Elizabeth Dale

'Social Equality Does Not Exist Among Themselves, Nor Among Us:' Baylies V. Curry and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1888

This article uses a civil rights case, brought under a state statute in Chicago in 1888, to explore the ideas of equality, particularly social equality, prevalent at the time. The article also considers why the jury’s decision for the plaintiff, confirmed on appeal by the Illinois Appellate Court and the Illinois Supreme Court, had no lasting impact. In doing so, the article considers the relationship between the power of law and public opinion.

It Makes Nothing Happen: Reasons for Studying the History of Law

In place of the idea that legal history should search for a new grand narrative of law, written to persuade lawyers and judges and change the world, this article suggests that legal historians focus their attention on writing and teaching more particularized histories targeting a popular audience.

Not Simply Black and White

Until the early twentieth century juries in Illinois had the power to decide the law as well as the facts in criminal law cases. This power allowed them to apply their own sense of what was just, rather than follow the rule of law. The result was a legal system responsive to a popular sense of justice, and often guided by public opinion or prejudice.

Digital Humanities as Public Humanities

Abstract This chapter frames the University of Florida’s (UF) programmatic activities in the Digital Humanities (DH), delineated at UF with the emphasis on the Humanities as Public Humanities, and then focuses specifically on the role of the Graduate Internship Program in the Libraries as a strategic initiative supporting transformative collaboration through library partnership with teaching units and immersive engagement with graduate students. The chapter reviews the background, planning, and goals of the Internship Program. The chapter also covers two of the initially awarded internships in DH/Scholarship and Publishing, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean and Digital Scholarship. Importantly, the chapter is collaboratively authored by library faculty who developed the Internship Program Committee, teaching faculty who helped create and lead unique internship opportunities, and the graduate student interns themselves, to together address larger conceptual issues and questions of DH as Public Humanities in engagement for graduate education and library programs.

Book Review: Chinese Law: A Language Perspective

The main thrust of this review is a consideration of Cao’s claim that her book would show how “the study of Chinese law and language can illuminate and offer insight for not only the study of the subject matters specific to China but also for the study of law, language and human society in general” (p. 5). And in general, I think the book meets that goal. The book succeeds in this respect in part because many of the points Cao makes about Chinese law are not unique to that legal system. As she notes in several places, the fundamental idea that laws are speech acts that “do things with words,” a concept that is key to her analysis, originated with the English philosopher John L. Austin, and has long been important to efforts to students of law in Europe and America (Cao cites many of the relevant works in her useful notes and bibliography). This simultaneously makes Cao’s substantive analysis of Chinese words and phrases accessible to readers who might be familiar with Western legal scholarship and helps to introduce legal theory to scholars of Chinese law. Her treatment of fazhi in chapter three is a model in this respect, clearly combining a comparison of the different uses of fazhi over time with an assessment of the term’s contemporary construction in a way that illuminates the possibilities for further changes in the concept and law itself. At the same time, Cao’s discussion of fazhi also contributes to recent treatment of the rule of law, complementing works such as Brian Tamanaha’s On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) which seek to explore the varieties of meanings assigned to that concept and render it less static. By exploring the idea of the rule of law within an evolving semiotic and Chinese context, Cao’s work helps push the boundaries of that concept further. Other parts of the book make equally effective use of other concepts from the sociolegal study of law. Cao’s treatment of the gap between what Chinese law requires and the way law in China is enforced (or not) is the most obvious Book Rview s