PhD Program in Global History and Governance, University of Naples

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

PhD Program in Global History and Governance.  Host Institution: Scuola Superiore Meridionale at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli (Italy).  Program coordinator: Prof. Daniela Luigia Caglioti.  Six 4-year doctoral fellowships are available at the newly instituted Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples (Italy) for the academic year 2020-2021

Scholarship amount: € 19,000.00 per year; 50% increase of the scholarship for research abroad; Up to 20% of the scholarship in research funds per year.  Starting date: 2 November 2020

The Program: The Ph.D. in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original academic research.  The course offers a multi-disciplinary training program based on history and law and open to contributions from other disciplines, such as economics and political science. The program focuses on the comparison, connections and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet since the first epoch of global imperialism and does so by focusing on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes and the organization of power, on the interdependencies between economic, political, juridical, cultural and social factors and on the circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, people, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.  For more information, visit here.

Admission requirements: Candidates must possess an MA/MS degree by October 30, 2020, and an excellent command of English.  They must present a research project in a subject relevant to the Ph.D. program.

Required Application Materials:

- Online application form (and a € 50 fee payment for Italian citizens only);
- Copy of an ID document;
- CV (max 2 pages);
- Master’s degree thesis (plus abstract);
- Copy of publications, if present;
- Two letters of recommendation;
- A research proposal (max 3,500 words).

Application deadline: June 30, 2020, 02:00 pm (CET).  Details and application forms are to be found here in Italian and here in English.   For further information please write to ghg@unina.it.

Conference: League of Nations and international law

[We have the following announcement.]

A conference on the League of Nations and International Law during the Interbellum will take place in Brussels on Oct. 25-26, 2019. It will focus on the role of international law and lawyers in the formation of the League and of the League in the development of international law. Registration is possible until Oct. 15, 2019 (registration form here). Here's the program, after the jump: 

Weekend Roundup

• A belated welcome to the blogosphere to Hist@FedGov Blog, the “Official blog for news and views about History@FedGov and federal history” of the Society for History in the Federal Government! 

• Over at History and the Law: a conversation with legal historian Rahela Khorakiwala on judicial iconography and courtroom architecture in India.

• Keep an eye out for the Offices of the Southern Jurist-Diplomat, a project of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School. Recent events include the inaugural Saba Mahmood Memorial Lecture, "On the Ruins of History and the Obstinacy of Struggles" by Samera Esmeir, UC Berkeley on Aug.21, 2019; and a conference "for contemporary jurists on how to foster meetings between peoples and their laws which accord the other, and their law, dignity" through long "Southern histories" of such encounters (Aug.21-23, 2019).

• The inaugural "State of the Field Lectures" at the University of Pennsylvania's South Asia Center (Oct.12, 2019) will be by two legal historians: Julia Stephens, Rutgers, "Haunted Archives: Tracing Diasporic Deaths across Britain's Indian Ocean Empire" and Kalyani Ramnath, Harvard, "Legal Histories and Affective Geographies: Reimagining the Bay of Bengal."

• If school's starting, announcements of Constitution Day events can't be far behind.  Lurleen B. Wallace Community College, in Andalusia, Alabama, will host a free, public symposium starting at 10 AM on September 17. Among the presenters is Lawrence Cappello, assistant professor of US constitutional history at the University of Alabama and the author of None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, which is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.   More.

• Your Abstract Is More Important Than You Think, writes former LHB Guest Blogger Christopher Schmidt, as well as other tips for publishing in Law and Social Inquiry, the journal of the American Bar Foundation, which Professor Schmidt edits.

• Politico reports on a FOIA lawsuit seeking the disclosure of the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel of the US Department of Justice issued over 25 years ago.  A notice of the lawsuit, Francis v. DOJ, by Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute is here.

• A livestream of an interview of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Library of Congress's National Book Festival is scheduled to take place here from 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. today.  More.

• Via the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog, a call for nominations for the Connecticut Supreme Court Historical Society’s Collier Prize.

