Legal institutions and practices are embedded in the cultural life of communities and political formations. If law is best understood as a process of “ordering relations” (Rosen 2006), then a study of legal cultural forms involves an examination of the ways in which people employ the law to order social relations by constructing diverse categories of meaning and experience. Law, therefore, is not simply a means of political domination and authority, but rather an arena for cultural contestations based on competing notions of justice and differing moral and ethical value systems. Comparative Studies in Society and History has consistently published seminal essays on law, culture, and society since the 1960s, covering a range of topics and themes such as, but not limited to: colonial law and codification, legal pluralism, tradition and modernity, politics of jurisdictions, sovereignty and state-making, penal regimes, law and religion, relations of property, family law, legal experts, gendered subjectivities and agency, legal procedures, and material practices. Curating a syllabus on legal cultures that represents the richness of this scholarship and demonstrates the significance of their contributions is by no means a simple task. The rubrics that follow give a broad overview of this rich body of comparative scholarship and suggest readings that are thematically in conversation with each other.
Continuity and Ruptures
The following essays examine aspects of the discursive tension between tradition and modernity that lay at the heart of colonialism by focusing on the potential and pitfalls of arguments about continuity and invention of tradition in colonial and postcolonial societies. Judith Scheele moves away from debates about invention of Berber customary law and focuses on the continued popularity and reshaping of Berber law codes in thinking about the relationship between law-making and collective life. Tony Ballantyne shows that while the indigenous communities in New Zealand retained their values and practices from the pre-contact period, they were simultaneously “irrevocably transformed” by a century of subordination to the British colonial legal regime. Josh Berson highlights the contemporary significance of the “continuity doctrine” in indigenous land claims cases in Australia.
Berson, Josh. 2014. “The Dialectal Tribe and the Doctrine of Continuity.” 56 (2): 381–418.
Ballantyne T. 2011. “Paper, Pen, and Print: The Transformation of the Kai Tahu Knowledge Order.” 53 (2): 232-260.
Scheele, Judith. 2008. “A Taste for Law: Rule-Making in Kabylia (Algeria).” 50 (4): 895–919.
*Further Reading:
Bernal V. 1994. “Gender, Culture, and Capitalism: Women and the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village.” 36 (1): 36-67.
Bonfield L. 1989. “The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England.” 31 (3): 515-534.
Demian, Melissa. 2014. “On the Repugnance of Customary Law.” 56 (2): 508–36.
Dirks N.B. 1997. “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India.” 39 (1): 182-212.
Willis, Justin, and George Gona. 2013. “Tradition, Tribe, and State in Kenya: The Mijikenda Union, 1945–1980.” 55 (2): 448–73.
Hoffman, Katherine E. 2010. “Berber Law by French Means: Customary Courts in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930–1956.” 52 (4): 851–80.
MacMaster N. 2013. “The Roots of Insurrection: The Role of the Algerian Village Assembly (Djemâa) in Peasant Resistance, 1863–1962.”55 (2): 419-447.
Peletz M.G. 1993. “Sacred Texts and Dangerous Words: The Politics of Law and Cultural Rationalization in Malaysia.” 35 (1): 66-109.
Rosen L. 1978. “Law and Social Change in the New Nations.” 20 (1): 3-28.
Roque, Ricardo. 2015. “Mimetic Governmentality and the Administration of Colonial Justice in East Timor, ca. 1860–1910.” 57 (1): 67–97.
Sovereignty and Jurisdictional Politics
While drawing boundaries and fixing jurisdictions is how states often articulate sovereignty, in practice these processes can be rather fluid and liminal. The role of the law in these processes is to enable distinct arenas for cultural contestations where people settle or negotiate claims thereby shaping legal institutions and practices that strengthen the power of the state as the ultimate arbiter of justice. Lauren Benton’s essay on colonial law and jurisdictional politics emphasizes how colonial regimes were plural legal orders where indigenous litigants exploited jurisdictional tensions that shaped the direction of colonial legal reform, simultaneously strengthening the power of the colonial state and giving rise to a “global legal order.” In her review essay, Yanna Yannakakis highlights how “colonial legal culture was forged in diverse configurations of conflict and alliance that played out in remote village tribunals and metropolitan courts of appeal,” and yet, the “tyranny of the archives persists” where “the voices of native litigants and witnesses tend to be highly mediated through translation and transcription” (1071). Ziad Fahmy shows how people who inhabited “jurisdictional borderlands,” or contact zones with multiple competing legal authorities and jurisdictional ambiguity, were often able to maximize their immediate social and economic interests by assuming “extraterritorial legal identities” in precolonial Alexandria.
