Note: This list is skewed to include extra readings that focus on women, gender, and sexuality.
Professor Tamar Herzog
European Legal History
Broad Temporal Overviews
1. Bellomo, Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe 1000-1800. Wash. D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 1995.
2. Berman, Harold. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition.
Harvard University Press, 1985.
3. Kelly, J.M. A Short History of Western Legal Theory. Oxford University Press, 1992.
4. Langbein, John H. Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime.
University of Chicago Press, 2006.
5. Merryman, John Henry. The Civil Law Tradition, 3rd Edition: An Introduction to the Legal
Systems of Europe and Latin America. Stanford University Press, 2007.
6. Stein, Peter. Roman Law in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Medieval Law
7. Bartlett, Robert. Trial by Fire and Water. The Medieval Judicial Ordeal. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986.
8. Brundage, James A. Medieval Canon Law. New York: Longman, 1995.
9. Brundage, James A. The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and
Courts. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
10. Koziol, Geoffrey. Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval
France. Cornell University Press, 1992.
11. Whitman, James Q. The Origins of Reasonable Doubt. Theological Roots of the Criminal
Trial. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
Feudal Law
12. Brown, Elizabeth. “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval
Europe.” American Historical Review 79, no. 4 (Oct. 1974): 1063-1088.
13. Hudson, John. Law, Land and Lordship in Anglo-Norman Europe. Oxford University Press,
1994.
14. Reynolds, Susan. Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted. Oxford University
Press, 1994.
English Law
15. Baker, John Hamilton. An Introduction to English Legal History. 3rd ed. London:
Butterworths, 1990.
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16. Hogue, Arthur R. Origins of the Common Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966.
17. Langbein, John H. The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford Studies in Modern Legal
History). Oxford University Press, 2005.
18. Plucknett, Theodore. A Concise History of the Common Law. Liberty Fund, 2010.
Western Family Law
19. Desan, Suzanne. The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. University of California Press,
2004.
20. Dyer, Abigail. “Seduction by Promise of Marriage: Law, Sex, and Culture in SeventeenthCentury Spain.” Sixteenth Century Journal 34, no. 2 (2003): 439-455.
21. Glendon, Mary Ann. The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law, and Family in the
United States and Western Europe. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
22. Hardwick, Julie. Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in
Early Modern France. Oxford University Press, 2009. [Focus on chapters about marriage and
family.]
23. Ozment, Steven. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Harvard
University Press, 1985.
24. Phillips, Roderick. Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
25. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. Penguin Books,
1982.
26. Stone, Lawrence. Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987. Oxford University Press, 1990.
27. Stretton, Tim and Kesselring, Krista J., eds. Married Women and the Law: Coverture in
England and the Common Law World. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.
28. Tsoukala, Philomila. “Marrying Family Law to the Nation.” American Journal of
Comparative Law 58, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 873-910.
29. Urquhart, Diane. “Ireland and the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.” Journal of
Family History 38, no. 3 (2013): 301-320.
30. Vick, Brian. “Liberalism, Nationalism, and Gender Dichotomy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
Germany: The Contested Case of German Civil Law.” Journal of Modern History 82 (Sept.
2010): 546-584.
Witchcraft and Law
31. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Routledge (3d ed. 2006).
32. Monter, William. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to
Sicily. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Chapter 12: Witchcraft: The Forgotten Offense.
Colonial Law and Legal Culture
33. Aubert, Guillaume. “‘To Establish One Law and Definite Rules’: Race, Religion, and the
Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code Noir,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic
World (ed. Cecile Vidale). University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 [Chapter 1].
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34. Banner, Stuart. “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia.”
Law and History Review 23(1) (2005): 95-131.
35. Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
36. Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty. Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–
1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
37. Bilder, Mary Sarah. The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004
38. Herzog, Tamar. Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and
Spanish America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
39. Herzog, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas.
Harvard University Press, 2015.
40. Herzog, Tamar. Upholding Justice: Society, State and the Penal System in Quito. University
of Michigan Press: 2004.
41. Merry, Sally Engle. Colonizing Hawai’i. The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999.
Gender, Family, and Colonial Law
42. Hardwick, Julie; Pearsall, Sarah; and Wulf, Karin. “Centering Families in Atlantic Histories.”
William & Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (April 2013): 205-224.
43. Lazarus-Black, Mindie. “Bastardy, Gender Hierarchy, and the State: The Politics of Family
Law Reform in Antigua and Barbuda.” Law & Society Review 26, no. 4 (1992): 863-900.
44. Loos, Tamara. “The Imperialism of Monogamy in Family Law,” in Subject Siam: Family,
Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. Cornell University Press, 2006 [Chapter 4].
45. Martínez, Maria Elena. Genealogical Fictions. Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in
Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
46. Premo, Bianca. Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, & Legal Minority in Colonial
Lima. UNC Press, 2005.
47. Premo, Bianca. “Felipa’s Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century
Oaxaca.” Ethnohistory 61, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 497-523.
48. Roberts, Richard. “Custom and Muslim Family Law in the Native Courts of the French
Soudan, 1905-1912,” in Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Legacies and
Post-Colonial Challenges (ed. Shamil Jeppie, Ebrahim Moosa, & Richard Roberts),
Amsterdam University Press, 2009 [Chapter 2].
49. Sharafi, Mitra. Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947.
Cambridge University Press, 2014. (Skip Part Three.)
50. Sharafi, Mitra. “The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain
to Baroda.” Law and History Review 28, no. 4 (November 2010): 979-1009.
51. Williams, Mary. “Private Lives and Public Orders: Regulating Sex, Marriage, and Legitimacy
in Spanish Colonial Louisiana” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World (ed. Cecile
Vidale). University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 [Chapter 7].
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Civil Law in the United States
52. Bryson, W. Hamilton. “The Use of Roman Law in Virginia Courts.” American Journal of
Legal History 28 (1984): 135-46.
53. Helmholz, R.H. “Use of the Civil Law in Post Revolutionary American Jurisprudence.”
Tulane Law Review 66, no. 6 (June 1992): 1651-84.
54. Hoeflich, M.H. Roman and Civil Law and the Development of Anglo-American Jurisprudence
in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
55. Stein, Peter. “The Attraction of the Civil Law in Post-Revolutionary America.” Virginia Law
Review 52, no. 3 (1966): 404-34.
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