"Coming Apart," "War Time," "Pink and Blue," and More: This Week in the Book Pages

This week, don't miss the New York Times review of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum), by Charles Murray. Like Murray's previous books (Losing Ground, the Bell Curve), Coming Apart is sure to provoke a reaction from social scientists and historians. Another source of controversy will be the book's implication: in reviewer Nicholas Confessore's words, "that economic insecurity doesn’t have much to do with eroding civic values, so we shouldn’t bother using government to tackle inequality."

On inequality and its significance, see also the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Andrew Hacker reviews, here, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger 
(Bloomsbury), by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett; The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good (Princeton University Press), by Robert H. Frank; The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics (Doubleday), by Thomas Byrne Edsall; and Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others 
(Polity), by James Gilligan. 


Also in the NYRB: R.J.W. Evans reviews two books on Bismarck (here, subscribers only); Richard Bernstein reviews A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (Norton), by Aaron L. Friedberg (here); Richard Lewontin reviews three books on DNA and crime (here, subscribers only); and Michael Tomasky covers two books on Mitt Romney (here).

The New Republic gives us much food for thought this week -- 

Mark Schmitt (Roosevelt Institute) takes up "moderate Republicanism" in his review of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press), by Geoffrey Kabaservice. 

Eric Posner (University of Chicago) covers War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press), by Mary Dudziak (here). In Posner's opinion,

Dudziak’s argument provides a twist on a common view among legal academics about the relationship between wartime and civil liberties. Like these scholars, Dudziak believes that people tolerate infringements of civil liberties because they are bamboozled by leaders and not because security threats require sacrifices. But whereas most scholars emphasize the public’s emotional reaction to a threat (people panic and approve of excessive measures that lead to abuse), Dudziak focuses on cognitive or perhaps imaginative deficiencies (people misunderstand the nature of wartime and approve excessive measures because they think the war will be temporary).

Dudziak's response to the review is here.

Also reviewed in TNR: Borrow: The American Way of Debt (Vintage Books), by Louis Hyman (here).

Subscribers to the Chronicle of Higher Ed may enjoy Kacie Glenn's review of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America (Indiana University Press), by Jo B. Paoletti. Here's a taste:

Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, studies apparel design and textiles, as well as the psychology of dress, consumer culture, developmental psychology, and the history of childhood. In her new book, she describes how, over the past 100 years, parents have increasingly gravitated toward children's clothing that telegraphs their offspring's gender to the world.

Read on here.

The Wall Street Journal reviews Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Knopf), by Stephen R. Platt. Here's a taste:

Much recent scholarship on the Taiping Uprising . . . has shown the value in approaching the 1860s as a time when China was wracked by a civil war not completely unlike the one taking place on the other side of the Pacific. . . . Mr. Platt presents the first book-length foray in this direction, providing a compelling alternative account of much-studied events that feels both a bit old-fashioned (in its panoramic view of battles and leaders) yet also very much in step with recent scholarship, placing national stories into global frameworks.
 

Also reviewed in the WSJ: three new books on the Girl Scouts and its founder (here).


In the pages of the Nation, you'll find a review of Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (Hill and Wang), by Jean H. Baker. Reviewer Michelle Goldberg recognizes the need to place Sanger, now a highly politicized figure, in proper context, but concludes that the book "adds little to our understanding of [Sanger's] dynamic, pathbreaking and often maddening ideas and life."

Weekend Round-Up

• In case you missed the links on H-Law, a review of David Bernstein's Rehabilitating Lochner by the Federal Judicial Center's Daniel Holt is here; Bernstein's reply is here; and Holt's further thoughts are here.

• Around the colloquia:  Jody David Armour, USC Law,  presented "Nigger Lover: Luck, Law, and Language in the Social Construction of Niggas” in USC Law, History, and Culture program; James Salzman, Duke Law, presented "Thirst: The Histories of Drinking Water” at Brooklyn Law; Ariela Gross, USC Law, presented “All Born to Freedom? Comparing the Law and Politics of Race and the Memory of Slavery in the U.S. and France Today” at Washington University Law; and Christopher Beauchamp, Brooklyn Law, presented "The Pure Thoughts of Judge Hand: A Historical Note on the Patenting of Nature" to NYU Law's Colloquium on Innovation Policy.  Hat tip: Legal Scholarship Bog

• Here is GW Law's press release announcing Michael Morin's receipt of the first Richard & Diane Cummins Legal History Research Grant.  Professor Morin will be using the grant to work with the Burns Library's unusually strong collection in early French law.  Hat tip: Legal Scholarship Blog

• UPDATE:  The January issue of the American Journal of Legal History is now out.  The table of contents is here.

The Weekend Round-Up is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

On the LHB Facebook Page: Civil Rights

This past week on the Facebook page we highlighted American legal thought with links to sources and reading including Dan Ernst on Roscoe Pound and the administrative state, Al Brophy on Antebellum intellectuals and the law, and this month’s guest blogger, Felice Batlan, on gender and sociological jurisprudence.

Coming up next week, links to suggested reading and sources on civil rights.  To start things off: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, “Thinking Historically about a ‘Supreme Court Pro Bono Bar’” from June 2011.

Fede's "Roadblocks to Freedom"

This week’s mail brought a paperback copy of the latest book by Andrew Fede, Roadblocks to Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the United States South, from Quid Pro Press.  It is available in multiple formats, including reasonably price paperback (list $38.99) and hard cover (list $56.99) editions and as an ebook in Kindle, Nook and Apple.  We've noted the publication of other Quid Pro books before (here and here).  The book design is no-frills, but the press looks to be an excellent option for important but hard-to-publish scholarly monographs.

To the book itself:

Andrew Fede's new book considers the law of freedom suits and manumission from the point-of-view of legal procedure, evidence rules, damage awards, and trial practice—in addition to the abstract principles stated in the appellate decisions. The author shows that procedural and evidentiary barricades made it increasingly impossible for many slaves, or free blacks who were wrongfully held as slaves, to litigate their freedom. Even some of the most celebrated cases in which the courts freed slaves must be read as tempered by the legal realities that the actors faced or that the courts actually recognized in the process.