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

PhD Program in Global History and Governance

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

PhD Program in Global History and Governance, Scuola Superiore Meridionale at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli (Italy).  Program coordinator: Prof. Daniela Luigia Caglioti

Six 4-year doctoral fellowships are available at the newly instituted Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples (Italy) for the academic year 2019-2020

Scholarship amount: € 19,000.00 per year; 50% increase of the scholarship for research abroad;
Up to 20% of the scholarship in research funds per year.  Starting date: 1 November 2019.

The Program: The PhD in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original academic research. The course offers a multi-disciplinary training program based on history and law and open to contributions from other disciplines, such as economics, political science and political philosophy. The program focuses on the comparison, connections and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet since the first epoch of global imperialism and does so by focusing on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes and the organization of power, on the interdependencies between economic, political, juridical, cultural and social factors and on the circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, people, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.  More information are available [here].

Candidates must possess a MA/MS degree by October 30, 2019 and an excellent command of English; They must present a research project in a subject relevant to the PhD program.

Required Application Materials:

• Online application form (and a € 50 fee payment for Italian citizens only);
• Copy of an ID document;
• CV (max 2 pages);
• Master’s degree thesis (plus abstract);
• Copy of publications, if present;
• Two letters of recommendation;
• A research proposal (max 3,500 words).

Application deadline: September 2, 2019, 12:00 (CET).  Details and application forms are to be found [here (Italian version) and here (English version)]. 

For further information, please contact Prof. Daniela Luigia Caglioti, danielaluigia.caglioti@unina.it

The Limits of Law: Cases

We asked the 2018-19 Davis Fellows the following question: how has your time at the Davis Center led to new insights about the reach and limits of law and legalities? Here is one set of answers that relate to each scholar's area of study (our other posts in this series are here and here):

European or Global? Secular or Religious? How (Some) European Jurists Re-Consider their Past

Recently, I returned from a visit to the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt (https://www.rg.mpg.de/en), where several groups are working simultaneously to re-cast European legal history. Rather than thinking about Europe in isolation, rather than insisting on law as a secular affair, members of these groups interrogate the processes that led European law to expand overseas, as well as the way religion contributed to this expansion. They ask: What would happen to European law if we observed it from a global perspective? If we considered not only its accomplishments (rule of law, constitutions, democracy, etc.) but also its other legacies (empire, slavery, violence, and so forth)?[1] If we focused on the entanglements between law, religion, and morality?

With study groups centered on “Legal Transfer in the Common Law World”, “European Normative Orders in Ibero-America,” “Governance of the Universal Church after the Council of Trent,” “The Legal History of the School of Salamanca,” or “Translations and Transitions: Legal Practice in 19^th Century Japan, China, and the Ottoman Empire,” this re-thinking follows several paths. 

(1)   It interrogates the spaces that scholars need to study if they are to understand the history of European law. In tune with existing affirmations that Europe was an idea rather than a continent and that its meaning and extension constantly mutated, they suggest that historians of European law should modify the scope of their analysis. The appropriate scope could cover from Rome to the Mediterranean, further west to Latin-Christendom, North to England and Scandinavia, and across Oceans to Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

(2)   It asks about the consequences of the encounter between Europeans and other legal cultures. Rather than posing a West vs. the Rest, or engaging in, dismissing, or criticizing Eurocentrism, the aim is to understand how interactions between European and non-European norms changed both. Change and endurance are important in this regard but looking at European law elsewhere also has important methodological underpinning. European response to the “other,” scholars at the Max Planck argue, can tell us a great deal about European law. It allows to perceive its rigidity on occasions, malleability on others, and helps identifying its core principles as well as their potentialities. In other words, the main question we should ask is not whether European law was indeed universal (or potentially universal) as some Europeans have argued, but which parts of it survived the transfer outside Europe, what was lost, what changed, and how.  

