Between the mid-seventeenth and the late-eighteenth centuries thousands of enslaved people were brought to the British Isles. Many were enslaved, and they were publicly bought and sold, marked by brands, collars and manacles, and some were sent from Britain into plantation slavery. Slavery did not, hoverer, flourish in Britain. By the time of Somerset v Stewart (1772) and Knight v Wedderburn (1778) the large majority of people of color in Britain were free, many of them self-liberated. Despite the best efforts of enslavers to maintain their property rights in people, the enslaved regularly escaped. Newspaper “runaway advertisements” were invented in London during the second half of the seventeenth century, and between the 1650s and 1770s they reveal the development of the freedom seeker in the public sphere. The Somerset and Knight decisions did little to change slavery in the British Isles but rather confirmed a change that was all but complete. The most significant impact of the decisions was in the colonies, where planters interpreted the courts’ actions as evidence of a growing imperial threat to the institution of slavery

This article continues a long-term investigation into the nature of legislation, regulation, and administration across United States history. In contrast to persistent myths about an original American legal and political inheritance dedicated primarily to private rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economics, this article explores the earliest roots of American public rights, popular lawmaking, and regulatory policymaking. In the very first activities of revolutionary Provincial Congresses and Committees of Safety, this article locates a surprisingly robust template for the future development of American state police power, public provisioning, general-welfare legislation, and socio-economic regulation.

Kenya's first post-colonial government, under Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, came to power in December 1963 having adopted emergency powers and security legislation that had been used in the colonial suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. Kenyan nationalists opposed this authoritarian and often draconian legislation in the 1950s for its abuses of human rights and excesses of state powers. This article explains how Kenya's nationalists came to accept and adopt this legislation, illiberal emergency powers becoming a key element in the protection of the fragile bureaucratic-executive state after 1963. An account is given of how colonial security officers used emergency powers in the counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau. In the decolonization process, the continuing activities of Mau Mau's Kenya Land and Freedom Army, the shifta secessionist movement in the Northern Frontier District, and political opposition from within the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party threatened Kenyan stability. To combat these challenges, colonial officers and nationalists alike agreed to retain colonial security laws, especially the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance. The legacies of colonial law therefore remain prominent in Kenya's security legislation and have been used as recently as 2023 to deal with perceived threats to the bureaucratic-executive state.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), founded in Paris in 1946 by a group of antifascist lawyers, has long been dismissed as a Soviet front organization. Yet, this characterization overlooks its complex and multifaceted history. This paper reassesses IADL’s first thirty years, exploring its origins, internal debates, and cross-border engagement. Drawing on archival records, this article argues that—despite a period of Communist influence—the IADL contributed to international legal and political discourse by advancing an original approach defined here as radical legal internationalism. Through this framework, IADL lawyers questioned Cold War ideological boundaries and brought into dialogue Communist, progressive, New Left, decolonial, and liberal rights traditions. The article also uncovers the IADL’s significant role in promoting international law and human rights through trial observation, UN advocacy, and missions of inquiry. In challenging the dominant account of the Left’s delayed and uneasy embrace of human rights, this article calls for a broader understanding of Cold War-era legal internationalism and highlights an alternative tradition of legal activism.

In total, 75,000 to 250,000 Asian civilians died building the Thailand-Burma Death Railway under Japanese military orders during the Second World War. Among these were women whose experiences remain overlooked or marginalized in histories about the Death Railway. This microhistory of the Kudo Butai war crimes trial draws on recent scholarship on the relational and structural aspects of victimization and agency to study the sexual abuse and broader experiences of women on the railway. It focuses on the experiences, strategic acts, and survival choices of the following women who appear in trial records: the nineteen-year-old orphan sexually tortured to death, “Siamese lady friends” of some defendants, and the Chinese dresser’s wife who helped POWs. By identifying the relational and structural conditions contributing to sexual violence on the railway, this study demonstrates that the overwhelming experience of women under Japanese military occupation was one of the widespread vulnerability to sexual violence.

