The Civil Rights cases involved five prosecutions and civil suits from California, Kansas, Missouri, New York, and Tennessee for denying African Americans access to public accommodations (hotels, theaters, and railroad cars) in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Justice Joseph P. Bradley, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court, held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited only offi…
The Republicans chose Lincoln as their candidate in the 1858 Illinois senatorial race against Douglas. The campaign was marked by a series of seven brilliant debates between the two contenders. Lincoln advocated loyalty to the Union, regarded slavery as unjust, and was opposed to any further expansion of slavery. He opened his campaign on June 16, 1858, with the declaration "'A house…
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of the national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that has become one of the most famous speeches of U.S. history. Lincoln's speech came less than six months after the conclusion of the Gettysburg campaign (June 27–July 4, 1863), one of the bloodiest battles of the U.S. Civil War. Confederate G…
Abraham Lincoln gave many memorable addresses during his political career, but his second inaugural address is ranked as perhaps his greatest speech. On March 4, 1865, as he began his second term as president, Lincoln delivered the address at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. With the Union forces close to victory—the Civil War would end the following month—Lincoln's address loo…
Sojourner Truth was a nineteenth-century African American evangelist who embraced abolitionism and women's rights. A charismatic speaker, she became one of the best-known abolitionists of her day. Born a slave and given the name Isabella Baumfree, she was freed in 1828 when a New York law abolished slavery within the state. In 1843 she had a religious experience and came to believe that God…
The Articles of Confederation reflected the new nation's fear of centralized power and authority. Under the Articles the states were more powerful than the central government, which consisted only of a Congress. Each state had one vote in Congress, with that vote determined by a delegation of from two to seven representatives. Though the Congress had the authority to regulate foreign affair…
The Bill of Rights, which consists of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, was drafted by the first Congress of the new government in 1789 and went into effect on December 15, 1791, when Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify the amendments. The Bill of Rights followed a tradition in Anglo-American law of drawing up a list of basic rights to which all the people in the state we…
Myra Bradwell's efforts to gain admission to the Illinois bar resulted in a Supreme Court decision. Bradwell had married a lawyer and read the law with her husband. In 1869 she passed the Illinois bar examination but was refused admission to the bar. She appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prevented the state from imposing ad…
The World's Experience Upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is Based The Brandeis brief signaled a change in the type of evidence a court would consider in determining a case. With the growth of the social sciences, quantitative and qualitative studies conducted by researchers would increasingly find their way into U.S. courtrooms. …
Pound acknowledged that some people have always been dissatisfied with the law, but he contended that the courts did indeed need to be administered more effectively. He also noted that the adversary system often turned litigation into a game, irritating parties, jurors, and witnesses and giving the public the "false notion of the purpose and end of law." In addition, he attacked the …
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his determination to pass a strong civil rights act that would end racial discrimination in employment, education, and other spheres of life. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas D. Katzenbach, Johnson's congressional liaison, worked with Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D.-Minn.) and Senate minority …
The development of the law in the thirteen American colonies between 1620 and 1776 was marked by the willingness of the colonists to apply elements of English common law and to devise new, and often simpler, ways of handling legal matters. Because many of the colonial settlements were geographically isolated, the law varied from place to place, and local traditions, customs, religious beliefs, and…
By the 1750s the American colonies had grown in both population and economic strength. Increasingly, the colonists expressed dissatisfaction with Great Britain's control of their political and economic affairs. The colonies chafed under the rules of British mercantilism, the idea that colonies were to be exploited as a source of raw materials and a market for the mother country. The king an…
Once the Constitution had been offered to the states for ratification, critics opposed it on several grounds. Most importantly, they argued that the Constitution created an overly powerful central government that could abuse the rights of citizens and criticized the Framers for failing to include a bill of rights. To win over the opposition, the supporters of the Constitution agreed that the enact…
A declaration by the representatives of the united colonies of North America, now met in Congress at Philadelphia, setting forth the causes and necessity of their taking up arms …
In Congress, July 4, 1776 The Unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America …
Dred Scott was a slave owned by an army surgeon, John Emerson, who resided in Missouri. In 1836 Emerson took Scott to Fort Snelling, in what is now Minnesota, but then was a territory in which slavery had been expressly forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1846 Scott sued for his freedom in Missouri state court, arguing that his residence in a free territory had released him from slave…
By the President of the United States of America …
An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown The English Bill of Rights grew out of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. During the revolution King James II abdicated and fled from England. He was succeeded by his daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, a Dutch prince. Parliament proposed a Declaration of Rights and presented it to Willi…
