Texas law regarding the legal status of women and their property rights developed from the mingling of Spanish and English laws. Spanish laws regarding the protection of women's rights developed during the centuries-long Reconquest, when the Spanish Christians slowly took back the Iberian Peninsula from the Moorish conquerors. Women were of special importance to the expansion of Spanish civilization. Later, when Spain conquered and colonized the New World, these rights for women came, too. In the New World, women's rights under Spanish law remained the same as in Spain. Again, the Spanish were spreading their civilization across frontiers and women needed protection. When the Spanish moved into Texas, they brought their laws with them yet again. Archival evidence demonstrates that Spanish laws in early Texas remained essentially unchanged with regard to the status of women. Events in the history of England caused its legal system to develop in a different manner from Spain's. In England, the protection of property was the law's most important goal. With the growth of English common law, husbands gained the right to control their wives's lives in that married women lost all legal identity. When the English legal system crossed the Atlantic and took root …

The Great Depression elucidated the shortcomings of the banking system and its control by Wall Street. The creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 was insufficient to correct flaws in the banking system until the Banking Acts of 1933 and 1935. A.P. Giannini, the American-Italian founder of the Bank of America and Mormon Marriner S. Eccles, chairman of Federal Reserve Board (1935-1949), from California and Utah respectively, successfully worked to restrain the power of the eastern banking establishment. The Banking Act of 1935 was the capstone of their cooperation, a bill that placed open market operations in the hands of the Federal Reserve, thus diminishing the power of the New York Reserve. The creation of the Federal Housing Act, as orchestrated by Eccles, became a source of enormous revenue for Giannini. Giannini's wide use of branch banking and mass advertising was his contribution to American banking. Eccles's promotion of compensatory spending and eventual placement of monetary control in the hands of the Federal Reserve Board with Banking Act of 1935 and the Accord of 1951 and Giannini's branch banking diminished the likelihood of another sustained depression. As the Bank of America grew, and as Eccles became more aggressive in …

Much work has been done over the last fifty years in the study of the English ecclesiastical courts. One court that thus far has escaped much significant scholarly attention, however, is the one located in Chester, England. The author analyzes the acta of that court in order to determine what types of cases were being heard during the years 1540-42. His analysis shows that the Chester court did not deviate significantly from the general legal and theological structure and function of Tudor church courts of the period.