CFP: ASLH 2021

 [We have the following, updated Call for Papers for the 2021 annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.  DRE]

The Program Committee of the ASLH invites proposals for complete panels and individual papers for the 2021 meeting to be held November 4-6 in New Orleans. Panels and papers on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome.  We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography.  Due to the cancellation of the Society’s 2020 in-person conference, some of the panel slots for the 2021 conference will be filled by previously accepted proposals. However, there is ample room on the program for new submissions and we look forward to developing a rich and diverse program for our meeting in New Orleans.

The Program Committee welcomes traditional panel proposals (1 chair, 1-2 commentators, 3-4 paper presentations), and other forms of structured presentation for a 90-minute slot, including lightning round (1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters for a few minutes each on projects in a related field at any stage of development), skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters), or roundtable format (1-2 chairs, 3-4 presenters). The Committee will also consider author-meets-reader panel proposals concerning books with a publication date of 2020. We encourage panels that put two or three books in conversation, with up to three commentators total. Requirements for proposals each type of session are outlined below.

Panel Type: Traditional

Format: 1 chair, 3-4 participants, 1-2 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, up to 300 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Lightening Round
Format: 1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Skills/Pedagogical Session
Format: 1 chair, 3-4 presenters
Session abstract/description: Yes, up to 300 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Roundtable
Format: 1-2 chairs, 2-3 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Author meets Readers
Format: 1-2 chairs, 2-3 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: No
Panelist CVs: Yes

As a general matter, we will not be able to accommodate special scheduling requests, so prospective presenters, chairs, and commentators at the main conference should plan to be available on Friday, November 5, and Saturday, November 6.  The ASLH has a strict one-appearance policy. Prospective participants may submit proposals for multiple sessions, with the understanding that the panel chair will be responsible for promptly finding an appropriate substitute member for any session from which a participant has to withdraw.

The Program Committee encourages panels that include participants from groups historically under-represented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

Limited financial assistance (covering airfare and ground transportation only) is available for presenters in need, with priority given to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and scholars from abroad.

The members of the Program Committee are Fahad Bishara, Eliga Gould, Sophia Lee, Tahirih Lee, Alison Lefkovitz, Cynthia Nicoletti, Bhavani Raman, Karl Shoemaker, Simon Stern, and Victor Uribe. The co-chairs of the Program Committee are professors Kristin Collins (collinsk@bu.edu) and Ari Bryen (ari.z.bryen@vanderbilt.edu).

All program presenters must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. All proposals must be submitted through the ASLH website, which will be available to take submissions shortly.

The submission portal will open on February 15, 2021 and will close on March 15, 2021.

Weekend Roundup

• The Fordham Law Review recently published a symposium on the legacy of Senator Birch Bayh, whose accomplishments include helping draft the 25th Amendment. It's titled "Celebrating the Impact of Senator Birch Bayh: A Lasting Legacy on the Constitution and Beyond." The symposium is among the many 25th amendment resources on the Fordham Law website.
  

• Our friends at the Federal Judicial History Office of the Federal Judicial Center has posted a new contribution to its Spotlight on Judicial history series: A Woman Appears In the Supreme Court: Belva Lockwood’s Career in the Federal Court, by Christine Lamberson, Director of the Office.

• In Made by History at the Washington Post: Elizabeth D. Katz on Kamala Harris and the history of women's right to hold office. 

• Here's what happened when Courtney E. Thompson (whose book we announced recently here) ran the 1776 Report through TurnItIn. 

• 
  Our blogger Mitra Sharafi won a teaching award at Wisconsin.
  

• New online in the AJLH: Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen, “From Disputation Hall to High Office: Swedish Students' Legal Dissertations at German and Dutch Universities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.”

•  We were reminded that James Boyd White’s Keep Law Alive (Carolina Academic Press, 2019) speaks to recent events.
  

• ICYMI:  Matthew Gabriele on Vikings, Crusaders, Confederates: Misunderstood Historical Imagery at the January 6 Capitol Insurrection (AHA Perspectives).  Mary Frances Berry et al. on DJT's legacy (BBC News).  Patti Minter on the inauguration (13WBKO).  Annette Gordon-Reed on slavery and today (Texas Public Radio).
  

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

Schmidt on Theodor Sternberg and the "Closet of Conceptualism"

Over at the blog "History | Sexuality | Law," Katharina Isabel Schmidt, a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University and a JSD candidate in law at the Yale Law School, has posted Theodor Sternberg and the Closet of Conceptualism.  The essay commences:

Sometime in the mid-1930s, German jurist Theodor Sternberg (1878-1950) concluded that law and love were incompatible. In one of his “erotosophical” fragments, he claimed that affective bonds thrived under anarchy. Love, for Sternberg had to be free from egoism and compulsion, eschew both duty and obligation. “Coitus,” especially, was divine in origin—God’s love for the world incarnate—and just like God’s love was limitless, sexuality knew no law.

--Dan Ernst

Barnes, "What Were Shareholder Rights in the Wake of the American Revolution?"

The Florida State University Business Review has published "What Were Shareholder Rights in the Wake of the American Revolution?" by Victoria Barnes (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History). The abstract:

This Article investigates the common law rights of shareholders in the wake of the American Revolution. It analyzes the rights and powers that shareholders relied on in litigation about corporate governance disputes, in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The relevant rules were imported into the literature of Anglo-American commercial law and linked to the later development of fiduciary duties and the business judgment rule. This Article shows that, at this point in history, these doctrines did not exist, as such, in the fiber of Anglo-American corporate law. The analysis demonstrates that shareholders had strong powers which could be exercised through litigation. These powers included the ability to dissolve the company, remove management, and stop further use of the corporate name. This discussion of shareholder rights at the time of the foundation of the United States is of particular importance to those states that still have a strong equitable jurisdiction.

