Li's "Translating Weimar"

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory of a new open access publication in its series, Global Perspectives on Legal History.  DRE]

Fupeng Li, Translating Weimar: The Cultural Translation of the Weimar Constitution in China (1919-1949).  Global Perspectives on Legal History. Vol. 28

How can a constitution imagine social revolution? This book answers this question by placing social rights at the center of the Weimar Constitution's long journey to China. It tells a global legal history of how jurists and legislators used constitutional language to conceptualize 20th-century projects of social transformation.

Moving between Germany and China, the book follows the Weimarer Reichsverfassung as it was read, translated, and rewritten by Chinese actors. Rather than treating the Weimar Constitution's influence as a simple "reception" of foreign ideas, it reconstructs how Chinese jurists used debates on labor, welfare, and economic order to rethink what a social constitution could be - and what kind of social revolution it might legitimately guide.

At the core of the analysis lies a structural shift: from the Weimar Constitution's rights-based model of social order to the policy-oriented constitutionalism that came to characterize modern China. Drawing on multilingual archives and constitutional drafts, the study traces how the Weimar Constitution's catalog of fundamental social rights was progressively reframed as Fundamental National Policies, transforming social rights into state programs, planning targets, and ideological commitments.

Organized around the triad of space, time, and tradition, the book maps the routes by which German Staatsrechtslehre and the Weimar Constitution's concept of social rights entered Chinese debates, shows how they were positioned within changing temporal narratives of crisis and revolution, and examines how they were negotiated in the encounter with Confucian statecraft, revolutionary nationalism, and socialist planning. In doing so, it offers a new framework for understanding how constitutions mediate social revolution through the cultural translation of rights into policies.

The book will interest scholars and students of constitutional law, global legal history, and modern Chinese history who seek to understand how social rights traveled across borders - and how, in the process, they quietly remade the meaning of both "constitution" and "revolution" in the 20th century.

Dean's "Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law"

Steven A. Dean, Boston University School of Law, has posted Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow (Oxford University Press):

Global tax policy has long determined which states can access the resources necessary to flourish. Today, even the wealthiest states struggle to tax rich individuals and multinationals. Anti-Black racism has enriched affluent states at the expense of marginalized ones and undermined the taxing power of all nations.

In a compelling narrative interwoven with personal storytelling, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow connects Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s metaphor of the "bad check"-representing unfulfilled promises of freedom and equality to Black Americans-to contemporary anti-Black global tax policies. The book uncovers lost connections, such as those between Edwin Seligman, an architect of our global tax system, and the Dunning School, which laid the foundation for Jim Crow laws, and between Stanley Surrey, a Harvard professor and advisor to President John F. Kennedy, and key moments of the Cold War.

Furthermore, it takes a global view and reveals how racial panic triggered by African decolonization allowed an exclusive club of white countries to deliver a second bad check to newly sovereign states like Kenya and Nigeria. By circumventing the inclusive one-country, one-vote system of the United Nations, the OECD and its double tax treaty dismantled the generous arrangements that helped Europe rebuild after both World Wars.

Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law exposes the surprising role anti-Black racism played in shaping an international tax system that benefits billionaires at the expense of billions of people. This eye-opening account challenges readers to rethink the global tax system and its profound impact on racial and economic justice.

--Dan Ernst 

The Declaration of Independence in Global Context

This year's Harmsworth Conference of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford is The Meanings of Independence: The American Declaration in Global Context, 1776-1826.  It meets March, 19-20, 2026, and is convened by Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire, and Patrick Griffin, Notre Dame University.

