Unsound Empire is a history of criminal responsibility in the nineteenth-century British Empire told through detailed accounts of homicide cases across three continents. If a defendant in a murder trial was going to hang, he or she had to deserve it....

As a legal scholar who first argued in the early 1990s for a right to gay marriage, William N. Eskridge Jr. has been on the front lines of the debate over same‑sex marriage for decades. In this book, Eskridge and his coauthor, Christopher R. Riano, o...

Few terms in political theory are as overused, and yet as under-theorized, as constitutional revolution. In this book, Gary Jacobsohn and Yaniv Roznai argue that the most widely accepted accounts of constitutional transformation, such as those found...

The Supreme Court has never simply evaluated laws and arguments in light of permanent and immutable constitutional meanings, and social, moral, and yes, political ideas have always played into Supreme Court justices' impressions of how they think a c...

This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France's first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial su...

Western accounts of natural and political order have deployed two basic ideas: project and system. In a project, order is produced by the intentional act of a subject; in a system, order is immanent in the world. In the former, order is made; in the...

This first comprehensive history of software patenting explores how patent law made software development the powerful industry that it is today. Historian Gerardo Con Diaz reveals how patent law has transformed the ways computing firms make, own, and...

Over 25 years in the making, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is described by the UN as setting an important standard for the treatment of indigenous peoples that will undoubtedly be a significant tool towards eliminating human...

The last work of Abraham Lincoln's law of war expert Francis Lieber was long considered lost – until Will Smiley and John Fabian Witt discovered it in the National Archives. Lieber's manuscript on emergency powers and martial law addresses important...

This engaging and accessible study looks at the origins, evolution, purpose, and limitations of intellectual property. Detailing how intellectual property affects industry, politics, cultural expression, and medical research, Aram Sinnreich takes a m...