Weekend Roundup

• From Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians: "The American Public’s Role in Financial Regulation," by Christopher Shaw.

• Via Nursing Clio: An interview with Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, author of A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain.
  

• 
  Paula J. Giddings will discuss “The Prescient Life of Ida B. Wells,” “a crusading journalist and pioneer in the fights for women’s suffrage and against segregation and lynchings” in conversation with FDR Library Director William Harris, in the Library’s Henry A. Wallace Center at 6:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 26, 2024, and streaming on YouTube and Facebook.  Register here.
  

• Congratulations to John Cairns, University of Edinburgh, upon the announcement that he is to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow.
  

• Heikki Pihlajamäki, Professor of Comparative Legal History at the University of Helsinki, has “won the Gad Rausing Prize for Outstanding Humanities Research. Pihlajamäki was awarded the prize, worth 1.5 million Swedish krona.”  More.
  

• Frances M. Clarke, University of Sydney, is the first Australian to win the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which “rewards the finest scholarly work published in the prior year in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era.” She and her coauthor, Rebecca Jo Plant, University of California, San Diego, won the prize for Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University Press).
  

• Reshaping American Life: Today’s Supreme Court in Historical Context, and its Potential Impact on our Future, a discussion/debate between Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Case Western Reserve Law Professor Jonathan Adler, moderated by California Supreme Court Justice Carol Corrigan, will take place on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, 12:15 p.m. (PT) / 3:15 p.m. (ET).  It is to last 75 minutes and will take place in-person and virtually.  Register here.
  

• The University of Edinburgh Press seeks proposals for its new book series, New Approaches to Ancient Greek Institutional History.  The series editors are Mirko Canevaro, Edward Harris, and  David Lewis.
  

• ICYMI: "Maricopa County Honors Public Defenders and Landmark Legal Victories [such as Gideon v. Wainwright] During 'Public Defense Recognition Week'” (Hoodline).  "How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans" (Time--the new home of Made by History).
  

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

Children and the Law: A Conference in Honor of Michael Grossberg

We have the following announcement, regarding a November 10, 2022, pre-conference convening at this year's meeting of the American Society for Legal History:

Children and the Law: A Conference in Honor of Michael Grossberg

Mini-Conference Schedule

9:30am “Saving Our Kids”

Opening Remarks by Laura Edwards (Princeton University) & Dirk Hartog (Princeton University)

10-11:30am “Who Gets the Child?”

Comment by Steven Mintz (University of Texas, Austin)

Chelsea Chamberlain (University of Pennsylvania), "Perpetual Children": Mental Disability, Institutional Commitment, and the Intimate State

Naama Maor (Tel Aviv University), “We Cannot be Hoodwinked into Making Paroles”: Delinquent Children, State Institutions, and the Boundaries of Juvenile Justice

Kristen McCabe Lashua (Vanguard University of Southern California), “If the boy’s word is to be taken”: Child Testimonies in Early Modern England

Nathan Stenberg (University of Minnesota), “A Peculiar Case”: Disability, Performance, and the Legal (De)Construction of Institutionalized Children's Personhood at the Pennhurst State School & Hospital

11:45-12:30 Lunch

12:45-2:15pm “A Protected Childhood”

Comment by Barbara Welke (University of Minnesota)

Wangui Muigai (Brandeis University), The Tenth Crusade: Baby-Saving, Racial Violence, and the NAACP

Yukako Otori (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), Esther Kaplan's Saga: From an Undesirable Immigrant to an Undeportable "Child"

Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez (University of Illinois Chicago), The Double Removal of Migrant Youth: Late-Twentieth Century Data Collection and Education Law as U.S. Immigration Deterrence

Shani Roper (University of the West Indies), Sitting at Intersections: Institutionalized Children and the Law in Colonial Jamaica 1904 to 1950

Doris Morgan Rueda (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), “The Boy is Large for His Age”: Making Age in Arizona’s Early Juvenile Court, 1907-1920

2:30-4pm “Legal Rights for Children?”

