The Docket 1.2

The second issue of The Docket is now live.  Here is Law & History Review editor Gautham Rao's introduction (which includes an invitation to contribute), and here is Felice Batlan's timely and impressive article, "Deja Vu and the Gendered Origins of the Practice of Immigration Law: The Immigrants' Protective League, 1907-1940."

Newman on Progressive-Era Meat Inspection (and My Exam Question on the Same Topic)

Patrick Newman, Florida Southern College, has posted The Big Meat: The Beef Trust, Regulatory Capture, and Government Intervention:

Government Inspection of Meat (NYPL)

This paper analyzes the relationship between government intervention and the Chicago Beef Trust in the late 19th and early 20th century up to the historically significant 1906 Meat Inspection Act. It argues that in order to understand the process behind the 1906 act one must also understand the motivations behind prior meatpacking regulations. The large Chicago meatpacking firms, innovators in meat safety and quality, were one of many special interest groups involved in the legislative arena and consequently lobbied against damaging legislation and supported the passage of laws they could benefit from. With regards to the 1906 inspection act the packers successfully blocked hostile legislation and instead secured an increase in government subsidized inspection and an extension of regulatory compliance to smaller competitors. This regulatory capture resulted in industry consolidation and higher prices at the expense of smaller competitors and consumers. Government meat regulation was not the result of one monolithic special interest but instead due to the complex interaction between rival and antagonistic groups.

In case you were wondering, Professor Newman writes that his paper

goes beyond [Gabriel] Kolko’s work . . . by extending it to earlier legislation and uses additional archival sources in the form of newspapers, private letters, and government reports to better understand the motivations behind the various actors involved. It argues, contra to Kolko [in Triumph of Conservatism (1963)], that the Chicago packers were not the only interest group but one of many, which included rival packers, rural cattlemen, railroads, local butchers, muckrakers, politicians and bureaucrats.

Professor Newman’s paper reminds me that I never posted the essay question on meat inspection from the most recent exam from my legal history course.  In researching the prompt, I was intrigued to see that judicial review of the Service's orders was controversial during the passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, just as it was in debate over judicial review of Interstate Commerce Commission orders in the Hepburn Act of the same year.  The prompt follows after the jump.

CFP: Woman Suffrage at 100

Woman's Journal & Suffrage News (1913) (LC)

[And, speaking of edited collections, we have the following call for one.  A longer version of the call  follows after the jump.]

Suffrage at 100: Women and American Politics Since 1920

Call for 500-word Proposals: DUE September 15, 2018.  Editors: Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow

Collection Overview
As the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment approaches, women are seemingly at a crossroads in American politics. More women candidates have come forward than in any other period on record, spurred in part by the historic Women's March in 2017 and mobilization around #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, and #timesup, the latter with its own legal defense fund. In all this expectant fervor, Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, has cautioned, "We are not going to see, in one cycle, an end to the underrepresentation of women in American politics that we've seen for 250 years. . . . This is a marathon, not a sprint." 

This collection will map out the last 100 years of this lengthy struggle to recognize, appreciate, and cultivate women's civic engagement since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.  Our purpose is not celebratory.  Instead, we seek to trace the uneven road to suffrage and public office women of different backgrounds and means experienced after 1920.  We also intend to expose the institutional barriers and masculinist conceptions of leadership that women in politics have faced and continue to tackle.  Women have exhibited considerable democratic imagination within and outside the traditional channels of electoral politics. 

Melding gender, social, cultural, and political history, this collection seeks to capture examples of women acting together and on their own within and outside electoral and governmental channels to claim a political presence, enlist state action, and create alternative services and solutions.  In doing so, we use this historic centennial to make visible the determined presence of women in politics since 1920, while also calling attention to the ways these women have and continue to be written out of history.

Submission Guidelines
We welcome new articles (8,000 to 10,000 words including notes) broadly addressing women and American politics since 1920.  We also welcome related historiographic essays and interpretive analysis accompanying relevant primary source document(s).  We hope to fully cover 1920-2020, dividing the collection into themes: women at the ballot box; women who run; women who lead; women redefining politics; women in political history; and the Nineteenth Amendment as a milestone.  Please see our extended call (attached PDF) for elaboration of each theme. 

Article abstracts of 500 words and a CV can be sent by September 15, 2018 to: Stacie at staranto@ramapo.edu or Leandra at lrzarnow@central.uh.edu.  We also welcome questions and comments at those email addresses.  Applicants will be notified by November 1, 2018.  The due date for polished drafts will be May 1, 2019. 

[Longer version after the jump.]

Should I do an edited collection? Advice to Collection Editors

Credit: British Library Flickr

Group publications can be challenging in many ways. We asked legal historians for their advice on doing edited volumes or special issues (h/t: LSA Law and History CRN). Our questions: 

• What works and what doesn’t? 
• What did you learn the hard way or wish you had known from the start? 
• Was it worth it in the end?
• Were there any unexpected benefits?

We received a ton of responses. In the first post of this series, we shared advice on contributing a chapter as an author. This second post is about putting together such collections as an editor of the volume or special issue. The third will cover advice from scholars who have been editors of journals that produce special issues. 

Our title borrows from Karen Kelsky’s post on the same topic (h/t: The Professor is in).

• From Sally Hadden, on work done with co-editors Al Brophy and Patti Minter:
• “A strong vision before you begin inviting people is essential. Put it on paper, give it clarity and depth.
• Imagine the ‘dream team’ of contributors you want and ask them first, but be prepared with other names to make sure your original strong vision doesn't go by the wayside if A or B is unavailable.
• Shoot for a mix of established and brand-new scholars, so that your table of contents shows contributions from more than one generation [this may help sell to more than one generation too!]
• Set clear deadlines up front.
• If you have brand-new scholars contributing, stick to those deadlines. Their tenure may depend on it.
• Provide regular feedback to your contributors. Don't leave them guessing. ("Thanks for your essays. We will be using this timetable to turn them around." "We've submitted the manuscript to the press." "We've had positive readers' reports." "We're sending out essays with editorial feedback for your review and revision." "Thanks for being so prompt in returning this revised essay." "The press tells us that we are in the fall catalog")
• Ask your contributors to assist with the index by giving you the index terms they want to see covered, at a minimum.
• Ask your contributors for suggestions about where the volume should be reviewed.
• I was really lucky. I worked with two excellent co-editors, we moved the two volumes through the process promptly, we worked with presses whose editors kept their word about when things would happen. The vast majority of our contributors delivered when they said they would.”

