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

Ramnath's "Boats in a Storm"

Kalyani Ramnath, University of Georgia, has published Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962 (Stanford University Press):

For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

--Dan Ernst

LHR 41:2

Law and History Review 41:2 has been published.  It is a remarkable, guest-edited collection of articles on Law, Courts, and Constitutions in Twentieth-Century South Asia, four of them published open access.

Law, Courts, and Constitutions in Twentieth-Century South Asia
Saumya Saxena, Alastair McClure

The Drafting of the Constitution of the Union of Burma in 1947: Dominion Status, Indo–Burmese Relations, and the Irish Example
Donal K. Coffey

Nepal's Constitutional Foundations between Revolution and Cold War (1950–60)
Mara Malagodi

Constitutions and Modernity in Post-Colonial Afghanistan: Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and the Making of an Afghan Nation-State
Elisabeth Leake

Negotiating Nationhood: Constitutional Warfare, International Law, and the Birth of Bangladesh
Cynthia Farid

Policing Sati: Law, Order, and Spectacle in Postcolonial India
Saumya Saxena

Killing in the Name Of? Capital Punishment in Colonial and Postcolonial India
Alastair McClure

Mergers and Legal Fictions: Coverture and Intermarried Women in India
Leilah Vevaina

Courts and Constitutions in South Asia and the Global South: A View from the Middle East
Faiz Ahmed 

--Dan Ernst

CFP: South Asia Legal Studies Workshop

Just released: the Call for Proposals & Commentators for the 17th Annual South Asia Legal Studies Workshop, which will be held in person: October 18, 2023, at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and virtually on December 1-2, 2023.  It invites a short paper or project proposal “relating to any aspect of the study of law and South Asia.”  The organizers write:

We understand “law” in its broadest sense to encompass not only state law, but also norms emanating from non-state sources and actors. We welcome proposals from a diverse array of disciplines and career paths and research on issues of timely interest and concern have been particularly well received at past workshops. Please note that those who presented during the last two years (2021 and 2022) are not eligible to apply.

--Dan Ernst

AJLH 62:2

Here is the TOC for American Journal of Legal History 62:2 (June 2022):

British Policy towards the Incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR: A Dilemma of de facto and de jure Recognition    
Evgeny Tikhonravov
 
The Judicial Failsafe: American Legal Colonialism in the Philippines    
Timothy J Foley
 
Amnesty and the Limits of Transitional Justice in Brazil: The Case of Expelled Low-Ranking Soldiers, 1964–2014    
Marilia Corrêa
 
Book Reviews
 
Susan J. Pearson, The Birth Certificate: An American History    
Teal Arcadi
 
Inge Van Hulle, Britain and International Law in West Africa    
Joyman Lee
 
Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification    
Marie-Amélie George

--Dan Ernst

Inagaki on the Rule of Law and Emergency in colonial India

Haruki Inagaki (Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan) has published The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India: Judicial Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century with Palgrave Macmillan. From the press:

This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians’ ‘forum shopping,’ the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King’s Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions—peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes—used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government’s indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company’s attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company’s charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.

Praise for the book: 

 “Inagaki’s methodical study demonstrates how the Company’s disputes and eventual subjugation of the independent King’s Court in Bombay embedded the logic of state necessity and perpetual emergency into the governing fabric of the British colonial regime. In so doing, it offers a compelling and important new insight into how colonial rule privileged security and political order over the rule of law.” - Mark Condos

“Britain’s empire did not arrive fully formed in India. Haruki Inagaki’s superbly-researched, well-argued book traces its emergence in a proliferating set of arguments between different groups of British officers, who variously fought with and co-opted Indian elites. It traces the debates which raged amongst British officers about the character of Britain’s presence in India during the early nineteenth century, in doing so unravelling the fractured, debated character of the imperial enterprise itself. British India’s Imperial constitution was, he argues, forged within the opposition between radically different logics of power. Inagaki’s book offers a compelling account of the real life of empire in motion. A vital contribution to the burgeoning field of imperial legal history, it speaks well beyond narrow thematic categories, and is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of empire more broadly and the Indian subcontinent.“ - Jon Wilson

Further information is available here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Here’s a description of Citizenship and Claims of Belonging in Australian Law and History, a research project based at the University of Sydney Law School, funded byt he Australian Research Council Special Research Initiatives.
  

