BOOK: Joanna McCUNN & Gwen SEABORNE (eds.), Insiders and Outsiders in the History of Law [Reimagining Law and Justice, ed. Carl F. STYCHIN] (London: University of London Press, 2026), 200 p. ISBN 9781911507833 [OPEN ACCESS]

 

(image source: University of London Press)

Abstract:

Writing the history of law involves choices: whose stories are to be told, and how? Traditionally, legal history has focused on influential ‘insiders’ like judges, lawyers and legislators, and on studying the records they produced. Today, increasing attention is being paid to the lives of ‘outsiders’, drawing on new sources and methods to understand their experiences of the law. This book brings together new research that examines dividing lines drawn in the history of law and the experiences of those who have fallen inside and outside them. From prominent judges and law reformers to women, colonial subjects and gender nonconforming people, and from medieval Crusader states to twentieth-century England, this book examines the legal encounters of a wide range of individuals and communities. The authors explore how people became legal insiders or outsiders, how the law treated them, and how they sought to wield legal processes to their advantage. They demonstrate the malleability and contingency of any insider/outsider binary. From the Tudor queens of England to mixed-race people in colonial Jamaica, legal actors have transcended boundaries and interacted with law in potent and unexpected ways. At this pivotal moment for legal history, this book prompts conversation between those engaged in legal and historical studies and legal practice, and demonstrates the potential for a reinvigorated and representative legal history to improve our understandings of law’s past.

Table of contents:

• Introduction
  Joanna McCunn and Gwen Seabourne

• 1 “All those men who are not of the law of Rome”: participation and exclusion of non-Latin plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and clerks in the courts of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
  Jennifer Pearce

• 2 Sir John Vavasour (d. 1506) and the Palatine of Lancaster: lawyer, judge, Northerner
  A J Hannay

• 3 Inside and outside the palace: Henry VIII’s queens at law
  Anthony Musson and Kirsty Wright

• 4 Racial Passing and Miscegenation in Colonial Jamaica
  Justine Collins

• 5 ‘Being interpreted and translated into the English language’: the Chevalier d’Éon, the French outsider, in the English Law Courts, 1764-1776
  Daniel F. Gosling

• 6 ‘A Scottish Judge’: Law Reform in the Age of Henry Brougham – An Outsider’s Influence
  Patricia McMahon

• 7 Judicial insiders: the Coleridge dynasty
  Philip Handler

• 10 Jurors and Jury Service in Interwar Bristol
  Kay Crosby

• 11 Closing reflections: beyond insiders and outsiders
  Joanna McCunn and Gwen Seabourne

On the editors:

Joanna McCunn is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol, where she teaches Legal History and Contract Law. After studying at the University of Oxford and working at the Law Commission for England and Wales, Joanna embarked on her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, earning her PhD in 2019. Her research focuses on the historical development of English private law, and she has published a number of articles and book chapters in this area. She is a member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Legal History.

Gwen Seabourne is Professor of Legal History in the University of Bristol Law School, where she teaches Legal History and Property Law. Her main research interest is Legal History, particularly pre-1500 English and Welsh Legal History, and she has written on subjects from bread price regulation to suicide. Recent work has focused on gender in the medieval world, and she has published widely, including three sole-authored monographs and many articles. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the councils of the Selden Society and Cymdeithas Hanes Cyfraith Cymru/Welsh Legal History Society.

Read more here: DOI  

Giulio ABBATE, Legal education in the western world: a cultural and comparative history, by Rogelio PÉREZ-PERDOMO (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024) (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 174-180)

(image source: Taylor&Francis)

Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo's work provides a comparative and historical account of legal education in the Western world, from ancient Rome to the present day. Following the traditional division of comparative law, it addresses both the civil and common law traditions, focusing on changes in legal education over the centuries and the interrelations between the two traditions in contemporary times. 

Adopting a longue durée perspective, the book presents itself as an 'introduction to a cultural and comparative history of the law' (1), and it achieves its purpose. Alongside the historical analysis of legal education through its main features, the book examines the interactions between legal education and its social and intellectual context, also focusing on 'the social role of the most important legal actors' (1) - legal professionals. 

This work demonstrates that legal education is, and has always been, inseparable from the ideas and concepts of law, its historical development and its social function. Law possesses a constitutive social force.' It has been a factor in the ordering and disciplining of society. Legal education, in turn, 'is linked to the law as a way of ordering society and to the conceptualisation of the law itself' (1), playing a significant social role. 

