Weekend Roundup

• Legal historian Sarah Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania, has been appointed to the Evan C Thompson Chair for Excellence in Teaching (Almanac). 

• "William G. Ross, the Albert P. Brewer Professor of Law and Ethics at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, was honored with the Thomas W. Woolley Scholarly Achievement Award during the university's 185th Opening Convocation on Aug. 25."  More. 

• UVA's Sarah Milov was quoted in a recent New York Times article on "Social Media and the Myth of the Big Tobacco Moment."

• In "The Maritime Origins of Judicial Review," Thomas H. Lee, Fordham Law, reviews The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789-1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2025), by Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law (Lawfare).   

• Matthijs Wibier, an assistant professor of Classics at the University Of Cincinnati, has "edited and translated a Latin legal text [about taxes] he pieced together from fragments that surprisingly survived in the Egyptian sands for more than 1,600 years" (UC News).  

• Charles Plambeck, Adjunct Professor of Law, and Kathleen DuVal, Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History, will lecture on the 1776 North Carolina Constitution at UNC Law from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm on September 23.

• Karin Wulf interviews Anna O. Law about her new book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants  (Commonplace).

• The exhibit, "Pennsylvania’s Founding: How a City and a Colony Shaped America’s Civic DNA," a joint project of the National Constitution Center and Drexel University, will be on display at the NCC from September 30 through January 3.  In conjunction with the exhibit is the NCC town hall, "The Holy Experiment: Religious Liberty, Pennsylvania, and the Making of America" which will take place on September 29.  (Metro Philadelphia).   

• 
  The American Antiquarian Society will hold a book event on Peter Jaros's The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature (2026) on November 19, 2026, from 2 - 3pm (AAS).

• UConn Law's notice of new faculty and fellows includes Brianne Felsher, "a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at Berkeley" who "studies the legal history of queer families and marriages in the United States from the early 1800s through World War I." 

• "Do We Need a New Approach to Our Origin Stories?" Ned Blackhawk (Yale University) discusses this question and others in an interview for the Nation.

• A notice of Vox Mercatoria, a podcast growing out of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project, “Migrating commercial law and language: Rethinking lex mercatoria (11th-17th cent.),” which is directed by Stefania Gialdroni, University of Padua. 

• The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory Partner Group, “The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade,” will hold a discussion workshop on September 4, 2026, 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM (Local Time Germany) (More).

• ICYMI: The one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court of Ohio's "Women in the Law" exhibit (CNO).  Rachel Shelden writes that For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical (TPM).  Kelsey Dallas on Alcohol at the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUSblog).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Legal historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin has been appointed dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Stanford's notice is here.
   
• Over at JOTWELL: Bethany Berger (Iowa College of Law) spotlights Lila Teeters Knolle's Indians Now Taxed: Citizenship and Taxation in Settler-Colonial South Dakota, 44 J. Am. Ethnic History 44 (2025); Lisa Owens (UMass Dartmouth) flags K-Sue Park's Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, 133 Yale L.J. 1487 (2024). 

• From In Custodia Legis: "Murder, He Signed? The Unexpected Death of A Declaration of Independence Signer." 

• We have previously posted about Christina Kexel Chabot's "The Interstitial Executive: A View from the Founding," forthcoming in the BYU Law Review. She has now posted an updated version, which includes historical evidence that bears directly on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Trump v. Slaughter. 

• Nursing Clio is spotlighting undergraduate writing this summer. Here's a post on "Registration of Maternity Homes Act, 1934: Institutional inadequacy and indifference in Irish maternity homes," by Whitney Cowan (St. Olaf College). 

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

Palau-McDonald on Farrington v. Tokushige

MJ Palau-McDonald, University of Hawai’i at Manoa--William S. Richardson School of Law, has posted Farrington v. Tokushige: Language & Power in Hawai’i:

In Farrington v. Tokushige (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Fifth Amendment grounds a series of laws enacted by the Territory of Hawai'i to control and ultimately eradicate private Japanese language schools. Legal commentary on Tokushige is sparse. The case is often characterized as a straightforward application of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) and Meyer v. Nebraska (1923). Together, Tokushige, Pierce, and Meyer are often cast as the Court’s public education chapter of the Americanization period. However, viewing Tokushige as a simple extension of Meyer and Pierce alienates the case from its historical context of white elites’ attempts to maintain political and economic control in the Territory in the face of a growing population of Nisei (U.S.-born children of first-generation Japanese immigrants), who, unlike their parents, were U.S. citizens with the right to vote. In this way, the Territory’s anti-Japanese movement was distinct from concurrent Japanese exclusion initiatives in California and Washington, which revolved around attempts to prevent Japanese land ownership and economic ascension, though the fear of the “yellow peril” was the fulcrum around which these movements metastasized. Through an examination of the social and legal history behind Tokushige, this article reinserts the significant racial dynamics that undergirded the events, the cultural depictions, and the legal justifications for the Japanese school control legislation that was lost in the Court’s sterilized decision. It also resituates Tokushige within the context of U.S. colonization and the forces that justified control over Hawai’i’s politics, land, and culture. The case’s unique history is inextricably intertwined with the establishment and maintenance of U.S. hegemony in the Pacific. Recontextualized, Tokushige implicates core questions of power that are increasingly relevant today, including who has access to political and economic power and who creates the conditions for access to that power.

--Dan Ernst 

Quadri on Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity

Oxford University Press has published Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity (Mar. 2021), by Junaid Quadri (University of Illinois at Chicago). A description from the Press: 

Transformations of Tradition probes how the encounter with colonial modernity conditioned Islamic jurists' conceptualizations of the shari'a. Departing from the tendency to focus on reformist-minded thinkers and politically charged issues, Junaid Quadri directs his attention towards the overlooked jurisprudential writings of Muhammad Bakhit al-Muti-i (1854-1935), Mufti of Egypt and a frequent critic of the famed reformists Muhammad 'Abduh and Rashid Rida. There, he locates a remarkable series of foundational intellectual shifts. Offering a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in the history of Islamic thought, Quadri tracks how Bakhit reworks the relationship of the shari'a to categories of understanding as fundamental as history and authority, science and technology, and religion and the secular, thereby upending the very ground upon which Islamic law had until then functioned. Through close readings of complex legal texts and mining of oft-neglected archives, this carefully researched study situates its argument in both the contested scholarly world of a quickly-changing Cairo, and the transregional school of Hanafi law as represented by jurists writing in Kazan, Lucknow, and Baghdad. Examining Islamic jurisprudential discourse in the colonial moment, Transformations of Tradition uncovers a shari'a that is neither a medieval holdover nor merely a pragmatic concession to the demands of a new world, but rather deeply entangled with the epistemological commitments of colonial modernity.

More information is available here. You can listen to an interview with the author here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Owensby and Ross Interviewed on "Justice in a New World"

Every month or so the Toynbee Prize Foundation posts interviews with the authors of books on comparative and global history.  Just up is its interview of Brian Owensby and Richard Ross about their edited volume, Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (2018).  Writes the moderator, Nicholas Sy, University of the Philippines Diliman:

How intelligible were colonial legal norms to indigenous Americans and how intelligible were indigenous legal norms to settlers? Responding to a historiography that describes either a dynamic of gradual understanding or a dynamic of continuing incomprehension, legal historians Professors Brian Owensby and Richard Ross have crafted the prodigious edited volume Justice in a New World. Resting on nuanced comparison, the volume argues for a less homogenizing view, and highlights instead the degree to which various indigenous communities were integrated into different early modern empires.

In our conversation, we discuss the genesis of their work and its key concepts. We also explore the different comparative axes along which we may examine both indigenous and settler notions of intelligibility.

--Dan Ernst

Lo Extrajudicial, Premo

My last two posts with Judith Mansilla discussed a dimension of law that consumed perhaps the greatest part of colonial Spanish Americans’ legal experiences: a world of verbal agreements, handshakes, and homemade contracts or bills of sale. But we confronted the historian’s dependence on the more official legal archive to provide us glimpses of this dimension, specifically on the civil case record where litigants and witnesses referred to their “pacts,” or “oral receipts.” 

We should not, however, assume that this dimension of law was unsanctioned or fell into a category of the broadly “normative” as opposed to the strictly “legal.” (cont'd)

Paperless Law and Extrajudicial Legality

I am so grateful that Mitra invited me to be the guest blogger during this first month of the new year and decade.  If I understand correctly, for your New Year’s resolution, you couldn’t decide between learning more about Latin American legal history or thinking more about the relationship between literacy and legal culture, right? Well, great news! My posts this month will be about both. 

