What Is in a Name?: “Our French Law”

Abstract

Sarah Hanley, professor of history and law, University of Iowa, studies legal his tory in early modern France . Her books and articles on constitutional history include Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton University Press, 1983; French ed., Aubier, 1991) and Les Femmes dans I'histoire: loi sal ique (Indigo, 1994). She has written many articles on French law and litigation, and three of them, Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern French Historical Studies (1989; French trans., Politix: Revue des Sciences Sociales du Politique Sorbonne (1995); Sites of Political Practice in France: Lawsuits, Civil and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500-1800, American Historical Review (1997), and The Jurisprudence of the Arrets: Marital Union Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550-1650, Law and History Review (2003), have won prizes across disciplinary lines from the Society for French Historical Studies (Koren Prize 1990), the American Political Science Association (Mary Parker Follett Award 1998), and the American Society for Legal History (William Surrency Prize 2004). She recently published The Family, the State, and the Law in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France: Political Ideology of Male Right versus an Early Theory of Natural Rights, Journal of Modern History (2006), and in a fifth edition, her opening chapter, La Loi Salique, appears in Nouvelle Encyclopedic Politique et Historique des Femmes (Les Belles Lettres, 2010; 1st and 2nd French ed., Presses Universitaires de France 1997; English ed., Routledge, 2003; Spanish ed., Akal, 2010). Currently she is at work on two books, one on constitutional issues, King's One Body: From the Fraudulent Salic Law to the Political Theory of Male Right in France, 1400-1700, the other treating law and litigation, Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Law, Litigation, and Local Knowledge, 1500-1800.