The Declaration of Independence, whose 250th anniversary Americans will observe in 2026, is the United States’ founding text, but it was also a transformational international text. Although Congress’s main purpose was to declare thirteen of Britain’s American colonies to be free and independent states, the Declaration’s words and example spoke to audiences well beyond the new union’s borders. Convened by Eliga Gould and Patrick Griffin, Harmsworth Professors, respectively, for 2025-26 and 2022-23, this conference will explore some of the implications of that wider message. In addition to the response to the Declaration in Britain, Ireland, and Europe, we anticipate presentations that focus on North America’s Indian country, Haiti and the Caribbean, Sierra Leone and West Africa, and China and British India. Participants will be encouraged to approach their topic from the broadest possible social and cultural contexts, paying particular attention to how categories of race and class, as well as gender and sexuality, mediated what independence meant. As the choice of 1826 as the conference’s endpoints, we hope to include presentations on the Spanish American Revolutions that extended the quest for independence throughout the Western Hemisphere. 1826 was also the year that two of the main architects of American independence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died, both on July 4.

Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, will deliver the keynote.

 --Dan Ernst 

Ellias and Lalafaryan on the Global Law of Debt

Jared A. Ellias, Harvard Law School, and Narine Lalafaryan, University of Cambridge, have posted The Global Law of Debt: 

Corporate debt financing and the restructuring of large corporations are now governed by what this Article calls the “global law of debt,” a transnational system shaped more by law firms, investment banks, and investors in New York and London than by national laws or court decisions. Large companies can now optimize governing law on a transaction-by-transaction basis, for example by borrowing in New York and then restructuring that debt in the United Kingdom, or by borrowing in London through English-law governed contracts with New York-law interpretation for select provisions.  This Article provides the first account of this development, tracing its origins to the 1960s, when New York and London debt professionals expanded into each other’s markets, creating an entangled system that fostered mutual learning and competition.  In 1978, Congress enacted a new bankruptcy law that gave American lawyers and investors corporate restructuring expertise that they later exported abroad.  In the post-pandemic era, London emerged as a global restructuring hub rivaling the United States.  These developments have produced a robust global debt market, but they have also unsettled long-standing assumptions about the rights of creditors as Chapter 11’s primacy fades and controversial American innovations that erode creditor protections proliferate globally.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Caitlin Tully, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Princeton University, has published an essay in The Atlantic: "The Court has an Easy Answer on the Fed."  

• From Time's "Made by History": Douglas Boin (Saint Louis University) on "How Patriarchy Undermined the Roman Republic."   

• Malick W. Ghachem, MIT, discusses his book The Company and the Colony: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble with Gerald Horne on the “Freedom Now” program on KPFK radio.

• Jill Hasday, Minnesota Law, discussed her book We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality with Kate Shaw on the Strict Scrutiny podcast.

• Allen Boyer reviews Kathryn Schumaker's Tangled Fortunes (Mississippi Books Page).   

• We've spotted an advertisement for a predoc university assistantship with Prof. Dr. Lena Foljanty, Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna. 

• Lawbook Exchange's November 2025 catalogue on Scholarly Law and Legal History (Part 1; Part 2).

• ICYMI:  A Very Short History of Freedom of Speech by Oliver Bramley (Constitution Society). How Germany's Nuremberg trial for Nazi crimes transformed international law (rfi).

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

Rosenboim on Kelsen and the Chicago World Constitution Draft

Or Rosenboim, University of Bologna, has published, open access, Law, peace, and world order: Hans Kelsen’s global thought in the 1940s in the Journal of Global History:

In the mid-twentieth century, the jurist Hans Kelsen envisaged a new legal and political international order. His global thinking revolved around his idea of a ‘world state’ as a means to preserve peace. The article contends that Kelsen’s ideas on global legal and political order and a world state in the 1940s drew on his intellectual biography and on his earlier theoretical writings on order in the national scale. Another important source for understanding Kelsen’s global thinking is his critique of the Chicago World Constitution Draft, a mid-century project which proposed the establishment of a federal world state. As this study shows, Kelsen’s global thinking is characterised by a multi-scalar logic and an emphasis on positive law as the foundation of political and legal order. These elements render his ideas distinct in the historical trajectory of modern global thought, and deserve the attention of global historians today.

