Weekend Roundup

• Rosa Goluboff and G. Edward White reflect on the enduring legacy of the Declaration of Independence (Virginia Law). 

• William Novak reflects on Polan Fellowship and the Future of Democracy (Michigan Law).  

• Legal historian Jennifer Mnookin is now president of Columbia University (NYT). 

•  For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical: a preview of Rachel Shelden's forthcoming The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History (TPM).

• The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory is expanding its collaboration with India through the launch of the Centre for Legal History of India, in cooperation with the National Law School of India University in Bangalore and the NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad. 

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  The July newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here.  It includes a report of the Society's recent panel on U.S. v. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

• A new exhibit at the Law Library of Congress: The US Code at 100.

• From the Touro Law Review: a podcast episode featuring David S. Reynolds, interviewed by Rodger Citron, on Reynolds's recent book The Two Ships That Shaped America: The Mayflower, the White Lion, and the History of the Nation.  

• ICYMI: Sarah Trott on the five time the U.S. Constitution has come under threat (Conversation).   Anna Snyder asks, Why do historians complicate things? (Contingent).   Guénaël Mettraux on the history of war crimes (Articles of War).  The history of fireworks in Ohio (CNO). An interview with Jill Lepore on the Constitution (Jacobin).  Herbert Hovenkamp on the history of the rule of reason in antitrust law.  

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

Weekend Roundup

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  ASLH President Mitra Sharafi discusses Fear of the False, "her new book about colonial South Asia's critical role in the development of forensic science" on Law in Action, the podcast of the University of Wisconsin Law School.   

• From the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History: John Fea (Messiah University) on "Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students." 

• Another memorial to the late Gordon Wood, via History News Network x Bunk History. 

• "The History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) has released 'The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,' the first comprehensive report documenting and analyzing the Trump administration’s sweeping, coordinated effort since January 2025 to reshape how the American past is recorded, preserved, and shared with the public" (OAH).

• Steven Hahn reviews Born Equal: The Remaking of America’s Constitution, 1840–1920
  by Akhil Reed Amar (The Nation). 

• Via H-Disability: a memorial to Richard K. Scotch, author of multiple landmark histories of disability law and policy. 

• A call for papers for a conference on the Legal History of Tamilnadu.  Deadline for abstracts: June 15.  

• The conference "Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution" will take place at UMass Amherst from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 12, 2026 (H-Law).

• "Students from Stanford Law School’s Center for Racial Justice recently helped bring Wong [Kim Ark]’s story to life through a Bay Area public-history project that joins law, art, and community memory" (Stanford Lawyer).  

• U.S. Representative French Hill has introduced a bill to require the Department of the Interior to study the preservation and incorporation into the National Park System of the home of Scipio Jones (QQ) 

• A recording of the webinar, Equality and Exclusion: Israel's Constitutional Order and Its Palestinian-Arab Minority (1948–2025), with Ofra Bloch, moderated by Jon D. Michaels (UCLA).

•  ICYMI: Eric Segall asks that we "Please Stop Calling the Roberts Court Justices Originalists" (Dorf of Law). Jamelle Bouie discusses the so-called "Colored Conventions" of the nineteenth century in arguing that "The Supreme Court Doesn’t Own the Constitution" (NYT).

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

CFP: Forum on International Legal History & Philosophy

[We have the following CFP for a Forum on International Legal History & Philosophy at the Chanakya National Law University in Patna, India.  DRE]

This Call for ideas (in the form of detailed abstracts) invites scholars working in International Law, Constitutional Law, and Legal Philosophy, whether individually or through interdisciplinary approaches. The contours of the forum are outlined below in two overlapping and porous themes.

Aims.  We intend to stimulate discourse on international legal history and theory employing regional and archival lens. We expect a rough sketch of your clearly formulated idea to make such stimulations. We aim to discuss the vitality of your research ideas for them to be transformed into future research (beyond this forum). 

