Ghachem at BC on Jesuits and the Souls of Slaves in 18th-Century Haiti

[And that’s not all from our friends at Boston College!]

We invite you to join us on Thursday, Feb. 16 at 4:30, in the Rare Book Room of the Boston College Law School Library for our fourth and final event of the Legal History Roundtable 2016-2017. We are delighted to welcome Malick Ghachem, Professor of History at MIT. . . .

Professor Ghachem will be presenting a paper, “The Jesuits, the Souls of Slaves, and the Battle for Haiti, 1720-1730.” The paper is available on the website.

Refreshments are available beginning at 4:15 pm. outside the Library Conference Room. The discussion will begin at 4:30. The Clough lecture with Dr. Peer Zumbansen will not start until 5:30 so those who plan to attend both events should be able to.

The story of the Society of Jesus in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) begins in the early years of the eighteenth century, when the French monarchy expelled the resident Capuchin friars and invited the Jesuit order to take their place.  The remarkable priests who served during these years laid the foundations of the Catholic Church in Haiti, attending to the spiritual needs of a nascent French planter community while also organizing parishes and building the main cathedral in Cap Français.   The work of carving out an Ignatian space in this emerging crucible of eighteenth-century Atlantic capitalism unfolded against the backdrop of a near-total breakdown of political order in the colony during the early 1720s.  As local creoles mounted a dramatic rebellion against the slave trading monopoly of the French Indies Company in Saint-Domingue, the Jesuits found themselves drawn into some unexpected realms of secular and spiritual effort alike: the writing of Haiti’s first histories and the proselytization of its rapidly expanding and already resistant community of slaves.  How the Ignatians carried out these two missions tells us much about both the Jesuit order itself and the circumstances of Haiti’s sudden rise as the most profitable plantation colony in the world by the third decade of the eighteenth century.

Malick W. Ghachem is a historian and lawyer.  His primary areas of concentration are slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history.  He is the author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a history of the law of slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) between 1685 and 1804.  The book received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize for the best work in English on French history and was co-winner of the Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book published in the field of Caribbean studies over the past three years.  He teaches courses on the Age of Revolution, Slavery and Abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics.

Professor Ghachem earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University and his doctorate in history from Stanford.  He clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Miami, FL in 2004.  A member of the Massachusetts bar, Professor Ghachem practiced law in Boston from 2005 to 2010 for two law firms: Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.  For part of that period (2006-2007) he served as a lecturer in MIT’s Political Science Department.  Between 2010 and 2013, he taught at the University of Maine School of Law in Portland, ME, where he is now a Senior Scholar.

CFP: History, Law and Politics in Brazil

[From the visitors’ posts on our Facebook page.]

The editors of the journal, Prima Facie, in conjunction with the research groups, Legal History Studies, as well as the Research and Study Network on Human Rights & Education Policy at the Federal University of Paraiba, announce the 1st Conference on History, Law, and Politics, to be held from the 15th to the 17th of March 2017 at the Federal University of Paraiba located in João Pessoa, Paraiba, Brazil. In accordance with the theme of the conference and its network groups, a range of content will be discussed aiming to understand how concepts in the disciplines of History, Political Science, and Law may intertwine to benefit the training of legal students, historians, and scholars from related fields. Researchers interested in the conference may apply to present their work as well as to attend the sessions. Participants will be divided into groups of oral presentation according to their topics of study, and whether their works are in-progress or completed. An abstract book with the complete program will be available online. A special call is under preparation for two editions of Prima Facie journal, ISSN 1678-2593. These issues, containing the selection of 40 articles amongst the works presented at the conference, will be published in 2017. A peer-reviewed book will also be published in English after the conference has been completed. We accept papers in Portuguese, English, and Spanish [here].  We are on Facebook.

Gonzalez Le Saux on the Chilean Legal Aid Service

Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux, a doctoral candidate in Columbia University’s Department of History, has posted Mediated Justice: Lawyers and Social Workers in the Chilean Legal Aid Service, 1932-1960s, which is forthcoming in volume 42 of Law and Social Inquiry:

This article deals with the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service from its creation in 1932 until the 1960s, the institution that served as the main legal intermediary between the lower classes and the justice system. By focusing on how the Legal Aid Service’s professional staff — lawyers and social workers — used this institution to define their professional identity, and on how they conceived of their role as mediators, I argue that this institution promoted a system of legal intermediation that privileged conciliation over contentious litigation, and that it worked as a multiple-layered screen between popular demands and the justice system. This reveals why, in comparison to the progressive inclusion of the poor in new welfare state agencies in mid-twentieth century Chile, the judicial system appeared as a conservative and exclusionary force: legal aid had precisely for purpose that the most radical demands could not reach the courts.