Comment by David Tanenhaus (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Tera Agyepong (DePaul University & American Bar Foundation), Constructing Race and Gendered Delinquency in the Juvenile Justice System

Juandrea Bates (Winona State University), Bringing Child Protection Home: Juveniles as Initiators of Child Protection Suits in Buenos Aires 1890-1930

Emily Prifogle (University of Michigan), Rural Students and a “Right” to Local Schools

Kathryn Schumaker (University of Oklahoma), Desegregating Discipline: Corporal Punishment and Children's Rights in the Classroom in the 1970s

4:15pm Afterward

Introduction of Michael Grossberg by Ajay Mehrotra (American Bar Foundation and Northwestern University) & Bengt Sandin (Linköping University in Sweden)

Closing Remarks by Michael Grossberg

5pm Cocktail Reception

 

-- Karen Tani

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

AHR Roundtable on Age

The April 2020 issue of the American Historical Review features a roundtable, "Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," organized by Nicholas Syrett (University of Kansas) and Corinne Field (University of Virginia). Of special interest to legal historians: 

• Ishita Pande (Queen's University), "Power, Knowledge, and the Epistemic Contract on Age: The Case of Colonial India": on the implementation of age-of-consent legislation in high courts across colonial India
• Corrie Decker (University of California, Davis), "A Feminist Methodology of Age Grading and History in Africa": on how colonial authorities expanded the legal importance of chronological age while precolonial African societies assessed age in relative terms (juniors versus seniors). Faced with two incommensurable systems for understanding life stages, African women found new ways to assert a sense of generational belonging and new definitions of maturity. 
• Bianca Premo (Florida International University), "Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Colonial Spanish American Law": on how indigenous, enslaved, and property-less individuals in Spain’s American colonies multiplied privileges based on age calculations that proved situational rather than numerically exact. The ages that Spanish American officials set down on paper in criminal trials, censuses, and freedom suits derived from complicated cultural equations; Premo contends that age proved a critical guarantee of rights, a language colonial subjects could use to turn legal incapacities into beneficial protections.
• Ashwini Tambe (University of Maryland), "The Moral Hierarchies of Age Standards: The UN Debates a Common Minimum Marriage Age, 1951-1962": on United Nations efforts to consider a universal minimum age of consent for marriage. This involved a series of tense deliberations, as former colonial powers framed early and forced marriage in newly independent states as forms of slavery. Debates about a universal marriage age came to mark differences between imperial powers and decolonizing nations.
• Corinne Field (University of Virginia) and Nicholas Syrett (University of Kansas), "Age and the Construction of Gendered and Raced Citizenship in the United States": on how the postbellum state relied upon age to reinforce inequalities rooted in female dependence and chattel slavery. Congress denied equal benefits to the families of black Civil War soldiers because they lacked adequate proof of age. Postbellum legal majority differentiated between men and women, shoring up gender inequality even as women gained new rights and opportunities. Chronological age, Field and Syrett conclude forcefully, is not a neutral fact, but a vector of power through which officials and ordinary people construct and contest the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. 

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Welcome, Bianca Premo!

We are very pleased to have Professor Bianca Premo (Florida International University) join us as our first guest blogger of the new decade. She is a historian of Latin America and the author of two scholarly monographs. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a comparative study of how ordinary, often illiterate litigants made law modern in the courtrooms of vast regions of the eighteenth-century Spanish empire. Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (UNC Press, 2005) reveals how Lima's children were socialized into colonial hierarchies and how adults viewed and practiced their roles as authority figures over children in a legal culture that favored elite fathers and distant kings. Prof. Premo has also co-edited Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), a collection on children and childhood in early modern Spain, Portugal, and colonial Latin America. She is the author of over a dozen articles and book chapters on colonial Peru and Mexico and early modern Spain, spanning the fields of legal studies, ethnohistory, gender, family history, and Atlantic history. Her next research projects will take her deeper into the history of childhood and gender--and into the twentieth century. You can read more about Prof. Premo's work and interests here.

Welcome, Bianca Premo!

