Ohlmeyer, Ross and Stern on Legal Anglicization in British North America, Ireland and India

Jane Ohlmeyer, Trinity College, Dublin, Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois, and Philip Stern, Duke University, have posted Anglicization of and through Law: British North America, Ireland, and India Compared, 1540-1800, which also appears in Journal of Modern History 98 (2026): 539-77.

Historians of British North America, Ireland, and India write, each in their own ways, about the convergence of societies in the English empire towards metropolitan models, a process generally known as “anglicization.” Yet anglicization has never been studied as a feature connecting the global British empire. Scholars typically consider a single region and seldom engage with others. We pursue a comparative approach, using law as our vantage point. Our goal is to explore anglicization of law and through law in British North America, Ireland, and India over the course of the long early modern period from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries.  Our article begins with brief histories of anglicization in Ireland, America, and India that establish a foundation for comparison, for identifying commonalities and differences. We describe the “life cycle” or sequence of anglicization taking place upon different timelines in each of the three regions. Lest we overstate the extent of anglicization, we next consider difficulties that arise when deploying the concept. We conclude by suggesting how our project might stimulate comparative imperial history by developing categories that are portable, transferrable across place and time, and useful in studying both British overseas expansion globally and in connecting the British experience to that of other empires. Towards this end, we apply our approach to a contrast case: the Spanish empire’s fraught efforts to construct legal authority over indigenous peoples in New Spain and Peru.

--Dan Ernst 

Bray and Burset on General Law: The British Empire, the American Republic, and Now

Samuel L. Bray, University of Chicago Law School, and Christian R. Burset, University of Pennsylvania Law School, have posted Why General Law?

It has been almost a century since the Supreme Court said in Erie, "There is no general federal common law." But the general law is in the middle of a controversial revival. Instead of siding with the adherents or detractors of general law, this Essay explores why general law emerges, and why it disappears. Three episodes of the emergence of general law are considered: the rise of general law in the late-eighteenth century British Empire, the rise of general law in the early American Republic, and the rise of general law in twenty-first century originalist and textualist scholarship. In each of these episodes, general law is a solution to a problem of missing law. The law it provides is formally acceptable, abstract, and locally defeasible. These characteristics make general law valuable, but they also tend to make it temporary, as it provides the scaffolding for the construction of a more permanent legal regime.

--Dan Ernst

10 Things I learned while writing my (second) book

 I am delighted to be back as a Legal History (guest) Blogger. My second scholarly monograph, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia, came out in April 2026 with Cornell University Press. This month, I'd like to share some insights, surprises, and challenges from the project, which occupied me for much of the past 12+ years. Today: 10 things I learned while working on the book:

1.      You can take publication-grade photos with your phone: Perhaps this is obvious to others, but I
assumed the only way I could get publication-quality versions of images for my book that I took at the British Library (pictured) would be to order images through the BL’s Imaging Services. Unfortunately, the BL was hit with a ransomware attack in 2023. BL leadership refused to pay the ransom, and their online catalogue was destroyed as promised. It took the BL several years to recover (they are still not back to how things were before), and their Imaging services were essentially shut down so they could concentrate all their efforts on reconstructing the catalogue. For about a year, I thought this meant I could not include about a third the images I planned to use for my book, which was devastating. But then my IT colleague showed me how to use my phone to re-take the images at the BL (I could still go there and order up the original items, fortunately). By putting the phone on a stack of books to avoid any tilt or handshaking, and by adding 1-2 light sources, I retook these images and they were good enough to publish. The BL gave me permission to reproduce these for free, happily.

More after the jump.

Weekend Roundup

• ASLH President (and former Legal History Blog co-moderator) Mitra Sharafi discusses her new book, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia (Cornell University Press) over at the New Books Network.  

• Penn Carey Law announces the awarding of its first Certificate of Study in History and Historical Research Methods, which provides students with "a structured pathway to build expertise in legal history without the multi-year commitment of Penn Carey Law’s JD/PhD Program in American Legal History." 

• Over at JOTWELL: Ilya Somin (Scalia Law) spotlights Anna O. Law's Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (2026); Reuel Schiller (UC Law San Francisco) reviews Alma Steingart, One Person, One Vote? The Gap between Representative Equity and Mathematical Equality after Baker v. Carr, 112 J. Am. Hist. 702 (2026).

• Todd C. Peppers and Madison Mycoff  on how Chief Justice Warren Burger celebrated the Declaration of Independence in 1971 (SCHS).   

