Abstract This article reinterprets the constitutional history of Republican China by foregrounding women as active participants in constitution-making and critique. While the Guomindang (KMT) portrayed constitutions as instruments to conclude the Nationalist Revolution, proclaiming gender equality as already achieved and subsuming women’s rights under nationalist and eugenic imperatives, feminist actors engaged constitutional discourse as a strategic arena for political struggle. Drawing on writings, petitions, and debates from the 1930s to the 1940s, the article shows how women transformed reproductive labor, maternal welfare, and birth control into constitutional questions central to the meaning of citizenship. Through birth control clinics, Women’s Constitutional Research Associations, and lobbying for quotas, equal pay, maternity protections, and property rights, feminists treated the constitution not as a fixed text but as an opportunity to reshape institutional design and challenge structures that perpetuated gendered exclusion. Their critiques exposed the biopolitical logics embedded in eugenic policy, marriage regulation, and maternalist ideology, while their proposals articulated a competing vision of constitutionalism that sought to use legal reform as leverage for broader transformation. Situating the Chinese case alongside global examples of bottom-up constitutional engagement, the article argues that women’s activism produced a distinctly gendered form of popular constitutionalism. It highlights both the possibilities and limits of pursuing equality through constitutional reform within an ascendant party-state and underscores the enduring tension between constitutional governance and women’s reproductive autonomy.
In the aftermath of formal independence, two institutions, the East African Court of Appeal (EACA) and the University of Dar es Salaam School of Law, became important international barometers of the potential of post-colonial legal radicalism. Due to the unique power of federal Pan-Africanism in East Africa, the EACA survived the wave of dissolution that claimed similar colonial courts of law. If the EACA represented the formal apotheosis of one version of supranational law, it was the law school at the University of Dar es Salaam, which produced a deeper and wider development of legal thought about the circumstances of law in East Africa. The scholarship produced in Dar es Salaam not only undergirded the legal academies of multiple East African nations but proved globally influential for several left and left-liberal schools of thought. Despite the loose and imperfect coordination of these parallel bodies, the project of East African law shared by the Court and University provides unique insights into the opening for anticolonial or heterodox visions of the law that existed in the opening of twentieth century decolonization and independence. The legal institutions of federal Pan-Africanism usefully illustrate both the unexpected successes and structural limitations on atypical iterations of internationalist Global South legal radicalism.
Despite the burgeoning international literature on the history of sexual violence, the topic of incest has received limited attention from historians. This article examines hitherto restricted archival files on thirty-seven offenders who were convicted of incest in the independent Irish state under the Punishment of Incest Act 1908 and, in doing so, provides a rare glimpse into exploitative sexual practices within Irish families in the decades after independence. The findings show that incest perpetrators were effectively a male preserve and that incest was almost always an abusive relationship that persisted over an extended period of time. The article also reveals that victims were invariably younger than offenders, some incest offenses involved alcohol, violence, and threats, many cases resulted in pregnancy, motherless children appear to have been vulnerable, and most of these crimes were premeditated and non-consensual. The article concludes by capturing the limitations of the 1908 Act in neglecting to cover sexual acts other than vaginal intercourse and embrace a broader range of family relationships.
While much has been written about William Blackstone, the jurist, politician, and legal writer, this article provides a critical new understanding of Blackstone, the husband, friend, and investor. It considers Blackstone's legal and economic actions as well as ideas, analyzing his strategies for managing family wealth and comparing them to the strategies employed by a member of his extended family who was a Jamaican planter. Here, the article contributes to recent scholarship on the global dimensions of English and British legal history. It offers a fuller account of Blackstone's proximity to the colonial plantation economy by investigating how economic change and imperial controversies impacted his personal and professional life. It also exposes Blackstone's conventionally masculine bias by detailing the different ways in which he privileged male interests when making personal investment choices and when coming to judicial decisions about women's property claims. A gendered ideology, which positioned male authority as central to the success of the household, state, and empire, furnished the framework within which Blackstone justified the operation of law and directed his own actions as head of his family. Placing Blackstone's jurisprudence and experience within the contexts of patriarchy and colonialism, the article sheds new light on this influential figure, showing how he embodied the core features of an eighteenth-century family man and shaped modern ideas about male authority, property, and power.
