In this article four photographs of mixed law courts (landraad) in nineteenth-century colonial Indonesia are approached as a window to study the materiality and meaning of cloth in courtrooms. The photos grant access to a careful colonial curation as well as complex Javanese hierarchies that were translated onto and through cloth, and its colors and patterns. Batik sarongs, tablecloths, head scarves, robes and gowns, coats and turbans reveal a courtroom of semiotic richness and plurality where different actors were signaling different messages to multiple audiences. This emphasis on cloth contributes to an emergent and rich discussion on the importance of objects in the study of law and empire, that has primarily focused on the materiality of paper and other objects of lawmaking. In the mixed court of the landraad, it was cloth that spoke louder than words and paper. This article emphasizes that in a mixed court the display of a plural world and jurisdictional layering, complicating the binary between direct and indirect colonial rule, was more important than a monolithic reflection of state law. Cloth was crucial to the display of this plural world and used as a way to impose, maintain, alter, insert oneself in or resist colonial rule.

This paper suggests the use of cultural expertise as encompassing concept that can account for the natural cultural competence developed in Iran. In earlier times, Zoroastrian law was first based on religious norms and the primary theological division between sins and offenses. Iranians had to adapt to different legal systems: customary law, religious law and secular law. Priests, jurists, judges, officials and translators were the main cultural “experts” and mediators between the people and the normative institutions. The introduction of imami legal theories and jurisprudence in the 16th century together with the reinforcement of the secular political power engaged Iran in a stabilized judicial context ruled by shiʿi scholars, qāzis and mujtahids. In 1919, as a consequence of the new French inspired Constitution, the Ministry of Justice, in order to train a new generation of judges, magistrates and justice personnel, set up a law school. Professors, who can be considered as cultural experts, contributed to the acculturation process initiated in the judicial system. Examples of his continuous struggle are recounted in Ostad Elahi's (1895-1974) memoirs, relating the difficulty Iranians had to accept the change, both cultural and psychological, initiated by the modernization and westernization program put into operation (1911-1935).

Notebooks written by students at the Litchfield Law School are among the primary sources for understanding the influence of English law in this country. The notebooks provide rich documentation of how the common law and elements of English law were presented, explained, and compared with American law in a formal classroom setting during the Early Republic. The digitization project described here, the first large-scale digitization initiative undertaken at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, with the cooperation of the Litchfield Historical Society, is intended to organize, describe, and analyze those notebooks with a web site containing a database, bibliography, inventory, and links to images. The Litchfield student notebook project was intended not only to create digital surrogates of important historical sources, but also to inform future digital legal history projects at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Researchers of the history of late imperial Russia quite often base their studies on the texts of laws as recorded in the official edition: the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). The laws were published there in chronological order for purposes of conducting inquiries; it was specifically the Complete Collection in which the original text of a decree approved by the emperor could generally be found.

In August 1849, outspoken proslavery Missouri Supreme Court Judge James H. Birch sued Unionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri for slander because he had publicly accused Birch of having kept “his own negro wench” and whipped his wife because she had dared to complain about it. On first impression, the lurid accusation and resulting lawsuit might seem merely colorful window dressing for the virulent sectional politics of the late antebellum period. Benton's objectionable utterances certainly exemplify the verbal pyrotechnics that, after the Mexican War, often accompanied public debate over the question of whether African-American bondage was to extend across the continental United States. But the vituperation that gave rise to Birch v. Benton, in fact, marked the beginning of one of the most widely-publicized episodes in the struggle pitting the champion of Jacksonian democracy in the trans-Mississippi Southwest against a powerful cadre of proslavery leaders who sought to end his thirty-year career in the United States Senate. According to legal historian Gerald T. Dunne, the politicized nature of the case and its contentious appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court provided the critical catalyst for lawmakers in the state to amend its constitution in 1850 to replace lifetime tenure for judges with periodic voter choice. The landmark constitutional revision both instituted popular election of judges and shook up the composition of the proslavery high court, including the removal of Judge Birch.

Most court opinions are like actors: the older they get, the less people pay attention to them. For instance, the case immediately after Pierson v. Post in volume 3 of Caines's Reports is called Hollingsworth v. Napier. It was an important case in its day, much more important than Pierson v. Post, because it involved a recurring question of commercial law: what rights, if any, did a seller retain in goods stored in a public warehouse after he had delivered a bill of sale to the buyer? Hollingsworth went on to be cited in forty court opinions distributed fairly evenly through the 1870s, but then its career was over. It was cited twice in the 1880s, once in 1892, and never again.

