McQuade on terrorism and colonial law

 Joseph McQuade (University of Toronto) published A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea with Cambridge University Press in 2020. From the publisher: 

Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today.

Praise for the book:

"A brilliant deconstruction of the colonial prose of counter-terrorism and its post-colonial legacy, McQuade's book provides new insights into how legal states of exception were crafted to delegitimize revolutionary violence. A must read for anyone wishing to understand the true nature of British ‘rule of law' in India and its global ramifications." - Sugata Bose

"The declaration of a global war on terrorism in 2001 did not come out of the clear blue sky. Instead, as Joseph McQuade demonstrates in this brilliantly conceived and researched genealogy, some of its most forgotten roots lie in Britain's colonial administration in India and its diplomatic efforts on the world stage. An essential contribution to imperial and international legal history." - Samuel Moyn

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Amanda Frost, Bronfman Professor of Law & Government, American University Washington College of Law, will be speaking on her book You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers online at Politics & Prose on January 28.  More. 
  

• Linda Kerber and Lisa Moses Leff will comment at the first Washington History Seminar of 2021 on at 4 PM ET Monday when David Nasaw discusses his new book, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War.  Register here; watch here.

• Applications for the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History are due on January 15.  This two-week program of the American Society for Legal History for early career scholars will take place June 13-26, 2021.  Information here.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Gregory P. Downs (UC Davis) and Kate Masur (Northwestern University), "Yes, Wednesday’s attempted insurrection is who we are."
  

• If you're working on death, this Call for a Royal Holloway virtual conference (15-16 April 2021) may be of interest. Proposals for Until Death Do Us Part: Historical Perspectives on Death and Those Left Behind, 1300-1900 are due Jan.29, 2021.

• And here's another Call for a virtual conference, from the University of Reading (27 April 2021): Medieval Government Finance: Innovation and Experimentation. Proposals due by 19 Feb. 2021.

• “When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of conferences and public talks, the editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era organized a series of webinars with historians to discuss new books and research in Civil War era scholarship. The webinars are free, registration required, and the recordings are posted on the JCWE’s YouTube channel.”  The lineup for the first five months of 2021 lineup is here. 

• New from the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore: a brief introduction to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution.

• ICYMI:  Holly Brewer explains that Thomas Jefferson did not rig the 1800 election (Washington Monthly).  George F. Will doesn’t care for the Slaughterhouse Cases (WaPo).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• In the op-ed pages of the New York Times: John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) writes about how courts have historically responded to challenges to public health laws -- and how they are doing so today ("Republican Judges Are Quietly Upending Public Health Laws").

• In the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Bruce J. Shulman (Boston University) on how "Court-packing — and other radical constitutional reforms — might save America"; Daniel S. Luck on how "Originalism threatens to turn the clock back on race"; and more.
  

• Via Religion & Politics: Ronit Y. Stahl (University of California, Berkeley) on "The Book of Ruth: Justice Ginsburg on Religious Freedom."
  

• The David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University has recently updated its bibliography of the history of Israeli law to expand its coverage down to 1977.  The compilers write that they have consulted Palestinian and Arabic-language sources and would be very happy to receive further references.
  

• We’ve previously noted that Linda Kerber will deliver the 2020 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture from the College and Law at the University of Iowa at 3:00 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 28 and our now please to pass along word that Constance Backhouse, ASLH delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies and a former ASLH president, and former ASLH Treasurer, Craig Klafter, nominated Professor Kerber was nominated for this prize.
  

• A recording of the 2020 Roger Trask Lecture of the Society for History in the Federal Government, delivered by Bill Williams, formerly Chief of the Center for Cryptologic History at the National Security Agency, is here.

• We just wanted to make sure you all knew about Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of Chicago 7.  We still recall our viewing of the documentary William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, by the famous radical lawyer’s daughters.  

• The 14th Annual South Asia Legal Studies Workshop happened online this week, hosted by the University of Wisconsin Law School. It included a good crop of legal history papers (program here).

• "100 Years After the 19th Amendment: Their Legacy, and Our Future,” a traveling exhibit of the American Bar Association, opens at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law on October 18.  Several events are planned, and the UK Law Library has created an accompanying website.  More.
  

