Welcome (Back), Mitra Sharafi!

We are thrilled to announce that former LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi will be re-joining us for the month of August as a guest blogger! 

Professor Sharafi is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a renowned legal historian of South Asia. She is also a dedicated servant of the field -- including in her current role as President of the American Society for Legal History. 

Cribbing now from her Wisconsin bio: 

Mitra Sharafi (UW History)

She holds law degrees from Cambridge and Oxford (the UK equivalent of a JD and LLM) and history degrees from McGill (BA) and Princeton (PhD). Her first book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) won the Law and Society Association’s Hurst Prize in 2015. Her second monograph, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia, came out with Cornell University Press (Open Access) in 2026. Her next major project will explore the world of non-European law students from across the British empire (and globe) who came to London's Inns of Court to become barristers, 1860s-1960s. 

A fuller description of Fear of the False, via the Press:

Fear of the False uncovers colonial South Asia's critical role in the development of forensic science. Around 1900, the government of British India created a web of institutions for the scientific detection of crime. Driven by anxieties about "native mendacity," newly minted forensic analysts focused on uncovering faked evidence planted by South Asians. These experts, joining toxicologists known as "chemical examiners," were supposed to extract objective, scientific truth in the service of British justice. But in trying to counteract the presumed tendency of colonized peoples to lie, the system enabled widespread misconduct by state experts, increasing the risk of wrongful convictions of South Asian defendants.

Through scrupulously documented legal cases, Mitra Sharafi reveals that colonial dynamics put special pressure on the relationship between truth and justice. Examining falsity on both sides of the law through the use of testing to (mis)identify poisons, blood, and spermatozoa, as well as debates over adversarialism and inquisitorialism in the colonial courtroom, Fear of the False explores advances in forensic science and shortcuts in criminal procedure against the backdrop of colonial mistrust.

Thanks to generous funding from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the ebook editions of this book are available as open access volumes through the Cornell Open initiative.

Welcome back, Professor Sharafi! 

-- Karen Tani