--Dan Ernst

Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowships

[We have the following announcement from the American Society for Legal History.  DRE]

Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowships
 
This new initiative is intended to provide funding for early career scholars, publishing in English, who are working on projects in legal history relating to non-U. S. history topics. Non-U. S. history topics refers to research that does not qualify for the fellowships awarded by the Cromwell Foundation in coordination with the ASLH. Early career scholars includes those researching or writing a PhD dissertation (or equivalent project) and recent recipients of a graduate degree working on their first major monograph or research project. The Committee will make up to five awards.

Criteria:  Early career scholars, publishing in English, researching in non-U. S. fields of legal history.  Amount: $2,000.  Deadline: June 30, 2025

Elements of Application:

1. Project Proposal (maximum 750 words including notes).  The proposal should include (in this order): your name and contact information; name and contact information for the reference you have asked to write for you; and project title and description;
2. Budget & Timeline (1 page);
3. Curriculum Vitae (1 page). It should include your name, contact information, education and degree dates, current appointment (if any), publications and conference papers, and professional society affiliations; and
4. One Letter of Recommendation.

Applicants should submit items 1-3 in a single pdf, and arrange to have the letter of recommendation submitted directly. Both the application and reference must be received by the deadline of June 30, 2025. Only complete applications will be considered.

Applications should make clear the relevance of law to the project and how the research will tell us something new about law. Applications should engage with relevant scholarship in the field. Finally, applications should have a clear budget that is specific about how and where you plan to spend research funds.

Submit Application and Recommendation to: global@aslh.net.  Awards will be formally announced at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Detroit.  Questions? Please email Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu).

ASLH Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective to Aden Knaap

Continuing our round-up of the prizes and award announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective -- awarded for the first time this year. About the prize: 

The Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective will honor exceptional dissertations on topics in European legal history in global perspective and presented for PhD or JSD degrees awarded in the previous calendar year. Topics may include European legal interactions with people or places outside Europe, legal processes spanning Europe and other world regions, and developments in legal theory closely related to imperial, transnational, or trans-regional trends.

This inaugural award went to Aden Knaap (Henry Chauncey ’57 Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs) for “Judging the World: International Courts and the Origins of Global Governance, 1899–1971” (Harvard University, 2023). The citation:

The 2023 Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize is awarded to Aden Knaap for his dissertation “Judging the World: International Courts and the Origins of Global Governance, 1899–1971.” This deeply original, carefully researched study presents a sweeping history of world courts, from early initiatives in 1899 to the postwar origins of today’s international courts. The dissertation makes two key contributions. It emphasizes formative efforts to establish world courts in the first half of the twentieth century, an overlooked but important period, and places visions of world courts at the very center of the evolution of global governance. The dissertation reveals how plans for key international institutions, including the World Bank and the United Nations, imagined them initially as global courts. Knaap’s study is based on extensive research in multiple archives and is beautifully written. It brings together legal, diplomatic, and international history in exposing an understudied but important dimension of European and global legal history.

Congratulations to Aden Knaap!

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Regulating the Global Movement of Care

 [We have the following CFP.  DRE]

W G Hart Workshop 2025: Regulating the Global Movement of Care.  Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London.  11-12 June 2025

We invite abstracts (of 250-300 words) for the 2025 W G Hart Workshop focusing on the role of law in regulating the global movement of care. Given the historical and contemporary significance of the issue of the movement of carers, we welcome abstracts that explore the legal regulation of care (including comparative and international aspects) through the lens of a variety of disciplines: law, history, anthropology, politics, sociology, criminology, and creative arts.

