Weekend Roundup

• 
  ASLH President Mitra Sharafi discusses Fear of the False, "her new book about colonial South Asia's critical role in the development of forensic science" on Law in Action, the podcast of the University of Wisconsin Law School.   

• From the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History: John Fea (Messiah University) on "Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students." 

• Another memorial to the late Gordon Wood, via History News Network x Bunk History. 

• "The History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) has released 'The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,' the first comprehensive report documenting and analyzing the Trump administration’s sweeping, coordinated effort since January 2025 to reshape how the American past is recorded, preserved, and shared with the public" (OAH).

• Steven Hahn reviews Born Equal: The Remaking of America’s Constitution, 1840–1920
  by Akhil Reed Amar (The Nation). 

• Via H-Disability: a memorial to Richard K. Scotch, author of multiple landmark histories of disability law and policy. 

• A call for papers for a conference on the Legal History of Tamilnadu.  Deadline for abstracts: June 15.  

• The conference "Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution" will take place at UMass Amherst from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 12, 2026 (H-Law).

• "Students from Stanford Law School’s Center for Racial Justice recently helped bring Wong [Kim Ark]’s story to life through a Bay Area public-history project that joins law, art, and community memory" (Stanford Lawyer).  

• U.S. Representative French Hill has introduced a bill to require the Department of the Interior to study the preservation and incorporation into the National Park System of the home of Scipio Jones (QQ) 

• A recording of the webinar, Equality and Exclusion: Israel's Constitutional Order and Its Palestinian-Arab Minority (1948–2025), with Ofra Bloch, moderated by Jon D. Michaels (UCLA).

•  ICYMI: Eric Segall asks that we "Please Stop Calling the Roberts Court Justices Originalists" (Dorf of Law). Jamelle Bouie discusses the so-called "Colored Conventions" of the nineteenth century in arguing that "The Supreme Court Doesn’t Own the Constitution" (NYT).

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

The Fine Script: Legal Marginalia, 1100-1700

We have word of The Fine Script, a conference exploring comparative approaches to legal marginalia circulating in Europe and the Middle East between 1100 and 1700, will be held on Monday, August 31 and Tuesday, September 1, from 10 AM-3:30 PM.  The conference will" connect the present with the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period—placing Ireland within Europe, and Europe in its relationship with the Middle East and the Byzantine Sphere."  It can be attended in-person in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais or online (the zoom link will be circulated via email prior to the event).

--Dan Ernst.  Schedule after the jump. 

Cheta's "How Commerce Became Legal"

Omar Youssef Cheta, Syracuse University, has published How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press):

When Egypt's markets opened to private capital in the 1840s, a new infrastructure of commercial laws and institutions emerged. Egypt became the site of profound legal experimentation, and the resulting commercial sphere reflected the political contestations among the governors of Egypt, European consulates, Ottoman rulers, and a growing number of private entrepreneurs, both foreign and local. How Commerce Became Legal explores the legal and business practices that resulted from this fusion of Ottoman, French, and Islamic legal concepts and governed commerce in Egypt.

Focusing on the decades between the formalization of Cairo's practical autonomy within the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s and its incorporation into the British Empire in the 1880s, Omar Cheta considers how modern laws redefined the commercial sphere, shaping a mode of market governance that would persist for decades to come. He highlights the demarcation of a new law-defined commercial realm separate from the land regime and from civil or family-centered exchanges, and reconstructs these changes through both legal codes and state orders, as well as individual merchant voices preserved in court documents. As this book documents both individual experiences and structural explanations, it offers a rare perspective on the scope and reach of market governance over the mid nineteenth century, revealing changes simultaneously from within and without state institutions.