Thematic Background: Legal History.  The word 'civilization' has re-entered academic discourse, only this time it is the East which is assertive of it. India is asserting its civilizational heritage by calling itself the 'mother of democracy'. However, the evidence of it (for example, Sangha) points more towards democratic values, like public participation, than a political system of democracy. Alongside this civilizational assertion is a renewed emphasis on "decolonizing" India, including in the field of law, though both the efficacy of these efforts and the normative framework of "decolonization" itself remain contested. While these debates have gained traction in International Relations (see the March 2023 issue of International Affairs on "India as a 'civilizational state'"), their implications for international law, legal history, and legal philosophy remain underexplored.

This Call invites scholars of international law, legal history, and legal philosophy to intervene in this debate through a focused regional and archival lens. While earlier works, such as C. H. Alexandrowicz's discussion of the Mandala system situating Kautilya within the Law of Nations (1965), have addressed cognate themes, this project concentrates specifically on Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, including their pre-modern formations. Thus, Pataliputra, Azimabad, and Patna, while essentially the same site, retain their individuality and continuity across time and space. Contributions on neglected princely states and provinces such as Arah, Awadh, Benaras, Baksar, Betiyah, Champaran, Darbhanga, Sasaram, Sagauli, among others, are especially welcome. 

Many of these entities were classified as "Zemindari estates" rather than "Princely states." Colonial Bihar thus reveals how international law sustained empire not by outright denial of sovereignty, but by withholding international legal personality from polities that governed in every meaningful sense. The contemporary relevance of these discriminatory practices persists, as illustrated by the 1st and the 26th Amendment to the Indian Constitution, land reform Act of Bihar and U.P. 1950, State of Bihar v Radha Krishna Singh & Ors (1983) and The Vesting of Bettiah Raj Properties Act, 2024.

The Call also encourages works on figures such as Veer Kunwar Singh and Begum Hazrat Mahal, particularly research drawing on archives from the National Archives of India, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, and the Khuda Baksh Oriental Library (Patna). Finally, it seeks renewed readings of colonial constitutional instruments, such as the Pitt's India Act (1784) and the Government of India Act (1833), and the constitution-like document drafted during the early days of the 1857 revolt.

The Call, therefore, asks: How does colonial legal invisibility structure postcolonial international law? What legal techniques differentiated Zemindari estates and Princely states? How do colonial legal categories shape postcolonial constitutional disputes? What do colonial legislations tell us about the constitutional origins of international law? How did British colonial rule transform indigenous sovereignty into quasi-sovereign authority without formal annexation (of places like Betiyah-Raj and Darbhanga-Raj)? 
           
Thematic Background: Indian Legal Philosophy.  A related interest of this call is Indian (legal) philosophy. While no Indian philosophical school explicitly identifies itself as "legal", the Nyaya tradition, through its sustained engagement with Pramana, Prameya, Tarka, Nirnaya, Sabda, Artha etc., offers a systematic framework grounded in logic and epistemology.

This project is interested in works exploring the connections between the Nyaya school and decolonization and retains the regional focus. Gotama (or Aksapada Gautama) who composed Nyaya Sutras, Panini (composer of Astadhyayi), Gangesa (pioneer of Navya-Nyaya branch), Udayanacarya (defended Nyaya school against Buddhist critiques), Vachaspati Misra (Critique of Nyaya school), Kautilya (whose thoughts on Anviksiki was used by Gotama for Nyaya school) were all either based in the Bihar region or wrote their works here. 

We, therefore, encourage scholars to explore the fields of Nyaya, Vaisesika, Navya- Nyaya (through works of Gangesa), and of Panini's Astadhyay1. While Panini tells us how reasoning works Nyaya explains why reasoning works. Scholars working exclusively in the field of philosophy, and those working on legal philosophy are welcome to respond to this call.

Participation details.  If your research aligns with either of these themes or questions, we invite you to participate in this Forum, as:

1.    Presenters.  If you would like to present your research, you are requested to submit a 500-word abstract, clearly setting out

• the central theme(s) of your research, 
• your core research question(s),  
• three to five literatures you are engaging with,
• your name, position and affiliation. 

We will select abstracts based upon the novelty, strength and coherence. The selected participants will then be required to submit a preliminary draft of not more than 1500 words one week before the Forum, i.e. on 8th April 2026 for thorough academic engagement with your research. Participants will have ten minutes to present their work at the forum. 