The Workshop is organised around four themes - precarity, advocacy, protection, and kinship networks (see below) - reflecting the varied facets through which law's role in regulating the movement of care can be examined. Care is broadly defined and includes healthcare, social care, domestic care, as well as unpaid care. Legal requirements often create precarity by imposing stringent professional regulatory standards on migrant care workers or permitting the claw back of visa fees. Law may also be a tool in the hands of carers and individuals and organisations who support them to battle against exploitation. Legal regulation may, in some instance, offer protection to migrant care workers. Law, in particular immigration requirements, can also define relationships between migrant carers and their broader kinship networks both in their host countries and in the countries that they come from.

Abstracts should be emailed to adrienne.yong@city.ac.uk and p.saksena@leeds.ac.uk by 5pm on Monday, 6 January 2025. Please also include a brief biography of the speaker in the submission. Further details on the workshop themes are included below.

Academic Directors:

Dr Adrienne Yong (City St George's, University of London)
Dr Priyasha Saksena (University of Leeds)
Dr Amanda Spalding (University of Leeds)
Dr Amrita Limbu (University of Leeds)
Professor Marie-Andrée Jacob (University of Leeds)

More after the jump.

P&P Special Issue: Ordering the Oceans

Past & Present has published a supplemental issue, Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World: Law, Violence, and European Empires, edited by Jeppe Mulich and Renaud Morieux:

Once the primary domain of naval and social historians, the field of maritime and oceanic history has become in the last decade part of larger and ongoing conversations in the historical discipline. Rather than simply riding the wave of global and transnational history, maritime and oceanic history has been contributing decisively to the recent inflexions of these fields. It has brought attention to issues of disconnection, power asymmetry, frictions, and material and environmental factors. It has questioned the capacity of European empires to control distant spaces, by focusing on legal geography and zones of blurred sovereignty, and by foregrounding the experience of non-European people. It has offered new methods, reflecting critically on how to combine scales of analysis and challenge inherited framings. What all these approaches share is a concern with the relationship between global processes and issues of governance.

Oceanic history is a particularly good laboratory in which to think about order-making in a global context. Many oceanic histories now share the premise that the oceans were governed and not lawless spaces. Yet many authors still focus, on the one hand, on governance and regulatory frameworks, and on the other, on forms of resistance. The concept of ‘ordering’ enables historians to bypass a dichotomy that is, in many ways, unsatisfactory. Focusing on oceans allows us to explore the unstable nature of any order in a more dynamic way than would be possible if confined only to studying the land. The processes taking place on and around the oceans were not always distinct from those on land — but they were often heightened, more experimental and in some cases pre-dated their terrestrial counterparts. Oceans rarely feature in classic accounts of the emergence of the modern state and international order, tied as these are to notions of territorialization and centralization. Focusing on oceans and oceanic contact zones underlines that the structural changes that took place between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, with respect to state formation, empires, global trade and migrations, were inherently the product of inter-imperial and interpolitical dynamics. Furthermore, a focus on the water margins and the polyglot peoples inhabiting them shows how much these changes were shaped from below and from the peripheries. State and social transformation was caused as much by actions at the margin of empires as it was by policies coming from their centres.

 --Dan Ernst.  H/t: KR

YLS Seminar on the History of Latin American Law

On Wednesday, February 14, 2024, from 2:00 - 6:00 PM, in Room 124 of the Yale Law School, YLS’s Schell Center for International Human Rights and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory is sponsoring a symposium, History of Latin American Law:

The event aims to present and discuss the book [The Cambridge History of] Latin American Law in Global Perspective recently published by Cambridge University Press. The book, edited by Tamar Herzog and Thomas Duve, brings together sixteen articles written by scholars from Latin America, Europe, and the United States on the history of Latin American law. The event will be structured around two panels. In the first one, panelists will examine the theoretical and methodological commitments of the book. In the second one, panelists will analyze three topics that cut across the volume: cultural minorities, legal pluralism, and the relationship between law and State.

Here is the program.  Space is limited.  Registration is required.

