Weekend Roundup

• Floyd Abrams reviews Wendell Bird’s The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act” over at First Amendment News.

• The Federal Judicial Center has arranged its collection of its Notable Federal Trials series in this nifty timeline.  

• Bound By Every Tie of Duty: John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice of Van Diemen’s Land, by Jacqueline Fox (Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd), has made the short list for the Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History.

Robert A. Taft (LC)

• We felt late to the party when we saw how many legal historians had done Brian Frye's Ipse Dixit podcast.  We aren't scanning all 556 episodes but can report they include Christopher Tomlins, Nicholas Bagley and Julian Davis Mortenson  Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Thomas McSweeney, Elizabeth Katz, Taja-Nia Henderson and Lutie A. Lytle, Jilll Hasday, Seth Barrett Tillman, and Justin Simaud. Also, from February 1947, Robert A. Taft calls for "curbs on the power of the executive branch of the government"!!

• Sure, you're on lock down, but that doesn't mean you can't (virtually) browse the George Wythe Room at the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary.  H/t: Tom McSweeney.

• The sixth edition of Borkowski's Textbook on Roman Law, by Paul J. du Plessis, is now available.

• A more accessible version of John Fabian Witt's lecture on the legal history of infectious diseases is here.

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Can you steal a peacock? A post by Krista J. Kesselring on animals in early modern law.

• The Hoover-Roosevelt Transition premiers on the Facebook page of the FDR Library on Wednesday, May 13.  FDR Library Director Paul Sparrow and Hoover Library Director Thomas Schwartz discuss the relationship between FDR and HH “during the 1932 campaign and the transition between their presidencies, examining their different philosophies in the role of government and the protection of individual liberty and freedom. Followed by a Q&A in the comments.

• The Tagore Law Lectures (1870-1986) are now available here on the University of Calcutta Digital Library.

• And also on South Asia: check out this Twitter thread by Kalyani Ramnath (@kalramnath) on epidemics, contagion, migration, and law.

• ICYMI: Mary Ziegler interviewed on Abortion and the Law in America in Mother Jones and on WORT.  WaPo's obituary of Barbara Babcock. 

• I was very sorry to learn of the death of John M. Murrin, from whom (and Douglas Greenberg) I took a marvelous reading course on early America while a graduate student at Princeton.  Vast knowledge, zero pretension, kind, and witty (especially if you went in for atrocious puns).  His essays include a landmark study of the colonial legal profession and the brilliant "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity."  They are collected in Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic, ed. Andrew Shankman (Oxford University Press, 2018), reviewed here.  John Fea's remembrance is here. H/t: Al Brophy. DRE

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

Kelly on Militarized Medicine and Corporate Punishment in Australia

Catherine Kelly, University of Bristol, has posted Medicine, Law, and the Lash: Militarized Medicine and Corporal Punishment in the Australian Colonies 1788–1850, which is forthcoming in Legal History:

The service of medical practitioners in the early Australian colonies was inextricably bound up with a heavily militarized culture. This article explores the relationships between those medical practitioners, legal punishment, and the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. The service of medical practitioners in the Australian colonies, coming as it did so close on the heels of two generations of war, gives us an important insight into the effects of the Napoleonic wars both upon the practice of medicine in the service of the British State, and also the State’s attitude to the use of medical expertise. In the military spaces of transport and colony, the medical officer became an important lynch pin in the discipline and control exercised over convict bodies. Military medical expertise was useful to the State in understanding the best ways to discomfort and hurt convicts, without quite killing them. This expertise was further cultivated by the State in the ongoing design of the medical role in the colonies that came to hark forward to the prison officer of the later nineteenth century whose position, balanced precariously between punishment and care, has been of such interest to penologists and medical historians.

–Dan Ernst

CFP: ANZLHS 2020

 [We have the following call for papers.  DRE]

“One Empire, Many Colonies, Similar or Different Histories?”

39th Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society, Auckland, 9th-12th December 2020

Abstracts are invited from scholars bringing historical perspective on law who wish to gather at The University of Auckland and AUT University - there to listen to and discuss papers and panels on aspects of law in history. The 2020 theme invites a comparative lens on British imperial and colonial histories. Other papers with an historical perspective on law might include work that positions law in a specific temporal frame; deals with histories of law, lawmaking, and legal ideas; or has a focus on legal institutions and their personnel. Proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers are welcome.

