Forgotten Hills: Law, Environment, and Social Transformations on the Frontiers of Tibet and China
Wesley B. Chaney, Cambridge University Press (Forthcoming September 2026)
Forgotten Hills is a book about lost geographies. It is about how the subordination of mountainous Tibet to lowland China meant the erasure of the hills between, and how the legal, environmental, and social transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hardened boundaries between Tibetan, Chinese, and Muslim peoples, obscuring the histories and practices that had bound hill folk together for generations. Wesley B. Chaney tells the story of this transformation by exploring small communities on the ferociously complex “mid-slope”—the hills along the northeastern edges of the Tibetan Plateau. Drawing from legal cases, genealogies, and Tibetan-language histories, Forgotten Hills illustrates how disputes over traditional landholding regimes erupted into violent conflict over resources and ethnic and religious identity. The ethno-politics that define modern China, this book reveals, arose from the legal disputes and everyday politics of the now forgotten hills. (Purchase here.)
Legal Theory in the Colonies: Hindu and Jewish Scholars under British Rule
Assaf Likhovski, Cambridge University Press (Forthcoming August 2026)
In colonial India and Mandatory Palestine, early-twentieth-century legal scholars made important contributions to the study of the nature of law, particularly by analyzing Hindu and Jewish law – their ancient religious systems. This book reconstructs the lives and ideas of these scholars, revealing a forgotten global wave of jurisprudential innovation that appeared across many territories in the non-Western world. The book challenges the view that non-Western legal scholars working in the colonies were passive recipients of Western ideas. It argues that Indian and Jewish thinkers used Western historical and sociological approaches to law to reimagine Hindu and Jewish law, and to assert their relevance to modern legal and constitutional debates. Though historical in scope, the story this book tells is also relevant to contemporary tensions between Western liberal law and non-Western religious legal traditions. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core. (Purchase here.)
The Judgment of the Provinces: The Roman Empire and the Origins of Law and Society
Ari Z. Bryen, Cambridge University Press (March 2026)
Roman law is justly famous, but what was its relationship to governing an empire? In this book, Ari Z. Bryen argues that law, as the learned practice that we know today, emerged from the challenge of governing a diverse and fractious set of imperial subjects. Through analysis of these subjects’ political and legal ideologies, Bryen reveals how law became the central topic of political contest in the Roman Empire. Law offered a means of testing legitimacy and evaluating government, as well as a language for asking fundamental political questions. But these political claims did not go unchallenged. Elites resisted them, and jurists, in collaboration with emperors, reimagined law as a system that excluded the voices of the governed. The result was to separate, for the first time, ‘law’ from ‘society’ more broadly, and to define law as a primarily literate and learned practice, rather than the stuff of everyday life. (Purchase here.)
Reluctant Abolitionists: Britain and the End of the Colonial Death Penalty
James M. Campbell, Cambridge University Press (February 2026)
Britain abolished the death penalty for murder in 1965, but many of Britain’s last colonies retained capital murder laws until the 1990s. In this book, James M. Campbell presents the first history of the death sentences imposed under British colonial rule in the late twentieth century; the decision-making processes that determined if condemned prisoners lived or died; and the diverse paths to death penalty abolition across the empire. Based on a rich archive of recently released government records, as well as legislative debates, court papers, newspapers and autobiographies, Reluctant Abolitionists examines connections between the death penalty, British politics, decolonisation and the rise of international abolitionist movements. Through analysis of murder trials, clemency appeals, executions and legal reforms across more than 30 British colonies, it reveals the limits of British opposition to the death penalty and the enduring connections between capital punishment and empire. (Purchase here.)
Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700
Sonia Tycko, Cambridge University Press (February 2026)
Consent has been celebrated as a guarantor of liberty and self-determination; however, its history suggests a different meaning. In this book, Sonia Tycko reconstructs the coercive role of contracts in early modern English labor. The long-term, long-distance, and high-risk nature of pauper apprenticeships, transatlantic indentured servitude, military conscription, and prisoner of war labor drove some English people to develop consent into a tool of labor coercion. Coercion could constitute valid consent for people whose social position, age, and gender fit the profile of natural laborers. Many subordinates experienced consenting – or the presumption of their consent – as a form of acceptance of, or even submission to, their position. This book reveals that early modern labor was one of the fields in which ideas of freedom of contract, voluntariness, and enticement developed. (Purchase here.)
