Brady on Metes and Bounds

Maureen (Molly) Brady, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds, which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal:

Since the settling of the American colonies, property boundaries have been described by the “metes and bounds” method, which is a highly customized system dependent on localized knowledge of movable stones, impermanent trees, and transient neighbors. The metes and bounds system has long been the subject of ridicule, and a recent wave of law-and-economics scholarship has argued that land must be easily standardized to facilitate market transactions and yield economic development. However, historians have not yet explored the social and legal context surrounding the metes and bounds system—obscuring the important role that highly customized property played in stimulating growth.

Using new archival research from the American colonial period, this Article reconstructs the forgotten history of metes and bounds within recording practice. Importantly, the benefits of metes and bounds were greater—and the associated costs lower—than ahistorical examination of these records would indicate. The rich descriptions of the metes and bounds system transmitted valuable information to American settlers and could be tailored to different types of property interests, permitting simple compliance with recording laws. While standardization is critical for enabling property to be understood by a larger and more distant set of buyers and creditors, customized property practices built upon localized knowledge serve other important social functions that likewise encourage development.

Bodenhamer's "Very Short Introduction" to the U.S. Constitution

The latest volume of interest to constitutional and legal historians in Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series is The U.S. Constitution: A Very Short Introduction, by David J. Bodenhamer, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.  (We're sending our review copy to the President.)

Though the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788, its impact on our lives is as recent as today's news. Claims and counterclaims about the constitutionality of governmental actions are a habit of American politics. This document, which its framers designed to limit power, often has made political conflict inevitable. It also has accommodated and legitimized the political and social changes of a vibrant, powerful democratic nation. A product of history's first modern revolution, the Constitution embraced a new formula for government: it restrained power on behalf of liberty, but it also granted power to promote and protect liberty.

The U.S. Constitution: A Very Short Introduction explores the major themes that have shaped American constitutional history: federalism, the balance of powers, property, representation, equality, rights, and security. Informed by the latest scholarship, this book places constitutional history within the context of American political and social history. As our nation's circumstances have changed, so has our Constitution.

Today we face serious challenges to the nation's constitutional legacy. Endless wars, a sharply divided electorate, economic inequality, and immigration, along with a host of other issues, have placed demands on government and on society that test our constitutional values. Understanding how the Constitution has evolved will help us adapt its principles to the challenges of our age.

TOC after the jump.

García, "Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality"

We missed this Nov. 2017 publication from the University of California Press: Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality, by David G. García (University of California, Los Angeles). A description from the Press:

Strategies of Segregation unearths the ideological and structural architecture of enduring racial inequality within and beyond schools in Oxnard, California. In this meticulously researched narrative spanning 1903 to 1974, David G. García excavates an extensive array of archival sources to expose a separate and unequal school system and its purposeful links with racially restrictive housing covenants. He recovers powerful oral accounts of Mexican Americans and African Americans who endured disparate treatment and protested discrimination. His analysis is skillfully woven into a compelling narrative that culminates in an examination of one of the nation’s first desegregation cases filed jointly by Mexican American and Black plaintiffs. This transdisciplinary history advances our understanding of racism and community resistance across time and place.

A few blurbs:

“Strategies of Segregation is a carefully researched, effectively argued, and beautifully written study of the centrality of school segregation to the racialization of space and the spatialization of race in Oxnard, California. Its deft blend of evidence from archival and oral history sources makes a major contribution to the histories of school and residential segregation. This fine book also reveals how Mexican Americans and Blacks fought back and battled for educational equity and racial justice.”—George Lipsitz 

“Through a study of how school segregation and residential segregation reinforce one another, Strategies of Segregation examines how structural racism became embedded in Oxnard, a city just north of Los Angeles. David G. García’s analysis across multiple urban institutions and interlocking racial practices will make this a model book for years to come.”—Natalia Molina

More information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at JOTWELL's Property section, Shelley Ross Saxer (Pepperdine Law) has posted an admiring review of University of Virginia legal historian Maureen Brady's forthcoming article on "Damagings Clauses."

• Also in JOTWELL, from the Intellectual Property section, Mark McKenna (University of Notre Dame) praises "The Article of Manufacture in 1877," by Sarah Burstein (University of Oklahoma).  The article appeared in Volume 32 of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2017).

• Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University, will deliver the keynote speaker at the Spring 2018 Commencement Ceremonies at the University of Michigan-Flint. 

