Was Dorothy Short Black? And, more importantly, did she know it? These questions, odd-sounding and perhaps unsettling to the contemporary reader, were the ones raised by Leonard Harry Wood in the hopes of avoiding prison for the crime of seduction. This Article examines the story of Dorothy Short and Leonard Wood, their relationship, and the criminal case that followed it in order to explore the ways in which seduction laws worked to create ( and recreate) gendered categories of race. The Article's main contribution is shedding new light on the 1932 Virginia Supreme Court case Wood v. Commonwealth of Virginia, and more broadly on the ways in which seduction jurisprudence influenced racialized understandings of gender.

On August 13, 1850, John Price knocked on the door of a two-story clapboard home in Timbuctoo, New Jersey, looking for a fugitive slave named Betsey Thompson. Five years earlier, Thompson had fled from James Mitchell's plantation in Maryland. She married a free Black man and the two settled in Timbuctoo, an unincorporated community of formerly enslaved and free Blacks, numbering about 100 people. 1 There she gave birth to their son, Joel Henry Thompson, on January 16, 1849. Under the law of New Jersey, Joel Henry was free by virtue of his birth within the state's borders. But according to the US Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause and implementing federal legislation, Betsey Thompson was a slave for life. Although Thompson did not know it at the time, Price was working with George Alberti, a professional slave catcher, who had been hired by James Mitchell to get her back. Whether through coercion, fraud, or force-the historical record is unclear-Price succeeded in bringing Thompson and nineteen-month-old Joel Henry to Alberti's home in Philadelphia. If Thompson went willingly, she realized her mistake by the following day, when Alberti" quieted her with a'billy"'that left" a bruise on [her] head" before forcibly dragging her before a justice of the peace. 3 At the end of a short hearing, the judge concluded that Thompson was a fugitive slave and awarded Alberti a certificate giving him the legal right to take her back across the border to Mitchell in Maryland. With her son in her arms, Betsey Thompson traveled with Alberti by carriage back to Mitchell's plantation in Elkton, Maryland-a journey of about fifty miles across a state border that doubled as the line between freedom and slavery.

China's lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic was widely considered a stark demonstration of the unconstrained power of an authoritarian state. Yet this power may not be as limitless as it appears. This article, the result of extensive fieldwork encompassing over ninety interviews and on-site visits to Chinese cities, primarily focusing on Shanghai and Wuhan, where the most significant lockdowns occurred, delves into the intricacies of the Chinese partystate's response to the pandemic. It offers a unique perspective on the constraints that societal forces impose on the party-state's exercise of power and, in doing so, challenges conventional wisdom. While the Chinese Communist Party (" CCP") touted its COVID-19 response as a testament to the robustness of its institutions, critics pointed to the widespread infringement of individual rights and the suffering endured during China's pandemic lockdowns. However, one aspect has been largely overlooked: the role of society itself. This study uncovers the hitherto unexamined role of society in monitoring and resisting the party-state's encroachments on individual rights during the pandemic, a phenomenon I term" cooperating to resist." My research reveals the state's inherent limitations in enforcing neighborhood lockdowns and providing essential services to locked-down communities. Crucially, I demonstrate that the cooperation of citizens, particularly homeowners, was indispensable to the state's ability to maintain its COVID-19 control measures. Yet, this cooperation was not without its implications. When homeowners, who had been willing partners of the government, invoked legal narratives to voice their concerns, the government found itself compelled to respond. This interdependence between the government and homeowners unveils a dynamic where dependence begets power, complicating the prevailing narrative of China's" strong state, weak society." It also offers fresh insights into the dynamics of power and legality in authoritarian regimes and casts new light on the relationship between property rights and sovereignty. In an authoritarian regime, property law emerges as a sanctuary of resistance for citizens.

James Whitman observed more than once that historians of law should boldly set out to formulate 'grand theories,' long-term interpretive hypotheses that draw together the infinite number of details into an overall picture, rather than merely proposing detailed studies of individual sources or particular legal institutions. While specialists in legal history dwell on the details, these overviews are offered by others: economists, anthropologists, and now even social psychologists, who attribute a key role in the interpretation of the world to the transformations of legal institutions. 1 Some of us acknowledge these and other shortcomings in our own fields, yet we tend to advise others how to go about addressing these issues rather than personally engaging in the work. For more than three decades, however, Whitman has been offering 'grand theories,' ie, interpretations of major historical and social phenomena, demonstrating that the contribution of legal history can still be fundamental to understanding social transformations: on dignity, on the status of persons, on the responsibility of the judge, on the ambiguous relationship between libertarian and capitalist ideologies in twentieth-century America. Now he addresses the immense problem of property rights in Western legal consciousness in his latest book, which is being published as I write this article.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 once had a sure spot in our constitutional canon. The New Deal Congress celebrated it as" one of the greatest civil documents of all time," in part because it marked" a complete change in the method of governing new communities formed by colonization." Rejecting the European model of" second-class colonies," the Ordinance instead framed an" empire of liberty" that treated old states and new territories as equals. That view still has prominent defenders: Professor Akhil Amar" celebrates" the Ordinance's" strong anti-imperialist thrust," while Judge Sutton would put it" on a Mount Rushmore of American laws."

