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 region with the rest of the province and nation, along with the British Columbia Provincial Police force's reliance on peace keeping in an era that was beginning to reassess what professional policing might entail. The result demonstrates that while the Georges imagined themselves as resting on the periphery of the white settlement frontier, the evidence indicates that in seeking acceptance by opinion leaders elsewhere in the nation, locally self-identified respectable people eagerly embraced the norms of post-Edwardian Canada. That the Georges tawdry reputation persists into the early twenty-first century suggests that the resilience of this notoriety reflects forces at play well-beyond British Columbia's northern interior. Framed in this fashion, the Christmas Eve murder sheds light on the legacies of reputation on the white settlement frontier, the influence of gender, class, and ethnicity in the construction of crime, and the evolution of professional policing.

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 in Mocha was expanded to include not only British European subjects of the Crown and certain native dependents of the factory, but also the entire Indian merchant population of the port. Bombay's claim stood on shaky ground, however, as the legal boundaries of British subjecthood in the Indian subcontinent were anything but clear, not least to colonial administrators themselves. Prosaically enough, the intervention was foiled by an inaccurate translation of the treaty from English to Arabic, demonstrating the extent to which Company officials were at the mercy of non-Western middlemen and translators who brokered between them and local rulers and administrators. A second line of inquiry in this article thus looks at the structural vulnerabilities of legal imperialism, reflecting upon the potential of contradictions and untranslatabilities between British-imperial and Arab-Islamic legal and epistemological assumptions in shaping the outcomes of the imperial encounter in the western Indian Ocean.

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.

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 these public declarations drew on long-standing practices of oathing in western Tanzanian societies, while administrative sources indicate that oaths had been used in Islamic legal practice. Both mission and administrative sources show that these public declarations became a fairly routine means to facilitate slave emancipation between about 1907 and the 1920s. They were seen as legitimate by both (ex)owners and (ex)slaves, and were welcomed by officials as they mitigated tensions between owners and slaves, and between slave owners and missions. This legal practice was not codified in either the gradualist German-era laws on slavery or the more proactive abolitionist laws enacted by the British. It was a bottom-up innovation, developed in a context in which effective emancipation depended on drawn-out struggles and negotiations over personal autonomy and malleable social norms.

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 notion of honor was more important in the law, from the 1940s a debate was held about the relationship between mental illness and infanticide laws in the context of the Franco regime's emphasis on pronatalism. While in Spain the institutional monopoly of the generalist forensic physician as preferred expert excluded psychiatrists, in the Netherlands forensic psychiatrists were more influential, and their role increased from the 1950s. The article argues that regardless of many differences in forensic and political culture in both countries infanticidal women were pathologized: in Spain mostly via some interpretations of the infanticide law, and in the Netherlands via forensic psychiatry. However, pathologization, we show, involved many lay actors such as lawyers, legal scholars, and probation services.

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 argue that legal pluralism is not a theory but a research perspective, and, as such, is not meant to provide us with explanatory propositions, but rather to increase our awareness of the plurality and inter-relationality of socio-legal spheres and of the implications thereof. We further identify—and briefly discuss—the four core principles of a pluri-legal perspective: plurality, relationality, power, and agency. Taken together, these four premises constitute a manifesto of sorts for a pluri-legal perspective.

Until today, not only the general public but also scholars of colonialism and imperialism debate about the extent to which Europeans were aware of the centrality of racial discrimination for colonialism and empires. Those who stress that racism was the foundation of European colonialism appear to be anachronistic. However, as this essay demonstrates, at least the British of the late nineteenth century were well-aware of the constitutive character of racial discrimination for their Empire. During the “constitutional panic” which the proposal of the Ilbert Bill in 1883 caused, the arguments exchanged in newspapers, town hall meetings and parliamentary debates revealed the racist foundation of British India. One contemporary observed “the unhappy tendency of this controversy to bring into broad daylight everything which a wise and prudent administrator should seek to hide.” This essay seeks to bring into broad daylight once again what has been widely forgotten or ignored. Statements in Parliament expressing that it was “perfectly impossible and ridiculous, so long as we retained our hold on India, to give Native races full equality” testify for explicitness of the debate. Analyzing the arguments against the Ilbert Bill, which sought to introduce full racial equality in the judiciary, serves for better understanding the foundation of British India.

