Updated (Room Change): Book launch and Round Table (with Special Guests!) for Fernandez and Dubber, Law Books in Action

UPDATED--ROOM CHANGE: Please note that the book launch scheduled for this Thursday evening will be held in the Faculty Common Room, Flavelle House, not the Rowell Room as previously announced.


A while ago I posted about an exciting collection of essays on the history of the Anglo-American legal treatise, "Law Books in Action" published by Hart and edited by U of T's Angela Fernandez and Markus Dubber.

Angela advises that there are some great sounding events planned around the book, to which everyone interested is invited.

First, there are special guests! Three prominent legal historians will be joining the celebration: Morton Horwitz (Harvard Law School); Bob Gordon (Stanford Law School); and Susanna Blumenthal (University of Minnesota, Faculty of Law).

On Thursday November 29 at 7:00 pm., there will be a book launch in the Rowell Room (Flavelle House, U of T Faculty of Law.) Copies of the book will be available for sale and authors will be on hand.

The next day, Friday November 30 from 10:30-12, in the Solarium (Falconer Hall, U of T Faculty of Law) the editors and guests will participate in a roundtable discussion providing commentary on and reactions to the book.

This is a terrific collection, and it's wonderful to see it getting this attention and support. I hope to see many of you at both events.

Mawani, "Law's Archive" on SSRN

Renisa Mawani of the Department of Sociology at UBC has posted "Law's Archive" on SSRN. The paper will appear in volume 8 of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.

Here's the abstract:

The archival turn has followed a long, protracted, and spiraled trajectory through the fields of history, historical anthropology, philosophy, and literary studies. Animated by the cultural turn and shaped by the challenges of poststructuralism, subaltern, and postcolonial studies, critics have formulated history's archive not solely as a repository of sources through which to retrieve and/or assemble the past but as an uneven effect of power and a set of contested truth claims through which history itself has been a site of struggle. Law and legal studies, by contrast, have had curiously little to say on the subject. That the archive has been the topic of such vibrant debate and disagreement outside of law but not within it is a problematic that informs this review. This article revisits the spirited and now familiar debates in history and these other fields and asks how these critical engagements—which have yet to fully dislodge the archive as truth or radically change how we write history—might productively inform conceptualizations of law's archive. Given law's significance to historical, contemporary, and future struggles over sovereignty, authority, violence, and nonviolence, its archive, I argue, cannot be broached as a compendium of sources or as a regime of power/knowledge alone. Rather, law is the archive. It is an expansive and expanding locus of juridico-political command, one that is operative through what I term a double logic of violence: a mutual and reciprocal violence of law as symbolic and material force and law as document and documentation. Law's archive is a site from which law derives its meanings, authority, and legitimacy, a proliferation of documents that obscures its originary violence and its ongoing force, and a trace that holds the potential to reveal its foundations as (il)legitimate.

British Colonial Legalities: Two Panels in Search of Papers

British Colonial Legalities: Two Panels in Search of Papers

British Colonial Legalities
CRN 15
Law & Society Association Meeting 2013
Boston 30 May to 2 June

The LSA&#8217;s deadline is upon us and who would want to miss the Boston LSA? We have two rather exciting panel proposals here &#8211; does your work fit? Please email Yael Berda by 20 Nov if it does:"Yael Berda" <yaelberda@gmail.com>,

Perhaps you too have an idea and are looking for others to form a panel with? Please take advantage of being on the British Colonial Legalities email list!

And please do send this on to others who might find it useful.

Please note that LSA has strict rules on participation this time round and we can only really be on one panel or roundtable.

Best wishes from
Wes, Binyamin and Jothie.


Panel One: Organiser Yael Berda, Princeton.
Colonial legal practicalities - the mundane daily work of colonial rule

Law in the colonies was not only a juridical template constructed in London and proliferated throughout the empire. Rather, it was a patchwork of local and British laws, ad hoc regulations, judicial decisions and administrative decrees that made up the complex daily life of governance in and of the colonies. In this panel we explore legal practices in the colonies: bureaucratic and administrative practice, lawyers&#8217; practices and practices of the subjects that used the law as a form of resistance to colonial rule in order to provide a richer, deeper account of the life of the law in the British colonies.
Panel Two: Organiser: Yael Berda, Princeton.

Law, Geopolitics, Populations

Population movements, partitions, transfers and displacements took place in British colonies during colonial rule and following decolonization. Laws, judicial decisions and legal definitions of citizens and subjects played an important part in the geopolitical re-designing of the British empire and its post colonies This panel focuses on the relationship between law, geopolitics and populations in the colonies and post colonies.


