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In Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition, Justin Buckley Dyer provides a succinct account of the development of American antislavery constitutionalism in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the context of recent revisionist scholarship, Dyer argues that the theoretical foundations of American constitutionalism - which he identifies with principles of natural law - were antagonistic to slavery. Still, the continued existence of slavery in the nineteenth century created a tension between practice and principle. In a series of case studies, Dyer reconstructs the constitutional arguments of prominent antislavery thinkers such as John Quincy Adams, John McLean, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who collectively sought to overcome the legacy of slavery by emphasizing the natural law foundations of American constitutionalism. What emerges is a convoluted understanding of American constitutional development that challenges traditional narratives of linear progress while highlighting the centrality of natural law to America's greatest constitutional crisis.

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A fresh look at the importance of natural and international law in the religious politics at the heartlands of the Reformation, from the Low Countries, the German principalities up to Transylvania; from Niels Hemmingsen to Gian Battista Vico; from religious reasons for the universalist claims of natural law to political arguments for the sacred polity, their tension and creative potential.

This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely devoid of these histories and without a strong conception of the formative role of race. As a result, recent movements to reintegrate these topics into the field generally reflect a broader trend in the legal academy of treating race as an elective rather than fundamental topic. This Article shows that these histories contain insights that are crucial for understanding their legacies in our present legal system. It offers an account of how current conceptions of the field of property law evolved and what we learn from suppressed histories. It shows that the histories of conquest and slavery explain aspects of the system – its construction of jurisdictions, property value, ground-level institutions, and organization of force, for example – that belong at the core of the curriculum and the field. First, this Article examines patterns of erasure in the property-law canon to explore how we came to understand property law as primarily a collection of doctrines derived from English law regulating relations between neighbors. It uses property-law casebooks as an index and offers the first comprehensive study of the tradition. This analysis shows that many of the norms of erasure and validations of racial hierarchy that casebooks exhibit were set during the period of their emergence – the time of the formal close of the frontier and the Jim Crow Era. It was not until the 1970s that casebooks began to critically examine the histories of conquest and slavery for the first time, but the query into their consequences for the property system has remained partial and inconsistent. I then examine three ubiquitously taught topics in property law–discovery, labor, and possession – in light of the contexts in which they arose, to highlight their role in the creation of new markets for land and people in early America. I show that Chief Justice Marshall's iteration of the Discovery Doctrine drew from an international legal tradition that authorized European conquests and the transatlantic slave trade to establish racial hierarchy as the basis of U.S. jurisdiction and trade in lands. In addition to affirming that hierarchy, as scholars have shown, the labor theory also captured the ways that colonists attributed property values to land and people only when they came into white possession. I further argue that the labor of property creation in the colonies in significant part comprised legal work, beyond agriculture labor, including the passage of laws creating homesteading incentives, making enslavement racial, permanent, and hereditary, and establishing systems such as the rectangular survey, comprehensive title registry, and easy mortgage foreclosure. Finally, taking possession of property in this context entailed a process of dispossession turning the principle of honoring possession on its head. Looking at possession as part of the Discovery Rule and fugitive-slave laws reveals that the state largely delegated enforcement of possession – and the concomitant racial violence of dispossession – to private actors in ways that simultaneously invested them in property interests and racial hierarchy. This Article opens a new inquiry into what these long-buried histories teach us about property law. It argues that they are indispensable for understanding the unique fruits of the colonial experiment that define American property law today – the singular land system that underpins its real estate market and its structural reliance on racial violence to produce value.

This article investigates the relationship between legal personality for nature and Indigenous philosophies by comparing two cases: the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 and the 2014 Te Urewera Act of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Through these case studies the article considers the nature of Indigenous relations with the concept of rights of nature, arguing that this relation is primarily strategic, not genealogical. The article engages with the concept of legal personality and shows that it is not a direct translation of Indigenous conceptions, but rather a potential straitjacket for Indigenous emancipatory politics. The radical character of Indigenous ontologies is not fully reflected in the concept of legal personality. Furthermore, the way in which rights are granted to the natural environment is an important part of the effect that such rights might have on Indigenous communities. Despite some affinities between rights of the environment and Indigenous philosophies, overstating the connection might constrain the radical political and legal implications of Indigenous thought.

