Symposium
on Comparative Early Modern Legal History:
Meanings
of Justice in New World Empires: Settler and Indigenous Law as Counterpoints
Date:
Friday, October 10, 2014
Location:
Newberry Library, Chicago
Organized
by: Brian Owensby (University of Virginia) and Richard J. Ross (University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Understandings
of justice differed among New World empires and among the settlers, imperial
officials, and indigenous peoples within each one. This conference will
focus on the array of meanings of justice, their emergence and transformation,
and the implications of adopting one or another definition. Our emphasis
is less on the long-studied problem of the ethics of conquest and dispossession
as on the notions of justice animating workaday negotiations, lawsuits, and
assertions of right. To this end, we are interested in the following
sorts of questions: What about pre-contact legality and about European
debates about law impelled empires to offer indigenous people access to
settlers’ courts and legal remedies? How did indigenous notions of
legality shape natives’ resort to settlers’ law? How and why did it occur
to Indians that European law offered them a tactical opportunity? To what
extent did indigenous litigants and communities see law as a moral
resource? In what ways did Indians misconstrue settler’s legality because
of their own preconceptions about justice? How did indigenous recourse to
law shape colonial and imperial legal structures? These questions invite
reflection on how settler law became intelligible—tactically, technically
and morally—to natives.
From the
Europeans’ point of view, settlers thought about their own legal order by
reference to highly stylized depictions of natives’ law. Sometimes
indigenous legality was treated as an example of primitivism, or savagery, or
the work of the devil; sometimes as an honorable system appropriate to the
social situation of Indians; sometimes as a precursor to imperial law;
sometimes as reminiscent of legal systems in European antiquity or in other
non-Western societies; and sometimes as an early stage in the Scottish
Enlightenment’s four-stage theory of socio-legal development. How did
indigenous law serve as a contrast that helped settlers legitimate, critique, and
understand their own legal system? Conversely, in what ways did the
example of settler law occasion debates about the meaning of justice within
native communities? The conference will bring together law professors,
historians, and social scientists to explore how settler and indigenous law
acted as counterpoints within and across European New World empires.
Brian Owensby
(University of Virginia History) and Richard Ross (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Law and History) organized “Meanings of Justice in New World Empires: Settler
and Indigenous Law as Counterpoints.”
The conference is an offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early
Modern Legal History, which gathers under the auspices of the Center for
Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to explore a
particular topic in the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the
period c.1492-1815. Funding has been
provided by the University of Illinois College of Law.
Attendance
at the Symposium is free and open to the public. Participants and attendees should preregister
by contacting the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library at
312.255.3514, or send an e-mail to renaissance@newberry.org.
Papers will be precirculated electronically to all registrants.
For information
about the conference, please consult our website at http://www.newberry.org/symposium-comparative-early-modern-legal-history
or contact Prof. Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu
or at 217-244-7890.
Here
is the program and schedule:
9:00 Welcome: Brian Owensby (University of
Virginia, History) and Richard Ross (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
Law and History)
9:05 to 10:40: Panel: Constructing Native
Elites and Indigenous Jurisdictions (16C-17C)
Karen
Graubart (Notre Dame, History): “Learning From the Qadi: The Jurisdiction of Local Rule in the
Early Colonial Andes”
Alcira Dueñas (Ohio State, Newark, History): “Reclaiming the ‘República de Indios:’ Colonial Indigenous
Agents in the Production and Enforcement of Law”
Bradley Dixon
(University of Texas, Austin, History): “The ‘Darling
Indians’: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Crisis of Virginia’s Native American Elite”
Commentator
#1: Sherwin Bryant (Northwestern, History)
Commentator
#2: Karen Kupperman (New York University, History)
Chair: Richard Ross (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Law and History)
10:40 to 10:55: Refreshment Break
10:55 to 12:30: Panel: Native and Settler
Legal Understandings (17C-18C)
Jenny
Pulsipher (BYU, History): “Defending and Defrauding the Indians: John Wompas, Legal Pluralism, and the Sale of
Indian Land”
Yanna
Yannakakis (Emory, History): “‘False justice’ (‘justicia xihui’)? Colonial Law and Indian Jurisdiction in Highland
Oaxaca, Mexico”
Tamar
Herzog (Harvard, History): “Dialoguing with Barbarians: What
Natives Said and Europeans Responded in Eighteenth-Century Portuguese-America”
Commentator #1 and Chair: Stuart Banner
(UCLA, Law)
Commentator #2: Robert Morrissey
(University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, History)
12:30 to 1:50: Lunch: Participants and
audience members are invited to try the restaurants in the neighborhood around the Newberry.
1:50 to 3:05 : Panel: Indigenous Legal Ideas
in the 18C
Bianca Premo
(Florida International, History): “Now and Then: Status, Custom, and Modernity
in Indian Law, Spanish America. 18th Century”
Craig Yirush
(UCLA, History): “‘Since We Came out of this Ground’:
Treaty Negotiations and Indigenous Legal Norms in Eighteenth-Century North
America”
Commentator:
Daniel Richter (University of Pennsylvania, History)
Chair: Brian
Owensby (University of Virginia, History)
3:05 to 3:20: Refreshment Break
3:20 to 4:55 Panel: Native Law and the Long
19C
Gregory
Ablavsky (University of Pennsylvania, Law and History): “Species of
Sovereignty: Native Claims-Making and the Early American State”
Lauren Benton
(New York University, History): “Protection, Jurisdiction, and Interpolity
Legalities in the Atlantic World”
Marcela
Echeverri (Yale, History): “Liberal Experiments and Indigenous
Citizenship in New Granada, 1810-1814”
Commentator
#1 and Chair: Frederick Hoxie (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
History)
Commentator
#2: Emilio Kourí (University of Chicago, History)
5:00 Adjourn
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