Like all good historical research, “Gloria's story” raises more questions than it can answer. My reaction to the article, which I initially shared with the author as an anonymous reviewer for Law and History Review, assumes that this incompleteness is a welcome aspect of the historian's trade, rather than a gap that we should cover with theorization or redundant evidence. Yet the narrative structure of case studies like this makes it necessary to probe what is left outside the story, however unpleasant it might be. In these comments I will try to do that by inserting this fascinating case into a historical reflection about the relationship between violence and the law, an aspect of Guatemalan history that “Gloria's Story” reluctantly illustrates.

John Wertheimer, the author of “Gloria's Story,” has produced a complex and absorbing text that skillfully guides the reader through the microhistory of Gloria's concubinage to an enhanced appreciation of the greater legal, social, and institutional forces at play in mid-twentieth century Guatemala. Using Gloria's story to shift into more general observations about law and society in Guatemala, Wertheimer states that laws can “affect behavior by establishing incentives and disincentives for different types of action and by reinforcing or undermining different values.” Wertheimer reads the legal records involving Gloria and her family to write her story from the dominant critical perspective of gender and class. He notes the way in which class distinctions played into the creation and maintenance of concubinages and the manner in which gender stereotypes bolstered such institutions. It is all exacting yet comfortable stuff for us to read. “Yes, yes, of course, exactly” we nod as we read of the individual and institutional gendered oppression meted out on Gloria and her children by Julio and the state. Nonetheless, Wertheimer's analysis delves deeper: Gloria may have gained in status and stability through her concubinage, and liberal reforms such as decriminalizing adultery and casting out distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children may have had the unintended consequence of strengthening the institution of adulterous concubinage.

In 1940, in the inaugural issue of its Bill of Rights Review, the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee expressed its conviction “that a distinct field of law—that of civil rights—[was] emerging.” From the standpoint of lawyers, judges, and scholars looking forward from that moment, the contours of the new field were largely unknown. In large part, that uncertainty was due to the Supreme Court's dismantling of the dominant doctrinal framework governing the relationship between individuals and the state in the 1930s.

As Daniel Hulsebosch and Ruth Paley show in their perceptive and helpful comments, Somerset's Case raises questions about several dimensions of the nature of British imperial slavery. As to those dimensions, we share considerable common ground. I agree with Paley that racism was an important element in the treatment of black slaves in England and in its colonies. Hulsebosch is correct that in the late eighteenth century protecting liberty in England by keeping England free from slavery could co-exist with the willingness or desire to maintain colonial slavery. However, as discussed below, the significance of the Somerset decision goes beyond racism and metropolitan protection.

Forums are not for the faint of heart. My critics offer a searching analysis of my approach and arguments. William Novak questions the basic assumptions and methods of my article; indeed, he dismisses it out of hand as a well-known “traditional” story told in an equally traditional “narrative” fashion. Somewhat more graciously, Daniel Rodgers contests the validity of some of its arguments; more fundamentally, he disputes the legitimacy—at least for a “normal” political actor such as Charles Evans Hughes—of an ideological frame of reference. Just tell the (traditional) story, he says; come to grips with the man and forget the labels. For his part, William Forbath largely accepts my conceptualization but disputes my contention that the traditional liberal state died in 1937. Rather, he argues, the post–New Deal American state was deeply informed by Hughes's “lawyerly” brand of “transitional” liberalism, which balanced a “progressive” commitment to reform and administrative state-building with a “classical” regard for dual federalism and the primacy of courts and common law. Finally, Risa Goluboff contests my suggestion, via Hilaire Belloc, that the new constitutional order subordinated individual economic rights to the interests of the national state and the elites that control it. The quest for economic rights remained strong, she suggests, until the onset of the Cold War, which limited the reach of the American welfare state, and the Brown decision, which gave a racial (and, eventual, gender) definition to liberal reform.

One of the most vexing challenges accompanying any attempt to reconstruct the legal history of the family is deciding how much interpretive weight to assign to social factors as opposed to legal factors. “Gloria's Story” is loaded with social history, in part because it focuses on a small group of decidedly non-elite characters. It discusses non-legal matters as big as the impact of wealth concentration on the Guatemalan family and as small as the social significance of home births, as opposed to hospital births, in Quetzaltenango during the 1960s. Nonetheless, the most important factors driving the analysis are legal, not social. The article's central argument—that “modernizing” legal reforms adopted in Guatemala since the mid-nineteenth century have fortified, not weakened, adulterous concubinage—emphasizes the effects of legal change.