Slave owners in almost all slave societies had the right to manumit or free their slaves. Slavery law also permitted people to win their freedom if they were held as slaves contrary to law. Fede provides a comprehensive view of how some enslaved litigants won their freedom in the court—and how many others, like Dred and Harriet Scott, did not because of the substantive and procedural barriers that both judges and legislators placed in the way of people held in slavery who sought their freedom in court.

From the 17th century to the Civil War, Southern governments built roadblock after roadblock to the freedom sought by deserving enslaved people, even if this restricted the masters' rights to free their slaves or defied settled law. They increasingly prohibited all manumissions and added layers of procedure to those seeking freedom—while eventually providing a streamlined process by which free blacks "voluntarily" enslaved themselves and their children.

Drawing on his three decades of legal experience to take seriously the trial process and rules under which slave freedom cases were decided, Fede considers how slave owners, slaves, and lawyers caused legal change from the bottom up.

Here are the blurbs:

"ROADBLOCKS TO FREEDOM is the most comprehensive study of the law of manumission ever written. Andrew Fede has examined and analyzed hundreds of cases and statutes from the antebellum South, and provided a coherent framework for understanding the complex legal issues that arose when masters tried to voluntarily free their slaves. This book provides a solid and important resource for all scholars in the field. All of us in the field are indebted to Fede for this tremendous research and analysis."
 - PAUL FINKELMAN, President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law, Albany Law School
 Author, Slavery and the Founders (2001)

"In ROADBLOCKS TO FREEDOM, Andrew Fede has given us a comprehensive look at one of the more troubling issues in the legal history of the United States. While we are all aware that American law supported slavery, Fede gives us a detailed look at how often the law was hostile to manumission. This is a well researched study that will prove to be of considerable value to students of law and history alike."
 - ROBERT J. COTTROL, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History and Sociology, The George Washington University.  Coauthor, Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution (2003)

"ROADBLOCKS TO FREEDOM is a must read for anyone interested in the legal history of slavery in the American South. Exhaustively researched, the study picks apart, categorizes, and contextualizes hundreds of cases and statutes addressing the efforts and abilities of slaves to obtain their freedom and of masters to manumit those they held in bondage. Fede's comprehensive analysis is matched only by his careful attention to detail, painting a deeply nuanced picture of the competing social, political, economic, and legal interests at play when a slave's potential for liberty was at stake."
 - JASON A. GILLMER, Professor of Law and John J. Hemmingson Chair in Civil Liberties, Gonzaga University

The American Journal of Legal History Seeks a Web Editor

The American Journal of Legal History is looking for a web editor.  Here is the announcement:


The American Journal of Legal History has an opening for a web editor.  Duties include updating the Journal's web site (www.ajlh.org), Facebook page, and Wikipedia entry as necessary while seeking new ways to increase the electronic reach of the Journal.  Benefits include a complimentary subscription to the Journal, inclusion on the masthead, and recognition on the web site's staff page.  Expressions of interest and/or nominations should be sent to Professor Robert M. Jarvis, Chair of the Journal's Advisory Board, at jarvisb@nsu.law.nova.edu.

Walker on Race and the Exclusionary Rule in the 1960s

Anders Walker, Saint Louis University School of Law, has posted Theatres of Procedure, a revisionist account of the exclusionary rule in the 1960s.  Here is the abstract:

This article explodes standard interpretations of the exclusionary rule, relying on archival sources to demonstrate that the Warren Court’s incorporation of the rule to the states did not professionalize police so much as worsen their conduct, increasing tensions between beat patrolmen and racial minorities. By the mid-sixties, such tensions escalated to the point that both white police and black activists derided the Court’s criminal procedure revolution as an effort not to ameliorate inequality so much as to contain the poor in urban ghettos. Rather than counter this charge, the Court proceeded to turn against urban protesters, upholding the convictions of a string of black demonstrators including national civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1968, such cases provided an odd corollary to the Court’s criminal procedure decisions, pointing to a little recognized drama of control aimed not at helping minorities so much as containing radical protest in the United States.

Premier of PBS Documentary Based on Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name

On Monday, February 13, 2012 at 9p.m. EST, PBS will debut a documentary film, directed by Sam Pollard and based on David Blackmon's Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Slavery By Another Name: The Reenslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  Read a description of the film below. Watch the trailer here.

Slavery by Another Name challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

Based on Blackmon’s research, Slavery by Another Name spans eight decades, from 1865 to 1945, revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled this “neoslavery” to begin and persist. Using archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments filmed on location in Alabama and Georgia, it tells the forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants living today. The program also features interviews with Douglas Blackmon and with leading scholars of this period.

Remembering Will Stacey, a son and a soldier

As legal historians, and simply as human beings, one contribution we try to make is to nurture the next generation.  We do that as teachers, of course, but we also do that as parents, aunts, uncles and neighbors.  As our collective children grow to adulthood, we don’t expect them to be taken from us.  It seems both tragic and unfair.  For one legal historian and her family, this year has brought both that great unfairness, and at the same time a message from her son, showing us the way that those taken too early leave their own legacy.

With great sadness, I share this news from Laura Kalman and Reuel Schiller:

Will, Robin, Anna and Bob Stacey

We are deeply saddened to have to report the death of Will Stacey, the son of our friend and colleague Robin Chapman Stacey, a legal historian who teaches in the history department at the University of Washington. Will, who was sergeant in the Marine Corps, was killed in Afghanistan on January 31st.  He was 23 years old. 

Robin is a splendid teacher, and a prolific, prize-winning scholar of medieval European law,  focusing particularly on Celtic law in early Ireland and Wales.  She is also an active member of the legal history community - she is a member of the Law and History Review's editorial board and a past member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History.  We hope that the community of legal historians will join us in extending our condolences to Robin (email here) and her husband Bob, as well as their daughter, Anna, and Will's long-time girlfriend, Kimmy Kirkwood.

