LHR 37:4

Law and History Review 37:4 (November 2019) has just been published online.  Here’s the TOC:

Original Articles

Of “Masculine Tyranny” and the “Women's Jury”: The Gender Politics of Jury Service in Third Republic France
Sara L. Kimble

Disqualified Witnesses between Tannaitic Halakha and Roman Law: The Archeology of a Legal Institution
Orit Malka

Invited Articles

The Political Functions of (Premodern) Courts and Procedure and Questions of Comparative Method
Amalia D. Kessler

Disqualified Witnesses Between Tannaitic Halakha and Roman Law: A Response to Orit Malka
Paul J. Du Plessis

Roman and Jewish Law: Looking for Interaction in all the Right Places
Christine Hayes

Book Reviews

Rohit De, A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. 312. $40.97 hardcover (ISBN: 9780691192550).
Arvind Elangovan

Xiaoping Cong, Marriage, Law, and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940–1960, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 346. $31.99 paper (ISBN 9781316602614).
Yue Du

Jennifer Altehenger, Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1989, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 406. $49.95 hardcover (ISBN 9780674983854).
Glenn Tiffert

Taisu Zhang, The Law and Economics of Confucianism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 319. $116.00 hardcover (ISBN 9781107141117).
Maura Dykstra

Susanne Pohl-Zucker, Making Manslaughter: Process, Punishment and Restitution in Württemberg and Zurich, 1376–1700, Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. x, 335. $134.00 hardcover (ISBN: 9789004218215).
Harriet Rudolph

Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 310. $89.99 hardcover (ISBN 9781108419727); $29.99 paper (ISBN 9781108410168); $24.00 eBook (ISBN 9781108330978).
Ian Cram

Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $45.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780674980815).
Alexander Arnold

Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 328. $39.95 hardcover (ISBN 9781469636436); $29.99 e-book (ISBN 9781469636450).
Allison Madar

Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 384. $39.95 hardcover (ISBN 9780674982994).
H. Robert Baker

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 320. $30.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780300218664).
Julia W. Bernier

Anders Walker, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $30.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780300223989).
Brandon Jett

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• David Sugarman, professor emeritus at the law school at Lancaster University, has posted a truly lovely appreciation of the law W. Wesley Pue (1954-2019) that appeared in the Newsletter of the Research Committee of the Sociology of Law.

• Professor Sugarman’s assessment of the work of the late Christopher W. Brooks, entitled "Law, Law-Consciousness and Lawyers as Constitutive of Early Modern England: Christopher W. Brooks’s Singular Journey," published in Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern English Society. Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Brooks, ed. Michael Lobban, Joanne Begiato, Adrian Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019),  32-57, is not available online, but the abstract is here.

• Out online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India, by Zak Leonard, and Of “Masculine Tyranny” and the “Women's Jury”: The Gender Politics of Jury Service in Third Republic France, by Sara L. Kimble. 

• Joanna Grisinger (Northwestern), Kimberly Welch (Vanderbilt), Logan Sawyer (Georgia), and Kathryn Schumaker (Oklahoma), the co-organizers of the Law and History Collaborative Research Network of the Law and Society Association, have posted a call for legal history panels for LSA’s annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, May 28-31, 2020.  They also seek volunteers to join their ranks as co-organizers.

• We can't possibly keep up with historically informed, impeachment-related posts, but here's a few: U.S. Whistleblowers First Got Government Protection in 1777 (History).  HNN rounded up hot takes from seven historians.  A brief history of presidential impeachment (BBC History Extra).

• In other news: A descendant of a Virginia slaveholders sues a professor et al. for saying as much, apparently on the theory that in noting this and his opposition to the removal of Charlottesville’s statue of Robert E. Lee, the defendants claimed he was “a racist and an opponent of people of color” (Roanoke Times). Meanwhile, at Chapel Hill, UNC professors bring the history of Jim Crow to the present.

• The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum will present Freedom of Speech and the First Amendment, a conversation and book signing with Ronald K. L. Collins, coauthor of We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 12, 2019.

• Over at Nursing Clio: "'Immoderate Menses' or Abortion? Bodily Knowledge and Illicit Intimacy in an 1851 Divorce trial" by Sara Lampert (University of South Dakota)

• CNN's "Black in America" series recently featured Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins), author of Birthright Citizens. Video here.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: David Farber (University of Kansas) on "how drug-related violence complicates criminal justice reform." And more.

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

Chin on Frampton, "The Jim Crow Jury"

Over at JOTWELL, you'll find an admiring review by Gabriel "Jack" Chin (UC Davis) of "The Jim Crow Jury," by Thomas Ward Frampton (Harvard Law School). The article appears in Volume 71 of the Vanderbilt Law Review (2018). Here's a taste of the review:

This article challenges the practice of non-unanimous criminal jury verdicts in Louisiana. In a certain sense, the article was irrelevant, moot, by the time it saw print. This is not because, say, it was about an election that was already over, or made an argument that the courts had definitively rejected. Instead, the claim in this paper was so factually, legally and historically compelling that even in draft form it spurred concrete action; thanks in part to this paper, the policy it analyzed was both declared unconstitutional by a court, and repealed by the voters. 

The article carefully recounts the history of the substantial elimination of African Americans from juries in Louisiana after Reconstruction. African Americans were, of course, a major part of the population of most of the former Confederate states, and amounted to a majority in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. As Frederick Douglass wrote, “the liberties of the American people” depended on “the Jury-box” as well as “the Ballot-box,” if allowed to serve on juries, there was the danger that African American defendants would get a fair hearing, and that Whites (and White officials) accused of crimes against African Americans could be convicted. These were risks that White supremacists could not accept.

Read on here.

Jaffe on the jury in India

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

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