The full article is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Pardo on Bankruptcy and Slavery in New Orleans

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted On Bankruptcy’s Promethean Gap: Building Enslaving Capacity into the Antebellum Administrative State, which is forthcoming in the Fordham Urban Law Journal:

As the United States contends with the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal bankruptcy law is one tool that can be used to resolve the financial distress suffered by individuals and businesses. When implementing this remedy, the question arises whether the law’s application should be viewed as limited to addressing private debt matters, without regard for the public interest. This Article answers the question by looking to modern U.S. bankruptcy law’s first forebear, the 1841 Bankruptcy Act, which Congress enacted in response to the depressed economic conditions following the Panic of 1837. That legislation created a judicially administered system that nationalized bankrupts’ assets, some of which featured prominently in the business of slavery. This Article focuses on a specific episode from New Orleans, which at the time was the nation’s third-most-populous city, had the nation’s largest slave market, and had one of the nation’s largest money markets. One of the bankruptcy cases commenced in that city involved the administration and sale of Banks Arcade, which was a premier commercial exchange for auctioning enslaved Black Americans. This history about how the federal administrative state restructured one component of the U.S. slavery complex should prompt critical reflection on how present-day bankruptcy law manages the fallout from a financial crisis. This Article concludes that courts have the authority to permit the public to advocate for its interests in distressed assets redeployed through the federal bankruptcy system.

–Dan Ernst

Ireton on freedom suits in the early Spanish empire

Chloe L. Ireton (University College London) has published "Black Africans' Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire" in the Renaissance Quarterly (23 Dec. 2020) 1-43. Here's the abstract: 

This article explores how some enslaved Black Africans litigated for their freedom in Spanish royal courts in the sixteenth century on the basis that—as Christians—they had been unjustly enslaved in Africa. With a focus on the port cities of Seville and Cartagena, I explore how freedom litigation suits illuminate how individuals from starkly different social worlds and intellectual milieus—who inhabited the same urban sites—affected and shaped one another's intellectual landscapes. I trace how enslaved Africans’ epistemologies of just slavery shaped broader discourses on the just enslavement of Africans in the Spanish Empire.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Chin, "A Nation of White Immigrants: State and Federal Racial Preferences for White Noncitizens"

The Boston University Law Review has published "A Nation of White Immigrants: State and Federal Racial Preferences for White Noncitizens," by Gabriel Jackson Chin (University of California, Davis). The abstract:

U.S. law, of course, drew many lines based on race from the earliest days of slavery and colonialism. It is also well known that the government discriminated against noncitizens in favor of citizens in areas such as licensing and land ownership. This Article proposes that during the long Jim Crow era, there was an additional body of racially discriminatory state and federal law that discriminated against noncitizens of particular disfavored races. This body of law has not been fully recognized or described. Because the federal government and many state governments had policies encouraging white immigration, they sought methods to discriminate against nonwhite noncitizens, primarily Asians, without also burdening white noncitizens. The “declaration of intention” to naturalize, a required part of the naturalization process, was a key device used to effectuate this policy. Between 1790 and 1952, eligibility for nationalization was racially restricted, such that only members of preferred races could file a declaration of intent. Therefore, offering benefits to so-called “declarants” intentionally and effectively favored white immigrants. Hundreds of state and federal laws offered benefits to declarants with respect to a wide range of opportunities, including voting, land ownership, public benefits, military service, public employment, government contracting, and occupational licensing. This combination of state and federal law offered white immigrants in many parts of the United States an opportunity for substantial equality with white citizens from the moment they arrived in the United States, while it simultaneously restricted competition from—and maintained the subordinated status of—noncitizens of color. This body of law should be considered when evaluating the history of racial discrimination in this country and its present effects. 

The full article is available here. 

-- Karen Tani

de la Rasilla's "International Law and History Modern Interfaces"

Ignacio de la Rasilla, Wuhan University, has published International Law and History
Modern Interfaces with cambridge University Press as part of the series Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law:

This interdisciplinary exploration of the modern historiography of international law invites a diverse assessment of the indissoluble unity of the old and the new in the most global of all legal disciplines. The study of the history of international law does not only serve a better understanding of how international law has evolved to become what it is and what it is not. Its histories, which rethink the past in the present, also influence our perception of contemporary matters in international law and our understandings of how they may potentially unfold. This multi-perspectival enquiry into the dominant modes of international legal history and its fundamental debates may also help students of both international law and history to identify the historical approaches that best suit their international legal-historical perspectives and best address their historical and legal research questions.

Some endorsements:

'A fascinating and comprehensive analysis of scholarly trends in international legal history. In recent decades, the historical study of international law has expanded dramatically. De la Rasilla surveys the many perspectives and methodologies brought to the subject, offering both a guide and a thoughtful analytic perspective of his own.' David Kennedy, Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Institute of Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School

'In recent years, the interest in the history of international law as a field of academic scrutiny has exploded. The rapid expansion of international law’s historiography and the proliferation of different approaches and methodologies have created an urgent need for guidance for the scholar who wants to survey the field and plot the course of her own contributions. In combining insightful discussions with an impressive knowledge of older and recent literature, Ignacio de la Rasilla has provided them with both a compass and a map.' Randall Lesaffer, Professor of Legal History at the Universities of Leuven and Tilburg and Series Editor of The Cambridge History of International Law

'Ignacio de la Rasilla has done a great scholarly service by digesting and organising the vast and various literatures on history and international law. His lucid, learned and comprehensive book is now an indispensable guide to this burgeoning field.' David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Harvard University and Affiliated Faculty, Harvard Law School

--Dan Ernst

Thompson on crime, violence, and phrenology

Courtney E. Thompson (Mississippi State University) has published An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America with Rutgers University Press. From the publisher: 

An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.

 Praise for the book:

"Courtney Thompson provocatively measures the face, head, and soul of American phrenology and invites us to a discovery of the historical origins of scientific criminology." - Stephen Casper

"In this compelling book, Courtney Thompson takes readers to the prisons, courtrooms, and streets of antebellum cities to expose just how phrenology claimed authority on criminality. Rich in detail and analysis, An Organ of Murder vividly illustrates the long history of making criminal minds and bodies into objects of medical and scientific inquiry." - Carla Bittel

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Tulsa Law Review's Annual Book Review Issue

Tulsa Law Review 55:2 (2020), a book review issue, includes essays of interest to legal historians:

Reassessing the Historical Foundations of Originalism, by Lee Borocz-Johnson

The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, by Jonathan Gienapp

Forging the American Nation, 1787-1791: James Madison and the Federalist Revolution, by Shlomo Slonim

Triangulating Law and Political-Economic Development, by Jonathan Chausovsky

The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History, by James Ely Jr.

