The Faculty Lounge

Justice

Karen Tani at the Legal History Blog has drawn attention to Allan Beever's new book, Forgotten Justice: The Forms of Justice in the History of Legal and Political Theory (OUP, 2013). The argument fron the publisher:

    Throughout much of the history of political philosophy, many of the great philosophers begin their work with an investigation of private law. Why is this? And why is the central focus of our modern concern, the state, examined so late in their works? This book suggests an answer to these and related questions. It reveals that there are two general ways of thinking about the legal and the political: the modern which sees all through the lens of the state, and the traditional which begins with individuals and with the normative relations that exist between them building only slowly towards the community and the state.

    In the modern view, private law is understood as a method for achieving certain social goals. As such, it can be overlooked by political philosophy. For the traditional view, on the other hand, private law is of central philosophical importance, because it is there that we observe a society's enunciation of its most fundamental political and legal values. Arguing that an understanding of the traditional view is essential to an understanding of private law and political life, this book highlights how the modern conception is seriously distorting in this regard.

    A story unfolds throughout the chapters: the story of the growth and decline of the traditional view in political and legal thought. It challenges the modern fixation with the state, arguing for a return to the traditional view of legal and political community.

Strictly speaking of the historical argument- that sounds rather pursuasvie to me. We have a very difficult time thinking about the relationship between political philosophy and public law (or "public philosophy") on the one hand and private law on the other. The most striking example of this difficulty that comes to mind, at least for me, is the concept of equity. We have strong, broad historical and theoretical treatments of the subject (think of Peter Hoffer's Law's Concience, David Lieberman's The Province of Legislation Determined (a personal favorite of mine), or the work of Drucilla Cornell, or along those lines Derrida's famous essay in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. That being said, the relationship between the concept of equity and the jurisdiction of equity is understudied. Good places to look right now, I have found, are in law and literature- Daniela Carpi's own work and edited volumes, including The Concept of Equity and Practiging Equity, Addressing Law, and Bradin Cormack's A Power to do Justice, and in legal history- Ian Williams of University College, London on the practical creation of maxims in late medieval and early modern legal theory.

Chancery courts at all levels of various constitional orders were controversial in the early modern British Atlantic world precisely because they were local sites for configuring jurisdictional and judical power (think of the political situation behind the Zenger case, or Jefferson's pet project of instituting a High Court of Chancery in Virginia, to say nothing of his equity commonplace book). Chancery, in other words, was shot through with larger, open-ended questions at play in English, British, and British American constitutionalism about who judges and where (and for whom and for where) they get to do it. Contests over conciliar courts (from the Star Chamber on down) were fundamental fights about sovereignty itself. 

Now in terms of political theory, one of the many reasons I remain skeptical of the perpetually asserted importance of Carl Schmitt is that his notions of the state of excpetion and political theology would not have struck anyone in the early modern world thinking about equity as particularly insightful or original. It has long been understood that there is a point at which positive if not all of customary law breaks down, loses coherence, or becomes suspended, and a good deal of the history of legal and political thought has been concerned to identify just what that point is and when or where it should be or simply is reached, and what should happen when it is reached. Are we standing then in the presence of natural law, a transcendent justice, and how do human institutions, or human beings themselves, acknowledge that point and deliver that justice without becoming, or at least appearing to become, either the object or instrument of sheer force of sovereign will? These are questions broached by More and Hobbes among others in their days and in our own age of "governmentality" and the security state these questions are hardly irrelevant. But, so the argument might go, we ask and answer such questions not only in political philosophy or high constitutional (or unconstitutional) politics, but in our relationships with one another, in everyday practices and in private law. Bonnie Honig of the American Bar Foundation makes something of a similar point in her book, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy.

One could speak here of a need for ordinary legal philosophy. 

Anyway, I will discuss Jefferson's place in all this in another post before signing off. Beever's book sounds quite interesting, and it seems to be part of a trend to refocus legal scholarship on big questions that involve the long history of thought- it is worth noting that scholars are getting over our ingrained (and I would want to say in many cases still justified) concerns about metanarratives.

 

 

 

Caleb Smith's The Oracle and The Curse

I recently had the pleasure of reading Yale English Professor Caleb Smith's The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War.  It's about the conflict between oracles (judges) and cursers (people on the outside of "the system" -- like antislavery advocates, especially people like Nat Turner and John Brown).  Thus this is an interpretation of American literature as it relates to the clash of visions of law and justice in the years leading into Civil War.  Cribbing now from Harvard University Press' website:

Condemned to hang after his raid on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown prophesied that the crimes of a slave-holding land would be purged away only with blood. A study of omens, maledictions, and inspired invocations, The Oracle and the Curse examines how utterances such as Brown’s shaped American literature between the Revolution and the Civil War.

In nineteenth-century criminal trials, judges played the role of law’s living oracles, but offenders were also given an opportunity to address the public. When the accused began to turn the tables on their judges, they did so not through rational arguments but by calling down a divine retribution. Widely circulated in newspapers and pamphlets, these curses appeared to channel an otherworldly power, condemning an unjust legal system and summoning readers to the side of righteousness.

Exploring the modes of address that communicated the authority of law and the dictates of conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion, Caleb Smith offers a new poetics of justice which assesses the nonrational influence that these printed confessions, trial reports, and martyr narratives exerted on their first audiences. Smith shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.

I have some more thoughts on The Oracle and the Curse in the spring 2013 issue of the Civil War Book Review.  I note that Caleb Smith’s The Oracle and The Law speaks to huge issues, such how pre-Civil War American law gained and maintained legitimacy? How authority shifted from legal and religious elites to popular sovereignty from Revolution through Civil War? And how our country reconciled the higher law arguments of abolitionists with the principles of law and constitutionalism that so widely supported property rights in enslaved humans? It speaks to timeless questions of obedience to law, even as the law is unjust. And our nation continues to struggle with them, as our citizens turn sometimes to the streets and occasionally even to violence, as they challenge everything from environmental development to our wars abroad.  The rest of my review is available here.

Legal Theory and Legal History: To Think What We Are Doing

 

 

“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

 

- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958)

 

I want to start off my time here at the lounge by sharing some thoughts on the relationship between theoretical reflection, jurisprudence, and legal history. I want to do that because I just got back from a conference where this relationship was the topic of much discussion(Legal Theory and Legal History: A Neglected Dialogue? Queen Mary, University of London, April 12-13, 2013), and one particular entry into these discussions and others like them struck me as warranting further exploration.

