Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Samantha Barbas, University at Buffalo Law, on her receipt of an NEH grant for a "sociolegal history of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan."  More.  

• New and ungated in Studies in American Political Development: “No Bodies to Kick or Souls to Damn”: The Political Origins of Corporate Criminal Liability, by Anthony Grasso, Rutgers University.

• As a faculty member at Georgetown University faculty, this one shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.  @dbqur

• In Nursing Clio's The Deathbed series: Julie Hardwick on abortion and infanticide in 17th-18th-c. France. 

• The CFP for the next conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, to be held in a hybrid format in Arlington, VA, June 17-20, 2021, is here.

• Constitution Day is around the corner.  (We never thought we'd say this, but, "Robert Byrd, would that you were with us in this hour!")  Boston College’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy is observing the date with The Equal Rights Amendment: A Constitution Day Conversation, with Julie Chi-hye Suk and Katharine Young.
  

•  The United States Capitol Historical Society announced that its 2020 National Heritage Lecture, delivered virtually on September 14, 2020, will be a discussion of “one of the most far-reaching accomplishments of mid-20th century American government: The comprehensive and strategic investment in our transportation infrastructure.”   The Supreme Court Historical Society and the White House Historical Association are also sponsors of the event.  More.
  

• ICYMI: A review of James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model (Concord Monitor).  Danielle Allen on The Flawed Genius of the Constitution (Atlantic)
  

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

Lee to Lecture on Contagious Diseases and the Rule of Law in the British Empire

[We have the following announcement from the Transnational Legal History Group Seminar of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  DRE]

‘Protecting Women and Morals? Contagious Diseases Laws and the “Rule of Law” Ideal in the British Empire, 1886-1899’ by Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee (Online)

What does it mean for liberal empires to invoke the rule of law, on the one hand, and to expand their
control over subject populations, on the other? This article examines debates over the freedom of women during the repeal of the Contagious Diseases (CD) ordinances by the Protection of Women and Girls ordinances in the directly ruled colonies of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang and Malacca). Originating in Hong Kong, CD laws were used to contain the spread of venereal diseases among soldiers and other populations across the modern British empire. Officials employed these laws to police prostitution and subject working-class, “native” women to medical surveillance. While the compulsory medical examination of women ended with the repeal of CD laws across the British Empire, the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong continued to regulate prostitution for the protection of “native” women and their freedom, revealing the peculiar significance of the “rule of law” under liberal imperialism. In a historical ethnography of the “rule of law” ideal, Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee demonstrates how officials utilized its central premise of individual liberties as a comparative frame of evaluation to formulate a racially differentiated mode of gendered sovereignty.

Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee’s research and teaching examines the significance of culture, law and politics in social processes of state-making and governance. He is working on a book on the significance of law and race in the making of “direct rule” in the modern British Empire. Focusing on the re-constitution of Jamaica and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang and Malacca) as Crown Colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this project examines the workings (and postcolonial legacies) of liberal imperialism in relation to colonies marked as plural societies. Notably, Lee’s dissertation on this topic won the University of California, San Diego’s 2018 Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal (Social Sciences).

Register here by 5pm, 22 September 2020 to attend the seminar.

Wong on the abolition of concubinage in Hong Kong

Max W. L. Wong (University of Hong Kong) has published Chinese Marriage and Social Change: The legal abolition of concubinage in Hong Kong with Springer. From the press: 

This book provides a comparative account of the abolition of concubinage in East Asia, offering a new perspective and revised analysis of the factors leading to – and the debates surrounding  – the introduction of a new Marriage Reform Ordinance in Hong Kong in 1971. It uses this law as a platform to examine how the existence of concubinage – long preserved in the name of protecting Chinese traditions and customs — crucially influenced family law reforms, which were in response to a perceived need to create a ‘modern’ marriage system within Hong Kong’s Chinese community after the Second World War. This was, by and large, the result of continued pressure from within Hong Kong and from Britain to bring Hong Kong’s marriage system in line with international marriage treaties. It represented one of the last significant intrusions of colonial law into the private sphere of Hong Kong social life, eliminating Chinese customs which had been previously recognised by the colonial legal system’s family law. This book contextualizes the Hong Kong situation by examining judicial cases interpreting Chinese customs and the Great Qing Code, offering a comprehensive understanding of the Hong Kong situation in relation to the status of concubines in Republican China and other East Asian jurisdictions. It will be of particular interest to teachers and students of law, as well as researchers in gender studies, post-colonialism, sociology and cultural studies.

 Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Tidmark to Lecture on the London Fire Courts

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Selden Society with the Four Inns of Court presents The Fire Courts: Successfully Delivering Justice in a Time of Plague and Fire, by Jay Tidmarsh, Notre Dame Law School, 21 October 2020, 5.30pm.  Click Here to Book.

1665 had been a devastating Plague Year. 1666 was going that way and then the Great Fire destroyed seven eighths of London. The international scene was bleak. Samuel Pepys despaired of London ever being rebuilt.

And yet, within ten years modern London had risen from the ashes, and with London’s resurgence the foundation for continued rise of the British Empire had been laid. Professor Jay Tidmarsh of Notre Dame Law School will explore the social and economic impact of the Great Fire and explain how a six-section Act of Parliament, which erected a novel Fire Court to cut a path through the tsunami of legal disputes that threatened the timely rebuilding of London, played a central role in the City’s redevelopment. Drawing on research into the London Fire Court as well the Southwark Fire Court established after the Great Southwark Fire of 1676, the lecture will also explore lessons for modern times: the circumstances under which government intervention can foster resilience and the ways in which the judiciary can be a key partner in recovery from disaster.

