This issue of Law and History Review begins with three articles that might be best described as histories of the present. Ciara Molloy seeks to understand why late twentieth-century reformers failed to achieve significant changes to rape law in the Republic of Ireland. She challenges the widely accepted view that feminism failed to enact meaningful change. Rather, she argues, activists succeeded in shifting cultural sensitivity toward acquaintance and marital rape, while structural and institutional biases against female rape complainants were to blame for dwindling convictions. Past Associate Editor of Law and History Review Felice Batlan writes the history of Chicago's Immigrants’ Protective League, which was an association of grassroots activists who created a powerful model of immigration advocacy. Women powered this movement and helped tens of thousands of immigrants to contest draconian immigration laws between 1910 and 1940. For Batlan, this story explains both the long history of President Donald J. Trump's immigration measures as well as the equally long history of ordinary Americans seeking to protect immigrants. Lauren MacIvor Thompson then examines how ideals of contract freedom in late nineteenth-century America problematized medical jurisprudence that routinely posited women's intellectual incapacity because of medical conditions. She finds that reformers drew on the idea of freedom of contract to argue for women's right to bodily freedom, an argument that would later become central in the birth control movement.
Next, Simon Rabinovitch takes us to French colonial courts in Algeria, where the status of Jews became the subject of a significant legal contest. Where recent scholars have emphasized the significance of French colonial administration, Rabinovitch instead identifies how Jewish collective rights forced French courts, and ultimately the French state, to confront a major problem in citizenship and naturalization law.
From Algeria we then move to the postwar United States for Laura Oren's history of the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL). In the 1950s, NAWL created a model no-fault divorce law and launched a wave of activism and publicity with the aim of disseminating this law as far and wide as possible. For Oren, this long-overlooked story is a crucial historical context for the no-fault divorce “revolution” that would occur decades later.
Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko's article, “Space, Law, and Justice in Leibniz: Leibniz as a Theorist of Spatial Justice,” is one of the more theoretical pieces that we have published in recent years. She builds on the work of Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on spatial justice to show that Leibniz's historical perspective on space, law, and justice are vital contexts for making sense of the “spatial” concept at the heart of this scholarly movement.
Ahmad Amara's study of the Ottoman extension of rule and jurisdiction to the Bersheeba frontier of southern Palestine in 1900 challenges prevailing scholarship that has classified the Bedouin Shaykh courts as “tribal courts.” Rather, he argues, the court began as a legal exception but transformed quickly into a world of judicial complexity that provoked jurisdictional crises in Beersheba and far beyond. Where numerous scholars see legal pluralism at work, Amara instead tells a story defined by conflict and tension.
Nikolas Bowie’s article turns to Massachusetts in the late 1970s and uncovers the story of a protracted struggle between a municipal corporation and a business corporation. The First National Bank of Boston splashed a lot of cash on advertisements to lobby against statewide efforts to increase personal income taxes. The municipal corporation of Boston then took advantage of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of this type of political speech by corporations. Bowie’s article is a striking explanation of how emerging First Amendment free-speech doctrines politicized the corporation—both municipal and financial.
We are pleased to introduce a new section in Law and History Review: “Sources and their Uses.” These articles will explore legal sources and offer new analytical frameworks for understanding them. Our first article of this type is by Mahmood Kooria and it studies how premodern Islamic legal texts have been transformed through hypertext commentaries and the world of social media. Kooria argues that this constitutes an extension of a textual longue-durée of Islamic law.
Finally, Laura Kalman offers a sweeping and passionate historiographical review of the long-standing debate between “progressives” and “revisionists” about constitutional law and history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kalman argues that the rumors of the death of progressive scholarship of this era have been greatly exaggerated. While criticizing revisionists for advancing a cartoonish, straw-man version of the progressives’ work, she also revisits what she believes are the progressives’ greatest legal achievements and seeks to rebalance the scholarly dialogue.
Law and History Review is pleased to add our new quarterly digital imprint, The Docket (lawandhistoryreview.org), to the American Society for Legal History's existing digital venues of H-Law, the Society's website (legalhistorian.org), and Cambridge University Press's journal site (journals.cambridge.org/LHR). The Docket is edited by Associate Editor Michan Connor and features original articles, interviews, and reviews, as well as companion pieces to those appearing in Law and History Review. Our readers might be particularly interested in the latest issue of The Docket, which is a tribute to the scholarship of Professor Robert W. Gordon. We invite proposals for contributions to The Docket. Readers may also consult our twitter feed (twitter.org/history_law) for the latest from our editorial team.
