Appealing to the Tsar: Petitioning and Advocacy in Imperial Russia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Although Russia's judicial reforms of 1864 brought many new elements to legal culture, such as jury trials and a professional bar, many traditional elements persisted. Primary among them was petitioning directly to the tsar. These papers compare and contrast the different ways that Russian subjects could access justice, from direct petitioning (with examples from the eighteenth and twentieth centuries) to lawyerly advocacy in a nineteenth-century jury trial.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Jane Burbank, New York U

Papers

• The Reketmeister: Russia's Eighteenth-Century Petitions Chancery - Nancy S. Kollmann, Stanford U

• Private Justice in Public Courts: Victims' Lawyers in Post-Reform Russia, 1866-1884 - Sergei Antonov, Yale U

• Petitions, Responsibility, and Mercy in Late-Imperial Russia - Alison K. Smith, U of Toronto (Canada)

Discussant

• Alexander M. Martin, U of Notre Dame