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

Temple on Legal Emotions in Blackstone's England

Just out with NYU Press is Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone's England by Kathryn D. Temple, Georgetown University. From the publisher:

William Blackstone’s masterpiece, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), famously took the “ungodly jumble” of English law and transformed it into an elegant and easily transportable four-volume summary. Soon after publication, the work became an international monument not only to English law, but to universal English concepts of justice and what Blackstone called “the immutable laws of good and evil.”

Most legal historians regard the Commentaries as a brilliant application of Enlightenment reasoning to English legal history. Loving Justice contends that Blackstone’s work extends beyond making sense of English law to invoke emotions such as desire, disgust, sadness, embarrassment, terror, tenderness, and happiness. By enlisting an affective aesthetics to represent English law as just, Blackstone created an evocative poetics of justice whose influence persists across the Western world. In doing so, he encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice.

Ultimately, Temple argues that the Commentaries offers a complex map of our affective relationship to juridical culture, one that illuminates both individual and communal understandings of our search for justice, and is crucial for understanding both justice and injustice today.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Helmholz on "The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers: An Historical Introduction, by R. H. Helmholz (University of Chicago). A description from the Press:

Historians of the English legal profession have written comparatively little about the lawyers who served in the courts of the Church. This volume fills a gap; it investigates the law by which they were governed and discusses their careers in legal practice. Using sources drawn from the Roman and canon laws and also from manuscripts found in local archives, R. H. Helmholz brings together previously published work and new evidence about the professional careers of these men. His book covers the careers of many lesser known ecclesiastical lawyers, dealing with their education in law, their reaction to the coming of the Reformation, and their relationship with English common lawyers on the eve of the Civil War. Making connections with the European ius commune, this volume will be of special interest to English and Continental legal historians, as well as to students of the relationship between law and religion.

A few blurbs:

‘This valuable book by one of our most eminent legal historians is the product of fifty years engagement with the history of the Church courts in England. It not only provides new insights into the careers of eighteen very different ecclesiastical lawyers over seven centuries but also (in the first half) prepares the way with an accessible and authoritative history of their profession.' -- John H. Baker 

‘The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers: An Historical Introduction is an important contribution to the literature on the history of the legal profession by the leading scholar of canon law. It combines a thorough and insightful analysis of the development, education, and regulation of a somewhat neglected segment of the English legal profession with a view of the profession through the activities of its practitioners.' -- Jonathan Rose

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Churchill on Victorian crime control

We missed this one when it came out in 2017. It recently won the Socio-Legal Studies Association's 2019 Theory and History Prize. Out with Oxford University Press is Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public by David Churchill, University of Leeds. From the press: 

The history of modern crime control is usually presented as a narrative of how the state wrested control over the governance of crime from the civilian public. Most accounts trace the decline of a participatory, discretionary culture of crime control in the early modern era, and its replacement by a centralized, bureaucratic system of responding to offending. The formation of the 'new' professional police forces in the nineteenth century is central to this narrative: henceforth, it is claimed, the priorities of criminal justice were to be set by the state, as ordinary people lost what authority they had once exercised over dealing with offenders.

This book challenges this established view, and presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity which ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice. With unique conceptual clarity, it seeks to reorient modern criminal justice history away from its established preoccupation with state systems of policing and punishment, and move towards a more nuanced analysis of the governance of crime. More widely, the book provides a unique and valuable vantage point from which to rethink the role of civil society and the state in modern governance, the nature of agency and authority in Victorian England, and the historical antecedents of pluralized modes of crime control which characterize contemporary society.

Praise for the book:

"This is an original and readable book . . . it offers a valuable contribution to the question of how we can attempt to understand everyday responses to social problems in the nineteenth-century city." - Matt Neale

"a substantial and original achievement in criminal justice scholarship." - P. T. Smith

Further information is available here.

