<p> Nevada statehood was a bi-lateral event that required approval from both the federal government and the territorial residents. It has been extensively studied from a federal perspective, but no scholar has fully considered how the territorial judiciary influenced the residents&rsquo; approval of statehood. The judiciary&rsquo;s role is particularly relevant when explaining why territorial residents <i>rejected</i> statehood by a four-to-one margin only to <i>authorize</i> statehood a mere eight months later by an eight-to-one margin. </p><p> This paper will demonstrate the Nevada Territorial Supreme Court (NTSC) is an unrecognized but powerful influence in the statehood vote of September 1864. It begins with an examination of judicial systems in the Nevada area under the Utah Territory. It next examines the challenges of a remote, spiritual authority when profound mineral wealth was discovered during the spring of 1859, and suggests the absence of legal order and judicial normalcy compelled the creation of the Nevada Territory. </p><p> The NTSC exploded into existence in 1861 but then imploded under the weight of its own work during the summer of 1864. Great fortunes were in dispute and the three territorial judges were unable to manage the voluminous litigation. (In 1864, more than 400 lawsuits were on file in Storey County but only three were tried to a jury&mdash;and only one trial resulted in a jury verdict). Judicial processes became corrupted and productive mining and related capital infusions came to a halt. After a protracted battle between the newspapers, and a growing chorus of public discontent, the embattled judges resigned from office a mere 16 days before residents voted on statehood. Thus, voters knew the alternatives well: a rejection of statehood would maintain an impotent judiciary and perpetuate the mining recession, whereas the approval of statehood would result in popularly elected judges who were accountable to the citizens they served. </p><p> This paper examines the details of the first and second constitutional conventions through a judicial lens, the primitive judicial system in place during territorial years, and the role of the press in fomenting public discontent with the courts. This paper also examines the decisional work of the NTSC, which has never been published or otherwise folded into the historical record of Nevada. While some court records exist at the Nevada State Archives, the court&rsquo;s official opinions have been lost. Based upon extensive research into the newspapers of the time, this paper includes a significant portion of the NTSC&rsquo;s decisional history. Finally, this paper introduces the judicial personalities and suggests, contrary to other scholarship, that systemic corruption is more easily alleged than proven.</p>

<p> In <i>Dred Scott v. Sandford</i>, Chief Justice Roger Taney spoke for the majority of the United States Supreme Court to declare that Blacks were not constituent members of the American political sovereignty, but rather they were &ldquo;beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race&rdquo; and they &ldquo;had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.&rdquo; Through engaging in a critical inquiry of constitutional hermeneutics, Blacks looked to the Constitution to deduce their collective identity. However, when they looked in the constitutional mirror, they saw a broken reflection. By evaluating the existential dichotomy of the African-American self-identity revealed in the responses to the <i> Dred Scott</i> decision, this research argues that the African-American self-identity was broken by the Supreme Court&rsquo;s declaration that they were neither citizens nor people under the Constitution; however, in the face of the <i>Dred Scott</i> decision, the African-American self-identity used the very document which denied their right to exist, to galvanize a unique identity capturing their oppression, and the hope to realize their deprived liberty.</p>

<p> In public schools, student expression commonly calls for the attention of school staff in one form or another. Educators have a practical interest in understanding the boundaries of student freedom of speech rights and are often directed to the four student speech cases decided to date by the Supreme Court (<i>Tinker v Des Moines</i> (1969), <i>Bethel v Fraser </i> (1986), <i>Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier</i> (1988), and <i> Morse v Frederick</i> (2007)). Sources about these cases abound, but most focus on legal reform issues such as the political arguments of opposing preferences for more student freedom or more school district control or the lack of clear guidance for handling violations </p><p> I propose an alternative approach to understanding the Supreme Court&rsquo;s student speech jurisprudence focusing not on its correctness but on cultural influences which have worked and continue to work on the Court both from without and within. This approach may lead to a new understanding of Court decisions as legally binding on educators and an appreciation of the necessary rhetorical artistry of the Justices who write them. Not intended in any way as an apologetic of the Court&rsquo;s decisions on student speech, this study is based particularly on the work of Strauber (1987), Kahn (1999) and Mautner (2011). It takes the form of a cultural history going back to the Fourteenth Amendment&rsquo;s influence on individual rights from its ratification in 1868 to its application in Tinker in 1969 and beyond. </p><p> Seen as cultural process which begins with the Amendment&rsquo;s initial almost complete ineffectiveness in restricting state abridgment of fundamental rights including speech to its eventual arrival, fully empowered, at the schoolhouse gate, this study attempts to make student speech rights more accessible to educators and others. The tensions between the popular culture which espouses the will of the people and the internal legal culture of the Court itself and its most outspoken and articulate Justices resolve into decisions which become the law of the land, at least for the moment. The study also offers implications for administrators together with suggestions on how to stay current with free speech case law applicable to the schools.</p>

