Judge Thomas A. Flannery (1918-2007)

[The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit has an excellent collection of oral histories of lawyers and judges active in the circuit.  Recently, it has asked interviewers to revisit their oral histories and prepare summaries for the Society’s website.  I've already posted one for Bernard I. Nordlinger.  Here is one for Thomas A. Flannery (1918- 2007), who was so admired by the bench and bar of the District of Columbia Circuit that they endowed a lecture series in his honor.  (The latest will be delivered on Wednesday, November 6, by Judge Paul L. Friedman, with remarks from Jessie K. Liu, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.  The oral history itself is here.]

Thomas A. Flannery (DCCHS)

In the United States, “the bar” is quite properly taken to be synonymous with the “legal profession,” but a narrower meaning of the term, a close-knit group of lawyers who forged their professional identity in the crucible of the courts, better fits the life and career of Thomas Aquinas Flannery.  He was born in 1918 in the “Swampoodle” neighborhood, home to the District of Columbia’s Irish community.  His father, a carpenter, was the son of an immigrant; the ancestors of his mother, who looked after their five children, arrived in the United States a generation earlier.  The family’s financial condition, while never good, was precarious after his father became too sick to work.  From the age of sixteen, Flannery took one job or another, but he was also a good enough student at Gonzaga High School to earn an academic scholarship and contemplate attending Georgetown College.  The family’s finances dictated that he obtain a career more quickly, and so instead he attended night law school at Catholic University, which did not then require an undergraduate degree.

In this, Flannery followed Edward Matthew Curran, fifteen years his senior, who shared his May 10 birthday, married a cousin close to his family, and became a judge of the Police Court while Flannery was in high school.  (Curran would later serve as U.S. Attorney and Judge and Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.)  After receiving his law degree and passing the bar in 1940, he worked briefly as a clerk in the Treasury Department before serving as a combat intelligence officer in the Army Air Force during World War II.

Both he and Washington had changed upon his return.  Command responsibility had matured Flannery, and the District of Columbia was much more cosmopolitan than it had been in his youth.  For several years he took what law jobs he could find, in the Lands Division of the Department of Justice and with several small firms.  Then came the turning point of his legal career: with Curran’s help, he landed a job in the U.S. Attorney’s office.  He spent nine of the next ten years in the criminal division, closely supervised by its chief, inspired by two senior trial lawyers, and, on occasion, instructed by the bench.  Decades later, he still recalled Alexander Holtzoff’s rebuke in court for an evidentiary gaffe and advice on cross-examination more genially imparted in chambers.

A year in the civil division prepared him for a stint at a leading local firm, but he never lost interest in criminal law.  On behalf of the Board of Trade, he testified in favor of stricter enforcement of stronger criminal laws.  He also opposed the Durham rule on insanity.  John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, took notice and appointed him U.S. Attorney.  He thoroughly reorganized the office, shifting its focus from street crimes to white-collar offenses and complicated drug conspiracies, recruiting an unusually talented staff, and pairing juniors with more experienced seniors to create what he termed “a great training program for assistants.”

Flannery expected to be named to the U.S. District Court eventually, but when, a year and a half after his appointment, a vacancy occurred, someone else filled it.  Evidently, the bench took notice.  Before Judge Leonard Walsh announced his retirement, he gave Flannery advance notice so that he could get to Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst before he was beset by others with candidates for the judgeship.  By now a resident of Montgomery County, Maryland, Flannery faced some opposition from the District of Columbia Democrats (who wanted one of their number appointed) and his home state senator (who had his own candidate), but after a few months’ delay, the Senate confirmed him in December 1971.

Judge Flannery claimed not to have a judicial philosophy.  As he showed when he enjoined the Department of Health and Human Services from enforcing a regulation requiring parental notification before adolescents could obtain contraceptives, he would not let even the firmly held values acquired during his Jesuit education stop him from following the law as laid down by higher courts.  He emulated the judges he admired most from his own days as a lawyer, including Richmond B. Keech, Edward Allen Tamm, and Luther W. Youngdahl.   “Not in a mean way,” he explained, “but in a firm way,” they took control of their courtrooms and conducted trials as fairly as possible.  He thought that criminal laws should be strictly enforced and also that the constitutional rights of defendants should be strictly defended.  Appeals from administrative agencies challenged him at first, until he realized that they just required more time and preparation and then came down to a judgment call.  In such cases, he said, “I did what I thought was right.”  The rest of his docket he took in stride.  “I had worked before judges so many years and had tried so many cases that there were no real surprises.”  He assumed senior status in 1985 and died in 2007.

