In This Issue

Our first issue of 2019 features bold arguments, big questions, and innovative approaches. We begin with two articles that seek to uncover heretofore overlooked stories about medieval and early modern England.

Merriddee Bailey embraces a fairly new methodology in turning to the history of emotion. Emotions, she argues, were not part of the jurisdiction of any court. Nor was there any legal interest in evoking them or recording them. And yet, she argues, a closer look at cases before the court of chancery between 1386 and 1558 nonetheless finds emotions, while providing social and legal historians with an example of how to tease them out. Cordelia Beattie takes a more traditional approach, but her findings are no less significant. Beattie challenges the argument that sometime near 1450 wives stopped making wills. She explores the surviving wills in the deanery of Wisbech in 1465–77, its connected diocese of Ely from 1449 to 1505, and the probate acta of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham from 1483 to 1497 and finds that the story of women's wills was subject to far more regional variation than has been previously understood. In particular, she turns to court books to argue that wives with some land or buildings continued to make wills, and that wives married to churchwardens or church court jurors were more likely to have their wills proved.

Hannah Callaway writes the microhistory of a single case in late eighteenth century France. François Baudon had been a tax farmer until his death in 1781. His widow, her children, and Baudon's children from his first marriage each made claims on his considerable fortunes. For Callaway, the adjudication of these claims opens a window on the changing relationship between family life and legal practice. Specifically, she reads the case as part of an enlightenment legal challenge to the concept of the family that predated formal political reform of family life during the French Revolution.

We then move to two articles on the problematic relationship between race and belonging in nineteenth century America. Kimberly Welch tells the story of William Johnson, a free black barber and businessman in antebellum Natchez, Mississippi. Johnson, argues Welch, studied the law and believed that he “knew the law.” Johnson's diary is itself a compelling narrative. But in Welch's hands, Johnson's story becomes evidence that scholars should prioritize personal understandings of what it means to “know the law” before theorizing about the legal consciousness of free blacks and slaves in early America. The next article addresses the problem during the period after the Civil War. Giuliana Perrone's article examines how Reconstruction Era judges decided domestic law cases brought by former slaves. Perrone argues that these judges failed to understand the reality of slavery as a lived institution and the inter-racial relationships that persisted even after slavery's formal demise. These judges sought to treat slavery as an immediately remediable set of legal disabilities. Their refusal to resolve the lingering shadows of slavery on freedpeople undercut abolition in profound ways. Perrone's article is noteworthy for one more reason: a previous version was awarded the Kathryn T. Preyer Award from the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) in 2016. Perrone is the fourteenth Preyer Award winner to publish in Law and History Review.

Kevin Crosby's article takes us back to England and Wales in the years immediately following the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919. Scholars commonly assumed that the law broadened the jury franchise by including some women, but Crosby finds that the unintended consequences of reform actually removed some women from the jury franchise. The Western Assize circuit had long ignored property qualifications for jury qualification, which in fact limited the number of women who could participate. Reforming this problem proved expensive and, more importantly, the eventual solution of basing juror qualification on electoral registration ended up excluding women who had met the old property qualification.

Boyd Van Dijk then presents us with a seemingly familiar recounting of the formation of the Geneva Conventions, but tells a very different story than the typical narrative that identifies the Conventions as the byproduct of liberal humanitarianism and Western European intentions. Surprisingly, Van Dijk illustrates how the Soviet Union had an important, if mixed, legacy in developing the Conventions. He identifies areas of close cooperation between the Soviets and the International Committee of the Red Cross, especially when it came to reforming “inhumane” measures in war. At the same time, however, the Soviet delegation opposed certain enforcement mechanisms, thus setting the stage for the future successes and failures of the Geneva Conventions.

Julia Ogden's groundbreaking study of the legal and judicial vulnerability of male youth in Buenos Aires in sixty-five sodomy and rape cases between 1853 and 1912 demonstrates courts’ shifting understanding of males who experienced sexual assault in the years between the codification of the criminal law and the passage of the first consent laws. Judicial authorities were slow to integrate boys into the legal order because of cultural aversion to sodomy, a societal preoccupation with female sexuality, and the prevailing liminality of boys in prevailing laws.

This issue also features Ignacio De La Rassilla's article about the problem of periodization in the historiography of international law. He breaks down several generations of scholarship into a broad typology before proposing an alternative, multiperspectival model for periodizing international law.

We are pleased to announce that a forthcoming issue of The Docket (lawandhistoryreview.org) will feature an interview with Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente about their plenary lecture at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the ASLH. Because of the leadership and guidance of Christopher Beauchamp, the society's web site has also been redesigned and is an outstanding resource for scholars, including a new, simplified page for joining the society or renewing membership: https://aslh.net. Finally, we want to call attention to the Call for Applications for the 2019 Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars competition, which is available on the society's web site and appears below.