• “So you want to synthesize filmmaking with legal history? Davidson has a course for that": John Wertheimer’s "Filming Southern Legal History" seminar.  More.

• Starting on April 16, Laney College in Oakland, CA, will host Herstory: The Legal History of Chinese American Women.  Drawn from the personal collection of Dr. Chiu Chang, the exhibit “features rare photographs and case descriptions of efforts by Chinese-American women to gain legal standing in the U.S.”

• ICYMI, last week the California Law Review hosted a symposium on Amanda Tyler's Habeas Corpus in Wartime (Oxford University Press).  

• Timothy Snyder's revelatory essay on Ivan Ilyin and his influence on Putin's Russia.  Chilling reading, after reports of Stephen Bannon's advice to the White House on executive privilege.

• From Krista Kesselring at the Legal History Miscellany blog: "Star Chamber Stories: Using Criminal Law to Criminal Ends in Early Modern London."

•  Our friends at the Max Plank Institute for European Legal History have announced Legal Journals of the 19th Century (Juristische Zeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts).  It provides “online access to a vast collection of legal journals . . .   Seventy-five journals were selected, compiled in uninterrupted series, supplemented with structural and meta-data, and published.”  More.

• At the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy blog: a recent online roundtable discussion of Ornit Shani's book, How India Became Democratic (announced on the blog here), featuring essays by Suhrith Parthasarathy, Anupama Roy, and blog host Gautam Bhatia, along with a response from the author.

• Today is the early registration deadline for the 2018 Policy History Conference. 

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

Kedar, Amara & Yiftachel on Israel/Palestine conflict

Now out with Stanford University Press is Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev by Alexandre Kedar (University of Haifa), Ahmad Amara (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), and Oren Yiftachel (Ben-Gurion University). From the press:

Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial
conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international-comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the "dead Negev doctrine" used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state. Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice.

Praise for the book:

"People are dispossessed not only with guns and bulldozers, but also with legal practices and strategies. Emptied Lands reveals how the painfully named and legally invoked Dead Negev Doctrine facilitates the continued dispossession of Bedouins in the Negev, the most intense and protracted land dispute within Israel. Drawing from decades of activism and scholarship, Kedar, Amara, and Yiftachel provide a powerful challenge to the doctrine, creating space for better forms of legality." -Nicholas Blomley

"Three of the best critical scholars of contemporary Palestine have successfully combined legal, geographical, and political analysis into a forensic study of how Israel has weaponized the law against the most vulnerable of all inhabitants of Palestine, the Bedouins. A remarkable multidisciplinary feat, this book provides an essential understanding of settler colonialism." -Eyal Weizman

Further information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• From the University of Minnesota: "the first-ever effort to comprehensively map the use of racially restrictive covenants in a U.S. city."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Frederick Rowe Davis (Purdue University) on the history behind the EPA's pesticides restrictions (now being loosened); Noah Shusterman (China University of Hong Kong) on "what the Second Amendment really meant to the Founders"; Kathryn Schumaker (University of Oklahoma) on the high school activists of Parkland, Florida, and the historic free speech decisions that protect them; Ian Toller-Clark (University of Illinois) on "why the courts are unlikely to have the last word on gerrymandering."

• From the blog of the American Constitution Society: Sophia Z. Lee (University of Pennsylvania) on "Using History to See the Glass Part Full in Janus v. AFSCME."

• ChinaFile has posted an interview with recent guest blogger Taisu Zhang (Yale Law School), on his book The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England.  UPDATE: Here's one more, from the New Books Network.

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

Szto on Chinese American Property Ownership

Mary Szto, Valparaiso University Law School, has posted From Exclusion to Exclusivity: Chinese American Property Ownership and Discrimination in Historical Perspective, which originally appeared in the Journal of Transnational Law and Policy 33 (2015-16):

Chinese investors are now the largest number of foreign investors in US residential and commercial real estate. Many buy in upscale, exclusive markets. It is little known, however, that in the past Chinese faced severe property discrimination in the US. This paper traces three eras of Chinese property ownership and discrimination. Many Chinese first came to the US for the 1849 Gold Rush and for building the first transcontinental railroad. However, during the Exclusion Era (1882-1943), Chinese were prohibited from immigrating to the US and becoming citizens because they were deemed unassimilable. Racial restrictive covenants in deeds were first used against the Chinese. Chinese lived in Chinatowns not only because of restrictive covenants, but because of extreme violence against them elsewhere. During the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were deemed a "model assimilated minority" worthy of living in suburbs. The Chinese had not changed, but geopolitics had. Unfortunately, the model minority myth pitted minority groups against each other. In the Post-Cold War era, the Chinese American population has multiplied. However, along with other Asian Americans and minorities, Chinese Americans face housing, education, and job discrimination. I conclude that we must unearth the past history of property discrimination to address continuing discrimination, leverage the current investment, and to seek property equity and healing communities for all.

