Thursday, July 13, 2023

Davis on Caribbean Comparative Legal History

Kevin E. Davis, New York University School of Law, has posted Haiti and the Uses of Comparative Legal History in the Caribbean:

This essay uses the history of Haiti’s constitution as a launching point for examining the challenges and opportunities inherent in studying comparative legal history in the Caribbean. It begins by explaining why the Caribbean’s remarkable diversity, along multiple dimensions, makes it a useful site for comparative legal history. The following sections illustrate the argument by explaining how a comparative historical approach can shed light on the relationship between law and three social processes implicated by the Haitian Constitution of 1805: state formation, recognition and expansion of citizenship, and economic development. 
--Dan Ernst