 

And that is the work of Christopher Tomlins, with whom I had the pleasure of an all too brief (at least for me) conversation about his reading of Walter Benjamin, and in particular, his effort to imagine and practice a materialist (and because materialist a post-critical) study of the law. Tomlins, Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Irvine, has for some time been urging scholars across a variety of related fields to move beyond the model of scholarly practice associated with Critical Legal Studies, its equivalent in what Tomlins calls Critical Legal History, and the broader, basic idea that the job of the historian is to historicize- to situate chosen objects of study within an ever-multiplying series of contexts that are declared by the historian or other self-proclaimed critical scholar to be specific, plural, and complex, and only responsibly understood as such. The effect of this kind of practice is to neutralize the political potentiality of the material at hand, and it has been part of Tomlins’ project to suggest that this has to do with the ideological situation of the historical profession- it is in the interest of a historian to show up and say “no, no, its more complicated than that,” to display their specialized erudition, and to pave the way for a practice explicitly limited to the further extension of the complicating, contextualizing work that only we critical historicists are equipped to carry out. For Tomlins, I take it, this enlists the historian in the perpetuation of Benjamin’s “empty and homogenous time,” the result of which is a historical profession that constructs a celebratory, progressive, and ironically uncritical narrative of itself as doing the necessary work of recovering other contexts, other voices, other agencies, and other identities, and we can be assured, so the thinking goes, that this is self-evidently politically efficacious in and of itself.

 

Against critique and contextualization, Tomlins presents Benjamin’s concept of constellation: “There could be no apter evocation of the disquiet that marks the beginning of any critique of history worthy to be called dialectical, which must renounce a calm, contemplative attitude towards its subject to become aware of the critical constellation in which precisely this fragment of the past is found with precisely this present.”(1) The goal here is to build a relationship to the past that is aware of just why this particular thing is before us to consider at this particular moment- in short, what its doing here, and how should we understand the fact that it is here- as Benjamin elsewhere writes, of how this fragment of the past flashes up in the moment of danger in which we find ourselves. Cultural history, Benjamin writes, “may increase the burden of the treasures that are piled up on humanity’s back. But it does not give mankind the strength to shake them off, so as to get its hands on them.” (2) The historical practice of actualizing constellations is explosive- it remembers and recovers something, a fragment of the past that punches through the bounded character of the present. Tomlins is currently moving beyond the expansiveness of his incredible recent book, Freedom Bound, and focusing on Nat Turner and the 1831 slave revolt that he led in Virginia. In our own moment of the confrontation of liberalism’s self-understanding with theological and political violence, Turner explodes the image of the American past as the perpetually expanding demand for and use of the language of liberty, even as that image includes the history of active resistance to slavery. Like John Brown, there is something unclassifiable about Turner- you cannot understand him simply by describing the context or contexts in which he acted, social, linguistic, or otherwise, if you can hope to understand him at all, and in this age of creating and recovering multiplying alternative agencies and identities there is something profoundly discomforting about that. To speak of redemption in this case is to blow open what we would mean by redemptive constitutionalism.

 

I hope I have done justice to the arguments Chris Tomlins has been making. Where he and I touched bases was on the mutually felt need for historians in particular to attend to the conditions of their own intellectual practice, and to do so, in part, by attending to the history of intellectual practice. Quite simply, we need to “think what we are doing,” to use the words of another reader of Benjamin’s (I don’t know how much use Tomlins would have for Arendt, but the fragment I’ve provided here seems apt).

 

Tomlins’ both historical and more explicitly methodological work has been provocative for me, and I want to just note some of my reactions to it as a way of opening up space for future thinking. I cut my teeth, or am still cutting my teeth I suppose on a civically and historically conscious approach to legal and political thinking in time that we can see mot significantly (for me) in the work of J.G.A. Pocock. For Tomlins, I take it, “Cambridge” historiography has become conventional and is reaching a point of diminishing returns- a kind of conservative philosophical version of the critical historicism practiced by CLS and CLH. There is a minor point to be made that I don’t think there is a unitary school beyond what we generally call Cambridge school history of political thought, but the larger point I want to make is that it is difficult to actually rethink one’s practice without confronting conditions of historicity and plurality, although that does not stop us from trying. I take Pocock’s Gibbon project, soon to be consummated in a sixth volume of Barbarism and Religion, to be evidence enough that there is quite a bit to be done with the history of thinking and writing in contexts. An even more important point is this- a study of the past that is aware of the conditions of its practice will be one drawn into confronting histories of thinking and acting differently as a crucial part of any effort to do the same in the present. Benjamin’s constellations are still critical, and it might be said that this time of multiplying and reverberating fundamentalisms can ill afford to an age after critique, howsoever we might reimagine the method and locations of critical activity.

 

What I take to be at issue here is the contested nature of the common Nietzschean inheritance to the metatheoretical and metahistorical project of Tomlins and the genealogical, historical, and sometimes archaeological project (think of Foucault) that Tomlins is trying to get out of or away from. But that is a discussion for another time. Chris Tomlins’ evocation of Benjamin’s unique materialism is the place from which thinking about law and legal history has to begin today- and that is because by materialism Benjamin meant not just Historical Materialism but the actual stuff we use to make a world. Benjamin’s writings invite a history of thought, and in particular, a history of legal thought that is attentive to the material and revolutionary dimension of practice. This would be a history of fragments, of texts and their readings and rewritings, of materials and their collection and recollection. It would be a history of law, but it would also be a history of the uses to which the material of that history is put. When everyone is an originalist of one kind or another, perhaps it is this emphasis on materiality itself, the idea of getting one’s hands on the law, that flashes up as a memory fragment for our own moment of danger.

 

In a few future posts, I’ll be discussing my own work on Jefferson and the history legal and political thought, and how that fits into this, among other things that pop up.

 

 

 

 

1. Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian,” One-Way Street and Other Writings, Jephcott and Shorter, trans. (Verso, 1979), p. 351.

