Beyond the borders of the law : critical legal histories of the North American West / edited by Katrina Jagodinsky, Pablo Mitchell.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Jagodinsky, Katrina, editor.

Mitchell, Pablo, editor.

William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, sponsoring body.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Law--West (U.S.)--Congresses.

Law.

Borderlands--West (U.S.)--Congresses.

Borderlands.

West United States.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xiii, 368 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Lawrence, Kansas : University Press of Kansas, 2018.

Summary:

"In the American imagination "the West" denotes a border--between civilization and wilderness, past and future, native and newcomer--and its lawlessness is legendary. In fact, there was an abundance of law in the West, as in all borderland regions of vying and overlapping claims, jurisdictions, and domains. It is this legal borderland that Beyond the Borders of the Law explores. Combining the concepts and insights of critical legal studies and western/borderlands history, this book demonstrates how profoundly the North American West has been, and continues to be, a site of contradictory, overlapping, and overreaching legal structures and practices steeped in articulations of race, gender, and power. The authors in this volume take up topics and time periods that include Native history, the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders, regions from Texas to Alaska and Montana to California, and a chronology that stretches from the mid-nineteenth century to the near-present. From water rights to women's rights, from immigrant to indigenous histories, from disputes over coal deposits to child custody, their essays chronicle the ways in which marginalized westerners have leveraged and resisted the law to define their own rights and legacies. For the authors, legal borderlands might be the legal texts that define and regulate geopolitical borders, or they might be the ambiguities or contradictions creating liminal zones within the law. In their essays, and in the volume as a whole, the concept of legal borderlands proves a remarkably useful framework for finally bringing a measure of clarity to a region characterized by lawful disorder and contradiction. "-- Provided by publisher.

"In popular culture, the American West is generally thought of as a lawless place, full of gunfights and vigilante justice. In this edited collection, which comes out of the Clements Center's annual symposium program, Katrina Jagodinsky and Pablo Mitchell bring together a cast of scholars who show that, far from being lawless, the West was actually home to a multitude of overlapping laws and legal systems. Contributors will address how race, gender, and citizenship intersect with issues around water and natural resource rights, crime and punishment, health care, property rights, and child custody fights. While critical legal studies--advanced by such people as UPK author Lawrence Friedman--has been a strong field since the 80s, and Western/borderlands history has similarly been a vibrant field, the two have never really come together in a solid way. Jagodinsky and Mitchell hope to correct that through this vibrant collection that puts critical legal scholars and historians in conversation"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : into the void, or the musings and confessions of a redheaded stepchild lost in western legal history and found in the legal borderlands of the North American West / Katrina Jagodinsky

Enforcing colonial boundaries in the twenty-first century : settler anxiety and the Violence Against Women Act / Sarah Deer

Race, blood, and belonging : transnational Blackfoot bands and families along the US-Canada border, 1855-1915 / Jeffrey P. Shepherd

Abortion and intimate borderlands / Alicia Gutierrez-Romine

Legal ambiguities on the ground : Black Californians' land claims, 1848-1870 / Dana Elizabeth Weiner

Ditches and desirability : regulating race through the flow and quality of immigration and the application of western water law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries / Tom I. Romero II

Jurisdictional no man's land : Choctaws, lawyers, and the coal question in Indian Territory / Brian Frehner

The courtroom as legal borderland : colonial encounters between western and indigenous legal tradition in the courts of the Alaska district, 1902-1903 / Andrea Geiger

Reforming deportees : imprisonment and immigration control during the 1930s / Kelly Lytle Hernandez

The specter of compensation : Mexican claims against the United States, 1923-1941 / Allison Powers Useche

Negotiating race : the legal borderlands of court-ordered desegregation in Denver, Colorado / Danielle R. Olden.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780700626786

0700626786

9780700626793

0700626794

OCLC:

1048659498