(3)   If enlarging the research on European law to less-than-usual suspects is important, research at the Max Planck also reminds us that as important is to ask, “what is law.” Rather than assuming that law was a secular affair, the research agenda followed in Frankfurt recognizes the centrality of religion by integrating to the study of European law canon law and moral theology and by re-evaluating the contribution of the church to the dissemination of juridical ideas. One emblematic way they do so is by insisting on the importance of pragmatic literature, that is, the non-juridical literature that inculcated normative conduct (https://www.rg.mpg.de/research/knowledge_of_the_pragmatici).[2]  Drawing our attention to less-than- conventional sources for legal history, it observes what practitioners published but also the contents of popular works, as well as works of moral theology, confessionaries, and the like. The working assumption is that these types of sources, mostly ignored, contributed greatly not only to disseminate legal ideas, not only to vulgarize them (as they are often viewed) but also to develop and enrich European legal tradition.

---

[1] Thomas Duve. “Global Legal History: Setting Europe in Perspective.” In Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber, and Mark Godfrey (eds.). Oxford Handbook of European Legal History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 115-140. This transformation began in 2009 after Thomas Duve was named director of the Institute. The Max Plank has this amazing system: The Society identifies individual scholars and names them directors of an institute, giving them space, funding, and administrative support to hire scholars and develop their own intellectual agenda, the only condition being that they innovate. 

[2] The results of this project will soon be published in a new Open Access book series with Brill Publishers, titled Max Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds.

A Business History Doctoral Colloquium on Globalization & De-Globalization

[We have the following announcement.]

The BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History will be held once again in conjunction with the 2019 BHC annual meeting. This prestigious workshop, funded by Cambridge University Press, will take place in Cartagena de Indias, Columbia on Wednesday March 13th and Thursday March 14th, 2019. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to doctoral candidates who are pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history, from any relevant discipline (e.g., from economic sociology, political science, cultural anthropology, or management, as well as history).  Most participants are in year 3 or 4 or their degree program, though in some instances applicants at a later stage make a compelling case that their thesis research had evolved in ways that led them to see the advantages of an intensive engagement with business history.

The theme of the 2019 BHC annual meeting is "Globalization and De-Globalization: Shifts of Power and Wealth."  We welcome proposals from students working within the conference theme, as well as any other thematic area of business history.  Topics (see link for past examples) may range from the early modern era to the present, and explore societies across the globe.  Participants work intensively with a distinguished group of BHC-affiliated scholars (including the incoming BHC president), discussing dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and career trajectories.

Applications are due by 15 November 2018 via email to amy.feistel@duke.edu and should include: a statement of interest; CV; preliminary or final dissertation prospectus (10-15 pages); and a letter of support from your dissertation supervisor (or prospective supervisor).  All participants receive a stipend that partially defrays travel costs to the annual meeting.  Applicants will receive notification of the selection committee’s decisions by the end of 2018.

This year’s faculty participants are:

Edward Balleisen (Director), Professor of History and Public Policy, Duke University
              American Business, Legal, and Policy History

Ann Carlos, Professor of Economics, University of Colorado-Boulder
              Early Modern Empires/Trade in North America

Paloma Fernandez-Perez, Professor of Economic and Business History, University of Barcelona Business School
              Spanish and Latin American Business History

Takafumi Kurosawa, Professor of Economic Policy, Kyoto University
              European and Japanese Business History

Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History, Williams College
              African Business History

Questions about the colloquium should be sent to its director, Duke Professor of History Edward Balleisen, eballeis@duke.edu. 

Oxford Handbook of European Legal History

The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, edited by Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber, and Mark Godfrey, has been published. 

The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History charts the landscape of contemporary research and the shift from national legal histories to comparative methods, which have profoundly affected the way we understand legal transformation at the local, national, regional, European, and global level. The Handbook shows legal change in terms of continuous flow and exchange of influences, which take place within complicated combinations of cultural, political, and social networks. The present Handbook captures this revised conception of European legal history; it not only merely reflects the state of the discipline, but also aims to shape it. As the chapters of this Handbook show, ancient Roman law owed much to the Near Eastern legal orders. Later on, from the fifteenth century onwards, the major European legal orders gradually spread to all continents. Indeed, most of the globalization of law has taken place by way of European legal systems turning global.

