Horticultural titles. Seeds, gardens, and English law in seventeenth-century Virginia plantations

“Legal geography” encapsulates a breadth of scholarship. Within legal geography, there is considerable debate as to what the boundaries of law and geography are and should be. Some scholars argue that legal geography is a nascent subdiscipline of human geography. Others argue that more than a discipline, legal geography is an intellectual commitment to a particular kind of multidisciplinary engagement with the law. With such a seemingly divergent set of interests, defining the bounds of legal geography can be challenging. Throughout the literature on legal geography there is a consistent thread: legal geography concerns the co-constitution of law, space, and power. Legal geography is a law-in-society approach, meaning that scholarship in legal geography is concerned with law’s central relationship to social processes; law cannot be understood outside of the spatial and temporal social, political, and economic conditions of its production. In this work, law is defined along three, often overlapping lines: law as process, law as text, and law as practice—each with a focus on law as a mechanism of power in law and (in)justice in society. Existing scholarship has focused on questions of environment; courtroom architecture; human rights; neoliberal globalization; property relations and the right to the city; colonialism and postcolonialism; race, migration, and citizenship; and methodological considerations. It has often centered on the law as a practice of Global North state power. Recent calls by North American legal geographers and existing work by Australian legal geographers has begun to push legal geography into new terrain: spaces outside the Global North. Recent engagement with feminist scholarship has also provided new opportunities to explore the spatially uneven gendered and embodied effects of law. This work, with its international and intersectional approach, provides important direction for the future of legal geography.

Review: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, by HorneGeraldNew York:Monthly Review Press, 2018. $95.00; paper, $25.00. Pp. 356.

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

(2020). The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 66, No. 4, pp. 600-602.

This thesis examines the role of law and legal practices in transformations of urban space in post-socialist Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan. In doing so, the thesis contributes to the ‘interdisciplinary project’ of legal geography and expands on debates examining the relation between law and the city. The thesis aims to fill several lacunae in legal geography and studies on law and the city. First, the thesis responds to a bias in knowledge production within legal geography through its focus on cities in the global North. Examining law and legal processes in Bishkek expands on the meaning of ‘law’ beyond Western liberal formulations by addressing the plurality and overlap of multiple legal spaces. Second, by drawing on legal processes unfolding in the post-socialist city, the over-emphasis on space in legal geography, to the detriment of time, is explored to examine how different time periods and time frames – the transition from ‘socialist’ to ‘post-socialist’ as well as the gradual shift from ‘illegal’ to ‘legal’ – feature in the everyday ‘making’ of the law. An appreciation of time in legal geography, responds to the processes and mobilities of law and space, countering fixed and static interpretations. Third, an emphasis on law and legal processes responds to a gap in urban theory where analyses of the ‘legal’ are often buried within economic and political questions. The thesis aims to show the importance of analysing the ‘legal’ as its own object of study in understanding transformations of urban space. The role of law and legal practices in urban transformations is examined in relation to the case study city of Bishkek. Two connected entry-points are used to explore the relationship between law and urban transformations. The first examines the regulation of rural-urban migration in relation to shifting meanings of property while the second, investigates the legalisation process of a ‘squatter’ settlement on the urban periphery. Meanings and enactments of law and space are therefore investigated through the legal- spatial themes of internal migration, property rights, and illegality. This involves examining the persistence and continuity of legal spaces, despite official changes to legislation, as well as destabilising meanings of ‘illegality’ by examining the agency of both state and non- state actors and material and non-material components in law making processes. The thesis draws on a ‘mixed method’ technique by combining legal doctrinal analysis with ethnography. The thesis therefore relies on two distinct epistemological traditions in formulating a research narrative. Doctrinal analysis responds to a positivist notion of searching for the ‘truth’ internally within the body of law, while the ethnographic methods employed emphasise the partiality of scientific knowledge production. In formulating an understanding of the law and legal processes that relate to the empirical themes of this research, analysis of Kyrgyz and international law were combined with seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bishkek. The ethnographic research was largely based on semi-structured interviews and ‘shadowing’ applicants through various legal and administrative procedures. The thesis argues that studies on legal space require an appreciation of temporality and process. Legal spaces such as the ‘squatter’ settlement on the urban periphery, or the ‘city’ more broadly, are performed and produced over time. An emphasis on temporality demonstrates how processes are sometimes disconnected from official changes in legislation and are, instead, embedded within historical trajectories. From a policy-based perspective, the enactment of legislation is not, on its own, a solution to urban problems. This reductionist perspective of law and urban space bolsters notions that both are detached from historical, economic and political processes rather than recognising their constitutive, produced, and fragmentary nature.

