[We share the following announcement.]
Symposium
on Comparative Early Modern Legal History:
Arguing
for the Rule of Law:
Using
the Hebrew Bible and Caricatures of Foreigners in British and Spanish America
Date: Friday,
October 26, 2018
Location: Newberry
Library, Chicago
Organized by:
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas, Austin) and Richard Ross
(University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
How did settlers, imperial officials,
indigenous peoples, and Africans in the New World seek to demonstrate, or
disprove, that a polity respected the rule of law? (The phrase “rule of
law” is modern; but the core of the idea is not). Colonial rule invited
accusations of arbitrary government and systematic lawlessness. This
conference will focus on two common techniques used to assess whether a polity
respected the supremacy of law. First, controversialists asked whether
governance accorded with God’s expectations of justice as laid out in
Scripture, particularly the Hebrew Bible. Second, caricatures of other
societies could be held up to make one’s own appear lawful and just, or the
reverse. British American settlers applauded the civility of their law by
reference to the presumed barbarism of the Irish and Amerindians. They
saw liberty in their exploitive legal order by opposing it to the supposed
absolutism of the Spanish and French empires. Spanish settlers justified
their rule and derecho by contrasting them to the law of indigenous
polities and of their New World rivals. The conference will bring
together historians, law professors, and social scientists to think about the
complex debates about the rule of law in the English and Iberian Atlantic.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of
Texas, Austin) and Richard Ross (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
organized “Arguing for the Rule of Law: Using the Hebrew Bible and Caricatures
of Foreigners in British and Spanish America.” The conference is an
offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, which
gathers every other year at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to explore
a particular topic in the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in
the period c.1492-1815. Funding has been provided by the University of
Illinois College of Law.
Attendance at the Symposium is free and open to the public. Those who
wish to attend should preregister by sending an email to Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu.
Papers will be circulated electronically to all registrants several weeks
before the conference.
For information about the conference,
please consult our website at https://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/specialty-programs/legal-history/
or contact Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu
or at 217-244-7890.
