Byrne's "Justice and Mercy"

Apologies for having missed this one.  Philippa Byrne has published Justice and Mercy: Moral Theology and the Exercise of Law in Twelfth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2018):

This book examines one of the most fundamental issues in twelfth-century English politics: justice. It demonstrates that during the foundational period for the common law, the question of judgement and judicial ethics was a topic of heated debate - a common problem with multiple different answers. How to be a judge, and how to judge well, was a concern shared by humble and high, keeping both kings and parish priests awake at night. Using theological texts, sermons, legal treatises and letter collections, the book explores how moralists attempted to provide guidance for uncertain judges. It argues that mercy was always the most difficult challenge for a judge, fitting uncomfortably within the law and of disputed value. Shining a new light on English legal history, Justice and mercy reveals the moral dilemmas created by the establishment of the common law.

–Dan Ernst

Thank You, Tom McSweeney!

We want to thank Thomas McSweeney of William & Mary Law for his series of posts prompted by his recently published book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals:

The Overly Familiar Treatise
Putting the People into Legal History
Who are the "We"?
Legal Genres
Were Justices Lawyers?

Thanks, Tom!

Weekend Roundup

• The submission portal for the 2020 annual conference of the American Society for Legal History, which will be held November 11-14 at the Sheraton Grand Chicago, is now open!  The deadline to submit a paper or proposal is Friday, March 13, 2020.  Our post of the call is here.  Other information is here.

• We somehow missed the publication last summer in the Harvard Law Review of Dr. Wu's Constitution, a note on what the author called the “conflicted approach to civil liberties” that John Jingxiong Wu, one of Holmes’s correspondents, took in drafting a constitution for the Republic of China in the 1930s.

• He said, She said: Christopher Tomlins over at HNN on his new book, In the Matter of Nat Turner.

• Sara M. Butler over at Legal History Miscellany, on Hearing and Speaking the Law in Medieval England.

• New online from Law & History Review and Cambridge Core: The Problem of African Girlhood: Raising the Age of Consent in the Cape of Good Hope, 1893–1905, by Elizabeth Thornberry.

• And from the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford University Press: The Historical Evolution of Allegiance During Occupation, by Manuel Galvis Martinez.

• ICYMI: North Dakota State University “students packed into the Memorial Union for Recreating the Constitutional Convention of 1787." 

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

Jahner, "Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta "

New from Oxford University Press: Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta (Dec. 2019), by Jennifer Jahner (California Institute of Technology). A description from the Press:

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue -- in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science -- but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism.

Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta traces processes of literary training and experimentation across the early history of the English common law, from its beginnings in the reign of Henry II to its tumultuous consolidations under the reigns of John and Henry III. The period from the mid-twelfth through the thirteenth centuries witnessed an outpouring of innovative legal writing in England, from Magna Carta to the scores of statute books that preserved its provisions. An era of civil war and imperial fracture, it also proved a time of intensive self-definition, as communities both lay and ecclesiastic used law to articulate collective identities. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta uncovers the role that grammatical and rhetorical training played in shaping these arguments for legal self-definition. Beginning with the life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the book interweaves the histories of literary pedagogy and English law, showing how foundational lessons in poetics helped generate both a language and theory of corporate autonomy. In this book, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's phenomenally popular Latin compositional handbook, the Poetria nova, finds its place against the diplomatic backdrop of the English Interdict, while Robert Grosseteste's Anglo-French devotional poem, the Chateau d'Amour, is situated within the landscape of property law and Jewish-Christian interactions. Exploring a shared vocabulary across legal and grammatical fields, this book argues that poetic habits of thought proved central to constructing the narratives that medieval law tells about itself and that later scholars tell about the origins of English constitutionalism.

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Sutherland Article Prize to Weil & Handler

At this year's meeting of the ASLH, the Sutherland Article Prize (for the best article on English legal history published in the previous year) was awarded to Patrick Weil (Centre for the Social  HIstory of the 20th century at the University of Paris) and Nicholas Handler (Paul Weiss) for their article “Revocation of Citizenship and Rule of Law: How Judicial Review Defeated Britain’s First Denaturalization Regime.” It appeared in Volume 36, no. 2 of the Law & History Review (May 2018).

