Laske's "Law, Language and Change"

Caroline Laske, a research fellow at the Ghent Legal History Institute (Belgium) and the holder of a Heinz Heinen fellowship at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (Germany), has published Law, Language and Change: A Diachronic Semantic Analysis of Consideration in the Common Law (Brill, 2020):

In this monograph, Caroline Laske traces the advent of consideration in English contract law, by analysing the doctrinal development, in parallel with the corresponding terminological evolution and semantic shifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an innovative, interdisciplinary study, showcasing the value of taking a diachronic corpus linguistics-based approach to the study of legal change and legal development, and the semantic shifts in the corresponding terminology. The seminal application in the legal field of these analytical methodologies borrowed from pragmatic linguistics goes beyond the content approach that legal research usually practices and it has allowed for claims of semantic change to be objectified. This ground-breaking work is pitched at scholars of legal history, law & language, and linguistics; and is of importance to scholars of private law working on promises and contract.

–Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Rowan Williams on “Saving our Order: Thomas Becket, Henry II and the Law of Church and State,” 10 December 2020, 17:30 - 19:00.  H/t: LPK
  

• 
  The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation announces the webinar series, Black Inventors and Innovators: New Perspectives.  It is free and open to the public and will convene daily November 16–20, 2020 from 1:00-2:30pm ET. “This week-long program will draw renewed attention to historic and contemporary inventors of color and Black technology consumers, while discussing strategies for building a more equitable innovation ecosystem. Through presentations by an interdisciplinary group of thought leaders and engaged discussions with our online audience, this 'state of the field' workshop will identify critical questions, seek out new case studies, and articulate theories, concepts and themes to inform the next generation of research, archival collecting, museum exhibitions, and invention education initiatives.”  Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University, is on Thursday’s panel. 
  

• Lawbook Exchange has released its catalogue on Law and Literature.
  

• Ronald K. L. Collins reviews Hamilton and the Law: Reading Today’s Most Contentious Legal Issues Through the Hit Musical by Drexel University law professor Lisa A. Tucker (WaPo).

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Krista Kesselring on the hardships of 18th-century English law on wives

• And at Nursing Clio: Melissa E. Blair and Christopher Ferguson ask why so many scholarly fellowship programs are still residential.

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

Goldsworthy on History of British Constitutional Theory

Jeffrey Denys Goldsworthy, Monash University Faculty of Law, has posted A Brief History of Constitutional Theory in Britain, which is forthcoming in The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom (Cambridge UP):

This paper surveys the development of constitutional theory in England, and later Britain, from the Twelfth Century until today. It shows how contending theories attempted to reconcile the need for strong central authority to maintain order and justice, with the need to control that authority - either through law or political struggle - to prevent its misuse. It describes a gradual transition from theories of monarchical rule to those of mixed government and finally parliamentary democracy, and how they understood the place or role of the Church, the law, “the community” and “the people”.

--Dan Ernst

English Manuscript Law Reports: A Query from Sir John Baker

[We have the following query from Professor Sir John Baker.  H/t: Michael Widener.  DRE.]

English Manuscript Law Reports

Over the course of my professional life as a legal historian, I have become aware both of the immense importance of unpublished law reports in the history of the common law and of the difficulty in finding them for want of adequate catalogues. The Selden Society has commissioned a descriptive catalogue, and work is under way to assemble and edit the descriptions of the thousand or so items of which we are currently aware. I have compiled lists over the years for my own use, and, since they include volumes found in librarians’ cupboards and on uncatalogued shelves, I am sure there must be other manuscripts which have not come to my attention in this rather random way. It would be a great service to scholarship if librarians could draw our attention to any manuscripts which might be included and which are not noticed in my English Legal Manuscripts in the U.S.A. The catalogue will cover the period 1500 to 1800 and will be limited to original reports of legal arguments, excluding trials, precedents of pleading, and commonplace books derived solely from printed sources. In cases of doubt, I will be glad to help with identification. Please send any information which might be helpful, including questions, to me at jhb16@cam.ac.uk.

John Baker
(Professor Sir John Baker, Cambridge)

Selden Society Prizes to Papp-Kamali and Kennefick; Honorable Mention to McSweeney

[We have the following announcement from the Selden Society.  DRE] 

David Yale Prize

Instituted in 1998, this biennial prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales from scholars who have been engaged in research in the subject for not longer than about ten years.  Since 2017, separate prizes have been given for the best book and the best article published  in the preceding two years. The prize is named in honour of Mr David Yale, QC, FBA, then President of the Society and formerly Literary Director.