• ICYMI: Jack Rakove on originalism and Judge Barrett (WaPo).  Sara Georgini, series editor for The Papers of John Adams, On the Peaceful Transfer of Power: Lessons from 1800 (AHA Perspectives).  Michael Koncewicz, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, on Loyalty and Duty in the Federal Bureaucracy, From Nixon to Trump (HNN).
  

• Update: Over at IEHS Online, the website of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, Jane Hong interviews Lucy Salyer about Under the Starry Sky. (Also: it does have legs: I discussed Laws Harsh as Tigers in class this semester, too!  DRE.)
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Julia Rose Kraut, the Judith S. Kaye Fellow for the Historical Society of the New York Courts, will speak on her book Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States in the Washington History Seminar of the National History Center of the American Historical Association on October 14 at 4:00 ET.  From the announcement: "Kraut also highlights lawyers, including Clarence Darrow and Carol Weiss King."  Register here.
  

• The US Customs and Border Patrol has asked the National Archives to "designate as temporary all records regarding CBP’s dealings with DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: a recipient of complaints of civil rights abuses from across the department."  More. 
  

• The Docket 3:3 is now online.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has announced "Spotlight on Judicial History," a series of “brief essays, posted periodically, on a wide variety of interesting topics related to federal court history.  The first, by Jake Kobrick, is A Brief History of Circuit Riding.

• Lorianne Updike Toler, Information Society Project, Yale Law School, has posted The Publication of Constitutional Convention Records, a “ short history of the print and digital publication of all records of the Constitutional Convention, from 1787-2020.”
  

• The recording of the National History Center's congressional briefing, "Financial Responses to Economic Crisis," is here. 
  

• You had us at "Hughes": Avoiding Post-Election Chaos: Wilson vs. Hughes, 1916 by Matthew Waxman (Lawfare).  Also: a video on the history of housing discrimination in Arlington, VA.

• Update: Rutgers British Studies Center is hosting Empires of Law in Colonial South Asia this Monday at 12pm-1ET for a Q&A session (register here) with Tanya Agathocleous and our blogger Mitra Sharafi. The video talks are posted here.

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

McClure on whipping in colonial India

 Alastair McClure (University of Hong Kong) has published "Archaic Sovereignty and Colonial Law: The reintroduction of corporal punishment in colonial India, 1864-1909," Modern Asian Studies 54:4 (2020), 1712-47. Here's the abstract: 

The judicial and summary punishment of whipping—absent from the Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860—was passed into law through Act No. VI of 1864. This legislation, tacked on as an appendage to the IPC, invested the judge with wider discretionary powers to administer violence across Indian society. In this case what emerged was an evolving attempt to enlarge the colonial state’s capacity for quotidian violence, targeting certain bodies to reaffirm, manage, and police the social hierarchies upon which colonial sovereignty depended. In the context of a slow imperial movement away from the cast-iron distinctions that had been made between groups in the early nineteenth century—distinctions that had, among other things, supported a legally enforced system of slavery—new methods to mark the value of different bodies were created. The events of the 1850s, in particular the rebellion of 1857-1858, saw the re-emergence of the colonial idea that certain bodies could withstand violence, and that violence itself could be used to create economically productive colonial societies, in debates around penal law and punishment. This article will trace this history through formal legal restrictions and informal legal cultural practices in relation to corporal punishment in colonial India. Over the course of the period under study, this legislation introduced into law what one official termed ‘the category of the “whippable”’. Charting the changing shape of this legal category along lines of race, gender, caste, class, and age, the article will argue that a logic of exceptionality, channelled here through the application of judicial violence, attempted to structure and manage Indian society in complicated ways.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Burset on advisory opinions

 Christian Burset (Notre Dame Law School) has an article coming out in vol. 74 of the Vanderbilt Law Review, forthcoming in 2021. Here's the abstract posted on SSRN for "Advisory Opinions and the Founders' Crisis of Legal Authority" (Notre Dame Legal Studies Paper No.200826):

The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.