• From another scholar: “Some thoughts on editing volumes.  Without meaning to, I have CO-edited three volumes and single-edited one volume of an author’s papers (working now on another’s).  I emphasize the co-edited part because that has been key to those volumes, but in different ways. [One] volume came about through the same editor that solicited my [own monograph]. I thought it would be selfish and unhelpful for me to be the lead person on both. So, I asked [X] to take the lead on that volume. The point here is that sometimes edited volumes can be about building a field and investment in a field. At that time, [X] was not centered in [the main theme of the edited volume]. His editorial work on that volume brought him squarely into a small field and, as a result, made our field much better because of his subsequent publications.  Around [year], a sometime teacher of mine, [Y], contacted me about contributing to a volume for our mutual teacher.... When I agreed, he then asked whether I knew other [similar scholars] who might contribute and suddenly I was co-editor. He never said this to me, but I have a feeling that the volume has stalled at some point...I give this history…because sometimes editing a volume is about getting worthy things started again.  One might start with 20 contributors in mind and only 8 end up doing anything. A secondary infusion of editorial help, in this case, pushed the whole thing in a way that I think fulfilled the purpose of the original idea.  For what it’s worth, the [non-US] publisher of that volume has repeatedly told me that this was his breakthrough into the US academic scene. [That publisher] has now become an important publisher of…monographs and edited volumes [on the theme of our volume]. I don’t really believe that our volume had much to do with it, but maybe a little. Finally, this new volume was a fun project for me because I got to work with my old mentor... I’m proud of the volume and its contributors, but the publication process with [publisher] was frustrating. It’s all style and format, but there are inconsistencies that the publisher introduced that we are now responsible for.  Substantively, the volume attempts a new state-of-the-field description/assessment, drawing on the expertise of many…In terms of takeaway, any edited volume should have a clear purpose. We intended to make [name’s] lifetime work more accessible. He covered all aspects of [theme] and so do we. That means the world looks different than if we started with [more standard] categories. We’re fine with that. Readers should adjust, because it’s worth it. I think it’s too early to say if we succeeded but I will always be happy with the goals.  So, as you can see, my experience suggests that various good reasons exist for editing volumes.  Cooperation was essential to those I’ve worked on and I recommend co-editing, if the work can be divided cleanly (as it was in each case for me).  In the case of single-editor volumes, it’s about why. So, general advice? Make sure you’re advancing a field and have a clear, unitary purpose behind a volume.”

• Dan Ernst: “Having done one, I'm with the Karen [Kelsky] of the blogpost.” DE would be surprised if many editors of a volume would want to edit another one. “Law review symposia issues might be a different matter, because so much of the most awful part is shifted to the students, and there's a drop dead deadline.” “My general position is a strong presumption that the costs of such volumes usually outweigh the benefits. The whole should be decisively more than the sum of its parts. This usually happens only with a great deal of ex ante planning by an editor, who envisions a large, multifaceted problem or question, assigns pieces of it to the proper people, give them enough time and incentives, and rides herd and polices deadlines right up to final submission. Usually, the best efforts by editors to find order in essays culled from the on-going projects of even historians working within hailing distance of each other falls short of the mark.”

• Jim Jaffe: “About editing:

1. Make extra double sure that any co-editor is willing and able to do their share of the work. Editing a volume is a tedious and frustrating endeavor. There are a lot of slackers out there so avoid any free riders.
2. Beware of contributors who may steal your idea. This happened to me after I gave up editing a volume of essays and then one of my contributors went on to edit and publish the exact same thing. Not all that unusual, I’ve been told.
3. Make sure your publisher thoroughly understands the scope and audience for your project….The chief editor at [publisher] desperately wanted [a volume I was putting together] until he actually saw its contents. After putting in the work to prepare the table of contents, draft an introduction, etc., he decided it wouldn’t fit into their catalog after all. He didn’t seem to understand at the outset that the volume was to be historical and not contemporary.”

• Sally Gordon:”I have been the editor of exactly NO edited volumes but have participated in several and written intros for a couple.  I also am on a faculty editorial board of a scholarly press and have seen how unmanageable many such projects are.  Honestly, keeping all the authors on point and within word limits is very difficult.  So now I understand better the urgency of the mandate to craft a piece to suit the main focus of a volume.  Without a really strong and careful editor, the authors kind of swim off in different directions, and such a volume without a clear focus can easily lose its way.”
• Kelly Kennington: “I have not yet participated in an edited volume as either an author or an editor, largely because my university does not count such publications or work toward tenure and promotion unless it is peer reviewed.  I am currently working on a forum for a journal that will be peer reviewed, and I am one of the two organizers as well as a contributing author.  At the moment, we have only solicited the articles and discussed the time table, though, so I don't have much advice on how to do it.  We did find that the Journal was more open to doing a shorter forum than a special issue.”
• Dan Klerman, speaking as a contributor, but with advice to editors of collections: “The only sticking point is that the slowest contributor (or editor) determines the publication date.  So for one of these books, I think the delay between submitting my final draft and publication was about 4 years.  So my main suggestion is pick people who can stick to a deadline and keep people moving.”
• From a scholar who co-edited two volumes, and who has also done a symposium issue of a journal: “It isn't easy to get an edited volume accepted any more, and the first one I did (which was not on law) was hell on wheels.  The second one [with a co-editor] was idyllic.  The third one [co-edited, happening currently] has been slower than I would have liked, but that is because the contributors have been slow.  I know presses never to touch.”
• Julie Novkov: “As an editor
• the best volumes I’ve done have been worked on through conferences, where we have put together multiple panels with volume contributors presenting chapters and discussing others’ chapters. This really helps to get the main themes more integrated, and helps authors refer to each other in a less forced way
• identify key themes early on and communicate them to authors
• be willing to read and comment on even very early and preliminary drafts! Some of the best chapters start just as think pieces that the author then shapes as the volume develops
• try to collect chapters from people at a variety of career stages and do what you can to get the people in the volume to know each other in real life. A volume project can also be a wonderful exercise in community building.