Pérez-Perdomo's work goes further, aiming to clarify the role of legal education in organising law and maintaining legal tradition. This methodological approach defines the first chapter of the book, which addresses the civil law tradition. The chapter's primary aim is to demonstrate the relationship between legal education and the conception of law, from classical Rome to Justinian. It outlines the gradual development of the legal field and the organisation of methods for legal knowledge and its transmission. These points are discussed particularly with reference to the opinions of the jurisconsults, which structured legal knowledge and contributed to the transformation of the legal field in response to the changing needs of Roman society. Legal education, in turn, reflected the prevailing concept of law. And 'once the law was consolidated as an intellectual discipline' (11), legal education subsequently assumed a more formal character. 

The work then examines the changes that occurred under Justinian's rule. The promulgation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis significantly altered the concept of law, which became identified exclusively with the written document sanctioned by political authority. As a result, the author argues, law became detached from […]

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671641

BOOK: Valentin JEUTNER, On the Lotus: Postcards 1898-1931 (Lund: Media-Tryck, 2026), 390 p. ISBN 97891900023259 [OPEN ACCESS]

(image source: International Law Reporter)

Abstract:

Love letters, travel updates, expressions of grief, boredom, excitement, and longing: this book brings together more than 150 postcards written by passengers aboard the Lotus, a French liner that connected Marseille with the great ports of the eastern Mediterranean between 1898 and 1931. Written by pilgrims and poets, soldiers and scholars, royals and revolutionaries, the messages offer rare glimpses into everyday life during one of the most transformative periods of modern history. An afterword explores the ship’s enduring legal legacy as the vessel at the center of international law’s famous Lotus Case of 1927.

On the author:

Professor of International Law at Lund University in Sweden and Senior Retained Lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the United Kingdom. At Lund University’s Faculty of Law, he directs the Museum of International Law

Read the volume here.

 

ONLINE SEMINAR: Invisible Borders in the Maltese Archipelago under the Sicilian Shadow: Entangled Histories II-2 (Thu 29 OCT 2026, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CET)

 

(Source: Entangled Histories)

Abstract:

This paper examines the singular institutional configuration of the Maltese archipelago under the rule of the Order of Saint John, analysing the "border" not as a mere geographic demarcation, but as a complex legal and feudal apparatus. Although the settlement of the Knights in 1530 established a state entity endowed with sovereign prerogatives, Malta formally remained a sub-fief of the Kingdom of Sicily. This research explores how this "invisible border" necessitated a constant renegotiation between the Order’s institutions and the Sicilian viceregal administration.

Through the study of grant diplomas (gratie), viceregal correspondence, and normative acts, this talk investigates how feudal dependency influenced the political and material sustainability of the island. The jurisdictional border manifested through symbolic rituals, such as the famous annual tribute of the Maltese falcon, and pragmatic constraints, including the regulation of Sicilian grain exports and access to the Kingdom’s appellate courts. Ultimately, the Maltese case offers a privileged perspective for understanding early modern border dynamics, where territorial stability depended on managing fragmented sovereignty and navigating overlapping spheres of normative authority.

About the speaker:

Agostino Zito is a PhD Candidate and subject specialist in the History of Institutions at the Department of Political Science of the University of Messina, as well as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Malta. He holds a degree in Law from the Kore University of Enna and has been a national council member of SIDRI (Italian Society for Doctoral Studies) since 2025. He is the author of articles published in specialist journals in the fields of legal and institutional history, alongside his work as a legal consultant in agri-food law.

Registration here, free but mandatory.

BOOK: Erika RUMMEL with the assistance of James K. FARGE (ed.), Guardians of Law and Tradition The Parlement of Paris During the Reign of Francis I – Selected Documentary Sources [Mediaeval Sources in Translation; 65] (Turnhout: Brepols, 2026), 168 p. ISBN 9780888443151, € 25

 

(image source: Brepols)

Abstract:

This collection of sixty documents, translated into English for the first time, presents selected deliberations and decisions of the Parlement of Paris during the reign of Francis I (1515–1547), focusing on the relationship between these guardians of secular law and the guardians of church law. Their interactions shed light on the complex nature of the Reformation, showing that the distinction between ecclesiastical and secular law was not as sharp then as it would become in later centuries.