This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only in the United States, but also in England and British India—became opposed to advisory opinions in the second half of the eighteenth century. The death of advisory opinions was a global phenomenon, rooted in a crisis of common-law authority.

Early modern English judges had routinely advised the Crown. This advisory role was politically fraught but doctrinally unproblematic thanks to a jurisprudential orthodoxy that treated judges’ opinions as evidence of a preexisting common law. Although this declaratory theory survived into the nineteenth century (and beyond), it began to fragment after 1750, as lawyers began to disagree about the nature of precedent. Those disagreements generated new pressure to clarify the weight of different kinds of legal authority. Most lawyers intuited that advisory opinions were less authoritative than decisions arising from litigation. But because bench and bar lacked a common theory of legal authority, they were unable to articulate a shared understanding of what respect was due to judges’ extrajudicial pronouncements. As a result, advisory opinions became dangerous, because the judges who issued them could not control how future readers might treat them. In response, judges sought to limit their advisory activity—first in England, then in British-controlled Bengal, and finally in the United States, whose judges inherited Britain’s contested and dynamic understanding of judicial power.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Weekend Roundup

• Anne C. Fleming is remembered, especially by other former Climenko Fellows, in Harvard Law Today. 

• The Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History, to be held virtually on December 5, 2020 has been announced.  Fergus Smith will present Civil Litigants in Nineteenth-Century Sheriff Courts.

•  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Turning a Blind Eye: Infanticide and Missing Babies in Seventeenth-Century Geneva, by Sara Beam

• Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943, by Richard F. Hamm, University of Albany at SUNY, has been published online in the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic.

• Over at Notches: Ishita Pande, Queen's University, on her new book, Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937.

• Over at Legal History Miscellany:  Sara M. Butler on Law Enforcement Officials and the Limits of Violence in Medieval England.

• Ryan Greenwood at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog: the University of Minnesota Law Library has an upcoming exhibit on the 1935 Commission on the Harlem Riot, Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

• “The Bangor Historical Society is presenting a virtual exhibit that will focus on the connection between fashion and women’s freedoms. ‘Interwoven: Women’s Fashion and Empowerment’ focuses on the history of women’s rights, including social, economic, legal and voting, while relating milestones and benchmarks with fashion trends by decade" (Bangor Daily News).  And the National Constitution Center also has a new exhibit on the 19th Amendment (Philly Voice).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued a catalogue of forty-one noteworthy titles on The Laws of War and Peace.

•  ICYMI: A review of Matthew Van Meter’s Deep Delta Justice (WaPo).  Mary Ziegler on What's Next for Abortion Law? (Boston Review).  UVA Law's first female students.

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

Special issue: Constitutional Legacies of Empire

 The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly has a special issue out on "The Constitutional Legacies of Empire," edited by Paul F. Scott (University of Glasgow). Here is the Table of Contents for vol.71, no.2 (summer 2020):

• Paul F. Scott, "Introduction: 'The Constitutional Legacies of Empire'"
• Jane Rooney, "Crown act of state and detention in Afghanistan"
• Courtney Grafton, "Foreign act of state and empire"
• Martin Clark, "'Something like the principles of British liberalism': Ivor Jennings and the international and domestic, 1920-1960"
• Devyani Prabhat, "Unequal citizenship and subjecthood: a rose by any other name...?"
• Donal K. Coffey, "Constitutional law and empire in interwar Britain: universities, liberty, nationality and parliamentary supremacy"
• T. T. Arvind and Daithí Mac Síthigh,"Constitutionalism in the periphery: revisiting the roots of self-rule movements in Ireland and India"
• Lindsay Stirton and Martin Lodge, "Constitutional legacies of empire in politics and administration: Jamaica's incomplete settlement"
• Paul F. Scott, "The Privy Council and the constitutional legacies of empire"
• Roger Masterman, "The constitutional influence of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on the UK apex court: institutional proximity and jurisprudential divergence?"

