The Lawful Empire by Stefan Kirmse explores the introduction of the Great Reforms’ court system in the governorates of Taurida and Kazan΄, two regions in the Russian Empire that were, simultaneously, imperial peripheries with substantial non-Orthodox and Muslim populations and fully integrated legal and administrative spaces of the imperial state. The book is not, however, written in the dated tradition of regional history. The analysis is rich in themes and implications ranging from questions of imperial governance, citizenship-subjecthood, and public rituals to subalternity and experience of lived imperial diversity. The author avoids both the Sonderweg interpretation of Russian history and the normative Eurocentric perspective on the trajectory of Russian modern state and law by describing the historical experience of the second half of the nineteenth century in the analytical language of imperial diversity and legal pluralism. In this canvass the post-Reform Russian empire appears as “deeply ambiguous” (14), failing to neatly fit the abstract ideal-types of colonial or continental empire, but open to comparison with other imperial formations (288).

Zooming in on the introduction of circuit courts in Taurida and Kazan΄, the author contextualizes this legal change by studying different groups of population in these regions in the pre-Reform estate system of rights and obligations, through the social and political history of religious markers of difference, and through the work of the Muslim Spiritual Administrations of Orenburg and Simferopol (together with the Orthodox Church administration and Karaites, Catholic and Armenian Gregorian confessional structures). He also explores the role of Islamic law (adat and shari'a) in the legal pluralism of Russian space, the place of township (volostnye) courts in the space of legal pluralism, land relations in both regions in connection with the hybrid estate structures tuned to accommodate local/imperial difference, and the place of the selected regions in the overall governance and imaginary of the empire. Almost nothing escapes this analysis of two imperial situations that goes down to a micro-level of imperial diversity and up to the macro-imperial level of territorial and non-territorial arrangements for differentiated populations.

Based on rich archival corpuses and careful cross-examination of records, the core of the book traces the introduction of the reformed courts in Taurida and Kazan΄, the simultaneous “integration” of imperial space and population in the new legal order and the “accommodation” of new legal institutions to the local conditions of diversity. The factor of the nationalizing empire is taken into account, but often proved weak vis-à-vis the new courts and jurists of the reform era. The reformed courts introduced another judicial venue in the legal system of the Russian empire, they helped develop an inclusive legal space, empowered the non-dominant groups of population and promoted Muslims to the ranks in the judiciary (172–80). Looking at the rationale for Muslims to choose circuit courts over other available judicial venues (181–213), Kirmse convincingly argues that Muslim communities in question were not monolithic or unmixed from the surrounding population (215–19) and that Muslim plaintiffs pragmatically sought a neutral arbiter in cases of internal communal disputes and cross-communal encounters. This theme could have been further developed addressing the recent literature on the mixed and hybrid nature of mass society in the context of imperial diversity (such as in the work by Ilya Gerasimov).

The micro-historical account of the accommodation of the new courts to local conditions changes the perception that circuit courts promoted a homogenized national citizenry in place of imperial subjecthood. The book provides fascinating details on how the new legal institutions made every effort to make justice accessible to the local population (132), cared about a multiplicity of languages (137, 145) and religious oaths (164), and even took into account conflicting religious holidays (172). In a dialogue between Eric Lohr (unified, national citizenship) and Jane Burbank (imperial rights regime) on post-Reform citizenship-subjecthood, this book offers a new interpretation that leans more to Burbank's view: the operating concept of equality before the law did create a more inclusive and rationalized legal space, but equality was not the same and did not lead to purging cultural difference. Therefore, the book is an important contribution to the historical understanding of the impact of the Great Reforms and to the discussion of conflicting trajectories of building a modern imperial state in the context of diversity.