Drawing on thirty freedom suits from nineteenth-century eastern Cuba, this article explores how some slaves redefined slaveholders' oral promises of manumissions by grace from philanthropic acts into contracts providing a deferred wage payout. Manumissions by grace tended to reward affective labor (loyalty, affection) and to be granted to domestic slaves. Across Cuba, as in other slave societies of Spanish America, through self-purchase, slaves made sustained efforts to monetize the labor that they did by virtue of their ascribed status. The monetization of affective work stands out amongst such efforts. Freedom litigants involved in conflicts over manumissions by grace emphasized the market logics in domestic slavery, revealing that slavery was a fundamentally economic institution even in such instances where it appeared to be intertwined with kinship and domesticity. Through this move, they challenged the assumption that slaves toiled loyally for masters out of a natural commitment to an unchanging master-slave hierarchy. By the 1880s, through court litigation and extra-judicial violence, slave litigants and insurgents would turn oral promises of manumission by grace into a blueprint for general emancipation. Through their legal actions, enslaved people, especially women, revealed the significance and transactional nature of care work, a notion familiar to us today.

Based on Carol Smart's observation that rape law reform as lobbied for by the feminist movement during the 1970s and 1980s failed to achieve any meaningful change, this article seeks to examine the nature and implications of rape law reform in the Republic of Ireland from the 1980s to the present day. During the 1980s the conceptualization of rape changed from a proprietorial crime to a violation of individual bodily integrity due to feminist lobbying efforts and the emergence of a victim-centered approach in the criminal justice system. Though this changing conceptualisation has led to significant attitudinal change, particularly surrounding the issues of acquaintance and marital rape, procedural change has failed to secure higher conviction rates. In particular, this article demonstrates that the legal reforms achieved in the 1980s potentially resulted in a 2% decrease in rape conviction rates by 2007. When compared to England/Wales, conviction rates as distinctive from prosecution rates in Ireland remain chronically low. This indicates that any legal reforms must take account of the institutional bias ingrained the Irish criminal justice system against female rape complainants, which has continuing relevance for Irish legislation pertaining to sexual violence such as the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, 2017. Overall this article suggests that rape is an exceptional crime and needs to be reassessed as such.

In 1885, in the midst of the North-West Resistance in which Indigenous people took up arms against the colonial Canadian state, three Cree men executed an elderly Cree woman. At their trial for murder, the defendants were found guilty. They avoided execution because colonial authorities became convinced that they believed that their victim was a wendigo, a cannibal spirit. Killing a wendigo was justified under Cree law and so, argued one judge, the defendants lacked the mens rea necessary to sustain a murder conviction. The history of this case shows the limits of colonial legal jurisdiction and sovereignty. Scarce resources, hostile territory and Indigenous resistance hampered the colonial state's efforts to consolidate its legal control over the Canadian frontier. This essay notes the importance of these forces, but also argues that common law jurisprudence itself could impair the ability of the state to hold Indigenous defendants criminally responsible. Colonial officials regularly invoked the idea that Indigenous people adhered to different legal and normative orders in order to illustrate their supposed inferiority. However, this official recognition of the legal pluralism of the North-West could undermine a defendant's responsibility and cut against efforts to assert the exclusive jurisdiction of Canadian criminal law.

We are living in an age of political turbulence, social division, and resistance. The resistance that formed in reaction to the election of Donald Trump styles itself a force to defend constitutional rights, democratic norms, and the rule of law in the United States. Perhaps the New Republic best explained its advent: the Resistance had been born of partisan—that is, Democratic—fury after “liberalism had been dealt its most stunning and consequential defeat in American history.” “For the first time in decades, liberalism has been infused with a sense of energy and purpose,” with millions of people devoted to a singular cause: resisting Trump.

Some of the founding fathers of Israel's legal system were lawyers educated in Polish law schools. What was the impact of this background on their legal thought? There are few explicit references to Polish law in Israeli legal texts. However, indirectly, legal and constitutional ideas taken from Polish law did appear in Israeli law. This article focuses on the legal writing of four Israeli lawyers in the period immediately after Israel's independence in 1948, showing how Polish law was used by these lawyers as a source for occasional precedents, for critiquing Israeli law (dominated by English law), and, mostly, for constitutional precedents.

The relatively greater impact of Polish law in the constitutional realm can be attributed to the fact that Poland (like other new countries established in the interwar period in the periphery of western Europe, such as Ireland) offered Israeli lawyers constitutional models that were both more modern, and more relevant to the specific circumstances of the new state, where religion played an important role in defining the identity of the nation. The history of the impact of Polish law on Israeli law can thus serve as an example of interwar constitutional innovation in the European periphery, and its later impact on post-World War II constitutional law.