The articles by Donal Coffey and Martin Clark are available for download on an open-access basis.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Pande on child marriage in colonial India

         Ishita Pande (Queen's University, Ontario) has published Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937 with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

     Ishita Pande's innovative study provides a dual biography of India's path-breaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and of 'age' itself as a key category of identity for upholding the rule of law, and for governing intimate life in late colonial India. Through a reading of legislative assembly debates, legal cases, government reports, propaganda literature, Hindi novels and sexological tracts, Pande tells a wide-ranging story about the importance of debates over child protection to India's coming of age. By tracing the history of age in colonial India she illuminates the role of law in sculpting modern subjects, demonstrating how seemingly natural age-based exclusions and understandings of legal minority became the alibi for other political exclusions and the minoritization of entire communities in colonial India. In doing so, Pande highlights how childhood as a political category was fundamental not just to ideas of sexual norms and domestic life, but also to the conceptualisation of citizenship and India as a nation in this formative period. 

Praise for the book:  

"In this theoretically rigorous feminist history, Ishita Pande shows us how and why imperial 'age of consent' controversies should more aptly be read as regimes of reproductive temporality that shape minority and majority political claims in South Asian modernity in all its worldly ambition. Sex, Law and the Politics of Age opens up the terrain of 'juridical childhood' to a whole new set of questions and methods, rethinking girlhood as a prism of colonial and postcolonial ambition and a secularizing epistemic lever in the process." -Antoinette Burton

"A fascinating read, this book adeptly and sensitively renders the child as a moral-political category, and a socio-cultural construct, of modernity in colonial India. Through a close reading of the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, Pande brilliantly intertwines debates on sexuality, childhood and age with the carving of a Hindu reformist nation." -Charu Gupta

"Here, finally, is a superbly researched and expansive South Asian/Indian history of the categories of age and consent, and their translations and tribulations within legal and social structures of surveillance and control. An indispensable book for scholars of law, gender and sexuality." -Anjali Arondekar

"Pande brilliantly deploys the generative power of gender analysis and queer theory to reinterpret one of the most widely-debated topics in colonial South Asian historiography: the question of ‘child marriage’. This rigorous and beautifully written book will be required reading for all historians and scholars of gender and sexuality in the twentieth century." -Todd Shepard 

You can join the author for an online book event, "Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age with Ishita Pande" on Monday, August 24, 2020 at 12.30-1.30pm CDT. Register here.

Further information about the book is available here.  

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Floyd Abrams reviews Wendell Bird’s The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act” over at First Amendment News.

• The Federal Judicial Center has arranged its collection of its Notable Federal Trials series in this nifty timeline.  

• Bound By Every Tie of Duty: John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice of Van Diemen’s Land, by Jacqueline Fox (Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd), has made the short list for the Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History.

Robert A. Taft (LC)

• We felt late to the party when we saw how many legal historians had done Brian Frye's Ipse Dixit podcast.  We aren't scanning all 556 episodes but can report they include Christopher Tomlins, Nicholas Bagley and Julian Davis Mortenson  Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Thomas McSweeney, Elizabeth Katz, Taja-Nia Henderson and Lutie A. Lytle, Jilll Hasday, Seth Barrett Tillman, and Justin Simaud. Also, from February 1947, Robert A. Taft calls for "curbs on the power of the executive branch of the government"!!

• Sure, you're on lock down, but that doesn't mean you can't (virtually) browse the George Wythe Room at the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary.  H/t: Tom McSweeney.

• The sixth edition of Borkowski's Textbook on Roman Law, by Paul J. du Plessis, is now available.

• A more accessible version of John Fabian Witt's lecture on the legal history of infectious diseases is here.

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Can you steal a peacock? A post by Krista J. Kesselring on animals in early modern law.

• The Hoover-Roosevelt Transition premiers on the Facebook page of the FDR Library on Wednesday, May 13.  FDR Library Director Paul Sparrow and Hoover Library Director Thomas Schwartz discuss the relationship between FDR and HH “during the 1932 campaign and the transition between their presidencies, examining their different philosophies in the role of government and the protection of individual liberty and freedom. Followed by a Q&A in the comments.

• The Tagore Law Lectures (1870-1986) are now available here on the University of Calcutta Digital Library.

• And also on South Asia: check out this Twitter thread by Kalyani Ramnath (@kalramnath) on epidemics, contagion, migration, and law.