 

2. Ibid, p. 361. 

Signposts: The Chapters

Last week I talked some about Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History, which Sally Hadden and Patti Minter co-edited.  It has  just appeared from the University of Georgia Press (and is available at a nice discount at amazon and Barnes and Noble).  The book is designed to highlight the extraordinary breadth of work going on in southern legal history -- which spans a huge amount of time (from the seventeenth through the late twentieth century), as well as subjects of study (from local courts through appellate courts, to legislatures, treatise-writers, and humble litigants), and methods (often social history these days, but also intellectual and cultural history).  At some point I hope to talk a lot more about just how expansive legal history is these days -- and the challenges that poses for those of us looking for unifying themes.  I want to talk about the problems legal historians face; I've been thinking about this in particular as I've been reading the Companion to American Legal History.  I think the Companion really helps pull together those themes, but that's a story for another time.

Right now I want to mention each of the individual chapters, because I think this gives a sense of the scope of the work in this volume.  The chapters are "In my mother's house: Dowry Property and Female Inheritance Patterns in Spanish Florida" by Susan Richbourg Parker; " The Law and Order campaign in New Orleans, 1763-1765 : A Comparative View" by Thomas N. Ingersoll;  "'Using the faculties conceded to her by law': Slavery, Law, and Agency in Spanish New Orleans, 1763-1803" by Jennifer M. Spear; "South Carolina's Grand Jury Presentments: The Eighteenth-Century Experience" by Sally E. Hadden; "Guarding Republican Liberty : St. George Tucker and Judging in Federal Virginia" by Jessica K. Lowe; "The Shades of Loyalty: Elisha W. Chester and the Cherokee Removal" by Tim Alan Garrison; " The Material Conditions of Dependency: The Hidden History of Free Women's Control of Property in the Early Nineteenth-Century South" by Laura F. Edwards; "Democracy, and Lynching, in America," by Christopher R. Waldrep; "The World Made by Laws and the Laws Made by the World of the Old South," by me; "Peaceful Revolution and Popular Sovereignty: Reassessing the Constitutionality of Southern Secession," by Roman J. Hoyos; "Strategic Litigation and the Death of reconstruction," by Cynthia Nicoletti; "The Homestead Exemption and Southern Legal Culture," by James W. Ely, Jr; "A Place for Themselves in the Modern World: Southern Women and Alcohol in the Age of Prohibition, 1912-1933" by Lisa Lindquist Dorr; "Race, Property, and Negotiated Space in the American South: A Reconsideration of Buchanan v. Warley," by Patricia Hagler Minter; "Race, Law, and Southern Public Higher Education, 1860s-1960s," by Peter Wallenstein; "The Southern Roots of the Reapportionment Revolution," by Charles L. Zelden; and "Defending the Right to Discriminate: The Libertarian Challenge to the Civil Rights Movement," by Christopher W. Schmidt.

When I have a little more time I want to compare the subject matter of these essays to the subjects in the 1989 volume edited by Kermit Hall and James Ely, An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South.  One obvious difference is that Hadden and Minter deal with legal (as opposed to constitutional) history.  I think that's a good gauge of how interests have broadened over the past twenty-five years. 

books.google has a preview of the book here.

Roisman on Property and Human Rights

I'm delighted to see that Florence Roisman's casebook on Property and Human Rights has appeared from Carolina Academic Press.  Cribbing now from the Press' website:

This book contains materials regarding intersections of property law with civil and human rights claims in the United States and internationally. The chapters cover The Nature of Property, The Development of Civil Rights Principles in the U.S., International Human Rights Law, and Human Rights in the U.S. Roisman addresses homelessness, expropriation, and discrimination on the bases of race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, and other characteristics. Among the recent cases presented are the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2004 decision rejecting a claimed property interest in the recognition of a protective order, a South African case enforcing a right to housing, a 2003 Maryland decision assessing the need for just cause for eviction in Low Income Housing Tax Credit developments, a 2002 9th Circuit opinion regarding disability discrimination, and the Michigan Supreme Court decision overturning Poletown. 

This book looks terrific and I'm looking forward to reading it and I hope teaching from it as well.

A Companion to American Legal History

I'm delighted to announce that the Companion to American Legal History that Sally Hadden and I have been co-editing for the last few years is now available in ebook format and will be appearing shortly in hardcopy from Blackwell-Wiley.  In the tradition of the other Blackwell Companions to American History, this book surveys recent writing on American history.  It's about the historiography of legal history and the idea is that readers can turn to it for a good introduction to the field and also for pointers from experts about directions for future research.

The Companion is broken down into time period essays, from the seventeenth century through the late twentieth century (by Elizabeth Dale, Sally Hadden, Ellen Pearson, Roman Hoyos, Chris Schmidt, and me); they are followed by essays on groups of people: Native Americans (Christian McMillen), African Americans in the eras of slavery and freedom (by T.J. Davis and James Campbell respectively), Women (Felice Batlan),  Families (David Tanenhaus), Immigrants (Allison Brownell Tirres), and Lawyers (Mark Steiner).  The next and largest section has essays on subject areas, with chapters on the economy in early America (Christine Desan) and in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (Harwell Wells), labor (Deborah Dinner), poverty (Felicia Kornbluh and Karen Tani), taxes (Robin Einhorn), administrative state (Joanna Grisinger), law and religion (Steven Green), military (Elizabeth Hillman), criminal law (Elizabeth Dale), and intellectual property (Steven Wilf).  The final section is on legal thought, with chapters on law and literature (Jeannine DeLombard), early American legal thought (Steven Macias), nineteenth and early twentieth century jurisprudence (James Schmidt), critical legal studies (John Schlegel), and an imperial perspective on American legal thought (Clara Altman).

Even with something this broad there's the question of what more could have been added; I think the next edition should have separate chapters on sexuality, economics, critical race studies, and I'd like to see something on the history of the book, even.  It is testimony to how far leagl history has migrated from where it was a generation ago that we don't have separate chapters on common law doctrine.  I think in a new edition I'd like to have chapters on contracts, property, and torts.  Or at least to think about those.  

Over at legal history blog, Chris Schmidt has some fabulously generous words about the book; he also talks some about his terrific synthesis of American legal history in the twentieth century.  

