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In This Issue

This issue moves from studying the law-in-action in the Empire State to seeing how law operated in the British Empire. It begins with two histories of law in New York during the late nineteenth century. These studies emphasize how assumptions about the roles of men, women, and law shaped the administration of criminal justice as well as the delivery and definition of legal aid. Building on the theme of gender and justice, this issue’s forum analyzes how women in colonial India negotiated the personal law system. In our first article, Carolyn Strange shows how clemency, pardoning, and executive justice were inextricably connected to criminal justice in Reconstruction-era New York. Through the pardoning of one convicted murderer in 1877, she demonstrates how mercy operated as a mechanism of substantive justice that hinged on appraisals of the offender’s character and circumstances. Frank Walworth, convicted for the murder of his father, Mansfield, argued that filial concern for his mother’s safety had prompted his chivalrous act. Strange contends that this line of defense tested the boundaries of the “unwritten law.” Although the defense’s characterization of the dutiful son failed to produce an acquittal, it later helped persuade the governor to pardon him. The Walworth case suggests that historians need to pay closer attention to executive justice as a site of “lawless law,” where preemptive honor-based violence could find a receptive audience. Equally, it draws attention to the persistence of sentiment in nineteenth-century law and the particular significance of men’s feelings about authorized and unauthorized masculine violence. Although women could petition for mercy, it still took men to judge men fit for punishment or pardons. Our second article by Felice Batlan shows how organized legal aid societies first developed through the delivery of legal services by women to women. The Working Women’s Protective Union, which was founded in 1863, had by 1888 conducted over 10,000 prosecutions and mediated 25,000 disputes on behalf of women. The complex history of the Union reveals how shifting gender ideologies intersected with the nascent labor movement, understandings of wage labor, newer ideas about philanthropy,