• From Nursing Clio's "undergraduate writing series": “Presumptive Testimony Only”: From Esther Davis to Patience Rousseau, Two Centuries of Criminalizing Pregnancy Loss, by Rachel Kuhn.

• "Cooley Law School Professor Joseline Jean-Louis Hardrick recently premiered, “If These Headlines Could Talk,” an original historical documentary musical that brings the landmark decisions of the Warren Court to life through storytelling, music, archival materials, and legal history" (Florida Bar News).

• Kali N. Murray, Marquette Law, on the haunting of American trademark law (by fugitive slave advertisements) (Marquette Today). 

• Over at Shugerblog, Jed Shugerman (Boston University School of Law) has been "fact-checking" the U.S. Supreme Court. The latest installment is here. 

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

JLH 45:2

The Journal of Legal History 45:2 (2024) has been published open access online.  With a hat-tip to ESCLHblog, here is the TOC.  DRE]

The Common Law and Civil War in Fourteenth-Century England: The Prosecution of Treason and Rebellion Under Edward II, 1322–1326 
Sophie Thérèse Ambler

What did it mean for poor and middling men and women to take up arms against their government? How did they negotiate competing claims for their participation in civil war and what consequences confronted them? This article analyses the crown’s investigation of its opponents following the 1321–22 civil war, comparing its predecessor of the Montfortian civil war (1263–67), to examine how the king, justices and juries tackled these questions. It demonstrates how the crown rooted the summary conviction and execution of Thomas of Lancaster and other noble insurgents in common law procedure; then, at the King’s Bench and a special inquiry in the Welsh Marches, re-framed treasonous offences to tackle non-noble insurgents; then, fearing a new uprising, instrumentalised the common law’s machinery to gather military intelligence. The crown recognized the agency of subjects across society in civil war and juries were ideally placed to investigate it; they also weighed subjects’ culpability, balancing obligation to the king against the mitigating realities of coerced participation in war. Thus, juries and the communities who informed their verdict were invited to engage with the ethical and legal dilemmas of civil war. This article thus presents a people’s history of treason.

On the Origins of Invalidation of British Colonial Legislation by Colonial Courts: The Van Diemen’s Land Dog Act Controversy of the 1840s – Part One
Ian Loveland

By 1865 British Imperial governments had accepted that colonial courts had the authority to invalidate colonial statutes which contravened the relevant colony’s constitution. This situation arose notwithstanding the lack of any express grant of such jurisdiction to colonial courts in Imperial or colonial legislation. This paper evaluates the first instance of a colonial court asserting that jurisdiction, during the Dog Act crisis in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in the 1840s. Part one of the paper charts the background to, conduct of and judgment in the relevant litigation. The second part, which will appear in a future issue of this journal, explores the consequential attempts of the colony’s Governor to remove the judges from office and to re-enact the invalidated colonial law. The suggestion made is that the Dog Act controversy provides considerable insight into how, despite the absence of any explicit statutory grant of such jurisdiction, the power of judicial review of colonial legislation by colonial courts became established as an orthodox element of British colonial constitutional law in the latter nineteenth century.

Crime, Trade Marks and Soft Trade Policy in the Interwar Era: Market Realities and the Merchandise Marks Act 1926
Elena Glover

This article explores a facet of the relationship between trade marks and the criminal law in the UK in the interwar era, a pivotal period of transition in UK economic policy from free trade to a more managed economy. Drawing together insights from legal, business and economic history, we show that, in the interwar years, the context of domestic politics and wider international trade policy, produced a greater focus on the relationship between trade marks and market-place understandings of the national origin of manufactured products. This context included the passage of the Merchandise Marks Act 1926, a criminal law statute that stipulated the circumstances in which imported goods were to be marked with an indication of national origin, and included a criminal offence regulating trade marks enforced by prosecutions brought by the Board of Trade. We argue that the criminal law regulating trade marks became entwined with ‘soft’ trade policy, i.e. a means of protecting the domestic/empire market falling short of tariff protection. Drawing on substantial original archival research, we explore the problems that confronted the Board of Trade when it enforced the 1926 Act in view of market realities.

