Patrick Monson

Position
Alumni; Ph.D. 2024
Bio/Description

Dissertation Title:
"Imperializing Pluralism: Legal Reform, Language Rights, and Shifting Pluralities in Imperial Russia's Baltic Provinces, 1860–1917"


My dissertation examines tensions between legal pluralism and homogenization raised by Imperial Russia’s 1864 progressive judicial reform. Based on extensive archival research, it makes a number of novel claims. To begin, German elites, who held a monopoly over a distinctive Baltic legal system, attempted to draft reform legislation. Some central officials perceived certain elements of the local legal system as more advanced than those of the empire. Yet Baltic elite control over the judiciary contradicted a core reform principle: that all social groups were to be equal before the law. They proposed decentralizing and democratizing the legal system by opening up the courts to other social groups and local languages. Such a policy would have resulted in more accurate justice and a more localized, inclusive form of plurality.

The opposite view, however, won out. The final, centralizing reform of 1889 imposed Russian as the exclusive language of oral proceedings. While officials expressed some geopolitical concerns, they primarily touted greater impartiality and the protection of rights as their primary motives. This warranted full merger with the empire, even at the expense of linguistic rights and accuracy. This signaled the state’s transition from a composite empire—consisting of pluralistic, differentiated legal orders—to a more unitary state and legal order. Local law, however, remained in force. The Baltics’ legally pluralistic position thus shifted from one of elite-based autonomy to a unique form of state-centric pluralism in which the imperial state not only influenced, but completely hegemonized, or “imperialized,” Baltic legal particularity.

I argue that the new Russian-speaking judges drew on rigorous training in Roman law to interpret the Romano-Germanic Baltic civil law with remarkable competence. Their meticulous attention to evidence generally culminated in equitable treatment of Baltic litigants. Yet frequent mistranslation resulted in inaccurate rulings, challenging the premise of linguistically homogenizing states as more capable arbiters. Despite these challenges, as well as the lack of translations of law codes, many Estonians and Latvians managed to obtain justice by invoking evidence, expert knowledge, and tenets of local law. The growing presence of local bilingual jurists meant that Baltic particularity was becoming both more imperially integrated and more localized at the same time.

My dissertation research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Stephen F. Cohen-Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship (2021-22), and several Princeton awards. I received half of my M.A. credits and a number of awards while studying East European Jewish history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I currently serve as a content strategist at FamilySearch, where I help lead efforts to digitize documents in dozens of East European archives. I also teach family history-genealogy as an adjunct faculty member at BYU-Idaho. My greatest pride and joy is my family.

Education

M.A., Estonian History, University of Tartu, 2015
B.A., Family History-Genealogy (emphasis Eastern Europe), Brigham Young University, 2012

Degree Year
2024
Year of Study
Alumni
Area of Interest
Imperial History
Jewish History
Legal History
Social History
Home Department & Other Affiliations
History
Period
17th & 18th Centuries
19th Century
20th Century
Region
Europe
Russia and Eurasia