an imaginative way so as to create an institution which today rivals the courts in the number of disputes heard.

Penny Tucker

Between 1300 and 1550, London's courts were the most important English lay lawcourts outside Westminster. Analysing the administration of the law by the medieval and early modern city of London, the author provides a detailed account, accessible to non-legal historians, of the workings of London's laws and its lawcourts and those who worked in them. The author demonstrates the ways in which that administration, and those involved in it, both affected contemporary law and lawcourts and helped to shape the modern English law.

Avner Greif

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. This book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration.

Vincent Farenga

How can the ancient Greeks help us define ourselves as both citizens and individual selves? This study looks to the ways the Greeks decided questions of justice as a key to understanding how our moral and political lives can be intertwined. Using Greek epic, law, drama, philosophy and forensic rhetoric over nearly six hundred years, it identifies the various 'scripts' of citizen life that inspired different philosophies of moral individualism and political obligation in remarkable individuals from Achilles and Odysseus to Pericles, Alcibiades and Socrates.

Edward M. Harris

This volume brings together essays on Athenian law by Edward M. Harris, who challenges much of the recent scholarship on this topic. Presenting a balanced analysis of the legal system in ancient Athens, Harris stresses the importance of substantive issues and their contribution to our understanding of different types of legal procedures. Collectively, the essays in this volume demonstrate the relationship between law and politics, the nature of the economy, the position of women, and the role of the legal system in Athenian society.

Adriaan Lanni

Adriaan Lanni draws on contemporary legal thinking to present a new model of the legal system of classical Athens. She analyzes the Athenians' preference in most cases for ad hoc, discretionary decision-making, as opposed to what moderns would call the rule of law. Lanni argues that the Athenians consciously employed different approaches to legal decision-making in different types of courts. Lanni presents classical Athens as a case study of a successful legal system that, by modern standards, had an extraordinarily individualized and discretionary approach to justice.

David Schmidtz

What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due, but what that means in practice depends on context. The formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity, but the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a neighborhood rather than that of a building. A theory of justice is a map of that neighborhood.

David Schmidtz

What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due, but what that means in practice depends on context. The formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity, but the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a neighborhood rather than that of a building. A theory of justice is a map of that neighborhood.