Bücher der Reihe Studies in Legal History

States of Dependency recounts the transformation of American poor relief in the decades spanning the New Deal and the War on Poverty. This history explains how public welfare became bureaucratized, centralized, and professionalized; how welfare rights claims materialized; and why, nonetheless, American citizenship does not guarantee a minimally adequate income.

Distinguished legal historian Robert W. Gordon presents here, for the first time together, four decades of his field-changing scholarship on law and society, particularly as it pertains to questions of racial equality, gender equity, and equal employment opportunity.

From 1852, until the Mormon Church's decision to abandon the practice in 1890, the battle over polygamy redefined religious liberty in America. This book discusses the ""Mormon question"" and its legacy in constitutional law and political theory.

Today, most Americans lack constitutional rights on the job. Instead of enjoying free speech or privacy, they can be fired for almost any reason or no reason at all. This book uses history to explain why, taking readers back to the 1930s and 1940s when advocates across the political spectrum set out to enshrine constitutional rights in the workplace.

Captures the paradox at the heart of American constitutional history. This title argues that the revolutionary transformation did not, therefore, consist of a conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualised. Maria Agren chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex tale of unintended consequences.

Examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to ""try"" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media. This title argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in print.

Based on a detailed examination of New York case law, this text traces the efforts of citizens of diverse racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds to live together in the state between 1920 and 1980. It shows that a new legal ideology was created which aspired to liberty and equality for all.

A study of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. It demonstrates how he inherited certain traditions; how he reshaped them in the light of his experience as a lawyer, political candidate and judge; and how he justified the vision of the law he wrote.

In this first comprehensive study of women's property rights in early America, Marylynn Salmon discusses the effect of formal rules of law on women's lives. By focusing on such areas such as conveyancing, contracts, divorce, separate estates, and widows' provisions, Salmon presents a full picture of women's legal rights from 1750 to 1830.

Traces the development of law schools, the legal profession, and legal thought, relating their evolution to intellectual, political, and social trends. Stevens describes how the establishment gained power over education after 1920 and how, in the past two decades, both students and the practicing profession have questioned this authority.

Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878

Taking an approach to the history of the jury in modern France by investigating the legal, political, sociocultural, and intellectual aspects of jury trial from the Revolution through the twentieth century, this title demonstrates that these juries, through their decisions, helped shape reform of the nation's criminal justice system.

A history of German criminology from Imperial Germany through the Weimar Republic to the end of the Third Reich. Drawing on primary sources, it shows that German biomedical research on crime predominated over sociological research and thus contributed to the rise of the eugenics movement.

Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350-1550

This book re-examines fundamental assumptions about the American legal profession and the boundaries between 'professional' lawyers, 'lay' lawyers, and social workers. Putting legal history and women's history in dialogue, it details the history of the origins and development of free legal aid for the poor in the United States.

Stephen Robertson provides a study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence against children. His study, based on the previously unexamined files of the New York County district attorney's office, reveals the importance of child sexuality and sex crimes in twentieth-century American culture.

James Oldham reviews developments in English common law during the 18th century, particularly the influence of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, whose reforming work laid the foundations of modern English and American civil law.

Legal and political struggles in America redefined the place of agriculture in the industrial market. The author of this book aims to show that farms were adept at borrowing such legal forms as the corporate trust for their own purposes and obtaining legislative recognition of the new style.

An interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. The text argues that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class inheritance was the virtual exclusion of females from land holding.

Chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This book addresses scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.

A history of the English criminal trial and the development of a criminal bar in London between 1750 and 1850. It charts the transformation of the legal process and the evolution of professional standards of conduct for the criminal bar by examining the working lives of the Old Bailey barristers.

Beyond the Prison Gates: Punishment and Welfare in Germany, 1850-1933

Presenting the history of expropriation of land for the common good in Europe and North America from medieval times to 1800, this title contextualizes the history of a legal doctrine regarding the relationship between government and the institution of private property. It focuses on western Europe and the English colonies in America.

Offering a window into the history of the modern legal profession in Western Europe, Stephen Jacobson presents a history of lawyers in the most industrialized city on the Mediterranean. Beginning with the resurrection of a decadent bar during the Enlightenment, Jacobson traces the historical evolution of lawyers throughout the long nineteenth century.

Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations

Focusing primarily on the exclusion of the Chinese, this study analyzes the debates surrounding immigration law and its enforcement during the height of nativist sentiment in the early-20th century. The author argues fundamental principles were established which still dominate immigration law.

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India's independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seem to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.

Perhaps the greatest problem of medieval property law was that third parties often challenged transactions. By the eleventh century, many devices for attempting to forestall or defeat claims were in use. Tabuteau considers the nature and efficacy of these devices as well as the degree to which the consent of interested parties was necessary or advisable. Originally published in 1988.