Every volume I’ve ever worked on, as a chapter author or as an editor, has been worth it!”

• Wes Pue: “I’ve edited a number of journal special issues and some book collections. Here are some random thoughts: 

1. The most frustrating are projects which cannot proceed without solid contributions from each of a number of contributors. All become hostage to the last to submit.  There are good and bad reasons for delayed delivery but the consequences are the same.
2. Thematic unity is important but a prior determination that some topic(s) MUST be included invites hazard if the work is not in hand when it is needed. 
3. A well-chosen co-editor can make a project fun, widen the intellectual scope, share the work, and expand the net of contributors.  I’ve benefited immensely from such arrangements. Sometimes, however, there is a ‘cost’ of losing decisions regarding items to include or reject. Having to reject something you wish to include makes for an unhappy moment. 
4. I’ve liked working on projects emerging from working groups of loosely allied scholars, each exploring a topic or interdisciplinary enquiry from their own perspective.  This can push scholarship in new and innovative directions. 
5. Getting edited books into print can be difficult compared with taking on guest editorship of a journal. Occasionally publishers encourage a volume but lose interest (possibly because of change of staff) before the work emerges. 
6. Folks need to beware [of the] time commitment. Edited collections can take a ton of time (they don’t always). This can be costly to scholarly careers, especially for those stepping onto tenure track or wishing to do so.  Pick solid, reliable contributors, any one of whom can be left out if not ready to proceed by publication date.  It can be helpful to hire a good copy editor to assist (a task to be avoided by academics) if you can. Be prepared to reject submissions by friendly colleagues (ouch).”

• Intisar Rabb: “I’ve largely had good experiences as an editor… Here are a few thoughts:
• I loved the experience of a helping to compile recent co-edited volume. My co-editor and I convened a conference which then turned into a volume…in honor or a retiring colleague, who hated Festschrift compilations that were random selections of student and collegial writings, and preferred something thematic. Luckily, we were able to settle on [a] theme that started his academic career, was of close [interest] to us as editors, and where many of his students and colleagues had something to say. To be as inclusive as possible, we also opened up the conference through a call for papers, the best of which would be published in the volume, and we also asked other colleagues of the professor honored who could not attend the conference if they had something to contribute on the theme. For good measure, and to make it a scholarly publication worthy of the field, we published through an academic press, which included peer review. Because of the good will for the honoree (and draconian, threatening emails about being timely from the organizers and editors – which we knew we had to back up by being timely ourselves in the editing to make it before the honoree’s actual retirement), the conference was enlightening and jovial, and contributors were timely with their submissions. After the conference, we submitted the volume after 12 months, and it was published in 18 months – which is pretty fast!
• Some benefits were getting to work closely with a friend and colleague on editorial decisions, and getting to know some of the work of colleagues in the field on a subject of close interest to me (I didn’t know that some were also moving in that direction) – so I found it well worth doing, and we even talked about keeping in touch to perhaps do further work together or at least read each others’ manuscripts in the future.”

• Mitra Sharafi: “Good advice from a wise colleague: don’t think of being an editor of a group publication as research. It is service.”

A very big thank you to contributors!

Weekend Roundup

• WaPo’s Fred Barbash on my Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail: "Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling."  Update: CNN’s Chris Cillizza’s email interview of Professor Mikhail.  DRE

• Now online on C-SPAN: Last month's National History Center briefing, on the History of US Trade Policy.

• Greg Taylor, University of Adelaide School of Law, has posted The Grand Jury of New Zealand, which appeared in LAWTALK 919 (July 2018): “Little is remembered of the grand jury of New Zealand nowadays, but it existed within living memory – after 118 years of operation starting in 1844, the last grand jury sat in Gisborne on 28 November 1961. As late as July 1961 a grand jury in Hamilton refused to permit a prosecution against an electricity worker for failing to provide the necessary safety equipment and thereby causing the death of a worker.”

• This week in the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Alison Lefkovitz (New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark) on "Jordan Peterson and the Return of the Men's Rights Movement."

• ICYMI: Josh Blackman & Seth Barrett Tillman on Lawfare: Is Robert Mueller an “Officer of the United States” or an “Employee of the United States”?  Seth Barrett Tillman, What is the "Privilege" of the Writ of Habeas Corpus? on New Reform Club. Michael Klarman in the Harvard Gazette: Are there holes in the Constitution?

• From "Talking Points Memo": Gregory Downs (UC Davis) on the 150-year history of today's voter suppression tactics.

• On the University of Leicester's Carceral Archipelago: Katy Roscoe on 19th-c. Gibraltar convicts and the sea.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Rubin's "Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial"

Avi Rubin, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has published Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial: The Yildiz Case (Syracuse University Press):

In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his chambers, the veins in his arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Pasa, a political foe of the autocratic sultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirty-three years.

The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed suicide remains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.

Adams on Drybones and the Canadian Bill of Rights

Eric M. Adams, University of Alberta Faculty of Law, has posted Judicial Agency and Anxiety Under the Canadian Bill of Rights: A Constitutional History of R v Drybones, which is forthcoming in National Journal of Constitutional Law (2018):

The 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights and its case law appear as a footnote in Canadian constitutional history. Seen as a disappointing half measure, courts and scholars alike generally agree that the statutory Bill of Rights cases have little jurisprudential value given the ascendancy of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Among the cases still partially remembered, cited, and celebrated is R v Drybones, the only instance in which the Supreme Court of Canada rendered legislation inoperative under the Bill of Rights. In this retelling, Drybones is presented as a story of judicial agency and anxiety in a moment of constitutional change. Placed alongside the forgotten jurisprudence of the Bill of Rights, especially Robertson and Rosetanni, and situated within scholarly and popular receptions of the case, Drybones appears not as a dot along a pre-determined trajectory, but as a window into the combination of people and circumstance necessary to drive constitutional change. It is equally a story of discrimination, a changing north, and Canadian judges at all levels of court wrestling with competing visions of equality, judicial power, and democracy. It is, finally, a story of a remarkable and unlikely moment of profound judicial regret. Interweaving these stories, I argue that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms arrived not because the Bill of Rights failed as has so often been argued, but rather because the Bill of Rights succeeded in altering irretrievably, although not uniformly, Canada’s constitutional imagination.

