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
Tag Archives: ian c. pilarczyk
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
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
Article 4, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution states that the United States “shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government….” Sometimes referred to as the Guarantee Clause, the definition of “republican” government is not … Continue reading
Want to guess the number of federal laws in the U.S.? Good luck– even the Library of Congress doesn’t know. While this is one of the most popular questions asked of the Library’s reference librarians, they point out that simply tallying … Continue reading
I was pleased to have the opportunity to share some thoughts about distance learning in legal education in the National Jurist a few weeks ago. As the article just came out–you can read it here (Education Anywhere February 2015) — I … Continue reading
One of the most common 19th century civil suits was for alienation of affection, awarding damages to litigants whose marriages disintegrated due to the actions of a third party. In order for a plaintiff to prevail, he or she had … Continue reading