Book reviews

Contractual Relations: A Contribution to the Critique of the Classical Law of Contract by David Campbell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, xxiv + 438 pp (including index), £95 (hardback), ISBN 9780198855156
Warren Swain

Subversive Legal History: A Manifesto for the Future of Legal Education by Russel Sandberg, Oxford, Routledge, 2021, 6 p+234 pp., £109.44, ISBN 9780367191290 (hardback)
Susan Bartie

Siddiqui's "Islamic Law on Trial"

Sohaira Siddiqui, Georgetown University, has published Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India (University of California Press, 2025):

Prior to the East India Company’s establishment in India in 1661, Islamic law was widely applied by the Mughal Empire. But as the Company’s power grew, it established a court system intended to limit Islamic law. Following the Great Rebellion of 1857, the decentralized Islamic legal system was replaced with a new standardized system. Islamic Law on Trial interrogates the project of juridical colonization and demonstrates that alongside—and despite—the violent displacement of Muslim legal sovereignty, Muslims were able to engage with and even champion Islamic law from inside the colonial judiciary. The outcome of their work was a paradoxical legal terrain that appeared legitimate to both Muslim practitioners and English colonizers. Sohaira Siddiqui challenges long-standing assumptions about Islamic law under British rule, the ways in which colonial power displaced preexisting traditions, and how local Muslim elites navigated the new institutions imposed upon them.

Georgetown University Qatar's notice of the book is here. 

 --Dan Ernst

du Plessis's "Henry Maine’s Ancient Law as an Expression of Victorian Humanism"

Paul J. du Plessis, University of Edinburgh, has published Henry Maine’s Ancient Law as an Expression of Victorian Humanism (University of Edinburgh Press):

This monograph offers a comprehensive contextual analysis of Maine’s Ancient Law, emphasising the author’s use of various sources to construct the book's key themes. Ancient Law was written as a sophisticated piece of rhetorical prose grounded in Maine’s education in the classics. Central to this analysis is the significant role of Roman law in shaping the narrative, particularly its influence on Maine’s arguments and conclusions.

The monograph also positions Maine’s work within the broader intellectual debates of the nineteenth century, especially concerning the teaching of English law and Britain’s colonial presence in India. By situating Maine’s Ancient Law within this larger context, the study enhances our understanding of the text, revealing the historical legal framework that resonates in modern legal discourse and thought. This connection enriches our knowledge of Maine’s contributions and highlights the enduring relevance of his ideas.

–Dan Ernst

Jansen on Alienage in the British Caribbean

Jan C. Jansen, University of Tübingen, has published Alien Acts in the Age of Emancipation: Mobility Control and Executive Power in the British Caribbean, 1820s–1830s online in Law and History Review:

In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.

--Dan Ernst

Auerbach's "Overseer State"

Sascha Auerbach, University of Nottingham, has published The Overseer State: Slavery, Indenture and Governance in the British Empire, 1812–1916 (Cambridge University Press):   

In this compelling work, Sascha Auerbach offers a bold new historical interpretation of late-stage slavery, its long-term legacies, and its entanglement with the development of the modern state. In the wake of abolition, from the Caribbean to southern Africa to Southeast Asia, a fusion of government authority and private industry replaced the iron chains of slavery with equally powerful fetters of law and regulation. This 'overseer-state' helped move, often through deceptive and coercive methods, millions of Indian and Chinese indentured laborers across Britain's imperial possessions. With a perspective that ranges from Parliament to the plantation, the book brings to light the fascinating and terrifying history of the world's first truly global labor system, those who struggled under its heavy yoke, and the bitter legacies left in its wake.

--Dan Ernst

Ballas and Moran on Criminal Justice in Colonial Himalaya

Irit Ballas and Arik Moran have published General Will or Public Order? The Debate on Criminal Justice Policy in Early Colonial Himalaya, 1815–1816 in Law and History Review:

When the British East India Company (EIC) conquered the West Himalaya region in the 1810s, it faced a critical challenge commonly encountered by colonial empires: determining the extent of intervention in intracommunity criminal matters among colonized subjects. This article examines the archived correspondence of colonial officials regarding this challenge and scrutinizes the various arguments made for and against intervention. It shows that the alterity of the subject population was strategically employed by both sides of the debate, who simultaneously promoted contradictory agendas: for those advocating intervention, alterity rendered involvement in criminal matters necessary and just, whereas those averse to intervention employed the very same notion to justify the opposite stance. This dual usage is explained by exposing the contemporary ideas about criminal justice that underlay each of these positions: that criminal law should represent the general will of society, and that it must be executed by a centralized power so as to maintain public order. While these two tenets are commonly perceived as supporting one another, the analysis reveals their decoupling in colonial settings. The debates of EIC officials thus demonstrate how the colonial setting distorts ideas foundational to modern criminal law systems, casting doubt over whether they were ever truly in harmony to begin with.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization, John Q. Barrett lets us, too, read Charles Reich's mail as Reich decides between Paul, Weiss and Arnold Porter & Fortas in 1955.

