John Fabian Witt
Biographic Data
| ID | 331023 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Fabian Witt |
| GIVEN NAMES | John Fabian |
| FAMILY NAME | Witt |
| SIGNATURE | WITT J F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Cambridge History of International Law
Volume II of The Cambridge History of International Law breaks the mould of Eurocentric histories in the field by exploring international law in Asia from antiquity to decolonisation. Its twenty-six chapters span a vast geography, covering both the landmass and the oceans; offering accounts of statecraft and diplomacy, war and trade; marriage and gift-giving; treaty-making and dispute settlement; ideas of the human and 'the other'; and entangleme…
Antagonists and Enablers: The Tragic Dance of Biden and the Supremes
Garland's Million; or, the Tragedy and Triumph of Legal History: American Society for Legal History Plenary Lecture, New Orleans, 2021
This article reprises the Plenary Lecture from the American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, in November, 2021. Witt presents the story of cases that are quintessential examples of the kind of broken success that law makes available and that legal history helps us see. In other words, these cases make visible that the at-best-tragic realization of ideals is built into the mechanisms of the law
The Partisan Transformation of American Public Health Law, 1918 to 2020
By the end of the 19th century, state supreme courts like Wisconsin's could say confidently that the police power to regulate for epidemics was essentially a law of overruling necessity, one that was coex tensive with self-protection and a part of the inherent and plenary power in the state which enables it to prohibit all things hurtful to the comfort and welfare of society (State v Burdge, 70 N W 347, 349, 1897) A federal court of appeals had n…
Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era
Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 300. $59.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1108488709. John Fabian Witt John…
The Fourteenth Amendment as an Ending: Constitutional Beginnings and the Demise of the War Power
Since its enactment and ratification, savvy observers have viewed the Fourteenth Amendment as a vindication of the military experience of the Civil War. Bullets and bayonets in wartime led to peacetime citizenship in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment and to peacetime ballots that were first protected in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and then bolstered in the Fifteenth Amendment. But there is another story to tell as well, one in which…
The Czar and the Slaves: Two Puzzles in the History of International Arbitration
In 1822, the Russian czar resolved a dispute over compensation for slaves fleeing to British lines during the War of 1812. American observers have long asserted that this canonical decision favored the United States. But new debate has recently arisen among historians. Uncovering evidence from diplomatic archives, this Article concludes that the czar did indeed side with the United States. Moreover, the case demonstrates how nineteenth-century Am…
A Lost Theory of American Emergency Constitutionalism
In the wake of the Civil War, Columbia Law School professor Francis Lieber, architect of some of the Lincoln administration's most important legal strategies, set out to write a definitive text on martial law and the emergency power. Lieber's text would have summed up his view of the legal lessons of the Civil War. Lieber died in 1872, leaving an unfinished manuscript to his son, Guido Norman Lieber, soon to become the Judge Advocate General of t…
Strategy & Entailments: The Enduring Role of Law in the U.S. Armed Forces
This essay aims to redescribe key moments in the history of American military engagements to account for a persistent role that law has played in these conflicts. The law of war tradition has persisted since the War of Independence, we argue, because of an internal dynamic that makes it both strategically useful and costly for the United States to commit itself to rule-bound warfare. Invoking the laws of war to advance the strategic interests of …
The Jury in Lincoln's America
Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain - By Jamie L. Bronstein
Law and War in American History
The Metaphysics of Mind and the Practical Science of the Law
In “Mind of a Moral Agent,” Susanna Blumenthal elegantly limns the rise and partial fall of the common sense theory of moral responsibility in American law. As Blumenthal convincingly describes it, the problem for early American jurists was nothing less than to solve the paradox of determinism and free will. How can the law declare someone morally culpable unless we are free to choose our own ends
The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law
From Loss of Services to Loss of Support: The Wrongful Death Statutes, the Origins of Modern Tort Law, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Family
The wrongful death statutes enacted in most states during the mid-nineteenth century have long represented a classic moment in the narrative of American legal history. Historians have not observed, however, that American wrongful death statutes amended the English act on which they were modeled to introduce a gender asymmetry peculiar to the United States. Led by New York, most American jurisdictions limited wrongful death actions to “the widow a…
Rethinking the Nineteenth-Century Employment Contract, Again
Legal historians have turned with renewed energy in recent years to the project of fleshing out the myriad rules by which the common law of the free labor employment contract structured social relations in nineteenth-century America. Of course, labor relations have always been prominent in the literature. The German sociological tradition has long taught us to see in the legal protection of property rights a source of coercive power over the work…
From Loss of Services to Loss of Support: The Wrongful Death Statutes, the Origins of Modern Tort Law, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Family
The wrongful death statutes enacted in most states during the mid-nineteenth century have long represented a classic moment in the narrative of American legal history. Historians have not observed, however, that American wrongful death statutes amended the English act on which they were modeled to introduce a gender asymmetry peculiar to the United States. Led by New York, most American jurisdictions limited wrongful death actions to “the widow a…
Strategy & Entailments: The Enduring Role of Law in the U.S. Armed Forces
This essay aims to redescribe key moments in the history of American military engagements to account for a persistent role that law has played in these conflicts. The law of war tradition has persisted since the War of Independence, we argue, because of an internal dynamic that makes it both strategically useful and costly for the United States to commit itself to rule-bound warfare. Invoking the laws of war to advance the strategic interests of …
Rethinking the Nineteenth-Century Employment Contract, Again
Legal historians have turned with renewed energy in recent years to the project of fleshing out the myriad rules by which the common law of the free labor employment contract structured social relations in nineteenth-century America. Of course, labor relations have always been prominent in the literature. The German sociological tradition has long taught us to see in the legal protection of property rights a source of coercive power over the work…
Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era
Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 300. $59.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1108488709. John Fabian Witt John…
The Czar and the Slaves: Two Puzzles in the History of International Arbitration
In 1822, the Russian czar resolved a dispute over compensation for slaves fleeing to British lines during the War of 1812. American observers have long asserted that this canonical decision favored the United States. But new debate has recently arisen among historians. Uncovering evidence from diplomatic archives, this Article concludes that the czar did indeed side with the United States. Moreover, the case demonstrates how nineteenth-century Am…
A Lost Theory of American Emergency Constitutionalism
In the wake of the Civil War, Columbia Law School professor Francis Lieber, architect of some of the Lincoln administration's most important legal strategies, set out to write a definitive text on martial law and the emergency power. Lieber's text would have summed up his view of the legal lessons of the Civil War. Lieber died in 1872, leaving an unfinished manuscript to his son, Guido Norman Lieber, soon to become the Judge Advocate General of t…
From Loss of Services to Loss of Support: The Wrongful Death Statutes, the Origins of Modern Tort Law, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Family
The wrongful death statutes enacted in most states during the mid-nineteenth century have long represented a classic moment in the narrative of American legal history. Historians have not observed, however, that American wrongful death statutes amended the English act on which they were modeled to introduce a gender asymmetry peculiar to the United States. Led by New York, most American jurisdictions limited wrongful death actions to “the widow a…
Rethinking the Nineteenth-Century Employment Contract, Again
Legal historians have turned with renewed energy in recent years to the project of fleshing out the myriad rules by which the common law of the free labor employment contract structured social relations in nineteenth-century America. Of course, labor relations have always been prominent in the literature. The German sociological tradition has long taught us to see in the legal protection of property rights a source of coercive power over the work…
The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law
The Metaphysics of Mind and the Practical Science of the Law
In “Mind of a Moral Agent,” Susanna Blumenthal elegantly limns the rise and partial fall of the common sense theory of moral responsibility in American law. As Blumenthal convincingly describes it, the problem for early American jurists was nothing less than to solve the paradox of determinism and free will. How can the law declare someone morally culpable unless we are free to choose our own ends
Law and War in American History
Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain - By Jamie L. Bronstein
The Jury in Lincoln's America
Strategy & Entailments: The Enduring Role of Law in the U.S. Armed Forces
This essay aims to redescribe key moments in the history of American military engagements to account for a persistent role that law has played in these conflicts. The law of war tradition has persisted since the War of Independence, we argue, because of an internal dynamic that makes it both strategically useful and costly for the United States to commit itself to rule-bound warfare. Invoking the laws of war to advance the strategic interests of …
A Lost Theory of American Emergency Constitutionalism
In the wake of the Civil War, Columbia Law School professor Francis Lieber, architect of some of the Lincoln administration's most important legal strategies, set out to write a definitive text on martial law and the emergency power. Lieber's text would have summed up his view of the legal lessons of the Civil War. Lieber died in 1872, leaving an unfinished manuscript to his son, Guido Norman Lieber, soon to become the Judge Advocate General of t…
The Czar and the Slaves: Two Puzzles in the History of International Arbitration
In 1822, the Russian czar resolved a dispute over compensation for slaves fleeing to British lines during the War of 1812. American observers have long asserted that this canonical decision favored the United States. But new debate has recently arisen among historians. Uncovering evidence from diplomatic archives, this Article concludes that the czar did indeed side with the United States. Moreover, the case demonstrates how nineteenth-century Am…
The Fourteenth Amendment as an Ending: Constitutional Beginnings and the Demise of the War Power
Since its enactment and ratification, savvy observers have viewed the Fourteenth Amendment as a vindication of the military experience of the Civil War. Bullets and bayonets in wartime led to peacetime citizenship in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment and to peacetime ballots that were first protected in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and then bolstered in the Fifteenth Amendment. But there is another story to tell as well, one in which…
The Partisan Transformation of American Public Health Law, 1918 to 2020
By the end of the 19th century, state supreme courts like Wisconsin's could say confidently that the police power to regulate for epidemics was essentially a law of overruling necessity, one that was coex tensive with self-protection and a part of the inherent and plenary power in the state which enables it to prohibit all things hurtful to the comfort and welfare of society (State v Burdge, 70 N W 347, 349, 1897) A federal court of appeals had n…
Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era
Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era Radical Histories versus Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law: Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 300. $59.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1108488709. John Fabian Witt John…
Garland's Million; or, the Tragedy and Triumph of Legal History: American Society for Legal History Plenary Lecture, New Orleans, 2021
This article reprises the Plenary Lecture from the American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, in November, 2021. Witt presents the story of cases that are quintessential examples of the kind of broken success that law makes available and that legal history helps us see. In other words, these cases make visible that the at-best-tragic realization of ideals is built into the mechanisms of the law
The Cambridge History of International Law
Volume II of The Cambridge History of International Law breaks the mould of Eurocentric histories in the field by exploring international law in Asia from antiquity to decolonisation. Its twenty-six chapters span a vast geography, covering both the landmass and the oceans; offering accounts of statecraft and diplomacy, war and trade; marriage and gift-giving; treaty-making and dispute settlement; ideas of the human and 'the other'; and entangleme…
Antagonists and Enablers: The Tragic Dance of Biden and the Supremes
Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · History (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Politics (4 works) · Economics (3 works) · History (3 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (3 works)