The publication date for the hard copy is April 15, though my hope is that it'll be rolling out of the warehouse a bit sooner than that.  And, as I noted above, it's available now on kindle and in Wiley's ebook format as well.  The book is priced for library sales -- it lists for around $200 (or $155 for the electronic edition); but if you order it from Wiley directly, use the code ALH13 for a 20% discount.   My hope is that if this interests you you'll pass word along to your favorite librarian.  In the meantime, the table of contents and the first chapter are on Wiley's website.

The Machinery of Criminal Justice

My good friend Stephanos Bibas, a criminal law and sentencing scholar at UPenn, recently penned an important book tackling the always weighty issue of how criminal justice is administered, entitled "The Machinery of Criminal Justice."    As his abstract explains:

Two centuries ago the criminal justice system was primarily run by laymen. In court, victims and defendants interacted face to face while lay jurors from the community sat in judgment. Jury trials passed moral judgment on crimes, vindicated victims and innocent defendants, denounced guilty defendants, and reconciled and healed wounded relationships. But over the last two centuries, lawyers have taken over the process, silencing victims and defendants and, in many cases, substituting a plea-bargaining system for voice of the jury. This lawyerized machinery has purchased efficient, speedy processing of many cases at the price of sacrificing softer values, such as reforming defendants and healing wounded victims and relationships. In other words, the U.S. legal system has bought quantity at the price of quality, without recognizing either the trade-off or the great gulf separating lawyers' and laymen's incentives, interests, values, and powers. This book explores these trends and considers how criminal justice could better accommodate lay participation, values, and relationships.

Laudably, this book has gotten a lot of attention in the scholarly and public realms. In the current issue of the Harvard Law Review, Professor Nicola Lacey reviews the book, criticising Bibas's decision not to explore the "expanding scope of the criminal law" and do more comparative analysis, as well as faulting his promotion of a "false vision of a village idea:"

Humanizing the Criminal Justice Machine: Re-Animated Justice or Frankenstein's Monster?

Professor Bibas responds, arguing, among other things, that the current American landscape challenges us to build consensus at the neighborhood or local level, and to narrow criminal enforcement to those policies that can command broad support :

Criminal (In)Justice and Democracy in America

Whatever your take, it is well-worth your time to read the book and the two reviews, whether you are a prosecutor or criminal defender, a criminal law scholar,  a lawyer, or simply a member of the general public who wants to know what's really going on in the criminal justice system. 

And if you just can't get enough, here's the link to Professor Bibas's recent star turn on C-SPAN discussing these very issues.  Fascinating!

Acting White

I'm pleased to see that Acting White: Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America by Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati is now out from Oxford University Press.  I've been hearing about this for what seems like years -- and I'm guessing Devon and Mitu perceive it as even longer (though it pales by comparison with how I perceive how long I've been working on University, Court, and Slave!)  I've even had the chance to read parts of Acting White along the way -- the focus here is how law should treat/respond to people's behavior.  Back when anti-discrimination law, for instance, could classify people as black or white based on appearance it was a lot simpler.  Now Carado and Gulati show that we (and presumably the law) are dealing with behavior and expectations of how people should act based on race, and racial classifications based on behavior rather than just appearance.  

Cribbing now from the OUP website:

What does it mean to "act black" or "act white"? Is race merely a matter of phenotype, or does it come from the inflection of a person's speech, the clothes in her closet, how she chooses to spend her time and with whom she chooses to spend it? What does it mean to be "really" black, and who gets to make that judgment?

In Acting White?, leading scholars of race and the law Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that, in spite of decades of racial progress and the pervasiveness of multicultural rhetoric, racial judgments are often based not just on skin color, but on how a person conforms to behavior stereotypically associated with a certain race. Specifically, racial minorities are judged on how they "perform" their race. This performance pervades every aspect of their daily life, whether it's the clothes they wear, the way they style their hair, the institutions with which they affiliate, their racial politics, the people they befriend, date or marry, where they live, how they speak, and their outward mannerisms and demeanor. Employing these cues, decision-makers decide not simply whether a person is black but the degree to which she or he is so. Relying on numerous examples from the workplace, higher education, and police interactions, the authors demonstrate that, for African Americans, the costs of "acting black" are high, and so are the pressures to "act white." But, as the authors point out, "acting white" has costs as well. 

Provocative yet never doctrinaire, Acting White? will boldly challenge your assumptions and make you think about racial prejudice from a fresh vantage point.

Provocative and never doctrinaire -- that, of course, describes both of the authors, as well as the book.   Here's an interview Devon did with Touré and the rest of the crew on MSNBC's show "The Cycle".  It's exciting for an academic book to get this much attention on the national news.

Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History

It's my great pleasure to announce that Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History is now available at Barnes and Noble, a few days ahead of the publication date of April 1 and at a very nice price (less than $17).  This volume was co-edited by two of my friends, Sally Hadden (who's also a co-editor with me of A Companion to American Legal History) and Patti Minter.  Cribbing now from the University of Georgia Press website for the book and from a post I put up on this last December:

In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's pathbreaking 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.

Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.

The contributors are Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely, Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden, and me.  Here is a flier with more details on Signposts.

Open Source Public Review

Here's a pretty exciting idea, which I guess some number of people are experimenting with -- crowd sourcing peer review.  Ohio University Press will be publishing soon a volume called Subjecting History: Building a Relationship Between History and Its Alternatives.  The volume asks how the perspectives of historians and the public differ about history.  That is, the volume makes history the subject of study.  Cribbing now from the book's website, the editors Trevor R. Getz and Thomas G. Padilla are interested in question such as: how well academic scholarship represents past? Does it align or conflict with nonacademic ways of understanding the past?  What are ways that academic scholarship can better represent the past without appearing to ignore interpretations that run counter to it?  These questions are important and I'd think that down the road one might address how judges think about history, perhaps differently from how academics historians think about it. 

As part of an NSF funded experiment in open peer and public review, the editors have put drafts of the chapters on the net and are asking for public comment.  You can read all the chapters and then comment on them.  Just to be clear, these are drafts that are still undergoing revision.  And this I find particularly interesting -- the Press may include the public comments in their final volume.  The essays deal with a bunch of different micro-level stories -- one, for instance, deals with a Rhode Island playground named after a child who passed away in the late nineenth century.  Reminds me of how a lot of people use parks to create memorials to their friends -- and also in the early twentieth century used restrictive covenants to control who could use the park.

