In the third book of his Annals, Tacitus interrupts his account of Tiberius’ reign to present an extensive digression on Roman legal history, beginning with humanity’s earliest days during the proverbial ‘Golden Age’, and ending in the Early Principate. This article posits that the passage is central to our understanding of Tacitus’ legal thinking, and suggests that his handling of existing narrative traditions allows him to present a notably sceptical approach to the law. By comparing Tacitus’ account of Roman legal history to that of other authors, and placing it within the wider context of legal themes within his work, it becomes clear that he presents the law not as an inherently civilizing force but rather as a potential tool for oppression. However, this does not mean that the legal excursus amounts to little more than a straightforward narrative of legal decline: Tacitus introduces a number of strategic ‘bright spots’, suggesting that, while the law is always in danger of becoming repressive, it can in fact be used for good—although this beneficial use is aspirational rather than self-evident, and is in danger of being undermined by many different parts of Roman society.

This article examines institutional safeguards for fairness in rent-arrears evictions from the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). It reconstructs the reform sequence that led to the adoption of a novel—possibly unique—institutional mechanism: the Office of the Commissioner for Housing Equity (OCHE), an independent accountability mechanism for procedural fairness in evictions. It was a contingent institutional response to tragic administrative failings, not a response to judges’ or legislatures’ external oversight. Several individuals shaped the reform, subject to political and economic constraints. The history is interesting in its own right. It is a tragic vignette. But it also has broader relevance for administrative law scholars, and for others who are interested in the relationship between law and public policy. Institutional structures like the OCHE are one version of “internal administrative law.” Reforms to that kind of law are often invisible to legal scholars. This article makes one such story visible.

This paper is a response to Lauren Benton’s 2025 Thrupp Lecture.

This article engages with two aspects of how cartography enabled law and jurisdictional ordering in a specific historical context. First, by interrogating the ways in which the great trigonometrical surveys of the British colonial enterprise and the Atlas of India entrenched “India” as a distinct, coherent, and contiguous geographical entity, this article will demonstrate how an epistemology rooted in a civilising impulse produced the perception of India as a thoroughly refined British legal territory. Second, by engaging with the maps and records of colonial cadastral and revenue surveys, this article will show how maps played a critical role in the visualisation of British Indian territory in terms of police networks. Such a visualisation paved the way for the rationalisation and systematisation of horizontal jurisdictions, with vertically aligned hierarchies, across the territory.

This article analyzes reformist treatises from nineteenth-century Iran that called for tanzimat (re-ordering). Central to this reformist discourse was the demand for the enactment of qānūn (modern law). This new conceptualization of law emerged under the influence of European legal codification, which reshaped the characteristics of law across numerous Muslim societies during the nineteenth century. The Iranian case is particularly significant because its theory of law developed largely within a noncolonial context and independently of direct Western intervention. Ultimately, the redefinition of qānūn extended legal constraints to monarchical authority and action, laying the foundations for constitutional thought in Iran decades before the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11.

This article takes a closer look at the creation of the Royal Decree of 11 October 1916, which regulated the state of war and the state of siege during World War I. It gave the government the power to restrict certain fundamental rights to such an extent that it effectively amounted to a suspension of those rights. It is notable that the Belgian Constitution prohibits this through Article 187 (formerly Article 130), which states that the Constitution can never, as a whole or partially, be suspended. Nevertheless, was the decree-law justified under the notion of necessity, without giving a proper explanation of what necessity actually meant? Using a socio-legal-historical approach, this article finds that necessity should be understood not only as a factual situation requiring certain measures to survive the war, but also in relation to specific (postwar) political objectives.

In 1964, in Rookes v Barnard, the House of Lords restated the law concerning aggravation of damages. Its effect was to dispel what had been described as its ‘Janus-like attitude’. This attitude was borne out by the historical common law’s tendency to allow two theoretically distinct elements – punishment and compensation – to intermingle in awards of what had hitherto been loosely labelled ‘exemplary’ damages. And yet the House’s restatement has proved controversial. This paper presents the first historical examination of the Janus-like attitude in which the pre-1964 law concerning aggravation of damages persisted in England. By shedding new light on the period from which this area of the law of civil damages immediately broke some six decades ago, it helps modern scholars and law reformers better understand the controversy in which it remains embroiled.

This article considers the adequacy of the tests for identifying delegated legislation and highlights limitations in these tests relating to instruments made under ambiguous powers. This article, accordingly, proposes a new two-stage test for identifying delegated legislation. The long-standing source-based test should be expanded to become a “source-and-form” test as the primary or first-stage test. However, where this fails to identify the nature of the instrument because the powers granted in the enabling Act are ambiguous, this article proposes a new second-stage test: the “legislative-character” test. This article then applies the new test to three types of instruments of an ambiguous nature, revealing that they should be understood as examples of what this article identifies as a new category of “innominate” delegated legislation.

This article explores the Chicago School Board’s 1915 union-busting effort against the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, a union of women teachers co-founded by two Catholics. This article argues that newspaper coverage reveals that the gender identities and religious affiliations of the CTF members made them doubly intolerable. Not only did their very presence in public schools threaten to introduce Catholicism into a space that Protestants viewed as their domain, but these women also had the temerity to expect just compensation for their work. The Catholicism of the CTF’s leaders attracted nativist prejudice, and the press’s fixation on religious difference reframed the Loeb Affair from a conflict over salaries, pensions, and union membership into an endeavor to wrest the schools from Catholic control. Whatever the initial motivation of the Loeb Rule, anti-Catholicism became a weapon to defeat the economic and equality claims of women who demanded to be treated as professionals rather than as proxy mothers. From this viewpoint, the Loeb Affair figures not only as a loss for organized labor and teacher organizing, but it also illustrates Progressive Era beliefs about competing ways of performing womanhood, the role of religion in public schools, and the fear of Catholic power.

Why did the nineteenth century see so little progress in addressing smoke pollution, even as smoke was increasingly recognised as a problem and economical technological solutions were identified? This article argues that efforts to abate smoke were impeded by the antagonistic class relationship between stokers and manufacturers, which prevented the emergence of a mutually beneficial compromise around smoke abatement. Employers sought to reduce smoke by compelling their stokers to take greater care under the threat of punishment. Law played an important role, siding with employers to impose liability for smoke pollution on stokers. Even when stokers were not prosecuted directly, employers often demanded indemnities as compensation for careless stoking. This reinforced mistrust between the two classes, undermining efforts to bring stokers on board with the goal of abating smoke. These findings may offer lessons today, as climate policy continues to be opposed despite the availability of green technologies and the existence of a scientific consensus on climate change.