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It’s been said that there’s no time like the present. But where we are now is often the result of where we’ve been in the past. With that in mind, Briefly Legal invites you to travel back in time to take a look at what happened during this week in legal history:

April 29 marks the 20^th anniversary of the incendiary verdict in the Rodney King trial, in which a predominately white jury acquitted four police officers who had been charged with beating King after pulling him over for a traffic violation the year before. The verdict ignited three days of rioting in Los Angeles, culminating with the televised image of a group of rioters dragging Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, from his rig and beating him. A federal court eventually convicted the four officers of violating King’s civil rights. Denny’s attackers were convicted of assault and battery.

On April 30, 1927, the first women’s federal prison opened in Alderson, West Virginia. Most of the women who were sent there had violated drug and alcohol laws enacted during Prohibition. The Federal Institution for Women bore little resemblance to women’s prisons today, though, because back then prison was intended to reform inmates rather than punish them. Women in the Alderson institution learned how to do clerical work, work on the 500-acre facility’s farm, and cook and can fruits and vegetables.

President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 Law Day in 1958 to highlight the role law played in establishing the United States. Three years later, Congress passed a joint resolution confirming Law Day, which had first been proposed by the American Bar Association in 1957. Law Day is intended to encourage Americans to consider the laws that uphold their rights as described in the country’s founding documents on democracy.

And on May 3, 1951, the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee met in a closed session to discuss President Harry S. Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It was no secret that there was no love lost between the pair, and MacArthur was extremely vocal about his disapproval of Truman’s Cold War policies. MacArthur spoke for six hours during the hearing’s opening session, using the time as a forum for a personal diatribe against Truman that ultimately caused MacArthur to fall out of favor with the American public and lose his presidential bid to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Thanks to History.com for this week’s legal tidbits.