[We have the following CFP for the conference, "The Corpse of Evidence: Cadavers and Proofs in Early Modern European Forensic Medicine."]
We invite scholars to submit abstracts for a proposed volume on the history of early modern European forensic medicine. At the center of the volume is the cadaver, observed, dissected and manipulated to provide answers to the questions of doctors, lawyers, theologians. How did the practices of interrogation of the dead body evolve in the different European countries and how did the concept of proof change?
Proposals are encouraged which, while based on specific case studies, can provide ample stimulus for reflection and allow for comparisons between countries with different cultural, and particularly scientific, traditions.
We welcome submissions on the following subjects:
- Medical-legal Literature
- Dissection practices and narratives
- Resistance to dissection
- Postmortem phenomena
- The corpse in the history of mentalités
- Comparative analyses between the various European legal systems
- Comparisons of doctors, lawyers and theologians
- Pathological anatomy and teratology
- Processes of beatification and sanctification in the Catholic Church
Those interested should submit a 300 word abstract describing the essay they propose to write. Authors should include a short cv, affiliation and contact information with their abstracts, which should be sent electronically to Dr. Francesco Paolo de Ceglia: francescopaolo.deceglia@uniba.it
The deadline for submission is November 1, 2013.."]
We invite scholars to submit abstracts for a proposed volume on the history of early modern European forensic medicine. At the center of the volume is the cadaver, observed, dissected and manipulated to provide answers to the questions of doctors, lawyers, theologians. How did the practices of interrogation of the dead body evolve in the different European countries and how did the concept of proof change?
Proposals are encouraged which, while based on specific case studies, can provide ample stimulus for reflection and allow for comparisons between countries with different cultural, and particularly scientific, traditions.
We welcome submissions on the following subjects:
- Medical-legal Literature
- Dissection practices and narratives
- Resistance to dissection
- Postmortem phenomena
- The corpse in the history of mentalités
- Comparative analyses between the various European legal systems
- Comparisons of doctors, lawyers and theologians
- Pathological anatomy and teratology
- Processes of beatification and sanctification in the Catholic Church
Those interested should submit a 300 word abstract describing the essay they propose to write. Authors should include a short cv, affiliation and contact information with their abstracts, which should be sent electronically to Dr. Francesco Paolo de Ceglia: francescopaolo.deceglia@uniba.it
The deadline for submission is November 1, 2013.
McSweeney on Civil and Common Law in Medieval England
Thomas J. McSweeney, William & Mary Law School, has posted two articles. The first is Property Before Property: Romanizing the English Law of Land, which appeared in the Buffalo Law Review 60 (2012):
We tend to treat the idea of property as if it is a neutral way to speak about the relationship between people and things. In comparative legal studies, it is easier to compare two different cultures’ approaches to people and things when we assume that both can usefully be spoken of in terms of property. But property has a history. Terms like proprietas and possessio, which give the modern common law a vocabulary for speaking about that relationship, arose in the context of the classical Roman law and were worked into a systematic language of property by medieval Roman law scholars. The early common law, however, did not use the language of property to describe the relationship between people and things.
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| Image Credit: BC Law Library |
In this paper, I will examine the period when English justices first attempted to turn English norms and practices concerning landholding into a law of property. Between 1187 and 1258, several justices tried their hands at writing treatises in which they translated English court practices into a systematic property law on the Roman model. The justices of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, particularly the justices who wrote the treatise known as Bracton, were heavily invested in the idea that English law was part of the Romano-canonical ius commune. They realized, however, that the practices of the English courts and the landholding norms of the Anglo-Norman landed elite could not be made to fit neatly into a Roman law mold. The authors of Bracton embarked upon what we might consider an early exercise in comparative law scholarship. They created several complicated and contradictory schemes to try to express English landholding in Roman law terms, but ultimately failed in their attempts to create a coherent English law of property. Their failure is useful to us, however, in that it shows us very clearly that the language of property is not natural or essential and in that it helps us to understand a way of talking and thinking about landholding that is alien to us today. We can use the ways the Bracton authors creatively misunderstood the Roman law of property to help us to understand the cultures of landholding they came from: those of the English courts and the Anglo-Norman landed elite of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.The second is English Judges and Roman Jurists: The Civilian Learning Behind England's First Case Law, which appeared in Temple Law Review 84 (2012):
This Article looks at a historical problem — the first use of case law by English royal justices in the thirteenth century — and makes it a starting point for thinking about the ways legal reasoning works in the modern common law. In the first Part of the Article, I show that, at its origin, the English justices’ use of decided cases as a source of law was inspired by the work civil and canon law scholars were doing with written authorities in the medieval universities. In an attempt to make the case that English law was on par with civil law and canon law, the justices and clerks of the royal courts began to treat cases as if they were the opinions of great jurists, to apply the same types of dialectical reasoning that were used in civil law discourse to those cases, and to work them into systems of authority. They used cases, as the modern common law does; but they used cases to create systems of the kind we usually associate with civil law. In the second Part of the Article, I turn to the modern common law and, using the methods of medieval case law as a mirror, show that the differences between civil law and common law reasoning are more perceived than real. American lawyers tend to view common law as flexible and creative, whereas they view civil law as ossified and hierarchical. This largely stems from the fact that common lawyers focus on the judicial opinion as the place where legal reasoning takes place. By integrating other texts, like the student outline and the restatement — which seek to create a harmonious system out of judicial opinions — into the picture of common law reasoning, I show that common law reasoning shares quite a bit in common with civil law reasoning.
