Weekend Roundup

• ASLH President (and former Legal History Blog co-moderator) Mitra Sharafi discusses her new book, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia (Cornell University Press) over at the New Books Network.  

• Penn Carey Law announces the awarding of its first Certificate of Study in History and Historical Research Methods, which provides students with "a structured pathway to build expertise in legal history without the multi-year commitment of Penn Carey Law’s JD/PhD Program in American Legal History." 

• Over at JOTWELL: Ilya Somin (Scalia Law) spotlights Anna O. Law's Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (2026); Reuel Schiller (UC Law San Francisco) reviews Alma Steingart, One Person, One Vote? The Gap between Representative Equity and Mathematical Equality after Baker v. Carr, 112 J. Am. Hist. 702 (2026).

• Todd C. Peppers and Madison Mycoff  on how Chief Justice Warren Burger celebrated the Declaration of Independence in 1971 (SCHS).   

• From Nursing Clio's "undergraduate writing series": “Presumptive Testimony Only”: From Esther Davis to Patience Rousseau, Two Centuries of Criminalizing Pregnancy Loss, by Rachel Kuhn.

• "Cooley Law School Professor Joseline Jean-Louis Hardrick recently premiered, “If These Headlines Could Talk,” an original historical documentary musical that brings the landmark decisions of the Warren Court to life through storytelling, music, archival materials, and legal history" (Florida Bar News).

• Kali N. Murray, Marquette Law, on the haunting of American trademark law (by fugitive slave advertisements) (Marquette Today). 

• Over at Shugerblog, Jed Shugerman (Boston University School of Law) has been "fact-checking" the U.S. Supreme Court. The latest installment is here. 

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

CFP: International Society for Chinese Law and History

[Via H-Law, we have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Proposals: The Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH)

Theme: “Chinese Law in Motion: Change, Practice, Circulation, and Continuity.”  Wuhan, China, June 18-19, 2027.  Proposal submission link: ISCLH 2027 Biennial Conference Submission System.  Submission Deadline: August 31, 2026.

The International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH), established in 2014, is the leading international hub for Chinese legal historians, boasting approximately 150 members worldwide. The society organizes workshops in North America and biennial conferences in Asia. To date, ISCLH has successfully organized four in-person biennial conferences, with co-sponsorship of Fudan University (Shanghai, 2015), China University of Political Science and Law (Beijing, 2017), Taipei University (Taipei, 2019), and Peking University (Beijing, 2025), respectively. Additionally, the society also hosted two virtual conferences in 2021 and 2023.

The Seventh Biennial Conference will be held in Wuhan, China on June 18-19, 2027. As with previous conferences, we welcome submissions on any aspect of Chinese legal history from any period.

We especially encourage submissions that highlight this year's theme, “Chinese Law in Motion: Change, Practice, Circulation, and Continuity.” Law is never static. Across different historical periods and political regimes, Chinese law has evolved through processes of reform, adaptation, transmission, and contestation. Legal institutions, ideas, texts, and practices have moved across jurisdictions, social groups, and geographic spaces, while also preserving and reconfiguring enduring traditions and norms. This theme encourages inquiry into the ways Chinese law has changed, circulated, and persisted across diverse historical and social contexts. We interpret Chinese law and its culture broadly, encompassing legal systems and practices in traditional China proper, those of peripheral regions, and those pertaining to Chinese communities beyond national borders. Works that approach law comparatively or from a transnational perspective are especially welcome. So are works that invite theoretical and methodological discussion.

Conference format and submission guidelines.  This conference is held in person; virtual participation is not accommodated in principle. 

We encourage the submission of proposals for organized panels, with 3-4 papers in dialogue with each other under a general topic. You are also welcome to submit individual paper proposals, which, if selected, will be grouped together with other papers into panels. The proposal and the presentation can be in either English or Chinese. 

Please use the ISCLH 2027 Biennial Conference Submission System to submit panel or individual paper proposals. 

