We've been highlighting the contents of the most recent
issue of the
Law & History Review. Here's our final post on the
book reviews:
Allison Brownell Tirres (DePaul University College of Law) reviews Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), by Kelly Lytle Hernández. Tirres admires "the unique transnational perspective that [the book] brings to the history of immigration law," and the "rich and provocative way" in which it explores "the complex dynamics of race, migration, and law in the twentieth century."
Joanna Grisinger (Clemson University) offers an equally laudatory review of Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2010), by James D. Schmidt. According to Grisinger, Schmidt uses court records from six southern states to show how "[l]egal language and courtroom experience validated child labor as a public problem for working-class families who had previously believed quite the opposite."
On the following pages, Christopher W. Schmidt (Chicago–Kent College of Law) takes up Christopher Waldrep's "impressively researched" exploration of the battle against Mississippi's all-white jury system: Jury Discrimination: The Supreme Court, Public Opinion, and a Grassroots Fight for Racial Equality in Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2010). Schmidt praises the book for "effectively highlight[ing] the variability of Jim Crow . . . and the sometimes unexpected power of the law."
Next up: H. Robert Baker (Georgia State University) reviews Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Baker describes the book as "beautifully researched," and "careful and methodical" in its analysis. He highlights Schwalm's "consistent and persuasive engagement of gender."
In the final book review, Karl Jacoby (Brown University) covers Defying the Odds: The Tule River Tribe's Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries (Yale University Press, 2010), by Gelya Frank and Carole Goldberg. Jacoby sympathizes with the book's "ambitious collaborative approach" (Frank is an anthropologist, Goldberg, a legal scholar), but notes several "provocative questions" and exciting leads that the authors failed to follow.
The full reviews are available
here, to subscribers.
