Books in the Studies in Legal History series

Investigating a wide range of problems in the development of English law, this collection of original essays honours the contributions of Samuel D. Thorne to the study of English legal history from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. The essays combine close study of legal texts and doctrines in their own setting with broader analysis of the interaction of legal and social change.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a remarkable book based on prodigious research, Horwitz offers a sweeping overview of the emergence of a national legal system from English and colonial antecedents. He treats the evolution of common law as intellectual history and demonstrates how shifting views of private law became a dynamic element in the economic growth of the U.S.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing on a vast array of archival, legal and official sources, the author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history while analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of that reform and its relationship to contemporary penal-reform movements abroad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.