The Limits of Law: Davis Center 2018-19

The 2018–2020 theme at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies is “Law & Legalities,” a topic that includes the limits of law as well as its pervasiveness. The Davis Center sponsors residential fellowships each year on our theme, for either a year or one term. This year our group has consisted of nine fellows besides me and Natasha Wheatley, an affiliated Princeton faculty member: George Aumoithe (postdoctoral fellow), Tatiana Borisova (National Research University High School of Economics, St. Petersburg), Jonathan Connolly (postdoctoral fellow), Tom Johnson (University of York), Lena Salaymeh (Tel Aviv Law School), Franziska Seraphim (Boston College), Mitra Sharafi (University of Wisconsin Law School), Elizabeth Thornberry (Johns Hopkins University), and Barbara Welke (University of Minnesota).

Through our various research projects situated in different places and centuries, we are especially interested in examining how legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and extra-legal forms of social order have interacted. In order to extend our conversations beyond Princeton, each of this year’s fellows contribute a perspective on this issue. We asked the 2018-19 fellows to reflect upon the following question: how has your time at the Davis Center led to new insights about the reach and limits of law and legalities? Our essays are divided into two groups, one on our cases, and another on our methods, each of which will appear in a subsequent post. But as an introduction, we feature the piece by Barbara Welke (University of Minnesota), which offers a more personal reflection on the year’s leave experience.

-Angela N. H.Creager, Director

Barbara Welke

Some fifty-plus years ago, Tillie Olsen opened an essay titled “Silences” published in Harper’s Magazine, saying “literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.”   The quote she included from Melville’s “famous” letter to Hawthorne – “I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances.  The calm, the coolness, the silent grass growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, that can seldom be mine” – might as easily be said of academia and not just for men.  

This is an unexpected opening, I know, to what was supposed to have been my reflections on the Davis Center theme, but given the limitations of space, I am electing to address what may be the more important underlying question of the conditions which enable any of us to truly think or create original work at all.  I am privileged to hold a tenured job, to come from an institution with smart, generous colleagues and a rich intellectual culture.  Still, this year has been freeing.  The Law & Legalities theme at the Davis Center is, alas, only for two years, but it highlights the importance of residential fellowships that take one out of the worlds in which we are “pulled hither and thither,” that purposefully gather scholars across rank from post-docs to full professors and across temporal and geographic fields, bound only loosely by a theme and free them to think and create. 

For me, the productivity has been not only in conversations with other Davis Center Fellows and Postdocs, but equally generative conversations with a broad range of others from graduate students to emeriti faculty.  With days spent largely in the hard – I might say what often feels like the impossible task of writing – I’ve spent evenings in the renewing work of reading creative works of history, but also creative non-fiction, memoir, essay, and poetry, works through which I imagine broadened possibilities for the writing of legal history.  The combined result has been a welter of new ideas and a number of new chapters.  As I realized years ago in leading the Hurst Institute, the genius of the thing was in part its structure, coupled with outstanding administrative support that freed fellows individually and collectively to think.  The same has been true here, coupled with generous, inspired leadership.  I would urge us as a field to think how we might create (and fund!) more such short- and longer-termed, residency and non-residency, themed, cross-rank, cross-field legal history writing hunkers – shelters from being “pulled hither and thither” in which we might think and create.  

Photo (L to R): Tom Johnson, Liz Thornberry, George Aumoithe, Barbara Welke, Lena Salaymeh, Tataiana Borisova, Angela Creager, Natasha Wheatley, Jon Connolly

(posted by Mitra Sharafi)

Call for Applications: Princeton Postdoc in "Law and Difference"

We have the following call for applications, from Princeton University:

“Law & Difference” Postdoctoral Research Associate 

Position Description 

Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Study is pleased to announce one residential Postdoctoral Research Associate or more senior position, renewable for a second year contingent upon satisfactory performance. During the academic years 2018–2019 and 2019–2020, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies will focus of the topic of “Law & Legalities.” In conjunction with our program of residential fellowships, we invite recent Ph.D's to apply for a postdoctoral position focused on the more specific topic of “Law & Difference.” The successful candidate will work on some aspect of how the social construction and lived experience of difference—such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, ability/disability, or age—intersect with legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and extra-legal forms of social order. We invite candidates working on any time period or geographical area, and especially encourage applicants whose work ranges beyond the twentieth-century United States. 