I’ll be blogging about the vibrant world of law that transcended the written record in colonial and contemporary Latin America. I begin with a reflection on the enduring legacy of the concept of the Lettered City in Latin America—the idea that bureaucratic writing served as an ordering tool of elite domination over the “illiterate” masses. The next post will consider the persistent practices of ordinary Latin Americans taking law into their own hands, copying legal manuals, contracts and other documents. Then I’ll be joined by a fellow historian of Lima to explore more deeply extrajudicial contracts and verbal agreements in the seventeenth century, followed by my reflections on how the promotion of paperless law, as opposed to written law and litigation, was fundamental to Spanish colonialism. Finally, I’ll conclude, along with another co-poster, with a reflection on paperless citizenship in early twentieth-century Cuba. 

So kick off those running shoes—who needs them?—and let me help you achieve your New Year’s goals.

--Bianca Premo

On the Indigenous Experience in the Americas

One of the issues that habitually frustrates me is the disconnect between historians who work on the colonial period and those who specialize in the indigenous world. Theoretically, both engage with the same period and depend on similar or even (on occasions) identical sources, but their aims and their readings are often diverse, the bibliography they consult is habitually distinct, and they frequently belong to different fields and professional associations. The result is that they are seldom in conversation with one another. Having participated recently in a search for a historian of Indigenous North America made this clear to me, but so have many years working as a scholar of Spanish America.

How could one place colonial and indigenous history in dialogue? To answer this question, I authored two pieces. The first piece was concerned with Indigenous right to land, the other focused on campaigns to resettle natives in new, Spanish-style communities.[i]

Attempting to understand why some historians insisted on Spanish respect to native land rights (mostly historians of the Spanish colonial state) while others criticized Spain for the massive dispossession of natives (mainly historians interested in the native experience of empire), I observed how respect to native rights operated in the colonial period.  I argued that respect did not guarantee continuity. On the contrary, it (often) introduced change. This could happen because Spanish judges, although willing to recognize indigenous right to land, understood land rights not according to Indigenous law but according to European juridical traditions. These judges tied land rights to occupation and described occupation in ways that resonated with the European experience. The result was both the suppression of ancient rights as well as the invention of new entitlements. In other words, examination of how European norms were applied vis-à-vis natives enabled to affirm that respect to native rights and native dispossession could operate simultaneously.

With regards to native resettlement, historians of native Spanish America usually denounced resettlement campaigns as a colonial measure aimed at controlling, converting, and exploiting the native population. Yet, as a historian of Spain in both Europe and the Americas I knew that resettlement did not only target natives but also Spaniards and that it operated in both the Old and the New World. Justifying it were contemporary convictions that only people who resided in proper communities (and indigenous communities were not considered “proper”) could be tied to the polity religiously and civically. The question when resettlement was required, against whom, and for which end, thus demanded a larger and a longer vision. As happened in the case of native land rights, just looking at natives, just looking to the Americas, was insufficient.

These remarks are not meant to diminish the plight of native Americans. European colonialism turned the native world upside down. It was a human-made hurricane that touched and upset almost everything. But, regardless of how terrible it had been, if we wish to understand how it operated, we should not separate the study of the native world from the study of the colonial (and by extension European) world, with which it was closely entangled.

---

[i]  Tamar Herzog. “Colonial law and ‘Native Customs’: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Spanish America.” The Americas 63(3) (2013): 303-321 and Tamar Herzog. “Indigenous Reducciones and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue.” Ler História 72 (2018): 9-30 (an earlier version of this work was published under the title “Terres et déserts, société et sauvagerie. De la communauté en Amérique et en Castille à l’époque moderne.” Annales HSS 62 (3) (2007): 507-538)).

Does European Law Have a History?

Historians have routinely divided European Legal history into many pieces. They distinguished an English from a Continental law and they often proceeded to describe national legal spheres even in periods, which pre-dated the emergence of nation-states. It was as if, once legal systems were nationalized in the late eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century, it was no longer possible to imagine a legal history that pre-dated the nation state or that, even after nation-states were formed, continued to be shared by the different European countries.  

