Banerjee on Sanskritic Equivalents of Law

Last June, the conference Law, Empire, and Global Intellectual History was held at Heidelberg University. The journal Modern Intellectual History has since accepted some papers presented there for a special forum of the same name.  One is now available on-line: Sovereignty as a Motor of Global Conceptual Travel: Sanskritic Equivalents of "Law" in Bengali Discursive Production, by Milinda Banerjee, Assistant Professor in Presidency University, Kolkata, India, and Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Munich.

de la Rasilla del Moral on Vitoria & international law in Spain

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral, Brunel University London, has published In the Shadow of Vitoria: A History of International Law in Spain (1770-1953) with Brill. From the press:

In the Shadow of Vitoria: A History of International Law in Spain (1770-1953) offers the first comprehensive treatment of the intellectual evolution of international law in Spain from the late 18th century to the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral recounts the history of the two ‘renaissances’ of Francisco de Vitoria and the Spanish Classics of International Law and contextualizes the ideological glorification of the Salamanca School by Franco’s international lawyers. Historical excursuses on the intellectual evolution of international law in the US and the UK complement the neglected history of international law in Spain from the first empire in history on which the  sun never set to a diminished and fascistized national-Catholicist state.

Table of Contents after the jump.

Meierhenrich, "The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law"

New from Oxford University Press: The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (March 2018), by Jens Meierhenrich (London School of Economics). A description from the Press:

This book is an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual State (1941, reissued 2017), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel's was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of Nazism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany. His sophisticated-not to mention courageous-analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. As a result of its clandestine origins, The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of intellectual resistance to the Nazi regime.

In this book, Jens Meierhenrich revives Fraenkel's innovative concept of "the dual state," restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public law scholarship. Blending insights from legal theory and legal history, he tells in an accessible manner the remarkable gestation of Fraenkel's ethnography of law from inside the belly of the behemoth. In addition to questioning the conventional wisdom about the law of the Third Reich, Meierhenrich explores the legal origins of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. The book sets the parameters for a theory of the "authoritarian rule of law," a cutting edge topic in law and society scholarship with immediate policy implications.

A few blurbs:

"As early as 1938, Ernst Fraenkel, a German labor lawyer and social democrat chased out of Germany because of his Jewish origin attempted an analysis of Nazi law. He argued that law and lawlessness existed side-by-side, and deviously complemented one another. Meierhenrich has carefully and admirably excavated this intellectual achievement, and reimagined Fraenkels dual state for the twenty-first century. This is a terrific book and of immediate relevance for understanding the present: dual states are everywhere." - Michael Stolleis 

"One would have hoped that in our own time a rigorous analysis of Nazi law would serve only antiquarian purposes. However, Jens Meierhenrich's magnificent The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat serves as a painful reminder that this is unfortunately not the case. In this brilliant and meticulous reevaluation of Ernst Fraenkel's interrogation of the workings of the Third Reich's legal system, Meierhenrich revives the idea that authoritarian regimes are not in fact lawless entities, but in fact states that deploy legalism in both cynical and systematic ways. In an era when hybrid regimes, which combine both dictatorial and liberal elements, proliferate throughout the world - in Europe and North America, as well The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat is an indispensable read." - John P. McCormick

More information is available here.

Kimmel on conversion in early modern Spain

Out with the University of Chicago Press' Law and Society series, we missed this one when it appeared in 2015. Seth Kimmel (Columbia University) has published Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the end of Islamic Spain. The book was awarded the American Comparative Literature Association's Harry Levin Award in 2017. From the press:

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing scholarly communities sought to define a Spain that was, at least officially, entirely Christian, even if many suspected that newer converts from Islam and Judaism were Christian in name only. Unlike previous books on conversion in early modern Spain, however, Parables of Coercion focuses not on the experience of the converts themselves, but rather on how questions surrounding conversion drove religious reform and scholarly innovation.

In its careful examination of how Spanish authors transformed the history of scholarship through debate about forced religious conversion, Parables of Coercion makes us rethink what we mean by tolerance and intolerance, and shows that debates about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over the methods and practices that demarcated one scholarly discipline from another.

 Praise for the book:

"In Parables of Coercion Kimmel succeeds wonderfully in excavating the intersection of early modern Spanish socioreligious and intellectual history and in deciphering its various discourses....Kimmel further uncovers the dialectical relationship between socioreligious discord and innovative cultural production by religious intellectuals in seventeenth-century Spain, and in the process he manages brilliantly to render meaningless the conventional, simplistic characterization of early modern Spain as a purely intolerant society. It was far more complicated during the sixteenth century afterlife of Islamic Spain than historiographical orthodoxy suggests." -Modern Philology

"Ranging across canon law, sacred philology, and history in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain, Seth Kimmel aims to demonstrate how the phenomenon of Muslim converts to Christianity was entertained by experts in those disciplines, as well as the ways in which the Morisco question affected the disciplines themselves." -Renaissance Quarterly

"Kimmel has written a fascinating study of the learned cultures built out of a century of Spanish Christian intolerance toward Islam, beginning with the coerced conversion of Spain's Muslims to Christianity in the early sixteenth century, to the expulsion of the Moriscos (as the converts and their descendants were called) in the early seventeenth. He shows us how the evolving  'Morisco question' animated the emergence of disciplines such as philology, history, theology, political theory, and economics. In the process, he provides us with an alternate and disquieting history of our own scholarly, political, and religious practices." -David Nirenberg

Further information is available here.