Selma Moidel Smith Student Writing Competition in California Legal History

[As a reminder, we are moving up the following Call for Submissions.  DRE]

The California Supreme Court Historical Society (CSCHS) encourages all students working on
California legal history (NOT just the history of California courts) to apply for [the Selma Moidel Smith Student Writing Competition in California Legal History.  Papers may include elements of digital humanities and may also be co-authored. This is a GREAT WAY to get attention for your hard work!

$5,000 first-place, $2,500 second-place, and $1,000 third-place prizes will be awarded to the best papers on California state or colonial history, broadly considered. Recent winners include a study of the death penalty in California, the evolution of California land law, the desegregation of Stanford Law School, and disability law and the campaign for independent living. as well as a jointly authored paper on Chinese adoption practices and their role in immigration decisions after the Chinese Exclusion Act.

We accept papers of at least 7,500 and not more than 15,000 words, including notes and other explanatory matter. The competition is open to students and recent graduates in history and/or law, provided that they did not have full-time academic employment at the time the paper was written. The paper should also be unpublished; prize winners will likely receive an offer to publish in California Legal History, CSCHS's journal.

Papers may be self-nominated or sent in by a professor or supervisor. To ensure anonymity, the author's name should appear only on a separate cover page, along with the author's mailing address, telephone number, email address, and the name of their school.  

Submissions are due by July 1, 2026 and should be sent to director@cschs.org with the subject line "Smith Prize." The winners will be announced in August 2026, and an award ceremony (likely over Zoom) will be held in August or September. 

For the Prize Committee: Sarah Barringer Gordon, Laura Kalman, Stuart Banner

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington University Law Review Online: Michael Bannerjee (UC Berkeley) on "Land-Grant Universities."  

• 
  The Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology announces the establishment of its Research Centre for Legal History.

• Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, discusses the history of conceptions of federalism in the United States on the Stationary Bandit podcast. 

• "His Majesty The King has approved the appointment of Professor Wim Decock, of the Universities of Louvain and Liège, as the new Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford. He will take up the post on 1 October 2026 and succeeds Professor Wolfgang Ernst." [No relation.  DRE]  H/t: ESCLH Blog, which has the link to the press release.

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts is staging a historical reenactment of proceedings in the Amistad case on Monday, February 2, 2026, from 6:00 - 8:00 PM at the Appellate Division, First Department Courtroom in New York City.  

• Laurence H. Tribe reviews Jill Lepore's We the People (NYRB).

• ICYMI: Andrea Katz and John Guida ask, Has the Supreme Court Backed Itself into a Corner (on removal)?  Britt Tevis on Ben Shahn’s mural, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" at Syracuse University (Daily Orange).  Meet Edward Bennett Williams (Daily Record).  Return Jonathan Meigs, Jr., Ohio's First Chief Judge (CNO).  What Were the Palmer Raids and What Tactics Did They Use? (History).  Citywide general strikes in US history, including in Minneapolis (Jacobin). 

• Update: A review of Old Courthouse, that book on the Merced County court--where Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. was filed. 

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Burset on the Origins of Statutory Stare Decisis

Christian R. Burset, Notre Dame Law School, has posted The Origins of Statutory Stare Decisis:

Federal courts apply stare decisis with extra force to decisions that interpret statutes. Critics contend that this “supercharged” deference to statutory precedents lacks a legitimate pedigree. But that charge rests on conjecture, since scholars have paid little attention to how English courts historically handled such cases. This Article responds with a new history of statutory stare decisis. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it argues, common lawyers endorsed the maxim communis error facit ius—common error makes law. That maxim counseled against overturning a course of decisions merely because they had interpreted a statute erroneously. Indeed, as one leading judge remarked, “A series of precedents against the plain words of an act of Parliament have made a law.” Starting in the 1760s, however, several factors—better legislative drafting, partisan conflict over jurisprudence, and high-profile treason trials—led some lawyers, but not all, to reject communis error when it came to statutes. The result: By the 1790s, English law contained two rival approaches to statutory precedent—a classical paradigm, which effectively allowed a course of precedent to amend a statute; and a revisionist alternative, which held that precedent could clarify but not alter a statute’s meaning. Americans inherited that conflict, which endured well into the nineteenth century. This history offers a new perspective on statutory stare decisis today. It also suggests a further question: If some early Americans thought precedent could reshape legislation, what did that mean for erroneous constitutional precedents?

--Dan Ernst 

Query about the Early History of Bar Prep Courses

Carole Prietto, the archivist of Georgetown Law, recently asked me about the history of courses designed to prepare law graduates for the bar before the emergence of the modern bar preparation companies.  The card reproduced at right prompted her question.  I'm afraid she stumped me.  She would be grateful for any leads LHB readers might have for her.  Please contact her at cap166@georgetown.edu.