Table of contents:

Introduction

Documents

Part One: The Battle Against “Lutherans”
Part Two: Censorship of Books, Teaching, and Preaching
Part Three: Maintaining Public Order
Part Four: Crime and Punishment
Part Five: The Person of the King
Bibliography 145
Index of Persons and Places 149
Index of Subjects

On the editors:

Erika Rummel, Professor emerita in the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, is the author of The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance & Reformation (1995) and more than a dozen other books, and the translator of four volumes in The Collected Works of Erasmus. James K. Farge is a Fellow of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. He is the author of Religion, Reformation, and Repression in the Reign of Francis I: Documents from the Parlement of Paris, 1515–1547 (2015), and of two volumes of the proceedings of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, among other works.

Read more here. 

LECTURE SERIES: "Why Legal History Matters?" with Tamar Herzog (Rome: Università Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, 4, 9, 10, 11 DEC 2026)

(Source: Storia del diritto)

JOURNAL: Revue d’histoire des Facultés de droit et de la culture juridique, n° 43–44 (2023–2024) [Paris: SHFD]

(image source: PUD)

La Société pour l’histoire des Facultés de droit et de la culture juridique (SHFD) annonce la publication prochaine du numéro double 43-44 de la Revue d’histoire des Facultés de droit et de la culture juridique, dont la parution est prévue en novembre 2026.

Ce volume rassemble plusieurs dossiers consacrés à des questions majeures de l’histoire de la pensée juridique et de ses circulations internationales.

Un premier ensemble, intitulé Duguit et les Amériques, historicités et circulations transatlantiques d’une pensée juridique, examine la réception et les transformations de l’œuvre de Léon Duguit dans différents contextes américains, notamment en Argentine, au Brésil, en Colombie, à Cuba et aux États-Unis. Il aborde également la question des transferts culturels et de l’influence de la doctrine française.

Un deuxième dossier porte sur La place de la doctrine universitaire dans la construction du droit des assurances (XIXe–XXe siècles), tandis qu'un troisième est consacré aux victimes juives de la Faculté de droit de Paris pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, à la mémoire institutionnelle et aux rapports entre juristes et législation antisémite.

Le numéro comprend également des entretiens avec Louis Assier-Andrieu et plusieurs études relatives à l’histoire des facultés de droit, à la doctrine juridique et à l’enseignement du droit.

Le volume peut d’ores et déjà être commandé, notamment au tarif préférentiel proposé aux membres de la SHFD.

Sommaire et modalités de commande : Portail universitaire de droit.

REMINDER CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: 4rd Central and Eastern European Legal History Conference (Belgrade: 19-21 May 2027) [DEADLINE: 15 December 2026]

The Central and Eastern European Legal History Conference (CEELHC) was first held in Vienna in 2019, followed by conferences in Budapest in 2023 and Krakow in 2025. The fourth CEELHC conference will take place in Belgrade and will be hosted by the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Law from 19 to 21 May 2027.

We invite scholars and researchers working in the field of Central and Eastern European legal history and political doctrines to submit proposals for presentations. Contributions should address topics related to the broadly conceived legal history of Central and Eastern Europe.

The conference will be bilingual, with English and German as the official conference languages. The regular conference fee is EUR 200. A reduced fee of EUR 150 applies to doctoral students.

Participants will have the opportunity to submit their contributions for consideration for publication in the following journals: “Annals of the Faculty of Law in Belgrade”, “Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs”, “Pázmány Law Review”, and “Krakowskie Studia z Historii Państwa i Prawa”. Please note that contributions submitted for publication must be in English.

The deadline for the submission of proposals is 15 December 2026. Applicants will be notified of the acceptance of their proposals by 31 January 2027 at the latest. The deadline for payment of the conference fee is 1 March 2027. Payment details will be provided to accepted participants at a later date.

Proposals should be submitted in the form of an abstract of up to 300 words and sent to: ceelhc2027@ius.bg.ac.rs

We look forward to welcoming scholars from across Central and Eastern Europe to Belgrade and to an inspiring academic exchange on the legal history and political doctrines of the region.

 

SYMPOSIUM: Francesco Paolo Casavola: il magistero barese di uno studioso universale [Bari: Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, 30 October 2026]

(image source: RLW)

The University of Bari Aldo Moro will host a study day, “Francesco Paolo Casavola: il magistero barese di uno studioso universale”, on Friday, 30 October 2026, from 09:00 to 13:30, at the Aula Magna di Ateneo in Bari, Italy.

