Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross. Cambridge University Press (January 2020). Available via Cambridge and Amazon.

How did Africans become ‘blacks’ in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders’ efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies – Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana – Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom – not slavery – established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

‘At a moment when ‘Send Them Back’ has reemerged as a nativist rallying cry, Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a brilliantly lucid guide to the deep history of how race and ethnic origin came to be potent ciphers for civic belonging. … De la Fuente and Gross show that brutality lay not merely in the imposition of slavery, but in the creation of racial regimes ranking black bodies even once freed from bondage. If enslavement is construed as an external political constraint, the project of freedom becomes focused on unshackling bodies from those confines. But if white means free and black means slave, then political status is embodied, innate and inescapable. … To this day, the legacy of free-but-not-full-citizen delimits quietly powerful hierarchies in our varying capacities to travel, vote, mix socially, run a business, hold public office, and intermarry. This indispensable book shows how knowing the past might aid us to intelligently reform our future.’

Patricia J. Williams – Columnist, The Nation Magazine

‘In this incisive and spell-binding study, Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross meticulously investigate the archives of the ‘legal regimes of slavery and race’ in the culturally disparate locations of Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia, thus exposing the differences and similarities between Spanish, French, and English approaches to manumission and interracial relationships. In addition, the authors brilliantly focus on the bottom up efforts of the enslaved to gain freedom, thus exposing how these ‘unpredictable twists and turns’ established the meaning of blackness in law. Not only an important legal analysis, Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells many fascinating stories of heroic efforts to attain freedom through legal regimes.’

Henry Louis Gates, Jr – Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

‘Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a brilliant study of the making of race in the New World. Deeply researched, insightful, and smoothly written, this book is a major contribution to the scholarly literature on slavery and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, attitudes about people of African descent.’

Annette Gordon-Reed – Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Harvard University, and author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

‘In Cuba of 1860, many persons of color who purchased their freedom lived alongside slaves; while In Louisiana and Virginia free people of color had almost disappeared, and to be black was to be enslaved. The difference was in the law and custom regulating freedom – law made by many hands, including those of slaves themselves. This book, based on meticulous archival research and brilliantly reasoned and written, is comparative legal history at its finest.’

Robert W. Gordon – Stanford University

‘To what can we attribute the distinct racial ideologies that emerged in different slaveholding societies in the Americas? In this rich and innovative comparative study, Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente emphasize the role of the emergence of communities of free persons of African descent, and their evolution over time. Although elites in all three societies sought to attach sharp social distinctions to color, the authors find that ‘the association between blackness and enslavement, whiteness and freedom, remained less strict and precise in Cuba than in Virginia and Louisiana.’ As slavery itself was abolished, these prior differences laid the groundwork for divergent experiences of access to the rights of citizenship. This is a provocative and important book.’

Rebecca J. Scott – Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law, University of Michigan

‘Becoming Free, Becoming Black provides crucial insights into the ways that conceptions of race and power varied across the Americas in the era when slavery was at its most widespread. It is a valuable window on the ways that the system maintained itself, and on the resistance that, although often unsuccessful, showed the persistence of the will to resist under even the most horrendous conditions.’

John Foster Source: Souciant Magazine

This book explores the role of mens rea, broadly defined as a factor in jury assessments of guilt and innocence from the early thirteenth through the fourteenth century – the first two centuries of the English criminal trial jury. Drawing upon evidence from the plea rolls, but also relying heavily upon non-legal textual sources such as popular literature and guides for confessors, Elizabeth Papp Kamali argues that issues of mind were central to jurors’ determinations of whether a particular defendant should be convicted, pardoned, or acquitted outright. Demonstrating that the word ‘felony’ itself connoted a guilty state of mind, she explores the interplay between social conceptions of guilt and innocence and jury behavior. Furthermore, she reveals a medieval understanding of felony that involved, in its paradigmatic form, three essential elements: an act that was reasoned, was willed in a way not constrained by necessity, and was evil or wicked in its essence.

‘Probing the boundaries of popular conceptions of mens rea, Kamali draws on a remarkable array of non-legal sources, from homilies and theological treatises, to poems, ballads, and romance literature. In so doing, Kamali becomes one of the few legal historians to analyze the law with respect to the culture that produced it. The result is an engrossing study of medieval England’s justices and jurors and the cultural pressures that influenced their verdicts.’

Sara M. Butler – King George III Professor in British History, Ohio State University

‘No one who reads Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s study of mens rea in the operation of medieval English justice can come away unimpressed. It is founded on a thorough exploration of the legal sources, but it is profoundly enriched by the author’s brilliant exploitation of literary sources. Taken together, both sorts of texts allow Professor Kamali to uncover more than we have ever known of the mentality of English judges, jurors and, criminals alike. Her book is in every way a tour de force.’

William Chester Jordan – author of From England to France: Felony and Exile in the High Middle Ages

‘Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s compelling analysis of felony trials demonstrates how a masterful engagement in religious and literary sources illuminates and enriches our understanding of the formal legal world in the later medieval period – its actors, its processes, its rules and, particularly, its outcomes. This ground breaking book deserves to be read for a very long time indeed.’

Alice Taylor – King’s College London

‘Kamali’s book is not just a tour de force. It is a scholarly treat, brilliantly marrying legal and literary history. Medievalists with any interest in law should rush to read it.’

James Whitman – Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale University

‘Kamali explores how medieval juries acted on their ‘understanding of culpability situated in the heart and mind’ as they judged defendants accused of homicide and other serious crimes. Her deep archival research in judicial records and examination of literary and religious texts reveal the depth and breadth of the medieval understanding of mens rea, or guilty mind, which undergirded the concept of liability … Recommended.’

L. C. Attreed Source: Choice

‘Using an impressive range of sources – administrative, jurisprudential and literary – she supplies a definitive survey of the means and devices by which juries struggled to dispense justice in criminal cases, over the century after 1215 … promise[s] a bright future, not only for [Kamali] but for the ongoing study of medieval law.’

Nicholas Vincent Source: History

Almost Citizens lays out the tragic story of how the United States denied Puerto Ricans full citizenship following annexation of the island in 1898. As America became an overseas empire, a handful of remarkable Puerto Ricans debated with US legislators, presidents, judges, and others over who was a citizen and what citizenship meant. This struggle caused a fundamental shift in constitution law: away from the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood, and toward doctrines that accommodated racist imperial governance. Erman’s gripping account shows how, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, administrators, lawmakers, and presidents together with judges deployed creativity and ambiguity to transform constitutional meaning for a quarter of a century. The result is a history in which the United States and Latin America, Reconstruction and empire, and law and bureaucracy intertwine.

‘More than a century after the United States announced its rise to world power by vanquishing Spain in the ‘splendid little war’ of 1898 and acquiring distant island possessions, the American colonial experiment in Puerto Rico endures as a test of the promise of American citizenship. Sam Erman reconstructs the first years of this experiment, exploring the understandings and misunderstandings that led Congress to grant citizenship and an elected legislature to the people of Puerto Rico in 1917. His deeply researched narrative sheds new light on how the destinies of the United States and its new colony became intertwined – a process that prefigured the continuing clamor for full and equal United States citizenship for the Puerto Ricans.’

José A. Cabranes – United States Circuit Judge and author of Citizenship and the American Empire

‘Erman’s exploration of debates over the annexation and governance of Puerto Rico tells a powerful and long-overlooked story of constitutional transformation.’

Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus – author of Foreign in a Domestic Sense

‘Erman tells the story of Puerto Rico and the invention of a new constitutional category – ‘unincorporated territories’ – in a compelling narrative that interweaves politics, constitutional controversy, and the lives of Puerto Rican activists.’

John Witt – Yale University, Connecticut

‘Sam Erman’s superb book illuminates the political and constitutional origins of the world’s largest colony, Puerto Rico. His deep research and lively writing provide a ready, and altogether chastening, explanation for the fact that, a full century after the Jones Act awarded citizenship to all Puerto Ricans, all too many mainlanders, including the President, scarcely credit the reality that the island and its beleaguered citizens are truly part of a united American community with equal entitlement to our solicitude.’

Sanford Levinson – author of An Argument Open to All: Reading ‘The Federalist’ in the 21st Century

‘Almost Citizens shows off both [Erman’s] range and his substantial chops as a historian: the book is deeply researched and densely footnoted, but Erman’s writing is also lively and lucid, and he has an eye for catchy stories and compelling characters. Most importantly, he has recovered a crucial history of the struggle over democracy, rights, race, and gender in America, a set of conflicts we have not left behind.’

Andrew Lanham Source: The New Republic

‘This book by a US law professor about the fate of Puerto Rican aspirations to citizenship and then to statehood after the 1898 annexation up until this day, proves revealing … ‘The empire that dared not speak its name’ – as Erman says, with a certain grace – was characterized by ambiguity and inconsistency, sending equivocal signals and resisting the constitutional provisions for equal rights and the calls for statehood. US triumphalism and racism has prevailed at the expense of inclusive, democratic impulses.’

Source: El Nuevo Dia

‘Erman melds meticulous archival research with the acuity of a serious constitutional lawyer in tracing his constitutional history of empire.’

Jedidiah Kroncke Source: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)

‘In the US, citizenship is almost meaningless, and Constitutional protections are even less significant. In 1899, access to the benefits of the US was controlled by those in power rather than guaranteed by American founding documents. Almost Citizens traces the development of legal thought and application in the US transition from post-Civil War recovery to imperial power. … the American civilizing mission was undergirded by Democrats’ racism; Republicans’ hollow commitments to liberty; varying Puerto Rican goals of protection, citizenship, statehood, and independence; and American insecurity in the face of new imperial opponents. This toxic mixture enabled lawmakers to promise and reject citizenship almost simultaneously, while the Supreme Court actively carved a trail of ambiguity, leaving Congress and the executive branch to craft a piecemeal imperial policy. Erman’s detailed analysis of American colonial administration and legal argument makes for a distressing, fascinating read. Recommended.’

J. L. Meriwether Source: Choice

‘… Almost Citizens makes an important contribution to the study of the history of the extension of US citizenship to Puerto Rico and the debates over the development of a new expansionist tradition.’

Charles R. Venator-Santiago Source: Journal of American Ethnic History

In the mid-eighteenth century, author and magistrate Henry Fielding adjudicated cases of theft, assault, and public disorder from his London home on Bow Street. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Fielding’s modest ‘police office’ had expanded to become the most prolific court system in Britain and the cornerstone of criminal and civil justice in the metropolis. Sascha Auerbach examines the fascinating history of this institution through the lens of ‘courtroom culture’ – the combination of formal statute and informal custom that guided everyday practice in the London Police Courts. He offers a new model for understanding the relationship between law, culture, and society in modern Britain and illuminates how the local courtroom became a crucial part of everyday life and thoroughly entangled with popular representations of justice and morality.

‘This lively social history of the London courtroom treats it as a space of encounter between the modern self and the modern state. British law-and-order values were shaped by Victorian ‘courtroom culture’ and the ordinary people – including working-class women – for whom it served as a site of both contest and community.’

Antoinette Burton – University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

‘An authoritative and engaging study of a key institution of the modern British state, whose importance has been largely overlooked. The book takes an admirably expansive view, looking at how the stipendiary courts functioned, how they were portrayed and how they served different constituencies, including those of gender and class.’

Jennifer Davis – Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

‘Victorian police courts were sites of education, disputation, score-settling and problem-solving, where moral prescriptions and life lessons were issued, contested, and avidly chronicled by a growing local press. Sascha Auerbach’s authoritative, deftly written and entertaining account shows how central and significant this little-understood institution was to the lives of the working class of Victorian London.’

John Davis – The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

‘An ambitious study of Victorian and Edwardian crime and criminal law, focused on the least studied, but crucially important, summary ‘police’ courts: their magistrates, their clientele, and their audiences. Triangulating from the perspectives offered by criminal statistics, parliamentary reports, and particularly the popular and elite press, the book seeks to explain the ‘courtroom culture’ of a critical institution that mediated class relations. It shows how newspaper representations of summary justice, driven largely but not entirely by commercial competition, evolved during great changes in Victorian society and London’s municipal government.’

Douglas Hay – Professor Emeritus, Law and History, York University