--Dan Ernst 

Mikhail on Birthright Citizenship and Unwritten Constitutionalism

My Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail has posted Birthright Citizenship, Unwritten Constitutionalism, and the Nature of the Union, which is forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities:

Many of Jonathan Gienapp’s core arguments in his outstanding new book, Against Constitutional Originalism, are well-taken, and they represent important challenges to any theory that focuses unduly on the text of the Constitution at the expense of other, non-textual considerations. Yet readers familiar with the history of birthright citizenship might recognize problems lurking on the horizon. A useful way to appreciate the main problem is to recall how Roger Taney approached the topic of American citizenship in Dred Scott v. Sandford. According to Taney, the text of the Constitution could not resolve this foundational issue because it could not, on its own, specify what kind of federal union stood beneath it. Instead, what was required was a proper understanding of the nature of the political community that formed the "People of the United States” in the first place. Much like Gienapp does, Taney insisted that the Constitution’s meaning was shaped by the nature of the polity, and the nature of the polity could not be derived from the written instrument alone, but required an appeal to history, sociology, and political theory. Or as Taney put the point in a famous passage: “The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government, through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call ‘the sovereign people,’ and every citizen is one of this people and a constituent member of this sovereignty.”

So, do Jonathan Gienapp and Roger Taney see eye-to-eye when it comes to the need for constitutional interpreters to go beyond the text to theories of union and sovereignty? Is there a convergence here that might teach us something about the risks of appealing to concepts such as “social contract theory,” “unwritten constitutionalism,” and “the nature of the Union” as a counterpoint to originalism and the written Constitution? And what precisely are the implications of Against Constitutional Originalism—and of originalism itself—for the birthright citizenship debate? This invited essay on Gienapp's stimulating book does not seek to answer all of these questions directly, but to begin laying the groundwork for doing so by exploring two topics that bear on them: citizenship in the original Constitution, as interpreted in Dred Scott, and birthright citizenship, as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment and interpreted in Elk v. Wilkins.  Both of these cases involve race, racism, and unwritten constitutionalism, and both of them turn on tacit theories of union, sovereignty, and the American polity. After discussing these topics, the Essay concludes with a few additional reflections on the government's legal defenses of the president’s Executive Order on birthright citizenship.

--Dan Ernst 

G. Edward White to Edit the Journal of Supreme Court History

The Supreme Court Historical Society has announced that, effective immediately, G. Edward White has succeeded Ross E. Davies as Editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History.  Now more than ever, we need scholarship on the U.S. Supreme Court that meets the highest standards of professional historians, and so the appointment of such an eminent and accomplished legal and constitutional historian to the post is an immensely important and promising development.

--Dan Ernst 

Green Bag Does Doyle's "One Crowded Hour"

Our friends at The Green Bag have published the latest in its series of coffee table books under the series title Regulation & Imagination.  As its title suggests, it is centered on a short story: Legal, Historical & Literary Perspectives on Highway Robbery, featuring the autograph manuscript of Arthur Conan Doyle's One Crowded Hour.  The volume includes not only facsimile reproductions of the published article (in the August 1911 issue of The Strand Magazine) and the autograph manuscript but also an introduction from the editor, Ross E. Davies, and commentary by Professor Davies and ten others.  I especially liked Michael A. Perino's essay, "The Wolves of Wall Street," which could enliven a Securities Regulation class with its summary of fictional accounts of early financial speculation and Udo Keppler's arresting cartoons of stock manipulators.

Dan Ernst 

Schorr on Anglicization and Reform in Mandate Palestine Tort Law

David B. Schorr has published Against "Anglicization": Class, Codification, and the Common Law in Palestine's Civil Wrongs Ordinance in Law and History Review:

This article explores the enactment of the Civil Wrongs Ordinance in Mandate Palestine in order to question the utility of “Anglicization” as a historical lens, and to suggest that it tends to crowd out more helpful framings, in particular those involving distributive or class motivations and effects. The Ordinance has been portrayed primarily as an instance of the codification of the common law of torts and its import to Palestine. Without denying the Englishness of the Ordinance, this article demonstrates that it did not codify the common law of tort but went considerably beyond it in reforming Palestine’s liability regime. It further argues that the “Anglicization” framing obscures more than it illuminates, missing the massive redistribution of risk, costs, liability, and welfare that resulted from the change in Palestine’s tort law. The study also complicates the commonly accepted chronology of the development of compensation for injuries in the common law world. In Palestine, English-style tort law was the product of progressive reform, designed to overcome the shortcomings of the preceding regime of workers’ compensation schemes. The significance of Anglicized tort law in this jurisdiction was thus very different, in some ways the polar opposite, of that in other, better-known contexts.

--Dan Ernst

Barbara Aronstein Black (1933-2026)

Columbia Law reports that Barbara Aronstein Black died yesterday.  She was president of the American Society for Legal History in 1985-1989, when I joined the scholarly discipline of legal history.  She was so gracious to a new entrant and so wise and wryly intelligent that I knew I wanted to be a member of any club that would have her as its leader.

Here is Dean Daniel Abebe's letter to Columbia Law's faculty and staff.

Barbara A. Black (CLS)

I write to share the deeply sorrowful news that Barbara Aronstein Black—graduate of the Class of 1955, longtime member of our faculty, and the first woman to serve as Columbia Law dean—passed away yesterday at the age of 92. 