The Selden Society and the Inns of Court have joined forces to establish a new series of annual lectures open to scholars, students and the general public to show the relevance of a wider understanding of Legal History. This first talk on the genesis and impact of the Fire of London Disputes Act 1666 and how Fire Courts helped the City of London and other communities recover in a surprisingly short time is designed to have particular salience in our present uncertain times.

Davies on 1916 and the Supreme Court

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, has posted A Changed Court, 2020 Green Bag Almanac 193:

On June 10, 1916, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes resigned from the Court so that he could campaign full-time for the Presidency of the United States on the Republican ticket. The move turned out, eventually, to be a double blessing for sitting President Woodrow Wilson of the Democratic Party. First, in the summer, Wilson nominated John H. Clarke — like Wilson, a Democrat and a Progressive — to replace Hughes at the Court. Clarke was promptly confirmed and commissioned, and he took office on July 24. Second, in the autumn, Wilson ran for reelection and defeated Hughes on November 7. And it was, in addition, a busy year for speculation, staff changes, and sentimental expressions at the Court.

--Dan Ernst

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 

McIntyre and Milne on "Alien" Power in Australia

 Joe McIntyre and Sue Milne, University of South Australia School of Law, have posted The Alien and the Constitution: The Legal History of the ‘Alien’ Power of the Australian Commonwealth:

The identity of a body politic is inevitably intertwined with that of the excluded other. The quintessential political ‘other’ is the ‘alien’. The express constitutional power to regulate ‘naturalisation and aliens’ in s51(xix) has come to be seen as the hook upon which to hang the Commonwealth’s power to regulate Australian nationality and citizenship. Given the Australian colonies were obsessed with exclusions, and the Commonwealth’s roll-out of the White Australia policy as one of its first legislative priorities on immigration, this connexion between alienage and immigration (and thus eventually citizenship) appears inevitable. It is, however, historically wrong. This article argues that the scope and purpose of the ‘aliens power’ has been miscast, and that as a matter of history its true analogue was the races power, not immigration. The power was designed to regulate the domestic disabilities of aliens (and the removal of those disabilities through naturalisation), just as the races power regulates the disabilities of particular classes of persons. Moreover, and contrary to subsequent jurisprudence, the meaning of ‘alien’ at Federation was clear and unambiguous. This article unpicks the history records to understand this purpose and meaning at Federation in a way that challenges our contemporary understanding of Australian identity.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Unauthorized European Migrations to the United States

 We have the following Call for Papers:

Unauthorized European Migrations to the United States

        We solicit proposals for papers that explore unauthorized European migrations to the United States. We anticipate a university press will publish the papers as a volume edited by Danielle Battisti, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and S. Deborah Kang, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to the publication of the volume, the editors and organizers will convene at the University of Nebraska for workshops and a conference pertaining to the volume.        

         The conference and volume will afford scholars from the United States and the world to explore the origins, nature, and significance of irregular European migration flows to the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. In so doing, we aim to expand our current understanding of the history of illegality in the United States. The volume intends to examine how and why thousands of European migrants adopted illicit migration strategies to circumvent restrictionist immigration laws; excavate the roles of race and racism in the production and representation of European illegality; explore the impacts of illegality on the shaping of migrant politics, social worlds, and domestic lives; illuminate the development of US laws, policies, and institutions pertaining to the policing of undocumented immigration; and describe the impacts of these migrations on European sending states, among other topics.

         We welcome scholarly papers based on archival research as well as conceptual pieces that think critically about theory and terminology. Papers might focus on a specific European migrant group or examine unauthorized European migrations to the United States in a comparative context.  Those comparisons might consider European migrants in relation to other migrant groups; or may situate unauthorized European migration in a transnational or international context.  Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcomed.

         We seek submissions from scholars in the United States and abroad and of any rank or affiliation. By November 15, 2020, please send project proposals of 500-800 words and a one-page CV to Danielle Battisti (dbattisti@unomaha.edu) and S. Deborah Kang (sdkang2020@utdallas.edu). The proposal ought to describe the research project and its connection to the themes of the volume and the conference. If selected, authors should be prepared to submit full papers (approximately 8000 words with notations) for review by September 1, 2021.    

Please circulate to your networks and colleagues. 

-- Karen Tani

Stanford Center for Law and History Workshop 2020-21

The Stanford Center for Law and History has announced the lineup for its 2020-2021 workshop:

Oct. 6, 2020: Lisa Surwillo, Stanford Iberian and Latin American Cultures

Trafficked from Free Soil: María de Jesús and 19th Century Spanish Cuba

Oct. 20, 2020: H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., Duke Law

Foreign Interference in US Elections is Nothing New

Oct. 27, 2020: Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon Law

Bound Biographies: Transoceanic Itineraries and the Afro-Iberian Diaspora in the Americas

Jan. 19, 2021: Magdalene Zier, Stanford Law and History

Crimes of Omission: State Action Doctrine and Anti-Lynching Legislation in the Jim Crow Era

Feb. 2, 2021: Ari Bryen, Vanderbilt Classical and Mediterranean Studies

Law and/as Flesh: Provincial Aristocrats and the Law in the Eastern Roman Empire

Feb. 23, 2021: Kimberly Welch, Vanderbilt History and Law

“Eulalie Mandeville’s Money:” Black Moneylenders and Economic Citizenship in the Antebellum U.S. South

April 20, 2021: Anne Twitty, University of Mississippi History

Remaking Bondage: The Persistence of Unfreedom in the Northwest Territory

April 27, 2021: Rohit De, Yale History

Decolonization, Diasporas and the Origins of Emergency Lawyering

May 11, 2021: Nathaniel Hay, Stanford History and Yale Law

Patenting the Guillotine: Intellectual Property Law in Revolutionary France

--Mitra Sharafi

Constitutional History Chair at VMI

[The following announcement appeared on H-Net.  DRE]

The Virginia Military Institute seeks a tenure-track associate or full professor for a newly endowed chair in United States Constitutional History, to begin in August 2021. Candidates should be well-prepared to develop and teach a new, core-curriculum, upper-division introduction to United States Constitutional history. Core curriculum courses are required of all cadets.

