Monday, March 5, 2007

Law & History Review features Forum on 2nd Amendment and Articles on the late 18th C Atlantic World

For subscribers, the Spring 2007 issue of the Law and History Review arrived in mailboxes recently. For others, unlike most other scholarly journals, the LHR is fully available on-line. Editor David S. Tanenhaus introduces the issue this way:
The four articles in this issue of Law and History Review offer fascinating perspectives on the latter years of the long eighteenth century in England, the West Indies, and North America. As these engaging essays reveal, the characteristics of this period included not only war and revolution, but also a complex debate over the relationship between slavery and marriage, the development of pretrial procedures in felony cases, the silencing of capital convicts in the pardoning process, and a rethinking of gun regulation. Collectively, these articles remind us of the poignant contingency of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the Atlantic World.

For his full summary of the issue, click here.

The contents include:

Articles

"A Civil Inconvenience"? The Vexed Question of Slave Marriage in the British West Indies
Cecilia A. Green

Sir John Fielding and Public Justice: The Bow Street Magistrates' Court, 1754–1780
J. M. Beattie

Imposing the Royal Pardon: Execution, Transportation, and Convict Resistance in London, 1789
Simon Devereaux

Forum: Rethinking the Second Amendment
Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early America: The Legal Context of the Second Amendment
Robert H. Churchill

For responses to Churchill by David Thomas Konig, William G. Merkel and Saul Cornell, click here.