Rackley, Auchmuty and friends on women's legal landmarks in the UK and Ireland

Erika Rackley, University of Kent and Rosemary Auchmuty, University of Reading have co-edited the volume, Women's Legal Landmarks celebrating the history of women and law in the UK and Ireland with Hart. From the press: 

Women's Legal Landmarks commemorates the centenary of women's admission in 1919 to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland by identifying key legal landmarks in women's legal history. Over 80 authors write about landmarks that represent a significant achievement or turning point in women's engagement with law and law reform. The landmarks cover a wide range of topics, including matrimonial property, the right to vote, prostitution, surrogacy and assisted reproduction, rape, domestic violence, FGM, equal pay, abortion, image-based sexual abuse, and the ordination of women bishops, as well as the life stories of women who were the first to undertake key legal roles and positions. Together the landmarks offer a scholarly intervention in the recovery of women's lost history and in the development of methodology of feminist legal history as well as a demonstration of women's agency and activism in the achievement of law reform and justice.

 Table of Contents after the jump:

Mansell on female servants in early modern England

Charmian Mansell, University of Exeter, has published "The variety of women's experiences as servants in England (1548-1649): evidence from church court depositions" in Continuity and Change 33:3 (Dec.2018), 315-38. Here is the abstract: 

This article demonstrates, using evidence from church court depositions, that women's experience of service in early modern England was more varied than scholarship suggests. Moving beyond its conception as a life-cycle annual occupation, the article situates service within individual life-stories. It argues firstly, that service extended across the whole of women's working lives and secondly, that employment arrangements took a wide range of forms. Service for women is shown to have been flexible, varied and contingent, employing a diversity of individuals under a variety of different employment agreements.

Further information is available here. 

Gregory, Grey, Bautz and friends on Victorian Judgment

James Gregory, Daniel J. R. Grey, and Annika Bautz (all from the University of Plymouth) have co-edited Judgment in the Victorian Age with Routledge. From the press: 

This volume concerns judges, judgment and judgmentalism. It studies the Victorians as judges across a range of important fields, including the legal and aesthetic spheres, and within literature. It examines how various specialist forms of judgment were conceived and operated, and how the propensity to be judgmental was viewed.

Here's the chapter line-up:

Part I: The Judgment of the Law

1. Cartes de visite and the First Mass Media Photographic Images of the English Judiciary: Continuity and Change. Leslie J. Moran

2. Sir Redmond Barry and the Trial of Ned Kelly: representing the Judge and Judgment in Nineteenth-Century Australia. Alice Richardson

3. The Emotional Reactions of Judges in Cases of Maternal Child Murder in England, 1840 –1900. Alison Pedley

4. ‘What Will Most Tend Towards Morality’: Sir Cresswell Cresswell and the Divorce Court, 1858-1863. Gail Savage

5. ‘Infamous Falsehoods’: Judges, Perjury, and Affiliation Trials in England, 1855–1930. Ginger Frost

6. Authoritative Judgments in a Provincial Town: Responses to Everyday Offending in Plymouth 1860 – 1900. By Kim Stevenson and Iain Channing

Part 2: Judgments in Culture

7. Judging the Judges: The Image of the Judge in the Popular Illustrated Press. Craig Newbery-Jones

8. The Matter of Judgment: Comparing Gendered Perspectives on Victorian Legal Culture in Popular Literature. Judith Rowbotham

9. The Operation and Representation of Art Judgment. James Gregory

10. Judging by the Hand: Handwriting and Character in Victorian Literary Culture. Karin Koehler

11. ‘They will not read it, but their sons & daughters may’: judging Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) in the nineteenth century. Cian Duffy

Further information is available here.

Zhang Wins SSHA Presidents Book Award

Via a Yale Law School press release, we have word that the Social Science History Association has awarded the Presidents Book Award to Yale Law professor (and former LHB guest blogger) Taisu Zhang:

Zhang’s book, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England (Cambridge University Press) offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Zhang argues that this social differences in Late Imperial and Republican China versus the more “individualist” society of early modern England had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production. 

The 2018 SSHA Presidents Book Award is awarded annually to a first work by an early-career scholar and comes with a $1000 prize.

Read on here. Congratulations to Professor Zhang!

Weekend Roundup

• From Time magazine's website: a Labor Day op-ed by Caitlin Rosenthal (University of California, Berkeley) on the Emancipation Proclamation as "among the most important [labor regulations] in American history." 

