This article explores how colonial law in India interacted with the construction of caste rank (varna) between 1860 and 1930. It specifically tracks contestations over Kayasthas’ legal varna rank in northern and eastern India through various inheritance disputes, threading them together to shed light on how courts sought to anchor their interpretations of Hindu law around the Indian jurisprudential conceptions of varna. It examines the successes and failures of Kayasthas to have favorable legal rulings that would uphold their status as “twice-born”/dvija, demonstrating that colonial law was limited in its ability (and often indifferent) to construct caste ranks. Inconsistent ruling in provincial courts pushed Kayasthas to seek taxonomic recognition as “twice-born” in the colonial census, demonstrating how colonial law and taxonomy intersected in novel ways. This article argues that by taking a novel approach to Indian social history through the prism of law, we can enrich our understanding of how modern notions of caste and social rank were constructed in colonial India.

Moving beyond the current flaws in originalism will require developing a genuinely historical approach to reading Founding era texts that draws on the best inter-disciplinary methods available. Reading legal texts historically will require originalism adopt standard historical practices, not reject them. Scholars must get the history right before deciding if any of the historical meanings recoverable from a careful study of the original debate over the Constitution might be relevant to modern law. Determining which meanings might be probative or dispositive for modern legal issues is a separate task from the process of uncovering the legal meaning of Founding era constitutional texts. Deciding what, if any relevance, such historical meaning ought to have in contemporary law is at its core a legal question, and not one that history can answer. Still, if legal scholars are going to cite history as authority, they have an obligation to get the history right.

Northern Brazil experienced consequential socio-economic and legal transformation by the mid-eighteenth century in the context of imperial reforms. If the region relied for decades on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans, the Portuguese crown banned the practiced in 1755. To develop a plantation economy, the monarchy created a trading company responsible for shipping unprecedented number of enslaved Africans. This article discusses ruptures and continuities on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans. It focuses on one city, São Luís, and makes extensive use of Catholic sources (baptisms and marriages), notarial records, and legal cases. The article analyzes the connection between mechanisms that allowed the resilience of slavery (or forms that resembled slavery) and attempts to claim and preserve freedom or autonomy, in this case the strategic use of the índio status. The article develops two of those mechanisms: social dependencies created within the households and the use of socio-racial classifications by the colonial society. I make two interconnected arguments. First, I propose a bottom-up process of Indigenous slavery abolition. Indigenous workers were savvy litigants and they fought for their place as mobile wage laborers within the city. Second, in that moment of socio-economic and legal transformations, slaveholders developed vernacular practices stressing black maternal origins to slaves.

There has been a great deal of confusion in recent years in regard to what we mean by “truth.” Although confusion and debate over determining the truth is hardly novel for either philosophers or common folks, the issue of “truth” and how we might know it (or produce it) has been quite the rage these last twenty years among historians, legal scholars, and postmodern would-be theorists. Plausibility, coherence, elegance, and consistency over time and within a community are just a few among the current yardsticks. These have, in both their rule-bound and unfettered forms, nudged aside inherited liberal (and marxist) conceptions of “correspondence theory,” which held that there is something really true out there—our task being to get as close to it as we can.

Lindsay Farmer's argument that, in seeking to replace the common law with legislation, and in striving for a novel systematization of the relationship between civil and penal law, the criminal law commissioners of 1833-45 transformed the understanding of criminal law in relation to government is a powerful one. It is to some degree an inferential argument, positing that a reading of Bentham's theory of legislation allows us to understand the commissioners' work better, since Bentham “makes explicit many of the broader political assumptions that guided the commissioners and allows us to understand the precise nature of their codification project.” It is worth asking therefore how far the commissioners were informed by Benthamic ideas and what they understood their task to be.

Charles Evans Hughes's career ran along the fault lines of most of the major political events of his lifetime. Muckraking catapulted him to fame. He governed New York during four key years of the Progressive era as an effective administrator and earnest reformer. He stayed with the Republican Party when the Progressives bolted in 1912. He ran for the presidency in 1916 but missed the prize, albeit by a narrower electoral college margin than any other contender until the very end of the century. He was instrumental in negotiating the international naval disarmament accords of 1921–22, landmarks of progressive internationalism in their day that fell under sharp criticism a decade later. He presided over the U.S. Supreme Court during the key years of the New Deal, though in most histories of the 1930s Court he comes across as something of an also-ran behind its more memorable shapers: Brandeis, Cardozo, Sutherland, Black, even Roberts. Hard to pin to any achievement or distinct idea, slipping in and out of the dramatic movements of his day, he was the kind of man who makes history but easily falls out of the history books.

The “who” of a lawsuit, who can sue and who can be sued, has long been a fundamental issue of process. Lengthy discussions of the issue are found in Roman law texts of eighteen centuries ago and in succeeding centuries in texts influenced by Roman law. In Roman law texts, the “who” of a lawsuit was discussed in the same context and, most importantly, with the same seeming concern as the fundamental issues of whether the court had authority over the parties and whether the court had competence over the subject matter. The same is true for many of the texts influenced by Roman law.

