ANZLS Program Now Available

Courtoom Scene, Sydney, 1817 (wiki)

The program for the 39th Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society, “an intensive 1 day world-wide gathering devoted to law in history” on December 9, is now available here.  The keynote plenary sessions are Joshua Getzler, Oxford University, on “Six Nations of the Grand River, military feudalism, and the roots of ‘honour of the Crown’”; Miranda Johnson, Otago University, on “Reckoning with a Pacific empire state: Race, nation, citizenship and the idea of New Zealand”; and a closing address by Dame Sian Elias, former Chief Justice of New Zealand.

--Dan Ernst

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De and Evans in Legal Histories of Empire

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Legal Histories of Empire Symposium: Rohit De and Catherine Evans

Please join us for the first of several planned symposia in 2020 and 2021 for Legal Histories of Empire and for the celebration of a special birthday of the founder of the Legal Histories of Empire Conferences.

Our speakers:

Rohit De: "Brown Lawyers, Black Robes: Decolonization, Diasporic Lawyers and Minority Rights"

Rohit De is Associate Professor of History at Yale University and is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018). As a Carnegie Fellow, he is currently working on a book on a history of rebellious lawyering and decolonization

Catherine Evans: “Civilization as Sanity in the Victorian Empire”

Catherine L. Evans is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. Her first book, Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law, comes out next fall (Yale University Press, 2021).

Timezones:
New Haven/Toronto @ 4 pm on 30 October
Vancouver @ 1pm on 30 October
Sydney @ 7 am on 31 October
Auckland @ 9 am on 31October
London/Dublin @ 8 pm on 30 October
Singapore @ 4 am on 31 October

Registration: Free via Eventbrite [here].  Registration is required.  You will be emailed a Zoom link 36 hours before the event.

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Owensby and Ross Interviewed on "Justice in a New World"

Every month or so the Toynbee Prize Foundation posts interviews with the authors of books on comparative and global history.  Just up is its interview of Brian Owensby and Richard Ross about their edited volume, Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (2018).  Writes the moderator, Nicholas Sy, University of the Philippines Diliman:

How intelligible were colonial legal norms to indigenous Americans and how intelligible were indigenous legal norms to settlers? Responding to a historiography that describes either a dynamic of gradual understanding or a dynamic of continuing incomprehension, legal historians Professors Brian Owensby and Richard Ross have crafted the prodigious edited volume Justice in a New World. Resting on nuanced comparison, the volume argues for a less homogenizing view, and highlights instead the degree to which various indigenous communities were integrated into different early modern empires.

In our conversation, we discuss the genesis of their work and its key concepts. We also explore the different comparative axes along which we may examine both indigenous and settler notions of intelligibility.

--Dan Ernst

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