The 2019 David Yale Book prize was awarded to Elizabeth Papp Kamali for Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The prize committee said of this work:

Papp-Kamali’s Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England is a wide-ranging and deeply researched contribution to the history of criminal law. In seeking to understand what ‘felony’ meant in medieval England, Papp-Kamali takes on a question which Maitland considered unanswerable. This book changes our existing understanding, using a challenging methodology which uses a much wider range of sources than is often the case in legal history scholarship. In doing so she places legal history within the history of wider cultural norms and influences to produce perceptive and valuable conclusions.

The committee also recommended that an honourable mention be given to Thomas J. McSweeney for his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2019)

The 2019 David Yale article prize was awarded to Ciara Kennefick for ‘‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ in the Journal of Legal History 39 (2018), pp.  307-339. The prize committee said of this article:

Kennefick’s ‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ is a genuinely novel re-examination of an important part of English legal history, highlighting the interaction between questions of law about contractual fairness, and mathematics. Interest in legal questions drove interest in the study of probability, while developments in the mathematics of probability came to resolve legal questions. The article changes the way we look at the history of this area of law.

Sackar on Lord Devlin

Out this month by Justice John Sackar (Supreme Court of New South Wales) is Lord Devlin with Hart Publishing. From the press:

Lord Devlin was a leading lawyer of his generation. Moreover, he was one of the most recognised figures in the judiciary, thanks to his role in the John Bodkin Adams trial and the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry. It is hard then to believe that he retired as a Law Lord at a mere 58 years of age. This important book looks at the life, influences and impact of this most important judicial figure. Starting with his earliest days as a school boy before moving on to his later years, the author draws a compelling picture of a complex, brilliant man who would shape not just the law but society more generally in post-war Britain.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Tidmark to Lecture on the London Fire Courts

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Selden Society with the Four Inns of Court presents The Fire Courts: Successfully Delivering Justice in a Time of Plague and Fire, by Jay Tidmarsh, Notre Dame Law School, 21 October 2020, 5.30pm.  Click Here to Book.

1665 had been a devastating Plague Year. 1666 was going that way and then the Great Fire destroyed seven eighths of London. The international scene was bleak. Samuel Pepys despaired of London ever being rebuilt.

And yet, within ten years modern London had risen from the ashes, and with London’s resurgence the foundation for continued rise of the British Empire had been laid. Professor Jay Tidmarsh of Notre Dame Law School will explore the social and economic impact of the Great Fire and explain how a six-section Act of Parliament, which erected a novel Fire Court to cut a path through the tsunami of legal disputes that threatened the timely rebuilding of London, played a central role in the City’s redevelopment. Drawing on research into the London Fire Court as well the Southwark Fire Court established after the Great Southwark Fire of 1676, the lecture will also explore lessons for modern times: the circumstances under which government intervention can foster resilience and the ways in which the judiciary can be a key partner in recovery from disaster.

The Selden Society and the Inns of Court have joined forces to establish a new series of annual lectures open to scholars, students and the general public to show the relevance of a wider understanding of Legal History. This first talk on the genesis and impact of the Fire of London Disputes Act 1666 and how Fire Courts helped the City of London and other communities recover in a surprisingly short time is designed to have particular salience in our present uncertain times.

Utz on Dickens on the English Income Tax

Stephen Utz, University of Connecticut School of Law, has posted Boz Among the Radicals: Dickens Records a Turning Point in Tax History:

Charles Dickens, 1867 (LC)

Charles Dickens recorded many trials conduct by his friend, the attorney Thomas Talfourd. Dickens was only twenty-two years old when he recorded the trial of the Weekly True Sun's principal officers for their challenge to the Whig Parliament's rejection of an income tax. Liberal members of Parliament and the public opposed the trial. Dickens' perfect capture of the trial attorneys' and defendants' speeches at the trial reveals his understanding of the issues and his apparent sympathy with the defendants' cause. Yet he later stood back from all this, with the apparent exception of his parting of the ways with Harriet Martineau, his partner in the publishing venture of Dickens' middle years, which have been his rejection of her taking the same side the Whigs had taken in 1834.