Barbara was born and raised in Brooklyn, attended New York City public schools, and, at the young age of 16, enrolled at Brooklyn College. She decided to attend Columbia Law School at the suggestion of one of her undergraduate professors—eschewing earlier plans to go to Brooklyn Law School like her father and brothers. Despite being one of only a handful of women in her law school class, Barbara quickly flourished at Columbia. “It was in the Columbia Law School that I suddenly woke to the fact that serious intellectual endeavor was right for me, was what I wanted to do, was what I felt myself capable of doing,” she said during an interview in 2006. She also met her future husband of nearly 50 years, Professor Charles L. Black Jr., at Columbia Law School.

After a hiatus from academia spent raising her three children, Barbara began a graduate program at Yale University. She earned a Ph.D. in history in 1975 and joined the Yale faculty as a professor of history the following year. As a scholar, Barbara’s research was at the intersection of law and Anglo-American history, and one of her earliest publications, “The Constitution of Empire: The Case for the Colonists,” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 1976) earned broad acclaim among the legal academy.

Barbara accepted a tenured faculty position as the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia Law School in 1984, relishing the chance to return to her native city. Just two years later, Barbara assumed the deanship, making national news as the first woman to helm an Ivy League law school. During her five-year tenure, Barbara advanced curricular reform, recruited several renowned corporate law scholars to the Law School faculty, and addressed persistent issues with the physical plant. She also was instrumental in launching initiatives on race and gender studies and introduced flexible options for students and employees who were mothers.  

Along the way, Barbara faced obstacles that were all too typical for women of her generation. She described “the essential maleness of the law school culture” she experienced as a student and academic fellow. It was all the more meaningful, then, that Barbara chose to accept the Columbia Law School deanship—a decision she hoped would send a message to other women struggling to succeed in the male-dominated legal academy. 

Barbara retired from teaching in 2008 but continued to remain active both at Columbia Law School and in the legal academy writ large. She was a fixture at Law School events like the annual Stone Circle Luncheon, which brings together alumni who graduated 50 or more years ago. Barbara lived close to campus for many years and only recently relocated to Philadelphia to be near her daughter—a move that was, she wrote to me on January 9, “turning out very well.” 

It is impossible for me to characterize the depth of Barbara Black’s impact on, and affection for, Columbia Law School. She was a singular figure in our history, someone who truly accelerated the transformation of this institution and left an indelible legacy—including a beautiful portrait and a professorship named in her honor—that will no doubt endure well into the future. 

Please join me in expressing sincere condolences to Barbara’s family, including her three children: David, Gavin, and Robin. We will post a full tribute on the Law School’s website in the coming days and hope to gather to celebrate Barbara’s life in due course.

Updates: The New York Times obituary.  And more from Columbia Law.

 --Dan Ernst 

Clark Legal History Series at Boston University School of Law: Spring 2026 Lineup

We have the following announcement:

This spring, the Clark Legal History Series at Boston University School of Law meets on Wednesdays at 4:20-6:20 in Room 410. 

Jan. 21: John Witt, Yale Law School

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster 2025)

(Focus on Prologue, Chapters 15 & 17, and Epilogue)

 

Jan. 28: Sherif Girgis, Notre Dame Law School (visiting Harvard)

Fixing "History and Tradition" and Levels of Generality

  

Feb. 11: Mary Bilder, Boston College Law School

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (2023)

 

Feb. 18: Emmanuel Arnaud, Boston University Law

“Colonial Remnants: Criminal Adjudication in the USVI”

 

Feb. 25: Beau Baumann, Yale Law/Utah Law (co-presenting with Jed Handelsman Shugerman)

“Quasi-Judicial: A History and Tradition”

 

March 4: Rephael Stern, Boston University Law

“We Have Invented a New International Legal Concept of 'Administered Territory'”: Making Israel's Legal Space, 1948-1950

 

March 18: Marco Basile, Boston College Law

"The Misunderstood History of the International Limits of Congressional Power"

 

March 25: Laura Weinrib, Harvard Law School

"Unveiling Influence: Lobbying and the First Amendment in Postwar America.”  

  

Tuesday, April 7, 4 pm: Dylan Penningroth (UC Berkeley Law)

Bacon Lecture at the BU History Department

-- Karen Tani 

ASLH Submission Portal Open

The portal for submitting proposals for the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Banff on November 12-14, 2026, is now open.  Access it via the CFP.  

--Dan Ernst 

AHA John K. Fairbank Prize to Sommer

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History ("offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800"). This year's award went to legal historian Matthew H. Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Matthew H. Sommer’s The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China is a landmark study that recovers the hidden lives of gender-nonconforming individuals through meticulous archival research. By combining legal, medical, and literary sources with a nuanced transgender framework, Sommer broadens the field of modern East Asian history, illuminating how embodiment, identity, and social practice shaped Qing society and redefining global conversations about gender and modernity.

Congratulations to Professor Sommer!

