“The true principles of government”: William Henry Harrison and the Whig counter-revolution

Beyond his military exploits on the frontier, William Henry Harrison is best remembered as the president who died a month after taking office. Discussions of his presidency frequently focus on the ephemeral, such as the fatal illness he contracted while delivering his inaugural address – the longest ever – in the bitter cold. The address itself, one of the most unusual state papers in U.S. history, has largely escaped the serious notice of historians, political scientists, and legal scholars. Harrison proposed nothing short of a constitutional revolution that would have reduced the chief executive to a mere figurehead. This paper explores the many peculiarities of Harrison's address, including the Whig theory of the presidency, a radical and overlooked innovation that aimed to fundamentally alter the role of the chief executive in the constitutional order. A close reading of Harrison's inaugural and brief tenure as president also reveals a number of factual errors and interpretative missteps made by leading scholars of the period.     

Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the poetics of figuration in the English revolution

Though English humanists tended to emphasize the continuity between rhetoric and poetics, Thomas Hobbes confronted the tensions between those linguistic arts as they were practised in the early modern period. This essay argues that Hobbes’s reinvestment in rhetorical eloquence was accompanied by a renewed understanding of figurative expression’s uniquely poetic effects. Breaking from royalist writers who often insisted upon the literal truth of monarchical imagery, Hobbes adapted an approach to metaphor honed by parliamentarian polemicists in the English Revolution. In both his literary-critical epistle, the “Answer to Davenant”, and Leviathan, Hobbes used an awareness of language’s poetic dimensions to revise many of the master tropes of early modern discourse, deconstructing the epic invocation to the muse and fundamentally transforming the body politic. In the process, he demonstrated the power of poetic figuration as a philosophical instrument for collective knowledge.     

张之洞与晚清法律教育

晚清国内新式外交和法律人才严重缺乏,张之洞积极倡导与推行近代法律教育,在新式学堂中开设西方法律课程与专业,派遣人员出国学习西方法律,创办与发行报刊介绍西方法律知识。虽然其深厚的儒家文化制约着他不能学习西方法律的民主精神,但其倡导近代法律教育的积极主张与各种实践却促进了晚清法律教育的发展与观念的转变,培养了一批新式外交和法律人才,推动着中国传统法律教育走向近代化。     

The Savage Science: Sigmund Freud,Psychoanalysis, and the History of Religion

This article analyzes how Freud takes issue with the prioritization of the present over and above the historical past. Significantly, Freud's understanding of history is closely related to his interest in Christianity's historical dependence on Jewish antiquity. He emphasizes the common sources of both religions: both are shaped by the experience of guilt. Christianity, however, relegates the historical past to the realm of the “old Adam.” According to Freud, Jewish culture, by contrast, revolves around the commemoration of a “savage” (i.e. pre‐modern) past. This article thus focuses on how Freud combines his analysis of onto‐genesis (in his psychoanalytical case studies) with a discussion of phylogeny. The manifestation of psychic illness gives body to the unconscious remembrance of phylogenetic history. Thanks to religious and literary documents an irrational past has been put down in writing. According to Freud, this characterizes their historical truth value.     

Medical Hermeneutics of Murder. Race,Medicine and Law in a Murder Case from Finnmark, 1911

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the investigation of a murder case in Finnmark in 1911, where four siblings killed their young brother. In the legal investigations following the misdeed, a number of medical experts played a prominent role. Their role was to assess the mental condition of the defendants, but also to make sense of the murder. A specific interpretational mode was called for: a “medical hermeneutics” of the murder. The murder investigation becomes an occasion for discussing medical and juridical interpretations of human agency at the turn of the century, and especially of the role of the concept of “race” in these interpretations. For at least some of the physicians involved, the racial make-up of the ethnic group to which the actors belonged constituted an inevitable part of the context that made the act intelligible. Although the concept of race, and the conceptual frameworks offered by degenerationism and medical psychology to a certain degree made the act intelligible, these interpretational schemes had little to offer in terms of assessing the legal accountability of the defendants. Hence, the case illustrates the profound epistemological limits of medical interpretation in facing a legal case.     