cummings on the Racial History of Policing in the US

andré douglas pond cummings, University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law, has posted Reforming Policing, which is forthcoming in the Drexel Law Review 10 (2018): 573-630:

Law enforcement killing of unarmed black men and police brutality visited upon minority citizens continues to confound the United States. Despite protests, clarion calls for reform, admitted training shortcomings and deficiencies among U.S. law enforcement officers, conferences, summits, and movements to reform policing, the solution to ending undisciplined police violence and the hostile killings of unarmed minority individuals at the hands of U.S. police seems to elude us. Why should this be? The United States is home to some of the most creative, innovative, pathmarking, and course-changing thinkers the world has ever known. This challenge — police killing of unarmed minority citizens and law enforcement brutality — could be one that this nation can solve; that is, if there is a political and moral will to do so.

This article proposes a radical restructuring of United States law enforcement policies, procedures, and applications in order to address this critical challenge. After comparing some of the nation’s most innovative police reform efforts, this article will provide policymakers, legislators, officers, leaders, judges, and lawyers the most effective reform efforts and best thinking that have been implemented to date in connection with saving the lives of residents who face danger from those trained to protect and serve them. This article may serve as a signal to a potential sea change in failed police practices that have endured for decades in the United States.

This proposal unfolds as follows: Part I describes the historical evolution of policing practices in the United States, including the influence of slave catchers in the South during the slave trade and tracing back to the nation’s founding. This historical analysis will demonstrate the deep-seated bigotry and race-hatred that influenced many early law enforcement practices throughout the nation. Part II reviews the historical racial difficulties and will reflect on how they manifest today, where policing in many departments still centers around controlling black and brown individuals. Part III then surveys some of the most influential and innovative police reform efforts that have been undertaken by cities, municipalities, and states around the country, particularly those that are revolutionizing policing in a way that recognizes the historical racism and seeks to reform policing in a meaningful and human-centered way. Finally, Part IV recommends a battery of policies and reforms that may deeply influence the way policing is conducted currently and provide a better way forward. The Article ends with concluding thoughts.

Allison on Dicey, Magna Carta, and the Rule of Law

John W. F. Allison, University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, has posted Minimising Magna Carta and Modernising Exposition of the Rule of Law in the English Historical Constitution, a draft of a chapter accepted for publication in the forthcoming Handbook on the Rule of Law, edited by Christopher May and Adam Winchester (Edward Elgar Publishing).

Dicey’s view of the English constitution as historical was traditional, but he promoted, and imported to that constitution, a history that was comparative, critical and modernist. His promotion of history as comparison affected his treatment of Magna Carta and his view of its importance to the rule of law. Provisions of Magna Carta provisions are compared and contrasted with Dicey’s exposition of the rule of law to explain his disdain for Magna Carta’s importance, to show the extent to which his exposition of the rule of law marked its modernisation in the English historical constitution, and to illustrate Diceyan history as comparison. The historical comparison serves as an illustration with which to consider the value of history as comparison - for Dicey in his treatment of Magna Carta and for normative interpretivists in drawing upon his rule of law.

That Emoluments Clause Decision

I am pleased to see that Judge Peter J. Messitte's ruling today in District of Columbia v. Donald J. Trump (the DC/MD Emoluments Clause case) draws upon the research of my Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail in the opinion's substantial discussion of the historical record.  Also, after considering it at length, Judge Messitte also rejected Seth Barrett Tillman’s argument in an amicus brief that the presidency was not covered by the Foreign Emoluments Clause.

Cushman on Teaching the "Lochner Era"

"A Very Insanitary Cellar Bakery" (NYPL)

Barry Cushman, Notre Dame Law School, has posted Teaching the Lochner Era, which appears in the St. Louis University Law Journal 62 (2018): 537-567:

This article, prepared for the St. Louis University Law Journal's issue on “Teaching the Fourteenth Amendment,” develops a taxonomy of the Supreme Court's economic substantive due process jurisprudence during the so-called “Lochner Era” of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and offers an assessment of the trajectory and mechanisms of the decline of that body of doctrine.

Adams on Japanese Canadians and the Canadian Constitution

Eric M. Adams, University of Alberta Faculty of Law, has posted Constitutional Stories: Japanese Canadians and the Constitution of Canada, which is forthcoming in volume 35 of the journal Australasian Canadian Studies:

Constitutions, and the law and culture they generate, constitute in the broad, diverse, and conflicting stories we tell about places, peoples, and nation states. Significant constitutional anniversaries have always marked an occasion for creating and challenging constitutional stories. The 150th anniversary of Confederation offers an opportunity to reflect on the stories that Canadian constitutional history has to contribute to the country’s broader constitutional narrative and self-understanding. In particular, I explore how significant moments in the constitutional history of Japanese Canadians reveal the relationship between constitutional failure and meaningful moments of constitutional resistance and change. In doing so, we see the capacity of constitutional history, often abandoned by scholars for the more immediate imperatives of contemporary constitutional concerns, as integral to a full understanding of Canadian constitutional law, culture, and politics.

ASLH Membership: Join or Renew Now

We have the following announcement from the American Society for Legal History -- timed to coincide with voting in the upcoming ASLH elections and registering for the upcoming meeting:

On behalf of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH), we invite all legal historians, practitioners, graduate and law students, and interested parties to join the ASLH or renew their memberships. 

The American Society for Legal History is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to fostering scholarship, teaching, and study concerning the law and institutions of all legal systems, both Anglo-American and those that do not operate in the Anglo-American tradition. Founded in 1956, the Society sponsors the Law and History Review and Studies in Legal History. 

Membership in the ASLH offers numerous benefits for scholars of legal history. The Society holds annual conferences to foster intellectual development in legal history worldwide. While the organization is based primarily in the United States, its membership and its scope are international. 