In February 1915, non-citizen teachers throughout California abruptly learned that they would soon lose their jobs when state officials announced that local and county governments were required to enforce a long-forgotten anti-alien public employment law. In response, one Canadian immigrant teacher, Katharine Short, launched a diplomatic, legal, political, and public relations campaign against the policy. Earning the support of powerful (Anglo-)Canadian nationalists in wartime and a favorable depiction in California news coverage as a “practically American” Canadian woman, Short’s efforts culminated in an exemption for most immigrant teachers from the state’s nativist public employment policies. This article recovers, recounts, and contextualizes the California Alien Teachers Controversy of 1915 at the center of transformations in the political development, law, and politics of American citizenship and citizenship rights from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It testifies to the growing power and powers of state governments to shape immigrants' lives and livelihoods via alienage law long into the mid-twentieth century, the rhetorical strength and courtroom limits of “right to contract” arguments in the context of anti-alien hiring and licensure disputes, and the disparate impact of these nativist laws on immigrants owing to inequalities of race, gender, and class and how those inequalities shaped the less-than-inclusive aims and strategies of Katharine Short in her campaign to alter the state's nativist public employment policies.

For almost a month in 1877, the Russian public was engrossed in one of the largest nonpolitical trials in the history of Russian law. An alleged criminal organization dubbed the “Jacks of Hearts Club” (Klub chervonnykh valetov) involved 48 defendants in addition to several who had died or managed to escape, as well as more than 300 witnesses. The charges included dozens of episodes of fraud and forgery committed between 1866 and 1875, in addition to one murder and one count of sacrilege. Even more sensational was the fact that the group of defendants belonged to “respectable” society, among them wealthy merchants, landowning nobles, and even a member of the aristocratic Dolgorukov family. In the Russian popular lexicon, a “Jack of Hearts” became enduring shorthand for a personable young swindler of upper-class origins. Over the years, the story grew in the telling, with some of the legends travelling from author to author, such as the story of Pavel Speier, the alleged leader of the club who supposedly tricked a naïve English tourist into “buying” the official residence of the Moscow governor general on Tverskaia Street.

One of the most important legacies of the American Civil War, not just in the re-united States of America but also in the nineteenth and twentieth century world, were the new laws of war that the conflict introduced. “Lieber's Code,” named after the man who authored it for the Lincoln administration, was a set of instructions written and issued in April 1863 to govern the conduct of “the armies of the United States in the field.” It became a template for all subsequent codes, including the Hague and Geneva conventions. Widely understood as a radical revision of the laws of war and a complete break with the Enlightenment tradition, the code, like the war that gave rise to it, reflected the new post-Napoleonic age of “people's wars.” As such, it pointed forward, if not as the expression of the first total war, then at least as an expression of the first modern one, with all the blurring of boundaries that involved.

In 1788, a Dutch-born minister in upstate New York named Lambertus De Ronde translated the U.S. Constitution into Dutch. Five years later, a legal scholar in the Netherlands, Gerhard Dumbar, produced another Dutch translation of the U.S. Constitution. De Ronde's translation was printed on at least two separate occasions in 1788, and scores of editorial changes between the two printings demonstrate that De Ronde was working to make the text appealing and understandable to his audience. Dumbar, however, disparaged De Ronde's translation for its amateurish character. Dumbar claimed, furthermore, that a legal education, and not experience in an American context, was essential for understanding the Constitution. In an analysis of the context and language of these two early Dutch translations of the Constitution, this article contributes new perspectives on the transnational character and influence of the U.S. Constitution. This article argues that for the Dutch in New York, debates about ratification and interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, were as much concerned with local character and transnational currents as with national politics.

History is a strange medium: it carries the most contemporary debates onto the most distant terrain. Both Bruce Mann and David Konig focus on the notions of change and context that undergird the forum essays. Those issues, more than any moment in early New York, link the articles and the comments. By exploring the way we defined “constitutions,” “constitutionalism,” and “constitutional history,” the commentators open up a large and current question. They invite a discussion about approaches to constitutional change.

Kunal Parker's “State, Citizenship, and Territory” can be read in at least two ways. Read one way, it tells an important story about how regulation of the poor was driven upward in Massachusetts during the nineteenth century, from the localities to the state. In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts had imposed primary responsibility for care of the poor on its towns. But during the eighteenth century, with the growth of a landless, wandering population, town poor relief budgets came under increasing pressure. The towns responded by lobbying the Massachusetts legislature to pass a series of statutes that made it more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement. People who fell into need in Massachusetts but who had not acquired a town settlement became state paupers for whom the state, rather than any town, was fiscally responsible. As it became more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement, the number of state paupers increased, shifting a portion of the fiscal burden of poor relief from the towns onto the state.