Benton L. 1999. “Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State.” 41 (3): 563-588.
Fahmy, Ziad. 2013. “Jurisdictional Borderlands: Extraterritoriality and ‘Legal Chameleons’ in Precolonial Alexandria, 1840–1870.” 55 (2): 305–29.
Yannakakis, Yanna. 2015. “Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal Cultures. A Review Essay.” 57 (4): 1070–82.
Maritime Jurisdictions
Lauren Benton and Fahad Ahmad Bishara demonstrate how legal pluralism and international law shaped a maritime legal culture in the Indian Ocean. Benton highlights the role of pirates in seeking and adopting legal strategies to examine the link between “globalizing legal practices” and the emergence of distinctions between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as “separate regulatory spheres.” Bishara focuses on the role of dhow captains “who located themselves within an imperial legal geography, and appropriated legal technologies—passes and flags—to help them shape the legal possibilities of a changing political and economic seascape” (366).
Benton, Lauren. 2005. “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism.” 47 (4): 700–724.
Bishara, Fahad Ahmad. 2018. “‘No Country but the Ocean’: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, ca. 1900.” 60 (2): 338–66.
*Further Reading:
Beverley, Eric Lewis. 2013. “Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire.” 55 (2): 241–72.
Donovan, Kevin P. 2023. “Uhuru Sasa! Federal Futures and Liminal Sovereignty in Decolonizing East Africa.” 65 (2): 372–98.
Feldman, Gregory. 2016. “‘With My Head on the Pillow’: Sovereignty, Ethics, and Evil among Undercover Police Investigators.” 58 (2): 491–518.
Karamursel, Ceyda. 2017. “Transplanted Slavery, Contested Freedom, and Vernacularization of Rights in the Reform Era Ottoman Empire.” 59 (3): 690–714.
Lombard, Louisa. 2018. “Denouncing Sovereignty: Claims to Liberty in Northeastern Central African Republic.” 60 (4): 1066–95.
Mongia, Radhika V. 2007. “Historicizing State Sovereignty: Inequality and the Form of Equivalence.” 49 (2): 384–411.
Nadasdy, Paul. 2012. “Boundaries among Kin: Sovereignty, the Modern Treaty Process, and the Rise of Ethno-Territorial Nationalism among Yukon First Nations.” 54 (3): 499–532.
Raianu, Mircea. 2018. “‘A Mass of Anomalies’: Land, Law, and Sovereignty in an Indian Company Town.” 60 (2): 367–89.
Richards, Jake Subryan. 2020. “The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870.” 62 (4): 836–67.
Sartori, Paolo. 2014. “Constructing Colonial Legality in Russian Central Asia: On Guardianship.” 56 (2): 419–47.
Shankar, Devika. 2022. “A Slippery Sovereignty: International Law and the Development of British Cochin.” 64 (3): 820–44.
Singha R. 2007. “Finding Labor from India for the War in Iraq: The Jail Porter and Labor Corps, 1916–1920.” 49 (2): 412-445.
Stern, Rephael G. 2020. “Legal Liminalities: Conflicting Jurisdictional Claims in the Transition from British Mandate Palestine to the State of Israel.” 62 (2): 359–88.