You will need the following information to complete the submission. [For a] panel proposal:

• panel title and abstract (300 words maximum); 
• organizer and all presenters' name, email, WeChat (if available), position and affiliation, type of travel document, whether they apply for the Travel Grant, paper title and abstract (300 words maximum); 
• chair/discussant information (you can leave it blank if the chair/discussant hasn't been finalized yet) 

[For an] individual paper proposal:

• presenter's name, email, WeChat (if available), position and affiliation, type of travel document, whether you apply for the Travel Grant, paper title and abstract (300 words maximum) 

Important Dates.  Abstract submission deadline: August 31, 2026.  Notification of Acceptance: October 15, 2026

Registration, Logistics, and Travel Grant.  The conference registration fee will be waived for active ISCLH members. Accepted presenters must either demonstrate that they have active membership during the conference dates by April 1, 2027, or pay a one-time conference registration fee.

Participants are responsible for their own transportation and lodging. The co-organizer of the conference will help make reservations for 2 or 3 nights of hotel rooms for accepted participants at the participants’ cost. Participants are also welcome to make their own hotel arrangements according to their preferences.  Meals during the conference period will be provided by the co-organizer. 

We will provide a limited number of travel grants, available for graduate students and early career scholars who are ISCLH members and are presenting at the conference, to offset part of the travel costs. Priorities will be given to those who travel internationally or a long distance to Wuhan for the conference.

Contact.  Please direct any inquiries about the ISCLH 2027 Biennial Conference to isclh2027@gmail.com.

Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

On June 24, 2026 (at 12pm Eastern), join us for an international workshop featuring contributors to a forthcoming Modern Criminal Law Review Special Issue on “Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective,” guest edited by Clifford Ando (University of Chicago).

Recent years have witnessed several revolutions in the study of ancient law. These include new models for the study of ancient states, deriving in particular from comparative study; new interpretive emphasis on the limits of state infrastructural power; detailed study of the pluralist nature of legal authority in ancient empires in particular; and the extraordinary recovery of previously unknown documentary materials, especially in central Asian and East Asian contexts. This issue seeks to bring these new insights to bear on the study of criminal law in a global array of contexts:  the Ancient Near East, classical Athens, Qin and Han period China, the high Roman empire, and rabbinic Judaism.

Participants include: 

Clifford Ando, University of Chicago (moderator)
Beth Berkowitz, Columbia University
Ari Bryen, Vanderbilt University
Liang Cai, University of Notre Dame
Benjamin Gallant, Harvard University
Adriaan Lanni, Harvard University
Mark Letteney, University of Washington
Seth Richardson, University of Chicago
Andrew Wolpert, University of Florida

To join us for this free online event, please register here. Registration is encouraged, but not required; if you prefer to join the event directly, head over to the MCLR+ YouTube channel at the time of the event (please note the time zone). All attendees will have the opportunity to post questions and comments via YouTube live chat.

Global Dissertation Prize

[We have the following announcement from the ASLH.  DRE.]

The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) is delighted to announce a new dissertation prize: the Global Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in global legal history. The [prize] recognizes the best dissertation from the previous calendar year on topics centered outside the United States. Eligible dissertations must be written in English and submitted for a PhD, JSD, or equivalent doctoral degree, excluding the JD, awarded in the previous calendar year (for example, a dissertation for a PhD awarded in 2025 would be eligible in 2026). Dissertations should not be predominantly focused on the US and may examine contexts, processes, or institutions that are local, regional, imperial, comparative, global, or otherwise. 

Submissions should be made by the author including only (1) the dissertation as submitted to the university for the degree, and (2) a curriculum vitae. 

To be considered for the year’s prize, the author should e-mail a PDF electronic copy of the dissertation and author’s curriculum vitae to the prize committee chair (globaldissertationprize@aslh.net) with the subject heading: GLOBAL DISSERTATION PRIZE SUBMISSION. Please title the PDF as “author last name” and “short title” .pdf (for example, Adewoye Lawyers Southern Nigeria.pdf).  

Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2026.  Award Amount: $500.

Weekend Roundup

• The Asian Legal History Association has hosted its official launch in Hong Kong (The Standard).  The speech of the Secretary for Justice, Paul Lam, at the launch is here. Update: Donal Coffey was there, too.

