During the first half of the nineteenth century, Mid-Atlantic States expanded guardianship to include habitual drunkards. Legislators in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey empowered courts to put habitual drunkards under guardianship, a legal status that stripped them of their rights to own property, enter into contracts, make wills, and, in some states, even vote. Amid the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of male suffrage, the habitual drunkard signified a masculine failure of self-government that disqualified propertied men from the privileges of full citizenship. The struggle to define habitual drunkenness, detect the habitual drunkard, and put him under guardianship transformed the courtroom into an arena for contesting the thresholds of compulsion, policing respectable manhood, and drawing the borders of full citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States.

This article documents the legal and social history of “distress for rent” (also known as rent distraint) in early Republic New York, a legal tool that allowed landlords whose tenants were in arrears to seize tenants’ belongings and sell them to offset the cost of the unpaid rent. Rent distraint was a practice and topic around which New Yorkers contested ideological and practical conceptions of class, the rights of property, the role of law, and welfare. In 1811, New York City officials began tracking tenants in arrears of rent, creating a deep archive of documents that reveal the nuances of landlord-tenant relations and subsistence in this period. This article follows that paper trail, exploring distraint in this context as a legal remedy, as an experience with major impacts on individuals’ lives, and of efforts to reform the law and the lived experience of law. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, poor, middling, and wealthy New Yorkers were engaged in knowledge exchange around distraint and the social categories and experiences associated with it. Their stories document a materialist sensibility that crossed class lines and was attuned to the practical dimensions of working people’s living conditions.

This article examines cross-border inheritance transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia between the 1840s and the late 1980s. These transfers were not only characterized by private considerations and kinship networks but were also strongly intertwined with national and international political developments. This article argues that the history of transnational inheritance transfers since the 19th century can be subdivided into three distinct periods. The first period, from the mid-19th century to 1914, witnessed the gradual development and expansion of professional networks and legal agreements designed to facilitate cross-border estate transfers. By contrast, the second period, from World War I and the October Revolution of 1917 through the late 1960s, was a time of unprecedented global disruption. Unlike the half-century before World War I, governments and probate courts complicated, delayed, and prevented inheritance transfers across state borders due to military and ideological conflicts. During the third period, beginning in the 1960s, governments, international organizations, lawyers, and families resumed efforts to create structures that would legally protect and enable cross-border estate transfers in an increasingly globalized world.

The history of the laws of war is an increasingly popular research field of international law. Claire Vergerio’s book War, States, and International Order: Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War is a good-read in this regard. It provides a critical analysis of how 19th-century international lawyers misread and reinterpreted the writings of the 16th-century Italian jurist Alberico Gentili to establish the modern sovereign state as the sole legitimate subject of the laws of war. In this review essay, I offer a critical reading of War, States and International Order, positioning its intervention in the context of broader scholarly debates.

This article reappraises the early intellectual formation of the medieval “lex mercatoria” thesis: the idea that the international merchants of medieval Europe (or perhaps beyond) enjoyed a universal, autonomous, and customary body of commercial law created and administered by themselves. The debate over its existence, raging for at least 120 years, shows no signs of slowing, in part because the idea is of undoubted usefulness to both proponents (so-called “mercatorists”) and critics. The article offers a new account of the origins of this idea and looks to disaggregate different mercatorist conceptions. Revising the conventional genealogy that traces the theory through the work of Berthold Goldman to the nineteenth-century German scholar Levin Goldschmidt, who is much misunderstood in Anglophone scholarship, it argues that the idea’s powerful re-emergence in the second half of the twentieth century was mediated through two distinct channels, one centred around the British-German jurist Clive Schmitthoff and the other around the British historian William Mitchell. The latter yoked Goldschmidt’s emphasis on the medieval merchant class as a source of legal innovation to a thoroughly Anglophone concept: the “law merchant”. Critics, however, have engaged primarily with Schmitthoff’s conception, whose “strong” mercatorist argument was not only unusually forthright but reoriented the debate to focus on commercial law’s supposed autonomy from the law of territorial states, an even less plausible proposition in historical terms.