--Dan Ernst 

ASLH's Virtual New Books Series

[Here's another reason to join the American Society for Legal History: Members can virtually participate in this series on great new books in the field.  DRE]

Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series, 2025-2026 

All sessions will be on Zoom Wednesdays from 6:00-7:00 pm (Central Time).  We will send an email two weeks in advance of each event.  You must RSVP to receive the zoom link.  RSVP messages will be sent to membership approximately 1 week before the event.  ASLH Members can watch videos of previous events on our members page
 
September 17, 2025 – Esther Liberman Cuenca, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Sara M. Butler
 
October 22, 2025 – Sonia Gomez, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (NYU Press, 2024) & Kathryn Schumaker, Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South (Basic Books, 2025)
 
December 10, 2025 – Marla A. Ramírez, Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Kevin R. Johnson
 
January 21, 2026 – Omar Youssef Cheta, How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Nurfadzilah Yahaya
 
February 25, 2026 – Tadashi Ishikawa, Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Jisoo M. Kim
 
March 25, 2026 – Serena Mayeri, Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Yale University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Margot Canaday
 
April 15, 2026 – Kevin Arlyck, The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789–1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Alison LaCroix

Shechter on the 1964 Constitutions of Egypt, Iraq and Syria

Relli Shechter, Ben-Gurion University, has published, open access, Legislating the Progressive Arab Society: State Authority and Social Rights in the 1964 Interim Constitutions of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, in Law and History Review:

This article examines the 1964 interim constitutions of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria as markers of a two-decade-long shift in Arab constitutional design—moving from individual liberal rights toward a new regional social contract centered on social rights. The vision of a progressive society rested on two principles of collective welfare: solidarity—expressed through constitutional commitments to collective well-being—and social justice, which aimed to ensure equality and better living standards for all. Contrary to common interpretations, these documents were not simply authoritarian bargains or tools for consolidating power. Rather, the interim constitutions were social bargains that reflected legislative social engineering during decolonization and guided both citizens and the state in building a new society. Despite the intense regional rivalries, these constitutions reflected a shared commitment to socioeconomic transformation that transcended political divides. The analysis of these constitutions shows that the difficulties in their execution extended beyond future limitations of political will or economic resources. Rather, they contained inherent legal and ideological tensions about the structure and direction of the progressive society—particularly in their approach to fundamental questions of social organization. These tensions emerged in the complex relationship between family and individual rights, the delicate balance between private and collective ownership, and the role of state patriarchy in providing social welfare.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Binghamton University's notice of Nathanael Andrade's forthcoming Killing the Messiah: The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth (Oxford University Press).
  

• The National Constitution Center will hold a Town Hall on the Evolution of the Presidential Pardon from Jefferson to Trump on Thursday, March 27, from 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm with Brian Kalt, Michigan State College of Law, and Jeffrey Toobin.  Jeffrey Rosen will moderate.
  

• 
  Lawbook Exchange's January 2025 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History books, including the one pictured below right. 
  

• Two book events will be live at and streamed from the FDR Library: Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR's 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal with David Pietrusza on January 15, 2025, at  2pm ET, and Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany with Rebecca Brenner Graham on January 27, 2025, at 2pm ET.   
  

• CFP: "The Yale Whitney Humanities Center Working Group 'Cultural Foundations of Law and Public Administration' plans on publishing an edited volume on Cultures of Good Legislation/Good Administration that will address different cultural contexts (West/Global South/Asia). A hybrid symposium at Yale is also intended to foster the dialogue between the contributors."  H-Law.

• ICYMI, American Expansionist Edition: Why Thomas Jefferson Faced Opposition to the Louisiana Purchase (History Channel).  How the U.S. could in fact make Canada an American territory (The Conversation).

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

CFP: Law, colonialism and gender in the Muslim world

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

Law, colonialism and gender in the Muslim world

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

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

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

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

Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to:

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

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

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

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

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

Postdoc on Local Law under Rome

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The [European Research Council] project Local Law under Rome is offering a number of Postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem beginning October 2024, or as soon as possible thereafter. Scholars who have received their Ph.D. after October 1st 2019 or will submit their Ph.D. no later the beginning of the Postdoctoral period are eligible to apply.

The successful candidate will be a part of a unique interdisciplinary team which will be engaged in comparative study of local legal cultures within their Roman imperial context. Together we seek to enhance the understanding of provincial legalism in its multiple manifestations.  

We are seeking experts in one (or more) of the following legal traditions, who are committed to a contextual and historical analysis of legal materials: (1) Early rabbinic law (2) Legal papyrology (3) Roman law in the provinces, or (4) Greek law. We also welcome applications by scholars of (5) Anthropology of Law who are interested in these materials.

The appointed fellow is expected to work closely with other team members. S/he will participate in the project’s ongoing activities and is expected to contribute to its collaborative outputs, produce project-related publications and provide materials for the comparative database.    