Robin, Bob, Anna, and Kimmy have decided that the best way to honor Will would be through donations to support the Little League baseball teams in Seattle.  Will was a superb player--a star pitcher for many years--and loved little kids. They believe that Will would be thrilled if he was remembered at a baseball field, or in a team name, or even through the purchase of some uniforms. Donations, which are tax-deductable, may be sent to:

Roosevelt University Greenlake Little League
Attn: Will Stacey Memorial Fund
9594 First Avenue NE, #122
Seattle WA 98115

Will Stacy's life and death are covered in The Seattle Times.  ABC News selected him as a "Person of the Week" last week (embedded below), sharing his letter to his parents that his service in Afghanistan had been worth the terrible price.

Cushman on the Limits of the New Deal Analogy

Barry Cushman, Virginia Law, has posted The Limits of the New Deal Analogy.  Here is the abstract:

The past three years of the Obama Administration inevitably have elicited comparisons between the present day and the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. While frequently illuminating, such comparisons often overlook an important point that many may have forgotten: compared with the major reform initiatives undertaken during President Obama's tenure, a review of the roll call votes reveals that the measures enacted by the New Deal Congresses enjoyed a remarkable degree of bipartisan support. In addition, the Democrats enjoyed large majorities in the House of Representatives from 1933 forward, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate after 1934.

These dual luxuries of bipartisan support and electoral dominance had two important implications for the durability of New Deal legislation. First, they guaranteed that in the near term there would be no significant movement within Congress to repeal that legislation. Second, they ensured that if the Supreme Court held such legislation unconstitutional, Congress would get a second bite at the apple. In several instances in which the Hughes Court held that a legislative attempt to address a particular problem did not pass constitutional muster, the New Deal Congresses would have, and would take, the opportunity to reformulate the program to achieve the desired end through means consistent with prevailing constitutional doctrine.

Neither of these conditions obtains today. Congressional Republicans are committed to substantial modification or outright repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and if the Court were to declare all of portions of that Act unconstitutional, there is virtually no chance that it would be enacted in anything like its current form by the present Congress. Moreover, polling data suggest that popular support for the Act is not nearly as strong as it was for programs challenged before the Court in 1937. Court decisions invalidating either the minimum wage or the Social Security Act would have frustrated both the legislative and the popular will. By contrast, polls show the American people favoring repeal or judicial invalidation of all or part of the Affordable Care Act, and the Act as a whole does not enjoy the support of the present Congress. A Court decision striking down the individual mandate therefore would be flouting neither the current congressional will nor present popular preferences. We should bear such important differences in mind when contemplating the extent to which the 1930s provide an illuminating analogy to our present circumstances.

Bradley and Morrison on Historical Gloss and the Separation of Powers

Historical Gloss and the Separation of Powers has just been posted by Curtis A. Bradley, Duke University - School of Law, and Trevor W. Morrison, Columbia University - Law School.  Hat tip to the Legal Theory Blog.  Here's the abstract:

Arguments based on historical practice are a mainstay of debates about the constitutional separation of powers. Surprisingly, however, there has been little sustained academic attention to the proper role of historical practice in this context. The scant existing scholarship is either limited to specific subject areas or focused primarily on judicial doctrine without addressing the use of historical practice in broader conceptual or theoretical terms. To the extent that the issue has been discussed, most accounts of how historical practice should inform the separation of powers require “acquiescence” by the branch of government whose prerogatives the practice implicates, something that is viewed as critical to giving historical practice the force of law. Yet the concept of acquiescence has been treated much too casually in the literature. Claims about acquiescence are typically premised on a Madisonian conception of interbranch competition, pursuant to which Congress and the Executive Branch are each assumed to have the tools and the motivation consistently to guard against encroachments on their authority. It has become apparent from political science scholarship, however, that the Madisonian model does not accurately reflect the dynamics of modern congressional-executive relations. This requires a reexamination of the premises and implications of the idea of institutional acquiescence in particular, and of the role of historical practice more generally. Ultimately, we argue, the problems with the Madisonian model are not fatal to crediting historical practice in interpreting the separation of powers. But they do require more attention to the reasons why such practice is invoked, the extent to which the reasons demand institutional acquiescence, and the precise method by which such acquiescence is identified. To illustrate the importance of each of these questions, we present three case studies of constitutional debates concerning the separation of powers in which practice-based arguments are prominent - war powers, congressional-executive agreements, and removal of executive officers. 

Along the way, Bradley and Morrison have a helpful discussion of the relationship between historical data and arguments about constitutional interpretation and judicial review, noting that "not all approaches to constitutional interpretation," including some forms of originalism, "can easily coexist with arguments from historical practice." See pp. 10-15.

Eng, Ruskola and Shen, China and the Human

China and the Human has just been posted by David L Eng, University of Pennsylvania - Department of English; Teemu Ruskola, Emory University School of Law; and Shuang Shen, Pennsylvania State University - College of the Liberal Arts.  It is the Introduction to a special issue of Social Text.  Here's the abstract: 

China is everywhere in the news. Most stories seem to fall into one of two categories: accounts of China’s astounding economic development, and reports of equally astonishing human rights abuses in China. Paradoxically, as it turns into a global economic powerhouse, China’s relationship to political freedoms and rights appears to stand in an almost inverse relationship to its economic success. To make sense of the contemporary political moment, this essay examines the politics and histories of China and the human. At the same time, it constitutes a critical introduction to a special double issue of the journal Social Text on the same theme. The special issue, consisting of eleven essays and a visual dossier, considers the problematic conceptual, political, historical, and cultural relationship between Chineseness and humanity. By juxtaposing “China” and “the human” as two discrete categories, this introductory essay does not assume either concept as a pre-given object of knowledge. Rather — together with the other essays in the volume — it examines both China and the human as set of relational, differential, and contrapuntal events, in specific historical and geopolitical contexts.