• ICYMI: Mary Ziegler interviewed on Abortion and the Law in America in Mother Jones and on WORT.  WaPo's obituary of Barbara Babcock. 

• I was very sorry to learn of the death of John M. Murrin, from whom (and Douglas Greenberg) I took a marvelous reading course on early America while a graduate student at Princeton.  Vast knowledge, zero pretension, kind, and witty (especially if you went in for atrocious puns).  His essays include a landmark study of the colonial legal profession and the brilliant "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity."  They are collected in Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic, ed. Andrew Shankman (Oxford University Press, 2018), reviewed here.  John Fea's remembrance is here. H/t: Al Brophy. DRE

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

Weekend Roundup

• Barbara Allen Babcock, the first woman member of the Stanford Law School faculty, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita, the author of Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (2011, and a great promoter of the history of women in the legal profession has died. Here's Stanford's press release. 

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts concludes its Celebrate Diversity Month in Common Threads of Justice by joining with Supreme Court Historical Society in the program Ladies of Legend: The First Generation of American Women Attorneys.

• Here's a "sixty-second lecture"  on the legal history of epidemics in Modern America by Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. And by LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi: Pandemic or poison? How epidemics shaped Southasia's legal history

• Congratulations to Jennifer Mnookin, a historian of the law of evidence, Erika Lee, a historian of immigration law and policy, and my law dean William Treanor, a constitutional historian of the Founding, upon their induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  I was also very pleased to see my Georgetown colleague Michael Kazin among the inductees.  DRE

•  Have you noted the National Archives and Records Administration platform, History Hub?  It “connects agencies, researchers, and a bevy of citizen archivists within its online community to help the public through its research journeys.”  The latest episode announces Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series: A Match Made in History.

• Julian Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley’s attack on the originalist case for the nondelegation in American constitutional law has prompted two responses on SSRN by Ilan Wurman and Aaron Gordon. 

• ICYMI: Richard Lazarus’s Rule of Five, on Massachusetts v. EPA, in Harvard Law Today.The NYT obit of Richard Sobol, who went from Columbia Law to Arnold, Fortas & Porter to the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in 1965.

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

AHR Roundtable on Age

The April 2020 issue of the American Historical Review features a roundtable, "Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," organized by Nicholas Syrett (University of Kansas) and Corinne Field (University of Virginia). Of special interest to legal historians: 

• Ishita Pande (Queen's University), "Power, Knowledge, and the Epistemic Contract on Age: The Case of Colonial India": on the implementation of age-of-consent legislation in high courts across colonial India
• Corrie Decker (University of California, Davis), "A Feminist Methodology of Age Grading and History in Africa": on how colonial authorities expanded the legal importance of chronological age while precolonial African societies assessed age in relative terms (juniors versus seniors). Faced with two incommensurable systems for understanding life stages, African women found new ways to assert a sense of generational belonging and new definitions of maturity. 
• Bianca Premo (Florida International University), "Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Colonial Spanish American Law": on how indigenous, enslaved, and property-less individuals in Spain’s American colonies multiplied privileges based on age calculations that proved situational rather than numerically exact. The ages that Spanish American officials set down on paper in criminal trials, censuses, and freedom suits derived from complicated cultural equations; Premo contends that age proved a critical guarantee of rights, a language colonial subjects could use to turn legal incapacities into beneficial protections.
• Ashwini Tambe (University of Maryland), "The Moral Hierarchies of Age Standards: The UN Debates a Common Minimum Marriage Age, 1951-1962": on United Nations efforts to consider a universal minimum age of consent for marriage. This involved a series of tense deliberations, as former colonial powers framed early and forced marriage in newly independent states as forms of slavery. Debates about a universal marriage age came to mark differences between imperial powers and decolonizing nations.
• Corinne Field (University of Virginia) and Nicholas Syrett (University of Kansas), "Age and the Construction of Gendered and Raced Citizenship in the United States": on how the postbellum state relied upon age to reinforce inequalities rooted in female dependence and chattel slavery. Congress denied equal benefits to the families of black Civil War soldiers because they lacked adequate proof of age. Postbellum legal majority differentiated between men and women, shoring up gender inequality even as women gained new rights and opportunities. Chronological age, Field and Syrett conclude forcefully, is not a neutral fact, but a vector of power through which officials and ordinary people construct and contest the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. 