This paper investigates how a Brazilian judge in Barra Mansa, in the State of Rio de Janeiro, adjudicated cases in the early 20th century. It focuses on how Judge Torres made decisions and engaged with legal writings, judicial precedents, and laws. The study seeks to uncover the interrelated lines he drew between the legal framework governing adjudication and the normative rules he applied in concrete cases. Since jury trials were an exception in the Brazilian legal system and none occurred in Barra Mansa during the research period, Torres's rulings played a central role in shaping local concepts of justice. Analyzing judicial decision-making in a specific town and time frame sheds light on the broader dynamics of legal practice in early 20th-century Brazil.
This article considers how married women's legal status under coverture shaped retail credit practices in the twentieth-century United States, as a mass consumer economy began to take shape. It focuses particularly on the law of necessaries, which made husbands liable for the "necessary" purchases of their wives. Rooted in English common law, this doctrine had long facilitated the flow of commerce by enabling married women-who lacked the legal capacity to pledge credit in their own names-to trade on their husbands' credit. Yet at the dawn of the twentieth century, when women's preferences were increasingly determining retailer practices, the law of necessaries provoked new tensions among merchants, wives, and bill-paying husbands. What counted as necessary in an expanding world of goods, and who had the right to decide? Conflict over these questions lay at the heart of numerous lawsuits from the period, including one brought in 1901 by famed Philadelphia retailer Wanamaker & Co. against a New York businessman who refused to settle his wife's charge account. In probing Wanamaker v. Weaver, this article casts light on a key inflection point in the development of modern consumer credit, when American women's growing importance as consumers collided with a legal foundation that diluted their financial autonomy. The conflict generated confusion for credit-granting retailers in the early twentieth century and would ultimately influence their approach to consumer credit in decades to come.
From 1948 until 1967, Israel banned German language films, plays, and vocal music. Largely forgotten today, this article unravels the shifting contours of the ban-the only formal ban ever instituted by Israel on Germany-and unearths its rationales. It does so by focusing on the government agency in charge of formulating and administering the ban, the Film and Theatre Review Board. The article makes four arguments. First, the ban sought to protect the feelings of Holocaust survivors specifically, and Israeli society generally. Traumatized by the Holocaust, Israeli censors wished to remove any reminders of Germany from the public sphere. Second, the fluctuations of the ban tracked diplomatic developments with Germany and the changing sentiments in Israel toward postwar Germany. Third, the ban contributed to a discourse of national dignity and honor, bolstering the argument in favor of an independent Jewish state. Finally, the ban positioned the Board as an entity that claimed to speak for Jews, downplaying demands by Israeli Jews who wanted to consume German culture. As such, the ban should be viewed as an act of nation building and as an important component in the construction of a new Israeli identity, distinct from and independent of the diaspora Jew.
I first interviewed Stanley N. Katz in the fall of 2020. I had returned to teaching after a fellowship year at Princeton University with the Program in Law and Public Affairs. That year was interrupted by the outbreak of COVID-19, which drove me home to Vermont from New Jersey—but not before I had the opportunity to present my research on the New York State-based origins of the constitutional abortion rights ultimately endorsed in Roe v. Wade . Katz confirmed my sense of the importance of the late-1960s and early-1970s New York story, and more general emphasis on the state-level and statutory origins of Roe , by commenting that when he was teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, advocates of expanded abortion access like himself looked to New York as the model for what they might be able to achieve in Illinois. “We never,” he said, “expected the Supreme Court to bail us out.” 1
This article examines the near collapse of the legal fiction of extraterritoriality in nineteenth-century international law. Rather than treating extraterritoriality as a coherent doctrine or a straightforward instrument of imperial domination, it argues that the fiction functioned as a contested and unstable juridical device whose inadequacies exposed deeper tensions within international law. By distinguishing between two strands of critique-restrictive and reconstructive-the article reinterprets nineteenth-century debates as responses to the fiction's conceptual failure rather than as efforts at technical refinement. Restrictive critiques, advanced primarily by Belgian and Italian jurists, rejected the fiction for legitimizing excessive jurisdictional privileges that conflicted with emerging principles of sovereignty, secularism, and constitutional equality in Europe. Reconstructive critiques, by contrast, abandoned the fiction while seeking to preserve immunity and consular jurisdiction by re-grounding them in treaties, capitulations, or functional necessity. This divergence explains why the decline of fiction did not entail the disappearance of privilege but rather its partial re-foundation on narrower, more positivist grounds. Finally, the article demonstrates how these European debates circulated transnationally, furnishing non-Western actors with conceptual resources to contest unequal treaty regimes. Extraterritoriality thus emerges not as a settled imperial doctrine but as a productive failure that illuminates the structural instability of nineteenth-century international law.