--Dan Ernst

Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair

[We have word of the following exhibit at Yale’s Lilian Goldman Law Library, September 9 through December 19, 19, 2019, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511.]
    
Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair

Two centuries ago Queen Caroline of England was put on trial for adultery by her husband George IV, provoking an unprecedented media frenzy. Two Yale libraries, the Lewis Walpole Library and the Lillian Goldman Law Library are marking the bicentennial of the trial with a joint exhibition, “Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair.”

The colorful exhibition is on display September 9 through December 19 in the Yale Law School. It is co-curated by Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Walpole, and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Law Library.

Drawing on the Lewis Walpole Library’s strengths in graphic satire and the Law Library’s collections of trial accounts and illustrated legal texts, “Trial by Media” examines the role of print media in documenting the Queen Caroline affair and shaping public perceptions. The items range from mocking caricatures to political screeds and sober, journalistic accounts. Today these sources serve as a lens for studying gender roles, class divisions, publishing, political satire, and British politics.

In connection with the exhibition, there will be a mini-conference the afternoon of October 4 in the Yale Law School, with panels focusing on the legal and media aspects of Queen Caroline’s trial. An online version of the exhibition is under preparation.

”Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair” is on display in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, located on Level L2 of the Yale Law School (127 Wall Street, New Haven CT). The exhibition is open to the general public 10am-6pm daily, and open to Yale affiliates until 10pm.

For more information, contact Susan Walker, Head of Public Services, Lewis Walpole Library, phone (860) 677-2140 and email susan.walker@yale.edu, or Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, Lillian Goldman Law Library, phone (203) 432-4494 and email mike.widener@yale.edu.

–posted by Dan Ernst

AJLH 59:3

American Journal of Legal History 59:3 (September 2019) is out.  Here’s the TOC:

‘To Stay the Murderer’s Hand and the Rapist’s Passions, and for the Safety and Security of Civil Society’: The Emergence of Racial Disparities in Capital Punishment in Jim Crow New Orleans
Jeffrey S Adler

American Treatise Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister in Transatlantic Context   
Angela Fernandez
 
The Development of the ‘Modern’ Criminal Law of Evidence in English Law and in France, Germany and the Netherlands: 1750–1900   
R G Bloemberg

Book Reviews

Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America
Kyle G Volk

Whitman, James Q. Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law   
Joseph A Ross

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War   
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan

--Dan Ernst

Essays on Fascist, Nazi and Authoritarian Criminal Law

Ideology and Criminal Law: Fascist, National Socialist and Authoritarian Regimes, edited by Stephen Skinner and published by Hart, is now available:

With populist, nationalist and repressive governments on the rise around the world, questioning the impact of politics on the nature and role of law and the state is a pressing concern. If we are to understand the effects of extreme ideologies on the state's legal dimensions and powers – especially the power to punish and to determine the boundaries of permissible conduct through criminal law – it is essential to consider the lessons of history. This timely collection explores how political ideas and beliefs influenced the nature, content and application of criminal law and justice under Fascism, National Socialism, and other authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together expert legal historians from four continents, the collection's 16 chapters examine aspects of criminal law and related jurisprudential and criminological questions in the context of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Norway, apartheid South Africa, Francoist Spain, and the authoritarian regimes of Brazil, Romania and Japan. Based on original archival, doctrinal and theoretical research, the collection offers new critical perspectives on issues of systemic identity, self-perception and the foundational role of criminal law; processes of state repression and the activities of criminal courts and lawyers; and ideological aspects of, and tensions in, substantive criminal law.