Court, Credit, and Capital: Amsterdam’s Insolvency Legislation in the Dutch Golden Age
Maurits den Hollander, Cambridge University Press (November 2025)
Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth, the expansion of overseas trade, and a high level of religious tolerance sparked great institutional, socioeconomic and legal changes, a period generally known as ‘the Dutch Golden Age.’ In this book, Maurits den Hollander discusses how insolvency legislation contributed to the rise of a modern commercial order in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. He analyzes the procedure and principles behind Amsterdam’s specialized insolvency court (the Desolate Boedelskamer, 1643) from a theoretical perspective as well as through the eyes of citizens whose businesses failed. The Amsterdam authorities created a regulatory environment which solved insolvency more leniently, and thus economically more efficiently, than in previous times or places. Moving beyond the traditional view of insolvency as a moral failure and the debtor as a criminal, the Amsterdam court recognized that business failure was often beyond the insolvent’s personal control, and helped restore trust and credit among creditors and debtors. (Purchase here.)
Transborder Fugitives, Extradition, and Political Crimes in Modern China
Jenny Huangfu Day, Cambridge University Press (November 2025)
Uncovering a series of landmark but often overlooked extradition cases between China and foreign powers from the 1860s to the 1920s, this study challenges the prevailing conception that political crimes in China were solely a domestic phenomenon. Extradition and extraterritoriality played an important role in shaping laws and regulations related to political crimes in modern China. China’s inability to secure reciprocal extradition treaties was historically rooted in the legacy of extraterritoriality and semi-colonialism. Jenny Huangfu Day illustrates how the fugitive rendition clauses in the Opium War treaties evolved into informal extradition procedures and describes how the practice of fugitive rendition changed from the late Qing to Republican China. Readers will gain an understanding of the interaction between international law, diplomacy, and municipal laws in the jurisdiction of political crimes in modern China, allowing Chinese legal history to be brought into conversation with transnational legal scholarship. (Purchase here.)
Extradition & Empire: Sovereignty and Subjecthood in Hong Kong
Ivan Lee, Cambridge University Press (September 2025)
In the first book-length study of the imperial history of extradition in Hong Kong, Ivan Lee shows how British judges, lawyers, and officials navigated the nature of extradition, debated its legalities, and distinguished it over time from other modalities of criminal jurisdiction – including deportation, rendition, and trial and punishment under territorial and extraterritorial laws. These complex debates were rooted in the contested legal status of Chinese subjects under the Opium War treaties of 1842–43. They also intersected wider shifts and tensions in British ideas of territorial sovereignty, criminal justice and procedure, and the legal rights and liabilities of British subjects and alien persons in British territory. By the 1870s, a new area of imperial law emerged as Britain incorporated a frontier colony into an increasingly territorial and legally homogenous empire. This important perspective revises our understanding of the legal origins of colonial Hong Kong and British imperialism in China. (Purchase here.)
The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789–1825
Kevin Arlyck, Cambridge University Press (August 2025)
The Nation at Sea tells a new story about the federal judiciary, and about the early United States itself. Most accounts of the nation’s transformation from infant republic to world power ignore the courts. Their importance, if any, was limited to domestic politics. But the truth is that, in the critical decades following the Constitution’s ratification, federal judges decided thousands of maritime cases that profoundly shaped the United States’ relations with foreign nations. Judges ruled on the legality of naval captures made by European powers, regulated the conduct of American merchants, and tried pirates and slave traders who sought profit amid the turmoil of transatlantic war. Kevin Arlyck’s vivid reconstruction of this forgotten history reveals how, over time, the federal courts helped realize an increasingly bold conception of American sovereignty, one that vindicated the Declaration of Independence’s claim to the United States’ place “among the powers of the earth.” (Click to Purchase)
Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America
Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a ‘moral contagion’ of abolitionism and black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves. Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement. The sailors, their captains, abolitionists, and British diplomatic agents protested this treatment. They wrote letters, published tracts, cajoled elected officials, pleaded with Southern officials, and litigated in state and federal courts. By deploying a progressive and sweeping notion of national citizenship – one that guaranteed a number of rights against state regulation – they exposed the ambiguity and potential power of national citizenship as a legal category. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized the robust understanding of citizenship championed by antebellum free people of color, by people afflicted with ‘moral contagion.’
