The study of social allies in the field of American Civil Rights and Liberties History is largely an underappreciated aspect of this historical era. This work argues that social allies and their stories are worthwhile histories that are beneficial to the study of American Civil Rights and Liberties using Louisiana lawyer Herman Lazard Midlo as a case study. Midlo worked as a Louisiana lawyer from the 1930s to 1960s and fought tirelessly for the religious liberties of the Jehovah’s Witness community in the state. His story shows how beneficial and consequential the actions of social allies have had and can have on the protection and expansion of civil rights and religious liberties.

<p>This dissertation examines the political response of gay and lesbian organizations to the HIV/AIDS crisis through the lens of disability. When the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) formed in the 1970s, their early political efforts confronted the stigma and exclusion associated with the American Psychiatric Association’s disabling label. In the 1980s, gay and lesbian organizations faced a deadly epidemic—AIDS. The high cost of medical care left people with AIDS destitute. NGTF pressed the Social Security Administration to modify their disability criteria to recognize AIDS and ARC as qualifying disabilities. Fear and homophobia left people with AIDS vulnerable to employment, housing and medical discrimination as well as social ostracism. Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund countered AIDS discrimination in New York through collaborative efforts with city and state agencies. Disability rights codes and laws offered people with AIDS some protection against discrimination. The Task Force, the Gay Rights National Lobby and the Disability Rights Defense & Education Fund joined the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 1982. While the Conference did not engage in the campaign for gay and lesbian rights in the 1980s, their extended legislative crusade for the Civil Rights Restoration Act would bring AIDS onto the battlefield. This study finds these various antecedents came into play during the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to the extent that gay and lesbian organizations could describe the ADA as an “AIDS bill” in terms of both their political participation and the text protecting people with contagious diseases who were not a threat.<br></p>

<p>Sjötåget sommaren 1676 blev ett svenskt misslyckande. Efter regalskeppet Kronans förlisning och förlusten av sjöslaget den första juni 1676 tillsatte kungen Karl XI en kommissorialrätt med syfte att ställa de ansvariga för misslyckandet till svars. Kommissorialrättens protokoll har utgjort den här undersökningens grund. Syftet har varit att dels undersöka kommissorialrättens arbete, dess organisation, retorik och metod, men också att analysera de tankemönster och värderingar som präglade och styrde dess handlingsmönster. Det står klart att kommissorialrättens ledamöter, samt de berörda officerarna, i stor utsträckning delade ett antal föreställningar om mod och manlighet, plikt och trohet, samt heder och ära. Dessa föreställningar påverkade inte bara det sätt man valde att beskriva sjöslaget och officerarnas agerande i strid, utan också hur framför allt de anklagade kom att uppföra sig inför den sittande rätten. Rätten framstår i protokollen inte enbart som en arena för att skilja skyldiga från oskyldiga samt för att utdöma straff, utan också som en plats att bevisa och återupprätta en hotad heder.</p>

<p>The Irish immigrants have been an important part of London throughout the centuries. Their presence can be found from the 17^th century and onwards. Initially occupied as seasonal workers in agrarian fields the Irish later found alternative ways of supporting themselves as the Industrial Revolution transformed the whole of England. Despite their vital importance to the construction of what was to be known as "the modern Babylon" the Irish have been victims of both social prejudice and maltreatment. Some historians have imposed a comparison between the Irish in England and the African slaves in the United States. They have viewed the Irish with the spectacles of modern racism and in their presumptions created an unfair image of the relationship of the British and the Irish as the European equivalent of that of the African slaves and the American slave owners. Not content with superimposing the image of "the racist Englishman" solely on the 19^th century, scholars such as L. P Curtis and R. N. Lebow have sought to explain any questionable act committed by the British as a sign of xenophobia towards their Celtic neighbours, whether it be Cromwell’s Irish Campaign in 1649 or the lack of British aid during the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s.</p><p>This essay sets out to examine how Irish <em>women</em> were perceived at the Old Bailey Session House in London. Women have always received verdicts of a more lenient character than their male counterparts. It is therefore plausible to suppose that, if Cutis and Lebow are correct in their assumptions, Irish women should receive harsher verdicts and a higher frequency of those committed than those acquitted of crimes in comparison with their British counterparts, which simply is not the case.</p>

Though ultimately seeking more just law, civil disobedience still entails the breaching of a law. For this reason, most theories hold that people who practice civil disobedience must be willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions. On the other hand, a nation that is truly committed to justice will recognize that its constitution and legal order may in some ways fall short of perfect justice. In this thesis, I defend Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience as unique in its capacity for justification and even government toleration. Appealing to a shared conception of justice, Rawlsian civil disobedients are able to ground their actions in the same principles to which the state is committed. I argue that Rawls’s shared conception of justice is further substantiated when read in the light of his later theory of the overlapping consensus of comprehensive doctrines. I ultimately conclude that civil disobedience construed in the Rawlsian sense ought to receive some degree of toleration by the state, and particularly by constitutional states which maintain a formal commitment to justice in the protection of rights and intentional design of government institutions.

I denna uppsats studeras en sedan tidigare obehandlad källa rörande häxprocessen i Torsåkers socken i Ångermanland under 1600-talet. Källan som innehåller två rättsliga protokoll och en berättande text kring den ovan nämnda processen påträffades av en arkivarie vid namn Göran Gullbro i arkivet på länsmuseet Murberget i Härnösand. I och med studien har en avskrift av källan gjorts samt att dess innehåll har studerats och jämförts med redan sedan tidigare kända källor rörande ämnet. Här avses häradsrättens rannsakningsprotokoll från händelsen samt en avhandling i ämnet som publicerades 1771 författad av en Jöns Hornaeus.   Studien ger ett möjligt svar på frågan kring den funna källans beskaffenhet, samt en redogörelse för dess innehåll inför kommande studier. Hypoteserna om Jöns Hornaeus som författare till källans berättande del samt att de två protokollen skulle kunna vara avskrifter av det sedan runt 300 år tillbaka förlorade kommissionsdomstolsprotokollet testas med spännande resultat.

