This issue begins with a symposium “‘A Crime Against Humanity:’ Slavery and the Boundaries of Legality, Past and Present,” which features articles by Rebecca Scott, Keila Grinberg, Randy Sparks, Jennifer Martinez and Lisa Surwillo, and Ariela Gross and Chantal Thomas. An introduction by Ariela Gross sets out the themes of the symposium and the concluding article by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross considers what the articles say about boundaries and borders in the world of transatlantic slavery, past and present.
The symposium is followed by four other articles. The first, by Adam Wolkoff, looks at landlord–tenant law and the role of remedies, legal and extralegal, in the nineteenth century United States. Wolkoff unpacks the options available to landlords to show why historians who would understand the political economy of the nineteenth century, in particular the relation between law and capitalism, need to explore the role of remedies.
The next three articles look at various aspects of criminal law across time and space. In the first, Elizabeth Kamali looks at how medieval jurors used anger as one of the factors to help them distinguish among types of homicide. She also shows how complicated the process of assessing anger, or any emotion, could be and suggests a method for studying the place of emotion in the common law. The next article, by Barnet Hartston, takes the reader from England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to Germany in the late nineteenth century. Hartston's article explores the debate over when, and why, criminal trials should be closed to the public and the press. He uses that debate to consider the extent to which the German government and society had adopted liberal notions of a free press and open courtrooms.
The last article, by Orna Alyagon Darr, looks at British efforts to eradicate sex between men in Mandate Palestine. She argues that the actual practices of the courts in dealing with sodomy cases were never as dramatic as the colonial rhetoric, and she suggests that in many respects, the assumptions of the British rulers about male sex roles often resembled the attitudes of the local inhabitants.
This issue concludes with a selection of book reviews. We invite readers to also consider American Society for Legal History's electronic discussion list, H-Law, and visit the Society's website at http://www.legalhistorian.org/. Readers may also be interested in viewing the journal online, at http://journals.cambridge.org/LHR, where they may read and search issues of the journal.