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Michelle Bezark (Northwestern University), "History shows how to fix the U.S.'s abysmal maternal and infant mortality rates"; David Karol (University of Maryland, College Park), "Abortion will remain a national issue no matter what the Supreme Court does"; Bruce W. Dearstyne, "Unhappy about privacy laws? One teen showed how to force change"; Amy Sohn, "The moral crusader behind some of our most draconian, patriarchal laws."
  

• 
  Catch this virtual book event for South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives, edited by Neilesh Bose (University of Victoria): Thursday, Jan.13 at 4pm PST.
  

• Rethinking the Boundaries of Class: Labor History and Theories of Class and Capitalism, Julie Greene’s presidential address for the Labor and Working Class History Association, is open access in Labor though December 31.
  

• New online from the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic: The American Bar Association Looks to England, 1924 and 1957, by Christopher J Rowe.
  

•  ICYMI: Chief Justice Roberts and the Blackmun Papers (ABA Journal). Allen Guelzo discussed the Historical Foundation of the Roles and Powers of the President in a virtual event hosted by The Heritage Foundation (C-Span Classroom).  Fernanda Pirie on What Ancient Laws Can Teach Us About Holding Autocrats to Account Today (Time).
  

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

Medhi on the Indo-Afghan frontier

 Abhilash Medhi (Mount Holyoke) has published "Infrastructural Contingencies and Contingent Sovereignties on the Indo-Afghan Frontier" in Modern Asian Studies (2020), 1-38. Here's the abstract:

The Khyber Pass Railway is a defunct 42-kilometre-long railway line that connects the western reaches of Peshawar to the Afghan border. Completed in 1925 mainly to carry British troops, the railway line failed to attract decent passenger or commodity traffic. Instead, it made an impact on a more primal register. Negotiations carried out between the British Government of India and populations from around the Khyber to allow its construction reproduced and rearranged lines of authority among the latter. They also embedded colonial administrators in tribal hierarchies. Efforts to acquire land and labour opened up spaces of collaboration between the colonial administration and members of frontier tribes, effectively contributing towards a reconfiguration of sovereign power in the area. This article weaves questions of customary law and colonial legal cultures into a retelling of the history of the Khyber Pass Railway. Examining transactions across three domains of sovereign power—the economic right to use land, extension of juridical regimes, and territorial control—it argues that the operation of sovereignty in the late-colonial Indo–Afghan frontier did not adhere to conventional ideas about its concentration and monopoly. The colonial government as well as members of frontier tribes deployed the inconclusive nature of their transactions strategically and, often, sovereign power lay with the stakeholder who could determine which domains fell within the bounds of the sovereignty question and which domains fell without.

Further information is available on the Modern Asian Studies website via Cambridge University Press.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Landauer on Alexandrowicz and international law (part 2)

Carl Landauer, international lawyer, has published "The Polish Rider: C. H. Alexandrowicz and the reorientation of international law, Part II: declension and the promise of renewal" in the London Review of International Law, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2021), pp.3-36. We posted this on part 1 when it came out last year. Here's the abstract for part 2: 

This article is the second of a two-part analysis of the work of the international legal historian, CH Alexandrowicz. Part II analyses Alexandrowicz’s narrative of the decline of international law represented by 19th-century positivism and the scramble for African territory, where legal principles such as the protectorate became mere tools for acquisition, and treaties bereft of obligation. It traces his sympathy for the post-independence ‘new states’, his hope for the renewal of international law, the Romantic narrative imbuing his secular, modernist eschatology, and his continuing engagement with Indian Constitutional development.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

McQuade on terrorism and colonial law

 Joseph McQuade (University of Toronto) published A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea with Cambridge University Press in 2020. From the publisher: 

Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today.

Praise for the book:

"A brilliant deconstruction of the colonial prose of counter-terrorism and its post-colonial legacy, McQuade's book provides new insights into how legal states of exception were crafted to delegitimize revolutionary violence. A must read for anyone wishing to understand the true nature of British ‘rule of law' in India and its global ramifications." - Sugata Bose

"The declaration of a global war on terrorism in 2001 did not come out of the clear blue sky. Instead, as Joseph McQuade demonstrates in this brilliantly conceived and researched genealogy, some of its most forgotten roots lie in Britain's colonial administration in India and its diplomatic efforts on the world stage. An essential contribution to imperial and international legal history." - Samuel Moyn

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Amanda Frost, Bronfman Professor of Law & Government, American University Washington College of Law, will be speaking on her book You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers online at Politics & Prose on January 28.  More. 
  

