Leeming on Lawyers' History and Entick v Carrington

Mark Leeming, Justice of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and Challis Lecturer in Equity at the University of Sydney Law School, has posted Lawyers' Uses of History, from Entick v Carrington to Smethurst v Commissioner of Police, published as (2020) 49 Australian Bar Review 199:

John Entick (wiki)

Lawyers use history in different ways. This is partly because judges are directed to decide consistently with what has been decided before, such that continuity with the past is a matter of legal duty. But, as Maitland said, historical research serves the purpose of explaining and therefore lightening the pressure that the past exercises on the present, and the present upon the future. This article considers – including by reference to images of original documents – the multiplicity of ways in which lawyers use history, including the need for a contextual understanding of judgments, the deployment of expert evidence by legal historians, and the haphazard and imperfect reporting of judgments. It considers three quite different sources of Entick v Carrington, including one manuscript only recently published, and how that decision has been used to address modern disputes.

--Dan Ernst

Richman and Seo on Federalism and the FBI

Daniel C. Richman and Sarah Seo, Columbia Law School, have posted How Federalism Built the FBI, Sustained Local Police, and Left Out the States, which is forthcoming in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 17 (2021):

Diplomacy Ceremony, National Police Academy (LC)

This Article examines the endurance of police localism amid the improbable growth of the FBI in the early twentieth century when the prospect of a centralized law enforcement agency was anathema to the ideals of American democracy. It argues that doctrinal accounts of federalism do not explain these paradoxical developments. By analyzing how the Bureau made itself indispensable to local police departments rather than encroaching on their turf, the Article elucidates an operational, or collaborative, federalism that not only enlarged the Bureau’s capacity and authority but also strengthened local autonomy at the expense of the states. Collaborative federalism is crucial for understanding why the police have gone for so long without meaningful state or federal oversight, with consequences still confronting the country today. This history highlights how structural impediments to institutional accountability have been set over time and also identifies a path not taken, but one that can still be pursued, to expand the states’ supervisory role over local police.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Call for Papers - Special Issue of Punishment & Society: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective

In the twenty years since the publication of Florence Bernault’s edited volume A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, the study of Africa’s penal systems has expanded tremendously. This scholarship has not only provided a clearer picture of penal ideas and institutions on the African continent across multiple time periods and locations, it has also offered insights into wider questions about the relationship between punishment, colonialism, and decolonization as well as the global circulation of penal techniques. This special issue aims to analyze African developments on their own terms and in relation to imperial and global narratives of punishment and penological networks as well as to integrate the fields of history, sociology, and criminology more closely, highlighting how theoretical insights of sociology and criminology can inform historical research.  By presenting multiple works together in a special issue, we seek to emphasize the value of Africanist historical approaches and methods for interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary research, and to highlight the contribution that studies of African penal systems can make to advancing understanding of global trends in punishment, showing how research on punishment in Africa not only engages with theories from the Global North, but also generates theories that reshape wider approaches to the study of punishment.

Topics for consideration could include (but are not restricted to): indigenous forms of punishment; colonial and postcolonial prisons; capital and corporal punishment; political imprisonment; forced labour; and detention camps.

We are interested in articles undertaking detailed case-study analysis of key historical trends, showcasing different methodological and disciplinary approaches. We invite submissions on all regions of Africa, and its relations with broader global or international developments in punishment and penology.

We particularly welcome submissions from scholars based in Africa and early career scholars.



Author Information:

Interested applicants should send a 1 page, single-spaced outline of the proposed article to s.hynd@exeter.ac.uk. The outline should include: title; argument; temporal and geographical focus; contribution to the literature; research methodology and evidence base. The deadline for abstract submissions is September 30th, 2020. 

Submissions are received on a competitive basis and will be reviewed by the guest editors. 4-5 articles will be accepted. Accepted papers will be subject to editorial and peer review, and prior to submission authors will be invited to participate in an online writing workshop to develop their papers with peer feedback. The anticipate deadline for submission of final articles to Punishment & Society is August 2021.

Guest Editors: For more details, please contact the guest editors - Erin Braatz (Suffolk University Law School), Katherine Bruce-Lockhart (University of Waterloo), Stacey Hynd (University of Exeter).