This article analyses arguments used in an 1866 Brazilian freedom suit to highlight a substantive legal perspective. Historians of Brazilian slavery law have given attention to the politics of freedom suits, largely disregarding the role of law in their origins, developments, and outcomes. By looking at legal arguments, we show how law and political views mutually framed each other. We focus on the impact of 19th century legal modernizations in the distinction and contradictions between the law of status and property law, the legal translations of freedom, and the uses of arguments based on codes, natural law, and pragmatic considerations about the judiciary's role in a slave society. This is a micro-history of a suit that, with the help of other 19th-century freedom suits and legal doctrine, allows us to move up and down different historical scales to understand law's centrality in the political perpetuation and demise of slavery in Brazil.

Donald Trump's administration has provoked crisis after crisis regarding the United States’ immigration policy, laws, and their enforcement. This has affected millions of immigrants in the U.S. and those hoping to immigrate. Stemming from this, immigration lawyers are providing extraordinary amounts of direct pro bono legal services to immigrants in need. Yet the history of the practice of immigration law has been largely understudied. This article closely examines Chicago's Immigrants’ Protective League between 1910 and 1940. The League provided free counsel to tens of thousands of poor immigrants facing a multitude of immigration-related legal issues during a time when Congress passed increasingly strict immigration laws. The League, always headed by women social workers, created a robust model of immigration advocacy at a time when only a handful of women were professionally trained lawyers. The League's archival documents, manifests how Trump's immigration policies have a long and painful history. U.S. immigration law and its enforcement have consistently been cruel, inhumane, arbitrary, and capricious. Told from the ground up and focusing upon the day-to-day problems that immigrants brought to the League, one dramatically sees how immigration laws and practices were like quicksand, thwarting the legitimate expectations of migrants. The League, in response, participated in creating what would become the practice of immigration law, engaging, and quickly responding to changing laws, rules, policies, and the needs of migrants.

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.

This study examines how law, custom, and social norm interacted in civil justice in Qing and Republican China by looking into 152 civil cases tried in 1912, right after the founding of the Republic of China, and a body of legal interpretations from the Supreme Court during 1912-1929, and certain provisions in the Civil Code of 1929-30--the very first one in Chinese history. It shows that both law and custom were invoked by judges within their moral universe or social norm. It traces how the Supreme Court allowed local customs to be a legal ground for rulings in certain civil disputes, and which customs in civil matters in the Qing and the early Republic were, and which were not, “hardened” into the Civil Code. The interplay between law and custom, mediated by judges with their normative sense of right and wrong, constituted both continuity and change in civil justice between the Qing era and the Republican period. Ultimately, the issues addressed here speak to a larger question of how Chinese jurists, within their judicial discretions, tried to strike a difficult but necessary balance between “law-on-books” and “law-in-action,” while law on the books was undergoing important revisions.

In July 2012, a landmark hearing before the High Court in London found that the British government had a case to answer concerning human rights abuses, including torture and rapes, allegedly perpetrated by British colonialists in Kenya, during the Mau Mau counterinsurgency of the 1950s. Among the four elderly Kenyan claimants in court that day was a Kikuyu woman, Jane Mara, whose testimony related the sexual abuses she had suffered. Jane had been only 15 years of age, in 1954, when she was accused of being a Mau Mau sympathizer, and along with other villagers, she was taken for interrogation. The experience Jane Mara recounted was horrific. Beaten repeatedly by her inquisitors, she was then pinned to the floor by four African guards who held her thighs apart, while another guard forced a glass bottle into her vagina, using the sole of his boot to direct the bottle deeply into her. The pain was excruciating, and Jane realized that the bottle had been heated. When this ordeal came to an end, she was compelled to sit and watch as the three other young women were subjected to the same torture.

Writing for his fellow military officers in early 1903, United States Army Major C.J. Crane reflected on the recent Philippine–American War. The bloody struggle to suppress an insurgency in the Philippines after the United States had annexed them from Spain in 1899 had officially concluded the previous July. The war had been accompanied by fierce racist sentiments among Americans, and in keeping with these, Crane described his foes as “the most treacherous people in the world.” But Crane's discussion drew as much on concepts of law as it did on race. The average American officer, Crane argued, had “remembered all the time that he was struggling with an enemy who was not entitled to the privileges usually granted prisoners of war,” and could be summarily executed, without benefit of “court-martial or other regular tribunal.” If anything, the Americans had been too generous. “Many [American] participants in the struggle,” he maintained, “have failed to fully understand that we were practically fighting an Asiatic nation in arms and almost every man a soldier in disguise and a violator” of the laws of war. But what did those laws mean to the United States during the conflict, and what does this indicate about the broader history of international law's relationship to empire?