• Linda Kerber and Lisa Moses Leff will comment at the first Washington History Seminar of 2021 on at 4 PM ET Monday when David Nasaw discusses his new book, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War.  Register here; watch here.

• Applications for the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History are due on January 15.  This two-week program of the American Society for Legal History for early career scholars will take place June 13-26, 2021.  Information here.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Gregory P. Downs (UC Davis) and Kate Masur (Northwestern University), "Yes, Wednesday’s attempted insurrection is who we are."
  

• If you're working on death, this Call for a Royal Holloway virtual conference (15-16 April 2021) may be of interest. Proposals for Until Death Do Us Part: Historical Perspectives on Death and Those Left Behind, 1300-1900 are due Jan.29, 2021.

• And here's another Call for a virtual conference, from the University of Reading (27 April 2021): Medieval Government Finance: Innovation and Experimentation. Proposals due by 19 Feb. 2021.

• “When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of conferences and public talks, the editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era organized a series of webinars with historians to discuss new books and research in Civil War era scholarship. The webinars are free, registration required, and the recordings are posted on the JCWE’s YouTube channel.”  The lineup for the first five months of 2021 lineup is here. 

• New from the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore: a brief introduction to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution.

• ICYMI:  Holly Brewer explains that Thomas Jefferson did not rig the 1800 election (Washington Monthly).  George F. Will doesn’t care for the Slaughterhouse Cases (WaPo).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• In the op-ed pages of the New York Times: John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) writes about how courts have historically responded to challenges to public health laws -- and how they are doing so today ("Republican Judges Are Quietly Upending Public Health Laws").

• In the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Bruce J. Shulman (Boston University) on how "Court-packing — and other radical constitutional reforms — might save America"; Daniel S. Luck on how "Originalism threatens to turn the clock back on race"; and more.
  

• Via Religion & Politics: Ronit Y. Stahl (University of California, Berkeley) on "The Book of Ruth: Justice Ginsburg on Religious Freedom."
  

• The David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University has recently updated its bibliography of the history of Israeli law to expand its coverage down to 1977.  The compilers write that they have consulted Palestinian and Arabic-language sources and would be very happy to receive further references.
  

• We’ve previously noted that Linda Kerber will deliver the 2020 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture from the College and Law at the University of Iowa at 3:00 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 28 and our now please to pass along word that Constance Backhouse, ASLH delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies and a former ASLH president, and former ASLH Treasurer, Craig Klafter, nominated Professor Kerber was nominated for this prize.
  

• A recording of the 2020 Roger Trask Lecture of the Society for History in the Federal Government, delivered by Bill Williams, formerly Chief of the Center for Cryptologic History at the National Security Agency, is here.

• We just wanted to make sure you all knew about Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of Chicago 7.  We still recall our viewing of the documentary William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, by the famous radical lawyer’s daughters.  

• The 14th Annual South Asia Legal Studies Workshop happened online this week, hosted by the University of Wisconsin Law School. It included a good crop of legal history papers (program here).

• "100 Years After the 19th Amendment: Their Legacy, and Our Future,” a traveling exhibit of the American Bar Association, opens at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law on October 18.  Several events are planned, and the UK Law Library has created an accompanying website.  More.
  

• ICYMI: Jack Rakove on originalism and Judge Barrett (WaPo).  Sara Georgini, series editor for The Papers of John Adams, On the Peaceful Transfer of Power: Lessons from 1800 (AHA Perspectives).  Michael Koncewicz, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, on Loyalty and Duty in the Federal Bureaucracy, From Nixon to Trump (HNN).
  

• Update: Over at IEHS Online, the website of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, Jane Hong interviews Lucy Salyer about Under the Starry Sky. (Also: it does have legs: I discussed Laws Harsh as Tigers in class this semester, too!  DRE.)
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Julia Rose Kraut, the Judith S. Kaye Fellow for the Historical Society of the New York Courts, will speak on her book Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States in the Washington History Seminar of the National History Center of the American Historical Association on October 14 at 4:00 ET.  From the announcement: "Kraut also highlights lawyers, including Clarence Darrow and Carol Weiss King."  Register here.
  

• The US Customs and Border Patrol has asked the National Archives to "designate as temporary all records regarding CBP’s dealings with DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: a recipient of complaints of civil rights abuses from across the department."  More. 
  

