Finding emotions in medieval and early modern sources is one of the more difficult challenges currently facing historians. The task of uncovering emotions in legal records is even more fraught. Legal sources were precisely crafted to meet legal requirements and jurisdictional issues. Equally, emotions were not part of the jurisdiction of any court in the late Middle Ages or early modern period and there was no legal interest in eliciting them from litigants. Why then would we begin to think it is possible to find emotions in these legal records? This article invites social and legal historians to begin considering these questions by investigating the emotions in cases brought into the court of Chancery between 1386 and 1558.

This article responds to a debate about the clash between canon law and common law positions on whether married women in England could make wills and what freedoms they had in terms of bequeathing property. In particular, it revises the argument that wives largely ceased to make wills c.1450 by arguing that local customs should be given more attention. The article offers a detailed study of the surviving wills in the deanery of Wisbech 1465–77, its linked diocese of Ely 1449–1505, and the probate acta of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham 1483–97, in order to demonstrate that there was regional variation in the decline in married women's will-making. In particular, a focus on court books, which included visitation material alongside the enrolled wills and probate acta, enables more to be said about the kinds of married women who continued to make wills and their motivations. The article argues that in these areas, as well as a continued tendency for wives who had some land or buildings to make wills, married women who had close connections with men who acted as churchwardens or jurors in church courts were also more likely to have their wills proved, even when they had little to bequeath.

This article examines a particularly interesting inheritance case from late-eighteenth-century France to study the intersection of legal practices and Enlightenment ideas at the end of the Old Regime. The case, involving dispute around the estate of a deceased tax farmer, addresses family relations broadly within the specific context of inheritance and spousal assets. The five briefs produced on appeal to the Parlement of Paris show particular engagement with Enlightenment themes of reason, nature, and sentiment. The family was a locus of particular interest in eighteenth-century France because of its implications for social relations and its connection, through inheritance, to royal sovereignty. However, family law has been primarily studied from the perspective of practices, whereas the present article focuses on ideals. The article argues that the courtroom was an important site where the diverse implications of Enlightenment thought on family law were worked out. The argument that family law was a site for integrating ideals into practices has implications for how we think about the relationship between law and social change, as well as, in particular, the relationship between Enlightenment and Revolution.

This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.

This article analyses domestic law cases brought by former slaves during the decade following the Civil War. It argues that ending slavery was a long and complex process that included not only granting rights to freedpeople, but also subtracting the incapacities previously imposed by bondage and applying certain rights retroactively. Reconstruction-era judges, throughout the era and across the South, overlooked the realities of slavery as a lived institution. Instead, they reimagined slavery as a collection of legal disabilities that could simply be subtracted and summarily resolved. This is how they would carry out abolition. The notion that slavery had to be undone stands in contrast to prevailing scholarship that emphasizes the acquisition and exercise of rights as demonstrative of consummate freedom. Instead, this article shows that even when positive law and judicial rulings were used to deconstruct the peculiar institution, slavery, as a legal construct, could not be fully demolished. Judges and freedpeople alike were left to face troubling legacies for which there was no remedy. No performance of legal acrobatics could alter, undo, or fully resolve the myriad ways slavery continued to affect many former slaves and influence the direction of their free lives. Abolition would remain incomplete.

This article argues that the juror franchise became more restrictive in the years immediately after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 had broadened the jury franchise so as to include some women. It argues that the subsequent restrictions on the jury franchise have not standardly been discussed in the literature on the twentieth century jury because of the lengths taken at the time to present these reforms as merely technical in nature. Only six months after the 1919 Act was passed, a dispute broke out at the Western assize circuit regarding the practice–apparently sanctioned in the Juries Act 1825–of towns which “possessed” their own assizes summoning jurors according to custom, rather than statute. In practice, this meant that the ten “assize boroughs” had not always observed the property qualifications when summoning their jurors. The judiciary eventually prevailed over the Home Office and a series of local officials, ending the assize boroughs' ability to ignore the property qualifications (which kept a disproportionate number of women off the jury). This reform brought its own problems, however, and brought into focus the expense involved in following the burdensome rules for identifying jurors as set out in the 1825 Act. The solution–basing juror qualification on electoral registration–excluded from jury service conscientious objectors, foreigners, and women who satisfied the property qualification rules but lived elsewhere with a male relative.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 are often seen as the product of Western European design and liberal humanitarianism. Based on a collection of Western and Soviet archival materials, this article reveals the Soviet delegation's mixed but critical legacy in developing the Conventions. The Soviets, acting in surprisingly close cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), were essential for supporting a range of groundbreaking plans to end ‘inhumane’ measures in war, from unrestrained colonial warfare to inhumane treatment. They made however some of these protections vulnerable due to their opposition to accepting stronger enforcement mechanisms, such as allowing the ICRC and Protecting Powers to visit their Gulag archipelago. By doing so, the Soviets helped to create the foundations for both the successes and failures of the Geneva Conventions.

This article explores the legal and judicial vulnerability of male youth in Buenos Aires, Argentina between 1853 and 1912, years that correspond to the codification of criminal law and the passage of the first age of consent laws. Using 65 sodomy and rape cases, it traces the courts' changing treatment of males who suffered sexual assault. It argues that a traditional revulsion of sodomy, a cultural preoccupation with female sexuality, official concern with the social order, and the preoccupations of classical and positivist criminologists ensured the liminality of male youth in both the law and the courts. Judicial authorities only started to regard prepubescent boys as innocent in the first decade of the twentieth century. By highlighting how age, innocence and gender were only mutually constituted in the twentieth century, this article makes a significant contribution to literature on the emergence of modern notions of childhood and innocence. Historians have shown how categories such as class, ethnicity, filiation and natal status worked to include or exclude certain groups from this classification in modern Latin America, this work reveals how central both age and gender norms and expectations were to the belated integration of boys.

The first part of the article presents a six-tiered typology of conventional approaches to historical periodization in international law. The “hegemonic” approach, the “Eurocentric universalist” approach, the “state-centric” approach, the “intellectual doctrinal” approach, the “institutional” approach, and the “normative” approach to the question of periodization of the history of international law are surveyed in turn in the light of contemporary literature. The second part examines how in the wake of the recent “historical turn” in international law a new critical historiographical wave has problematized the question of periodization because of the homogenizing effects and the “teleology of progress” to which periodization is interpreted to contribute in international legal history. The third part tackles the notion of “alternative periodization” illustrating, with examples from contemporary literature in the history of international law, its value as a launching pad for the “formation of new, formerly unknown periods,” a task that is considered “an essential part of historiographical innovation.” The conclusion elaborates on the heuristic potential of a multiperspectival approach to the study of periodization in the history of international law.