This issue begins with Kalyani Ramnath's unlikely story of a Chettiar widow, a Dutch scholar of international law, and a footnote in Madras in the aftermath of World War II. Ramnath traces how an obscure debt case in a Madras civil court ended up in a Dutch legal treatise some twenty years later. Moreover, she argues that cases like this, in which ordinary litigants brought everyday cases during the Japanese occupation of Burma and the Dutch East Indies, as well as postwar reconstruction in Madras, Rangoon, and Batavia, became an archive for international law. She suggests that the interstitial and supplemental materials in subsequent treatises should be studied to discover the lives and stories that they encompass.
We then move to two interdisciplinary forums, the first of which studies “Cultural Expertise and Law in Ancient and Modern History,” which is the primary output of Cultural Expertise in Europe: What is It Useful For?, a project led by Livia Holden and funded by the European Research Council. Participants in the forum convened a workshop at Oxford University in July 2018. As Holden explains in her introduction, the goal of the forum is “to scrutinize whether the emergent concept of cultural expertise can diachronically account for in-court and out-of-court resolutions of conflicts in the history of law, and on the other hand to synchronically trace the historical developments of contemporary trends of cultural expertise.” Holden offers her own extended analysis before James Jaffe's study of the Indian Panchayat in mid-nineteenth-century Bombay, Soudabeh Marin's survey of cultural expertise in Iran, Jerome Bourgon's study of cultural expertise in Qing law, and Stanislaw Burdziej's examination of cultural expertise in Polish administrative courts. The forum concludes with Lawrence Rosen's reflections on the role of cultural expertise in the social sciences.
Our second forum, “Regulating Age of Consent in the British Empire,” grew out of a conference at SOAS in June 2018, “Comparative Perspectives on Regulating Age of Consent and Child-Marriage in the British Empire, 1880 to 1930,” which was funded by the Society of Legal Scholars and the Economic History Society and organized by Laura Lammasniemi and Kanika Sharma. The forum begins with Antoinette Burton's commentary on the “new intersectional histories” of the problem of age of consent in the British Empire. It is followed by articles by Kanika Sharma on consent laws in nineteenth-century India, Tanika Sarkar on the Indian Child Marriage Restraint Act, Nafisa Sheik Essop on the age of consent in colonial Natal, Elizabeth Thornberry on the Criminlaw Law Amendment Act in late nineteenth-century Cape of Good Hope, and Lammasniemi on Criminal Law Amendment in nineteenth-century England. Ishita Pande's commentary brings the forum to a close.
The Docket, our digital imprint, continues to publish features, book reviews, and other content at lawandhistoryreview.org. Contributors to the forum on age of consent laws plan to continue their conversation in The Docket in the near future. Readers interested in contributing to The Docket will find contact information on the web site.
Readers can keep track of the latest goings on at Law and History Review through our twitter account @history_law. The American Society for Legal History's redesigned web site can be accessed at https://aslh.net, for all the Society's latest announcements and news. The Society now also has a twitter account, the aptly named @ASLHtweets.
