Necessities of State: Police, Sovereignty, and the Constitution

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Regulatory Law ◽  
Independent States ◽  
The Law

Over the last fifteen years, legal historians have been exploring conceptualizations of the state and state capacity as phenomena of police. In this essay, I offer a genealogy of police in nineteenth-century American constitutional law. I examine relationships among several distinct strands of development: domestic regulatory law, notably the commerce power; the law of indigenous peoples and immigrants; and the law of territorial acquisition. I show that in state and federal juridical discourse, police expresses unrestricted and undefined powers of governance rooted in a discourse of sovereign inheritance and state necessity, culminating in the increasingly pointed claim that as a nation-state the United States possesses limitless capacity “to do all acts and things which independent states may of right do.”

John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.

Treaties and Treaty Making

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin G. Calloway
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Over Time

This chapter surveys how treaty making involving American Indians developed and changed over time. Early colonial treaties involved a hybrid diplomacy of Native rituals and European protocols, and business was conducted with wampum and oratory as much as with pen and paper. Increasingly, treaties involved land cessions. The United States adopted many of the forms of colonial treaties but employed them primarily as instruments of dispossession and removal. In the nineteenth century, the expanding nation-state made treaties that confined Indian peoples to reservations and that also included measures to “civilize” the tribes. Although Congress ended treaty making in 1871, “agreements” continued to be signed and treaties continued to have the force of law. Treaties were contracts between sovereigns, and tribes have invoked treaties to reassert their rights in modern America.

scholarly journals “Their debts follow them into the afterlife”: German Settlers, Ethnographic Knowledge, and the Forging of Coffee Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-420
Author(s):  
Julie Gibbings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Coffee Plantation ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Potential Symmetry ◽  
Alta Verapaz

AbstractGerman coffee planters in nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala were also ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers who published their works in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. Their published works, as well as coffee plantation records, government correspondence, judicial records and other archival materials reveal how German coffee planters-cum-ethnographers drew upon ethnographic knowledge and representations to forge a reliable labor force. Like ethnographers in Britain's colonies, German settlers in Alta Verapaz understood the potential symmetry between ethnography and the governance of indigenous peoples. Their ethnographic knowledges also push us to reconsider distinctions drawn between German cosmopolitan ethnographic traditions and British functionalist ones and demonstrate how ethnographic knowledge and cultural difference could be deployed to forge new kinds of racial capitalism. In Guatemala, the intimate relationship between the rise of capitalism and ethnography shaped the anti-communism of mid-twentieth-century anthropology in the region.

scholarly journals Discussion Forum: The Vanishing Nineteenth Century in European History?

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-695
Author(s):  
Karen Hagemann ◽  
Simone Lässig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Discussion Forum ◽  
European History ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Regional Comparison

This forum explores from multiple perspectives the often stated impression that the nineteenth century is “vanishing” from German and European history. It asks how one can explain this trend, what consequences it has for the development of historiography and public historical knowledge, if and why the nineteenth century matters for the present, and what the future of nineteenth-century history might be. Fourteen experts on different regions and historiographical approaches to European history from the United States and Germany discuss these questions. We sought contributors from these two countries in order to illuminate differences in the historical profession on either side of the Atlantic, and are sure that a broader regional comparison would point to more varieties in the state of historical research on the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Organizing Court Administration in order to fulfil access to justice under the Covid-19 State of crisis

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. e41891211113
Author(s):  
Ibnu Sina Chandranegara ◽  
Luthfi Marfungah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Regulatory Authority ◽  
The United States ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Procedural Law ◽  
Court Administration ◽  
The Law