Weekend Roundup

• Last Thursday, the Icesi Law School in Cali, Colombia, held a conference to commemorate twenty-five years of the Constitution of Colombia (right).

• Forthcoming in December from Carolina Academic Press: The Death Penalty as Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition, by John D. Bessler, and Law Professor and Accidental Historian: The Scholarship of Michael A. Olivas, edited by Ediberto Román.

• The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum will present Listening to the Roosevelts: Franklin D. Roosevelt–The War Years at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 28, 2016, in the Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home.  Mary E. Stuckey, professor of communication at Georgia State University, presents, with selected audio recordings of FDR during World War II. 

• The Canadian Journal of Women and Law seeks submissions for a special issue 30(2) to be published in December 2018 on Race, Gender and Law: A tribute to the scholarship of Sherene Razack, guest edited by Gada Mahrouse, Carmela Murdocca, and Leslie Thielen-Wilson.  H/t: H-Law.

• Seth Barrett Tillman on Ireland and World War II.

• On Talk Radio Europe: an interview with Ian Burney (University of Manchester) on his new book (with Neil Pemberton), Murder and the Making of English CSI, which we announced here

• CFP: Annual Comparative Law Work-in-Progress Workshop, UCLA School of Law, April 28-29, 2017. Interested? Submit your paper by Feb.1, 2017.

• The Singapore War Crimes Trial Web Portal was launched on Aug.29, 2016. Have a look here. H/t: World Legal History Blog

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

Oral History of the Brazilian Supreme Court

[We have the following announcement.]

On September 2nd, 2016, FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro will release volumes 11 to 15 of its Oral History of the Brazilian Supreme Court project - in cooperation with FGV Law School São Paulo and CPDOC - FGV's History and Social Sciences Department.

The project has interviewed 20 former and current Supreme Court justices about their lives, careers, path towards the Court, and most important cases. It is a unique historical record to study Brazilian legal elites, the late 1980s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, the Supreme Court's recent history, etc.

So far, the project has produced almost 100 hours of interviews. Books with each interview are also published. But everything is available online, licenced in Creative Commons, open access to everyone. . . .

On September 2nd, the interviews with justices Luís Roberto Barroso, Luiz Fux, Ilmar Galvão, Moreira Alves and Francisco Rezek will be made available. The justices, in addition to justices Nelson Jobim (who also coordinated the project) and Eros Grau, will be at FGV Rio's Cultural Center at 11 am, discussing the Supreme Court's history. The event is open to the public.

Bocksang Hola on “The Birth of Independent Chile’s Administrative Law”

[We recently noted the publication of El Nacimiento del Derecho Administrativo Patrio de Chile, by Gabriel Bocksang Hola, Profesor de Derecho Administrativo, Facultad de Derecho at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.  When we learned of the book, we invited Professor Bocksang Hola to discuss it on LHB.  We are very pleased he took us up on our offer.  His remarks appear below.]

Among Latin American scholars, there is a common, almost instinctive idea about the origins of Administrative Law in the territories that had belonged to the Crown of Spain: that they simply copied foreign models after their independence (achieved in the 1810s and 1820s), assuming that, among these, the most influential was the French system. Nevertheless, being myself a Chilean, I had an additional, even more worrying concern. There were grounds to suppose that, in my country, judicial review of Administrative action had disappeared or substantially weakened in the decades following since the revolution of the independence. But the lack of thorough studies in this field left many questions to answer.

I decided to systematically challenge both claims. I suspected that the answer to both matters would be negative, because of the results of a short paper I had published in 2011, titled “The Sources of Chilean Administrative Law before the Civil Code.” On the one hand, this quick inspection had led me to realize that judicial review had been operative during these years, although with some peculiar characteristics. On the other hand, noticing that the rules that judges still applied in the 1840s and 1850s were mostly derived from the ancient Spanish law, such as the Partidas of 1265, or more recent compilations, as the Novísima Recopilación of 1805, I had understood that it was impossible that the Administrative Law régime in Chile would have been the mere product of a transplant of French law–or any other law alien to the Hispanic tradition.

