This volume is the first comprehensive history of the evolving relationship between American slavery and the law from colonial times to the Civil War. As Thomas Morris clearly shows, racial slavery came to the English colonies as an institution without strict legal definitions or guidelines. Specifically, he demonstrates that there was no coherent body of law that dealt solely with slaves. Instead, more general legal rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. According to Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to...

From the Mormon Church's public announcement of its sanction of polygamy in 1852 until its formal decision to abandon the practice in 1890, people on both sides of the "Mormon question" debated central questions of constitutional law. Did principles of religious freedom and local self-government protect Mormons' claim to a distinct, religiously based legal order? Or was polygamy, as its opponents claimed, a new form of slavery--this time for white women in Utah? And did constitutional principles dictate that democracy and true liberty were founded on separation of church and state?...

From the end of the Revolution until 1851, the Virginia legislature granted most divorces in the state. It granted divorces rarely, however, turning down two-thirds of those who petitioned for them. Men and women who sought release from unhappy marriages faced a harsh legal system buttressed by the political, religious, and communal cultures of southern life. Through the lens of this hostile environment, Thomas Buckley explores with sympathy the lives and legal struggles of those who challenged it.

Based on research in almost 500 divorce files, The Great Catastrophe of My Life...

Based on a detailed examination of New York case law, this pathbreaking book shows how law, politics, and ideology in the state changed in tandem between 1920 and 1980. Early twentieth-century New York was the scene of intense struggle between white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant upper and middle classes located primarily in the upstate region and the impoverished, mainly Jewish and Roman Catholic, immigrant underclass centered in New York City. Beginning in the 1920s, however, judges such as Benjamin N. Cardozo, Henry J. Friendly, Learned Hand, and Harlan Fiske Stone used law to facilitate the...

In the eighteenth century, the English common law courts laid the foundation that continues to support present-day Anglo-American law. Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, 1756-1788, was the dominant judicial force behind these developments. In this abridgment of his two-volume book, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, James Oldham presents the fundamentals of the English common law during this period, with a detailed description of the operational features of the common law courts. This work includes revised and...

In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans' intense concern with sex crimes against children led to a wave of public discussion, legislative action, and criminal prosecution. Stephen Robertson provides the first large-scale, long-term study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence against children.

Robertson describes how the nineteenth-century approach to childhood as a single phase of innocence began to shift at the end of the century to include several stages of childhood development, prompting reformers to create legal categories...

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- 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.

Distinguished by the critical value it assigns to law in Puritan society, this study describes precisely how the Massachusetts legal system differed from England's and how equity and an adapted common law became so useful to ordinary individuals. The author discovers that law gradually replaced religion and communalism as the source of social stability, and he gives a new interpretation to the witchcraft prosecutions of 1692.

Originally published 1979.

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Investigating a wide range of problems in the development of English law, this collection of original essays honors 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. Although each essay has its own historiographical context, a substantial unity is achieved.

Originally published in 1981.

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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. By tracing the process from arrest to trial, sentencing, and punishment, this study will have a profound effect on our perception of American criminal justice.

Originally published in 1981.

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