The introductory essay provides a conceptual and historical map for this inquiry, in a comparative context that examines Euro-American, Chinese, and transnational itineraries of the human and their global crossings. It analyzes China’s potential to undo the universalizing claims of Western idealized norms of the human, while refusing to re-essentialize a Chinese otherness as an alternative perspective. More specifically, the essay interrogates the domination and limitations of the universal human while tracing alternative cosmologies and discourses of Chinese humanism and anti-humanism, informed by Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, as well as other religious and political traditions. It also examines Marxist and Maoist conceptualizations of the human from transnational perspectives, and finally it considers the status of the human in contemporary China, defined increasingly as a bearer of a set of political and legal rights. What humanity means in China today — and in the world — and what it will mean in the future, is part of an ongoing struggle over the meaning of the past and the politics of the present. This essay offers “China” as a methodology in itself, rather than simply an object of inquiry.

Cold War History at the Tamiment: A Visit to Chernobyl, Port Huron at Fifty, and More

Today marks the first in a series of seminars sponsored by the Center for the United States and the Cold War of the Tamiment Library at NYU.  Kate Brown’s paper is an artful chapter that artfully contrasts the planned city Chernobyl with the Ukrainian peasant community it supplanted. constructed around her own visit to the now-deserted "zone."  Also notable is the two-day conference in April to note the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, which promises to bring Tom Hayden together with Occupy Wall Street activists.

Most sessions (but not the Port Huron ones) convene at the Tamiment, which is located on the 10th floor of NYU’s Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South.  For more information, contact zk3@nyu.edi

February 9th - Kate Brown, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
“The Plutonium Curtain: Plutonium's role in making model cities and the nuclear security state
during the Soviet-American Cold War”

February 23rd - David Engerman, Brandeis University
“India as a Hotspot in the Economic Cold War”

March 8th - Sueyoung Park-Primiano, New York University
“Hollywood's Cold War Overtures in South Korea: Lessons in Democracy and Christian Love”

March 29th - Margaret Power, Illinois Institute of Technology
“Puerto Rican Nationalism, the Communist Party, and the U.S. Government during the Cold War: The Challenges of ‘Domestic’ Decolonization”

April 5th - Despina Lalaki, New York University
“American Academics Abroad. Cultural Responsibility and Ideology in the Cold War Era”

April 12th - Port Huron at 50 Keynote Address
"The Port Huron Statement in Historical Perspective"
6:00pm, Tamiment Library.  Sponsored by Department of Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt School and the Tamiment Library

April 13th - Port Huron at 50 Conference
Tom Hayden, "Participatory Democracy: From Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street”
9:30am-4:30pm, Glucksman Ireland House, 1 Washington Square Mews.  Sponsored by Department of Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt School and the Tamiment Library

April 19th - Roberta Gold, Fordham University
"City of Tenants"

May 3rd - Louie Milojevic, American University
“Building Tito-Land: American Foreign Aid and the Yugoslav Fantasy, 1948-1963”

Fernandez on Moyn, From Antiwar Politics to Antitorture Politics

Writing for the Jotwell legal history section, Angela Fernandez (University of Toronto) has reviewed Samuel Moyn, From Antiwar Politics to Antitorture Politics (a November 2011 working paper). In her view, it is "an excellent paper, . . . offering an extremely thoughtful intervention on the recent history of international law."

Read on here.

New Release: Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard (University of Michigan, both), has just been released by Harvard University Press.


Here's the description:

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family’s quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. 

Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie’s great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. 

Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

And a selection of blurbs:

“The pleasures of Freedom Papers unfold at various levels. It’s a family saga, an excursion through the commercial circuitry of the Atlantic world, and a compelling introduction to the great Age of Emancipation. It’s also a historical whodunnit: who was ‘Rosalie of the Poulard nation’? Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard trace the ties created by Rosalie and her descendants, Atlantic survivors whose ingenuity—combined with strategic access to pen, ink, and notaries—gave them just enough archival salience to make this telling possible. Scott and Hébrard are practiced experts at making the archive speak.”—Kathryn J. Burns, author of Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru 

“With this riveting family story that takes us from eighteenth-century Africa to twentieth century Europe, Scott and Hébrard re-write the history of slavery, race, and citizenship. Freedom Papers is stunningly original and movingly told—an instant classic.”—Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History 

“A wonderful, richly detailed history that leads the reader through two centuries in the life of a single family as the individuals within it spend their times on earth, struggling for security and standing. Unusual scholarship, beautifully recounted.”—Sidney W. Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

The Table of Contents is available here.

An author interview with Rebecca Scott is available here.

G. Edward White's Law in American History: Volume 1

Courtesy of UVA

Law in American History: Volume One by G. Edward (Ted) White has been published by Oxford University Press.   The publisher's description of the book follows.  Ted will answer our questions about his new book--the first in a three-volume series--and his body of work when he joins us in a series of guest blogger question and answer sessions next month. If you have questions for Ted, email them to me.

In the first of the three volumes of his projected comprehensive narrative history of the role of law in America from the colonial years through the twentieth century, G. Edward White takes up the central themes of American legal history from the earliest European settlements through the Civil War.

Included in the coverage of this volume are the interactions between European and Amerindian legal systems in the years of colonial settlement; the crucial role of Anglo-American theories of sovereignty and imperial governance in facilitating the separation of the American colonies from the British Empire in the late eighteenth century; the American "experiment" with federated republican constitutionalism in the founding period; the major importance of agricultural householding, in the form of slave plantations as well as farms featuring wage labor, in helping to shape the development of American law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the emergence of the Supreme Court of the United States as an authoritative force in American law and politics in the early nineteenth century; the interactions between law, westward expansion, and transformative developments in transportation and communication in the antebellum years; the contributions of American legal institutions to the dissolution of the Union of American states in the three decades after 1830; and the often-overlooked legal history of the Confederacy and Union governments during the Civil War.