The normal teaching load of nine credit hours per semester includes six credit hours of the new upper-division course in Constitutional History plus three credit hours per semester of an upper-division elective course as mutually agreed with the department head. Enrollments in all courses are capped at 21 or fewer students per section.

This position includes significant administrative duties related to the new course and to VMI’s commitment to ensuring that our graduates possess a thorough grounding in the principles and substance of the United States Constitution. The successful candidate will oversee other faculty teaching the course, represent the course as a member of VMI’s Core Curriculum Oversight Committee, and coordinate extracurricular speakers and events.

Minimum requirements include an earned Ph.D. in United States history and substantial teaching   experience bearing directly on the United States Constitution and its history. The most attractive applicants will have a genuine interest in developing and overseeing a core curriculum course, and significant experience managing both people and resources. We seek a colleague enthusiastic about joining a vibrant teaching department, and expect all our faculty members to maintain active research interests in their topical specialty. The successful candidate, whether hired at the associate or full professor level, will enjoy an accelerated tenure and (if applicable) promotion clock.

Preliminary Skype interviews with long-list candidates will precede fuller interviews. Normally, the department invites finalists for full-time faculty positions to VMI for two days of meetings, interviews, and tours. Due to the pandemic, this may not be possible. While we will bring candidates to VMI if conditions allow, we are prepared to interview finalists for this position during November or early December via videoconference, to include a teaching presentation via Canvas to a pilot upper-division course in the “American Civic Experience.”

VMI is a public, four–year, undergraduate military college of approximately 1,700 students, about half of whom accept commissions as officers in the armed forces upon graduation. Teaching excellence in a liberal arts setting is our first priority.  Faculty members who are United States citizens wear uniforms and adhere to military customs, but military experience among the faculty is neither required nor expected. For more information about VMI and the Department of History, please visit our web site at http://www.vmi.edu .

Applicants must complete an online state application and submit letters of interest, curricula vitae, and an unofficial transcript of all graduate course work on-line [here].

In addition to the materials submitted online, applicants should have three letters of recommendation (including comments on teaching) and samples of scholarship not readily available in electronic format sent directly to: U.S. Constitutional History Search Committee, Department of History, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA 24450. Please do not mail hard copies of letters of interest, curricula vitae, or application forms directly to the department.

Applications will be accepted until midnight, 12 October 2020.

In a continuing effort to enrich its academic environment and provide equal education and employment opportunities, VMI encourages women, minorities, disabled individuals, and veterans to apply. AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, and other national service alumni are also encouraged to apply. VMI will provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with documented disabilities to ensure equal access and equal opportunities with regard to employment, educational opportunities, programs and services.

Ceci n'est pas un chameau

In writing my book Fluid Jurisdictions: Arabs and Colonial Law in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), I approach legal history as a series of ‘portals.’ Each legal system and each legal device opened up a world of possibilities. The more a legal system is used, the deeper the sovereign ruler’s jurisdictions and vice versa. Likewise, each legal device such as a power of attorney echoes other similar or commensurable devices such as a wakala across legal systems and cultures further extending its utility across different jurisdictions. A series of portals connected the western end of the Indian Ocean to the eastern end allowing users to jump across huge spaces to enact various actions ranging from transferring economic power to granting a divorce. By generating links tied to institutional legal bureaucracies between otherwise disjointed points, they broadened the orbits of economic production and family responsibility. The use of colonial legal portals in particular came at high cost for most people because colonial legal systems tend to hold people captive. Before going through a portal, one had options, but once one passed through a door to colonial jurisdictions, it was hard to leave for myriad reasons.

 

I marvel at how little was opaque when it came to law in the eyes of my historical actors - the diasporic Arabs who originated from Hadhramaut in Yemen who seemed to adeptly navigate English common law, Dutch civil law and colonial reformulations of Islamic law in Southeast Asia. They created a scattered accumulation of legal documentation which we inherit today that reveal new-fangled colonial legal systems at every turn that because laws differed from island to island even as they came under a single jurisdiction at times in the vast archipelago in Southeast Asia. Colonial subjects legal practitioners were creating and discovering their own legal systems in ‘real time.’ Just like how I dwell on laws, legal classifications, legal documents, these people in the past also took time to dwell on the same things in multiple languages and idioms with higher stakes of course. To dwell is the first step towards a commitment, a willingness to engage with something strange.

 

Although I eventually turned to legal history as the main framework for my book, my original question focuses on the spaces in Southeast Asia to illuminate what truly happened in specific locations with particular jurisdictions. My starting question a decade ago was “why did Southeast Asian port-cities whose histories are often exalted for being mixed remain ethnically and socio-economically so divisive?” For example, Muslim subjects (later citizens) were divided ethnically even when classified as one community by colonial and national bureaucracies. It is tempting perhaps to merely blame European colonialism for deepening societal rifts in many ways but this is inadequate. I became intent on discovering the exact contours of the relationship amongst colonial subjects within the new colonial environments in the nineteenth century. As I dug further in the archives, I found that the diasporic peoples I was tracing were rooting themselves in Southeast Asia, intertwining their roots with that of colonial jurisdictions which deepened over time with the added weight of subjects’ expectations. Territorial jurisdictions within maritime Southeast Asia became paramount in the stories I tell although personal jurisdictions tied to older forms of sovereignty still traveled within individuals who continued to make unexpected connections across vast geographical expanses under oppressive rule.