Individual paper proposals for a 20 minute presentation must include an abstract (no more than 300 words) and a biographical statement (no more than 100 words).  Panel proposals by 3 or 4 speakers should include the above, plus a panel title and brief rationale for the panel as a whole (no more than 300 words).  All abstracts must be submitted to Karen Fairweather: k.fairweather@auckland.ac.nz by 15th July 2020.

The Organising Committee intends to notify all those whose abstracts have been accepted for the programme by the end of August 2020. All presenters must be current financial members of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society, or must pay a subscription for the 2020 year.

Graduate students are invited to apply for Kercher Scholarships to assist them in attending the conference. Please apply to Katherine Sanders: k.sanders@auckland.ac.nz by 31 August. Graduate attendees may also wish to enter for the Forbes Society Prize.

The Society's peer-reviewed journal law&history will consider submissions from those who present papers at the conference. A conference website with information on registration costs, accommodation options, etc will be established in due course. Our keynote speakers will include Dame Sian Elias (Retired NZ Chief Justice), Joshua Getzler (Oxford) and Miranda Johnson (Sydney, but soon to be at Otago).

Further information about the conference may be gleaned from David Williams: dv.williams@auckland.ac.nz or from [here].

Patrick on fortune-telling

Out now by Jeremy Patrick (University of Southern Queensland) is Faith or Fraud: Fortune-Telling, Spirituality, and the Law, published by UBC Press. The book includes a history of the regulation of fortune-telling across the common law world. From the publisher: 

The growing presence in Western society of non-mainstream faiths and spiritual practices poses a dilemma for the law. If a fortune teller promises to tell the future in exchange for cash, and both parties believe in the process, has a fraud been committed? Should someone with a potpourri of New Age beliefs be accorded the same legal protection as a devout Catholic?

Building on a thorough history of the legal regulation of fortune-telling laws in four countries, Faith or Fraud examines the impact of people who identify as “spiritual but not religious” on the future legal understanding of religious freedom. Traditional legal notions of religious freedom have been conceived and articulated in the context of monotheistic, organized religions that impose moral constraints on adherents. Jeremy Patrick examines how the law needs to adapt to a contemporary spirituality in which individuals select concepts drawn from multiple religions, philosophies, and folklore to develop their own idiosyncratic belief systems.

Faith or Fraud exposes the law’s failure to recognize individual spirituality as part of modern religious practice, concluding that the legal conception of religious freedom has not evolved to keep pace with religion itself.

Law and religion scholars in the United States, Canada, and Australia will find much to recommend this work, which also contains valuable material for British law and religion specialists and sociologists of religion.

Praise for the book:

 "Faith or Fraud is an ambitious work that fills a major gap in the literature about religious freedom and fortune-telling." -Danielle N. Boaz

"This book situates 'fortune-telling' as an unorthodox religious belief at the margins of current definitions and explores how religious freedom rights apply to this marginal practice. It is an excellent piece of legal scholarship in an area that has rarely been studied before." -Neil Foster

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Aroney on Australian Federalism

Nicholas Aroney, University of Queensland TC Beirne School of Law, has posted The Design of Australian Federalism, from The Oxford Handbook of the Australian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited by Cheryl Saunders and Adrienne Stone:

This chapter, published in The Oxford Handbook of the Australian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited by Cheryl Saunders and Adrienne Stone, examines the design of Australia's federal system. Two historical propositions affirmed in the preamble to the constitution are central to this idea. These are, firstly, that the constitution was predicated on an agreement between the people of the Australian colonies and, secondly, that the intention was to unite the colonies into an indissoluble federal commonwealth. The Australian constitution does not rest upon the consent of an already consolidated people; nor does it create a unitary state. It is the result of an agreement among several mutually independent political communities and it establishes a federal system of government that preserves their continuing existence as self-governing polities. This chapter explains how these central ideas are embodied in the distribution of powers, system of representation, and processes of alteration and amendment established by the constitution.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to my fellow Legal History Blogger Karen Tani upon being named the
  University of Pennsylvania’s 24th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, effective July 1.  DRE

• TOC for Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis / Revue d'Histoire du Droit / The Legal History Review 87:3 (December 2019).

• New from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Speaking the Unspeakable: Buggery, Law, and Community Surveillance in New South Wales, 1788–1838 by Luke Taylor.