The Irish immigrants have been an important part of London throughout the centuries. Their presence can be found from the 17th century and onwards. Initially occupied as seasonal workers in agrarian fields the Irish later found alternative ways of supporting themselves as the Industrial Revolution transformed the whole of England. Despite their vital importance to the construction of what was to be known as "the modern Babylon" the Irish have been victims of both social prejudice and maltreatment. Some historians have imposed a comparison between the Irish in England and the African slaves in the United States. They have viewed the Irish with the spectacles of modern racism and in their presumptions created an unfair image of the relationship of the British and the Irish as the European equivalent of that of the African slaves and the American slave owners. Not content with superimposing the image of "the racist Englishman" solely on the 19th century, scholars such as L. P Curtis and R. N. Lebow have sought to explain any questionable act committed by the British as a sign of xenophobia towards their Celtic neighbours, whether it be Cromwell’s Irish Campaign in 1649 or the lack of British aid during the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s. This essay sets out to examine how Irish women were perceived at the Old Bailey Session House in London. Women have always received verdicts of a more lenient character than their male counterparts. It is therefore plausible to suppose that, if Cutis and Lebow are correct in their assumptions, Irish women should receive harsher verdicts and a higher frequency of those committed than those acquitted of crimes in comparison with their British counterparts, which simply is not the case.

The purpose of this essay is to examine and explain how the Swedish mining court of Stora Kopparberget (the Great Copper Mountain) implemented its judicial legislation between 1641-1682. Questions are asked about which counts of indictments the court tried, which sentences they handed out, in what quantities and how these results looks in comparison with other contemporary courts. The index cards of the court judicial protocols are the primary source of information. The methods are those of quantity- and comparative analysis.The results show that theft of copper ore was the most common crime ransacked by the court. Other common crimes were (in order): sin of omission, transgression of work directions, fights, slander and disdain, trade of stolen ore, failing appearance in court etc.Fines were by far the most common sentence followed by shorter imprisonments, gauntlets, loss of right to mine possession, twig beating, loss of work, penal servitude, banishment, “wooden horse riding” and finally military transcription. Even though previous re-search, in the field of Swedish specialized courts, is almost non existent evidence confirms great similarities between the Stora Kopparberget mining court and Sala mining court. This essay will, hopefully, enrich our knowledge of specialized courts, of 17th century mining industry and society and let us reach a broader understanding of the working conditions of the mountain.

Provincial town clerks and scriveners have hitherto been a neglected subject in the historiography of the legal profession, yet as this thesis demonstrates, they contributed significantly to medieval England’s legal and scribal culture. Arguing for a new definition of scriveners based on their legal and linguistic literacy, this fresh interpretation differentiates between scriveners, notaries, generic clerks and lawyers and modifies the existing tendency towards classifying scriveners purely on the basis of the work they did and the legal instruments they produced. The study not only rectifies a gap in our knowledge, but reconceptualises our understanding of the lower echelons of the legal profession by examining the work that scriveners did and the role that they played in the local legal administration of medieval England, and by extension, the ways in which they facilitated access to justice on several levels. Focussing primarily on Exeter, Bristol, Bridgwater and Southampton, this research for the first time reveals the identities of some of the many scriveners who worked outside of London and evaluates their activities in provincial England. In order to achieve this, the thesis considers the extent to which scriveners were an integral part of an urban legal service as members of the provincial secretariat. Underpinning the theoretical framework of this thesis are themes such as literacy, clerical identity and professionalization – all of which are examined through the prism of law, languages and access to justice. Grounded in a palaeographic and diplomatic approach to the manuscript sources, this research has yielded some surprising results regarding the essential role of provincial scriveners within the legal, political and administrative landscape of medieval England. Fundamentally, this thesis offers a new vision of provincial English scriveners and the influence of their work. Set against the backdrop of an increasingly ‘professional’ legal profession, the importance of provincial scriveners as the keepers and creators of legal memory is highlighted along with the impact that this had on the wider legal community of medieval England.

This thesis is an investigation of the representation of the figure of the man who raped on the early modern stage. The early modern “man who raped” must be distinguished from the modern term “rapist” insofar as the modern term ascribes an ontological or sociological position to the individual male that was alien to the early modern world view. The shifting value of “rape” in the early modern period presaged more modern conceptions of rape as “an experience imposed on an embodied subject, a violent sexual assault that in its corporal nature destabilizes the intersubjective personhood of the victim” (Cahill 207). As such, the shifting values of the term also prefigured more modern conceptions of masculinity and the successful performance of masculine values. The figure of the man who raped on the early modern English stage often was not merely the monster against which successful forms of masculine behaviour could be contrasted – often such characters found a sympathetic audience. And often, that audience was encouraged and directed through paratextual and dramaturgical devices to see themselves in and identify with the man who raped, for he could be redeemed. This thesis uses the lens of the Roman play to investigate sexual assault because Roman plays clarified masculine ideals for the early moderns; Rome, civilization, manliness, stoic self-control and virtus on the early modern stage were all coincident terms that articulated sexual difference and therefore the construction of the male subject (Kahn 15). The first section looks extensively at the English inheritance of Roman and Anglo-Saxon laws on sexual assault, while the subsequent chapters turn to early modern drama more closely. The plays under study are Marston’s Wonder of Women, Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and Fletcher’s Bonduca. / SSHRC, School of English and Theatre Studies, College of Arts