• Ian Mansfield's review of the exhibition, Londoners on Trial: Crime, Courts and the Public 1244-1924, at the London Archives until February 25, 2027.

• From the Conversation: "The deaf blacksmith who married in 1576 – and the history of sign as a legal language."

• Over at JOTWELL: Blake Emerson (UCLA Law) has posted an admiring review of Nathaniel Donahue's "Officers at Common Law," which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal.   

• Ashley Everson on Pauli Murray, the Brown Decision, and the Struggle for Equal Rights (Black Perspectives).

• A notice of Akhil Reed Amar's Giannella lecture at Villanova on Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 (Villanovan). 

• Five Takeaways from conference on Richard Primus’s The Oldest Constitutional Question  (Michigan Law). 

• Now online: the website of the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard Law School, led by Sherrilyn Ifill.

• ICYMI: Birthright Citizenship Edition.  Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Anna O. Law about Law's book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship (Amicus). Ilya Somin on Slavery and Birthright Citizenship (Lawfare).  Smita Ghosh on Lynch v. Clarke (1844), the birthright citizenship case you never heard of (Slate). Akhil and Vikram Amar and Jason Mazzone on why the text, history, and structure of a landmark 1952 statute doom Trump’s executive order (SCOTUSblog). 

• ICYMI: Orin S. Kerr on How AI Tools Can Help With Legal History Research (Volokh Conspiracy). "The Trump administration’s campaign to remove National Park Service exhibits that 'inappropriately disparage' historical figures" has bogged down (Politico).

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

Schonthal's "Courts, Constitutions and Karma"

Benjamin Schonthal, University of Otago, has published Courts, Constitutions and Karma
Buddhism, Law and the Practices of Legal Pluralism in Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press).  It appears in Cambridge Studies in Law and Society, a series edited by Mark Fathi Massoud, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics and Political Science:

Although rarely acknowledged, Buddhist monastics are among the most active lawmakers and jurists in Asia, operating sophisticated networks of courts and constitutions while also navigating—and shaping—secular legal systems. This book provides the first in-depth study of Buddhist monastic law and its entanglements with state law in Sri Lanka from 1800 to the present. Rather than a top-down account of colliding legal orders, Schonthal draws on nearly a decade of archival, ethnographic and empirical research to document the ways that Buddhist monks, colonial officials and contemporary lawmakers reconcile the laws of the Buddha and the laws of the land using practices of legal pluralism. Comparative in outlook and accessible in style, this book not only offers a portrait of Buddhist monastic law in action, it also yields new insights into how societies manage multi-legality and why legal pluralism leads to conflict in some settings and to compromise in others.

--Dan Ernst 

CFP: 6th Asian Legal History Conference

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

The Faculty of Law, Multimedia University, Malaysia is organizing the Sixth Asian Legal History Conference in Melaka, Malaysia on 6–7 August 2026. The conference is supported by the Asian Legal History Association. Previous Asian Legal History Conferences have been hosted, organized and supported by the University of Law at Hue University, the Faculty of Law at Thammasat University, the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, the Faculty of Law at Doshisha University in Japan, and the Faculty of Law at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The conference aims to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers and graduate students to share their research findings on topics relating to legal history in Asia.

Submissions on any subject, providing they relate to legal history and fall into at least one of the categories specified below, will be considered. Among other themes, the organizers encourage papers on subjects such as:

• The historical evolution of common law, civil law, and socialist law traditions
• The history of law and empire
• The history of international law
• Transnational connections in legal history
• The history of law, gender and sexuality
• Legal pluralism and jurisdictional clashes
• Customary law and religious law
• The history of law schools and of the formation of the judiciary and of members of the legal profession.

The conference will be in person. Applicants will be responsible for their own transportation and accommodation costs.

Proposals may be for individual papers or panels. Panel proposals are particularly welcome, as the field of legal history is wide, and while the organizers will endeavor to cluster like papers together, thematic, geographic and temporal diversity of topics inevitably means panels composed of individually-submitted papers will cover only loosely-related subject matters.