 

To open a door, to dwell, to take root – that is the history of law in the colonies.

In the photograph on the cover of my book is a life-sized camel with a jubilant expression made out of wood, cloth and possibly metal on wheels accompanying a procession of Arabs in Surabaya located in Java who were commemorating the inauguration of Dutch Queen Wilhelmina in 1898 whose portrait is on the left. The Arabs in the foreground had their swords drawn as was customary at parades, weddings and special occasions. Amongst them, I spotted one of my main historical actors, the Kapitan Arab (head of the Arabs) of the Surabaya Arab community from the Bobsaid clan, a name I have encountered only in Surabaya. Sech Hasan bin Abdulla Bobsaid stood apart from his community slightly in front of them with his face to the camera. Clearly, he was the one who led the Arab delegation at this parade, flanked by members of his community, and the ecstatic camel and more subdued elephant replicas. The camel embodies this new creature in town – colonial legal forms which were mobile, tractable, reimagined versions of older laws moving forward into the twentieth century. My blog posts this month will focus on other aspects of this phenomenon.

 --Nurfadzilah Yahaya

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.

Utz on Dickens on the English Income Tax

Stephen Utz, University of Connecticut School of Law, has posted Boz Among the Radicals: Dickens Records a Turning Point in Tax History:

Charles Dickens, 1867 (LC)

Charles Dickens recorded many trials conduct by his friend, the attorney Thomas Talfourd. Dickens was only twenty-two years old when he recorded the trial of the Weekly True Sun's principal officers for their challenge to the Whig Parliament's rejection of an income tax. Liberal members of Parliament and the public opposed the trial. Dickens' perfect capture of the trial attorneys' and defendants' speeches at the trial reveals his understanding of the issues and his apparent sympathy with the defendants' cause. Yet he later stood back from all this, with the apparent exception of his parting of the ways with Harriet Martineau, his partner in the publishing venture of Dickens' middle years, which have been his rejection of her taking the same side the Whigs had taken in 1834.

--Dan Ernst

Smith on Mid-Victorian British Company Laws

David Chan Smith, Wilfrid Laurier University, has posted The Mid-Victorian Reform of Britain’s Company Laws and the Moral Economy of Fair Competition, which appears in Enterprise & Society (2020):

This paper reconstructs the history of the reform of Britain’s company laws during the 1850s and makes three major arguments. First, the Law Amendment Society was the driving force for reform and organized the campaign for change. Second, the advancement of working-class interests and ideas of fairness were central to the conceptualization of these reforms and the course of their advocacy. Company law reform was broadly conceived to include the revision of the law of partnership, corporations, and cooperatives to create a level playing field in which smaller entrepreneurs could compete against established capitalists. Finally, central to this campaign was the institutional logic of “fair competition.” Socialists and liberals both used this logic, demonstrating how moral ideas can shape organizational change.

--Dan Ernst

University of Michigan Race & Property speaker series

 [We share the following on a speaker series organized by Emily Prifogle at the University of Michigan this fall.]

Race & Property in Historical Perspective: 

A Series of Conversations about Research & Methods

K-Sue Park, Georgetown University

"Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Property Law Course"

Wednesday, September 23, 2020, 12-1pm.

Justin Simard, Michigan State University

"Citing Slavery"

Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 12-1pm

Taja-Nia Y. Henderson, Rutgers &

Jamila Jefferson-Jones, University of Missouri-Kansas City

"#LivingWhileBlack: Blackness As Nuisance"

Thursday, October 29, 2020, 12-1pm

For Zoom link or more information, e-mail: rickardj@umich.edu 

--Mitra Sharafi

Strauss on How the Administrative State Got to Now

Peter L. Strauss, Columbia Law School, has posted How the Administrative State Got to This Challenging Place, which is forthcoming in Daedalus, American Academy of Arts and Science (2020):

This essay has been written to set the context for a future issue of Daedalus, the quarterly of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, addressing the prospects of American administrative law in the Twenty-first Century. It recounts the growth of American government over the centuries since its founding, in response to the profound changes in the technology, economy, and scientific understandings it must deal with, under a Constitution written for the governance of a dispersed agrarian population operating with hand tools in a localized economy. It then suggests profound challenges of the present day facing administrative law’s development: the transition from processes of the paper age to those of the digital age; the steadily growing centralization of decision in an opaque, political presidency, displacing the focused knowledge and expertise of agencies Congress created to pursue particular governmental ends; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within agencies themselves, threatening similar displacements; and the revival in the courts of highly formalized analytic techniques inviting a return to the forms of government those who wrote the Constitution might themselves have imagined. The essay will not be published until months after the November election. While President Trump’s first term in office has sharply illustrated an imbalance in American governance between law and politics and law, reason and unreason, that imbalance is hardly new; it has been growing for decades. There lie the challenges.

–Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: Balleisen Tribute/"Borrower's Tale" Ungated

Edward Ballesien's memorial of Anne Fleming is up on the Exchange, the blog of the Business History Conference.  In addition, Cambridge University Press has kindly made her article "The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City," Law and History Review 30, no. 4 (2012), 1053-1098, free to access for the remainder of the year.

--Dan Ernst

Networks and Connections in Legal History

Just out from Cambridge University Press: Networks and Connections in Legal History, edited by Michael Lobban, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Ian Williams, University College London:

Network and Connections in Legal History examines networks of lawyers, legislators and litigators, and how they shaped legal development in Britain and the world. It explores how particular networks of lawyers - from Scotland to East Florida and India - shaped the culture of the forums in which they operated, and how personal connections could be crucial in pressuring the legislature to institute reform - as with twentieth century feminist campaigns. It explores the transmission of legal ideas; what happened to those ideas was not predetermined, but when new connections were made, they could assume a new life. In some cases, new thinkers made intellectual connections not previously conceived, in others it was the new purposes to which ideas and practices were applied which made them adapt. This book shows how networks and connections between people and places have shaped the way that legal ideas and practices are transmitted across time and space.

