Catalog of an exhibition held Nov. 3-Dec. 16, 2001 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Publisher description

On February 25, 1946, African Americans in Columbia, Tennessee, averted the lynching of James Stephenson, a nineteen-year-old, black Navy veteran accused of attacking a white radio repairman at a local department store. That night, after Stephenson was safely out of town, four of Columbia's police officers were shot and wounded when they tried to enter the town's black business district. The next morning, the Tennessee Highway Patrol invaded the district, wrecking establishments and beating men as they arrested them. By day's end, more than one hundred African Americans had been jailed. Two days later, highway patrolmen killed two of the arrestees while they were awaiting release from jail. Drawing on oral interviews and a rich array of written sources, Gail Williams O'Brien tells the dramatic story of the Columbia "race riot," the national attention it drew, and its surprising legal aftermath. In the process, she illuminates the effects of World War II on race relations and the criminal justice system in the United States. O'Brien argues that the Columbia events are emblematic of a nationwide shift during the 1940s from mob violence against African Americans to increased confrontations between blacks and the police and courts. As such, they reveal the history behind such contemporary conflicts as the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson cases.

The presence of gold, silver, and other metals is a hallmark of decorated manuscripts, the very characteristic that makes them “illuminated.” Medieval artists often used metal pigment and leaf to depict metal objects both real and imagined, such as chalices, crosses, tableware, and even idols; the luminosity of these representations contrasted pointedly with the surrounding paints, enriching the page and dazzling the viewer. To elucidate this key artistic tradition, this volume represents the first in-depth scholarly assessment of the depiction of precious-metal objects in manuscripts and the media used to conjure them. From Paris to the Abbasid caliphate, and from Ethiopia to Bruges, the case studies gathered here forge novel approaches to the materiality and pictoriality of illumination. In exploring the semiotic, material, iconographic, and technical dimensions of these manuscripts, the authors reveal the canny ways in which painters generated metallic presence on the page. Illuminating Metalwork is a landmark contribution to the study of the medieval book and its visual and embodied reception, and is poised to be a staple of research in art history and manuscript studies, accessible to undergraduates and specialists alike.

This is a study of the central role of history in late-nineteenth century American legal thought. In the decades following the Civil War, the founding generation of professional legal scholars in the United States drew from the evolutionary social thought that pervaded Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. Their historical analysis of law as an inductive science rejected deductive theories and supported moderate legal reform, conclusions that challenge conventional accounts of legal formalism Unprecedented in its coverage and its innovative conclusions about major American legal thinkers from the Civil War to the present, the book combines transatlantic intellectual history, legal history, the history of legal thought, historiography, jurisprudence, constitutional theory, and the history of higher education.

Why do people consult the law? Why do we consult lawyers? Law's Evolution and Human Understanding articulates a fresh conception of law that builds on Oliver Wendell Holmes' celebrated insights concerning law's predictive potential. The book considers important implications of this new understanding for how we individually make moral choices, how we read law, and some of the many other ways that law affects our lives.

The origin of law in the Hebrew Bible has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Until recently, the historico-critical methodologies of the academy have yielded unsatisfactory conclusions concerning the source of these laws which are woven through biblical narratives. In this original and provocative study, Calum Carmichael—a leading scholar of biblical law and rhetoric—suggests that Hebrew law was inspired by the study of the narratives in Genesis through 2 Kings. Discussing particular laws found in the book of Leviticus—addressing issues such as the Day of Atonement, consumption of meat that still has blood, the Jubilee year, sexual and bodily contamination, and the treatment of slaves—Carmichael links each to a narrative. He contends that biblical laws did not emerge from social imperatives in ancient Israel, but instead from the careful, retrospective study of the nation’s history and identity.

Knight outlines how some of the main contours of American law came to be as he recounts 21 stories beginning with Alfred the Great in the late 19th century and ending with the Rodney King trials in 1993.

The relationship between religion and the law is a hot-button topic in America, with the courts, Congress, journalists, and others engaging in animated debates on what influence, if any, the former should have on the latter. Many of these discussions are dominated by the legal perspective, which views religion as a threat to the law; it is rare to hear how various religions in America view American law, even though most religions have distinct views on law. In Faith and Law, legal scholars from sixteen different religious traditions contend that religious discourse has an important function in the making, practice, and adjudication of American law, not least because our laws rest upon a framework of religious values. The book includes faiths that have traditionally had an impact on American law, as well as new immigrant faiths that are likely to have a growing influence. Each contributor describes how his or her tradition views law and addresses one legal issue from that perspective. Topics include abortion, gay rights, euthanasia, immigrant rights, and blasphemy and free speech.

This illuminating book explores the theme of social constructionism in legal theory. It questions just how much freedom and power social groups really have to construct and reconstruct law.