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Colonial Law in Early America
In The Common Law in Colonial America: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607-1660, William Edward Nelson writes about three main colonial legal traditions: Virginia, New England, and Maryland. These three centers drew to various degrees from English common law, but deviated from it in a number of important respects and for reasons related to their establishments and purposes.
October 2011 / 3 min.
Early lawyering in colonial America
In the seventeenth century, according to Kermit Hall and Peter Karsten, “there were few lawyers and their status was problematic.”
September 2011 / 2 min.
Why do legal history? First remarks on Kermit Hall’s The Magic Mirror
In The Magic Mirror: Law in American History, Kermit Hall quotes former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to explain why we should do legal history: “This abstraction called the Law is a magic mirror, [wherein] we see reflected, not only our own lives, but the lives of all men that have been!”
September 2011 / 2 min.
Was early Supreme Court Justice John Marshall an originalist?
The question of whether John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1803-1835, was an originalist is, of course, anachronistic, as the term had not yet been invented during his lifetime. Still, given the ongoing controversy regarding judicial interpretation today, it’s an interesting question to ask about one of the foundational justices in American jurisprudence.
September 2011 / 4 min.
First remarks on G. Edward White’s The American Judicial Tradition
I’m reading G. Edward White’s The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges as part of my general background reading on American legal history. Lawrence Friedman may argue that “[t]here really isn’t a canon for legal history,” but I think White’s book at least comes close.
September 2011 / 3 min.
Further reflections on the nature of scientific evidence
For two weeks this July, I participated in a conference/summer session in Vienna (VISU) on the nature of scientific evidence. The program brought together students and lecturers from a number of disciplines.
August 2011 / 3 min.
Legal reasoning by analogy
My VISU presentation on reasoning in analogy in Warren and Brandeis’ famous 1890 law review article on privacy.
July 2011 / 1 min.
Presenting “Privacy & The Telegraph”
A slideshow presentation of my talk on the shifting views on privacy, from the nineteenth century’s focus on property and relationships to the twentieth’s focus on people as having an individual right to privacy.
May 2011 / 1 min.
Judge Noble Hand hints at the move from property to people
I have already discussed how Fourth Amendment protections and related “right to privacy” have shifted from a focus on property in the 19th century to one focused on people in the 20th. Judge Noble Hand’s 1897 law review article, Schuyler against Curtis and the Right to Privacy, gives some interesting hints about how American jurists contributed to this shift.
April 2011 / 4 min.
Confidentiality vs. privacy
In the law, there is a difference between confidentiality and privacy, and it’s a difference that’s important for both legal history (highlighted by the 20th century focus on the right to privacy in American law, as opposed to a 19th century focus on confidentiality) and contemporary law.
April 2011 / 3 min.