--Mitra Sharafi

Grey on infanticide in 19th-c. England and Wales

Last year, Daniel J. R. Grey, University of Plymouth published " 'No Crime to Kill a Bastard-Child': Stereotypes of Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales" in B. Leonardi's edited volume, Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 41-66. From the introduction: 

Executions of English and Welsh women for infanticide during the 'long nineteenth century' (1789-1914) were very much an anomaly, not the rule, despite the fact that it remained a capital offence and indistinguishable from any other type of murder until 1922...Precisely because of the focus by many colonial critics during the nineteenth century on the supposed widespread danger of infanticide by indigenous peoples--especially targeting unwanted daughters--as a custom that only the so-called civilising mission and imperial rule could eradicate, any suggestions that there might be parallels between the killing of young children at home and similar homicides in the colonies were variously played down, ignored, or explicitly denied. Instead, English and Welsh women who committed the crime were routinely and emphatically emphasised to be 'normal,' frequently of excellent character, and cultural discourses stressed that such a defendant should often not be considered legally responsible for their crime, even if their circumstances did not actually fit with either legal or medical definitions of insanity. This chapter explores how and why a distressing crime which might theoretically have been singled out for particularly harsh treatment became, instead, stereotyped as a type of killing only ever committed by the 'normal' and 'respectable'--sometimes even the 'good'--in nineteenth-century England and Wales.

A short preview of the chapter is available here. 

Sarkar on Bombay Factory Law

Aditya Sarkar, University of Warwick, has published Trouble at the Mill: Factory Law and the Emergence of the Labour Question in Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay with Oxford University Press. From the publisher: 

The book uses the Factory Acts of the late nineteenth century as an entry point into the early history of labor relations in India, specifically the mill industry of Bombay. It unites legal and social history in a manner which differs from most social histories of labor, and offers a new perspective on the constitution of industrial relations in colonial India.

The Factory Act passed by the Government of British India in 1881 produced the first official definition of 'factories' in modern Indian history as workplaces using steam power and regularly employing over 100 workers. It imposed certain minimal restrictions upon the freedom of employers in a limited range of industrial workplaces and invested factory workers, most explicitly children, with a slim set of immunities and entitlements. In 1891, the Factory Act was amended: factories were redefined as workplaces employing over 50 workers, the upper age limit of legal "protection" was raised, weekly holidays were established, and women mill-workers were brought within its ambit. In its own time, factory law was experienced as a minor official initiative, but it connected with some of the most potent ideological debates and political oppositions of the age.

This book takes these two pieces of labor legislation as an entry point into the history of "industrial relations" (the term did not yet exist in its present sense) in colonial India, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century combining the legal and social history which diverges from most studies of Indian workers. It identifies an emergent "factory question" built on the problem of protective labor legislation. The cotton-mill industry of Bombay, long familiar to labour historians as one of the nodal points of modern Indian capitalism, is the principal focal point of this investigation. While this is a book about law and regulation, it is neither a legislative nor a policy history. While it is preoccupied with the history of factory legislation, it does not offer a full narrative that takes this as its "object". And while the book focuses on Bombay's cotton mills, it contains significant departures both from the city and its major industry. A number of questions which have only rarely been thematized by labour historians--the ideologies of factory reform, the politics of factory commissions, the routines of factory inspection, and the earliest waves of strike action in the cotton textile industry--are raised in this book.

Table of Contents after the jump:

Fliter on child labor in America

John A. Fliter, Kansas State University has published Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children with the University Press of Kansas. From the publisher:

Child labor law strikes most Americans as a fixture of the country’s legal landscape, involving issues settled in the distant past. But these laws, however self-evidently sensible they might seem, were the product of deeply divisive legal debates stretching over the past century—and even now are subject to constitutional challenges. Child Labor in America tells the story of that historic legal struggle. The book offers the first full account of child labor law in America—from the earliest state regulations to the most recent important Supreme Court decisions and the latest contemporary attacks on existing laws.