Murder in the Shenandoah: Making Law Sovereign in Revolutionary Virginia
On July 4, 1791, the fifteenth anniversary of American Independence, John Crane, a descendant of prominent Virginian families, killed his neighbor’s harvest worker. Murder in the Shenandoah traces the story of this early murder case as it entangled powerful Virginians and addressed the question that everyone in the state was heatedly debating: what would it mean to have equality before the law – and a world where ‘law is king’? By retelling the story of the case, called Commonwealth v. Crane, through the eyes of its witnesses, families, fighters, victims, judges, and juries, Jessica K. Lowe reveals how revolutionary debates about justice gripped the new nation, transforming ideas about law, punishment, and popular government.
Endorsements:
Advance praise: “In Murder in the Shenandoah, Jessica K. Lowe deftly investigates a deadly brawl to illuminate the legal culture of the new nation’s most influential state, shortly after the American Revolution. Filled with plot twists, surprising revelations, colorful characters, and rich insights, this book will reward anyone interested in the roots of American criminal law.” –Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804
Advance praise: “Elegantly written and copiously sourced, Jessica K. Lowe’s book is a must-read for specialists and students alike. Lowe upends the accepted notion that southerners went outside the law to resolve conflicts because of the culture of honor that was inextricably embedded in slavery. She uses criminal law to open a window into social change in postrevolutionary Virginia and to set the stage for antebellum-era conflicts in imaginative and unexpected ways.” –Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation
Advance praise: “Jessica K. Lowe’s beautifully crafted account of murder and justice powerfully illuminates the reconstruction of criminal law in the early American republic. Lowe skillfully turns the story of a single Virginia killing into a compelling meditation on how people, high and low, struggled over the meaning of equality and the rule of law in the aftermath of revolution. A formidable piece of scholarship, Murder in the Shenandoah is also a gem of historical narration and analysis, at once tough-minded and humane.” –Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
Advance praise: “Professor Lowe has produced a volume that is both a murder mystery and a mini-treatise on the history of criminal law in colonial Virginia. Hard-nosed legal history has seldom been presented in such fascinating, readable form. Behind the legal story is an equally important story of social change in early Virginia. Lowe knows her Virginia law, and applies to it the questions of a modern historical sensibility. Readers will be surprised and intrigued by this admirable volume.” –Stanley Katz, Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies
Advance praise: “In Jessica K. Lowe’s poetic telling of a murder trial in the Shenandoah Valley on Independence Day in 1791, we see how issues of class, violence, and the rule of law came together to lead to the execution of a Virginia patrician. Lowe’s beautifully written book shows the law in motion. Wage workers, slaves, jurors, and the legal and planter elite all cross her stage as the values of democracy made a new American law.” –Alfred L. Brophy, author of University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Thought in Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War
Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis
This book focuses on the post-Civil War treason prosecution of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which was seen as a test case on the major question that animated the Civil War: the constitutionality of secession. The case never went to trial because it threatened to undercut the meaning and significance of Union victory. Cynthia Nicoletti describes the interactions of the lawyers who worked on both sides of the Davis case – who saw its potential to disrupt the verdict of the battlefield against secession. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Americans engaged in a wide-ranging debate over the legitimacy and effectiveness of war as a method of legal adjudication. Instead of risking the ‘wrong’ outcome in the highly volatile Davis case, the Supreme Court took the opportunity to pronounce secession unconstitutional in Texas v. White (1869).
Endorsements:
“The genius of Nicoletti’s work is that the Davis case provides a window into the persistent belief in American minds (even in the North) that secession was possible. That belief made the trial and execution of Davis that much more problematic than scholars have seen. Nicoletti backs up these claims with unsurpassed knowledge of legal proceedings and impressive research.”
–William Blair, Director of Richard Civil War Era Center and Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Professor, Penn State University, and author of With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era
“Cynthia Nicoletti tackles a hugely important topic: the post-Civil War resolution of the legal status of the Confederacy. The prosecution of Jefferson Davis squarely posed the question whether the Confederacy had become a separate country by seceding. If it had, southerners insisted there could be no treason. If it had not, many of the war powers asserted by the North would be called into question. Nicoletti brilliantly tracks the efforts of jurists and politicians to work through momentous questions about the American constitutional order.”
–John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School, Connecticut, and author of Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History
“Nicoletti’s beautifully written book studies a crucially important trial that never happened. She situates Davis’s treason case in the wider context of public discussions about how to treat officials of the former Confederacy and what to do about secession. Law, as Nicoletti argues, was not separate from other aspects of life in this period; it was deeply implicated within them and, thus, inseparable from them.”
–Laura Edwards, Peabody Family Professor of History, Duke University, North Carolina and author of A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights
Reviews:
George Rutherglen reviewed Secession on Trial in December 2017 for the Virginia Law Review (v. 103, pp 72-93). You can read the review online here.