•  Harold Koh et al.: Bills of attainder are back, but shouldn't be (Just Security).
  

• Evan Bernick's posts on birthright  citizenship (Volokh Conspiracy).
  

• The Florida Supreme Court Historical Society invites judges, lawyers, law professors, and other citizens to serve on its board of trustees.
  

• Modern Criminal Law Review 1:2 (2025) is a special issue, edited by Simon Stern, University of Toronto, devoted to Criminal Law, Literature, and History.

• We missed it, but on Thursday the American Constitution Society held the session,  Can New Histories of Reconstruction Transform the Constitution? with Khiara M. Bridges, Aderson François, Olatunde Johnson, Martha S. Jones, Osagie Obasogie, and Farah Peterson. 
  

• "The Supreme Court of Ohio announces the development of a new exhibit, Women in the Law, which celebrates the trailblazing contributions of women to Ohio’s legal history" (Court News Ohio).

• 
  
  The Florida Supreme Court Historical Society invites judges, lawyers, law professors, and other citizens to serve on its board of trustees.

• UMass Law Professor Faisal Chaudhry spoke on his book, South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Towards a Historical Ontology of the Law at the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Oxford and at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (UMass Law).
  

• 
  A (paywalled) review of Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South (Basic Books) by Kathryn Schumaker, University of Sydney (WSJ).

• Here's the CFP for the annual meeting of the Organization of American  Historians in April 2026 in Philadelphia.

• This year's Summer Civic Institute of the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University will be devoted to the Declaration of Independence.
  

• ICYMI: For the legal history of Dorset, be sure to stop in at the Shire Hall Museum in Dorchester (Dorset Echo). Two Fourth Circuit Judges visited Constitutional history class at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI).  David Corn on the War on History (Mother Jones).  ProPublica on the origins of the income tax and Window + Door on the history of tariffs.  Alexander Keyssar and Sean Wilentz quoted on the SAVE Act (Election Law Blog).

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

Machona on the Ilbert Controversy of 1883

Now available online from Law and History Review: Constitutional Panic in British India: How the Ilbert Bill Controversy of 1883 Revealed the Constitutive Character of Racial Discrimination in the British Empire, by Gwinyai Machona:

Until today, not only the general public but also scholars of colonialism and imperialism debate about the extent to which Europeans were aware of the centrality of racial discrimination for colonialism and empires. Those who stress that racism was the foundation of European colonialism appear to be anachronistic. However, as this essay demonstrates, at least the British of the late nineteenth century were well-aware of the constitutive character of racial discrimination for their Empire. During the “constitutional panic” which the proposal of the Ilbert Bill in 1883 caused, the arguments exchanged in newspapers, town hall meetings and parliamentary debates revealed the racist foundation of British India. One contemporary observed “the unhappy tendency of this controversy to bring into broad daylight everything which a wise and prudent administrator should seek to hide.” This essay seeks to bring into broad daylight once again what has been widely forgotten or ignored. Statements in Parliament expressing that it was “perfectly impossible and ridiculous, so long as we retained our hold on India, to give Native races full equality” testify for explicitness of the debate. Analyzing the arguments against the Ilbert Bill, which sought to introduce full racial equality in the judiciary, serves for better understanding the foundation of British India.

--Dan Ernst

Legal Transfer and Legal Geography in the British Empire

The Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie have published, open access, Legal Transfer and Legal Geography in the British Empire: Global Perspectives on Legal History, edited by Donal K. Coffey and Stefan Vogenauer:

The legal history of the British Empire is in its infancy. The research field ‘Legal Transfer in the Common Law World’ in the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory under the Directorship of Prof Stefan Vogenauer has been engaged in scientific examination and analysis of this field. In 2021, the Third Legal Histories of Empires Conference was held in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. A stream looking at the state of the art in Legal Transfer in the Common Law World was organized by Stefan Vogenauer and Donal Coffey, who have co-edited this volume which flows from that stream.

The book argues that a comparative approach can overcome jurisdictional and ahistorical biases still often present in the legal history of empires. In an imperial legal superstructure, such as the British Empire(s), models of legislative and interpretative methods were self-consciously adopted and adapted to different jurisdictions. Moreover, the process of decolonisation disclosed similarities and divergences in the legal development of these territories. Useful insights can be gleaned from a comparison across different methodologies which are concerned with a similar normative framework between and within societies, and their relationship to the natural world.

