Congratulations to our 2023 Honorary Fellows!
This year we induct 3 new honorary fellows. Election as an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History is the highest honor the Society can confer. It recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others. Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand. Please join us in congratulating these most distinguished colleagues!
Thomas Duve
The ASLH is delighted to honor Thomas Duve, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, both as an erudite and seemingly indefatigable historian, and as an institution-builder who nurtures the next generation of scholarship on a transnational scale.
Thomas Duve made his mark in the study of canon law and the legal and theological thought of the 16th and 17th century School of Salamanca, Spain, which had traditionally been identified with a comparatively small group of early modern students and professors of theology. Duve and his colleagues have reframed the Salamanca School to see it as a global enterprise, not simply for its far-flung missionary activity, but for the way in which its members responded to and incorporated thought and practice from Asia and the Americas during the long period of colonization and missionization.
Duve has continued to reflect on what he refers to as “systems of normativity” emerging across the Iberian colonial era. He sees those systems not just as extensions of metropolitan conceptions, but as the result of dialogic processes. His goal is thus a “global history of knowledge production” that spans legal history, canon law, and social history, and incorporates the voices of enslaved and indigenous men and women as well as those of Europeans. In many journal articles and edited volumes he has explicated, demonstrated, and expanded up this approach.
His own background is itself transnational. He initially studied law and philosophy in Heidelberg, Buenos Aires, and Munich, and taught legal history for several years at the Faculty of Canon Law at the Catholic University in Buenos Aires, before becoming Professor of Comparative Legal History at the Law School of the Goethe-University in Frankfurt, and Director at the Max-Planck-Institute. Under his influence, the Max Planck has transformed itself across the last decades from an institution focused on Europe into a global intellectual powerhouse that trains and nurtures scholars from different traditions, working on different regions, and heightens the visibility of their scholarship.
Duve’s scholarly research demonstrates the method he advocates. For example, he has shown that the classic European category of miserabiles personae– who could benefit from certain specific ecclesiastical legal protections — had to be “localized” anew in colonial Latin America. The Latin words in treatises could not alone answer the question of who might properly be thought of as occupying that category in a society marked by the presence of a large indigenous population as well as enslaved Africans held as property. In turn, the actions of those indigenous and enslaved persons who might seek such protection necessarily reshaped the norm itself.
Duve emphasizes that transmission is not a matter of the diffusion of norms and codes outward from the European center, but a continuous process in which both theory and practice are necessarily bent by local conditions and expectations. So to understand the processes of localization of law– which may vary from parish to parish as well as region to region — requires consulting all kinds of sources, including those that bounce the impact of localization back to the initial point of departure.
Duve argues that each instance of practice can then shape theory in the next stage. Indigenous ideas, initiatives, and conditions thus shape the very law itself. Books in hand and practice on the ground appear in continuous, albeit highly asymmetrical, dialogue. What a given normative concept can actually do in a new setting, circles back to shape how it is expressed.
This approach has proven to be generative for cross-national research teams, such as a recent project focused on legal pluralism and normativity in the Portuguese empire. Here we see the intersection between Duve’s scholarship and his institutional commitments. The core of his interpretive approach rests on dialogue among far-flung peoples, and embodies a picture of legal history as a global discipline. He has carried this over into the re-shaping of the mandate of the Max Planck Institute, seeking out, identifying, and nurturing scholars from Latin America and Africa as well as the United States and Europe, and expanding his own teaching as a visiting professor in Asia.
Thomas Duve’s peers marvel at his intellectual brilliance, and those he has mentored thoroughly perceive his generosity. We are delighted to recognize and honor his scholarship and his impact on our profession, naming him an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History.
Sarah Barringer Gordon
Sarah Barringer Gordon, the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, is a renowned legal historian, known far and wide for her insights into law and religion in American history. Sally has left a lasting impression on the field through her scholarship, her generosity of spirit, her wise counsel, and her inspired leadership.
Sally’s prize-winning first book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (2002) is, in the view of scholars in the field, “essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the history of the relationship between church and state.” It is “a powerful political and constitutional history,” making contributions in legal-economic, religious, cultural, and western history, and offering strikingly original contributions to what leaders in the field have come to call “the American Studies of American legal history.”
The Mormon Question manages to combine innovative methodological turns with a powerful demonstration that the Mormon encounter “was a central episode not only in the development of the law of church and state but also the history of federalism.”
Sally’s subsequent scholarship has left deep impressions. Her second book, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010), led the way, as one scholar has put it, “in the study of rights claims and constitutional rights discourses in modern American religious life.” Her article “The First Wall of Separation between Church and State” made the case that religious disestablishment was at once a landmark in the arrival of modern liberalism and a tool for the protection of human enslavement. Further articles with extraordinary range, from western massacres to religion, race, and the unexpected uses of corporate law in the early republic, have won distinguished prizes. Such work joins some three dozen articles, essays, book chapters and reviews to constitute a giant contribution to the literature.
For decades, Sally has been an unsurpassed contributor to the life of our field. She served as president of the Society and as co-editor of the Cambridge Press series, Studies in Legal History. She is a director of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and has served as member or chair of countless committees of the Society, including its all-important annual conference Program Committee.
She is widely known as “relentless in her work on behalf of the field.” Colleagues know that Sally “calls colleagues on weekends, emails people in the wee hours, and regularly buttonholes people in hallways, hotel lobbies, and airplanes to advance initiatives for the common good of legal historians. She does so with so much wit and charm that her interlocutors usually agree to help before they have quite understood what is involved.”
