The Laws Of Cultivation 37

Nomadic Indigenous Peoples and the Law

This book investigates the unique challenges faced by nomadic Indigenous peoples in claiming self-determination and rights to their ancestral lands. Nomadic or mobile Indigenous peoples have been largely ignored in the wider context of Indigenous land rights, but such groups are often even more marginalised than other Indigenous peoples. Focusing on the Indian Forest Rights Act, this book explores how access to justice remains uneven and elusive for mobile Indigenous communities who have been dispossessed of their lands. Exposing the lack of recognition of usufruct rights and of customary land laws, which have caused a more acute displacement from ancestral lands for mobile Indigenous peoples, the book reveals how their nomadic livelihoods have excluded them from government policies and laws. The book further examines the gendered and intersectional aspects of this exclusion. In conclusion, the book maintains that legislation such as the progressive Forest Rights Act is necessary, but not enough, to protect the rights of mobile Indigenous peoples. In such cases, the book argues, legislation has to be supported by nuanced governance, which is sensitive to the particular challenges presented by Indigenous peoples who are further marginalised through nomadic lifestyles. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers working in the areas of Indigenous studies, socio-legal studies, human and minority rights, and gender and international development.

A New Abridgment of the Law

Professors of the Law

What happened to the culture of common law and English barristers in the long eighteenth century? In this wide-ranging sequel to Gentlemen and Barristers: The Inns of Court and the English Bar, 1680-1730, David Lemmings not only anatomizes the barristers and their world; he also explores the popular reputation and self-image of the law and lawyers in the context of declining popular participation in litigation, increased parliamentary legislation, and the growth of the imperial state. He shows how the bar survived and prospered in a century of low recruitment and declining work, but failed to fulfil the expectations of an age of Enlightenment and Reform. By contrast with the important role played by the common law, and lawyers, in seventeenth-century England and in colonial America, it appears that the culture and services of the barristers became marginalized as the courts concentrated on elite clients, and parliament became the primary point of contact between government and population. In his conclusion the author suggests that the failure of the bar and the judiciary to follow Blackstones mid-century recommendations for reforming legal culture and delivering the Englishmans birthrights significantly assisted the growth of parliamentary absolutism in government.