The volume has two parts. The first presents four case studies for legal transfers in chronological order. Philip Girard’s chapter traces the evolution of the law regulating employers’ liability for injured workers in Quebec. Matilde Cazzola’s work looks at the evolution of the ‘protective principle’ and its deployment through a comparative lens, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom and the Australian colonies in the 19th century. Scott A. Carrière looks at the evolution of law in colonial Newfoundland, and in particular at the relationship between contract law, charters, and Company States. In Hong Kong, Christopher Roberts and Hazel W. H. Leung analyse the evolution of vagrancy law.

The second part contains a number of contributions engaging with the burgeoning field of legal geography in the context of the Empire. This is based around the ‘Property [In]Justice’ ERC group in University College Dublin headed by Amy Strecker. It includes chapters on the Caribbean by Amanda Byer, Southern Africa by Sonya Cotton, Kenya by Raphael Ng’etich, and a chapter by Sinéad Mercier on Ireland.

The different areas of law covered – including inter alia public law, employment law, land law – demonstrate the vitality of the comparative method.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

McClure's "Trials of Sovereignty"

Alastair McClure, The University of Hong Kong, has published Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857–1922 (Cambridge University Press).  It appears in the ASLH-sponsored series, Studies in Legal History.

Trials of Sovereignty offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics.

Here are some endorsements:

‘In this fresh and stimulating book, Alastair McClure explores the recalibrations of colonial rule which took place in the loop between calamitous violence and the exercise of mercy, between harsh punishment and its mitigation. We get a full sense of the impact of the 1857 rebellion on the codification of criminal law, and the accommodation in it of vast areas of judicial discretion to uphold both race privilege and unequal categories of colonial subjecthood. This is fine-tuned and rigorous scholarship, a major contribution to our understanding of colonial sovereignty in India and its unwinding.’ Radhika Singha, author of A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India

‘Trials of Sovereignty offers a compelling history of the ensnaring promise of mercy and its rejection in colonial India. Breaking with the conventional idea that sovereignty was solely built on state violence, Alastair McClure traces how terror and mercy were wielded as related expressions of sovereign power in the courtroom. From the last Mughal emperor to Mohandas Gandhi, McClure's meticulous analysis of modern India’s iconic political trials unearths mercy's fingerprints throughout colonial legal history. Because mercy was a crucial colonial tool for curtailing political rights and upholding a hierarchical social order, its rejection was pivotal to ideas of anti-colonial liberation. Trials prompts us to ask: who has the right to punish and by what measure? Posed as a question for the historian, McClure lays bare its significance to our unfinished present.’ Bhavani Raman, author of Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

 --Dan Ernst

ASLH William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Min Tae Cha

Continuing our round-up of the prizes and award announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize ("awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies").

This year's award went to Min Tae Cha (currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Nova Forum at the University of Southern California) for a dissertation titled “Constitutional Religion: Presbyterians between the British and American Empires” (Princeton University, 2023). The citation: 

“Constitutional Religion” is an astonishingly ambitious project that seeks to refold religious ideas and practices into the history of Anglo-American constitutional thought. Following Presbyterians in the British Empire and the United States in the long nineteenth century, Cha reveals the extent to which debates within the Presbyterian Church over issues including disestablishment, constitution making, and empire, were not conducted in isolation. Rather, they were shaped by and in turn shaped broader political events. That Cha finds a mutually constitutive relationship between Church and State is not surprising. What commands our attention is Cha’s argument that intertwined religious and political developments -- particularly disestablishment -- led to the creation of a “fiscal-missionary” church in the long nineteenth century. In an age of revolutions, immigration, and imperial expansion, Presbyterians scrambled to win souls and organize increasingly far-flung congregations. One striking result of this was ecclesiastical constitution making, which existed in a dialectical relationship with more familiar forms of secular constitution making. Skillfully tracing this process through close readings of underutilized religious sources, Cha shows how Presbyterians deployed written constitutions in order to mobilize congregants across the globe in the face of sectarian conflict. From Scotland to the United States to the Antipodes, Presbyterian lay people and clergy searched for solutions to pressing institutional problems, often settling upon older religious ideas and practices. Indeed, Cha deftly places Presbyterian constitutionalism within a much longer tradition of religious constitutionalism, Catholic and Protestant alike, even as he elucidates how the unique pressures of modernity required creative adaptations. He likewise connects centuries-old religious thought and praxis to processes of globalization and colonization. Through painstaking archival work, he traces the movement of people, practices, and ideas across oceans, and thereby makes a case for the broader significance of Presbyterian constitutional thought.

