Three and a half decades before the city of New York witnessed the first great battle waged by the new United States of America for its independence, rumors of a massive conspiracy among the city's slaves spread panic throughout the colony. On the testimony of frightened bondsmen and a handful of whites, over seventy slaves were convicted and a third of these were executed. The suspected conspiracy in New York prompted one of the most extensive slave trials in colonial history and some of the most grisly punishments ever meted out to individuals. Peter Hoffer now retells the dramatic story of...
Three and a half decades before the city of New York witnessed the first great battle waged by the new United States of America for its independence, ...
In the current legal climate where "everyone is an originalist," conventional wisdom suggests that judges merely find law, rather than make it. Orthodox common-law jurisprudence makes fidelity to the past the central goal and criterion. By contrast, the alternative approach, "reading the law forward"-what some call judicial pragmatism or consequentialism-is viewed as heretical. Rather than mount a theoretical defense of a forward-thinking jurisprudence, legal historian Peter Charles Hoffer offers an empirical study of how this approach to constitutional interpretation actually leads to better...
In the current legal climate where "everyone is an originalist," conventional wisdom suggests that judges merely find law, rather than make it. Orthod...