--Dan Ernst

Smith on Mid-Victorian British Company Laws

David Chan Smith, Wilfrid Laurier University, has posted The Mid-Victorian Reform of Britain’s Company Laws and the Moral Economy of Fair Competition, which appears in Enterprise & Society (2020):

This paper reconstructs the history of the reform of Britain’s company laws during the 1850s and makes three major arguments. First, the Law Amendment Society was the driving force for reform and organized the campaign for change. Second, the advancement of working-class interests and ideas of fairness were central to the conceptualization of these reforms and the course of their advocacy. Company law reform was broadly conceived to include the revision of the law of partnership, corporations, and cooperatives to create a level playing field in which smaller entrepreneurs could compete against established capitalists. Finally, central to this campaign was the institutional logic of “fair competition.” Socialists and liberals both used this logic, demonstrating how moral ideas can shape organizational change.

--Dan Ernst

Networks and Connections in Legal History

Just out from Cambridge University Press: Networks and Connections in Legal History, edited by Michael Lobban, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Ian Williams, University College London:

Network and Connections in Legal History examines networks of lawyers, legislators and litigators, and how they shaped legal development in Britain and the world. It explores how particular networks of lawyers - from Scotland to East Florida and India - shaped the culture of the forums in which they operated, and how personal connections could be crucial in pressuring the legislature to institute reform - as with twentieth century feminist campaigns. It explores the transmission of legal ideas; what happened to those ideas was not predetermined, but when new connections were made, they could assume a new life. In some cases, new thinkers made intellectual connections not previously conceived, in others it was the new purposes to which ideas and practices were applied which made them adapt. This book shows how networks and connections between people and places have shaped the way that legal ideas and practices are transmitted across time and space.

TOC after the jump. [DRE]

Utz on Chartism and the Income Tax

Stephen Utz, University of Connecticut School of Law, has posted Chartism and the Income Tax, which appeared in 2013 British Tax Review 192:

Although the identity of Chartism was bound up with political demands, many in the movement consistently pressed for the repeal of duplicative taxes on consumption and the introduction of even-handed taxation of land, capital and labour. Earlier popular radicals had asked for limited tax relief. Chartist leaders from the outset saw a link between fiscal problems and the democratic deficit prolonged by the Reform Act, insisting that a broader franchise would quickly lead to a broad direct tax. Novel features of their tax agenda emerged as they transformed views first aired in radical attacks on the replacement of workers with machinery and on the house and window taxes. By 1842, when Peel reinstated the income tax, they were arguing in their own words for the equity and neutrality of such a measure. Historians of the movement have neglected the coherence and detail of this Chartist agitation. With Peel’s defeat, and Disraeli’s failed attempt to extend the income tax, parliamentary hearings on making the tax permanent reflected elements of the movement’s distinctive views.

–Dan Ernst

Leib and Kent on the Law of Offices

Ethan J. Leib and Andrew Kent, Fordham University School of Law, have posted Fiduciary Law and the Law of Public Office: Suggestions for a Research Agenda, which is forthcoming in the William & Mary Law Review:

A law of public office crystallized in Anglo-American law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This body of law — defined and enforced through a mix of oaths, statutes, criminal and civil case law, impeachments, and legislative investigations — imposed core duties on public officeholders: Officials needed to serve the public good, not their own private interests; were barred from acting ultra vires; could often be required to account to the public for their conduct in office; and needed to act with impartiality, honesty, and diligence. Office-holding came to be viewed as conditional, with officers removable for misdeeds. This law of public office reflected something that looks similar to modern fiduciary duties of loyalty and care.

In this Essay, we extend the historical record describing this law of public office, and make several new claims — historical and theoretical. First, there are strong reasons to suspect that the law of public office and private fiduciary duties developed together and influenced each other. During the critical centuries we explore, the duties of officeholders such as trustees, executors, and corporate directors were developing alongside the duties of officials such as tax collectors and government commissioners. Parliament and other actors repeatedly used the language of trust, trusteeship, guardianship, and account to define the law of public offices. And public law concerns about abuse of power and the need for honesty, fidelity, and altruism in service of others may have seeped from public law into private fiduciary law. Influential political theory about the monarchy and lesser magistrates was also using trust and related legal language to set forth a fiduciary conception of public office-holding; the theoretical developments in political theory not only drew from legal concepts but may have helped shape them, as well.