Congratulations to Min Tae Cha!

Update: Notre Dame Law's notice of the award is here.

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Oaths and Oath-Taking in Historical Perspective

 [We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Oaths and Oath-Taking in Historical Perspective: Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire, 1700 to the Present, 7 March 2025, Northumbria University in Newcastle.

Organisers: Henry Miller and James McConnel, Northumbria University

As the 2023 coronation of King Charles III highlighted, oaths remain a feature of modern British public life. Indeed, though largely taken for granted, oaths and declarations continue to play a much wider role within many state agencies (e.g., cabinet government,  parliaments, the judiciary, the magistracy, the armed forces, and the police force). Oaths also feature in other parts of life in the UK: professions including doctors, senior lawyers, and CoE ministers are still required to take oaths. Oaths are also a requirement of some civil society groups (e.g., the Scouts) and are required for membership of some mass-membership associations (e.g., Freemasonry and Orangeism). And since 2004, oaths have been performed at UK citizenship ceremonies up and down the country. Crucially,  all these oaths are not just subscribed to in writing, but also performed in person, often in a public, ceremonial context.

In recent decades, early modern historians have advanced our understandings of oaths and oath-taking. As a result, we now have a much better understanding of the role of oaths in changing conceptions of the political community, evolving crown-subject/state-citizen  relations, and in relation to generating trust during the upheavals of the seventeenth century and their aftermath. However, understanding the evolution and role of oaths over the longue durée (especially beyond the early eighteenth century) requires more attention, and without assuming they inevitably declined after their early modern heyday. While in the British context, the practice of national oath-taking led by the state  declined after the early eighteenth century, oaths remained in common use for a wide variety of purposes. For example, oaths were ubiquitous in civil society, taken on a peer-to-peer basis on admission to friendly societies, trade unions, and various forms of voluntary association. Similarly, although the use of oaths as religious tests to disbar non-Anglicans from public office was largely dismantled in the nineteenth century, this does not explain the varied and continued use of written and oral oaths right  up to the present day. Rather than charting a decline from an early modern peak and seeing oaths as an archaic practice that retains a residual presence today, we instead want to explore the different roles that oaths perform and have performed and why this  has mattered in different temporal, geographic, social, and political contexts.  

This one-day interdisciplinary conference to be held on Friday 7 March 2025 at Northumbria University in Newcastle seeks to bring together early modern and modern historians, as well as scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, to consider the historical and contemporary roles of oaths and oath-taking in Britain and Ireland, and beyond. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Prof. Ted Vallance (Roehampton).  

Possible topics could include, but are not confined to:

Language and rituals of oaths
Subversive oaths
Oaths and secrecy  
Religious oaths and tests
Loyalty, the constitution, and the state
Assertory and promissory oaths
Perjury and oaths as legal instruments
Oaths and modernity
Oaths, business, and capitalism
Oaths, performance, practice, and behaviour
Oaths as speech acts
Oaths, vows, swearing, and promises
Oaths and dispute resolution
Oath and material culture
Literacy and oath taking
Oaths and the history of emotions
Resisting oaths
Conscience and notions of honour
Oaths and marriage
Oaths as abjurations
Oaths and professionalism
Mundane / profane oaths
Comparative perspectives on oaths and oath-taking
 
We welcome proposals of c. 250 words (for 15-minute in-person presentations) concerning these or other topics, to be submitted, along with a short CV, by the end of Friday, 20 December 2024. The submissions should be sent  to henry.miller@northumbria.ac.uk.  Proposers will be informed of the outcome in early January 2025.  

We have some limited funding available to support travel and, if appropriate, accommodation, expenses costs of speakers: this will be reserved for those who are early career researchers, independent scholars, or in fixed term posts. If you wish to be considered  for this financial support, please indicate your likely costs of attending the workshop; and we would also ask that you first draw on any internal sources to which you have access.

ASLH Sutherland Prize to Jonathan Connolly

Continuing our round-up of the awards and prizes announced at the 2024 meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Sutherland Prize. About the prize:

[N]amed in honor of the late Donald W. Sutherland, a distinguished historian of the law of medieval England and a mentor of many students, is awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Sutherland Prize Committee, to the person or persons who wrote the best article on the legal history of Britain and/or the British Empire published in the previous year.

