Monday, March 16, 2009

New Legal History Books in the Chronicle of Higher Education


The last few issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education have featured many exciting new books in legal history. Here are a few, along with the brief descriptions from the Chronicle:

True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico, edited by Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato (University of New Mexico Press; 276 pages; $27.95). Essays on how accounts of murder, infanticide, kidnapping, and other acts have been used to make sense of Mexican society at different periods of its history.

White But Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court, by Ignacio M. Garcia (University of Arizona Press; 239 pages; $55 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). A study of Hernandez v. Texas (1954), a murder case that led to a landmark ruling regarding racial bias in jury selection and the rights of Mexican-Americans.

Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, by John D. Blanco (University of California Press; 372 pages; $49.95). Topics include the interdependence of Spanish Christianity and indigenous traditions.

Jury, State, and Society in Medieval England, by James Masschaele (Palgrave Macmillan; 271 pages; $89.95). Covers the mid-12th to the end of the 14th centuries, a period that saw the emergence of the Common Law.