Mayeux's "Free Justice"

Out this month is Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press), by Sara Mayeux, Vanderbilt Law School.  It appears in the book series Justice, Power and Politics, edited by Heather Ann Thompson and Rhonda Y. Williams.

Every day, in courtrooms around the United States, thousands of criminal defendants are represented by public defenders--lawyers provided by the government for those who cannot afford private counsel. Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender has a surprisingly contentious history--one that offers insights not only about the "carceral state," but also about the contours and compromises of twentieth-century liberalism.

First gaining appeal amidst the Progressive Era fervor for court reform, the public defender idea was swiftly quashed by elite corporate lawyers who believed the legal profession should remain independent from the state. Public defenders took hold in some localities but not yet as a nationwide standard. By the 1960s, views had shifted. Gideon v. Wainwright enshrined the right to counsel into law and the legal profession mobilized to expand the ranks of public defenders nationwide. Yet within a few years, lawyers had already diagnosed a "crisis" of underfunded, overworked defenders providing inadequate representation--a crisis that persists today. This book shows how these conditions, often attributed to recent fiscal emergencies, have deep roots, and it chronicles the intertwined histories of constitutional doctrine, big philanthropy, professional in-fighting, and Cold War culture that made public defenders ubiquitous but embattled figures in American courtrooms.

Here are some endorsements:

"This is an excellent work of legal history that speaks to the present as we systemically think about the connections between poverty, race, incarceration, and the criminal justice system."--Felice Batlan, author of Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945

"Mayeux reveals core features of American political culture and political economy across a changing twentieth century. This is a brilliant book that should be read by everyone interested in the dimensions of the contemporary American legal regime."--Hendrik Hartog, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus, Princeton University

"Sara Mayeux brilliantly uses the contested history of public defenders as a lens to examine and illuminate American conceptions of democracy, liberalism, socialism, and even our broader political culture.  Free Justice marks the dazzling debut of a supremely gifted legal historian."--Justin Driver, author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind

"Free Justice details a remarkable transformation in the attitudes of white-shoe lawyers, Supreme Court justices, and law professors. In the early 1900s, they envisioned indigent criminal defense as an endeavor for private charity and equated public defense with totalitarianism. By mid-century, they insisted on public defense in criminal trials as a Cold War imperative. And by the end of the 1960s, necessity had forced them to redefine it as a vital element of the War on Crime. Only in the United States! Sara Mayeux's important, beautifully written book shows us the elite legal profession shaping and being shaped by society and reminds us of the tension between the Warren Court's great ideals and their implementation. Brava!"--Laura Kalman, author of The Long Reach of the Sixties: LBJ, Nixon, and the Making of the Contemporary Supreme Court

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rose QC

Hart has re-issued in paperback to mark the centenary of legislation enabling women to enter the professions for the first time in the United Kingdom, Rose QC, by Hilary Heilbron, the daughter of Dame Rose Heilbron and a barrister and Queen’s Counsel.

Rose Heilbron QC (later Dame Rose Heilbron), was an English barrister, who became a world famous icon of the 1950s and 1960s. She was one of the two first women King's Counsel (later Queen's Counsel) in 1949 and the first senior woman Judge in England in 1956 when she became Recorder of Burnley. This biography, written by her daughter Hilary, also a barrister and Queen's Counsel, charts her rise to prominence and success against the odds, excelling as an advocate and lawyer and later as only the second female High Court Judge in a career spanning nearly 50 years. She broke down many barriers with a string of firsts in the legal profession. She became a pioneer for women at the English Bar and for women generally, championing many women's causes in an era when it was not fashionable to do so.

The biography highlights her role as an inspiring and successful defence advocate in many famous and fascinating cases as well as in cases of great legal importance. These include the Cameo murder case in 1950; the trial of Devlin and Burns for capital murder; the representation of the striking Liverpool Dockers in a case of national importance; the defence of the notorious London gangster, Jack Spot; and the representation, in an early anti-discrimination case, of the world renowned cricketer, Learie Constantine.

Also chronicled are her years as a High Court Judge and the wide range of other legal and non-legal activities she undertook as a result of her fame including her appointment by the government in 1975 to chair an Advisory Committee on Rape.

With the added insights and recollections of her daughter it portrays a multi-dimensional picture of the young and beautiful Rose Heilbron - barrister, judge, working wife and mother - who not only managed to combine these public and private roles in an era when to do so was extremely rare, but who did so with the combination of warmth, flair and determination which was to make her an internationally acclaimed role model for women.

