In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries

The boundaries between the history of law and the history of everything else are quite blurry nowadays. Whether one is asking questions about the origins of the carceral state, the relationship between slavery and capitalism, the history of migration flows and empires, the longer story of human rights, the building of the straight state, the role of religion in public life, or many others, there is a shared belief that law and its history matters. In fact, legal historians began to focus on the blurring of boundaries such as those between markets and politics, between identity and state power, as well as between national borders and the flows of people, capital and ideas around the world.

Legal history, broadly conceived, seems to mark much of the most exciting work that is redrawing the boundaries of historical scholarship in many areas of study. In Between and Across: Legal History without Boundaries gathers some of the newest and freshest work by both younger and established scholars who are carrying forward that project and extending it into new areas of historical inquiry. It captures the best of the new and innovative tools and questions that have made law a central plane of inquiry, charts novel directions for the field, and poses broader questions concerning the past, present, and future.

Crossing a wide variety of geographic areas (from British-ruled Australia to colonial India and Malaysia, to the United States), the authors sketch new boundaries for the field to cross - boundaries of time, geography, and method - and claim that legal history provides the language to talk across national borders.

Kenneth W. Mack is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown Universities, and the University of Hawai'i. Professor Mack has also served as Senior Visiting Scholar at the Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge. In 2020, he received the Harvard Law School Student Government Teaching and Advising Award. In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise.

Jacob Katz Cogan is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Judge Joseph P. Kinneary Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Immediately before joining the College of Law, he served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He has also held visiting appointments at Vanderbilt University Law School and the University of Chicago Law School.