The full table of contents is on the website, but this list of chapters in Part One suggests how interesting the whole is:

The World Historical Significance of European Legal History: An Interim Report
James Q. Whitman

The Invention of National Legal History
Joachim Rückert

The Birth of European Legal History
Randall Lesaffer

Abandoning the Nationalist Framework: Comparative Legal History
Kjell å. Modéer

Global Legal History: Setting Europe in Perspective
Thomas Duve

Lambourn and friends on legal encounters on the medieval globe

Elizabeth Lambourn (De Montfort University) edited Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe, which came out with the Arc Humanities Press in 2017. From the publisher: 

Law has been a primary locus and vehicle of contact across human history—as a system of ideas embodied in people and enacted on bodies; and also as a material, textual, and sensory “thing.” The seven essays gathered here analyze a variety of legal encounters on the medieval globe, ranging from South Asia to South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Contributors uncover the people behind and within legal systems and explore various material expressions of law that reveal the complexity and intensity of cross-cultural contact in this pivotal era. Topics include comparative jurisprudence, sumptuary law, varieties of punishment, forms of documentation and legal knowledge, religious law, and encounters between imperial and indigenous legal systems. A featured source preserves an Ethiopian king’s legislation against traffic in Christian slaves, resulting from the intensifying African slave trade of the sixteenth century.

Contents after the jump:

Suk on Constitutional Protections of Motherhood

Julie C. Suk, Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, has posted Gender Equality and the Protection of Motherhood in Global Constitutionalism, which appears in the Journal of Law & Ethics of Human Rights 12 (2018): 151-80:

Most of the world’s constitutions contain clauses guaranteeing sex equality, and many also extend the special protection of the state to mothers. The constitutional protection of motherhood is undertheorized and neglected in global constitutional discourse, perhaps because jurisdictions like the United States view the special protection of women as contrary to gender equality. This Essay explores the feminist meanings and possibilities of constitutional mother- hood clauses, by focusing on Germany, where they originated in 1919. While motherhood clauses have had complex relationships with a range of feminist agendas, they solidified the notion that social reproduction was a subject for constitutional lawmaking. Addressing twenty-first century gender inequalities requires a more robust engagement of women’s disproportionate burdens in social reproduction. Having opened up a constitutional discourse around the challenges of social reproduction, motherhood clauses and gender equality guarantees can drive the search for new solutions.

Doctoral Program in Global History and Governance

We have word of the establishment of a Ph.D. program in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy:

The PhD in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original academic research.  The course offers a multi-disciplinary training program based on history and law and open to contributions from other disciplines, such as economics, political science and political philosophy. The program focuses on the comparison, connections and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet since the first epoch of global imperialism and does so by focusing on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes and the organization of power, on the interdependencies between economic, political, juridical, cultural and social factors and on the circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, people, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.
Members of the PhD board can offer training and preparation for research at the level of the best international centers in the following areas:

    History and historiography
    European empires of the modern and contemporary age
    States, wars and violence in the nineteenth and twentieth century
    History of slavery and forced labor
    The legal heritage of Europe and its integration
    Religions and the sacred in the modern and contemporary world
    Ideas, conceptions and practices of citizenship
    States, nations, languages, peoples, classes
    The globalization of law

The PhD course in Global History and Governance is designed for highly prepared and motivated students who also manage different languages and willing to study in multi and interdisciplinary environment.  Classes are taught either in Italian or English.  Candidates for the PhD are normally expected to hold a master’s degree (or an equivalent qualification) in a subject relevant to the intended topic of study.  The Coordinator is Daniela Luigia Caglioti and the PhD Board for 2018-2019 is here.  The deadline for applying is August 24, 2018.

Max Planck Summer Academy for Legal History 2018: The World and the Village

[We have the following announcement.]