TOC after the jump. [DRE]

Yale Law School Legal History Forum: 2020-21 Schedule

 The 2020-21 Yale Law School Legal History Forum schedule is out:

--Tuesday, September 15 (12:00-1:30 pm EDT) - Ariela Gross, USC Gould School of Law

--Tuesday, October 13 (12:00-1:30 pm EDT) - Thomas McSweeney,  William & Mary Law School

--Tuesday, November 10 (6:00-7:30 pm EST) - Kentaro Matsubara, University of Tokyo

--Tuesday, February 16 (12:00-1:30 pm EST) - K-Sue Park, Georgetown Law

--Tuesday, March 9 (12:00-1:30 pm EST) - Intisar Rabb, Harvard Law School

--Tuesday, April 6 (12:00-1:30 pm EDT) - Christopher Tomlins, Berkeley Law

--Tuesday, April 20 (12:00-1:30 pm EDT) (tentative, subject to Graduate School Spring Break) - Kunal Parker, University of Miami School of Law

The workshop coordinators invite you to reach out if you have any questions: Kathryn Blair (kathryn.blair@yale.edu) or Nathaniel Donahue (nathaniel.donahue@yale.edu). 

-- Karen Tani

Morley on Partisan Gerrymandering and State Constitutions

Michael Morley, Florida State University College of Law, has posted Partisan Gerrymandering and State Constitutions:

Since the U.S. Supreme Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering claims are non-justiciable under the U.S. Constitution, reformers have shifted their focus to pursuing such claims under state constitutions. In some cases, longstanding state constitutional provisions have been re-interpreted to prohibit partisan gerrymandering. In others, state constitutions have been expressly amended to either forbid partisan gerrymandering or transfer authority over drawing congressional and legislative district lines from the state legislature to independent redistricting commissions.

The U.S. Constitution does not confer authority to regulate federal elections on states as entities, however, but rather specifically on the “Legislature” of each state. The “independent state legislature doctrine” teaches that a state constitution is legally incapable of imposing substantive restrictions on the authority over federal elections that the U.S. Constitution confers directly and specifically on a state’s legislature. Over the past 130 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly adopted conflicting positions on the doctrine without recognizing its deep historical roots or normative justifications.

The independent state legislature doctrine reflects the prevailing understanding of states, Congress, and other actors throughout the Nineteenth Century, and was consistently applied during that period across a broad range of circumstances. It protects important structural considerations and is consistent with the political theory underlying the U.S. Constitution’s election-related provisions. Properly understood, the independent state legislature doctrine is a powerful, largely overlooked obstacle to the use of state constitutions to combat partisan gerrymandering.

–Dan Ernst

Welcome, Nurfadzilah Yahaya!

We are very happy to welcome our guest blogger for the month of September: 

Nurfadzilah (Fadzilah) Yahaya, National University of Singapore.

Professor Yahaya is a legal historian of the Indian Ocean. She is Assistant Professor of History at NUS. Prof. Yahaya received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 2012. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis until June 2015, and a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at NUS until June 2016.

Prof. Yahaya's book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020), explores how members of the Arab diaspora utilized Islamic law in British and Dutch colonial courts of Southeast Asia. Her next project explores colonial regulation of Islamic religious slaughter during the twentieth century. 

Prof. Yahaya has published journal articles in Law and History Review, Indonesia and the Malay World, and The Muslim World. You can explore her research website here and follow her on Twitter at @nfyahaya 

Welcome, Professor Yahaya!

--Mitra Sharafi

Spagnolo, Sampson and friends on Roman law

Coming out this fall with Hart Publishing is Principle and Pragmatism in Roman Law, co-edited by Benjamin Spagnolo (University of Cambridge) and Joe Sampson (University of Oxford). From the press:

This edited collection presents an interesting and original series of essays on the roles of principle and pragmatism in Roman private law.

The book traverses key areas of Roman law to examine the explanatory power of - and delineate interactions between - abstract, doctrinal principle, and pragmatic, real-world problem-solving. Essays canvassing sources of law, property, succession, contracts and delicts sketch the varied roles of theoretical narratives - whether internal to Roman doctrine or derived from external influence - and of practical, policy-based solutions in the jurists' thought.

Principled reasoning in Roman juristic argument ranges from safeguarding commerce, to the priority of acts or intentions in property transactions, to notions of pietas, to Platonic conceptions of the market. Pragmatism is discernible in myriad ways, from divergence between form and substance, to extension of legal rules for economic, social or political utility, to emphasis on what parties did rather than what they said.

The distinctive contribution of the book is its survey of different manifestations of principle and pragmatism across Roman private law. The essays -by eminent as well as emerging academics - will stimulate debates and shed new light on this topic, and will be of interest to both scholars and students of Roman law.

The Table of Contents, which includes no female authors, appears after the jump:

Anne Fleming: A Canadian Business Law Tribute

Anne Fleming was to present a paper based on her research on Birmingham, Alabama’s innovative bankruptcy court at 100 Years of Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law, a conference that was to be held last May and now is to be held next May.  The conference papers are to be published in a special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal, edited by the two conference organizers, Thomas G.W. Telfer and Alfonso Nocilla.  The two have announced that they have decided to dedicate the volume to Anne Fleming and have added the following to its foreword.

We would like to acknowledge that one of our conference panelists, Professor Anne Fleming of Georgetown University Law Center, passed away earlier this year. Anne was scheduled to present "The Origins of the American Consumer Bankruptcy System" during our first panel on Historical Perspectives on Insolvency Law. At the time of her passing Anne was engaged in a new book project: Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960. Her preliminary findings can be found on her website: The Bankruptcy Capital of the World: Debt Relief in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s.  We dedicate this special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal to Anne Fleming.

