Yovel on the Dreyfus Affair in Law and Literature

Jonathan Yovel, University of Haifa Faculty of Law, has The Dreyfus Affair: A Law and Literature Account of a Law and Literature Affair, which appears in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities:

Alfred Dreyfus (NYPL)

 How does law become public? What happens to it when it does?

A note fished from a wastebasket, forged evidence, a secret court-martial, public humiliation and a republic stressed to its limits: in 1894–95 France convicted and degraded Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason he did not commit. Within years the Dreyfus Affair had engulfed France, reshaping politics and giving rise to a new public sphere. It was fought in courts and offices as much as in newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, open letters, and even real-time feature film. 

This article reads L'Affaire as a "law and literature event," a real-time contest over meaning and performance in which novelists and essayists pleaded, lawyers turned authors, and legal performances spilled into the streets and back into a series of courts. Treating law and literature as a phenomenon, not only a method, unsettles the divide between "law in" and "law as" literature.

Through discourse analysis drawing on Bakhtin, Perelman, and Barthes, it examines Labori's carnivalesque pleading, Zola's address casting the jurors as protagonists, Lazare's forensic pamphlets, Proust's studied distance, Méliès's 1899 docudrama, and the anti-Dreyfusard Barrès' emphatic report from Dreyfus' Rennes trial, whose rhetoric of names, race, and a fictive "everyone" is a rhetorical masterpiece expressing the later "friend-enemy" foundation of Schmittian political theory. It traces how material, technological, and legal conditions shaped the construction of a mass public sphere and the ways law and legal discourse interacted within it, constructing audienceship and modes of expression and participation. 

"L'Affaire" means different things to different people. It is a story of shame and of the nascent political culture that would ravage Europe, but also of courage, struggle and redemption. The paper follows L'Affaire past Dreyfus's 1906 rehabilitation into a darker, second-generation sequel: the son of his accuser, du Paty de Clam, became Vichy's Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs, while Dreyfus's granddaughter, a Resistance member, perished in Auschwitz. Vichy and Dreyfus's 2025 posthumous promotion each offer a chapter in an ongoing legal story, or stories: the article argues that "L'Affaire" has become a plurality of stories told to and by fractured audiences to this very day.

--Dan Ernst

Bigot's "Histoire du droit administratif"

With a hat tip to ESCLH, we note the publication of Grégoire Bigot's Histoire du droit administratif (Presses Universitaires de France).

Souvent présenté comme une création de la Révolution et du XIXᵉ siècle, le droit administratif français plonge en réalité ses racines dans l’Ancien Régime. Bien avant 1789, la monarchie avait élaboré des mécanismes spécifiques pour encadrer l’action de ses agents, organiser la gestion des affaires publiques et régler les litiges impliquant l’administration. La Révolution ne crée pas ex nihilo un ordre nouveau : elle transforme, systématise et redéfinit des pratiques et des principes déjà anciens.

Ce manuel retrace l’histoire du droit administratif français dans la longue durée, depuis les institutions monarchiques jusqu’aux évolutions contemporaines. Il met en lumière la formation progressive des grands principes (légalité, responsabilité, service public) ainsi que l’affirmation d’un juge administratif autonome.

À travers l’étude des sources, des textes fondateurs et des grandes décisions jurisprudentielles, l’ouvrage montre comment s’est construit un droit original, au croisement des enjeux politiques, institutionnels et sociaux.

Clair et structuré, il offre aux étudiants les repères indispensables pour comprendre la genèse et les transformations d’un droit au cœur de l’État.

--Dan Ernst.  A machine-generated translation to English follows after the jump.

Bellis-Phan on Distraint in Early Modern France

Nga Bellis-Phan has posted A Legal Remedy Against Rent Arrears: Landlords’ Privilege on Furniture in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France, which appeared in Early Modern Debts, 1550-1770 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020):

The frequent default in rents payments was a real challenge in the rise of urban housing in Early Modern France. Unpaid landlords were protected by customary laws with a creditor's privilege which allowed them to pursue all movable furniture brought in by the tenants, including that which had been fraudulently removed to avoid seizure. This privilege was not necessary when tenants were eager to pay their debts but became useful to minimize economic loss when they disappeared without paying. Although the privilege was confirmed in legal litterature and case law, it faced challenges arising from the royal authority's struggles to organize an efficient procedure of execution on the disputed furniture and a clear hierarchy of privileged creditors.