-- Karen Tani 

Sunstein (and Others) on Hiss and Chambers

Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School, has posted The Enduring Relevance of Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers:

The Hiss-Chambers saga stemmed from a stunning accusation, by Whittaker Chambers, that Alger Hiss, a law clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and a golden boy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, was a Communist who had engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Initially, Chambers's accusation seemed implausible. But the evidence mounted, and Hiss's firm claims of innocence split the country. The Hiss-Chambers saga helped define, for a long period, the right and the left. In all probability, Chambers told the truth. Still, the Hiss-Chambers saga contains many mysteries, one of which is this: Why did Hiss proclaim his innocence for all of his life? What was in his mind? The Hiss-Chambers saga also casts a bright light on contemporary law and politics. There is no question that the Hiss Case helped to define modern conservatism; Chambers' great book, Witness, is one of its foundations. For decades, many conservatives thought that Hiss's guilt confirmed a large point, or a series of large points, about liberalism, the left, godlessness, disloyalty, otherness, loyalty, and patriotism. One could easily draw a straight line from the right-of-center conception of Alger Hiss, in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, to widespread views about enemies-on-the-left today. 

Professor Sunstein's paper provides an occasion to note the publication last year of Jeff Kisseloff's Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss (University Press of Kansas, 2025).  As the subtitle suggests, the book is the culmination of Kisseloff's decades-old research into the Hiss case.  It concludes, contrary to much recent scholarship, including G. Edward White's Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars (Oxford University Press), that Hiss was framed.  Here's Kansas's copy on the book:

When Alger Hiss was accused by Whittaker Chambers in 1948 of being a secret Communist spy in the 1930s, the subsequent perjury trials were some of the most sensational and politically significant trials of the century. Although Hiss was convicted, he maintained his innocence until his death, and historians have taken sides ever since. In this groundbreaking and revelatory book, Jeff Kisseloff brings new perspective, evidence, and accusations to this historical controversy.

Rewriting Hisstory is a firsthand account of how over fifty years, beginning when he worked for Hiss as a college student in the mid-1970s, Kisseloff was eventually able to determine the truth about Alger Hiss. With the skills of a veteran reporter and the analytical mind of a scholar, he brings to light a wealth of original material, including 150,000 pages of mostly unredacted previously unreleased FBI files—which he sued the FBI to obtain—and other documents from government and library collections around the country. Kisseloff also acquired a key piece of evidence: Woodstock 230099, the machine that the government claimed was used to type the copies of State Department documents placed in evidence against Hiss.

Taken together, Kisseloff has pieced together the truth, showing that Hiss was neither a Communist nor a spy and that the government knew it. But if Hiss didn’t produce the documents that were placed in evidence against him, who did? After careful research and by applying a process of elimination used in classic crime novels—who had the means, motive, and opportunity to do the job—Kisseloff points his finger at the only people who fit all three qualifications.

An act of vindication for one of the most divisive figures in the twentieth century, Rewriting Hisstory is a thrilling political page-turner about an accused spy that is itself a work of scholarly espionage, built on decades of painstaking research. This is an iconoclastic work that should rewrite history books.

The book has prompted a lengthy response by another independent investigator of the Hiss case, the lawyer John W. Berresford, who had posted a monographic paper and published several articles on the case.  In his response to Rewriting Hisstory, Berresford praised Kisseloff "for his dedication and some of his conclusions" but did not believe that the book had shaken "the overwhelming consensus that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy and traitor."

I myself have only researched Hiss in connection stopped with his service in Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the New Deal's emergency farm agency, which ended well before his time at the State Department.  I'll save my conclusions about Hiss and AAA for my forthcoming book on the legal "shock troops of the New Deal," but I am indebted to Kisseloff for filing that FOIA request and for the result, which anyone can access via the Black Vault and cite by "Kisseloff number."

Update:  Kisseloff's website for his book has a review essay by Peter Irons, entitled Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers,  and the Dogs That Didn’t Bark.  Among other things, it explains how Professor Irons came to offer to to help Hiss with the research for his coram nobis petition and replies to a review of Kisseloff's book by Harvey Klehr in Commentary.  

--Dan Ernst 

AHA Littleton-Griswold Prize to LaCroix

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society ("an annual award for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, broadly defined"). This year's award went to Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago) for The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Gorgeously crafted and scrupulously researched, this original synthesis introduces the “interbellum constitution”: an era, stretching from 1815 to 1865, marked by ferment over the overlapping, unsettled boundaries of local, state, and federal power in the United States. Alison L. LaCroix is utterly persuasive in analyzing the competing “federalisms” that drove public debates over concurrent powers, the regulation of commerce, and states’ rights. Her book illuminates a constitutional maximalism more dynamic, peopled, and capacious than we knew.

Congratulations to Professor LaCroix!

-- Karen Tani 

AHA Lepage Center Award to Cornell

Various prizes and awards were announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association, including the Lepage Center Award for Historical Work in the Public Interest. This year's award went to Saul Cornell (Fordham University):

For decades, Saul Cornell has directly influenced precedent-setting Supreme Court cases on gun safety by entering rigorously researched amicus briefs and expert witness reports into the legal record. Taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s “history-focused tests” for constitutionality, he provides plaintiffs with historical backing to keep firearms from dangerous people, literally saving lives. Moreover, his historical gun laws database is a model of generosity and rigor, as are his how-to workshops, editorials, podcasts, and blogs.