–Dan Ernst

Black on the Irish "Other" in Scotland

Lynsey Black, Maynooth University, has posted Murder, Capital Punishment, and the Irish in Scotland, 1864 to 1914, which was published in Irish Jurist 60 (2018): 154-166:

Throughout the 19th century, significant numbers of Irish persons emigrated to Scotland. These Irish migrants lived their lives under the shadow of the popular stereotype of the Irish as unruly and violent. Scholars such as Peter King and Carolyn Conley have noted that the Irish duly became an “out group” in Scotland during this period. This article explores the cases of Irishmen sentenced to death for murder in Scotland from 1864 to 1914. Drawing on nine case studies, the article draws on archival court materials and press reporting to examine issues such as the prevalence of sectarian tensions, and the Catholic Irish as “Other."

--Dan Ernst

Heeren on Crimmigation in Prohibition-Era Chicago

Geoffrey Heeren, University of Iowa College of Law, has posted Crimmigration in Gangland: Race, Crime, and Removal During the Prohibition Era, which appeared in THE Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 16 (2018): 65-101:

In 1926, local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities in Chicago pursued a deportation drive ostensibly directed at gang members. However, the operation largely took the form of indiscriminate raids on immigrant neighborhoods of the city. Crimmigration in Gangland describes the largely forgotten 1926 deportation drive in Chicago as a means to augment the origin story for “crimmigration.” Scholars up until now have mostly contended that the convergence of criminal and immigration law occurred in the 1980s as part of the War on Drugs, with crime serving as a proxy for race for policy makers unable to openly argue for racial exclusion of Latino immigrants in the post-civil rights era. Drawing on original archival research, this article traces those roots back much further, to the Prohibition Era of Gangland Chicago, when they arose in nascent form before being supplanted by the different enforcement dynamics of the Great Depression.

A close examination of the deportation drive of 1926 reveals that immigration enforcement at the time contained most of the elements that scholars today have identified when defining crimmigration: a popular preoccupation with “criminal aliens” and attribution of crime problems to them; local/federal collaboration in immigration enforcement; an increase in the criminal grounds for removal; an increase in the criminal prosecution of immigration issues; and an asymmetrical incorporation of criminal procedures into the world of immigration law.

Chicago-Bound Beer, Captured (LC)

These phenomena developed for some of the same reasons that crimmigration arose in a more monolithic form in the 1980s, and indeed, paved the way for it. The 1920s, like the 1980s, came on the heels of a massive surge in immigration as well as a shift in the demographics of immigration. Yet both were also periods of relative affluence, during which anti-immigration arguments needed to take a different tenor than the protectionist arguments that prevailed during periods of economic insecurity. Like the 1980s, the 1920s also followed on the heels of a “civil rights era”: the reconstruction period following the Civil War. Arguments that implicated race were couched in scientific terms during this era of scientific racism and eugenics. Adherents of scientific racism pursued a dubious quest to statistically establish that certain racial and ethnic groups, like Sicilians, had a greater propensity for crime. This principle justified not only limited immigration quotas for Southern and Eastern Europeans, but also deportation efforts like the 1926 raids that targeted Italian Americans, whose “whiteness” was in many ways contested at the time.

The 1980s War on Drugs paralleled the Prohibition Era in many ways. One was a return to the focus on crimmigration that developed during the 1920s. Crime served in the 1980s as an effective proxy for race because that linkage had been made so strongly during the earlier period.

--Dan Ernst

Lowe on law and murder in revolutionary Virginia

Jessica K. Lowe, University of Virginia, published Murder in the Shenandoah: Making Law Sovereign in Revolutionary Virginia with Cambridge University Press earlier in 2019. From the publisher: 

On July 4, 1791, the fifteenth anniversary of American Independence, John Crane, a descendant of prominent Virginian families, killed his neighbor's harvest worker. Murder in the Shenandoah traces the story of this early murder case as it entangled powerful Virginians and addressed the question that everyone in the state was heatedly debating: what would it mean to have equality before the law - and a world where 'law is king'? By retelling the story of the case, called Commonwealth v. Crane, through the eyes of its witnesses, families, fighters, victims, judges, and juries, Jessica K. Lowe reveals how revolutionary debates about justice gripped the new nation, transforming ideas about law, punishment, and popular government.