Individual abstract proposals should include a 150-300 word abstract and the corresponding author’s contact information. These should be submitted through [this Microsoft Form].

In addition, participants may make a panel proposal. Panel proposals should include a 150–300 word description of the panel, and the title of 3 to 5 individual papers, contact information for the panel chair. The abstract for the 3 to 5 individual papers in a designated panel need to be submitted through [this Microsoft Form].

Applications are due by midnight (Malaysia time) on 1 April 2026.  Decisions on acceptance of proposals will be made on a rolling basis. Interested parties are advised to submit a proposal as early as possible.  The venue of the conference will be in the city of Melaka, Malaysia and the registration fee will be informed later.  Full paper will be published in the Asian Journal of Law and Policy (MyCite-indexed) and other journals.

Further information and clarifications may be obtained by email to alhc2026@mmu.edu.my.

AHA John K. Fairbank Prize to Sommer

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History ("offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800"). This year's award went to legal historian Matthew H. Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Matthew H. Sommer’s The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China is a landmark study that recovers the hidden lives of gender-nonconforming individuals through meticulous archival research. By combining legal, medical, and literary sources with a nuanced transgender framework, Sommer broadens the field of modern East Asian history, illuminating how embodiment, identity, and social practice shaped Qing society and redefining global conversations about gender and modernity.

Congratulations to Professor Sommer!

-- Karen Tani 

CFP: Legal History in Asia and Beyond

 [We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Call for Papers – Legal History in Asia and Beyond: Lessons from the Past for the Present

The Transnational Legal History Group, part of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law withinthe Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Oxford Programme in Asian Laws of the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and the Asian Legal History Association are jointly hosting a conference on “Legal History in Asia and Beyond: Lessons from the Past for the Present.” The conference will take place in two parts: first on 17 and 18 March 2026 in Hong Kong, and then on 23 March 2026 in Oxford. Applicants should specify at which venue they would prefer to present when making their application. There is no obligation or expectation to attend both sessions, but participants are welcome to do so.

This unique cross-jurisdictional event will also serve to mark the institutionalization of the Asian Legal History Association (ALHA). The ALHA, which has its Secretariat at CUHK, brings together faculties and institutes from more than a dozen jurisdictions, collectively committed to promoting the study and knowledge of transnational legal history generally, enhancing the status and role of Asia as a generator and hub of global legal history knowledge, and developing collaborative relationships between universities in Asia and around the world.

Click here for the call for papers. The submission deadline is 31 October 2025.

Ballas and Moran on Criminal Justice in Colonial Himalaya

Irit Ballas and Arik Moran have published General Will or Public Order? The Debate on Criminal Justice Policy in Early Colonial Himalaya, 1815–1816 in Law and History Review:

When the British East India Company (EIC) conquered the West Himalaya region in the 1810s, it faced a critical challenge commonly encountered by colonial empires: determining the extent of intervention in intracommunity criminal matters among colonized subjects. This article examines the archived correspondence of colonial officials regarding this challenge and scrutinizes the various arguments made for and against intervention. It shows that the alterity of the subject population was strategically employed by both sides of the debate, who simultaneously promoted contradictory agendas: for those advocating intervention, alterity rendered involvement in criminal matters necessary and just, whereas those averse to intervention employed the very same notion to justify the opposite stance. This dual usage is explained by exposing the contemporary ideas about criminal justice that underlay each of these positions: that criminal law should represent the general will of society, and that it must be executed by a centralized power so as to maintain public order. While these two tenets are commonly perceived as supporting one another, the analysis reveals their decoupling in colonial settings. The debates of EIC officials thus demonstrate how the colonial setting distorts ideas foundational to modern criminal law systems, casting doubt over whether they were ever truly in harmony to begin with.

