Scholars have long asked to what extent there was a distinctive Puritan jurisprudence in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Purita n jurisprudenceis a shorthand that refers to those elements of seventeenth-century Massachusetts's laws and institutions designed or selected because of the early colony's religious commitments. Among the fundamentals of Puritan jurisprudence were the integrated and determined use of legal and ecclesiastical institutions to foster a godly community, the importance of the Bible as a touchstone for the legitimacy of rules, and a constitutional order restricting colony-wide voting and political office to regenerate members of covenanted churches. Some historians speak of “Puritan justice” or “Puritan legal culture” rather than “Puritan jurisprudence.” Differing in detail and emphasis, these formulations point to a core idea animating much writing about early Massachusetts: that the colony lived by a legal order distinctive by the standards of contemporary England and her North American and Caribbean colonies and strongly shaped by Puritan religious commitments and social thought.

On January 24, 1885, at 9:30 in the morning, a woman from the small rural village of Saint Laurent in East Flanders entered the Palace of Justice of Ghent. Pregnant with her eighth child, she had fled from her husband and was filing for a divorce. That morning, she was led to a small room—the office of the judge of the Regional Court—and was standing alone with four men whom she barely knew and did not understand because they spoke French. Her husband had only sent a lawyer to represent him. As the woman's “avoué” presented her complaints—abuse, threats, and finally her fear for the life of her unborn child that had forced her to leave the marital home—she could only hope he had correctly recorded her story and was representing it convincingly enough to take her case to the next level. Until then, her divorce had been a game between jurists in which she was not much more than a prop. After this reading of her complaints, however, the whole neighborhood was alerted to her failing marriage. Some neighbors even entered the courtroom with her to act as witnesses. Not only the judge, but the whole local community took up the task to decide if she had been the victim of a derailed husband, or had failed as a wife. And accordingly, it was decided if she was to become a “divorced woman,” with all the social stigmatization attached to that notion, or if she would be forced to return to her abusive husband again.

An inquiry into law in Manchukuo might seem, at first glance, to be something of an oxymoronic task. The state itself was created in clear contravention to international law, and when the investigation of the Lytton Commission stated as much in 1933, Japan walked out of the League of Nations, the closest the world had to an international arbitrational body at the time. Within Japan itself, the creation of Manchukuo could be considered the point of no return in the march toward wartime militarism. After this event, arbitrary and military power ran roughshod over civilian institutions of governance, so much so that some scholars of Japanese legal history characterize the period as the “collapse of the legal system” (hō teisai hōkai).

“She was always poking holes in balloons,” a friend said of the late and justly beloved Kathryn Preyer. These two outstanding articles, the first winners of the Preyer Competition, do that too. Together, they suggest that the Cold War affected domestic life in different ways than we have assumed.

June of 1955 was a busy month for the NAACP. Throughout the country, members and officials used direct action and a variety of legal tools to further the organization's fight against workplace discrimination. At the NAACP's annual convention, the organization reaffirmed that it “vigorously supports the purposes of organized labor.” But it also urged that “[w]here labor unions still practice any form of racial discrimination,” its members should “bring all the pressure they can against these undemocratic and discriminatory practices,” including using publicity, filing complaints with President Eisenhower's Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC), and, “wherever possible, by court action.” The audience hardly seemed to need this reminder.

Ephram (Fedya) Nestor, a Bulgarian-born immigrant to the United States, was “an unusual person,” according to his second wife Barbara. She met him in 1933 when he was selling vegetables from his car and remembers not really liking him. “He stayed too long,” he “talked too much,” and worst of all to this devoted radical, he “passionately espoused the cause of Communism [but] he didn't know too much about it.” Interviewed when she was ninety, sharp-witted Barbara Nestor still recalled how Fedya embarrassed her at a Marxist study group with his “foolish” statements and obvious lack of knowledge about Marx or communism. His family agreed he was “not much of a Communist” when he joined the local party in 1936 and could not be trusted with the simplest duties. Nonetheless, the federal government deported Fedya in 1956 for his brief Communist Party (CP) membership.

More than any other case from the postwar period, Brown v. Board of Education has captured the attention of historians and the public alike. The case itself, and the NAACP's campaign that led to it, have been the subject of books and articles beyond counting. In many history textbooks it is the only court case mentioned between the end of World War II and the early 1960s. It is one of a handful of cases that is recognized by the public at large and is surely the only Supreme Court case that has its own National Historic Site.