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Chatterjee on Mughal Law

Nandini Chatterjee, University of Exeter, has published Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires with Cambridge University Press. The book is available on an Open Access basis. From the publisher: 

Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glittering courts of the emperors and nobles, but still dramatic and filled with colourful personalities. From this perspective, we see war, violence, betrayal, enterprise, romance and disappointment, but we also see a quest for law, justice, rights and righteousness. A rare story of Islamic law in a predominantly non-Muslim society, this is also an exploration of the peripheral regions of the Maratha empire and a neglected princely state under British colonial rule. 

Praise for the book:

 "This book is an important work that enriches our understanding of family, empire and estate in South Asia. The analysis moves away from state policy and image-building to the micro-processes that actually reproduce state power. It achieves this through the mastery of difficult sources presented in a wide comparative frame.'"- Sumit Guha 

"In tracking a single family's legal documents over three centuries, Nandini Chatterjee has written an extraordinary book, upturning our understanding of how Mughal law worked and how it was experienced by its subjects. It will be revelatory for anyone interested in Islamic, South Asian, or Mughal history." - Samira Sheikh

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, University of Michigan Law School, has posted Why Study Tax History?, a review of volume 9 of Studies in the History of Tax Law, ed. P. Harris and D. de Cogan (Hart, 2019). 

• Congratulations to Emory Law's Deborah Dinner upon her being selected for an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship.  She received it for A Nation at Risk: Private Insurance and the Law in Modern America.  Congratulations, too, to Erik Linstrum, Associate Professor, History, University of Virginia, for Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire.

• Mary Dudziak recently tweeted out a link to the panel she moderated at SHAFR on in 2017 on War, Law, and Restraint, with Rosa Brooks, Jack Goldsmith, Helen Kinsella and John Fabian Witt.

• Some thoughts on epidemics in South Asian legal history: how the 1896 bubonic plague hit legal Bombay (-MS).  Voting during the Spanish Flu (Slate) and in today's NYT.  Polly J. Price (Emory) on quarantine in US history.  Frank Snowden’s lectures on “Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600,” including the final one, which calls “SARS, avian flu, and swine flu as ‘dress rehearsals’ for ‘something more serious.’” H/t: John Fabian Witt

• Ellen Carol DuBois on The Thorny Road to the Nineteenth Amendment (Smithsonian).

• There's a ton of ideas flying around as instructors switch to online teaching. Our Twitter favorites: a timely assignment idea if your other lesson plans fall through, some online archives you may not know about, academic resources going open-access, and even kindly guest lecture offers. And of course: "I Will Survive" and the horse drawing.  Also, it turns out you aren't funnier than Arkansas Law's Alex Nunn.  (Wait for it!)

•  Last weekend we mentioned Reuel Schiller's chapter in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, edited by Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).  Here's another chapter of interest: Sophia Z. Lee (University of Pennsylvania): "Rights in the New Deal Order and Beyond."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: William Horne (Villanova University), "In the hands of racist officials, the covid-19 pandemic may be a weapon." 

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

Khosla on the Indian Constitution

Coming out this month by Madhav Khosla (Ashoka University) is India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy with Harvard University Press. From the publisher:

Britain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge.

Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution—the longest in the world—came into effect.

More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.

Advance praise for the book:

“Erudite, analytically dazzling, and with a rare understanding of both India’s and democracy’s challenges, Madhav Khosla’s India’s Founding Moment gives readers unparalleled access to the ideas behind India’s radical experiment in democratic constitution-making. As that noble vision is now under assault from sinister forces that Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar knew well, we all should ponder Khosla’s all-too-timely book and do whatever we can to prevent the demise of India’s constitutional order.”—Martha C. Nussbaum