--Dan Ernst

Michigan Legal History Workshop

[Our friends at Michigan Law have sent us the lineup in its Legal History Workshop in the upcoming semester.  DRE]

February 5.  Session 3. Naomi Lamoreaux & Rebecca Eisenberg, University of Michigan Law School

What Administrative Agencies Can Do that Courts Cannot: Lessons from the Patent Office’s Handling of Interferences, 1836-1940

February 12.  Session 4. Heather Menefee, Northwestern University, Department of History

From “Loyal” to “Legitimate”: Racial Definitions of Political Identity during Dakota Tribal Reorganization, 1886-1999

February 19.  Session 5. Sanne Ravensbergen, University of Michigan, Department of History

The Hybrid Uniform of the Jaksa: Prosecutors in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Indonesia

February 26. Session 6. Aaron Hall, University of Minnesota, Department of History

The First Constitutional Lesson: Learning to Follow the Founding in Antebellum America

March 12.  Session 7. Beth Lew-Williams, Princeton University, Department of History

“John Doe Chinaman:” Law and Race in the American West

March 19.  Session 8. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, University of Southern California, Department of History

Maritime Prize Law and the Making and Unmaking of Empires, ca. 1689-1916

March 26.  Session 9. Megan Ming Francis, University of Washington, Department of Political Science

The Price of Civil Rights: Philanthropy and Legal Mobilization

April 2. Session 10. Justene Hill Edwards, University of Virginia, Department of History

Finances of the Freedmen: The Expansion and Plunder of the Freedman’s Bank, 1866-1867

April 9.  Session 11. Ivón Padilla-Rodriguez, University of Illinois, Chicago, Department of History

"In Consideration of Humanity:" Policing Mexican Child Refugees in the Early Twentieth Century United States

April 16.  Session 12. Sara Mayeux, Vanderbilt University, Law School

“Drug Money” in Legal, Political, and Cultural History

CFP: 5th Asian Legal History Conference

We have the following call for papers, for the 5th Asian Legal History Conference:

Doshisha University, with the support of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law’s Transnational Legal History Group at CUHK LAW and the Asian Legal History Association, is organizing the Fifth Asian Legal History Conference at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan on 31 July and 1 August 2025. Previous Asian Legal History Conferences have been hosted, organized and supported by the University of Law at Hue University, the Faculty of Law at Thammasat University, the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore and the Faculty of Law at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The conference aims to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers and graduate students to share their research findings on topics relating to legal history in Asia. The conference is open to both scholars anywhere in the world working on Asian legal history, broadly understood, and scholars based in Asia working on any legal history-related subjects.

Click here for the call for papers. The deadline for paper and panel proposals is 15 March 2025.

-- Karen Tani

AJLH 64:1

American Journal of Legal History 64:1 (March 2024) is now published online.

The Pennsylvania Council of Censors and the Debate on the Guardian of the Constitution in the Early United States
Angus Harwood Brown

Alexander Hamilton’s Constitutional Jurisprudence and the Bank Bill
Peter Charles Hoffer

Letter Writing and Legal Consciousness during World War I
Elizabeth A Hoffmann

Exemplary Damages Practice in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century England
Nicholas Sinanis

A Turbid River of History and Law: The Procurement of Women in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea
Marie Seong-Hak Kim

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Law, colonialism and gender in the Muslim world

[Via H-Law, we have the following CFP.  DRE]

Law, colonialism and gender in the Muslim world

This conference aims to bring together scholars working on the legal history of the Muslim world who focus on the colonial period and are interested in ‘gender-coded law’ (i.e. all legal domains that automatically invoke connotations of gender).

Several scholars have implied that imperialism did not affect gender relations in the Muslim world, since family law remained relatively untouched by the colonial powers (Anderson, Buskens, Peters). There are, however, several examples in colonial legal history that point to the influence of imperial powers on gender relations through law. The interdiction of homosexuality in British India (Radics) and the ban on interreligious marriage in the Dutch East-Indies (De Hart) are only two examples of the imperial footprint on gender laws. Moreover, nineteenth-century Western imperialism affected the thinking about gender in the Muslim world (Massad, Cuno, Khouloussy, Surkis). This suggests that contemporary gender-coded laws in Muslim-majority countries cannot be understood without studying the legislation issued by the imperial powers.

Academics who work in the field of legal history, gender history and/or social history (or a combination of these) are invited to share their research on the laws that were introduced in the Muslim territories during French, Dutch, British, Russian, or other colonial rule that touch upon gender. Proposals may concern various periods and topics, ranging from property law and land tenure to criminal law and family law.