In my most recent work (“A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia,” Harvard U Press, 2018) I sought to identify a common European legal tradition that also embraced England and that filtered outside Europe because of European colonialism and because of processes of adaptation, translation, and transplantation. Rather than tracing the evolution of specific arrangements, I wanted to understand what law was: how it emerged, how it gained validity, and who controlled these processes. In other words, I was after the operating system(s), not the specific solutions it (they) enabled formulating.

Having surveyed two and a half millennia (from the Roman empire to the present-day), my most salient conclusion was that the development of law in Europe was both surprisingly consistent and astonishingly unpredictable. Take for example, Roman law. Roman law, Goethe once said, was like a diving duck. Whether you saw it or not, it was always there. Goethe was unquestionably correct when he pointed out to the enduring legacies of Roman law, which were widely shared across the Continent, but he was wrong to imagine it as a single duck. Classical Roman law was radically distinct from how Medieval jurists, allegedly reviving it, read it, and it had even less in common with what 19^th century German jurists imagined it to be. If it was a diving duck, it constantly changed colors and shapes to the point that it was no longer clear which type of duck it was and whether it was a duck at all. The endurance of Roman law, in other words, was less illuminating of continuity than it was revealing of change.

The same thing was true of the Magna Carta, to mention yet another emblematic example. The Magna Carta was a thirteenth-century feudal charter meant to guarantee peace among lords. However, centuries after it was enacted, it was given a new meaning and a new role. What counted for this radical transformation was not only, not even mainly, the identity of those reading the document, but the contexts in which they operated. Therefore, if we wanted to understand how law evolved over time, we would need to reconstruct the contexts (the operating systems) in which specific documents, doctrines, or institutions were implemented.

Listening to what actors stated was rarely sufficient. Jurists who invoked Roman law pretended to obey its rationale and instructions. So did the early modern English lawyers who invoked the Magna Carta. Yet, their pretense for continuity did not mask the profound changes they introduced. While claims for continuity could mask change, claims for change could mask continuities.  This was evident when late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century French revolutionaries presented their system as entirely new, but it was also clear in the work of European jurists who purportedly wished to purge local law from the (evil) influence of Roman law yet nonetheless employed Romanist methodology. European legal development, in short, could be told as a story of actors both adopting and rejecting the past, both copying and re-writing it, both positioning for and against it. In the process, what the past meant, which parts of it were relevant, and how they could be used became essential as different individuals, groups, and institutions fought to discover, but also invent, the rules that would govern their relationships.

These processes were common across Europe. In the late Classical period and the high middle ages, the influence of Roman law and Roman traditions expanded outside the boundaries of the empire as a byproduct of the spread of Christianity and the creation of Latin Christendom. By that stage, however, Roman law was already very different from what it had been because it was infused with Christian ideals. Mixing with new elements continued with the Germanification of Roman law and the Romanization of Germanic laws. Roman, Canon, and Germanic laws all operated conjointly in the Middle Ages, alongside the extreme fragmentation of the legal regime. The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth-centuries witnessed a colossal effort to unite hundreds of local arrangements in a systematic ius commune (in the Continent), or common law (in England). This effort resulted in moments of greater or lesser cohesion but, above all, it unleashed a fierce struggle over the right to pronounce, make, implement, or unite, the law.

The advent of the modern state and stronger monarchical orders (as well as the opposition they generated), intensified these struggles. It also led to a serious questioning whether a common European law indeed existed and, if so, what was its nature. During these debates, many pointed to the obvious: that law was always contextual and, to some degree or the other, local. Particularism, such as embodied by the idea of a local customary, and then national law, however, never extinguished a horizon of commonality, only that commonality itself changed. Instead of placing Europe or Christianity at the center as had been the case during the Middle Ages, in the early modern period it progressively referenced a common humanity with a common rationality. This allowed Europeans to again refashion their system as universal by arguing that it united all humans regardless of their extreme dissimilarities.  These developments justified the imposition on occasions, the expansion in others, of European law overseas. They were responsible for severe Eurocentrism, but they also radically transformed European law. If what was common to Europeans was also common to all peoples and places, what was specifically European (and eventually national) in this law? Would European law become but a local version of a more general law that was in the process of being globalized?