The citation from the prize committee:

Denaturalization, a policy which deprives subjects of their citizenship, originated in the United States (1906). Adopted by Britain via the Nationality and Status of Aliens Acts of 1914 and 1918, it fell out of use after the Second World War but remained on the statute books. While the power to revoke citizenship was not used at all between 1973 and 2000, in the past decade the Home Office has demonstrated a new willingness to apply the law, revoking the citizenship of ‘at least 373 individuals’ in that period. Weil and Handler’s article explores the history of denaturalization, considering both its decline and recent resurgence. They argue that a provision of the BNSA Act of 1918 created a system of judicial review for decisions made within the Home Office that limited and eventually extinguished the powers of that office where denaturalization was concerned. Legislative changes in 2002 replaced the committee-based review, which had served to protect individual rights, with a ‘significantly more deferential’ and often secretive form of oversight. Original in terms of both its primary sources and argument, Weil and Handler’s article also offers an intriguing take on the broader issue of national belonging which has garnered so much attention in recent years in Anglo-American scholarship.

The committee also awarded an Honorable Mention -- to Elizabeth Papp Kamali (Harvard University) for “Trial by Ordeal by Jury in Medieval England, or Saints and Sinners in Literature and Law,” which appeared in Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

The members of this year's Sutherland Article Prize Committee were: Rebecca Probert (Chair) (University of Exeter); Paul Halliday (University of Virginia); Michael Lobban (London School of Economics, University of London); Allyson May (University of Western Ontario); and P.G. McHugh (University of Cambridge). We thank them for their service and offer our congratulations to all the winners!
-- Karen Tani

O'Callaghan, "Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age"

Cornell University Press has published Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age: Law and Justice in Thirteenth-Century Castile (2019), by Joseph F. O'Callaghan (Fordham University). A description from the Press:

In this magisterial work, Joseph O'Callaghan offers a detailed account of the establishment of Alfonso X's legal code, the Libro de las leyes or Siete Partidas, and its applications in the daily life of thirteenth-century Iberia, both within and far beyond the royal courts. O'Callaghan argues that Alfonso X, el Sabio (the Wise), was the Justinian of his age, one of the truly great legal minds of human history.

Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age highlights the struggles the king faced in creating a new, coherent, inclusive, and all-embracing body of law during his reign, O'Callaghan also considers Alfonso X's own understanding of his role as king, lawgiver, and defender of the faith in order to evaluate the impact of his achievement on the administration of justice. Indeed, such was the power and authority of the Alfonsine code that it proved the king's downfall when his son invoked it to challenge his rule.

Throughout this soaring legal and historical biography, O'Callaghan reminds us of the long-term impacts of Alfonso X's legal works, not just on Castilian (and later, Iberian) life, but on the administration of justice across the world.

A sampling of advance praise:

"Joseph F. O’Callaghan has composed a comprehensive text for students and scholars interested in the legislation of Alfonso X el Sabio, a text that is valuable for neophytes and seasoned investigators. One is awed by O’Callaghan’s magisterial command of the primary sources and the secondary literature." -- Jerry Craddock

"Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age is a fantastic, erudite, and necessary book. Joseph F. O'Callaghan has magnificently crafted a thorough piece of scholarship." -- Jesus R. Velasco

More information is available here. You can listen to an interview with Professor O'Callaghan about the book here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Renisa Mawani, University of British Columbia, will speak Thursday, Nov. 7, at the University of Oregon on "the S.S. Komagata Maru, which in 1914 left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and eventually deported to Calcutta.”  The lecture is based on Professor Mawani’s book, Across Oceans of Law.  More.

• The Minnesota Historical Society marks the centennial of Prohibition by digitizing Andrew J. Volstead’s papers.  More.

• Did you know that the Osgoode Society has an extensive oral history program on Canadian legal history?