The conference will be held at the University of Amsterdam on December 19 and 20, 2024. It will be a small (max. 15 participants) research seminar/workshop. Applications for participation, including 250-word abstracts and a 100-word brief biography should be sent to m.voorhoeve@uva.nl by July 1, 2024. If selected, the conference organization provides for travel and accommodation. The conference will be held at the historical building of the Allard Pierson Museum in the city centre of Amsterdam, which is close to Central Station.

Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• The participation of colonial bureaucrats and local (religious) elites to the formation of colonial gender-coded law
  

• Debates on gender-coded law in the press and other sources such as colonial law magazines
  

• The circulation of law between the ‘homeland’ and the colonies as between various colonies and empires
  

• Crosspollination and circulation of ideas about law and gender within the Muslim world during the Age of Empire/Nahda period

Contact Information: dr. Maaike Voorhoeve, Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Kroncke on Labor in the American Empire

Jedidiah J. Kroncke, University of Hong Kong, has posted Suspended in Empire: The Imperial Legacies of American Territorial Labor:

On the Trail, Northern Luzon, 1924 (LC)

A great deal of recent attention has been giving to acknowledging the full historical scope of American empire and its legal foundations. A recurrent focus of this attention has been the impact of the Insular Cases—a set of early 20th-century doctrines that legitimate American territorial acquisitions while denying their full incorporation under the Constitution. Issues of political citizenship and property have thus predominated critical work on the Insular Cases.

This article expands on this resurgent interest by focusing on another critical element of this acknowledgment: the history of territorial labor which has long been central to the political economy of American empire. Explicating the role and regulation of territorial labor reveals enables of more complete picture of American empire, as well as its evolving pursuit of new legal forms to project national power while avoiding democratic accountability.

Most concretely, the unprincipled doctrines of the Insular Cases have led to a paradigm of perpetually precarious bargaining in which territorial labor only enjoys the formal protection of labor and employment law subject to complete federal discretion and potential revocation. Mapping the diverse and contingent legal regimes this bargaining has produced unearths all too many tragedies past and present as the largely invisibilized labor of territorial people has been circulated throughout American empire while building its economic and military foundations.

Further complicating this formally inchoate set of rights are the practical realities territorial labor has historically been subject to under conditions of American empire: localized employer domination, tactics of racialized labor migration, and the overshadowing anti-democratic disciplinary rationales of U.S. national security. These realities are evident throughout the diverse range of contemporary territories as well as in their scarring effects within former American territories and military occupations. Moreover, imperial labors’ roaming logics of dehumanization are today increasingly displaced onto even more vulnerable foreign migrant workers within many territories themselves.

Acknowledging the role of territorial labor in American empire blurs the line between territorial and incorporated life and law. Most powerfully, it reveals how the conditions of territorial labor reflect back the enervated nature of American economic citizenship writ large. This reflection is just one of the many ways in which territorial history presents lessons increasingly applicable to broader swaths of American life under conditions of modern economic globalization. The article ultimately integrates territorial history into renewed demands for a democratic political economy for all those living under American sovereignty.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: 4th Asian Legal History Conference

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Papers – The 4th Asian Legal History Conference

The University of Law – Hue University, with the support of the Transnational Legal History Group of the CUHK LAW’s Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law and the University of Oxford Programme in Asian Laws, will be organizing the Fourth Asian Legal History Conference on 25-26 July 2024. The conference is supported by the Asian Legal History Association. Previous Asian Legal History Conferences have been hosted, organized and supported by the University of Law at Hue University, the Faculty of Law at Thammasat University, the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore and the Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The conference aims to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers and graduate students to share their research findings on topics relating to legal history in Asia. The conference is open to both scholars anywhere in the world working on Asian legal history, broadly understood, and scholars based in Asia working on any legal history-related subjects.

The conference will be held entirely in person. Participants will be responsible for the costs of travel and accommodation. The organizers will circulate a list of suggested hotels to selected presenters. The organizers will also provide two lunches, one dinner, and tea breaks.