Making of Nation-States
Jurisdictional struggles that emerge out of distinct cultures of legality may in some cases lead to the institutionalization of “weak states.” Besnik Pula’s essay considers why the Albanian nation-state in the early-twentieth century failed to establish “durable mechanisms of governance among marginal social groups,” and how jurisdictional struggles diminished its control over communities in the highlands even as it continued to remain “organizationally capable.” Samuel Fury Child Daly focusses on the role that law played in articulating national identity and citizenship in postcolonial Africa. Daly emphasizes the role of bureaucracy and legal paperwork in state-making by highlighting how “ideas about order, discipline and legal process were at the heart of Biafra’s sense of self as a nation,” (894) and how the courts became sites of the articulation of Biafra’s national culture.
Daly, Samuel Fury Childs. 2020. “A Nation on Paper: Making a State in the Republic of Biafra.” 62 (4): 868–94.
Pula, Besnik. 2015. “Institutionalizing a Weak State: Law and Jurisdictional Conflict between Bureaucratic and Communal Institutions in the Albanian Highlands.” 57 (3): 637–64.
*Further Reading:
Grant D. 2015. “Civilizing” the Colonial Subject: The Co-Evolution of State and Slavery in South Carolina, 1670–1739.” 57 (3): 606-636.
Scott, James C., John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias. 2002. “The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname.” 44 (1): 4–44.
Velychenko S. 1997. “Empire Loyalism and Minority Nationalism in Great Britain and Imperial Russia, 1707 to 1914: Institutions, Law, and Nationality in Scotland and Ukraine.” 39 (3): 413-441.
Penal Regimes
Corporal punishments, racialized incarceration, political economies of carceral systems, and sex-gender systems are critical to understanding modern punitive regimes. The articles included in this section move beyond an analysis of penal institutions per se, and examine the production of embodied subjectivities. Farzin Vejdani explores the multiple meanings and uses of branding as punishment and bodily inscriptions in nineteenth century Iran, while Steven Pierce examines how scandals around flogging in colonial Nigeria introduced penal reforms, simultaneously institutionalizing the idea of cultural specificity of particular forms of disciplinary techniques. Sarah Balakrishnan offers new insights on the emergence of a carceral system organized around the female body and examines links between gendered carceral systems and mercantile capitalism in nineteenth century West Africa. Focusing on the case of penal discipline in colonial Barbados, where the majority of inmates were women, Cecilia Green situates prisons within larger systems of surplus labor management and examines the relationship between ideas about domesticity and female deviance in tracing shifts in modes of disciplining women.
Crime and Punishment
Vejdani, Farzin. 2023. “Branded Bodies: Judicial Torture, Punishment, and Infamy in Nineteenth-Century Iran.” 65 (2): 321–45.
Pierce, Steven. 2024. “The Suffering Subject: Colonial Flogging in Northern Nigeria and a Humanitarian Public, 1904–1933.” 66 (2): 319–41.
Gender and Incarceration
Balakrishnan, Sarah. 2023. “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957.” 65 (2): 296–320.
Green, Cecilia A. 2011. “‘The Abandoned Lower Class of Females’: Class, Gender, and Penal Discipline in Barbados, 1875–1929.” 53 (1): 144–79.
*Further Reading:
Beattie, Peter M. 2011. “The Jealous Institution: Male Nubility, Conjugality, Sexuality, and Discipline on the Social Margins of Imperial Brazil.” 53 (1): 180–209.
Grant K. 2011. “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike.” 53 (1): 113-143.
Herrup C. 1985. “Crime, Law and Society.” 27 (1): 159-170.
Kenney, Padraic. 2012. “‘I Felt a Kind of Pleasure in Seeing Them Treat Us Brutally.’ The Emergence of the Political Prisoner, 1865–1910.” 54 (4): 863–89.
MacDonald, Mairi S. 2012. “Guinea’s Political Prisoners: Colonial Models, Postcolonial Innovation.” 54 (4): 890–913.
Schayegh C. 2005. “Serial Murder in Tehran: Crime, Science, and the Formation of Modern State and Society in Interwar Iran.” 47 (4): 836-862.
