CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES

Special Issue "Gender and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England"(Summer 2012) Deadline for Submissions: May 15, 2012

The nineteenth century was a period rife with watershed moments in the history of law and gender in England. It is also a period marked by contradictions: legislation that granted women greater rights under the law took place in fits and starts, and was never unaccompanied by cultural and social backlash. The period began, in 1801, with a national census that revealed women outnumbered men by 400,000, and ended with the repeal of the discriminatory Contagious Diseases Acts (1866) and the passage of the First Married Woman's Property Act (1870). Debates about the relationship between women and the law, and their attendant questions (e.g. Were women legal persons? Could they be?), permeated the legislation, court cases, newspapers, serials, and novels of the day. The roles, and legal power, of English men were also in flux during the period. The rise of industrialism, as well as the middle class, challenged the masculinity of the landed and leisured male aristocrat. Laws that!

granted women greater rights in marriage, divorce, and ownership of earnings and property served to challenge the centrality of the male patriarch in traditional family structures. In turn, masculinity became increasingly defined by both state-sponsored and independent imperial ventures in the colonies. And by the end of the nineteenth century, a new version of manhood came into being. The rise of the aesthetes, as represented by the publicity surrounding Oscar Wilde, and the criticism of the aesthetes, as symbolized by his rather public trial, serve as the most infamous example of events that brought to light growing anxieties about masculinity, sexuality, and the law.

This special issue of NCGS invites scholars from across the arts and humanities to contribute their work on the intersections between law, gender, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. Topics that might be addressed include:

·Queen Victoria

·Marriage, Motherhood, and/or Families (including the Child Custody Act, the Matrimonial Causes Act, and the Married Woman's Property Act

·Governesses and their relationship to legal families

·Property and inheritance

·Authorship and the International Copyright Act

·Education (including the establishment of Queen's College, London; Bedford College; and Girton College)

·The "odd" women (singletons)

·Women and reform movements (including the Voting Act and the Equal Franchise Act)

·Labor laws (including the Ashley's Mines Act and the Factory Acts)

·Health Care and the Contagious Diseases Act

·Criminal Justice (including Prostitution, Sodomy Trials, and Prisons)

·Imperialism, colonialism, and gender

·Masculinities

· Performance

Please send complete papers (of between 5,000 and 8,000 words) electronically for consideration to the guest editors of the special issue (Prof. Katherine Gilbert and Prof. Julia Chavez) at the following email addresses: kgilbert@drury.edu and JChavez@stmartin.edu

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2012

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. The journal is a collaborative effort that brings together scholars from a variety of universities to create a unique voice in the field. We endorse a broad definition of gender studies and welcome submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and nationality. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies publishes two regular issues a year, in addition to a specially-themed summer issue, and accepts submissions year-round.

NOTICE: Judges and Judging in the History of the Common Law and Civil Law

Paul Brand and Josuha Getzler (eds), Judges and Judging in the History of the Common Law and Civil Law: From Antiquity to Modern Times has been released:

In this collection of essays, leading legal historians address significant topics in the history of judges and judging, with comparisons not only between British, American and Commonwealth experience, but also with the judiciary in civil law countries. It is not the law itself, but the process of law-making in courts, that is the focus of inquiry. Contributors describe and analyse aspects of judicial activity, in the widest possible legal and social contexts, across two millennia. The essays cover English common law, continental customary law and ius commune, and aspects of the common law system in the British Empire. The volume is innovative in its approach to legal history. None of the essays offer straight doctrinal exegesis; none take refuge in old-fashioned judicial biography. The volume is a selection of the best papers from the 18th British Legal History Conference.

The book includes

Part I. Common Law:

1. Judges and judging 1176–1307 Paul Brand
2. Formalism and realism in fifteenth-century English law: bodies corporate and bodies natural David J. Seipp
3. Early modern judges and the practice of precedent Ian Williams
4. Bifurcation and the Bench: the influence of the jury on English conceptions of the judiciary John H. Langbein
5. Sir William Scott and the law of marriage Rebecca Probert
6. The politics of English law in the nineteenth century Michael Lobban
7. Judges and the criminal law in England 1808–1861 Phil Handler
8. Bureaucratic adjudication: the internal appeals of the Inland Revenue Chantal Stebbings
Part II. Continental Law:

9. Remedy of prohibition against Roman judges in civil trials Ernest Metzger
10. The spokesmen in medieval courts: the unknown leading judges of the customary law and makers of the first continental law reports Dirk Heirbaut
11. Superior courts in early modern France, England and the Holy Roman Empire Ulrike Muessig
12. The Supreme Court of Holland and Zeeland judging cases in the early 18th century A. J. B. Sirks
Part III. Imperial Law:

13. 11,000 prisoners: habeas corpus, 1500–1800 Paul D. Halliday
14. Some difficulties of colonial judging: the Bahamas 1886–1893 Martin J. Wiener
15. Australia's early High Court, the Fourth Commonwealth Attorney-General and the 'strike of 1905' Susan Priest
16. Judges and judging in colonial New Zealand: where did native title fit in? David V. Williams.

NOTICE: Edinburgh Roman Law Group

Centre for Legal History

EDINBURGH ROMAN LAW GROUP

The next meeting of the Group will be held on Friday 16 March 2012 at 5.30 p.m. when

Professor Dr. Andreas Thier

Professor of Legal History, Canon Law, Legal Theory and Private Law at the University of Zurich

will speak on

“The prince's power over money and medieval canon law”

Lorimer Room, Old College

University of Edinburgh

All welcome

It would be of great assistance if you would email Dr. Paul du Plessis (p.duplessis@ed.ac.uk) or write or telephone to him at the School of Law, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL, U.K. ((0)131 6509701), if you wish to join us afterwards for dinner “aux frais des participants”.