In this article, we discuss the spatiotemporal interlegalities of 22 women living in Iraq, understood as an emerging legal landscape characterised by legal and normative entanglements rather than parallel systems of laws and morals. Iraqi women are situated at the intersections of the coexisting legal spaces and stratifications of various scales and multiple normative orders that have been deeply embedded in Iraqi religious and tribal traditions throughout time. It is at these intersections that experiences of non-freedom and struggles for freedom are intimately felt and possible contradictions among the multiple legal spaces and normative orders encountered. Herein, we assess women’s opportunities to negotiate the boundaries of their spaces, their abilities to govern those spaces, and the constraints they encounter on their routes to freedom. We used a map metaphor to elucidate the women’s processes for finding their way. Women’s freedom in the Iraqi context is complex, indicative of multi-layered processes of negotiation within the legally pluralistic landscape. The concept of interlegalities is a useful tool for conceptualising the multifaceted interconnections in the legal landscape of Iraqi women. The Middle East legal geography has not been widely examined, but the special characteristics of the Iraqi context regarding the interplay among legal spaces and normative orders are essential for contributing to legal geography discussions, as some theoretical premises are unsuitable for application to contexts with pluralist legal systems that lack democratic traditions.

Slavery, Race, and the Contours of Belonging in the Atlantic World Jessica M. Parr (bio) Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics Resistance in the Early Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $39.95. Brooke N. Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xii + 340 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $40.00. Ruma Chopra, Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 336 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina University Press, 2018. 335 pp. Maps, figures, and index. $39.95. When direct English engagement in the transatlantic slave trade opened up in 1689, it ushered in an age where the English became the largest traffickers of Africans. The dissolution of the Royal African Company’s charter was the result of arguments made by merchants that the Company’s monopoly on English trade was a violation of their rights as Englishmen, under the Constitution of 1688.1 English sensibilities about “rights” and “liberties” stood in contestation to “slavery,” and in many cases, the lack of positive and/or negative law concerning the legality of chattel slavery meant that the shapers of empire were left to define the parameters of enslavement. Early English debates about law and slavery frequently entailed addressing potential loopholes over whom could be enslaved and under what circumstances. For instance, was it permissible to hold slaves in Great Britain, or only in its dominions? Was it legal to enslave Africans who had been baptized, or would planters who allowed missionaries onto their plantation be forced to manumit those who converted to Christianity? And what of the children born to enslaved [End Page 211] women? Were there justifications in law and philosophy that made slavery an inheritable condition, and were the children born of enslaved Black women and white enslavers condemned to slavery themselves?2 In an effort to address these legal ambiguities, English economic interests and law frequently went hand-in-hand in shaping imperial policy around the Atlantic slave trade.3 The transatlantic slave trade was a multi-empire system, but even within the British Empire, the legal geography was complex, uneven, and inconstant. Edward Rugemer’s ambitious new work, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, traces the development of slave law in the British Atlantic, with a particular focus on mechanisms of resistance to slavery. Rugemer follows the development of slave law from English’s first “slave society” in Barbados through Jamaica, slavery’s entrenchment in the Carolinas, the complexities of abolitionist politics in Great Britain and the United States, and the “retrenchment” of enslavers in the nineteenth century.4 He illustrates the ways in which economic interests, law, and resistance are interlinked. For instance, in his discussion colonial administrators worked not only to clarify details like the ways that the sale of slaves as property could be used to satisfy planter debts, but administrators’ ability to align their general drive to protect property rights with the laws that were designed to control property (i.e. their slaves). His analysis is corroborated by works like Andrew Fede’s study of the law governing planters’ homicides against slaves. Fede draws the connections between jurisprudence that framed justified killings as, at times a necessary function of protecting their property (including their other slaves).5 British law, as both Rugemer and Fede demonstrate, was different than that in the Portuguese, French, or Spanish empires because the structure of English law meant that colonial policymakers and judges were able to fold aspects of English positive law and common law into “local conditions.”6 Collectively, these works illustrate the different ways that law shifted to make enslaving Africans more economically efficient.7 Birthright citizenship is another contour of slavery and the law that has begun receiving attention recently. Martha Jones’s pathbreaking book, Birthright Citizens (2018) provides an exemplary analysis of...