Praise for the book: 

 "Elegantly written and copiously sourced, Jessica K. Lowe’s book is a must-read for specialists and students alike. Lowe upends the accepted notion that southerners went outside the law to resolve conflicts because of the culture of honor that was inextricably embedded in slavery. She uses criminal law to open a window into social change in postrevolutionary Virginia and to set the stage for antebellum-era conflicts in imaginative and unexpected ways." -Victoria Saker Woeste

"Jessica K. Lowe's beautifully crafted account of murder and justice powerfully illuminates the reconstruction of criminal law in the early American republic. Lowe skillfully turns the story of a single Virginia killing into a compelling meditation on how people, high and low, struggled over the meaning of equality and the rule of law in the aftermath of revolution. A formidable piece of scholarship, Murder in the Shenandoah is also a gem of historical narration and analysis, at once tough-minded and humane." -Sean Wilentz 

"Professor Lowe has produced a volume that is both a murder mystery and a mini-treatise on the history of criminal law in colonial Virginia. Hard-nosed legal history has seldom been presented in such fascinating, readable form. Behind the legal story is an equally important story of social change in early Virginia. Lowe knows her Virginia law, and applies to it the questions of a modern historical sensibility. Readers will be surprised and intrigued by this admirable volume." -Stanley Katz

"In Jessica K. Lowe’s poetic telling of a murder trial in the Shenandoah Valley on Independence Day in 1791, we see how issues of class, violence, and the rule of law came together to lead to the execution of a Virginia patrician. Lowe’s beautifully written book shows the law in motion. Wage workers, slaves, jurors, and the legal and planter elite all cross her stage as the values of democracy made a new American law." -Alfred L. Brophy

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Churchill on Victorian crime control

We missed this one when it came out in 2017. It recently won the Socio-Legal Studies Association's 2019 Theory and History Prize. Out with Oxford University Press is Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public by David Churchill, University of Leeds. From the press: 

The history of modern crime control is usually presented as a narrative of how the state wrested control over the governance of crime from the civilian public. Most accounts trace the decline of a participatory, discretionary culture of crime control in the early modern era, and its replacement by a centralized, bureaucratic system of responding to offending. The formation of the 'new' professional police forces in the nineteenth century is central to this narrative: henceforth, it is claimed, the priorities of criminal justice were to be set by the state, as ordinary people lost what authority they had once exercised over dealing with offenders.

This book challenges this established view, and presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity which ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice. With unique conceptual clarity, it seeks to reorient modern criminal justice history away from its established preoccupation with state systems of policing and punishment, and move towards a more nuanced analysis of the governance of crime. More widely, the book provides a unique and valuable vantage point from which to rethink the role of civil society and the state in modern governance, the nature of agency and authority in Victorian England, and the historical antecedents of pluralized modes of crime control which characterize contemporary society.

Praise for the book:

"This is an original and readable book . . . it offers a valuable contribution to the question of how we can attempt to understand everyday responses to social problems in the nineteenth-century city." - Matt Neale

"a substantial and original achievement in criminal justice scholarship." - P. T. Smith

Further information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• Our friends over at the Federal Judicial Center have alerted us to their  very useful new webpage, Selected Developments in the History of Supreme Court Jurisdiction. 

• Lucy Salyer, University of New Hampshire, has published the essay The Irish-American Social Club Whose Exploits in Their Homeland Sparked a New Understanding of Citizenship in Zócalo Public Square, as part of the Smithsonian-sponsored series, “What It Means to Be American.”

• Welcome to the blogosphere, History and the Law, moderated by Catherine Evans, Franziska Exeler, Kalyani Ramnath, and Surabhi Ranganathan!  The blog is part of the Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas Programme, which is supported at the University of Cambridge by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

• Over at New Books Network there’s a podcast with Andrew Fede on his latest book, Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and Atlantic World.  Mary Block reviewed the book here, and Jeannine DeLombard reviewed it here.

• As part of its 150-year celebrations, the University of Wisconsin Law School hosted a retrospective event recently on the work and legacies of J. Willard Hurst and Frank Remington. "Law in Actions Innovations in Wisconsin Law School Courses, 1950-1970" featured Dirk Hartog and Malcolm Feeley, plus Wisconsin faculty Bill Clune, Bill Whitford, Cecelia Klingele, and our blogger Mitra Sharafi.

• Advance alert: Testimonial Exclusions and Religious Freedom in Early America, by Jud Campbell, University of Richmond School of Law, is now available from Law and History Review.

