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.

Hasegawa on Crime & Punishment in the Russian Revolution

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, UC Santa Barbara, has published Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd with Harvard University Press. From the publisher: 

Russians from all walks of life poured into the streets of the imperial capital after the February Revolution of 1917, joyously celebrating the end of Tsar Nicholas II’s monarchy. One year later, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks now in power, Petrograd’s deserted streets presented a very different scene. No celebrations marked the Revolution’s anniversary. Amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight.

In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II’s abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar’s regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers.

The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as “counterrevolutionary activity,” to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.

Praise for the book:

“Hasegawa is one of our leading historians of the February Revolution… [He] makes a strong case that the catastrophic social breakdown, most especially the violent crime that pervaded life in Petrograd after the collapse of the monarchy, ‘served as a stepping-stone toward the creation of the pervasive instrument of terror that became an integral part of the Communist dictatorship.’” -Joshua Rubenstein

“This book makes a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the Russian Revolution by revealing the violent, chaotic lived experience of the revolution in the capital city. In a narrative full of colorful characters and stories, Hasegawa gives us a street-level view of the collapse of state authority that cleared the way for the Bolshevik seizure of power.” -Eric Lohr

“Hasegawa addresses the very important, largely ignored thus far, role of crime and the breakdown of social order and public safety. In doing so he changes the way we think and write about the Russian Revolution, making this one of the more original things I have seen in a very long time.” -Rex Wade

Further information is available here.  

Cutterham's "Gentlemen Revolutionaries"

We note the publication of Gentlemen Revolutionaries Power and Justice in the New American Republic (Princeton University Press), by Tom Cutterham, Lecturer in United States History at the University of Birmingham.

In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation.

Tom Cutterham examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone. They also sought personal prestige and cultural preeminence. Cutterham describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's "lower sort" as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else.

Lively and elegantly written, Gentlemen Revolutionaries demonstrates how these elites, far from giving up their attachment to gentility and privilege, recast the new republic in their own image.

Cong on Marriage & Gender in Revolutionary China

Xiaoping Cong, University of Houston, has published Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940-1960 with Cambridge University Press (2016). From the publisher:

Xiaoping Cong examines the social and cultural significance of Chinese revolutionary legal practice in the construction of marriage and gender relations. Her book is an empirically rich investigation of the ways in which a 1943 legal dispute over an arranged marriage in a Chinese village became a legal, political and cultural exemplar on the national stage. This conceptually groundbreaking study revisits the Chinese Revolution and its impact on women and society by presenting a Chinese experience that cannot and should not be theorized in the framework of Western discourse. Taking a cultural historical perspective, Cong shows how the Chinese Revolution and its legal practices produced new discourses, neologisms and cultural symbols that contained China's experience in twentieth-century social movements, and how revolutionary practice was sublimated into the concept of 'self-determination', an idea that bridged local experiences with the tendency of the twentieth-century world, and that is a revolutionary legacy for China today.

Table of Contents after the jump.