There will be no sections or panels at the forum. Each participant will be expected to attend all the presentations. This is aimed at breaking departmental barriers and fostering interdisciplinary engagements from which both lawyers, historians and philosophers can gain.

2.    Engaged Listeners.  Scholars from the field of law, history and philosophy (including teachers, PhD Scholars) and students (including graduate and post graduate students) who are interested in understanding and potentially developing future work on these themes with us are invited to join the forum as Engaged Listeners. Engaged listeners will have access to all presentations at the forum and will have chance to interact with the presenters within and outside the forum, providing an opportunity to refine their research interests and to contribute to the project in the future.

For participating as engaged listeners, individuals are requested to submit a 200-word statement outlining their reasons and motivations for participating, and their primary areas of interest (identifying two to three such areas), and their name, position and affiliation. 

Presenters and Engaged Listeners should send their abstracts to ilhilpf@gmail.com.

Date and Venue.  10 AM to 5 PM, 15 April 2026 at Chanakya National Law University, Patna, Bihar, India.

Key dates:
15 March 2026.  Submission of abstracts (by presenters) & interests (by engaged listeners)   
25 March 2026   Communication of selection (for presenters & listeners)   
5 April 2026       Registration   
8 April 2026       Research outline submission (by presenters)  
 

Registration details:  
For presenters:

• For undergraduate, postgraduate students and PhD scholars: Rs. 500/- 
• For teachers and practitioners: Rs. 1000/- 

There is no participation fee for the engaged listeners.

The Project is being led by Aman Kumar, PhD Candidate at the Australian National University, Canberra. The Forum is convened by Dr Swati Singh Parmar (DNLU, Jabalpur) and Dr Aditya Roy (CNLU, Patna).

De and Shani's "Assembling India's Constitution"

Rohit De, Yale University, and Ornit Shani, University of Haifa, have published Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History (Cambridge University Press): 

 In this paradigm-shifting history, two leading historians of India re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, Ornit Shani and Rohit De instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.

--Dan Ernst 

ASLH Burbank Article Prize to Fei

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize. About this prize: 

The Jane Burbank Article Prize in global legal history will be awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history published in the previous calendar year. Submissions may address any topic or period, and may focus on case studies in which the analysis relates to broader processes or comparisons. Articles on methodological or theoretical contributions are also welcome.

The 2025 Burbank Prize winner was Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections,” Past and Present 266:1 (2025): 40-74. The citation:

In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a collection of letters and documents which includes a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved people she owned, conducted in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels: the case summary itself and its process, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use.

An Honorable Mention went to Rui Hua (Boston University), for “The Cheese, the Worm, and the Law: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian Borderland, 1906-1927,” Modern Asian Studies 58:4 (2024): 1201-1221.

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani 

 

Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Centre for Legal History of India

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The newly established Centre for Legal History of India (CLHI) at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany, has just advertised three PhD positions and a postdoc position in the field of Indian legal history, all of which are fully funded. 

[The CLHI] is dedicated to advancing research and academic collaboration in the field of Indian legal history. Its primary objective is to strengthen and professionalize the discipline by providing training, mentorship, and resources to doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, equipping them to produce high-quality scholarship.

The Centre seeks to foster a collaborative environment where scholars can engage in critical dialogue about both the current state and future scope of research and pedagogy in this diverse field. Building on a multilateral network connecting institutions and researchers within India and internationally, the Centre showcases the richness and breadth of Indian legal history, identifying areas of common ground while highlighting the diversity of legal traditions and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Indian legal history has long been a significant focus in the Department of European and Comparative Legal History, especially in the context of the study of legal transfers within the common law world. Given the central role of the Indian subcontinent in the history of the British Empire and the deep and varied legal traditions therein, the Centre aims to contribute towards developing legal history in India as a distinct and valuable field of study that merits dedicated resources and sustained scholarly attention.

The Centre maintains formal collaborations with leading Indian law schools NLSIU Bangalore and NALSAR. It is supported by a Centre Advisory Council and has a dedicated visitors’ programme.

