This is the first biography written from a legal perspective on the public life of Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884); a prominent figure in the common law world in the second half of the 19th century. ...Drawing on a range of primary source materials including newspaper articles, case law and extensive archival research in the UK and USA, it charts his rise as a lawyer first in the mixed legal system of Louisiana and then nationally. In 1853 he was the first person of Jewish heritage to be offered nomination to the US Supreme Court – an honour he declined. Benjamin was also a member of the US Senate, a slave owner and a supporter of Southern secession. In the Civil War he served continuously in the Confederate Cabinet initially as Attorney General, then as Secretary of War and finally as Secretary of State. Following the victory of the Union he fled America, a fugitive. In political exile in England he requalified as a Barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. Within a decade he had written a scholarly and long-enduring treatise on commercial law and become the undisputed advocate of choice in appeals before the House of Lords and the Privy Council. This book considers the extraordinary career of this distinguished jurist and reflects upon his legal legacy.
What explains divergences in political liberalism among new nations that shared the same colonial heritage? This book assembles exciting original essays on former colonies of the British Empire in ...South Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia that gained independence after World War II. The interdisciplinary country specialists reveal how inherent contradictions within British colonial rule were resolved after independence in contrasting liberal-legal, despotic and volatile political orders. Through studies of the longue durée and particular events, this book presents a theory of political liberalism in the post-colony and develops rich hypotheses on the conditions under which the legal complex, civil society and the state shape alternative postcolonial trajectories around political freedom. This provocative volume presents new perspectives for scholars and students of postcolonialism, political development and the politics of the legal complex, as well as for policy makers and publics who struggle to construct and defend basic legal freedoms.
"I read these stories of the first generation of women lawyers with awe and gratitude. We are all in their debt - and in Jill Norgren's, too, for recovering this forgotten history." - Linda ...Greenhouse, Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow, Yale Law School In Rebels at the Bar, prize-winning legal historian Jill Norgren recounts the life stories of a small group of nineteenth century women who were among the first female attorneys in the United States. Beginning in the late 1860s, these determined rebels pursued the radical ambition of entering the then all-male profession of law. They were motivated by a love of learning. They believed in fair play and equal opportunity. They desired recognition as professionals and the ability to earn a good living. Through a biographical approach, Norgren presents the common struggles of eight women first to train and to qualify as attorneys, then to practice their hard-won professional privilege. Their story is one of nerve, frustration, and courage. This first generation practiced civil and criminal law, solo and in partnership. The women wrote extensively and lobbied on the major issues of the day, but the professional opportunities open to them had limits. They never had the opportunity to wear the black robes of a judge. They were refused entry into the lucrative practices of corporate and railroad law.Although male lawyers filled legislatures and the Foreign Service, presidents refused to appoint these early women lawyers to diplomatic offices and the public refused to elect them to legislatures. Rebels at the Bar expands our understanding of both women's rights and the history of the legal profession in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the female renegades who trained in law and then, like men, fought considerable odds to create successful professional lives. In this engaging and beautifully written book, Norgren shares her subjects' faith in the art of the possible. In so doing, she ensures their place in history.Jill Norgrenis Professor Emerita of Political Science at John Jay College, and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She is the award winning author of many articles and books, includingBelva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President( NYU Press, 2007);The Cherokee Cases; and American Cultural Pluralism and Law(with Serena Nanda).
Egypt after Mubarak Rutherford, Bruce K
2008, 2013., 20130221, 2013, 2008-12-14, 2013-02-21, 20080101, Letnik:
48
eBook, Book
Which way will Egypt go now that Husni Mubarak's authoritarian regime has been swept from power? Will it become an Islamic theocracy similar to Iran? Will it embrace Western-style liberalism and ...democracy?Egypt after Mubarakreveals that Egypt's secularists and Islamists may yet navigate a middle path that results in a uniquely Islamic form of liberalism and, perhaps, democracy. Bruce Rutherford draws on in-depth interviews with Egyptian judges, lawyers, Islamic activists, politicians, and businesspeople. He utilizes major court rulings, political documents of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the writings of Egypt's leading contemporary Islamic thinkers. Rutherford demonstrates that, in post-Mubarak Egypt, progress toward liberalism and democracy is likely to be slow.
Essential reading on a subject of global importance, this edition includes a new introduction by Rutherford that takes stock of the Arab Spring and the Muslim Brotherhood's victories in the 2011-2012 elections.
What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes. Lowering the ...Bar analyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the “legalization” of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans’ deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers.
"The history of the black lawyer in South Carolina," writes W. Lewis Burke, "is one of the most significant untold stories of the long and troubled struggle for equal rights in the state." Beginning ...in Reconstruction and continuing to the modern civil rights era, 168 black lawyers were admitted to the South Carolina bar.All for Civil Rightsis the first book-length study devoted to those lawyers' struggles and achievements in the state that had the largest black population in the country, by percentage, until 1930-and that was a majority black state through 1920.
Examining court processes, trials, and life stories of the lawyers, Burke offers a comprehensive analysis of black lawyers' engagement with the legal system. Some of that study is set in the courts and legislative halls, for the South Carolina bar once had the highest percentage of black lawyers of any southern state, and South Carolina was one of only two states to ever have a black majority legislature. However, Burke also tells who these lawyers were (some were former slaves, while others had backgrounds in the church, the military, or journalism); where they came from (nonnatives came from as close as Georgia and as far away as Barbados); and how they were educated, largely through apprenticeship.
Burke argues forcefully that from the earliest days after the Civil War to the heyday of the modern civil rights movement, the story of the black lawyer in South Carolina is the story of the civil rights lawyer in the Deep South. AlthoughAll for Civil Rightsfocuses specifically on South Carolinians, its argument about the legal shift in black personhood from the slave era to the 1960s resonates throughout the South.
In Seward's Law
, Peter Charles Hoffer argues that William H. Seward's
legal practice in Auburn, New York, informed his theory of
relational rights-a theory that demonstrated how the country could
...end slavery and establish a practical form of justice.
This theory, Hoffer demonstrates, had ties to Seward's career as a
country lawyer. Despite his rise to prominence, and indeed
preeminence, as a US secretary of state, Seward's country-lawyer
mentality endured throughout his life, as evinced in his personal
attitudes and professional conduct. Relational rights, identified
and termed here for the first time by Hoffer, are communal and
reciprocal, what everyone owed to every other member of their
community. Such rights are at the center of a jurisprudential
outlook that arises directly from living in a village. Though
Seward was limited by the Victorian mores and the racialist
presumptions of his day, the concept of relational rights that
animated him was the natural antithesis to the theories and
practices of slavery. In the legal regime underpinning the
institution, masters owed nothing to their bondmen and women, while
those enslaved unconditionally owed life and labor to their
masters. The irrepressible conflict was, for Seward,
jurisprudential as well as moral and political. Hoffer's leading
assumption in Seward's Law is that a lifetime spent as a
lawyer influences how a person responds to everyday challenges.
Seward remained a country lawyer at heart, and that fact defined
the course of his political career.
