ASLH Names Whitman Honorary Fellow

 [Here is the citation for the Honorary Fellowship of the American Society for Legal History for James Q. Whitman.  It was read by Amalia D. Kessler, Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies, Stanford Law School. DRE]

--This final announcement is particularly meaningful to me.

--I've learned from many truly remarkable teachers-several of whom are here. But there is only one Jim Whitman.  

--Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale, Professor Whitman sets a model of scholarly erudition, brilliance, and creativity, as well as respectful, engaged and compassionate mentorship.  

--Professor Whitman is a prolific scholar, having published five monographs and at least fifty articles.  

--These works are extraordinary on multiple levels, including the depth of the learning on which they draw.
 
--Professor Whitman has an incredible command of numerous secondary and primary source literatures, spanning many different time periods and languages.  

--Indeed, his command of foreign languages alone is truly astounding.  

--But what is perhaps most remarkable is that he manages to draw on this erudition in ways that are never narrow and arcane but in service of a highly ambitious research agenda that probes some of the deepest, most enduring questions of social theory, while engaging directly with many of our most profound socio-legal challenges today.  

--His scholarship thus extends all the way from ancient Rome to the present-day and examines an incredibly diverse range of topics.  

--It has been recognized with numerous scholarly awards, as well as visiting professorships and honorary doctorates from around the globe.  

--His very first book, The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era: Historical Vision and Legal Change, already demonstrates his unique ability to identify the profound interconnections between seemingly technical aspects of law and legal doctrine and our most profound social and political questions.
 
--By the end of this tour de force, we understand how it came to seem obvious to so many nineteenth-century German law professors and their followers that it was only through the study of ancient Roman law that it would be possible to develop a modern legal and political system suited to the distinctive "spirit" of the German people.

--In Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe and a series of related articles, Professor Whitman develops his signature approach to comparative law, which focuses on divergences rather than convergences and roots these in deeply embedded historical structures.  

--More particularly, he locates the origins of continental European conceptions of dignity in a much older law of honor that was long central to maintaining the continent's legally enshrined status hierarchies.  

--Modern dignity law in Europe, he argues, arose as an effort to democratize upward, extending aristocratic treatment to all.  

--In contrast, the United States democratized by levelling downward.  

--The end result was the emergence of radically different approaches to a range of vital legal questions on the two sides of the Atlantic-including, among others, criminal punishment, privacy, and antidiscrimination.

--In The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial, Professor Whitman brings together an extraordinary array of legal, philosophical and theological texts penned from the middle ages through the eighteenth century, on both sides of the English Channel, in order to reframe our understanding of Anglo-American criminal law's reasonable doubt standard.  

--Restoring the central role of theology in shaping law and legal systems for centuries, he rejects the commonly held understanding that the standard was intended to protect the criminal defendant from wrongful conviction and argues instead that it was designed to facilitate conviction by assuaging the anxieties of judges and jurors who feared that they would be eternally damned for sentencing someone to death.

--Professor Whitman's book, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War, inquires into the demise of the early-modern pitched battle.
 
--Drawing on a vast and difficult literature in multiple languages, he argues that the pitched battle is best understood as a legal procedure for resolving property disputes between competing sovereigns.  

--As such, it facilitated the construction of procedural rules that made it easy to determine which party was the victor, thus enabling adversaries to lay down arms relatively quickly and with limited bloodshed.  

--Troublingly, it was in no small part the rise of the modern republic that undermined this international legal system, giving rise to a previously unnecessary body of humanitarian law focused on minimizing the horrors of war.

--Professor Whitman's most recent book, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, examines American laws of race from the perspective of the German jurists responsible for building the Nazi legal system, demonstrating that contemporary U.S. race-based immigration law and anti-miscegenation laws served as a key model for the enactment of the Nuremberg laws.  

--In a recent conversation, our fellow legal historian Steven Wilf shared with me a wonderful Charlotte Brontë quote with which I was unfamiliar.  

--Writing to her publisher, Brontë praised a recent book she had read, noting that it "seems to give me eyes."  

--Through his pathbreaking scholarship and teaching, Professor Whitman has given eyes to all of us, profoundly transforming our understanding of the European past and its persistent legacies-and in ways that are sure to endure.  

--It is a great honor and pleasure to welcome him as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.