Child Labor in America: The Epic Struggle to Protect Children, by John A. Fliter

Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic, by Eric Lomazoff

Popular Legitimacy: A Tenuous Proposition, by Emily Pears

Building a Revolutionary State: The Legal Transformation of New York, 1776-1783, by Howard Pashman

We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution, by George Van Cleve

The Many Faces of American Captivity and Its Legal Matrix: A Review Essay, by Christian Pinnen

University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War, by Alfred L. Brophy

Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court, by Paul Finkelman

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest, by William Kiser

Free Speech Idealism, by Timothy Zick

The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Compromise, by Laura Weinrib

Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, by Keith E. Whittington
 
Who Is Responsible for Presidential Supremacy? by Kathleen Tipler

Supreme Court Expansion of Presidential Power: Unconstitutional Leanings, by Louis Fisher

President Obama: Constitutional Aspirations and Executive Actions, by Louis Fisher

Reclaiming Accountability: Transparence, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, by Heidi Kitrosser

--Dan Ernst

Mistry & Gurman, eds., "Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy"

Columbia University Press has published Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (2021), edited by Kaeten Mistry (University of East Anglia) and Hannah Gurman (New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study). A description from the Press:

The twenty-first century witnessed a new age of whistleblowing in the United States. Disclosures by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others have stoked heated public debates about the ethics of exposing institutional secrets, with roots in a longer history of state insiders revealing privileged information. Bringing together contributors from a range of disciplines to consider political, legal, and cultural dimensions, Whistleblowing Nation is a pathbreaking history of national security disclosures and state secrecy from World War I to the present.

The contributors explore the complex politics, motives, and ideologies behind the revelation of state secrets that threaten the status quo, challenging reductive characterizations of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors. They examine the dynamics of state retaliation, political backlash, and civic contests over the legitimacy and significance of the exposure and the whistleblower. The volume considers the growing power of the executive branch and its consequences for First Amendment rights, the protection and prosecution of whistleblowers, and the rise of vast classification and censorship regimes within the national-security state. Featuring analyses from leading historians, literary scholars, legal experts, and political scientists, Whistleblowing Nation sheds new light on the tension of secrecy and transparency, security and civil liberties, and the politics of truth and falsehood.

Advance praise:

As Kaeten Mistry and Hannah Gurman demonstrate in this brilliant and compelling collection, the fates of national security whistleblowing and democracy are linked. These sharply written essays examine the characteristics of whistleblowers, the way secrecy and whistleblowing have changed over time, the interests at stake when the government prosecutes whistleblowers, and much more. Whistleblowing Nation is essential reading on the tensions between government secrecy and the transparency essential in a democracy. -- Mary L. Dudziak

For a list of contributors, check out the Table of Contents. More information is available here. 

H/t New Books in Law, where you can find an interview with the editors.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• The Viennese Legal History Society (Wiener Rechtsgeschichtliche Gesellschaft) holds its events online via Zoom during the pandemic and opens the talks now for the wider public.  On 19 January, at 18:50 Vienna, Professor Thomas Simon (Vienna) will give a talk in German with the title: "Christlich", "deutsch", "ständisch": Die sog. "Maiverfassung" 1934 und der "Autoritäre Ständestaat". Versuch einer verfassungsgeschichtlichen Einordnung.  Zoom link.

• Shannon McSheffrey, Concordia, on Disorder, Riot, and Governance in Early Tudor London: Evil May Day, 1517, in the Late Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, February 5, 2021, 5:30PM - 7:00PM.
  

• On Monday, March 8, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:00pm, former LHB Guest Blogger Thomas McSweeney, William and Mary Law School, will discuss his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2020) with Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard Law School.  Register and more here.

• The University of Nebraska, Lincoln is advertising a postdoctoral research associateship for “a project manager of a collaborative team collecting and processing habeas corpus petitions to design and populate a robust database that will allow researchers to demonstrate the many interpersonal and institutional relationships evident in these claims to freedom while also assessing their significance and value within the larger body of American jurisprudence.”  More.
  

• New Books in Law has an interview with Virginia Torrie on her book Reinventing Bankruptcy Law, which we've previously spotlighted.
  

• Jane Dailey, University of Chicago,  discusses her new book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History, and "what America’s history with lynch mobs can teach us about the attack on the Capitol" with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles on Legal Talk Network. 
  

• Nial Osborough, "Ireland’s greatest legal historian," is dead (Irish Times).
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has lesson plans for its video, "The Supreme Court and the 1876 Presidential Election."  
  

• The Organization of American Historians has issued a statement January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
  

• “The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is now accepting nominations for the 2020 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article in US intellectual history by an emerging scholar."
  

• Over at Environment, Law, and History, David Schorr notices Thomas Le Roux’s extended review of Chad Montrie's The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (U Cal Press, 2018).
  

• 
  Supervisory Curator Herman Eberhardt of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library explores “historic artifacts, documents, photographs, and film from the inaugural ceremonies of 1933, 1937, 1941, and 1945" on January 20 at 2PM.  More.
  

• Legal historical op-eds and other writings on self-pardons, the 25th Amendment, impeachment, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and related matters are legion.  Here is a smattering: The US Senate History office on the post-resignation impeachment of William Belknap. William Eskridge says self-pardoning isn't a thing (WaPo).  Mark Graber on the second impeachment (WBALTV).  How scholars interpret "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" (NatGeo).  John D. Feerick on our nation's history with presidential inability and succession (The Hill).  Eric Foner and Gerard N. Magliocca on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (WaPo).  Joanne Freeman ad Geoffrey Stone on sedition (NYT).  Gregory Ablavsky compares the assault on the Capitol with the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 (Stanford News).
  