Regimes and Relations of Property
Property as a concept and analytical key to social forms rests on relations among people, not just between people and things. It is also often assumed that the status of things as property inscribed in legal regimes of property rights precedes processes of dispossession and accumulation of capital. Matthew Shutzer, in his article on the formation of property law for coal in colonial South Asia, argues that “the discursive framing of coal’s status as property emerged out of, rather than preceded, social and ecological displacements caused by a coal commodity boom after 1894” (432). The absence of coal’s status as property was, therefore, “reassembled through a recursive conception of legality” (432). Rebecca Scott and Michael Zeuske examine the links between freedom, property, and membership in the political community by showing how claims of former slaves over resources such as land, tools, and animals drew upon ideas of customary possession, and assertion of rights to respect and remuneration.
Scott R.J., Zeuske M. 2002. “Property in Writing, Property on the Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land, and Citizenship in the Aftermath of Slavery, Cuba, 1880–1909.” 44 (4): 669-699.
Shutzer, Matthew. 2021. “Subterranean Properties: India’s Political Ecology of Coal, 1870–1975.” 63 (2): 400–432.
*Further Reading:
Berry, Sara. 2002. “Debating the Land Question in Africa.” 44 (4): 638–68.
Dirks N.B. 1986. “From Little King to Landlord: Property, Law, and the Gift under the Madras Permanent Settlement.” 28 (2): 307-333.
Graeber D. 1997. “Manners, Deference, and Private Property in Early Modern Europe.” 39 (4): 694-728.
Guillet D. 1998. “Rethinking Legal Pluralism: Local Law and State Law in the Evolution of Water Property Rights in Northwestern Spain.” 40 (1): 42-70.
Kumar D. 1985. “Private Property in Asia? The Case of Medieval South India.” 27 (2): 340-366.
Family and Inheritance
Practices of inheritance and family disputes over property are productive sites for exploring the relationship between gender, patriarchal norms, and women’s autonomy within commerce and modern subjecthood. Moving away from scholarship on the preservation of women’s property rights under the Dutch legal regime’s policy of preservation of customary law (adat) in colonial Indonesia, Guo-Quan Seng shows how the legal regulation of credit and commerce gave shape to Confucian “Chinese” patriarchal family forms, thereby restricting creole Chinese women’s autonomy by subjugating them to the authority of the “housefather.” Rachel Sturman examines the connectedness of property and personhood that remains crucial to modern notions of individual, privacy, and subjectivity by focusing on how the relations of persons and things continued to be linked within families in colonial India.
Seng, Guo-Quan. 2018. “The Gender Politics of Confucian Family Law: Contracts, Credit, and Creole Chinese Bilateral Kinship in Dutch Colonial Java (1850s–1900).” 60 (2): 390–414.
Sturman, Rachel. 2005. “Property and Attachments: Defining Autonomy and the Claims of Family in Nineteenth-Century Western India.” 47 (3): 611–37.
*Further Reading:
Bestor J.F. 1996. “Bastardy and Legitimacy in the Formation of a Regional State in Italy: The Estense Succession.” 38 (3): 549-585.
Brettell C.B. 1991. “Kinship and Contract: Property Transmission and Family Relations in Northwestern Portugal.” 33 (3): 443-465.
Doumani B. 1998. “Endowing Family: Waqf, Property Devolution, and Gender in Greater Syria, 1800 to 1860.” 40 (1): 3-41.
Goody J. 1973. “Strategies of Heirship.” 15 (1): 3-20.
Leonard, Karen Isaksen. 2011. “Family Firms in Hyderabad: Gujarati, Goswami, and Marwari Patterns of Adoption, Marriage, and Inheritance.” 53 (4): 827–54.
Nazzari M. 1995. “Widows as Obstacles to Business: British Objections to Brazilian Marriage and Inheritance Laws.” 37 (4): 781-802.
Peluso N.L. 1996. “Fruit Trees and Family Trees in an Anthropogenic Forest: Ethics of Access, Property Zones, and Environmental Change in Indonesia.” 38 (3): 510-548.
Powers D.S. 1989. “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Legal History: The Attack on Muslim Family Endowments in Algeria and India.” 31 (3): 535-571.
Tonomura H. 1990. “Women and Inheritance in Japan’s Early Warrior Society.” 32 (3): 592-623.