• On April 3, the University of Colorado Law School’s Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law hosts its 2020 Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. Conference on Constitutional Law on "Women’s Enfranchisement: Beyond the 19th Amendment," with three panels and a keynote by Reva Siegel.  More.

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has added a 3rd webcast to its site, a discussion with author David Bruce Smith on his children's book, American Hero - John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States.  More.

• ICYMI: Slavery in East Brunswick, NJ.  Stanford Law’s Rabia Belt on caucus voting and democracy.  Andrea Dennis on Mass Surveillance and Black Legal History.  "Lincoln collector and scholar Guy Fraker” donates a pleading written by Abraham Lincoln to the  McLean County Museum of History.

• Update: Paul J. du Plessis delivered the Alan Watson Memorial Lectures 2020, entitled The Civil Law in Three Acts, at the School of Law, Edinburgh University.

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

Weekend Roundup

• The conference Critical Legal Studies: Intellectual History and the history of the present, will be held at Princeton University, on February 27-28, 2020.  “Prompted by plans to create a Critical Legal Studies Archive at the Princeton University Mudd Library, the conference will bring together those who participated in CLS in its heyday; key figures from contemporaneous movements in the US and abroad; and people interested today in this history and its contemporary significance.”  The conference is free and open to the public and sponsored by Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs.

• Over at Lawfare: Matthew Waxman, Columbia Law, on The Mexican-American War and Constitutional War Powers.

• Kellen Funk, Columbia Law, has Twitter-reviewed Mortenson and Bagley's Nondelegation at the Founding.

• At The Historical Society of the New York State Courts: A biographical sketch of Harold Arnoldus Stevens.  Also, a YouTube video in which member of the Society's Board of Trustees discusses "how we have tragically lost details of historic NY events of national importance."
  

• ICYMI: Exploring the history of Underground Railroad, in the Youngstown Vindicator.  Brooklyn’s courts celebrate Black History Month, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.  One barrister's love for the horse hair wig, courtesy of the ABC and Law Fuel.   Law in frontier Oregon, in the Redmond Spokesman.  Better late than never: The NYT obituary of Homer Plessy.

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

O’Donnell's "Inventing Unemployment"

Anthony O’Donnell, Senior Lecturer in Law, La Trobe University, Melbourne, has published Inventing Unemployment: Regulating Joblessness in Twentieth-Century Australia (Hart):

This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy across the past 100 years. It poses the question 'How does unemployment happen?'. But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so as to produce something we call 'unemployment'? And how has that changed over time?

Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories – the 'employed', the 'unemployed', those 'not in the labour force' – are fraught, and do not always easily correspond with people's working lives. Across the first decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with the problem of which forms of joblessness should be classified as 'unemployment' and which should not. This book traces those debates. It also chronicles the emergence and consolidation of a specific idea of unemployment in Australia after the Second World War. It then charts the eventual unravelling of that idea, and relates that unravelling to the changing ways of ordering employment relationships.

In doing so, Inventing Unemployment challenges the preconception that casual work, self-employment, and the 'gig economy' are recent phenomena. Those forms of work confounded earlier attempts to define 'unemployment' and are again unsettling our contemporary understandings of joblessness. This thought-provoking book shows that the category of 'unemployment', rather than being a taken-for-granted economic variable, has its own history, and that history is intimately related to our changing understandings of 'employment'.

–Dan Ernst

Boyd, Ramsay and Ali on Imprisonment for Debt in Colonial Victoria

Jodie Boyd, RMIT University, and Ian Ramsay and Paul Ali, Melbourne Law School, have posted "Contrary to the Spirit of the Age": Imprisonment for Debt in Colonial Victoria, 1857–90, which appears in the Melbourne University Law Review 42 (2019): 737-779:

The reintroduction in 1857 of imprisonment for debt in colonial Victoria flew in the face of international momentum for its abolition. In its criminalisation of debt and poverty, the Fellows Act 1857 (Vic) (21 Vict, No 29) also defied the rapid advancement of democratic and egalitarian principles in the fledgling colony. Frequently referred to as ‘gross class legislation’, the law was used unabashedly to target poor small debtors, leaving ‘mercantile men’ with significant debt untroubled by the prospect of a debtors’ gaol. Despite consistent and broad opposition to the Fellows Act, its advocates resisted repeated attempts to abolish or meaningfully amend it. It is argued here that the law, and its survival against the ‘spirit of the age’, can be understood as part of a broader story of conservative resistance to the democratic innovations that threatened the power of the Victorian mercantilist establishment.

