Abstract This article uses the case of Fortune Ferguson, Jr to explore the creation and effects of the creation of a centralized justice system in Florida in the 1920s. This involved a 16-year-old Black teenager accused, convicted, and executed for rape in Florida in the mid-1920s. This represented the first person sentenced to die in the newly created electric chair in Florida’s state prison. The shift to the electric chair and state-run executions reflected a larger move by the legislature to remove criminal justice processes from the decentralized system that existed prior to 1923. This system vested significant authority in the community, local officials, and private contractors. But that system came under significant strain by the 1910s and 1920s. The shift to the electric chair and state executions emerged out of the larger critiques of the decentralized justice system. As such, this case reflects an effort to establish the authority of the new centralized system, as it was one of the first cases to be tried in it. The transition to state-run private executions was not as disadvantageous to local officials as scholars have suggested. Instead of framing the centralization of criminal justice processes as a competition between state and local criminal justice actors, the case of Fortune Ferguson provides insight into the collaborative efforts that occurred between state and local officials that augmented the authority of formal agents of criminal justice at both the state and local levels.

Abstract In the initial years of the republican era, New Granada (now Colombia) underwent a profound transformation in its sources and mechanisms of credit, transitioning from the predominance of a spiritual economy during the colonial period to a secular system that gradually evolved into a banking framework by the late nineteenth century. Starting in the mid-1830s, influenced by liberal ideology, a combination of factors catalysed this evolution, including the liberalization of interest rates, the establishment of savings institutions, and intellectual discourse surrounding the need to organize a formal banking system. Despite several attempts to establish an institutionalized financial framework, only in the 1860s and 1870s did the federal government ultimately foster the formation of regional banks. This article serves as an introduction to comprehend the origins and progression of the Colombian banking system.

Abstract Homicide suspects in the United States have sometimes maintained, and prosecutors and juries have sometimes agreed, that their crimes were less serious or were justified entirely if they were responding to homosexual advances by their victims. Studies of such a defence’s use have, with a single exception from 1868, been confined to the period after 1920. A newspaper search, modelled on one used to explore another supposed ‘unwritten law’, identifies nine additional instances between the Civil War and 1914. In the most notable of them, the murder of Joseph Frye in Boston in 1879, such advances were all but explicitly recognized as constituting legal provocation that mitigated the crime. In this and other cases, a credible invocation of the defence seems to have lightened the killer’s punishment when any was imposed.

Abstract On 20 January 1969, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed suit against 37 International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) locals in 10 Texas cities. The DOJ charged that the ILA was in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In United States v International Longshoremen’s Association, the government attacked the segregated union structure found throughout the state’s waterfronts and condemned a long history of racial bias. In Texas, black dock workers made up two-thirds of ILA membership, but got fewer than half of the total work assignments. Black longshoremen both leaned on the law and defied it. For almost two decades, they refused to merge with white locals, but filed federal complaints to gain fair employment. This article argues that the struggle to maintain separatism while advocating for equality at ILA waterfronts was an effort to gain an unattainable workplace freedom by insisting on upholding a century-long tradition of biracial cooperation that was at the root of economic injustice, but at the cornerstone of an indispensable moral value and black sustainability.

Abstract The Bank of Canada is an independent Crown corporation that sees its primary responsibility to be promoting Canada’s economic welfare by maintaining low and stable inflation. When it was first created in 1934, however, the Bank was a radically different institution—a privately owned corporation primarily meant to anchor Canada’s economy globally and manage foreign exchange. Not only was the Bank not tasked with managing inflation, but key policymakers behind its founding thought doing so would be a severe mistake. This article offers the first legal history of the Bank’s founding. It maps the enormous public debate that accompanied the creation of the Bank and the various, often contradictory visions expressed for it. The article labels these five visions: a Bankers’ Bank, a Government Bank, an Imperial Bank, an Economists’ Bank, and a Bank of the People. The article then looks at the original legal design of the Bank and argues that it largely fit the Imperial Bank model. Charting this history helps us better understand this vital organ of Canadian government, and has the potential to upset many of our accepted, contemporary notions of central banking.

Abstract Japanese military brothels during the Pacific War, known as comfort stations, and the predicaments of women confined there still reverberate in public memory. Of late a growing number of scholars have called for approaching the comfort women issue from a broader historical context, linking it to Japan’s prewar state-regulated prostitution, later transplanted into its colonies, and human trafficking. This article discusses the legal frameworks of indentured contracts and criminal prosecution surrounding the procurement of women in imperial Japan and colonial Korea. Most women entered prostitution impressed by poverty when the law fully recognized their agency as independent contractors. The age-old machinery of advanced loan agreements, signed or guaranteed in many cases by destitute parents, revealed how the ill-guided idea of filial piety muddled the boundaries between the exercise of legal rights and their abuses. The judicial process dealing with prostitution contracts and also the crimes of abduction and kidnapping helps understand how law and state institutions operated in the Japanese colonial empire. The recent historiographical debate on the comfort women raises critical questions about the conditions under which the past is assessed.

Journal Article Christian G Fritz, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance Get access Christian G Fritz, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance ( CUP 2023), pp 411. US$39.99 (hardcover). ISBN 9781009325578 Jane Manners Jane Manners Temple Beasley School of Law, Philadelphia, PA, USA E-mail: jane.manners@temple.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, njae007, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/njae007 Published: 08 June 2024

Abstract In the 1760s and 1770s, Thomas Bever, a once-eminent but today nearly-forgotten English civilian, was delivering a course of lectures devoted to civil law at Oxford. The final part of those lectures, known as the Appendix, was of a different character from the earlier parts. In the Appendix Bever discussed the development of the law and constitution of 15 European countries. His description was an attempt to compare different systems and to abstract general legal concepts common to different countries. Along with other issues, Bever was specifically interested in abstracting the common roots of medieval feudalism. The analysis offered in this article is the result of archival investigation comparing two different versions of Bever’s lecture notes. The main objective of the article is to reconstruct Bever’s narrative, together with analysing his methodology and the intellectual framework of his work. This investigation reveals the intricacies of the legal education offered at Oxford in the second half of the eighteenth century.