Law

He wrote nothing himself, so the man scholars still argue over is entirely a construction of students, satirists and a philosopher born after his death.

1963

1968

A treaty signed by a minority faction, ratified by a single Senate vote, overrode a Supreme Court ruling the president simply declined to enforce.

2010

No original copy of the Edict of Milan survives, historians increasingly doubt it was ever a formal edict at all, and it did not make Christianity Rome's religion, whatever the name suggests.

A law that spoke only of voluntary land exchange produced forced marches that killed thousands, and a Supreme Court ruling against it changed nothing because the president simply declined to enforce it.

The same charter that let judges reject a defence comparing Nazi camps to Allied detention centres also barred prosecutors from examining Soviet purges and deportations, a legal boundary drawn to protect the court's own authors as much as to convict its defendants.

1925

A president kept 3,432 hours of his own conversations on tape, and it was that recording system, not the burglars, that eventually brought him down.