Many people over the years have wanted to write about her: this is the first authorised biography.

Table of Contents after the jump.

Stephens' Governing Islam

In 2018, Julia Stephens (Rutgers University) published Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

Governing Islam traces the colonial roots of contemporary struggles between 
Islam and secularism in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The book uncovers the paradoxical workings of colonial laws that promised to separate secular and religious spheres, but instead fostered their vexed entanglement. It shows how religious laws governing families became embroiled with secular laws governing markets, and how calls to protect religious liberties clashed with freedom of the press. By following these interactions, Stephens asks us to reconsider where law is and what it is. Her narrative weaves between state courts, Islamic fatwas on ritual performance, and intimate marital disputes to reveal how deeply law penetrates everyday life. In her hands, law also serves many masters - from British officials to Islamic jurists to aggrieved Muslim wives. The resulting study shows how the neglected field of Muslim law in South Asia is essential to understanding current crises in global secularism.

Praise for the book:

 "This book is nothing less than a landmark in its lucid, subtle, and persuasive arguments about the transformation of Islamic law in its encounter with colonial legal discourses and institutions. Basing herself on an archive of extraordinary breadth, Stephens revises old assumptions about Muslim law and about the consequences of colonial governance at every turn. This analysis of the past illuminates a present in urgent need of fresh understanding." -Barbara D. Metcalf

"Governing Islam is a masterful and compelling book that explores modern South Asia's Muslim legal history through ideas about religion, economy, gender, custom, colonialism, and socialism. Using primary sources in multiple languages, Julia Stephens reveals the many layers of law for Muslims. The result is simply superb - a fascinating portrait of vernacular, colonial, and post-colonial legal cultures, all intertwined and with plenty of intriguing twists." -Mitra Sharafi 

"A major work of scholarship that brings together the history of law, religion and family in British India to tell the story of South Asian secularism. Erudite and sophisticated in tone this is a much-needed monograph at a time when the idea of secular India faces its gravest threat." -Seema Alavi

Watch Prof. Stephens' 2015 interview on the book project on Yale's The MacMillan Report. 

Further information about the book is available here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi

Schuler on Pittsburgh lawyers

Ron Schuler has published The Steel Bar: Pittsburgh Lawyers and the Making of America with Marquez Press. From the press: 

The Steel Bar: Pittsburgh Lawyers and the Making of America examines Pittsburgh’s part in the development of American democratic and commercial institutions and how its lawyers helped to shape American history in significant ways. During Pittsburgh’s earliest days, Pittsburgh lawyers, living as outsiders on the frontier of America, were actively defining the limits of political dissent in the young Republic. By 1902, however, Pittsburgh lawyers occupied top spots in all three branches of government at the same time: as U.S. attorney general and solicitor general, as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, and as a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Not merely a coincidence, by the end of the nineteenth century Pittsburgh lawyers were considered to be among the Nation’s most influential—for their roles in the rise of Pittsburgh as the wealthiest and most important industrial city in America, as interpreters and curators of the earliest major American corporations, and as tacticians in the ongoing struggles between labor and management. During the Progressive Era and the rise of federal regulation, Pittsburgh lawyers fought epic battles against the government over the right to collective bargaining, the limits of monopoly power and local government self-determination. At the same time, the profession itself evolved in Pittsburgh, through wars and McCarthyism, the Civil Rights era and globalism, and through the democratization of the bar and the entry of women and minorities into the front ranks of the profession, as Pittsburgh’s lawyers stepped forward to become stewards and builders during the decline of Steel and the renaissance of a great American city.

Praise for the book:

“Ron Schuler’s The Steel Bar is a magnificent tour-de-force: It weaves together history, law and powerful story-telling to produce a dramatic, readable account of the people and unexpected forces that shaped our nation’s legal system. This book belongs on the shelf of any serious student of law, history, and the role played by the bench and bar in forging America’s remarkable destiny.”—Ken Gormley

“[A] thoroughly researched and easily readable account of an untold story. Schuler takes the microcosm of the Pittsburgh legal community … to illustrate far broader social themes about the rule of law.”—Harry Litman

“[T]he best and most engaging history of a city bar that I’ve read in many years. Far from being just another chronicle of a local profession, The Steel Bar shows how Pittsburgh lawyers played leading roles in the development of national politics, economic growth and social change. It’s a great story written with verve, panache and wit that properly puts Pittsburgh at the center of the American narrative.” —Bernard J. Hibbitts

 More information is available here.