Regulating Religion
Managing religious difference and heterogeneity in multicultural societies has deep implications for processes of nation and state building, democratization, and governance. The relationship between legal norms and religious practice is critical to these processes and involves the interplay of multiple competing actors, institutions, and ideologies. Articles in this rubric discuss the different approaches that states deploy for regulating religion, such as judicialization, bureaucratization, and corporatization of religious questions in multicultural societies. Others focus on themes such as practices of secular governance that include state involvement in religious matters, the relationship between scriptural authority and legal codes, and questions of religious freedom, violence, tolerance, and conversion in relation to competing political, moral, and ethical imaginaries.
Al-Qattan, Najwa. 2002. “Litigants and Neighbors: The Communal Topography of Ottoman Damascus.” 44 (3): 511–33.
Anderson J.N.D. 1971. “The Role of Personal Statutes in Social Development in Islamic Countries.” 13 (1): 16-31.
Burak, Guy. 2013. “The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Post-Mongol Context of the Ottoman Adoption of a School of Law.” 55 (3): 579–602.
Chatterjee, Nandini. 2010. “English Law, Brahmo Marriage, and the Problem of Religious Difference: Civil Marriage Laws in Britain and India.” 52 (3): 524–52.
Christelow A. 1982. “The Muslim Judge and Municipal Politics in Colonial Algeria and Senegal.” 24 (1): 3-24.
Culang, Jeffrey. 2018. “‘The Shari‘a Must Go’: Seduction, Moral Injury, and Religious Freedom in Egypt’s Liberal Age.” 60 (2): 446–75.
Fuller C.J. 1988. “Hinduism and Scriptural Authority in Modern Indian Law.” 30 (2): 225-248.
Fyzee A.A.A. 1963. “Muhammadan Law in India.” 5 (4): 401-415.
Halevi, Leor. 2020. “Nationalist Spirits of Islamic Law after World War I: An Arab-Indian Battle of Fatwas over Alcohol, Purity, and Power.” 62 (4): 895–925.
Jones, Carla. 2024. “Style on Trial: The Gendered Aesthetics of Appearance, Corruption, and Piety in Indonesia.” 66 (4): 814–44.
Kemper S. 1984. “The Buddhist Monkhood, the Law, and the State in Colonial Sri Lanka.” 26 (3): 401-427.
Derrett J.D.M. 1961. “The Administration of Hindu Law by the British.” 4 (1): 10-52.
Kenny, Gale, and Tisa Wenger. 2020. “Church, State, and ‘Native Liberty’ in the Belgian Congo.” 62 (1): 156–85.
Özgül, Ceren. 2014. “Legally Armenian: Tolerance, Conversion, and Name Change in Turkish Courts.” 56 (3): 622–49.
Peletz, Michael G. 2013. “Malaysia’s Syariah Judiciary as Global Assemblage: Islamization, Corporatization, and Other Transformations in Context.” 55 (3): 603–33.
Sezgin, Yüksel, and Mirjam Künkler. 2014. “Regulation of ‘Religion’ and the ‘Religious’: The Politics of Judicialization and Bureaucratization in India and Indonesia.” 56 (2): 448–78.
Legal Experts
This rubric focuses on the role of lawyers, magistrates, judges, and their relationship with other professional experts or “outsiders” who advise clients on legal matters. Broadly, these studies delineate how legal knowledge is mediated and made accessible to ordinary people. Erik Mueggler examines the legal plaints authored by people, including domestic slaves who could not use pen and paper, bondsmen, bonded tenants, concubines, and wives of a chieftain in a Qing native domain. Stuart Kirsch’s article “treats legal transcripts and depositions as examples of life-writing to examine the contribution of experts to environmental litigation” (336) and compares the different forms and uses of ghostwriting.
Mueggler, Erik. 2021. “Rewriting Bondage: Literacy and Slavery in a Qing Native Domain.” 63 (1): 99–132.
Kirsch, Stuart. 2022. “Scientific Ghostwriting in the Amazon? The Role of Experts in the Lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador.” 64 (2): 335–62.