• Also Phil Magness and the Pacific Legal Foundation on the 1619 Project (PLF).
  

• Update: Shirley Abrahamson's NYT obituary.
  

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

Knowles on Learning the Law in 1830s Massachusetts

Helen J. Knowles, SUNY Oswego, has posted Learning the Law in 1830s Massachusetts: The Contrasting Experiences of Wendell Phillips and Lysander Spooner:

Wendell Phillips (NYPL)

Lysander Spooner (NYPL)

In the 1840s, Lysander Spooner and Wendell Phillips espoused opposing abolitionist interpretations of the United States Constitution. The former argued that the document did not sanction the enslavement of human beings, the latter denounced the text as a proslavery “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” This essay explores the effects of their contrasting legal educations on these theories. In the 1830s, Spooner worked as a legal apprentice under the tutelage of John Davis, Charles Allen, and Emory Washburn, three prominent lawyers (and politicians) working in Worcester, Massachusetts. By contrast, Phillips, consistent with his Boston Brahmin ancestry, attended the then-nascent Harvard Law School. The essay concludes that Spooner’s legal philosophy shows a far greater indebtedness to his legal education than does Phillips’s. This argument is defended by drawing on the voluminous correspondence and papers of both Phillips and Spooner, and the writings of their legal tutors and mentors.

--Dan Ernst

A Blurb for Bartie's "Free Hands and MInds"

Some time ago, we posted a notice of Susan Bartie’s Free Hands and Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars.  At the time, we had no endorsement to post with it.  We have one now:

Free Hands and Minds is centered in absolutely first rate, short-form—longer than an article and shorter than a book—intellectual biographies of three Australian legal scholars, each active at the time when Australian law teaching was professionalizing years after World War II.  Peter Brett who took a Harvard JSD under Henry Hart centered his work  on Criminal Law; Alice Erh-Soon Tay, first on comparisons with and between the Marxist legal systems of China and Russia and later on Human rights; and Geoffrey Sawer the law governing Australian federalism seen from the perspective of political and social circumstances at the time of the relevant decisions.  For each, the scholarship is taken seriously, the life is taken seriously and the academic surround is taken seriously, pretty much all at the same time.  No one could ask more from work in this form.

                    --John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo School of Law

--Dan Ernst

Gooday, Wilf and friends on patent cultures

 Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds) and Steven Wilf (University of Connecticut) have co-edited Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

This book explores how dissimilar patent systems remain distinctive despite
international efforts towards harmonization. The dominant historical account describes harmonization as ever-growing, with familiar milestones such as the Paris Convention (1883), the World Intellectual Property Organization's founding (1967), and the formation of current global institutions of patent governance. Yet throughout the modern period, countries fashioned their own mechanisms for fostering technological invention. Notwithstanding the harmonization project, diversity in patent cultures remains stubbornly persistent. No single comprehensive volume describes the comparative historical development of patent practices. Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective seeks to fill this gap. Tracing national patenting from imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century to our time, this work asks fundamental questions about the limits of globalization, innovation's cultural dimension, and how historical context shapes patent policy. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the contested role of patents in the modern world.

 Here's the Table of Contents:

Part I. Introductory

1. Diversity versus harmonization in patent history: an overview · Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf

2. The 1883 Paris Convention and the impossible unification of industrial property · Gabriel Galvez-Behar

3. One for all? The American patent system and harmonization of international intellectual property laws · Zorina Khan

Part II. Americas: Technical Imaginaries

4. US patent models as specimen and specification · Courtney Fullilove

5. Mexico and the puzzle of partial harmonization: nineteenth-century patent Law reconsidered · Edward Beatty

6. An early patent system in Latin America: the Chilean case, 1840s–1900s · Bernardita Escobar Andrae

Part III. Southern Europe

7. The Italian patent system during the long nineteenth century: from privileges to property rights in a latecomer industrializing country · Alessandro Nuvolari and Michelangelo Vasta

8. Industrial 'property', law, and the politics of invention in Greece, 1900–1940 · Stathis Arapostathis

9. Mediation and harmonization: construction of the Spanish patent system in the twentieth century · Ana Romero de Pablos

Part IV. Central and Eastern Europe

10. The struggle over 'the social function of intellectual work in the economy of nations': engineers, patent law, and enterprise inventions in Germany and their European significance · Karl Hall

11. Multiple loyalties: hybrid patent regimes in the Habsburg empire and its successor states · Karl Hall

12. Patent debates on invention from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union · Karl Hall

Part V. Asia

13. Patent policy in India under the British Raj: a bittersweet story of empire and innovation · Rajesh Sagar

14. The India twist to patent culture: investigating its history · Tania Sebastian

15. The life and times of patent no. 2,670: industrial property and public knowledge in early twentieth-century Japan · Kjell Ericson

Part VI. Epilogue

16. Postscript · Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

A Panel on Presidential Self-Pardons

We have word of a panel co-sponsored by the Miller Center for Public Affairs and the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy at the University of Virginia School of Law: Can the president pardon himself? with John Harrison, Brian Kalt, Bernadette Meyler, and Micah Schwartzman, Friday, January 15, 2021, 11:00AM - 12:00PM (EST):

As President Trump prepares to leave office, can he give himself a presidential pardon? What are the legal arguments for and against self-pardoning? What does the original meaning of the Constitution say about this issue, and is there precedent for it? This expert panel will focus on the constitutional basis of the pardon power, its history and limits, the relationship between pardoning and impeachment, and the legal and political implications of an attempt by the president to self-pardon.

--Dan Ernst

Wozniakowski on Tax Policy and US Territorial Expansion

Tomasz P. Wozniakowski, Hertie School of Governance, has posted The Fiscal Origins of American Power: Federal Tax Policy and US Territorial Expansion in the Nineteenth Century:

In this working paper, I argue that United States (US) territory quadrupled within the first three generations since 1789 because, in the nineteenth century, the US developed a fiscal-military state capable of mobilizing considerable resources without provoking any major tax rebellion. Relying on indirect taxes—customs duties and excises—meant that the federal government could draw on a stable and uncontentious stream of revenue. This fiscal capacity allowed the US government to finance different methods of its territorial expansion, including warfare and purchase.

