Category: Legal History
-
Originalism and Jury Nullification in America: A Legal Basis for the Restoration of a Lost Right
By Lawson Wright — A peal of alarm bells shattered the brisk yet tranquil Saturday morning in Boston on February 15, 1851. A mob had stormed the local courthouse in an effort to rescue fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins from being returned to slavery under the newly strengthened Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Intended to mend…
-
Man v. Machine: Social and Legal Implications of Machine Translation
By Cecilia Quirk — In a predominantly English-speaking country such as the United States, it can be easy to take for granted the essential relationship between the arts of law and translation. Yet, as David Bellos notes in Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, legal texts are translated…
-
How Long Will China’s Animal Cruelty Laws Have to Wait?
By Leyuan Ma — In April 2020, a university student in China’s Shandong Province was expelled from school after videos of him mercilessly torturing and murdering over 80 stray cats surfaced on the Chinese internet; in October of the same year, a man from Shanxi Province poured boiling water over a pregnant cat, killing her…
-
The Supreme Court’s Perversion of Property Rights
By Beck Reiferson — Political philosophers have long regarded the right to property as one of man’s most essential rights. John Locke, whose writings were among the most influential on the political thought of America’s Framers, believed the primary purpose of governments is to protect its citizens’ property rights. In his Two Treatises of Government,…
-
El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law: Contemporary Implications of Forced Tender Legislation
By Cecilia Quirk — From the invention of paper money in 7th century China to the FDR administration’s decision to drop the gold standard in 1933, money has constantly evolved in unexpected, even unsettling ways. Just as a world without paper money, or even without credit cards, seems unimaginable today, it’s no wonder that the…
-
The Gender Dichotomy: How Sharia Law in the Seventh Century Granted Women Legal Empowerment
By Noura Shoukfeh — The world’s youngest major religion, Islam, was established in the seventh century when the Prophet Muhammad amassed a following dedicated to the revelations he recieved in the Qur’an. The growth of Islam in the decades after Muhammad’s death, combined with the widespread need to implement a coherent ethical account of Islamic…
-
Asian American Lawyers: Then and Now
By Rebecca Cao — Conversations about Asian Americans have only just captured national attention as anti-Asian hate crimes have escalated amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the past two years, numerous discussions about Asian American identity, stereotypes of Asians, and America’s egregious history of exclusion against Asian Americans have surfaced, and, most recently in July 2021,…