--Dan Ernst 

Meyler and Setzer on the French Influence on Cardozo's Living Constitutionalism

Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School, and Elliot Setzer, Yale University, have posted Cardozo's Living Constitutionalism in Comparative Context, which appeared in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities:

Benjamin N. Cardozo (NYPL)

Although he served as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1932-1938, the source of Benjamin Cardozo’s preeminence has generally been his contributions to common law jurisprudence and his theories of common law judging. This essay argues that several of Cardozo’s unpublished writings suggest he also developed a significant constitutional theory in dialogue with continental—and particularly French—legal thinkers. Despite not appearing prominently in Cardozo’s published constitutional opinions, this theory influenced Chief Justice Hughes’s majority opinion in the case of Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), a case that not only stripped the Contract Clause of much of its adjudicatory power but also paved the way for the Supreme Court to undo the laissez-faire vision of the Lochner era.

Cardozo most clearly outlined his theory in an essay on “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power,” written shortly before his nomination to the Supreme Court, and in a draft concurrence in the Blaisdell case—one that he abandoned after Chief Justice Hughes modified his own opinion to incorporate several of Cardozo’s paragraphs. “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power” develops Cardozo’s views of judicial authority in America as refracted not only through Tocqueville’s account but also through that of contemporary French jurists, including the comparative law scholar Édouard Lambert. Reading his Blaisdell concurrence against that backdrop both highlights the transatlantic conversations about judicial review ongoing during the 1930s and the potential for a French influence on Cardozo’s understanding of rights.

--Dan Ernst 

Bracke's "Reproductive Rights in Modern France"

Maud Anne Bracke, University of Glasgow, has published Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford University Press):

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms.

This book breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors - including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments - Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally.

--Dan Ernst

Bracke's "Reproductive Rights in Modern France"

Maud Anne Bracke has published Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950–1980 (Oxford University Press):

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms.

This book breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors--including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments--Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally.

--Dan Ernst 

Fitzsimmons on the French Constitution of 1791

Michael P. Fitzsimmons has published The Forgotten Constitution: The Origins, Realization, and Legacy of the French Constitution of 1791 (Oxford University Press):

The French Constitution of 1791 has a major legacy that overturned many centuries of historical tradition but remains little known outside of France. It ratified the unprecedented transformation of a society based on monarchy-centered government and legal privilege to one based on a sovereign citizenry and legal equality. Its powerful impact served as the inspiration for the wave of constitution-making that engulfed Europe during the nineteenth century and expanded globally thereafter. Furthermore, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as its original preamble, the Constitution of 1791 is associated with the concept of human rights proclaimed by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Drawing on wide-ranging and long-overlooked manuscript sources, The Forgotten Constitution highlights the Constitution of 1791's underappreciated importance and influence in the world. The constitution was the product of a long-term crisis of the Bourbon monarchy grounded in fears of despotism. The idea of a constitution took hold during the 1780s as the means to stabilize the kingdom through a more equitable distribution of power while attempting to accommodate a king. By making a constitution a compact between monarch and people, by its written assurance of civic and natural rights, and by its assertion of legal equality as an essential element of political legitimacy, the Constitution of 1791 codified the principles of the French Revolution. This book shows how it was the French constitutional tradition, inspired by the Constitution of 1791, that drove the Western constitutional ideal, especially in the revolutions of 1848.

--Dan Ernst

NCC Town Halls Announced

The National Constitution Center has announced several interesting online and in-person Town Halls, including:
    
The Future of Birthright Citizenship: A Constitutional Debate, on Thursday, April 24 at Noon ET

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship has reignited debates over the 14th Amendment and the meaning of citizenship in America. Join legal experts Amanda Frost of the University of Virginia School of Law, Kurt Lash of the University of Richmond School of Law, Ilan Wurman of the University of Minnesota Law School, and John Yoo of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law as they analyze the legal challenges surrounding birthright citizenship, explore the constitutional and historical arguments on all sides of this debate, and discuss its broader implications for immigration. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates. 

Democracy in France and America With Justice Stephen Breyer and Christiane Taubira, on Thursday, May 15 at 6:30 p.m. ET

The Honorable Stephen G. Breyer, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (ret.) and National Constitution Center honorary co-chair, joins Christiane Taubira, former French justice minister, for a conversation on democracy, the rule of law, and constitutional traditions from French and American perspectives. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates. 

Executive Authority: Presidential Power From America’s Founding to Today, on Tuesday, June 3 at Noon ET

Legal scholars Gillian Metzger of Columbia Law School and Saikrishna Prakash of the University of Virginia School of Law examine the founders’ vision for the presidency, how presidential power has changed over time, and the key constitutional debates that have shaped the modern presidency. The discussion will also explore how the Trump presidency fits within this historical context and what it means for the future of presidential power. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.

