Author: Lauren BentonPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521009263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
Argues that institutions and culture serve as important elements of international legal order.
Law and Colonial Cultures
Author: Lauren BentonPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521009263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
Argues that institutions and culture serve as important elements of international legal order.
Law and Colonial Cultures
Author: Lauren A. BentonLaw and Colonial Cultures
Author: Lauren A. BentonPublisher:
ISBN: 9780511328886
Category : International law
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Book Description
Advances a new perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics, it uses case studies to trace a shift from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial world.
The Transatlantic Constitution
Author: Mary Sarah BilderPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution—that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances—shaped the legal development of the colonial world. Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder describes how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the place of English law in the colonies; the existence of equity courts and legislative equitable relief; property rights for women and inheritance laws; commercial law and currency reform; and laws governing religious establishment. Using as a case study the corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number of appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal culture.
Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850
Author: Richard J. RossPublisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814771165
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
Historians used to imagine empire as an imperial power extending total domination over its colonies. Now, however, they understand empire as a site in which colonies and their constitutions were regulated by legal pluralism: layered and multicentric systems of law, which incorporated or preserved the law of conquered subjects. By placing the study of law in diverse early modern empires under the rubric of legal pluralism, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 offers both legal scholars and historians a much-needed framework for analyzing the complex and fluid legal politics of empires. Contributors analyze how ideas about law moved across vast empires, how imperial agents and imperial subjects used law, and how relationships between local legal practices and global ones played themselves out in the early modern world. The book’s tremendous geographical breadth, including the British, French, Spanish, Ottoman, and Russian empires, gives readers the most comparative examination of legal pluralism to date. Lauren Benton is Professor of History, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. Her books include A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 and Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900. Richard J. Ross is Professor of Law and History at the University of Illinois (Urbana/Champaign) and Director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History. With Steven Wilf, he is currently working on a book, entitled: The Beginnings of American Law: A Comparative Study.
"Esteemed Bookes of Lawe" and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia
Author: Warren M. BillingsPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813939402
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Virginia men of law constituted one of the first learned professions in colonial America, and Virginia legal culture had an important and lasting impact on American political institutions and jurisprudence. Exploring the book collections of these Virginians therefore offers insight into the history of the book and the intellectual history of early America. It also addresses essential questions of how English culture migrated to the American colonies and was transformed into a distinctive American culture. Focusing on the law books that colonial Virginians acquired, how they used them, and how they eventually produced a native-grown legal literature, this collection explores the law and intellectual culture of the Commonwealth and reveals the origins of a distinctively Virginian legal literature. The contributors argue that understanding the development of early Virginia legal history—as shown through these book collections—not only illuminates important aspects of Virginia’s history and culture; it also underlies a thorough understanding of colonial and revolutionary American history and culture.
A Search for Sovereignty
Author: Lauren BentonPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107782716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.
Exploring Law and Culture
Author: Dorothy H. BraceyPublisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478636475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121
Book Description
Evocative and stimulating, engaging and timely, this small volume makes sense of the complicated and reciprocal relationship between law and culture. It starts with various definitions of law and the factors that anthropologists consider when they compare legal systems. Next, the experiences of exemplary researchers throughout history and some of the methods they used in their discoveries are discussed. Readers learn how to employ the comparative method and build a typology based on the source of a particular law by putting the world’s legal system into one of three categories: Western law, religious law, and traditional law. The book also tackles important issues such as formal law versus informal law, using law to legitimize power, and clashing values within a single legal system. Examples from fieldwork experiences and historical events offer readers a chance to see how a method has been applied or a concept developed—as well as how law and culture are intertwined in the real world.
Between Law and Culture
Author: Lisa C. BowerPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816633814
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
What happens to legal thought when key terms-society, culture, power, justice, identity-become unsettled? With the boundaries defining sociolegal scholarship undergoing a profound shift, this book explores the intersections of law, culture, and identity. Sexuality, race, sports, and the politics of policing are among the topics the authors take up as they examine how law both reproduces and challenges fundamental notions of order, discipline, and identity. Contributors: Rosemary J. Coombe, U of Toronto; David M. Engel, SUNY, Buffalo; Marjorie Garber, Harvard U; Herman Gray, UC, Santa Cruz; Rona Tamiko Halualani, San Jos State U; David Harvey, CUNY; Deb Henderson; Yuen J. Huo, UCLA; S. Lily Mendoza, U of Denver; Trish Oberweis, American Justice Institute; Paul A. Passavant, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Lisa E. Sanchez, U of Illinois; Carl F. Stychin, U of Reading; Tom R. Tyler, New York U; Christine A. Yalda.
Colonizing Hawai'i
Author: Sally Engle MerryPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691009325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
How does law transform family, sexuality, and community in the fractured social world characteristic of the colonizing process? The law was a cornerstone of the so-called civilizing process of nineteenth-century colonialism. It was simultaneously a means of transformation and a marker of the seductive idea of civilization. Sally Engle Merry reveals how, in Hawai'i, indigenous Hawaiian law was displaced by a transplanted Anglo-American law as global movements of capitalism, Christianity, and imperialism swept across the islands. The new law brought novel systems of courts, prisons, and conceptions of discipline and dramatically changed the marriage patterns, work lives, and sexual conduct of the indigenous people of Hawai'i.