This essay on Victoria Saker Woeste's Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012) emphasizes that what made Ford's broadsides against Jews in the 1920s so dangerous was technology—his command of an unparalleled network of distribution, through his nationwide Ford dealerships. In addition, at the time of Ford's libels, US legal culture had not yet absorbed the idea that ideological and psychological subordination of minority groups was the principal harm worked by what would later be called “hate speech.”

Parker's Common Law, History, and Democracy in America joins an ongoing effort to turn the tables on “law and …” by replacing the familiar question “What can history, sociology, and cultural studies tell us about law?” with a new line of inquiry asking “What can law teach us about the reach and limits of disciplinary thinking?” In his study of the reception of common law into nineteenth‐century American jurisprudence, Parker unearths a notion of time based on stability and repetition that challenges the dominant modernist and historicist approach to the writing of law and history. Parker, however, shies away from drawing the full implications of this move and it remains unclear whether, in the final analysis, he escapes the spell of legal historicism.

This essay reflects on how Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013), a study of second‐century Roman Egypt, contributes to the study of law and on how legal culture in ancient Egypt relates to law and legal cultures in other times and places. From the perspective of social history, this essay focuses on the connections between the victims of violence who seek redress in local courts in Egypt and more contemporary work on the legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana and the United States. This comparison reveals how law becomes a vehicle for the marginalized to repair and reconstruct their personhood.

In Someday All This Will Be Yours, Hendrik Hartog (2012) examines how private inheritance law structured the strategies people used at the turn of the twentieth century to induce relatives to care for them as they aged. Reading it as a book about social inequality and the family reveals how wealth, gender, and race not only worked to deny claims of marginalized caregivers but also to hide the way these social hierarchies affect family life. Although race does not figure in Hartog's analysis, highlighting its latent presence illustrates the often unspoken yet fundamental role race plays in legal regulation of families.

This essay examines the linguistic anthropological themes emergent in Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). Viewing law as a discourse, it explores how language is constitutive of law and is the primary modality of acting upon, and enacting the world(s) that it shapes, giving meaning to the lives of people who engage each other in and through it. Violence petitions in second‐century Egypt are a fundamental mode of sense making and problem solving, calling on legal authorities to interpret claims of iniuria, or legal battery, into a language that they understand and remedy. In doing so, law changes the discourse of violence, specifically, and social life, more broadly.

In this short response to the reviewers of Someday All This Will Be Yours, A History of Inheritance and Old Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), the author identifies some of the paradoxes and difficulties that researching and writing the book posed and, along the way, qualifies and complicates some of the conclusions that he then drew. In particular, he questions the extent to which a work of history speaks to the concerns of the emerging field of elder law.

In this essay, I situate Kunal Parker's Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900, within a broader set of intellectual currents engaged with questions of time and temporality. Although Parker's book centers on the common law and history and develops specific conceptions of time, in so doing, he invites legal historians and legal scholars to ruminate on the times of law, particularly the temporal relations that law has with itself. Placing Parker in conversation with Henri Bergson and the recent Bergsonian revival in critical theory, I suggest that law has a duration, a formulation that opens other itineraries to consider the dynamic times of law.

In this essay, I respond to three readers of my book, Henry Ford's War and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, by embracing the opportunity to reconsider the book's theoretical and historiographical frames. I synthesize the contributions that Clyde Spillenger, Carroll Seron, and Aviam Soifer make in their deep readings of the book and respond to their criticisms. I then place the book into a new interpretive frame that is emerging in the field of the “new civil rights history,” as it is now being conceptualized in the work of Risa Goluboff, Kenneth Mack, Tomiko Brown‐Nagin, and others writing on civil rights advocacy in the twentieth‐century United States.

In my response to the reviews of my book by Marianne Constable, Shai Lavi, and Renisa Mawani, I situate the argument of Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism within a concern with contemporary forms of historical knowledge. Where contemporary historical knowledge practices subsume their objects of investigation, I adopt the temporality of the object of investigation—namely, the common law—as the structure my book. In different registers, Constable, Lavi, and Mawani urge me to take up more explicitly the foundational questioning about which they care. I welcome their readings. However, given the distinct problematic from which I start, I argue, the book is not in the first instance an argument about the ontology of history or law.

