Via the Legal Scholarship Blog, here are downloadable papers from today’s workshops:
NYU Legal History, Peter Hoffer (Georgia History), The Treason Trials of Aaron Burr: A Law Story from the Early Republic. Here is a taste:
There is something almost seductively attractive about Aaron Burr. Slight and short, with a high brow and piercing eyes, no one who met him ever forgot this founding father. A trusted and admired friend to some, a feared and reviled adversary to others, no founding father provoked such strongly divided opinions in his time–or in ours.
Nor did any of the revolutionaries experience such dramatic swings in their fortunes as he. Accused variously of a hair-brained plot to “revolutionize” the West and detach it from the rest of the nation, of an invasion of Spanish Mexico that would leave him its king, and of a variety of more mundane canal, land development, and banking schemes, he seemed to combine in his life all the virtues of honor and excesses of ambition common to his contemporaries.
Historians and biographers still debate whether he was a misunderstood patriot or a scheming traitor. Had he only been less secretive about his intentions! Nevertheless, his trials for treason and high misdemeanor are worth a fresh look. The trials attracted more attention than any other in the first four decades of the new nation. They caused the first media frenzy in the nineteenth century, bringing correspondents from newspapers to Richmond from all over the country. They also brought together Burr, Chief Justice John Marshall, and agents of President Thomas Jefferson, who watched the course of the trials from afar. Hovering over them, like the ghost of Banquo at MacBeth’s coronation feast, was the rival Burr killed in a duel, Alexander Hamilton.
University of Washington, Balakrishnan Rajagopal (MIT Human Rights), Pro-Human Rights but Anti-Poor? Rethinking the Indian Supreme Court through a Social Movement Analysis. Here is the abstract:
Judicial activism is a contested phenomenon, with the liberals and even the conservatives championing it while denouncing its particular manifestations. In this article, I examine the recent judicial practice of one of the most activist judiciaries in the world, that of India, where progressive politics is often, and sometimes always, associated with an activist and benign court. Indeed, the Indian Supreme Court has a global reputation as a torchbearer on human rights. In this article, I adopt a social movement perspective to understand the actual impact of the court on the struggles of the poor for livelihood, resources, values, and identity, enacted through struggles for the recognition and realization of economic, social, and cultural rights. After an analysis of the record of the Supreme Court of India, I conclude that the Court has increasingly shown a bias against the poor in its activist rulings and made judicial activism a more problematic device for social movements in India to rely upon. To explain why this is happening, the article introduces two ideas: first, the emergence of the judiciary as an organ of governance and its attendant problems, and second, the internally biased nature of the rights discourse which tends to reproduce binary arguments for either increasing State capacity or for increasing choice of goods in the marketplace. The article concludes by exploring lessons from the jurisprudence of other countries and international law and urges the Indian Supreme Court to reinvent a jurisprudence informed more by the social movements of the poor.