Our final issue of 2020 begins with Bain Attwood's history of the practices of claiming indigenous land in the British colony of South Australia. While scholars have emphasized the importance of colonizers claiming possession, Attwood focuses on the precise roles that law played in the claiming of land in South Australia in the broader power dynamics between competing forces. Following Attwood's article, we feature two pioneering articles on sexual regulation in the British colonial world: J. Y. Chua's history of Section 37A of the 1938 Straits Settlements Penal Code, which criminalized same-sex acts in Singapore; and Luke Taylor's study of buggery charges against men in New South Wales between 1788 and 1838.
We then move to the United States in the early nineteenth-century, and to Craig Hollander's history of compensation claims after the War of 1812. According to Hollander, slavery complicated the adjudication of claims for lost property and required the United States Congress to enlargen payouts to claimants. Mark Coen's fascinating history of jury intimidation by women Republicans in the Irish Free States between 1926 and 1934 follows. Coen finds that a small group of women disrupted the proceedings of the justice system and caused a political uproar in Ireland and beyond.
Our final three articles focus on the intersection of race, law, and power in the modern world. Katherine Unterman's study of the aftermath of the United States Supreme Court's 1901 “Insular Cases” on Guam, where Guamanians used petitions, court challenges and other forms of activism to gain the right to jury trials. Joanna Grisinger's article about antiapartheid activism against South African Airways in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s seeks to explain legal mobilization and institutional behavior in an increasingly globalizing world of sovereignty and jurisdiction. Finally, Alexa Neale and Lizzie Seale study capital punishment in twentieth-century England and Wales. They find that race was a crucial factor in ‘mercy narratives’ that sought to save prisoners from the gallows.
The Docket, our digital imprint, continues to publish features, book reviews and other content, including coverage of the American Society for Legal History's 2020 annual meeting, at lawandhistoryreview.org. Readers interested in contributing to The Docket will find contact information on the website.
Readers can keep track of the latest goings on at Law and History Review through our Twitter account @history_law. The American Society for Legal History's redesigned website can be accessed at https://aslh.net, for all the Society's latest announcements and news. The Society's Twitter account is @ASLHtweets.