--Dan Ernst

Rubenstein and Henderson on Woman Citizenship in Australian Archives

Kim Rubenstein and Andrew Henderson, Australian National University, have posted Record and Recollection: Women’s Active Citizenship and National Archives, which appears in Law & History 6 (2019): 98-124:

Postmodern theories of the development of archival collections argue that archives created and administered under executive power often exclude voices and accounts outside the mainstream. These critiques are generally directed towards the absence of life experiences outside the purview of the central activities of the state. However, there is little empirical testing of how women’s active contributions within the concerns of government activity are recorded. This article tracks two events, recorded in the oral histories of two women lawyers collected as part of the Trailblazing Women and the Law Project, through the records of the National Archives of Australia (NAA). Its purpose is to start investigating how well these women, who have been active citizens, are ‘recorded’ in the formal national memory. It highlights the importance of undertaking further research to determine how well the NAA, as a state-run archive, represents women’s active citizenship in its telling of Australian legal history.

--Dan Ernst

Pitt Cobbett's "Constitution and Government of Australia"

We’ve recently learned of the publication of William Pitt Cobbett's The Constitution and Government of Australia, 1788-1919 (Federation Press, 2019), edited by Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney.

Between 1910 and 1919, William Pitt Cobbett, former Professor of Law and Dean of the Sydney Law School, wrote what would become his great opus on the Constitution and Government of Australia but the manuscript was never published. Its publication had been frustrated in the period following his death by the High Court’s judgment in the Engineers Case in 1920 and the new constitutional order it created. A century later, Professor Anne Twomey, has edited Cobbett’s original manuscript, taking care to preserve the integrity of his work.

The Federation Press, with the support of the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History, published this important historical work which provides a detailed perspective of how the Constitution operated in the first two decades after federation.

The editor writes us:

[The book] has a bit of history of its own.  Pitt Cobbett became the first full-time Dean of Sydney Law School in 1890.  He was Dean throughout the period of the drafting of the Australian Constitution, campaigned against its approval by the people in referendums, and studied its interpretation by the first High Court, which was comprised of judges who had participated in framing the Constitution.  Cobbett retired in 1910 and spent the last nine years of his life writing his grand opus on the Constitution and Government of Australia.  It was the culmination of his life's work and he desperately wanted it published, but died just as he was completing the full draft.  He passed away on the last day of the Griffith High Court.  The following year, the Court, under Chief Justice Knox, fundamentally changed the way the Constitution was interpreted, treating it as a legal document, rather than a political compact.  The executors of Cobbett's will decided his manuscript could no longer be published without major alterations, and donated it to the University of Sydney.  There it sat, neglected, for a century.

Today it is an important historical record of how the Australian Constitution was viewed by those who wrote it and interpreted it during its first two decades.  It has now been edited and published for the first time, upon the centenary of Pitt Cobbett's death.  There is some irony in this.  Cobbett was also renowned for having no time for women and excluding them from studying law while Dean of the Law School.  So he would have been shocked and possibly horrified to know that it was two women who cared enough about his manuscript to edit it, complete all his footnotes, place it in its context and publish it upon the centenary of is death.  But hopefully, he would also have been grateful.

An endorsement:

William Pitt Cobbett largely completed the original manuscript of his opus on the Constitution shortly before his death in 1919. While it was intended to be posthumously published, in 1920 the High Court’s constitutional jurisprudence radically shifted in the Engineers case ((1920) 28 CLR 129). At the time, this would have required a substantial revision for the work to remain current, and so the manuscript was given to the University of Sydney Law School – of which he had been a Professor and Dean – as a memorial. Now a century on, the manuscript has been carefully and ably transcribed, edited and published for the first time.

Those involved are to be greatly thanked. In addition to the text, there is a fascinating biographical note by Professor Anne Twomey and a comprehensive introduction to Cobbett’s work outlining what has changed since it was written, what remains the same and his unique insights relevant to today. While the importance of the work is that it paints a portrait of the history and early interpretation of the Constitution up to 1919 before the High Court’s decision in Engineers, its value is not merely one of historical interest. As Twomey perhaps understates, “it occasionally also shocks with the modernity and prescience of its contents”. This is a most important, if not necessary, text for any scholar of Australian legal history and constitutional law.