One Essay cannot decisively establish whether the similarities in language, concept, and timing were mere coincidence or rather evidence of some conscious co-development in the law of public offices, political theory, and fiduciary law. Proving (or disproving) actual causal relationships will need to be the work of the future. We conclude with some potential implications for our research agenda, should further work continue to confirm our findings here. Fiduciary political theorists should be less anxious about drawing from private law models — and private law fiduciary theorists might need to be less insistent on the purity of the private sphere. As we show, during the critical periods when fiduciary law and the law of public office come into their own, the public-private distinction wasn’t yet creating the divide that exists today. Our research agenda invites more mutual learning — both historically and for law and institutions today.

--Dan Ernst

Kershaw on the Glorious Revolution and Prerogative Power

David Kershaw, London School of Economics Law Department, has posted Revolutionary Amnesia and the Delegated Nature of Prerogative Power:

William and Mary (NYPL)

What is the nature and source of prerogative power? Where does it come from and how was it created? British constitutional law makes several assumptions in these regards, none of which have been subject to careful interrogation. Presumptively, it assumes that these powers are powers constituted in the midst of time through an amalgam of conquest, religion and community. It assumes that these kingly powers are original powers, meaning that the end for which a power is to be used is determined by the power-holder; they are not delegated powers subject to purposive limitation as are statutorily delegated powers. And it assumes that the prerogative powers exercised today are the same kingly powers exercised by Kings and Queens, time out of mind. These assumptions are the structural drivers of the arguments on both sides of the recent debate and case law surrounding the Government’s use of the prerogative of prorogation. However, as this article demonstrates, historically situated, all of these assumptions are inaccurate. The article shows how we have ignored the revolutionary implications of the Glorious Revolution in 1688; our last “historically first” constitutional event. When we interrogate this event we see that the prerogative powers exercised by the executive today are not original but delegated, and they were not constituted prior to 1688 but were formed through statutory delegation from a constituted parliamentary sovereign in 1689, the Convention Parliament. They are merely a grander form of statutory delegated powers and as such can be subject to judicial review which focuses on the use of those powers for their proper purpose. This insight renders the Supreme Court’s approach in Miller II unnecessary, and the Divisional Court’s approach untenable.

--Dan Ernst

Bessler on the Eighth Amendment and the Glorious Revolution

John D. Bessler, University of Baltimore School of Law, has published A Century in the Making: The Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the Origins of the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment, in William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal. 27 (2019): 989-1078:

The Scourging of Titus Oates (NYPL)

The sixteen words in  the U.S. Constitution's Eighth  Amendment have their roots in England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. This Article traces the historical events that  initially gave rise to the prohibitions against excessive bail, excessive fines,  and cruel  and unusual  punishments. Those three proscriptions can be found in the English Declaration of Rights  and in its statutory counterpart, the English Bill of Rights. In particular, the Article describes  the legal  cases  and draconian punishments during the  Stuart dynasty that led English and Scottish parliamentarians to insist on protections against cruelty and excessive governmental actions. In describing the grotesque punishments of Titus Oates and others during the reign of King James II, the Article sheds light on the origins of the language of Section 10 of the English Bill of Rights.  That  language became  a model for similarly worded provisions in early American  constitutions and declarations of rights, including the Virginia Declaration of Rights, that were linguistic forerunners of the  Eighth Amendment. The U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment, ratified in 1791, became the law of the land more than 100 years after the Glorious Revolution, though that provision of the U.S. Bill of Rights was shaped by the Enlightenment as well as by early American understandings of English law and custom. The Article describes the  seventeenth-century origins of the Eighth Amendment's prohibitions and the Enlightenment's impact on eighteenth-century  thinkers, while highlighting how existing American prohibitions against excessive bail,  excessive fines,  and cruel and unusual punishments are now understood to bar acts inconsistent with "the  evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." The Article  concludes by outlining the implications of the Eighth Amendment's history for modern American jurisprudence. In doing so, it provides a critique of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent Eighth Amendment decision in Bucklew v. Precythe.

--Dan Ernst

Leubsdorf on Shakespeare's Trials

John Leubsdorf, Rutgers, Rutgers Law School, has posted Shakespeare's Staged Trials:

The Bard (NYPL)

The trials in Shakespeare’s plays are strange. There are no lawyers or professional judges, there may be no witnesses, and the adjudicator often imposes unusual sanctions such as banishment. Most strikingly, these are almost always fake trials, manipulated by a character toward a predestined result. Two obvious explanations — that trials in Shakespeare’s day were like that, and that trials in the contemporary drama were like that — turn out to be largely incorrect. It is more persuasive to trace the strange features of Shakespeare’s trials to the various dramatic functions they fulfill, yet even this approach does not explain everything. There is one more possible explanation, which can be discovered only by reading the article.

