Friday, December 29, 2006

2006 Book Notes: The UNC Press Legal History Series

An important venue for publishing legal history is the Studies in Legal History Series at the University of North Carolina Press. Current series editors are Daniel R. Ernst, Georgetown Univeristy Law Center, and Thomas A. Green, University of Michigan. Here's the description from the press:

Studies in Legal History is published in association with the American Society for Legal History. The series consists of books that grapple with key questions in legal history. The series welcomes works of unusual distinction by both senior and junior scholars. Most of the published volumes in the series deal with American legal history, though a significant number are on European topics. There are no chronological, cultural, or geographical limits on volumes in the series.


In addition to Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (previously noted, here), in 2006 the series also published Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine by Assaf Likhovski. Here's the description:
One of the major questions facing the world today is the role of law in shaping identity and in balancing tradition with modernity. In an arid corner of the Mediterranean region in the first decades of the twentieth century, Mandate Palestine was confronting these very issues. Assaf Likhovski examines the legal history of Palestine, showing how law and identity interacted in a complex colonial society in which British rulers and Jewish and Arab subjects lived together.

Law in Mandate Palestine was not merely an instrument of power or a method of solving individual disputes, says Likhovski. It was also a way of answering the question, "Who are we?" British officials, Jewish lawyers, and Arab scholars all turned to the law in their search for their identities, and all used it to create and disseminate a hybrid culture in which Western and non-Western norms existed simultaneously. Uncovering a rich arsenal of legal distinctions, notions, and doctrines used by lawyers to mediate between different identities, Likhovski provides a comprehensive account of the relationship between law and identity. His analysis suggests a new approach to both the legal history of Mandate Palestine and colonial societies in general.

Meanwhile, Likhovski has just posted a related SSRN paper, noted here.

Other UNC Press books in 2006, related to legal history but not in the Series, include:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930-1960 by Judy Kutulas

George Mason, Forgotten Founder by Jeff Broadwater

Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic by Matthew Mason

The Weight of Their Votes Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s by Lorraine Gates Schuyler

The Papers of John Marshall Vol. XII: Correspondence, Papers, and Selected Judicial Opinions, January 1831-July 1835, with Addendum, June 1783-January 1829 by John Marshall Edited by Charles F. Hobson

The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State by Mary Poole