-
“Lost in Translation”: Extraterritoriality, Subjecthood, and Subjectivity in the Anglo–Yemeni Treaty of 1821 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-27 Itamar Toussia Cohen
In 1821, an expeditionary force of the Bombay Marine imposed an unequal treaty upon the imam of Sana‘a, sovereign of the Yemeni port of Mocha. Previous accounts, depicting the incident as a standard rehearsal of British gunboat diplomacy, have overlooked an important legal innovation enfolded in the treaty wherein the East India Company's claim for extraterritorial jurisdiction over British subjects
-
Legal Pluralism as a Category of Analysis Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-21 Jessica Marglin, Mark Letteney
A debate has raged for decades over legal pluralism and its value for the study of law. Much of this back and forth has resolved to a fight over what law “is” and push-and-pull between legal centrists and pluralists. This introductory essay proposes a new framework for thinking about legal pluralism. Turning away from the centrist/pluralist binary, we instead ask what work legal pluralism as a category
-
“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-21 Alan McPherson
Why have scandalous sprees of lawbreaking by U.S. government officials proven so seductive yet so difficult to prosecute? This article takes the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan–Bush era as an instructive case study and red flag in the attitudinal erosion of the belief in the rule of law among American conservatives. Before the scandal broke, officials and legal counsels willfully mis-interpreted
-
A Grand Jury Exhortation Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-16 Benjamin Keener
This essay brings to light a rare feature of the Stewart legal system. Grand jury charges remain understudied, partly for want of primary source materials. The brief historical and biographical sketches of the essay are appended by a unique and relevant artifact of the time: a preamble or exhortation to a grand jury charge, ostensibly delivered by a Justice of the King's Bench, John Dodderidge.
-
Witnesses for the State: Children and the Making of Modern Evidence Law Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-13 Laura Savarese
This article identifies an overlooked legacy of the child protection movement in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S.: transformations in evidence law and procedure that undermined common-law restrictions on children's testimony. Scholarship on the nineteenth-century modernization of evidence law argues that the rise of cross-examination allowed for the demise of common-law witness
-
The Cartojuridism of the British East India Company Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-09 Sabarish Suresh
This paper will engage with the early colonial maps of the British East India Company to analyze its representative, as well as creative, functions, delineating how maps represent existing legal relations, entrench hierarchies, and visually transmit projected, and aspired, notions of legal authority and sovereignty. This paper studies the constitutive role of cartography apropos law, territory, and
-
The Abolition of Slavery in Africa's Legal Histories Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Benedetta Rossi
This introduction contextualizes the special issue's articles in the broader continental dynamics. It discusses the Eurocentric bias of the historiography and suggests that the view that Europe was responsible for the legal abolition of slavery in Africa should be nuanced and qualified. Some independent African polities abolished slavery before Europe's colonial occupation. Nowhere did European abolitionists
-
The Sultans of Zanzibar and the Abolition of Slavery in East Africa Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Michelle Liebst
In 1890, Sultan Ali of Zanzibar declared in writing that “we wish by every means to stop the slave trade.” Statements like these, in addition to the actual passing of anti-slavery legislation, call into question the generally accepted scholarly understanding that the sultans of Zanzibar only agreed to pass and enforce anti-slavery legislation because they were under duress from European, mainly British
-
The Carried-Off and the Constitution: How British Harboring of Fugitives from American Slavery Led to the Constitution of 1787 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Timothy Messer-Kruse
Accounts of the factors that led to the drafting of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have focused on Congress' failures to levy taxes, regulate commerce, and provide security against internal unrest and foreign encroachments. Left out from history are the attempts of the founders to force Britain to return thousands of escapees from slavery they sheltered. Patriot state leaders tried to coerce the
-
Abolitionist Decrees in Ethiopia: The Evolution of Anti-Slavery Legal Strategies from Menilek to Haile Selassie, 1889–1942 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Takele Merid, Alexander Meckelburg
Slavery and the slave trade were fundamental institutions in Ethiopian history. Their abolition was a protracted process that involved developing, debating, passing, and applying multiple anti-slavery and anti-slave trade edicts and decrees under successive rulers. While slavery existed in various societies that were later integrated in the Abyssinian empire since the second half of the nineteenth