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will be engaged in full-time work on the proposed historical project during the first year, and may teach up to one undergraduate course per semester in the second year (if renewed) pending need, enrollments, and the approval of the Office of the Dean of the Faculty. The “Law & Difference” position is strictly residential, as the Postdoctoral Research Associate will also participate in all of the Davis Center’s weekly activities (along with the Center’s other fellows). The program is designed to nurture the academic career of an emerging scholar by providing opportunities to pursue research and possibly teach while gaining mentoring from Princeton faculty and the resident Davis Center fellows. 

The initial expected term of appointment is July 1, 2018–June 30, 2019, with renewal possible for a second year contingent upon satisfactory performance. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will receive a competitive salary along with University benefits and an annual research fund of $5,000.

More information is available here.

Davis Center 2018-19

Last week, we featured a series of three posts on the limits of law from the 2018-19 Davis Center fellows. Here they are, all in one place for ready reference:

• The Limits of Law: Davis Center 2018-19
• The Limits of Law: Cases
• The Limits of Law: Approaches

The Davis Center's law and legalities theme continues in 2019-20. 

--Mitra Sharafi

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):

The Limits of Law: Cases

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 one set of answers that relate to each scholar's area of study (our other posts in this series are here and here):

CFP: Law, Difference, and Healthcare

[We share the following announcement. The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2019.]

The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Department of History at Princeton University are hosting a conference and workshop on “Law, Difference, and Healthcare: Making Sense of Structural Racism in Medico-Legal History,” organized by George Aumoithe (Davis Center postdoctoral research associate). Our gathering will be 1-1/2 days long to be held from Thursday to Friday afternoon of June 6—7, 2019. Our keynote speakers will be author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology Deirdre Cooper Owens and author of Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care Dayna Bowen Matthew.

Further information after the jump:

Davis Center fellowships

[We have the following announcement. Deadline: Dec.1, 2018.]

During the 2019-20 academic year, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University will focus on the topic of “Law & Legalities.” This seminar will bring together visiting scholars working on law in societies around the world and throughout human history, on topics including (but not restricted to) state administration, gender and sexuality, race, religion, property, science, environment, technology, war, migration, commerce, medicine, disability, incarceration, and human rights. How have legal, illegal, quasilegal, and extra-legal forms of social order interacted in different periods and places? We will consider the historical possibilities and predicaments that have emerged within legal and juridical systems (both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’), as well as the conflicts that have arisen from the overlapping jurisdictions of custom, community, religion, nation-state, empire, and international bodies.

Fellowships are awarded to employed scholars who are expected to return to their position. Verification of employment and salary will be requested prior to approval by the Dean of the Faculty. PhD required.

The application for a visiting position is available here.

The deadline for receipt of applications and letters of recommendation for fellowships is December 1, 2018, 11:59 p.m. EST. Applicants must apply online and submit a CV, cover letter, research proposal, abstract of proposal, and contact information for three references.
Princeton University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Further information is available here.

Angela N. H. Creager

Director, 2016–2020

Davis Center Fellows in 2018-19

[We have the following announcement of Davis Center fellows at Princeton's History Dept. for the 2018-19 year (theme: Law and Legalities).]

2018-19 Davis Center Fellows

Tatiana Borisova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, “‘For My Enemies, the Law’: A Social History of Law, Justice, and Terror in Russia, 1860–1918,” spring 2018

Tom Johnson, University of York, “Legal Artifacts: Fabricating Law in Medieval England,” year

Lena Salaymeh, Tel Aviv Law School, “Secularislamization: Secularization and Contemporary Islamic Law,” year                  

Franziska Seraphim, Boston College, “Geographies of Justice: Japan, Germany, and the Allied War Crimes Program, 194­3–1958,” fall 2018


 Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin Law School, “Fear of the False: Forensic Science in Colonial India,” fall 2018


Elizabeth Thornberry, Johns Hopkins University, “Imagining African Law: South Africa, 1870–1927,” year

Barbara Welke, University of Minnesota, “The Course of a Life,” year                                        

2018-19 Law & Difference Postdoctoral Fellows

George Aumoithe, PhD in History 2018, Columbia University

Jon Connolly, JD and PhD in History 2017, Stanford University

Further information is available here.