The Max-Planck Summer Academy for Legal History provides a selected group of highly motivated early-stage graduates, usually PhD candidates, an in-depth introduction to methods and principles of research in legal history.  The academy consists of two parts. The first part provides an introduction to the study of sources, methodological principles, as well as theoretical models and controversial research debates on basic research fields of legal history. In the second part the participants discuss the research theme and develop their own approach to the theme.  The course will take place at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

This year’s theme [is] The World and the Village. The Global and the Local in Legal History

As an academic discipline, legal history emerged both in Europe and several other world regions in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the age of the nation-state. Research in legal history that focuses on local and regional contexts—Europe, for example—is a largely product of this heritage.  Global history, historiographic reflection and new methods in the humanities have helped to bring the complexity of local, national, regional and global relationships into the purview of legal history. Moreover, the increasing importance of supranational and transnational law make it all the more urgent from the perspective of legal studies to consider the relation between world and village.
Applicants to the 2018 Summer Academy are encouraged to present research projects that give special consideration to the connection between local and global legal discourses. 

Eligibility Requirements: (1)  Early-stage graduates (usually PhD candidates); and (2) Working knowledge of English is required; German is not a prerequisite

Application: Required documents for the application are a CV, a project summary (approx. 10 pages) and a letter of motivation.

Fees: There is no participation fee. Accommodations will be provided by the organizers. Participants, however, will be responsible for covering their travel expenses.  There will be a limited number of travel scholarships available.

Deadline: Applications are to be sent in by January 31, 2018
Contact Info:  Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Dr. Stefanie Rüther, summeracademy@rg.mpg.de

Weekend Roundup

• Recently posted in the Washington Post’s “Made By History” series is Victoria Saker Woeste’s The anti-Semitic origins of the war on "fake news."  It recounts “How Henry Ford tried to discredit the media in order to spread anti-Jewish propaganda.”  

• A scholars' brief on "the History and Original Meaning of the Fourth Amendment as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner in Carpenter v. United States" is now up on SSRN.

• The Faculty Lounge has an announcement of a new project at Southern Methodist University, Women’s Rights in America: From Early Stirrings to Third Wave Feminism.

• Congratulations to Sarah Staszak, whose No Day in Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Retrenchment (Oxford University Press, 2015) has recently won the J. David Greenstone Book Award from the American Political Science Association for best book published in the past two years in politics and history. 

• Of possible interest to legal historians of Asia: two back-to-back conferences on comparative law in Asia at the National University of Singapore, Sept.27-28, 2018. The deadline for registration is Sept.12. Details here.

• A follow-up to our recent post on teaching non-US and global legal history through film: Bram Fischer (2017) is about lawyers and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Trailer here (H/t: Rohit De). 

• The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource) is co-hosting an art exhibit on the Bill of Rights at Cooper Union in New York City during Constitution Week (September 18-23). The exhibit is free and open to the public.

• Congratulations to Steven Brown, Auburn University, for wining the Hughes-Gossett Senior Prize for the best article in the Journal of Supreme Court History.  More. 

• Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, delivers The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office, the 2017 William Roger Louis lecture, before the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program on Monday, September 11, 2017, 4:00pm-5:30pm, in the Wilson Center’s 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom.

• A reminder that the Law Library of Congress will commemorate Constitution Day with a talk by Michael J. Klarman, Harvard Law School, on The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016), on Tuesday, September 12, 2017, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. in Room LJ-119, located on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, DC.

• Until just recently we missed quite a symposium on Native American Law in the Modern Era in the Albany Government Law Review 10:1.  Contributions include  Indian Title: Unraveling the Racial Context of Property Rights, or How to Stop Engaging in Conquest, by Joseph William Singer; Indians, Race, and Criminal Jurisdiction in Indian Country, by Alex Tallchief Skibine; Anishinaabe law and "The Round House,” by Matthew L.M. Fletcher; The Doctrine of Christian Discovery: Its Fundamental Importance in United States Indian Law and the Need for its Repudiation and Removal, by Joseph J. Heath, Esq.; and The Anglocentric Supremacy of the Marshall Court, by Neyooxet Greymorning.