                         Queensland Law Reporter – 18 October 2019 – [2019] 41 QLR 7

Table of contents after the jump

–Dan Ernst

Bartie's "Free Hands and Minds"

Just out from Hart is Free Hands and Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars, by Susan Bartie,  Lecturer in Law at the University of Tasmania:

Peter Brett (1918–1975), Alice Erh-Soon Tay (1934–2004) and Geoffrey Sawer (1910–1996) are key, yet largely overlooked, members of Australia's first community of legal scholars. This book is a critical study of how their ideas and endeavours contributed to Australia's discipline of law and the first Australian legal theories. It examines how three marginal figures – a Jewish man (Brett), a Chinese woman (Tay), and a war orphan (Sawer) – rose to prominence during a transformative period for Australian legal education and scholarship.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with former colleagues and students, extensive archival research, and an appraisal of their contributions to scholarship and teaching, this book explores the three professors' international networks and broader social and historical milieux. Their pivotal leadership roles in law departments at the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, and the Australian National University are also critically assessed.

Ranging from local experiences and the concerns of a nascent Australian legal academy to the complex transnational phenomena of legal scholarship and theory, Free Hands and Minds makes a compelling case for contextualising law and legal culture within society. At a time of renewed crisis in legal education and research in the common law world, it also offers a vivid, nuanced and critical account of the enduring liberal foundations of Australia's discipline of law.

The very interesting TOC is here.

–Dan Ernst

Leeming on Fusion in NSW

Mark Leeming, Judge of Appeal, Supreme Court of New South Wales and Challis Lecturer in Equity at the University of Sydney Law School, has posted Fusion - Fission - Fusion: Pre-Judicature Equity Jurisdiction in New South Wales 1824-1972, which appears in the forthcoming Equity and Law: Fusion and Fission (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118-143:

The very idea of a "fusion fallacy" and the central importance of the effect of the Judicature legislation upon common law and equity is associated with New South Wales. Yet the Supreme Court of New South Wales was constituted in 1824 as a single court with broad jurisdiction at common law and in equity. One hundred and fifty years later, legislation was required to fuse its separate common law and equity "sides". How did that fission come about? This chapter, largely based on unpublished primary records, seeks to explain how that occurred.

--Dan Ernst

Adams and Toy-Cronin on Dunedin's Courthouse and Bar

Jane Adams and Bridgette Toy-Cronin, University of Otago, have posted Nurturing Tradition in Dunedin: Courthouses, Lawyers, and Justice, which appeared in the Otago Law Review (2018):

Opening of the Law Courts (1902) (credit)

Using the reopening of the Dunedin Law Courts as a case study, this article considers the role of courthouses in the life of the city, the legal profession, and in Aotearoa New Zealand's twenty first century justice system. It uses an examination of primary historical sources and a close reading of the speeches given at the ceremonial sitting to trace the history of the enthusiasm for saving the building and explores the meaning of the building to the legal and wider community. This is timely as we look to possible online futures where physical courthouses spaces might have a much reduced role. The final part of the article considers the ceremonies and the courthouse in light of the relationship between Maori and Pakeha, and the changing nature of justice policy with its emphasis on efficiency and accessibility.

 --Dan Ernst

CFP: "The Past is Prologue: The Impact of Law’s History"

[We have the following call for papers.]

The Past is Prologue: The Impact of Law’s History : A New Edited Collection of Essays on Legal History

The Book.  Legal rules, decisions, institutions, and individual actors have had an enormous impact on our cultures and societies today. The leaders that govern us, the crimes that are committed, and the freedoms that we cherish are part and parcel of the enduring legacy of legal history. Despite its diminishing presence in legal education in recent decades, the study of legal history is on an upswing as its importance gains renewed recognition. The availability of new techniques and resources allow scholars to develop new insights and supplement, contextualise, or challenge our previous understandings of the causes and consequences of developments in law and society.

We are assembling a special collection of essays that consider how legal history in Aboriginal, British, Australian, American or wider contexts have shaped our shared present. The essays in this collection will be more than just discussions of particular aspects of legal history in the abstract; instead, each will draw a clear and significant connection to a meaningful feature of our lives today. With this Call for Papers, we are now soliciting contributions from the academy and members of the public more generally.