Organised with the involvement of the Department of Law and the Department of Education, Psychology and Communication Sciences (ForPsiCom), the event will be dedicated to the scholarly work and academic legacy of Francesco Paolo Casavola, distinguished scholar of Roman law and legal history and former President of the Italian Constitutional Court (1992-1995).

The symposium will offer an opportunity to reflect on Casavola's intellectual contributions and his influence on Italian legal scholarship, university education, and public institutions. Particular attention will be devoted to his years of academic activity in Bari, his approach to legal education, and the relationship between Roman law, constitutional thought, and civic responsibility that characterised his scholarly and public engagement.

The programme will bring together colleagues and scholars who will examine different aspects of Casavola's intellectual legacy through personal recollections, academic reflections, and discussions of his writings.

Programme – Friday, 30 October 2026

09:30 – Institutional Greetings

• Roberto Bellotti – Rector, University of Bari Aldo Moro
• Loredana Perla – Director, Department of Education, Psychology and Communication Sciences (ForPsiCom)
• Carmela Ventrella – Director, Department of Law

Introduction by Andrea Lovato.

10:00 – First Session

• Francesco Lucrezi – Imparare da Casavola
• Lorenzo Franchini – Esperienze di vita e di consuetudine scientifica con Casavola
• Loredana Perla – La pedagogia di Casavola: l’Enciclopedia Treccani dei ragazzi

11:15 – Coffee Break

12:00 – Second Session

• Gaetano Piepoli – Gli anni baresi (1960–1967)
• Francesco Fasolino – L’impegno civile di Casavola negli scritti non romanistici
• Antonio Incampo – Moro e Casavola. Dalla persona allo Stato

13:15 – Concluding Remarks

The conference will conclude at approximately 13:30.

SYMPOSIUM: Areas, Norms, Time: Entangled. Blogging Global Legal Histories (Vienna: University of Vienna, 3-4 DEC 2026)

 

One year after the launch of the ANT.E blog, we will reflect on how to develop research approaches in global legal history further for the future. How can we productively decenter the discipline’s discourse and initiate a true conversation between the different perspectives from which legal history is written? And how can we use modern formats to make a true difference in communication, interconnection, knowledge production and diffusion?

A renowned keynote speaker and three interactive expert panels are set to inspire lively debates. Join us and add your voice to the conversation! Register by email to: ante.rg@univie.ac.at

Website: https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/

Organizers: Prof. Lena Foljanty (University of Vienna), Prof. Miloš Vec (University of Vienna), Asst.-Prof. Zülâl Muslu (Tilburg University)

Program:

Thursday, 3 December 2026

13:00  Welcome

13:30-14:00    Opening remarks

14:00-15:00    Keynote by Thomas Duve (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory)

15:00-15:30    Coffee break

15:30-17:30    Panel 1 Writing Global Legal Histories Today

Friday, 4 December 2026

9:30-9:45        Welcome back

9:45-12:00      Panel 2 Bridging Past and Present

12:00-13:00    Lunch

13:00-15:00    Panel 3 Blogs as a Medium for Global Legal Histories

15:00-15:45    Concluding discussion

FIRST VIEW ARTICLES: Law and History Review [OPEN ACCESS]

(image source: CUP)

 

Female Perseverance in the Courtroom: Gendered Litigation Patterns in Early Modern Brabant and Limburg (Klaas Van Gelder) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1017/S0738248026101862
Abstract:

This article contributes both methodologically and substantially to the debates on uses of justice in early modern Europe and, more specifically, about how and to what extent women asserted their rights in the courtroom. The approach is quantitative, with an analysis involving three courts in the duchies of Brabant and Limburg during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: the princely Council of Brabant as well as the local aldermen’s benches of the towns of Vilvoorde and Tienen. Systematically determining the proportion of women at the beginning of court cases (through the court rolls and distribution books) and comparing it to the proportion at the end of the proceedings (through the judgment books) reveals remarkable gender patterns: When women decided to go to court, they were more likely than men to litigate until a final judgment was rendered. Moreover, they sued on a narrower range of issues than men, with a preponderance of cases on inheritance, annuities, and debts. The explanation for this perseverance in court may be that women were less able to use informal forums for conflict resolution, or—more likely based on the sources that form the basis of this contribution—that they experienced a greater need to prove their rights than men.

