Please find below a description of the contents (with abstracts) of the Fall 2000 issue of the Law and History Review (volume 18, number 3), which will be mailed to subscribers in September '00. The issue contains a full complement of articles and book reviews.

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  In This Issue

  	
  I.  Articles
  
  A Historian as a Source of Law: Abbot Peter of Henrykow and the Invocation
  of Norms in Medieval Poland, c. 1200-1270
       --Piotr Gorecki
  
  This article investigates the invocation of norms as an avenue of
  dispute prevention in medieval Europe.  In a passage taken from the
  thirteenth-century history of the Henrykσw monastery in Silesia, the
  author, Abbot Peter, seeks to protect his monks from inheritance claims
  advanced by heirs of a Polish knight who had alienated an estate to the
  monastery.  The Abbot invokes a norm of "Polish law," distinguishing
  ancestral estates from acquisitions, and represents the estate as an
  acquisition, exempt from inheritance claims.  Despite his confidence, his
  story and other contemporary evidence reflect uncertainty about the
  distinction between acquisitions and inheritances, and their implications
  for security of alienation.  Like his contemporaries, Peter was aware of
  this tension, and reduced it in several ways: by situating the invocation
  of the norm within the circumstances and relationships characteristic of
  knightly acquisitions in thirteenth-century Poland; by tacitly accepting,
  and then refuting, a presumption of heritability of the estate in question;
  and by coupling the invocation of the norm with several other approaches
  that were on their face inconsistent with it.  The result was a negotiation
  among several elements of the law of thirteenth-century Poland, and the
  articulation of the norm as a formal rule of "Polish law."
  
  Industrial Arbitration, Equity, and Authority in England, 1800-1850
       --James A. Jaffe
  
  This article argues that in England during the first half of the
  nineteenth century arbitration was a well-known component of the industrial
  relations system.  Evidence is presented not only of a relatively vital
  voluntary system of industrial arbitration but also of statutory efforts to
  formally impose this mode of resolving industrial disputes.  Informal
  systems of arbitration in industries as disparate as coal mining, printing,
  weaving and pottery are examined in detail as is the effect of several
  relevant statutes.  It is argued, however, that the success or failure of
  either of these forms of arbitration often was determined by the parties'
  authority to impose arbitration rather than arbitration's inherent claims
  to justice or fairness.  Such a perspective frequently accounts both for
  the forms in which such voluntary schemes of arbitration were adopted and
  survived as well as the apparently inconsistent responses evoked by
  arbitration from employers and employees.  The equity promise of
  arbitration, therefore, while not irrelevant often was less important than
  the terms upon which the modes of settlement were implemented.
  Arbitration, it was understood at the time, tended to consolidate
  asymmetrical relations rather than to redress them.
  
  II.  Forum.  Truth, Law, and History. New Departures in Israeli Legal
  History, 	Part One
  
  Historical Adjudication: Courts of Law, Commissions of Inquiry, and
  "Historical Truth"
  	--Asher Maoz
  
  	This article deals with two controversial issues: the ability of
  courts of law to ascertain the truth and the role of judicial and
  quasi-judicial institutions in establishing historical facts.  These
  questions are examined against the background of two painful episodes in
  the short history of Israel –  the investigation into the murder of Haim
  Arlosoroff and the trial of Israel Kastner.
  	Arlosoroff, one of the leaders of the Zionist Socialist party,
  Mapai, was murdered in 1933 in Tel-Aviv. The rival  Revisionist Movement
  was accused of incitement against Arlosoroff and two of its members were
  accused of committing the murder. They were acquitted for lack of
  corroboration of an eyewitness' testimony. Five decades later Prime
  Minister Menachem Begin initiated the establishment of a State Commission
  of Inquiry to investigate the accusations.
  	Israel Kastner, a leader of Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust,
  was accused of collaborating with the Nazis.  The accusation was connected
  with arguments that the Zionist leadership in Palestine abstained from
  rescue operations during the Holocaust. The Attorney General initiated
  criminal defamation proceedings against the accuser.
  	The article argues that in both cases legal institutions were used
  to arbitrate between conflicting historical  narratives and come up with
  "official"  historical stories.  The article criticizes these attempts.
  While it is doubtful whether there exists a "historical truth," the task of
  establishing it should not be left to legal institutions.  History and
  philosophy should remain in the open market where people are free to debate
  and differ.
  