In this paper, I will adduce a number of important arguments to prove the existence of a nexus between sacrifice and punishment. In order to achieve this objective, I will base my approach on the anthropology of religion, in the sense that I will take sacrifice as the conceptual lens or hermeneutical prism through which to observe and, more importantly, redescribe the history of criminal law from around the later Middle Ages until the fall of the ancien regime. In doing so, ample proof can be unearthed that an unmistakable sacrificial dimension pervades criminal history, at points becoming so tangible that the existence of a phenomenon I propose to call penal sacrifice or sacrificial punishment-ie a punishment that is for a variety of reasons to be situated on the threshold of indifference between sacrifice and punishment-is, at least to my mind, difficult to deny. The strength of my case, now, is to a considerable extent determined by the work of James Whitman. When one is out to trace the family resemblances between sacrifice and punishment, Whitman is remarkably" good to think with"-to use a celebrated Levi-Straussian expression. 2 In fact, some of the most telling structural parallels between criminal law and sacrifice I uncovered were virtually presented to me on a silver platter in Whitman's writings.

Sometimes one sees things clearer from afar. Some years ago, James Q. Whitman published a remarkable article, evocatively titled" Long live the hatred of Roman law!" In it, he traced the long history of animosity towards Roman law in European culture, from the Middle Ages to the Nazis, discussing the various reasons why Roman law has been attacked by opponents ranging from theologians, lawyers and political leaders as being against the Christian faith, as being foreign, capitalistic, against morality and public good. He argues pointedly that the" hatred of Roman law was, in fact, a constant of western history until 1945." 1 What has been most remarkable is the extent in which similar claims, that Roman law promotes greed, unrestrained capitalism or other vices, have circulated throughout its history. In these often nationalistic narratives about law and what should constitute law, Roman law was presented as an alien and immoral monster, which sought to destroy all that is good and proper. According to these stories, Roman law promoted property absolutism that was considered offensive to theologians, political absolutism that was offensive to everyone except the princes, who adored the example of" princeps legibus solutus", and law that was materialistic and individualistic and thus offensive to the common people and their customs, as mainly characterized by nineteenth century Romantic authors in Germany and their Nazi followers. The latest would even codify their hatred of Roman law in point 19 of the Nazi party program (1920), which would call for the eradication of materialistic Roman law.

This essay examines the socioeconomics of status hierarchies: how they respond to external demands, and how, in terms of institutional structure, they make themselves socially usable and durable. It asks whether there are, in some sense, "natural hierarchies"-hierarchies that will almost always emerge in sophisticated societies, regardless of sociopolitical or economic conditions. It highlights adaptability as the central functional feature that makes status rankings durable, and employs this measure to identify two kinds of "natural hierarchies": wealth and seniority. Between the two, the former has drawn the lion's share of political and intellectual attention, but the latter possesses similar functional advantages, and is likely just as pervasive across human societies, historical and modem. Like wealth hierarchies, seniority hierarchies also serve as generally useful proxies for most attributes that societies commonly value, are also relatively easy to use, and avoid direct normative conflict with most sociopolitical value systems even more adeptly than wealth hierarchies do. The term "natural hierarchy" is employed here in a purely descriptive sense, without any normative connotations whatsoever.

As James Whitman has shown in a groundbreaking article in the The Yale Law Journal, subtle changes in the moral-legal treatment of business practices in the early modern Low Countries may be indicative of a wider tendency to lend normative support to the rise of a modern commercial society. Expanding on this insight, this article shows that with regards to the treatment of the problem of" monopolies", a similar such change occurs. In a passage from his influential work On the Law of War and Peace (1625), Hugo Grotius argued that" not all monopolies are against nature", thereby creating space for a more lenient treatment of chartered companies and dominant positions acquired through commercial industry in comparison to the Roman legal tradition and scholastic morality. Moreover, drawing on Max Weber's intuition about the spiritual sources of Western legal culture, this paper argues that a fresh look at Grotius's moral theological sources, especially Leonardus Lessius's On Justice and Law (1621), may provide us an explanation as to the why this subtle shift in his normative assessment of certain monopolistic practices occurred in the first place.

Although he served as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1932-1938, the source of Benjamin Cardozo's preeminence has generally been his contributions to common law jurisprudence and his theories of common law judging. This essay argues that several of Cardozo's unpublished writings suggest he also developed a significant constitutional theory in dialogue with continental-and particularly French-legal thinkers.