• The Museum of Baltimore Legal History has upgraded its space in the Mitchell Courthouse.  More.

• This interactive London Medieval Murder Map charts 142 homicide cases committed between 1300 and 1340. From the Coroners' Rolls, and hosted by Cambridge University's Violence Research Centre.

• From the latest newsletter of the Historical Society of the New York Courts: On November 13, St. John’s University School of Law and the New York State Court of Appeals, with Dean Michael A. Simons and Professor John Q. Barrett, and, on November 15, "Richmond County Courthouse Centennial."  An exhibit at the neoclassical courthouse, located across the street from the terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, opened today and includes Eliza Burr's petition for divorce from her husband Aaron Burr.  (More, from silive.)

• New from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Cultural Expertise and Law: An Historical Overview, by Livia Holden.

• ICYMI: John Fabian Witt reviews Eric Foner’s Second Founding in WaPo.  A conversation with Adam Winkler about We the People on the PBS Newshour.

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

Echevarria, Monferrer-Sala, Tolan and friends on law and religious minorities

We missed this one back in 2017: A. Echevarria (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid), J. P. Monferrer-Sala (Universidad de Córdoba), and J. V. Tolan (Université de Nantes) have co-edited Law and Religious Minorities in Medieval Societies: Between Theory and Praxis with Brepols Publishers. From the press:

This volume shows through the use of legal sources that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful; and at the same time shows how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated.

Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs, inferior but protected non-Muslim communities (in particular Jews and Christians) and Roman Canon law decreed a similar status for Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe. Yet the theoretical hierarchies between faithful and infidel were constantly brought into question in the daily interactions between men and women of different faiths in streets, markets, bath-houses, law courts, etc. The twelve essays in this volume explore these tensions and attempts to resolve them. These contributions show that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful — and at the same time how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated.

Table of Contents after the jump:

Weekend Roundup

• The Library of Congress has launched the Constitution Annotated, “the authoritative source for how the Supreme Court has interpreted the nation’s governing document over the years.”

• Harper’s Magazine is out with a forum, moderated by Rosa Brooks, published as Constitution in Crisis: Has America’s founding document become the nation’s undoing?  The other participant are Donna Edwards, Mary Anne Franks, David Law, Lawrence Lessig, and Louis Michael Seidman.

• Josh Blackmon and Randy Barnett have published An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know, which is especially notable for the accompanying online library of sixty-three videos.

• The University of Arkansas has issued a release on its law review’s symposium on the bicentennial of M'Culloch v. Maryland.

• Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University, delivered the Gilder-Jordan Lecture at the University of Mississippi on September 17.

• Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, a former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and the author, most recently, of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times, will help lead “an ‘organizing for change’ panel discussion September 22 at the Milford Theater, 114 Catherine St., Milford, [PA]."  More.

• ICYMI:  A report of Jean Teillet's discussion of her book The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation, at the Law Society of Ontario on September 18 (Law Times).  "The historical differences between Scottish and English Law, and what it means for Brexit" (BBC History Extra).  A Constitution Day plea for the study of state constitutions (Real Clear Politics). Erika Lee, University of Minnesota, on “the enduring history of American xenophobia” (MinnPost)

• Catching up on the Legal History Miscellany: Sara M. Butler (The Ohio State University) on priests claiming sanctuary and serfs vs. slaves in medieval England, Krista J. Kesselring (Dalhousie University) on Elizabethan witch trials, and Cassie Watson (Oxford Brookes University) on a 19th-c. poisoning in the Inner Hebrides

• The exhibit  “Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” on loan from the New-York Historical Society, runs from October 18 to December 31 at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (Birmingham Times, via the Philadelphia Tribune)

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Jamie Pietruska (Rutgers University) on "why President Trump gutting the USDA’s research service is so dangerous"; Steele Brand (King's College) on "why knowing Roman history is key to preserving America’s future"; and more.

• The University of Hong Kong has announced its first law and humanities summer school. The dates are June 8-13, 2020. More information here.