Taking mid-nineteenth century Belize as a case study, this article considers the role of migration in forming political, legal, and spatial geographies in a region with weak state institutions and disputed borders. The Caste War—a series of conflicts starting in 1847 in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán— resulted in the movement of thousands of people into the neighboring British settlement of Belize. This population movement reshaped the interface between the metropole and the settlement. This was a colony-defining moment in the development of Belize, leading to an extension of imperial control that eventually culminated in the transition to Crown colony in 1871. The refugee crisis was tied to broader Atlantic questions around asylum, law and empire. The benevolent treatment of refugees became the gauge of a “civilized” colony until the refugee crisis turned into a race crisis. This article examines how local administrators used a humanitarian discourse to enshrine white settler colonialism in a territory suddenly inhabited by a foreign-born multi-ethnic majority. The refugee label became a way to secure British sovereignty over the territory and its inhabitants, including non-British subjects, while extracting resources from the newcomers.

This article studies the registration practices of land and property on palm leaf deeds (olas) in Sri Lanka, in relationship to the advent of paper land grants (giftebrieven) under the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s rule in the long eighteenth century. A database of about 2500 Dutch land grant deeds and translated olas, ranging from 1685 to 1795 are contextualised via judicial records of Dutch civil courts, where (translated) olas were regularly used as evidence. Not only does this allow us to track the geographical encroachment of Dutch power over coastal Sri Lanka as part of a colonial transition, but at the same time shift the perspective to study which individuals and communities on the island engaged with Dutch land bureaucracy. In doing so, we showcase the continued importance of traditional ola deeds and (pre-)colonial registers for both local land owners and the colonial bureaucracy itself, regardless of the Dutch government’s push for paper, attempted to delegitimise the local ola recordings, and acts of symbolic violence to infringe on both the materiality as well as the perceived importance of palm leaf deeds. In the long eighteenth century several paper and palm leaf realities coexisted in Sri Lanka and at times conflicted, entangled, and convoluted within and outside the bureaucratic institutions to form what ‘material pluralism’ within a larger context of legal pluralities.

Legal centralization in British America was characterized by the passing of arbitration from the community level to the colonial courts. As a consequence, when the 1765 Stamp Act raised the cost of court business, colonists were at a loss for alternatives. This paper addresses the question of why, at this point, colonists did not return to earlier, non-state forms of arbitration. It offers an explanation by providing a detailed empirical study of an alternative American legal forum: the Philadelphia Quaker monthly meeting. While busy arbitrating disputes in the early colonial period, it declined from around 1720. Contrary to what might be expected, this decline was not the consequence of state efforts to marginalize competing institutions. Rather, the local Quaker population abandoned their community legal forum in favor of the public courts. This was likely due to the Quaker court's reliance on reputation-based instruments for enforcement. As Philadelphia's population grew, the meeting's practice of pressuring culprits into compliance through public shaming lost its edge. Accordingly, Friends moved their legal business to the public courts. The paper contributes to the debates on the legal pluralism of empires, the history of arbitration, and state formation in the Atlantic.

Over thirty years ago, Leonard Levy, building explicitly on suggestions first offered by Walter Nelles, and implicitly on observations made by Roscoe Pound, commented on the unusual conjunction of two decisions announced within weeks of each other in 1842 by Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The cases, Farwell v. Boston & Worcester Railroad which helped create the fellow servant rule in the United States, and Commonwealth v. Hunt, which involved a prosecution for criminal conspiracy for organizing a labor union as a closed shop, seemed at odds. Hunt appeared to expand worker rights to collective action, while Farwell appeared to restrict worker rights to compensation from workplace injuries. Shaw's apparent protection of a worker's right to organize, “a pro-worker stance,” seemed to conflict with his refusal to recognize a worker's right to recover for an industrial accident in particular circumstances, “an anti-worker stance.” The question is obvious—how can these decisions be made compatible, or does their incompatibility have to be accepted with a shrug of the shoulders and a nod toward the evolutionary progress of the common law?

Almost every state and territory adopted a married women's property act between 1835 and 1850. These acts generally exempted married women's property from attachment by creditors of their husbands, effecting a slight change in the battery of common-law coverture rules that gave husbands management of their wives' real property and ownership of their personal property. Alterations in the roles of women in the family, increases in education of women and growth in the importance of women's public service groups provided an environment sympathetic to initial reforms in married women's property law. In addition, economic panics and depressions affected the family economy, providing an incentive for adoption of rules exempting married women's property from the claims of their husbands' creditors.

The first quality the reader may have noted about these two essays is that they both deal with the question of the legal rights of marriage partners to the economic fruits of one another's labor. But inasmuch as this was only one of several issues addressed by Bruce Kercher, I see it only as an interesting coincidence. Somewhat more noteworthy is the difference between their methodologies: Golder and Kirkby's engagingly crafted socio-legal analysis beautifully illustrates the “thick description” virtues of a case study of litigation, reform agitation and legislation, while Kercher gets us well beyond Alan Atkinson's pioneering study of his subject by carefully drawing evidence unavailable to Atkinson from some of the many cases that he and his research assistants have uncovered from manuscript and newspaper records over the past several years (decisions of the Supreme Courts of New South Wales and VanDieman's Land that are steadily becoming available to us all on two websites). Needless to say, both methodologies “work.”