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

CFP: Mixed Familial Relations Viewed Globally and Comparatively

[We have the following call for papers for a special issue in The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, devoted to Mixed Marriage, Interracial Relationships and Binational Couples from Global and Comparative Perspectives and guest edited by Julia Moses, University of Sheffield/University of Göttingen and Julia Woesthoff, DePaul University.]

In response to the mass globalization of the twenty-first century and associated migration, a recent boom in social-scientific research has analyzed various manifestations of binational and interracial romantic relationships in the present and recent past. This theme issue seeks to historicize this research by drawing on key case studies from across the world and across time and drawing on relevant historiography and theoretical literature. This call for proposals welcomes both quantitative and qualitative studies that shed light on individual experiences of, as well as various practices of regulating, ‘interracial’, ‘binational’ and ‘mixed marriages’. The issue aims to parse the assumptions behind these contested concepts and to trace how these categories have shifted over time and space. In doing so, it also seeks to chart how intermarriages and other forms of interracial, binational and cross-confessional relationships took shape: who participated in these relationships? How common were they, and in which circumstances were they practiced (or banned)? Contributions investigating relationships involving regions in the Americas, Africa and Asia are particularly welcome.

Malaspina on Vattel's "Droit des Gens"

[We have the following announcement of the latest from the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.]

Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina, L'eterno ritorno del Droit des gens di Emer de Vattel (secc. XVIII-XIX): L'impatto sulla cultura giuridica in prospettiva globale, Global Perspectives on Legal History 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History 2017).  364 p., € 17,69 D.  ISBN: 978-3-944773-07-0.  Open Access Online Edition.  Print-on-demand.

The numerous editions and early translations produced throughout the eighteenth century enabled the broad dissemination of Emer de Vattel's juridical-political work Droit des gens. This book investigates the global impact of the Droit des gens with regard to the different political realities, the historical and legal contexts as well as the attempts, mechanisms and strategies used to put these ideas into practice and establish new doctrine between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Droit des gens had an extremely diverse impact, owing to its varied reception in different political situations, historical and legal contexts, and attempts at practical and theoretical implementation. The fact that Vattel's book was a point of reference for a considerable number of jurists and politicians further demonstrates its authority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The question naturally arises whether the continuous references to the work may be regarded as "typical citations of style", simply confined to referencing Vattel's thought, or whether they are a clear sign of a deeper significance; one springing directly from the characteristics of the Droit des gens, with its capacity to organise and regulate the State in its domestic and international relations.

With L'eterno ritorno del Droit des gens di Emer de Vattel (secc. XVIII-XIX) by Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History presents the newest publication in its book series "Global Perspectives on Legal History."  As its title suggests, the series is designed to advance the scholarly research of legal historians worldwide who seek to transcend the established boundaries of national legal scholarship that typically sets the focus on a single, dominant modus of normativity and law. The series aims to privilege studies dedicated to reconstructing the historical evolution of normativity from a global perspective.  It includes monographs, editions of sources, and collaborative works. All titles in the series are available both as premium print-on-demand and in the open-access format.  More information on the series and forthcoming volumes.

Benton at Queen Mary

Lauren Benton (credit)

We hear from Maksymilian Del Mar, Reader in Legal Theory, in the Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, that the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context, which he co-directs, has organized a series of events around a visit this month by Lauren Benton, Professor of Law and History, Vanderbilt University, “and one of the world’s leading global legal historians.”

17 May.  CLSGC Annual Lecture/IHSS Inaugural Lecture by Professor Lauren Benton: Constitutional Panics and Imperial Power:

A counterrevolutionary strike by lawyers, a wave of cases brought by slaves against masters, a charge of illegal torture by a governor—legal actions such as these drew together protest, reform, panic, and constitutionalism in the British empire. As officials scrambled to respond to perceived threats to order, they debated the proper contours of the imperial constitution and tinkered with structures of legal pluralism. Counterrevolution and proto-liberalism blended together in the process. This lecture follows cycles of colonial reform and legal panic as they resolved into calls for greater imperial power as a constitutional necessity in the early nineteenth British empire.