*Further Reading:
Galanter M. 1972. “The Aborted Restoration of ‘Indigenous’ Law in India.” 14 (1): 53-70.
Khare R.S. 1972. “Indigenous Culture and Lawyer’s Law in India.” 14 (1): 71-96.
Morrison C. 1972. “Kinship in Professional Relations: A Study of North Indian District Lawyers.” 14 (1): 100-125.
Nash G.B. 1965. “The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800–1861.” 7 (2): 203-220.
Rudolph L.I, Rudolph S.H. 1965. “Barristers and Brahmans in India: Legal Cultures and Social Change.” 8 (1): 24-49.
Legal Devices
The articles in this section highlight the various strategies, material practices, legal principles, and protocols that shape legal traditions, documentary cultures, subjectivities, and agency. Francisco Apellániz work on notarial cultures in medieval Alexandria and Damascus focuses on what constituted proof, who could bear testimony, and the exchange of legal concepts between Islamic and Frankish legal traditions. Jessica Marglin tells us a “new story” about orality and writing in Islamic law in Morocco, and highlights the centrality of written evidence in Moroccan shari‘a courts in the nineteenth century. She shows how notarized documents could outweigh oral testimony, giving them particular relevance to shaping the experiences of non-Muslims within Islamic legal institutions. Her essay calls for an approach to undercut the dichotomy between writing and orality. Similarly, Nandini Chatterjee examines a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama used widely in India in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to “narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs” (406). She situates these documents in the wider Islamic and Persianate worlds of jurisprudence and documentary culture. Ravi de Costa and Bianca Premo consider the different ways in which people represent themselves as legal subjects in petitions in Australia, and eighteenth-century Spanish Empire, respectively.
Apellániz, Francisco. 2016. “Judging the Franks: Proof, Justice, and Diversity in Late Medieval Alexandria and Damascus.” 58 (2): 350–78.
Chatterjee, Nandini. 2016. “Mahzar-Namas in the Mughal and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form.” 58 (2): 379–406.
Costa, Ravi De. 2006. “Identity, Authority, and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions.” 48 (3): 669–98.
Marglin, Jessica M. 2017. “Written and Oral in Islamic Law: Documentary Evidence and Non-Muslims in Moroccan Shari‘a Courts.” 59 (4): 884–911.
Premo, Bianca. 2011. “Before the Law: Women’s Petitions in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire.” 53 (2): 261–89.
*Further Reading:
Mathew, Johan. 2019. “On Principals and Agency: Reassembling Trust in Indian Ocean Commerce.” 61 (2): 242–68.
Raman, Bhavani. 2012. “The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras.” 54 (2): 229–50.
Rupcic, Sonia. (2021) “Mens Daemonica: Guilt, Justice, and the Occult in South Africa.” 63 (3): 599–624.
Legalities/Illegalities
Essays in this rubric investigate the entanglements, interdependence, and co-constitution of spheres of legalities and illegalities. Jatin Dua examines the shared economy of hijacking and ransom and uses the analytic of “protection” to destabilize the distinctions between legality and illegality, trade and finance, and piracy and counterpiracy. He argues that “protection is key to apprehending processes of mobility and interruption central to global capitalism” (507). Anastasia Piliavsky moves beyond the law to highlight the relations of ambivalent interdependence between agents of the law and those that ostensibly break the law. Hedwig Waters shows how, in contemporary post-socialist Mongolia, the rural poor have developed their own discourse of legitimate and illegitimate economic behavior that “morally condones their illegal wildlife procurement, selling, and smuggling activities” (445). Joshua White exposes the gap between slavery as a legal institution and slaving in practice, revealing complex entanglements of legal and illegal practices of enslavements in the early modern Ottoman world.
Dua, Jatin. 2019. “Hijacked: Piracy and Economies of Protection in the Western Indian Ocean.” 61 (3): 479–507.
Piliavsky A. 2011. “A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India.” 53 (2): 290-313.