Realizing that the influence of this tradition over independent Chile, and its dialogue with foreign influences as well, would be more obviously noticeable before judicial reception of Chilean codification, I decided to perform an in-depth study of the period extending from the unconscious beginnings of the Independence (1810) until the beginning of the widespread application of the Chilean Civil Code (around 1860).

Perlingeiro on European and American Influences on Administrative Law in Latin America

[Last November, we noted the Portuguese version of "A Historical Perspective on Administrative Jurisdiction in Latin America: Continental European Tradition versus US Influence," by Ricardo Perlingeiro, Universidade Federal Fluminense; Tribunal Regional Federal da 2a Região.  He has now published an English-language version, in the British Journal of American Legal Studies 5 (2016): 241-89]

From the perspective of US influence, this text analyses the history of administrative jurisdiction, starting from the 19th Century, in the 19 Latin American countries of Iberian origin (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela). The analysis includes the US unified judicial system and procedural due process of law to decisions by the administrative authorities, the fertile field of primary jurisdiction, which is in conflict with the Continental European tradition firmly established in Latin American administrative law. While setting out the contradictions of administrative jurisdiction in Latin American countries that result from importing rules without putting them in the proper context, the text seeks to identify trends and create perspective to build a model of administrative justice specific to Latin America, drawing on the accumulated experience of the United States and Continental Europe.

Haley's "Law's Political Foundations"

Out this month from Edward Elgar publishing is Law’s Political Foundations: Rivers, Rifles, Rice, and Religion, by John O. Haley, William R. Orthwein Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, Washington University in St. Louis.

Law’s Political Foundations explains the development of the two basic systems of public and private law and their historical transformations. Examining the historical development of law in China, Japan, Western Europe, and Hispanic America, Haley argues that law is a product, rather than a constitutive element, of political systems.

Four narrative chapters commence with the development of Chinese legal tradition as a public law order in which regulatory and penal rules were central, compared to the primacy of private law in Western Europe. China was not only among the earliest but also historically the most enduring example of public law order. The European Legal Tradition, in contrast, became the source of the private law structures of legal systems worldwide. The Japanese and Hispanic American experiences are explored as pivotal links that help to identify foundational factors that underpin the historical development of public and private law orders. Also explained in both contexts is the endurance of private ordering both within and beyond the law.

These vivid comparisons and analyses in these stories of rivers, rifles, rice, and religion will serve as an excellent critical resource for scholars and academics of comparative law and legal theory.

Endorsements by M. C. Mirow, Donald C. Clarke, and Mark Ramseyer after the jump.

Cajas-Sarria on Colombian Constitutional History, 1910-1991

We have from Mario Cajas-Sarria, Associate Professor, Icesi University School of Law, Cali, Colombia, word that he has published, in Spanish, The Construction of Colombian Constitutional Justice: A Historical and Political Perspective, 1910-1991, in Revista Jurídica Precedente 7 (2015):

This article traces the path of reforms and attempts to reform the Colombian Constitutional Justice and reveals how political actors and scholars, with different purposes and strategies, under certain political contexts and legal doctrines, built it between 1910 and 1991. The narrative evolves in five stages: It begins in 1910 when the Constituent Assembly attributed to the Supreme Court the duty and power to decide on the constitutionality of laws before she claimed by any citizen. The second is the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who tried to establish a Constitutional Court in 1953 and then established a “Chamber of Constitutional Affairs” within the Supreme Court in 1956. The third tells of the attempt to create a Constitutional Court in 1968, which ended in a modest Constitutional Chamber within the Supreme Court. The fourth deals with the failed constitutional amendment of 1979 that modified the functions of the Supreme Court as a constitutional judge and which was declared unconstitutional by that same Court late in 1981. The last stage is the creation of the Constitutional Court by the National Constituent Assembly 1991.

Bocksang Hola's "Birth of Independent Chile’s Administrative Law"

We were pleased to meet a fellow historian of administrative law, Gabriel Bocksang Hola, at the conference on comparative administrative law at the Yale Law School in April.  He is Profesor de Derecho Administrativo, Facultad de Derecho, at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.  He is also the author of a monumental history, El Nacimiento del Derecho Administrativo Patrio de Chile, published by Thomson Reuters in 2015.  Here is a translation of a summary of its contents.