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 indeed the work of the magistrates that issued them. At times these magistrates formulated new provisions; for the most part they selectively drew on past edicts, not least to accommodate the demands of their friends and clients. These patterns in compositional practice can only be understood within the framework of Roman political culture. More importantly, in their annually changing published form judicial edicts emerge as crucial objects in the construction of time in ancient Rome. Arguably, they constituted a legal practice that could encompass revolution—at least for a year.

This article revisits the roots of anti-statism in the United States by analyzing opposition to the introduction of compulsory school vaccination and medical examinations at the local and state levels in the Progressive Era. It shows that the widespread use of compulsory schooling laws to promote vaccination in the late nineteenth century, which led to establishing compulsory school medical exams and school nurse programs in the early twentieth, precipitated intense conflicts over states’ police powers. Exploring the controversy over school vaccine requirements in Utah between 1899 and 1901, the article reveals that resistance to public health interventions in schools fused skepticism of science with a gendered defense of individual and parental rights to challenge states’ power over children. The article then traces how these conflicts filtered up to the federal level, framing arguments against a proposed federal department of health in the 1910s. Led by the National League for Medical Freedom, opponents directly linked the reach of the police powers via compulsory school health initiatives with the expansion of federal power, arguing they were connected in a plot to establish “state medicine” that imperiled the gendered freedom of the “individual”—i.e., the white male citizen—over the home.

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 disqualification rules. The erosion of restrictions on children's testimony, however, requires an alternative or additional explanation, because cross-examination did not allay fears about children's reliability. The driving force for changes in the law governing child witnesses, I argue, was the slate of nineteenth-century child protection laws whose enforcement typically required children's testimony. The case study of Progressive-Era New York, presented here, reveals how evidence law and procedure adapted to substantive law's demand for children's evidence: reformers legislated an exception to the common-law oath requirement in children's cases, pushed trial courts to modernize their approach to examining child witnesses’ competency, and expanded the state's power to detain children as material witnesses. Those reforms fostered the ends of law enforcement, but did not resolve enduring debates about the reliability risks of children's testimony and the costs of testifying for children's wellbeing.

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 return of all fugitives from slavery evacuated with the British army by blocking payment of debts to England in violation of the Treaty of Paris. Such actions ultimately caused the breakdown of the agreement and exposed the structural inability of the Congress to enforce the terms of a duly ratified treaty over intransigent states. Ultimately, the issue of the “carried off” and with it the nation's ability to conduct foreign policy, was the paramount issue that could only be resolved by a fundamental restructuring of the federal structure of government.

The twentieth-century processes of legal modernization rendered transformations to the concept of authority and its public perception. This article builds on the complex Weberian articulations of these transformations to analyze a contemporary contentious debate concerning the establishment of a Rabbinical Court of Appeals, in Mandatory Palestine, between 1918 and 1921. This initiative, imposed by the British government and supported by non-religious Jewish leaders, raised a heated controversy between two rabbinical figures—Haim Hirschnson of Hoboken, New Jersey, and Ben-Zion Uziel of Jaffa. Based on a close reading of their texts, juxtaposing them to Weberian conceptualizations of modern authority, and contextualizing them in particular historical circumstances, I argue that both rabbis comprehended the appellate mechanism as transforming the concept of rabbinical authority. By instituting appellate courts, authority shifts from its “charismatic” or “traditional” form to a “legal” institutional-based form. They harshly disagreed, however, if this transformation is a positive development in the modernization of Jewish law, or, on the contrary, will have a detrimental impact on the public's trust in the judiciary. The rabbinical articulations of these Weberian themes, as I suggest to interpret their texts, shed light on the application of the Weberian theory of bureaucracy to the judicial system and legal profession and also provide illuminating insights into the analysis of current church-law relationships, in Israeli law and elsewhere.