• From In Custodia Legis, a guest post by Ryan Reft on "Federal Courts, Judge Gerhard Gesell, and the Security State." Also a guest post by Stephen Mayeaux, in collaboration with Dante Figueroa, on Spanish Legal Documents (15th to 19th centuries).

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

Barrington & Sobecki, eds., Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature

A recent release from Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature (July 2019), edited by Candace Barrington (Central Connecticut State University) and Sebastian Sobecki (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands). A description from the Press:

Despite an unprecedented level of interest in the interaction between law and literature over the past two decades, readers have had no accessible introduction to this rich engagement in medieval and early Tudor England. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature addresses this need by combining an authoritative guide through the bewildering maze of medieval law with concise examples illustrating how the law infiltrated literary texts during this period. Foundational chapters written by leading specialists in legal history prepare readers to be guided by noted literary scholars through unexpected conversations with the law found in numerous medieval texts, including major works by Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Malory. Part I contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices and institutions in medieval England, and Part II covers medieval texts and authors whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law.

More information, including a full TOC, is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Charles Evans Hughes and The Role of New York's Organized Bar at a Time of Crisis for the Rule of Law, the 55th Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture, delivered by Henry F. Greenberg, president-elect of the New York State Bar Association, is now available.

• New in Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: “Plant Yourselves on its Primal Granite”: Slavery, History and the Antebellum Roots of Originalism, by Aaron R. Hall; and Disqualified Witnesses between Tannaitic Halakha and Roman Law: The Archeology of a Legal Institution, by Orit Malka.

• Have you registered for ASLH Boston yet? 

• Eric Rauchway will speak on his book, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal, on Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 7:00 p.m., in the Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home.   I recently read Winter War and learned a great deal from it.  In particular, I was struck by its depiction of Hoover as a person who, incapable of taking no for an answer on November 8, 1932, at once started laying the foundation for what he was certain would be his inevitable vindication.  But even this was to be denied him: when conservatives finally looked for an early twentieth-century president to exalt, they rejected Hoover (the Reconstruction Finance Corporation looked too much like the Troubled Asset Relief Program) in favor of Coolidge.  DRE

•  ICYMI: John Mikhail on Hammer v. Dagenhart, United States v. Darby, and the Tenth Amendment over at Balkinization.   Also at Balkinization, Mark Tushnet on Justice Gorsuch getting his history of the Schechter case from Amity Shlaes.  Sam Erman on how Isabel Gonzalez shows us that the Constitution is what we make of it in The Hill.

• And finally: check out the online database, England's Immigrants 1330-1550: Resident Aliens in the Late Middle Ages. It has entries on over 64,000 peoples, along with themed posts (under Background: Individual Studies).

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

The Limits of Law: Approaches

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 a set of answers that relate to methods, heuristics, and approaches (the other posts in this series are here and here):

Weekend Roundup

• Michael Klarman devoted his talk in HLS’s “Last Lectures” series to Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose lawyering, he said, evinces “hope and resilience in what I find to be an alarming political landscape.”  More.

• The Norman Transcript kvells over the winning of the Supreme Court Historical Society’s Journal of Supreme Court History by University of Oklahoma graduating senior Adam Hines for “Ralph Waldo Emerson & Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: The Subtle Raptures of Postponed Power," to appear in the May edition of the Journal of Supreme Court History.  Mr. Hines was a student of OU's Andrew Porwancher.

• A tweet from our friends at the Federal Judicial Center reminds us of its massive online bibliography, Historical Scholarship Related to Federal Judges. 

• At San Francisco State, Steve Harris “uses role-playing to transport his students into the past” in a constitutional-history-laden course.  His student Serafina Kernberger's Ben Franklin alone is worth the click. He was drawing upon techniques learned in Barnard College’s Reacting to the Past program, which holds its Nineteenth Annual Faculty Institute, this year devoted to Democratic Education in Uncertain Times on June 12-15, 2019.

• On Friday, May 17, 2019, Laura Sumari, University of Helsinki, will speak on Refugee Narratives of Europe: An Area of Security? in the EuroStorie research seminar series at the University of Helsinki.

• ICYMI:  Daniel Okrent on the history of anti-immigration laws in the United States on NPR.

• And finally: a Twitter thread from Erik Wade, Universität Bonn on cats in early medieval law

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

Weekend Roundup

• Our friends at the Federal Judicial Center have posted the legislation that for the first time increased the size of the US Supreme Court and established a new federal circuit. 

• We're getting caught up on Legal History Miscellany posts since the new year--here's Krista J. Kesselring (Dalhousie University) on Star Chamber records and early modern fugitives, Sara M. Butler (The Ohio State University) on femme sole status, and Cassie Watson (Oxford Brookes University) on illustrated Victorian crime reports.

• Over at Nursing Clio: Cara Delay (College of Charleston) on the trial of abortionist Mamie Cadden in 1950s Ireland.

• An advance alert from Oxford University Press tells us of the online publication of two articles in the American Journal of Legal History.  We've previously noted Zachary Newkirk’s "Full Justice May Be Done Them": The Case of Bill, Charles, Jupiter, Randolph, et al. v. William A. Carr in a Florida Freedmen's Bureau Court.  New to us is John Harrington and Ambreena Manji’s “Africa Needs Many Lawyers Trained for the Need of their Peoples”: Struggles over Legal Education in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.

• Calling all junior scholars of Asian socio-legal studies (including those doing archival research): read up on the Training Initiative for Asian Law & Society Scholars (TRIALS) here. The deadline is June 20, 2019.

• ICYMI: An ABA Journal Gallery: 12 Supreme Court milestones that helped define First Amendment rights.  A report on the presentation “Idaho Women Win the Right to Vote” by the professors Katherine Aiken and Rebecca Scofield at the University of Idaho.

• Update:  When we think of legal-historian spouses of presidential candidates, we of course think of Bruce Mann, a past-president of the ASLH.  The Hill reminds us we should also think of Amy Klobuchar's spouse, John Bessler. Legal historians: they're quite the catch!

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

Scholar Spotlight: Sara McDougall

Our Scholar Spotlight series continues, today featuring Sara McDougall, John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center. In our first interview, we noted that only three of the fifty contributors to the recently published Oxford Handbook of European Legal History were women. Like Women Also Know History, this Scholar Spotlight series aims to showcase female scholars and their work. Its special focus is scholars of European legal history. 

Sara McDougall is Associate Professor of History at John Jay College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and appointed to the CUNY Graduate Center in French, History, and Medieval Studies. She lives in New York.

Website: www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/sara-mcdougall

Alma maters: Yale University, Ph.D. in History, May 2009. BA in History Boston University, 2003.

Fields of interest: legal history, family history and family law, culture, gender studies, social history, comparative law, medieval studies, world history.

Describe your career path. What led you to where you are today?

My childhood dream was to become an opera singer and I started college as a voice performance major but was shocked to find myself desperately missing reading and writing. I seriously flirted with the idea of becoming a playwright but in the end it was reading and writing and teaching history, legal history, that I found the most satisfying and engaging way of spending most of my time, and I still feel that way.

What do you like the most about where you live and work?

I love the social justice mission of John Jay College, and our wonderfully diverse student body. I find teaching at CUNY satisfying - if always challenging - and take greatest pleasure in the fact that graduating from CUNY seems to improve students' economic mobility out of poverty. I am also really looking forward to co-teaching a graduate seminar with Julie Suk in 2019, "Mothers-in-Law," which will examine the legal history of mothers as legal subjects, as lawmakers, and as lawbreakers.

What projects are you currently working on? I am writing a book on the consequences of illicit pregnancy for mothers in medieval France. It investigates what women pregnant out of wedlock could do and did do, what was done to and for them. I have found a wide range of responses. They run a gamut from horror stories of domestic violence and killing to far happier stories in which mothers and children are provided for, and the mothers able to find work or husbands, and even able to resume monastic life as nuns (or abbesses!). While late medieval France generally deserves its reputation as a dangerous and intolerant place, for a variety of reasons it was more charitable towards women pregnant out of wedlock than we might expect. Certainly I have been surprised how often the medieval sources suggest efforts at better treatment of pregnant women, and of singlemothers, than we can find in the United States today.