With membership comes:
-fellowship and intellectual stimulation of your peers
-networking opportunities with scholars across legal history
-subscription to Law and History Review
-reduced rates for the ASLH 2018 Annual Meeting in Houston, held November 8-11 

Join or renew by July 31 to insure that you may vote in the upcoming ASLH election. Join today at www.cambridge.org/ASLH 

Please contact Dr. Patricia Minter, Membership Committee Chair, for further information (Patricia.minter@wku.edu)

CFP: BLHC 2019

[The website is now live for next year’s British Legal History Conference, to be held July 10-13, 2019, at University of St Andrews.  Its theme is “Comparative Legal History.”  The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2018. Here is the CFP:]

Abstracts are invited for the 2019 British Legal History Conference taking place at the University of St Andrews, on the theme of comparative legal history.

The theme builds upon F.W. Maitland’s famous observation that “history involves comparison,” and that those who ignore every system but their own “hardly came in sight of the idea of legal history.”  The aim is to examine differences and similarities across a broad time-period to produce better approaches to the subject of legal history, combining depth of analysis with historical contextualization. Rather than comparing individual rules or searching for universal systems, the theme will take an intermediate approach the topic of comparative law, investigating patterns in legal norms, processes, and practice.

The papers accepted for this conference may themselves take a comparative approach. However, there is no requirement that each paper is explicitly comparative, as the sessions will be designed to allow comparative perspectives to emerge between individual papers.

We welcome proposals from historians in all fields of legal history, whether doctrinal or contextual, domestic or transnational. Proposals which inform our understanding of the Common Law through comparison with other legal systems (e.g. civil or canon) as well as geographical comparisons are particularly welcome.

Proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers are encouraged.

Please email abstracts (strict maximum 250 words) to blhc2019@st-andrews.ac.uk by 15 September 2018.

Further information on the conference, travel, and accommodation can be found [here.]

Should I do an edited collection? Advice to Authors

Credit: British Library Flickr

Group publications can be challenging in many ways. We asked legal historians for their advice on doing edited volumes or special issues (h/t: LSA Law and History CRN). Our questions:

• What works and what doesn’t?
• What did you learn the hard way or wish you had known from the start?
• Was it worth it in the end?
• Were there any unexpected benefits?

We received a ton of responses. In the first post of this series, we share advice on contributing a chapter as an author. The second post will be about putting together such collections as an editor of the volume or special issue. The third will cover advice from scholars who have been editors of journals that produce special issues.

Our title borrows from Karen Kelsky’s post on the same topic (h/t: The Professor is in).

On the problem of delay:

• “It's fun to work with/get feedback from people you know and trust, and I've had good experiences. In my experience, they are held hostage by the slowest author, so they tend to come out a few years later than initial (pessimistic) estimates. (I assume this blog post will be full of synonyms for ‘herding cats.’) I've been relatively fortunate that I haven't needed things to come out by a certain deadline for tenure/promotion, but I'd definitely warn junior scholars away from them if that was a concern.”

• “My thoughts on contributing, particularly for untenured folks, is to be very careful about committing to something highly specialized or getting too much ‘in the weeds’ on a project, because a publisher can and will pull the plug, even on a finished volume. If you can't easily repurpose the chapter for another project, this can really impair your publishing agenda.”

• “Here is my edited volume horror story: Workshop in 2011, I committed to publish piece (pre-tenure), book still languishing with [the publisher], although I corrected proofs about 2 (maybe 3) years ago (after tenure decision made without publication). AND I signed publication agreement that embargoes piece for 5 years after publication, which means that every year not published extends that embargo. AND I am now deeply embarrassed for the piece to appear with a current…date, when I wrote it using the literature of 2011. I will look like I completely ignored years of relevant work. No idea what is going on, but makes my last experience with an edited volume (5 years from conference to book) look speedy.”

• “I had a mixed experience with an edited volume…I was very flattered to be asked and spent a decent chunk of my pre-tenure time writing an original contribution. But then years passed in which nothing happened, publication-wise, and I worried about the chapter getting stale. During that time, I received zero credit for this piece of scholarship within my own institution. The piece did not make it into my tenure file. But there were positives, too. I learned some valuable things from writing the chapter, and participating in the volume put me in scholarly and real-life conversation with some people I really admire.”

• “One bandaid remedy to the staleness problem is to say in footnote 1: ‘This article was written in 2013.’ Obviously it’s still not great if your piece doesn’t come out until 5+ years after you wrote it (I’m in this situation with an article right now), but at least this tells the reader: ‘here is why you’re not seeing post-2013 literature in this piece, even though it has a 2019 publication date.’ I don’t usually post drafts on SSRN, academia.edu, or elsewhere, because I try to have only one version out there—the final one. But with the chapter I wrote several years ago whose edited volume shows no signs of coming out soon, I have asked the editors if I may post a draft of my chapter online, just to get it out there in some form.”

• Jim Jaffe: “As a contributor, I’ve been fortunate enough to have excellent editors, but the entire process is a long one and can take much longer than publishing an article in a journal. Of course, some or most edited volumes are not peer reviewed, so the quality of the finished product varies. One might want to be aware of these things.”

• Dan Klerman: “I have contributed chapters to several edited volumes and special issues recently. I have found the process to be very easy.  The editors had a very light touch, and everything went smoothly.  The only sticking point is that the slowest contributor (or editor) determines the publication date.  So for one of these books, I think the delay between submitting my final draft and publication was about 4 years.”

• Intisar Rabb reports some good experiences as an author. However, as an author, “my main complaint is the time it takes to go from submission to publication, and the lack of communication from the editors sometimes in that process. I have often submitted materials, and 5 years later have waited on news of review or publication. I wish editors would be more timely and follow a schedule of publication that is reasonable (2 years is fine; 5 years is excessive). My other main complaint is the time it takes to go from solicitation [by the editors] to submission [by me], and the lack of communication from me sometimes in that process!”

• Julie Novkov: “Meet your deadlines, for the love of whatever deity you worship!”

On the tenure & promotions process:

• “It is important to ask yourself: how does this count for tenure or promotion? My view is that if you are counting on an edited volume to get you tenured or promoted you either shouldn’t do it or should not be promoted. I think it is important for individuals to have their own, independent pedigree and to use edited volumes as a way to advance an argument or to build something good for a field. Otherwise, do something else.”

