At the University of Chicago Law School, Richard Helmholz had me and the other members of his seminar read Goebel's devastating assault on the frontier thesis as applied to the legal history of the American colonies, and, early in my work with him, John Langbein pointed me to the monumental Law Enforcement in Colonial New York (1944). [read post]

It was compiled by a New Jersey justice of the peace named James Parker, who drew heavily on a book that had been published recently, Richard Burn’s The justice of the peace, and parish officer (London, 1755). [read post]

ITERATIVE DISJUNCTIVE SYLLOGISM Basic propositional logic teaches that the disjunctive syllogism (modus tollendo ponens) is a valid argument, in which one of its premises is a disjunction (P v Q), and the other premise is the negation of one of the disjuncts: P v Q ~P­­­_____ ∴ Q See Irving Copi & Carl Cohen Introduction to Logic at 362 (2005). [read post]