–Dan Ernst

Sources of Early Modern Colonial Law

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Workshop: Sources of Early Modern Colonial Law - Global and Comparative Perspectives.  CoCoLaw Project, University of Helsinki.  November 9th and 10th, 2023

The CoCoLaw Project (University of Helsinki) is organizing a workshop that delves into the exploration of legal sources in early modern colonial law from a comparative perspective, shedding light on the perspectives of various European empires. Key questions to address include:

• What were the foundational legal sources that shaped colonial legal systems?
• How did courts, lawyers and subjects utilize these legal sources?
• In what ways did colonial legal sources differ from those in the metropolitan centers?
• What changes and trends emerged during the early modern period in this context?

Participants in the workshop are encouraged to address these questions by presenting case studies or broader syntheses related to a specific empire. Throughout the discussions, we anticipate drawing comparisons among the empires, examining the legal sources available and employed within colonial territories.

For this workshop, we are excited to announce our distinguished keynote speakers, including Alejandro Agüero from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Alicia Schrikker from Leiden University, and Naveen Kanalu from École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

The workshop is open to all interested participants, whether attending in person or online.

You can register using [this] link.  More information about the CoCoLaw Project and its activities [is here]. 

[Schedule after the jump.]

Weekend Roundup

• "The William & Mary Archive of American LGBTQ Political and Legal History, a first of its kind in the United States, will be featured at a June 7 event celebrating PRIDE month at the W&M Washington Center" (William and Mary News).  Another report of the archive (WYDaily).
  

• Ron Harris. the Kalman Lubowsky Professor of Law and History, Tel Aviv University, delivered "The Globalization of Company Law 1844-1914," the Youard Lecture in Legal History for 2023, at the University of Oxford Faculty of Law on May 30.
  

• In The Dark Side of Defamation Law, a featured review in the New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen reviews Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan by Samantha Barbas.  Actual Malice also made the New Yorker’s list of “The Best Books We've Read in 2023 So Far.”

• A recording of that Supreme Court Historical Society session on securities regulation and the Supreme Court with Adam Pritchard and Robert Thompson has been posted to YouTube.
  

• Ken Bridges, South Arkansas Community College, on the "Brooker Brothers," two African American lawyers who “shaped Arkansas’s legal landscape” (El Dorado News-Times)
  

• ICYMI: Emily Blanck, Rowan University, on her forthcoming Remembering Emancipation: Juneteenth as America’s Emancipation Holiday (University of North Carolina Press) (Rowan Today).  A South Carolina lawyer will ask the Supreme Court to rename Brown v. Board of Education as Briggs v. Elliott  (ABAJ).  Steven Mintz on Rights Talk (IHE Blog).  Troy J.H. Andrade on encountering Queen Lili‘uokalani at the National Portrait Gallery (ACS).  A career tip for Brandeis University graduate students from Winston Bowman, Associate Historian at Federal Judicial Center.
  

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

Halliday on English Laws and Global Histories

English Laws, Global Histories; or, What Makes a Court Supreme? the presidential address Paul D. Halliday, University of Virginia, delivered at the North American Conference on British Studies in November 2021, has now been published open access in the Journal of British Studies.  Here is a taste:

I will explore a question I've long puzzled over: how might one produce a global history of English laws? We need this history; a global orientation offers the only way to conceive English laws in all their Englishness. I stress English, for the laws of a British empire were peculiarly English. Yet they were also multiform: so much more than indicated by all the maps of common law countries one might find online. We also need this history because understanding English law's extra-English transformations will help us think through any number of problems that people around the globe confront now in the possession and protection of rights in all their forms: substantive and procedural, civil, constitutional, and human.