--Dan Ernst

JSCH 45:2

Journal of Supreme Court History 45:2 (2020) has been published.  Here’s the TOC:

Introduction
Melvin I. Urofsky

Fletcher, Whitney, and the Art of Disagreement
Mark R. Killenbeck

Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller and the Great Mustache Debate of 2444
Todd Peppers

The Politics of Disabled Supreme Court Justices
Judge Glock

Tension in the Unitary Executive: How Taft Constructed the Epochal Opinion of Myers v. United States
Robert Post

Kumezo Kawato and “Justice Court”
Charles J. Sheehan

--Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: Business Historians Remember

[We have been speaking of Anne Fleming as a legal historian, but her grasp of the small-sum loan industry in City of Debtors was so impressive that business historians claimed her, too.  Here is the message Neil Rollings, President of the Business History Conference, acting on behalf of the BHC Trustees and Executive Committee, sent to members BHC members.]

It is with a sense of utmost shock and deep sadness that I write to inform you all that Anne Fleming passed away on Tuesday 25th August due to an embolism. I am sure that you will be as stunned by this awful news as I am. Anne has been an extremely willing and able servant to the BHC, currently as trustee and chair of the Electronic Media Oversight Committee. She also played a leading role in helping to revise the BHC bylaws. Recently, she had agreed to be a member of the BHC’s new anti-racism committee. In the short period of time I had worked with Anne, her selfless willingness to help, her legal eye for detail and her capacity to contribute efficiently and effectively shone through.

Her intellectual contributions to business history were outstanding, as she received the 2016 Herman E. Kroos Prize for the best dissertation in business history and followed this up by winning the 2019 Ralph Gomory Prize for her book City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, 2018). Her current research projects promised to confirm and enhance her academic reputation.

But perhaps her most lasting contribution will be her warmth, generosity and interest in others. She will leave a large hole in the business history community and had already made a lasting contribution to it. It is tragic that such a blossoming career has ended so early and so abruptly.

Here is a link to a legal history blog In memorium of Anne. Our thoughts are with all who knew her and our deepest condolences go to her family and friends at this time.

Anne Fleming: Georgetown Law Remembers

Georgetown Law’s memorial notice for Anne Fleming, with remembrances from faculty, students and staff, is now online.  (A few other faculty members and students had earlier shared their memories on social media, including here and here.)  I’d like to provide some context for my quote in the notice, a sentiment I stammered out during an online convening of the Georgetown law faculty on Thursday.

I have attended quite a few panels at quite a few annual meetings of the American Society for Legal History, but I can remember only two in which I teared up.  One was “The Surprising Effects of Sympathy,” a memorial discussion of the work of Elizabeth B. Clark at the 1998 meeting in Seattle.  The other was a Kathryn T. Preyer Award panel in November 2011.  Named for a great mentor of legal historians, the Preyer Award is an annual prize contest for graduate students.  That year Mary Bilder chaired, with comments by two senior legal historians whose work I had admired since my own early days in the field, William Wiecek and Charles McCurdy.   I remember Chuck McCurdy’s comment in particular.  As Karen reported in a post, Chuck said, “Kitty would have loved these papers,” explained why, and concluded that, with new entrants like these, the field of legal history was certain to thrive for years to come.  A similar thought had occurred to me as I listened to the papers, and to hear Chuck articulate it, connecting a departed generation represented by Kitty Preyer through him and Bill Wiecek to an entering generation, was very moving.  Two of the award winners that year were Kevin Arlyck and Michael Schoeppner.  The third was Anne Fleming, for “The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City,” which she subsequently published in Law and History Review and as a chapter in City of Debtors.

In the brief time Anne Fleming wrote legal history, she more than delivered on the promise that was so evident in 2011.  As I told my Georgetown colleagues, she was the kind of person who, when you looked around and realized she was engaged in the same enterprise you were, made you think the activity must be worthwhile if someone that good was also committed to it.   Now when legal historians look around and realize Anne’s not there, we’ll feel diminished by her absence but also grateful for all she did when she was with us.

--Dan Ernst

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

Geiringer on Representation-Reenforcement and the NZ Bill of Rights

Claudia Geiringer, Victoria University of Wellington School of Law, has posted When Constitutional Theories Migrate: A Case Study, which is forthcoming in the American Journal of Comparative Law:

The last decade or so has witnessed a burgeoning of literature on the role of cross-jurisdictional influences in the design (as well as subsequent interpretation) of national constitutions. The consensus emerging from that literature is that transnational borrowing in the course of constitutional making is both inevitable and impossible. In a globalized world, those involved in the design of a new constitution naturally look beyond their borders for inspiration. Borrowing is thus endemic. But borrowing, in any true sense, is also impossible because in the process of migration, constitutional ideas must be de- and then re-contextualized in order to fit them for the new legal system.

What, though, if the object of transnational influence is not a constitutional text or an institutional mechanism but, rather, a scholarly theory? That is the question addressed by this article. Specifically, the article examines the intriguing (and little known) story of how John Hart Ely’s representation-reinforcing theory of (American) constitutional interpretation was transformed into a blueprint for the design of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It suggests that Ely’s journey to the South Pacific has the potential to illuminate both the study of constitutional migration generally and, more specifically, the linkages between comparative law and constitutional theory.

–Dan Ernst.  H/t: Legal Theory Blog

Anne Fleming: In Memoriam

Anne C. Fleming, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, died suddenly Tuesday night from natural causes.  We at the blog were fortunate to know her and we join her colleagues, students, friends, and family in mourning her passing. This post will not do justice to her life, but it is a first attempt to recognize the many ways in which she enriched our field.  We know that more remembrances will follow; when they do, we will post them here.

