CFP: Gender and justice in Scotland

 [We share the following Call, via the Edinburgh Legal History Blog. Submissions are due by 19 March 2021.]

Gender and justice in Scotland: historical and legal perspectives 

‘Gender and Justice in Scotland: Historical and Legal Perspectives’ is a collaborative symposium between the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History and the School of Law. The historical struggle for gender equality has transformed women’s access to justice in Scotland today. Over the last two centuries, Scottish feminists and their supporters campaigned for women’s right to vote, to own property, to seek marital separation, to obtain custody of their children and to have bodily autonomy. Understanding women’s access to justice in the Scottish past can help legal practitioners and the courts make better-informed decisions when encountering similar problems today. The ways in which we make sense of women’s social agency needs to acknowledge the intersectional nature of ongoing discrimination throughout history. Even today, the struggle for gender equality is far from complete, and a glaring disparity between the achieved equality of women and their lived realities still remains. 

This is a call for papers which aims to explore issues affecting women’s access to justice in Scotland across time and space, and we welcome research on all Scottish courts, regions, jurisdictions, ethnicities, sexual and gendered identities, languages and religious and confessional identities. We also welcome papers that approach Scotland through a comparative or international perspective. Post-graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply. We welcome abstracts from a variety of disciplines, including (but not limited to): history, law, criminology and social science. We invite papers that address the following or related themes in a historical or legal perspective: • inheritance, succession and family law • cohabitants’ rights on separation and death • civil partnership, marriage, and divorce • civil remedies for domestic abuse and gender-based violence • reproductive health rights • parental rights and responsibilities, children and adoption. 

The symposium will be held online on 6 and 7 May 2021. Please send a 300-word abstract with a short biography to the organiser with ‘Gender and Justice’ in the subject line by 19 March 2021. 

Organiser: Dr Rebecca Mason, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Law Email: contact@womenmarriagelawscotland.org 

Co-organisers: Dr Maud Bracke and Dr Jackie Clarke (Centre for Gender History); Professor Jane Mair (School of Law).

--Mitra Sharafi

Loft on Litigation and the Anglo-Scottish Union

Philip Loft, University of Cambridge has published "Litigation, the Anglo-Scottish Union, and the House of Lords as the High Court, 1660-1875" in The Historical Journal 61:4 (2018), 943-67. The article won the Royal Historical Society's 2019 David Berry Prize for best essay on any aspect of Scottish history. Here's the abstract: 

This article examines the role of the House of Lords as the high court from the Restoration of 1660 to the passage of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act in 1876. Throughout this period, lay peers and bishops judged appeals on civil law from the central courts of England and Wales, Ireland (aside from between 1783 and 1800), and Scotland after the Union of 1707. It has long been known that the revolution of 1688–9 transformed the ability of parliament to pass legislation, but the increased length and predictability of parliamentary sessions was of equal significance to the judicial functions performed by peers. Unlike the English-dominated profile of eighteenth-century legislation, Scots constituted the largest proportion of appellants between 1740 and 1875. The lack of interaction between Westminster and Scotland is often seen as essential to ensuring the longevity of the Union, but through comparing the subject matter of appeals and mapping the distribution of cases within Scotland, this article demonstrates the extent of Scottish engagement. Echoing the tendency of Scottish interests to pursue local, private, and specific legislation in order to insulate Scottish institutions from English intervention, Scottish litigants primarily sought to maintain and challenge local privileges, legal particularisms, and the power of dominant landowners.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Cairns's Watson Lectures on Slavery and Scotland

The recordings of Slavery and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, the Alan Watson Memorial Lectures for 2019, delivered by Professor John W. Cairns at the Centre for Legal History at the University of Edinburgh, have been posted on the Centre’s website.  The lectures are "Enslaved and Enslavers in Scotland" (February 14, 2019); "Managing the Enslaved?" (February 21, 2019); and "Challenging Enslavement" (February 28, 2019).

Weekend Roundup

• “Two retired judges of the Supreme Court of Canada say 50 years is too long to seal internal court documents revealing the communications between judges on cases.”  More. 

• Last Wednesday, the Nelson Mandela University held a launch of The Land is Ours: South Africa’s First Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi

• Although we were aware that the Historical and Special Collections of the Harvard Law School Library had opened the papers of Stanley S. Surrey, we only recently realized that the manuscript memoir of this great tax scholar and policymaker, "Fifty Years [A Half-Century] with the Internal Revenue Code," is readable on-line. 

• UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy “is inviting proposals for innovative new research projects that have three defining qualities: (1) they bring historical analysis to bear on issues of contemporary political or social relevance; (2) they explicitly aim to contribute to solving an identifiable problem; and (3) they are collaborative in nature.”

• My Georgetown Law colleague Randy Barnett has tweeted a list of Books on the Constitution for Libertarians and Conservatives.  DRE

• And in Scottish legal history: new online resources by Rory MacLellan make more accessible the court and guild records of one Scottish town, the burgh of St. Andrews, 1550-1700.

• Update: Former LHB Guest Blogger Mary Ziegler, Florida State Law, to NPR on the history of Title X and the gag rule.

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

Rahmatian on Lord Kames

Rounding off our Commonwealth titles from 2015 is Lord Kames: Legal and Social Theorist by Andreas Rahmatian, University of Glasgow. The book re-establishes the importance of the ideas and legal philosophy of Scottish jurist and philosopher, Lord Kames. More from the publisher: 

The Scottish jurist, judge, legal historian and philosopher Henry Home (1696–1782) took the title Lord Kames when he was elevated to the bench of the Scottish Court of Session in 1752. In the 18th century, his books were influential and widely read; the educated classes and representatives of the Enlightenment in England, France and in the German states were all familiar with his aesthetic and philosophical writings. 

Andreas Rahmatian explains Kames’ conceptions of legal philosophy, including black-letter law, legal science, legal theory, legal sociology and anthropology in its early stages, setting them in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. He looks at how Kames came to be one of the forefathers of comparative law, sociology of law, legal psychology and ‘legal science’ in its proper meaning, as opposed to ‘law’.

Praise for the book:

"Andreas Rahmatian deploys multi- and inter-disciplinary skills worthy of the polymathic Kames himself, setting him in the context of eighteenth-century law and Enlightenment but also arguing that we should pay close attention to what his writings tell us today. The result is challenging new insight on the work of a remarkable jurist." -Hector L MacQueen

Further information is available here.