The scholarship will be granted for a maximum of 3 years. (subject to review at the end of each year). The fellow will receive a monthly stipend of approximately 11,000 NIS. Additional funding for travel will be available following approval. The fellow will have an office at the Mount Scopus Campus in Jerusalem and is expected to be present there regularly. Knowledge of Hebrew is not required.

Please submit the following documents (in one PDF file) to the e-mail address below:

• Introduction
• Letter describing your academic experience and motivation for participating in the project (2-3 pages)
• Curriculum vitae
• Abstract of the PhD dissertation
• Writing Sample: dissertation chapter or a paper that has been published or accepted for publication (no more than 30 pages)

In addition, please arrange for two Reference Letters to be sent directly.

We encourage potential applicants to contact us for additional information on the project, the
application procedure, The Hebrew University and life in Jerusalem.  Applications will be Reviewed beginning March 15, 2024.

Prof. Yair Furstenberg, Talmud Department, Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.  yair.furstenberg@mail.huji.ac.il

MPI-TAU Transnational Legal History Workshop

[We have the schedule for the Transnational Legal History Workshop, sponsored by the Max Planck Institute and Tel Aviv University.  DRE]

The Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at The Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory will continue the joint MPI-TAU Transnational Legal History Workshop in the Fall Semester 2023/2024.

The workshop will meet from 19:00-20:30 (Frankfurt time) and 20:00-21:30 (Tel Aviv time). This year's organizers and moderators are Leora Bilsky (TAU), Thomas Duve (MPI), Rachel Friedman (TAU), David Schorr (TAU), and Stefan Vogenauer (MPI).

Sessions will be conducted on Zoom and will be based on pre-circulated papers. The papers will be sent to each participant one week in advance.

Registration for participation is required: mpitauwkshp@gmail.com

6 December                Assaf Likhovski (TAU)

Studying Ancient Constitutional Law in Colonial India and Mandatory Palestine

13 December              Jan-Henrik Meyer (MPILHLT)

European Community Environmental Law in the 1970s: Combatting Water Pollution

20 December              Noga Morag-Levine (Michigan State University)

England’s Missing Boards of Health: The Medieval Beginnings of an Anglo-Continental Divergence

10 January                  Alon Jasper (TAU)

Transforming a Polity into an Economy: The Five Nations and the Railroads, 1855-1894

17 January                  Raquel Sirotti (MPILHLT)

State-like powers? Charter Companies and the production of knowledge of normativity in Mozambique (1891-1942)

24 January                  Egas Moniz Bandeira (FAU)

Changing Legal Professions in China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire in the long 19th century: Towards a Historical Comparison

31 January                  Aparna Balachandran (Delhi University)

Religion, Law and Urban Governance: Subaltern Christians as Legal Subjects in Early Colonial South India

7 February                  Cristiano Paixão (University of Brasília)

Transnational legal mobilization: repressive structures and networks of resistance in S. American dictatorships (1964-1988)

14 February                Julia Moses (University of Sheffield)

Harmonizing the Family? International Law, Cultural Norms and Marriage at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

21 February                Sarina Kuersteiner (Union College)

Whatever God Gives: Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Rizq and Latin Resicum in Commercial Vocabulary, 1154-1164 CE

AJLH 63:2

The American Journal of Legal History has published its 63:2 (June 2023) issue.  It is devoted to the symposium "Status in Ancient and Medieval Law."

Status in Ancient and Medieval Law: Introduction
Timothy Lubin

Empire, Status, and the Law
Clifford Ando

Metics and Freedmen: Conflicts of Social and Juridical Status in the Classical and Hellenistic Greek World
Elizabeth A Meyer

Religious Endowments in Ancient India and the Institutionalization of Brahmin Caste Status
Timothy Lubin

Belief as Status: Premodern Islamic Law, Duties, and the Martyr Conundrum
Adnan A Zulfiqar

The Matter of Personae in Medieval Italy
Melissa Vise

‘Our Practice Has a Superiority:’ Debt Enforcement, Bills of Exchange, and Credit in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow
Hunter Harris

Book Reviews

Eric L Muller, Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America’s World War II Concentration Camps
Gabriel J Chin

Brent Salter, Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951
Oren Bracha

 --Dan Ernst

Penna and Meijering's "Sourcebook on Byzantine Law"

Daphne Penna and and Roos Meijering have published A Sourcebook on Byzantine Law: Illustrating Byzantine Law through the Sources (Brill).  

This is the first book in English providing a wide range of Byzantine legal sources. In six chapters, this book explains and illustrates Byzantine law through a selection of fundamental Byzantine legal sources, beginning with the sources before the time of Justinian, and extending up to AD 1453.

For all sources English translations are provided next to the original Greek (and Latin) text. In some cases, tables or other features are included that help further elucidate the source and illustrate its nature. The volume offers a clear yet detailed primer to Byzantine law, its sources, and its significance.

--Dan Ernst

Rabb on Punishment in Medieval Islamic Law

Intisar A. Rabb, Harvard Law School, has posted Enforcement and Punishment in Medieval Islamic Law, which is forthcoming in Cultural History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age, ed. Sarah McDougall and Karl Shoemaker (Bloomsbury 2022):

The striking thing about medieval Islamic criminal law is that it featured a jurisprudence of doubt and lenity facing off against political practices of control and severity. Principles of Islamic criminal law placed interpretive authority in the group of scholar-jurists who gained expertise to read divine texts to say what the Law is (sharīʿa). Practices of Islamic criminal law authorized executive authorities—caliphs, sultans, and their agents—power over law enforcement (siyāsa). Principles informed the task of expert jurists and state-appointed judges in defining legitimate punishment derived from Islam’s foundational texts. Practices informed the wide array of severe punishment that law enforcement officials meted out regularly, with a justification that it was “in the public interest” (maṣlaḥa). Principles often justified limited punishment by means of “deterrence” (zajr) and “spiritual rehabilitation” (kaffāra). Practices often justified unrestrained punishment as a means of maintaining law and order, social control, or might as right. The principles of punishment, practices of punishment, and justifications for punishment typically operated in siloes separated by a wide plain. This chapter explores the ground where they met.

Examining both principles and practices of medieval Islamic criminal law can shed light on some of the most pressing questions of old criminal law (Islamic and otherwise): What is the extent of convergence or divergence between Islam’s principles and practices? How, from juristic or social-political accounts of criminal justice, can we explain the types of punishments we see on the books and in the world as we know it?

To answer these questions, I will explore the principles-practices divergence by first examining the legal sources. Then I will review them alongside narratives of social-political practices. For the legal principles, I draw on previous work outlining medieval Islamic criminal law and the expansive role of doubt in substantive law and in criminal procedure. To explore the practices, I canvas Maḥmūd Shaljī’s seven-volume Encyclopedia of Punishment (MMawsūʿat al-ʿadhāb), in which he collects all mentions of “punishment” from a well-known set of historical chronicles and other literary sources from the eighth century onward. I supplement his sources with the less-covered Seljuq, Mamlūk, and Ottoman-era accounts of punishment that Christian Lange (2012), Carl Petry (2008), and others have collected in their studies. By combining views of criminal law from the pens of medieval jurists together with accounts of contemporaneous acts reporting on their less verbose executive counterparts, I offer depictions of how each side tended to approach crime and punishment.

--Dan Ernst

Ablavsky Wins LSA's Hurst Prize

Congratulations to Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford Law School, for winning the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize of the Law and Society Association “for this year’s best sociolegal history book. Ablavsky’s book, Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford University Press, 2021), explains the growth of federal authority in the first two U.S. federal territories—the Northwest and Southwest. While the Washington administration, Congress, federal officials, land office administrators and other federal bureaucrats sought to assert their vision of federal power over the West, the land they sought to govern and transform was far from empty. His book addresses the underlying questions of what federal power is and who its architects are. The book further identifies how the federal government can be studied—not as a monolith, but as the outcome of many different struggles playing out at grass-roots levels.”

We hear that Nada Moumtaz, University of Toronto, received Honorable Mention for God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021).

--Dan Ernst

Pirie's "Rule of Laws"

Fernanda Pirie, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford, has published The Rule of Laws: A 4000-Year Quest to Order the World (Basic Books):

Almost without exception, the laws enforced throughout the world today are modelled on systems developed in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For two hundred years, European colonisers exported their laws everywhere they could. But in many places they weren't filling a void: again and again, they displaced local traditions that were already ancient when Vasco Da Gama first made landfall in India. Even the Romans, first framers of the European tradition, were inspired by earlier precedents.  

Where, then, did it all begin? And what sophisticated approaches to justice have been lost in the drive for uniformity? In The Rule of Laws, anthropologist Fernanda Pirie traces the development of the world's great legal systems - Chinese, Indian, Roman, and Islamic. But she also shows how common people-tribal assemblies, merchants, farmers-have called on laws to define their communities, regulate trade, and resist outsiders. The variety of the world's laws, Pirie reveals, has long been almost as great as the variety of its societies. Although legal principles originating in Western Europe now seem to dominate the globe, a more complicated legal reality persists on the ground, one that is evident everywhere from the influence of Islamic law across the Middle East, to the persistence of traditional codes among nomadic Tibetan yak herders, to the unwritten rules of gangs worldwide.

At the heart of this story is a persistent paradox. Rulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But they have also offered ordinary people a way to resist authority and to express their diverse visions for a better world. 

--Dan Ernst

Loeffler on the UDHR, the Genocide Convention, and the 1948 Israeli-Arab War

James Loeffler, University of Virginia, has published Three days in December: Jewish human rights between the United Nations and the middle east in 1948, in the Journal of Global History (2021), 1–19:

The twin birth of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Yet historians have largely ignored how these legal projects intersected with that year’s war in Israel/Palestine. In this article, I push these two stories back into a single frame by examining the year-long efforts of one early human rights organization, the World Jewish Congress, to advance rights-claims on behalf of Middle Eastern Jewish communities imperiled by the regional repercussions of the war. The WJC’s record of activities affords us a direct window into contemporaneous activist understandings of the ties between the Holocaust and the Nakba, human rights and genocide, and international law and politics. More broadly, it reveals the intrinsic limits of early human rights advocacy in an emerging global system exclusively structured around nation states.

–Dan Ernst

Cetin on Turkey's First Woman Lawyer

Sevgi Çetin has posted Trailblazers III: Süreyya Agaoglu the First Woman Lawyer of Turkey:

In 1927, Süreyya Agaoglu became the first woman lawyer of Turkey. She had to force the doors of the Law School of the ancient Ottoman Empire. Because in its religious and tradition-based court system and laws, there was no place for a woman lawyer. According to the Mecelle, (the Ottoman civil and procedural code) ''In civil cases, evidence is only valid when given by two males, or one male and two females, but in places where males cannot be possessed of the necessary information, the evidence of females alone will be accepted in respect of the property.'' In a legal system, women were not excepted as witnesses, it would be impossible to give them the authority of a lawyer. While she was a student at the university, the old Ottoman Empire with its laws and institutions withdrawn from the stage of history. The young Republic of Turkey opened the doors of the legal profession to women. Agaoglu and her friends led the way, and today women consist the half of lawyers

--Dan Ernst

Muchlinski on property rights in Palestine

David Muchlinski (Georgia Tech) has published the following article: "Swords and Plowshares: Property Rights, Collective Action, and Nonstate Governance in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1920-1948," American Political Science Review (published online on 28 June 2021). Here's the abstract: 

Developing states lacking a monopoly over the use of force are commonly seen as having failed to live up to the ideal Weberian sovereign type. Yet rather than being a calling card of anarchy, the devolution of important state functions to subnational actors is a rational strategy for developing states to effectively provide important public goods. The case study of the Jewish Community of Palestine demonstrates one instance where subnational communities provided public goods. This study highlights the causal effect of property rights within institutions to drive behavior consistent with the provision of public and private goods. Analyzing temporal and institutional variation across two agricultural communities demonstrates a unique strategy of subnational governance and public goods provision in a developing state. Devolution of public goods provision to subnational actors may be an alternative strategy of governance for developing states that are not yet able to effectively provide important public goods.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Quadri on Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity

Oxford University Press has published Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity (Mar. 2021), by Junaid Quadri (University of Illinois at Chicago). A description from the Press: 

Transformations of Tradition probes how the encounter with colonial modernity conditioned Islamic jurists' conceptualizations of the shari'a. Departing from the tendency to focus on reformist-minded thinkers and politically charged issues, Junaid Quadri directs his attention towards the overlooked jurisprudential writings of Muhammad Bakhit al-Muti-i (1854-1935), Mufti of Egypt and a frequent critic of the famed reformists Muhammad 'Abduh and Rashid Rida. There, he locates a remarkable series of foundational intellectual shifts. Offering a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in the history of Islamic thought, Quadri tracks how Bakhit reworks the relationship of the shari'a to categories of understanding as fundamental as history and authority, science and technology, and religion and the secular, thereby upending the very ground upon which Islamic law had until then functioned. Through close readings of complex legal texts and mining of oft-neglected archives, this carefully researched study situates its argument in both the contested scholarly world of a quickly-changing Cairo, and the transregional school of Hanafi law as represented by jurists writing in Kazan, Lucknow, and Baghdad. Examining Islamic jurisprudential discourse in the colonial moment, Transformations of Tradition uncovers a shari'a that is neither a medieval holdover nor merely a pragmatic concession to the demands of a new world, but rather deeply entangled with the epistemological commitments of colonial modernity.

More information is available here. You can listen to an interview with the author here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Monnickendam on Jewish law and early Christian identity

Yifat Monnickendam (Tel-Aviv University) has published Jewish Law and Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, and Infidelity in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

Ephrem, one of the earliest Syriac Christian writers, lived on the eastern outskirtsof the Roman Empire during the fourth century. Although he wrote polemical works against Jews and pagans, and identified with post-Nicene Christianity, his writings are also replete with parallels with Jewish traditions and he is the leading figure in an ongoing debate about the Jewish character of Syriac Christianity. This book focuses on early ideas about betrothal, marriage, and sexual relations, including their theological and legal implications, and positions Ephrem at a precise intersection between his Semitic origin and his Christian commitment. Alongside his adoption of customs and legal stances drawn from his Greco-Roman and Christian surroundings, Ephrem sometimes reveals unique legal concepts which are closer to early Palestinian, sectarian positions than to the Roman or Jewish worlds. The book therefore explains naturalistic legal thought in Christian literature and sheds light on the rise of Syriac Christianity.

Here's the chapter line-up:

Introduction

1. Creating a primary bond: what is betrothal?

2. During betrothal: is premarital cohabitation an option?

3. Creating a marital bond: can rape determine marital status?

4. Breaking a marital bond: what do fornication and adultery do?

5. Discussion and conclusions.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Robert B. Stevens (UCSC)
  

  Robert Bocking Stevens, the author of the indispensable Law Schools: Legal Education in America: 1850-1960 (1983), has died.  The UC Santa Cruz notice is here.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has updated its Demography of Article III Judges, 1789-2020.
  

• Over at Balkinization, a symposium is underway on former LHB Guest Blogger Mary Ziegler's  Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present (2020), including Mark Graber’s contribution, Constitutional Trench Warfare over Abortion. 
  

• On February 23, the Law Library of Congress hosts the webinar Evolution of Presidential Powers under the Turkish Constitutional System, with Kayahan Cantekin, the Law Library’s foreign law specialist for Turkic-speaking jurisdictions.
  

• Filippo Maria Sposini, PhD candidate, University of Toronto and Roy McMurtry Fellow, Osgoode Society, has published The rise of psychological physicians: The certification of insanity and the teaching of medical psychology, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (2021).  It argues that by giving doctors the authority to report “facts of insanity,” the 1853 Lunatic Asylums Act created the need for “psychological physicians” capable of certifying lunacy and sped the development of psychiatry as a medical specialty.
  

• The OAH has extended its CFP deadline for its annual meeting until February 17, 2021.
  

• ICYMI: "My Name is Pauli Murray" premieres at the Sundance Film Festival (Star Tribune). What Would U.S. Grant Do (about White Supremacy)? (Politico).  A history of unusual impeachments (Governing).  Amend, the Netflix documentary on the 14th Amendment (Philly Voice).  Reconstruction: A Timeline (History).

• Update: In the LRB, read Erin Maglaque's essay on John Christopoulous' book on abortion in early modern Italy.

• Update: The American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies is hosting an online seminar for the next six weeks. "New Research in Sri Lankan History" includes several sessions on legal history. Register here.

• Update: The Middle Temple Library Blog has posted this handy list of online ecclesiastical law resources. 

• Update: The Einstein Foundation welcomes nominations from the humanities and social sciences for its Award for Promoting Quality in Research (due: March 31, 2021).

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