Symposium on Sharafi's "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947"

A symposium in Modern Asian Studies is devoted to an article by Mitra Sharafi, Wisconsin Law, who is the new President of the American Society for Legal History.  Professor Sharafi's  article was "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947: A medico-legal history," published in Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021): 371–428.  The just-published symposium includes comments by Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University; Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University; and Philippa Levine, Emerita, University of Texas; with a response by Professor Sharafi.

--Dan Ernst 

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

Aulakh's "Empire and the Peasant Proprietor"

Preet S. Aulakh,York University, has published Empire and the Peasant Proprietor: Inter-Colony Land Reform in the Victorian Era (Oxford University Press):

As the British Empire consolidated its geographical possession of distant lands by the 19th century, the agrarian nature of its colonies necessitated careful considerations about land tenure relationships. After intense debates around property rights and political economy, several land laws were enacted across the Empire between 1868 and 1875, which recognised the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators. Empire and the Peasant Proprietor examines this transformative shift in the imperial approaches to land tenure.

Through a comparative analysis of historical land tenure arrangements in three diverse colonial sites, Punjab, Ireland, and Prince Edward Island, the book identifies two crucial mechanisms which facilitated the institutionalisation of peasant proprietorship. One, there was a fortuitous ideological alignment between important governing agents in the three colonies. Two, the debate about the impact of land reform in the colonies on the 'sanctity' of English principles was redirected, allowing for inter-colony analogies and precedents to support the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators.

Empire and the Peasant Proprietor demonstrates the importance of these reciprocal influences within the imperial system and provides insight into contemporary challenges of secure land rights for a large proportion of the global population that continues to be dependent on agriculture for sustenance.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

--Dan Ernst

Tsai and Levinson on Caste

Robert L. Tsai, Boston University School of Law, and Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School, have posted Under What Circumstances is “Caste” Likely to Be a Useful Analytic Concept (and Should We Care)?:

There is growing interest among egalitarians to embrace "caste" to analyze forms of inequality in the United States. In this essay, we offer a few reservations about this trend. First, we note some general limits to arguments by analogy. Second, we point to some historical and legal differences between the caste system in India and the system of American slavery and segregration that followed. Third, if caste analysis were to take hold in American law, many more cultural practices (and perhaps even the value of pluralism itself) would need to be reconsidered. Fourth, there is some risk that the anti-caste project could lead to a proliferation of groups and conditions problematically characterized as "backward," and thereby paradoxically fixing social status in the political imagination. Relatedly, caste analysis in the law might obscure subtleties in material inequality. Fifth, even when caste is used purely as a trope for political mobilization, we note concerns of intelligibility and persuasiveness that ought to be taken into account. 

--Dan Ernst 

Law & Society Dissertation Prize to Fei

At the recent meeting of the Law and Society Association, the winner of the annual Dissertation Prize was announced. The award went to Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for a dissertation titled "Local Women, Global Histories? Gendering Economic Life, Law, and Islam in Early Modern Transregional India." The citation:

Du Fei, Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, who earned his PhD from Cornell University, has been selected as the winner of this year’s Dissertation Prize. His dissertation, “Local Women, Global Histories? Gendering Economic Life, Law, and Islam in Early Modern Transregional India,” challenges gendered constructions of Islamic law and reveals how gender-insensitive narratives have shaped dominant histories of trade and travel in global Islam. 

Historians have long traced the movements of merchants, colonizers, and legal professionals across transregional India, often casting men as global actors and non-European women as local, domestic subjects. But what was it precisely that made some of these histories “global” and others “local”? What roles did women actually play in the economic life of the time, and how did they engage with legal systems, while navigating financial and social networks? Drawing on extraordinarily rich archival research and sharp theoretical analysis, Fei’s dissertation uncovers a fascinating inversion of mainstream assumptions about the histories of gender in Islam. 

While Muslim women in transregional India are often portrayed as passive or economically marginalized, Fei shows that some acted as strategic negotiators—engaging with jurists, judges, and male kin to assert claims through Islamic law on property and inheritance. Rather than being confined to the private sphere, these women regularly negotiated with male kin, jurists, judges, and officials in multiple courts. Taking readers across the lands and seas of South Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, Fei effectively constructs a new archive for the legal history of South Asia, drawing on sources in Persian, Arabic, English, and Dutch.  