White incorporates recent scholarship in anthropology, ethnography, and economic, political, intellectual and legal history to produce a narrative that is both revisionist and accessible, taking up the familiar topics of race, gender, slavery, and the treatment of native Americans from fresh perspectives. Along the way he provides a compelling case for why law can be seen as the key to understanding the development of American life as we know it. Law in American History, Volume 1 will be an essential text for both students of law and general readers.

CFP: Australia New Zealand Law & History Society

[Here's a call for papers for what appears to be a particularly well-crafted annual meeting of Antipodean legal historians, to be held at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).  The organizers tell me that they are keen to have "many of our North American colleagues" attend.  Here is the link to the conference website; here a link to another conference at UTS, on the "historical connections" between the legal profession and defense forces; here a link to yet another, on feminism and the law that will include "revisiting the past."]

The 31st Annual Conference of the Australia New Zealand Law and History Society will be held at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), 10-12 December 2012. UTS is the most centrally located law school in Sydney, situated next to Central Station, on the edge of China Town, three minutes by monorail from Sydney’s central shopping district and a short trip to the harbour by direct train or bus.

The conference theme is “Receiving Laws/Giving Laws”. It is orientated towards the movement, transmission and transformation of laws and their histories – across Empire, through time, in and between genres and disciplines. The receiving and giving of laws could be addressed in a broad range of ways. How do laws and histories translocate? By what means (doctrinal, processual, cultural) are laws transmitted and received in new places? What transformations happen as a result of this movement? Whose histories, cultures and laws appear and disappear through these transformations? What kinds of interventions can bring about ways of transforming, perceiving and transmitting the law and its histories/cultures?

The keynote speaker is Professor Philip Girard, University Research Professor and Professor of Law, History & Canadian Studies, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. There will also be a plenary panel in which three scholars will address the theme of the conference, each through a different genre of legal history: Professor Anne Orford, Melbourne Law School; Dr Katherine Biber, School of Law, UTS; Dr Damen Ward, Crown Law Office, Wellington.

The organising committee would welcome interest from historians from any jurisdiction. The call for papers will be open until late June. Inquiries or paper proposals - including a title, brief abstract and brief biography - should be sent to shaunnagh.dorsett@uts.edu.au

Craine on Common Law and Common Folk in Early America

Elaine Forman Craine's Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America (Cornell Press) is the subject of a recent issue of Rorotoko.* The book, which Craine (Fordham University) classifies as "microhistory," is composed of "six stories about early Americans and how brushes with the law affected everyday life."

Here's Craine on the book "in a nutshell":

The chapters range geographically from New England to New Amsterdam and from Maryland to Bermuda. Men and women, free and enslaved, humans and spirits rub elbows throughout the pages as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries collide with the early nineteenth.  Although social issues dominate the story lines, sex and money are integral to the narratives.

Taking a "wide angle" view, Craine writes:

What . . . ties the chapters together and makes a coherent narrative of six disparate stories is the widespread knowledge of and reliance on legal principles that had stood the test of time in the Dutch and Anglo-American worlds. In all of the chapters, the actors display an amazing grasp of law and an astonishing comprehension of their “rights.”

And the takeaway:

Those debtors, tenants, and servants played as much of a part in the creation of a legal culture as did the legislators who wrote the laws. By obeying such laws, common folk legitimized the authority of those above them. By circumventing the system and seeking justice or punishment through private negotiations, common folk created common law.  

 Read on here.

*As regular readers can probably tell, I love the Rorotoko format because it encourages authors to consider their books from different angles and to explain themselves in jargon-free prose. For historians and consumers of history, the format is particularly useful: it allows authors to talk about "pay off" and process in a way that might be inappropriate for the book itself, but is nonetheless fascinating for readers. Viva, Rorotoko!

How the Cold War Matters to the War Powers Debate

This is the second in a series of posts about my new book, War·Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, kicked off when Eric Posner so helpfully generated an on-line discussion.  He dismisses an argument about Cold War statebuilding because "it would be hard to exaggerate legal scholars’ obsession with the rise of executive power, going back at least to the Nixon administration, indeed to the New Deal."

The question of why the Cold War matters to an understanding of the war powers debate might, at first glance, seem obvious.  The most iconic case about presidential war power, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952), is a product of the Cold War era, decided during the Korean War.  We might also think of the Cold War as one “wartime” among many in American history, so that we might compare this wartime to others when analyzing the role of the courts in reining in executive power.  It’s especially when this sort of argument is employed that the Cold War presents some difficulty.  The Cold War is ambiguous, on its own terms.  Was it really a “wartime” that we can compare with others, or was it something else?

The problem of just what the Cold War was was anticipated by George Orwell in 1945.  When reflecting on what the advent of nuclear weapons would bring, Orwell suggested that the world would be divided between two or three “monstrous super-states,” each with nuclear weapons, that would “divid[e] the world between them.” These monster states would not use the bomb against each other. Instead, they would be “unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’” with their neighbors. The nuclear age would therefore bring “an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely ‘a peace that is no peace.’” The idea that the Cold War was neither wartime nor peacetime ultimately competed with a discourse of the end of peace itself – the idea that wartime had become a permanent feature of the world.

The nature of the Cold War was troublesome at its ending as well as its onset.  When an American soldier thought of as “the last Cold War casualty” was laid to rest on March 30, 1985 in Arlington National Cemetery, a controversy erupted about how he should be remembered.  Arthur Nicholson’s headstone reads: “Killed in East Germany, U.S. Military Liaison Mission.” The Veterans of Foreign Wars objected. “No mention is made of who killed him or why he was shot,” argued an editorial in the VFW Magazine. “This is reflective of how many Americans who preceded Nicholson in death during the Cold War are remembered.”  American veterans have lobbied for the creation of a Cold War medal, so that the Cold War would be memorialized as a wartime, but the bill has not been enacted.