Congratulations to Professor Cornell!

-- Karen Tani 

CFP: The Refugee-Migrant Distinction: Toward a Global History

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

"The refugee-migrant distinction: toward a global history,” October 15-16, 2026, Darwin College, Cambridge, UK.  Organizers: Bastiaan Bouwman (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), Fabrice Langrognet (CNRS, France), Jeremy Adelman (University of Cambridge).  Funded by Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (Fung Global Network Fund) and Gates Cambridge Trust
  
The distinction between refugees and migrants is central to current law, policy, and public debate around asylum and migration. While the distinction between refugees and migrants is far from the only factor in shaping migration policies (Thiollet et al., 2024), states' prerogative of granting refugee status serves as an important albeit unreliable carve-out from a generally restrictive mobility regime. Opponents and proponents of permissive immigration rules each tend to emphasize the binary nature of the distinction - and its close corollary, "forced" versus "voluntary" migration - to their own ends. Restrictionists argue that most people crossing borders in search of asylum, especially in irregular ways, are not "deserving" refugees, but are actually unwelcome "economic migrants." Conversely, most refugee advocates, and especially the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (Carling, 2023), insist that it is essential to defend the legally protected status and essential nature of "refugees" as distinct from "migrants." Scholars have shown, however, that the empirical difference between refugees and migrants is often tenuous (Lucassen, Lucassen and Manning, 2010), even in good-faith attempts to adjudicate it, whereas the fraught politics of migration ensures that attempts to police the distinction in practice are often deeply arbitrary and capricious. Yet insistence on this binary allows liberal states to legitimize their exclusionary bordering practices, relegating "mere" migrants to a realm of virtually unrestrained state discretion (Long, 2013; Hamlin, 2021). Meanwhile, sweeping policies ostensibly aimed at deterring only migrants also impede access to asylum, hurting "genuine" refugees as well (Costello, 2018; FitzGerald, 2019). Hence, some leading refugee advocates have wondered whether refugee scholars should "hold the line" separating refugees from (other) migrants (Aleinikoff, 2021).
 
A view of refugees and migrants as ontologically distinct has permeated much scholarship, including recent work on "refugee history," which has sought to redress forced migrants' previous erasure from much of the historical record (Langrognet, 2023; Marfleet, 2025). Yet historians have, like social scientists, paid increasing attention to the construction and contestation of the "refugee" label, denaturalizing it by analyzing its contingent, situated manifestations over time. Most scholars now understand that "in writing the history of refugees, they need to be alive to the process of constructing refugees and not simply to take 'refugee' as a pre-existing category" (Stone, 2018: 103). By attending to this process, historians have begun to show how the uneven implementation of political and legal categories - (im)migrant, refugee, displaced person, etc. - has been produced by and influenced a range of social and political factors, and the ability of people to challenge or evade these (Reinisch and Frank, 2014; Gabaccia, 2022; Huhn and Rass, 2025; Struillou, Zehni and Manneh, 2025; Gatrell, 2025). In this manner, refugee history has made visible the wider ideological tensions at stake, including nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, mobility versus immobility, and pluralism versus essentialism.

The aim of this conference is to more fully elucidate the relational nature of the distinction between refugees and migrants, its function in the wider field of migration, and its genealogy. Much of the scholarship on the refugee-migrant distinction has been carried out by social scientists and legal scholars (Zetter, 1991; Crawley and Skleparis, 2018; Erdal and Oeppen, 2018; Atak and Crépeau, 2021; Abdelaaty and Hamlin, 2022; Bialas et al., 2025), whose work is focused on the present. While engaging in conversation with the narratives and arguments they advance, the conference will take a more historical perspective, which will also better inform contemporary debate. While historians have in recent years gone beyond methodological nationalism to trace the evolution of the "international refugee regime" and other transnational dimensions of twentieth-century forced displacement (e.g. Bresselau von Bressensdorf, 2019; Jansen and Lässig, 2020; Taylor et al., 2021; Schönhagen, 2023; Bouwman, 2026), there is no agreement on how, why, and where the refugee-migrant distinction surfaced, circulated, and functioned, be it in the interwar era, the postwar and Cold War periods, or the "restrictive turn" of the 1980s. Whereas the historiographies of forced displacement and migration have too often remained separate, answering these questions promises to productively chart overlaps between these fields (Gatrell, 2019).

