Bücher der Reihe Studies in Legal History

King Alfred's domboc ('book of laws'), the most ambitious legal text of the Anglo-Saxon period, combines translated biblical laws with Alfred's own ordinances and those of the early West-Saxon King Ine. This edition and commentary - the first in over a century - will interest all students of English history and law.

In medieval England, a defendant who refused to plead to a criminal indictment was sentenced to pressing with weights as a coercive measure. Using peine forte et dure ('strong and hard punishment') as a lens through which to analyse the law and its relationship with Christianity, Butler asks: where do we draw the line between punishment and penance? And, how can pain function as a vehicle for redemption within the common law? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book embraces both law and literature. When Christ is on trial before Herod, he refused to plead, his silence signalling denial of the court's authority. England's discontented subjects, from hungry peasant to even King Charles I himself, stood mute before the courts in protest. Bringing together penance, pain and protest, Butler breaks down the mythology surrounding peine forte et dure and examines how it functioned within the medieval criminal justice system.

This volume is the first comprehensive history of the evolving relationship between American slavery and the law from colonial times to the Civil War. As Thomas Morris clearly shows, racial slavery came to the English colonies as an institution without strict legal definitions or guidelines. Specifically, he demonstrates that there was no coherent body of law that dealt solely with slaves. Instead, more general legal rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. According to Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to reconcile a social order based on slavery with existing English common law (or, in Louisiana, with continental civil law.) Because much was left to local interpretation, laws varied between and even within states. In addition, legal doctrine often differed from local practice. And, as Morris reveals, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, tensions mounted between the legal culture of racial slavery and the competing demands of capitalism and evangelical Christianity.

In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio's analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

Michael Lobban examines the use of detention without trial in the British African Empire, evaluating the various legal powers used to facilitate imperial expansion. An essential text for lawyers and historians, Imperial Incarceration demonstrates the importance of context in understanding the law's effect.

Becoming Free, Becoming Black offers the first comparative study of law, race, and freedom in the Americas from the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Slaveholders linked blackness and slavery in the law, but by the mid-nineteenth century the social meaning of blackness varied over time and under different legal regimes.

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted setting--individual states--as a proving ground for their proposals. But federal policies precipitated a series of crises in the states that the drys strove to overcome. According to Hamm, interaction with the federal government system helped to reshape prohibitionists' legal culture--that is, their ideas about what law was and how it could be used.Originally published in 1995.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Drawing on a wide array of sources, including plea rolls, guides for confessors, and popular literature of the era, this book argues that issues of mind were central to jurors' determinations of whether a particular defendant should be convicted, pardoned, or acquitted outright in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England.

Challenging traditional accounts of the development of American private law, Peter Karsten offers an important new perspective on the making of the rules of common law and equity in nineteenth-century courts. The central story of that era, he finds, was a struggle between a jurisprudence of the head and a jurisprudence of the heart.

Almost Citizens traces the struggles over citizenship waged between US officials and Puerto Rican individuals, which led to a seismic constitutional shift away from citizenship, rights, and statehood, and toward racist imperial governance.

Allen Steinberg brings to life the court-centred criminal justice system of nineteenth-century Philadelphia, chronicles its eclipse, and contrasts it to the system - dominated by the police and public prosecutor - that replaced it. He offers a major reinterpretation of criminal justice in nineteenth-century America by examining this transformation from private to state prosecution.

So commonplace has the term rule of law become that few recognize its source as Dicey's Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. Cosgrove examines the life and career of Dicey, the most influential constitutional authority of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, showing how his critical and intellectual powers were accompanied by a simplicity of character and wit.

Examines Europe's first significant national policies on social welfare in the late nineteenth century, which saw regulation focused on workplace accidents and had major implications for state-society relations. Ideal for scholars in history and law with an interest in the welfare state, labor regulation, and occupational health.

Jessica K. Lowe tells the story of Commonwealth v. Crane, exposing deep rifts in post-Revolutionary Virginia and using it to unearth Revolutionary America's gripping debates over justice, criminal punishment, and equality before the law. She shows how post-Revolutionary Virginia was gripped by the question of what it means to make law 'sovereign'.

Birthright Citizens examines how black Americans transformed the terms of belonging for all Americans before the Civil War. They battled against black laws and threats of exile, arguing that citizenship was rooted in birth, not race. The Fourteenth Amendment affirmed this principle, one that still today determines who is a citizen.

The primary founder and guiding spirit of the Harvard Law School and the most prolific publicist of the nineteenth century, Story served as a member of the US Supreme Court from 1811 to 1845. His attitudes and goals as lawyer, politician, judge, and legal educator were founded on the republican values generated by the American Revolution.

UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Nelson identifies three principal institutions involved in conflict resolution: the twon meeting, the church congregation, and the courts of law. He subsequently determines the type of cases over which each institution had jurisdiction and studies the procedures by which each functioned.

UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

John Henry Schlegel recovers a largely ignored aspect of American Legal Realism, a movement that sought to bring the modern notion of empirical science into the study and teaching of law. He argues that empirical research was integral to Legal Realism, and he explores why this kind of research did not, finally, become a part of American law school curricula.

Distinguished by the critical value it assigns to law in Puritan society, this study describes precisely how the Massachusetts legal system differed from England's and how equity and an adapted common law became so useful to ordinary individuals. The author discovers that law gradually replaced religion and communalism as the source of social stability.

Focusing on a single county at a time when the population grew from 24,000 to 246,000, the authors combine statistical analysis of documentary sources, contemporary newspaper accounts, and exploration in criminal case files to give a detailed reconstruction of the operations of the county's entire criminal justice system.

Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labour - labour that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon - Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of al labour agreements punishable by imprisonment.

Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analysing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighbourly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbours and strangers alike.

Shows how the Black Death triggered massive changes in both governance and law in fourteenth-century England, establishing the mechanisms by which the law adapted to social needs for centuries thereafter. Robert Palmer's book, based on all of the available legal records, establishes a genuinely new interpretation and chronology of these important legal changes.

This study refutes the vision of the USA's stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety and health, political economy and property, and morality. Challenging the myth of individualism, the author explores the commitment to public duty.

Of interest to both historians and legal scholars, this book shows how the choice of peoples themselves became a basis for the status of territory, instead of dynastic entitlement. This is a pre-history of national self-determination, one of the most important principles of the twentieth century.

This book focuses on the post-Civil War treason prosecution of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which was seen as a test case on the major question that animated the Civil War: the constitutionality of secession. The case never went to trial because it threatened to undercut Union victory.

How could enslaved women assert legal claims to personhood, wages, and virtue when the law regarded them as mere property? Fractional Freedoms tells the story of enslaved legal actors within the landscape of Hispanic urban slavery, focussing on women who were socially disadvantaged, economically active and extremely litigious.