Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, New York. He is one of the leading scholars on fascism and populism. Professor Finchelstein is the author of many books that have been translated into several languages, including the successful From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017). His new monograph, Fascist Mythologies. The History and Politics of Unreason in Borges, Freud, and Schmitt, is forthcoming in June 2022 from Columbia University Press. Given this, he is a natural starting point to discuss the global dimension of populism and its historical experiences from Latin America to Italy. Andrea Mammone, co-editor of Modern Italy, interviewed him in December 2021.

This article addresses how a once influential but now obscure jurist addressed a potential paradox in liberal thought—between democratic control over borders and transnational rights—as it arose in the mid-nineteenth-century, amid advocacy against authoritarianism and for free trade and movement, on the one hand, and the increasing calling into question of natural law theories that may have best facilitated free movement, on the other. While scholarship has increasingly shown how the boundaries between periods of natural law and positivist hegemony are difficult to distinguish, specific tensions in the mid-nineteenth-century called for an approach that preserved free movement in light of the growing appeal of empiricism and state sovereignty. In this context, August Wilhelm Heffter proposed that states were bound by higher law as a consequence of their free decision to enter international communities: these communities’ purpose, he wrote, bred customary laws facilitating interstate interaction. Heffter’s approximation of “natural” law in a more positivist context and his use of the period’s “customary” logic helps account for his influence not only in periods of free trade and movement’s ascendancy but also the survival of forms of his thought into periods of sovereigntist reaction against them. It therefore holds potential to address what scholarship has termed today’s “liberal paradox” between democracy and migration better than approaches that emphasize a more complete return to natural law.

This article analyses the place of the legal procedure known as requerimiento (requirement) in the social life of late medieval Castile. Drawing on archival sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it examines how Castilians deployed the requerimiento and what meanings and functions this procedure assumed, particularly in processes of conflict-management. While much has been written about the requerimiento as a ritual of conquest in Spanish America, the place of this procedure in the legal culture of late medieval Castile has received little scholarly attention. By examining how the requerimiento operated within the world of civic disputes in Castilian villages and towns, this study brings to light a rather unknown background for the more familiar requerimiento, the colonial ritual of the sixteenth century.

This article reprises the Plenary Lecture from the American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, in November, 2021. Witt presents the story of cases that are quintessential examples of the kind of broken success that law makes available and that legal history helps us see. In other words, these cases make visible that the at-best-tragic realization of ideals is built into the mechanisms of the law.

When the television drama series The Women's Prison (Sijin al-Nisā’) was aired in Egypt during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in 2014 (covering thirty episodes, each around 30 to 40 minutes), it became a hit and attracted a huge audience (Fig. 1). This was partly due to the popularity of its major theme, which focused on women and crime through characters inhabiting the famous al-Qanatir al-Khayriyya women's prison, located on the outskirts of Cairo. Another reason for its success was the group of creative women who produced it: director Kamla Abu-Zikri, scriptwriter Maryam Naʿum, art director Shirin Farghal, costume designer Rim al-ʿAdil, and director of photography Nancy ʿAbd al-Fattah. Abu-Zikri and Naʿum had collaborated on earlier works, most notably for their 2009 acclaimed film One-Zero (Wahid-Sifr) and the drama series Zaat, adapted from a famous novel of the same name by the veteran Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim, which aired during Ramadan in 2013. Moreover, the key female role in both Zaat and The Women's Prison was played by the popular star actress Nelly Karim, guaranteeing high viewing rates.

This roundtable on women and crime was inspired by a discussion at a CUNY Dissections Seminar in April 2021, where Gülhan Balsoy presented her work in progress on Ottoman crime fiction in the early 20th century. The focus of her paper was a popular murder mystery series called The National Collection of Murders, which had been published in Istanbul in 1914. The protagonists of this fictional crime series were a mother and daughter known as the Dark Witch and the Bloody Fairy, who led an underground criminal gang living in a secret subterranean world beneath the city of Istanbul. While reading her paper the night before the seminar, I could not help but notice striking parallels between this fictional Ottoman murder mystery and the sensationalized media coverage of a 1921 Egyptian serial murder case, popularly known by the name of its alleged perpetrators, Raya and Sakina. In both the fictive Ottoman story and the Egyptian media coverage of a real crime, two sets of female relatives were presented as the respective leaders of a criminal gang that stole luxury goods from respectable families and turned their homes into human slaughterhouses. In both cases, the female gang leaders used “superstition” to deceive and trap their victims while continually outwitting the police, all against a backdrop of illicit sex.