This year's winner was Jonathan Connolly (Princeton University), for “Reading Morant Bay: Protest, Inquiry and Colonial Rule,” Law and History Review 41 (2023): 193-216. The citation:

Jonathan Connolly’s insightful, tightly-argued and compelling essay uncovers a new and deeper understanding of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. This uprising in post-emancipation Jamaica, and its violent suppression, have been widely interpreted as a “transformative crisis of empire” that simultaneously consolidated racist attitudes among imperial Britons and engendered seminal British debates about justice, sovereignty and the rule of law. By focusing on legal process, and debates over adherence to process, Connolly shows how law produced meaning in the aftermath of the rebellion. He traces the ways in which a royal commission of inquiry, swiftly assembled to investigate events in Jamaica, adopted a legalistic focus on the “proximate cause” of rebellion. This lawyerly focus, combined with the racialized bias that led commissioners to discount testimony provided by black Jamaicans, enabled them to narrowly limit the events to be investigated. While protesters in Jamaica had engaged in widespread and systematic critique of colonial misgovernment, Connolly argues, commissioners successfully reframed that scandal of misrule so that it was understood to be a scandal about the violent use of martial law by Jamaican Governor Edward John Eyre. This “process of discursive transformation” was completed in the subsequent prosecutions, and debates over those prosecutions, that made up the “Governor Eyre controversy.”

Congratulations to Professor Connolly!

-- Karen Tani

The Slavery, Law and Power Project

[We recently noticed the project on Slavery, Law and Power in the British Empire and Early America at the University of Maryland, created with the support of the National Archives and the American Society for Legal History.  Here is its description.  DRE.]

SLP (Slavery, Law, and Power) is a project dedicated to bringing the many disparate sources that help to explain the long history of slavery and its connection to struggles over power in early America, particularly in the colonies that would become the United States. Going back to the early English Empire, this project traces the rise of the slave trade along with the parallel struggles between monarchical power and early democratic institutions and ideals. We are creating a curated set of documents that help researchers and students to understand the background to the fierce struggles over both slavery and power during the American Revolution, when questions of monarchical power, consent to government, and hereditary slavery were all fiercely debated. After America separated from Britain, the United States was still deeply influenced by this long history, especially up to the Civil War. The colonial legacies of these debates continued to affect the course of politics, law, and justice in American society as a whole.

America’s current struggles over authoritarianism and democracy, over racism and social justice, have long roots. Whereas most historians began their explorations of those roots with the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, or in some cases with individual colonies’ discrete history with regard to slavery or democracy, this project aims to help scholars access that longer history within the context of the larger power structure of the British Empire. The Slavery, Law, and Power (SLP) project focuses on primary sources that expose the debates and struggles over slavery and power in the early modern British Empire and in the new United States. At present many of these sources are buried in archives–in difficult old handwriting–and scattered across institutions, many geographically remote from each other. When some of these materials are accessible via scanned databases, they are often behind a cascade of different paywalls.  It is thus difficult for scholars to see how the structures of power connected, or to see how those imperial structures in many ways promoted not only authoritarian governance, but also slavery.

Under royal patronage, slavery, and the slave trade (and Britain’s role in it) expanded exponentially across its empire on the African coast and in the Americas (even when “free trade” in slaves was permitted in slaves after 1698, that trade was protected at great expense by the Royal Navy). At the same time this period marked the birth of what we now call democratic principles and legal practices. How these connect is a crucial and difficult question that for too long we have been trying to answer without sufficient access to the evidence that helps us to see how structures of governance interacted with the polices, that helps us understand individual actions without a broader context.

Piecing together these struggles over policies and practices requires that many of the original sources be put in conversation.  But these sources are so difficult to access that most scholars have consulted only fragments of this larger record. SLP seeks to enable historians, political theorists and scientists, and scholars in African American, American, and British studies to access materials that reveal how power and law, censorship and propaganda, political theory and religion, all influenced and connected to the development of racial chattel slavery–and its eventual demise–in the British Empire and the United States.

Maynooth History Research Seminar

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Maynooth University announces a History Research Seminar on Thursday, October 17, 2024, from 17:00 to 19:15, in AHI Seminar Room 1.33, First Floor, IONTAS.  All are welcome.

