Something Else: History, Legal Imagination, and the American Revolution

This article reviews Martti Koskenniemi’s To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power , 1300–1780, Dannelle Gutarra Cordero’s She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World , and James Q. Whitman’s From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World . These authors raise fundamental questions about what was going on and what was or is at stake in the legal theorizing, argumentation, and adjudication that characterized the immediate prehistory of the nascent US constitutional order.