It is often thought that the origins of Administrative Law in Chile are recent and that its development was mainly shaped by foreign models. The reality, however, is quite different. From the First National Meeting of the Government of Chile (1810) through the widespread application of the Chilean Civil Code (ca. 1860), through war, political disturbance and constitutional instability, an administrative order flourished in this country. Although it had deep roots in Spanish colonial law, it developed in a Republican context alongside the other institutional innovations of the time.

Essential aspects of Chile’s current Rule of Law originated in this often overlooked period.  These include constitutional supremacy, the responsibility of the State, public property, the legality of administrative unilateral acts and administrative contracts, judicial review, the promotion of public service, and the fundamental lines of its administrative organization.

The Birth of Independent Chile’s Administrative Law draws upon extensive research in constitutional, legislative and administrative sources, hundreds of judicial decisions–many of them unpublished–and scarce doctrinal writings on Public Law of those years to provide the first thorough history of the birth of Administrative Law in independent Chile.

Goebel on the Anti-Imperial Metropolis

Michael Goebel, Freie Universität Berlin has published  Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge 2015), a portrait of anti-imperial networks of colonial and exiled non-Europeans in interwar Paris. For us legal historians, there is lots to chew on here. The book uses police records and explores naturalization, citizenship, and the law governing intermarried couples (especially colonial men marrying French women). Many of Geobel's key figures were also law students. 

From the publisher: 

This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese, and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international, and global history as well as migration, race, and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea.

Some blurbs:

Unterman, "Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders"

Another new one from HUP: Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders (Oct. 2015), by Katherine Unterman (Texas A&M University). From the Press:

Extraordinary rendition—the practice of abducting criminal suspects in locations around the world—has been criticized as an unprecedented expansion of U.S. police powers. But America’s aggressive pursuit of fugitives beyond its borders far predates the global war on terror. Uncle Sam’s Policemen investigates the history of international manhunts, arguing that the extension of U.S. law enforcement into foreign jurisdictions at the turn of the twentieth century forms an important chapter in the story of American empire.

In the late 1800s, expanding networks of railroads and steamships made it increasingly easy for criminals to evade justice. Recognizing that domestic law and order depended on projecting legal authority abroad, President Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1903 that the United States would “leave no place on earth” for criminals to hide. Charting the rapid growth of extradition law, Katherine Unterman shows that the United States had fifty-eight treaties with thirty-six nations by 1900—more than any other country. American diplomats put pressure on countries that served as extradition havens, particularly in Latin America, and cloak-and-dagger tactics such as the kidnapping of fugitives by Pinkerton detectives were fair game—a practice explicitly condoned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The most wanted fugitives of this period were not anarchists and political agitators but embezzlers and defrauders—criminals who threatened the emerging corporate capitalist order. By the early twentieth century, the long arm of American law stretched around the globe, creating an informal empire that complemented both military and economic might.

From the advance reviews:

“Uncle Sam’s Policemen uncovers the hidden history of America’s rise to power. Unterman shows how battles a century ago over policing, rendition, and deportation transformed the way that Americans saw themselves in the world. Her book stands at the forefront of the most exciting work in U.S. legal history and the history of U.S. foreign relations.”—Christopher Capozzola

“A compelling, briskly written, and important account of how the history of cross-border policing enabled contemporary rendition and expanded American global power.”—Mary L. Dudziak

More information is available here.

Domínguez on Chilean Family Law

Carmen Domínguez, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, has posted Los Principios Que Informan El Derecho De Familia Chileno: Su Formulación Clásica Y Su Revisión Moderna (The Principles Underlying the Chilean Matrimonial Law: Its Classic Formulation and Modern Review), which appeared in the Revista Chilena de Derecho 32 (2005): 205-18:

English Abstract: This paper develops the historical evolution of Private Law in general and family law in particular. It also elaborates upon the guiding principles that in-nerve the many deep changes that family law has undergone over the years. The second part of the article is a critical analysis of the effects of such changes, suggesting the different directions of the recent reforms sought to be introduced into Chilean law. These directions are basically referred to the need to strengthen the family, as stated by the Constitution, and to tackle and reach the idea of what is good for the whole society, as included within the concept of family as the first and foremost community of individuals.

Georgetown International History Seminar, 2015-16

[We have the following announcement.]