• The Docket 3:3 is now online.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has announced "Spotlight on Judicial History," a series of “brief essays, posted periodically, on a wide variety of interesting topics related to federal court history.  The first, by Jake Kobrick, is A Brief History of Circuit Riding.

• Lorianne Updike Toler, Information Society Project, Yale Law School, has posted The Publication of Constitutional Convention Records, a “ short history of the print and digital publication of all records of the Constitutional Convention, from 1787-2020.”
  

• The recording of the National History Center's congressional briefing, "Financial Responses to Economic Crisis," is here. 
  

• You had us at "Hughes": Avoiding Post-Election Chaos: Wilson vs. Hughes, 1916 by Matthew Waxman (Lawfare).  Also: a video on the history of housing discrimination in Arlington, VA.

• Update: Rutgers British Studies Center is hosting Empires of Law in Colonial South Asia this Monday at 12pm-1ET for a Q&A session (register here) with Tanya Agathocleous and our blogger Mitra Sharafi. The video talks are posted here.

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

McClure on whipping in colonial India

 Alastair McClure (University of Hong Kong) has published "Archaic Sovereignty and Colonial Law: The reintroduction of corporal punishment in colonial India, 1864-1909," Modern Asian Studies 54:4 (2020), 1712-47. Here's the abstract: 

The judicial and summary punishment of whipping—absent from the Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860—was passed into law through Act No. VI of 1864. This legislation, tacked on as an appendage to the IPC, invested the judge with wider discretionary powers to administer violence across Indian society. In this case what emerged was an evolving attempt to enlarge the colonial state’s capacity for quotidian violence, targeting certain bodies to reaffirm, manage, and police the social hierarchies upon which colonial sovereignty depended. In the context of a slow imperial movement away from the cast-iron distinctions that had been made between groups in the early nineteenth century—distinctions that had, among other things, supported a legally enforced system of slavery—new methods to mark the value of different bodies were created. The events of the 1850s, in particular the rebellion of 1857-1858, saw the re-emergence of the colonial idea that certain bodies could withstand violence, and that violence itself could be used to create economically productive colonial societies, in debates around penal law and punishment. This article will trace this history through formal legal restrictions and informal legal cultural practices in relation to corporal punishment in colonial India. Over the course of the period under study, this legislation introduced into law what one official termed ‘the category of the “whippable”’. Charting the changing shape of this legal category along lines of race, gender, caste, class, and age, the article will argue that a logic of exceptionality, channelled here through the application of judicial violence, attempted to structure and manage Indian society in complicated ways.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Burset on advisory opinions

 Christian Burset (Notre Dame Law School) has an article coming out in vol. 74 of the Vanderbilt Law Review, forthcoming in 2021. Here's the abstract posted on SSRN for "Advisory Opinions and the Founders' Crisis of Legal Authority" (Notre Dame Legal Studies Paper No.200826):

The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.

This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only in the United States, but also in England and British India—became opposed to advisory opinions in the second half of the eighteenth century. The death of advisory opinions was a global phenomenon, rooted in a crisis of common-law authority.

Early modern English judges had routinely advised the Crown. This advisory role was politically fraught but doctrinally unproblematic thanks to a jurisprudential orthodoxy that treated judges’ opinions as evidence of a preexisting common law. Although this declaratory theory survived into the nineteenth century (and beyond), it began to fragment after 1750, as lawyers began to disagree about the nature of precedent. Those disagreements generated new pressure to clarify the weight of different kinds of legal authority. Most lawyers intuited that advisory opinions were less authoritative than decisions arising from litigation. But because bench and bar lacked a common theory of legal authority, they were unable to articulate a shared understanding of what respect was due to judges’ extrajudicial pronouncements. As a result, advisory opinions became dangerous, because the judges who issued them could not control how future readers might treat them. In response, judges sought to limit their advisory activity—first in England, then in British-controlled Bengal, and finally in the United States, whose judges inherited Britain’s contested and dynamic understanding of judicial power.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Weekend Roundup

• Anne C. Fleming is remembered, especially by other former Climenko Fellows, in Harvard Law Today. 

• The Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History, to be held virtually on December 5, 2020 has been announced.  Fergus Smith will present Civil Litigants in Nineteenth-Century Sheriff Courts.

•  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Turning a Blind Eye: Infanticide and Missing Babies in Seventeenth-Century Geneva, by Sara Beam

• Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943, by Richard F. Hamm, University of Albany at SUNY, has been published online in the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic.