This article examines the role of religious law in the context of modern state formation in the Arabian Gulf sheikhdoms. It focuses on Qatar, where a dual legal system emerged out of contestations over political community in the aftermath of imperialism and oil. From the mid-twentieth century onward, the ruling family empowered both a sharia and a civil judiciary without fully clarifying the jurisdictional boundaries between the two judiciaries. Until the 2003 unification of the judiciary, litigants were seemingly free to take civil and criminal cases to a court of their choice. I suggest that the appeal of Qatar’s Sharia Courts lay primarily in the socially embedded nature of Islamic legal practice, the extra-legal functions fulfilled by sharia judges, and the transnational networks of Islamic institutions. While the appeal of the sharia was partly produced by the state, Islamic legal institutions also drew force from their oppositional stance toward modern state power. The Qatari case shows how legal actors can secure state recognition by positioning themselves as authentic cultural mediators against the alienating structures of modern bureaucracy when they offer an alternative model of justice grounded in a dense network of social relations and the provision of a wide range of services.

This article offers a fresh account of the colonial processes that upended Muslim juridical regimes in South Asia between 1808 and 1885. Based on unexplored sources in Arabic and English, the discussion is set in the South Indian coastal towns of today’s Kerala and Tamilnad, where Muslims practiced Shafi‘i law and were not subject to continuous Muslim rule at any point in history. Given their longue-durée experience of non-Muslim rule, the Shafi‘i jurists had to rethink classical jurisprudential norms to empower the learned Muslims (the ‘ulama) as alternative sources of authority, so that they could elect and dismiss Islamic law judges (qazis) as their local leaders in the coastal towns. Qazis thus emerged and operated as a bastion of Shafi‘i power and Shafi‘i religious authority in the region. Once the British Empire claimed the mantle of the Mughal Empire that practiced Hanafi law, it could not as easily bring these Shafi‘is into its imperial fold. Their juridical autonomy provoked fears of political subversion for the British Empire in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, prompting its officials to bring the Shafi‘is under direct government control and reconfigure the community-elected qazis, which were the foci of Shafi‘i leadership.

This essay explores a key stage in the legal history of the concepts of consent and guilt in cases of rape, namely in twelfth-century canon law in the work of Gratian and the early canonists who commented on his Decretum. It substantially revises the account that currently exists in scholarship and explains that confusion between raptus and rape and a limited read of the Decretum have combined to provide a problematic picture in which, it has been claimed, neither Gratian nor broader medieval canon law took rape seriously as an offence. The essay focuses on the underexplored Causa 32 in the Decretum and discusses how Gratian very directly addressed forced coitus in that section of his text, both condemning it and exonerating women of all guilt who are forced to have sex without their consent. Gratian and the decretists ended up changing the discourse on rape, in part through their treatment of both Lucretia of Roman legend and an early Christian martyr, Lucia. Their considerations, which intersected with theology, resulted in a legal principle that a raped wife cannot be charged with adultery. Since their considerations could also be applied to any rape victim, their work is important for the development of rape law and legal notions of consent.

The years immediately following the issue of Magna Carta and the death of John were of fundamental importance in determining the trajectory of the nascent common law legal system. Although the existence of the Bench had functionally been permanently established under chapter seventeen of Magna Carta, the central royal court faced an uncertain future under conciliar rule and in the aftermath of extensive civil conflict. The extensive extant records of the common law fines made to initiate actions in the Bench as recorded the Fine Rolls offer a window into the roles played by the court in relation to litigants, within the wider structure of royal governance, and in relation to a rapidly evolving legal system. An analysis of these sources can therefore both illuminate the early workings of the common law legal procedures and characterize the demand for royal justice that survived the First Barons’ War before continuing to grow across the thirteenth century. What emerges is a picture of a judicial system at the onset of a period of rapid development and widespread demand that would come to lay the foundation for the massive expansion of royal justice that was to follow throughout the reign of Henry III and beyond.

Photographs, much less comic books, are not often seen to be focal sources of legal-historical research. This is so despite the growing momentum in the humanities and social sciences to take the visuality of culture, history, and law seriously.1 Notwithstanding the “visual turn”2 in law and humanities and socio-legal studies, it remains quite rare for legal history journals to carry images for the close reading of their pertinent implications. For the most part, legal scholarship has continued to exclude much of the optical media that arrange and compose the history of law, including the textual documents whose visuality produces, even contests, foundational legal concepts.3 This omission calls for intervention, not because legal history has failed to engage critically with dominant histories and the legal orders that they sustain, but rather because archived photographs and their (re)entry into visual modes of storytelling expand the range of historical sources that facilitate such critical projects.4 More fundamentally, the remediated photograph discloses the technological and theoretical assumptions of history-writing, prompting reflection on how far legal history should evolve to accommodate insights from its neighboring fields.5

Our aim is to illuminate the persistent problem of evidence in cases of sexual violence in conflict zones by investigating the relationship between archival practices and processes of legal redress. This special issue consists of six essays, with contributors drawn from the disciplines of history and law. In temporal terms, the cases range from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth century; spatially, they address conflicts in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The case studies each offer an overview of “their archive,” explain its creation and limitations, and address its political logic and uses. As we interrogate archives, where evidence of sexual violence is located, it is critical that we note three things. First, to understand the nature and political construction of the archive. Second, to use this insight to interpret and assess the nexus of power relations within which historical and contemporary actors operate. Finally, to remember the inescapable limits of the evidence that shape the pursuit of justice, past or present.

