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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:

Legal history was made left and right June 19-25 during a two-decade stretch that began in 1862. On July 22 of that year, President Abraham Lincoln announced to his cabinet and chief advisers that he was going to issue the Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery. However, Lincoln waited until Sept. 22 to go public with the proclamation because he wanted to make the announcement following a Union military victory. His hope was that the newly freed slaves would flee the South, join the Union Army and force a Confederate collapse. Lincoln announced the proclamation after the Union victory at Antietam.

Just over a decade later, the infamous gunslinger Doc Holliday committed his first murder. It was July 19, 1879, when a former army scout named Mike Gordon shot up Holliday鈥檚 New Mexico saloon after one of the girls who worked there refused to run away with him. Holliday, a dapper former dentist from Atlanta, ended the temper tantrum with a single shot. Though he was reputed to have killed many, Holliday was only involved in eight shootouts and proven to have murdered two men during his lifetime.

On the same day five years later, President Chester Arthur issued a proclamation that gave the federal government the authority to hold people entering the nation鈥檚 ports in quarantine to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, though the proclamation actually used the term 鈥減estilence.鈥� George Washington issued the first quarantine to prevent the plague and smallpox from spreading. In 2003, George W. Bush added Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) to the quarantine list.

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