History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness

There has been a widespread recovery of public memory of the events of the Second World War since the end of the 1980s, with war crimes trials, restitution actions, monuments and memorials to the victims of Nazism appearing in many countries. This has inevitably involved historians being called upon to act as expert witnesses in legal actions, yet there has been little discussion of the problems that this poses for them. The French historian Henry Rousso has argued that this confuses memory with history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, judicial investigations unearthed a mass of historical documentation. Historians used this, and further researches, from the 1960s onwards to develop their own ideas and interpretations. But since the early 1990s there has been a judicialization of history, in which historians and their work have been forced into the service of moral and legal forms of judgment which are alien to the historical enterprise and do violence to the subleties and nuances of the historian's search for truth. This reflects Rousso's perhaps rather simplistically scientistic view of the historian's enterprise; yet his arguments are powerful and should be taken seriously by any historian considering involvement in a law case; they also have a wider implication for the moralization of the history of the Second World War, which is now dominated by categories such as "perpetrator,""victim," and "bystander" that are legal rather than historical in origin. The article concludes by suggesting that while historians who testify in war crimes trials should confine themselves to elucidating the historical context, and not become involved in judging whether an individual was guilty or otherwise of a crime, it remains legitimate to offer expert opinion, as the author of the article has done, in a legal action that turns on the research and writing of history itself.     

Credibility in the Court of Chancery: Salesbury v. Bagot, 1671-1677

ABSTRACT

Between 1671 and 1677, William Salesbury of Rhug fought a bitter legal battle in Chancery against his cousin, Dame Jane Bagot, and her family. William contested Jane’s inheritance of the Bachymbyd estate, Denbighshire, which once belonged to their shared paternal grandfather. According to the Chancery records, their grandfather wrongfully disinherited William’s father. The Lord Chancellor judged five out of six points in William’s favour. However, the estate archives demonstrate that William’s father had no lawful claim to Bachymbyd and William built his suit on forgeries and half-truths. In a case where a daughter inherited an estate from a younger son, William manipulated the contemporary social norms of gender and primogeniture. The suit provides a unique opportunity to understand how credibility was constructed in the seventeenth century. This article suggests that credibility depended on social norms and played a larger role in the law, and perhaps wider society, than evidence-based truth.     

I,Claudius. Self‐styling in early medieval debate

Historians often have difficulties understanding contrary figures who deviated from mainstream practices and beliefs. In the case of Claudius of Turin, who because of his iconoclasm has been pictured as a proto‐Protestant, this image of a solitary was partly his own creation. Claudius liked to present himself as a truth‐teller, defending God's honour and the unity of the church against all kinds of evils. This article uses the case of Claudius and the response of Dungal, one of his learned opponents, like him connected to the royal court, to reflect on the role of self‐styling in early medieval debate.     

God,Justice and Society

Abstract

This non-evaluative overview of God, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible summarizes Jonathan Burnside’s introduction to biblical law and his demonstration of its value as a resource for modern legal issues     

Reporting and Interpreting Legal Violence in Asia: The East India Company's Printed Accounts of Torture, 1603–24

This article examines how printed accounts of torture can reveal the ways the law was experienced, interpreted and reported by the East India Company (EIC) during the early decades of the seventeenth century. It will explore how the company came to impose its own interpretation of the law when interacting with local powers and people while simultaneously attempting to adapt to and operate within existing legal systems in early modern Asia. This careful balance—sustaining English law while accepting the restraints of a different legal system—was essential in a region where merchants and other travellers moved through areas criss-crossed with overlapping jurisdictions. Interactions with locals often turned violent, even when under the protection of local states, and the English used legal violence to sustain their position in Asia as much as they were threatened by its use by others. Concepts of how the law operated were far from simple and overlapping legal institutions, customs and ideas resulted in numerous moments of competition as different legal structures were imposed simultaneously. The company was forced to think carefully about these issues when law and violence came together during the most violent aspect of judicial enquiry—torture. To assess how the EIC thought about the law and how this influenced the development of their imperial policies this article will focus on how information regarding the law—in its most extreme application—was reported to an English and European audience through the careful presentation of information regarding events in Asia.