Kadens on Twyne's Case at Georgetown Law, 10/25

We here at Georgetown Law had a great time Friday when my fellow LHB Blogger Mitra Sharafi inaugurated the Georgetown Legal History Colloquium with her paper, "South Asians and West Africans at the Inns of Court: Empire and Expulsion circa 1900."

We are also looking forward to our next session, on October 25, at which Emily Kadens,  Northwestern Pritzker Law School, will present "New Light on Twyne’s Case":

Edward Coke (NYPL)

In 1602, the English Court of Star Chamber decided the fraudulent conveyance case Attorney General v. Twyne & Pearce. The opinion offered factors to consider in identifying when the conveyance of goods or property was fraudulent. These factors have been so useful to judges that Twyne’s Case has proven to be among the most enduring old English cases in the common law. Courts still routinely cite it for its specific analysis, and scholars reference it frequently in their studies of fraudulent conveyance law. And yet the report of the case, written by Edward Coke (who was the Attorney General in the suit), upon which judges and scholars rely contains many inaccuracies and omissions. A large number of case documents from Twyne and related actions remain in the National Archives in London, however, and they permit us to flesh out the story behind this iconic case. It turns out that the allegedly fraudulent transaction and its aftermath were very complicated, involving a rural economy of credit without banks, the ties among and feuds between local gentry and their partisans, the late Elizabethan government’s terror of popular unrest, and possibly even official malfeasance. The article unpacks this convoluted tale to provide a more accurate account of the events leading to the lawsuit. In addition, it both (1) examines fraudulent conveyance cases before Twyne in an attempt to discern whether Twyne raised novel or particularly useful issues around which the Star Chamber could fashion its interpretation of fraudulent conveyance law, and (2) examines the immediate impact of Twyne’s new jurisprudence on fraudulent conveyance cases brought in equity courts in the years shortly after Coke’s report was published.

If you’re a legal historian or student who would like to attend, please contact me or my co-convener Anne Fleming at Georgetown Law.

--Dan Ernst

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: 

Siddiqui on Syed Mahmood

Sohaira Siddiqui, Georgetown University Qatar has published "Navigating Colonial Power: Challenging Precedents and the Limitation of Local Elites" in Islamic Law and Society 26:3 (13 June 2019), 1-41. Here's the abstract: 

In 1869, the British allowed Muslims to sit as judges on the High Court. This article explores the legal opinions of the first Muslim judge to be appointed to the High Court, Syed Mahmood. Straddling two competing worlds – that of Cambridge University and that of his native India – Justice Mahmood both legitimated and resisted colonial judicial power. In this essay I will demonstrate how British judges interpreted points of Islamic law within an English legal framework, and how these interpretations contradicted their translated texts of Islamic law, yet became the foundation of legal precedents established through the doctrine of stare decisis. Despite participating within the British colonial judiciary, Mahmood challenged these precedents, demonstrating his ability to navigate the paradoxes of colonial power to secure for himself a legitimate platform from which he could argue his juridical interventions. The efficacy of these challenges, however, ultimately was restrained by the institutions and structures of the colonial jural project.

Further information is available here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi

Sharafi on rule of law and constitutionalism in India

Our blogger Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin, has posted the paper, "Parsi Legal Culture, Constitutionalism, and the Rule of Law" on SSRN. The piece is forthcoming in a volume edited by Nawaz B. Mody. It began life as the conclusion to Sharafi's book, before being removed and expanded into its own separate article. Here's an abstract:

Parsi legal culture has played an important role in the constitutional life of modern India, helping nationalists pivot from extra-legal resistance to the business of running a state. This article suggests that Parsi legal culture reinforced constitutionalism and the rule of law in India. As ideals, the latter two concepts impose restraints on the exercise of power. During the late colonial period, elite Parsis led the early "constitutionalist" phase of the Indian National Congress movement (1885-1919) and insisted on working for change through existing state processes and structures. Early Congress leaders Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, and Dinsha Wacha were products of Parsi legal culture. They were turning outward--for the benefit of all Indians--the law-focused strategy that had worked so well during the preceding half-century for their own community. Their approach was abandoned as the nationalist movement became a mass movement circa 1920 under Gandhi's leadership. The values of Parsi legal culture and the Congress constitutionalists were relegated to the back burner from the 1920s until the late 1940s. However, they were brought back to life upon independence, particularly in the Constituent Assembly that created the Indian Constitution (1947-50) and in the interpretation of the Indian Constitution after 1950. The early Congress model of "constitutional agitation"fed into what B. R. Ambedkar would call India's "constitutional morality." Both required the relinquishment of "the bloody methods of revolution" and of Gandhian civil disobedience alike. Early independent India could re-activate constitutionalism and the rule of law as ideals because these ideas were preserved readymade within a particular politico-legal tradition, albeit one that had fallen out of favor in the decades before independence. This tradition was heavily influenced by Parsi legal culture.

