During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the government of British India created a wave of new institutions for the scientific detection of crime. Falsity was a special preoccupation of colonial officials, who were invested in the “native mendacity” stereotype. Driven by deception anxiety, the new South Asian forensics focused on finding the fake. Forensic experts worked to detect falsity from without, identifying evidence like animal blood and poison planted by colonized tricksters trying to frame rivals and subvert the colonial legal system. But the processes put in place during colonial India’s forensic heyday also enabled new forms of falsity from within, including misconduct masked by the exemption of some state experts from cross-examination. This feature, which increases the risk of wrongful convictions, lives on in South Asian legal systems today.
Mitra Sharafi is a legal historian whose research focuses on South Asia. She holds law degrees from Cambridge and Oxford (the UK equivalent of a JD and LLM) and history degrees from McGill (BA) and Princeton (PhD). Her first book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 won the Law and Society Association’s 2015 Hurst Prize. She is completing her second book manuscript, provisionally entitled, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia. Her next major project will explore the world of non-European law students from across the British empire (and globe) who came to London's Inns of Court to become barristers, 1860s-1960s. Sharafi has published articles on the history of abortion, blood-stain testing, forum-shopping for divorce, the legal profession, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and slavery. Future articles will examine the role of scientific experts in criminal trials, and the history of law books and publishing. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, Institute for Advanced Study, Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Romnes Faculty Fellowship, Shelby Cullom Davis Center, and Social Science Research Council.
Sharafi teaches Contracts I at the UW Law School, along with undergraduate courses in Legal Studies and History. She is the recipient of campus awards for her teaching and mentoring.