This article examines how ideals of contract freedom within the women's rights movement challenged medical and medical jurisprudence theories about women between 1870 and 1930. Throughout this period, medicine linked women's intellectual incapacity with problems rooted in their physical bodies. Doctors opined that reproductive diseases and conditions of pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and menopause rendered women disabled, irrational, and inherently dependent. Yet at the same moment, the elimination of the legal disability of coverture, and new laws that expanded women's property and earnings rights contributed to changing perceptions of women's public roles. Courts applied far more liberal understandings of sanity and rationality in property and contract cases, even when the legal actors were women. Seizing this opportunity, reformers made powerful arguments against doctors' ideas of women's “natural” mental weakness, pointing out that the growing rights to contract and transact illustrated women's rationalism and competency for full citizenship. Most significantly, these activists insisted that these rights indicated women's right to total bodily freedom—a concept that would become crucially important in the early birth control movement.

The rise of extraterritoriality in the nineteenth-century has been described as a transitional phase that laid the ground for the construction of territorial sovereignty. Yet in Egypt, where a particularly extensive extraterritorial regime emerged in the mid-century, the expansion of European jurisdiction underneath national sovereignty became entrenched with the creation of international mixed courts in the 1870s. This outcome, the article argues, was the product of a complex compromise between European empires, which upheld different conceptions of extraterritoriality, and the government of Egypt. While Britain refashioned its own extraterritorial judicial system as a means of promoting legal reforms in the Ottoman world, France aggressively pursued the expansion of extraterritorial rights as an instrument of informal domination and economic exploitation. The creation of an international type of jurisdiction, less susceptible to French political pressures but applying a French system of law, proved acceptable to all parties, although it severely constrained Egyptian sovereignty from within, even after Britain took over the reins of government in 1882. Extraterritoriality was not merely a transition, but an original feature of the global legal order, arising out of modern imperialism and imperial rivalry and yet conducive to the forging of new instruments of international law and governance.

As the nineteenth-century French state expanded its borders in North Africa and incorporated what came to be Algeria into France, French King Louis-Phillipe, President and then Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and various ministers of war, governors general for Algeria, and other advisors and government officials all faced the question of how and if to naturalize the territory's inhabitants as French citizens. Recent literature on the French use of law to classify and control populations in Africa has focused on the French colonial administration. This article emphasizes instead the role courts played in sorting out the legal contradictions created by French colonialism, by using the Jews in Algeria as an example. The existing precedent of the Jews' forced de-corporation and naturalization in France made their collective religious rights in Algeria particularly problematic, and cases in the Algerian and French courts highlighting the anomalous legal status of Algerian Jews eventually led to Jewish, but not Muslim, naturalization by decree in 1870. This new interpretation of Jewish naturalization in French Algeria highlights the philosophical problem that Jewish collective rights forced the French courts and French state to confront, and the barriers to resolving it.

Over the past decade, the United Kingdom has deprived an increasing number of British subjects of their citizenship. This policy, known as “denaturalization,” has been applied with particular harshness in cases where foreign-born subjects have been accused of terrorist activity. The increase is part of a global trend. In recent years, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands have either debated or enacted denaturalization statutes. But Britain remains an outlier among Western democracies. Since 2006, the United Kingdom home secretary has revoked the citizenship of at least 373 Britons, of whom at least 53 have had alleged links to terrorism. This is more than the total number of revocations by Canada, France, Australia, and Netherlands combined. These developments are troubling, as the right to be secure in one's citizenship has been a cornerstone of the postwar European liberal political order, and of the international community's commitment to human rights.

In the wake of the Civil War, Columbia Law School professor Francis Lieber, architect of some of the Lincoln administration's most important legal strategies, set out to write a definitive text on martial law and the emergency power. Lieber's text would have summed up his view of the legal lessons of the Civil War. Lieber died in 1872, leaving an unfinished manuscript to his son, Guido Norman Lieber, soon to become the Judge Advocate General of the Union Army. Norman Lieber worked on the manuscript but never finished it. Hidden deep in the younger Lieber's papers in the National Archives, the manuscript summarizes a strand of thinking about constitutional emergencies that first emerged in the controversies over slavery, then animated Emancipation and the broader legal strategy of the Lincoln White House, before running headlong into the post-war backlash signaled by the Supreme Court's 1866 decision in Ex Parte Milligan. Building on debates over martial law in Anglo-American empire, the Liebers’ thinking embraced a forceful but constrained approach that made a cabined form of necessity the central principle of emergency governance in the modern state.