In part three of “Walking with Horatio Alger,” I take a train ride to Philadelphia’s Chinatown, spend an afternoon in a lonely academic library, drive to a Massachusetts cemetery while listening to Fats Waller, and relax at a party with a bunch of fun-loving kids. How can video help bring a 1909 edition of Ragged Dick back into some of its original spatial and temporal relationships?
Here’s the complete video:
Here are links to individual sections: part one; part two; and—the latest—part three.
Horatio Alger doesn’t have much to do with law or legal history—except for the extraordinary fact that he was Justice Benjamin Cardozo’s private tutor for a spell. But I hope you’ll enjoy this video all the same. It’s about a wonderful old book I found a couple of weeks ago after a long hike.
The video is the first, draft installment in a series which, among other things, is giving me great practice in video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro—which, in turn, will allow me to create a long-planned series of videos that will tell the story of the development of the common law through the linked story of ten rare books.
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September 13, 2014: This post has been moved to March 30, 2014 for organizational purposes.
Today the New York Times published an article by Alissa J. Rubin titled “Painful Payment for Afghan Debt: A Daughter, 6.” The title says it all. As a result of a legal arrangement to discharge a debt, the girl pictured on the front page of the paper wearing a red dress and purple shawl, Naghma Mohammad, will be forced to marry a lender’s 17-year-old son. Naghma “does not know what is going to happen,” says her father. Nor is she aware, in the words of the journalist, that she “will most likely be treated more like a family servant than a spouse—and at worst as a captive slave.”
Last week, I wrote about a closely related issue in a post ironically titled “‘In Praise of Forced Marriage’” (the post was a response to a critical review of my own work titled “In Praise of Kinship”). The New York Times article closely tracks what I said there.
I’d like to note three things in response to this moving story.
First, Afghan and Pakistani liberals resolutely condemn forced marriages like this one. In response to my earlier post, a devout Muslim friend of mine from the tribal areas of Pakistan wrote to proclaim that he “condemns [the practice] in all its manifestations. It’s against human rights and human dignity … I consider it a crime against humanity from its very roots.”
Liberals in developed states should be making common cause with people like my friend. We should be helping them in their modernization efforts, and we should be asking them—especially when they are critics of the United States—to help us appreciate the ways that we fall short of our own values.
Second, the article highlights the way in which people within traditional societies can feel trapped by the collective, kin-based social and legal structures that exist in the absence of effective state authority. Tellingly, the girl’s father, Taj Mohammad, muses in regret: “If, God forbid, they mistreat my daughter, then I would have to kill someone in their family”—and, indeed, he fears that “when she goes to that house, she will die soon.”
He also is dejected by the demand of his child’s future mother-in-law that Naghma be withdrawn from school because having a son’s future wife receive an education is “dishonoring” to the family. At the same time, the father seems prepared to accede to the demand—what else can he do?
Finally, a note about the Pashtun legal institution of the jirga, or counsel of elders, which sanctioned Naghma’s forced marriage. As I argue in The Rule of the Clan, I believe that social and legal modernization of the kind that advances principles of personal autonomy can only be effective if it works with and through clans and their traditional institutions rather than over and around them. Liberals need to respect customary legal practices if our efforts are to be both ethical and effective.
The jirga is one of those traditional legal institutions, and it has been as essential to Pashtun tribal life as federal courts are to the United States.
Yet if you speak with people who are familiar with the most traditional Pashtun tribal areas, they will tell you that jirgas today are changing. Traditionally, the jirga was composed of men who, like our own judges, could resist outside pressure and decide cases independently. But it is said that jirga membership standards are now in decline—that selection standards are increasingly less strict. The institution is being undermined in the same way that our own legal institutions would be weakened by a decrease in standards of bar admission.
Perhaps I’ll write about this central feature of liberal development—the maintenance of professional standards against external pressure—in a future post. It’s an issue liberals everywhere share, whether we are fighting against the social dislocations of war or against an unbridled marketplace.
This morning the Wall Street Journal published this critical review of The Rule of the Clan by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a professor of history the University of Notre Dame. I’m happy to receive the review (as I’ve noted here, I begin each morning with a bracing perusal of the Journal’s editorial page), and I send my greetings across the blogosphere to Fernández-Armesto and to readers who support his views—from which, I hope, all right-minded people will recoil in head-shaking disbelief.
Without writing more extensively about the review than it warrants, I’d like to use it as an opportunity to clarify my own views, because Fernández-Armesto’s remarks represent the kind of worrying trend in American political culture and intellectual life I criticize in the book: the rejection of the modernist values of the liberal Enlightenment.
Fernández-Armesto frames his review by recounting a story I tell in Chapter Three involving a civilian analyst for the U.S. Central Command. During one of his tours of Afghanistan, the analyst witnesses the proceedings of a Pashtun tribal jirga adjudicating a case of murder. In a practice known as swara, the council prevents a blood feud between the victim’s family and the perpetrator’s family by forcing the sister of the murderer to marry the brother of the murdered man.
As Fernández-Armesto notes, I indicate that “the young woman had no choice in the matter,” and I criticize the custom because it violates her autonomy.
Fernández-Armesto takes me to task for precisely this criticism, suggesting that I “can’t appreciate” that the “Afghan newlyweds may feel fulfilled as peacemakers.” He accuses me of endorsing “one-size [fits all] individualism.” Read the rest of this entry »
My new post is entirely in video format. It’s a short conversation with an Argentinean scholar about constitutional law in his country, including some differences between law there and in the United States. Our conversation touches on affirmative action, gay marriage, voter identification, and economic regulation, among other important issues. My wife says it’s fascinating, and I hope you’ll agree.
To watch, just click on the thumbnail below, or to see it in larger format (which I’d recommend), click above on the title of this post and then click again on the video window:
Worlds of Law 