• Kelly Kennington: “I have not yet participated in an edited volume as either an author or an editor, largely because my university does not count such publications or work toward tenure and promotion unless it is peer reviewed.  Even if it is peer reviewed, edited collections count less than journal articles or, of course, monographs.  I was asked to be an author in a couple of edited collections and said no both times to focus on my book and articles that will count toward my promotion file.  I wish that the administration valued edited volume contributions, but until they do, I don't think I will get involved in one.  My time for research and writing is so limited…that I have to be careful with how I choose to spend it.”

On the coherence of the collection:

• “As an author, I have contributed to several…volumes. The stinkers are those that just throw stuff together. For me, the process is often indicative of the result. I have twice been asked last-minute to contribute to something in order to ‘round out’ a volume. In both cases, the urgency was mere pretense (the volumes only appeared years later) and the resulting volumes were [a hodge-podge]. I regret doing those, but was trying to help someone in both cases. The best volumes as an author, for me, have been those that resulted from a coherent project (often including a preceding meeting/conference) in which contributors get a good sense of what the larger aim is…Moral? Don’t contribute to volumes where the point/purpose is not clear. Edited volumes, like everything, should have an argument, say something new. If they don’t, skip. If they do, and you like the direction, embrace the goal and make your contribution an integral part of the overarching effort."

• Sally Gordon: “In terms of being an author, the difficulty that I have found is figuring out how best to craft my piece given [the parameters of the group publication].”

• Julie Novkov: “As an author, it’s great if you can read the other chapters as they are in progress, or at least the ones in the same section of the volume as yours. If you can get either the introduction or a sense of the broad themes the editors are emphasizing, that really helps too.”

• Jim Pfander: “I just published a chapter in a historical collection…It was on balance a worthwhile experience although the volume took a very long time to appear. The editors did a lovely job writing intros and other narrative material to stitch the various chapters together. Whether the end result has a genuine coherence and whether the chapters add to one another I cannot really say. But there’s more coherence than in some collections, partly because the editors encouraged the contributors to think in terms of historical periods.”

On edited collections that start with a conference:

• Laura Edwards: “it seems like my best experiences with edited collections have come as a contributor, when the volume was connected to a conference, organized around the theme of the volume, where we presented papers and discussed them before revising.  I suspect there are a lot of reasons why that seemed to work so well.  For one, we all had an initial deadline for the conference, where we were all presenting.  Then the discussion of the papers was really helpful in thinking through revisions and also making a cohesive volume."

On the importance of edited volumes in certain sub-fields:

• “In some sub-fields, people do book chapters, not law review articles (in part because it's hard to get published in a top law review coming from this sub-field). I wonder if people who do comparative legal history feel similarly? [A friend] felt that there was just no way to get around these volumes [in her field]. And she perceived a big risk in saying ‘no’ to participating in a volume that included big names in her field.”

On accessibility:

• John Wertheimer: “As an author, a down side can be that sometimes scholarly indexes don’t include book chapters as they do journal articles and book titles. Consequently, the edited collection chapter can sort of fall off the edge of the earth, not to be heard from again. Folks working in your field might not ever find your piece if you publish it in an edited collection. It’s a line on your CV, but might not move the needle in the scholarly conversation.”

• Sally Gordon: “[One] difficulty with such projects is that so few of them are available digitally, and I have generally advised early career scholars that participating in a symposium issue of a journal is likely to yield more readership than a traditional edited volume."

• Dan Klerman: “Another issue is that book chapters seem to be hard for researchers to find.  Anything you can do to increase visibility and citations (e.g. get the chapters indexed in the standard services, into Google Scholar, or somehow into Westlaw or Lexis) would be really helpful. Sometimes I feel like these chapters seldom get read (or cited).”

When it is worth it:

• Julie Novkov: “Every volume I’ve ever worked on, as a chapter author or as an editor, has been worth it!”

• Sally Gordon: “there are occasions where a new field emerges that can be productively defined and explained in an edited volume as nowhere else, because it includes multiple perspectives and examples of scholarship.”

• "There is apparently a new phenomenon called ‘pop up’ books. The idea is to do a volume on a super-expedited basis. Since everyone knows that's the deal in advance, I guess it solves some of the ‘herding cats’ issues that tend to arise later in the process.”

A very big thank you to contributors!

Sunday Book Review Roundup

This week there's a wonderful range of reviews of interest for legal historians:

In the London Review of Books is a review of Daniel Livesay's Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833.

Kelly Lytle Hernadez's City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

At Books and Ideas is a review of Rogers Brubaker's Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities.

At the New Books Network, William Kuby speaks about his Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States.  Clayton Nall discusses his The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermine Cities.  Pekka Hamalained talks about his The Comanche Empire.  At The Nation is an interview with Martin Duberman.

Paul Finkelman's Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court is reviewed in The Federal Lawyer.

At NPR is an interview with Dan Kaufman about his The Fall of Wisconsin The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics.

Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer is reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

In The Washington Post is a review of The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett.

Patricia Willian reviews Molly Ladd Taylor's Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century and Scott W. Stern's The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women in the Times Literary Supplement.

Finally, in the New Yorker, the historian Allyson Hobbs and the journalist Nell Freudenberger reflect on their trip to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Weekend Roundup

• Birthright citizenship is much in the news of late. Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins) responds here (New York Times) and here (Washington Post).

• Also in the Washington Post (Made by History section): Gail Savage (St. Mary's College) on "why the Founders feared foreign influence in American politics"; Sarah Silverstein (University of Connecticut) on "the price of America’s withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council"; and more.

• The Association for Asian Studies' third "Emerging Fields in the Study of Asia" workshop for early career scholars will be on "Law, Society and Justice" in May 2019. Full details here. Apply here by Oct.1, 2018.

• The latest issue of the Journal of Legal Education contains two reviews of Stephen Presser's Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law, one by Bernard W. Bell and another by Scott Douglas Gerber.

• Presumably legal history will figure in the panel “Background Principle of Common Law and and Constitutional Property” that is part of this year's annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference at the William & Mary Law School on October 4-5.  This year’s Brigham-Kanner Prize recipient is Stewart E. Sterk.  The conference in his honor is entitled “The Federalism Dimension of Constitutional Property.”