This article also answers the question of whether rule-of-law values were inescapably colonial: they were not. A history of tension within the colonial state highlights the distinction between those who believed there had to be restraints on the exercise of power, and those who wanted to rule without law. Debates among colonial state actors and the harnessing of rule-of-law values by the early constitutionalists reflected the distinction between the projects of colonialism and the rule of law. The British initially used the rule of law to justify colonialism because it was there, neatly packaged and ready to ship, in metropolitan thought and political culture. They underestimated the concept's autonomy and its potential to eat away at the foundations of empire. This insight also addresses the question: how did a population that achieved such affluence and success under British rule reposition itself in decolonisation mode? In fact, there was no necessary contradiction between Parsi legal culture and the rejection of colonial rule. Through its embrace of rule-of-law values and constitutionalism, Parsi legal culture helped build a solid foundation for the newly independent polity.

Further information is available here and here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi

Welles on Berle on the Corporate Bar

Harwell Wells, Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law, has posted a very interesting contribution on the American legal profession to that annual symposium on Berle and Means’s Modern Corporation and Private Power.  It’s “All Lawyers are Somewhat Suspect”: Adolf A. Berle and the Modern Legal Profession, Seattle University Law Review 42 (2019):

Adolf A. Berle was perhaps the preeminent scholar of the modern corporation. He was also an occasional scholar of the modern legal profession. This article surveys his writings on the legal profession from the 1930s to the 1960s, from the sharp criticisms he leveled at lawyers, particularly corporate lawyers, during the Great Depression, to his sunnier account of the lawyer’s role in the postwar era. I argue that Berle’s views were shaped both by the reformist tradition he inherited from Louis Brandeis and his writings on the corporation, which left him convinced that the fate of the legal profession would be determined by that of the modern corporation.

--Dan Ernst

Matzko's "Best Men of the Bar" (and Introduction by Funk)

Well, this is unexpected.  Historians interested in the American bar at the turn of the twentieth century have long known of John Austin Matzko’s work on the American Bar Association–if not his dissertation, than his chapter in The New High Priests, a collection of essays edited by Gerard W.  Gawalt.  In July, the dissertation is to be published by Talbot Publishing (an imprint of Lawbook Exchange) as Best Men of the Bar: The Early Years of the American Bar Association, 1878-1928:

Matzko illustrates how the early American Bar Association endeavored to create a traditional professional gatekeeping organization by gaining control of legal education, entrance examinations, and ethical codes. The early ABA supported reformist values of political and social change if such change could be overseen by courts. It was not until the second decade of the twentieth century that it began its transformation into a more conservative group.

 Here is an endorsement:

"In this penetrating and gracefully-written account of the formative first-half century of the American Bar Association, Matzko actually makes institutional history absorbing - an excellent account of the personalities and ideas that formed the legal profession on a national level, the transition from a "Gentleman's Club" to a professional association and, in due course, an entity which established widely-shared minimum standards for the quality of legal education and admission to the State bars. Likely to be the definitive account for some time to come. William E. Butler, Dickinson Law, Pennsylvania State University.

The book includes an introduction by Kellen Funk, Columbia Law School, who was one of Professor Matzko’s students at Bob Jones University, where Professor Matzko taught for over forty years.  Professor Funk's introduction, now posted on SSRN, is a valuable review essay on the history of the legal profession during Professor Matzko’s period.  Here is its abstract:

John A. Matzko's The Best Men of the Bar began as a dissertation defended in 1984. Despite the central importance of the ABA to the turn-of-the-century class stratification of the bar, the accreditation of legal education, the emergence of the “canons” of legal ethics, and the settlement of the codification controversy with model laws and restatements, no institutional history of the ABA appeared in the intervening years. Literatures have arisen devoted to the entrance of women and African Americans to legal practice in the late nineteenth century, while the internal dynamics of the elite (mostly male and white) bar during the New Deal has received sustained attention. But as of yet, the elite of the bar to which women, minorities, and New Deal progressives were reacting has been relatively neglected.

