This article seeks to capture the transformative potential of emergency powers, as a legal–political practice pertaining to liberal legality that ultimately can determine constitutional change, rather than a return to ‘normality’. It does so by providing an analysis of the transition from formal and limited liberal legality in Romania to the series of dictatorships that followed the instauration of the regime of royal dictatorship of King Carol II in 1938. Anchored in a close reading of the archival documents of the trial of the leader of the main far right movement, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and the subsequent legal proceedings, the proposed article aims to produce revaluation of the jurisprudential and constitutional status of the regime of King Carol II with a view of understanding the emergency-based dimension of this rule and the particular shift it operated foundational legal categories in criminal and constitutional law. I proceed by examining the current theoretical limitations in addressing the historical role of emergency in relation to constitutional orders. I turn then to exploring the political and legal context of the prorogation of emergency measures in 1938 Romania. Last, I examine the limited status of modern legality in a situation oversaturated by emergency measures.

I examine the transformation of Italy during the fascist era and the way in which it was explained by one of the most prominent constitutional lawyers of the time, Costantino Mortati (1891–1985). A member of the Constituent Assembly of 1946–1948 and later a constitutional judge, Mortati had a deep influence on the Italian post-War constitutional thinking. Here I focus on Mortati’s understanding of the state’s transformation after 1922. I show how he conceptualised Italy’s transition from a liberal state to an authoritarian regime as a shift from the parliament to the executive of the power of ‘political direction’, ie, the power of identification of the aims and values of the state. Mortati did not envisage in the Italian transformation the full erasure of the separation of powers, but rather a large reshuffle of political direction moving from the Parliament to the Head of Government, allegedly a process in line with the country’s needs in the 20th century. He read the growth of executive powers as the most enduring constitutional transformation of his time, one destined in his mind to persist even after the downfall of the regime.

Roger Smith’s Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials traced how Victorian Britain defined legal insanity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Smith demonstrated how determinations of criminal responsibility were shaped by more than legal reasoning alone, with verdicts also influenced by professional ambition among expert witness groups often with divergent medical opinions, in addition to broader factors such as social class, gender and evolving moral values. Given its rigour and societal insights, it represents a landmark achievement in the field.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1932 (TCPA 1932) was the first planning Act in English law to include country within the legal scope of town planning. This transformed the scope of town planning, legally enabling planning and land administration on a local, regional and national level. Despite this, the TCPA 1932 has been overlooked by legal scholars, who mark the origins of modern planning with the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. This paper celebrates the legacies of the TCPA 1932, namely the inclusion of rural areas within planning legislation, and the centralised role of local authorities in effectuating planning practice, demonstrating how these principles continue to shape planning legislation into the present.

Today, the Chancery Court is the appeal court for the province of York in the Church of England. There are some excellent specialised period-specific studies which take in the Chancery Court alongside other York church courts, mostly from the Borthwick Institute at York.1 However, there is no book exclusively devoted to the Chancery Court setting out its full history. The court is also rather neglected in standard texts on the history of English ecclesiastical law. Even the great Richard Helmholz has no index entry on it in his monumental history of canon law in England.2 Holdsworth in his well-known history of the common law has a page and a half on courts of the Archbishop of Canterbury; as to York’s archiepiscopal courts, he simply states they ‘corresponded’ to those of Canterbury.3 These are typical of most scholars today.4 This article, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance – to correct what seems to be a case of juridical amnesia and so to unveil the forgotten, or hidden, Chancery Court of York. It offers a short history of the identity, jurisdiction, officers, records and processes, and jurisprudence of the Chancery Court of York. It also points out some key differences between the Chancery Court and its Canterbury equivalent, the Arches Court. The article focuses mainly on its post-Reformation history, as treated in the dispersed secondary literature – and it adds to this what the English ecclesiastical lawyers since the Reformation – civilians, common lawyers, and clerical jurists – say about this York court.

This article explores the dynamics of court practice with regard to mercantile preinsolvency in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Belgium. In 1883, the Belgian legislature introduced the proceeding of concordat préventif, making it possible for insolvent entrepreneurs to remain outside the liquidation-oriented procedure of faillite. Instead, they could declare their financial problems and propose a scheme of payment to their creditors. Despite this goal, however, the 1883 law, along with subsequent laws of 1885 and 1887, imposed high majority voting requirements. Accordingly, in the Antwerp commercial court, the shortcomings of the legislation were amended to ameliorate its procedural and judicial practice. The new practices of the court resulted in higher rates of acceptance of applications. However, these success ratios were not evenly distributed among the groups of debtors who applied. Perceptions shared by both creditors and judges may have advantaged merchants, brokers, and entrepreneurs who belonged to the higher strata of the city’s business world.

The year 2025 marks the 120th anniversary of Lochner v. New York, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down legislative limits on work hours in the baking industry. U.S. scholars generally agree this decision harmed workers and was a setback to the labor movement in the United States. The essay borrows from some of the historian E.P. Thompson’s writings on the relationship between historical inquiry and normative values in order to reflect on Lochner and the relative consensus among scholars opposing the decision. That reflection in turn serves as a point of entry for thinking about the role of normative values in doing labor history, what values we propound in the present by writing and teaching about the history of working-class people, and how those issues relate to different ways labor historians can understand what is arguably our field’s central category, class. The essay suggests that, with regard to the Lochner decision and in general, labor history is something of a different activity if the field’s orientation is toward the amelioration of time- and place-specific problems in working-class people’s lives, toward class as inherently a category of violence and injustice, or both.

This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that they were linked to fraud. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was difficult to imagine that family property to which women contributed all their lives might actually belong to them. The article focuses on white women of considerable means. But the point is that the problematic legal category “women” not only compromised all women’s legal claims to property, but also obscured other, important social and legal differences—including those of race and class—among them.