• Over at Notches: Ishita Pande, Queen's University, on her new book, Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937.

• Over at Legal History Miscellany:  Sara M. Butler on Law Enforcement Officials and the Limits of Violence in Medieval England.

• Ryan Greenwood at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog: the University of Minnesota Law Library has an upcoming exhibit on the 1935 Commission on the Harlem Riot, Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

• “The Bangor Historical Society is presenting a virtual exhibit that will focus on the connection between fashion and women’s freedoms. ‘Interwoven: Women’s Fashion and Empowerment’ focuses on the history of women’s rights, including social, economic, legal and voting, while relating milestones and benchmarks with fashion trends by decade" (Bangor Daily News).  And the National Constitution Center also has a new exhibit on the 19th Amendment (Philly Voice).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued a catalogue of forty-one noteworthy titles on The Laws of War and Peace.

•  ICYMI: A review of Matthew Van Meter’s Deep Delta Justice (WaPo).  Mary Ziegler on What's Next for Abortion Law? (Boston Review).  UVA Law's first female students.

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

Special issue: Constitutional Legacies of Empire

 The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly has a special issue out on "The Constitutional Legacies of Empire," edited by Paul F. Scott (University of Glasgow). Here is the Table of Contents for vol.71, no.2 (summer 2020):

• Paul F. Scott, "Introduction: 'The Constitutional Legacies of Empire'"
• Jane Rooney, "Crown act of state and detention in Afghanistan"
• Courtney Grafton, "Foreign act of state and empire"
• Martin Clark, "'Something like the principles of British liberalism': Ivor Jennings and the international and domestic, 1920-1960"
• Devyani Prabhat, "Unequal citizenship and subjecthood: a rose by any other name...?"
• Donal K. Coffey, "Constitutional law and empire in interwar Britain: universities, liberty, nationality and parliamentary supremacy"
• T. T. Arvind and Daithí Mac Síthigh,"Constitutionalism in the periphery: revisiting the roots of self-rule movements in Ireland and India"
• Lindsay Stirton and Martin Lodge, "Constitutional legacies of empire in politics and administration: Jamaica's incomplete settlement"
• Paul F. Scott, "The Privy Council and the constitutional legacies of empire"
• Roger Masterman, "The constitutional influence of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on the UK apex court: institutional proximity and jurisprudential divergence?"

The articles by Donal Coffey and Martin Clark are available for download on an open-access basis.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Pande on child marriage in colonial India

         Ishita Pande (Queen's University, Ontario) has published Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937 with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

     Ishita Pande's innovative study provides a dual biography of India's path-breaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and of 'age' itself as a key category of identity for upholding the rule of law, and for governing intimate life in late colonial India. Through a reading of legislative assembly debates, legal cases, government reports, propaganda literature, Hindi novels and sexological tracts, Pande tells a wide-ranging story about the importance of debates over child protection to India's coming of age. By tracing the history of age in colonial India she illuminates the role of law in sculpting modern subjects, demonstrating how seemingly natural age-based exclusions and understandings of legal minority became the alibi for other political exclusions and the minoritization of entire communities in colonial India. In doing so, Pande highlights how childhood as a political category was fundamental not just to ideas of sexual norms and domestic life, but also to the conceptualisation of citizenship and India as a nation in this formative period. 

Praise for the book:  

"In this theoretically rigorous feminist history, Ishita Pande shows us how and why imperial 'age of consent' controversies should more aptly be read as regimes of reproductive temporality that shape minority and majority political claims in South Asian modernity in all its worldly ambition. Sex, Law and the Politics of Age opens up the terrain of 'juridical childhood' to a whole new set of questions and methods, rethinking girlhood as a prism of colonial and postcolonial ambition and a secularizing epistemic lever in the process." -Antoinette Burton

"A fascinating read, this book adeptly and sensitively renders the child as a moral-political category, and a socio-cultural construct, of modernity in colonial India. Through a close reading of the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, Pande brilliantly intertwines debates on sexuality, childhood and age with the carving of a Hindu reformist nation." -Charu Gupta

"Here, finally, is a superbly researched and expansive South Asian/Indian history of the categories of age and consent, and their translations and tribulations within legal and social structures of surveillance and control. An indispensable book for scholars of law, gender and sexuality." -Anjali Arondekar

"Pande brilliantly deploys the generative power of gender analysis and queer theory to reinterpret one of the most widely-debated topics in colonial South Asian historiography: the question of ‘child marriage’. This rigorous and beautifully written book will be required reading for all historians and scholars of gender and sexuality in the twentieth century." -Todd Shepard 

You can join the author for an online book event, "Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age with Ishita Pande" on Monday, August 24, 2020 at 12.30-1.30pm CDT. Register here.

