Jeanne-Marie Jackson, "The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa" (Princeton UP, 2026)

In this episode of New Books in Law, host Elisa Prosperetti interviews Jean-Marie Jackson, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, about her new book, *The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford's West Africa* (Princeton UP, 2026). Jackson presents a groundbreaking conceptual history of J.E. Casely Hayford, a towering yet underappreciated figure in West African intellectual and political life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather than a traditional biography, Jackson’s work uses conceptual history—drawing from the Cambridge School’s methods—to analyze how Casely Hayford’s texts engaged deeply with legal, political, and moral ideas across multiple scales, from local governance to Pan-African state-building. She argues that Casely Hayford’s legacy has been marginalized by both colonial historiography and postcolonial corrective frameworks that overemphasize orality and downplay the rich textual traditions of West Africa. Jackson emphasizes the fusion of the literary and the literal in Casely Hayford’s work—his legal treatises, novels, and political writings were not abstract exercises but deliberate, meticulously crafted tools for civic engagement and institutional reform. The conversation also explores the politics of elite identity, challenging the notion that Casely Hayford’s elite status rendered him irrelevant to broader African struggles, and highlights his enduring influence on figures like Kwame Nkrumah and J.B. Danquah. Jackson concludes by sharing her upcoming projects, including a collaborative book on 'discipline' in Southern African intellectual history and a historical study of moral vocabularies in the corporate merger of Anglo-Ashanti mining interests. Key takeaways include: 1) J.E. Casely Hayford was a polymathic intellectual whose work bridged law, literature, and politics with extraordinary precision; 2) African intellectual traditions are deeply textual and formal, not merely oral, and deserve recognition as such; 3) conceptual history offers a powerful method for understanding African thinkers on their own terms; 4) elite status should not be equated with political irrelevance or colonial collaboration; 5) close reading and citation are not just literary techniques but vital political acts in governance and representation.