  Comments
  
  Where Hannah Arendt Went Wrong
  	--David Abraham
  
  Making History: Israeli Law and Historical Reconstruction
  	--Eben Moglen
  
  Response
  
  Law and History: A Need for Demarcation
  	--Asher Maoz
  
  ***
  
  III.  Notes and Commentary
  
  Rethinking the Nineteenth-Century Employment Contract, Again
  	--John Fabian Witt
  
  	In recent years scholars have contended that the nineteenth-century
  law of the employment contract constructed a prescriptive status hierarchy
  through judicial elaboration of implied doctrines of contractual
  construction. This Commentary critiques the new histories of the employment
  contract for failing adequately to distinguish between default rules and
  immutable rules.  Parties could change the terms of their employment
  contracts, and they did so more often than the new histories would suggest.
  Accordingly, any account of the ways in which the law of the employment
  contract constructed workplace status relations must be tailored
  specifically to provide an explanation of the social consequences of
  default rules. The new histories lack such an explanation.
  	The Commentary surveys in preliminary fashion several alternative
  accounts of the impact of employment contract defaults on the employment
  relation.  In particular, it suggests that the real work of constructing
  the employment relation was done not by the substance of the default rules
  themselves, but rather by the complexity and unpredictability of the rules,
  as well as the daunting complexity of contracting around them.
  
  ***
  
  IV.  The LHR Electronic Resource Page
  
  Recovering and Reporting Australia's Early Colonial Case Law: The Macquarie
  Project
  	--Bruce Kercher
  
  ***
  
  V.  Book Reviews
  
  Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna
  --Gianna Pomata
  	reviewed by Mary Lindemann
  
  Social Identity in Imperial Russia
  --Elise Kimberling Wirtschafter
  	reviewed by Golfo Alexopoulos
  
  Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905
  --Jonathan Daly
  	reviewed by Abby M. Schrader
  
  Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin
  --Peter H. Solomon, Jr.
  	reviewed by Peter Krug
  
  State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1876–1914
  --Gerald Friedman
  	reviewed by John H. M. Laslett
  
  Slavery and the Law
  --Paul Finkelman, editor
  	reviewed by Timothy S. Huebner
  
  Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America
  --Nancy Isenberg
  	reviewed by Sarah Barringer Gordon
  
  Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic
  --Christopher L. Tomlins
  	reviewed by R. Ben Brown
  
  Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in
  Nineteenth-Century America
  --Nan Goodman
  	reviewed by Peter Karsten
  
  White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
  --Martha Hodes
  	reviewed by Ariela Gross
  
  Policing the Elephant: Crime, Punishment, and Social Behavior on the
  Overland Trail
  --John Phillip Reid
  	reviewed by Andrew R. L. Cayton
  
  Race, Place, and the Law, 1836–1948
  --David Delaney
  	reviewed by David F. Godshalk
  
  Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South
  --Martha Myers
  	reviewed by Alex Lichtenstein
  
  A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee
  Coalfields, 1871–1896
  --Karin A. Shapiro
  	reviewed by Pete Daniel
  
  Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States,
  1820–1920
  --Suzanne M. Marilley
  	reviewed by Kate Greene
  
  The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in
  Industrial America, 1865–1945
  --Victoria Saker Woeste
  	reviewed by Peter Carstensen
  
  A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948
  --Bryant Simon
  	reviewed by Eric Arnesen
  
  Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the
  Professionalization of Social Work
  --Karen W. Tice
  	reviewed by Ruth M. Alexander
  
  Creating Born Criminals
  --Nicole Hahn Rafter
  	reviewed by Michael Willrich
  
  Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial
  --Paul Kens
  	reviewed by Michael A. Ross
  
  Worker's Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935
  --Ruth O'Brien
  	reviewed by Colin Gordon
  
  Law and History: The Evolution of the American Legal System
  --Anthony Chase
  	reviewed by Kermit L. Hall
  
  Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of
  Liberalism
  --Judith Stein
  	reviewed by Josh A. Sides
  
  Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second
  Reconstruction
  --J. Morgan Kousser
  	reviewed by David Goldfield