–Dan Ernst

Lebovic's "Righteous Smokescreen"

Sam Lebovic, George Mason University, has published A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, with the University of Chicago Press:

When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Sam Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States. Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump

American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories

Here is a fuller description, including the TOC, of the previously noted essay collection, American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories, edited by Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski (New York University Press:

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the export of American power-both hard and soft-throughout the world. What role did US cultural and economic imperialism play in legal education? American Legal Education Abroad offers an unprecedented and surprising picture of the history of legal education in thirteen countries beyond the United States. Each study in this book represents a critical history of the Americanization of legal education, re-examining prevailing narratives of exportation, transplantation, and imperialism. Collectively, these studies challenge the conventional wisdom that American ideas and practices have dominated globally. American Legal Education Abroad begins with a foundational history by leading Harvard Law School historian Bruce Kimball, who explains the factors that created a transportable American legal model, and the book concludes with reflections from Susan Carle and Bob Gordon, whose observations on recent disruptions within US law schools suggest that their influence within the global order of legal education may soon fall into further decline.

This book should be considered an invaluable resource for anyone in the fields of law, legal history, socio-legal studies, law and society, legal education, comparative law, colonial and postcolonial legal studies, globalisation and law, and intellectual and cultural history.

Table of Contents

Introduction  

Part 1: Foundation Stories

1. The Proliferation and Transformation of Harvard's Case Method in the United States, 1870s-1990s. Bruce A. Kimball

2. How America Did (and Didn't) Influence English Legal Education, circa 1870-1965. David Sugarman

Part 2: Americanization-Critical Histories

3. American Influences, Canadian Realities: How "American" Is Canadian Legal Education? Philip Girard

4. Functionalism, Legal Process, and the Transformation (and Subordination) of Australian Law Schools. Susan Bartie

5. Conservatives, Nationalists, and American Romantics Debating Legal Education in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. John Harrington and Ambreena Manji

6. Transplantation and Domestication of American Models of Legal Education in Nigeria. J. Jarpa Dawuni and Rebecca Emiene Badejogbin

7. Model, System, or Node? Understanding Legal Education Reform in Twentieth-century China and Beyond. Jedidiah J. Kroncke

8. Transplants in Estonian Legal Education: Influences from the US Legal System. Irene Kull, Merike Ristikivi, and Aleksei Kelli

9. "The Turn to the West": American Legal Education and Educational     Reforms in the Swedish Welfare State, 1950-2000. Kjell Å Modéer

10. The American Case Method and New Japanese Legal Education. Yoshiharu Matsuura

11. Legal Education in France Turns Its Attention to the Harvard Model. Jean-Louis Halpérin

12. American Moment(s): When, How, and Why Did Israeli Law Faculties Come to Resemble Elite US Law Schools? Pnina Lahav

13. Catalytic Agents? Lon Fuller, James Milner, and the Lawyer as Social Architect, 1950-1969. David Sandomierski

14. Legal Teaching and the Reconceptualizing of the State: Global Law and New Legal Education Loci. José Garcez Ghirardi

15. Socratic Method, Philippine-style: To Unhave or Uphold? Emily Sanchez Salcedo

Part 3: US Perspectives

16. Rethinking Assumptions about the Global Influence of US Legal Education. Susan D. Carle

17. The Harvard Models in Their Native Habitat and Abroad: Reflections. Robert W. Gordon

The Contributors

Rebecca Emiene Badejogbin, Director of Academics, Council of Legal Education, Nigerian Law School.

Susan Bartie, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Tasmania.

Susan D. Carle, Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law.

J. Jarpa Dawuni, Associate Professor of Political Science, Howard University, Washington, DC, and Executive Director, Institute for African Women in Law.

José Garcez Ghirardi, Associate Professor, FGV SP Law School, Brazil.

Philip Girard, Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto.

Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law, Stanford University, and Chancellor Kent Professor of Law & Legal History, Emeritus, at Yale University.

Jean-Louis Halpérin, Professor (exceptional class), École Normale Supérieure, Paris and Director of the Unité mixte de recherche 7074-Centre for Legal Theory and Analysis (CNRS-University Paris X-ENS and EHESS).

