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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:

July 5, 1865, marks the beginning of the end for Mary Surratt and her co-conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. President Andrew Johnson signed the order for Surratt, David Herold, G.A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Michael O鈥橪aughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold and Samuel Mudd to be executed for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to commit the crime. The group of Confederate supporters also planned to murder General Ulysses S. Grant and Johnson, vice president at the time. On July 7, 1865, Surratt became the first woman in U.S. history to be executed by the federal government.

Also on July 5, jury selection began for the trial against members of the Chicago White Sox players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series. The 1921 trial for players like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver was purportedly mostly for show; the players agreed not to sully baseball鈥檚 reputation again, the jury dismissed the charges and a party was thrown at a nearby restaurant.

On July 7, 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O鈥機onnor as the nation鈥檚 first female U.S. Supreme Court justice. Previously a member of Arizona鈥檚 appeals court, O鈥機onnor received unanimous approval from the Senate and was sworn in on Sept. 25. O鈥機onnor, who played a key role in upholding abortion rights, retired on July 1, 2005.

July 10 marks the 87^th anniversary of the precedent-setting 鈥淢onkey Trial,鈥� in which John Thomas Scopes was tried for teaching evolution to students in his science class at a Tennessee high school. The law against teaching evolution had been passed just four months earlier, and Scopes purposely violated it and asked the American Civil Liberties Union to defend him. The ACLU team, led by Clarence Darrow, went up against William Jennings Bryan in the courtroom and, eventually, an outdoor venue intended to accommodate the enormous crowd of spectators. History.com sums up the scene:

鈥淚n a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd. On July 21, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on July 26, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and never woke up.鈥�

The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict on a technicality in 1927, and the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of the case in 1968 by ruling 鈥� in a different but similar case – that it violated the First Amendment.

On July 11, 1804, Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in the infamous dual in Weehawken, N.J. Burr and Hamilton had a long-standing beef that centered around Burr鈥檚 on again-off again loyalty to Thomas Jefferson鈥檚 political aspirations. In what was known as an 鈥渁ffair of honor,鈥� the two men met for a 7 a.m. dual in the same spot that Hamilton鈥檚 son had died defending his honor two years earlier. After Burr shot and killed Hamilton, the national outrage fueled murder charges in New York and New Jersey, but Burr finished his term as vice president in Washington, D.C.

Our thanks to History.com for this week鈥檚 legal tidbits.