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.

Together Cæsar and Cotton left an immense trove of English state papers on all matters of subjects. While Cæsar spent much of his lifetime as an officer of state, e.g., Master of the Rolls, they both devised innumerable works of great value. For instance, both he and Cotton expounded upon the issue of the post-nati and other arguments made in the conferences on the union with Scotland in Parliament. With their cessation in 1607, Cæsar undertook his most significant follow-up work: “That neither any General Statute nor Nativity only make a Man (whose Parents were Strangers) to be a Natural Subject in any Country.” Later duplicated by Cotton in Titus, F. IV., the intricacies of its two pages remained long-guarded in the private possession of such great men as Lords, Secretaries of State, and Prime Ministers. Only two centuries after Cæsar commenced its work did it come full circle to the British Museum—itself, ironically, formed from the seized library of Cotton. As for legal precedent, it is unique in that its broad historical scope predated the complexities of England's permanent royal colonies in America. During this period, every regnant—except for Charles I and James II—would assent unto major naturalization or alien statutes during their reign, all of which remained common law throughout England, the Empire, and America until, at the least, 1863.

The analysis delves into the complex legal intricacies surrounding the establishment of South Slavic state entities post-World War I, as international law of the time didn't fully encompass modern legal instruments defining international relations subjects. Nonetheless, legal arguments affirm the statehood of the State of SCS, formed within the former Austro-Hungarian Empire through legitimate representative bodies, despite lacking formal international recognition. The Croatian state transitioned governance under the National Council of SCS without abolishing its institutions. The analysis of the “December 1st Act” highlights procedural violations during the forming of the Kingdom of SCS, indicating a deviation from authorized scope, though it did not render the new state's government illegitimate. The negotiating process favored Serbian authorities, evident in the “Vidovdan” Constitution, yet it doesn't suffice to claim the State of SCS was annexed by the Kingdom of Serbia. Legally, there's little ambiguity, but disputes in international legal rulings and interpretations uncover internal political tensions and external pragmatic influences.

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 Black testimony in the South, outside of Louisiana. In this article, I argue that courts in the Upper South allowed some free Black testimony in cases involving whites in part because allowing (limited) Black testimony enabled courts to access the truth (slightly) more freely, thereby increasing the law's legitimacy. The exceptions to the general bar against Black testimony in cases involving whites also demonstrate the diversity of legal trends in the antebellum Upper South. In Maryland, the space for free Black testimony shrank. In D.C. and Delaware, it grew. But Southerners long contested the relationship between race and law. Competing pressures to administer a well-functioning legal system and to maintain racial hierarchy exerted force on the white elite. Southern elites, even before the great convulsion of the Civil War, sometimes divided on how best to administer a white supremacist legal regime.

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 century. It argues that two overlapping processes—legal reforms and nation-state building—synergized to restructure the meaning of filial piety from a largely integrated principle in Qing, which bridged the gaps between filiality and loyalty to the emperor and between personalized morality and imperial state legitimacy, to divergent new interpretations of filial piety, including the individualist filial piety, nationalist filial piety, legal filial piety, and sentimental filial piety. Each new interpretation inherits only part of its original meaning and incorporates newly introduced legal knowledge of legal equality and property ownership. The article concludes that various, sometimes contradictory interpretations of filial piety indicate the Republican legal reforms as an in-between, dynamic spectrum of legal change with vigorous negotiations among different legal actors and knowledge regimes.

This article republishes a series of documents concerning citizenship rights for African Americans who were abroad. Twice during the 1850s the U.S. Secretary of State (William L. Marcy) issued instructions to consuls where he spelled out the relationship between race and citizenship for individuals who were beyond the borders of the United States. Because citizenship was not clearly defined the antebellum period, either in law or practice, the Secretary's guidance offers an important set of documents that scholars from a variety of fields can incorporate into their scholarship and teaching.