Indeed,The Best Men of the Bar presciently offered a number of arguments that today puts the work right at home in contemporary historiography of America’s legal profession, particularly in its focus on the control of legal education and the interconnections between codification and access to the profession. The central argument of the book is one that both anticipates recent literature yet also extends it by disrupting our conventional attempts to describe the elite bar of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States. While recent studies have challenged the notion of a monolithic classical legal “orthodoxy,” Best Men of the Bar clarifies the story by dividing the ABA’s early history into two periods: one that drew on and was shaped by the age of reform, and a later period of reaction and retrenchment. This introduction surveys the major historiographical debates about the turn-of-the-century American legal profession to illustrate the power of this argument. One of the recurring themes of the works surveyed within is the slightly embarrassed admission that the Gilded Age bar in many ways countered the trend towards conservatism that developed later in the Progressive Era.

–Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Our friends at the Federal Judicial Center have posted the latest in the Center’s series of teaching materials on Famous Federal Trials.  It’s U.S. v. New York Times, that is, The Pentagon Papers Case, in which "the publication of secret government documents about the Vietnam War leads to a federal court conflict pitting national security against freedom of the press."

• Recently posted over at Law and Political Economy (LPE) blog is the symposium Piercing the Monetary Veil.  Contributors include Christine Desan and Roy Kreitner.

• Boy, we're sorry we couldn't attend this one: Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law, on Private Practices, Public Projects: Reflections on Connections between Work for Clients and Public Activities in the History of the Legal Profession last Thursday at Northwestern University.  H/t: Christopher Schmidt.

• Be sure to check out the redesigned website of the Historical Society for the District of Columbia Circuit.

• Mark W. Gifford, Bar Counsel for the Wyoming State Bar, has published Regulation of the Practice of Law in Wyoming: A 150-Year Walk Through the History Books in the Wyoming Law Review 19 (2019): 1-43.

• The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs announced the publication of a symposium on its 50th anniversary in the Howard Law Journal. 

• An updated webpage helps catch us up on legal history at Edinburgh Law School. 

• Thomas C. Britton will discuss the history and development of the SIU School of Law at noon, May 21, in the Hiram H. Lesar Law Building Courtroom on the Southern Illinois University Carbondale campus.  He will base his talk on a chapter in his recently published Southern Illinois University at 150: Growth, Accomplishments, and Challenges.

• "The 2020 BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History will be held in conjunction with the BHC annual meeting . . . in Charlotte Wednesday, March 11 and Thursday, March 12. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to early-stage doctoral candidates pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history, from any relevant discipline.  Applications are due by 15 November 2019 via email to BHC@Hagley.org."  More on this prestigious competition of the Business History Conference is here. 

• My erstwhile and present Georgetown Law colleagues Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School, and Louis Michael Seidman, Georgetown University Law Center, have posted On Being Old Codgers: A Conversation about a Half Century in Legal Education, a “conversation, conducted over three evenings,” capturing “some of our thoughts about the last half century of legal education as both of us near retirement.”  DRE  

• We didn’t realize that Attorney General William Barr contributed an oral history to the Miller Center for Public Affairs series on the George W. Bush presidency.  Thanks, WaPo!

• In WaPo's "Made by History" series: Victoria Saker Woeste on the dark history of the raisin mafia.  Sarah A. Seo on traffic stops.

• ICYMI: Mary Ziegler on recent developments in the campaign to overturn Roe on NPR (et al.).  The History Channel’s notice of Dan Abrams and David Fisher’s Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense: The Courtroom Battle to Save His Legacy.  Also, the History Channel on the first Social Security check.  More on legal historians as partners: some, it seems, make dreams come true.

• You can register now here for the upcoming workshop on Law, Difference, and Healthcare at Princeton's Davis Center. It is organized by George Aumoithe and runs June 6-7, 2019.