In this article, the author examines the influence of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical ideas on Hans Kelsen’s early theory of international law. He situates Kelsen’s work within the post-World War I context, where Kant’s vision of perpetual peace significantly impacted the creation of international organizations. The article delves into Kelsen’s seminal work “Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts,” exploring how Kelsen’s pure theory of law parallels and diverges from Kant’s concepts. While Kelsen’s ideas were shaped by Kantian philosophy, particularly in promoting a lawful international order, Kelsen transcended Kant by developing a more rigorous, epistemologically grounded legal theory. The author argues that Kelsen’s adaptation of Kantian principles reflects both a continuation and transformation of Kant’s vision, tailored to the political and cultural challenges of early 20th-century Europe.

This article examines the 1964 interim constitutions of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria as markers of a two-decade-long shift in Arab constitutional design—moving from individual liberal rights toward a new regional social contract centered on social rights. The vision of a progressive society rested on two principles of collective welfare: solidarity—expressed through constitutional commitments to collective well-being—and social justice, which aimed to ensure equality and better living standards for all. Contrary to common interpretations, these documents were not simply authoritarian bargains or tools for consolidating power. Rather, the interim constitutions were social bargains that reflected legislative social engineering during decolonization and guided both citizens and the state in building a new society. Despite the intense regional rivalries, these constitutions reflected a shared commitment to socioeconomic transformation that transcended political divides. The analysis of these constitutions shows that the difficulties in their execution extended beyond future limitations of political will or economic resources. Rather, they contained inherent legal and ideological tensions about the structure and direction of the progressive society—particularly in their approach to fundamental questions of social organization. These tensions emerged in the complex relationship between family and individual rights, the delicate balance between private and collective ownership, and the role of state patriarchy in providing social welfare.

France ceded territorial claims to Newfoundland to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, but French fishermen retained rights to operate seasonal cod fisheries along a stretch of coastline known as the French Shore. The treaty was one of several laws formalizing the property regime based on the commons that emerged among European fishermen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Several demographic and geopolitical changes converged after the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) to raise the question of whether French fishing rights on the French Shore were exclusive or concurrent with British fishing rights on that coast. Treaty and customary law seemed at odds on this question, forcing fishermen, merchants, naval officers, and ministers to articulate what constituted property and how property should be conceived if an interimperial commons were to work. The conflicts that transpired highlighted how they answered these questions differently. Agents of the state tended to promote the commons while some British subjects tried to create a real property regime from below. Disputes over real property formation on the French Shore show another dimension of the early modern enclosure process, demonstrating both the role of the commons in empire and the challenges of resource management in an interimperial space.

This article examines the role of British imperial constitutional law in the Zionist campaign against establishing a Legislative Council in Palestine during the early 1930s. At the time, the British government sought to introduce limited self-government in Palestine through a parliamentary institution that would include both locals and British officials. However, the Zionist leadership opposed this initiative, fearing that a representative institution reflecting the country’s demographics would threaten the development of the Jewish National Home. This article explores the Zionist engagement with the British imperial constitutional experience within its campaign against the Legislative Council, emphasizing the strategic application of British constitutional law by two Zionist officials, Leo Kohn and Chaim Arlosoroff. Through this case, the article highlights the influence of British constitutional law on interactions between national movements and the British Empire. It argues that the British imperial system offered an adaptable and flexible political framework. The Zionists’ attentiveness to this flexibility not only sheds light on the interplay between Zionism and the British Empire during the mandatory period but also underscores the place of constitutional flexibility in political debates within the British Empire.

The article concentrates on the massive project of popularizing the court system and penal practice in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1960s. From then on, the GDR transferred a considerable amount of jurisdiction to collectives, which were further assigned the task of adjudicating “close to the people” within and alongside the existing legal system. We will analyze how the government, with this project, managed to translate the ideological task of sanctioning the inner-state enemy into existing legal concepts and how it used law as a means to advance its political aims. By focusing on the judicialization of politics in the GDR, the article examines the legal history of the GDR as an important example in the broader and pressing phenomenon of the relationship between law and authoritarian politics.

