In recent decades a large amount of scholarship has been devoted to the task of explaining the ways in which European powers claimed possession of indigenous people's territories across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This research has emphasised the role of the law in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. But more work is required to establish the precise roles that the law played in the claiming of land and to measure its importance relative to other factors. In this paper I consider one British colony, South Australia, in order to investigate the changes that occurred in the roles that the law performed over time in the claiming of the indigenous people's lands, and to assess the importance of these relative to the roles played by historical, moral, political, psychological and material factors. I conclude that in this instance at least the role that the law played in the claiming of possession was rather different than that suggested by numerous studies of the claiming of possession as well as much less significant.

This article describes the federal government's little-known effort to remunerate civilians who lost private property during the War of 1812. It shows how wartime “sufferers” pressured their congressional representatives for redress. In response, their representatives created a new federal office to adjudicate claims for lost property. But this office quickly came under scrutiny for making allegedly erroneous disbursements. Although Congress curtailed the office's power, representatives of the claimants continued to push for a more generous policy. To garner more free state support, they pointed out that officials had sought indemnities for the slaves the British had liberated during the war, but not for other forms of lost property. To remedy this preferential treatment, most northern congressmen began to support enacting a more generous compensation policy. In response, southerners demanded payment for slaves who had been lost in the war. Ultimately, northerners joined with the representatives of the sufferers from the South to pass a new law. However, this law only offered remuneration for buildings, which, in effect, tabled the discussion over slavery. This article therefore reveals how legislators employed the politics of slavery to build a coalition to create a law, which, in turn, was limited by those same politics.

In 1938, the British enacted Section 377A of the Straits Settlements Penal Code, criminalizing male same-sex acts in Singapore. Although the law was neither the first nor only attempt to regulate same-sex activity, it represented a stark intensification in sexual policing. Yet, the reasons for the introduction of Section 377A remain elusive. New sources, including recently declassified documents, reveal that Section 377A intersected with the colonial state's wider project of social control. In the early 1930s, intensified policing of female prostitution inadvertently magnified the visibility of male prostitution in Singapore, just as homosexuality was emerging as a distinct conceptual category. Meanwhile, scandals about sexual liaisons between European officials and Asians men threatened British legitimacy. This “discovery” of homosexuality led the British to introduce Section 377A. As British troops arrived in Singapore in the late 1930s in response to Japanese expansionism in the Far East, concerns about blackmail, military discipline, and the colonial color line governed the enforcement of Section 377A. Between 1938 and 1941, the British disproportionately used Section 377A to punish Asian male prostitutes whom they thought had seduced European men. Secondarily, the British used the provision to deter European soldiers, sailors, and non-officials from exposing themselves to extortion. Seen in this light, Section 377A served as a response to changing configurations of race, class, and sexuality in colonial Singapore.

This paper is an empirical and theoretical analysis of buggery charges brought against men in New South Wales in the period 1788—1838. Drawing on a previously unexamined archive, it shows that an irregular pattern of charges in the first forty years of colonization was displaced by a dramatic increase in buggery charges in the period 1828–1838, and a move towards charging accused persons capitally; that the genesis of most complaints was community, rather than official, surveillance; and that throughout the entire period witnesses were far from circumspect in their evidence of unspeakable acts. The paper then argues that the upswing in charges post-1828 was only partly related to the introduction of the Offences Against the Person Act 1828 and its lower evidentiary threshold for proof of buggery. More important, it suggests, was the acute moralism of NSW society in the 1820s and 1830s, generated in part by John Thomas Bigge's 1822 Report into the State of the Colony of New South Wales. The move towards capital charges, however, does appear to bear some relationship to the changes in the Offences Act. The final part of the paper connects social anxiety over buggery to the 1837–38 Molesworth Inquiry into Transportation and the eventual cessation of convict transportation to NSW in 1840.

This article examines a campaign of jury intimidation conducted by female Republicans in the Irish Free State from 1926 to 1934. It discusses the rationale, logistics and key personalities of the campaign, as well as the policing, prosecutorial and legislative responses to it. The article demonstrates that a small number of women disrupted the administration of justice and generated a significant amount of publicity for their actions, not only in Ireland but also in the British press. In-depth consideration of this overlooked campaign brings issues of gender, state legitimacy, subversive activity and the vulnerability of the jury system into sharp relief.

This article adds to the growing literature about how the Supreme Court's decisions in the Insular Cases affected the residents of the U.S. territories. It focuses on the territory of Guam, which lacked juries in both criminal and civil trials until 1956–nearly sixty years after the island became a U.S. possession. Residents of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Virgin Islands had limited jury trials, but Guam was left out due to its strategic military significance as well as racialized ideas about the capabilities of Chamorros, the native inhabitants of the island. This article recovers the struggle by Guamanians to gain jury trials. It argues that independence movements, like those in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, were not the only forms of resistance to American empire. Through petitions, court challenges, and other forms of activism, Guamanians pushed for jury trials as a way to assert local agency and engage in participatory democracy. For them, the Insular Cases were not just abstract rulings about whether the Constitution followed the flag; they deeply affected the administration of justice on the ground for ordinary Guamanians.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small group of antiapartheid activists, led by the American Committee on Africa and chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa Rep. Charles Diggs Jr., launched a campaign against South African Airways' new flights into the United States. Using the legal and political strategies of the American civil rights movement, and the fragmentation of power within the American political system, activists tried to turn South African apartheid into an American civil rights problem that American government institutions could address. The strategy was indebted to the political and legal strategies of the civil rights movement, but framing demands around existing civil rights law necessarily limited what activists could ask for and what domestic institutions could provide. In practice, the campaign's successes were limited and legalistic; where domestic civil rights law directly conflicted with apartheid law, airlines could comply with the former without really challenging the latter. And the foreign policy context meant more failures than successes, as domestic legal institutions were reluctant to involve themselves with foreign policy concerns. Their successes and failures nonetheless tell us much about legal mobilization and institutional behavior in a period of globalization where sovereignty and jurisdictional lines were overlapping and conflicting.

Fifty-seven men of color were sentenced to death by the courts of England and Wales in the twentieth century and were less likely to receive mercy than white contemporaries. Though shocking, the data is perhaps unsurprising considering institutional racism and unequal access to justice widely highlighted by criminologists since the 1970s. We find discourses of racial difference were frequently mobilized tactically in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and Wales: to support arguments for mercy and attempt to save prisoners from the gallows. Scholars have identified historically and culturally contingent narratives traditionally deployed to speak to notions of lesser culpability. These mercy narratives reveal contemporary ideals and attitudes to gender or class. This article is original in identifying strategic mercy narratives told in twentieth-century England and Wales that called on contemporary tropes about defendants' race. The narratives and cases we explore suggest contemporary racism in the criminal justice system of England and Wales has a longer history than previously acknowledged.