Our first issue of 2020 sees some big changes. We are sad to announce the departure from our team of Michan Connor, who has become the Editor of the History News Network. In his time as editor of the Docket and as Associate Editor for Digital Projects for Law and History Review, Michan brought an...
Gautham Rao: Law and History Review and The Docket in the time of COVID-19
First, and most importantly, all of us at Law and History Review hope that all of our readers, reviewers, colleagues, friends and associates are staying safe and healthy during this incredibly difficult time. It was just a few months ago that a good part of the legal history community convened in Boston for the annual...
Ed. Note: The Docket recently asked Carter Findley to give our readers a brief overview of his new book on the life and work of one of the most important but neglected legal thinkers, diplomats, and men of letters of the Enlightenment: Mouradega d’Ohsson. Carter Vaughn Findley, Enlightening Europe on Islam and the Ottomans: Mouradgea...
R.B. Bernstein Reviews James E. Lewis’ Burr Conspiracy
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of R.B. Bernstein’s review of James E. Lewis, Jr., The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis, which will appear in Law and History Review 38.2 (May, 2020). James E. Lewis, Jr., The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis. Princeton: Princeton...
Laura Flannigan: Seeing Medieval Poverty in the Archives of the Court of Requests
Editor’s Note: Laura Flannigan’s article, “Litigants in the English ‘Court of Poor Men’s Causes,’ or Court of Requests, 1515-1525,” will appear in Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (May, 2020) and is currently available on our Cambridge University Press site. In this article, she describes the sources and her research process for the article....
Introduction[1] This essay examines the representation of seventeenth-century colonial North America in early Native American literature. While the history of Native-colonial relations of this period is complex, conflict was an inevitable and often dominating part of those encounters, and, in turn, drew the attention of Native writers and historians: Samson Occom, Elias Boudinot, Black Hawk,...
I began researching the criminalization of same-sex intimacy in colonial New South Wales (NSW) while I was a doctoral student at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. My thesis actually concerned the legal construction of the family in England and, in the initial stages, Australia. I was interested in some of the legal moves...
Sadie Jarrett: Using Legal Records to Understand the Early Modern Welsh Gentry’s Sense of Self
The defining event in the legal history of early modern Wales was the passing of the Acts of Union in 1536 and 1543. Wales in its entirety had been under English governance since the 1282/3 conquest of Wales by Edward I of England. The 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan formally annexed Wales to England, but the...
Editor’s Note: As part of our coverage of the legal history scholarship that was scheduled to appear at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, we are pleased to offer the following abstract. Natalie Shibley “The History of Legal Challenges to the Ban on Transgender Military Personnel” The current ban on the...