“This brilliant and challenging book shows how political choices—what to put in a constitution, the locus of effective power, and the forms of representation—can create citizens who can and must govern themselves in a modern democracy while facing deep challenges caused by poverty, caste, and illiteracy. It is at once a contribution to Indian constitutional history, constitutional theory, and political theory, and is a ‘must read’ for everyone in those fields.”—Mark Tushnet

“This is a sensitive analysis of the moral imagination behind the Indian Constitution, a document intended to free the democratic process from sectarian identities and to strengthen centralized state power. As Indian democracy struggles to stay on the rails, Khosla’s book is a timely reminder of what it was meant to be.”—Partha Chatterjee

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Mitra on Indian Sex Life

Durba Mitra (Harvard) has published Indian Sex Life with Harvard University Press. From the publisher:

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life, Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society.

Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women’s performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women’s sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world.

Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

The book includes two chapters (at least) that will be of special interest to legal historians: Ch.2, "Repetition: Law and the Sociology of Deviant Female Sexuality" and Ch.3, "Circularity: Forensics, Abortion, and the Evidence of Deviant Female Sexuality." 

Praise for the book: 

"Indian Sex Life is a well-theorized, dense, and provocative addition to current historical scholarship in gender, sexuality, and colonial/postcolonial studies of South Asia. Drawing attention to the surplus of representations around female sexual deviance within historical materials, Durba Mitra makes bold, ambitious claims about the concept of the prostitute and its role in the unfolding of methods in the social study of colonial Bengal."—Anjali Arondekar

"The startling, convincing insight in Durba Mitra's superbly researched concept-history of the prostitute is that ideas about deviant female sexuality undergird modern disciplinary knowledge, shaping debates across fields as diverse as jurisprudence, political economy, and philology. This is a valuable contribution to the global history of sexuality, and essential reading for scholars interested in modernity, colonial knowledge, gender, and cultural history."—Prachi Deshpande

"In Indian Sex Life, Durba Mitra writes with the utmost clarity and precision about female sexuality in colonial India, a topic long regarded as messy and opaque. This innovative and beautifully crafted study of the prostitute makes excellent use of feminist and queer theory to trace the construction of deviancy in social scientific thought. There are crucial insights here for scholars across the disciplines."—Laura Doan

"Pathbreaking and original, Indian Sex Life establishes the central place of deviant female sexuality in discussions about Indian society in a range of disciplines. Departing from other studies about prostitution in the subcontinent, this valuable work makes significant contributions to the literature on colonial India and to the voluminous writings on gender and sexuality in South Asia. It will compel global scholars of sexuality to question their existing assumptions."—Douglas E. Haynes

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Legal scholars and historians on the uproar over changes to India's citizenship laws: read this by Shubhankar Dam, this by Rohit De and Surabhi Ranganathan, this by Madhav Khosla, this by Gautam Bhatia, and this by Neeti Nair. Here's a useful microsyllabus on citizenship and provisional belonging in South Asia, by Swati Chawla, Jessica Namakkal, Kalyani Ramnath, and Lydia Walker.

• On January 14, 2020, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History hosts a colloquium on Decolonial Comparative Law, with Ralf Michaels and Lena Salaymeh.

• Yesterday Katie Watson, JD, Associate Professor of Medical Social Sciences, Medical Education, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine delivered Contextualizing Abortion: The History of Morality Laws and the Legal Personhood of Women, which was the Annual Women’s Reproductive Health Scholarly Concentration Lecture at Brown University.

• "The [British] National Archives have provoked outcry from academics by announcing a new trial restricting readers to 12 documents a day” (Telegraph, via HNN).

• Over at SCOTUSblog: Amanda Frost, "Academic highlight: Sohoni on the 'lost history' of nationwide injunctions."

• Now available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Expert Testimony in the Social Sciences: A Historical Overview of Contemporary Issues, by Lawrence Rosen.

• Trey Gaines, Director of the Bartow History Museum, is to speak on the history of the 1869 Courthouse in Cartersville, Georgia, on January 15 from noon to 1 p.m.  (More)

• ICYMI: “31 women who blazed trails” in Oregon history, including Mercedes Deiz, the state’s first black female lawyer  (Statesman Journal).  Robert Caro's papers bound for the New-York Historical Society (NYT).  In praise of the library of the Queens County Supreme Courthouse.