Arthur Nicholson’s body came to rest in a shifting terrain. Even as he bled to death in a field in East Germany, the historical category of his military service—the Cold War—was beginning to collapse. The nature of this death and its consequences (was it a murder, as Vice President George Bush claimed?  or was he a soldier killed in battle?)  depended on whether it fit into a period that we call wartime.  He was a liminal figure in an ambiguous era, and his death seemed to trigger a need to stabilize the categories.

The ambiguities of the Cold War era, so much a part of its experience, get lost when it is simply assumed to be a “wartime” in a way that allows for a comparison with other American wartimes.  The argument that wartime affects law and politics is an argument that a geopolitical event affects law and politics.  To better understand the nature of the geopolitical event, we might then turn to the scholarship about geopolitics, for example scholarship in the history of U.S. international relations.  But when we do, any easy analogy begins to fall apart, for we find a disconnect between the diplomatic history literature and legal scholarship about nature of the Cold War and its impact.

There are at least two sorts of difficulties presented by the disconnect between diplomatic history accounts of the Cold War and the way the Cold War tends to work as a category for legal scholars. 
The rest is below the fold.

Slate’s Series on Recovered Report Cards

Late last year, Paul Lukas from Slate released a series of articles chronicling his discovery of old report cards from a girl’strade school in New York City and the subsequent search to return the cards tothe students’ families.  Lukas discovered the old report cards in 1996 sitting in a box of soon-to-be discarded materials at Stuyvesant High School.  Many of the report cards dated back to the early 1900’s so Lukas kept the report cards sensing that they had significant historical value.  More like detailed school records, the cards contained information including the girls’ subsequent employment history, correspondence from school personnel, and notes about the girls from teachers, social workers, and doctors.  Many of the girls were from immigrant families, but the cards revealed that there were also black students, one Hispanic, and one Native American student, each marked with a black dot, which Lukas believes to be a warning system to protect the students from job discrimination.  In the series, Lukas threads the stories of several girls together to give a glimpse of the nature of the garment industry in which most of the girls found themselves: “difficult, usually short-term, and almost always low-paying.”  My own research on legal aid also reveals that smaller manufacturers and jobbers also failed to pay women’s wages entirely.  That the girls’ employment stories were so meticulously documented by the school’s placement office makes Lukas’ find that much more important.  Lukas’ intuition about keeping the cards for their historical value was spot-on as what emerges from his discovery is a rich source of immigrant, education, and working class history.  A number of these documents are now available to view on-line.

Ziff on the Legal History of the Great Onyx Cave

Bruce Ziff, Alberta Law, has posted The Great Onyx Cave Cases -- a Micro-History.  Here is the abstract::

Credit

Controversies surrounding property rights to the Great Onyx Cave in Kentucky have given rise to two legendary decisions with enduring legal importance. The first of these, Edwards v. Sims (1929), is a leading authority on the extent of ownership rights below the surface of land. The second, Edwards v. Lee's Administrator (1936), concerns the appropriate measure of damages for trespass. Stripped to essentials, the facts that led to these two important rulings are quite straightforward: E discovered a cave beneath his surface, which he developed into a thriving tourist attraction. However, it turns out that approximately one-third of the cave passes below, well below, the surface of land owned by L, who had no ready means of access to the cave. Should title to the cave as a whole belong to the party who owns the mouth and who has taken possession? If not, how might one assess damages for trespass where E has benefited financially by the acts of trespass, but L has no practical use for his portion of the cave.

Marvel Mills Logan

Of course, life is rarely as simple as that suggested by these sparse facts, and if one delves into the background of these famous cases -- a story that has been neglected over the years -- additional insights emerge. As it turns out, this dispute is one episode in a tempestuous time, the so-called 'cave wars' period, in which confrontations and lawsuits over cave rights and tourism in the region were commonplace. Moreover, the fight over Great Onyx Cave arose amid a campaign to acquire the caves in the region for a national park. As the clouds of the Depression formed, the park project must have held out hope for the local landowners. In addition, one member of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, Marvel Mills Logan, played a significant and somewhat unconventional role in the Great Onyx Cave litigation and the events surrounding it. His place in the story is examined in detail.

Hat tip: PropertyProp Blog

Wilkes on Habeas Corpus in Georgia, 1733-1865

Donald E., Jr. Wilkes, University of Georgia Law School, has posted From Oglethorpe to the Overthrow of the Confederacy: Habeas Corpus in Georgia, 1733-1865, which appears in the Georgia Law Review 45 (2011): 1015-1072.  Here is the abstract:

This Article will provide, for the first time, a comprehensive account of the writ of habeas corpus in Georgia not primarily focused on use of the writ as a postconviction remedy. The Article covers the 132-year period stretching from 1733, when the Georgia colony was established, to 1865, when the Confederate States of America was finally defeated and the American Civil War came to a close.

Likhovski on Writing Cultural Histories of Tax Law

Assaf Likhovski, Tel Aviv University School of Law, has posted Chasing Ghosts: On Writing Cultural Histories of Tax Law, which is forthcoming in the UC Irvine Law Review.  Here is the abstract:    

This article discusses the use of arguments about "culture" in two debates about the imposition, application and abolition of income tax law: A debate about the transplantation of British income taxation to British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, and a debate about tax privacy in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain. In both cases, "culture," or some specific aspect of it (notions of privacy) appeared in arguments made by opponents of the tax. However, it is difficult to decide whether the use of cultural arguments in these debates simply reflected some "reality" that existed prior to these debates, whether "culture" was actively constituted in these debates to further the specific interests of the participants, or whether the cultural arguments that appeared in the debates combined reflection and constitution in some determinable way. Using legal debates to learn something about culture, the article concludes, is sometimes problematic. The article therefore suggests an additional approach to the study of law and culture, one which focuses on the rhetorical level, seeking to map the ways in which arguments about "culture" (and related terms referring to the traditional and particular), appeared in tax law debates.