-
Pathologization, Law, and Gender in Cases of Infanticide in Spain and the Netherlands in the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Comparative Perspective Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Willemijn Ruberg, Sara Serrano Martínez
This article compares how gender and pathologization were entangled in the laws on infanticide in Spain and the Netherlands in 1930–1960, as well as in court practices. Both countries knew lenient laws for women who killed their newborn babies. These laws themselves did not assume that these women were suffering from a mental disorder, even though they referred to emotional state. In Spain, where the
-
A Christmas Eve Murder and the Notorious Georges: Community Identity in Northern British Columbia, 1913/14 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Jonathan Swainger
Based upon archival and newspaper sources, this article explores the relationship between the notoriety of South Fort George, Fort George, and Prince George (the Georges) in British Columbia's northern interior, and the sense of self and place for residents on the eve of World War I. The investigation of Harry Porters’ Christmas Eve murder glimpses gender, class, and ethnic sensibilities linking the
-
In Pursuit of Freedom: Oaths, Slave Agency, and the Abolition of Slavery in Western Tanzania, 1905–1930 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Salvatory S. Nyanto, Felicitas M. Becker
This article examines ways in which slaves and missionaries used public declarations before witnesses to carve out a distinctive space of legal proceedings in pursuit of emancipation in western Tanzania. This way of pursuing emancipation shows slaves deploying their intellectual creativity and cultural knowledge to shape the German and British colonial legal systems. Interviews provide evidence that
-
Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Shumeng Han, Xiangyi Ren
The principle of filial piety underpinned both parent–child relations and, more broadly, Qing legal and social order. Entering the turbulent years of the Qing–Republic transition, filial piety went through substantial changes. Drawn from the local legal archives in Jiangjin county, Sichuan, this research traces the transformation of filial piety in legal practice during the first half of the twentieth
-
Exploring African Abolitionism: Fante Perspectives on Domestic Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Michael Ehis Odijie
This article draws on a variety of primary sources to first illustrate the rise of African abolitionism in the Fante region in the mid-nineteenth century and then situate local abolitionists in the context of colonial legal abolition in the Gold Coast. When the British abolished slavery in 1874, various Fante groups had been developing local anti-slavery views and strategies closely connected to the
-
Ahmad Bey's 1846 Istiftāʾ: Its Dual Legislative Framework and Religio-Political Context Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Ismael Musah Montana
On April 26, 1846, Ahmad Bey signed a historic emancipation decree making the Regency of Tunis the first in the modern Islamic world to formally abolish the longstanding institution of slavery. While the decree marked the first of such unprecedented measures, attracting a barrage of compliments from anti-slavery societies around the globe, it conflicted with the local notions of enslaving practices
-
The Edicts of the Praetors: Law, Time, and Revolution in Ancient Rome Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Lisa Pilar Eberle
This paper revises current understandings of judicial edicts in ancient Rome—the annually published texts in which Roman magistrates set out the formulae according to which they would institute trials during their year in office. While standard accounts see these edicts as the work of legal specialists, heretofore neglected sources for how contemporaries talked about these texts suggest that they were
-
Human Rights at the Edges of Late Imperial Britain: The Tyrer Case and Judicial Corporal Punishment from the Isle of Man to Montserrat, 1972–1990 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Christopher Hilliard, Marco Duranti
In Tyrer v. United Kingdom (1978), the European Court of Human of Human Rights ruled that judicial corporal punishment contravened Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which proscribed “degrading treatment or punishment.” The case unfolded at a formative moment in British legal activism, as left-wing civil-liberties lawyers who had been wary of human rights discourse began taking cases
-
Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Quaker Court, 1682–1772 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Esther Sahle
Legal centralization in British America was characterized by the passing of arbitration from the community level to the colonial courts. As a consequence, when the 1765 Stamp Act raised the cost of court business, colonists were at a loss for alternatives. This paper addresses the question of why, at this point, colonists did not return to earlier, non-state forms of arbitration. It offers an explanation
-
Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-12 Eric Eisner
While every slave state except Louisiana limited free Black testimony in cases involving whites, and most barred it completely, several jurisdictions with slavery, including three in the Upper South—Delaware, Maryland, and D.C.—allowed at least some free Black testimony in cases involving whites at least some of the time. Historians and legal scholars have largely overlooked the phenomenon of free
-
“Let the Commander Respond”: The Paradox of Obedience in the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Danny Orbach, Ziv Bohrer
Between 1870 and 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy provided uniquely broad legal protection to subordinates who perpetrated crimes under the orders of military superiors. Legal immunity was provided not only to soldiers who obeyed orders contrary to international law, but also to those who under orders violated domestic standing legislation of the Japanese Army. This gave rise to a so-called
-
Why did Latin America Lose Faith in the Law? Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Timo Schaefer
Colonial Latin America had the fame of being a land where lower-class people were forever suing their betters. To Latin America's popular classes, the law was an indispensable instrument for claiming rights, solving conflicts, and advancing interests. Fast-forward to the middle of the twentieth century, however, and Latin American law held a very different fame. The law was now something to be shunned
-
Paper Empires: Layers of Law in Colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Nandini Chatterjee, Alicia Schrikker, Dries Lyna
Anthropologists and historians have recently underscored the ways in which European colonialism created novel regimes of legality and record-keeping, associated with ambitious and exclusive state-centered claims to both truth and rights, while being inevitably and constantly sucked into eddies of forgery and corruption. However, attention so far has been focused on English/European-language records
-
Persistence of Practice in Law's Parwana and Palm Leaf Empire Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Paul D. Halliday
The essays in this forum demonstrate how attending to the intricacies of documentary practice provides a way to see legal practices over the long haul. Different materials—for instance, paper and palm leaves—manifested different ways of understanding and doing law. But change from one way of doing law to another is sticky; old practices persist alongside new ones. Appreciating this helps us see past
-
The Medico-Legalization of Sex in the Nineteenth-Century United States Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Maayan Sudai
The rising field of medical jurisprudence in common law from late eighteenth century has led to a rearrangement of authority and epistemic power between lay and expert witnesses, in favor of the latter. Although the law had long relied on testimony from members of the community to establish the legal fact of a person's sex, the legal procedure of fact-making started to rely instead on the opinions
-
Beyond “Death Do Us Part”: Spousal Intestate Succession in Nineteenth-Century Hispanic America Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Carmen Diana Deere
In colonial Hispanic America, widows and widowers were in an unfavorable position if their spouse died without a will, only inheriting from them if the deceased left no blood relatives to the 10th degree of kinship. This article examines the extent to which the intestate position of the surviving spouse improved in the new civil codes of the sixteen republics, and how their approaches were influenced
-
Genteel Culture, Legal Education, and Constitutional Controversy in Early National Virginia Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Matthew Steilen
This article focuses on the movement to reform legal education in early national Virginia, offering a fresh perspective by examining the connection between legal education and society and culture. It challenges the notion that constitutional ideas were the primary driving force behind reforms and argues that social status and “manners” played a more significant role. Wealthy elites in Virginia associated
-
Law, Courts, and Constitutions in Twentieth-Century South Asia Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Saumya Saxena, Alastair McClure
This special issue brings together scholars from multiple disciplines and with varied research and geographic expertise to study the historical role played by the law in governing the political, social, and cultural life of twentieth-century South Asia. These articles have not emerged in a vacuum, but rather build on an exciting turn in South Asian history that is placing new focus on the legal and
-
Negotiating Nationhood: Constitutional Warfare, International Law, and the Birth of Bangladesh Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Cynthia Farid
This paper argues the Government in Exile (GIE), the first government of independent Bangladesh, played an important role in framing the founding moment in legal terms. The GIE's constitutional warfare through its adherence to legalism, and subsequent internationalization of the conflict significantly shaped the independence movement of 1971. The GIE was composed of leaders who were lawyers, economists
