--Dan Ernst
[We have word of the following open-access publication in the Global Perspectives on Legal History series of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal History. DRE.]
Agustín E. Casagrande, Constitución y Arbitrariedad: Conceptos e imaginarios del constitucionalismo argentinoo (Global Perspectives on Legal History, Vol. 26)
The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) is delighted to announce a new dissertation prize: the Global Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in global legal history. The [prize] recognizes the best dissertation from the previous calendar year on topics centered outside the United States. Eligible dissertations must be written in English and submitted for a PhD, JSD, or equivalent doctoral degree, excluding the JD, awarded in the previous calendar year (for example, a dissertation for a PhD awarded in 2025 would be eligible in 2026). Dissertations should not be predominantly focused on the US and may examine contexts, processes, or institutions that are local, regional, imperial, comparative, global, or otherwise.
Submissions should be made by the author including only (1) the dissertation as submitted to the university for the degree, and (2) a curriculum vitae.
To be considered for the year’s prize, the author should e-mail a PDF electronic copy of the dissertation and author’s curriculum vitae to the prize committee chair (globaldissertationprize@aslh.net) with the subject heading: GLOBAL DISSERTATION PRIZE SUBMISSION. Please title the PDF as “author last name” and “short title” .pdf (for example, Adewoye Lawyers Southern Nigeria.pdf).
Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2026. Award Amount: $500.
Andrea Scoseria Katz, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has posted No Higher Law: The Uruguayan Plebiscite of 1980 as a Failed Constituent Moment:
On November 30, 1980, the people of Uruguay were called on to vote on a new constitution whose objective was to legalize the military dictatorship that had ruled Uruguay since 1973. The proposed constitution would reestablish elections, political parties, and an independent judiciary, but all subject to overrule by the National Security Council (COSENA), the junta of military leaders that acted as the nation's de facto ruling body. Despite the highly repressive political environment in which the plebiscite was held, the citizenry rejected the draft in resounding fashion by a vote of 57% to 43%. Although the Plebiscite of 1980 was certainly a "failure" from the regime's point of view, it is considered a founding moment in Uruguayan history during which the dictatorship was delegitimized and the process of redemocratization triggered, culminating in a democratic transition in 1985. This case illustrates that constitutional failures can be successes in the long term when they launch deeper processes of democratization or constitutionalism.
--Dan Ernst
Pedro Jimenez Cantisano has published, in Portuguese, “Um perpétuo estado de sítio”: atos de império e despotismo administrativo na Primeira República in the Revista Direito e Práxis:
–Dan ErnstThis article explores the appropriations of the notion of administrative despotism in early-twentieth-century Brazil. Across the Atlantic world, during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, this idea was used to criticize the expansion of the State through administrative law. The references for despotism varied in time, from the old regime’s absolutism to twentieth-century totalitarianism. In Brazil, the references were both global, such as the notion of oriental despotism, and local, such as the usages of state of siege during the early years of the Brazilian first republic. These appropriations are shown through legislation, legal doctrine, judicial records, and newspapers, in the context of urban and public health reforms implemented in Rio de Janeiro, from 1903 to 1909. The consequences of the distinction between atos de império and atos de gestão for the judicial control of the administration, among other aspects of an administrative law that was especially reformulated to support the reforms, were central for debates about administrative despotism.
Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.
--Dan Ernst
David Sugarman, Lancaster University Law School, has published “The Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case” open access in the Journal of Law and Society 51: 4 (2024): 459–490:
The world’s imagination was caught by the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet on charges of egregious human rights crimes and the 16-month battle to extradite him to Madrid. For the first time, a former head of state had, while travelling abroad, been arrested on such charges, with his claim to immunity being rejected by a national court. The case’s notoriety increased when Lord Hoffmann, a judge when it first came before the Law Lords, did not publicly disclose his links with Amnesty International, an intervenor in the proceedings. Pinochet’s release on health grounds compounded the controversy. This article reveals hidden histories behind the Pinochet case, advancing our understanding of its progression and wider significance. It illuminates the relationship between law and politics, the role of personal views and judicial creativity in the UK’s top court, the ways in which law operates in practice, and its promise and limitations.
Credit: LC
--Dan Ernst
Allison Powers, University of Wisconsin-Madison, has published Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford University Press):
--Dan ErnstArbitrating Empire offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property.
Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, Allison Powers demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal.
Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire-and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day.
Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.
What Are We Looking for? Your project should relate to our department’s research agenda. We are especially interested in legal historical studies on:
When Can You Come? Start your research stay on 1 April 2025, 1 July 2025, 1 October 2025, or 5 January 2026.
When is the Deadline? Submit your application by 30 August 2024 via our online application system. We will let you know our decision in October.
What Do You Need to Apply? (1) Research Proposal: Up to 2,500 words explaining how your project fits with our research; (2) References: Contact details of two scholars who can provide references (if needed); and (3) Publications: PDFs of three relevant publications from the last five years.
Please note: Once you get the scholarship, you cannot change the start date or the month.
More information here.