Close reading of documents produced by the early courts in New South Wales show two young men, formerly barristers at the Northern Assizes, innovating in their court rooms. Such innovation derived from their merchant background rather than the traditions of mercy or paternalism of the Assizes. In such innovations colonial agents were empowered and could shape the workings of the courts themselves. Minutes of the court show the impact of new kinds of elites generated by wealth built on slavery on the courts in the colonies and the subsequent flowering of subcultures.

When the British East India Company (EIC) conquered the West Himalaya region in the 1810s, it faced a critical challenge commonly encountered by colonial empires: determining the extent of intervention in intracommunity criminal matters among colonized subjects. This article examines the archived correspondence of colonial officials regarding this challenge and scrutinizes the various arguments made for and against intervention. It shows that the alterity of the subject population was strategically employed by both sides of the debate, who simultaneously promoted contradictory agendas: for those advocating intervention, alterity rendered involvement in criminal matters necessary and just, whereas those averse to intervention employed the very same notion to justify the opposite stance. This dual usage is explained by exposing the contemporary ideas about criminal justice that underlay each of these positions: that criminal law should represent the general will of society, and that it must be executed by a centralized power so as to maintain public order. While these two tenets are commonly perceived as supporting one another, the analysis reveals their decoupling in colonial settings. The debates of EIC officials thus demonstrate how the colonial setting distorts ideas foundational to modern criminal law systems, casting doubt over whether they were ever truly in harmony to begin with.

This article makes the case for recognizing the connection between the Poor Law and the Adoption of Children Act 1926. A child who received welfare under the Poor Law could be de facto adopted by the guardians as early as the late-nineteenth century. Very little is known about this type of de facto adoption which is a significant gap because over 10,000 children were adopted in this way, and it provided the basis for latter de jure adoption. This article initiates the process of filling this gap by exploring archival resources to determine why children were de facto adopted under the Poor Law before the introduction of de jure adoption in 1926. Understanding this form of de facto adoption is important because it was justified as a mechanism of child protection, but this article contends it was another form of punishment designed for families experiencing material deprivation which directly influenced the law on de jure adoption in England. By establishing the connection between the 1926 Act and its Poor Law predecessor, the de jure adoption framework can be contextualized within its wider social history which is embedded in class conflict and distrust toward impoverished families.

From a comparative perspective, this paper argues that early Chinese empires lacked the concept of talion or tort law when malicious violence or intent became factors. Instead, wrongdoers were required to pay fines to the government or received punishment as hard labor for the state. Victims not only could not receive compensation but were sometimes punished along with the offender if their loss was perceived as a loss to the empire. I argue that the absence of corrective justice in criminal cases can be traced back to the philosophical underpinnings of the body politic, a prominent discourse in early China that viewed the emperor and the people as a single, organic entity. When people were conceived of as constituting a unified, singular entity, criminal actions against an individual were interpreted as damage to the empire. Therefore, punishments for offenders were designed to compensate the empire, not the individual. Furthermore, in the context of the body politic, the suffering of both victims and offenders was regarded as metaphysically equal, which justified frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale to secure harmony within the empire. Originally, the body politic was employed to admonish and criticize the throne, urging the emperor to align his interests with the well-being of his people, but in practice, it compromised the practice of justice.

A long tradition of comparative scholarship has succeeded to establish the impact of Roman legal environment on rabbinic law making during the first two centuries CE, particularly in the field of family and status. Yet, the specific channels for acquiring this knowledge have hitherto remained a matter of conjecture. This paper argues that the rabbis were exposed to the contents of the current legal handbooks. Tractate Qiddushin (on betrothal) of the Mishnah includes two peculiar units: the first (1.1–5) regarding forms of acquisition and the second (3.12) on the status of newborns. Both units appear in key points in the tractate and exhibit striking structural and conceptual similarities to extended portions of the Roman school tradition regarding the laws of status, as handed down in Gaius’ Institutes and Pseudo-Ulpian's liber singularis regularum. It is therefore suggested that these units provide the earliest literary attestation already around the turn of the third century CE for the dissemination of Roman legal education among non-Roman provincials in the East, who sought to adjust their local practices into Roman-like legal structures.