-
Courts and Constitutions in South Asia and the Global South: A View from the Middle East Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Faiz Ahmed
Not long ago, the study of comparative law in U.S. law schools was dominated by North American and European constitutional systems. Thanks to the contributions of a new generation of legal historians, including those canvassed in this special issue, the landscape is changing. In this special issue, scholars of courts and constitutions in twentieth century Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, India, and
-
“Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Kathryn Schumaker
This article examines the enforcement of anti-miscegenation law in Progressive Era Mississippi by focusing on a series of unlawful cohabitation prosecutions of interracial couples in Natchez. It situates efforts to police and punish mixed-race families within the broader legal culture of Jim Crow, as politicians, judges, and district attorneys sought stricter enforcement of morals laws, including those
-
The Politics of Libel: Thomas Erskine, Freedom of the Press, and Transatlantic Legal Culture, c. 1780–1830 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Nicola Phillips
This article analyzes how the multidirectional movement of legal and popular printed texts, newspapers, letters, and citizens contributed to the political and legal influence of individual lawyers across the Atlantic. It is based on a case study of leading common law barrister and Whig MP Thomas Erskine (1750–1823). It examines the dissemination of Erskine's legal and political arguments, and other
-
Legal Pluralism's Other: Mythologizing Modern Law Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Caroline Humfress
This article interrogates the concept of legal pluralism, as it currently tends to function within contemporary legal and historical scholarship. It argues that the concept of legal pluralism cannot ‘liberate’ positivist analytical legal theory from monist (municipal, state-centric, etc.) straightjackets, but rather itself presumes the primacy of centralized state-issued law—at the same time as masking
-
Rethinking the Rethinking of Legal Pluralism: Toward a Manifesto for a Pluri-Legal Perspective Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Ido Shahar, Karin Carmit Yefet
The paper addresses the perpetual discontent evoked by the concept of legal pluralism, one which, in turn, brings about incessant efforts to “rethink” it. We suggest that one of the sources of this discontent is the erroneous view that legal pluralism is a theory, and the consequent misguided expectations that it should provide scholars of law and society with causal hypotheses and explanations. We
-
Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow
Challenging the common assumption that legal misunderstanding was pervasive, this article analyzes jurisdictional politics as an element of “interpolity law”—a broad framework for legal interactions across polities and regions in the early modern world. It draws on recent research on jurisdictional politics to show how such an approach allows historians to avoid some of the familiar pitfalls associated
-
The Rise of the Indigenous Jurists Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Clifford Ando
Numerous Roman grants to local communities of the right to use local law survive in contemporaneous copies starting in the second century BCE. Contemporaneous with these grants of autonomy, Rome urged institutional changes that reconstituted local elites as aristocracies of office. By contrast, evidence that individuals identified themselves as experts in local law survives in bulk only starting in
-
Genuine Concern for Animals in England's Nineteenth-Century Animal Protection Movement: The Case Against Reductionist Interpretations Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Angela Fernandez
Animal–human history is an increasingly popular area of historical research.1 Diana Donald's 2020 book, Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of animal protection and the role women have played in moral reform movements. Starting from the premise that the prevention of cruelty to animals is “a pure product of the
-
The Redefinition of Clandestine Marriage by Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Theologians and Jurists Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Paolo Astorri
Within the medieval Catholic Church, the term ‘clandestine betrothal’ was associated with the absence of witnesses, solemnities, and other formalities. Parental consent was not a legal requirement for betrothal or marriage, which was based on the free decision of the spouses. However, Martin Luther held that the will of the parties was not sufficient, because the couple was joined by God, and God’s
-
The Uses and Abuses of Legal Pluralism: A View from the Sideline Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Tamar Herzog
This text takes issue with how present day debates regarding legal pluralism affect our vision of the past, as well as limit the horizons of possibilities in the future. It suggests that the genealogy of these debates determined what would be seen, and what ignored, and that, as a result, it has privileged some aspects, while forgetting the importance of others.