By positioning the household as a critical site of economic activity, the dissertation also unsettles simplistic accounts of patriarchy and offers a major methodological and substantive contribution to the economic and legal history of global early modernity. It advances scholarship on legal pluralism by demonstrating how women navigated overlapping legal traditions as they engaged in debates among Muslim jurists, colonial officials, and Orientalists. In short, Fei’s dissertation represents the epitome of law and society scholarship. 

The committee unanimously praised the exceptional reach of the dissertation, spanning gender studies, legal history, and Islamic studies, and its potential to mark a leap forward in socio-legal scholarship that employs historical analysis. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, the dissertation lays the groundwork for an important interdisciplinary intervention. In a period marked by opportunistic originalism, it offers socio-legal scholars a compelling example of how careful archival rereading can serve as a powerful counterpoint in legal argumentation about global histories. 

Congratulations to Professor Fei!

Ray, "The Trial That Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence"

Routledge India has released The Trial That Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence (2024), by Ashish Ray. A description from the Press:

The Indian National Army (INA) trials of 1945-46 have generally been given short shrift by historians in their cataloguing of the Indian freedom movement. This book examines to what extent the trials had an impact on the final phase of India's quest for independence. In so doing, it unveils that, while the Indian National Congress's extended odyssey to win independence was essentially about a passive push-back, at a critical juncture of its campaign to extinguish British colonialism in India, it applauded and capitalised on the INA's use of force. The central, explosive narrative is about Britain holding a court martial of three officers of the INA - Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon - convicting them, before a dramatic turn in events.

The material unearthed by the book throws new light on a decisive juncture leading to the transfer of power in India. It will be indispensable for researchers interested in South Asia, especially the Indian freedom movement. It will be invaluable for students of history, colonialism, military studies, politics in pre-Partition India and law.

An interview with the author is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Fleming's "Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurisprudence"

 Christopher T. Fleming has published Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurisprudence in the British Academy Monographs of Oxford University Press:

This monograph outlines the core principles of Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit jurisprudence (Dharmasastra) and traces their application in the practical legal administration of religious and charitable endowments throughout Indian history. Dharmasastra describes phenomena that, in Anglo-American jurisprudence, are associated with courts of equity: the management of religious and charitable trusts; and the guardianship of those who lack legal capacity. Drawing on Sanskrit jurisprudential and philosophical texts, ancient inscriptions, Persian legal documents, colonial-era law reports, and contemporary case law, Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurispudence demonstrates that India's rulers have drawn on rich and venerable Sanskrit jurisprudential principles of equity and trusts in their efforts to regulate religious and charitable endowments. This book presents the history of India as a history of trusts, revealing how the contemporary law of Hindu religious endowments is subtended by a rich mélange of Sanskritic, Persianate, British, and constitutional jurisprudential principles.

--Dan Ernst

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

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

Sreenivas on Legalizing Abortion in India

Mytheli Sreenivas, Ohio State University, has published Population, Eugenics and Reproductive Rights: Legalising Abortion in India, 1966–71 open access in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies:

This article analyses the 1971 passage of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, which created a framework for legal abortion in India. Examining the policy and legislative discourses that led to abortion reform, it demonstrates that the history of the MTP Act is not a simple trajectory of advancing the reproductive rights of pregnant persons. Rather, a connection to regimes of population control marked the MTP Act in enduring ways, notably by linking abortion to family planning, and by justifying the procedure as a eugenic response to disability. This history suggests why a rights-based approach to abortion has been so elusive, with enduring impact on access to abortion care.

--Dan Ernst

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.

CFP: Contours of Legal History in India

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory are organising a Legal History Workshop, titled Contours of Legal History In India: Pedagogy and Research, on March 27 and 28, 2025, at the NLSIU campus.

About the Workshop.  Emerging research on legal history in India has emphasized upon the dynamic life of  law, going beyond its doctrinal imperatives, and highlighting histories of petitioners, lawyers, and litigants both in the courtrooms and outside it. Legal historical research includes new archives and methodologies for rethinking the relationship of law with society – that is, between the normative imaginings rooted in the realm of ideas and intellectual legacies and the everyday experiences of law rooted in mundane operations. ‘Contours of Legal History in India: Pedagogy and Research’ is the first workshop co-organized by the Max Planck Institute of Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt (Germany) and National Law School of India University, Bangalore (India) that will bring together researchers, scholars, and students to discuss the new imperatives in the field of legal history in India.

