During the academic years 2018/19 and 2019/20, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies will focus of the topic of “Law & Legalities.” This two-year seminar will bring together scholars working on law in societies around the world and throughout human history, on topics including (but not restricted to) state administration, gender and sexuality, race, religion, property, science, environment, technology, war, migration, commerce, medicine, disability, incarceration, and human rights. How have legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and extra-legal forms of social order interacted in different periods and places? We will consider the historical possibilities and predicaments that have emerged within legal and juridical systems (both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’), as well as the conflicts that have arisen from the overlapping jurisdictions of custom, community, religion, nation-state, empire, and international bodies.
Davis Center Fellows, 2018-19
Tatiana Borisova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg
Imperial Russian law and violence
Tom Johnson, University of York (UK)
Law in medieval England
Lena Salaymeh, Tel Aviv Law School
Islamic law and secularization
Franziska Seraphim, Boston College
Japan & Germany, prosecution of war crimes
Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin Law School
Forensics in 19th- and 20th-century colonial India
Elizabeth Thornberry, Johns Hopkins University
Colonial law in 19th- and 20th-century South Africa
Barbara Welke, University of Minnesota
US injury law
Postdoctoral Fellows on the Sub-Theme of “Law & Difference”
George Aumoithe, Ph.D. Columbia University, 2018
20th-century public health law and administration, race, and sexuality
Davis Center Postdoc, 2018-20
Jonathan Connolly, Ph.D./J.D. Stanford, 2017
19th-century emancipation law and indentured labor migration in the British Empire
Davis Center Postdoc, 2018-19
Davis Center Fellows, 2019-20
Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University
Law and climate science in South Asia
Malachi Crawford, Prairie View A&M University
The Nation of Islam and African-American Free Speech in US Courts
Rohit De, Yale University
Rebellious lawyers and the jurisprudence of decolonization
Sarah Ghabrial, Concordia University, Montreal
Colonial law and the Muslim family in Algeria
Stuart McManus, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Slave law in the early modern Iberian world
Mary Mitchell, Purdue University
Law and nuclear weapons testing in postwar Oceania
Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania
A history of the Soviet dissident movement
Judith Surkis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Children, development, and international law in decolonization
Karl Ubl, University of Cologne
Punishment in the Carolingian Empire
Davis Center Conferences
Decolonization and International Law (March 2019)
Natalie Zemon Davis Workshop (May 2019)
Law, Difference, and Healthcare: Making Sense of Structural Racism in Medico-Legal History (June 2019)
Law and Legality in Modern Eastern Europe (October 2019)
Davis Center Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration (November 2019)