Click here for the call for papers. The deadline for paper and panel proposals is 15 March 2024.

LHR 41:3

Law and History Review 41:3 (August 2023) has been published.  It is a special issue, “Paper Empires: Layers of Law in Colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean,” with guest editors Nandini Chatterjee, Alicia Schrikker, and Dries Lyna. (Links are provided to the articles published open access.)

Paper Empires: Layers of Law in Colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean
Nandini Chatterjee, Alicia Schrikker, Dries Lyna

An Empire in Disguise: The Appropriation of Pre-Existing Modes of Governance in Dutch South Asia, 1650–1800
Alicia Schrikker, Byapti Sur

Material Pluralism and Symbolic Violence: Palm Leaf Deeds and Paper Land Grants in Colonial Sri Lanka, 1680–1795
Dries Lyna, Luc Bulten

The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India
Leonard R. Hodges, Nandini Chatterjee
   
Registering and Regulating Family Life: The School Thombos in Dutch Sri Lanka
Bente de Leede, Nadeera Rupesinghe

A New Language of Rule: Alwar's Administrative Experiment, c. 1838–58
Elizabeth M. Thelen

A True Copy? Documents and the Production of Legality in the Bombay Inam Commission
Dominic Vendell

Oceanic Mobility and the Empire of the Pass System
Bhavani Raman

The Sailing Scribes: Circulating Law in the Twentieth-Century Indian Ocean
Fahad Ahmad Bishara

Persistence of Practice in Law's Parwana and Palm Leaf Empire
Paul D. Halliday
   
–Dan Ernst

Zhang's "Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation"

Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School, has published The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press):

How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science, legal theory, economics, sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China's imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on Sino-European divergence.

Here are some encomia:

A theoretically elegant, evidence-rich, and innovative explanation for why imperial China declined and fell. The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation sheds light on the roots of the 'Great Divergence' in economic development between China and Europe. A tremendous achievement that deserves to be widely read.' Yuhua Wang, Professor of Government, Harvard University

'This book is a brilliant new take on comparative economic history. Skillfully integrating institutional analysis, economics, and political thought, Zhang provides us with an erudite, deeply learned account of the Qing's failure to expand tax capacity, drawing us into contemplation of a path not taken.' Tom Ginsburg, Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law, University of Chicago

'In this refreshing and incisive work, Taisu Zhang shows us how the weakness of the late Qing regime depended less on structural constraints than on a specific worldview about the proper role of the state. Low taxation was a deliberate choice, made in response to the presumed lessons of history, and it would have far-reaching implications. This will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand long trends in Chinese political development.' David Stasavage, Julius Silver Professor, New York University

'In this characteristically ambitious book, Taisu Zhang looks for obstacles on China's path to modernization in a surprising place: tax capacity. He explains the unwillingness of China's nineteenth-century rulers to raise taxes neither in terms of eternal cultural values nor structural factors, but rather as the outcome of a specific type of conservatism that can be explained historically.' Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History, Harvard University

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Reva Siegel, YLS, on Dobbs and the Politics of Constitutional Memory on Balkinization.  Also, here. 
  

• Stanford Law School has a report on that Celebration of Lawrence Friedman, during which “nine panelists showered tributes on the still-prolific, 92-year-old legal historian," and "Amalia Kessler, director of the Stanford Center for Law and History and an organizer of the event, spoke of  “our beloved” Friedman’s 'great intellect' and 'tremendous menschlichkeit,'”
  

• The Harvard Law School "will collaborate with the Royall House and Slave Quarters--a museum in Medford, Massachusetts that is among the last freestanding quarters where enslaved people lived in the north--to conduct research and collaborate on educational programming" (Reuters).
  

• From In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress: Caitlin Connelly on Chew Heong v. United States, Sarah Friedman on  Hansberry v. Lee, and Rachel Star Koladis on Alchemy and The Act Against Multipliers.
  

• Randall Kennedy, HLS, will speak on Wednesday, February 1, at the University of Mississippi School of Law on“The Greatest Lawyer in American Legal History: Thurgood Marshall.”  More.
  