--Dan Ernst

Kadens on Twyne's Case

Take it from me, folks: the research underpinning this transporting case study of debt in early modern England is astonishing.  Emily Kadens, Northwestern University School of Law, has posted New Light on Twyne's Case, which appears in American Bankruptcy Law Journal 94 (2020): 1-84:

Edward Coke (NYPL)

Twyne's Case, a 1602 English Star Chamber decision, is one of the most durable decisions of the American common law tradition. The case famously concerns fraudulent conveyance, which occurs when a debtor transfers some or all of his assets to a third party with the intent to "hinder, delay, or defraud" the debtor’s creditors. The case continues to provide judges with a test to evaluate when a transfer, even one made for good consideration, was done with the intent to defraud.

The opinion, as reported by Edward Coke, is still regularly cited in US courts. However, it turns out that the the facts that Coke reported, and the embellishments that have grown up around it, are not accurate. (Teaser: the case was not about sheep.) This article uses previously unknown trial documents to retell the complex and surprising story behind Twyne's Case. In so doing, it also opens for further study the role, within the larger premodern credit economy, of transfers of title without transfers of possession—conveyances that have, since 1571, often been declared fraudulent.

--Dan Ernst

Annunziata on Defoe on London Stock-Jobbing

Filippo Annunziata, Bocconi University, has posted At the Early Dawn of the Modern Regulation of Financial Markets: The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers (1701) and The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (1719) by Daniel Defoe:

NYPL

In the year Robinson Crusoe (1719) is delivered to the press, Daniel Defoe publishes a magnificent pamphlet (The Anatomy of Exchange Alley: or a System of Stock-Jobbing) where he mercilessly exposes the serious embezzlement he observes on the London exchange market, throwing himself - with tones that are at times sarcastic, at times vehement - against the speculative activities of that time. Just like Robinson Crusoe's cannibals pounce on their poor victims, so the stock-jobbers devastate the market, manipulating it, and, in doing so, damage the stock exchange, the national economy, the Parliament, the Crown, and all the citizens of the Kingdom. The result is an apocalyptic vision of what, in the future, would become the most important financial market in Europe and that, in 1719, was still an infant, albeit a somewhat developed one. The text of 1719 is not a monad in Defoe's production, nor does it represent a one-off case of grievances against the vibrant speculations on the securities market, at the time allegedly perpetrated by the jobbers. In a previous libellus of 1701 - The Villainy of Stock Jobbers Detected and the Causes of the Late Run after the Bank and the Bankers Discovered and Considered - Defoe had already harshly stigmatized the conduct of London jobbers, thus becoming part of a larger literary vein of the time.

Many of the questions that Defoe raises still remain significant today; they underpin many of the policy choices that govern the regulation of stock exchanges, and, generally, of markets for financial instruments, in particular in the area of Market Abuse. Many of the situations that Defoe describes are a true anticipation, 300 years before hand, of the issues with which modern Legislation against Market Abuse is concerned: insider trading, market manipulation, appropriate disclosure of price-sensitive information. Market efficiency appears to have been right at the dawn of modern financial markets, a widely shared concern, that Defoe rightly captures in these writings.

–Dan Ernst

Festschrift on Late Medieval Monarchy, Political Culture and the State

Just out from York Medieval Press (and Boyden & Brewer) is Monarchy, State and Political Culture in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of W. Mark Ormrod, edited by Gwilym Dodd, Associate Professor of History, University of Nottingham, and Craig Taylor, Reader in Medieval History at the University of York:

The essays collected here celebrate mark the distinguished career of Professor W. Mark Ormrod, reflecting the vibrancy and range of his scholarship on the structures, personalities and culture of ruling late medieval England. Encompassing political, administrative, Church and social history, the volume focusses on three main themes: monarchy, state and political culture. For the first, it explores Edward III's reactions to the deaths of his kinfolk and cases of political defamation across the fourteenth century. The workings of the "state" are examined through studies of tax and ecclesiastical records, the Court of Chivalry, fifteenth-century legislation, and the working practices of the privy seal clerk, Thomas Hoccleve. Finally, separate discussions of collegiate statutes and the household ordinances of Cecily, duchess of York consider the political culture of regulation and code-making.