Advice for contributors.  This edited collection will be initially offered to an Australian academic press.  Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words explaining the focus and approach your proposed essay would take to ensure appropriate academic rigour. The proposed volume is intended to be scholarly but accessible in tone and approach. Each contribution should be in the area of 6000 to 10000 words. Please email abstracts to marcus.harmes@usq.edu.au by 30 September 2019.

About the editors. Associate Professor Marcus Harmes is Associate Director (Academic Development) in the University of Southern Queensland’s Open Access College and teaches legal history in the law degree.  Dr. Jeremy Patrick is Acting Associate Head of School (Research) in the University of Southern Queensland School of Law and Justice. He has published on the historical aspects of various subjects in the area of law and religion.  Ms Sarah McKibbin is Lecturer (Law) in the University of Southern Queensland’s School of Law and Justice. She was instrumental in developing the legal history course in the law degree.

--posted by Dan Ernst

Aronson on Judicial Review In Australia

Mark Aronson, University of New South Wales, has posted Retreating to the History of Judicial Review? which is forthcoming in the Federal Law Review:

Less than a decade ago, the High Court said, in effect, that State Supreme Courts have substantially the same entrenched jurisdiction to issue relief in the nature of the prerogative writs as the Constitution confers on the High Court. The New South Wales Court of Appeal reads this narrowly, holding that only three specific remedies are protected, together with the rules and limitations that existed at federation. If correct, we might see the emergence of two bodies of doctrine, the old law of remedies, and the new law of "judicial review" (a concept that emerged only after federation). In an unrelated case, six High Court judges implied a limited privative clause ousting non-jurisdictional certiorari. The seventh judge said that this was unnecessary, because in his view, that branch of certiorari conflicts with judicial review fundamentals, is historically misconceived, and should apply only where the reviewing court can try the matter afresh. This article reviews these developments, discusses their rationales, and questions both the history and its importance.

Sethna, Davis and friends on travel for abortion

Out with Johns Hopkins University Press is Abortion Across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services, edited by Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa and Gayle Davis, University of Edinburgh. Many of the chapters are historical in approach, focusing on travel for abortion since the 1960s. From the press: 

Safe, legal, and affordable abortion is widely recognized as an essential medical service for women across the world. When access to that service is denied or restricted, women are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, seek backstreet abortionists, attempt self-induced abortions, or even travel to less restrictive states, provinces, and countries to receive care.

Abortion across Borders focuses on travel across domestic and international boundaries to terminate a pregnancy. Christabelle Sethna and Gayle Davis have gathered a cadre of authors to examine how restrictive policies force women to move both within and across national borders in order to reach abortion providers, often at great expense, over long distances and with significant safety risks. Taking historical and contemporary perspectives, contributors examine the situation in regions that include Texas, Prince Edward Island, Ireland, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Throughout, they take a feminist intersectional approach to transnational travel and access to abortion services that is sensitive to inequalities of gender, race, and class in reproductive health care.

This multidisciplinary volume raises challenging logistical, legal, and ethical questions while exploring the gendered aspects of medical tourism. A noticeable rollback of reproductive rights and renewed attention to border security in many parts of the world will make Abortion across Borders of timely interest to scholars of gender and women's studies, health, medicine, law, mobility studies, and reproductive justice.

Table of Contents after the jump: 

New Online Source on Austrialian Investigations of Japanese War Crimes

The National Archives of Australia has just launched Dr Narrelle Morris’ new archival guide to Australia’s war crimes records: Japanese War Crimes in the Pacific: Australia’s Investigations and Prosecutions (National Archives of Australia, 2019).

The guide of more than 150,000 words covers Commonwealth government records (principally holdings of the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial) on the World War II war crimes investigations of Sir William Flood Webb (1943-46), the United Nations War Crimes Commission (1943-48), the Australian Army’s Directorate of Prisoners of War & Internees, post-war investigations, the War Crimes Act 1945 (Cth) and preparation for trials, the 300 Australian Military Court war crimes trials (1945-51), the Australian War Criminals Compounds, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946-48), and the repatriation, parole and release of convicted war criminals. Each chapter begins with a substantial, footnoted discussion of the subject matter before listing relevant records in sections. Appendix B contains an alphabetical name index with more than 950 entries of all war criminals tried by Australia with details of their trial(s) and outcome(s). Appendix D contains a basic index to finding key documents within the (now archival files) of the 300 Australian trial proceedings.