The essay deals with the rape component of the Muslim Turkish massacres of Christian Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians during the years between 1894 and 1924 and the pertinent archival sources. During the three bouts of massacre, amounting to staggered genocides, in 1894–1896, 1915–1916 and 1920–1924, in which the Muslim Turks, under Ottoman imperial governments and, subsequently, under Ataturk’s Nationalist/republican rule, murdered some two million Christians, tens of thousands of Christian women were raped and/or forcibly abducted to Muslim households and Islamized. While almost all Turkish official records of these events have been destroyed or slicked away, archives in the West - US, German, French and British state archives and archives of missionary societies then operating in Asia Minor - are open to researchers and abound with materials that describe and analyze the massacres and the rapes and abductions that accompanied them. The essay lays out what happened and why, and how researchers have traced what happened.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Russian rulers released dozens of decrees about petitions. First, the decrees regulated the format of petitions, emphasizing their formulaic nature and moving them away from the personal appeals with supplication and abasement that were present in earlier centuries. These decrees recognized that petitions were essential to the administrative functioning of the imperial Russian state but saw them as akin to forms or applications. Second, the decrees stated firmly that petitioners should not approach the ruler directly. In part, these decrees reflect the rulers’ irritation at being endlessly bothered by personal requests, but Russia’s rulers also gave a more serious justification for the ban on personal appeals: they had established the rule of law, which meant that their subjects did not need to bother them personally and instead should clearly know other authorities—courts, governors—to address for aid. While efforts to change the format of petitions largely succeeded, efforts to curtail petitions directly to the ruler largely failed. That failure likely reflects several factors: inefficiencies in the judicial or administrative system, contradictory laws that still made space for petitions because they were useful, and because they held the promise of getting help quickly.

Recent scholarship on conservative constitutionalism in the United States focuses near-exclusively on the development of originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Before conservatives turned to originalism to counter the perceived threats of an activist judiciary in the 1980s, however, this article demonstrates that conservatives employed a very different interpretive philosophy to counter a very different perceived threat. To do so, this article reconstructs the history of a conservative legal movement that predated “the” conservative legal movement. Indeed, this article uncovers how conservatives employed natural law philosophy to respond to the elite legal academy’s seemingly morally foundationless positivism during the Cold War. The network of natural lawyers that sustained this earlier movement was deeply indebted to the Natural Law Institute (NLI), an academic initiative of the University of Notre Dame established in 1947. By framing the founding fathers’ natural law philosophy as a bulwark of individual liberty against the encroachments of legal realists, World War II-era totalitarians, and Cold War communists, the NLI created what the political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky has termed a “political epistemic network.” In concluding, this article suggests that recovering the history of the NLI’s epistemic network reveals the importance of natural law to the making of conservative constitutionalism during the Cold War.

In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.

Witness testimony in a judicial setting is commonly viewed as a form of evidence—a means to inform a judicial body of relevant facts in a given case. In this perspective, witnesses are merely instrumental to the process of adjudication. While this viewpoint provides a useful account of how we think of witness testimony in courts today, it is illsuited to the way witnesses and their role were perceived in the ancient world. Drawing on a cross-cultural analysis of ancient and late antique texts, the article recovers a different perception of the role of witnesses that once prevailed in the societies that gave rise to Western civilization. According to this alternate view, witnesses were not seen as passive providers of information but rather as active agents with the power to adjudicate—a role that we would now associate with judges. The article offers a new conceptualization of this historical transformation, outlining two paradigms that can help us critically examine the implied assumptions about the role of witnesses in adjudication: “the instrumental paradigm,” which is dominant in contemporary thought, and “the authoritative paradigm,” emerging from ancient texts, wherein witnesses held a far more authoritative role than the contemporary understanding suggest. The study argues that the instrumental paradigm reflects a radical transformation in the meanings of testimony and witness as legal concepts—a shift that marks an unexamined revolution in the history of legal thought.