Postema on the History of Analytic Jurisprudence

Gerald J. Postema, University of North Carolina - Philosophy and Law, has posted Analytic Jurisprudence Established, a chapter in LEGAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE COMMON LAW WORLD, G. J. Postema & Enrico Pattaro, eds., Springer, 2011. Hat tip.  Here's the abstract:

“Analytic Jurisprudence Established” is Chapter 1 of Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Common Law World (Springer, 2011). The book tells a critical history of Anglophone general jurisprudence and legal philosophy in the twentieth century as a tale of two Boston lectures, separated by sixty years, and their respective legacies: Holmes’s “Path of Law” (1897) and Hart’s Holmes Lecture “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” (1958). This opening chapter sketches the developments of British jurisprudence from Austinians in the late nineteenth century through Salmond to Glanville Williams in the mid-twentieth century. In this remarkable story, most of the familiar doctrines elegantly articulated and defended in Hart’s Concept of Law are anticipated, including his pivotal doctrine of the rule of recognition. Also in this period we find roots of the distinctive methodological commitments of analytic jurisprudence evident throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, along with searching critiques of them. It is a story of surprisingly rich ideas in embryo that matured only with debates over Hart’s seminal work in the last third of the century. Bibliographical references are available upon request of the author.

Conference: Representing the Vulnerable

Readers interested in the history of poverty law and lawyering may wish to take note of this upcoming conference at the University of California Hastings College of Law:

Representing the Vulnerable and Remembering Ralph Abascal: Lessons from the 1970s

Start:  3/16/2012 from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM
Location:  200 McAllister, Alumni Reception Center

This conference examines the role, responsiveness, and effectiveness of lawyers in representing socially vulnerable groups on policy matters. The first session will focus on advocacy undertaken by government-funded legal services lawyers in California in the early 1970s to counter then Governor Ronald Reagan’s welfare reform proposals. This multi-faceted campaign is the subject of a forthcoming book by UC Hastings Professor Mark Neal Aaronson on representing the poor. Subsequent conference sessions will discuss social justice lawyering today and what lessons can be learned from the 1970s. The closing session will be a remembrance of the life and times of Ralph Santiago Abascal, who was the key legal architect of the welfare advocacy campaign discussed during the first session. Abascal was a UC Hastings graduate (1968) and later a member of its Board of Directors (1981 - 1993).

The event is free, but RSVP is encouraged, even if you are local.

The roster of participants is impressive. It includes Martha Davis (Northeastern University), Reuel Schiller (UC Hastings), Florence Roisman (Indiana University), and Scott Cummings (UCLA).


Hat tip: Poverty Law Blog

Fellowship Opportunities

The American Council for Learned Societies, the Smithsonian, and the Gilder Lehrman Center all announce 2012 fellowship competitions.  Find descriptions and links for more information below.


The American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) invites applications for its second competition of the ACLS Public Fellows Program. The program will place thirteen recent Ph.D.s from the humanities and humanistic social sciences in two-year staff positions at partnering organizations in government and the nonprofit sector. Fellows will participate in the substantive work of these organizations and receive professional mentoring. Deadline for applications is March 21, 2012. More information is available at: http://www.acls.org/programs/publicfellows/.


Situated at the center of the world’s largest museum complex, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) are a vital part of the Institution’s research, exhibition, and education enterprise. March 15, 2012 is the deadline for many SIL fellowships, resident scholar programs, and fellowships. More information is available at:http://www.sil.si.edu/Galaxy.cfm?id=3.3.


Applications are now open for the residential fellowship with The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Applications are encouraged from scholars and public intellectuals to study the fundamental origins and circumstances surrounding debt bondage, forced labor, human trafficking, and other forms of modern day slavery. Deadline is March 1, 2012 More information is available at:http://www.yale.edu/glc/info/trafficking.htm.

Linder on State-Level Cigarette Regulation the 1880s

Library of Congress

Marc Linder, University of Iowa College of Law, has published as a free ebook a massively researched history of cigarette regulation in Iowa (with extensive forays into other states) from the 1880s to the very recent past.  The larger work is entitled "Inherently Bad, and Bad Only": A History of State-Level Regulation of Cigarettes and Smoking in the United States Since the 1880s.  Now available is volume 1, An In-Depth National Study Embedding Ultra-Thick Description of a Representative State (Iowa).

The book shows that in two thirds of the states Americans did in fact "clamor for, oppose, debate, enact, litigate, live (and die) under, comply with, enforce, violate, repeal, celebrate, and mourn the disappearance of" outright smoking bans from 1889 and 1927.  The principal parts of the book are as follows:

1.  THE FIRST WAVE OF ADULT PROHIBITORY LEGISLATION: STATE MEASURES TO BAN CIGARETTE SALES AND PUBLIC CIGARETTE SMOKING: 1889-1899

2.  THE RISE AND FALL OF THE STATEWIDE PROHIBITION OF SELLING CIGARETTES IN IOWA: 1880s-1921

3.  THE CONTEXT OF STATE ANTI-CIGARETTE AND ANTI-SMOKING LEGISLATIVE TRENDS IN THE 1910s AND 1920s BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER REPEAL IN IOWA

4.  CIGARETTE SALES LICENSURE AND TAXATION IN IOWA DURING THE PERIOD OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE SMOKING: 1921 TO THE 1960s

5.  THE INCIPIENT NATIONAL MOVEMENT TO AVOID SECONDHAND SMOKE EXPOSURE IN THE 1970s

6.  THE STRUGGLE IN IOWA FOR ANTI-PUBLIC SMOKING BANS: 1970s TO 2008

Quite apart from the importance of its subject, "Inherently Bad and Bad Only" is significant as an example of the dissemination of research that would be very expensive to publish in print.

What Eric Posner Misses About War Time

Eric Posner has spent much of the last decade criticizing the liberal legal response to post-9/11 government policies. In his review of my new book, he sticks to the script. But this leads him to miss a critical point: the book does not reinforce post-9/11 liberal thought but instead criticizes it.

