In 1885, in the midst of the North-West Resistance in which Indigenous people took up arms against the colonial Canadian state, three Cree men executed an elderly Cree woman. At their trial for murder, the defendants were found guilty. They avoided execution because colonial authorities became convinced that they believed that their victim was a wendigo, a cannibal spirit. Killing a wendigo was justified under Cree law and so, argued one judge, the defendants lacked the mens rea necessary to sustain a murder conviction. The history of this case shows the limits of colonial legal jurisdiction and sovereignty. Scarce resources, hostile territory and Indigenous resistance hampered the colonial state's efforts to consolidate its legal control over the Canadian frontier. This essay notes the importance of these forces, but also argues that common law jurisprudence itself could impair the ability of the state to hold Indigenous defendants criminally responsible. Colonial officials regularly invoked the idea that Indigenous people adhered to different legal and normative orders in order to illustrate their supposed inferiority. However, this official recognition of the legal pluralism of the North-West could undermine a defendant's responsibility and cut against efforts to assert the exclusive jurisdiction of Canadian criminal law.

Robert Gordon became the pioneering scholar of the history and historiography of American law with the publication of his first essays in the 1970s. His research and teaching have stimulated and guided the dramatic growth of American scholarship in legal history during the past four decades, much of it written by his own students and the many others whose work he has generously encouraged and engaged. Taming the Past combines the classic essays he has published in various journals and edited collections throughout his distinguished career alongside lectures that are printed here for the first time. Brief introductory notes place the essays in the context of their original appearance and often cite subsequent relevant scholarship. Gordon has also added a general introduction that provides a useful overview of the entire collection. The whole is much more than the sum of its impressive parts.

Historically, the clear recognition by the courts that all adults in public intercourse owe a duty of reasonable care to avoid injuring others has been seen as an early nineteenth century development. Occasionally it is recognized that what is known about the emergence of the tort of negligence in English law comes almost entirely from the printed reports of civil (plea side) cases tried in the three common law courts (King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer). It was not until the 1790s that regular printed reports of jury trials (or nisi prius cases, as they were called) began, and even then, enlightenment from the nisi prius reports was limited. Most of those reports were sketchy, and very few included instructions given to the jury by the trial judge. More importantly, the reports covered only a small fraction of the jury trials that were conducted by the common law courts. The overwhelming majority of civil jury trials ended with the jury verdict (or an occasional nonsuit), with no post-trial proceedings, and what happened in many thousands of these plea-side jury trials in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been something of a black hole in the historical record.

Historians have argued that sixteenth and seventeenth century English colonial charters claimed the lands of indigenous people on the basis of their discovery by Europeans. Examination of these charters, however, demonstrates that a charter authorized acquiring land from the indigenous population in a specific region, not seizing indigenous it, and regulating the entry of other potential settlers. Charters also regulated overseas relations among the European nations to reduce or prevent international conflict by recognizing similar claims to monopoly of access to lands claimed by other developing empires. Charters were rooted in a medieval legal tradition that included canon law commentaries that recognized the legitimacy of infidel dominium and papal bulls that sought to regulate fifteenth-century Iberian expansion in the Atlantic. English charters built on this legal tradition and were a stage in the creation of a European legal order for overseas expansion. The fundamental issue was regulation of the sea and sea routes to Asia and to the New World, not the acquisition and possession of indigenous land. The English charters should be understood as elements of the long-running debate about whether access to the sea was open to all or could be closed to outsiders.

Over the past decade, the United Kingdom has deprived an increasing number of British subjects of their citizenship. This policy, known as “denaturalization,” has been applied with particular harshness in cases where foreign-born subjects have been accused of terrorist activity. The increase is part of a global trend. In recent years, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands have either debated or enacted denaturalization statutes. But Britain remains an outlier among Western democracies. Since 2006, the United Kingdom home secretary has revoked the citizenship of at least 373 Britons, of whom at least 53 have had alleged links to terrorism. This is more than the total number of revocations by Canada, France, Australia, and Netherlands combined. These developments are troubling, as the right to be secure in one's citizenship has been a cornerstone of the postwar European liberal political order, and of the international community's commitment to human rights.

A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person's private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person's basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name 'perspectival diversity'. This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by enlarging the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society.

If ‘F’ is a predicate, then ‘Fer than’ or ‘more F than’ is a corresponding comparative relational predicate. Concerning such comparative relations, John Broome's Collapsing Principle states that, for any x and y, if it is false that y is Fer than x and not false that x is Fer than y, then it is true that x is Fer than y. Luke Elson has recently put forward two counter-examples to this principle, allegedly showing that it yields contradictions if there are borderline cases. In this article, I argue that the Collapsing Principle does not rule out borderline cases, but I also argue that the principle is implausible.

This study examines contact-induced change in Jèrriais, the severely endangered Norman variety currently spoken by some 1% of the population of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands. Today, English dominates all linguistic domains of island life, and all speakers of Jèrriais are bilingual. The analysis uses original data to test empirically whether Myers-Scotton's (2002) five theoretical assumptions about the structural path of language attrition (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the individual) also have relevance for the process of language obsolescence (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the community). It explores i) whether Jèrriais is undergoing contact influenced language change owing to its abstract grammatical structure being split and recombined with English, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's Abstract Level model; and ii) whether different morpheme types of Jèrriais are related to the production process in different ways and are, accordingly, more or less susceptible to change during the process of language obsolescence, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's 4-M model. In addition to its contribution to linguistic theory, this study increases existing knowledge about Jèrriais and makes data from this language available for systematic comparison with other languages.

In this paper, we analyse the difference between two types of behavioural policies – nudges and boosts. We distinguish them on the basis of the mechanisms through which they are expected to operate and identify the contextual conditions that are necessary for each policy to be successful. Our framework helps judging which type of policy is more likely to bring about the intended behavioural outcome in a given situation.