African History as Legal History

Many thanks to the editors for inviting me to post here this month, although I’ll confess to feeling like something of an interloper.   Indeed, exploring that feeling struck me as a useful starting point for my thoughts this month.  African history has a peripheral place within the broader field of legal history, and vice versa.  That’s probably not going to change significantly in the near future; but I’d like to make a pitch for legal historians in other times and places to read a bit more in African legal history, and I’ve put together some recommended readings to start with. 

I didn’t start thinking myself as a legal historian until several years after I’d finished my PhD.  I wrote my dissertation, which became my first book, on the history of rape in colonial South Africa; but the questions that I was interested in were less about law than about culture and politics.  I wanted to understand how people thought about sexual violence and sexual consent, and how their ideas changed during the intensely violent process of colonization.  In my initial research, law appeared as a methodological riddle.  By far the largest body of archival material dealing with sexual violence came in the form of court cases: criminal prosecutions for rape and violations of anti-miscegenation laws, divorce hearings, and civil litigation over seduction and adultery.   I sifted through thousands of court records with the goal of reading around and beyond the formulaic phrases of the colonial courtroom, with the hope of deciphering how people talked about sexual violence when they weren’t adjusting their narratives to the expectations of these various legal venues.

I succeeded, in part. My research left me skeptical of overly determinative accounts of forum-shopping.  At least in the 19th century Cape Colony, plenty of litigants turned up in court with little knowledge of how to shape their testimony to the court’s expectations, even if they wanted to.  But I couldn’t figure that out without understanding the courts themselves.  At the most basic level, I needed to understand who had power, and how they used it.  I needed to understand how cases travelled through the court system, from the court clerk to the magistrate to the Solicitor General to the jury.  I needed to know how the words of Xhosa-speaking litigants were transformed into English-language transcripts.  And I needed to know how all the actors in this system thought about rape as a legal category.  

In order to make sense of my archival records, in other words, I needed to become a legal historian of sorts.  It was a more challenging process than I anticipated.  There is a rich body of scholarship on the history of the colonial Eastern Cape, much of which draws heavily on court records, but very little that lays out the basic functioning of the colonial court system.  Meanwhile, the official statements of the colonial regime were usually aspirational at best.  Indigenous African law had no official legal status in most of the Cape Colony, but an approximation was nonetheless widely applied in civil cases, many of which literally bore the notation “informal case” across the top of the archival record.  Meanwhile, few 19th century magistrates had formal legal training, or even access to standard legal texts, so the form of law applied in lower courts on the colony’s periphery was often quite different from that described by judges and prominent advocates in Cape Town.  

As I worked through these questions, I came to see courts themselves as sites for the dissemination of legal knowledge.  I could see African defendants learning how colonial officials thought about rape, and I could see colonial officials developing new understandings of African “customary law.” I also came to appreciate the political stakes of law itself, as I read black intellectuals vigorously debating the place of customary law in the emerging segregationist state.  As I finished my first book, law moved squarely to the center of my research.  My current book project has “law” not only in the title, but before the colon (Imagining African Law: Black Intellectuals and the Politics of Custom in South Africa), and I’m currently the lone Africanist among a group of fellows at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center working on the theme of “Law and Legalities.”

Yet, despite this trajectory, I still feel like an outsider to legal history in many ways.  My time at the Davis Center has been tremendously intellectually productive, precisely because there is still so much I don’t know about the field (luckily, there are very smart people around to explain these things to me).  I would guess that most of my colleagues working on law and African history, a small but vibrant field, feel the same way. 

There are both institutional and intellectual reasons for this. In comparison to scholars of American, European, or Latin American legal history, relatively few of us have legal training, and even fewer teach at law schools. Meanwhile, historians of African law have focused disproportionately on the history of “customary law,” a protean term that glosses a variety of bodies of law which claim some connection with precolonial African law.  This preoccupation has brought us in conversation with a wide-ranging scholarship on legal pluralism, but has simultaneously cut us off from many of the other major questions in legal history.  There is shockingly little historical scholarship on the process of writing African constitutions and the development of postcolonial legal regimes, for example, despite the recent turn in the broader field to postcolonial history.  There is also less work than you might expect that treats law as part of African intellectual history.