The contributors are Elizabeth Biggs, James Bothwell, Gwilym Dodd, Helen Killick, Helen Lacey, Joanna Laynesmith, Jonathan Mackman, Anthony Musson, Sarah Rees Jones, and E.H. Watt.  The blog of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York has a brief notice on Professor Ormond and the launch for the festschrift.

--Dan Ernst

Dingle's Conversations with Prichard

Lesley Dingle, University of Cambridge, has posted Conversations with Michael J. Prichard: The Fun of Legal History and the Triumph of Research Over Administration:

Michael Prichard was born before the Second world war and lived through the bombing and destruction of much of London. When he entered university in 1945, King’s College London had reoccupied its old quarters in the badly-damaged Somerset House, and along with LSE and UCL had pooled teaching resources to overcome staff shortages and accommodation damage. This inadvertently gave Michael a rich pool of mentors upon which to found his career, and who served him well in later years. He entered Queens’ College Cambridge in 1948 and experienced the unique post-war phenomena of the “returning warriors”, which continued, along with the “weekenders”, when he became a fellow at Gonville & Caius in 1950. Here he has remained, and is still a Fellow, seventy years later.

Michael Prichard (Squire Law Library)

His legacy is a fund of memories of a life-long journey through changing landscapes of legal research, teaching, and college and faculty administration. I first interviewed Michael for the Eminent Scholars Archive in 2012, where his biography and general academic reminiscences are set forth. I now revisit aspects of these, following a conversation I had with David Yale for ESA in November 2019. David was Michael’s career-long colleague, and his interview shone new light on their decades of joint endeavour unravelling the development of maritime law in the British Isles. Shortly after David’s reminder of the magnitude of their project, an encounter with Professor David Ibbetson, and most-recently a meeting with Michael, now in his 93rd year, have spurred me to summarise particular aspects of Michael’s varied research projects. In the process, I shall emphasise the overall sense of adventure, and enjoyment - in short “fun”, with which he explored the history and jurisdictional intricacies of the Admiralty Court (jointly with David Yale), presented his enlightened insights into the evolution of aspects of tort law, and explained his research of the few esoteric conundrums in which a retiree was able to indulge.

--Dan Ernst

LHR 38:2

Law and History Review 38:2 (May 2020) is now available online.  Here are the contents:

In This Issue

Litigants in the English “Court of Poor Men's Causes,” or Court of Requests, 1515–25
Laura Flannigan

Law, Language and the Printing Press in the Reign of Charles I: Explaining the Printing of the Common Law in English
Ian Williams

Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India
Zak Leonard

Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia
Priyasha Saksena

Secularizing Islam: The Colonial Encounter and the Making of a British Islamic Criminal Law in Northern Nigeria, 1903–58
Rabiat Akande

Book Reviews

Stephan Dusil, Wissensordnungen des Rechts im Wandel: Päpstlicher Jurisdiktionsprimat und Zölibat zwischen 1000 und 1215. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 629. €135.00 hardcover (ISBN 9789462701526); €95.00 paper (ISBN 9789462701335); €71.00 ebook (ISBN 9789461662853).
Atria A. Larson

Charlene M. Eska, A Raven's Battle-Cry: The Limits of Judgment in the Medieval Irish Legal Tract Anfuigell. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xiv + 338. $119.00 hardcover (ISBN 9789004391987)
Joe Wolf

Zachary Chitwood, Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 236. $105.00 hardcover (ISBN 9781316861547).
Paolo Angelini

Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 405. $45.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780691178592); $27.99 ebook (ISBN 9780691185378).
Rowan Dorin

James E. Lewis Jr., The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 713. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780691177168); $21.95 paper (ISBN 9780691191553).
R. B. Bernstein

Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 384. $41.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780674737495).
Timo Schaefer

Philip Thai, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 408. $60.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780231185844).
Diana S. Kim

Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexican Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xv + 302. $32.50 hardcover (ISBN 9781469635491).
Felice Batlan

Ken I. Kersch, Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii + 407. $84.99 hardcover (ISBN 9780521193108); $34.99 paper (ISBN 9780521193109).
Logan Everett Sawyer

--Dan Ernst