The conference also aims to expand our understanding of the refugee-migrant distinction's role beyond the West, given the Eurocentric origins of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the field of refugee law (Madokoro, 2016; Ballinger, 2025). Scholarship on flight and migration still centers heavily on Western countries that receive people on the move, especially their policies of admission or contributions to the international refugee regime's stated goal of achieving "durable solutions." This remains an important topic, especially since in the US and elsewhere, we are arguably witnessing the "end of asylum", with indiscriminate anti-immigration policies casting the distinction between refugees and migrants in doubt (Ngai, 2025). But more work is needed on other world regions, which always knew migration and forced displacement but only gradually, partly, and sometimes not at all became subject to the institutions and categories that rose in the West - and even when they were, not without contestation. Non-Western states and regions also generated their own conceptions of the relationship between refugees and migrants, moreover, calling the historiographical centrality of Western-centric institutions into question (Abdelaaty, 2021; Kapoor, 2022; Moretti, 2022; Reed and Schenck, 2023; Hamed-Troyansky, 2024; Moon, 2025).

The conference will bring together both established and early-career scholars. While historical in focus, interdisciplinary approaches and reflection are welcomed. A form of joint publication following the conference is envisioned, such as a special issue in a leading journal.
 
We welcome proposals on any aspect of the above, including from such standpoints as:

• Agency of refugees and migrants
• Advocacy for migrants' rights
• Labor/economic policy
• Socioeconomic rights, e.g. the right to work
• Differential functioning of the refugee-migrant distinction based on national origin, ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, or religion
• Collaboration and competition in international governance, e.g. between UNHCR and IOM
• Externalization of border control
• Consequences for the refugee-migrant distinction of the recent erosion of the right of asylum (e.g. in the U.S. since 2020)
• Public attitudes toward refugees and migrants
• Knowledge production about (forced) migration and its governance

Proposals, including an abstract of ca. 300 words and a biographical note of ca. 100 words, should be sent by 16 February 2026 to fgnf.cambridge@gmail.com. Applicants will be notified in March 2026. Note that participants will be asked to submit papers for pre-circulation by the end of September 2026.
 
Early-career scholars are encouraged to apply. On a case-by-case basis, financial help can be provided to applicants upon request; please include such requests with your proposal, including explanation as to why support is required.
 
[Bibliography after the the jump.]

Sunday Roundup

• Now available on-line, a recording of that National Constitution Center town hall, The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed. 

• Also newly available online: Michael McConnell and Noah Rosenblum's debate on originalism at NYU Law on November 19, 2025. 

• William M. Treanor, the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Constitutional Law and Constitutional History and Dean Emeritus of Georgetown Law, will deliver the 2025 Gouverneur Morris Endowed Lecture of the Bronx County Historical Society at Fordham Law, which is co-sponsoring the event, on Wednesday, January 28, 2025 at 6:30 pm.  Dean Treanor’s topic: “The Constitution’s Penman, Gouverneur Morris" (New York Almanack).  

• Jeremy Kessler on the law and history of bans on history of viewpoint discrimination at a Columbia Law School alumni luncheon.  (The event is called the "Stone Circle" Luncheon, and I'm embarrassed to say I was slow to get the reference.)  (Columbia Law School). 

• 
  Heidi Kitrosser reviews Patrick G. Eddington, The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley to Eisenhower (Georgetown University Press, 2025) (Lawfare).

• ICYMI: The 1924 Immigration Act is back, unfortunately (The Guardian).  The Rise of Scholars' Amicus Briefs.  "Gun carry regulation was always the norm" (The Hill).  "A (very) short history of Crimes Against Humanity" (EJIL Talk!).  "Historic Dispute Over ‘Unitary Executive’ Advances in Trump Era"--a very full and thoughtful explainer (CT Examiner).  

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

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  David Sugarman (credit)

  The Socio-Legal Studies Association has awarded David Sugarman its 2025 prize for  “Outstanding Contribution to the Socio-Legal Community."  Professor Sugarman's contribution to “modern socio-legal historical studies” was specially noted.  SLSA's informative notice is here.  See also the notices of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford and of Lancaster University.

• News from the National Constitution Center: President and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Rosen is transitioning to the role of CEO Emeritus.  

• YLS’s notice of New Perspectives on the Legal Treatise (Hein), edited by Femi Cadmus and Nicholas Mignanelli, a collection of essays resulting from the Second Yale Legal Information Symposium, entitled “The Legal Treatise: Past, Present, and Future” and held in March 2023.  New Perspectives opens with an essay by John Langbein that traces “the decline of legal treatise writing in the American legal academy to the rise of legal realism.”

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  UVA Law's notice of Saikrishna Prakash's The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History (Harvard University Press) (pub. date 1-20) with a discussion of the book by Professor Prakash. 

• On February 23, Michael Klarman, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, will deliver the Robert L. Levine Distinguished Lecture at Fordham Law, entitled, “How did we get here?” (Fordham Law).

• Daniel E. Thompson has posted Litigating Originalism in Bruen: A Brief-Level Coding Study of History, Evidence, and Argument Form.  "This ["descriptive and provisional"] article offers a pilot, brief-level coding analysis of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Corlett (No. 20-843) at the certiorari stage and the same docket at the merits stage (NYSRPA v. Bruen). Using a transparent scoring rubric, it codes ten briefs on four dimensions: Originalist Evidentiary Strength (0–4), Historical-to-Doctrinal Rigor (0–4), Rhetorical Force (0–3), and Consequentialist Overlay (0–3)." 

• From Bunk: "Best History Writing of 2025."  

• Recently published: The Old Alcalde: Life and Times of a Texas Fire-Eater, Oran Milo Roberts, by John A. Adams, Jr.  Roberts was, in addition to much else, Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and the president of Texas's Secession Convention in 1861 (Ricochet).

• Jack Goldsmith on Edward Levi's Department of Justice (Executive Functions). 

• ICYMI: Ilan Wurman on birthright citizenship (Compact).  Stephen Halbrook on "history and tradition" and the Second Amendment in Joel Alicea's amicus brief in the Hawaii "no carry case" (Volokh Conspiracy). A terrifically interesting HLR case comment, bridging Roman Law, Norman Rockwell and FDR's White House, on Elam v. Early (4th Cir. 2025).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Resnick's "Impermissible Punishments"

Judith Resnik, Yale Law School, has published Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy (University of Chicago Press):

Impermissible Punishments explores the history of punishment inside prisons and how governments grappled with obligations to justify the punishments they impose. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the creation of the corrections profession and weaves together the stories of people who made rules for prisons and the stories of those living under the resulting regimes.

Resnik maps three centuries of shifting ideas, norms, and legal standards aiming to draw lines between permissible and impermissible punishments. Her account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement, and the pioneering prisoners who insisted that law should protect their individual dignity. Taking us to the present, Resnik analyzes the expansion of imprisonment, the inability of public and private prisons to provide safe housing, and the impact of abolition politics.

Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments examines what governments committed to equality owe to the people they detain and argues that many contemporary forms of punishment need to end. 

UCL Faculty of Laws will host an impressive book launch on May 14.  Also, horrifically, this.

--Dan Ernst 

Dhondt on Jurisdiction and Taxation in the Habsburg Netherlands

Frederik Dhondt has posted Jurisdiction and Taxation in the Habsburg Netherlands: The Manuscripts of Goswin Arnould de Wynants, Emperor Charles VI’s Belgian Councillor, which also appears in Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor de Uitgave der Oude Wetten en Verordeningen van België /Bulletin de la Commission Royale pour la Publication des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances de Belgique 59 (2025): 231-352:

Goswin-Arnould de Wynants (1661-1732), councillor (judge) in the Council of Brabant, and member of the High Council for the Netherlands in Vienna appointed by emperor Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire, was one of the most privileged observers of law and administration in the Spanish and then Austrian Netherlands at the turn of the eighteenth century. Most of his work has never been published, although copies of his manuscripts circulated relatively widely and can be found in various Belgian heritage institutions. Although Wynants is a reference for nineteenth- and early twentieth century legal historians, scholarship in legal history seems to have forgotten both the author and the eighteenth century in the Southern Netherlands. Part of the explanation lies with Wynants’s informal writing style and lack of explicit references, which render his work less suitable for handwritten text recognition and computational legal history. However, a traditional close reading highlights his extensive use of implicit legal reasoning and elements of broader legal culture. Building on the work of Ben Croon (1991) and the institutional study of Klaas Van Gelder (2016) as well as the comprehensive study of public law manuscripts of Martin Schennach for the Holy Roman Empire (2020), two of Wynants’s main works are analysed. First -for the battle over jurisdiction between secular and ecclesiastical power- his Memoirs on the institutions of the Austrian Netherlands. Secondly, the treatise on taxation in Brabant. Although it is still solid to see Wynants as a ‘regalist’ (Croon), defending the secular ruler against ecclesiastical competition and fiscal exemptions, this image has to be complemented. In fine, Wynants primarily defends the judge as a crucial actor in the early modern legal ‘cacophony’ of legal sources and languages (Herzog 2024).

--Dan Ernst 

Gonzales's "Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation"

David-James Gonzales, Brigham Young University, has published Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford University Press):

On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation.

Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals.

--Dan Ernst

Nominate an ASLH Honorary Fellow!

[We have the following Call for Nominations for Honorary Fellows from the American Society for Legal History.  DRE.]

The Honors Committee of the American Society for Legal History solicits nominations of senior scholars for consideration for election as Honorary Fellows of the Society.  Election as Honorary Fellow is the highest honor the Society can confer.  It recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.  Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand.  The Society seeks to recognize scholars who are not simply distinguished in their fields, but who also have given back to the discipline and made their fields stronger by creating communities of scholars and scholarship and by helping other (often younger) scholars to stand on their shoulders.  In other words, scholars who are as committed to building a future for their fields as they are to studying the past.  Commensurate with the growing international reach of the Society, we seek nominations of senior scholars who, collectively, similarly encompass the wide scope of scholarship in legal history.

Nominations should be submitted to Ariela Gross, chair of the Honors Committee, by email (grossa@law.ucla.edu) before February 9, 2026.  Each nomination should include a statement of why the nominee merits election.  Statements should address the nominee’s scholarly distinction and their citizenship in the field.  A list of current and past honorary fellows is [here].

Hamm's Biography of Arthur Garfield Hays

Richard F Hamm has published Confronting Racism: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Fight for Equality, 1925-1954 (SUNY Press):

Beginning in 1925 the corporate lawyer and civil libertarian Arthur Garfield Hays began battling segregation. This book details Hays's work on the Mayor's Commission that investigated the1935 Harlem riot; his role in a 1937 restrictive covenant case in Westchester, County; his representing a challenger to the segregated draft in World War II; his part in ending the exclusion of African Americans from the American Bar Association; and his opposition to strong fair employment legislation. Motivated by his conception of a good society that valued civil liberties, democracy, and individualism, Hays fought for African Americans' legal rights under the Constitution. His activism was limited by his conservative economic views and his fear of an active state that intervened in private matters. His career illuminates the potential and perils of interracial co-operation during the long civil rights movement. Because the issues he confronted continue today-police mistreatment of African Americans, housing discrimination, limits on African Americans in the professions, racial discrimination in the military, and how to build government structures to limit discrimination-this book speaks to our time as well as his.

 --Dan Ernst 

Cromwell Foundation Cromwell Article Prize to Funk & Mayson

Via the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, we have the following announcement:

The Cromwell Article Prize for best article in legal history published in the calendar year 2024 has been awarded to Kellen R. Funk (Columbia Law School) and Sandra D. Mayson (Penn Carey Law School) for their article Bail at the Founding, published in volume 137 of the Harvard Law Review.  Funk and Mayson do a deep dive into the law and practice of bail at the founding, finding that the liberty-protecting law on the books was belied in practice for many accused of crimes, for whom pretrial detention was a routine matter.  Through astonishing archival sleuthing, the authors uncover a world of pretrial detention and bail practice that turned not on cash but on reputation.  Sureties and unsecured pledges, they find, were the principal mechanisms for those let out of custody pending trial in the early republic. 

Bail at the Founding is an archival exploration of great value to the working out of the Constitution’s original public meaning for questions about pretrial detention.  It is also a challenge to that project, because it raises deep questions about whether and how the reputation-centered and cash-scarce world of the late eighteenth century can be translated into the cash- and credit-rich world of the twenty first.

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, established by William Nelson Cromwell in 1930, supports work in American legal history.  The Foundation’s prize for the legal history article of the year is intended to recognize the growing role of legal history and teaching and research in law schools. This year the prize was selected from articles published in leading student-edited law journals. The prize committee, chaired by Foundation trustee John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School), consisted of Foundation trustees Sarah Barringer Gordon (Penn Carey Law) and John Langbein (Yale Law School), along with Dan Ernst (Georgetown Law), Amalia Kessler (Stanford Law School), and Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago Law School).  

The Foundation makes grants to support important work in all facets of American legal history including archival preservation, scholarly study of original documents, original research in all areas of the law, and research and writing of biographies of major legal figures. Information on how to apply for a prize, fellowship or grant may be found on the Foundation’s website, cromwellfoundation.org.

Congratulations to Professor Funk and Professor Mayson! 

-- Karen Tani 

Weekend Roundup

• A historian's' amicus brief, sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice, has been filed in United States v. Hemani, "a constitutional challenge to a federal statute prohibiting any individual who 'is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance' from possessing a firearm." The signatories are Holly Brewer, Saul Cornell, Brian DeLay, Randolph Roth, Simon Stern, Stephen Taylor, and William Treanor.  

• The life and legacy of John Hope Franklin, an episode of the radio program, Black America (KUT).

• A recording of that Federalist Society panel on originalism and birthright citizenship, including Kurt Lash, Amanda Frost, and Keith Whittington, is here.   

• The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, seeks a research associate to "undertake directed research and produce public-facing and scholarly work on histories and legacies of religions and freedom in the early Americas with an emphasis on the eighteenth century." 

• Jessica Lake will discuss her book, Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law at UVA Law on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, from 5-6 p.m.  

• The schedule has been announced for that symposium at Boston College on February 20 to honor the life and work of the late  Ken Kersch.   

• In memoriam: Daniel Walker Howe (UCLA).

• Lady Margaret Hall's notice of the ASLH and Cromwell Foundations award of its William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize to Grace Mallon.

• The January 2026 newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here. 

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  The Merced County [CA] Historical Society has released its book, Old Courthouse: 150 Years, 150 Stories (Merced Sun-Star). 

• "Talbot Publishing, an imprint of The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., is pleased to announce the publication of M.H. Hoeflich and John Moreland’s Little Law Books."

• Alex Wellerstein discusses his new book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (LGM Podcast). 

• The finalists for the African American Intellectual History Society's Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History (Black Perspectives).

• Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur on "Jan. 6 and the Long Shadow of Civil War- and Reconstruction-Era Political Violence" (Talking Points Memo).

• ICYMI: Jack Rakove on what’s wrong with The American Revolution by Ken Burns (Washington Monthly).  Anna O. Law on birthright citizenship, in an interview heralding her book (The Redoubt).  Max Skjönsberg on Maitland, Smith, and Laissez-Faire (Law and Liberty).  Ilya Somin on Chief Justice Roberts on the Declaration of Independence (Volokh Conspiracy). A Timeline of Divorce in America (History).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.