Precisely because this divide is so entrenched, however, I see big intellectual dividends in reading across it.  In recent years, my own thinking has been shaped by reading Bianca Premo and Tamar Herzog on law in Latin American empires, Kunal Parker on the common law in America, and Matthew Sommer on alternative marriage practices in late imperial China.  I’d like to think that those working in other fields would benefit equally from reading scholarship on law in African history—and as evidence for this claim, I’d point to Dylan Penningroth’s The Claims of Kinfolk  and Ann Marie Plane’s Colonial Intimacies, two books about American history that draw substantially on Africanist scholarship on customary law.

So, to close this post, here are some of my favorite books in African legal history.  The list skews towards my own interests in gender, sexuality, and empire, although I’ve tried not to be too parochial. Happy reading!

1. Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia.  The foundational book in the history of colonial-era customary law.  Dense, but worth it!

2. Sara Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Not legal history strictly speaking, but all the more interesting because of it; Berry examines customary courts as part of a broad set of struggles over property and rural wealth. 

3. Thembeka Ngcukaitobi, The Land is Ours: Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism in South Africa.  Written for a popular audience by one of South Africa’s pre-eminent human rights lawyers, an exemplar of the recent interest in law as intellectual history and an argument for the importance of legal history to contemporary South African politics.

4. Emily Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice and Rights in Colonial Mali.  Exemplary in bridging different spheres of law through an analysis of marriage and a succession of attempts to reform marriage law.

5. Mahmoud Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.  The classic book on the politics of indirect rule, and a forceful argument about the role of customary law in that process.  

6. Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, Law in Colonial Africa.  An edited collection that provides a useful starting entrée into this corner of the field. 

7. Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa.   An argument for the role of Islamic law and associated practices in creating and sustaining the trans-Saharan caravan trade.

8. George Karekwaivanane, The Struggle Over State Power in Zimbabwe: Law and Politics Since 1950.  Thinks through the role of law as a category and practice in a time and place where the “rule of law” was often recognized in the breach.

9. Harri Englund, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor.  This one is cheating—Englund is an anthropologist, but one that I think historians should read, particularly if we want to understand the complicated place of law in the international human rights project. 

This is obviously not a comprehensive list, but I hope it provides a useful starting point.  I’ll be back later this month to talk about institutional efforts to bridge the fields of African history and legal history.

Davis Center fellowships

The Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton's History department will feature the theme, "Law & Legalities" for the coming two academic years. Applications for one- and two-semester fellowships are due on Dec.1, 2017:

This two-year seminar will bring together visiting scholars working on law in societies around the world and throughout human history, on topics including (but not restricted to) state administration, gender and sexuality, race, religion, property, science, environment, technology, war, migration, commerce, medicine, disability, incarceration, and human rights. How have legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and extra-legal forms of social order interacted in different periods and places? We will consider the historical possibilities and predicaments that have emerged within legal and juridical systems (both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’), as well as the conflicts that have arisen from the overlapping jurisdictions of custom, community, religion, nation-state, empire, and international bodies. 

Fellowships are awarded to employed scholars who are expected to return to their position.  Verification of employment and salary will be requested prior to approval by the Dean of the Faculty.  PhD required.  To apply for a visiting position, please link to: https://dof.princeton.edu/academicjobs. The deadline for receipt of applications and letters of recommendation for fellowships for 2018/2019 is December 1, 2017, 11:59 p.m. EST. Applicants must apply online and submit a CV, cover letter, research proposal, abstract of proposal, and contact information for three references. 

Further information is available here and here.

MLK scholar Clayborne Carson to speak at launch of new California International Law Center

Clayborne Carson, Professor of History and founding Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University will speak on "The Global Vision and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr." at the launch of the new California International Law Center at UC Davis School of Law. Diane Amann, founder of the IntLawGrrls blog, is Director of the new Center. The event will take place from 12-1 pm in King Hall's Wilkins Moot Courtroom on the UC Davis campus.