I learned about this because my friend Jim Hall of the University of Alabama has a chapter on how the University preserved (and in some cases removed) the ruins of the campus after it was burned by the United States army at the conclusion of the Civil War.  The short version of Jim's story is that campus was largely burned at the conclusion of the War and some of the ruins were maintained for several decades (and in fact a few ruins are still on the campus).  All of this is tragic -- the University was yet another of the many, many victims of the extraordinary violence unleashed by the war (and that preceeded the war during the era of slavery).  The library was one of the many buildings burned.  And so we lost the collection of books -- though if you're interested in this, here's a catalog of the books in that library.  One of these days I'm going to write something about that collection.  There's also an important story about the compensation that the federal government gave the University (in the form of land in the late nineteenth century).

The image is of the University of Alabama's campus before the War.  As the caption indicates, the Mound (one of the ruins that Jim writes about) is on the site of the Washington Dormitory.

The New Mind of the South

I see fromClara Altman at the legal history blog that Tracy Thompson's The New Mind of the South is getting some serious attention (like in the LA Times).  I'm a fan of W.J. Cash's 1941 book The Mind of the South -- and of course of works on the mind of the south (err, the slave-owning south) in the pre-Civil War era.  I do not yet have a copy of Thompson, so I'm not able to speak to the book -- but I will be writing about it soon.  But two pieces of Steve Oney's LA Times review call out for comment.  First, the South has obviously changed in huge, huge ways since the 1960s.  But -- and this is why I go to Pittsboro for a haricut every month -- there are still huge gaps between southern culture and northern. 

My favorite librarian says of Chapel Hill, the only problem with this place is there are too many Yankees around here.  That's her way of saying that Chapel Hill is really northern.  Much of the rest of North Carolina is southern, however.   The crowd in the barber shop on main street in Pittsboro agree with my favorite librarian (and they'd add that President Obama is a socialist born in Kenya). 

Second, Oney quote Thompson's conclusion that the South is  "finally disentangling itself from the Confederacy."   Of this I agree -- though I'd phrase it somewhat differently.  I think the Civil War is finally over.  And I'd say the sign of this is that back in December 2010 when the Sons of Confderate Veterans were sponsoring a ball to commemorate the 150th anniversay of South Carolina's secession in December 1860 one of their members was quoted as saying something along the lines of, sure slavery was a cause of the Civil War -- but there were other causes, too.  While I agree much more heartily with the first part of that sentence than the second, I took that as the sign that everyone acknowledges that the war was about slavery and that we as a nation finally recognize the centrality of race to the war and the rest of our history.  Ah, I thought as I read that, the extended battle over the memory of the war's causes is over.

A much more critical review in the Dallas Morning News begins, "One response to Tracy Thompson’s The New Mind of the South, the title of which was inspired by Wilbur Joseph Cash’s 1941 book The Mind of the South, might be, 'Enough already.'"

Trolls

Nice little bit from artist Vi Hart over at Brain Pickings. Taming the Trolls.  A little uncomfortable psychoanalysis in the piece if negative comments get you down (which they do me from time to time). Brain Pickings is a great site and offers lots of wonderful tidbits of interest to academics and non-academics alike -- most of which have nothing to do with trolls and such.

Researchers and Librarians

On February 26 I had the chance to be on a really fun and thoughtfully-organized panel over at Davis Library, our main library at UNC.  The idea was to get a few faculty (two of anthropology, one from library and information science, and two from law) to talk about how we research.  The audience were academic librarians here at UNC and I think they thought of us sort of like zoo creatures -- or human research subjects, anyway.  (Michelle Meyer could tell us whether they needed IRB approval!)  

Some of the talk was of simple questions, like how do we keep up with developments in our field; others were research intensive, like what are our current projects and what library resources are we using for them.  It was pretty interesting to hear the resources the social scientists were using.  Unsurprisingly, there was lots of talk of GIS and huge databases.  The professor from the library and information sciences school spoke about one of her projects, on the first woman librarian at Oxford's Bodleian Library.  Pretty cool stuff.  Makes me jealous, because I'm pretty sure that book will get a lot of sales!  Perhaps one of these days I'll write a book about Mrs. Lincoln's Librarian's cat.  That would be like catnip to acquisitions librarians.

My use of library resources seems rather pedestrian by comparison -- or maybe old fashioned, though in a digital kind of way.  Unsurprisingly I rely heavily on westlaw and then some of the more specialized databases for historical sources -- like books.google and some of the propriety databases (a couple of my favorites are making of modern law and the Sabin catalog).  

I'm old enough to remember having to go to the library and reel through microfilm if I wanted to look at a seventeenth century book.  No need for that now -- I can get every extant book published in English (and in the UK, even if not in English) at my office via the library website.  Too bad these days my research isn't focused on the seveenth century.  

But as for the nineteenth century stuff, most of what I need in terms of law books and cases are on-line and full-text searchable (thank God!)  We also through the magic of ancestry.com (and one of the databases I learned about, heritage -- which I think is essentially a cut-down version of ancestry), have census records on-line.  This makes possible serious social history that would have been essentially impossible even fifteen years ago.  I'd still like to see more in terms of newspapers (especially newspapers) and pamphlets scanned in.  From my perspective, the books.google scanners can't get to that stuff soon enough.  To borrow a phrase from Sarah Palin, "scan, baby, scan."

All of the widely available information puts a huge premium on interpretation.  Once you could make a career in history by finding information; now that a lot of it is much more easily accessible, there's the often more difficult question of what it all means.  I can remember saying when I was in law school that I thought when westlaw put the pre-Civil War cases on-line that would transform how we thought about legal history -- I think we've taken advantage of that mass of data less effectively than we ought to.  But we have seen lots more connections between judges than we had previously and I think we're seeing just how unified legal thought was, north, south, and west in the years leading into war.  (Along these lines, I might observe that Vernon Burton's presidential address for the Southern Historical Association makes great use of books.google data.  But that's a story for another time.)

Then as a sort of fun question at the end my colleague Sara Sampson, who organized the panel, asked what is the most recent book you've read that isn't related to your research.  And she added, in what format did you read it?  Everyone else had pretty creative answers, though I must admit that since I essentially never read anything that isn't related to my research, I had to stretch back a ways for that answer, to Haldor Laxness' Paradise Lost.  (And of course Sara asked about the format in which we read the book -- everyone else was reading on their kindle or ipad.  Not me, unsurprisingly.)