A new book is out, open access, in the Global Perspectives on Legal History series of the Max-Planck-Institut for Legal History and Legal Theory: Adriane Sanctis de Brito's Seeking Capture, Resisting Seizure: An International Legal History of the Anglo-Brazilian Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade (1826–1845):
The treaties to suppress the slave trade were the subject of intense legal battles and debates in the first half of the 19th century. By delving into the legal disputes that took place within the context of the Anglo-Brazilian treaty, this book highlights the political importance of what might at first glance be perceived as little more than argumentative hurdles over the rules and proceedings regarding the search and capture of ships. Some of these legal battles were carried out in the correspondence between the Foreign Offices, sometimes between diplomatic representatives or within mixed commissions, while still others involved the process of interpretation and the resignification that took place over the course of years and involved a multiplicity of exchanges between various actors and institutions.
Britain constantly pushed to expand the legal use of force and possibilities of capture within the spaces outlined by the treaty regime. Brazil actively engaged in the legal interpretation, and in so doing created an argumentative onus that would later continue to transform British legal approaches and the very expectations about the content of the law the two parties were applying.
By constantly challenging the scope and limits of the treaty, Brazilian representatives slowed down the process of abolishing the slave trade, thus preserving the perverse practice, while at the same time protecting Brazil’s independence against the expansion of British interference. Whether reading the bilateral treaty clauses as analogous to or differently from prize law or general international law, the day-to-day interpretation forged anti-slave trade rules that kept ships, instead on enslaved people, protagonists of slave trade suppression mechanisms.
This history of the Anglo-Brazilian treaty provides more detail about the mechanisms created by international law to combat the slave trade. It also reveals the complex legal translations of state inequality, humanitarianism, violence, and the fine line between war and peace.
--Dan Ernst
[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
Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.
--Dan Ernst
Here is the TOC for American Journal of Legal History 62:2 (June 2022):
British Policy towards the Incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR: A Dilemma of de facto and de jure Recognition
Evgeny Tikhonravov
The Judicial Failsafe: American Legal Colonialism in the Philippines
Timothy J Foley
Amnesty and the Limits of Transitional Justice in Brazil: The Case of Expelled Low-Ranking Soldiers, 1964–2014
Marilia Corrêa
Book Reviews
Susan J. Pearson, The Birth Certificate: An American History
Teal Arcadi
Inge Van Hulle, Britain and International Law in West Africa
Joyman Lee
Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification
Marie-Amélie George
--Dan Ernst
[We have the following Call for Papers. DRE.]
The Dynamics of Early Modern Colonial Laws and Legal Literature, 26-28 October 2022, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Finland
The conference organizers invite papers exploring how legislative strategies of early modern colonial empires affected each other, what they had in common, and how colonial laws emanating both from Europe and the colonies themselves developed into different directions. Conference papers will look at early modern colonial legislation of the empires in multiple contexts: medieval inheritance of ius commune and legal pluralism; early modern transformations of legal orders, such as the growth of police regulation; and not the least, the local colonial realities and normativities.
Connected to the last point, contributions investigating local readings of "foreign" legal literature will also be welcome. One may ask what role legal literature had in the circulation of legal rules and concepts, and in confronting societal challenges. Examples from court practice and legislative bodies highlight these complex processes. "Legal literature" will not be understood in the sense of being strictly dogmatic or methodological, but in the broad sense of personally constructed texts on law, written for legal practitioners, both academically trained lawyers and laymen.
This conference will bring together legal scholars, historians, and social scientists to explore the complex entanglements of early modern colonial laws.
Confirmed keynote speakers are professors Thomas Duve (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt) and Andréa Slemian (University of São Paulo).
The conference is organized jointly by two projects, Comparing Early Modern Colonial Laws: England, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain (Academy of Finland, University of Helsinki) and Reading Law Glocally: Local Readings of Foreign Legal Literature in a Globalized World (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries) (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / France, Ghent University, University of Helsinki, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). The conference committee consists of professors Laura Beck (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Serge Dauchy (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Georges Martyn (Ghent University) and Heikki Pihlajamäki (University of Helsinki).
Please send, in one file, your abstract (max. 300 words) and short CV to the address:
heikki.pihlajamaki@helsinki.fi.
The language of the conference is English. There is no registration fee. The organizers will consider applications for reimbursement of travel costs and/or accommodation for junior researchers presenting papers. Participation online will be possible, and publication of the conference papers is foreseen. The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2022.
[We have the following call for papers for the conference Change over time in the Iberian Worlds: stabilising regimes of normativity. DRE]
The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory’s Glocalising Normativities project aims to construct a global history of normative production by studying the interaction of local processes of the cultural translation of normative knowledge within global networks in the early modern Iberian worlds.
For the project’s 2022 Annual Conference and the resulting publication, we are looking for contributions focusing on legal change and stability in any region of the Portuguese and Spanish empires in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas during the early modern period. We want to explore how legal history can offer a particular perspective for understanding legal change. Discussions of case studies, comparisons, long-term perspectives as well as methodological and analytical approaches – particularly in conversation with the long-standing tradition of discussions on legal change – are welcome. A detailed description of the conference’s topic and its conceptual framework can be found in the full text of the Call.
The selected papers will first be discussed as drafts in a virtual meeting to be held in April 2022. The final papers will be discussed in person (should the pandemic situation allow) in Frankfurt am Main at the Glocalising Normativities Annual Conference on 19–21 October 2022, and subsequently submitted for publication in the Brill series Max Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds. The deadline for submission of proposals is the 15th of January 2022.