At a time of retrenchment in higher education, it is nice to hear news of a law school building a new program. As for the Martin Luther King connection, the law school's building, according to the announcement, "was dedicated to memory of the slain civil rights leader on April 12, 1969." King was killed in April 1968. Davis Dean Kevin Johnson explains: "As we mark our fortieth anniversary at King Hall, the inauguration of the California International Law Center offers us a perfect opportunity to rededicate ourselves to the legacy of Dr. King, who did so much to promote justice and equality not only in the United States but around the world."

More details are here. Carson, editor of the King papers at Stanford, is the author of the civil rights history classic In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981), and other works. His address will be posted on the UC Davis School of Law website.

Weekend Roundup

• Our friends at the Federal Judicial Center have posted the latest in the Center’s series of teaching materials on Famous Federal Trials.  It’s U.S. v. New York Times, that is, The Pentagon Papers Case, in which "the publication of secret government documents about the Vietnam War leads to a federal court conflict pitting national security against freedom of the press."

• Recently posted over at Law and Political Economy (LPE) blog is the symposium Piercing the Monetary Veil.  Contributors include Christine Desan and Roy Kreitner.

• Boy, we're sorry we couldn't attend this one: Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law, on Private Practices, Public Projects: Reflections on Connections between Work for Clients and Public Activities in the History of the Legal Profession last Thursday at Northwestern University.  H/t: Christopher Schmidt.

• Be sure to check out the redesigned website of the Historical Society for the District of Columbia Circuit.

• Mark W. Gifford, Bar Counsel for the Wyoming State Bar, has published Regulation of the Practice of Law in Wyoming: A 150-Year Walk Through the History Books in the Wyoming Law Review 19 (2019): 1-43.

• The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs announced the publication of a symposium on its 50th anniversary in the Howard Law Journal. 

• An updated webpage helps catch us up on legal history at Edinburgh Law School. 

• Thomas C. Britton will discuss the history and development of the SIU School of Law at noon, May 21, in the Hiram H. Lesar Law Building Courtroom on the Southern Illinois University Carbondale campus.  He will base his talk on a chapter in his recently published Southern Illinois University at 150: Growth, Accomplishments, and Challenges.

• "The 2020 BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History will be held in conjunction with the BHC annual meeting . . . in Charlotte Wednesday, March 11 and Thursday, March 12. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to early-stage doctoral candidates pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history, from any relevant discipline.  Applications are due by 15 November 2019 via email to BHC@Hagley.org."  More on this prestigious competition of the Business History Conference is here. 

• My erstwhile and present Georgetown Law colleagues Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School, and Louis Michael Seidman, Georgetown University Law Center, have posted On Being Old Codgers: A Conversation about a Half Century in Legal Education, a “conversation, conducted over three evenings,” capturing “some of our thoughts about the last half century of legal education as both of us near retirement.”  DRE  

• We didn’t realize that Attorney General William Barr contributed an oral history to the Miller Center for Public Affairs series on the George W. Bush presidency.  Thanks, WaPo!

• In WaPo's "Made by History" series: Victoria Saker Woeste on the dark history of the raisin mafia.  Sarah A. Seo on traffic stops.

• ICYMI: Mary Ziegler on recent developments in the campaign to overturn Roe on NPR (et al.).  The History Channel’s notice of Dan Abrams and David Fisher’s Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense: The Courtroom Battle to Save His Legacy.  Also, the History Channel on the first Social Security check.  More on legal historians as partners: some, it seems, make dreams come true.

• You can register now here for the upcoming workshop on Law, Difference, and Healthcare at Princeton's Davis Center. It is organized by George Aumoithe and runs June 6-7, 2019.

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

Weekend Roundup

•  From the Washington Post's Made by History section: Erik Erlandson (Ph.D. candidate, University of Virginia) on how "the bureaucracy serves as a bulwark against hasty deregulation"; Joshua T. McCabe (Endicott University) on the history of limiting the mortgage deduction - can it be done again?; and Molly Michelmore (Washington & Lee) on "how the GOP uses 'family values' to slash taxes."

• Emory Law's press release on LHB Founder Mary Dudziak's naming as an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History is here.  She is pictured with another Honorary Fellow, David V. Williams of the University of Auckland, and three past ASLH presidents.