I am also co-authoring an article on infanticide in late medieval Burgundy with Rudi Beaulant, and working as well with a wonderful group of scholars on the long history of infanticide in Europe and the Americas.

Have your interests evolved since finishing your studies? Not really! Many of the topics I write about are those that attracted me to legal history in the first place, the human stories we can find in historical sources, and court records in particular. Comparative work has always been important to me. I am hoping to begin more work with biographical and public-facing history.

What's the most fascinating thing you've ever found in your primary sources?

The records of royal pardon from late medieval France are a treasure trove for the social historian, or for anyone interested in law, culture, gender, or crime, of course. Reading these pardons we are drawn in and drawn out, we find ourselves alternatively rooting for the criminal, or deploring what to us seems like a miscarriage of justice when a villain escapes punishment. The storytelling in these pardon narratives reveal something about us as well as the behaviors of the past they document and justify.

For example, I was surprised and more than a little horrified to find myself cheering after reading a sad story of an abandoned young pregnant woman who at every stage seemed likely to seek to harm her infant and herself, but who instead decided to burn down her lover's house and subsequently sought and obtained royal pardon. I had not expected to find myself ever smiling at arson, but there was something that felt good in that her dangerous act, which allegedly caused no harm or injury beyond loss of property, but which also seemed to take vengeance not just on her lover but on the oppressive and intolerant patriarchy that we might assume would be all too quick to forgive his indiscretion while condemning her for "allowing herself to be impregnated by him." Much harder to enjoy are the all-too frequent accounts of rape and domestic violence that were also pardoned. These pardons, therefore, force us to confront both the complex role of mercy in medieval justice, and also some inconsistencies in our own ideas about right and wrong and the appropriate use of punishment.

Update: read Sara McDougall's recent Made by History op-ed in the Washington Post here.

Rio on slavery in early medieval Europe

Back in 2017, Alice Rio (King's College London) published Slavery After Rome, 500-1100 with Oxford University Press. From the publisher:

Slavery After Rome, 500-1100 offers a substantially new interpretation of what happened to slavery in Western Europe in the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The periods at either end of the early middle ages are associated with iconic forms of unfreedom: Roman slavery at one end; at the other, the serfdom of the twelfth century and beyond, together with, in Southern Europe, a revitalized urban chattel slavery dealing chiefly in non-Christians. How and why this major change took place in the intervening period has been a long-standing puzzle. This study picks up the various threads linking this transformation across the centuries, and situates them within the full context of what slavery and unfreedom were being used for in the early middle ages. 

This volume adopts a broad comparative perspective, covering different regions of Western Europe over six centuries, to try to answer the following questions: who might become enslaved and why? What did this mean for them, and for their lords? What made people opt for certain ways of exploiting unfree labor over others in different times and places, and is it possible, underneath all this diversity, to identify some coherent trajectories of historical change?

Praise for the book:

"Rio has done a splendid job of analysing an extremely intractable source base and providing an interpretation that, without in any way trying to smooth over the inconsistencies and messiness of the evidence, nevertheless makes sense. Her book forces us to rethink narratives regarding the importance of the slave trade for the early European economy....She has done a tremendous service by giving us a new basis for discussion of one of those elements of social transformation. This study will be an indispensable addition to any and every library (and course bibliography) that includes early medieval history in its remit."-Shami Ghosh

"This excellent work provides a new lens for understanding the many varieties of early medieval unfreedom, and readers should welcome the clarity Rio has brought to this topic....Highly recommended."-Choice

Further information is available here.