18 May.  Masterclass with Postgraduate Students 

23 May.  Workshop on A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (2010) 

25 May.  New Book Symposium on A Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law 1800-1850 (2017).

The Young Interdisciplinary Scholar in a Global Academic Market

Working historically almost always implies some sort of critical position on past scholarship. Hardly any topic of investigation is fully novel, so new sources or new theories of interpretation are brought to bear on old sources or old theories of interpretation to advance the state of knowledge in one’s respective field. In the context of transnational and comparative legal history, this is almost a given as past scholarship is often presented as an active enabler of colonialism, imperialism and all manner of undesirable cross-cultural practices.

In my own work on China, I routinely feel this pull as I trace back misconceptions about Chinese law in American legal culture through different eras. Perhaps no better example is the long-standing impact of Max Weber’s characterizations of Chinese law as developed in his four-fold typology of legal ideal types. The academic and popular life of Weber’s use of Chinese law, parallel to his use of Islamic law, grew out of its redeployment in negative normative contrasts with Western law (even though Weber’s critique of the common law is generally elided in the process). In particular, Talcott Parson’s embedding of his interpretation of Weber in modernization theory helped normalize many of these pernicious characterizations, which have achieved near hegemonic status in legal studies.

This may seem odd as a way of opening a post on the globalizing market for young academics. But I am motivated to do so because much advice regarding new opportunities for teaching beyond one’s home country is so focused on entry-level hiring. This is understandable for numerous reasons. The intense competition for scarce academic position induces a now well-recognized anxiety for most graduate students throughout their training. And as someone who made the leap to securing my first full-time teaching post abroad, I often get very detailed questions about how to engage the emerging market for international legal teaching from those facing these anxieties.

I am generally happy to do so with the caveat that as increasingly common it is for US-trained legal academics to teach abroad, most experiences are still fairly singular. A quick comparison of the internet resources for the entry-level hiring markets in economics and law reveals a wide-gulf in expectations. There are both demand and supply reasons for the late-coming US participation in the international legal market, many of which anyone who works in comparative or transnational law understands well.

But I preface this post with comments on Weber with the same objective as when I carry out conversations about how to access the international legal academic market(s). For all my criticism of Weber’s comparative legal sociology, much of which has been twisted beyond his own intentions, I generally consider Weber an inspiration, and singularly brilliant. When I teach socio-legal courses, I always try to relay to students how pioneering and innovative Weber’s work was in founding modern social science and legal sociology specifically.

But in the realm of comparison, for his work on both economics and religion, Weber was limited by the possibilities of his era. He could not flick a switch and encounter Chinese legal discourse in real-time, nor was he likely to have Chinese interlocutors at the conferences he attended. More concretely, the material sources on Chinese law that he had access to were filtered through the decisively Sinophobic turn that had afflicted European studies of China in the 19^th century. To his credit, his use of comparative examples in his legal sociology was aimed at better explaining Europe than it was to specifically diagnose foreign developments. In fact, when I read Weber’s opus Economy and Society, I am still struck by the industry required to produce such an interdisciplinary and synthetic work in an age with quite different informational technologies readily available. If Weber were alive today, I have little reservation that his depictions of foreign law would not mirror those he produced almost a century past.

Empire and Imperialism: (Mis)Framing Cross-Cultural Engagements

One major shift in modern anthropology occurred when the discipline “came home.” By the mid-20th century the neat division between sociological studies of Western nations and anthropological studies of non-Western societies progressively broke down. Harold Miner penned the classic article “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” to highlight the necessity and discomfort of subjecting American culture to the same sort of dispassionate analysis of ritual as had been applied with such rigor abroad.

This move spurred ongoing debates about the inter-relationship between theories of interpretation and various subjects of analysis. The thread therein that became increasingly relevant in my experience writing Futility was examining the assumption that those studied were on the other side of various social inequalities. Edward Said’s influential work on the concept of Orientalism spawned numerous analyses about how foreign cultures are represented in academic writing. Implicit in these debates were the implications that arise when these representations are applied across power asymmetries. One book that impacted my own thinking on overseas state-action in this regard was James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which explored attempts to “modernize” populations by powerful foreign agents who had deemed them underdeveloped.