From Exclusion to Protection: Chinese Merchant Capital in the Philippines Under US Law and Empire, 1921–1926 (Jilene Adelina Chan Chua) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1017/S0738248026101837
Abstract:

Scholarship about the Chinese Question has largely understood it as a “coolie” question, but what if it was reframed in terms of merchants? Well-studied US anti-Chinese laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act targeted working-class rather than elite Chinese, like merchants and students. But in 1921, the US-controlled Insular Government in the Philippines enacted a statute known as the Chinese Bookkeeping Act (Act No. 2972), marking a moment when US Chinese exclusion laws were directed toward businessowners. The act banned Chinese-language record-keeping and affected merchants ranging from small storeowners to multi-millionaire tycoons. A group of Chinese merchants in the Philippines sued the colonial government and appealed their case to the US Supreme Court, which ruled the Bookkeeping Act unconstitutional in 1926. For the “coolie” Chinese question, the US Supreme Court said “yes” to exclusion, but for the merchant Chinese question, the Court said “no.” The Court’s rejection of a merchant Chinese exclusion became part of the Philippines’ transformation into a US colony. In relation to a patriotic Filipino capital and unmarked Euro-American capital, Chinese capital won rights even as it was framed within US law as “alien” by American and Filipino judges and politicians and, surprisingly, by the Chinese merchants themselves.

Keeping It (Too Much) in the Family: Annulment by Reason of Affinity in Eighteenth-Century Venice (Celeste McNamara) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI
Abstract:

Although divorce was increasingly available through religious and civil courts in 18th-century Europe, the Catholic Church still considered marriage indissoluble. Thus, the only legal route out of a marriage was annulment. Historians have noted several strategies for annulments in premodern Europe, most often claims of lack of consent. One less common but interesting way to seek annulment was to claim affinity by fornication, in which one spouse claimed a premarital sexual relationship with a close relative of the other. Couples could also make a similar claim of a violation of public honesty, in which a person was originally betrothed to one person but then married their close relative. Both constituted impediments to marriage according to canon law. In 18th-century Venice, the Patriarchal tribunal heard a steady stream of these cases. Couples, along with their families, friends, and neighbors, provided detailed testimony to the tribunal to attain annulments. This article argues that the narrative structures and testimonies in these cases demonstrate that 18th-century Venetians thought that bad marriages should not be indissoluble, in spite of the Catholic Church’s refusal to allow divorce, and were willing to push the boundaries of truth to work around the legal restrictions they faced.

Love or Law: Viking Foundations of Medieval English Dispute Settlement (Jake A. Stattel) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1017/S0738248026101850
Abstract:

In prominent legal historical works, Michael Clanchy and Stephen D. White constructed an important paradigm for medieval dispute settlement by adapting the phrase “law and love” from the Anglo-Norman Leges Henrici Primi. Yet, rarely has this aphorism’s background been explored. This article argues that “love or law” has roots in Viking-Age Scandinavia, where this Old Norse terminology represented a unique dynamic of dispute resolution revolving around harsh “law” pressuring parties to make “love” settlements outside of court. Contrasting sharply with Anglo-Saxon disputing norms centered on formal compensation tariffs, “love or law” found its way to England’s tenth-century Danelaw, first recorded in the Wantage Code. This alliterative pair continues in English writings, while “love-days” become a major cultural feature, and more broadly, the dynamic of threateningly punitive “law” inducing “love” agreements appears in action within early common law case records. In ways that recollect Icelandic and Danelaw practices, negotiated compensation occurring “under the shadow of law” may have been a major feature of medieval English dispute as hinted by our surviving sources. Scandinavian dispute concepts, occasionally coined by unique “love or law” vocabulary, may have had a subtle yet profound influence on some of the grounding assumptions of English common law. 

Filling the Legal Void: Missionaries as Legal Actors in Regulating Monogamous Unions in the Congo Free State (1885–1908) (Ilaria Masseroni) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1017/S0738248026101916
Abstract:

In the Congo Free State, where the administration of Leopold II concentrated on economic exploitation and largely neglected family law, Belgian missionaries assumed functions the state left unattended. This article examines how they became legal actors in the regulation of marriage between 1885 and 1908, imposing monogamy as a condition of Christian and civilized life against the widespread practice of polygamy. Officiating marriages, keeping civil registers, adjudicating disputes over dowry, and organizing Catholic villages where monogamous unions were institutionalized, missionaries operated as intermediaries between the colonial administration and Congolese communities, their authority resting at once on canon law and on the practical demands of governance. Drawing on missionary periodicals, correspondence, decrees, and administrative records, the study reconstructs a legal role that has received little scholarly attention, situating it within debates on legal pluralism and vernacular imperial constitutionalism that treat law as a fluid practice articulated by diverse actors rather than a fixed body of metropolitan rules. By placing missionaries at the center of colonial lawmaking, the article shows how religion and law were interwoven in the making of the colonial state, even as local communities resisted and reshaped the norms imposed upon them. In conclusion, this study reveals the complexities of missionary involvement in colonial governance and offers new insights into the intersection of law, religion, and colonialism in Central Africa.

Law and Justice in the Court of the Marshalsea of the King’s Household, 1509–1547 (Jonathan McGovern)  [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1017/S0738248026101941
Abstract:

The court of the marshalsea, which originated in the late thirteenth century, exercised jurisdiction over a circular area of twelve miles’ radius centered on the king’s current residence. This article offers the first scholarly discussion of this mysterious court in the reign of Henry VIII. It begins by discussing the court’s criminal jurisdiction and its judicial procedure in felony cases, explaining the significance of a 1542 statute that expanded and clarified its jurisdiction over serious crimes committed within the palace precinct. The article then analyzes the court’s civil jurisdiction and suggests reasons why its officers may have been willing to stretch jurisdictional rules in cases of trespass. Next, the article discusses what is known about the personnel of the court, charting the rise of the under-steward of the marshalsea (referred to as steward from 1539) as its chief controlling officer. I show that by 1542, the court’s jurisdiction had become trifurcated into a plea side, an rdinary criminal side, and a “palace” criminal side. Reforms to the court in the reign of Henry VIII illustrate a general process of judicial regularization that occurred in the early sixteenth century. The regularization of legal institutions during Henry’s reign was a “reformation from within” that promised to be far less destructive than the “reformation from without” forced on the marshalsea and other legal institutions under the Stuarts.

The Founding as Ideology (Aaron Hall) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1017/S0738248026101886
Abstract:

The “Founding” is a keyword in the United States’ constitutional vocabulary. Across popular politics, public law, and civic culture, it signifies a closed moment of constitutional creation—and often much more. Invocations commonly involve vague yet powerful significations about constitutional authority, memory, and meaning-making. Particularly as “originalist” judicial and academic writing leans on these submerged qualities, it is worth asking: what is the Founding? This Article proposes a conceptual answer in historical context. Through a close study of contours of antebellum constitutionalism, it argues for understanding the Founding as an ideology that committed Americans to venerate and defer to an authoritative, originary constitutional era. Forged as citizens grappled with the politics of slavery, the Founding structured language and perception, motivated action and inaction, and delimited boundaries of political possibility. This Article studies two essential sites of inculcation apart from formal power—civic ceremonies and educational practices—to sketch the structure of the constitutional Founding as ideology. Then, it outlines how that ideology authorized constitutional actions of voting, legislating, judging, protesting, and seceding. In conclusion, the Article suggests that its analysis models a broader framework for interpreting the diffuse materials of constitutional life across periodizations of constitutional history. Approaching the Founding as ideology can allow scholars to better see how its relative authority over time and the purposes to which it has been directed have shaped American constitutional experience.

Writing Women into the Constitution: Gendered Citizenship and Reproductive Autonomy in Republican China (Yu Liu)  [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1017/S0738248026101801
Abstract:

This article reinterprets the constitutional history of Republican China by foregrounding women as active participants in constitution-making and critique. While the Guomindang (KMT) portrayed constitutions as instruments to conclude the Nationalist Revolution, proclaiming gender equality as already achieved and subsuming women’s rights under nationalist and eugenic imperatives, feminist actors engaged constitutional discourse as a strategic arena for political struggle. Drawing on writings, petitions, and debates from the 1930s to the 1940s, the article shows how women transformed reproductive labor, maternal welfare, and birth control into constitutional questions central to the meaning of citizenship. Through birth control clinics, Women’s Constitutional Research Associations, and lobbying for quotas, equal pay, maternity protections, and property rights, feminists treated the constitution not as a fixed text but as an opportunity to reshape institutional design and challenge structures that perpetuated gendered exclusion. Their critiques exposed the biopolitical logics embedded in eugenic policy, marriage regulation, and maternalist ideology, while their proposals articulated a competing vision of constitutionalism that sought to use legal reform as leverage for broader transformation. Situating the Chinese case alongside global examples of bottom-up constitutional engagement, the article argues that women’s activism produced a distinctly gendered form of popular constitutionalism. It highlights both the possibilities and limits of pursuing equality through constitutional reform within an ascendant party-state and underscores the enduring tension between constitutional governance and women’s reproductive autonomy.

Time Out of Joint: Raymond Carré de Malberg and the Referendum in the Public Law of the Third Republic (Amnon Lev) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI  10.1017/S0738248026101783
Abstract: 

The article examines the state theory of French public lawyer Raymond Carrré de Malberg. It argues that he responds in a highly original way to a crisis of public law government that is tied to the emergence of the social sciences and to the democratization of society. The analysis ties Carré de Malberg’s attempt to salvage the idea of public law government to his reflections on the referendum, which he will reject as incompatible with the regime of the Third Republic, only to rehabilitate it in his late work. The analysis brings to light a depletion of the ideological resources of public law government, which speaks to a European-wide crisis of public law. As we shall show, it also speaks to an overarching crisis of a bourgeois society that had channeled its power through the legislature but realized that this organ of government would not continue to be the seat of power in society.

Marjorie CARVALHO DE SOUZA, Punishment, labour and the legitimation of power, eds. Adam S FAGBORE, Nabhojeet SEN and Katherine ROSCOE (Routledge: Abingdon, 2025) (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 169-172)

(image source: Taylor&Francis)

Punishment, Labour and the Legitimation of Power, edited by Adam S. Fagbore, Nabhojeet Sen, and Katherine Roscoe, is the second volume in the series Social History of Punishment and Labour Coercion, initially published by Amsterdam University Press and now under Routledge. The series intends to be a 'platform for expansive understandings' of both punishment and labour coercion. By 'expansive', the series editors mean the analysis of a broad range of forms of punishment, enforced either by state apparatuses or non-state actors, as well as a wide spectrum of labour regimes, from wage labour and enslavement to indenture, tribute, convict, or unpaid labour. 

This collective volume reflects that ambition not only in its thematic range, which includes under the notion of 'punishment' practices such as imprisonment, branding, banishment, convict labour, debt bondage, and penal servitude, but also in its geographical and temporal coverage. Overall, it spans over five millennia across four continents, from ancient Mesopotamia to eighteenth-century Japan, China, and Mongolia, and from Merovingian Gaul to nineteenth-century Portuguese Africa. 

A rich introductory essay by the volume's three editors provides the framing for these diverse themes, geographies, and temporalities. They establish theoretical unity via a ‘Trans-cultural and Trans-epochal Perspective on Labour Mobility,’ defining the term not only as the capacity to move but also as the mobilisation into coerced labour. 

The essays are organised into three clearly defined analytical axes, each comprising three chapters, which together trace three distinct temporal arcs from antiquity to the contemporary period. 

Part I examines the relationship between punishment and the production of labour relations, both in its role of sustaining existing labour regimes and also in generating new ones. It includes contributions that explore punishment as a means of facilitating well-known shifts between labour systems, such as the end of slavery in the Atlantic world, but also as a mechanism for managing the workforce in less familiar contexts of heightened labour demand, such as ancient Egypt. 

It is from this latter historical context that the section opens, with Adam Simon Fagbore's study of Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt. This contribution examines the central government's attempts to immobilise personnel within protected royal and temple endowments through a broad range of punitive practices, which targeted not only field labourers but also local officials who failed to […]

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671638

Book: Assaf LIKHOVSKI, Legal Theory in the Colonies: Hindu and Jewish Scholars under British Rule [Studies in Legal History, eds. Lisa FORD, Thomas MCSWEENEY, Reuel SCHILLER & Taisu ZHANG] (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2026), 442 p. ISBN 9781009699907, £32 [OPEN ACCESS]

 

Abstract:

In colonial India and Mandatory Palestine, early-twentieth-century legal scholars made important contributions to the study of the nature of law, particularly by analyzing Hindu and Jewish law – their ancient religious systems. This book reconstructs the lives and ideas of these scholars, revealing a forgotten global wave of jurisprudential innovation that appeared across many territories in the non-Western world. The book challenges the view that non-Western legal scholars working in the colonies were passive recipients of Western ideas. It argues that Indian and Jewish thinkers used Western historical and sociological approaches to law to reimagine Hindu and Jewish law, and to assert their relevance to modern legal and constitutional debates. Though historical in scope, the story this book tells is also relevant to contemporary tensions between Western liberal law and non-Western religious legal traditions.