In 1854, acting as a federal commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Law, Suffolk County probate judge Edward Greeley Loring returned the alleged runaway Anthony Burns to slavery. In protest, antislavery activists petitioned legislators to exercise a little-used power to demand that the next governor remove Loring from state office. For three years, Know-Nothing governor Henry J. Gardner refused to do so, and Republican Nathaniel P. Banks removed the judge in 1858 with considerable reluctance. For both men, and for their parties, Loring's ordeal had ideological significance beyond his personal fate. This dissertation traces this significance to a lasting debate between conservatives and radical reformers over the principle of judicial independence from popular influences. Advocacy of elections for judges and other reforms went back to the Jeffersonian era, but antislavery activists took up the theme to protest judicial submission to the 1850 fugitive law. They joined earlier critics who condemned the state judiciary as a self-serving clique. Loring, who owed his position to family, social, and political ties, made an exemplary villain despite his efforts to show objective fairness during the Burns trial. Radicals demanded his removal in the name of popular moral sovereignty, while conservatives defended him in the interest of judicial independence. The radical implications of removal were somewhat muted by the Personal Liberty Law of 1855, which lent the campaign some statutory authority. The states-rights aspect of the controversy, however, remained divisive even after Republican victories made the judge's fall a reasonable certainty. The final debates over Loring in 1858 exposed a continuing conflict between conservatives and radicals within the Republican party that had already hindered its early development. Loring's story as a whole illustrates the enduring significance of Jackson-era reform politics beyond the acknowledged demise of the Jacksonian party system.

This is a social and legal history of the role played by Vermont's courts in regulating sexual activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It relies on a quantitative and qualitative review of civil and criminal cases brought and disposed of in four of Vermont's county courts, as well as the decisions of Vermont's Supreme Court. Unlike urban areas that developed alternative administrative centers of regulatory power, Vermont's rural county courts were its most important site of sexual discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Civil suits were brought by and on behalf of women and girls for sexual defamation, sexual assault, breach of promise to marry, and bastardy, along with suits brought by fathers resulting from their daughters' seduction. Such suits had high success rates and awarded large monetary damages. Judges and juries focused more on the harm caused by uncontrolled male sexuality than on female moral transgressions. Men were on notice that they would be punished for violating sexual norms, including unwanted sexual advances. This study also examines how prosecutors, judges, and juries dealt with criminal sexual offenses such as adultery and forcible and statutory rape. Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the evidentiary requirements for a conviction coupled with concerns about a surging divorce rate and flagging morality led to a dramatic increase in adultery prosecutions after the Civil War. The state imprisoned hundreds of men and women for this offense. In forcible rape cases, courts allowed evidence of prior sexual acts on the part of the alleged victim to be used to impeach her credibility on the question of consent, but they also made clear that the question of consent depended on the woman's perspective. A man's perception that the sexual advance was welcome carried little weight. The state also raised the age of consent from eleven to fourteen (1886) and then sixteen (1898), leading to a surge in statutory rape prosecutions. As with forcible rape cases, guilty verdicts were obtained in a large majority of cases. And as with civil cases, judges and juries punished men for failing to control their sexual impulses.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American jurisprudence grappled with the issue of marital property. States under the Anglo-American legal tradition of common law revised marital property allocations to allow wives to hold certain categories of property separate from their husbands. These changes were enacted, in part, to insulate a wife’s property from the vagaries of the market but the judicial response reveals a larger narrative of ambivalence and anxiety about women, property, and the suggested mobility of separately held possessions. Marital property reform begins in an historical moment when the question of what a woman could own in marriage morphed into larger cultural anxieties such as the very meaning of ownership and “things” themselves in the face of new intangible properties. Writers of fiction also captured these anxieties, and created imagined scenarios of marriage and property to expose constructions of ownership, property, womanhood, and marriage. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening attempts her withdrawal from her marriage by dismantling the Pontellier home and removing what she believes she owns to a separate physical space. The tragedy of her story can be understood for its legal impossibility under common law, as well as the restricted meanings of marriage and separate property under Louisiana’s civil law jurisdiction. At the end of Edith Wharton’s Summer, Charity Royall chooses to secretly reclaim a brooch that was a gift from her lover. Her action suggests a desire for privacy and could be viewed as fraudulent to her marriage vows. Pauline Hopkins’s character Hagar in Hagar’s Daughter repossesses material spaces which she was forbidden to own and control because of her race and gender, and uses the American justice system to support her claims to ownership and contractual rights. In contrast to Hopkins’s tenuous but nonetheless optimistic portrayal of contract, Marìa Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? describes contract and the American legal system overall as empty promises. Marriage and property in Ruiz de Burton’s novel work as tropes through which to critique nineteenth-century American society and the destructive force of capitalism within its most intimate spaces.