Anne was an honors graduate of Yale College and the Harvard Law School. Amidst her studies, she also found time to work at the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.  After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York and then with the Honorable Marjorie O. Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Third Circuit.  From there, she went to the Foreclosure Prevention Project in South Brooklyn Legal Services, where she served as a Staff Attorney from 2007 to 2009.

Anne Fleming (credit)

In 2009, Anne enrolled in the doctoral program of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, immediately impressing fellow students with her clear-eyed sense of purpose, her maturity, and her generosity of spirit.  She wrote her dissertation under the direction of Sarah Barringer Gordon, but had many other fans and supporters on the faculty, including dissertation committee members Thomas Sugrue and Michael Katz. 

She also earned recognition outside of Penn. As a graduate student, she was a fellow in the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute of the American Society for Legal History, a prestigious training ground for scholars entering the field of legal history. (Follow the link for some photos from the Hurst Institute class of 2013.) Two different learned societies awarded her their graduate paper prizes: the ASLH, for “The Borrower’s Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City” (subsequently published in the Law and History Review) and the Business History Conference, for “The ‘Very Fibre of Personal Finance’: Changing Beliefs about the Regulation and the Small Sum Lending Industry in New York, 1900-1940."  Her dissertation, completed in 2014, was similarly well received, winning the BHC’s annual dissertation prize.

In 2012, Anne returned to the Harvard Law School as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law. She taught legal writing and thrived as a scholar, drawing on the methodological diversity of her fellowship class to widen her own scholarly range. But she remained devoted to the research questions that had grown out of her public interest legal work and animated her history training. She was "just so committed to the truth," recalls a colleague from her time there. 

 

Anne joined Georgetown’s law faculty in 2014.  In that year she also published “The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the ‘Law of the Poor,’” which placed Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company in the context of a statutory transformation of consumer protection law.  The article remains revered by contracts law teachers for the way it reframes a canonical case.

Anne’s book, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, 2018), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the annual book prize of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers and the Ralph Gomory Book Prize of the Business History Conference, whose prize committee described it well:

In this deeply-researched, well-crafted, and timely book, Anne Fleming offers a rich history of the small loan industry, across most of the twentieth century.  Drawing on evidence from hundreds of court cases, among other sources, Fleming skilfully reconstructs the changing experiences and strategies of borrowers and lenders, as they navigated changing local and national regulatory regimes.  Using crisp prose, Fleming provides a clear discussion of a long and complex story about business and regulation, while highlighting the struggles of individual human characters.  City of Debtors is a detailed, scholarly study, but one that never loses sight of bigger, enduring problems and questions, including, as Fleming puts it, questions about the “meaning of justice within capitalism.”

She discussed the book in a series of posts on LHB. In characteristic fashion, Anne wrote about her work in a way that was the opposite of self-aggrandizing, studding her posts with words of wisdom for other writers.  She also discussed the book with the director of the American Bankruptcy Institute in the ABI’s podcast series.

At her untimely death, Anne had entered a new and ambitious phase of her scholarly career. For example, her 2019 article "The Public Interest in the Private Law of the Poor" explored "uncharted connections between private law and poverty law," showing "how concerns about public spending on poor relief have shaped debates over the private law of the poor for over a century." The article was aimed not only at legal historians and scholars of poverty law, but also at scholars of law and economics and policymakers concerned with contemporary economic inequality. 

Anne was also fully embarked on an enormously exciting book project, “Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960.” Anne planned to describe “how working-class households, both black and white, organized their financial lives and navigated the shifting matrix of legal rules and institutions that governed credit relationships and debt forgiveness in the first half of the twentieth century.”  Although she had conducted research on Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and expected to sample bankruptcy files in other cities, her research centered on Birmingham, Alabama, where, for over five years in the 1930s, an innovative “Debtors Court” adjudicated the filings of 10,000 wage earners seeking debt adjustment or forgiveness.  The court inspired Chapter 13 of the federal bankruptcy law, which extended its system of court-supervised repayment to the entire nation.  Further, its docket and case files, when linked to the census and city directories and geocoded, made possible a rich portrait of the financial lives of the working class and showed how race shaped access to credit and debt relief.  She captured her preliminary findings in a website, The Bankruptcy Capital of the World: Debt Relief in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s, which she was still revising at her death.  We link to it with permission.

Her colleagues, students, and fellow historians all remember her warmth, generosity, utter lack of pretension, and above all her kindness.  A colleague at South Brooklyn Legal Services recalled her as “fiercely dedicated to her clients, a brilliant and selfless advocate.”  Tom Sugrue, one of her dissertation advisors, writes that she was “quietly brilliant and deeply humane.” “Losing a good scholar is bad enough,” writes Bruce Mann, who advised her when she was a Climenko, “but losing such a good person is far worse.”

We at the blog will miss her dearly and treasure her memory.  

-- Dan Ernst, Mitra Sharafi, and Karen Tani

Center for the Study of Law & Society Speaker Series: Fall 2020 Lineup

The Center for the Study of Law & Society has released the Fall 2020 lineup for its speaker series and, as always, there are some speakers of interest to our readers: 

Monday, September 14 – Patricia Cain & Eleanor Swift
Professor of Law, Santa Clara University
Professor Emerita, Berkeley Law
“Breaking into the Legal Ivory Tower: The First American Women Law Professors”
(In celebration of 150 Years of Women at Berkeley) 

Monday, November 23 – Richard Ross
David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of History, University of Illinois
“The Rule of Law in British America: Thinking with Indians While Comparing to Spaniards”

The full lineup is available here.