Further information about the book is available here.  

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Floyd Abrams reviews Wendell Bird’s The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act” over at First Amendment News.

• The Federal Judicial Center has arranged its collection of its Notable Federal Trials series in this nifty timeline.  

• Bound By Every Tie of Duty: John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice of Van Diemen’s Land, by Jacqueline Fox (Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd), has made the short list for the Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History.

Robert A. Taft (LC)

• We felt late to the party when we saw how many legal historians had done Brian Frye's Ipse Dixit podcast.  We aren't scanning all 556 episodes but can report they include Christopher Tomlins, Nicholas Bagley and Julian Davis Mortenson  Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Thomas McSweeney, Elizabeth Katz, Taja-Nia Henderson and Lutie A. Lytle, Jilll Hasday, Seth Barrett Tillman, and Justin Simaud. Also, from February 1947, Robert A. Taft calls for "curbs on the power of the executive branch of the government"!!

• Sure, you're on lock down, but that doesn't mean you can't (virtually) browse the George Wythe Room at the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary.  H/t: Tom McSweeney.

• The sixth edition of Borkowski's Textbook on Roman Law, by Paul J. du Plessis, is now available.

• A more accessible version of John Fabian Witt's lecture on the legal history of infectious diseases is here.

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Can you steal a peacock? A post by Krista J. Kesselring on animals in early modern law.

• The Hoover-Roosevelt Transition premiers on the Facebook page of the FDR Library on Wednesday, May 13.  FDR Library Director Paul Sparrow and Hoover Library Director Thomas Schwartz discuss the relationship between FDR and HH “during the 1932 campaign and the transition between their presidencies, examining their different philosophies in the role of government and the protection of individual liberty and freedom. Followed by a Q&A in the comments.

• The Tagore Law Lectures (1870-1986) are now available here on the University of Calcutta Digital Library.

• And also on South Asia: check out this Twitter thread by Kalyani Ramnath (@kalramnath) on epidemics, contagion, migration, and law.

• ICYMI: Mary Ziegler interviewed on Abortion and the Law in America in Mother Jones and on WORT.  WaPo's obituary of Barbara Babcock. 

• I was very sorry to learn of the death of John M. Murrin, from whom (and Douglas Greenberg) I took a marvelous reading course on early America while a graduate student at Princeton.  Vast knowledge, zero pretension, kind, and witty (especially if you went in for atrocious puns).  His essays include a landmark study of the colonial legal profession and the brilliant "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity."  They are collected in Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic, ed. Andrew Shankman (Oxford University Press, 2018), reviewed here.  John Fea's remembrance is here. H/t: Al Brophy. DRE

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

Weekend Roundup

• Barbara Allen Babcock, the first woman member of the Stanford Law School faculty, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita, the author of Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (2011, and a great promoter of the history of women in the legal profession has died. Here's Stanford's press release. 

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts concludes its Celebrate Diversity Month in Common Threads of Justice by joining with Supreme Court Historical Society in the program Ladies of Legend: The First Generation of American Women Attorneys.

• Here's a "sixty-second lecture"  on the legal history of epidemics in Modern America by Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. And by LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi: Pandemic or poison? How epidemics shaped Southasia's legal history

• Congratulations to Jennifer Mnookin, a historian of the law of evidence, Erika Lee, a historian of immigration law and policy, and my law dean William Treanor, a constitutional historian of the Founding, upon their induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  I was also very pleased to see my Georgetown colleague Michael Kazin among the inductees.  DRE

•  Have you noted the National Archives and Records Administration platform, History Hub?  It “connects agencies, researchers, and a bevy of citizen archivists within its online community to help the public through its research journeys.”  The latest episode announces Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series: A Match Made in History.

• Julian Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley’s attack on the originalist case for the nondelegation in American constitutional law has prompted two responses on SSRN by Ilan Wurman and Aaron Gordon. 

• ICYMI: Richard Lazarus’s Rule of Five, on Massachusetts v. EPA, in Harvard Law Today.The NYT obit of Richard Sobol, who went from Columbia Law to Arnold, Fortas & Porter to the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in 1965.

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