The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, on Monday, June 23 at 6:30 p.m. ET

This program is presented in partnership with the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute and the Organization of American Historians.  Akhil Reed Amar and David Blight of Yale University join National Constitution Center President Jeffrey Rosen for a sweeping conversation about the Constitution and the debates that have shaped America—from the founding era to today. They’ll examine transformative moments in American history and landmark Supreme Court decisions.

--Dan Ernst

Stone Peters's "Staging Witchcraft Before the Law"

Julie Stone Peters, Columbia University, has published Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials (Cambridge University Press) in print and open access online via Cambridge Core.

While the judicial machinery of early modern witch-hunting could work with terrifying swiftness, skepticism and evidentiary barriers often made conviction difficult. Seeking proof strong enough to overcome skepticism, judges and accusers turned to performance, staging 'acts of Sorcery and Witch-craft manifest to sense.' Looking at an array of demonological treatises, pamphlets, documents, and images, this Element shows that such staging answered to specific doctrines of proof: catching the criminal 'in the acte'; establishing 'notoriety of the fact'; producing 'violent presumptions' of guilt. But performance sometimes overflowed the demands of doctrine, behaving in unpredictable ways. A detailed examination of two cases – the 1591 case of the French witch-demoniac Françoise Fontaine and the 1593 case of John Samuel of Warboys –suggests the manifold, multilayered ways that evidentiary staging could signify – as it can still in that conjuring practice we call law.

--Dan Ernst.  Update: Link fixed.  H/t CEP

CFP: Hugo and the Law

“Hugo and the Law,” 8 May 2025, Maastricht University Faculty of Law, Maastricht, The Netherlands

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Actes et Paroles, the collection of Victor Hugo’s political speeches, the UM Law and Popular Culture Research Network organizes a Workshop on 8 May 2025 dedicated to the author’s conceptualization of several legal issues. The Workshop will take place at the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University (The Netherlands), with a fully in-person program.

Goal and Background of the Workshop.  In his several works, Victor Hugo has often delved into profound perspectives into the relationship between humanity and the law. Hugo was not merely a renowned novelist but a visionary thinker who engaged with multiple societal issues, including the intricacies of the legal system, the condition of women, the rise of socialism, and the future of Europe. On the 150th anniversary of the publication of Actes et Paroles – which perfectly captures such themes– this Workshop aims to examine Hugo’s conception of the law.

Hugo’s conception of the law is multifaceted, encompassing both its theoretical foundations and its practical implications. His writings often reflect a deep concern for the struggle for power and the ethical responsibilities of institutions. Through an examination of Hugo’s literary corpus, the Workshop will explore how his books’ characters grapple with the complexities of law and its impact on individuals and society. One key aspect of the Workshop is Hugo’s emphasis on the moral dimension of the law. His characters navigate questions of morality, duty, and conscience by their interactions with legal systems. At the same time, the Workshop will address Hugo’s critique of the legal machinery, shedding light on his observations regarding the potential for injustice and the abuse of power. Furthermore, this Workshop will investigate the historical context in which Hugo lived and wrote, considering the political and social upheavals that influenced his views on the law. From the aftermath of the French Revolution to the establishment of the Second French Republic, through the rise and fall of the Empire of Napoleon III, until the experience of the Commune, Hugo’s observations of the evolving legal landscape are integral to understanding his perspective on the nature of power, the State and the foundations of Europe, and the condition of women.

By examining the philosophical, historical, and theoretical underpinnings and practical implications of Hugo’s thoughts on law, the Workshop aims to illuminate the enduring relevance of his insights and their potential to inspire contemporary discussions on law and justice.

Abstract Submissions.  The “Hugo and the Law” Workshop will feature panel sessions. Submissions should relate to the overarching theme of the Workshop.

Submissions should indicate the title of the contribution, an abstract (max. 400 words), and the contact information and a short biography of the speaker (max. 150 words). Fully written papers are not required. We encourage submissions in English, and co-authored papers will be also considered.

Who Can Participate in this Workshop?  The “Hugo and the Law” Workshop is not restricted to lawyers. We welcome proposals that offer multi-disciplinary perspectives from various areas of law (including civil, criminal, tax, and labor law), as well as from scholars in e.g. the humanities and other social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science, sociology) with an interest in the Workshop’s theme. We welcome submissions from senior and junior scholars (including doctoral students) and interested practitioners.

How and When to Submit?  Send your submission to agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl.  The Call for Papers closes on 22 December 2024. Shortly after that, the authors will be informed whether their papers are selected for a presentation during the Workshop.

