Legal History Commons^™

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

The Illusion Of Equality: The Failure Of The Community Property Reform To Achieve Management Equality, Elizabeth Carter

Elizabeth R. Carter

A Different Sort Of Justice: The Informal Courts Of Public Opinion In Antebellum South Carolina, Elizabeth Dale

Elizabeth Dale

Studies of nineteenth century legal history assume that the antebellum South, and antebellum South Carolina in particular, had a legal culture shaped by honor culture and marked by the hierarchical assumptions and extralegal violence that honor culture engendered. In this article, I offer a modification of that well-established account. While I do not question the influence of honor on South Carolina's antebellum legal culture, I suggest that the state had a second, shame-based system of popular justice, in which women played a prominent role. As was the case with honor culture, this second form of extralegal justice, which I have …

Gender, Legal Education, And Judicial Philosophy In The Region, Claudio Grossman

Claudio M. Grossman

No abstract provided.

Imbrication Of Legal And Expert Discourses On Monoparental Adoptive Processes, Raquel Medina Plana

Raquel Medina Plana

Long and complex, international adoption processes can be seen as constituting a set of performative practices which involve strategies of transmission/ incorporation of culture, implying the construction of relational identities or subjectivities. With an “educational” drive, and a strong uniformity aspiration, the relevant institutions would be constructing a unified kind of adoptive parenthood, not just in their public dimension but also on the more intimate identity configuration level: the emotional life, affections, expectations, personal history… (Borrillo and Pitois-Etienne, 2004). When confronted with “non-traditional” family projects (as it is the case with monoparental adoption), adoptive processes perform a strong governmental control …

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

Law, History, And Feminism, Tracy A. Thomas

Tracy A. Thomas

This is the introduction to the book, Feminist Legal History. This edited collection offers new visions of American legal history that reveal women’s engagement with the law over the past two centuries. It integrates the stories of women into the dominant history of the law in what has been called “engendering legal history,” (Batlan 2005) and then seeks to reconstruct the assumed contours of history. The introduction provides the context necessary to appreciate the diverse essays in the book. It starts with an overview of the existing state of women’s legal history, tracing the core events over the past two …

Elizabeth Cady Stanton And The Notion Of A Legal Class Of Gender, Tracy A. Thomas

Tracy A. Thomas

In the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton used narratives of women and their involvement with the law of domestic relations to collectivize women. This recognition of a gender class was the first step towards women’s transformation of the law. Stanton’s stories of working-class women, immigrants, Mormon polygamist wives, and privileged white women revealed common realities among women in an effort to form a collective conscious. The parable-like stories were designed to inspire a collective consciousness among women, one capable of arousing them to social and political action. For to Stanton’s consternation, women showed a lack of appreciation of their own …

Rights, Race, And Manhood: The Spanish American War And Soldiers’ Quests For First Class American Citizenship, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

Unlike the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Spanish American War and the Philippine Resistance were not accompanied by significant rights advances for people of color. Rather, rights continued to flow in retrograde, with increased political and cultural repression. Men of color contributed substantially and formally to the war effort, with companies of black and Filipino soldiers serving in combat and many individual Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian men and male descendants of Asians serving as well. Nonetheless, they were unable to leverage service into successful claims to the rights of manhood. This paper explores these dynamics in the context of …

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: The Case Of World War I, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

In the Civil War and World War II, many men of color gained rights while women's rights were in retrograde. While World War I is not a perfect mirror image of the Civil War and World War II, it may make sense to think of World War I as reversing the polarities that were in operation in the two other major conflicts. To understand this dynamic, this paper will explore the kinds of claims that men of color and women made for rights based in forms of civic service and sacrifice, how those claims were met by various state actors, …

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventheenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude—slavery in the mid-seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry—English; her …

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: Who Earns Rights, And When?, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

This paper considers two moments that scholars generally agree featured advances for African Americans’ citizenship – the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II and its immediate aftermath – and reads these moments through lenses of race and gender. I consider the conjunction of acknowledged sacrifices and contributions to the state, the rights advances achieved, and the gendered and racialized conceptions of citizen service emerging out of both post-war periods. This conjunction suggests that the kind of citizenship that people of color gained during and after wartime crises depended upon gendered and racialized hierarchies that valued …