Internet/Library Assignment - Development of the United States
In Chapter 6 of Going to the Source ("The Question of Female Citizenship), you read about the James Martin law case against the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts to recover property that his mother, a loyalist to the British crown, had lost because she followed her husband, a British official, into exile rather than support the Revolution. That case illustrated the tensions between the new concept of citizenship and the traditional duties most people believed wives had toward their husbands. By Thursday, June 24th, I would like you to find an additional case of your own in which the rights of women was at issue in the Early Republic (1776-1820). Lexis Nexis - a data base - includes all state and federal appellate-level court cases from the 1770s to the present, and the data base is avaiulable on-line through the Rutgers Library system. To find a case, you need to do the following:
1. go to the Rutgers library web site: http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/
2. from the library home page, go to "Indexes and Databases"
3. from the list of indexes and databases, select "Lexis Nexis Academic" (Rutgers terminal or dial-up required).
4. on the left side of the page, select "Legal Research"
5. under case law, select "State Case Law"
6. select a state (Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania)
7. in the search screen try combinations of keywords (such as woman, women, citizenship, citizen, dower, feme covert) and set the years as "1776" to "1820." You should get several cases with any combination. To get the case in the book (Going to the Source), click on Massachusetts, then put in "Martin" and "Commonwealth" in the keywords, and 1805 in both dates. The full set of opinions will then be available.
7. OR, select "Federal Case Law" under "Case Law" - step 5 above). Experiment with the same type of choices as in #7 above. To get a relevant case, try putting "Shanks" and "Dupont" in the keywords, and 1830 in the dates.
When you find a case, print out the page that best describes what the case is about and/or how it was resolved. Explain in writing on the back of the page you have printed out how the case defined or modified women's rights as citizens or as wives (dower, feme covert).