Friday, June 3, 2011

More from the Law & History Review: book reviews, part I

As promised, here's a glimpse of what you'll find in the Book Reviews section of the most recent issue of the Law & History Review.
Reviewer Geoffrey Koziol (University of California, Berkeley) "wish[es] [he] could recommend" Francis Oakley's Empty Bottles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050) (Yale University Press, 2010). He worries, however, that the book is "dangerous."

Mike Macnair (St. Hugh's College , Oxford University) shares other critics' high opinion of Paul Halliday's Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), but raises a question about its "framing narrative."

Oren Bracha (University of Texas School of Law) recommends to students of copyright history Isabella Alexander's Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century (Hart Publishing, 2010). He notes that it "also provides much food for thought for those interested in contemporary intellectual property debates."

Núria Silleras-Fernández (University of Colorado, Boulder) highlights Marie A. Kelleher's convincing argument for Christian women's simultaneous agency and victimhood in The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). She welcomes the book into the historiography of gender and the law.

Reviewer William Chester Jordan (Princeton University) commends Thomas N. Bisson for "tak[ing] on a big problem" in The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton University Press, 2008), even if he leaves future historians with a "significant problem" of their own.
Many more books were reviewed in this issue, so stay tuned . . . .

In the meantime, subscribers may access the journal's full content here.