Donald Trump's administration has provoked crisis after crisis regarding the United States’ immigration policy, laws, and their enforcement. This has affected millions of immigrants in the U.S. and those hoping to immigrate. Stemming from this, immigration lawyers are providing extraordinary amounts of direct pro bono legal services to immigrants in need. Yet the history of the practice of immigration law has been largely understudied. This article closely examines Chicago's Immigrants’ Protective League between 1910 and 1940. The League provided free counsel to tens of thousands of poor immigrants facing a multitude of immigration-related legal issues during a time when Congress passed increasingly strict immigration laws. The League, always headed by women social workers, created a robust model of immigration advocacy at a time when only a handful of women were professionally trained lawyers. The League's archival documents, manifests how Trump's immigration policies have a long and painful history. U.S. immigration law and its enforcement have consistently been cruel, inhumane, arbitrary, and capricious. Told from the ground up and focusing upon the day-to-day problems that immigrants brought to the League, one dramatically sees how immigration laws and practices were like quicksand, thwarting the legitimate expectations of migrants. The League, in response, participated in creating what would become the practice of immigration law, engaging, and quickly responding to changing laws, rules, policies, and the needs of migrants.

Based on Carol Smart's observation that rape law reform as lobbied for by the feminist movement during the 1970s and 1980s failed to achieve any meaningful change, this article seeks to examine the nature and implications of rape law reform in the Republic of Ireland from the 1980s to the present day. During the 1980s the conceptualization of rape changed from a proprietorial crime to a violation of individual bodily integrity due to feminist lobbying efforts and the emergence of a victim-centered approach in the criminal justice system. Though this changing conceptualisation has led to significant attitudinal change, particularly surrounding the issues of acquaintance and marital rape, procedural change has failed to secure higher conviction rates. In particular, this article demonstrates that the legal reforms achieved in the 1980s potentially resulted in a 2% decrease in rape conviction rates by 2007. When compared to England/Wales, conviction rates as distinctive from prosecution rates in Ireland remain chronically low. This indicates that any legal reforms must take account of the institutional bias ingrained the Irish criminal justice system against female rape complainants, which has continuing relevance for Irish legislation pertaining to sexual violence such as the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, 2017. Overall this article suggests that rape is an exceptional crime and needs to be reassessed as such.

This article examines the Ottoman extension of rule and jurisdiction to the Beersheba frontier of southern Palestine. As part of its Tanzimat reform policies, the Ottoman administration founded the new town and sub-district of Beersheba in 1900, and sought to implement a legal reform. Deviating from the formal law that requires the founding of a civil-nizamiye court, the Ottoman instituted a form of legal exception and authorized the local administrative council to sit as a judicial forum and for its Bedouin Shaykh members to serve as judges. Studies of Ottoman Beersheba have typically focused on Bedouin autonomy and tribal law. The few studies that discussed the judicial order, have mistakenly assumed the Ottoman institution of a “tribal court,” and its persistence thereafter. Interestingly, what began as a simple grant of legal exception, justified by civilizational discourses of ignorance and savagery, grew into a judicial complexity. Very soon jurisdictional tensions arose, integrating questions across various webs of legal orders, jurisdictions, and political networks that shaped the reform in Beersheba and beyond. In following various legal disputes from Beersheba to Gaza, Jerusalem, and Istanbul, the article challenges some of the prevailing research categories, dichotomies, and approaches in the study of Ottoman legal history and tribal societies, including the concept of ‘legal pluralism.’

This article examines how ideals of contract freedom within the women's rights movement challenged medical and medical jurisprudence theories about women between 1870 and 1930. Throughout this period, medicine linked women's intellectual incapacity with problems rooted in their physical bodies. Doctors opined that reproductive diseases and conditions of pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and menopause rendered women disabled, irrational, and inherently dependent. Yet at the same moment, the elimination of the legal disability of coverture, and new laws that expanded women's property and earnings rights contributed to changing perceptions of women's public roles. Courts applied far more liberal understandings of sanity and rationality in property and contract cases, even when the legal actors were women. Seizing this opportunity, reformers made powerful arguments against doctors' ideas of women's “natural” mental weakness, pointing out that the growing rights to contract and transact illustrated women's rationalism and competency for full citizenship. Most significantly, these activists insisted that these rights indicated women's right to total bodily freedom—a concept that would become crucially important in the early birth control movement.

This article surveys the debate between “progressives” and “revisionists” about the Constitution and constitutional interpretation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary revisionist scholarship assumes that its victory over progressive scholarship is complete. The article suggests otherwise. First, it summarizes the revisionists’ achievements. Second, in an attempt to improve the quality of the debate, it maintains that “revisionist” and “progressive” legal historians undermine their cases by using words like “progressive,” “Gilded Age,” and “Jacksonian,” and that “revisionist” is not an enlightening term, either. Third, it contends that revisionists have made straw men out of the progressives, whose diversity and contributions they ignore, and that they have shown a lack of empathy for the circumstances facing the progressives. At considerable risk, progressives called attention to the relevance of political calculation, economic self-interest, and biography to understanding the Constitution, constitutional interpretation, and judicial power. The article also observes that revisionists have not yet won the day and that there are still “progressive” holdouts in the legal academy and history departments. Finally, it argues that like the work of “revisionists,” the scholarship of the “progressives”—particularly if we rechristen both—still has something to teach us and that it is time to abandon the familiar dialectic of thesis and antithesis and turn to synthesis.