–Dan Ernst

Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History

We’ve received word of a new book series, Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History, edited by Aniceto Masferrer, University of Valencia, and Heikki Tapio Pihlajamäki, University of Helsinki:

This series covers the general area of comparative legal history, including contributions focusing on both 'internal' legal history, i.e., doctrinal and disciplinary developments in the law, and 'external' legal history, i.e., legal ideas and institutions in wider contexts. Considering the various legal traditions worldwide, the series also welcomes works dealing with other laws and customs from around the globe. Temporal or geographical in approach, the series will consider both legal and similar law-like normative traditions. Works encompassing views from different schools of thought and contributions from comparative and transnational historiography, including interdisciplinary approaches, are encouraged. With a focus on higher level research in the form of monographs and edited collections, proposals for supplementary reading and textbooks are also welcomed.

Members of the editorial board appear here.

–Dan Ernst

Serious Fun: A conference with & around Schlegel

John Henry Schlegel (credit)

Serious Fun: A conference with & around Schlegel! is now online in the Buffalo Law Review.  It honors John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law. We note that there are no women among the contributors.

Symposium Introductions

Foreword
David A. Westbrook

Tuesday Afternoons with Schlegel
Barry Cushman

Symposium Essays

The Tale of Two Harts; A Schlegelian Dialectic
Charles L. Barzun

Of Sheepdogs and Ventriloquists: Government Lawyers in Two New Deal Agencies
Daniel R. Ernst

Transmission of Mastery
James A. Gardner

The Schlegelians v. the Langdellians on Legal Education
Robert W. Gordon

John Henry Schlegel and The Muppet Show
Alfred S. Konefsky

Normativity and Objectivity in Historical Writing (My Dinner with Schlegel)
Matt Steilen

“Read What Was Never Written”
Christopher Tomlins

“I Am Better At Narrative Than Analytical History”: Schlegel’s Version of Intellectual History
G. Edward White

Symposium Afterword

Saying Thanks with Some Self-Reflection
John Henry Schlegel

--Mitra Sharafi

Tuori on Europe and scholars in exile

 Kaius Tuori (University of Helsinki) has published Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars and the Battle for the Future of Europe with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

European legal integration is often justified with reference to the inherent unity of European legal traditions that extend to ancient Rome. This book explores the invention of this tradition, tracing it to a group of legal scholars divided by the onslaught of Nazi terror and totalitarianism in Europe. As exiles in Britain and the US, its formulators worked to build bridges between the Continental and the Atlantic legal traditions, incorporating ideas such as rule of law, liberty and equality to the European heritage. Others joined the Nazi revolution, which promoted its own idea of European unity. At the end of World War Two, natural law and human rights were incorporated into the European project. The resulting narrative of Europe, one that outlined human rights, rule of law and equality, became consequently a unifying factor during the Cold War as the self-definition against the challenge of communism.

 Praise for the book:

"Kaius Tuori convincingly demonstrates how a narrative from Roman law to European identity was constructed in the twentieth century, and the ideological purposes the fiction was made to serve, including across the divide between National Socialist Europe and a self-styled continent of human rights. There is much to learn from Tuori's erudition and insight." - Samuel Moyn

"Tuori is to be commended for producing a rich and textured work filled with important insights. This book will undoubtedly reframe the debate about the ideologies supporting the narratives of European legal history to a significant extent." - Paul J. du Plessis

"A deeply learned investigation of a somber history, Kaius Tuori's Empire of Law tracks the fate of the study of Roman law through the Nazi years and into the post-War effort to rebuild Europe. Indispensable reading for understanding the Roman legal tradition in Western history." - James Whitman

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Mirow on Spanish Justice for British Residents in Colonial Florida

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has posted Judges for British Subjects in Spanish East Florida, which is forthcoming in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy:

Great Britain transferred East Florida with its capital St. Augustine to Spain in 1783. From the early months of 1783 until November 1785, the province experienced overlapping assertions of jurisdiction during a protracted transitional period. Arriving in mid-1784, Spanish Governor Zéspedes encountered a massive British population that did not leave as quickly as imperial authorities or treaty drafters anticipated. Lacking a legal adviser and instructions from Spanish authorities, Zéspedes asserted Spanish sovereignty through various ad hoc legal innovations. This article addresses his creation of “Judges over His Britannic Majesty’s Subjects” resident in Spanish East Florida. The judges appointed were not trained in English law; British subjects resisted their assertions of jurisdiction, the procedures they employed, and their attempts to provide Spanish justice for their British guests. This episode exposes jurisdictional battles tied to sovereignty in a legally plural, imperially liminal place and moment. It reveals gaps in legal understanding between imperial actors and established prejudices between British common law and Spanish colonial law (derecho indiano) in criminal civil, and procedural matters. This distance was exacerbated by a lack of informed legal experts. British residents yearned for a stable place and stable law as they settled their affairs and departed East Florida. The Spanish leadership responded to these desires with assertions of absolute sovereignty and instances of legal ingenuity such as Judges for British Subjects.

–Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Amanda Frost, Bronfman Professor of Law & Government, American University Washington College of Law, will be speaking on her book You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers online at Politics & Prose on January 28.  More. 
  

• Linda Kerber and Lisa Moses Leff will comment at the first Washington History Seminar of 2021 on at 4 PM ET Monday when David Nasaw discusses his new book, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War.  Register here; watch here.

• Applications for the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History are due on January 15.  This two-week program of the American Society for Legal History for early career scholars will take place June 13-26, 2021.  Information here.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Gregory P. Downs (UC Davis) and Kate Masur (Northwestern University), "Yes, Wednesday’s attempted insurrection is who we are."
  

• If you're working on death, this Call for a Royal Holloway virtual conference (15-16 April 2021) may be of interest. Proposals for Until Death Do Us Part: Historical Perspectives on Death and Those Left Behind, 1300-1900 are due Jan.29, 2021.