Larson on widows in Durham

Peter L. Larson, University of Central Florida, has published "Widow-right in Durham, England (1349-1660)" in Continuity and Change 33:2 (August 2018), 173-201. Here's the abstract: 

A customary tenant's widow in County Durham had a right to his holdings for her life, and did not forfeit the lands for remarriage or fornication in contrast to customs found elsewhere in England. In this case study of three neighbouring villages, more than 80 per cent of widows with the option exercised this right, and did so consistently over three centuries. The persistence of this pattern indicates that widows as tenants were common and capable of cultivating or managing holdings. It suggests complex interconnections of gender with local social and economic structures, which include marriage, migration, and household formation.

Further information is available here. 

Prak on citizens without nations

Maarten Prak, Universiteit Utrecht, has published Citizens without Nations: Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c.1000-1789 with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

Citizenship is at the heart of our contemporary world but it is a particular vision of national citizenship forged in the French Revolution. In Citizens without Nations, Maarten Prak recovers the much longer tradition of urban citizenship across the medieval and early modern world. Ranging from Europe and the American colonies to China and the Middle East, he reveals how the role of 'ordinary people' in urban politics has been systematically underestimated and how civic institutions such as neighbourhood associations, craft guilds, confraternities and civic militias helped shape local and state politics. By destroying this local form of citizenship, the French Revolution initially made Europe less, rather than more democratic. Understanding citizenship's longer-term history allows us to change the way we conceive of its future, rethink what it is that makes some societies more successful than others, and whether there are fundamental differences between European and non-European societies.

Praise for the book:

"A profoundly original book. Prak shows how much of what historians and social scientists think they know about citizenship and the rise of democratic politics is simply wrong. Uncovering the errors that have blinded so many, he proceeds to construct a historically grounded foundation for a new understanding of the meaning of citizenship that instructs us about the past and the present." - Jan de Vries

"This is a major contribution to emancipating citizenship from the nation. Tracing varieties of citizenship before its invention as nationality, Prak makes a compelling case for understanding citizenship as a practical activity without binary oppositions: European versus non-European, urban versus rural, or national versus international. The result is a riveting narrative, forcefully inviting us to think differently and historically about citizenship." -Engin Isin

"This is a large, richly researched, provocative study which repositions the pre-modern city, its citizens and agencies, at the centre of the European political stage. It is a brilliant exemplar of the New Urban History, setting European developments in a broad global perspective." -Peter Clark

"In this wide ranging and bold book, Maarten Prak offers a penetrating analysis of urban citizenship in pre-modern Europe. He both revises a Weberian narrative about the distinctiveness of western European civic institutions in comparison to those in Asia and the Americas and undoes assumptions about the superiority of national citizenship post-1789.'" -Martha Howell 

Further information is available here. 

Weekend Roundup

• This is a cool one: a senior history major--Denton Ong--made it into the Washington Post's "Made by History" section, with this op-ed on President Trump's authority to declare a national emergency in order to build a border wall.

• John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School, reviews Richard Brookhiser’s new biography of John Marshall in the New Republic  "The Operative: How John Marshall built the Supreme Court around his political agenda"

• Looking for a new podcast? We like Medieval History for Fun and Profit, with Drs. Alice Rio and Alice Taylor, both of King's College London. Episode 13 is on justice.

• The Call for Proposals for the 2020 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians closes February 1.  The theme is “(In)Equalities.”  "The 2020 Program Committee, co-chaired by Margot Canaday, Princeton University, and Craig Wilder, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invite submissions to the 2020 OAH Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Sessions will be scheduled April 2-4, with half and full day workshops on Sunday, April 5."

• ICYMI: More on Women in Legal Education Oral History Project, with a comment from Marie Failinger, in the Mitchell Hamline News.  The Arizona Daily Wildcat interviews University of Arizona law professor Andrew Coan on his book Prosecuting the President: How Special Prosecutors Hold Presidents Accountable and Protect the Rule of Law.  Federal judge Richard Gergel’s book Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring discussed with an interview of the judge in the New York Times.

• Stanford Law School has published a nice piece on the work of its thriving legal history community. [Back in November, but we just noticed it.]

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