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

Cheta on the Egyptian legal profession

Omar Cheta, Bard College has published "A Prehistory of the Modern Legal Profession in Egypt, 1840s-1870s" in the International Journal of Middle East Studies 50(2018): 4, 649-68. Here's the abstract: 

This article examines the emergence of a new corps of legal practitioners in Egypt during the 1860s and early 1870s. The proceedings of hundreds of merchant court cases in mid-19th-century Cairo are replete with references to deputies and agents (wukalā; sing. wakīl) who represented merchant-litigants in a wide range of commercial disputes. Examining how these historical actors understood Egyptian, Ottoman, and French laws, and how they strategically deployed their knowledge in the merchant courts, this article revises the commonly accepted historical account of the founding of the legal profession in Egypt. Specifically, it argues that norms of legal practice hitherto linked to the establishment of the Mixed Courts in 1876 were already being formed and refined within the realm of commercial law as part of a more comprehensive program of legal reforms underway during the middle decades of the 19th century. In uncovering this genealogy of practice, the article reevaluates the extent to which the khedival state shared a legal culture with the Ottoman center, and, simultaneously, created the space for a new form of legal representation that became ubiquitous under British, and, subsequently, postcolonial rule.

Further information is available here. 

Feingold on decolonizing Tanzania

Ellen R. Feingold (museum curator and faculty affiliate, Georgetown University) has published Colonial Justice and Decolonization in the High Court of Tanzania, 1920-1971 with Palgrave Macmillan. From the publisher: 

This book is the first study of the development and decolonization of a British colonial high court in Africa. It traces the history of the High Court of Tanzania from its establishment in 1920 to the end of its institutional process of decolonization in 1971. This process involved disentangling the High Court from colonial state structures and imperial systems that were built on racial inequality while simultaneously increasing the independence of the judiciary and application of British judicial principles.  Feingold weaves together the rich history of the Court with a discussion of its judges – both as members of the British Colonial Legal Service and as individuals – to explore the impacts and intersections of imperial policies, national politics, and individual initiative. Colonial Justice and Decolonization in the High Court of Tanzania is a powerful reminder of the crucial roles played by common law courts in the operation and legitimization of both colonial and post-colonial states. 

Table of Contents after the jump:

Jus Gentium 3:1

Vol.3, issue 2 of Jus Gentium: Journal of International Legal History (July 2018) is out. Here is the Table of Contents:

ARTICLES

• "Arbitration at Vienna: Recasting the History of International Dispute Resolution" by S. Harris
• "The Rising Generation of International Lawyers at St. Petersburg University: Zaremba and Spasovich" by V. I. Ivanenko
• "The Baltimore Incident and American Naval Expansion" by Mark W. Podvia    
• "The 1917 Russian Revolution and International Law" by O. O. Merezhko  
• "The Development of the Science of International Law at the Koretsky Institute of State and Law" by K. O. Savchuk and I. M.Protsenko
• "Currency Control, Exchange Contracts, and War: Boissevain v. Weil" by J. Anderson
• "Brown v. United States and Confiscation of Enemy Property" by IsaacSchaphorst

NOTES AND COMMENTS

• "Kronid Malyshev and the Renaissance of Private International Law" by V. I. Ivanenko
• "On Teaching the History of International Law" by W. E. Butler
• "The People as a Subject of International Law"by I. O. Kresina and O. V. Kresin

DOCUMENTS AND OTHER EVIDENCE OF STATE PRACTICE

• "Brief Calendar of International Practice for Spain and Portugal 1641 to 1818" by P. Macalister-Smith and J. Schwietzke

BOOK REVIEW

•  Philippe Sands, Східно-західна вулция. Повернення до Львова 671 [East West Street: Return to Lviv] (2017) by T. R.Korotkyĭ and N. Pashkovskyĭ

Further information is available here.

Boston College Legal History Roundtable in fall 2018

[We share the following announcement.]

In the fall of 2018, the Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable started its 17th successful year. The Roundtable draws on Boston College Law School’s and Boston College’s strength and interest in legal history. It offers an opportunity for Boston College faculty and faculty from other area institutions, students, and members of the Boston College community to meet and discuss a pre-circulated paper in legal history. Meeting several times each semester, the Roundtable seeks to promote an informal, collegial atmosphere of informed discussion.

For the 2018-2019 academic year, Professor Mary Sarah Bilder, Professor Daniel R. Coquillette, Professor Frank Herrmann and Professor Daniel Farbman are conveners.

The Roundtable usually meets several times during the semester in the afternoon at 4:30 pm in the Library Conference Room of the Boston College Law School Library. Refreshments are available beginning at 4:15 pm.*

In 2018-2019, our first Roundtable will be jointly sponsored with the BC Law School Tax Policy Workshop and therefore meet at noon. 

Papers will be available when appropriate before each presentation.

For more information, please contact: 

Joan Manna (617) 552-4344

For assistance with parking passes for non-BC faculty, please also contact Joan.

THIS YEAR'S SCHEDULE after the jump.