Fijalkowski, "Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial "

Routledge has published Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial (2023) by Agata Fijalkowski (Leeds Beckett University, UK). A description from the press:

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials.

The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, this book examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity.

This original and insightful engagement with the relationship between law and the visual will appeal to legal and cultural theorists, as well as those with more specific interests in Stalinism, and in Central, East, and Southeast European history.

More information is available here. An interview with the author is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Steinberg's "Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio's Decameron"

Justin Steinberg, University of Chicago, has published Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio's Decameron: Realism on Trial (Cambridge University Press):

In Boccaccio's time, the Italian city-state began to take on a much more proactive role in prosecuting crime – one which superseded a largely communitarian, private approach. The emergence of the state-sponsored inquisitorial trial indeed haunts the legal proceedings staged in the Decameron. How, Justin Steinberg asks, does this significant juridical shift alter our perspective on Boccaccio's much-touted realism and literary self-consciousness? What can it tell us about how he views his predecessor, Dante: perhaps the world's most powerful inquisitorial judge? And to what extent does the Decameron shed light on the enduring role of verisimilitude and truth-seeming in our current legal system? The author explores these and other literary, philosophical, and ethical questions that Boccaccio raises in the Decameron's numerous trials. The book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern studies, literary theory and legal history.

--Dan Ernst

Choosing Representative Cases from Many; Or, Privilege & Prejudice in 1865 Liverpool.

Choosing Representative Cases from Many; Or, Privilege & Prejudice in 1865 Liverpool.

The Reverend James Kelly of Liverpool was not well liked. His spat with the church’s organist was bad enough, but Kelly’s diatribes against city officials drew public attention to this pugnacious – and litigious – clergyman. Seemingly anxious over the fate of Anglicanism, Kelly – who preached about the Protestant martyrs of Bloody Mary’s reign to a new generation – balked at the appointment of a Roman Catholic priest as chaplain in one of the city’s jails and railed against voters who had returned Liverpool’s first Jewish mayor that same fall. Not content to issue commentary from the pulpit, Kelly broadcast his opinions in the local newspapers.

While a number of local papers followed Kelly’s squabbles with local notables, Randall Sherlock’s Liverpool Mail did so with particular glee. Under the heading “Irish Scandal at St. George’s Church,” the weekly newspaper detailed the “wolfish”-ness of Irish clergy. It began with a diatribe against the Irish clergy in general and then proceeded to describe the barbarity of Kelly using the church for “potato-boiling” and his penchant for brawling (typical of Irish stereotypes as well) [1].

This fusillade of ethnic stereotypes did not even attempt a pretext of defending Catholics from Kelly. The attack on Kelly ran next to a column decrying fanatical Roman Catholic priests “running mad” overseas. Sherlock tried to apologize later. Kelly was unsatisfied, however, and sued. He won, but the jury awarded him a symbolically negligible single farthing. Kelly appealed for a new trial, believing himself entitled to higher damages. The justices of the Queen’s Bench disagreed.

I love the point in research where one gets to immerse oneself in a single case for some time. While this can happen regularly with high profile cases, it is rarer in the cases of ordinary men and women. Indeed, piecing together the ins and outs of a defamation case is not easy at all. Those which appear in law reports can contain more about precedent than on the case itself. Newspaper coverage can be as terse as a few lines, or can stretch out over multiple articles for months – even years – on end. Reconstructing a case can entail a great deal of additional research, and this is simply not feasible to do for over 600 cases. It’s as I concentrate on a cluster of cases that seem to illustrate a broader phenomenon that I really get to plunge into the weeds. I zeroed in on Kelly for an upcoming conference paper initially for pragmatic reasons; I knew that, in addition to the law report which I had in my electronic file, there were a further 80+ articles about the Rev. Kelly in the British Library Newspaper Database. There’s often quite a bit to be unpacked even from a few lines about a trial. There is all the more to be uncovered when one has not only 80 articles, but seemingly verbatim coverage of the trials among them.

If I were telling a history of case law, I would address the two legal issues at issue in Kelly v. Sherlock. First, the Queen’s Bench found that they had no standing to allow for a new trial solely on the basis of insufficient damages. That would illegitimately circumvent the jury’s role. Second, the judge at the assize level provides a particularly eloquent defense of a clergyman’s privilege of preaching to his flock as he sees fit. His phrasing would be republished in legal text books for years [2]. I suppose these points will make their way into my account, but I, like many of you, am more interested in the case’s implications for society at the time. I am want to explore through newspaper and legal reports how a community works out norms of proper authority and the acceptable limits on stereotyping. Here, as in quite a few cases involving the clergy, the question centered on the authority of the pulpit and the privilege (even the duty) of the clergyman (as opposed to the newspaper) to criticize different social groups as a whole. Was Kelly’s behavior a proper subject of public interest (as Sherlock claimed)? Even if it were, what were the boundaries between proper discussion and malice or ridicule?

