The practice of jury sequestration predates the Declaration of Independence, as its first recorded use in the U.S. was in the 1770 Boston Massacre trial in which the jury was sequestered for a week. The longest recorded sequestration was eight and … Continue reading
Yearly Archives: 2015
The word “arrest” is Anglo-Norman in origin, related to the French word “arrêt” meaning “to stop” or “to stay”. In the U.S., the most common slang expression to signify arrest is “collared” (similar to the French slang, incidentally!), while in … Continue reading
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which sought to guarantee equal rights for women, was originally introduced in Congress in 1923 but not submitted for ratification until 1972. It was ultimately ratified by 35 states (although some of these later rescinded … Continue reading
I am very pleased to feature a guest blog this week, from Rob Carter in the U.K. (welcome, Rob!). While not specifically on a legal subject, it is on an interesting historical topic that also is related to law, namely — … Continue reading
A legal fiction is a fact that is assumed or created by courts in order to apply a legal rule. Most often a feature of common law systems, perhaps the best-known (and one of the most controversial) such fictions in the … Continue reading
In 2011 I wrote a blog about the archaic form of legal action known as trial by combat. In it, I mused about whether the right to trial by combat (also commonly called ‘wager of battle’ or ‘trial by battle’) to settle … Continue reading
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, an estimated 1,165,383 violent crimes occurred nationwide in 2014, a decrease of 0.2 percent from the 2013 estimate (2015 full results are not yet available). This was 6.9 percent less than in 2010, and 16.2 percent less … Continue reading
Distressingly, there is no official “Lawyer’s Day” in the U.S.–despite the fact that nearly half of the members of Congress are lawyers. In fact, a member of Congress in 2015 was 66x more likely to be a lawyer than the average … Continue reading
The Supreme Court is provided for in Article 3, Section 1 of the Constitution, but only the Chief Justice is specifically mentioned (in Article 1, Section 3). The number of other “Judges of the Supreme Court” (Article 2, Section 2) is … Continue reading
While it is commonly thought that the phrase “of the people, by the people, for the people” is a description of our government that is found in the Constitution, the language actually comes from Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. … Continue reading
Since 2000, license plates for the District of Columbia display the slogan “Taxation Without Representation”, to reflect the fact that D.C. has no voting representatives in Congress. It does, however, send a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, and has … Continue reading
The Fugitive Slave Clause is found in Article 4, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which states that “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or … Continue reading