What then did it mean then for anthropologists to study American law and lawyers, who were most often socially more powerful than anthropologists themselves? The answer to this is still unsettled, and there is still a great deal of discomfit when anthropologists write about the powerful. In my own work, I confronted this tension when my subject of study became American lawyers in China, and where the dominant frames of analysis I inherited from my home discipline were ill-fit to capture the structure of Sino-American relations.

The most common term used by critical scholars to describe almost all American legal interactions abroad in the contemporary era is imperialism. Imperialism is a decidedly capacious concept, as it can capture modes of influence from direct territorial colonialism to a range of cultural and economic influences between and within nations.

In my graduate studies, I first came to the literature on “law and development” not through the frequently cited article by David Trubek and Marc Galanter, “Scholars in Self-Estrangement,” but through their contemporary James Gardner, who wrote an extensive post-mortem on US legal reform efforts in Latin America entitled Legal Imperialism. Gardner’s choice of the frame of imperialism reflected the implicit normative judgment of the word, and tried to capture the ethnocentrism he came to see at the heart of his own work as an exporter of American law.

Yet, the central irony of Gardner’s work was that whatever type of imperialist he had been, he was not only a failed imperialist—in that his and his cohort’s attempt to influence Latin American legal education did not come to fruition—but also that from Gardner’s own analysis it is clear that the project was doomed from the start by a whole host of conceptual and logistical presumptions that the American lawyers engaged in the project carried with them.

The Challenges of Comparative Law and Transnational History

One of the ever-impressive aspects of working on transnational legal history is encountering the careers of many pioneering international lawyers. For an academic, one is struck by the polymath capabilities of those who moved between legal cultures and traditions well before the easy access of information that the internet has allowed.

What these internationalized careers help convey is that transnational law, and thus transnational legal history, is always concurrently engaged in comparative law. Distinct bodies of law formally divorced from any particular nation state, say WTO dispute resolution, are ever a hybrid amalgam of various national traditions, in construction and more so in practice.

In my own graduate education, I came to this realization first through the work of Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth. Their first book, Dealing in Virtue, highlighted both this polymath quality in early international arbitrators and that the focal function of their abilities was not so much to practice professionally in distinct national settings (though many did) but to be able to navigate the linguistic and practical challenges of transnational spaces where these influences collided.

During my research for Futility, I came to appreciate this for many of the missionaries I studied. The term “cosmopolitan” is often used quite superficially, and today can simply denote a well-funded travel itinerary that substitutes taxi driver conversations for cultural immersion. By contrast, I was taken with, and without any personal religious sentiment, the serious intellectual rigor with which many dedicated missionaries confronted their transnational, inter-cultural challenges.

Even though I would come to be critical of the overall impact of missionaries on Sino-American relations, I could find little fault with the reflexive positions many missionaries eventual came to. John Nevius was one example who challenged my own preexisting assumptions about the critical cosmopolitanism of missionaries, and who was considered an iconoclast in Chinese missionary circles for his committed focus on local ownership and criticisms of naïveté about unequal power relationships in inter-cultural contexts

Wu Jinxiong (Wiki)

For Chinese actors, this type of relative sophistication was matched by difficulties navigating stark power asymmetries both with outside actors and their own domestic regimes. In the context of law, this led many lawyers to struggle with representational strategies at home while trying to critically understand the foreign legal systems and ideas they engaged with. A key example here was Wu Jingxiong (吳經熊) or John Wu, a Catholic convert who wrote throughout his career on Asian and Western legal systems in critical juxtaposition. Wu also actively engaged as a liberal minded reformer within the authoritarian Guomingdang regime who putatively governed Chinese from the late 1910s to the late 1940s. His life was a decidedly transnational one, but at its core one of a comparative lawyer.