This article situates the ‘personal law’ in late colonial India in the nineteenth-century genealogy of the idea of ‘family law.’ In doing so, it also looks at a case between Indian Muslim spouses before the judge and Islamic modernist Syed Mahmood. Involving the doctrine of the restitution of conjugal rights, the case was conducted in the shadow of a question about whether marriage was a status or contract that had a much wider resonance in the late nineteenth-century Anglo-common law world. The overall goal of the article is to critically reconsider a common view about legal modernization in the long nineteenth-century Islamicate world as a process of domesticating the Islamic sharīʿa tradition to the sphere of family affairs and personal status. Working along a distinct path from other new scholarship that is moving past this thesis, I suggest that domestication should be seen as part of what some have called the globalization of classical legal thought after 1850. Because the era of domestication continued to be an important point of reference for later exponents of political Islam the article also argues that seeing the categories of personal law and family law genealogically has implications for the problem of translation that has often made scholars reticent about striking an equivalence between ‘Islamic law’ and sharīʿa (or beyond the Islamicate world, between ‘modern law’ and Afro-Asian juridical tradition).

In the aftermath of the Civil War, state judges lost their long-held right to inquire into the legality of federal detentions, and habeas corpus—once almost solely the business of state courts—was largely transformed into a federal remedy. We argue that the wartime furor surrounding underage enlistees was a key factor in driving this legal change. Scholarship on the use of habeas corpus during the war generally concentrates on cases involving freedom of speech or political association, but thousands of parents and guardians also petitioned Union authorities and state courts to retrieve minor children who had enlisted without their consent. Angrily demanding that the military discharge such youths, they portrayed control over the personhood and labor of minor children as fundamental to American liberty. At the same time, state court judges fought to retrain jurisdiction over such cases as a critical check on federal and military power. We illuminate these conflicts by drawing on a rich array of sources that capture the competing perspectives of federal and state court judges, Lincoln Administration officials, elected representatives, military officers, parents and guardians, and minors themselves. In the process, we show the halting and contested transformation of habeas corpus, the outcome of which ultimately redefined the relationship between American citizens and their government, preventing aggrieved parents from using state courts to safeguard their rights against federal and military authorities, and blocking state courts from querying the legality of federal detentions of any kind.

From the 1830s to the 1930s, elites across the United States increasingly privatized executions and standardized execution protocols. These changes reflected and reinforced a more bureaucratic image of the state as an abstract entity run by professionals operating in rule-bound roles rather than particular actors governing in an unsystematic way. After this period of change, the aesthetics of the execution ceremony had so thoroughly changed that the death penalty had the potential to inspire critiques of the modern state as cold, detached, and callous. It rarely did, however. Changes to state killing threatened to diminish the recognition of human dignity in the nation's execution chambers were countered by melodramatic popular renderings of executions that preserved their sacred, traditional character. Toward the end of this period of change, from 1915 to 1940, playwrights, screenwriters, and journalists maintained executions as events in which the humanity of the state that killed and the condemned who died was constantly foregrounded, even as execution modes and protocols became rationalized and machine-like. Reflecting this ethos, images of condemned men in the nation's collective imagination became disproportionately white.

Assessment and awarding of compensation to victims of injury and loss are among the main duties performed by courts in many different legal systems. In Western law, it constitutes a central purpose of tort law, which in itself is one of the fundamental branches of law. Did Chinese law have a specific approach to the question of compensation, which singularizes it from other legal systems? From the points of view both of statute law and judicial practice, my primary concern is to investigate whether compensation was granted to victims of injury or death under the Ming and Qing laws.

In 1794, the Russian Empire convened the first high admiralty court for appeals to review petitions of merchants and privateers embroiled in the second Russian–Ottoman war of Catherine II's reign (1787–91). The Commission for Archipelago Affairs, as this admiralty court was called, decided more than 170 cases on the basis of Russian maritime law and its interpretation of the law of nations concerning commercial navigation and privateers. A year into its work, the commission determined that one case sat at the center of most disputes that pitted merchants against Russian-flagged privateers: the affair of Lambros Katsonis. The commission's decisions for most of the cases on its docket rested on its determination of Katsonis's standing in the Russian Empire. Once decided, the outcome of the matter went on to define the distinction between Russian privateers and naval officers in Russian law: precedents that shaped Russian naval practices for the next 50 years.