Friday, October 28, 2011

Tomlins's Freedom Bound: The WMQ Symposium (et al.)

A review by Stuart Banner, UCLA Law, in the William & Mary Quarterly of the Bancroft-Prize-winning Freedom Bound by UC Irvine's Christopher L. Tomlins appears here.

Update
Since posting, I've learned from Richard Ross, Illinois Law and History, that Professor Banner's essay is part of a “critical forum” in the Quarterly on Tomlins's book.  It originated as an author-meets-readers session at "The Struggle for Land: Property, Territory, and Jurisdiction in Early Modern Europe and the Americas,” a conference Professor Ross and Tamar Herzog (Stanford History) organized as the 2010–11 offering of the Newberry Library's Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History.

 The other contributors to the WMQ forum (published in this on-line edition of the October 2011 issue) are Julia Adams (Yale Sociology); Tamar Herzog and Richard Ross, Paul Eiss (Carnegie Mellon Anthropology and History); and Richard White (Stanford History).  Chris Tomlins responds.

A Further Update
Peter Onuf, Virginia History, has published a comprehensive review of Freedom Bound in the November 2011 issue of the Journal of Legal Education.  The October 2011 issue of the American Historical Review has another review, as well as reviews of books by Alison LaCroix, Kunal Parker, and Barbara Welke.  (Or so I'm told; my copy hasn't found me yet.)