In recent years alone, Sally launched the campaign to endow fellowships for the Hurst Sumer Institute, establishing permanent funding for the training of a new generation of scholars in legal history. Along with Ray Solomon, Sally established the Wallace Johnson First Book Program, which assembles workshops and offers early guidance to aspiring book authors.
In her role as editor, Sally has shepherded a generation of ground-breaking and prize-winning books into print. Sally is famous, in the words of one of her distinguished authors, as a “hands on” editor “from start to finish,” acting “as a second set” of eyes and ears and making sure authors see “the forest for the trees.”
And of course Sally is a “famously dynamic and inspiring teacher,” offering up a trademark mishmash of “charisma, style, and fun.” Visitors to her courses may find her sporting a pointy black hat to teach the Salem witch trials. Or they may find her describing with analytic precision the intertwined histories of racial exclusion and religious disestablishment.
In teaching and beyond, Sally has crafted an astonishing legacy in the study of law and history at Penn, making it one of the finest programs in the world. By the rough count of Sally’s colleagues, she has formally advised more than two dozen graduate students and informally mentored countless others. Sally’s mentorship involves, in as one of her closest colleagues puts it, “equal parts blunt criticism and effusive encouragement.” And always love.
At a recent festschrift in Sally’s honor former Society president Laura Kalman announced that “We all stand on Sally’s shoulders.” The Honors Committee agrees wholeheartedly. Professor Sarah Barringer Gordon has touched us with her love and her special genius in ways big and small. It is hard to imagine a better model for the Honorary Fellow role.
Radhika Singha
The Honors Committee is pleased to announce the election of Professor Radhika Singha, recently retired from the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. Professor Singha is a pioneering historian of law in South Asia, the author of innovative and inspiring studies of criminal law and imperial regulation, and a revered advisor to a generation of scholars who have turned South Asian legal history into a dynamic field of research. Her work transcends imperial, national, and regional boundaries, shifts the focus of legal studies away from familiar European and American contexts, and has widened the range of international legal history.
Professor Singha began her studies in history in India and earned an M.A. degree at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). She then studied at Cambridge University, completing her Ph.D. in 1990. She returned to India where she taught at three universities: Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University, and, from 2002 until her retirement in 2021, at JNU. At JNU, India’s leading university for the humanities and social sciences, Professor Singha advised and, it is fair to say, formed a new generation of scholars who have brought the history of South Asia into mainstreams of academic life in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Professor Singha’s exceptional scholarship has been recognized by institutional appointments, invitations, and fellowships in the U.K., the USA, Ireland, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, and Thailand.
Professor Singha’s monograph, Crime and Criminal Justice in Colonial India, published by Oxford University Press in 1998, was based on Singha’s research into the entwined trajectories of colonial, Company, and regional law. This study remains a major reference point on the development of criminal law in India under Company rule and has influenced scholarly work in many fields, well beyond South Asia studies.
Singha’s other master monograph, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-21, also published by Oxford (2019), tells the story of the half-million Indian non-combatant workers who were drafted into the murderous campaigns of the British in World War One and its imperial follow-up. This brilliant, lively, and compelling work explores the regulation of military labor by British and local authorities, as well as the impact of the “coolies’” service on legal possibilities, life, and politics in post-war India. While many have written about or at least paid heed to the Indian soldiers who fought for Britain, no one had thought to recover the history of the half million so-called “non-combatants” who were brought into British service as military “followers.” Yet these were the people who cleaned up the multiple messes of the war, who carried stretchers, prepared food, and were at the beck and call of British officers. The topic itself was new, but so is Singha’s move of the war’s history out from its usual Eurocentric frame and into a global, trans-imperial context.
Singha’s attention to the colonial state’s impact on the lives of laborers, outcasts, and subordinated groups runs through her whole oeuvre, as does her vast knowledge of legal technologies in a colonial context. Her expertise on the British Code of Criminal Procedure underlies her studies of surveillance and policing, enabling her to highlight the discretionary element in codification. She has addressed questions of identification, and pursued the extensive efforts at regulating mobility inside and out of British colonies, as well as the intersection of military law with legal history. Singha never tells a single story: race, religion, gender, and status all matter for the endeavors, reforms, setbacks, cruelty and creativity of imperial rule and its challengers.
The nomination of Radhika Singha elicited an outpouring of admiration for her qualities as a teacher. In her position at JNU, the home of India’s national archives, Singha encouraged and supported the research of scholars who subsequently became professors in the United States, the U.K. and elsewhere in the now much wider world of legal history, of South Asia, and of empire studies.
It would be good if our citation could end on a high note, but we find ourselves in a time when the enormous achievements of Indian scholarship are being undermined by an orchestrated assault on academic freedom and quality. JNU, India’s premier university where Singha inspired so many students, is under attack, including physical violence against students, and prison sentences for both faculty and students. Professor Singha closes the acknowledgments in her recent monograph as follows: “I wish I could find words to express the full measure of my admiration for those students, teachers and staff of JNU who, in the face of sustained intimidation, defend liberal values and keep visible those being abandoned as citizens.” Let us join in recognizing Professor Singha, who has done so much to inspire commitment to these principles, with an honorary fellowship in the American Society for Legal History.