Land is a significant and controversial topic in South Africa. Addressing the land claims of those dispossessed in the past has proved to be a demanding, multidimensional process. In many respects the land restitution program that was launched as part of the county’s transition to democracy in 1994 has failed to meet expectations, with ordinary citizens, policymakers, and analysts questioning not only its progress but also its outcomes and parameters.Land, Memory, Reconstructio...

Speeding up land reform through a constitutional amendment that would explicitly permit the expropriation of land without compensation has dominated legal and political-policy debates in South Africa in recent years. Taking this politically and emotionally charged issue as its starting point, this volume offers both expert commentary on this issue from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and also fresh ideas on how to advance the redistributive transformation that South Africa so urgent...

The closing arguments from ten noteworthy cases—“lawyers and nonlawyers will enjoy the passion and eloquence of these counselors; practitioners of law will find much to learn from them” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).Until now, only the twelve jurors who sat in judgment were able to appreciate these virtuoso performances, where weeks of testimony were boiled down and presented with flair, wit, and high drama. For five years the authors researched every ar...

Their names linger in memory mainly as punch lines, synonyms for obscurity: Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, Calvin Coolidge. They conjure up not the White House so much as a decaying middle school somewhere in New Jersey. But many forgotten presidents, writes Michael J. Gerhardt, were not weak or ineffective. They boldly fought battles over constitutional principles that resonate today. Gerhardt, one of our leading legal experts, tells the story of The Forgotten Presidents. He s...

This book presents new material and shines fresh light on the under-explored historical and legal evidence about the use of the doctrine of discovery in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. North America, New Zealand and Australia were colonised by England under an international legal principle that is known today as the doctrine of discovery. When Europeans set out to explore and exploit new lands in the fifteenth through to the twentieth centuries, they justified their s...

Law has played a central role in American history. From colonial times to the present, law has not just reflected the changing society in which legal decisions have been made-it has played a powerful role in shaping that society, though not always in positive ways. Eminent legal scholar G. Edward White-author of the ongoing, multi-volume Law in American History-offers a compact overview that sheds light on the impact of law on a number of key social issues. Rather than offer a straight chr...

Originalism holds that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning at the time it was enacted. In their innovative defense of originalism, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport maintain that the text of the Constitution should be adhered to by the Supreme Court because it was enacted by supermajorities—both its original enactment under Article VII and subsequent Amendments under Article V. A text approved by supermajorities has special value in a democracy because it...

By extending the chronological parameters of existing scholarship, and by focusing on legal experts' overriding and enduring concern with 'dangerous' forms of common crime, this study offers a major reinterpretation of criminal-law reform and legal culture in Italy from the Liberal (1861–1922) to the Fascist era (1922–43). Garfinkel argues that scholars have long overstated the influence of positivist criminology on Italian legal culture and that the kingdom's penal-reform movement was dri...

This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. Scholars of early modern English literature and history have increasingly found that an understanding of how people in the past thought about and used the law is key to understanding early modern familial and social relations as well as important aspects of the political revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Judicial...

Of all the written portraits of the delegates who attended the Federal Convention of 1787, few are as complete and compelling as those penned by William Pierce Jr. (1753–89), one of four delegates from Georgia. While at the convention or shortly thereafter, Pierce produced character sketches of fifty-three of the fifty-five delegates. Although widely quoted and cited, the sketches—until now—have never been analyzed or annotated in detail. John R. Vile’s study offers new insights into the w...

This text addresses the corporate causes of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the emergence of modern Republican China. Weaving together political, legal and business histories, it focuses on the key relationship between China, cement and corporations, and demonstrates how the particular circumstances of cement manufacturing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China serve to illuminate key aspects of Chinese political economy and illustrate the importance of legal frameworks in t...

Constitutional politics has become a major terrain of contemporary struggles. Contestation around designing, replacing, revising, and dramatically re-interpreting constitutions is proliferating worldwide. Starting with Southern Europe in post-Franco Spain, then in the ex-Communist countries in Central Europe, post-apartheid South Africa, and now in the Arab world, constitution making has become a project not only of radical political movements, but of liberals and conservatives as well. Wh...