In 1884, the University of Berne celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with ceremonies spanning three days, attended by delegates from the international diplomatic corps and many of the universities of Western Europe. As part of the ceremonies, the university awarded honorary doctorates in theology, philosophy, medicine, and law. Along with a number of Swiss and German scholars, one American was honored: Joel Prentiss Bishop. He was, the university thought, among those “who by their learning and their works rendered great service to their land and to the science of the law.”

Historical inquiry into the character of local dispute resolution and the operation of customary law in medieval England begins in manorial courts, since it is from those local courts that the most abundant documentation survives. Were the judgments of these courts “principled” in the sense of being rooted in substantive legal rules that courts ordinarily followed, or were they ad hoc determinations based on factual circumstances invisible to the modern reader? Can historians extrapolate behavioral norms and shared cultural values from the manor court records that survive in increasing profusion from the second quarter of the thirteenth century?

The train Mary Jane Chilton had boarded, typical of trains of the period, had two passenger coaches: a ladies' car and a smoker. Only women and women accompanied by gentlemen rode in the ladies' car, while in the smoker rode all manner of men traveling alone, some of whom were smoking and drinking. In the oncoming darkness, Mary Jane Chilton feared the smoker and the men there who were strangers to her. Yet as she tried to enter the ladies' car, the brakeman blocked her way; the conductor seconded his actions: “that car was not for niggers.” Rather than go into the smoker, Mary Jane Chilton sat down on the steps of the ladies' car until the conductor, as she describes, bodily moved her to the train platform in front of a crowd of cheering bystanders, and the train pulled out of the station. Mary Jane Chilton, her fifteen-year-old daughter, and her eight-year-old nephew were left to walk to Carondelet, Missouri.

Slave law in early Louisiana is of great interest because it was shaped by three major European legal traditions under the rule of France (1699 to 1769), Spain (1769 to 1803), and the United States (after 1803). In this article, the types and origins of slave laws in early Louisiana and their application in the slave society of New Orleans is examined. Several different imperial, local, and mixed codes were ordained in the colony to govern relations between masters and slaves, and these laws reveal either the political strategies of imperial policymakers or the social tactics of slaveowners, but very little about actual slave treatment. The administration of justice in New Orleans was mostly determined by the planters: local needs and ideals prevailed when they conflicted with those represented by the crown's laws, and the courts rarely interfered with the authority of indivdual slaveowners over their chattels.

The decades following the American Revolution witnessed major changes in American society. As traditional means of social control eroded, an increasingly secular society turned to lawmakers—both judicial and legislative—to craft new norms. Nineteenth-century legislators and judges actively promoted new visions of the economy, politics, and society. No area of social concern escaped their attention. Recent scholarship focusing on women and the family has explored how lawmakers transformed pre-Revolutionary legal concepts in reaction to changes in the nature of the family itself. This article examines the legal response in one narrow intersection of law and society: the law of sexual slander.

Over the course of the late winter and spring of 1933, the German Bar Association (DAV), along with most other institutions in Germany, submitted to “coordination” by the new National Socialist regime. Coordination in reality meant a takeover of the private legal profession by younger lawyers who were National Socialist activists, directed from Berlin. The traditional leadership of the German bar permitted itself to be replaced by newcomers, formerly far removed from the centers of power in professional institutions. Regional lawyers' chambers, despite minor delays and efforts to express solidarity with colleagues in leadership now defined as falling outside of the “racial community,” also succumbed. Within five months, a profession that nineteenth-century reformers had condidered a bulwark of civil soviety, and which had viewed itself as a rock of independence from both state and public, had bowed to the demands of a party whose leader viewed lawyers with contempt and valued race over right.

The Types Riot of June 8, 1826, is the most celebrated episode of conservative political violence in Upper Canada. It was directed against William Lyon Mackenzie, an immigrant from Scotland and a newspaper editor in York (Toronto) who had perfected a style of journalism characterized by scathing personal abuse of the colony's leaders. About a dozen well-connected individuals, most of them lawyers or law students, broke into the offices of Mackenzie's Colonial Advocate newspaper in its owner's absence. Terrorizing Mackenzie's mother, son, and assistants, the rioters wrecked the press and scattered the types, throwing some of them into the bay nearby. In a harbinger of what was to come, more than one magistrate looked on without interfering. The attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, neither disciplined the lawyers and law students among the rioters nor prosecuted them in the criminal courts.

When Henry II (1154–1189) ascended the English throne, centralization of administration became a key theme of his government and judicial reform a key theme of centralization. Throughout his reign, Henry enlarged royal jurisdiction over pleas of land by providing, by means of royal writs, jury trial before the king's justices as an alternative to judgment in the seignorial courts. The assize of novel disseisin (1155 x 1166) led the way for the assizes utrum (1164), mort d'ancestor (1176), and darrein presentment (post 1179), and for the Grand Assize (c. 1179) and writs of dower. Henry also centralized and tightened royal jurisdiction over criminal pleas through the Assize of Clarendon (1166) and reform of the appeal of felony.