In 1821, an expeditionary force of the Bombay Marine imposed an unequal treaty upon the imam of Sana‘a, sovereign of the Yemeni port of Mocha. Previous accounts, depicting the incident as a standard rehearsal of British gunboat diplomacy, have overlooked an important legal innovation enfolded in the treaty wherein the East India Company's claim for extraterritorial jurisdiction over British subjects in Mocha was expanded to include not only British European subjects of the Crown and certain native dependents of the factory, but also the entire Indian merchant population of the port. Bombay's claim stood on shaky ground, however, as the legal boundaries of British subjecthood in the Indian subcontinent were anything but clear, not least to colonial administrators themselves. Prosaically enough, the intervention was foiled by an inaccurate translation of the treaty from English to Arabic, demonstrating the extent to which Company officials were at the mercy of non-Western middlemen and translators who brokered between them and local rulers and administrators. A second line of inquiry in this article thus looks at the structural vulnerabilities of legal imperialism, reflecting upon the potential of contradictions and untranslatabilities between British-imperial and Arab-Islamic legal and epistemological assumptions in shaping the outcomes of the imperial encounter in the western Indian Ocean.

This essay brings to light a rare feature of the Stewart legal system. Grand jury charges remain understudied, partly for want of primary source materials. The brief historical and biographical sketches of the essay are appended by a unique and relevant artifact of the time: a preamble or exhortation to a grand jury charge, ostensibly delivered by a Justice of the King's Bench, John Dodderidge.

This article identifies an overlooked legacy of the child protection movement in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S.: transformations in evidence law and procedure that undermined common-law restrictions on children's testimony. Scholarship on the nineteenth-century modernization of evidence law argues that the rise of cross-examination allowed for the demise of common-law witness disqualification rules. The erosion of restrictions on children's testimony, however, requires an alternative or additional explanation, because cross-examination did not allay fears about children's reliability. The driving force for changes in the law governing child witnesses, I argue, was the slate of nineteenth-century child protection laws whose enforcement typically required children's testimony. The case study of Progressive-Era New York, presented here, reveals how evidence law and procedure adapted to substantive law's demand for children's evidence: reformers legislated an exception to the common-law oath requirement in children's cases, pushed trial courts to modernize their approach to examining child witnesses’ competency, and expanded the state's power to detain children as material witnesses. Those reforms fostered the ends of law enforcement, but did not resolve enduring debates about the reliability risks of children's testimony and the costs of testifying for children's wellbeing.

This paper will engage with the early colonial maps of the British East India Company to analyze its representative, as well as creative, functions, delineating how maps represent existing legal relations, entrench hierarchies, and visually transmit projected, and aspired, notions of legal authority and sovereignty. This paper studies the constitutive role of cartography apropos law, territory, and social order, in a specific historical context, by examining the crucial political role played by the British East India Company's cartographic practices and maps in aspiring and imagining the transplantation and establishment of English sovereignty in the Indian subcontinent. This paper will also show how British maps visually entrenched and supplemented unique forms of social hierarchy and marginalization, and legal categories and stratifications, in Indian cities. By analyzing maps, memoirs, cartouches, dedications, ornaments, plans, prospects, and historical manuscripts appertaining to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century operations of the Company, this paper will demonstrate, firstly, that cartography preceded, visually imagined, and set the stage for the coalescence of British sovereignty and the expansion of its law in the Indian subcontinent; secondly, that cartography provided the visual support for social ordering; and thirdly, that maps do not have a singular function. This paper proposes a notion of cartojuridism to capture the myriad ways in which cartography, law, sovereignty, and society intersect and relate with each other.

This article compares how gender and pathologization were entangled in the laws on infanticide in Spain and the Netherlands in 1930–1960, as well as in court practices. Both countries knew lenient laws for women who killed their newborn babies. These laws themselves did not assume that these women were suffering from a mental disorder, even though they referred to emotional state. In Spain, where the notion of honor was more important in the law, from the 1940s a debate was held about the relationship between mental illness and infanticide laws in the context of the Franco regime's emphasis on pronatalism. While in Spain the institutional monopoly of the generalist forensic physician as preferred expert excluded psychiatrists, in the Netherlands forensic psychiatrists were more influential, and their role increased from the 1950s. The article argues that regardless of many differences in forensic and political culture in both countries infanticidal women were pathologized: in Spain mostly via some interpretations of the infanticide law, and in the Netherlands via forensic psychiatry. However, pathologization, we show, involved many lay actors such as lawyers, legal scholars, and probation services.

Based upon archival and newspaper sources, this article explores the relationship between the notoriety of South Fort George, Fort George, and Prince George (the Georges) in British Columbia's northern interior, and the sense of self and place for residents on the eve of World War I. The investigation of Harry Porters’ Christmas Eve murder glimpses gender, class, and ethnic sensibilities linking the region with the rest of the province and nation, along with the British Columbia Provincial Police force's reliance on peace keeping in an era that was beginning to reassess what professional policing might entail. The result demonstrates that while the Georges imagined themselves as resting on the periphery of the white settlement frontier, the evidence indicates that in seeking acceptance by opinion leaders elsewhere in the nation, locally self-identified respectable people eagerly embraced the norms of post-Edwardian Canada. That the Georges tawdry reputation persists into the early twenty-first century suggests that the resilience of this notoriety reflects forces at play well-beyond British Columbia's northern interior. Framed in this fashion, the Christmas Eve murder sheds light on the legacies of reputation on the white settlement frontier, the influence of gender, class, and ethnicity in the construction of crime, and the evolution of professional policing.