-
Mergers and Legal Fictions: Coverture and Intermarried Women in India Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Leilah Vevaina
Within India's system of plural personal laws, the rights of women in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance are solely based on their natal communal identity. While we see many examples of women appealing to courts to secure or improve their rights vis-à-vis personal laws, marriage outside the community has often occluded these rights completely. Marital property, inheritance, and even access
-
Oceanic Mobility and the Empire of the Pass System Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Bhavani Raman
From the age of empires to the apartheid regime in South Africa, pass laws have defined the scope of the mobility of subjects by relying on a paper document, the pass. This essay focusses on the pass document to understand the governance of mobility in the Indian ocean. In doing so, it shows how the pass document in its various forms through many centuries in fact, illuminates a form of inter-legal
-
Creating Law through Regulating Intimacy: The Case of Slave Marriage in Nineteenth-Century New York and the United States Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Lauren Feldman
This article argues that American jurists fashioned new understandings about the capacity of states to legislate about marriage through regulating the intimate lives of enslaved and newly freed individuals. This article does so through analyzing the creation and impact of a little-studied 1809 law in New York that legalized the marriages of enslaved people—while individuals were still enslaved—as part
-
Introduction: Rethinking the Policing of Homosexuality in Modern America Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Angela Fernandez, Gautham Rao
In 2021, Anna Lvovsky published Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall with the University of Chicago Press. The book studies gay communities’ confrontations with criminal law in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Lvovsky, a professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Harvard University, pays particularly close attention to law enforcement
-
Complicating Conformity Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Marie-Amélie George
In the fall of 1989, the queer community became embroiled in a fierce debate over whether to press for marriage rights. Two attorneys from Lambda Legal, a leading gay and lesbian rights organization, set out the competing considerations in the pages of Out/Look, a community magazine. Tom Stoddard, the then-executive director, argued that the movement should prioritize marriage rights because that strategy
-
Meet Me in Pervert Park: Epistemology, Positionality, and Praxis in the Queer History of Policing and the Law Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Steven Maynard
Just a stone's throw from the campus of the university in Kingston, Ontario, where I teach, is a small park. Hugging a rocky stretch of Lake Ontario shoreline, Macdonald Park, named after Canada's first prime minister, is better known by locals as “Pervert Park.” Since at least World War II, Pervert Park has been the primary cruising ground in Kingston for men searching for sex with other men, a meeting
-
Into Law's Artifice: Postwar Policing, Sexual Difference, and the Epistemic Gap Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Yvonne Pitts
Vice Patrol analyzes how reconfigurations in postwar gay public life, psychiatric research, and policing surveillance technologies recast Americans’ chimerical commitments to purging sexual vice. Before a more radical, visible queer liberation movement emerged after 1969, vice enforcement was not a monolithic project but rather a conglomeration of newly empowered post-Prohibition liquor agents, policing
-
Response Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Anna Lvovsky
I want to begin by thanking the editors of Law and History Review for hosting this rich exchange on Vice Patrol, as well as Marie-Amélie George, Yvonne Pitts, and Steven Maynard for their generous and generative comments. Engaging so deeply and so rigorously with another scholar's project, connecting it to one's own research and even to one's own life experience, is an act of remarkable collegiality
-
Seeing Like an Anti-Fraud State Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Susanna L. Blumenthal
“They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death,” Jonathan Swift famously wrote of the fictional island of Lilliput in Gulliver's Travels. Appearing as an epigraph of Edward Balleisen's Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff, it invites comparison of Lilliput with the United States, not least because it is paired with a 2007 quotation
-
How Hermann Kantorowicz Changed His Mind About America and Its Law, 1927–34 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Katharina Isabel Schmidt
Hermann Kantorowicz crossed the Atlantic twice: to take up a visiting professorship at Columbia Law School in the summer of 1927, and to find refuge at New York's University in Exile in 1933/1934. Between his first and second stay, the German-Jewish émigré changed his mind about America and its law fundamentally. While he had—patronizingly—praised his US colleagues for “catch[ing] up… intellectually”
-
Legal Limbo and Caste Consternation: Determining Kayasthas’ Varna Rank in Indian Law Courts, 1860–1930 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-09 Hayden J. Bellenoit