• Update: Laura Kalman, "Distinguished Professor of History from University of California, Santa Barbara, Will Present Annual Robert T. Miller Lecture" at Baylor University on March 25.

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

Bowie on a "Crimes" Standard for Impeachable Offenses

Nikolas Bowie, Harvard Law School, has posted High Crimes Without Law, which appears in the Harvard Law Review Forum 132 (2018): 59:

Professor Bowie has authored one of two Responses the Forum is running in December inspired by Professor Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz’s recently published book on impeachment, To End a Presidency. These pieces are being published contemporaneously with Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen’s book review. Bowie offers a theory of the proper scope of the impeachment power that neither Paulsen nor Tribe and Matz embrace — namely, that Congress may only impeach for conduct that violated an extant criminal law. In other words, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” can only refer to conduct that is in fact a crime or a misdemeanor, and impeachment is best understood as a criminal, rather than civil, process. This was the theory articulated by then-former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis as he defended President Andrew Johnson from impeachment, and Bowie asserts that Curtis’s theory has been right all along. Among his many arguments, Bowie closes with a practical one: Insisting that impeachment be grounded in positive criminal law is the most effective way to ensure that, both now and in the future, it does not become a mere political weapon.

Wilson-Buford, "Policing Sex and Marriage in the American Military"

New from the University of Nebraska Press: Policing Sex and Marriage in the American Military: The Court-Martial and the Construction of Gender and Sexual Deviance, 1950–2000 (Nov. 2018), by Kellie Wilson-Buford (Arkansas State University). A description from the Press:

The American military’s public international strategy of Communist containment, systematic weapons build-ups, and military occupations across the globe depended heavily on its internal and often less visible strategy of controlling the lives and intimate relationships of its members. From 1950 to 2000, the military justice system, under the newly instituted Uniform Code of Military Justice, waged a legal assault against all forms of sexual deviance that supposedly threatened the moral fiber of the military community and the nation. Prosecution rates for crimes of sexual deviance more than quintupled in the last quarter of the twentieth century. 

Drawing on hundreds of court-martial transcripts published by the Judge Advocate General of the Armed Forces, Policing Sex and Marriage in the American Military explores the untold story of how the American military justice system policed the marital and sexual relationships of the service community in an effort to normalize heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the linchpin of the military’s social order. Almost wholly overlooked by military, social, and legal historians, these court transcripts and the stories they tell illustrate how the courts’ construction and criminalization of sexual deviance during the second half of the twentieth century was part of the military’s ongoing articulation of gender ideology.

Policing Sex and Marriage in the American Military provides an unparalleled window into the historic criminalization of what were considered sexually deviant and violent acts committed by U.S. military personnel around the world from 1950 to 2000.

A few blurbs:

“A far-reaching and harrowing analysis of the American military justice system’s policing of marital and sexual lives of service members during the second half of the twentieth century. . . . [This is] an original and important contribution to the historiography on gender and sexuality studies in the American military.”—Aaron Belkin

“Essential to the study of gender, sexuality, military culture, and crime, each of which matters in distinct but related academic disciplines and to policy-making and social justice advocacy. . . . [This book] reveals the U.S. military’s practice with respect to crime, sex, and marriage in a way that will enrich the fields of gender and sexuality studies. It makes [both] careful and novel arguments.”—Elizabeth L. Hillman

More information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• Leiter has culled from the Sisk data set the 10 Most-Cited Legal History Scholars in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017.  The data set covers only legal historians on law faculties.  It also only counts citations in law reviews, and that is, "of course, only one metric of scholarly distinction and accomplishment.”  Surprise: they’re all white men!  (That said, had Reva Siegel been classified as a legal historian tout court, she would have led the list.)

• Although it sounds in constitutional law more than constitutional history, LHB readers will be interested in the just published Constitutional Democracy in Crisis (Oxford University Press), for which Mark Graber, Sandford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet “asked thirty-five of the leading experts on constitutionalism to consider the state of constitutional democracy with respect to particular countries, regions and problems.” H/t (and Graber's fuller description) Balkinization.

• Bloomberg News’s Big Law Business Podcast interviews Victor Li about his book Nixon in New York: How Wall Street Helped Richard Nixon Win the White House.