The guide can be downloaded as a free e-book (pdf format) here (at the bottom of the page). Or it can be viewed online in HTML format, which links directly to the catalogue (thus straight to the digitised online records in many cases). The guide is under a Creative Commons license, so it can be freely shared and copied.

Narrelle is an editor of and contributor to Australia’s War Crimes Trials, 1945-51 (Brill, 2016) and the law reporter for the forthcoming law reports series on the Australian Military Courts war crimes trials of the Japanese. She can be contacted at narrelle.morris@curtin.edu.au.

Littlewood on Early NZ Tax Policy

Michael Littlewood, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, has posted William Hobson and the Origins of the New Zealand Tax System, 1840-1842:

William Hobson (NZ History)

The literature on the history of New Zealand in the 1840s is extensive but it does notaddress systematically the methods by which the colonial government attempted to finance itself. This article addresses that gap. The inaugural Governor, William Hobson, conscientiously adopted the revenue-raising methods proposed by London (mainly land sales and customs duties) plus several others (notably liquor licensing, a tax on auctions, and borough council rates), but the revenues raised were nowhere near adequate to cover spending. Government salaries fell into arrears and the colonial government found itself insolvent. In desperation, Hobson resorted to borrowing, which predictably proved unsatisfactory. London blamed him for the Colony’s insolvency, but the real problem was that its economy was simply too small to sustain a government even remotely resembling the British colonial norm.

Motha on sovereignty and violence

Stewart Motha (Birkbeck College, University of London) published Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence with the University of Michigan Press in 2018. From the publisher:

Archiving Sovereignty shows how courts use fiction in their treatment of sovereign violence. Law’s complicity with imperial and neocolonial practices occurs when courts inscribe and repeat the fabulous tales that provide an alibi for archaic sovereign acts that persist in the present. The United Kingdom’s depopulation of islands in the Indian Ocean to serve the United States’ neoimperial interests, Australia’s exile and abandonment of refugees on remote islands, the failure to acknowledge genocidal acts or colonial dispossession, and the memorial work of the South African Constitution after apartheid are all sustained by historical fictions. This history-work of law constitutes an archive where sovereign violence is mediated, dissimulated, and sustained. Stewart Motha extends the concept of the “archive,” as site of origin and source of authority, to signifying what law does in preserving and disavowing the past at the same time. 

Sovereignty is often cast as a limit-concept, constituent force, determining the boundary of law. Archiving Sovereignty reverses this to explain how judicial pronouncements inscribe and sustain extravagant claims to exceptionality and sovereign solitude. This wide-ranging, critical work distinguishes between myths that sustain neocolonial orders and fictions that generate new forms of political and ethical life.

 Praise for the book:

“Set in and around the Indian Ocean, Archiving Sovereignty is a thoughtful meditation on how the law traffics in fictions—the ‘as if’—as it adjudicates state sovereignty in contexts of colonial and postcolonial violence. Elegantly written, it invites an important consideration of the law’s complex work as historical archivist.” - Avery F. Gordon

“Stewart Motha re-envisions the Indian Ocean as a material site of law, violence, and dispossession that he compellingly terms an ‘archive of the present.’ Drawing comparatively from Australia, South Africa, and the Chagos Archipelago, Motha offers a beautifully crafted analysis of law and sovereignty, how they draw from and disavow their entangled colonial histories.” - Renisa Mawani

“Of the many interwoven themes in Archiving Sovereignty, the driving motif for me is Kant’s ‘as if,’ which responds to the disappearance of metaphysical objectivity. If objects are the only knowable facts, the unknowable is suspended in the ‘as if.’ This is true for a lie (such as acting as if law were grounded in nature or acting as if sovereignty were a power in itself) as well as for a fertile fiction. We must then think of the ‘as if’ in its relation to an absence of first law, and think of sovereignty as the ‘as if’ of a postulation of ‘nothing’ at the centre of existence. Stewart Motha explores this double dimension, its commingling and unravelling, its aporias and suggestions that are of course inexhaustible. This research is at the heart of the concerns and expectations of the present time.” - Jean-Luc Nancy

“Through a series of brilliant readings of contemporary cases of exile and exclusion the source of legality, the archive, is exposed as an unstable archipelago and excoriated as the fictive mark of sovereign solitude.” - Peter Goodrich

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