This essay is a critical appraisal of William Novak's New Democracy, published in March 2022. A sequel to The People's Welfare, published in 1996, New Democracy continues Novak's revisionist account of American state building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, the book draws attention to the years between the American Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression as the formative period of the American administrative-regulatory state, assailing a historiography that has credited the epoch of the New Deal as the definitive creative moment of the modern American state. Assessing New Democracy's evidence and arguments, the essay finds that Novak's book makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of state advocacy, but fails to offer definitive empirical measures for its central claim that the New Deal origin of the modern American state is a myth. Examining the philosophy of history that lies beneath New Democracy's arguments, the essay holds that Novak's claim that history is irreversibly linear markedly constricts the interpretive possibilities open to him and to those who may follow his lead.

The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.

Abstract In this Coda to the symposium on my book In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, I address the relationship in the book between law, history, and theory. Writing history informed by theory has always been important to me, for historical research is at least as much an engagement in interpretation as an exercise in description.

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last forty years has begun to ebb, socio-legal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This paper asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and older materialisms – both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist – that held sway prior to post-structuralism? What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in current legal studies? To attempt answers, the paper turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard – once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin – once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements – earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The paper argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross’s interesting collection Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America seeks to advance the history of European Atlantic empires by subjecting the legalities of colonizing to comparative assessment, specifically how encounters between Indigenous peoples and Iberian and Anglophone intruders were refracted by their idiosyncratic legal cultures. Comparison, say the editors, promises broadened conceptual purchase for historians of encounter wishing to interrogate the extent and limits of cross-cultural comprehension. Comparison will open up “new vistas on issues of jurisdiction, sovereignty, legal inclusion and exclusion, the quality and role of intermediation in structuring legal encounters and producing legal outcomes, and the intellectual foundation of justice as a guiding idea for legal engagement” (22). Eight individual essays furnish the empirical meat: analyses of dialogic speech acts (Tamar Herzog, Craig Yirush), conceptual hybridity (Jenny Pulsipher), jurisdictional competition (Karen Graubart, Nancy Gallman...

This chapter argues that Virginia was not the “calm and peaceful” world prior to Turner's Rebellion as Gray claimed. Turner's rebellion, in fact, took place amidst regional black restlessness at the prospect of seemingly endless enslavement, and regional white discord over the relationship between land, labor, and political representation. In the rebellion's aftermath, that white discord became a more profound rupture in the politics of slavery itself, driving a bitterly divided House of Delegates to entertain the possibility of gradual emancipation. From that rupture there emerged a new political and economic equilibrium, centered not on propertied hierarchy but on property's commoditization, notably, commodified labor.

In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. This book penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution. Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner's notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. This book provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. The book also undertakes a critical examination of William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots. A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, the book is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.

With the ebb of the last half century's linguistic/cultural turn, socio-legal and legal-humanist scholarship has begun to return to materiality. This article addresses the "new materialisms" and "vibrant matter" of recent years, and asks how they might be embodied in a philosophy of law that can address the forms, notably "spatial justice," that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies. To attempt answers, the article turns to two figures from the middle decades of the twentieth century: Gaston Bachelard - once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin - once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued a trajectory of inquiry that braided two putatively distinct elements: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of classical antiquity's four physical elements - earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to "arousing [the world] from its dream of itself." The article argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law with the humanities, new materialism can be reminded that it has a potent history from which a poetics can be fashioned for the material forms in which law appears to us today.

This chapter explores the guilt of the “fragile sovereigns” who were threatened by Turner's actions and how he had highlighted the problems of slavery. It shows how these vulnerable, fragile sovereigns against whom Turner was rebelling were also guilty sovereigns. Slaves could not be emancipated unless the emancipists were removed from Virginia. But the cost of removing them was too great, and nobody knew what to do. Turner's brusque intervention in white Virginia's affairs caused a panic that only heightened public anxiety. Thus the chapter reveals a tyrannical regime that does not change, that resists the politics of change, that ends up decrying the messages of politics altogether and embracing political economy to explain and justify its stasis.

This essay canvasses how far meanings of “regime change” can be stretched beyond their current invocation as anodyne neologistic cover for the illegality of a “coup d’état.” Some years ago the anthropologist John Borneman made one attempt to extend the compass of regime change beyond simple realist “topplings” of governments one disfavors to responsibility for legal reconstruction of the target regime because he wished to argue that idealistic interventions against tyrannical rule should always be legitimate. This essay asks whether the term can be stretched in a different direction, to encompass instances of intervention against tyrannical rule beyond the sphere of interstate relations where it is currently lodged. To test the proposition I turn here to a particular event—the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in 1831—and to recent work in political theory that dwells on the politics of counter-sovereignty. Here regime change encompasses a rebellion of slaves against a tyrannical slaveholding regime, a failed attempt to deploy a revolutionary politics of counter-sovereignty against the regime’s pretensions to legality. Here tyranny remains the target of regime change. But rather than the solvent of tyrannical rule, law in this case is the instrument of its expression.

From Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Styron and Sharon Ewell Foster, from Kyle Baker to Nate Parker and others, American popular culture has found Nat Turner endlessly fascinating. The fascination of course extends to historians. Particularly in recent years, scholars have dug deeply into the local history of what came to be called "The Turner Rebellion." The result is a greatly enriched archive. Still, much of what is known of the event itself and of its eponymous leader-and hence the manner in which both event and leader are portrayed-remains dependent on Thomas Ruffin Gray's famous pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner. Naturally one must ask whether a hastily written twenty-page pamphlet rushed into print by an opportunistic white lawyer, down on his luck and hoping to cash in on Turner's notoriety, actually deserves to be treated as empirically reliable access to the mentalités of those engaged in executing an "insurrectory movement." Should the pamphlet survive that test, a second question immediately surfaces: precisely what is it that the pamphlet evidences, and how? This essay seeks an answer through consideration of a number of recent literary analyses of the genre of Gray's pamphlet and through application of the concept of genre to Turner's own words.

Law & Society ReviewVolume 53, Issue 2 p. 611-613 Book Review Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence. By Stewart Motha. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Jennifer Balint, Jennifer BalintSearch for more papers by this authorChristopher Tomlins, Christopher Tomlins ctomlins@law.berkeley.edu Berkeley Law, University of CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author Jennifer Balint, Jennifer BalintSearch for more papers by this authorChristopher Tomlins, Christopher Tomlins ctomlins@law.berkeley.edu Berkeley Law, University of CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 15 April 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12404Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume53, Issue2June 2019Pages 611-613 RelatedInformation