Stefan B. Kirmse is a senior research fellow and research coordinator at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, and a senior lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is the author of Youth and Globalization in Central Asia (2013) and the editor of Youth in the Former Soviet South (2011) and One Law for All? (2012).

• Introduction; 1. Minority rights and legal integration in the Russian empire; 2. Borderlands no more: Crimea and Kazan in the mid-nineteenth century; 3. Implementing legal change: new courts for Crimea and Kazan; 4. Images and practices in the new courts: the enactment of monarchy, modesty, and cultural diversity; 5. Seeking justice: Muslim Tatars go to court; 6. Confronting the state: peasant resistance over land and faith; 7. Dealing with unrest: crime and punishment in the 'crisis years' 1878–79; Conclusion.

'… the book is an excellent introduction both to the most successful of the great reforms and to how ordinary people, and in particular ethnic and religious minorities, resorted to the new courts in the first decades of their functioning.' Jonathan Daly, The Slavonic and East European Review