• And here's another Call for a virtual conference, from the University of Reading (27 April 2021): Medieval Government Finance: Innovation and Experimentation. Proposals due by 19 Feb. 2021.

• “When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of conferences and public talks, the editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era organized a series of webinars with historians to discuss new books and research in Civil War era scholarship. The webinars are free, registration required, and the recordings are posted on the JCWE’s YouTube channel.”  The lineup for the first five months of 2021 lineup is here. 

• New from the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore: a brief introduction to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution.

• ICYMI:  Holly Brewer explains that Thomas Jefferson did not rig the 1800 election (Washington Monthly).  George F. Will doesn’t care for the Slaughterhouse Cases (WaPo).
  

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

Kirkby on "Indian" Enfranchisement in Canada

Paradises Lost? The Constitutional Politics of “Indian” Enfranchisement in Canada, 1857–1900, by Coel Kirkby, University of Sydney Law School, is now available from the wesbite of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal.  Professor Kirkby writes that it is part of a forthcoming book, The Birth of the Native: Democracy and the Disenfranchisement in the British Empire.  Here is the abstract:

Enfranchisement was the legal process for an individual or community to end their legal status as “Indians” under the Indian Act. The Canadian government hoped it would break up bands before assimilating them into settler society. This article aims to excavate the untold story of this attempt to extinguish special “Indian” status in the nineteenth century. It first traces enfranchisement as part of a Victorian discourse of civilization and as a specific Canadian legal process for the assimilation of “Indian” subjects. It then uses new archival sources to tell the untold story of the politics of enfranchisement over the second half of the nineteenth century. The article concludes with the strange case of Doctor Oronhyatekha (aka Mr. Martin). His story is of one exceptional individual’s attempt to pursue an alter "Indian” enfranchisement can help us better appreciate what is at stake in contemporary questions of belonging within the agonistic relationships of the Canadian and Indigenous constitutional orders.

--Dan Ernst

Lash on "Bill of Rights" Revisionism

Kurt T. Lash, University of Richmond School of Law, has posted The 1791 Amendments as the 'Bill of Rights,' Founding to Reconstruction (A Response to Revisionists):

Unlike the “Declaration of Rights” annexed to many state constitutions, the ten amendments added to the federal Constitution in 1791 have no formal title at all. It is only by cultural tradition that Americans refer to these provisions as our national “Bill of Rights.” Until recently, most scholars assumed that this tradition could be traced back to the moment of ratification. Over the last decade or so, however, a number of scholars have challenged this assumption. These “Bill of Rights revisionists” claim that Americans did not commonly refer to the first ten amendments as “the bill of rights” until the twentieth century. Prior to that, most Americans either did not believe they had a national bill of rights or they would have more likely pointed to the Declaration of Independence as the country’s “bill of rights” than to the 1791 amendments. If the revisionists are right, then a substantial portion of constitutional historical scholarship is shot through with historical error, in particular scholarship supporting the incorporation of the Bill of Rights as part of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This essay examines the historical record in order to determine whether the claims of the Bill of Rights revisionists are correct. It presents the results of an exhaustive investigation of political, legal and cultural references to the “bill of rights” from the time of the Founding to Reconstruction (and beyond). These references, most of which are presented here for the first time, suggest that the revisionist claims about the ten amendments are false. Long before the twentieth century, and decades before Reconstruction, Americans commonly referred to the first ten constitutional amendments as “the Bill of Rights.” Moreover, references to the 1791 amendments as the national bill of rights vastly outnumber historical references to the Declaration of Independence as a “bill of rights,” and indicate that nineteenth century Americans were not at all confused about the meaning and content of their national “Bill of Rights.” If any “revision” is in order, it is the need to (1) revisit and revise our understanding of the original theoretical role played by the Bill of Rights at the time of the Founding and (2) recognize the remarkably broad coalition of Americans who, by the time of Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment, embraced an altogether different theory of the 1791 amendments.

--Dan Ernst

Lantigua on Spanish contributions to international law

 David M. Lantigua (University of Notre Dame) has published Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

Before international relations in the West, there were Christian-infidel relations. Infidels and Empires in a New World Order decenters the dominant story of international relations beginning with Westphalia in 1648 by looking a century earlier to the Spanish imperial debate at Valladolid addressing the conversion of native peoples of the Americas. In addition to telling this crucial yet overlooked story from the colonial margins of Western Europe, this book examines the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic to consider how the ambivalent status of the infidel other under natural law and the law of nations culminating at Valladolid shaped subsequent international relations in explicit but mostly obscure ways. From Hernán Cortés to Samuel Purchas, and Bartolomé de las Casas to New England Puritans, a host of unconventional colonial figures enter into conversation with Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, and John Locke to reveal astonishing religious continuities and dissonances in early modern international legal thought with important implications for contemporary global society.

 Here's the Table of Contents:

1. Introduction. International relations beyond Westphalia

Part I. The New World Crucible of Infidel Rights:

2. Theocratic world order and religious wars

3. Spanish Dominicans and the 'affair of the Indies'

4. The politics of natural law at Valladolid, 1550–1551

Part II. God, Empires, and International Society:

5. From infidels to savages: empires of commerce and natural rights

6. The scholastic law of nations, native occupation, and human solidarity.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Magliocca on Confederate Amnesty under the 14th Amendment

Gerard N. Magliocca, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, has posted Amnesty and Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment:

Jefferson Davis, 1885 (LC)

This Article is the first scholarly account of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which excluded many ex-Confederates from office unless a supermajority of Congress granted a waiver. Section Three was the first part of the Fourteenth Amendment applied by Congress--even before the Amendment was ratified. Section Three was the first part of the Fourteenth Amendment applied by the courts, with Chief Justice Chase's opinion in "Griffin's Case" setting the tone for future Fourteenth Amendment decisions that narrowed the text's scope. And Section Three was the part of the Amendment that received sustained attention in Congress when a broad amnesty was enacted in 1872 and Senator Charles Sumner tried (unsuccessful) to add a broad civil rights amendment to the amnesty bill.