Children had worked in America from the time the first settlers arrived on its shores, but public attitudes about working children underwent dramatic changes along with the nation’s economy and culture. A close look at the origins of oppressive child labor clarifies these changing attitudes, providing context for the hard-won legal reforms that followed. Author John A. Fliter describes early attempts to regulate working children, beginning with haphazard and flawed state-level efforts in the 1840s and continuing in limited and ineffective ways as a consensus about the evils of child labor started to build. In the Progressive Era, the issue finally became a matter of national concern, resulting in several laws, four major Supreme Court decisions, an unsuccessful Child Labor Amendment, and the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Praise for the book:

 “Fliter chronicles the century-long struggle in the United States, complicated by the structural constraints of American constitutionalism, to abolish the social evil of child labor. By the mid-twentieth century, reformers had forged a national consensus and secured state and federal laws to keep children in school and out of unsafe workplaces, but that consensus is unraveling. This timely history is a wake-up call for twenty-first-century Americans.” -David S. Tanenhaus

“In this detailed and clearly written book, John A. Fliter focuses on child labor as a legal and administrative issue at both the state and federal levels. The book’s greatest contribution is its comprehensive approach, which starts in the 1840s and continues up to the present day when child labor laws have once again come under fire. This immediately becomes one of the most useful books on American child labor law.” -James Marten

Further information is available here.

Maxwell on indigenous child-removal policies

Krista Maxwell has published "Settler-Humanitarianism: Healing the Indigenous Child-Victim," Comparative Studies in Society and History 59:4 (2017), 974-1007. Here is the abstract: 

Victims of colonial, Indigenous child-removal policies have attracted public expressions of compassion from Indigenous and settler-state political leaders in Canada since the 1990s. This public compassion has fueled legal and political mechanisms, leveraging resources for standardized interventions said to “heal” these victims: cash payments, a truth-telling forum, therapy. These claims to healing provide an entry-point for analyzing how and why the figure of the Indigenous child-victim, past and present, is morally and politically useful for settler-states and their public cultures. I use the formulation of “settler-humanitarianism” to express how liberal interventions of care and protection, intended to ameliorate Indigenous suffering, align with settler-colonialism's enduring goal of Indigenous elimination (Wolfe 2006). Removal of Indigenous children was integral to the late nineteenth-century formation of the Canadian and Australian settler-states. Missionaries and colonial administrators represented these practices as humanitarian rescue from depraved familial conditions. Settler-humanitarians have long employed universalizing moral registers, such as “idleness” and “neglect,” to compel state interventions into Indigenous families. More recently, “trauma” has emerged as a humanitarian signifier compelling urgent action. These settler-humanitarian registers do political work. Decontextualized representations of Indigenous children as victims negate children as social actors, obscure the particularities of how collective Indigenous suffering flows from settler-colonial dispossession, and oppose children's interests with those of their kin, community, and nation. I analyze how and why Aboriginal healing as settler-humanitarianism has been taken up by many Indigenous leaders alongside settler-state agents, and examine the ongoing social and political effects of the material and discursive interventions it has spawned.

Further information is available here.

Special issue: The Child at Risk

We've learned of a special issue of SOLON: Journal of Law, Crime & History 7:1 (2017) on "The Child at Risk in Modern Britain." Daniel J. R. Grey is the guest editor. Here is the line-up:

Daniel J. R. Grey, Introduction: The Child at Risk in Modern Britain, 1-15

Margaret L. Arnot, Perceptions of Parental Child Homicide in English Popular Visual Culture 1800-1850, 16-74

Kim Stevenson,, ‘Children of a Very Tender Age Have Vicious Propensities’: Child Witness Testimonies in Cases of Sexual Abuse, 75-97

Judith Rowbotham, When to Spare the Rod? Legal Reactions and Popular Attitudes Towards the (In)Appropriate Chastisement of Children, 1850-1910, 98-125

Victoria Bates, The Child as Risk: Precocious Girls and Sexual Consent in Late Victorian Britain, 126-144

Kate Bradley, Saving the Children of Shoreditch: Lady Cynthia Colville and Needy Families in East London, c.1900-1960, 145-163

Conference Report

Rhiannon Pickin, Lives Trials and Executions, Liverpool, 24 May 2017, 164-168

Further information is available here.