• A YouTube video of Paul Finkelman’s lecture, "Kosciuszko: A Bridge to Liberty for All," which treats “Brigadier General of the Continental Army and Polish freedom fighter, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and his efforts to end slavery” is here.

• Just Security blog is hosting a symposium on The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, by Yale's Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro.  The first post, by Gary J. Bass, is here.

• That Congressional briefing on the Historical Context of Civil War Monuments, sponsored by the National History Center, airs on C-SPAN3 today at 6:00pm EST.

• Here's an interesting CFP from Perspectives on Politics: Celebrities and Politics.  "We ... invite scholars to submit theoretical and empirical pieces that build on existing celebrity/celebrities and politics research or break new ground to explore the power of "celebrity" and interrogate the forces that produce and maintain it."  The interested should contact perspectives@apsanet.org.

• The History and Public Policy Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, is now accepting applications for its 2018 Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research.

•  A reminder: the deadline for submitting papers and panels for the Policy History Conference, to be held  in Tempe, Arizona, May 16-19, 2018, is December 8, 2017.

• And another: the Davis Center fellowship deadline (theme: law & legalities) at the Princeton History department is Dec.1. Details here.

• ICYMI: K. Sabeel Rahman, Brooklyn Law, on Law, Political Economy, and the Legal Realist Tradition Revisited, on Law and Political Economy Blog.  James D. Folts, New York State Archives, on Documenting Our Past: Great Documents of New York Legal History.

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

Call for Papers: Women & International Criminal Law

Call for Papers: Women & International Criminal Law

Special Issue of the International Criminal Law Review

Dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald

The International Criminal Law Review invites submissions for its 2010 special issue entitled "Women and International Criminal Law," to be guest-edited by Diane Marie Amann, University of California, Davis, School of Law; Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Temple University Beasley School of Law; and Beth Van Schaack, University of Santa Clara School of Law. The Special Issue is dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald, a pathbreaker in international criminal law who has served as Chief Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a member of the Iraq Intelligence Commission, Co-Chair of the American Society of International Law Task Force on the International Criminal Court, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

This special issue is devoted to the topic of women and international criminal law. The majority of the articles have been solicited from prominent academics and practitioners in the field of international criminal law and feminist jurisprudence, such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Prof. Jenny Martinez, Dean Martha Minow, Prof. David Luban, Prof. Leila Nadya Sadat, Prof. Naomi Cahn, and Lucy Reed. The editors have also reserved several slots for submissions in response to this call to papers. Submissions should be inspired by this theme statement:

Special Issue Theme: Women & International Criminal Law

The law, it has been noted, "has not always served women well."[1] The critique extends readily to international law. Until very recently, women were absent from the processes of international law formation and enforcement, and invisible within substantive law reflective of the male experience. Mirroring the public/private divide running through much of law and society, the law, and those with the power to use it, tended to treat all forms of gender violence as opportunistic, peripheral, or private crimes reflecting personal motives and desires unconnected to issues of international importance. Thanks to the tireless work of committed advocates, jurists, and diplomats, international criminal law now treats many forms of gender violence as prosecutable offences against the physical and mental integrity of the victim. With the promulgation of the Statute of the International Criminal Court and the voluminous jurisprudence of the ad hoc criminal tribunals, the law now sanctions the prosecution of gender crimes as war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and the predicate acts of genocide.

Women have stood front and center to push these developments. Other international institutions often are dominated by men. Yet women have served in top posts in all of the modern tribunals, as Presidents (Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, Navanethem Pillay, and Renate Winter), Registrar (Dorothée de Sampayo Garrido-Nijgh), Chief Prosecutors (Louise Arbour and Carla Del Ponte), Deputy Prosecutors (Fatou Bensouda), Gender Advisors (Patricia Viseur Sellers and Catharine MacKinnon), and in many other judicial, prosecution, defense, and administrative capacities. The tribunals are approaching gender parity in staffing, although women remain concentrated in the lower professional grades. International criminal law is thus one area of international law in which women have made headway in terms of substantive law and institutional access; still, significant obstacles remain to ensure a robust system of gender justice in the face of continued violations.

