UNL Symposium: Legal Borderlands in the North American West

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Carroll R. Pauley Symposium (October 6-7, 2016) will be devoted to legal history this year. The topic is Legal Borderlands in the North American West. Here's the description:

Legal borderlands include spaces crisscrossed by jurisdictional, political, and racial/ethnic boundaries. Other legal borderlands are international boundaries that divide cities and families. In addition to physical spaces, legal borderlands also include philosophical spaces where the legal code is ambiguous or contradictory—those offering “separate, but equal” protections, for instance, or those defining American Indians simultaneously as sovereign nations and as wards of the federal government.Similarly contradictory legal borderlands include the many competing codes and jurisdictions regulating criminal law, immigration, mineral rights, reproductive rights, water distribution, and other fundamental concerns in the legal history of the North American West.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Brown University) will deliver the keynote lecture, titled “Many Fronteras: Multiple Spaces of Cultural and Legal Contact, Conflict and Exchange in the Americas, 1600-1900.” The full program is available here.