Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom rode the tidal wave of takeovers in the 1970s and '80s to become the most profitable law firm in the world. At its peak, partners there earned an average of over $1 million a year. Unabashedly competitive and zealously private, Skadden, as the firm is known, was different from leading firms of previous eras: they had reflected the might and luster of their clients, but Skadden became a big business in its own right, with global.
In 'Law's Empire', Ronald Dworkin relects on the nature of the law, its authority, its application in democracy, the prominent role of interpretation in judgement and the relations of lawmakers and lawgivers in the community.
With one simple myth, nations burned. Under the Almighty, an empire has been forged, bringing peace to the once-divided continent. But now, a spark of truth threatens to ignite the religion of lies. Chapman unknowingly brought the Seventh Precinct to their demise. Now Officer Holden Sanders, known throughout the Capital City as the survivor, seeks the truth of how so many he held dear were slaughtered. But when it comes to light his former mentor might still draw breath, the Officer of God is forced to wage war against the Almighty itself.
A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.
This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. Distinguished contributors expose new dimensions of legal pluralism in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires. In-depth analyses probe such topics as the shifting legal privileges of corporations, the intertwining of religious and legal thought, and the effects of clashing legal authorities on sovereignty and subjecthood. Case studies show how a variety of individuals engage with the law and shape the contours of imperial rule. The volume reaches from Peru to New Zealand to Europe to capture the varieties and continuities of legal pluralism and to probe the analytic power of the concept of legal pluralism in the comparative study of empires. For legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 maps new approaches to the study of empires and the global history of law.
Together, the chapters in Empire and Legal Thought make the case for seeing the history of international legal thought and empires against the background of broad geopolitical, diplomatic, administrative, intellectual, religious, and commercial changes over thousands of years.
We call habeas corpus the Great Writ of Liberty. But it was actually a writ of power. In a work based on an unprecedented study of thousands of cases across more than five hundred years, Paul Halliday provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world's most revered legal device. In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the king's subjects. The key was not the prisoner's "right" to "liberty"Ñthese are modern idiomsÑbut the possible wrongs committed by a jailer or anyone who ordered a prisoner detained. This focus on wrongs gave the writ the force necessary to protect ideas about rights as they developed outside of law. This judicial power carried the writ across the world, from Quebec to Bengal. Paradoxically, the representative impulse, most often expressed through legislative action, did more to undermine the writ than anything else. And the need to control imperial subjects would increasingly constrain judges. The imperial experience is thus crucial for making sense of the broader sweep of the writ's history and of English law. Halliday's work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guantnamo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.