John Harrington, Professor of Global Health Law and Director of the Centre for Law and Global Justice, Cardiff University and Director of the ESRC Doctoral Training Programme in Wales.

Aleksei Kelli, Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Faculty of Law, University of Tartu, Estonia.

Bruce A. Kimball, Professor in Philosophy and History of Education, The Ohio State University.

Jedidiah J. Kroncke, Associate Professor of Law, University of Hong Kong.

Irene Kul, Professor of Civil Law and Head of the Department of the Civil Law, University of Tartu, Estonia.  

Pnina Lahav, Professor, Boston University School of Law.

Ambreena Manji, Professor of Land Law and Development, Cardiff University.

Yoshiharu Matsuura, Professor Emeritus and Designated Professor for a special graduate program, Nagoya University Graduate School of Law.

Kjell Å Modéer, Professor Emeritus of Legal History, Lund University, Sweden.

Merike Ristikivi, Associate Professor of Legal History in the Faculty of Law, University of Tartu, Estonia.

Emily Sanchez Salcedo, Teacher, Commercial Law Department, De La Salle University in the Philippines.

David Sandomierski, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Western University in London, Ontario.

David Sugarman, Professor Emeritus of Law, Lancaster University Law School; Senior Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London; and Senior Associate, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford.  

Pirie's "Rule of Laws"

Fernanda Pirie, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford, has published The Rule of Laws: A 4000-Year Quest to Order the World (Basic Books):

Almost without exception, the laws enforced throughout the world today are modelled on systems developed in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For two hundred years, European colonisers exported their laws everywhere they could. But in many places they weren't filling a void: again and again, they displaced local traditions that were already ancient when Vasco Da Gama first made landfall in India. Even the Romans, first framers of the European tradition, were inspired by earlier precedents.  

Where, then, did it all begin? And what sophisticated approaches to justice have been lost in the drive for uniformity? In The Rule of Laws, anthropologist Fernanda Pirie traces the development of the world's great legal systems - Chinese, Indian, Roman, and Islamic. But she also shows how common people-tribal assemblies, merchants, farmers-have called on laws to define their communities, regulate trade, and resist outsiders. The variety of the world's laws, Pirie reveals, has long been almost as great as the variety of its societies. Although legal principles originating in Western Europe now seem to dominate the globe, a more complicated legal reality persists on the ground, one that is evident everywhere from the influence of Islamic law across the Middle East, to the persistence of traditional codes among nomadic Tibetan yak herders, to the unwritten rules of gangs worldwide.

At the heart of this story is a persistent paradox. Rulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But they have also offered ordinary people a way to resist authority and to express their diverse visions for a better world. 

--Dan Ernst

Clio@Themis: The Relaunch

We are grateful to David Sugarman for word that Clio @ Themis, the on-line review of legal history, has a new website, which makes current and previously published articles more accessible. From the website:

Founded in 2009 at the initiative of several researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, joined by a number of University lecturers, Clio@Themis contributes to the development of debates and scientific exchanges with regard to the history of law. Its creation in France is based on enlargement and enrichment of the traditional perspectives of the legal history. Indeed, the history of law, through more and more varied types of research, concerns now all periods, from Antiquity to the beginning of the 21th century. This broadening of perspectives is not only in a chronological context, but also a geographical one: today, the subject of the history of law is necessarily European, comparative, and reacts to the phenomena of legal globalisation.

As a consequence, far from keeping legal history locked in a complacent study of the past, this journal aims to be an instrument for the critical understanding of the present. It does not intend to separate legal phenomena from social phenomena. In addition to questions about socio-economic factors in the production and reception of the law, it is increasingly important to consider reflections on judicial culture, the formation and circulation of ideas and judicial concepts, practices and representation.

History, Law, Society: these three ideas express, without any doctrinal constraint, our usage of historical method, our focus on legal subjects and our embrace of social science in the broadest sense.

–Dan Ernst

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: