NOTICE: MUSSON & STEBBINGS ON MAKING LEGAL HISTORY

Cambridge University Press has just published Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebblings (eds), Making legal history: approaches and methodologies (2012).


The book is largely drawn from the British Legal History Conference held in Exeter in 2009. It also includes, however, David Ibbetson's 'Comparative legal history: a methodology', originally delivered at the European Society of Comparative Legal History (ESCLH)'s inaugural conference held in Valencia in 2010. It also includes several other ESCLH members.

The volume is described as:

Drawing together leading legal historians from a range of jurisdictions and cultures, this collection of essays addresses the fundamental methodological underpinning of legal history research. Via a broad chronological span and a wide range of topics, the contributors explore the approaches, methods and sources that together form the basis of their research and shed light on the complexities of researching into the history of the law. By exploring the challenges posed by visual, unwritten and quasi-legal sources, the difficulties posed by traditional archival material and the novelty of exploring the development of legal culture and comparative perspectives, the book reveals the richness and dynamism of legal history research.

Contents

• Introduction Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebbings
• Reflections on 'doing' legal history - Sir John Baker
• Editing law reports and doing legal history: compatible or incompatible projects - Paul Brand
• The indispensability of manuscript case notes to eighteenth-century barristers and judges - James Oldham
• Judging the judges: the reputations of nineteenth century judges and their sources - Patrick Polden
• Benefits and barriers: the making of Victorian legal history - Chantal Stebbings
• The historical turn in late nineteenth-century American legal thought - David M. Rabban
• The methodological debates in German speaking Europe (1960–1990) - Marcel Senn
• Exploring the minds of lawyers: the duty of the legal historian to write the books of non-written law - Dirk Heirbaut
• Comparative legal history: a methodology - David Ibbetson
• 'They put to the torture all the ancient monuments': reflections on making eighteenth-century Irish legal history - Sean Donlan
• The politics of historiography and the taxonomies of the colonial past: law, history and the tribes - Paul McHugh
• Lay legal history - Wilf Prest
• Antiquarianism and legal history - Michael Stuckey
• Re-examining King John and Magna Carta: reflections on reasons, methodology and methods - Jane Frecknall-Hughes
• Visual sources: mirror of justice or 'through a glass darkly'? - Anthony Musson
• Sanctity, superstition and the death of Sarah Jacob - Richard Ireland.

NOTICE: New Issue of SOLON: Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies in Law, Crime and History

The latest edition of SOLON: Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies in Law, Crime and History is now live at:

The articles include:

• Tom Smith, Zealous Advocates: The Historical Foundations of the Adversarial Criminal Defence Lawyer
• Vicky Holmes, Absent Fireguards and Burnt Children: Coroners and the Development of Clause 15 of the Children Act 1908
• Stefan Slater, Street Disorder in the Metropolis, 1905-39

Contact: solon@plymouth.ac.uk

CALL FOR PAPERS: Australia New Zealand Law & History Society

The following Call for Papers was lifted straight from the Legal History Blog:

CFP: Australia New Zealand Law & History Society

Posted by Dan Ernst 

[Here's a call for papers for what appears to be a particularly well-crafted annual meeting of Antipodean legal historians, to be held at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). The organizers tell me that they are keen to have "many of our North American colleagues" attend. Here is the link to the conference website; here a link to another conference at UTS, on the "historical connections" between the legal profession and defense forces; here a link to yet another, on feminism and the law that will include "revisiting the past."]

The 31st Annual Conference of the Australia New Zealand Law and History Society will be held at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), 10-12 December 2012. UTS is the most centrally located law school in Sydney, situated next to Central Station, on the edge of China Town, three minutes by monorail from Sydney’s central shopping district and a short trip to the harbour by direct train or bus.

The conference theme is “Receiving Laws/Giving Laws”. It is orientated towards the movement, transmission and transformation of laws and their histories – across Empire, through time, in and between genres and disciplines. The receiving and giving of laws could be addressed in a broad range of ways. How do laws and histories translocate? By what means (doctrinal, processual, cultural) are laws transmitted and received in new places? What transformations happen as a result of this movement? Whose histories, cultures and laws appear and disappear through these transformations? What kinds of interventions can bring about ways of transforming, perceiving and transmitting the law and its histories/cultures?