-- Karen Tani

How the Law Treats Hate

We have word of a Zoom conference,  How the Law Treats Hate: Antisemitism and Anti-Discrimination Reconsidered, sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Religion, Race and Democracy Lab, in partnership with UVA’s Jewish Studies Program and Karsh Center for Law and Democracy.  It takes place on September 10, 12:15 pm - 5:30 pm.

The global upsurge in antisemitism has triggered intense public debates about the role of law in combatting religious and racial hatred. This conference brings together leading scholars of law, history, and Jewish Studies to rethink pressing contemporary questions about antisemitism’s relationship to other forms of discrimination, the proper boundaries between hate speech and free speech, and the Jewish relationship to American civil rights and international law

--Dan Ernst

Zhang on print media and legal knowledge in Qing China

 Ting Zhang (University of Maryland) has published Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China with the University of Washington Press. From the publisher: 

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China’s legal

system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could afford to buy them. Publishers not only extended circulation of the dynastic code and other legal texts but also enhanced the judicial authority of case precedents and unofficial legal commentaries by making them more broadly available in convenient formats. As a result, the laws no longer represented privileged knowledge monopolized by the imperial state and elites. Trade in commercial legal imprints contributed to the formation of a new legal culture that included the free flow of accurate information, the rise of nonofficial legal experts, a large law-savvy population, and a high litigation rate.
Comparing different official and commercial editions of the Qing Code, popular handbooks for amateur legal practitioners, and manuals for community legal lectures, Ting Zhang demonstrates how the dissemination of legal information transformed Chinese law, judicial authority, and popular legal consciousness.

 Praise for the book:
"Takes recent developments in the field of Chinese legal history to a new level by combining the study of law with the study of book history and print culture." - Li Chen
"Overturns several stereotypes about Chinese law, most importantly that Chinese people did not know what the law was." - Madeline Zelin
"Makes a very important corrective to our understanding of the dissemination of legal information in the late imperial period by defining the ways in which such information was transmitted broadly, even to illiterate commoners. Circulating the Code expands our understanding of the range of works printed during the commercial publishing boom of the late Ming and Qing." - Cynthia Brokaw
Further information is available here.
--Mitra Sharafi

Elangovan on the making of India's Constitution

 We missed this one in 2019, when Arvind Elangovan (Wright State University) published Norms and Politics: Sir Benegal Narsing Rau and the Making of the Indian Constitution, 1935-50 with Oxford University Press. From the publisher: 

During the twilight of British rule in India, Sir Benegal Narsing Rau (1887–1953),

was sought after by the ruling elites—both British and Indian—for his immense knowledge of the nature and working of the constitutions of the world as well as his reputation for being just and impartial between competing political interests. Yet, Rau’s ideas and his voice have largely been forgotten today. By examining Rau’s constitutional ideas and following their trajectory in late colonial Indian politics, this book shows how the process of the making of the Indian constitution was actually never separated from the politics of conflict that dominated this period. This book demonstrates that it is only by foregrounding this political history that we can simultaneously remember Rau’s critical contributions as well as understand why he was forgotten in the first place.

 Table of Contents after the jump: 

Siegert on State Liability in the First World War

[We have the following book announcement from our friends at Max Planck.  DRE]

The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History just published a new volume in its book series Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte: Philipp Siegert, Staatshaftung im Ausnahmezustand: Doktrin und Rechtspraxis im Deutschen Reich und in Frankreich, 1914-1919.

The First World War is sometimes called the 20th century's "primordial catastophe." It raised diverse legal questions and led to a host of fundamental changes. In volume 322 of the MPIeR's book series Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte, which has just been published, Philipp Siegert examines state liability law in Germany and France between 1914 and 1918. On the basis of a detailed analysis of both French and German archival sources, he analyses states' legal responsibility during such a state of emergency and identifies categories of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" state action that, however, were either non-existent in pre-war international law or even contradicted it. Nevertheless, these were subsequently sanctioned by the peace treaties, and even a century after 1919 remain part of the international order. The ways in which destruction, expropriation and economic war measures carried out by France and Germany were assessed and sanctioned is highly instructive for the question of state liability in international law today.

Comprehensive List of Legal History Journals

The Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History of the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University has posted the most complete list of legal history journals we’ve ever seen.  The list was compiled primarily by Ron Harris and Assaf Likhovski, who would like to know of any they may have missed.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Call for Papers - Special Issue of Punishment & Society: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective

In the twenty years since the publication of Florence Bernault’s edited volume A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, the study of Africa’s penal systems has expanded tremendously. This scholarship has not only provided a clearer picture of penal ideas and institutions on the African continent across multiple time periods and locations, it has also offered insights into wider questions about the relationship between punishment, colonialism, and decolonization as well as the global circulation of penal techniques. This special issue aims to analyze African developments on their own terms and in relation to imperial and global narratives of punishment and penological networks as well as to integrate the fields of history, sociology, and criminology more closely, highlighting how theoretical insights of sociology and criminology can inform historical research.  By presenting multiple works together in a special issue, we seek to emphasize the value of Africanist historical approaches and methods for interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary research, and to highlight the contribution that studies of African penal systems can make to advancing understanding of global trends in punishment, showing how research on punishment in Africa not only engages with theories from the Global North, but also generates theories that reshape wider approaches to the study of punishment.

Topics for consideration could include (but are not restricted to): indigenous forms of punishment; colonial and postcolonial prisons; capital and corporal punishment; political imprisonment; forced labour; and detention camps.

We are interested in articles undertaking detailed case-study analysis of key historical trends, showcasing different methodological and disciplinary approaches. We invite submissions on all regions of Africa, and its relations with broader global or international developments in punishment and penology.

We particularly welcome submissions from scholars based in Africa and early career scholars.