LSA&#8217;s Call for papers at www.lawandsociety.org/boston2013.html

Dostie and Dupre on 1898 prohibition referendum

New in Explorations in Economic History (Vol. 49 Issue 4) an article, '"The people's will": Canadians and the 1898 referendum on alcohol prohibition' by economists Benoit Dostie and Ruth Dupré.

Here's the abstract, the last line of which made me laugh out loud. Economists, what can you say? But as an empircally based case study on a referendum, this seems as though it could be quite useful to legal historians interested in law reform and/or alcohol regulation or the role of religion in law making.

The 1920s American alcohol prohibition is notorious but not unique. Quite a few countries went through a vigorous struggle. But it is in Canada in 1898 that the very first national referendum on prohibition in the world took place. In this article, we focus on this rare and neglected event in Canadian history, in which the government came close but finally did not impose prohibition. In our empirical analysis, we use census district-level data to investigate how the shares of Yes, No and Abstentions vary according to four sets of factors: religious, demographic, social and economic. Our results confirm the literature on temperance and prohibition with religion [Evangelicals against Catholics and Anglicans] as the key explanatory variable, followed by the heterogeneity of the population, measured by the proportion of foreign-born. Urbanization has also the expected (although small) impact. Results for wealth are mixed. The economic interest rationale is not confirmed but that can be explained by the historical context.

Chambers on Married Women and Businesses in Ontario

Lori Chambers has extended her interest in Ontario married women's property law reform to examine its consequences for married businesswomen. Her new article "Married Women and Businesses" appears in the fall 2012 issue of Ontario History (not yet online.) The Ebscohost listing for this article does not include the author's name, but this is Lori. Here's the abstract:

Married women's property law reform in the nineteenth century made it legally possible for wives to run businesses independently of husbands.

However, marital property law reform as interpreted by the courts of Ontario still conceptualized the wife as a dependent partner in marriage who owed labour and services to her husband.

A woman's ability to run a business on her own account was limited by the rules assigned to married women's property ownership, and her labour in a family business was constructed as a labour of love, performed for the benefit of family, and to the profit of her husband.

Women faced significant challenges in obtaining credit and maintaining ownership of enterprises.

By examining Ontario cases in which wives sought to control the assets from their businesses, this paper explores the limitations of reform, and asserts not only that business is not gender neutral, but also that understanding law is essential to understanding why women have been marginalized in the business community and business history

Life and times of Kwakwaka'wakw activist Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951)

And another, published this summer, a life and times style biography from UBC Press, Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom by anthropologist Leslie Robertson and the Kwagu’l Gixsam Clan.  Order here.

Says UBC press:

Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las is a compelling conversation with the colonial past initiated by the descendants of Kwakwaka'wakw leader and activist, Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951). Working in collaboration, Robertson and Cook's descendants open this history, challenging dominant narratives that misrepresent her motivations for criticizing customary practices and eventually supporting the potlatch ban. Drawing from oral histories, archival materials, and historical and anthropological works, they offer a nuanced portrait of a high-ranked woman who was a cultural mediator; devout Christian; and activist for land claims, fishing and resource rights, and adequate health care. Ga'axsta'las testified at the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, was the only woman on the executive of the Allied Indian Tribes of BC, and was a fierce advocate for women and children. This powerful meditation on memory documents how the Kwagu'l Gixsam revived their dormant clan to forge a positive social and cultural identity for future generations through feasting and potlatching.

Legal History of Post WWI Halifax by Michael Boudreau

Also new (last spring) from UBC Law and Society series, City of Order: Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918-35 by criminologist/legal historian Michael Boudreau from St. Thomas University, Fredericton. Order on line here.

Here's the blurb:

Interwar Halifax was a city in flux, a place where citizens struggled to adopt new ideas and technologies as they dealt with rising levels of poverty, unemployment, and outmigration. Although many Haligonians debated the pros and cons of the modern world, most agreed on one thing -- modernity was corrupting public morality and unleashing an imposing array of social problems, including crime, on their fair city.

 

Michael Boudreau pieces together from case files and archival records a riveting portrait of citizens, policy makers, and officials turning to the criminal justice system to create a bulwark against further social dislocation. Officials modernized the city’s machinery of order -- courts, prisons, and the police force -- and placed greater emphasis on crime control, while residents supported tough-on-crime measures and attached little importance to rehabilitation. These initiatives, in this particular cultural context, gave birth to a constructed vision of a criminal class that provided the police with convenient targets in their effort to build a city of order -- ethnic minorities, working-class men, and female and juvenile offenders.

 

This absorbing study of crime and culture in interwar Halifax shows how tough-on-crime measures can compound, rather than resolve, social inequalities and dislocations.