This study presents the first biography of ‘Abd Allāh b. ‘Abd al-ḥakam (d. 214/829), an important figure in the nascent Mālikī school, and introduces his compendium of law. The subject of the Arabic text is the law of slavery, and two chapters examine early Mālikī slave law in the context of other Near Eastern legal codes. The narrow focus on Ibn ‘Abd al-ḥakam and his Compendium is used to refine the distinction between "organic" and "fixed" editions of early legal texts, and also to argue that these texts can be used to reconstruct the thought of even earlier figures, such as Mālik B. Anas (d. 179/795). Early Mālikī Law should be of value to legal historians, scholars of religion and all those working in the developing field of Slave Studies. The valuable conclusions arising from this study of a single legal text indicate the importance of continued analysis of these early documents, both the few that have been published and the many which remain unexplored in manuscript collections.
"In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign. Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved by industrial capitalism a radical and militant program that drew them into the union's ranks in great numbers. But its growth, coinciding with World War I and the Russian Revolution, was seen by powerful capitalists and government officials as an existential threat and it had to be stopped. In Under the Iron Heel, Ahmed White documents the torrent of legal persecution and extralegal, sometimes lethal violence that shattered the IWW. In so doing, he reveals the remarkable courage of those who faced this campaign, uncovers the origins of the profoundly unequal and conflicted nation we know today, and lays bare disturbing truths about the law, political repression, and the limits of free speech and association in class society"--
Prior to 1862, when the Department of Agriculture was established, the report on agriculture was prepared and published by the Commissioner of Patents, and forms volume or part of volume, of his annual reports, the first being that of 1840. Cf. Checklist of public documents ... Washington, 1895, p. 148.
In 1906 a white lawyer named Dabney Marshall argued a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court demanding the racial integration of juries. He carried out a plan devised by Mississippi's foremost black lawyer of the time: Willis Mollison. Against staggering odds, and with the help of a friendly newspaper editor, he won. How Marshall and his allies were able to force the court to overturn state law and precedent, if only for a brief period, at the behest of the U.S. Supreme Court is the subject of Jury Discrimination, a book that explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on America's civil rights history. Christopher Waldrep traces the origins of Americans' ideas about trial by jury and provides the first detailed analysis of jury discrimination. Southerners' determination to keep their juries entirely white played a crucial role in segregation, emboldening lynchers and vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan. As the postbellum Congress articulated ideals of national citizenship in civil rights legislation, most importantly the Fourteenth Amendment, factions within the U.S. Supreme Court battled over how to read the amendment: expansively, protecting a variety of rights against a host of enemies, or narrowly, guarding only against rare violations by state governments. The latter view prevailed, entombing the amendment in a narrow interpretation that persists to this day. Although the high court clearly denounced the overt discrimination enacted by state legislatures, it set evidentiary rules that made discrimination by state officers and agents extremely difficult to prove. Had these rules been less onerous, Waldrep argues, countless black jurors could have been seated throughout the nation at precisely the moment when white legislators and jurists were making and enforcing segregation laws. Marshall and Mollison's success in breaking through Mississippi law to get blacks admitted to juries suggests that legal reasoning plausibly founded on constitutional principle, as articulated by the Supreme Court, could trump even the most stubbornly prejudiced public opinion.
