We were intrigued by this student note:  Fighting Words at the Founding, Harvard Law Review 138 (June 2025): 2049-2070.  From its introduction:  At the Founding, speakers of fighting words were indictable only if they intended to cause violence. Yet today, Americans who speak fighting words without any intention of causing a fight routinely face criminal sanctions. The Supreme Court has yet to rule definitively on whether the First Amendment requires that the government prove mens rea to punish the speaker of a fighting word. But in the lower courts, nearly every defendant prosecuted for speaking a fighting word faces strict liability: Her interior mental state is irrelevant. That approach breaks with the uniform practice of the common law at the time the nation ratified the First Amendment. --Dan Ernst

(Image source: Taylor&Francis ) In this ambitious monograph Anna di Robilant describes how European jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth...

The Ames Foundation, with the financial support of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, has been transcribing the twenty-two volumes of the records of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature ca. 1690 – ca. 1780 (Mass SCJ), edited by Professor Sally Hadden of Western Michigan University.   The transcriptions of the first two volumes have just been published online.  The first transcribe the records of the Mass SCJ from 1760–1762; the second transcribes a volume of maritime cases dating from the period of the Revolutionary War. --Dan Ernst 

Allen D. Boyerand Mark Nicholls , The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 333. $180.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780367509934).

This paper uses a dispute over the franchise of infangthief between the abbot of Tewkesbury and the earl of Gloucester to shed light on jurisdictional claims over the right to try and hang hand-hav...

As an heir, through John Langbein when he taught at the University of Chicago, to the "Development of Legal Institutions" tradition in American Legal History, I was thrilled--really thrilled--by the publication of The Tradition of History at Harvard Law…

Published in English Studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)