On the author:

Assaf Likhovski is the Danielle Rubinstein Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. He is the author of Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine and Tax, Law, and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. 

 Read more about the book here. Read the book in open access here.

BOOK: Artur SIMONYAN, Development of Regional International Law. Lessons from Russia and Eurasia (London: Routledge, 2026), 230 p; ISBN 9781003599173, € 168

 

(image source: Routledge)

Abstract:

This book explores the evolution and internalisation of regional international law in the Eurasian Russian context, covering historical, contemporary, and future perspectives. Providing a forward-looking analysis, the book makes predictions as to how emerging geopolitical and geoeconomic trends will influence the development of regional international law and the balance of power within the Eurasian region. Analysing perceptions of universalism and regionalism across various historical periods in Eurasia, the book focuses on what now encompasses the post-Soviet states, with wider lessons for the international legal community. The book discusses Russia's use of international law to sustain its geopolitical objectives and the subsequent responses from neighbouring states. Evaluating Soviet international law and its relationship with regionalism and universality, the book also explores post-Soviet Russia's efforts to redefine international law by creating its own vision of regional (Eurasian) international law through regional organizations such as the CIS, CSTO, and EAEU in the post-Soviet Eurasian space. Within the current context of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it explores how the post-Soviet Eurasian states have navigated their legal and political landscapes amidst competing pressures from both regional and global actors. The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of international law, alongside Eurasian Russian politics.

Table of contents:

Part I: Russia, International Law, and The French Revolution: A Universalist Counter-project and Its Regional Uses

1. The French Revolution and the Remaking of International Law

2. Counter-revolutionary Responses to Revolutionary International Law: The Russian Empire’s View

3. Territorial Expansion and Intervention: Russia’s Departure from the Byzantine-centred Regional Conception of International Law

 

Part II: Two Socialist International Laws: Between Universalism and Regionalism

4. Constructing Socialist International Law: An Early Attempt       

5. Socialist International Law Reasserted: The Brezhnev Doctrine 

6. The Union Republics and International Law: From Socialist Self-Determination to grossraum (dis)ordering

 

Part III: Post-Soviet Eurasia: Between Multipolarity and Regional Legal Ordering

7. Russia’s Dual Position vis-à-vis Contemporary International Law: A Weak Universal Guardian and a Regional Hegemon

8. Consolidating Regional International Law in Post-Soviet Eurasia

 

Conclusion: Universality as a Form of Regional Ordering   

On the author:

Artur Simonyan is an Assistant Professor of International Law at the American University of Armenia. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg and a senior fellow at the Berlin-Potsdam research group “International Rule of Law: Rise or Decline?” at the Free University of Berlin. He holds a PhD in International Law from the University of Tartu. His articles have appeared in the European Journal of International Law, the Chinese Journal of International Law, and the Hague Yearbook of International Law and the Baltic Yearbook of International Law, among others. His research and teaching focus on the history and theory of international law and critical approaches to international law.

Read the book here: DOI 10.4324/9781003599173.

ONLINE SEMINAR: History and Law Seminar: Meet the editors of legal history journals (30 NOV, 4pm GMT)

 Abstract:

Join Allison Tirres, Craig Green and David Schorr for a discussion about publishing research in law and history. This session offers an opportunity to hear editors’ perspectives on developing an article, choosing a journal and navigating submission, peer review and revisions. Whether you are preparing your first submission or developing your next publication, come along to ask questions and gain practical insights into the publishing process. Postgraduate researchers, early career scholars and colleagues at all career stages are welcome.

More information here. 

(source: Dr Victoria Barnes)

📝 Join the ESCLH Blog Team

 

The blog of the European Society for Comparative Legal History is looking for new colleagues to join the team of bloggers.

The ESCLH Blog has become an international resource for announcements of new publications, calls for papers, funding opportunities, and other scholarly news at the intersection of law, history, and the wider humanities and social sciences, across Europe and beyond.

Joining the team of bloggers is an opportunity to contribute to a vibrant scholarly community and help bring research and opportunities to an international readership. Bloggers are expected to contribute three to four posts per month.

We welcome applications from scholars across all jurisdictions and legal traditions, and particularly encourage those whose backgrounds or perspectives are currently underrepresented within the team to apply. The position of blogger is not paid.

Interested in joining us? Please send your CV and a brief motivation letter to esclh blog at gmail dot com by 15 November 2026.