Conference Organizing Committee.  Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact a member of the Workshop Organizing Committee:

Eline Couperus(e.couperus@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Agustín Parise (agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Franco Peirone (franco.peirone@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Livia Solaro (l.solaro@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Arthur Willemse (arthur.willemse@maastrichtuniversity.nl)

Hamilton, "A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion"

A belated notice that Oxford University Press has published A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion (2023), by Tom Hamilton (Durham University). A description from the Press:

Paris, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'?

A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion is a dramatic account of the impact of the troubles on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical studies.

Tom Hamilton shows how this trial contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in postwar France. People throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers' illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection.

More information is available here. An interview with the author is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• The Ius Commune Podcast has released on Spotify the first of a two-part series on French Medieval Law with Ada Kuskowski, University of Pennsylvania.
  

• Congratulations to Tomiko Brown-Nagin upon her receipt of the 2023 the Order of the Coif award for Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Harvard Law Today).
  

• The National Constitution Center has been busy.  A recording of From Spies to Leakers: The History of the Espionage Act, with Heidi Kitrosser and Sam Lebovic, is now available.  On Monday, December 11, at 7 PM, it will host, free and online, The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, a discussion with Robert Post, the author of the latest volume in the the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court.  And on Wednesday, December 13, at 12:00 pm EST, it will host the discussion, also free and online, Loyalists vs. Patriots and the American Revolution, with Joyce Lee Malcolm and Eli Merritt.
  

• The Historical Society for the New York Courts has posted a recording of its webinar, The Struggle for Ratification: New York's Role in Shaping the U.S. Constitition.  It was Moderated by the Honorable Albert M. Rosenblatt, with John P. Kaminski, Michael J. Klarman, Richard Leffler, and Jack Rakove.
  

• Lee Wilson leads the new “legal history emphasis area” in the Department of History and Geography’s at Clemson University (Clemson News).
  

• Here is the historians' amicus brief in the free speech case, Moody v. NetChoice, in the U.S. Supreme Court.
  

• ICYMI: Saul Cornell on How the Supreme Court's Conservatives Can Solve Their Guns Dilemma Without Losing Face (Slate).  Unraveling Ulysses S. Grant’s Complex Relationship With Slavery (Smithsonian).  A six-episode, "true  crimes" podcast on the trial of Levi Weeks for the murder of Emma Sands in 1800.  (“I’m standing in this clothing store,” said the creator Allison Flom, and “see people around trying on sweaters and slacks, and mannequins everywhere, wanting to just scream, like, 'Someone was killed here!'”) (CBS News)
  

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

Cracow Studies of Constitutional and Legal History

We're grateful to Maksymilian Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London, for drawing our attention to the online repository of papers, Cracow Studies of Constitutional and Legal History?  Those of us who lack Polish might still be interested in papers posted there in English, including James Gordley's Betrayal of the French Civil Code: A Tragedy in Three Acts and Professor Del Mar’s Animating the Past: History-Making, Memory-Making, Law-Making:

This paper examines certain history-making and memory-making practices that allow us to see how the past may be animated. These practices are: first, the Ancient Greek sophistic arts, as exemplified by Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, and as revived, in dialogue form, in Renaissance humanism; and second, Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, and medieval memory arts, with particular attention to the composite generative imagery of those arts. Animating the past – as these practices of history-making and memory-making do – is of great epistemic and political value to communities: it enables acts of argument and judgement, and, more generally, it is vital for vibrant democracies. The paper signals, albeit only briefly, how these practices are also intertwined with legal history, and in particular the history of legal reasoning, suggesting some ways forward, in future work, for investigating the entangled histories of history-making, memory-making, and law-making.

--Dan Ernst

Kuskowski, "Vernacular Law Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France"

 The Studies in Legal History Series at Cambridge University Press has released by Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France, by Ada Maria Kuskowski (University of Pennsylvania). A description from the Press:

Custom was fundamental to medieval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the medieval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualized in writing. Based on French lawbooks known as coutumiers, Ada Maria Kuskowski traces the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.

Advance praise:

"This book is a marvel, mixing erudition and imagination. Describing the cultural upheaval of the writing of custom, Ada Kuskowski opens new doors to the understanding of medieval law." -- James Q. Whitman, 

"By studying the first coutumiers as a coherent whole, with a focus on language and manuscripts and an eye toward recent scholarship in legal history generally, Kuskowski defines a subject every bit as complex, interesting, and influential as the medieval Roman and canon laws that overshadow it in the historiography." -- Adam Kosto

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Grisel's "Limits of Private Governance"

Florian Grisel, Associate Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, has published The Limits of Private Governance: Norms and Rules in a Mediterranean Fishery (Bloomsbury):

Is there a future for the law? In this book, Florian Grisel addresses one of the most fascinating questions raised by social scientists in the past few decades. Since the 1980s, socio-legal scholars have argued that governance based on social norms (or “private governance”) can offer an alternative to regulation by the law. On this account, private governance could be socially efficient and even optimal compared with other modes of governance.

