Browse

This book presents a history of expropriation of land for the common good in Europe and North America from medieval times to 1800. It contextualizes the history of an important legal doctrine regarding the relationship between government and the institution of private property. The book concentrates on western Europe and the English colonies in America. As it argues, expropriation was a common legal practice in many societies in which individuals had rights to land. It was generally accepted that land could be taken from them, with compensation, when the community, however defined, needed it. It cites examples of the practice since the early Middle Ages in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and from the seventeenth century in America. The book concludes with a discussion of past and present ideas and assumptions about community, individual rights, and individual property that underlie the practice of expropriation but have been largely ignored by historians of both political and legal thought.

Offering a window into the history of the modern legal profession in Western Europe, this book presents a history of lawyers in the most industrialized city on the Mediterranean. Far from being mere curators of static law, Barcelona's lawyers were at the center of social conflict and political and economic change, mediating between state, family, and society. Beginning with the resurrection of a decadent bar during the Enlightenment, this book traces the historical evolution of lawyers throughout the long nineteenth century. Among the issues it explores are: the attributes of the modern legal profession; how lawyers engaged with the Enlightenment; how lawyers molded events in the Age of Revolution and helped consolidate a liberal constitutional order; why a liberal profession became conservative and corporatist; and how lawyers promoted fin-de-siecle nationalism. From the vantage point of a city with a distinguished legal tradition, the book provides fresh insight into: European social and legal history; the origins of liberal professionalism; education, training, and the practice of law in the nineteenth century; the expansion of continental bureaucracies; and the corporatist aspects of modern nationalism.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualized. This book chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex tale of unintended consequences. A public sphere of influence—including the wife's family and the local community—held sway over spousal property rights throughout most of the seventeenth century, the book argues. Around 1700, a campaign to codify spousal property rights as an arcanum domesticum, or domestic secret, aimed to increase efficiency in legal decision making. New regulatory changes indeed reduced familial interference, but they also made families less likely to give land to women. The advent of the print medium ushered property issues back into the public sphere, this time on a national scale, the book explains. Mass politicization increased sympathy for women, and public debate popularized more progressive ideas about the economic contributions of women to marriage, leading to mid-nineteenth-century legal reforms that were more favorable to women.

This book takes a comprehensive approach to the history of the jury in modern France by investigating the legal, political, sociocultural, and intellectual aspects of jury trial from the Revolution through the twentieth century. It demonstrates that these juries, through their decisions, helped shape reform of the nation's criminal justice system. The book argues that from their introduction in 1791 as an expression of the sovereignty of the people through the early 1900s, juries often acted against the wishes of the political and judicial authorities, despite repeated governmental attempts to manipulate their composition. It argues that high acquittal rates for both political and nonpolitical crimes were in part due to juror resistance to the harsh and rigid punishments imposed by the Napoleonic Penal Code. In response, legislators gradually enacted laws to lower penalties for certain crimes and to give jurors legal means to offer nuanced verdicts and to ameliorate punishments. Faced with persistently high acquittal rates, however, governments eventually took powers away from juries by withdrawing many cases from their purview and ultimately destroying the panels' independence in 1941.

Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their “property,” or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property. This book chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial independence and ultimately, this book argues, economic democracy. By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual property-producing companies—including DuPont, Rand Mc-Nally, and the American Tobacco Company—the book addresses scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.