Madison's first essay, Federalist, no. 10, is the most frequently quoted of the group. In it, Madison discussed the idea of political factions. At the time it was commonly agreed that democratic society needed to prevent factions because they would ultimately undermine the government and lead to violence. Madison agreed that factions can divide government but came to the opposite conclusion…
In 1681 King Charles II of England granted William Penn a large tract of land on the west bank of the Delaware River, which Penn named Pennsylvania in honor of his father. Penn, a member and intellectual leader of the Quakers (Society of Friends), saw Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other persecuted peoples. Penn believed in religious toleration on both pragmatic and moral grounds. He tho…
During the presidential campaign of 1932, with the United States mired in the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for action by the federal government to revive the economy and end the suffering of the thirteen million people who were unemployed. When he took office on March 4, 1933, the national mood was bleak. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt reassured the nation that "…
On September 11, 2001, two hijacked aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, destroying the complex. Another plane hit the Pentagon, headquarters for the U.S. military, outside Washington, D.C. A fourth plane, also believed to be heading for Washington, D.C., crashed in rural Pennsylvania when passengers attempted to retake control from the hijackers. Almost 3,000 people were…
On September 17, 1796, leading newspapers published President George Washington's Farewell Address to the nation. Washington, who was nearing the end of his second four-year term, had rejected pleas by members of the Federalist party to seek a third term. The address, which was never delivered orally, is now remembered for its comments on foreign policy, but in 1796 Washington was also conc…
John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 by a slim margin over Vice President Richard M. Nixon. During the campaign Kennedy had charged that the United States had fallen militarily behind the Soviet Union during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Therefore, when Kennedy gave his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, he focused on U.S. foreign policy. Kennedy's addre…
An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas …
Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political scientist, historian, and politician, is best known for Democracy in America (1835). A believer in democracy, he was concerned about the concentration of power in the hands of a centralized government. During his visit to the United States in 1831 and 1832, Tocqueville observed the deep social and political divisions produced by slavery. He was impressed, …
This section contains a diverse collection of legal, political, and historical information, most of which is organized in tabular form and in chronological order. The tables provide readers with precise dates of the reigns of British monarchs and the terms of service of U.S. Supreme Court justices, presidents, vice presidents, and attorneys general. Readers may, for example, consult the succession…
Since the nineteenth century, the role of lawyers and the nature of law in U.S. society have been the subject of ongoing debate and scrutiny. Legal scholars and practitioners have discussed whether the law is a self-contained body of rules, displaying logic and reason. Some have embraced this view and have aspired to make law a science. Since the early twentieth century, however, other important l…
On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge the passage of new voting rights legislation. Although Johnson had successfully engineered the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a et seq.) the year before, problems remained. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders demanded an end to racially dis…
The document that has come to be known as Magna Charta (spelled variously as "charta" or "carta"), or Great Charter, is recognized as a fundamental part of the English constitutional tradition. Although it is not a constitution, it contains provisions on criminal law that were incorporated into the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. In 1215 King John of England (1…
In 1620 the ship Mayflower departed from England for the New World. Many of those on board were religious dissenters, known then as Separatists and later as Pilgrims or Puritans, who preferred to separate altogether from the Church of England rather than try to change the church as other dissenters attempted to do. The passengers also included emigrants who were not members of the Separatist congr…
In opposition to mechanical jurisprudence, Pound offered his theory of sociological jurisprudence. He acknowledged that the common law contains some constant principles, particularly in regard to methods. He gave these principles the name "taught legal tradition." Pound believed that the implementation of this taught legal tradition by wise common-law judges resulted in substantive c…
By 1818 the rapid growth in population in the North had left the Southern states, for the first time, with less than 45 percent of the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The U.S. Senate was evenly balanced between eleven slave and eleven free states. Therefore, Missouri's 1818 application for statehood, if approved, would give the slave states a majority in the Senate and reduce th…
President Monroe announced that North and South America were closed to colonization, that the United States would not become involved in European wars or colonial wars in the Americas, and, most importantly, that any intervention by a European power in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere would be viewed by the United States as an unfriendly act against the United States. Later preside…
When Europeans arrived in North America in the 1600s, they discovered that Native American tribes already occupied the land. Between the 1630s and the War of Independence, white settlers gradually pushed the Native Americans, whom they called "Indians," westward. The goals of the settlers, which included colonization, land exploitation, and religious conversion, led to cultural and s…
An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio The Northwest Ordinance (officially the Ordinance of 1787) was enacted by the Congress of the Confederation of the States on July 13, 1787. This statute provided for the government of the Northwest Territory, an area bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes, and created a procedu…
Dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation grew during the 1780s until Congress finally summoned a convention to amend and revise the Articles. All of the states except Rhode Island sent delegates to the convention, which convened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in May 1787. A fundamental problem for the delegates was resolving a split between the states that favored a strong national gover…
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is one of the most celebrated legal figures in U.S. history. His writings on jurisprudence have shaped discussions on the nature of law, and his court opinions have been studied as much for their style as their intellectual content. Holmes rejected the idea that law could be studied as a science. He also emphatically dismissed Langdell's belief that legal systems o…
At issue in Plessy v. Ferguson was an 1890 Louisiana law that required passenger trains operating within the state to provide "equal but separate" accommodations for "white and colored races." The Supreme Court upheld the law by a 7–1 vote, in the process putting a stamp of approval on all laws that mandated racial segregation. In his majority opinion, Justice He…
In his first inaugural address, delivered on January 20, 1981, Reagan reaffirmed his campaign pledges. With the nation in an economic recession, he declared that "government is not the solution to our problem." Instead, he proposed to remove "the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity," reawaken "this industrial giant," get …
The "Second Treatise" (the second part of Two Treatises on Government) was written during the period preceding the abdication of King James II. Locke's work, which was published in 1690, became a justification for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when government was reformed along the lines outlined by Locke in his Two Treatises. As a result of these reforms, England became a …
The southern colonies relied on slave labor to cultivate the cash crops raised on large plantations. The first slave ships reached the colonies in the 1620s, and by the end of the century, the slave trade between West Africa and the southern colonies was thriving. The social and legal relations between the English colonists and the African slaves were governed by racial beliefs and economics. Sinc…
The Stamp Act was designed to raise almost one-third of the revenue needed to support the military establishment permanently stationed in the colonies at the end of the French and Indian War. The act placed a tax on newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets and broadsides, legal documents of all kinds, insurance policies, ship's papers, licenses, and even playing cards and dice. All these documents a…
Parliament wasted little time in attempting to reassert its authority over the colonies. Between June 15 and July 2, 1767, it enacted four measures to raise revenue to pay the salaries of British governors and other officials in the colonies so that these officials would be independent of the colonial legislatures, which had been paying their salaries. The statutes came to be known as the Townshen…
In the final agreement, the British recognized the independence of the United States. The treaty established generous boundaries for the United States; U.S. territory now extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River in the west, and from the Great Lakes and Canada in the north to the 31st parallel in the south. The U.S. fishing fleet was guaranteed access to the fisheries off the coas…
The Sioux were an important confederacy of the North American Indian tribes that inhabited the Great Plains. In the seventeenth century the Sioux had comprised small bands of Woodland Indians in the Mille Lacs region of present-day Minnesota. Conflict with the Ojibwa (also called Chippewa or Anishinabe) forced the Sioux to move to the buffalo ranges of the Great Plains. As they became adept buffal…
The Declaration of Rights enumerates specific civil liberties, including freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, and the injunction that "no man be deprived of his liberty, except by the law of the land or the judgement of his peers." Other provisions prohibited excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishments, required authorities to have evidence and good cause before o…
Madison and Jefferson argued that Congress did not have the express constitutional authority to deport aliens nor to prosecute persons for seditious libel. They asserted in the resolves that state legislatures had the right to determine whether the federal government was complying with the mandate of the Constitution. In the second of the Kentucky Resolves, Jefferson contended that the "sov…
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a sweeping federal law that seeks to prevent voting discrimination based on race, color, or membership in a language minority group. The act was passed in the aftermath of one of the more violent episodes in the history of the civil rights movement. In 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., led a group of civil rights supporters on a march to Selma, Alabama, to demand vo…
David Dudley Field was an attorney from a prominent New York family. His brother was Stephen J. Field, a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Field was a leading crusader for the codification movement. He attacked the rules of civil procedure of his time, which were based on English common-law pleading practices. Common-law pleading was an arcane practice filled with traps for the uninitiated that could re…
Provided, that, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the part…
The women's rights movement in the United States began in the nineteenth century when some women reformers demanded the right to vote and the same legal rights as men. The participation of women in the abolitionist movement played a crucial role in crystallizing their dissatisfaction with the lack of rights accorded to females. Some, like Lucy Stone, saw parallels between women and slaves: …
By the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. presidents had begun to relax the traditional isolationism of U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless, when World War I began in 1914, the United States remained aloof from the conflict. President Woodrow Wilson was reelected to a second term in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war." Wilson and U.S. public opinion shifted, however, when Germa…
The Cherokee nation, located in the state of Georgia, sought to remain on its territory and be viewed legally as an independent, sovereign nation. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the tribe fought the state of Georgia's attempts to assert jurisdiction over Cherokee lands. The Cherokees appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that they were protected by treaties negotiated with the …