Cromwell Book Prize to Erman

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, acting on a recommendation of a committee of the American Society for Legal History, has voted to award its Book Prize to Sam Erman, University of Southern California, for Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire.  The ASLH Committee’s recommendation stated in part:

For subtlety, nuance, and complexity of analysis by a junior scholar, this is the best book in a year in which many superb books were nominated. Erman makes important and ambitious claims about the evolving constitutional meaning of citizenship in the U.S. empire after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. The book vividly recounts and perceptively analyzes the debates between and among Puerto Rican and U.S. judges, lawyers, administration officials, and legislators over the denial of full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. Erman shows how post-Civil War conceptions of full citizenship, rights, and statehood gave way to a regime of constitutionally permissible racist imperial governance.

Professor Erman’s book appeared in the Studies in Legal History, the ASLH-sponsored book series published by the Cambridge University Press.  Karen collects his posts on the book as an LHB Guest blogger here.

–Dan Ernst.  H/t: JDG3

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Julio Capó Jr. (Florida International University) and Melba Pearson (Florida International University’s Center for the Administration of Justice ) on Florida voter suppression as "Jim Crow Esq."; Ashley Farmer (University of Texas, Austin) on Black women running for Congress;
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has just launched The Supreme Court & the Presidential Election of 1876, "a documentary on the 15-member Electoral Commission (including 5 Supreme Court Justices) appointed to resolve the disputed election."
  

• New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Counterterrorism in American Civil Courts: The Role of Letelier v. Republic of Chile, by Alan McPherson.
  

• "Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and Social Justice," a discussion featuring Georgetown Law’s Brad Snyder, who is the author of House of Truth, and Jennifer Lowe, the Director of Programs and Strategic Planning of the Supreme Court Historical Society, will be conducted online on November 18, 2020 at 3 pm.  It is sponsored by the National Archives, the Supreme Court Historical Society, and the Capital Jewish Museum.  Register here.
  

• Street Law, with the help of the Supreme Court Historical Society, has revamped its site, Landmark Cases of the US Supreme Court. 

• A Call for an upcoming event at the Université de Neuchâtel on historical sources of Swiss law here (9-10 Sept. 2021).

• Update: a profile of Buffalo Law's Michael Boucai and his article "Before Loving" (UB Now).
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.  

INHIDE: Legal History in Argentina

We have news of the Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Founded in 1973, the Instituto is, deputy director Viviana Kluger tells us, “is the most important institution regarding legal history research in Argentina.”  It publishes Revista de Historia del Derecho, “a bi-annual journal indexed in international platforms,” and has a weekly seminar, conducted over Zoom and open to interested scholars.  It’s first session is tomorrow.  Dra. Ana Brisa Oropeza Chávez, Universidad de Anahuac-México, will present Los programas de Historia del Derecho en la enseñanza universitaria de México.

The complete schedule is here.  Notices of upcoming sessions are as follows: October 13, October 20, October 29, November 3, November 12, November 19,and  November 26.

Update: The Instituto records and posts all sessions of its seminar on YouTube.  You can also find the Instituto on Facebook, Instagram (inhide_oficial) and Twitter (@INHIDE_oficial).

--Dan Ernst

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

Marino on feminism as international human rights movement

 Katherine M. Marino (UCLA) published Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement with the University of North Carolina Press in 2019.

From the publisher: 

This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domíngez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara González; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today’s activists along class, racial, and national lines.

Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.

 Praise for the book:

“In this valuable contribution to the historiography of social movements in the Americas, Marino chronicles the impact of the women’s movement of leaders from six countries--Uruguay, Brazil, Panama, Cuba, the US, and Chile--in the interwar years . . . Marino successfully demonstrates that this was a vital period in Pan-American relations.”--Choice Reviews

“A brilliant and ambitious new account of the origins of global feminism . . . . Feminism for the Americas reconstructs a radical, transnational, and influential movement for women’s equality and social justice.”--International Feminist Journal of Politics

“The best book on Western Hemispheric feminism in at least two decades. . . . A necessary starting point for anyone contemplating research on inter-American feminism. . . . Marino has given us a masterpiece.”--Hispanic American Historical Review

The book has also won several book prizes, including the Ida Blom-Karen Offen Prize (International Federation for Research in Women's History), the 2020 Luciano Tomassini Book Award (Latin American Studies Association), and the 2020 Barbara "Penny" Kanner Award (Western Association of Women Historians).

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Religious Normativity in Early Modern New Granada

[We have the following announcement from our friends at Max Planck.  DRE]

Religious Normativity in Early Modern New Granada

Ecclesiastical institutions and actors played key roles in the formation of normative orders in early modern  Ibero-America. Their legal historical importance is now discussed in case studies focusing on New Granada - a region which included today's Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador - from the 16th to the 19th century. This is the subject matter of the most recent volume of the series Global Perspectives on Legal History (GPLH), edited by Pilar Mejía, Otto Danwerth and Benedetta Albani (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History).

The nine chapters of this Spanish-language volume explore the relationship between different types of religious normativity as well as their local adaptations in the archdiocese of Santafé and peripheral dioceses. With respect to the colonial period, they deal, for example, with language policy and activities of various religious orders (Dominicans and Jesuits), conflicts between regular and secular clergy, the role of educational centres (colegios and conventos) as well as with financial aspects of parish administration. Further contributions are devoted to the 19th century: in addition to the role of oaths in legal proceedings, the state-church relationship during the processes leading to independence and in Republican times both in Colombia and Venezuela is examined afresh.

The present volume is the third in a four-book series exploring the contribution of ecclesiastic institutions to normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. The first two books examined the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, respectively. The final volume (2021) will focus on Portuguese America (Brazil) and thus provide comparative material to the studies of Hispano-America.

More information on the volume [here].