How did sophisticated legal and administrative traditions travel across political and cultural boundaries before the emergence of modern bureaucracies? This article argues that answering this question requires historians to shift their attention from institutions to the experienced officials who sustained them. The movement of legal and administrative traditions across the medieval Mediterranean remains one of the least explored problems in institutional and legal history. Although historians have reconstructed the governmental structures of medieval kingdoms in considerable detail, less attention has been devoted to explaining how mature administrative traditions themselves circulated across political communities. Norman Sicily provides an exceptional setting in which to investigate this problem. Building upon the pioneering scholarship of Jeremy Johns, Hiroshi Takayama, Annliese Nef, Alex Metcalfe, and others, this article accepts the established continuity of the Sicilian royal dīwān, its multilingual documentary culture, and its sophisticated fiscal administration, while addressing a different question: if complex systems of government depended upon highly specialized officials, how did the practical knowledge embodied in those officials circulate beyond the governments in which it had originally developed? The article proposes that administrative transmission should be investigated primarily through personnel rather than institutions alone. Institutions cannot function independently of the individuals responsible for operating them. Documentary production, fiscal administration, judicial record keeping, and governmental routine depended upon experienced officials whose accumulated knowledge, professional judgment, and institutional memory were acquired through prolonged administrative service. Administrative traditions therefore travelled not merely through offices or written regulations, but through the movement of experienced personnel capable of reproducing governmental practice in new political environments. Norman Sicily illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity. Rather than dismantling the sophisticated administrative structures inherited from earlier Islamic rule, the Norman monarchy preserved and adapted the royal dīwān, retaining its documentary culture, fiscal organization, and multilingual administrative practices. The documented career of Thomas Brun serves as the principal case study through which this methodological framework is explored. Drawing upon Jeremy Johns' reconstruction of the Sicilian dīwān together with Richard FitzNigel's Dialogus de Scaccario, the article examines Brun not as proof of the transmission of any particular institution, but as evidence that experienced administrative personnel could move between major royal governments while continuing to occupy positions requiring exceptional technical competence. The contribution of this study is methodological rather than deterministic. It does not argue that any particular legal or administrative institution passed directly from Norman Sicily to another kingdom, nor does it assume that institutional similarities necessarily demonstrate historical borrowing. Instead, it argues that questions of institutional transmission should first be investigated through documentary evidence, official careers, and personnel networks before broader conclusions concerning legal or administrative development are drawn. By distinguishing administrative continuity, personnel mobility, and institutional transmission as analytically distinct processes, this article offers a new framework for examining the circulation of legal and administrative traditions across medieval legal cultures. It further argues that the Arabic, Greek, and Latin documentary collections preserved in Palermo provide an exceptional evidentiary foundation for reconstructing the personnel networks through which governmental expertise was preserved, adapted, and circulated across the medieval world.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
June 30, 2026
Aba-Namay on Legal and Administration Traditions Across Medieval Legal Cultures
Rashed M. Aba-Namay, National Law Center, has published Legal and Administrative Traditions Across Medieval Legal Cultures: Personnel Networks and Administrative Expertise Within and Beyond Norman Sicily. Here is the abstract.
Anderson on The Battle for Lower Manhattan: Trinity Church versus the Bogardus Heirs
Jerry L. Anderson, Drake University Law School, has published The Battle for Lower Manhattan: Trinity Church versus the Bogardus Heirs. Here is the abstract.
The descendants of Dutch colonists fought for over two centuries to reclaim title to sixty-two acres in lower Manhattan, granted by England to Trinity Church in 1705. The battles, both physical and legal, reached a climax in the mid-1800s, when New York's highest court ruled for Trinity in a series of cases. The rulings relied on Trinity's lengthy possession of the tract, illustrating how adverse possession in early American history helped create the certainty of title necessary for economic development.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Call For Papers, Law and Cultural Production
From Amy Kellam, IALS, University of London:
A month ago, I shared the call for papers for a special section of Amicus Curiae on Law and Cultural Production. I wanted to follow up as the abstract deadline of 15 July 2026 approaches. I am particularly keen to hear from scholars working on: • Law & Cultural production in the digital environment (platform labour, cognitive capitalism, and the political economy of creative work) • Critical theories of authorship, originality, and the work as a legal category For reference, the full call encompasses the following: From the economics of creative labour to the ownership of cultural heritage, from the philosophical foundations of property to the practical realities of copyright in a digital age, law is woven into almost every dimension of cultural production. This special section invites contributions that explore these intersections from a legal perspective, whether doctrinal, historical, philosophical, or interdisciplinary. Submission requirements: 300-word abstract + institutional affiliation + short biographical note Final papers: 8,000–10,000 words (including footnotes) Abstract deadline: 15 July 2026 Final papers due: 1 December 2026 Amicus Curiae is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. If you are unsure whether your work fits, please do drop me a line. I am always happy to discuss ideas informally! If you know colleagues who might be interested, I would be very grateful if you would forward this to them. All the best, Amy
June 25, 2026
Call for Applications, Visiting Fellows 2027, Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne
Call for Applications for Visiting Fellows 2027, Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne
The
Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at the University of Lucerne
invites applications for our Visiting Fellows Programme 2027.
The
fellowship programme supports junior scholars who wish to spend a period
of time in Lucerne pursuing work that overlaps with or otherwise complements
scholarly activities currently being pursued at the institute. During
their stay, fellows enjoy access to our specialist resources, and are invited
to share and develop their ideas with our community of faculty, researchers and
students.
Tailored to PhD candidates and postdoctoral
researchers, the programme is open to all working on interdisciplinary topics at the intersections between law, the
humanities and the social sciences. Focusing on critical and theoretical
approaches, the institute aims to bring together a diverse group of scholars
who read and think widely across fields, contexts and disciplines.
The deadline
for submissions is 30 September 2026.
Further
details on eligibility, application process and assessment criteria are
available online at www.lucernaiuris.ch.
Contact: steven.howe@unilu.ch
Carbado on Can You Be Black and Teach That?
Devon W. Carbado, UCLA School of Law, is publishing Can you be Black and Teach that? in the New York University Law Review.
Here is the abstract.
Notwithstanding the broad literature on race and constitutional criminal procedure, scholars have rarely engaged the epistemological burdens Fourth Amendment law imposes on Black students and faculty. Those burdens derive from a fundamental and insufficiently acknowledged disjuncture: despite the rights-protecting language in the Fourth Amendment (in particular, its prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures”), Fourth Amendment law is, for Black people, a domain of existential violence. It is Fourth Amendment law that determines when and how the police may engage us in our homes, in our cars, at school, and on our streets—and it is Fourth Amendment law that produces and governs the anti-Black border between surveillance and death. This fraught and necrological feature of Fourth Amendment law sets the doctrinal terms on which Black students must learn, and Black faculty must teach, the law. In that regard, the violence Black people encounter in the context of engaging Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is against the very Black body they occupy. This Article describes that normalized epistemological environment. One might think of the account the Article provides as a pedagogy of the Black body, or more precisely, as an articulation of what the Black body can teach us about the racialized “field of pain and death” Fourth Amendment law produces. That field includes a constitutional archive that requires Black people to learn and teach law through our legally sanctioned disposability. Fourth Amendment law is thus not merely violent in its social effects; it is epistemologically violent—and legal pedagogy is one of the sites where that violence is reproduced.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
June 19, 2026
Conklin on Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer: An Adventure in Christmas Litigation
Michael Conklin, Texas A&M University School of Law, has published Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer: An Adventure in Christmas Litigation. Here is the abstract.
In 1979 a novelty Christmas song titled Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer was released. It recounts the fictional story of how the author’s grandmother, while inebriated, was struck and killed by Santa’s sleigh. Much less known is a follow-up song called Grandpa’s Gonna Sue the Pants Off of Santa. This song walks through the aftermath where grandma’s surviving spouse goes through the litigation process seeking compensation from Santa. The lyrics elicit discussion on numerous pressing legal issues. This Essay is a lighthearted look at what this song can teach us about the law. Though Grandpa’s litigation experience may not have brought him comfort and joy, it did gift us a sleigh full of legal insight. This Christmas season, may all your legal studies be merry and bright!Download the essay from SSRN at the link.
June 18, 2026
Capers on Silencing as Blackening
I. Bennett Capers, Fordham University School of Law, has published Silencing as Blackening at 114 Georgetown Law Journal 813 (2026). Here is the abstract.
We are so accustomed to seeing defendants sit silently at criminal trials while their lawyers speak that we hardly question it. Or we tell ourselves this silence is for their own protection, part of their privilege against self-incrimination and the rules we have created for their own benefit. But what if we've gotten everything wrong? What if encouraging defendants to remain silent does not inure to their benefit at all, but to the State's? And what if this silencing is tied to race? "Silencing as Blackening" tells a fuller story about silent defendants. One, that this silence is rarely voluntary, but instead the result of a host of rules and decisions that encourage, coerce, and even compel silence. Two, although we have come to take defendants sitting silently as normal, in fact this silence is of recent origin. Three, although we claim this silence benefits defendants, the real beneficiary seems to be the State. Four, this silencing of defendants has a racial history, and today has race effects, such that we should recognize that silencing functions as a type of blackening. Rather than silencing defendants, and in effect blackening them, "Silencing as Blackening" argues we should carve out space for defendants to speak freely. And carve out space for us to listen. It argues that listening to defendants can help us rethink our entire criminal system. More ambitiously still, it argues that, just maybe, listening to defendants can help reduce racial and other biases. Can help undo race. And can help us let race go.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Upcoming Webinar: Taxation, Racial Capitalism, and the International Rule of Law: From Colonial Slavery to Global Governance
From Professor Paolo Farah, University of Tulsa School of Law: Upcoming Webinar: Taxation, Racial Capitalism, and the International Rule of Law: From Colonial Slavery to Global Governance
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June 16, 2026
Savage on Slavery and the Myth of Religious Liberty
Audra Savage, Wake Forest University School of Law, has published Slavery and the Myth of Religious Liberty at 51 BYU Law Review 1363. Here is the abstract.
This is a story about two ships. One is semi-mythical. The other is half-forgotten but brutally real. The first ship is the story of early settlers who sailed from Europe to escape religious persecution and—through hard work, perseverance, and righteous rebellion—built a nation upon the fundamental freedom of religious liberty for all. The second ship represents the painful history of America, with its millions of Africans stolen from their homeland, placed in unimaginable conditions, and stripped of their language, heritage, and most significantly, their beliefs. Current religious liberty jurisprudence centers around the historical understanding of the creation and ratification of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which encapsulates the mythology of the first ship. This jurisprudence, however, seemingly ignores the second ship and the Black experience with law and religion in the country’s early history. This reveals a gap in the myth of religious liberty that has influenced the Supreme Court’s adjudication of constitutional claims related to the First Amendment Religion Clauses. This Article provides the missing gap in the Court’s religious liberty story by exploring the historical role played by law and religion in the development of slavery in America. It describes the legal and religious understandings of Africans in early colonial history, including the justification for marking Africans for enslavement. It ends with insight into the countervailing forces of establishing slavery while disestablishing religion at the time the new nation was created. By providing this missing gap in the religious liberty story, the Article ensures that the first ship is less mythical and more real, while also ensuring that the second ship is not forgotten and takes its rightful place in church-state history.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
June 10, 2026
Published at ContractsProf Blog: Guest Post by Sid DeLong on Legal Fictions
Sid DeLong on Legal Fictions: A Guest Post. Published at ContractsProf Blog.
Fernandez-Lopez on Turandot and the Exhaustion of Power: Ritual, Genealogy, Sacrifice, and the Twilight of Civilizations
Edgar A. Fernandez-Lopez has published Turandot and the Exhaustion of Power: Ritual, Genealogy, Sacrifice, and the Twilight of Civilizations.
This article reinterprets Puccini's Turandot not as a fairy tale of feminine cruelty overcome by erotic persistence, but as a twilight drama of exhausted civilizational power. Recovering the libretto's overlooked Tartar genealogy, it argues that Calaf belongs symbolically to the very lineage of the "King of the Tartars" implicated in Turandot's ancestral wound, so that his crossing of the riddle-threshold is recognition rather than conquest. Through textual and musical analysis, and through comparison with Gozzi's Adelma, the study reclaims Liù-not Calaf-as the opera's moral center: a figure of concealed sovereignty whose gratuitous sacrifice, a love detached from possession, dissolves the sacrificial economy sustaining the imperial order. Situating the work alongside Wagnerian twilight, Shakespearean tragedy, and the Girardian theory of sacred violence, the article reads Turandot as a meditation on how civilizations perish spiritually before they perish materially-on how ritual and law outlive the meaning they once served.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Crowe on Pseudolaw, Folk Law, and Natural Law: How to Tell the Difference
Jonathan Crowe, University of Southern Queensland, School of Law and Justice, has published Pseudolaw, Folk Law and Natural Law: How to Tell the Difference. Here is the abstract.
Pseudolaw presents false or distorted, but superficially plausible, claims about legal doctrine. It is a dangerous and costly social phenomenon, with the potential to undermine social cohesion and the rule of law. Pseudolaw is dangerous, in part, because it is easily confused with two other phenomena that play important and legitimate, albeit widely overlooked, roles in legal processes: folk law and natural law. This chapter explicates the concepts of folk law and natural law, including their relationship to positive law and their place in legal decision-making. It distinguishes these concepts from pseudolaw, while also explaining why they tend to be conflated with it. I argue that folk law and natural law, properly understood, are crucial components of social cohesion and the rule of law; pseudolaw is harmful partly because it obscures and distorts the proper task of these notions in supplementing positive legal enactments.Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.
June 8, 2026
Schultz on Acts of Truth: Emotions and the Validation of Legal Knowledge
Thomas Schultz, King's College London, University of Geneva, has published Acts of Truth: Emotions and the Validation of Legal Knowledge. Here is the abstract.
Legal scholarship presents itself as an exercise in reason: the scholar elucidates, weighs the sources, follows the argument, emotions left at the door. This Article argues that the pose is false, and consequentially so. Emotions shape not only the margins of scholarship-the topics we choose, the tone of our debates, the schools we form-but they also reach all the way into what we take to be legally valid and true. Building on Pierre Schlag's account of the aesthetics of law and on work in psychology and the philosophy of mind on the role of emotion in cognition, the Article reframes the validation of juristic truth as the product of two emotionally laden processes: epistemic decision-making, the "acts of truth" by which a proposition is accepted as valid, and epistemic negotiation, the agreements through which a community settles what counts as known. It then identifies emotions likely at work in each-beauty, the fear of death, the fear of exclusion, the needs for recognition and for toil; and, in negotiation, appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role-arguing that they carry ontological weight, helping to constitute law itself as an object of knowledge and argument. Why, then, do scholars so insistently deny them? The answer lies in a "normative alexithymia," a trained inability to read one's own emotions that leaves a community poorly equipped to see the lens through which it apprehends its object. The Article proceeds by suggestion rather than proof, aiming less to demonstrate these emotions than to make their workings visible. Its claim is that emotion has always accompanied reason in the making of legal knowledge-and that recognizing this is itself a condition of thinking well.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
June 4, 2026
Giddens on Typographic Legality: The Source and Transmission of the Common Law (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press)
Forthcoming from Thomas Giddens, Dundee Law School: Typographic Legality: The Source and Transmission of the Common Law (Edinburgh University Press).
From the publisher's website:
The typographic form of judgment stages the authoritative presence of the common law. It is in the encounter with typographic materials that legal meaning is generated, yet typographic legality—the material expression of law as visual text—is rarely examined. In this book, Thomas Giddens refocuses critical attention by studying the history of the common law’s visual technologies and unpacking the heritage, meanings and techniques of its typographic appearance. It thereby develops new methodological approaches for reading the common law’s primary materials as visual media. From the archive as a typographic theatre of jurisdiction, to early law report printing, to the mass duplication of reports and their entanglement in the project of empire, to the common law’s digital display, Typographic Legality encounters enduring questions of legal authority, media and technology in the material details of the common law’s textual form.
Thirty percent discount available with the code NEW30.
Solove on A Century Ago, E. M. Foster's "The Machine Stops" Predicted How AI and Digital Tech Are Hollowing Us Out
From Daniel Solove's Solove on Tech: A Century Ago, E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" Predicted How AI and Digital Tech Are Hollowing Us Out.
Subscription might be required (free).
Indigenous Legal Orders, Legal Pluralism, and the Coloniality of Method Across Comparative Law, International Law, IP, and Trade Governance Webinar Now Online
News from Paolo Davide Farah, University of Tulsa College of Law:
The webinar Indigenous Legal Orders, Legal Pluralism, and the Coloniality of Method Across Comparative Law, International Law, IP, and Trade Governance.
The webinar brought together an outstanding group of scholars to explore how Indigenous legal orders challenge dominant legal epistemologies and invite us to rethink foundational assumptions embedded within international law, comparative law, intellectual property, cultural heritage governance, technology governance, development, and global governance more broadly.I was happy to moderate and contribute to the discussion featuring:
• Professor Chidi Oguamanam (University of Ottawa)
• Professor Elena Baylis (University of Pittsburgh School of Law)
• Professor Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci (Hofstra University School of Law)
• Professor Dana G. Jones (North Carolina Central University School of Law)The conversation addressed a range of interconnected themes, including Indigenous knowledge systems, legal pluralism, cultural heritage and repatriation, intellectual property, governance theory, artificial intelligence, structural bias, epistemic governance, and the future of global governance in an increasingly multipolar world.
Watch the Webinar Recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-DGGXPwRZI
Read the Full Post-Webinar Reflection
Additional Information, Speaker Biographies, and Suggested Readings
I hope these materials will be of interest to those working on Indigenous rights, legal pluralism, international law, comparative law, intellectual property, cultural heritage, governance, artificial intelligence, and related fields.
With best wishes,
Paolo
https://paolofarah.wordpress.com/
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=629289
Princeton University Press Sale--Fifty Percent Off Many Titles
Princeton University Press is having a fifty-percent-off sale through June 9th on most of its books. Many titles of interest, but here are a few.
Tristan G. Brown, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China.
Indira Ghose, A Defence of Pretence: Civility and the Theatre in Early Modern England.
Lynn Hunt: The Invention of Pornography.
Peter Manseau, The Jefferson Bible: A Biography.
June 3, 2026
Mazzone on The Unitary Executive and the Decisions of 1789 and 1861
Jason Mazzone, Univesity of Illinois College of Law, has published The Unitary Executive and the Decisions of 1789 and 1861 at 59 UC Davis Law Review Online 313 (2026). Here is the abstract.
Debates over the constitutional power of the President to remove executive officers are almost as old as the Republic itself. These debates continue today in the academic literature — with a vast body of writing on the constitutional basis (if any) for a presidential removal power, its scope, and the authority (if any) of Congress to regulate the power — and at the Supreme Court, which has decided a series of removal cases in recent years, and which has some removal cases on its current docket. Virtually every discussion (regardless of the conclusion reached) of the power of the President to remove executive officers invokes the so-called Decision of 1789. This Essay does also. But it focuses additionally on another important decision: that of 1861. In that year, the states that had seceded from the Union adopted their own permanent constitution. The Constitution of the Confederate States mimicked and repeated (with modifications) many of the provisions of the federal Constitution. It also included something the federal Constitution had not: a specific provision specifying the scope of the powers of the President to remove executive officers. Unusual though it might seem to turn for guidance to the Confederate Constitution — a charter written and ratified by traitors — the exercise has some payoff. It helps us identify some possible conceptions of presidential removal authority (under the federal Constitution) and to assess the relative merits of alternatives.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Hyland on "It Ends With a Lawsuit": Blake Lively v. Justin Boldoni A Mock Trial: Sexual Harassment and Defamation
William Hyland, Vernis & Bowling Law Firm, has published "It Ends With A Lawsuit": Blake Lively V. Justin Baldoni A Mock Trial: Sexual Harassment And Defamation at 32 University of Denver Sports and Entertainment Law Journal 12 (2026). Here is the abstract.
It Ends With Us, adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel about a couple in love caught in a cycle of domestic abuse, grossed more than $351 million globally upon its release in 2024. However, rumors of a feud between the co-stars took center stage. After the film debuted, Blake Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) against Baldoni and his associates. Lively, among other legal claims, alleged sexual harassment, retaliation, intentional infliction of emotional distress. Baldoni denied all allegations and filed his own defamation suit against Lively. A trial is tentatively set for May 18, 2026, in New York Federal court. This article attempts to analyze what a “mock” trial of the case would look like in Federal court, analyzing the legal allegations on both sides, the burden of proof necessary to prove the various claims, including defamation and sexual harassment, affirmative defenses, the major witnesses to be called, possible opening arguments for both sides, jury instructions, and a potential jury verdict.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
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