This article explores how colonial law in India interacted with the construction of caste rank (varna) between 1860 and 1930. It specifically tracks contestations over Kayasthas’ legal varna rank in northern and eastern India through various inheritance disputes, threading them together to shed light on how courts sought to anchor their interpretations of Hindu law around the Indian jurisprudential
-
An Empire in Disguise: The Appropriation of Pre-Existing Modes of Governance in Dutch South Asia, 1650–1800 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Alicia Schrikker, Byapti Sur
This article presents an analysis of the paper- and office work at two South Asian corners in the early modern Dutch empire. The article engages with current approaches to the histories of bureaucracy and empire that emphasize the lived experience of “paperwork” in order to gain a localized understanding of what constituted empire. The article focuses on the production and use of pattas, olas, and
-
A True Copy? Documents and the Production of Legality in the Bombay Inam Commission Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Dominic Vendell
This essay examines the role of Indian-language documentation in the production of legality in colonial western India, focusing on the workings of the Bombay Inam Commission (1852-1863). It situates legal validation of claims to tax-free land revenue within the broader process of securing, organizing, classifying, and registering Marathi- and Persian-language documents. Combating the effects of rain
-
The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Hardeep Dhillon
This article unravels an important historical conjuncture in the making of modern US citizenship and alienage by drawing on the state's regulation of naturalization as it relates to Asian immigration in the early twentieth century. My primary concern is to examine the socio-legal formations that constructed the thick distinctions between the modern US citizen and alien along the lines of racial difference
-
Concrete Leviathan: The Interstate Highway System and Infrastructural Inequality in the Age of Liberalism Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-21 Teal Arcadi
This article explores how the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways prompted litigation that altered the course of administrative law and governance from the 1960s onward. By that time, the construction of the interstate system had become synonymous with the destruction of neighborhoods and parks bulldozed to make way for the “concrete monsters,” as some came to call
-
Policing Sati: Law, Order, and Spectacle in Postcolonial India Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Saumya Saxena
This article explores the response of the postcolonial state to the question of widow immolation – sati. It demonstrates that the conversation on the practice of sati at the high point of Hindu law reform in the 1950s reflected the simultaneous pressures on the new democracy to establish rule of law while also accommodating the renewed reverence for tradition and religious custom in an independent
-
“To Save the Benefit of the Act of Parliamt”: Mapping an Early American Copyright Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Nora Slonimsky
While the reach of Parliament was hotly contested in eighteenth-century America, there was one Act in particular that proved especially complicated for geographer Lewis Evans and his daughter, Amelia Evans Barry. Believing that English copyright law did not extend to Philadelphia in the 1750s, Lewis Evans drew on a variety of tools and circumstances to, in essence, craft his own interpretation of what
-
Nepal's Constitutional Foundations between Revolution and Cold War (1950–60) Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Mara Malagodi
The 1950s represent a foundational decade in Nepal's constitutional history. In the wake of decolonization in British India, the “year 7 revolution” (1950–51) grew out of the alliance between King Tribhuvan Shah and Nepal's democratic political parties created in India against the Rana autocratic regime in Kathmandu. Eventually the pro-democracy forces prevailed, and a crucial political transition
-
A New Language of Rule: Alwar's Administrative Experiment, c. 1838–58 Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Elizabeth M. Thelen
Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister)
-
“No Quixotry in Redress of Grievances”: How Community Abatement of Public Nuisances Disappeared from American Law Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 William B. Meyer
Before 1859, the right of any member of the public to abate a public nuisance existed unchallenged in American law as a judicially recognized form of popular justice. In that year, the decision in Brown v. Perkins, authored by Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, restricted the right to those who had suffered particular injury. The decision grew out of a suit for damages by the owner of an illegal
-
Re-Reading Morant Bay: Protest, Inquiry, and Colonial Rule Law and History Review (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Jonathan Connolly
The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion figures prominently in scholarship on modern Britain, colonial Jamaica, and the British Empire, as a milestone of post-emancipation protest, a turning point in British race-thinking, and a focal point for debates on martial law and British justice. This article presents a new interpretation of the rebellion’s legal and political significance. Focused on processes of formal