Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize. About this prize:
The Jane Burbank Article Prize in global legal history will be awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history published in the previous calendar year. Submissions may address any topic or period, and may focus on case studies in which the analysis relates to broader processes or comparisons. Articles on methodological or theoretical contributions are also welcome.
The 2025 Burbank Prize winner was Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections,” Past and Present 266:1 (2025): 40-74. The citation:
In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a collection of letters and documents which includes a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved people she owned, conducted in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels: the case summary itself and its process, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use.
An Honorable Mention went to Rui Hua (Boston University), for “The Cheese, the Worm, and the Law: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian Borderland, 1906-1927,” Modern Asian Studies 58:4 (2024): 1201-1221.
Congratulations!
-- Karen Tani
