Bromby on An Annotated Chronology of Hansard References to "Colonial Prisoners' Removal" in the Westminster Parliament from 1869 Onwards @m_bro

Michael Bromby, Cayman Islands Law School; Glasgow Caledonian University, has published An Annotated Chronology of Hansard References to “Colonial Prisoners Removal” in the Westminster Parliament from 1869 onwards. Here is the abstract.

This paper presents an annotated chronology of all references to "colonial prisoners removal" in the UK Parliament’s Hansard reports. This site does not cover the period 2004-2006, or written answers from April 2010 onwards. Aside from the legislative drafting stages of the 1869 and 1884 Acts, there are very few references to colonial prisoners and their removal under the Acts in either House over a period spanning more than a century. The main focus of debates on the floor of both Houses were in relation to prisoner removals from Bahrain to St Helena in 1956. The Written Answers provide more detail on other removals, most notably some general statistics for the years 1967 and 1987.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (2011) @JuliaLaite

Here ICYMI:  More from Julia Laite, Reader in Modern History, University of London:

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Between 1885 and 1960, laws and policies designed to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. This book examines how laws translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex experienced criminalization, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the modern metropolis.

 

ICYMI: Laite on Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth Century London @JuliaLaite

ICYMI: Julia A. Laite, Taking Nellie Johnson's Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth Century London, 65 History Workshop Journal 96 (Spring 2008).

Mohr on Leo Kohn and the Law of the British Empire @UCDLawSchool

Thomas Mohr, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, has published Leo Kohn and the Law of the British Empire as UCD Working Papers in Law, Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12/2019. Here is the abstract.

Leo Kohn’s 1932 publication, The Constitution of the Irish Free State, is widely recognised as the leading textbook on the Irish 1922 constitution. Many aspects of this constitution have been reproduced or have influenced the provisions of the current Irish constitution of 1937. This ensures that Kohn’s book continues to be cited in major Irish court cases and scholarly works on law and history. Yet the 1922 constitution also contained a large number of provisions that were not reproduced in the 1937 constitution. These provisions concerned important aspects of British Imperial law and reflected the demands of the 1921 Treaty that created a special constitutional link between the Irish Free State and Canada and a secondary link to the other Dominions of the British Commonwealth and Empire. Kohn’s analysis of these provisions constitutes one of the most radical and politicised aspects of his book. While this article focuses on Kohn’s book and other legal works produced by him it does not purport to serve as a definitive biography of the man himself. Instead, this article challenges the accuracy of Kohn’s analyses relating to points of British Imperial law. In some instances, Kohn’s analyses were accurate in the context of 1932 when his book was published, but attempts to backdate these conclusions to the time of the birth of the Irish Free State constitution in 1922 are open to serious challenge. Despite these realities, Kohn’s conclusion that aspects of British Imperial law were nothing more than “archaic symbols” whose “meaningless for Ireland was writ large on every page” have had a profound impact on Irish law and historiography. This article also argues that Kohn’s attempts to minimise the significance of these aspects of British Imperial law may also have been influenced by his long-term ambition to draft a constitution for a Jewish State within the British Mandate of Palestine.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bonfield on Britain's Brief Encounter With Forced Heirship @NYLawSchool

Lloyd Bonfield, New York Law School, has published Farewell Downton Abbey, Adieu Primogeniture and Entail: Britain's Brief Encounter with Forced Heirship. Here is the abstract.

This article observes a little-noted proposal (the Landed Property of Intestates Bill) introduced into the British Parliament in 1836. It considers the debate upon it that ensued, and the accompanying pamphlet literature. The Bill proposed to alter the inheritance custom of primogeniture that directed the pattern of descent of freehold land in the absence of directions by settlement or will, and the dialogue is used as a lens to view the nexus between inheritance customs and broader political, economic and social concerns. The intensity of the dispute over primogeniture suggests that more was at stake than simply the devolution of land. The controversy in the Commons over the proposed legislation encompassed a discussion on the variety of purposes that succession law should serve. Lurking in the background in the debate over the proposed bill was a more abstract conundrum: should succession laws primarily be crafted to serve political ends, the constitution; or was it more appropriate to calibrate them to foster desirable social, economic or familial goals? In short, the debate put into sharp focus the question of what interests drive inheritance law, and how attempts can be made to modify it, if and when such concerns alter over time. The bill failed, and it would be for another century for Parliament to abolish primogeniture.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Fox on the Anglo-Scots Monetary Union of 1707 @UoELawSchool ‏

David Fox, School of Law, University of Edinburgh, has published The Anglo-Scots Monetary Union of 1707 as Edinburgh School of Law Research Paper No. 2018/24. Here is the abstract.

