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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Legal history
In the late nineteenth century, progressive reformers recoiled at
the prospect of the justice system punishing children as adults.
Advocating that children's inherent innocence warranted
fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation's
first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amidst an influx of
new African American arrivals to the city during the Great
Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile
justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how blackness
became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential
protections the status of ""child"" could have bestowed, Tera Eva
Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state's
transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice. This
important study expands the narrative of racialized criminalization
in America, revealing that these patterns became embedded in a
justice system originally intended to protect children. In doing
so, Agyepong also complicates our understanding of the nature of
migration and what it meant to be black and living in Chicago in
the early twentieth century.
The history of war is also a history of its justification. The
contributions to this book argue that the justification of war
rarely happens as empty propaganda. While it is directed at
mobilizing support and reducing resistance, it is not purely
instrumental. Rather, the justification of force is part of an
incessant struggle over what is to count as justifiable behaviour
in a given historical constellation of power, interests, and norms.
This way, the justification of specific wars interacts with
international order as a normative frame of reference for dealing
with conflict. The justification of war shapes this order, and is
being shaped by it. As the justification of specific wars entails a
critique of war in general, the use of force in international
relations has always been accompanied by political and scholarly
discourses on its appropriateness. In much of the pertinent
literature the dominating focus is on theoretical or conceptual
debates as a mirror of how international normative orders evolve.
In contrast, the focus of the present volume is on theory and
political practice as sources for the re- and de-construction of
the way in which the justification of war and international order
interact. With contributions from international law, history, and
international relations, and from Western and non-Western
perspectives, this book offers a unique collection of papers
exploring the continuities and changes in war discourses as they
respond to and shape normative orders from early modern times to
the present.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open
Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
It is funded by the University of Leicester. Between 1415, when the
Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the
North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of
Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch,
Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported
millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies
all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies
builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the
first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore
the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in
which political repression and forced labour combined to produce
long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They
investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to
penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict
flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service
and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of
convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and
convict experience and agency.
Although seemingly bizarre and barbaric in modern times, trial
by ordeal-the subjection of the accused to undergo harsh tests such
as walking over hot irons or being bound and cast into water-played
an integral, and often staggeringly effective, role in justice
systems for centuries.
In "Trial by Fire and Water," Robert Bartlett examines the
workings of trial by ordeal from the time of its first appearance
in the barbarian law codes, tracing its use by Christian societies
down to its last days as a test for witchcraft in modern Europe and
America. Bartlett presents a critique of recent theories about the
operation and the decline of the practice, and he attempts to make
sense of the ordeal as a working institution and to explain its
disappearance. Finally, he considers some of the general historical
problems of understanding a society in which religious beliefs were
so fundamental.
Robert Bartlett is Wardlaw Professor of Medieval History at the
University of St. Andrews.
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