• ConSource has announced a "Constitution Day Celebration with Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. Supreme Court," on Monday, September 17, 2018, 4:30-6:00 PM, in the NYU Skirball Center Auditorium, 566 LaGuardia Place, New York City.  You may reserve a seat here.

• Over at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog, Curator Ryan Greenwood shares highlights of recent rare acquisitions on criminal law at the University of Minnesota Law Library. He has also posted some entertaining illustrations from a 1925 copy of the French Civil Code here.

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

Berkel and friends on legal sources and Muslim societies

Maaike van Berkel, Radboud University, Léon Buskens, Leiden University, and Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Leiden University have edited the collection, Legal Documents as Sources for the History of Muslim Societies with Brill. From the publisher:

This volume is a tribute to the work of legal and social historian and Arabist Rudolph Peters (University of Amsterdam). Presenting case studies from different periods and areas of the Muslim world, the book examines the use of legal documents for the study of the history of Muslim societies. From examinations of the conceptual status of legal documents to comparative studies of the development of legal formulae and the socio-economic or political historical information documents contain, the aim is to approach legal documents as specialised texts belonging to a specific social domain, while simultaneously connecting them to other historical sources. It discusses the daily functioning of legal institutions, the reflections of regime changes on legal documentation, daily life, and the materiality of legal documents. 

Contributors are Maaike van Berkel, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Léon Buskens, Khaled Fahmy, Aharon Layish, Sergio Carro Martín, Brinkley Messick, Toru Miura, Christian Müller, Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Mathieu Tillier, and Amalia Zomeño.

Contents after the break:

Pohl-Zucker on manslaughter in Württemberg and Zurich

Susanne Pohl-Zucker, independent researcher has published Making Manslaughter: Process, Punishment and Restitution in Württemberg and Zurich, 1376-1700 with Brill. From the press: 

In Making Manslaughter, Susanne Pohl-Zucker offers parallel studies that trace the legal settlement of homicide in the duchy of Württemberg and the imperial city of Zurich between 1376 and 1700. Killings committed by men during disputes were frequently resolved by extrajudicial agreements during the late Middle Ages. Around 1500, customary strategies of dispute settlement were integrated and modified within contexts of increasing legal centralization and, in Württemberg, negotiated with the growing influence of the ius commune. Legal practice was characterized by indeterminacy and openness: categories and procedures proved flexible, and judicial outcomes were produced by governmental policies aimed at the re-establishment of peace as well as by the strategies and goals of all disputants involved in a homicide case.

Table of Contents after the jump:

• Introduction
• 1. Restitution: Strategies of Compensation and Resolution in Early Modern Württemberg
• 2. Prosecution: Manslaughter and the superfacto procedure
• 3. Legitimation: Legal Parameters and Expert Knowledge in Württemberg Homicide Trials
• 4. Accusations and Mediations: The Prosecution of Manslaughter in Zurich
• 5. Justification: Defensive Strategies in Zurich

Further information is available here.

Johnson on Buggery and Parliament

Paul Johnson, University of York, has posted Buggery and Parliament, 1533-2017:

Over nearly five centuries the UK Parliament, and its earlier incarnations, frequently legislated to ensure the regulation and punishment of buggery, a form of sexual conduct once generally accepted to constitute one of the most serious criminal offences known to law. In the early twenty-first century, Parliament abolished the offence of buggery and, subsequently, granted pardons to certain individuals previously convicted of it. Whilst some aspects of the history of Parliament’s approach to buggery are well known – particularly in respect of homosexual law reform – much of this history remains obscure. This article provides an in-depth consideration of the making of statute law in Parliament relating to buggery that reveals the dramatically changing attitudes of legislators towards this aspect of sexual conduct and highlights the significance and importance of the pardons granted to those convicted of the offence.

Jaffe on the jury in India

James Jaffe, University of Wisconsin, has published "After Nanavati" in the Economic and Political Weekly 53:32 (12 Aug. 2017). Here's an abstract:

(credit)

The famous Nanavati case of 1959 gave birth to two myths: that it was the last jury trial in India and that it was the prurient sensationalism of the new tabloid press, Blitz in particular, that corrupted the jury system and made its abolition necessary. It was actually the refusal of the government and the legal profession to confront class and caste differences in the courtroom, and not the popular press, that led to the abolition of the Indian jury.