Session one: 5.00pm-6.00pm

Dr Ashok Malhotra (School of History, Anthropology, Politics & Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast)
Establishing Imperial Nutritional and Agricultural Scientific Research Institutes in British India, 1918-29

Ashok Malhotra is a historian of British India and of twentieth-century global organic farming movement. He holds a PhD from Edinburgh University and had been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. His publications include Making British Indian fictions, 1772-1823 (2012). His current research project explores how colonial and agricultural research, undertaken in British India in the twentieth century, shaped the organic and environmental movements that emerged during the 1940s and 60s in Britain and the United States.

Session two: 6.00pm-7.15pm

Donal Coffey (Department of Law, Maynooth University)
An Imperial legal service in inter-War London

Dr Donal Coffey specialises in contemporary constitutional law and comparative constitutional history and is specifically interested in the constitutional history of the British Empire.  He holds a PhD from University College Dublin, his publications include Drafting Irish Constitution, 1935-1937 (2018) and Constitutionalism in Ireland, 1932-1938 (2018), and he is an Affiliate Researcher of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main.

Weekend Roundup

• The recording of that interview of Robert Post, on his Holmes Devise volume, The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, by William M. Treanor is here.   
  

• For the Stanford Legal podcast, Pam Karlan and Richard Thompson Ford interview Jonathan Gienapp on Challenging Originalism: Putting the Electoral College, Presidential Immunity, and Recent SCOTUS Decisions into Historical Context.
  

• On Tuesday, October 1, at 11:30 a.m., Esteban Llamosas (National University of Córdoba), will speak on Economía Política (y católica) en la enseñanza jurídica cordobesa: traducción del liberalismo en la Universidad de Córdoba (Argentina) en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, in the Legal History Colloquium of the law faculty of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.  It will take place in Seminar IV and may be viewed via Zoom.  (Meeting ID: 829 1079 8716 / Access Code: 609743).

• The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will hold a book launch for South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Towards a Historical Ontology of the Law, by Faisal Chaudhry, on Friday, October 04, 2024 at 12:00pm to 1:15pm in the Law School Moot Court Room.  The event will be bring together historians of South Asia (Tiraana Bains, Osama Siddiqui, and Sana Haroon) and Duncan Kennedy. Danya Reda, Wayne State Law, will moderate.  For Zoom access to the event, contact hfern@umassd.edu. 
  

• Also on Friday, October 4, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court Historical Society will commemorate the career of Sandra Day O’Connor with the panel Center Court: Justice Sandra day O’Connor and the Supreme Court.  It will take place in the Montpelier Room 101 in the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress from 4:30 with a panel starting at 5:00. The panelists are Neomi Rao, Julie Rose O’Sullivan, Joan Biskupic, and Theodore Olson.  Kimberly Atkins Stohr will moderate.  YouTube coverage is here.  Register to attend here.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has a new and very substantial post on the history of treaties in the federal courts.
  

• "Sylvia Mendez was just eight when she became part of a landmark school desegregation case that helped pave the way for the famous Brown v. Board ruling a decade later." The blog of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts tells the story of Mendez v. Westminster in a new Moments in History video.  
  

• Grace Mallon has been appointed to the Clive Holmes Fellowship in History at Lady Margaret Hall.  More.
  

• "The Historical Society of the New York Courts has named Allison M. Morey as its new Executive Director."  More. 
  

• "The FDR Presidential Library and Museum and the Gillespie Forum present a lecture and discussion with Jeffrey Urbin: Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt: Progressives in the New Deal on Tuesday, October 1, 2024 at 7:00 p.m."
  

• "In celebration of Constitution Day and the five-year anniversary of the Library of Congress website, the Constitution Annotated online, the Library of Congress is launching “Our Constitution,” a monthly podcast series that introduces listeners to the foundational legal document of the United States and how the nation’s charter has been interpreted over time."   More.
  

• Years ago, my then-colleagues Richard Chused and Wendy W. Williams taught a legendary seminar on Women's Legal History at Georgetown Law.  I had to smile, then, when I saw that Susan Damplo, one of their students in the 1987 offering of the seminar and now a New-York-City based lawyer, just posted the paper she wrote then to SSRN.  It is Federally Sponsored Childcare During World War II: An Idea Before Its Time.  DRE.

• 
  ICYMI: Rare Copy of U.S. Constitution, Found in a File Cabinet, Is Up for Auction (NYT).  ABA will bring lawyers to the UK to celebrate historic 1924 visit (ABAJ).  Linda Colley reviews The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom (NYRB). Cass Sunstein reviews Jonathan Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (WaPo). "Originalism Was Impossible," says Eric L. Muller (The Atlantic).

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