Browsing by Author "Sawyer, Jeffrey K."
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Item Distrust of the Legal Establishment in Perspective: Maryland During the Early National Years(Georgia Journal of Southern Legal History) Sawyer, Jeffrey K.Despising lawyers has been popular for centuries, and knowing when to take it seriously is often difficult. Since the 1640s in England, vicious attacks on lawyers and the common law have occasionally accompanied reform movements. Are these outbursts evidence of a long-term tradition of radical hostility towards the legal establishment? Or do they point to a tradition of political posturing with little real substance? With respect to early America, some very good historians have come to differing conclusions on these questions. Maxwell Bloomfield suggests that, while radical in tone, the attack on lawyers was rooted in essentially middle-class values and was not seriously connected to an ideology of social leveling or egalitarianism. He nevertheless demonstrates elegantly that the anti-lawyer sentiment of the Jacksonian period was part of a longer-term and culturally pervasive pattern. Richard Ellis's work, in partial contrast, documents radical attacks on the legal establishment during the Jeffersonian years, notably in Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Other legal historians have often stressed that fundamentally different conceptions of law, lawyers, judges, juries, and courts shaped the legal politics of Americans in the post-revolutionary years.Item Jacques Bon-Homme and National Politics: Ethos and Audience in 17th- Century Political Pamphlets(Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 1984) Sawyer, Jeffrey K.A number of fundamental problems remain in the way of providing a comprehensive analysis of pamphlets and pamphleteerng in Old Regime France. Our incomplete knowledge of the sizes of editions, the mechanisms of distribution, and author-patron relationships is one set of problems. Another stems from the complexity of the the texts themselves. Pamphlet authors often cultivated a baroque style of rhetoric, twisting their into elaborate figures of speech, sometimes beyond recognition. Many pamphlets, at least in the early part of the seventeenth century, were intentionally written in colloquial speech, and some even contain parodies of southern dialects. Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to interpretation is the rich undercurrent of allusions and citations to other pamphlets, to popular customs, to learned books, and "the whole cultural baggage of the epoch," to use Denis Richet's marvelous phrase. One of the main questions that arises from these difficulties is the question of the audience. This is a particularly troubling issue for those who are concerned about the concrete political functions of pamphleteering. The identity of the "public" is especially obscure in the seventeenth century. Millions of pieces of pamphlet propaganda were published, yet there is precious little evidence as to who read them and how these readers reacted. Occasionally, we can learn from diplomatic correspondence that this or that pamphlet caused a reaction among high-level politicians. But what about the larger audience for whom the pamphlets were presumably written? The evidence available about patterns of literacy suggests that the readers were predominantly urban, but this is hardly a very satisfying solution to the problem of establishing the audience for printed propaganda.Item Pamphleteers Construct Concini(University of Baltimore - School of Law, 1990) Sawyer, Jeffrey K.This paper is built around a problem of textual analysis that I have been wrestling with for some time as a historian of early seventeenth-century political propaganda. Stated broadly the problem is how to use the texts of hundreds of political pamphlets to reconstruct the world of discourse within which pamphlet readers reacted to printed political tracts. Take for example the dozens of pamphlets concerning the rise to power and assassination in April 1617 of Concino Concini. Concini, also referred to as the Marechal d'Ancre, was for a time one of the principal ministers in the administration of Marie de Medicis during the youth of Louis XIII. The Bibliotheque Nationale holds over 100 pamphlets published against Concini between 1614 and 1617, and another 16 (or so) in his favor. It is interesting to note that almost half of the pamphlets published against Concini appeared after his death. In fact, carefully edited accounts of Concini's strange career and horrible demise formed the centrifugal center of a legally sanctioned (and no doubt subsidized) campaign of printed propaganda. Fifty-seven (57) of the one hundred one (101) pamphlets against Concini at the B.N. were published after the events of April 24th, and many of these were published well after the subsequent trial and execution of Concini's widow on July 8th of the same year.Item Women, Law, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Early Harford County(Harford Historical Bulletin, 1999) Sawyer, Jeffrey K.Martha Griffith filed suit in 1794 against the executors of her late husband's estate. His will had left her a large, waterfront plantation on Swan Creek for the remainder of her life, but she wanted more. The suit demanded a large share of the family's working capital, specifically, livestock, supplies, farm equipment, and the slave labor force that made plantations prosperous in those times. The people and property involved in this case were for the most part members of a closely knit Harford County community, but the legal battle and its outcome had some larger implications. The decision in Griffith v. Griffith's Executors, rendered by the General Court and affirmed by the Court of Appeals, constitutes a significant piece of the legal history of early America. First, it re-established the undisputed rights of Maryland widows to a share of both the real and personal property of their deceased husbands. Second, it forced leading judges and lawyers in Maryland to undertake a deep historical and logical analysis of the authority of British legal precedents. What law would apply in cases where post-Revolutionary Maryland legislation was unclear? Third, the judgment silently affirmed that slaves in Maryland fell under the regime of personal property with respect to inheritance. The events surrounding the suit are particularly revealing of how law in action affected women with respect to inheritance and property. Despite many inequalities that affected women under the old common law in early Maryland, women had a dear legal right to own property and to use the courts of law to secure their rights, A widow's right to a reasonable share of her husband's property extended back into Anglo-Saxon times, and was one of the guarantees written into the Magna Carta. "Dower" is the old common law name for a widow's share. Customarily dower consisted of the use of and profit from one third of the deceased husband's real estate for the widow's lifetime, and one third of his personal estate after his debts were paid, But dower could also be fixed by a formal agreement.