Prange, Sebastian R. 2011. “Outlaw Economics: Doing Business on the Fringes of the State. A Review Essay.” 53 (2): 426–36.
Waters, Hedwig A. 2022. “Building Merit: The Moral Economy of the Illegal Wildlife Trade in Rural, Post-Socialist Eastern Mongolia.” 64 (2): 422–45.
White, Joshua M. 2023. “Slavery, Freedom Suits, and Legal Praxis in the Ottoman Empire, ca. 1590–1710.” 65 (3): 526–56.
Additional Readings
Legal Archive
Agmon, Danna. 2021. “Historical Gaps and Non-Existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India.” 63 (4): 979–1006.
Siddiqi A. 2001. “Ayesha’s World: A Butcher’s Family in Nineteenth-Century Bombay.” 43 (1): 101-129.
Sexuality
Graham S.L. 1991. “Slavery’s Impasse: Slave Prostitutes, Small-Time Mistresses, and the Brazilian Law of 1871.” 33 (4): 669-694.
Ibrahim, Nur Amali. 2016. “Homophobic Muslims: Emerging Trends in Multireligious Singapore.” 58 (4): 955–81.
Newton, Melanie J. 2005. “The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender, and British Slave Amelioration, 1823–1834.” 47 (3): 583–610.
Payne, Richard E. 2016. “Sex, Death, and Aristocratic Empire: Iranian Jurisprudence in Late Antiquity.” 58 (2): 519–49.
Perry M.E. 1985. “Deviant Insiders: Legalized Prostitutes and a Consciousness of Women in Early Modern Seville.” 27 (1): 138-158.
Labor
Subramanian, Divya. 2019. “Legislating the Labor Force: Sedentarization and Development in India and the United States, 1870–1915.” 61 (4): 835–63.
Werbner, Pnina. 2014. “‘The Duty to Act Fairly’: Ethics, Legal Anthropology, and Labor Justice in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana.” 56 (2): 479–507.
Debt and Debtor’s Prisons
Killick, Evan. 2011. “The Debts That Bind Us: A Comparison of Amazonian Debt-Peonage and U.S. Mortgage Practices.” 53 (2): 344–70.
Peebles, Gustav. 2013. “Washing Away the Sins of Debt: The Nineteenth-Century Eradication of the Debtors’ Prison.” 55 (3): 701–24.
Suter, Mischa. 2017. “Debt and Its Attachments: Collateral as an Object of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Liberalism.” 59 (3): 715–42.
Constitutionalisms
Fitzgibbon R.H. 1960. “The Process of Constitution Making in Latin America.” 3 (1): 1-11.
Pillai, Sarath. 2023. “German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, States’ Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India.” 65 (4): 801–27.
Free Speech
Candea, Matei. 2025. “French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech.” 67 (1): 5–32.
Human Rights
Merrett C, Gravil R. 1991. “Comparing Human Rights: South Africa and Argentina, 1976–1989.” 33 (2): 255-287.
Piccini, Jon, and Duncan Money. 2021. “‘A Fundamental Human Right’? Mixed-Race Marriage and the Meaning of Rights in the Postwar British Commonwealth.” 63 (3): 655–84.
Justice
Arieff, Alexis, and Mike McGovern. 2013. “‘History Is Stubborn’: Talk about Truth, Justice, and National Reconciliation in the Republic of Guinea.” 55 (1): 198–225.
Darling, Linda T. 2007. “Social Cohesion (‘Asabiyya) and Justice in the Late Medieval Middle East.” 49 (2): 329–57.
Geraghty, Mark Anthony. 2020. “Gacaca, Genocide, Genocide Ideology: The Violent Aftermaths of Transitional Justice in the New Rwanda.” 62 (3): 588–618.
Slotta, James. 2015. “Phatic Rituals of the Liberal Democratic Polity: Hearing Voices in the Hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.” 57 (1): 130–60.
Meenu Deswal is an Editorial Assistant at CSSH. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan, and her research broadly focuses on histories of social change, labor, and the law in rural communities in South Asia from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Race, Law and History Program and the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Michigan.
