2021 Honorary Fellows
The Society was delighted to elect three new Honorary Fellows on November 6, 2021. They are Shaunnagh Dorsett, Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, and Faculty Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington; Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, former Titular Regular Professor of the History of Argentine Law in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and Senior Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina; and James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. Read more about their contributions to the field of legal history in the citations below, which were crafted by our Committee on Honors.
Citation of Professor Shaunnagh Dorsett as an Honorary Fellow
The Society is pleased to welcome Shaunnagh Dorsett, Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, and Faculty Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington as an Honorary Fellow.
Professor Dorsett is a preeminent and influential scholar in the relatively young field of legal history in Australia and New Zealand. Professor Dorsett received a B.A. and LL.B. with Honours from the University of Tasmania in 1990 and an LL.M. from the University of Calgary in 1996. In 2005, she received her Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales for her thesis, “Thinking Jurisdictionally: A Genealogy of Native Title.”
She began her teaching career at Griffith University, where she rose to Senior Lecturer on the Faculty of Law before moving to the Faculty of Law of Victoria University of Wellington in 2004, first as Senior Lecturer, then as Reader-in-Law. Upon joining the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, in 2010, she continued her affiliation with the Faculty of Law at Victoria University as a Faculty Research Fellow.
Across three books, two co-edited volumes of essays, and over forty articles and book chapters, Professor Dorsett has opened areas of study and speculation where no one had gone before, becoming a vital force in the advancement of Australasian legal history. Her work is widely admired and is recognized internationally, and she has made major scholarly contributions to the legal history of 19th-century New Zealand and Australia, the wider legal history of the British Empire, and the jurisprudence of jurisdiction.
She has added enormously to our knowledge of the legal history of settler societies in the British diaspora, with particular reference to the encounter between Indigenous law and European law. Her work is read avidly by those who research settler-indigenous relations around the world, not only for its insights, but also for its method and style.
In her most recent book–Juridical Encounters: Maori and the Colonial Courts 1840-1852, published in 2017–Professor Dorsett combined an authoritative grasp of the jurisprudence of jurisdiction with exceptional empirical research to illuminate the wider process of colonization. The book received awards from the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand and the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society (2018). It also was a finalist for the Ernest Scott Prize, awarded by the University of Melbourne to the book judged the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand,
Professor Dorsett is widely regarded as a brilliant mentor; known for her tireless activity in organizing conferences, workshops, and colloquia, serving on editorial boards and prize committees, and creating and sustaining a worldwide network of scholars. She is a superb communicator who is much in demand as a keynote speaker in the English-speaking world.
As one scholar and current Honorary Fellow fo the Society told us, Professor Dorsett “stands at the very peak of Australasian engagement with legal history.” No one has contributed more in recent years to the field of legal history in Australia and New Zealand. Through her scholarship and her mentorship and encouragement of other scholars, Professor Dorsett is, in the words of another scholar and current Honorary Fellow, truly “a vital force in the advancement of Australasian legal history.”
The scholars we elect as Honorary Fellows are distinguished exemplars who are as committed to building a future for their fields as they are to studying the past, and professor Shaunnagh Dorsett is a worthy addition to that company.
We are pleased and honored to welcome her as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
Citation of Professor Víctor Tau Anzoátegui as an Honorary Fellow
The Society is also pleased to welcome Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, former Titular Regular Professor of the History of Argentine Law in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and Senior Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina as Honorary Fellow. Professor Tau is the pre-eminent legal historian of Latin America. His work revolutionized the field of early modern Spanish American law. He is also known as a generous mentor, not just to his own students but to every young scholar who crosses his path.
Professor Tau graduated from the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires as an Abogado in 1957. He also received a doctorate in Law and Social Sciences from the same faculty in 1963. In addition to his position at the University of Buenos Aires, he has been Professor of the History of Public Law at the Catholic University of Argentina, First Deputy Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho since 1995, and President of Argentina’s Academia Nacional de la Historia (1994-1999). Professor Tau is a member of the national academies of history of Argentina, Spain, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and Colombia, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the University of Oviedo.
Before Professor Tau began his work, the standard narrative was that law in Spanish America was essentially an extension of centralized royal authority in Spain. Colonial law in this view was expressed through royal decrees that defined the derecho indiano–the law of the Indies–as something largely separate from Spanish law itself and independent of social or cultural influences. Professor Tau’s great insight was that colonial law was not a separate domain–that neither in the colonies nor in Spain was there a codified written law, nor could law be reduced to royal orders. Instead, he revealed the pervasiveness of customary law and wrote extensively about the messy character of Spanish American law.
Little by little by little, he dismantled the assumptions of the preceding generations. He directed attention away from royal legislation, insisting instead that there was no one law but many different laws, that there was no coherent theoretical system but one based on specific solutions to specific problems, and that the authorities engaged in the task of making and applying the law were not just Spanish but also Indigenous, African, and local, as well as experts of all kinds and shapes. Professor Tau first articulated this approach in two volumes published in 1992, The law in Hispanic America: From Discovery to Emancipation and Casuismo y Sistema: Historical Inquiry into the Spirit of Derecho Indiano. He was already justly celebrated for major works in Argentine national legal history that combined intellectual history, the history of institutions, political history, and the history of legal culture. He expanded this perspective five years later in a third volume–New Horizons in the Historical Study of the Derecho Indiano–that set the agenda for the entire field.