In the pre-Brexit era, England has established itself as one of the dominant jurisdictions for the resolution of cross-border disputes in the European Union (and the world). The legal regime in relation to private international law (PIL) in England and Wales has been significantly influenced by the EU PIL framework that was adopted at EU level. The United Kingdom decision to leave the EU might have significant implications for the parties’ access to justice in cross-border cases. This paper aims to devise a theoretical framework that is necessary to evaluate the potential impact of the UK’s decision to leave the EU on the private parties’ access to legal remedies. To this end, the author relies on empirical (qualitative) data that was gathered in 2015 and early 2016 in the context of the EU Private International Law: Legal Application in Reality (‘EUPILLAR’) project, indicating how the current EU PIL framework is functioning in England and Wales. An analysis of the way the parties’ strategies are devised under the current EU PIL regime helps in identifying the aspects which need to be considered, in order to set the research agenda and ascertain how the legal landscape in relation to PIL should be revised in the post-Brexit era.

The enigmatic phrase born poses a series of problems for contemporary originalism. New Originalists, like Justice Scalia, focus on the public meaning of the constitutional text, but the notion of a born was likely a of derived from the idea of a born in English law - a category that most likely did not extend to persons, like John McCain, who were born outside sovereign territory. But the constitution speaks of citizens and not subjects, introducing uncertainties and ambiguities that might (or might not) make McCain eligible for the presidency.What was the original public meaning of the enigmatic phrase that establishes the eligibility for the office of President of the United States? There is general agreement on the core of settled meaning: some cases of inclusion and exclusion seem indisputable. As a matter of inclusion, anyone born on American soil with an American parent is clearly a born citizen. As a matter of exclusion, anyone whose citizenship is acquired after birth as a result of naturalization is clearly not a born citizen. But these clear cases of inclusion and exclusion do not exhaust the possibilities. John McCain's citizenship was conferred by statute - perhaps before, but perhaps after his birth. That leaves John McCain in a twilight zone - neither clearly naturalized nor natural born.This Essay explores the contribution of originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation to the controversy over the meaning of the natural born citizenship clause. Part II of the Essay explains the relevance of originalist constitutional theory to the controversy with special reference to the New Originalism - the view of constitutional meaning that emphasizes public meaning of the constitutional text at the time each provision was framed and ratified. Part III argues that that the clause creates a problem for public meaning originalism - the phrase born may not have had a widely shared public meaning in the late eighteenth century; the solution to this problem could be the notion of a term of art, in particular, the idea that the meaning of born derives from the English concept of a born subject. Part IV considers the possibility that the original meaning of the natural born citizen clause is subject to an irreducible ambiguity. Part V concludes with reflections on the exemplary significance of the natural born citizen clause for constitutional theory.

El presente trabajo analiza la semejanza de la regulación legal de las tasas judiciales en los ordenamientos jurídicos español e inglés, con especial referencia al orden jurisdiccional laboral, teniendo como referencia fundamental los pronunciamientos del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos y el Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea. El trabajo constata que enfrentan las mismas críticas desde al menos el siglo XVIII, y que los pronunciamientos jurisdiccionales nacionales son también muy similares. Utilizando argumentos de Derecho comparado, el trabajo concluye con una defensa de las ventajas de extender las tasas judiciales al orden jurisdiccional social.

Constitutional aspects of ecological safety in relation to offshore wind farms in the British and Polish legal systems

Introduction to Special issue

This article argues that boundary contestations between competing colonial powers in seventeenth-century North America need to be understood within a global context. Focusing on Dutch and English colonial and metropolitan writings of the mid-seventeenth century, the article outlines a shift in the way territory was understood by the two competing nations. Colonial powers had originally relied on fixed national traditions to justify their acquisition of colonial territory across the globe; yet, by the mid-seventeenth century colonial powers relied increasingly on an emerging legally codified system to describe territory. By situating Dutch and English colonial and metropolitan writings about intercolonial boundary disputes in North America within the context of both national traditional and emerging international legal systems of territory, the article links seemingly local colonial issues to a global network spanning multiple metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries.

Foreword Preface Introduction: Natives North America and the French Jesuits Montagnais Hunters of the Northern Woodlands Jean de Brebeuf on the Hurons Disease and Medicine Diplomacy and War Writings on the Natural Environment Missions to the Iroquois Martyrs and Mystics Exploring the Mississippi Questions for Consideration A Jesuit Relations Chronology Select Bibliography Index

Town founding in seventeenth-century North America: Jamestown in Virginia