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

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's Retropolis section, a profile of Mitsuye Endo, the under-appreciated Japanese-American citizen whose legal challenge to the Japanese American internment "forced the government to close the camps and allowed thousands of Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast."  

• Speaking of unlawful confinement, the History Office of the Federal Judicial Center has posted this introduction to federal habeas corpus jurisdiction. To its bibliography we would add Amanda Tyler's Habeas Corpus in Wartime (2017) and Eric Freedman's Making Habeas Work (2018).

• In individual posts we have mentioned several of the articles in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review's May 2019 symposium on administrative constitutionalism. The full symposium is now available here. It includes contributions by Karen M. Tani (University of California, Berkeley), Gregory Ablavsky (Stanford University), Joanna L. Grisinger (Northwestern University), Sophia Z. Lee (University of Pennsylvania), Jeremy K. Kessler (Columbia University), Bertral L. Ross II (University of California, Berkeley), William J. Novak (University of Michigan), Cary Coglianese (University of Pennsylvania), and William N. Eskridge, Jr. (Yale Law School). 

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Karin Wulf (Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture/William & Mary) on how "keeping historical records public and easily accessible" enables us to think for ourselves about impeachment.    

• Writing for JOTWELL's Contracts section, Daniel Barnhizer (Michigan State University) has posted an admiring review of "Cheating Pays," by legal historian Emily Kadens (Northwestern Pritzker School of Law). The article, which was based on a historical case study, appeared in Volume 119 of the Columbia Law Review.

• Available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia, by Priyasha Saksena.

• The blog of the Cato Institute has Roger Pilon’s notice of David N. Mayer, who died last month.  Mayer, professor emeritus of law and history at the Capital Law School, was the author of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 1994).

• ICYMI: Ryan Husey, The Carceral State and Prison Activism, an H-Net Book Channel Essay.

• In the op-ed section of the New York Times: Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Georgia State University) reminds readers that "Women Have Always Had Abortions."  

• Via History News Network: "Over 1500 Historians and Scholars Sign Letter Urging Impeachment." Also, Robert Hardaway (University of Denver Sturm College of Law) on "Impeachment and the Electoral College."

• Over at New Books in Law (part of the New Books Network): an interview with G. Edward White (University of Virginia) about Volume III of Law in American History (Oxford University Press, 2019). Also, Talitha LeFlouria (Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia) talks about her book Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

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

Bhatia on the Indian Constitution

Gautam Bhatia (practicing lawyer and independent scholar) has published The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts with HarperCollins India. From the press:

We think of the Indian Constitution as a founding document, embodying a moment of profound transformation from being ruled to becoming a nation of free and equal citizenship. Yet the working of the Constitution over the last seven decades has often failed to fulfil that transformative promise. Not only have successive Parliaments failed to repeal colonial-era laws that are inconsistent with the principles of the Constitution, but constitutional challenges to these laws have also failed before the courts. Indeed, in numerous cases, the Supreme Court has used colonial-era laws to cut down or weaken the fundamental rights. The Transformative Constitution by Gautam Bhatia draws on pre-Independence legal and political history to argue that the Constitution was intended to transform not merely the political status of Indians from subjects to citizens, but also the social relationships on which legal and political structures rested. He advances a novel vision of the Constitution, and of constitutional interpretation, which is faithful to its text, structure and history, and above all to its overarching commitment to political and social transformation.

The book has been shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2019. Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Head over the to 2019 Annual Meeting Recap for images from the recently completed gathering in Boston!

• The Smithsonian’s “Ten Best History Books of 2019" include Sarah Milov’s The Cigarette: A Political History and Sara Seo’s Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.

• Available online from AJLH and Oxford Journals: A Counter-Culture of Law: Jurisprudential Change and the Intellectual Origins of the Critical Legal Studies Movement, by Juhana Salojärvi.

•  Mishal Khan has posted this on race and slavery in India's legal history, over at openDemocracy.

•  ICYMI: "National Theatre to tackle Scotland's 'often unspoken' slave trade history" (The Scotsman).  The history of the York County (PA) bar celebrated. 

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