By Thomas Frampton

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like Strauder v. West Virginia (1880). Legal scholars and historians unanimously report that free people of color did not serve as jurors, in either the North or South, until 1860. In fact, this Article shows, Black men served as jurors in antebellum America decades earlier than anyone has previously realized. While instances of early Black jury service were rare, campaigns insisting upon Black citizens’ admission to the jury-box were not. From the late 1830s onward, Black activists across the country organized to abolish the all-white jury. They faced, and occasionally overcame, staunch resistance. This Article uses jury lists, court records, convention minutes, diaries, bills of sale, tax rolls, and other overlooked primary sources to recover these forgotten efforts, led by activists who understood the jury-box to be both a marker and maker of citizenship. A broader historical perspective—one that centers Black activists in the decades before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between race, rights, citizenship, and the jury.

 New York University Law Review, 2024, 66 pages

Edited by Diane Kirkby

This collection brings methods and questions from humanities, law and social sciences disciplines to examine different instances of lawmaking. Contributors explore the problematic of past law in present historical analysis across indigenous Australia and New Zealand, from post-Franco Spain to current international law and maritime regulation, from settler colonial humanitarian debates to efforts to end cruelty to children and animals. They highlight problems both national and international in their implication. From different disciplines and theoretical positions, they illustrate the diverse and complex study of law’s history.

Canberra: Australian National University, 2011. 236p.

Edited by Antony Duff

Five preeminent legal theorists tackle a range of fundamental questions on the nature of the philosophy of criminal law. Their essays explore the extent to which and the ways in which our systems of criminal law can be seen as rational and principled. The essays discuss some of the principles by which, it is often thought, a system of law should be structured, and they ask whether our own systems are genuinely principled or riven by basic contradictions, reflecting deeper political and social conflicts

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 272p.

By Joanna Carraway Vitiello

This book examines the administration of justice in the small northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia at the end of the fourteenth century. Through an examination of material from the judicial archives from the period 1371-1409, this study investigates the development of public justice, inquisition procedure, and dispute resolution in late medieval Reggio Emilia, also incorporating comparative material, especially archival material from Bologna at the end of the fourteenth century. This study seeks to add to the discussion on dispute resolution and court processes in late medieval Europe, moving the discussion outside the major urban centers of late medieval Italy to the periphery of urban life.

Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016. 232p.

By Jamie K. Taylor.  

Throughout the Middle Ages, witnessing was a crucial way religious and legal “truths” were understood and produced. Religious and secular officials alike harnessed the power of testimony to assert doctrinal, political, or legal responsibilities. Swearing an oath, testifying in court, and signing a deposition were common ways to shape and discipline both devotional and legal communities. In Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages, Jamie K. Taylor traces depictions of witnessing in a wide range of late medieval texts and shows how witnessing practices formed and reformed, policed and challenged medieval communities. Through close study of texts like the Man of Law’s Tale and Piers Plowman alongside sermon exempla, common law statutes, and pastoral treatises, Fictions of Evidence argues that devotional and legal witnessing practices offered medieval writers a distinct vocabulary they could use to expose how the ethical and legal obligations to one’s community were constructed. And since vernacular writers often challenged the ways ecclesiastical or secular authorities asserted community bonds, they found they could use those same witnessing practices and language to imagine extra-legal or extra-ecclesiastical communities that followed different ethical codes.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 232p

By Charity Organization Society of the City.

Six Years' Work of the Committee on Criminal Courts of the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, 1911-1917: A story of its work for the clean, intelligent and kindly administration of our Inferior Criminal Courts.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1918) 58 pages.

Edited by William Eves, John Hudson, Ingrid Ivarsen and Sarah B. White.

Essays in Comparative Legal History from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries. “This volume is a selection of essays taken from the excellent range of papers presented at the British Legal History Conference hosted by the Institute for Legal and Constitutional Research at the University of St Andrews, 10–13 July 2019. The theme of the conference gives this book its title: ‘comparative legal history’. …. But the chosen topic was also connected to the fact that this was, we think, the first British Legal History Conference held at a university without a Law faculty.”

Cambridge University Press. (2021) 278 pages.

By Ernest Bryant Hoag and Edward Huntington Williams

. “In presenting this book to the public the authors have in mind the need for brief but accurate account of the common mental defects and sociological factors encountered in study of adult criminals, and of delinquent children. From an extensive experience in criminological work, including the psychopathic laboratory and much expert testimony in court, they are convinced that many judges, lawyers, police officials and doctors will welcome the sort of information which is here given. They also have in mind the needs of social service workers, teachers, and students of sociology, and last, but not least, certain part of the general public, which is asking almost in vain for the explanation of the criminal and delinquent behavior which today, more than ever before, presents itself in every large community. The authors have not pretended to offer anything new to experts in the study of abnormal behavior, yet they hope that even some of these will find the case-histories, at least, interesting and perhaps valuable.”

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1923. 405p.

By M. Ralph Brown.

Psychology Apoplied to the Trial of Cases, to Crime and Its Treatment, and To Mental States and Processes, Indianapolis: “The aim of the author has been to collect and to explain within the covers of this small volume those principles of applied psychology which are of distinct benefit to the legal profession. Usefulness to the practicing lawyer has been the criterion upon which the inclusion or exclusion of material has been based. The field of applied legal psychology is at the present time almost an uncharted one. It is true that there are some few books, and a number of articles or chapters of books, upon this subject, yet on the whole they are so general in treatment, so difficult to obtain, or developed from some other angle than that of serving the lawyer in his work, that it was felt that a volume which would avoid these defects, and which would bring the subject down to date, would not be simply another volume on an old subject, but would be a really creative achievement.”

Bobbs-Merrill, 1926. 346p.

By Hugo Munsterberg.

Essays on Psychology and Crime. “There are about fifty psychological laboratories in the United States alone. The average educated man has hitherto not noticed this. If he chances to hear of such places, he fancies that they serve for mental healing, or telepathic mysteries, or spiritistic performances. What else can a laboratory have to do with the mind? Has not the soul been for two thousand years the domain of the philosopher? What has psychology to do with electric batteries and intricate machines? Too often have I read such questions in the faces of visiting friends who came to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall and found, with surprise, twenty-seven rooms over spun with electric wires and filled with chronoscopes and kymographs and tachistoscopes and ergographs, and a mechanic busy at his work.”

New York: Doubleday, 1908. 269p.

Edited by Paul J. du Plessis.

This volume brings together an international team of scholars to debate Cicero's role in the narrative of Roman law in the late Republic – a role that has been minimised or overlooked in previous scholarship. This reflects current research that opens a larger and more complex debate about the nature of law and of the legal profession in the last century of the Roman Republic.

University of Edinburgh Press (2018) 253 pages.

By Enrico Ferri. Translated by Edgar Betts.

Report and Preliminary Project for an Italian Penal Code, In both Italian and a rare English translation by Edgar Betts. This “model penal code” as it would be called today, though never adopted by Italy, formed the basis for many penal codes in communist and socialist countries around the world, in particular Cuba. The concepts of criminal intent and criminal responsibility remained (and still do) the devilishly sticky point for this and all criminal codes, especially when faced with the criticisms by social scientists that economic deprivation among many other factors may constitute powerful external “causes” of crime, thus muddying the waters considerably concerning individuals’ responsibility for their criminal acts.

Royal Commission for the Reform of the Penal Statutes. Italy. ca. 1920. 180p.