The Georgetown University Institute for Global History and the Mortara Center for International Studies present the 2015-16 International History Seminar.  Conveners: Toshihiro Higuchi, John McNeill, David Painter, and Aviel Roshwald

Unless otherwise noted, the seminar will meet on Tuesdays, 6:00-7:30 in the Mortara Center for International Studies at the corner of N and 36th Streets, NW (3600 N St., Washington, DC). Papers will be pre-circulated among participants (except for our first event, which is a book launch). Light refreshments will be served.

Thursday, October 8, 2:30-4:00 in ICC 662: Presentation by Michael Goebel (Free University, Berlin) about his new book, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

November 17: Sophie de Schaepdrijver (Pennsylvania State University), "The German Occupation of Belgium during the First World War"

January 26: Laura Beers (American University), "The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom"

March 1: Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York University), "Italian Prisoners of War, 1940-1950: What We Learn from Studying Defeat"

Thursday, March 17, 6:30-8:00: Max Paul Friedman (American University) "Containing the New Empire: Latin American Strategies against U.S. Hegemony in the Early Twentieth Century"

CFP: Journal Quaestio Iuris

The Journal Quaestio Iuris (ISSN 1516-0351), quarterly electronic publication of the professors of Law School of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), classified by Brazilian Ministry of Education as Qualis A2, Law, is pleased to announce our new number (vol. 08, no. 02, 2015) (see [after the jump] and open call for papers for the next number of Journal Quaestio Iuris which will be published in November 2015.

Created from the need to investigate the law from multidisciplinary matrices, the Journal Quaestio Iuris receives in a continuous flow, papers on Legal Theory, Philosophy of Law, Sociology of Law, History of Law, State Theory, Philosophy, Epistemology and others disciplines that having the law by subject matter.

In order to promote greater participation and interaction between researches, we invite university professors to participate in the journal by sending your papers to our next issue, noting that the Journal Quaestio Iuris seeking entries streaming, submitted in our webpage or through the e-mails referred to below of our Editorial Team. Papers will be accepted in Portuguese, Spanish or English.

It should be borne in mind that the Journal Quaestio Iuris has multidisciplinary debate on the scope of its editorial policy, whose contents can be accessed through our website.

We are still open call for participation of university professors who want to collaborate in the Journal Quaestio Iuris as Referees Assessors in sporadic review articles, which are sent for the online submission system (standard opinion of 02 pages, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of article, approving, suggesting corrections or not accepting for publication).

If you are interested in publishing articles or participation as an evaluator referee, send by the journal system or through e-mails listed below of our Editorial Team.

TOC for JQI 8:2 after the jump.  Contributors include Tony Freyer and Mark Tushnet.

Michele McKinley to be Fulbrighter

We note in today's Weekend Roundup that Michele McKinley, Oregon Law, will be presenting on the Law and Public Affairs Seminare at Princeton University on April 13.  LAPA's website also reports that Professor McKinley "has been named a 2015  Fulbright Fellow.  This prestigious award will enable McKinley to expand her work on Hispanic urban slavery to Cartagena, Colombia and the viceroyalty of Nuevo Granada (today’s Bogotá). This research is a continuation of McKinley’s LAPA project which is focusing on slavery in sixteenth and seventeenth century Lima."

Weekend Roundup

• This is apropos of nothing, but I ran across it while noodling over a student's paper on Paul Porter's tenure as chairman of the FCC, and it's too strange and wonderful not to note here. TV is the Thing This Year!

• Michelle A. McKinley, University of Oregon Law School, and one of this year’s LAPA Fellows at Princeton, will present  To Have and to Hold Onto: Domestic Slaveholding, Race, and Intimacy in Colonial Lima to the LAPA Seminar on April 13, 2015.  

• Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation, on Huffington Post on the legal expertise Indiana’s Republicans relied upon when passing the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Credit: Law Times

• From the Law Times: "For decades, a massive portrait of Sir James Gowan [right] hung in relative obscurity glancing a wary eye over what local lawyers affectionately call “settlement corner” at the Barrie [Ontario] courthouse.  Now, after a concerted effort by the community to restore the painting, the 147-year-old portrait of Simcoe County’s first judge will gain more prominence at the local courthouse.”  More.

• Words-to Live-By Department. John Hope Franklin to Mary Frances Berry: “He said, 'you already know more about this than anybody, why don’t you just write it?'"

