Via the
Law & Politics Book Review, we have word of an interesting collection of essays:
Stefan B. Kirmse, ed.,
One Law for All?: Western Models and Local Practices in (Post-) Imperial Contexts (Campus Verlag, 2012). Here's a
description from the University of Chicago Press (which is distributing the book for Campus Verlag):
Examining new archival material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, One Law for All?
discusses legal transfer and practice in imperial and post-imperial
societies, including Russia, Latin America, Africa, and East Asia. The
essays collected here analyze the legal sphere as a site of struggle,
both in debate and in everyday life, from the level of universal
aspirations to particular local practices. The contributors explore the
ways in which both lawmakers and ordinary people talk about and actively
use the law, thereby telling a story of contested European hegemony,
local assertions, and multiple legal borrowings.
Here's the Table of Contents:
Introduction / Stefan B. Kirmse 9
Discussing Legal Reform
A Step for the "Whole Civilized World"? The Debate over the Death Penalty in Russia, 1905-1917 / Benjamin Beuerle 39
A New Legal Order under Discussion: Legal Reform and the Loya Jirga in Afghanistan in the 1920s / Benjamin Buchholz 67
Agents of Knowledge Transfer: Western Debates and Psychiatric Experts in Late Imperial Russia / Lena Gautam 93
Gatekeepers to the Legal System: The Role of Legal Intermediaries
Tinterillos, Indians, and the State: Towards a History of Legal Intermediaries in Post-Independence Peru / Carlos Aguirre 119
The Ties that Bind: Sovereignty and Law in the Late Russian Empire / Jane Burbank 153
When People Go To Court
Law and Courts as Negotiating Tools: Marriage and Divorce in Republican China, 1912-1949 / Xiaoqun Xu 183
Dealing with Crime in Late Tsarist Russia: Muslim Tatars and the Imperial Legal System / Stefan B. Kirmse 209
Entanglements and Interactions within a Plural Legal Order: The Case of the German Colony Cameroon, 1884-1916 / Ulrike Schaper 243
De jure and de facto: The Penal Code of 1871 and Juridical Culture in Mexico City / Manuel de los Reyes García Márkina 265
And here's a link to a very comprehensive and thoughtful
review, by
Jonathan F. Parent (Department of Political Science, Rockefeller College
of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, SUNY).