The field of international criminal law nears a watershed moment, as ad hoc tribunals wind down and the International Criminal Court becomes fully operational. This opportune time invites reflection on whether international criminal law should be considered a feminist project. Accordingly, this volume offers sustained study of how international criminal law affects women and how women have affected international criminal law. We welcome submissions on the following topics:

. Can, and has, international criminal law improved the material conditions of women's lives and promoted the dignity of women?

. Is participation in international criminal justice liberating and transformative, or alienating and regressive?

. What legal reforms, procedural devices, advocacy strategies, and institutional arrangements can be employed to ensure that women experience the former and not the latter?

. Does fixation on criminal penalties constrain imagination and implementation of other ways to respond to the needs, demands, and aspirations of women in situations of armed conflict, mass violence, abuse, and repression?

. How have women - as activists, victims, lawyers, and perpetrators - changed the field?

. How has the gender jurisprudence advanced, or impeded, the development of international criminal law?

. Has international criminal law changed the way we think about violence against women?

This volume looks beyond sex crimes to consider multiple ways that women experience war and repression, as agents of change, as victims, and as perpetrators. The study adopts critical perspectives to challenge conceptual boundaries - between and within public international law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and international human rights - that tend to eclipse the intersectionalities of women's identities and to fragment women's experiences with violence, based upon whether violence occurs in a time of war or peace, whether it occurs at home or in a detention center, or whether the perpetrator is a state actor or a private person. Our hope is that the new perspectives presented in this collection will advance our thinking about gender and international law across a number of disciplines. We welcome your participation in this historic effort to examine the impact of international criminal law on women, and vice versa.

Special Issue Logistics

The volume will be published in spring 2011. Judge Wald and other contributors will present their works at a roundtable hosted at the American Society of International Law's Tillar House in Washington, D.C., on October 29, 2010 - days before the tenth anniversary of the first U.N. Security Council resolution on Women, Peace and Security.

To ensure anonymity in the selection phase, please submit a solid draft essay or article, in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 words, with all identifying information redacted, to Kathleen A. Doty, by way of an e-mail attachment in Word format (kadoty@ucdavis.edu), by April 15, 2010. Please note the paper's title (which should match exactly the title of the redacted paper) and your name and contact information in the body of the e-mail.

Once papers have been selected, they will be subject to a full edit and peer review in advance of the October roundtable. The final draft of the paper will be due no later than March 1, 2011, and should adhere to the International Criminal Law Review style sheet, which is available at http://www.brill.nl/AuthorsInstructions/ICLA.pdf.

About the Editors

Diane Marie Amann is Professor of Law and Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall, University of California, Davis, School of Law; a founding contributor to the IntLawGrrls blog, http://intlawgrrls.blogspot.com/; and a Vice President of the American Society of International Law. Her scholarship examines the interaction of national and international legal regimes in efforts to combat atrocity and cross-border crime.

Jaya Ramji-Nogales is Assistant Professor of Law at Temple University's Beasley School of Law; a regular contributor to IntLawGrrls blog; and a member of the Board of Legal Advisors to the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Her scholarship examines transitional justice mechanisms, and includes the volume Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence Before the Cambodian Courts (2005), co-edited with Beth Van Schaack.

Beth Van Schaack is Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law and Visiting Scholar (2009-2010) at the Center on Democracy, Development & The Rule of Law, Stanford University, as well as a regular contributor to IntLawGrrls blog. Prior to joining the law faculty, she was Acting Executive Director and Staff Attorney with The Center for Justice & Accountability, San Francisco, and a law clerk with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Her scholarship is in the area of international criminal law, and she is the co-author with Ron Slye of a leading casebook and hornbook on the topic.

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[1] Elizabeth Evatt, Foreword, in The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis ix (Hilary Charlesworth & Christine Chinkin eds., 2000).

Photo: Judge Patricia Wald.

Stanford Center for Law and History workshop schedule

[We share the following speaker line-up.]