But here's in some ways the most interesting part of this:  because the audience was filled with academic librarians, a bunch of them were tweeting the panel.  And the tweets give I think a really cool picture of how different people viewed the event.  Sort of like reading through student essays from the pre-Civil War era to get a sense of the range of ideas of students on the same topic.  They're at @DonnaBickford  @JoMCParkLib.

The Return of Jonah Lehrer, Apparently

So last night, the Twitterverse discovered, seemingly by accident, that today at noon, Jonah Lehrer will make his first public appearance since his spectacular fall from grace after admitting not only to self-plagiarism but also to borrowing from other writers (including his friend Malcolm Gladwell) without attribution and fabricating interviews and sources. His appearance will come in the form of a keynote address at the Media Learning Seminar 2013, sponsored by the Knight Foundation. The organizers of the event report that Lehrer will give a typically Lehreresque talk on the neuroscience of decisionmaking, including the decisions that led him to defraud his readers. In case you aren't in Miami, it's your lucky day: the event, including Lehrer's talk, is being livestreamed here.

As some have pointed out (see the comments, too), this was a pretty soft launch for what organizers are only now saying, after Twitter and its many angry fellow science writers discovered Lehrer's scheduled appearance, will include a mea culpa from Lehrer. The fact that the conference bio of Lehrer makes no mention of his misdeeds, including the fact that the publisher of his most recent book, Imagine, took the unusual step of recalling all copies of the book, does not inspire confidence that either the Knight Foundation or Lehrer initially intended this to be a thoughtful, appropriately contrite reflection on what happened. Lehrer's former colleague, collaborator and friend, the science writer David Dobbs, for one, is pretty angry. He says that he and others he knows are owed, but have not received, apologies from Lehrer, and he has pressed the conference organizers to put a few questions to Lehrer today.

As for Lehrer's anticipated discussion of the neuroscience of plagiarism and fabrication, I confess that my expectations are low. I've always thought that by far Lehrer's biggest sin was not his self-plagiarism, his more traditional plagiarism of others' work, or even his fabrication of Dylan quotes. Reusing text from his blog in a New Yorker post is between Lehrer, his God, and the various people who paid him for unique content, but I can't get very worked up about it on behalf of his readers. And as for his "old fashioned" plagiarism, that is, of course, a serious misdeed, but Gladwell readily forgave his friend, and Dylan, not surprisingly, doesn't seem to care.

As a serious consumer of social science and one interested in how it is produced and communicated, for me, Lehrer's biggest sin will always be the poetic license he took with science in the name of crafting a sexy and sellable just-so story. (Lehrer's fellow science writers who were denied the opportunities Lehrer has been given, in part because they insisted on engaging in careful and responsible — but less sexy — science communication are also victims of this sin.) You can read more about that here. (Disclosure: Lehrer's interlocutor in this exchange, and in an earlier New York Times book review of Imagine, is my husband. I also watched with some irritation as Lehrer came close, as the scandal unfolded, to blocking publication of their interview. Discount accordingly.) 

Update: The archived video of Lehrer's talk is here (the conference organizer begins moving in the direction of an introduction to Lehrer at around the 1:00:30 mark, and Lehrer himself starts at around the 1:03:30 mark). As others have remarked, the paralells to Lance Armstrong's mea-culpa-cum-comeback are hard to miss. Also of note: the giant screen behind Lehrer scrolling live tweets, most of them critical of him. No doubt the $20,000 Lehrer was paid for the talk helped ease the pain.

Update 2: Image above is an ironic screen shot from Poynter.org, which first reported Lehrer's fee, which Knight is referring to (also ironically) as an "honorarium."

Update 3: Aaannd...updated title to reflect that the speaker in question is in fact Jonah, not Johan, Lehrer.

Drone Strikes and the Imperial Presidency

As today's New York Times observes, the Obama administration's policy of drone strikes provides a troubling example of unconstrained executive power. Senator Angus King (I-ME) put it well when he criticized a regime in which the president is "the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner."

The article considers the possibility of a special "drone court" as an external check on the president and identifies the problems with that approach. Indeed, experience teaches us that external checks on the executive branch do not work very well. Both Congress and the courts generally have acquisced or even abetted the expansion of presidential power.

Hence, in my forthcoming book, Two Presidents Are Better Than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch (NYU Press), I observe that we need a strong internal check on the executive branch and that a two-person, bipartisan presidency would provide the right kind of check. As the founding fathers recognized and decision making research confirms, policy is better made when people with different perspectives work things out together.

George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War are illustrative—a single misguided decision maker can make choices very harmful to the country. In the words of Woodrow Wilson, the “whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man.”

Of course, there are many questions raised by a two-person presidency. How would two executives make decisions, why wouldn't they end up fighting with each other, etc.? These are all good questions, and I answer them in Two Presidents. For a summary of my answers, see Chapter 1.

The Resurrection of Nat Turner

I'm preparing for a CLE lecture I'm giving tomorrow afternoon on the trials in the wake of the Nat Turner rebellion.  Because I frame the lectures between two North Carolina cases -- State v. Mann in 1830 and State v. Will in 1834, I'm calling the lecture "Slave Trials in Virginia and North Carolina, 1830-1834."  But this is mostly about the trials in Southampton County in the wake of the rebellion.  There's some surprising stuff in those trials.  For instance, some people were actually acquitted.  But that's a story for later.  

Right now I want to talk about a two volume novel by my Durham neighbor Sharon Ewell Foster: The Resurrection of Nat Turner.  Foster's books are really interesting to me because she is grounded in many ways in the history of the rebellion and antebellum America.  The novel is framed by the efforts of Harriet Beecher Stowe to write about the rebellion in her novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.  And so Stowe and some other abolitionists -- including Fredrick Douglass -- are in the book.  Thus, Foster populates her book with actual historical actors -- and very exciting for me -- she bases a lot of this on data of how those people actually behaved.  Thus, a lot of the characters from the Turner rebellion are in the novel -- from the rebels to the white people of Southampton.  There are some of the key witnesses to the rebellion, who testified at the trials, and even some of the lawyers and judges.  As I historian I'm excited that the people I've come to know through the trial records are also people that Foster has come to know.  Of course as a novelist she has license to move well beyond what the historical record shows and to fill in gaps.  Even to extend into the world of what might have happened -- or how she thinks things should have happened.