The keynote speaker is Professor Philip Girard, University Research Professor and Professor of Law, History & Canadian Studies, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. There will also be a plenary panel in which three scholars will address the theme of the conference, each through a different genre of legal history: Professor Anne Orford, Melbourne Law School; Dr Katherine Biber, School of Law, UTS; Dr Damen Ward, Crown Law Office, Wellington.

The organising committee would welcome interest from historians from any jurisdiction. The call for papers will be open until late June. Inquiries or paper proposals - including a title, brief abstract and brief biography - should be sent to shaunnagh.dorsett@uts.edu.au

NOTICE: Ando on Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition

The Legal History Blog recently posted a notice on Clifford Ando's Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition (2011). It will be of interest to many of you. They wrote:

Clifford Ando, Professor of Classics, History, and Law at the University of Chicago, discusses his new book Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press) in a recent issue of Rorotoko.

On the book "in a nutshell":

For complicated reasons, Roman law as an academic discipline long remained fixated on describing its rules. How did one write a will at Rome? What was the age of marriage? Books had titles like “The Roman law of slavery.”

My book attempts to side-step questions about what Romans lawyers thought—in order to ask about how they thought. Why did they think law changed? How did they think change in the law could or should be justified? And how did they think legal institutions could or should adapt to social change?

For the fact of the matter was, Roman society was in constant flux. . . .

On how he came to the project:

Despite popular visions of Rome as a society of empire and of laws, this was not how professional historians saw the matter. For a generation at least, the dominant picture had instead been of ancient government as minimalist in its achievements and even its intents.

I therefore embarked on a large-scale history of the role of government in social and cultural change. To do that, I had to take Roman law more seriously than I had in the past.

Ando concludes with some thoughts about the book's broader significance. He hopes it will "draw attention to the astonishing creativity of Roman lawyers," as well as to "an understudied problem in the history of the Roman law, namely, the historical priority of private law at Rome, in contrast to all other forms of legal thought."

Read on here.

CALL FOR PAPERS: British Crime Historians Symposium

Call for papers

British Crime Historians Symposium 3

6-7 September, 2012, The Open University, Milton Keynes

[My apologies for the late posting. The Call for Papers has, unfortunately, now passed.]

Following on from the success of the British Crime Historians Symposia at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2008 and Sheffield University in 2010, the Open University is pleased to host the next in Milton Keynes on September 6th and 7th, 2012.

We would like this to be an opportunity for all those who work on the criminal justice history of the British Isles, or on other topics illuminated through criminal justice archives, to participate. We would like therefore to invite papers on any aspect of the history of criminal justice in the British Isles.

We are also especially keen to accept papers which:

• survey the historiography of this field,
• discuss methodological questions with a broader applicability,
• analyse historiographical developments in other countries with a view to informing the research agenda in the British Isles, or
• assess the public history of criminal justice.

Given the gratifyingly large number of historians studying this topic and the need to keep the meeting as affordable as possible while not fragmenting it into an excessive number of parallel sessions, it is unlikely that we will be able to give a verbal presentation slot to everyone who has something interesting to say. Thus we are also keen to receive proposals for poster presentations: we would particularly like to give space to posters from graduate students at any stage in their research. We will make sure that there is a critical mass of posters and that they are a central feature of the conference. We are also open to being approached with proposals for panels of papers on a linked theme.

The deadline for (200-word) abstracts for (15-20 minute) papers, panels (of 3-5 speakers) and (A1) posters is January 31st 2011. Please submit to BCHS2012@open.ac.uk. For further information, contact Paul Lawrence (p.m.lawrence@open.ac.uk) or Chris Williams (chris.williams@open.ac.uk). We will distribute a preliminary version of the programme by February 29th 2012.

NOTICE: Law and the French Atlantic Symposium

2012-13 Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History  

Friday, October 5, 2012 

9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. 

Law and the French Atlantic 

 Organized by Allan Greer, McGill University, and Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The French Atlantic has not yet received the sustained attention given to the British and Spanish Atlantic, particularly where the topic of law is concerned.  This conference will explore the legal dimension (broadly conceived) of the French Atlantic empire in the early modern period.  The variegated and rapidly evolving juridical order of ancien régime France was deeply implicated in the expansion of overseas commerce, the founding of colonies, and the creation of imperial administrations.

Participants may explore topics such as: legal discourse and imperial ideologies; the establishment of colonial jurisdictions in Canada, Louisiana, and the French West Indies; the regulation of slavery; indigenous peoples and the law; the emergence of colonial land tenures; and the legal framework for trade and business enterprise.  The organizers wish particularly to encourage comparative approaches that consider more than one French colony and that examine contrasts and convergences with the British, Spanish and Portuguese empires.  In according due attention to the distinctive features of French law and the French New World empire, we hope to enrich understandings of Atlantic history generally.

CALL FOR PAPERS: New Perspectives on locatio conductio in Roman law

New Perspectives on locatio conductio in Roman law

6 – 8 June 2012, Edinburgh

 

In the nearly 100 years since the publication of Emilio Costa’s La locazione di cose nel diritto romano (1915), the first monograph of the twentieth-century on letting and hiring in Roman law, modern understanding of this contract has changed significantly. The reasons for this are mainly twofold. First, scholars of Roman law, while still largely engaged in purely dogmatic investigations of the origins and development of legal rules and of the contributions of individual Roman jurists to this process, are slowly becoming more aware of the contexts in which these rules operated and their relation to Roman society such as, for example, in the work of Bruce Frier (Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome (1980)) and Dennis Kehoe (Investment, Profit and Tenancy: the Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy (1998)), to name but a few. In second place, the publication in 1999 of Roberto Fiori’s La definizione della ‘locatio conductio’ (1999) comprehensively transformed modern understanding of the conceptual structure of this contract and finally laid to rest the much debated issue of the “trichotomy”. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars with an interest in locatio conductio in Roman law (whether in Roman private or public law) to explore new insights (dogmatic, social, economic) into the origin and growth of this contract.

Deadline for submission of proposals: Friday 30 March 2012

For more information or to submit and abstract, please email Dr. Paul J. du Plessis (p.duplessis@ed.ac.uk)

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: Jurisdictional Complexity Workshop

Jurisdictional Complexity Workshop

Ghent University (Belgium) - 6-7 July 2012

As part of a project on ‘jurisdictional complexity’ in Western legal history (c1600-1900), led by Dr Seán Patrick Donlan (Limerick) and Dirk Heirbaut (Ghent), a workshop will be held in Ghent from 6-7 July 2012.

Participants in the workshop need not be part of the project and are free to discuss other periods and places. 

The workshop will focus on the historiographical methods necessary for the study of jurisdictional complexity, the attempt to capture a sense of the legal-normative whole in context studied. As described in the project statement, to do this:

[t]hose working on the project will be encouraged to utilise a number of interdisciplinary methods—comparative, contemporary theories of interpretation, as well as historical anthropology, geography, and sociology …. [The project] is, in effect, an analysis of the both the ‘law in action’ (per Roscoe Pound) and the ‘living law’ (per Eugen Ehrlich) of the past. Concentrating on limited geographical areas, its case studies will investigate, in a form akin to modern comparative ‘country reports’, both the legal and normative complexity of the past. It will do so, however, in light of the realities of the past, avoiding the imposition of modern national and juridical boundaries [and will] serve as instantiations of wider intellectual and institutional developments….

For additional information, contact Dr Seán Patrick Donlan (sean.donlan@ul.ie) or Dirk Heirbaut (Dirk.Heirbaut@UGent.be). Those interested in participating should contact Dr Donlan with a short abstract (approximately 250 words) and a curriculum vitae, ideally before 1 May 2012. Depending on the number of participants, presentations are likely to be approximately 15-20 minutes and should be in English.

There is no fee for participation, but participants will be expected to cover their own travel, accomodation, and meal costs.

Finally, note that this gathering immediately precedes the European Society for Comparative Legal History Conference to be held in Amsterdam (9-10 July 2012). Participants in that conference might consider visiting us in advance of that event.

NOTICE: ESCLH Conference Registration

REGISTRATION

Second Biennial Conference of the

European Society for 

Comparative Legal History

The Second Biennial Conference of the ESCLH will take place on 9 and 10 July 2012 in Amsterdam. The venue is the campus of the VU University. 

The Conference theme is “Comparative Legal History - Definitions and Challenges”: how do we delineate the landmarks which fruitful legal historical comparison requires and which are the specific problems that a comparative-historical approach of the various branches of law may encounter? 

Subthemes are Fascist Criminal Law (coordinator Stephen Skinner) and Corporate Law (coordinator Dave De ruysscher).

Enrolment/Registration is possible through the conference website until June 11: http://www.rechten.vu.nl/comparativelegalhistory

The fee (including coffee/tea during the breaks, drinks on Monday afternoon, the lunch and canal round trip on Tuesday) is €100 for non-members and €50 for students and PhD-students. ESCLH-members enroll free of charge. For the Buffet-Diner on Monday night an additional fee of €40 per head will be required for all participants (members, non-members and companions).