• This week in the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Walter D. Kamphoefner (Texas A&M) on "chain migration"; Mary Ziegler (Florida State University) on how "Brett Kavanaugh could shatter the alliance between the GOP and the antiabortion movement"; Michael D. Breidenbach (Ave Maria University) on "why the right to privacy should exist even after someone dies," and more.

• Thursday was a historic day for same-sex rights in India, where the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the "unnatural offences" provision of the Indian Penal Code (s.377). Great coverage of Navtej Singh Jauhar v. Union of India and the people behind it in the Indian Express, Scroll.in, and the Guardian (including photo highlights here). Here is a piece on how Indian legal academia influenced the judgment.

• Also on the Indian Penal Code via Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs' forum: Neeti Nair (UVA) has this historical take on religion and the limits of free speech in India.

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Jane M. Card on visual representations of the police in Victorian England.

• From Mother Jones, "An Old Anti-Irish Law Is at the Heart of Trump’s Plan to Reshape Legal Immigration," citing work by legal historian Hidetaka Hirota (Waseda University). 

• Update: Some last-minute ideas for teaching, as the new semester gets under way--here and here at South Asian Legal History Resources (MS).

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

McSheffrey on Sanctuary in England

Shannon McSheffrey, Concordia University, published Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550 with Oxford University Press in 2017. From the publisher:

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts. This is the first volume in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this 'medieval' practice had become outmoded and little-used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeing refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval practice accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary's resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the years between 1400 and 1550.

Here is the Table of Contents:

1. INTRODUCTION: RICHARD SOUTHWELL FLEES TO SANCTUARY

Seeking Sanctuary in Late Medieval and Tudor England

Explaining the Tudor Resurgence of Sanctuary

Sanctuary and the Partiality of the Archives

2. TAVERN BRAWLS, CIVIL WARS, AND REMEDIES FOR TYRANNY: THE EVOLUTION OF SANCTUARY IN ENGLAND, C. 1380-1500

Herman Stokfyssh and his Flight to Westminster: The Development of Chartered Sanctuary c. 1400

Sanctuary-Seeking 1400-1550: The Numbers

Sanctuary and the Wars of the Roses

Sanctuary, Mercy, and Redemption

Ecclesiastical Liberties as a Weapon Against Tyranny: St. Edmund and Sheriff Leoffstan

3. DEAN CAUDRAY AND THE CITY OF LONDON: THE POLITICS OF SANCTUARY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

The Escape of John Knight

St. Martin le Grand and the City of London: Liberties, Franchises, and Jurisdictions

Dean Caudray and the Events of September 1440

Marshalling Cases

The End of Dean Caudray's Days

4. THE HOSPITALLER'S CLOAK: MERCY, JUSTICE, JURISDICTION

Richard Pulham, Ralph Toker, and the Hospitaller's Cloak

The Hospitaller Order, English Criminal Justice, and Christian Mercy in Action

Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller Properties, 1400-1485

Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller Properties, 1485-1520

Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller properties, 1520-1539

5. FRANCIS WOODLEKE'S WINDOW: STRANGER SHOEMAKERS, BOUNDARIES, AND SANCTUARY IN LONDON IN THE 1530S

Living in the Precinct of St. Martin Le Grand

Governing St. Martin's Precinct in the Reign of Henry VIII

Stranger Artisans, Sanctuary Men, and the City

The Boundaries of St. Martin's

The Dissolution of St. Martin le Grand and Beyond

6. THE SANCTUARY TOWN OF KNOWLE: CRIME, LOCAL AUTHORITIES, AND THE STATE IN 1530S ENGLAND

The Goat Inn Robber and Sanctuary at Knowle

Robbery, Flight, Sanctuary

Sanctuary at Knowle and the Administration of Law and Justice in the 1530s

The Knowle Sanctuary and Tudor State Formation

7. CHESHIRE FEUDS: ARISTOCRATIC VIOLENCE AND THE USES OF SANCTUARY IN THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII

Affrays in St. Paul's Churchyard

Breaching Sanctuary

Sanctuary and Aristocratic Violence in the Reign of Henry VIII

8. CONCLUSIONS: SANCTUARY, LAW, AND POLITICS

The Statute of 1540 and Sanctuary's Precipitous Decline

Sanctuary, Law, and Politics in England, 1400-1550

Further information is available here.