Christopher Tomlins

This Article applies the concept of "legal transplant" to the slavery regimes that sprang up in all regions of settlement during the first two centuries of English colonization of mainland America. Using a distinction between "extrastructure" and "intrastructure," we can divide the Anglo-American law of slavery into discourses of explanation/justification and technologies of implementation. The two components were produced from distinct sources. English law possessed few intellectual resources that could be mobilized to justify and explain slavery as an institution. Here we find the law of nature and nations uppermost. English law offered many resources, however, for the management, distribution and control of movements of people. Thus, the Anglo-American law of slavery combined two transplanted resources within itself. As colonial settlements turned into slave societies, local innovations increasingly supplemented original transplants, compensating for their deficiencies and limitations and becoming, in turn, a third species of transplant. Assembly laws moved from colony to colony, creating commonalities within regions of settlement, and also — more interestingly — among regions usually thought quite distinct. Together the three species of transplants created densely instrumental slave regimes that enumerated all the ways in which summary mutilations and executions defined the slave’s life on the edge of death.

For more than a century, law schools have trained students to 'think like a lawyer'. In these times of legal crisis, both in legal education and in global society, what does that mean for the rest of us? In this book, thirty leading international scholars - including Louis Assier-Andrieu, Marianne Constable, Yves Dezalay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bryant G. Garth, Peter Goodrich, Duncan Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon - examine what is distinctive about legal thought. They probe the relation between law and time, law and culture, and legal thought and legal action; the nature of current legal thought; the geography of legal thought; and the conditions for recognition of a new 'contemporary' style of law. This work will help theorists, social scientists, historians and students understand the intellectual context of legal problems, legal doctrine, and jurisprudential trends in the current conjuncture.

This essay addresses the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland. Rather than narrate a familiar story of events--migration, settlement, the creation of viable Anglophone cultures amid hardship and danger--it pursues a less familiar track by examining the terms upon which English adventurers and their contemporaries understood the world they inhabited, the process of transatlantic expansion upon which they were engaged, and, in particular, the justifications they espoused for their appropriations of space from its existing inhabitants. My examination concentrates in particular on the conjoined discourses, literary and legal, in which the meanings of those terms are most clearly displayed. Through analysis of Shakespeare's early play Titus Andronicus, I demonstrate the salience of Tudor political economy--principally of sovereign power and invasion, of land and inhabitation, and of the city and barbarism--to the discourse of early-modern English colonizing. I show how the same complex of ideas animated the founding legal texts of English "settlement," revealed in the jurisdictional structures created and spaces occupied by the projectors of colonies. Finally, through reference to another foundational text, not of colonizing but of modern American legal history, I show the cardinal importance to contemporary America's historical self-construction of a refusal to acknowledge America's historical origins in a political economy of "colonization" and its violence, and its preference for a narrative of "energy" and "freedom" and their occlusion of violence.