• ICYMI: The Republicans' "Alger Hiss Problem" in Politico.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Moyse on Colonialism and Canadian Copyright Law

Pierre-Emmanuel Moyse, McGill University, Faculty of Law, has posted Colonial Copyright Redux: 1709 vs. 1832:

The study of colonialism shows us that the law often serves the needs and interests of both the Imperial power and the subjugated country. Concessions are necessary to rule a conquered population. In order to understand Canadian law and the measure of Imperial influence, one must understand the dialogue between the various legal traditions.

This essay will examine legal transplants in a historical and colonial context. It will begin with a brief review of Canadian history in order to understand the evolution of Canadian copyright law. It will focus on the creation and significance of Canada’s first copyright legislation. Using the Statute of Anne as a reference point, this essay will describe the evolution of Canadian copyright law on its journey to self-determination during the 18th and 19th centuries. More specifically, this essay will explore the influence of the 1709 Statute of Anne on the 1832 colonial Acte pour protéger la propriété intellectuelle.

It will argue that the influence of the Statute of Anne as an expression of the Canadianess of Canadian copyright policy is not to be found in the text of 1832. It can be found in the small prints of the numerous bills and amendments proposed to the English Parliament, in those provisions buried in the text which triggered an open war between Canadian, American and English publishers and stigmatized by the 1847 Foreign Reprints Act. It is in the context of the 1847 piece that the influence of the Statue of Anne and its monopolistic or imperialistic effects can be fully grasped

Habermacher on Blackstone's Commentaries and Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law

Adrien Habermacher, a doctoral candidate at McGill University, Faculty of Law, has posted “Felix Cohen Was the Blackstone of Federal Indian Law”: Taking the Comparison Seriously, which is forthcoming in volume 8 of the British Journal of American Legal Studies:

This paper explores thoroughly the many facets of Rennard Strickland’s comparison between Sir William Blackstone, author of the 1765-69 Commentaries on the Laws of England, and Felix Cohen, architect of the 1942 Handbook of Federal Indian Law.  It consists in a side by side analysis of both authors’ master works, political and educational projects, as well as general contribution to jurisprudence. It reveals that despite the stark differences between Blackstone’s work on the English common law from his professorship at Oxford in the late 18th century, and Cohen’s endeavors on the US federal law concerning Native Americans as a civil servant at the turn of the 1940’s, there are remarkable similarities in the enterprises of legal scholarship the two jurists took on, the larger political projects they promoted, and their role in the development of legal thought. The idea that “Felix Cohen was the Blackstone of Federal Indian Law” has stylistic appeal and could have been little more than a gracious way to celebrate Cohen. An in-depth comparative examination of legal history and jurisprudence however corroborates and amplifies the soundness of the comparison.

Bamzai on the First Presidential For-Cause Removal

Aditya Bamzai, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted Taft, Frankfurter, and the First Presidential For-Cause Removal, which is forthcoming in the University of Richmond Law Review 52 (2018): 691-748.

William Howard Taft (1909) (LC)

In the fall of 1912—while one of the most consequential presidential campaigns in United States history raged around them—William Howard Taft, Felix Frankfurter, and a handful of officials within the federal government initiated a process to remove two members of the Board of General Appraisers for inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office. The process culminated in President Taft’s for-cause dismissal of the two members, Thaddeus Sharretts and Roy Chamberlain, on the very last day that he served as President, after he received a report recommending their firing from a “committee of inquiry” that included Frankfurter.

Taft’s firing of Sharretts and Chamberlain was the first presidential for-cause removal. To this day, it remains the only time in the history of the nation that the President has expressly removed for cause an executive branch “officer of the United States” whose tenure is protected by statute after providing notice to the officer, holding a hearing, and finding that the statutory predicates for removal have been met. Taft’s action involved decisions by two individuals—Taft himself and Frankfurter—who would go on to become Justices of the United States Supreme Court and to author two of the most consequential opinions on the President's authority to remove subordinates, Myers v. United States and Wiener v. United States. It involved the construction and application of statutory language—“inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”—that Congress still uses to mark some kind of “independence” from presidential control on behalf of an administrative agency. Echoes of the issues that Taft and Frankfurter confronted in 1913 may be heard in Myers and Wiener, in Justice Sutherland’s opinion for the Court in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, and in recent controversies over the scope of the President’s power to remove subordinate officers within the executive branch.

Despite all of the foregoing, the episode has escaped scholarly attention and been the subject of no relevant legal discussion. No account of President Taft’s removal of the two Board members appears in the various treatments of the President’s removal power, or in the large literatures devoted to Taft and Frankfurter, two towering figures in American legal history. Indeed, it is widely, but mistakenly, assumed that no President has ever removed an officer for cause and that (in the words of the dissenting opinion in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Co. Accounting Oversight Board) “it appears that no President has ever actually sought to exercise [the removal] power by testing the scope of a ‘for cause’ provision.” As a corrective, this article tells the story of Taft’s for-cause removal of the two general appraisers on his last day in office, following a process started in the midst of his 1912 reelection battle with future President Woodrow Wilson and former President Theodore Roosevelt. It then explores the episode’s implications for present-day understandings of the development of the American administrative state and the doctrine of the separation of powers.

Readers interested more generally on Taft’s oversight of executive branch officials might also consult Michael Churgin on Taft’s Bureau of Immigration in the Texas Law Review 78 (2000): 1633-59.  In that case, Taft's investigation of the Commissioner General of Immigration stopped short of removal.

Kuby, "Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States"

Thanks to the New Books Network, we realized that we failed to notify readers about this one when it came out in February: Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge University Press), by William Kuby (University of Tennessee-Chattanooga). Here's a description from the Press:

Conjugal Misconduct reveals the hidden history of controversial and legally contested marital arrangements in twentieth-century America. William Kuby examines the experiences of couples in unconventional unions and the legal and cultural backlash generated by a wide array of 'alternative' marriages. These include marriages established through personal advertisements and matchmaking bureaus, marriages that defied state eugenic regulations, hasty marriages between divorced persons, provisional and temporary unions referred to as 'trial marriages', racial intermarriages, and a host of other unions that challenged sexual and marital norms. In illuminating the tensions between those who set marriage policies and those who defied them, Kuby offers a fresh account of marriage's contested history, arguing that although marital nonconformists composed only a small minority of the population, their atypical arrangements nonetheless shifted popular understandings of marriage and consistently refashioned the legal parameters of the institution.