Stanford Center for Law and History Workshop: 2019-20 Schedule

The Stanford Center for Law and History has announced the lineup for its 2019-20 workshop:

Oct. 1, 2019 — Corinne Leveleux-Teixeira, Université d'Orléans

Between theology and canon law. Oath and truth in late Middle Ages and early modern times (XIIth-XVIth centuries)

Oct. 29, 2019 — Richard Ross, University of Illinois Law and History

Anglicization of and through Law: British North America, Ireland, and India Compared, 1540-1800

Nov. 19, 2018 — Stephanie Jones-Rogers, UC Berkeley History

‘She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage’: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law

Jan. 14, 2020 — Brent Salter, Stanford Law

The Publisher’s Unpublished Empire: Samuel French and Authority Over Theatrical Copyright, 1856-1891

Feb. 4, 2020 — Rachel St John, UC Davis History

The Imagined States of America: The Unmanifest History of Nineteenth-century North America

Feb. 25, 2020 — Preetam Prakash, Stanford History

'Sufficient to Tame Their Brute Nature': Prison Management, Incarceration, and Escape in Qing China

April 7, 2020 — Ari Bryen, Stanford Humanities Center and Vanderbilt University

Law and/as Flesh: Some Thoughts on the Legal Cultures of the Eastern Roman Empire

April 28, 2020 — Kimberly Welch, Vanderbilt University History and Law

Free Black Creditors and the Law in the Early U.S. South

May 19, 2020 — Francesca Trivellato, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies

Property Rights vs. Social Ties? Old and New Perspectives on the Origins of Capitalism in Renaissance Florence

--posted by Mitra Sharafi

Princeton Conference on Law and Legality in Modern Eastern Europe

We have the following announcement, about an upcoming conference at Princeton University:

Law and Legality in Modern Eastern Europe
Princeton University
Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies
October 4-5, 2019

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4

1:15 p.m. Welcome and Introductions
Emily Greble (Vanderbilt University)
Iryna Vushko (Princeton University)

1:30 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. Politics of Punishment in the Habsburg and
Russian Empires

Chair: Emily Greble
Commentator: Ekaterina Pravilova (Princeton University)

Alison Frank (Harvard University), “The Emperor and the
Executioner: Justice, Mercy, and Capital Punishment in
the Habsburg Monarchy”

Iryna Vushko (Princeton University), “Imperial Golgotha:
Spielberg Prison in the Habsburg Empire”

Daniel Beer (Royal Holloway), “Rituals of Civil Death:
Sovereignty and Subversion in the Reign of Alexander II”

3:15 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Coffee Break

3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Overlapping and Contested Sovereignties

Chair: Iryna Vushko

Commentator: Lauren Benton (Vanderbilt University)

Natasha Wheatley (Princeton University), “Sovereignty as
a Knowledge Problem”

Aimee Genell (Western Georgia University), “From the
Legalist Empire to the Sovereign State”

Emily Greble (Vanderbilt University), “Debating Concepts
of Sovereignty: Muslims in Post-Ottoman Europe”

Dominique Reill (University of Miami), “Eeeny, Meeny,
Miny, Law: Law-Making and Self-Determination in
Absence of a State”

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5

9 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. International Law and Regional Implications

Chair: Emily Greble  

Commentator: Eric Weitz (The City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY)

Peter Holquist (University of Pennsylvania), “Testing the
New ‘Laws of War’: Imperial Russia and the 1877-78
Russo-Turkish War”

Jared Manasek (Pace University), “Occupation, Sovereignty,
and the Presumption of Legality: the “Forgotten” Ottoman Exclave of Ada Kale in the Danube International Waterway”

Kent Schull (State University of New York, Binghamton),
“Repatriating POWs in Post-Great War Eastern Europe:
Negotiating Citizenship & Belonging in the Wake of
Dismantled Empires, New Nation States & Imperial
Ambitions”

10:45 a.m. - 11 a.m. Coffee Break

11 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. The Transformation of the East European Legal Order in the 20th Century

Chair: Iryna Vushko 

Commentator: Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania)

Gábor Egry (Institute of Political History, Budapest), “The
Law of the State, the State of the Nation: the Idea of the
Nation and the Transformation of Legal Categories in
Interwar Eastern Europe”

Melissa Feinberg (Rutgers University), “The Dilemmas of
De-Austrianization: Family and Marriage Law in the First
Czechoslovak Republic”

Rebecca Reich (Cambridge University), “Journalism and
Judgment in the Post-Stalin Period”

 -- Karen Tani