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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:

We bid adieu to President Warren G. Harding on Aug. 2, 1923. The 58-year-old president died of an embolism that some theorized was caused by stress over the political firestorm brewing around him. Claims of corruption within Harding’s administration, including the Interior and Justice departments and Veterans Bureau, dogged the president as he embarked on a speaking tour along the West Coast and Alaska. Harding was in a San Francisco hotel when he died, and Calvin Coolidge was sworn in the next day.

Aug. 4 marks the 120^th anniversary of the death of Andrew and Abby Borden, whose daughter Lizzie was forever branded their murderer with an infamous poem despite being acquitted by a jury.

Fingerprint testing was widely used in Europe at the time, but Massachusetts police refused to test the hatchet used in the crime. Prosecutors tried to prove that Borden had burned a dress they claimed she wore during the crime and bought an axe the day before. The jury took about 90 minutes to decide that Borden was not guilty.

The federal income tax was born on Aug. 5, 1861, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act and Congress passed a 3-percent tax on annual incomes of $800 or more. The tax was intended to generate funding for the Civil War. Congress repealed the tax a decade later, but ratified the 16^th Amendment in 1913 and implemented the income tax system in place today.

Aug. 6 also is the anniversary of the first execution by electrocution. William Kemmler, convicted of killing his girlfriend, Matilda Ziegler, became the first prisoner to die by electric chair on that day in 1890 at Auburn Prison in New York.

Our thanks to History.com for this week’s legal tidbits.