Besides emphasizing the role of legal history as social and cultural history, Professor Tau identified previously-neglected research areas in the study of derecho indiano–such as histories of lawyers, book history, the importance of moral theology, the role of jurists, the production of local norms, and the long-lasting influence of colonial legal history on nation-states. Beyond his own path-breaking scholarship, Professor Tau has invested deeply in the larger international community of legal historians.
For more than thirty years he has been a leader–and for many years director–of the most important institution dedicated to studying derecho indiano, the Instituto Internacional de Derecho Indiano in Buenos Aires. Under his leadership, the Institute and its journal, Revista de Historia del Derecho, became an important center for research on legal history far beyond Argentina. From his perch at the Institute, Professor Tau–a genuinely warm, open scholar who delights in the company of those who delight in legal history–has inspired generations of scholars in Argentina, Brasil, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere, and connected them with one another as they pursued their research. Indeed, every scholar we consulted commented on how generous Professor Tau had been to them when they were junior scholars or even graduate students who had wandered into the library of his Institute.
The scholars we elect as Honorary Fellows are distinguished not simply by scholarship that has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others, but also by their commitment to building their fields and helping other, younger, scholars stand on their shoulders and carry the work forward. For decades, Professor Tau’s care for the field he transformed and for the people who work in it have shined through everything he does. He is a truly gifted, accomplished, and generous scholar who has revolutionized his field and built an international community while rarely leaving his birthplace, Buenos Aires.
We are pleased and honored to welcome him as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
Citation of Professor James Q. Whitman as an Honorary Fellow
This final announcement is particularly meaningful to me. I’ve learned from many truly remarkable teachers—several of whom are here. But there is only one Jim Whitman.
Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale, Professor Whitman sets a model of scholarly erudition, brilliance, and creativity, as well as respectful, engaged and compassionate mentorship. Professor Whitman is a prolific scholar, having published five monographs and at least fifty articles. These works are extraordinary on multiple levels, including the depth of the learning on which they draw.
Professor Whitman has an incredible command of numerous secondary and primary source literatures, spanning many different time periods and languages. Indeed, his command of foreign languages alone is truly astounding. But what is perhaps most remarkable is that he manages to draw on this erudition in ways that are never narrow and arcane but in service of a highly ambitious research agenda that probes some of the deepest, most enduring questions of social theory, while engaging directly with many of our most profound socio-legal challenges today.
His scholarship thus extends all the way from ancient Rome to the present-day and examines an incredibly diverse range of topics. It has been recognized with numerous scholarly awards, as well as visiting professorships and honorary doctorates from around the globe. His very first book, The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era: Historical Vision and Legal Change, already demonstrates his unique ability to identify the profound interconnections between seemingly technical aspects of law and legal doctrine and our most profound social and political questions. By the end of this tour de force, we understand how it came to seem obvious to so many nineteenth-century German law professors and their followers that it was only through the study of ancient Roman law that it would be possible to develop a modern legal and political system suited to the distinctive “spirit” of the German people.
In Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe and a series of related articles, Professor Whitman develops his signature approach to comparative law, which focuses on divergences rather than convergences and roots these in deeply embedded historical structures. More particularly, he locates the origins of continental European conceptions of dignity in a much older law of honor that was long central to maintaining the continent’s legally enshrined status hierarchies.
Modern dignity law in Europe, he argues, arose as an effort to democratize upward, extending aristocratic treatment to all. In contrast, the United States democratized by levelling downward. The end result was the emergence of radically different approaches to a range of vital legal questions on the two sides of the Atlantic—including, among others, criminal punishment, privacy, and antidiscrimination. In The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial, Professor Whitman brings together an extraordinary array of legal, philosophical and theological texts penned from the middle ages through the eighteenth century, on both sides of the English Channel, in order to reframe our understanding of Anglo-American criminal law’s reasonable doubt standard. Restoring the central role of theology in shaping law and legal systems for centuries, he rejects the commonly held understanding that the standard was intended to protect the criminal defendant from wrongful conviction and argues instead that it was designed to facilitate conviction by assuaging the anxieties of judges and jurors who feared that they would be eternally damned for sentencing someone to death.
Professor Whitman’s book, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War, inquires into the demise of the early-modern pitched battle. Drawing on a vast and difficult literature in multiple languages, he argues that the pitched battle is best understood as a legal procedure for resolving property disputes between competing sovereigns. As such, it facilitated the construction of procedural rules that made it easy to determine which party was the victor, thus enabling adversaries to lay down arms relatively quickly and with limited bloodshed. Troublingly, it was in no small part the rise of the modern republic that undermined this international legal system, giving rise to a previously unnecessary body of humanitarian law focused on minimizing the horrors of war.
Professor Whitman’s most recent book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, examines American laws of race from the perspective of the German jurists responsible for building the Nazi legal system, demonstrating that contemporary U.S. race-based immigration law and anti-miscegenation laws served as a key model for the enactment of the Nuremberg laws.
In a recent conversation, our fellow legal historian Steven Wilf shared with me a wonderful Charlotte Brontë quote with which I was unfamiliar. Writing to her publisher, Brontë praised a recent book she had read, noting that it “seems to give me eyes.” Through his pathbreaking scholarship and teaching, Professor Whitman has given eyes to all of us, profoundly transforming our understanding of the European past and its persistent legacies—and in ways that are sure to endure.
It is a great honor and pleasure to welcome him as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.