In the recent clamour to “decolonize”, pre-colonial pasts have often been rendered timeless, while the postcolonial moment has been interpreted as a replica of a “monolithic colonial”. How do we analyze the colonial genealogies of law in contemporary India? What about the precolonial iterations of law in the modern? What are the intersections of historical and legal methodologies and sources? What constitutes legal history in India? How does research intervene in, instruct, create pedagogical practices in both law and history?

Call for Papers.  The Contours of Legal History in India workshop invites contributions from PhD students and early career researchers working on the history of law and legal practices in India. We are interested in research that focuses on the social, cultural, economic, political, and the textual world of law across the colonial, postcolonial, and pre-colonial time periods. By keeping the temporal scope of the submissions wide, this workshop also aims to forge a critical dialogue between the fields of modern, pre-modern, and early-modern legal histories. In so doing, we hope to reinvigorate the debates on historical continuities and discontinuities and situate our respective works within this fragmented continuum.

Contours of Legal History in India is a two-day workshop to be held at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru on 27 & 28 March 2025. PhD students (preferably in their writing stage) and early career researchers affiliated to Indian universities are encouraged to apply. The workshop organisers will provide financial and infrastructural support towards travel and accommodation.

Submission Guidelines.  In keeping with the format of the workshop, selected applicants will be able to discuss their ongoing research, receive inputs from peers and experts, and explore writing strategies and publishing opportunities.

The submissions can focus on the following historical themes:

    Legal Histories, Archives, and Methods
    Imperialism, Nationalism, Sovereignty
    Material and Visual Histories of Law
    Borders, Migrations, and Legal Regimes
    Science in Law
    Hierarchy, Inequality, Legal Identities

Proposal Submission Deadline.  Those interested should send in a 400 word abstract of their work and a 200 word biography by October 20, 2024 before 11:59 PM IST to clhi@lhlt.mpg.de

Please make sure to attach your abstract and bio as a single PDF document using your full name as the title of the file.

Note: Please mention which theme your work fits into in your abstract. If your research speaks to multiple themes or neither of the above, do mention that too.

Important dates.  Selected applicants will be contacted by December 20, 2024.  Upon selection, workshop participants will have to submit a 4000 word draft developing their proposal and submit by February 15, 2025. Since it is a workshop, participants will be required to read all the papers from their panel.

For any questions or clarifications, write to: Dr. Reeju  Ray (ray@lhlt.mpg.de)

Chaudhry's "South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought"

Faisal Chaudhry, University of Massachusetts School of Law, has published South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford University Press):

This book delves into the legal history of colonial governance in South Asia, spanning the period from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a notable shift in the way sovereignty, land control, and legal rectification were conceptualized, particularly after 1858. During the early phase of the rule of the East India Company, the focus was on 'the laws' that influenced the administration of justice rather than 'the law' as a comprehensive normative system. The Company's perspective emphasized absolute property rights, particularly concerning land rent, rather than physical control over land. This viewpoint was expressed through the obligation of revenue payment, with property existing somewhat outside the realm of law. This early colonial South Asian legal framework differed significantly from the Anglo-common law tradition, which had already developed a unified and physical concept of property rights as a distinct legal form by the late 18th century. It was only after the transfer of authority from the Company to the British Crown, along with other shifts in the imperial political economy, that the conditions were ripe for 'the law' to emerge as an autonomous and fundamental institutional concept. One of the contributing factors to this transformation was the emergence of classical legal thought. Under Crown rule, two distinct forms of discourse contributed to reshaping the legal ontology around the globalized notion of 'the law' as an independent concept. The book, adopting a historical approach to jurisprudence, categorizes these forms as doctrinal discourse, which could articulate propositions of the law with practical and administrative qualities, and ordinary language discourse, which conveyed ideas about the law, including in the public domain.

--Dan Ernst