This book describes the ways in which married women appeared in legal practice in the medieval Swedish realm 1350-1450, through both the agency of women, and through the norms that surrounded their actions. Since there were no court protocols kept, legal practice must be studied through other sources. For this book, more than 6,000 original charters have been researched, and a database of all the charters pertaining to women created. This enables new findings from an area that has previously not been studied on a larger scale, and reveals trends and tendencies regarding aspects considered central to married women’s agency, such as networks, criminal liability, and procedural capacity.

Explaining the curious legal doctrine of "coverture," William Blackstone famously declared that "by marriage, husband and wife are one person at law." This "covering" of a wife's legal identity by her husband meant that the greatest subordination of women to men developed within marriage. In England and its colonies, generations of judges, legislators, and husbands invoked coverture to limit married women's rights and property, but there was no monolithic concept of coverture and their justifications shifted to fit changing times: Were husband and wife lord and subject? Master and servant? Guardian and ward? Or one person at law? The essays in Married Women and the Law offer new insights into the legal effects of marriage for women from medieval to modern times. Focusing on the years prior to the passage of the Divorce Acts and Married Women's Property Acts in the late nineteenth century, contributors examine a variety of jurisdictions in the common law world, from civil courts to ecclesiastical and criminal courts. By bringing together studies of several common law jurisdictions over a span of centuries, they show how similar legal rules persisted and developed in different environments. This volume reveals not only legal changes and the women who creatively used or subverted coverture, but also astonishing continuities. Accessibly written and coherently presented, Married Women and the Law is an important look at the persistence of one of the longest lived ideas in British legal history. Contributors include Sara M. Butler (Loyola), Marisha Caswell (Queen’s), Mary Beth Combs (Fordham), Angela Fernandez (Toronto), Margaret Hunt (Amherst), Kim Kippen (Toronto), Natasha Korda (Wesleyan), Lindsay Moore (Boston), Barbara J. Todd (Toronto), and Danaya C. Wright (Florida).

Fresh approaches to how premodern women were viewed in legal terms, demonstrating how this varied from country to country and across the centuries.

Exploring the relationship between gender and law in Europe from the nineteenth century to present, this collection examines the recent feminisation of justice, its historical beginnings and the impact of gendered constructions on jurisprudence. It looks at what influenced the breakthrough of women in the judicial world and what gender factors determine the position of women at the various levels of the legal system. Every chapter in this book addresses these issues either from the point of view of women's legal history, or from that of gendered legal cultures. With contributions from scholars with expertise in the major regions of Europe, this book demonstrates a commitment to a methodological framework that is sensitive to the intersection of gender theory, legal studies and public policy, and that is based on historical methodologies. As such the collection offers a valuable contribution both to women's history research, and the wider development of European legal history.

In this landmark book, the historian Linda K. Kerber opens up this important and neglected subject for the first time. She begins during the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," and ends in the present, when men and women still have different obligations to serve in the armed forces.

This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes the idea that the 1753 Act was harsh or strictly interpreted, illustrating the courts' pragmatic approach. Finally, it establishes that only a few non-Anglicans married according to their own rites before the Act; while afterwards most - save the exempted Quakers and Jews - similarly married in church. In short, eighteenth-century couples complied with whatever the law required for a valid marriage.

The World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 190 economies. Its goal is to inform policy discussions on how to remove legal restrictions on women and promote research on how to improve women’s economic inclusion.

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

In A Woman's Kingdom, Michelle Lamarche Marrese explores the development of Russian noblewomen's unusual property rights. In contrast to women in Western Europe, who could not control their assets during marriage until the second half of the nineteenth century, married women in Russia enjoyed the right to alienate and manage their fortunes beginning in 1753. Marrese traces the extension of noblewomen's right to property and places this story in the broader context of the evolution of private property in Russia before the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Historians have often dismissed women's property rights as meaningless. In the patriarchal society of Imperial Russia, a married woman could neither work nor travel without her husband's permission, and divorce was all but unattainable. Yet, through a detailed analysis of women's property rights from the Petrine era through the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Marrese demonstrates the significance of noblewomen's proprietary power. She concludes that Russian noblewomen were unique not only for the range of property rights available to them, but also for the active exercise of their legal prerogatives.A remarkably broad source base provides a solid foundation for Marrese's conclusions. These sources comprise more than eight thousand transactions from notarial records documenting a variety of property transfers, property disputes brought to the Senate, noble family papers, and a vast memoir literature. A Woman's Kingdom stands as a masterful challenge to the existing, androcentric view of noble society in Russia before Emancipation.