Abstract: The paper is part of a broader research project that explores the rise and development of forensic technologies in the British Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The question at the heart of the research is why did many of the forensic technologies of that period (fingerprinting, ballistics, dog tracking, bone aging) develop in the colonies, mainly by colonial administrators with little or no scientific training, rather than in the laboratories and universities of the imperial metropole? The answer, I argue, lies in forensic science and technology's role in creating the semblance of objectivity and precision, thus legitimizing judicial fact-finding by transplanted colonial legal systems. To satisfy legitimacy deficits, such novel forensic technologies often sacrificed the soundness of the forensic "science" being applied. Rather than developing independently, based on sound scientific principles and experimentation, and only later being adopted by colonial governments, I show that forensic technologies often took the reverse tack, developing to meet colonial governmental necessities (real or perceived). When reintroduced into the imperial metropole as methods of proof, some such technologies met fierce opposition and were rejected by the English legal system. The chapter I will present focuses on Mandate Palestine and is based on parts of my dissertation. It focuses on dog tracking, bone aging and handwriting identification.

Abstract: This is a chapter very near the end of a history about the way the English "made money" over time. That narrative is organized around a radical transformation. For centuries, the English created "commodity money," the silver pennies of the medieval world. The government sold people silver coin at the mint and required them to use that coin to pay taxes. It enforced that coin as the mode of payment between people and endorsed it as the exclusive medium of exchange for many purposes. At the end of the 17th century, the English "reinvented" money. The government established the Bank of England and borrowed long-term from it, taking its loan in the shape of bank notes. That innovation transformed the money supply; within a century, it would be made mostly out of bank notes. The chapter you have explores the debate that the English conducted over how to conceptualize money as they transformed it. Oddly enough, the debate produced an image of money as a fixed amount of metal. That image was alien to the way the medieval penny worked and was incongruous given the trend towards paper money. But the image organized the way people approached money and monetary policy; arguably, it still does.

Abstract: Adjudicating rights and managing risks have been two of the most important responsibilities of government in modem U.S. history. Since 1945, the expansion of rights claims and the multiplication of risk designations have coincided. This project probes that coincidence by considering the case of autism. Today designated as a developmental disability, autism's key characteristic—aloneness—challenges the sociability that grounds secure personhood and civic belonging. Autism therefore illuminates the boundaries of the human as well as the rights of citizens. This research project explores the following themes: autism and the campaign to measure, predict, and control developmental risks; autism as a controversial and increasingly prevalent clinical entity; autism as the basis for advocacy movements; autism and the right to education and early intervention; and neurodiversity and democracy. Autism illustrates how risk itself became a legitimate basis for political mobilization, collective identification, and rights claims.

Abstract: This paper forms part of a current project in which I explore the legal transformation of the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century, an era of emerging modern capitalism. Here, I examine the structure and dynamics of Islamic legal authority in the plantations of Muscat and Zanzibar, two staging grounds for Omani expansion in the Western Indian Ocean. In the midst of a regional commercial boom, plantation owners and merchants began experimenting with contractual forms and practices not previously recognized by Muslim jurists. As the market for their goods expanded, these economic actors manipulated the time horizons of different agrarian contracts, traded shares in different date palms, and engaged in a brisk trade in promissory notes and hypothecated properties. I draw on a cache of land transaction deeds from both ports' hinterlands and a corpus of legal opinions issued by muftis (jurisconsults) responding to questions from planters and merchants. I use these to examine the agents who gave shape to the new contracts and the process by which the contracts were given legal validation. In doing so, I trace out the contours of legal authority within these plantation societies and in the Western Indian Ocean more broadly – a commercial and legal world shaped less by soldiers and sultans than by merchants, planters, scribes, muftis, and jurists.

Abstract: The fundamental tension for American Jews has been one between assimilating into the larger national community and keeping a separate identity. Not rabbis but lawyers produced the most important responses to this tension. A century ago, the first generation of nationally prominent Jewish attorneys fashioned an enduring vocabulary of Jewish membership in and apartness from the national community - and with it, key features of American Jewish identity - out of the materials of constitutional law. The context was the mass immigration of two million "poor Russian Jews" around the turn of the last century. Singled out as "un-American" racial others, these newcomers produced a crisis for the small, established Jewish community. The crisis was practical: How to keep the gates open for these fellow Jews, while safeguarding one's own welcome? It was also existential: What was it to be an American and a Jew? Must Jewishness be recast as a private religious faith and nothing more – publicly invisible, with no distinctive social identity and no group claims on the law or polity; or could Jews publicly remain a "people apart," a distinct "nation" and even a separate "race," while participating fully and equally in American life? This handful of elite attorneys crafted the Jewish community's competing answers, fashioning key terms of American Jewish identity for the next century. In the process, the resources and constraints of U.S. constitutionalism shaped their rival accounts of American Jewishness. Scholars have left this history largely unstudied. Examining it reveals much about law's part in the creation of ethnic and cultural identities and how to study it.

Abstract: Within days of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress passed the Expatriation Act of 1868, declaring the right of expatriation to be "a natural and inherent right of all people" and obligating the government to protect its adopted, as well as its native, citizens when they traveled outside of the United States. Between 1868 and 1872, the United States signed treaties with twelve different countries which acknowledged the right of voluntary expatriation, diplomatic accomplishments that contemporaries described as "revolutionary" and "radical." Yet, in standard histories of the "revolution in civil rights" during Reconstruction – and even in contemporary discussions of immigration policy--, the expatriation act and treaties rarely register as significant aspects of citizenship law. In this book, I highlight the importance of "rules of exit" that governed individuals' ability to emigrate and expatriate in the nineteenth century and analyze why expatriation finally became a protected right during the era of Reconstruction, focusing in particular on the provocative role played by the Fenians, an organization of Irish American nationalists, but also on the contributions of a more staid group of international law reformers. But by the early 20th century, expatriation would more often be thought of as the process of losing rather than choosing citizenship, a shift galvanized by changing notions of allegiance and sovereignty that accompanied the rise of modern nation states.

Abstract: The slave rebellion known as the Turner Rebellion, which occurred in August 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, is well known to American historians. They have told its history by resort to the normal array of archival sources but much of their attention has been focused on one document, a 24 page pamphlet entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner written by a local attorney named Thomas Ruffin Gray, purportedly based on jailhouse conversations with the rebellion's leader awaiting trial. The research on which I am engaged will investigate the whole history of the rebellion and through it the history of antebellum slavery, but I too have chosen to begin with an interrogation of Gray's pamphlet. Thus far I have written three overlapping papers about the Rebellion and The Confessions. The first experiments with intertextual readings of the Confessions, employing Max Weber and Walter Benjamin as alternate "interlocutors." This paper treats Gray as the embodiment of a "disenchanting" positivist rationality that sets itself in opposition to Turner's metaphysical/religious account of his motivation. The second argues that the conflict of revelation with rationality at the heart of the Confessions' dueling accounts of the rebellion allows us a glimpse of the cosmology of capitalism. The third paper deals further with the contrast between the rational "social" account championed by Gray and the revelatory "soterial" (pertaining to salvation) account offered by Turner, and enquires into the origins of Turner's eschatology. A planned fourth paper will switch attention to William Styron's reinvention of Turner in his fictionalized "realistic" autobiography, The Confessions of Nat Turner. For the workshop I will present the fourth paper (entitled "Styron's Confessions") if I manage to finish it in time. If not I will present the third, which is entitled "Debt, Death, and Redemption: Toward a Soterial-Legal History of the Turner Rebellion."