During this period, standards for legal judgment of such cases were beginning to crystalize. That is important. More interesting still, are the disagreements, however, as one finds in the columns of the newspaper, among judges and juries, and between trials. It is in these moments that one finds critical tensions over who gets to constitute community, its boundaries, and the language that helps to keep it in balance. Perhaps not surprisingly, more elite commentators seemed embarrassed by both Kelly and Sherlock—though Kelly especially. His brand of evangelicalism did not sit well with those who prized cosmopolitan rationality and were more accepting of religious heterodoxy in civil society [3]. Elite commentators themselves were not entirely enlightened, however: keen to distance themselves from Kelly’s bigotry, these commentators attributed it to the “hot-blooded” Irish. Sherlock lost his case because his diatribe against Kelly the individual descended to ridicule; but more genteel anti-Irish stereotyping, which suffused a good portion of those 80+ articles, remained within the bounds of community acceptability [4].

[1] “Irish Scandals at St George’s Church”, Liverpool Mail, February 6, 1864, p. 5. The newspaper continued the diatribe a week later: “Irish Scandals at St George’s Church, No. II”, Liverpool Mail, February 13, 1864, p. 5.

[2] 686 Kelly v Sherlock, Queen's Bench Division, 13 June 1866, (1865-66) L.R. 1 Q.B. 686. See, for example, John Townsend, A Treatise on the Wrongs Called Slander and Libel and on the Remedy by Civil Action for those Wrongs, (London: Steven & Haynes, 1868), p. 354-355.

[3] See, for example: “The Finance Committee,” Liverpool Mail, April 9, 1864, p. 4; and “When a man embarks on a sea of controversy…,” The Englishman, November 5, 1864, p. 5.

[4] “The Rev. James Kelly,” Pall Mall Gazette, August 16, 1865, p. 1.  

--Caroline Shaw

Morrison on legal lynching

In 2018, Melanie S. Morrison published Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham with Duke University Press. From the publisher: 

One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham's black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death.

In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell's youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson's unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.

Praise for the book: 

 "In this passionate account of Jim Crow–era injustice, educator and activist Morrison exposes how courtrooms 'could function like lynch mobs when the defendant was black.'... Morrison, who is white, shares this painful story with clarity and compassion, emphasizing how much has changed since the 1930s, how much white people need to 'critically interrogate' the past, and how much 'remains to be done' in the fight for justice." - Publishers Weekly

"The author deserves praise for identifying Peterson’s trial as an important precursor to the 1960s civil rights movement. Audiences will be enthralled and angered by this all-too-familiar account of a criminal justice system that was and remains biased against black Americans." - Karl Helicher

"Morrison digs deeply into period newspapers and archives to uncover this story of injustice long overshadowed by the more famous Scottsboro Boys trial. A thoughtful look into a tale of prejudice and stolen justice that will find many readers who are interested in African American history, the early civil rights movement, and Southern history." - Chad E. Statler

Further information is available here.

-Mitra Sharafi

Rubin on an Ottoman political trial

Avi Rubin (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) has published Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial with Syracuse University Press. From the publisher: 

In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his chambers, the veins in his arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Paşa, a political foe of the autocratic sultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirtythree years. 

The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed suicide remains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.

 Praise for the book:

"A tour de force of socio-legal history of the late Ottoman Empire. Rubin leads the reader into a breathtaking journey through the history and historiography of one of the most serious political crises in late Ottoman history, the Yildiz Trial (1881), turning it into a thrilling microhistory." -Iris Agmon

"A fascinating and detailed micro-history of the trial of Midhat Paşa." -James E. Baldwin

Further information is available here.

Viola on Stalin-era trials in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola, University of Toronto published Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine with Oxford University Press in 2017. From the publisher:

Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals, NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in those courtrooms was unknown until now. 

In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational factors to shape the contours of state violence. 

Based on chilling and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the darkest recesses of Soviet repression -- the interrogation room, the prison cell, and the place of execution -- and sheds new light on those who carried out the Great Terror.

Praise for the book:

"A research tour de force from one of the leading historians of Stalinism, shedding remarkable new light on what happened at the end of the Great Purges. A 'must read' for scholars and students of the Soviet period."-Sheila Fitzpatrick

"This book is exceptional among the voluminous scholarship on Stalin's terror. Lynne Viola has written a fascinating and valuable work. The voices of those hangmen who ultimately became victims of the terror, as well as those they arrested, provide a stark picture of the Great Terror. The author explores the banality of evil in the Stalinist context: from the daily routine of torture and murder emerges the familiar figure of the self-righteous criminal."-Oleg V. Khlevniuk

"Stalinist Perpetrators draws back the curtain on how the Stalinist Terror actually operated--not just how the state ordered it, but how it happened in provincial offices and prison cells. Her subject is the 'purge of the purgers,' the trial and often execution of the men responsible for the Terror. The nature of her source material--voluminous case files on these accused individuals--allows her to reconstruct the process and practices of the Stalinist Terror, including the beatings and torture, at the level of individuals, both in Kyiv and in more mundane provincial cities." -Peter Holquist

"The Stalinist purges of the late 1930s stand as one of the most horrific episodes of state terror in the twentieth century. Yet the perpetrators of those crimes have remained anonymous for many decades, protected mainly by the rules of historical access in Russia. Now, Lynne Viola, working in Ukrainian archives, provides the first remarkable study of the perpetrators. In this groundbreaking book, we see for the first time who these individuals were, their backgrounds, what brought them to their position of life and death decisions, what life was like for them and their families during such a time. Most important, Viola examines with keen and dispassionate acumen how Stalin's murderers justified the torture and killing of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. This is a disturbing book, and one that needs to be read." -David Shearer

Further information is available here.