Symposium on Weiner's "Rule of the Clan"
Prof. Mark Fenster, Levin Colleiner's ty of San Andrés School of Law, Argentina
Dr. Arnold Kling, Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute.
Dr. Jan-Christoph Marschelke, Managing Director, Global Systems and Intercultural Competence Program (GSiK), University of Würzburg, Germany,
Prof. Tim Murphy, Universiti Utara Malaysia (University of North Malaysia).
Prof. Abdullah Saeed, Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia
Dr. Doyle R. Quiggle, Jr., author of "Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqdan in New England: A Spanish-Islamic Tale in Cotton Mather's Christian Philosopher?"
Prof. Jeanne Schroeder, Cardozo School of Law
Prof. Kevin Stack, Associate Dean for Research, Vanderbilt School of Law
Weiner's Worlds of Law
Over on Worlds of Law, Marc Weiner, a former guest blogger, has three interesting posts:
- Sharp's Numbers, about Blackstone's Commentaries and a book owned by Granville Sharp housed in the Yale rare books collection
- Maine Meets Maine, a video reflection on the historical significance of the cattle pound, joining the State of Maine and Henry Sumner Maine.
- A thread on E.B. White and international law, and more generally about certain characteristics of the midcentury legal imagination. The final post is "Why International Law is Like Webster's Third Dictionary (at least, for E.B. White)."
Schroeder Reviews Weiner's "Rule of the Clan"
Jeanne L. Schroeder, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, has posted Family Feud: Mark Weiner, The Rule of the Clan. Here is the abstract:
In The Rule of the Clan, legal historian Mark Weiner confronts the paradox that freedom requires law. He takes aim at one common assumption of libertarian political theory: a strong state is a threat to individual freedom. He warns that nostalgia for earlier, simpler societies is a deluded fantasy.
Weiner examination of traditional societies throughout the world and across history show that they share a single broad organizational structure that belies their facial diversity: the clan. Within the clan, man, and even more strikingly, woman, is neither free nor an individual. She is subordinate to her function within the group – in the case of woman, reproduction. In the clan, there are no individual rights protected by law, only the honor of the extended family to be avenged by feud. Adopting the terminology of “founding father of legal history and legal anthropology, Henry Sumner Maine”, Weiner argues that individual rights only come into being with the development of the state when Status relations are superceded by Contract.
Surprisingly, in his defense of the classical liberal ideal of individual rights and equality, Weiner implicitly rejects one of liberalism’s founding propositions: a vision of the free individual in the state of nature. Weiner’s thesis is more consistent with the speculative tradition of Continental theory than with American liberalism.
Trade and Legal Pluralism in the Era of the Geniza
The Fourth Berg International Conference, In-Between: Trade and Legal Pluralism in the Era of the Geniza, will be convened by the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, May 29-31, 2013. The organizers explain,
The conference is devoted to the study of the legal history of medieval trade, mainly based on the Cairo Geniza documents, but also dealing with other pre-modern contexts. It brings together many of the leading legal, social and economic historians of medieval Jewish trade and its law as well as leading global experts of the history of other medieval and early modern trade law systems.Program and further information here.
McSweeney to William & Mary Law
Congratulations to William & Mary Law for appointing the entry-level candidate Thomas McSweeney. Professor McSweeney received his J.D. in 2005 and his Ph.D. in History in 2011 from Cornell, where he has been a Visiting Professor of Law. "His book manuscript, tentatively titled, Priests of Justice: The Civil Law’s Role in the Development of the Early Common Law, looks at the ways English justices began to transform the administrative practices of the royal courts into a legal system using civil law as their model." He is the author of Property Before Property: Romanizing the English Law of Land, appears in the August 2012 issue of the Buffalo Law Review, and English Judges and Roman Jurists: The Civilian Learning Behind England’s First Case Law, appears in the August 2012 issue of the Temple Law Review.