This article analyses the 1707 monetary union between England and Scotland, seen from a legal historical perspective. The task requires a contextual interpretation of Article XVI of the Treaty of Union but, more especially, a fine analysis of the accounting and administrative documents that implemented the union as a numismatic process. Only when these are understood do the questions of private law emerge from the interstices. The article adds to the emerging literature on the economic history of monetary integration. One theme in the literature is the inter-relationship between political and monetary union. Political union drives monetary union but states that seek to preserve their political autonomy may accept some measure of monetary integration between themselves to facilitate trade relations. Strange as it may now seem, the monetary union of 1707 seemed relatively uncontentious in Scotland at the time. The reason may be that it was incidental to the bigger and more difficult question of political union between the two kingdoms. Unlike the formation of the euro-area nearly 300 years later it did not involve the cession of monetary sovereignty by states that, notionally at least, remained politically sovereign. The main effect of the union was simply to rebase the monetary standard of the currency in Scotland with the currency in England. That had been the goal of the Scottish monetary authorities since 1604, after the regnal union established by James VI/I. In one sense, the union simply restored the long-established status quo.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Women's Legal Landmarks: Celebrating 100 Years of Women and the Law in the UK and Ireland: Forthcoming From Hart Publishing @hartpublishing

Forthcoming from Hart Publishing: Women's Legal Landmarks: Celebrating 100 Years of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland (Erika Rackley and Rosemary Auchmuty, eds., Hart Publishing, 2018). Here is a description of the book's contents.

Women's Legal Landmarks commemorates the centenary of women's admission in 1919 to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland by identifying key legal landmarks in women's legal history. Over 90 authors write on landmarks that represent a significant achievement or marked an important stage or turning point in women's engagement with law and law reform. The landmarks embrace a wide range of topics, including the right to vote, equal pay, forced marriage, sexual violence, abortion and the ordination of women bishops, as well as the life stories of women who were the first to undertake key legal roles and positions. The collection was produced using an established feminist practice whereby each contribution was presented in collaborative workshops to ensure shared knowledge and insights into both the legal area and the historical context. Women's Legal Landmarks offers a scholarly intervention into the recovery of women's lost history, employing the methodology of feminist legal history to provide accounts which are accurate as to both law and historical context and which, taken together, demonstrate women's agency and activism in the achievement of law reform and justice.

 

Tugendhat on Slavery and Comparative Law in Eighteenth Century England @LawLeicester

Michael Tugendhat, Leicester Law School, has published Slavery and Comparative Law in Eighteenth Century England as University of Leicester School of Law Research Paper No. 17-08. Here is the abstract.

This paper addresses the contemporary criticism to the European Court of Human Rights in the UK by underscoring how the English law on human rights has been positively influenced by the laws of other European countries, in the same fashion as English law has traditionally influenced such foreign laws. The means for this analysis is a case-study on the introduction of the French law on slavery and the subsequent implementation of such principles in England. Slavery had been abolished in France since the early 1300s. Moorish slaves brought to France were being freed from at least 1571, as was recorded by Jean Bodin in 1576. In England, slavery had practically disappeared at the sunset of the Middle Ages. It resurfaced in the French and American colonies in the New World in the 1600s. In the period 1730-1790 French courts, citing Bodin, freed over 200 slaves brought to France from the colonies. In Somerset v Stewart, 1772, English courts finally held that slavery was not recognised by English law, which led to the termination of slavery in England once and for all; and it was the influence of French courts’ decisions on the bestowal of freedom to foreign slaves that led to the reasoning of the English Court.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Baker on Musings and Silences of Chief Justice William Osgood: Digest Marginalia About the Reception of Imperial Law

Blaine Baker, Mc Gill University, is publishing Musings and Silences of Chief Justice William Osgoode: Digest Marginalia about the Reception of Imperial Law in volume 54 of the Osgood Hall Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

This essay focuses on musings and silences in the margins of Canadian Chief Justice William Osgoode's late-eighteenth-century law library, to understand the role he assigned to Westminster-based imperial law in the transmission of 'British justice' to the colonies. It concludes that role was limited, mostly by Osgoode's greater commitment of time and energy to legislative and executive branches of government than to the judiciary, and by his sometimes cavalier impatience with English courts and legal commentators.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Mohr @ucddublin on The Irish Question and the Evolution of British Imperial Law, 1916-1922

Thomas Mohr, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, has published The Irish Question and the Evolution of British Imperial Law, 1916-1922 as UCD Working Papers in Law, Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12. Here is the abstract.

By the early twentieth century Dominion status seemed ideally suited as the answer to the perennial ‘Irish question’. It offered Ireland a generous measure of autonomy while maintaining the territorial integrity of the British Empire. Nevertheless, the prospect of granting Dominion status to Ireland remained little more than a fantasy on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War. This reality was altered by two parallel historical developments. The first of these was the 1916 Easter rising that killed any possibility of an effective home rule settlement for the entire island of Ireland. The second was a rapid acceleration in the evolution of the self-governing Dominions of the Empire towards greater autonomy in the constitutional sphere. In the aftermath of the First World War these two developments came together in the signing of the 1921 Treaty that permitted the Irish Free State to emerge with the status of a self-governing Dominion, the same constitutional status held by Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. This article will examine the legal and constitutional developments that took place between 1914 and 1922 that removed the possibility of an ‘Irish Dominion’ from the realms of fantasy and allowed it to play a vital role in the emergence of the self-governing Irish state. It also examines the important role of Hessel Duncan Hall’s book The British Commonwealth of Nations (1920) in influencing this process.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Mohr on Ireland and the British Empire, 1916-1937: A Relationship Reflected in Law Journals

Thomas Mohr, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, has published Ireland and the British Empire, 1916-1937: A Relationship Reflected in Law Journals as UCD Working Papers in Law, Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Research Paper No. 04/16. Here is the abstract.

The purpose of this article is to assess the value of law journals as sources for the analysis of modern Irish history. It examines how two periods of obvious political transition in Irish history are reflected in law journals. The article covers the period between 1916 and 1922, which saw the secession most of the island of Ireland from the United Kingdom, and the period between 1922 and 1937, which saw the gradual secession of the Irish Free State from the British Empire. It examines how military conflict, partition and the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty influenced the content, nature, and editorial policies followed by Irish law journals. Important non-Irish law journals, in particular the Canadian Bar Review and the Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, are also examined in the context of the constitutional relationship between the Irish Free State and Dominion status. These examples are used to support the conclusion that law journals remain important sources in charting and evaluating political transitions in early twentieth century Ireland.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Free Trade Doctrine In Printed Matter: The 1878 Royal Commission on Copyright

Barbara Lauriat, King's College London, The Dickson Poon School of Law, is publishing Free Trade in Books — The 1878 Royal Commission on Copyright in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA (2014). Here is the abstract.

The doctrine of free trade dominated Victorian policy discussions for decades — including those about copyright law. But the application of free trade doctrine to copyright policy discussions was not at all straightforward. Professed free trade supporters disagreed profoundly on the question of copyright. Some saw it as an illegitimate restriction on trade, while others viewed it as a mode of enforcing a natural property right. Why did the application of free doctrine to copyright policy result in such widely divergent positions on the proper scope and purpose of copyright law? This article attempts to answer that question, focusing on the 1878 Royal Commission on Copyright as illustrative of the extent to which free trade doctrine failed to guide copyright policy consistently. The complex relationship between free trade and copyright is a powerful example of the extent to which political ideologies are not predictive of individual views on the optimal scope of copyright protection.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.