In the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, courts and legislatures claim in principle to have repudiated the privileging of different-sex over same-sex couples and men over women in the legal regulation of the family. But as struggles over assisted reproductive technologies (ART) demonstrate, in the law of parental recognition such privileging remains. Those who break from traditional norms of gender and sexuality—women who separate motherhood from biological ties (for instance, through surrogacy), and women and men who form families with a same-sex partner—often find their parent-child relationships discounted. This Article explores what it means to fully vindicate gender and sexual-orientation equality in the law of parental recognition. It does so by situating the treatment of families formed through ART within a longer history of parentage. Inequalities that persist in contemporary law are traceable to earlier eras. In initially defining parentage through marriage, the common law embedded parenthood within a gender-hierarchical, heterosexual order. Eventually, courts and legislatures repudiated the common-law regime and protected biological parent-child relationships formed outside marriage. While this effort to derive parental recognition from biological connection was animated by egalitarian impulses, it too operated within a gender-differentiated, heterosexual paradigm. Today, the law increasingly accommodates families formed through ART, and, in doing so, recognizes parents on not only biological but also social grounds. Yet, as courts and legislatures approach the parental claims of women and same-sex couples within existing frameworks organized around marital and biological relationships, they reproduce some of the very gender- and sexuality-based asymmetries embedded in those frameworks. With biological connection continuing to anchor nonmarital parenthood, unmarried gays and lesbians face barriers to parental recognition. With the gender-differentiated, heterosexual family continuing to structure marital parenthood, the law organizes the legal family around a biological mother. Against this back-drop, nonbiological mothers in different-sex couples, as well as nonbiological fathers in same-sex couples, struggle for parental recognition. To protect the parental interests of women and of gays and lesbians, this Article urges greater emphasis on parenthood's social dimensions. Of course, as our common law origins demonstrate, the law has long recognized parental relationships on social and not simply biological grounds. But today, commitments to equality require reorienting family law in ways that ground parental recognition more fully and evenhandedly in social contributions. While this Article focuses primarily on reform of family law at the state level, it also contemplates eventual constitutional oversight.

Faced with the global climate change, as a major greenhouse gas emitter, China launched a pilot policy on low-carbon city construction since 2010. Few studies have discussed how climate policies affect the investment and financing behavior of energy-intensive enterprises. Based on the micro data of A-share listed enterprises in China’s energy-intensive industries, this study aims to assess the productivity effect of low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) policy and investigates the mechanism of financing and investment using the difference-in-difference method. Empirical results provide evidence that the LCCP policy has significantly improved the total factor productivity of energy-intensive enterprises. In terms of the mechanisms, the LCCP policy has increased the supply of bank credit to enterprises and encouraged their long-term investment in fixed assets and R&D activities. The productivity effect of the LCCP policy is greater for state-owned enterprises and enterprises with political connection. Urban human capital, industrial agglomeration, and resource endowment contribute to the productivity effect of LCCP policy for enterprises in the energy-intensive industries. The findings show that the LCCP is an effective comprehensive policy to promote the high-quality development of energy-intensive industries, and the findings also provide enlightenment for enacting better climate transition policies.

To date, 19 states have passed medical marijuana laws, yet very little is known about their effects. The current study examines the relationship between the legalization of medical marijuana and traffic fatalities, the leading cause of death among Americans ages 5–34. The first full year after coming into effect, legalization is associated with an 8–11 percent decrease in traffic fatalities. The impact of legalization on traffic fatalities involving alcohol is larger and estimated with more precision than its impact on traffic fatalities that do not involve alcohol. Legalization is also associated with sharp decreases in the price of marijuana and alcohol consumption, which suggests that marijuana and alcohol are substitutes. Because alternative mechanisms cannot be ruled out, the negative relationship between legalization and alcohol-related traffic fatalities does not necessarily imply that driving under the influence of marijuana is safer than driving under the influence of alcohol.