The Covid-19 pandemic in different countries, particularly in terms of performing their duties and functions, has both direct and indirect implications on the judiciary. This paper calls for a contrast between the implementation of law emergencies in the United States and the judiciary's reflection in Indonesia. The study uses the comparative approach in constitutional law to provide advice, which needs to be avoided in the Indonesian constitutional law by researching legal material and procedures in other countries' constitutional law. This article concludes that the Law of Judicial Power and the Law of Procedure in Indonesia require strict legal material on how procedural law does not give delegates too much technical, regulatory authority to each court during the time of crisis and has the potential to create unequal policies in the future to deal with judicial emergencies so that regulation is necessary.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna L. Grossman ◽  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Family Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Family ◽  
Important Trend ◽  
The Law

This introductory chapter takes a brief look at family law in the United States as it changed over twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. “Family law” refers to a particular branch of the law—mostly about marriage, divorce, child custody, family property, adoption, and some related matters. However, this chapter also briefly considers other parts of the law that touch on the family in an important way, such as inheritance or the intersection between criminal law and family affairs. The chapter then considers the changes to family law in this expanded sense. In part, the changes were continuations of trends that started in the nineteenth century; but in part they were completely new. Perhaps the single most important trend was the decline of the traditional family, the family as it was understood in the nineteenth century, the family of the Bible and conventional morality.

The Law of Commerce and Trade

2019 ◽  
pp. 241-262
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marine Insurance ◽  
Commercial Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commercial Paper ◽  
International Body ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Merchant

This chapter discusses the history of American commercial law covering the admiralty and general commerce, sale of goods, bankruptcy and insolvency, and contract. American commercial law was deeply and persistently in debt to England. Theoretically, even national sovereignty was no barrier. The laws of admiralty, marine insurance, commercial paper, and sale of goods were not, supposedly, parochial law, English law; they were part of an international body of rules. The law of sales of goods developed greatly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many, if not most, of the leading cases were English and were adopted in the United States fairly rapidly. Two strains of law—contract and the law merchant—each with a somewhat different emphasis, were more or less godparents of the law of sales.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Frank Towers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The U.S

Today’s political map of North America took its basic shape in a continental crisis in the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This volume explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the mid-nineteenth century from a continental perspective that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach. This introduction orients readers by first exploring the meaning of key terms—in particular sovereignty and its historical attachment to the concept of the nation state—and then previewing how contributors interrogate different themes of the mid-century struggles that remade the continent’s political order. Those themes fall into three main categories: the character of the states made and remade in the mid-1800s; the question of sovereignty for indigenous polities that confronted the European-settler descended governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States; and the interaction between capitalist expansion and North American politics, and the concomitant implications of state making for sovereignty’s more diffuse meaning at the level of individual and group autonomy.

The Prussian Theory of Government

1918 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. W. Willoughby
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Preceding Paper ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
The Law ◽  
Governmental System

Political scientists make a sharp distinction between the terms “State” and “Government.” A State is a group of individuals viewed as a politically organized unit. In the eyes of the law it appears as a corporate being possessing supreme authority and issuing commands in the form of laws addressed to those over whom it claims authority. A Government is the machinery or complexus of organs through which this state-being formulates, expresses, and enforces its will.In my preceding paper I dealt wholly with the Prussian conception of the State and had nothing to say regarding Prussian conceptions of Government. In this paper I shall have little to say regarding the Prussian theory of the State and shall devote myself almost wholly to a consideration of the Prussian governmental system. Of this system, however, I shall speak of but one of its features, namely, its strong monarchical character. In result there should appear what justification there is for the demand of the United States and of the Entente Powers for a modification of the Prussian system.

The Law and Foreign Prisoners in Texas: A Socio-Legal Analysis

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Jurg Gerber ◽  
Kate Angulski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Dietary Restrictions ◽  
Indefinite Detention ◽  
The Law

We examine in this article the legal status of foreign prisoners in the United States in general, and in the State of Texas in particular. With few exceptions, the law does not distinguish between domestic and foreign prisoners, granting similar rights and obligations to each. We conclude this article by examining current controversies in the treatment of foreign prisoners in the United States. Issues examined include dietary restrictions, use of languages other than English, length of hair, and mandatory and indefinite detention of aliens.

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