• For many years when someone--say, trade unionists--wanted to characterize some measure--say, the labor provision of the Clayton Act--as a fundamental check on power, the metaphor they used was "Magna Carta."  Since the early years of Rights Revolution, however, the first choice has usually been "Bill of Rights."  Is Magna Carta making a comeback, thanks to all the recent anniversary hoopla?  A Digital Magna Carta: Internet Governance and a New Social Contract.

• There's no fighting 3560 SSRN downloads (and counting), so I give up: Orin S. Kerr, George Washington University Law School, The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria.  And I'm told we should all go see The Originalist at Washington, DC's Arena Stage theater for fictional representations not only of Justice Scalia but of my beloved law school classmates at the University of Chicago in the 1980s.

• From the Norwich [Connecticut] Bulletin: "Central Connecticut State University history professor Matthew Warshauer and student Kristin Steeves will lead a discussion on the life and politics of Lafayette Foster, who as president of the U.S Senate served as the second-highest ranking official in the nation under President Andrew Johnson from April 15, 1865 through March 2, 1867.  'Lafayette Foster: A Principled Stand Against the Slave Power' takes place at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Slater Auditorium on the campus of Norwich Free Academy."

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

Essays on Fascism and Criminal Law

New from Hart Publishing is the collection of essays, Fascism and Criminal Law: History, Theory, Continuity, edited by Stephen Skinner, University of Exeter.

Fascism was one of the twentieth century’s principal political forces, and one of the most violent and problematic. Brutal, repressive and in some cases totalitarian, the fascist and authoritarian regimes of the early twentieth century, in Europe and beyond, sought to create revolutionary new orders that crushed their opponents. A central component of such regimes' exertion of control was criminal law, a focal point and key instrument of State punitive and repressive power. This collection brings together a range of original essays by international experts in the field to explore questions of criminal law under Italian Fascism and other similar regimes, including Franco's Spain, Vargas's Brazil and interwar Romania and Japan. Addressing issues of substantive criminal law, criminology and ideology, the form and function of criminal justice institutions, and the role and perception of criminal law in processes of transition, the collection casts new light on fascism's criminal legal history and related questions of theoretical interpretation and historiography. At the heart of the collection is the problematic issue of continuity and similarity among fascist systems and preceding, contemporaneous and subsequent legal orders, an issue that goes to the heart of fascist regimes' historical identity and the complex relationship between them and the legal orders constructed in their aftermath. The collection thus makes an innovative contribution both to the comparative understanding of fascism, and to critical engagement with the foundations and modalities of criminal law across systems.

A pdf of the TOC is here.

Krishnan, Dias and Pence on Brazil's Elite Corporate Lawyers

Jayanth K. Krishnan, Vitor Martins Dias, and John E Pence, Indiana University-Bloomington, have posted Legal Elites and the Shaping of Corporate Law Practice in Brazil: A Historical Study, which is forthcoming next year in Law and Social Inquiry.  Here is the abstract:    

While Brazil today has a legal market that allows for foreign lawyers and foreign firms, existing regulations are restrictive. Foreign lawyers are barred from practicing domestic law or litigation, and Brazilian-licensed lawyers working for foreign firms or partnering with foreign lawyers cannot do either as well. This was not always the case, however. Until 1963, there was little regulation on the legal profession. Beginning in 1913, elite American lawyers traveled to Brazil, with some even becoming prominent domestic practitioners. They partnered with local elite lawyers (who maintained their domestic privileges) and served as key brokers for U.S. businesses seeking market-entry. Drawing upon the elite theory literature, and on ethnographies, interview data, and over 1,000 pages of rare Portuguese and English archival sources, this study’s thesis is that sophisticated American and Brazilian legal elites capitalized on the lack of regulation to advance their financial interests, and in the process transformed Brazil’s corporate legal sector.

Bonilla on Liberalism and Property in Colombia

Daniel Bonilla, Universidad de los Andes School of Law, has posted Liberalism and Property in Colombia: Property as a Right and Property as a Social Function, which appeared in the Fordham Law Review 80 (2011): 1135-70.  Here is the abstract:    

Liberalism has determined the structure of the property law regime in Colombia. A genealogical analysis of the legal forms of the recent past that define and regulate property provides evidence of three key periods in the creation and consolidation of the right to property in the country. These three moments revolve around different forms of interpreting and balancing three fundamental values in the liberal canon: autonomy, equality, and solidarity.