This comment considers Ari Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013) from sociological and sociolegal perspectives. Although Bryen is a historian, and his site of inquiry is second‐century Roman Egypt, he turns to contemporary sociologists and law and society scholars to highlight the interplay between law and the social world in the construction of violence. In doing so, he finds a new way to analyze the role of law as a cultural resource for nonelites to make sense of their social world but also to change it (albeit with limits) through law.

The literature on the role of law in countries with so‐called hybrid regimes that are stuck somewhere between democracy and authoritarianism tends to dwell on the politicization of law and the courts. This has the effect of discounting the importance of the vast majority of cases that are decided in accord with the law. Taking Russia as a case study, this essay reviews a cross‐section of the literature on its courts in order to document this tendency and explore why alternative narratives of law have failed to gain traction: Burbank's Russian Peasants Go to Court (2004); Feifer's Justice in Moscow (1964); Kaminskaya's Final Judgment (1982); Ledeneva's Can Russia Modernise? (2013); McDonald's Face to the Village (2011); Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia (2004); Popova's Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies (2012); and Romanova's Butyrka (2010).

The publication of a previously unknown set of lectures delivered by Foucault in 1981 at Louvain's criminology institute constitutes a major revelation for legal and criminological scholars (Wrong‐Doing, Truth‐Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, 2014). The lecture material includes an extended discussion of the techniques used by Oedipus to establish the truth of his familial crime, a reflection on the beginnings of the inquisitorial justice system (which Foucault here argues paved the way for the scientific revolution), and analyses of contemporary forensic confessions. Throughout these meticulously edited lectures, the scientific and philosophical “inquiries” that revolutionized modern European knowledges are shown to be rooted in embodied practices of confession and avowal that go back to ancient Greece.

This is a review essay of Caron Beaton‐Wells and Ariel Ezrachi (eds.), Criminalising Cartels: Critical Studies of an International Regulatory Movement (2011); David J. Gerber, Global Competition: Law, Markets, and Globalization (2010); and Ioannis Lianos and D. Daniel Sokol (eds.), The Global Limits of Competition Law (2012). It explores the fragmented nature of national competition laws in the context of globalization and several harmonizing trends: the defining role of economics, the strong influence of US antitrust economics and law internationally, and the relative insularity of competition law from other subdisciplines of law. The recent emergence of competition regimes, especially in the BRICS countries, challenges these harmonizing trends, reducing US hegemony. Economics will remain central but cultural and institutional factors that reflect societal values will become more significant. This leads to a contradiction of convergence as to the benefits of competition law internationally and continuing fragmentation along national lines.

New work on the “history of capitalism” reveals how the personal freedom enjoyed by people living within the liberal capitalist mainstream is often purchased by coerced labor at the social margins. Walter Johnson's book River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom makes this argument with force, utilizing the concept of “slave racial capitalism” to suggest how race‐based slavery constituted a necessary component of early American economic expansion. Using Johnson's framework as a starting point, this essay argues that the legal institutions of property and contract, institutions underwriting a genuinely “slave racial capitalist” regime, also contained certain subversive possibilities within themselves, eventually challenging unfree labor as a modality of rule within the modernizing United States.

In this brief comment, I respond to symposium reviewers of my book Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). I consider the insights each provides from their respective discipline, and identify connections across those disciplines as well. More broadly, I comment on the theoretical purchase and unique challenges of law and society scholarship.

This essay reviews Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume I: Structures of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume II: Rights and Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). It defends developmental approaches in the study of US constitutional law. It explains how law has been studied in political science, illustrating how political development became part of the story. It outlines how American political development approaches work when applied to law, noting how studying law transforms these approaches. It notes the insights produced through the blending of American political development and constitutional law, explaining how these insights provide more leverage for understanding the role of courts as democratic institutions. The essay closes by discussing the promising directions these approaches suggest, defending their value beyond political science.