The story of Section Three is a microcosm of the trajectory of the Fourteenth Amendment as a whole during Reconstruction. Radical aspirations were followed by judicial caution and vigorous enforcement by Congress, only to give way to exhaustion with the implacable anger of southern whites over the protests of the first Black Representatives in Congress. And in a final irony, the first man to claim the protection of Section Three (in 1868) was the last man to benefit from congressional relief under that provision (in 1978)--Jefferson Davis. Section Three is a constitutional failure that deserves closer scrutiny.

–Dan Ernst

Getzler and Pitts Are New AJLH Editors-in-Chief

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The American Journal of Legal History and Oxford University Press are delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Yvonne Pitts and Prof. Joshua Getzler as Co-Editors-in-Chief, effective 1 January 2021.

Joshua Getzler is professor of law and legal history at the University of Oxford, and a fellow in law at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He trained in law and history in Australia, and then wrote a doctorate in legal and economic history at Oxford, resulting in his monograph A History of Water Rights at Common Law which was awarded the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2005.

Joshua works on the historical evolution of legal institutions of property, trust, fiduciaries, corporations, and charities, especially religious and welfare forms. He also studies the history of native title, and the jurisdiction and accountability of colonial, settler and imperial governments, principally in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Joshua has taught and researched at universities in Australia, USA and Israel. He serves on the council of the Selden Society for English legal history, the editorial boards of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Equity, and is co-editor of the OUP monograph series Oxford Legal History.

Yvonne Pitts is an associate professor of history at Purdue University - West Lafayette specializing in the legal histories of sexual regulation, disability, property, and legal culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. She is the author of Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth Century Kentucky, which was awarded the American Society of Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize in 2014. Her current research explores the U.S. military's system of licensing prostitutes and regulating sex work in Nashville, Tennessee during the American Civil War. She traces how regulatory practices around sexual danger, race relations, contagion, and the proper subjects of surveillance and legal discipline evolved in the context of a wartime military occupation. She is also working on a project examining the constitutional and legal understandings of the material texts and evidentiary practices in nineteenth century obscenity trials.

Joshua writes: "Under the vigorous editorial leadership of Alfred Brophy, Stefan Vogenauer, and Felice Batlan, the American Journal of Legal History stands out as a compelling publication, with every issue filled with erudition, originality, and thought-provoking discoveries. Stefan has described very well the growth of the journal to its current commanding form. The journal attracts great attention across North America, Britain, Europe, and the wider world. In a globalized society full of contention over justice and authority, livelihoods and identities, tradition and innovation, we need a vigorous and independent-minded legal history practice more than ever, to explore the shape of the past and its impact on the present. I am excited by the opportunity to carry forward and develop the mission of the AJLH, working closely with my co-editor Yvonne Pitts, the distinguished editorial board, the associate and review editors, and our OUP partners. We will strive to serve the legal-historical community by providing the best possible forum for scholarly work covering all periods and places."

Yvonne writes: "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to the field of legal history and work with diverse and international legal scholars as the co-editor of the American Journal of Legal History. The AJLH has a long tradition as a forum for highly respected, innovative legal historical scholarship across broad geographical, thematic, and temporal subfields. Under the able leadership of past editors Felice Batlan and Stephen Vogenauer, the AJLH has produced trenchant, influential research from early career and established scholars. I look forward to working with my co-editor Joshua Getzler to build on the AJLH's commitment to emerging questions and traditional themes in legal and constitutional history in local, national, and transnational contexts."

Oxford University Press would like to thank the outgoing editors, Prof. Stefan Vogenauer and Prof. Felice Batlan, for their skilled and dedicated work on AJLH. The AJLH was first published in 1957 and was the first English-language periodical in the field of legal history.

The French Civil Code at the Law Library of Congress

[We have the following announcement from the Law Library of Congress.  DRE]

On Thursday, January 28 at 2:00PM EST, join Foreign Legal Specialist, Nicolas Boring, for a new entry in our Foreign and Comparative Law Webinar Series. This entry in the series will discuss the French Civil Code. The French Civil Code, which Napoleon Bonaparte introduced in 1804, has had an enduring impact on the legal world, not just in France but throughout the world. Boring will discuss the Napoleonic Code’s history, evolutions and legacy in a new installment of the Law Library of Congress’ foreign and comparative law webinar series. This presentation will discuss not only French law, but also the Civil Code’s impact on other countries around the world, from Belgium to Haiti. To register, please visit [here.]

LHR 38:4

Law and History Review 38:4 is now online.

Bain Attwood, The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century

Craig Hollander,  “The Citizen Complains”: Federal Compensation for Property Lost in the War of 1812

J.Y. Chua, The Strange Career of Gross Indecency: Race, Sex, and Law in Colonial Singapore

Luke Taylor, Speaking the Unspeakable: Buggery, Law, and Community Surveillance in New South Wales, 1788–1838

Mark Coen, “The Work of Some Irresponsible Women”: Jurors, Ghosts, and Embracery in the Irish Free State

Katherine Unterman, Trial Without Jury in Guam, USA

Joanna L. Grisinger,  “South Africa is the Mississippi of the world”: Anti-Apartheid Activism through Domestic Civil Rights Law

Lizzie Seal and Alexa Neale, Racializing Mercy: Capital Punishment and Race in Twentieth-Century England and Wales

Book Reviews 

Richard H. Helmholz, The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvii, 232. $110.00 hardcover (ISBN 97811008499064).
Sarah B. White

Robin Chapman Stacey, Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 335. $89.95 hardcover (ISBN 9780812250510).
Gwen Seabourne

Niamh Howlin, Juries in Ireland: Laypersons and Law in the Long Nineteenth Century. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017. Pp. x, 293. $74.50 hardcover (ISBN 9781846826214).
John MacMenamin

Yuko Miki, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 292. $99.99 hardcover (ISBN 9781108417501).
Jean Hébrard

Faiz Ahmed, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 448. $51.50 hardcover (ISBN 9780674971943).
Amir A. Toft