It will focus on two case studies where torture was experienced by English merchants—and where accounts were deemed important enough for reportage and printed distribution. The accounts considered here, reporting the experience of torture in Bantam in 1603 and in Amboyna in 1623, were carefully developed and distributed by the company and intended to effectively present its ideas regarding the law and jurisdiction in the developing world of global commerce and empire. In the first, we see the English factors at Bantam seeking to operate within the parameters of the local rulers but increasingly turning to their own understanding of the law in response to threats. The account of this episode reveals how the company justified the seizure of legal authority through the effective interpretation of both English ideas of proof and their own grasp of international law. The second account covers an opposing scenario, where Dutch merchants seized legal authority over the English in contravention—or so the company claimed—of the law of nature and failing to effectively follow the rules of law regarding proof. Across the two accounts we see how the company struggled to come to terms with the ways it interpreted the law. This is turn defined how it developed policies regarding its role overseas, and the reporting of these legal encounters in England changed the way that other parts of the world and the challenges of international trade were understood.     

社会转型时期两代领导人的法治观的传承超越与立法的现代发展

回顾改革开放以来中国立法的发展,可见国家领导人的法治观念对社会、法律及两者的现代发展起着举足轻重的作用。邓小平的法制思想发展了毛泽东的法制思想,在法律与治国、法律与政党、法律与政策、民族与法制关系上提出了许多真知灼见:江泽民法治观的创新集中体现在中共中央两次用全会文件和国家的根本大法--宪法肯定了"依法治国"的权威地位。近20多年来,中国立法的实践有了长足的进展,在正确思想理论指导下,依法治国成为社会的共识,现代法制体系已基本建立,公民的法制观念已经有了质的进步。     

Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth–Century Pornography in England

This article analyses seventeenth–century pornographic literature and popular ballads to explore alternative representations, and hence interpretations, of female same–sex desire than those presented by either early modern legal, medical and religious discourse in which the image of the tribade predominates, or the homoerotic prose and poetry of female writers. It argues that early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result of either a physical abnormality (clitoral hypertrophy) or the desire to live as a man, and thence to take on his sexual as well as social role.     

The rights of a Florida wife: slavery, U.S. expansion, and married women's property law

Civil law rules were adopted in Florida that granted married women property rights long before legal reforms occurred in northern states. This article analyzes white wives' property and law in Florida between 1820 and 1860. Initially, married women's property rights were inadvertently protected by treaty law and limited to women who married before 1818. Wives' right to own separate property in Florida was subsequently reconfirmed in statute and extended to include later marriages. In contrast, nonwhites generally lost the rights and property they had enjoyed under Spain's civil law in the same period. This contrast reveals that in Florida (and other southern borderlands) it was not concern for women, or simply legal precedent, but the desire to incorporate new territory and expand slavery that influenced the development of marital property law. This challenges previous histories, which have excluded the earlier acts in the Southern borderlands and emphasized those passed in the Northeast beginning in the late 1840s. While those later acts were influenced by the early woman's rights movement and by concern for families reduced to poverty during the rise of market capitalism, this case study indicates that expansion of United States territory and slavery were responsible for the earlier married women's property rights in southern borderland territories such as Florida.     

Eric Voegelin and the Natural Law Tradition

Eric Voegelin’s criticism of Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism places him closer to the natural law tradition than to other legal traditions. This proximity could be interpreted as a defense of the contemporary relevance, or as an attempt to revive the natural law tradition in the twentieth century. However, Voegelin always avoids using the traditional terminology of natural law in his mature works, and expresses a certain ambiguity regarding its contemporary revival. To understand this problem, this article investigates the evolution of Voegelin's understanding of natural law and his criticism of different natural law traditions from Cicero to John Locke, especially his positive evaluation of Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’s interpretations. Furthermore, it seeks to illuminate his position on the contemporary relevance of this topic, as well as to assess some of the recent interpretations that consider Voegelin as a natural law thinker.