• From the Washington Post's Made by History section: Yael Schacher on how Biden’s announced asylum transit ban undermines access to life-saving protection.  Joel Zapata (Oregon State) argues that Border enforcement has been deadly by design.  Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) on What the next 50 years of reproductive rights activism can learn from the last 50.
  

• John Q. Barrett, St. Johns, discusses the new documentary “Nazis at Nuremberg: The Lost Testimony,” over at the Jackson List.
  

• Chicago-Kent College of Law invites submissions for the Roy C. Palmer Prize on Democracy, Civil Liberties, and the Rule of Law. This $10,000 prize “honors a work of scholarship that explores threats to, or supports of, the liberal democratic constitutional order.” (H/t Legal Scholarship Blog)
  

• New online in the AJLH: Charitable Trusts of Cemeteries and Places of Worship in Thailand: A Historical Anomaly, by Surutchada Reekie.
  

• “The Labor and Working-Class History Association and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History will jointly award a $2,000 research grant for a contingent faculty scholar, independent scholar, or community college faculty member engaged in work related to working people, their lives, workplaces, communities, organizations, cultures, activism, and societal context in any period and place.” Deadline February 1.
  

• The Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy at the Wayne State University Law School will hold a Zoom webinar on How Courts Are Shaping Congress' Power to Investigate on February 8, 2023, 12:00 - 1:30 p.m. ET.
  

• ICYMI: Is debt limit unconstitutional? Answer is yes, some argue, based on the 14th Amendment's public debt clause (ABAJ).  A timeline on the history of reproductive rights  (History).
  

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

CFP: Third Asian Legal History Conference

 [We have the following Call for Papers.  DRE]

The Transnational Legal History Group of CUHK LAW’s Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law is organizing the Third Asian Legal History Conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong on 20-21 June 2023. The conference is supported by the Asian Legal History Association. Previous Asian Legal History Conferences have been hosted, organized and supported by the Faculty of Law at Hue University, the Faculty of Law at Thammasat University, the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore and CUHK LAW.

The conference aims to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers and graduate students to share their research findings on topics relating to legal history in Asia. The conference is open to scholars anywhere in the world working on Asian legal history, broadly understood, and scholars based in Asia working on any legal history-related subjects.

Submissions on any subject, providing it pertains to legal history in Asia, will be considered. General topics may include:

• The historical evolution of common law, civil law, and socialist law traditions in Asia;
• Legal pluralism and jurisdictional clashes;
• The history of a particular area of law (constitutional law, property law, criminal law, etc);
• Theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying Asian legal history Dynastic law;
• Customary law;
• Colonial law;
• Religious law (broadly understood), e.g. Buddhist Law, Confucian Law, Hindu Law, Islamic Law, etc.

The conference organizers are particularly interested in papers addressing the following subjects:

• The history of law and empire;
• Asian approaches to and influences upon the history of international law;
• Explorations of the transnational connections between the manner in which the law has evolved in different Asian countries, and between Asian countries and other countries;
• The history of law, gender and sexuality;
• The history of international and regional organizations in Asia;
• The history of public order law;
• The history of law schools and of the formation of the judiciary and of members of the legal profession.

The conference will be held mixed-mode, including in person and online participants. Applicants should indicate whether they intend to attend in person or online. Applicants will be responsible for their own transportation and accommodation costs.

Proposals may be for individual papers or panels. Panel proposals are particularly welcome, as the field of legal history is wide, and while the organizers will endeavor to cluster like papers together, thematic, geographic and temporal diversity of topics inevitably means panels composed of individually-submitted papers will cover only loosely-related subject matters.

Individual paper proposals should include a 200-300 word abstract and the author’s contact information.

Panel proposals should include a 200-300 word description of the panel, 200-300 word abstracts of three to four individual papers, contact information for each person on the panel and contact information for the chairs of the panel.

Applicants should indicate their current and/or former academic affiliations, as well as current professional affiliations,  on their applications by midnight (Hong Kong time) on March 15th, 2023.

Submit proposals here.  Visit the conference website for more details.