The Limits of Private Governance supplements this optimistic analysis of private governance by assessing the long-term evolution of a private order in the fishery of Marseille. In the last eight centuries, the fishers of Marseille have regulated their community without apparent means of legal support from the French state. In the early 15th century, they even created an organisation called the Prud'homie de Pêche in order to regulate their fishery.

Based on archival evidence, interviews and ethnographic data, Grisel examines the evolution of the Prud'homie de Pêche and argues that the strong social norms in which it is embedded are not only powerful tools of governance, but also forces of inertia that have constrained its regulatory action.

The lessons drawn from this book will appeal to academics, policy-makers and members of the general public who have an interest in the governance of our modern societies.

–Dan Ernst

Mack on CRT and the French

Kenneth W. Mack, Harvard Law School, has posted Critical Race Theory and Scholarly Analyses of Race in France:

This preface to a special issue on Race and the Law of La Revue des Droits de l'Homme, presents a genealogy of Critical Race Theory, framed in light of the tendency in France to avoid fulsome scholarly discussions of racial identity, racial inequality and racial attitudes. The preface also frames its genealogy in light of political attacks on CRT that have been launched both in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Its genealogy frames the origins of CRT in the context of increased scholarly interest in race as a social construction during the 1980s and 1990s, and in the additional context of 1970s, 80s, and 90s scholarship that questioned universalizing and colorblind legal regimes of nations that purported to guarantee equality without regard to race. It also locates CRT within the larger universe of Critical Theory, including Critical Legal Studies, and examines concepts such as social construction, intersectionality, whiteness, structural racism and identity performance. 

--Dan Ernst

2021 Boucher Prize to Wood

Laurie Wood (Florida State University) has won the 2021 Boucher Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society for her book, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire, published by Yale University Press in 2020. 

Here's the citation: 

Laurie M. Wood’s Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire is the winner of the 2020 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher prize. Archipelago of Justice offers a major contribution to an emerging scholarship seeking to integrate the histories of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires in order to better understand how the early modern French empire operated as a whole. Wood achieves this remarkable accomplishment through her focus on the conseils. In the early modern French empire, the conseils—regional law courts—bound a far-flung and diverse imperial system together through a network of institutions, people, and practices. In Archipelago of Justice, Wood focuses our attention across the entire system of these crucial legal institutions (the administrative equivalent of the parlements of metropolitan France), along with the people who staffed them and the subjects who petitioned them, to show how they created power, order, and the very nature of French colonialism. Based on astonishing archival tenacity, the book is beautifully written through powerful case studies and stories that bring to life both the powerful and the marginalized in vivid detail. Its most powerful and creative intervention is surely at the level of framing. Approaching the conseil and its agents as a whole, Wood navigates from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, helping us see these frequently separate worlds together, as they were legally bound together in the early modern era through the fascinating history of the conseil.

Professor Wood will be guest blogging at the LHB in the future. In the meantime: many congratulations!

--Mitra Sharafi 

A French-Brazilian Legal History Webinar Series

[We have the following announcement of the online workshop series, French-Brazilian Chair of Legal History 2021 organized by José Reinaldo de Lima Lopes (University of São Paulo) and Nader Hakim (University of Bordeaux).  DRE.]

 

Details after the jump.

A Discussion of "The Neo-Liberal Republic"

On Monday, February 22, at 1:15 PM EST, Cornell University is sponsoring a discussion of Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France’s The Neoliberal Republic: Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France, which appears in Cornell University Press’s Corpus Juris book series, edited by Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell University.  The discussants are Samuel Moyn, Yale University/Yale Law School, Mitchel Lasser, Cornell Law School, and Katharina Pistor, Columbia Law School.  Antoine Vauchez, Universite Paris 1–Sorbonne, will respond.  Professor Anker will moderate.  Register here.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t:  Thomas Perroud

Cahiers Jean Moulin

We are pleased to learn of the French on-line journal Cahiers Jean Moulin, which is “mainly dedicated to legal history, with connections to positive law and social sciences” and edited by Guillaume Richard, professor of legal history and institutions at the University of Paris, and Chrystelle Gazeau, an associate professor of legal history at Lyon III University.  The latest issue is here.