John Fabian Witt

Bio: John Fabian Witt is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Diplomatic history & Chinese law. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 7 citations.

Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire

Abstract: Almost Citizens lays out the tragic story of how the United States denied Puerto Ricans full citizenship following annexation of the island in 1898. As America became an overseas empire, a handful of remarkable Puerto Ricans debated with US legislators, presidents, judges, and others over who was a citizen and what citizenship meant. This struggle caused a fundamental shift in constitution law: away from the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood, and toward doctrines that accommodated racist imperial governance. Erman's gripping account shows how, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, administrators, lawmakers, and presidents together with judges deployed creativity and ambiguity to transform constitutional meaning for a quarter of a century. The result is a history in which the United States and Latin America, Reconstruction and empire, and law and bureaucracy intertwine.

Tuer sans remords, une histoire de la peine de mort en Californie de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours

Abstract: La these propose l'etude du processus entier de la peine capitale en Californie depuis la fin du XIXe siecle, lorsque les executions sont transferees derriere les murs des penitenciers d'Etat, jusqu'a nos jours. L'etude se fonde sur les archives penitentiaires et les demandes de grâce des condamnes. La these est construite en croisant l'apport de M. Foucault sur le pouvoir de punir et de N. Elias sur le processus de civilisation. Il s'agit d'expliciter la disjonction temporelle grandissante entre condamnation a mort et execution. La premiere partie, juger, presente l'evolution de la procedure penale. L'acte de juger se complexifie avec la disparition progressive du droit de grâce et son remplacement par la confrontation complexe entre les cours californiennes et federales. La seconde partie, incarcerer, disseque la maniere dont les condamnes a mort ont ete traites dans les mois puis les annees precedant leur execution. Une incarceration d'un type nouveau apparait avec la surveillance croissante des gardiens, medecins et psychiatres. A mesure que le temps d'incarceration s'allonge, les condamnes du " couloir de la mort " finissent par arracher des droits comparables a ceux des longues peines. La troisieme partie, executer, explicite les mutations dans la methode et l'organisation de l'execution. La Californie pratique d'abord la pendaison avant d'adopter, en 1938, la chambre a gaz consideree alors comme moderne et indolore. En 1992, une juge federale bannit le gazage. La Californie adopte alors l'injection letale. Cette derniere technique ne resout pas les questions entourant la dignite de l'execution.

Martial Law and English Laws, c.1500–c.1700

Abstract: John M. Collins presents the first comprehensive history of martial law in the early modern period. He argues that rather than being a state of exception from law, martial law was understood and practiced as one of the King's laws. Further, it was a vital component of both England's domestic and imperial legal order. It was used to quell rebellions during the Reformation, to subdue Ireland, to regulate English plantations like Jamestown, to punish spies and traitors in the English Civil War, and to build forts on Jamaica. Through outlining the history of martial law, Collins reinterprets English legal culture as dynamic, politicized, and creative, where jurists were inspired by past practices to generate new law rather than being restrained by it. This work asks that legal history once again be re-integrated into the cultural and political histories of early modern England and its empire.

What Counts?: Political Economy, or Ways to Make Early America Add Up

Abstract: The field of early American political economy has quietly grown in the last decade, as historians have used a flexible framework to analyze how a wide variety of economic practices and ideas related to formal and informal political formations. Using capacious definitions of “political economy,” historians have followed in the footsteps of their sources, early American political economists, who, unsure of the range of the mechanisms and forces they were trying to describe, were wary of too narrowly delimiting their field of investigation. In contrast to other methodological approaches to early American economic practice, historians investigating political economy have largely been keen to “keep early America weird,” recognizing the unfamiliar and the dissonant in the past while generating important new perspectives on topics of perennial interest, such as the links between slavery and economic growth, and opening new inquiries into state-formation, market-creation, and the import of the early republic’s global connections. This essay highlights some of the common themes and questions driving recent work, delineates how histories of political economy both fit within and diverge from new histories of capitalism, and offers suggestions for further study.

Lawless Wars of Empire? The International Law of War in the Philippines, 1898–1903

Abstract: Writing for his fellow military officers in early 1903, United States Army Major C.J. Crane reflected on the recent Philippine–American War. The bloody struggle to suppress an insurgency in the Philippines after the United States had annexed them from Spain in 1899 had officially concluded the previous July. The war had been accompanied by fierce racist sentiments among Americans, and in keeping with these, Crane described his foes as “the most treacherous people in the world.” But Crane's discussion drew as much on concepts of law as it did on race. The average American officer, Crane argued, had “remembered all the time that he was struggling with an enemy who was not entitled to the privileges usually granted prisoners of war,” and could be summarily executed, without benefit of “court-martial or other regular tribunal.” If anything, the Americans had been too generous. “Many [American] participants in the struggle,” he maintained, “have failed to fully understand that we were practically fighting an Asiatic nation in arms and almost every man a soldier in disguise and a violator” of the laws of war. But what did those laws mean to the United States during the conflict, and what does this indicate about the broader history of international law's relationship to empire?