Thesis--Cologne. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. i-iii).

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Legal history is social history, family history, women's history, economic history, business history, and constitutional history; in fact it is a growth industry. Records from the civil division of the British Columbia Supreme Court furnish the best possible primary sources, the evidence for local studies in these fields. This thesis is put forward as a practical guide both for scholars who wish to search records from the Vancouver Supreme Court Registry and for archivists who need a conceptual framework for appraising civil court records. It traces the origins and common law traditions of the court, describes court administration and the rules for civil procedure, tabulates the kinds of record kept by the civil division, and works out for archivists a practical means of selection. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

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This thesis uses a microhistorical methodology to examine the social impact and lived experience of Prohibition in Sanford, Florida, and the surrounding area – an historically "dry" community. Historiographical claims from state, regional, and national studies are tested through data sampling of Sanford Municipal Court Records; close readings of more than 200 Sanford Herald articles; and an oral history with a local museum curator based on family tradition. This is an evidence-driven thesis. A thirty-percent sampling of 23,000 Sanford Municipal Court Records covering the Prohibition era (1920-1933) enables detailed analysis of alcohol-related arrest and enforcement patterns based on race, gender, and age. The Sanford Herald is examined for editorial content classified into three categories: local enforcement reports, opinion pieces, and Prohibition-related news. The oral history is analyzed in connection with municipal records, newspaper articles, and secondary scholarship. Conclusions are presented textually and visually with graphs and an interactive digital map. An underlying theme of this paper is the comparison of how the events of Prohibition unfolded at the local, regional, and national levels. Recent academic scholarship labels Prohibition as a vehicle for aggressive, targeted enforcement based on racial and economic factors. This work examines how this dynamic transpired in the local community of Sanford and the surrounding area. Further, this thesis evaluates the methodological value of detailed local study via data, textual, and verbal sources. The municipal court records, while rich in arrest data and demographic detail, are most fruitful when used in combination with other sources. The Sanford Herald archive and oral history provide more culturally contextualized source materials to construct the lived experience. Sanford serves as an example of a small town's experience with Prohibition. This methodological approach is effective in both supporting and raising questions to the current historiography.

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This thesis utilises district court records from the three judicial districts of Hammerdal, Offerdal, and Undersåker to shed light on Saamis’ presence in north-western Jämtland during the seventeenth century. The research question posed is how encounters with the local communities shaped the Saamis’ situation during a period of emerging colonial mores and contributes to the discussion on how encounters with others impacted the situation for the Saami in early modern Sweden. The theoretical framework adopts the concepts of borderlands, concurrences, and settler colonialism to understand the manifold of encounters that shaped the situation for the Saami, acknowledging the possibility that the encounters could be contradictory while also understanding them as shaped within a context of power asymmetries. Contrary to the northern lappmarks, this thesis shows that the Saamis in north-western Jämtland were deprived of representation at the local courts, affecting their influence in local self-governance and administration of justice. Moreover, by not only focusing on Saamis’ encounters with the representatives of the Crown and the Church but also with the non-Saamis who resided in the local communities, this thesis concludes that the Saamis’ situation was shaped by concurring and conflicting encounters, encompassing not only coercion and confrontation but also cooperation and coexistence.

The present study aims to reveal the credit practice in Galata region in seventeenth century, through dealing with the credit relations between religious groups and the position of women in economic relations as the main themes. Galata was one of the most important international trade ports in seventeenth century for not only the Otoman Empire but also the Mediterranean region. While it was expected that the credit organization in Galata should be different than the ones of priorly studied cities of Anatoli, Kayseri and Bursa, as a result of the combination of multinational structure of the region and its important trade port characteristics, it is seen that Galata was similar to the other cities with regard to the credit organization. Paralel to the results of other studies, it is observed that money exchange between religious groups was intensive and both Muslim and non-Muslim women were actively involved in economic life, by analyzing court records that belonged to the seventeenth century. The existance of credit relations without heed to religious or gender differences proved the existance of trust feeling between the groups. Like the previous studies about the practice of credit and credit organization in other Ottoman cities, this thesis attempts to help to understand the socio- economic structure of the Otoman society.

In the following essay I have studied child suffocation and infanticide in Västbo district in Småland 1860–1949. This has been done with a quantitative study of the district's death and funeral books which have shown the reduced frequency of the phenomena over time. I have also been able to point to a connection where child suffocation tended to occur in cases where the parents were married. Infanticide, on the other hand, was in most cases caused by an extramarital affair. Based on theories concerning the role of marriage,combined with the assumption that a female ideal is constructed on the basisof two counter-images, I have been able to show how the child murderer was seen as a greater threat to the social morality, compared with the married woman who suffocated her child in her sleep. Thus, there was also a greater tendency to punish the former more severely. In the qualitative part of thestudy, I have reviewed the district court's records concerning child murderers. Based on a theory that pregnancies, births and morality fell within the scope of a female sphere of responsibility, I have analyzed the actions of to the accused woman's homosocial group. Here, the study has been able to shed light on a significant female presence. This was partly reflected in the gender distribution of witnesses, as well as in how the authorities seemed to show aconfidence in the female sphere to bring clarity to the case.

Unlawful assembly accounts extracted from the Fredericksburg Mayor’s Court Order Books from 1821-1834, reveal rare glimpses of unsupervised, alleged illegal interactions between free and enslaved individuals, many of whom do not appear in other records. Authorities enforced laws banning free blacks and persons of mixed race from interacting with enslaved persons and whites at unlawful assemblies to keep peace in the town, to prevent sexual relationships between white women and free and enslaved black men, and to prevent alliance building between individuals. The complex connections necessary to arrange unlawful assemblies threatened the town’s safety with insurrection if these individuals developed radical ideas opposing the existing social order, the foundation of which was slavery. Akin to residents of areas where natural disasters like volcanoes always pose a risk of dangerous eruptions, those living in Fredericksburg lived their lives within the town slave society and its potential threats. In an area, state, and region where insurrections occurred, unlawful assembly, whether frequent or infrequent, mattered.