Foster portrays Nat Turner as the son of a slaveowner who had promised Nat his freedom.  Nat's father even -- Foster supposes -- made him a trustee of the Turner Baptist Church.  But Nat's family members refused to honor his father's wishes and kept him in slavery.  Nat, though, who has heard about the cities of Ethiopia where his mother came from, plans to lead slaves out of Southampton County, to freedom.  Foster then turns to the trials afterwards and portrays the white slaveowners as claiming that more slaves were involved in the rebellion than actually were -- and they did this so that they would receive compensation from the state when their slaves were executed.   Thus, one of the key witnesses -- Levi Waller -- whose family suffered the worst losses of anyone in the rebellion, appears in Foster's novel as a person who lied on the witness stand in order to convict slaves, so that he could receive money for them.  Turner's lawyer, William Parker, as well as the lawyer Thomas Gray (who published the Confessions of Nat Turner) appear in the novel, as does the prosecutor William Brodnax and defense attorney William French.

As I say, Foster bases her characters on historical figures, but she also departs from the historical record -- some of this I've already discussed, as in Turner was promised his freedom by his father.  That may have happened, but there's not evidence of this.  Another example of this is Foster's treatment of Will ("the executioner"), one of the rebels who Foster supposes survived the rebellion and fled north.  As part of the process of investigating the rebellion, Stowe meets with Will.  I'm thinking that Will died during the rebellion, probably at the first clash with the local militia at Parker's field.  And Foster turns Thomas Gray, who published the "Confessions of Nat Turner" into someone who was in on the conspiracy to make Turner into more of a rebel than he was.

I think Foster's novel is important not just for her reconstruction of the lives of the actors in the Turner rebellion, but for how she interprets the motives behind the rebellion and the trials afterwards.  There was violence aplenty during and in the wake of the Turner rebellion.  Foster makes judgments about the nature of the trials -- and the motives behind them: this was not so much about restoring order through violence (how's that for a riff onRichard Slotkin's book?) as about making money from the execution of innocent slaves.  

I see the world somewhat differently from her -- there are different motives (I see the trials more about control and less about economics).  I struggle with trying to make sense of Turner.  Was he, as an antebellum observer in Richmond asked, motivated by a desire for freedom or for vengeance?  It's hard to make someone who kills indiscriminately into a hero -- even as we may seek to understand the world of violence from which he emerged.  I'm deeply interested in why Turner chose the families he did to attack -- was this an issue of proximity or revenge?  Both?  And it's important to remember the violence in the wake of the rebellion, too.  Enslaved people were indiscriminately shot and, of course, tortured.  (This is part of the context for my observation that Django Unchained had less violence than I expected.)  As happens so often in history, the violence of slavery led to the violence of resistance, which led to even greater violence as the rebellion was put down and vengeance was extracted on those least able to bear it.

The purposes of history and literature differ, often -- though in a lot of ways they also overlap.  We can learn a lot from Foster's reconstruction of the Turner rebellion and the responses to it, especially as her re-interpretation of it challenges us to see the motives behind the system of slavery and the impulses towards freedom that clashed in Southampton from August through November 1831.

The Bard of Avon in Prison

Los Angeles Times, November 25, 2012

Reading “Hamlet” Behind Bars

By David Schalkwyk

It doesn’t look like much — just a tattered, 1970 edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. But inside, the book bears testament to an era.

Currently on display at the British Museum as part of an exhibition called “Shakespeare: Staging the World,” the book belongs to Sonny Venkatrathnam, who was incarcerated during the 1970s in South Africa’s apartheid-era political prison, Robben Island. Having convinced a warden that the volume was a Hindu religious text, Venkatrathnam was allowed to keep it with him in prison, where it was passed from prisoner to prisoner. At Venkatrathnam’s request, his comrades signed their names beside their favorite passages.

On Dec. 16, 1977, Nelson Mandela signed next to these lines: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.’

Walter Sisulu, another African National Congress leader and close confidant of Mandela, put his name beside a passage in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ in which Shylock talks about the abuse he has taken as a Jewish money-lender: ‘Still have I borne it with a patient shrug / For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.’

And Billy Nair, who went on to become a member of Parliament in the new South Africa, chose Caliban’s challenge to Prospero from ‘The Tempest:’ ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me.’

The Robben Island Shakespeare is the only book from the prison that records an act of personal literary appreciation by the major figures incarcerated at the time, many of whom went on to play major roles in post-apartheid South Africa. It is a kind of ‘guest book,’ bearing the signatures of 34 of the Robben Island prisoners. But is also more than that.

When they signed their names against Shakespeare’s text, each prisoner recognized something of himself and his relation to others in the words of a stranger. The Robben Island Shakespeare records that community of character and signature as an example of Shakespeare’s global reach and as a historically specific witness to a common human identity and shared experience.

It’s not at all clear how big a role the book played in the lives of prisoners other than Venkatrathnam. Not one of the memoirs written by inmates at Robben Island mentions the volume. And when the ANC was asked to comment on the significance of the book this year, its spokesman asked, ‘What is this “Robben Island Bible”?’ He denied that it had played any special role in the struggle against oppression.

Nevertheless, all the accounts of political imprisonment in South Africa during the apartheid era suggest that the humanities were central to the lives and needs of the prisoners. In an environment of extreme sensory deprivation, designed to deny people their affinity with others and to strip away humanity, the soul staked its claims with striking insistence. Music, some prisoners declared, was more important to them than food; many were prepared to suffer physical punishment for the sake of a book or a newspaper; and the cold of concrete and steel was turned into the warmth of community through common reading and shared education. Jacob Zuma, the current president of South Africa, has said he received his basic education at the ‘University of Robben Island.’ [….]

The rest of the article is here.

(David Schalkwyk is director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly. He is the author of Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare. He will be lecturing at the Huntington Library in San Marino on Monday evening.)