A few blurbs:

'The belief that marriage as an institution is in crisis is nothing new, historian William Kuby shows us in this engaging study of early twentieth-century marital nonconformists who pushed boundaries by engaging in trial marriages, serial polygamy, or interracial marriage, among other challenges to the norm. But while 'queer' couples generated a conservative backlash, Conjugal Misconduct demonstrates that even perceived challenges to the institution of marriage could serve to reinforce its power and influence in American social life.' -- Renee Romano  

'Conjugal Misconduct provides the definitive study of the 'amorphousness' of the institution of marriage between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonconforming heterosexual couples pursued every angle to evade restrictive state laws, often crossing state lines to find a more lenient marital regime. Their acts of defiance reshaped marital legitimacy, while revealing that the law itself could not constrain conjugal choices. For anyone who still clings to notions of marriage’s static, coherent past, this deftly written and deeply researched book proves that improvisation and even chaos shaped the legal history of heterosexual marriage.' -- Rebecca L. Davis

More information is available here.

JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History

[We have the following announcement of the JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History.  The deadline is September 30, 2018.]

At the end of 2012 Prof. Dr. Erk Volkmar Heyen, who served as Professor of Public Law and European Administrative History at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald until his retirement and as editor of the Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte (JEV) [that is, Yearbook of European Administrative History], which ran from 1989 to 2008, endowed a research fellowship in the field of European Administrative History (“The JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History”). The fellowship falls within the framework of the German University Foundation (Bonn, Germany).

The scholarship is intended to benefit the next generation of scientific researchers, particularly doctoral and post-doctoral students, and exclusively to complete their research project in as brief a period as possible to a maximum of 12 months. The scholarship is based on the usual rates for doctoral fellowships of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Should a fellowship be awarded to a researcher outside Germany, local scholarship rates will be taken into consideration. Marital status will not be taken into account, nor will travel or overhead costs be reimbursed.

The Board of the German University Foundation awards the fellowship based on the recommendation of a jury, which is based at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (MPIeR) in Frankfurt.

Early stage researchers from Germany and abroad are invited to apply. In accordance with the thematic and methodological spectrum covered by the JEV, the scholarship is open to all historical disciplines, provided the research project addresses an aspect of European administrative history from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The relevance of the research topic should not be restricted to a particular national context. Comparative research questions are particularly welcome.

First time applications for a scholarship commencing in January 2019 can be submitted until 30 September 2018. Applications in English or German should be sent in electronic form to: Priv.-Doz. Dr. Peter Collin, collin@rg.mpg.de. The application, which must also indicate the intended duration of the fellowship, should include: a tabular CV with details on the nature and course university education with copies of examination results and diplomas to be enclosed, a list of scientific publications, where applicable; a detailed description of the research project including a detailed outline, a detailed report on the current state of the project and writing progress, including the reasons for any delay in its completion; extensive excerpts from the manuscript; information on the project’s previous, current and planned financing arrangements; a precise timetable to complete the manuscript within the duration of the fellowship. Furthermore, at least one expert opinion on the research project and a personal reference from a university lecturer are to be submitted directly to the jury.

The MPIeR provides fellowship recipients with the opportunity to work in its library. Fellows are given the opportunity to present and discuss their research projects with members of the Institute. Upon expiration of the fellowship, the recipient is to submit a report on the status of the manuscript. The MPIeR provides for the publication of the manuscript in one of its book series, assuming it meets internal and scientific standards. The book is to acknowledge the support provided by the “JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History” in the masthead or in the preface.

Further information are available on the website of the MPIeR.

Weiss Mueller on the 18th-c. British Empire

Hannah Weiss Mueller, Brandeis University, published Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire with Oxford University Press in 2017. From the publisher: 

In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, when a variety of conquered and ceded territories became part of an expanding British Empire, crucial struggles emerged about what it meant to be a "British subject." Individuals in Grenada, Quebec, Minorca, Gibraltar, and Bengal debated the meanings and rights of subjecthood, with many capitalizing on legal ambiguities and local exigencies to secure access to political and economic benefits. Inhabitants and colonial administrators transformed subjecthood into a shared language, practice, and opportunity as individuals proclaimed their allegiance to the crown and laid claim to a corresponding set of protections. Approaching subjecthood as a protean and porous concept, rather than an immutable legal status, Subjects and Sovereign demonstrates that it was precisely subjecthood's fluidity and imprecision that rendered it so useful to a remarkably diverse group of individuals. 

In this book, Hannah Weiss Muller reexamines the traditional bond between subjects and sovereign and argues that this relationship endured as a powerful site for claims-making throughout the eighteenth century. Muller analyzes both legal understandings of subjecthood, as well as the popular tradition of declaring rights, in order to demonstrate why subjects believed they were entitled to make requests of their sovereign. She reconsiders narratives of upheaval during the Age of Revolution and insists on the relevance and utility of existing structures of state and sovereign. Emphasizing the stories of subjects who successfully leveraged their loyalty and negotiated their status, she also explores how and why subjecthood remained an organizing and contested principle of the eighteenth-century British Empire. 

By placing the relationship between subjects and sovereign at the heart of her analysis, Muller offers a new perspective on a familiar period and suggests that imperial integration was as much about flexible and expansive conceptions of belonging as it was about shared economic, political, and intellectual networks.

Here is the Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Of Sovereigns and Subjects 
• Chapter One: The Laws of Subjecthood 
• Chapter Two: The Free-Born Subject's Inheritance 
• Chapter Three: Real and Pretended Subjects: Mediating Subjecthood in the Mediterranean 
• Chapter Four: His Britannick Majesty's New Subjects: The Rights of Subjects in Grenada and Quebec 
• Chapter Five: The Promises and Perils of Subjecthood and Jurisdiction: Calcutta 
• Conclusion  

Further information is available here.