Continental Parlor 7 Hilton San Francisco and Towers Ballroom Level
Section on Legal History Tahirih Victoria Lee, Florida State University, Chair
Going the Distance: Law as a Tool for Wielding Influence Over Vast Territories
Moderator:
James Q. Whitman, Yale Law School
Speakers:
U.S. Extraterritorial Courts in the Twnetieth Century as a Means of Exercising Jurisdiction in the Pacific Tahirih Victoria Lee, Florida State University
English Settlement and Imperial Governanace Richard J. Ross, Indiana University, Indianapolis
Looking West: Dred Scott v. Sanford, as a case of Frontiersmenship Lea Vander Velde, University of Iowa
Commentator:
Robert J. Cottrol, The George Washington University
The panel will take up past uses of law as a means of colonial rule or extraterritorial influence with an eye toward exploring the various ways in which law helped overcome the difficulties of geographical and cultural distance. Each panelist will explore an example of how a ruler, from its seat of government, used law to communicate to subjects in distant territories its conceptions of governance. To do this, each will compare law's role as an instrument of communication at home to its role as an instrument of communication between home base and the distant place. The panelists will consider such questions as how did distance alter the role of law as a device for communication of norms? What was law able to do and to be domestically in the metropolis that it could not in the periphery on account of distances? The comparison will be done at the level of function (what could law do) and ideology (what was the law's assumed purposes and political identity).
Professor Lee will explore the federal government of the United States' use of law to exercise jurisdiction over areas of China, the Philippines, and Guam in the early to mid-twentieth century. Professor Ross will discuss law as a means of communication and governance in the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic British empire. Professor Vander Velde will explore three aspects of the infamous Dred Scott case: how the frontier experience shaped the litigants, how the frontier experience shaped the litigation and how in turn, the decision was expected to settle the law in the frontier territories.