D. Schultz reviewedSecession on Trial for Choice Reviews v. 55 no. 7 (March 2018).
Henry Cohen reviewed the book in the May 2018 The Federal Lawyer.
Peter Charles Hoffer reviewed the book in the Spring 2018 Civil War Book Review.
Al Trophy reviewed the book for The Journal of the Civil War Era in September 2018.
Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution
The advent of the principle of popular sovereignty during the French Revolution inspired an unintended but momentous change in international law. Edward James Kolla explains that between 1789 and 1799, the idea that peoples ought to determine their fates in international affairs, just as they were taking power domestically in France, inspired a series of new and interconnected claims to territory. Drawing on case studies from Avignon, Belgium, the Rhineland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy, Kolla traces how French revolutionary diplomats and leaders gradually applied principles derived from new domestic political philosophy and law to the international stage. Instead of obtaining land via dynastic inheritance or conquest in war, the will of the people would now determine the title and status of territory. However, the principle of popular sovereignty also opened up new justifications for aggressive conquest, and this history foreshadowed some of the most controversial questions in international relations today.
Endorsements:
“When the right of peoples to self-determination creates an international law immediately to the advantage of the French Revolution and ultimately for our present world, a brilliant paradoxical book explaining how French Revolution was a key experiment for our modernity.”
-Jean-Clément Martin, Université Paris 1 Sorbonne
“Kolla’s bold and thought-provoking study transforms our view of the French Revolution’s importance for international law. Kolla persuasively argues for positive advances, rooted in the doctrine of popularity sovereignty, and for an indirect “ripple” effect which provided an important foundation for the decisive nineteenth-century advance in international law.”
-Professor Hamish Scott, Oxford University
“Kolla makes a major contribution towards the development of modern international law. By combining political narratives with legal analysis he sheds new light on the impact of revolutionary ideas, in particular with relation to popular sovereignty, on international relations and their legal organization.”
-Randall C. H. Lessafer, Tilburg Law School
“In this brilliant and thoughtful study of international law during the French Revolution, Kolla presents a fascinating history of the principle of national self-determination, as it developed over a century before Woodrow Wilson brought this idea to Versailles. Kolla’s book will be of great interest to historians of modern Europe, political theorists, and legal scholars.”
-Dan Edelstein, Stanford University
Reviews:
Joshua Meeks reviewed Kolla’s book for H-Net in February 2018.
Richard Harding reviewed Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution in H-France Review v. 18 (May 2018) no. 116.
Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel
This book describes how a social-norms model of taxation rose and fell in British-ruled Palestine and the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Such a model, in which non-legal means were used to foster compliance, appeared in the tax system created by the Jewish community in 1940s Palestine and was later adopted by the new Israeli state in the 1950s. It gradually disappeared in subsequent decades as law and its agents, lawyers and accountants, came to play a larger role in the process of taxation. By describing the historical interplay between formal and informal tools for creating compliance, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel sheds new light on our understanding of the relationship between law and other methods of social control, and reveals the complex links between taxation and citizenship.
Endorsements:
“Likhovski has written a fascinating account of the development of taxation in a region that has long struggled with shifting rulers and divided populations. This book is more than just the definitive history of taxation in Israel. It is a case study on the cultural and sociological underpinnings of tax law itself.”
–Steve Bank, University of California, Los Angeles
“This brilliant book tells the story of how tax law in Mandatory Palestine was transformed from an intimate institution relying on the voluntary cooperation of taxpayers to a formal system enforced by lawyers. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the nature of law and in how to make a legal system that necessarily depends on voluntary cooperation achieve its goals.”
— Reuven Avi-Yonah, Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law, University of Michigan
“Once more, Assaf Likhovski has demonstrated his keen understanding of law and its social function in Ottoman and mandatory Palestine as well as the state of Israel. This volume solidifies Assaf Likhovski’s position as one of the most formidable and important scholars of the legal history of Israel.”
— Michael Stanislawski, Columbia University, New York
“Assaf Likhovksi has written an absolutely fascinating book. His exploration of the rise and fall of what he aptly calls the ‘intimate fiscal state’ uses taxation to provide a prism on the history of late Ottoman and British-ruled Palestine, as well Israel. Everyone interested in the relationship between law and society, the history of taxation, the subject of tax avoidance, and the history of Israel will want to read this brilliant work.”
–Laura Kalman, University of California, Santa Barbara