Timo Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico, 1820-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 243. $105.00 hardcover (ISBN 9781107190733); $29.99 paper (ISBN 9781316640784); $24.00 ebook (ISBN 9781108122214)
Reuben Zahler

Andrew Ventimiglia, Copyrighting God: Ownership of the Sacred in American Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 247. $115.00 hardcover (ISBN 9781108420518); $34.99 paper (ISBN 9781108430371); $28.00 ebook (ISBN 9781108359481).
Robert Spoo

Rubén Nazario Velasco, La historia de los derrotados: americanización y romanticismo en Puerto Rico, 1898-1917. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Laberinto, 2019. Pp. 295. $20.85 paper (ISBN 9781950414024).
Sam Erman

Joan Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2018. Pp. 322 + vi. $27.95 CAN hardcover (ISBN 9780774835336); $22.95 CAN paper (ISBN 9780774835343); $27.95 CAN ebook (ISBN 9780774835367).
Lyndsay Campbell

Pendas on Nazi trials

 Devin O. Pendas (Boston College) has published Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945-1950 with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

Post-war Germany has been seen as a model of 'transitional justice' in action, where the prosecution of Nazis, most prominently in the Nuremberg Trials, helped promote a transition to democracy. However, this view forgets that Nazis were also prosecuted in what became East Germany, and the story in West Germany is more complicated than has been assumed. Revising received understanding of how transitional justice works, Devin O. Pendas examines Nazi trials between 1945 and 1950 to challenge assumptions about the political outcomes of prosecuting mass atrocities. In East Germany, where there were more trials and stricter sentences, and where they grasped a broad German complicity in Nazi crimes, the trials also helped to consolidate the emerging Stalinist dictatorship by legitimating a new police state. Meanwhile, opponents of Nazi prosecutions in West Germany embraced the language of fairness and due process, which helped de-radicalise the West German judiciary and promote democracy.

 Praise for the book:

"A vast literature insists that the transition from authoritarianism to democracy demands that a nation frankly reckon with its past crimes. Pendas's new book brilliantly challenges this view. In exploring Germany's half-hearted and vexed efforts to punish and purge former Nazis and 'fellow travelers', he demonstrates how the German nation achieved an important political success at the cost of a disturbing moral failure. His is a fine and singular achievement." - Lawrence Douglas

"Pendas has spun a powerful cautionary tale about transitional justice, a necessary corrective to the idea that liberal-legal trials in the aftermath of atrocity necessarily lead to democratization. As Pendas shows with his usual erudition, the very different political fates of West and East Germany undermine any such happy teleology. An absolute must-read - and will no doubt be read for years to come." - Kevin Jon Heller

"This is the definitive account of the 'Nuremberg interregnum' … In a tour de force, Pendas takes the reader from Nuremberg to Dachau, Lüneburg, and Waldheim, and to the many places where investigations never made it to trial. Combining a keen eye for detail with analytical rigour, Pendas reasserts historians' authority on transitional justice's potential and its limitations. This excellent book shows how unintended consequences and perennially irrational actors defy neat models and precise cost-benefit analyses." - Kim Christian Priemel

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

ASLH Honorary Fellows

 [We have the following announcement.  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 Bruce H. Mann, chair of the Honors Committee, by email (mann@law.harvard.edu) before January 22, 2021.  Each nomination should include a brief statement of why the nominee merits election.  A list of current and past honorary fellows is [here].

Virtual conference: Paper Empires

 [We share the following announcement for a virtual conference happening on 7-8 Jan. 2021. To register, e-mail Nandini Chatterjee: n.chatterjee@exeter.ac.uk]

The Forms of Law Project, in collaboration with the Colonialism Inside Out Project and hosted
by the University of Exeter’s Centre for Imperial and Global History, will be holding the online conference ‘Paper Empires: Layers of law in colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean‘ on 7 and 8 January 2021.

Concept Note:

Anthropologists and historians have recently underscored the ways in which European colonialism created novel regimes of legality and record-keeping, associated with ambitious and exclusive state-centred claims to both truth and rights, while being constantly preoccupied with the spectre of forgery and corruption. However, the attention so far has been focussed on English/European-language records and the colonial institutions that produced, stored and deployed them. This focus has communicated a monolithic sense of power and normativity that unwittingly replicates the aspirations of colonial states. In addition, a more sociologically-inspired historiographical focus on colonial intermediaries as small cogs in the larger bureaucratic machinery tends to blur the underlying materiality and performative nature of record-keeping as such. Drawing on case studies from in and around South Asia, we propose instead that the law of empires was rooted in the highly localised, often multilingual, and fragmented bureaucracies that produced its records.

This conference brings together historians of pre-colonial Indian regimes with historians of British, Dutch and French colonialism in order to unearth genealogies of records in Bengali, Marathi, Persian, Sinhala and Tamil, besides French, Dutch and English, between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In exploring that extended period, we place equal valence on subcontinental India and Sri Lanka, on European-ruled South Asia and indirectly controlled princely states, and on the search for sovereignty on water as much as land. While each paper deals with a specific mode of legal or institutional recording, our collective aim is to understand how indigenous regimes co-emerged and competed with incipient European Company-states, creating new forms and potentialities, and indeed, a whole gamut of novel record-making and -keeping strategies, in line with evolving ideas of legality.

In doing so, we engage the following questions:

How have not just documents but also legal concepts and state frameworks been translated? How were pre-existing forms displaced or repurposed by using seemingly traditional forms for novel purposes?

In what ways do these bureaucracies defy compartmentalisation in indigenous and colonial regimes? What do such co-constituted regimes tell us about power, empire, and law?

How did the materiality and ceremoniality of bureaucracies and records embody the processes of colonial law and generate the reality of colonial governance?

How does emphasizing the forms, concepts, and frameworks of law and bureaucracy change our understanding of the role of state agents and intermediaries?

How were the notions of law and language enacted in the everyday locality related to cosmopolitan cultures or vice versa? What commonalities or tensions existed between the specifics of mundane legal and bureaucratic acts versus the totalizing visions of colonial states?

How do these processes look different in different periods of colonial rule, from protracted transitions to high colonialism?

More after the jump: