Last month in Boston, I attended the African Legal History Symposium, a one-day event at the start of the American Society for Legal History‘s annual meeting. The symposium was organized by  Erin Braatz (Suffolk University), Trina Leah Hogg (Oregon State University), Elizabeth Thornberry (Johns Hopkins University), and Charlotte Walker-Said (John Jay College of Criminal Justice). It was the first of its kind for the ASLH. Many of us non-Africanists came along, eager to learn more about Africa’s rich and diverse legal histories and to find connections with our own work. In my case, this got me ..read more

Last month, I posted this passage from A.J.C. Mistry’s law firm memoirs on the early history of women in the legal profession in British India. This month, I’m sharing a list of life writing titles (memoirs, autobiographies, farewell speeches) by women in law in South Asia. This means lawyers, judges, scholars, and legal scholactivists. Thanks to everyone on Twitter who contributed, including: @angryoungmanno1, @itihaasnaama, @kalramnath, @mssanjanam, @MihirCN, @smukherjee, and @vikramhegde. The original thread is here. These titles are in English unless otherwise indicated. Please e-mail if y ..read more

Mithan Lam (Tata), Autumn LeavesOne of my favorite chroniclers of the history of the legal profession in India is A. J. C. Mistry. Mistry was an unusual author of legal memoirs. He was not a lawyer or judge recounting favorite courtroom quips, but a “managing clerk” who ran the office at the law firm Wadia Ghandy and Co. in Bombay during the early 20th century. He was obsessed with detailed facts (dates, names, typewriter brands, etc.) and put them all together in three published memoirs–two of the firm and one of the Bombay High Court. I’ve written this short article about him, and my website ..read more

Today–August 15, 2019–marks the 72nd anniversary of the independence and partition of India and Pakistan. Thousands of survivors’ stories are preserved in the remarkable 1947 Archive and elsewhere. I want to share one more. This time, the survivor was a law journal.  The Criminal Law Journal of India was based in Lahore, a powerhouse of legal publishing in late colonial India. Its editors, writers, and staff were a cosmopolitan group, including Hindu and Muslim lawyers. During the chaos of partition, the journal’s management moved its headquarters from Lahore, then in Pakistan, to Nagpur, in i ..read more

I’m working on early 20th-century forensic experts in India, and have come across two odd research publications. In both cases, the physician-expert experienced an extreme and terrible mass event–one that sickened or killed many people. In both cases, the expert made it out alive. And in both cases, he figured that he might as well get a publication out of the experience! There are plenty of examples in the history of science of experimenters testing things out on themselves or their children. But the cases I found were accidental experiments on the self, not deliberate ones. These were opport ..read more

As I work on my history of forensics book project, I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate detective fiction written during my period of study (India, mid-19th century to the mid-20th). This has gotten me interested in how historians use fiction as a type of primary source. I’ve been asking around. Here is the long list of references that people have shared with me: Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2003): uses the fiction (and life-writing) of writers like Attia Hosain to write about the hist ..read more

Are you coming to the Law and Society Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month? If so, please join us for the Joint Annual Collaborative Research Network (CRN) Lunch for CRN 15: British Colonial Legalities & CRN 22: South Asia When: Saturday, June 1, 2019 @ 12.45pm-2.15pm Where: Article One – American Grill restaurant in the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill (LSA conference hotel), 400 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C., USA, 20001 Ph. +1 (202) 737-1234 Logistics: No need to RSVP. Attendees will be asked to cover their own lunch bills. We will be in a p ..read more

What links Mormonism and India? The Church of Latter Day Saints has a presence in India Sati by T. Rowlandson (1815, Wellcome Collection) today. And like other historians, scholars of South Asian history avail themselves of the genealogical riches of Mormon archives in Utah like the Family History Library. (Conversion into the faith can cover previous generations through baptism by proxy.) There’s also a lesser-known jurisprudential connection. Between the 1870s and the 1940s, judges in India, England and the US linked India and Mormonism conceptually. Sometimes, the connection was calm and pr ..read more