For additional information, please see the original notice.

NOTICE: Radding on Justinian

The Projet Volterra, UCL & the Earlier MiddleAges Seminar,IHR  present:

THE VOLTERRA LECTURE

PROFESSOR CHARLES RADDING (Michigan State University)

The Recovery and Use of Justinian’s Code In Eleventh-Century Italy 

Wednesday, 29th February 2012, 5.30pm 
Chancellor’s Hall, 
First Floor, South Block, SENATE HOUSE, 
Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU 

All Welcome 

To be followed by a reception
Any enquiries please to Dr Simon Corcoran.
Tel: 02076793614. Email: s.corcoran@ucl.ac.uk 
Website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history2/volterra

This interesting request recently appeared in H-Net:

Dear legal historian:

The American Society for Legal History's Graduate Student Outreach Committee seeks your legal history syllabi. If you have taught a legal history course, please send me a copy of your syllabus. All fields (U.S., non-U.S., ancient, modern) and all levels (graduate, undergraduate, law school, advanced seminar, introductory survey) accepted. Please send syllabi as e-mail attachments to: John Wertheimer, Davidson College, jowertheimer@davidson.edu

NOTICE: The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Prize for American Legal History

H-Net has circulated the following notice:

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation has generously funded a prize of $2,500 for an excellent article in American legal history published by an early career scholar in 2011. Articles published in 2011 in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize.

The Cromwell Foundation makes the final award, in consultation with a subcommittee from the American Society for Legal History. This subcommittee invites nominations for the article prize; authors are invited to nominate themselves or others may nominate works meeting the criteria that they have read and enjoyed. Please send a brief letter of nomination no longer than a page, along with an electronic or hard copy of the article, by May 31, 2012, to the subcommittee's chair, Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, Campus Box #3380, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380 or via email abrophy@email.unc.edu

NOTICE: Law and History Review Editorship

Law and History Review Editorship

After seven years of exceptional service, David Tanenhaus has decided to step down as editor of the Law and History Review, which is sponsored by the American Society for Legal History and published by the Cambridge University Press. The ASLH Publications Committee invites applications for the position. Applicants should be members of the Society who are accomplished legal historians, have the intellectual range to work with manuscripts from different periods and regions in legal history, and are conversant with both law and history. The departmental or institutional support required for the position is usually modest.

The editor's responsibilities include soliciting manuscripts in all fields of legal history, shepherding submitted manuscripts through the peer review and editorial processes, working with the journal's print and electronic publisher Cambridge University Press, and maintaining collaborative relationships with the journal's Editorial Board and the Board ASLH Board of Directors. Production management is the responsibility of the Cambridge University Press. Appointment is for an initial five-year term.

Call for Nominations - Honorary Fellows of the American Society for Legal History

The following Call for Nominations for Honorary Fellows of the American Society for Legal History was recently circulated:

In 2011 the American Society for Legal History made some important changes to its processes for electing Honorary Fellows of the Society. First, it abandoned the distinction it had formerly drawn between Honorary Fellows (limited to residents of the U.S. and Canada) and Corresponding Fellows (the rest of the world). Recognizing that we live in an increasingly globalized world, from now on there will be only one category of Honorary Fellows for all legal historians wherever they may be. (Existing Corresponding Fellows may maintain that title or choose to become Honorary Fellows.) Second, recognizing that the number of legal historians both in the United States and world-wide has greatly expanded in recent years, the society has abandoned any upper limit on the total number of Honorary Fellows that may be recognized at any given time. The only limitation is that no more than three Honorary Fellows may be elected in any given year.

NOTICE: Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship

Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship

Harvard Law School is seeking fellows who have a J.D. degree, who have completed the required coursework for their doctorate degree, or who have recently been awarded the doctorate degree. A J.D. is preferred, but not required. We will also consider applicants who are beginning a teaching career in either law or history. The purpose of the fellowship is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined. There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period.

Fellows are expected to spend the majority of their time on their own research. They are also asked to help coordinate the Harvard Law School Legal History Colloquium, which meets five or six times each semester. Fellows are invited to present their own work. Fellows will be required to be in residence at law school during the academic year (September through May).

Applicants for the fellowship for 2012-13 should address a letter to Professor Bruce H. Mann at the Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA 02318.