Saavedra on the Property on the Chilean Frontier, 1790-1830

Manuel Bastias Saavedra, University of Bremen, has posted The Lived Space: Possession, Ownership, and Land Sales on the Chilean Frontier (1790-1830), which appears (and may be cited) in Historia Crítica 67

By looking into sales of indigenous land in the territory of Valdivia between 1790 and 1830, this article discusses how legal interactions were tied to the local spaces of rural habitation. Since ownership was linked with possession and use in Spanish colonial law, local social relations and shared local knowledge were crucial for determining legal ownership and ensuring the validity of land transfers. This article provides insights into how law operated in newly integrated colonial spaces, and reveals that land transfers did not yet constitute purely contractual relations but were instead socially negotiated transactions involving different levels of authority and dependency.

Greer's "Property and Dispossession"

Allan Greer, McGill University, has published Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America with the Cambridge University Press.

Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of “property formation” to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent’s resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book’s geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.

Here are some endorsements:

“This fascinating book complicates the processes that led to the formation of colonial property. It suggests that the regimes we witness today were the result of dynamic and fluid developments that involved actors of all shapes and sizes. In this story, communal lands were as important as private property, art was an essential component of map-making, and a sense of places was more crucial than abstract territorial claims.”

Tamar Herzog - Harvard University, Massachusetts

“Although landed property is a foundation of our legal, political, and economic systems, too rarely has it been explored in its historically contingent and even kaleidoscopic nature. In a colossal feat of research and synthesis, Allan Greer looks across an entire continent to explore the varied forms of property formation in the early modern era - and the inextricably related processes of Native dispossession. From one of our most eminent historians at the height of his powers, this book will serve as the starting point for all future discussion on the subject.”

François Furstenberg - The Johns Hopkins University

“Monumental and mighty in its range and its depth, Property and Dispossession explores the surprisingly disparate ways in which empire-making in the early Americas did and did not allow for indigenous tenure, ultimately showing that it was not until the nineteenth-century era of state building that nation builders truly sought to liquidate Native communities through the destruction of their distinctive homelands. Native resistance took equally disparate forms over these centuries as indigenous communities fought to thwart dispossession - a fight that continues through the present day as battles for property and sovereignty remain in full throttle.”

Juliana Barr - Duke University, North Carolina

“In this astonishingly important book, Greer has set an agenda for global debates about the history of colonialism, landed empires, and strategies of dispossession. Colonial property was not the triumph of any single logic. Ideas and practices of ownership were contingent, grounded in relationships that date back to the earliest encounters and exchanges.”

Ely on the Right to Acquire Property since Buchanan v. Warley

James W. Ely Jr., Vanderbilt University Law School, has posted Buchanan and the Right to Acquire Property, which is forthcoming in the Cumberland Law Review:

This article examines the impact of the Supreme Court decision in Buchanan v. Warley (1917) invalidating residential segregation laws as a deprivation of property rights without due process of law. The decision was premised on a strong affirmation of the right to acquire property. The article explores the historical background and contemporary significance of the right to acquire property. It notes that early state constitutions expressly recognized such a right. It points out that the right to acquire found practical expression in hostility to state-conferred monopoly and in the right to follow common occupations, two doctrines which evolved under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The article stresses that the right to acquire property, as in Buchanan, serves to protect the interests of the economically disadvantaged, racial minorities, and fledgling entrepreneurs.

Although courts continued to invoke the right to acquire property, by the early twentieth century such right was increasingly limited by the spread of occupational licensing and enactment of laws hampering competition in certain businesses. This trend was facilitated by the emergence of New Deal jurisprudence which downplayed the rights of property owners and emphasized judicial deference to the economic judgment of legislators. As judicial review of economic regulations became largely perfunctory, occupational licensing and entry barriers proliferated in the years following World War II. Recently, however, some courts have looked skeptically at laws restricting entry into common occupations. The article concludes that the right to acquire property, although often ignored, retains some vitality.

Sen on Terra Nullius in the Andamans

Uditi Sen, Hampshire College has published "Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands" in Comparative Studies in Society and History 59:4 (2017), 944-73. Here is the abstract: 

This article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius.

Further information is available here. 

Ignace & Ignace, "Secwepemc People, Land, and Laws"

New from McGill-Queen's University Press: Secwepemc People, Land, and Laws: Yeri7 re Stsq'ey's-kucw (2017), by Marianne Ignace (Simon Fraser University) and Ronald E. Ignace (Simon Fraser University). A description from the Press:

Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws is a journey through the 10,000-year history of the Interior Plateau nation in British Columbia. Told through the lens of past and present Indigenous storytellers, this volume detail how a homeland has shaped Secwépemc existence while the Secwépemc have in turn shaped their homeland.

Marianne Ignace and Ronald Ignace, with contributions from ethnobotanist Nancy Turner, archaeologist Mike Rousseau, and geographer Ken Favrholdt, compellingly weave together Secwépemc narratives about ancestors’ deeds. They demonstrate how these stories are the manifestation of Indigenous laws (stsq'ey') for social and moral conduct among humans and all sentient beings on the land, and for social and political relations within the nation and with outsiders. Breathing new life into stories about past transformations, the authors place these narratives in dialogue with written historical sources and knowledge from archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, earth science, and ethnobiology. In addition to a wealth of detail about Secwépemc land stewardship, the social and political order, and spiritual concepts and relations embedded in the Indigenous language, the book shows how between the mid-1800s and 1920s the Secwépemc people resisted devastating oppression and the theft of their land, and fought to retain political autonomy while tenaciously maintaining a connection with their homeland, ancestors, and laws.

An exemplary work in collaboration, Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws points to the ways in which Indigenous laws and traditions can guide present and future social and political process among the Secwépemc and with settler society.

An advance review:

“I couldn’t put this book down! A masterpiece of multidisciplinary research on the Secwépemc Nation's history from the Ice Age to the present, science and archival records serve to back up the volume’s primary source of knowledge, the oral narratives and shared memories of the Secwépemc people. These accounts go deeper than science, to the moral lessons of how the humans and the land we live on should relate to each other. Only the Ignaces could write a book of this magnitude, based on their lifetimes of research while living Secwépemc lives as well.” -- Leanne Hinton

More information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• After their recent discovery, two journals from the Territorial Court of Clatsop County, dating from 1849 to 1853, have been deposited with special collection of the State of Oregon Law Library. More. 

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section, several op-eds of interest: Gregory Ablavsky (Stanford Law School), writes about states' battles with the federal government for control of public lands--and how both levels of government "have long trampled on Native American rights"; Carly Goodman (American Friends Service Committee) offers a historian's take on the Temporary Protected Status program and the consequences of failure to renew it; and Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant (University of Massachusetts Lowell) marks the 100th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Buchanan v. Warley ("The forgotten civil rights case that stopped the spread of Jim Crow").

•  Notice & Comment reports that Philip Hamburger, Columbia Law, the author of Is Administrative Law Unlawful? “has started a nonprofit, public interest law firm called the New Civil Liberties Alliance.”  H/t: JLG

• We noticed an advertisement for a “person with a strong interest in law, legal history and commercial arbitration” for a legal history of arbitration in the GCC, which we're assuming is the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

• Last week in Princeton University’s Workshop in Constitutional Development, Lynda Dodd, City College, City University of New York, presented on "Reconstruction and the Origins of Civil Rights," and Michael Paris, College of Staten Island, City University of New York, presented on "Derrick Bell and the Lost Cause of School Desegregation: A Reexamination."  H/t: LAPA.

• ICYMI: The Princeton Slavery Project, in the New York Times.  Also: The Bolsheviks and the Law.  And more bicentennial hoopla at HLS.

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

Rose on "Raisin in the Sun" and Real Estate Practices

Carol M. Rose, University of Arizona  James E. Rogers College of Law, has posted Raisin, Race, and the Real Estate Revolution of the Early 20th Century:

Diana Sands, Ruby Dee & Sidney Poitier in Raisin (1959)(NYPL)

Lorraine Hansberry’s hit play of 1957, A Raisin in the Sun, centered on the decision of an African American family in Chicago, the Youngers, to move to a house in a white neighborhood. The play is set in the post WWII era, but many of its scenes and actions relate back to real estate practices that began at the turn of the century and that continued to evolve into the mid-century and to some degree beyond. During those decades, housing development and finance increased dramatically in scale, professionalization and standardization. But in their concern for their predominantly white consumers’ preferences for segregation, real estate developers, brokers, financial institutions, and finally governmental agencies adopted standard practices that excluded African Americans from many housing opportunities, and that then reinforced white preferences for housing segregation.

Many seemingly minor actions in the play reflect the way that African Americans had been sidelined in the earlier decades’ evolving real estate practices—not just the family’s overcrowded apartment, but also more subtle cues, such as the source of the initial funds for the new house, the methods for its finance, and the legal background to the white homeowners’ effort to discourage the purchase. This paper, a draft chapter for the forthcoming law-and-literature collection, Power, Prose and Purse, pinpoints these and other small clues, and describes how standardizing real estate practices dating from the turn of the century effectively crowded out African American consumers like the Youngers, with consequences that we continue to observe in modern patterns of urban segregation.

Weekend Roundup

• UVA Law is digitizing "the 336 legal texts catalogued by the University librarian in 1828."  They are “part of a group of roughly 8,000 legal texts deemed critical for education in law by Thomas Jefferson.”  H/t: The Cavalier Daily.

• From the Washington Post: "Missouri v. Celia, a Slave: She killed the white master raping her, then claimed self-defense" - including a reference to legal historian Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins) and the Celia Project.

• Also in the Washington Post: Barbara Radnofsky on what the founders had in mind when they designed the impeachment process.

• The first panel at this week’s annual meeting of the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice was organized around Josh Chafetz’s Congress’s Constitution.  Quoting from the organizer Chris Walker’s post on Notice & Comment: “This timely book details the historical foundations for a number of powerful tools at Congress’s disposal—the power of the purse, the contempt power, freedom of speech and debate, and other oversight tools—to rein in the federal bureaucracy and to resolve Congress’s conflicts with the other branches of the government. This panel will discuss how Congress has used and can better utilize these tools to reassert itself in the modern administrative state.”  More.

• We noted the Harvard Law School's Diversity and U.S. Legal History Series as it transpired during the last academic year.  The lectures are now available on the "HLS Talks" webpage. 

• Inequality, Immigration, and the Politics of Populism: A Conference, October 28-29, 2017, at the NYU School of Law, sponsored by the New York Review of Books.

• John A. Ferejohn, NYU Law School, has posted Financial Emergencies, “a study of the use of emergency powers to deal with financial emergencies in revolutionary France and Weimar.”

• ICYMI: A report of a discussion after a screening of “Marshall” at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in the Washington Post.  Historians explain that access to documents at Indonesia’s National Archives isn’t what it should be.

• Update: For anyone working on the history of criminal law, the new Annual Review of Criminology has a special interdisciplinary article collection on Crime and Society. It includes articles like Malcolm Feeley and Hadar Aviram's "Social Historical Studies of Women, Crime, and Courts." Free access to the issue until Nov. 30, 2017 is available here.

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

Zhang, "The Laws and Economics of Confucianism"

Out today from Cambridge University Press: The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England, by Taisu Zhang (Yale Law School). The book is part of the series Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society. A description from the Press:

Tying together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. The dominance of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies in Late Imperial and Republican China, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status, allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority in the far more 'individualist' society of early modern England, essentially excluding low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production.

A few blurbs:

"In this lucid and thought-provoking study, Taisu Zhang creatively and empirically reinterprets the causal relationships among cultural norms, property institutions, and socioeconomic behavior in early modern China and England. This holds profound implications for the study of global economic history, Sino-Western comparison, and Chinese law and society. This important book will not fail to stimulate new inquiries and debates for many years to come."-- Li Chen 

"Marrying cutting-edge historical archival work with remarkable cross-disciplinary theoretical breadth, Taisu Zhang boldly and brilliantly raises vitally important questions about the interplay of culture, law, and economic institutions in pre-industrial China and England. Anyone interested in global economic history or in today’s China will want to engage this powerful but inviting book." -- William P. Alford

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

We are also excited to report that Taisu Zhang will be joining us as a guest blogger for the month of December. We look forward to hearing more about this project!

Chaudhry on proprietary rights in British India

Last year, Faisal Chaudhry, now at the University of Arizona, published "A Rule of Proprietary Right for British India: From revenue settlement to tenant right in the age of classical legal thought" in Modern Asian Studies 50:1. Here is the abstract:

Scholars have long debated the impact of the British ‘rule of property’ on
India. In our own day it has become common for historians to hold that the
Raj’s would-be regime of free capitalist property was frustrated by a pervasive
divide between rhetoric and reality which derived from a fundamental lack of
fit between English ideas and Indian land control practices. While seemingly
novel, the contemporary emphasis on the theory-practice divide is rooted in an
earlier ‘revisionist’ perspective among late-nineteenth-century colonial thinkers
who argued that land control in the subcontinent derived from a uniquely Indian
species of ‘proprietary’ (rather than genuinely propertied) right-holding. In this
article, I critically examine the revisionist discourse of ‘proprietary right’ by
situating it in a broader comparative perspective, both relative to earlier ideas
about rendering property ‘absolute’ during the East India Company’s rule and
relative to the changing conception of the property right among legal thinkers
in the central domains of the Anglo-common law world. In so doing, the article
significantly revises our understanding of the relationship between property, law,
and political economy in the subcontinent from the late eighteenth to the late
nineteenth century.

Cutterham's "Gentlemen Revolutionaries"

We note the publication of Gentlemen Revolutionaries Power and Justice in the New American Republic (Princeton University Press), by Tom Cutterham, Lecturer in United States History at the University of Birmingham.

In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation.

Tom Cutterham examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone. They also sought personal prestige and cultural preeminence. Cutterham describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's "lower sort" as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else.

Lively and elegantly written, Gentlemen Revolutionaries demonstrates how these elites, far from giving up their attachment to gentility and privilege, recast the new republic in their own image.

Seven from Dorsett on NZ and Australian Legal History

Shaunnagh Dorsett, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law, has posted seven recent papers from her backlist on SSRN.

Weekend Roundup

• James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale University. presents The Two Primitive Modes of Imagining Property: Owning Land, Owning Human Beings at the Barat House, Boston College Law School, on Monday, September 18, 2017, at 5:00 p.m.  The event is sponsored by BC’s Legal History Roundtable and Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.  

• We were pleased to note, in a back issue of the Minnesota Law Library's publication The Colophon, that among the student notebooks dating from 1948-1952 it had acquired was one for Stefan Riesenfeld's course, Modern Social Legislation.

•  We’ve previously noted the publication of the second volume of The Causes of War, by Alexander Gillespie, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Professor of Law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand with Hart Publishing.  Hart has just announced the publication of the third volume, covering the years 1400 CE to 1650 CE.  Mention Legal History Blog for a 20 percent discount!

• We have an announcement, in Portuguese, of a Postgraduate Specialization in Ethics, Law and Political Thought - a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts, Philosophy Center (CIFUL) and Theory and History of Law, Research Center of the University of Lisbon (THD-ULisboa). 

• Via the Faculty Lounge, we have word that Peking University School of Transnational Law is inviting applications for entry-level and lateral tenure track scholars of severl fields, including all areas of China Law and Legal History.  Inquiries should be addressed to Professor Mark Feldman, Chair, Faculty Appointments Committee, at mfeldman@stl.pku.edu.cn or mfeldman97@gmail.com.

• Sam Erman, Associate Professor of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, presented "The Constitution and the New U.S. Expansion: Debating the Status of the Islands" at the University of Wisconsin Law School on September 13, 2017.  H/t: Legal Scholarship Blog.

• Richard H. Underwood, University of Kentucky College of Law, will celebrate the release of his new book, Gaslight Lawyers: Criminal Trials & Exploits in Gilded Age New York, at Lexington, Kentucky's Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7.p. on Tuesday, September 19.  H/t: UK

• "This fall, NYU Law students and Steinhardt education doctoral students are partnering with public school teachers on a new more in depth Constitutional history curriculum that invites New York City high schoolers to 'think as lawyers,' exploring how different Supreme Court cases have shaped have shaped the way the nation's founding document has been interpreted over time."  More.

• ICYMI: Robert L. Tsai, in Politico, on Law And Order: The Troubling Sheriffs’ Movement That Joe Arpaio Supports.

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