Related Miscellany:

Here’s an inspirational story of an inmate “sentenced to 16 years for felony assault, a period extended by three years after an altercation with a guard in prison,” whose prison reading contributed to his becoming something of an expert on hieroglyphs: “Hieroglyphics Turn Prisoner Away from a Life of Crime.”

Duly inspired, here’s a link to the Prison Book Program.

And this may be a propitious occasion for the few of us dispositionally inclined to read the likes of Aristotle, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Michael Sandel, Iris Marion Young, G.A. Cohen, Thomas Pogge, and Amartya Sen on justice (distributive and otherwise), to be reminded of the relevance of Shakespeare, who also speaks to us about such things: A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice (2011).

Scarlett, Tara, and the Personality Theory of Property

Like Al, I also watched several hours of “Gone With The Wind” on Thanksgiving Eve (don't judge - there was a marathon!).  GWTW has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, but this time, I was most struck by Scarlett's pitch perfect demonstration of the personality theory of property.  This is evident throughout the film, and most notably in the last scene, where Scarlett hears the voices of her dearly departed father and Ashley Wilkes in her head.  After Rhett abandons her, she asks aloud, "What is there to do? What is there that matters?" and the following exchange ensues:

Mr. O'HARA: You mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O'Hara, that Tara doesn't mean anything to you? That land is the only thing that matters. It's the only thing that lasts. 

ASHLEY: Something you love better than me, though you may not know it.

Mr. O'HARA: Tara - this is where you get your strength.

ASHLEY: Tara - the red earth of Tara.

Mr. O'HARA: That land's the only thing that matters, it's the only thing that lasts.

ASHLEY: Something you love better than me, though you may not know it, Tara.

Mr. O'HARA: ...From which you get your strength... 

ASHLEY: ... the red earth of Tara.


Mr. O'HARA: Land's the only thing that matters... 

ASHLEY: something you love better than me...

BOTH:  Tara...Tara!... Tara!... Tara!

SCARLETT: Tara! Home. I'll go home..... 

Tara is the place where Scarlett achieves self-realization.  It is the place where her memories and ambitions are rooted.  It is also the place over which Scarlett asserts an entitlement that is superior to that of either of her sisters (and fellow heirs) Suellen and Carreen (recall the great scene where Scarlett bosses the sisters around, forces them to pick cotton, and then slaps Suellen for yelling "I hate Tara" in the fields).  I know there are some GWTW fans out there - what other theories of property are on full display in the film?

Inroads Into Shakespeare

For those parents who may be having trouble getting their teenage children to read or understand Shakespeare, I've just come across an interesting companion to "Hamlet" which might be more effective than Cliff Notes in thinking about the story.  "Ophelia" by Lisa Klein is a young adult novel which retells the events of "Hamlet" from Ophelia's point of view, starting in her childhood and ending after the close of events in "Hamlet".  Although the story is kind of overdone in places and certainly takes SOME liberties with Shakespeare's plot, it's intriguing to think of the story from another character's point of view and may be something that at least teen girls can relate to better than they might be able to relate to the play itself.  So for those interested in some Thanksgiving YA reading with your teenage girls, I recommend it for what it's worth.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Reading List

This compilation is marked by two conspicuous constraints: largely (i.e., with a few important exceptions) books only, in English. The first constraint is owing to the desire to keep the list manageable, the second because I’m not well acquainted with the bulk of the literature in other languages. I welcome suggestions for further titles.

• Abbas, Mahmoud (Abu Mazin). Through Secret Channels: The Road to Oslo—Senior PLO Leader Abu Mazen’s Revealing Story of the Negotiations with Israel. Reading, UK: Garnet, 1995.
• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.
• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. Palestinian Rights: Affirmation and Denial. Wilmette, IL: Medina Press, 1982.
• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, ed. The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
• Abuminah, Ali. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. New York: Holt McDougal, 2007.
• Alam, M. Shahid. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Aranson, Geoffrey. Israel, Palestinians and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank. London: Kegan Paul International, 1990.
• Arnon. Arie, Sara Roy and Leila Farsakh. Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation. London: Routledge, 2005.
• Aruri, Naseer H. The Obstruction of Peace: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995.
• Aruri, Naseer H. Dishonest Broker: The Role of the United States in Palestine and Israel. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003.
• Aruri, Naseer H., ed. Occupation: Israel Over Palestine. London: Zed Books, 1984.
• Asali, Kamil J., ed. Jerusalem in History. New York: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2000. 
• Auyyad, Abdelaziz A. Arab Nationalism and the Palestinians, 1850-1939. Jerusalem: Passia, 1999.
• Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
• Awad, Mubarak. Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East. Philadelphia, PA: New Society            Publishers, 1985.
• Awad, Mubarak E. and R. Scott Kennedy. Nonviolent Struggle in the Middle East. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publ., 1985.
• Barghouti, Omar. BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
• Baroud, Ramzy. The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle. London: Pluto Press, 2006.
• Baroud, Ramzy. My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story. London: Pluto Press, 2010.
• Beinin, Joel and Rebecca L. Stein, eds. The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, with the Middle East Research and Information Project, 2006.
• Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin. The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
• Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Ben-Eliezer, Uri. The Making of Israeli Militarism, 1936-1956. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.
• Benvenisti, Eyal. Legal Dualism: The Absorption of the Occupied Territories into Israel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
• Benvenisti, Eyal. The International Law of Occupation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Benvenisti, Meron. Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
• Bernstein, Deborah S. Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.
• Bisharat, Geroge. Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule: Law and Disorder in the West Bank. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989.
• Black, Edwin. The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. New York: Basic Books, 2001. ed.
• Black, Ian and Benny Morris. Israel’s Secret Wars: The Untold History of Israeli Intelligence. London: Hamish Manilton, 1991.
• Bowen, Stephen, ed. Human Rights, Self-Determination, and Political Change in the Occupied Territories. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997.
• Boyle, Francis A. Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2003.
• Brand, Laurie. Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for a State. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
• Brenner, Lenni. The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir. London: Zed Books, 1984.
• Bröning, Michael. The Politics of Change in Palestine: State-Building and Nonviolent Resistance. London: Pluto Press, 2011.
• Budeiri, Musa. The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism. London: Ithaca, 1979.
• Brynen, Rex, ed. Echoes of the Intifada: Regional Repercussions of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.