For over one hundred years—from the post–Civil War era to the post–Civil Rights era—the state of Alabama maintained a legal and social commitment to keeping blacks and whites from engaging in long-term sexual relationships with each other. Recent studies addressing the laws that barred miscegenation have shown that investigating governmental reactions to intimate interracial connections reveals much about the interplay between legal and social definitions of race as well as about the development of whiteness as a proxy for superior social, political, and legal status.

The purpose of this article is to examine socialist justice “in action.”Specifically, it looks at the Comrades Law system established in 1920s Palestine under the auspices of the General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Palestine. It finds that, regardless of original intentions, the Comrades Law quite rapidly became a quasi-state apparatus, displaying a clear bias in favor of institutional interests over those of individual workers. The argument, therefore, is that rather than becoming a liberating, alternative form of justice, this form of socialist justice ended up reinforcing existing relations of power and working as a mechanism of bureaucratic control.

By the close of the nineteenth century, most continental Europeans tacitly accepted, if they thought about it at all, the notion that a civil code governed multiple personal and familial relationships in their daily lives. Like so many legislative structures, intellectual suppositions, and cultural artifacts, what was once regarded as a novel or even a major break with the past came to be understood as one of the many requisites of modernity. Contemporary historians have adopted a similarly indifferent posture, their curiosity only piqued when encountering specific provisions entangled with other political issues. In a strikingly dissimilar approach to that adopted toward penal law, they have been disinclined to explore the relationship between civil legal endeavor and political culture or the history of ideas. Only with respect to Germany have scholars considered these topics worthy of in-depth analysis; in so doing, they have demonstrated that understanding juridical culture is fundamental to appreciating the textures and peculiarities of the liberal nation state.

The defense of Catalan civil law against the introduction of the Spanish Civil Code in the late nineteenth century was the catalyst for a broad social movement that would be transformed into Catalan nationalism by the turn of the twentieth century. Lawyers were central to this development. They interpreted and popularized the danger codification presented for Catalan society and they were instrumental in making the civil law a central element in the construction of Catalan national identity. Taking their cue from the experience of other stateless nations in Europe, lawyers developed a principled argument for political autonomy that was institutionalized with the creation, in 1901, of Catalonia's first nationalist political party, the Lliga Regionalista. Between 1881 and 1901, Catalan lawyers would help found a series of social movements for the protection of Catalan culture and orient these movements toward the adoption of nationalist objectives. Finally, lawyers would form the majority of the Lliga Regionalista's electoral candidates and the core of the party's strategists, helping the party climb to a position of dominance in Catalan politics between 1901–1932.

At the crossroads of sociology and history, scholars trained in different disciplines write legal history while engaged in a protracted guerilla war that focuses upon notions of normativity. Law and legal development as objects of investigation evoke in the sociology of law the very essence of normativity: what is law if not codified norms, and thus itself subject, perhaps, to norms of development or at least rationality? Conversely, legal historians trained in history departments, who subscribe to the particularizing norms cherished by that discipline, consciously pride themselves on their power to resist the temptations of normativity and, perversely in the view of some, insist upon examining, even celebrating, the deviant, the limiting case, the “exception to the rule.” At different times, one approach or the other has dominated the scholarly literature. Notoriously, the Parsonianism of the 1950s and early 1960s elevated a neo-Weberian normativity to hegemony in legal history as well as in social theory; now the chastened decades at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries have tipped the balance within legal history to social history's focus on people, ideas, and experience on the margin, a focus so full of potential to erode general schemes of normative development.

Kenneth Ledford's thoughtful and poignant commentary has highlighted a number of intriguing theoretical issues that will be debated as the study of modern Catalonia continues to make inroads into various disciplines within the Anglo-Saxon academy. Acknowledging Ledford's observations, I limit my response to clarifying three points: (1) the degree to which the Barcelona legal profession was unified; (2) lawyers and liberalism; and (3) the challenge that Catalan exceptionalism poses to Weberian modernization. In order to address these issues, I expand the scope of this response beyond that of the original article.

Kenneth Ledford has provided an insightful commentary on the two articles on Catalonia. He generously notes their contribution to debates on normativity in the history of civil law codification, for which I thank him. More important, Ledford raises several questions that need to be addressed before we can be convinced that “the Catalan experience can be used to refine and reshape assessments of any general European phenomena regarding civil law codification” (Ledford, 390). I shall use this space to briefly address each of his three questions.