This dissertation studies the discourse of legal scholars and reformers, exploring the ways in which their assumptions about gender shaped their arguments in relation to shorter hours and minimum wage laws. Examining seemingly abstract terms such as "freedom contract" and "citizenship," this work shows how laissez-faire legal scholars employed a discourse embedded with gender assumptions, linking manhood, work, and citizenship to ideals of individualism and competition, to argue against legislation for men. Yet logical inconsistencies arose when they tried to use these concepts, especially citizenship, to deny women protective legislation. In contrast, paternalist legal scholars concentrated on the needs of the public welfare, asserting that legislation would enable men to become better fathers, husbands, and citizens. Reformers and progressive legal scholars united to gain labor legislation for women in particular. Employing a discourse of maternalism, they argued that shorter hours and good wages preserved women for motherhood and protected their morality, thus benefiting the nation. Although this strategy worked well for hours laws, it foundered in arguments for wage legislation, especially as labor studies reported that some women supported entire families on their meager wages. The idea of the female breadwinner did not fit well with the primary identification of wage earning women as daughters and mothers. Reformers' language of motherhood also fell apart as a rationale for securing legislation when women gained the vote. Some feminists began to challenge sex-specific legislation on the grounds that it kept women from attaining full equality with men, fomenting a division among feminists and reformers that remains with us today: the "equality-versus-difference-debate." Although most activists could not reconcile this debate and ended up either supporting equality or difference, social researcher and reformer Mary Van Kleeck, an avid supporter of labor legislation, moved beyond the biologism of difference and instead focused on the commonalities that workers shared, especially in their opposition to employers. Rather than divide male and female workers, and design special legislation for each, Van Kleeck moved toward a non-gendered view of women in the workforce and focused on the idea that all workers had a right to labor legislation in exchange for their productive relation to the state.

Major League Baseball, alone among industries of its size in the United States, operates as an unregulated monopoly. This twentieth century regulatory anomaly has become known simply as the "baseball anomaly." Major League Baseball developed into a major commercial enterprise without being subject to antitrust liability. Long after the interstate commercial character of baseball had been established, and even recognized by the Supreme Court, baseball's monopoly remained free from federal regulation. This study explains the baseball anomaly by connecting baseball's regulatory status to the larger political environment, tracing the game's fate through four different regulatory regimes in the United States. The constellation of institutional, ideological and political factors within each regulatory regime provides the context for the persistence of the baseball anomaly. Baseball's unregulated monopoly persists because of the confluence of institutional, ideological and political factors which have prevented the repeal of baseball's antitrust exemption to date. However, both the institutional and ideological factors, which have in the past protected baseball's unregulated monopoly, are fading. Baseball's owners can no longer claim special cultural significance in defense of the exemption, nor can they claim that the commissioner system approximates government regulation sufficiently. Both of these strategies have been discredited by the labor unrest in baseball over the last decade. While baseball is one labor strike away from losing part of its exemption, it will likely retain the aspects of the exemption which cover the contractual relationship between the major and minor leagues, as well as the part of the exemption which allows Major League Baseball to regulate the migration of individual franchises. These aspects of baseball's exemption with likely be codified and expanded to all professional sports leagues. The eventual partial repeal of baseball's exemption and the likely expansion of part of baseball's exemption to other sports makes it both an outdated anomaly and a harbinger of sports antitrust policy in the twenty first century.

Land restitution is acclaimed as a political-economic strategy to mend land dispossession. However, land restitution policies lacking an understanding of the history of land property rights and the conditions of inequality under which it is distributed may produce new forms of uprooting, and reconfigure dimensions of class, gender and racial inequality. This research explores how current loss of territories of Afrocolombian community councils is grounded in a long history of exploitation, racism, (hetero) patriarchy, and deracination. I study the persistent mechanisms that account for the uprooting of Afrocolombian rural populations, and the strategies of resistance people pursue. I use a qualitative methods approach. I analyze archival documents such as letters of freedom, alcabalas , and receipts of manumission, land reform, and manumission laws; conduct interviews, make short term immersions in the disputed territories; and scrutinize testaments, maps, and public policy documents. I investigate the ways in which land has been distributed since 1851, when slavery came to an end in Colombia, and the extent to which restorative justice can occur with the 1448/2011 Colombian victims' reparation, and land restitution law without addressing land distribution inequality.