What’s at stake here is the way the very concept of “wartime” works in contemporary American law and politics. Just in the past week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the United States hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan in 2013. Meanwhile, at Guantanamo and elsewhere, the United States holds enemy combatants “for the duration of hostilities.” The “endings” of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq appear to have no consequences for the ending of detention. This illustrates a difficulty: there is a disconnect between the wars the United States is ending (Iraq and Afghanistan), and the war that has justified detention (the war on terror). President Obama generally has not employed the Bush Administration’s idea of a “war on terror,” but the war on terror continues to serve as the basis for detention.

This particular disconnect helps to uncover a more enduring problem of the misfit between the way war is conceptualized and the military conflicts the nation engages in. In War Time, I argue that this is not a new phenomenon. It has been of great importance at least since the Cold War. Uncovering the disconnect could enable more transparent decision-making – whether it be liberal-leaning or conservative.

Posner gets distracted by the usual right/left argument about war and civil liberties, and he reads the book as taking a position on the left side of that debate. I will address why this is a misreading in a later post (my argument is more about the scholarship on civil liberties, identifying a conceptual problem on both the left and the right), but right now let me take up what the book is actually doing.

A reader looking for conventional liberal complaints about post-9/11 government policy might be puzzled, as Posner is, about the reason the book spends so much time talking about time itself. The book is not a traditional historical narrative, but a work of critical historiography and intellectual history. It is short because it focuses on just one thing: the way ideas about time are part of the way we think about war, as captured in the very term “wartime.”

That temporal thinking is built into the way war is conceptualized goes back to at least Hobbes: “War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war.” “Wartime” itself, on its own terms, is a temporal concept. The purpose of my first chapter is simply to point this out. I turn to Durkheim and others to explain that we tend to think of time as a natural phenomenon, yet ideas about time are a cultural feature. Our wartime thinking is therefore not determined by the nature of time itself, or the nature of war. Like other kinds of time, it has its origins in social life.

The rest is below the fold.

What Made the Difference? This Week in the Book Pages

The New Republic gives us lots of food for thought this week. The headline review, by Heather Mac Donald (Manhattan Institute), covers The City That Become Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Oxford University Press), by UC Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring. Here's why the book is making waves:

The New York experience demands a revision in our understanding not only of crime suppression but of urban America itself, Zimring argues in his new book, the most important criminology work in recent memory. We now know, he writes, that “life-threatening crime is not an incurable urban disease in the U.S,” but rather that it can be greatly reduced without fundamental alterations in social and economic structure. And what made the difference in New York? Here, Zimring is at his most iconoclastic. It was policing, he claims. Nothing else in New York over the last two decades, besides its style of policing, can explain that large part of its crime drop that exceeded the national average. 

Read on here.

TNR has two more reviews for non-fiction fans: Those interested in women's history or the biography genre will want to check out Susie Linfield's review of Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power (Ballantine), by Susan Hertog. It is "a conceptually ambitious book about genuinely interesting women."

Readers interested in empire, colonialism, and governance should take note of Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacy in the Modern World (Public Affairs), by politician and scholar Kwasi Kwarteng (reviewed here). The book moves conversations about empire from the general to the specific by investigating governance practices in Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria, and Hong Kong. An earlier review, by Linda Colley, is here.

In the Wall Street Journal, you'll find a review of City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (Random House), by Roger Crowley. Crowley "chronicles the peak of Venice's past glory with Wordsworthian sympathy, supplemented by impressive learning and infectious enthusiasm."

Also in the WSJ book pages, John Matteson (author of The Lives of Margaret Fuller) picks five best books on "boundary-pushing women."

The latest issue of the London Review of Books is rich. Perry Anderson's review of three recent books on modern China is open access (here), as is Jenny Diski's review of Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (University of Chicago Press), by Alison Winter (here). Here's an excerpt:

We have asked shamans, clairvoyants, hypnotists, historians, scientists, surgeons, law-makers, artists and writers, social psychologists and psychoanalysts to investigate the truth, the facts, the interpretations, so to reassure us about the mechanism and reliability of remembering, but, as Alison Winter’s deft study of 20th-century memory controversies concludes, we haven’t come close to a definitive answer.

Subscribers may read Richard J. Evans's review (here) of German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge University Press), by Sebastian Conrad.

This week in the New York Times, Francis Fukuyama reviews Thinking the Twentieth Century (Penguin Press), by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder. Here's a taste:

As a historian of 20th-century Europe, Judt both chronicled and himself represented the huge ideological transformations that occurred between the beginning and end of that century. This life has now been documented in the quasi-­autobiographical “Thinking the Twentieth Century.” Conceived after Judt’s illness had already been diagnosed, the book consists of transcriptions of his conversations with Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian who is the distinguished author of a number of well-regarded books on Eastern and Central Europe. Snyder, highly erudite and opinionated himself, is not your typical journalistic interviewer; the book is more a dialogue than an autobiography.

The rest of the review covers "Judt’s journey from Marxism to 'East European liberal,'" his understanding of the duties of a public intellectual, and his controversial critique of Israel.

Also reviewed: Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image (Free Press), by Toby Lester (here). The book tells the story behind the famous "Vitruvian Man" drawing.

Sometime in middle school, I attempted my first real historical research paper. It was on Queen Lili'uokalani and the annexation of Hawaii. Well, I'm prepping a new note card because I learned today that a new book is out. The Los Angeles Times reviews Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure (Atlantic Monthly Press), by journalist Julia Flynn Siler (here).

DC Area Legal History Roundtable

The line-up for the Spring 2012 meeting of the D.C. Area Legal History Roundtable has been set.  It will convene on Friday, April 13, 2012 at the Catholic University of America–more particularly, in Room 220 of the Columbus School of Law, from Noon to 5:00 PM.  For more information please contact Professor Ken Pennington (pennington at cua.edu)

12:00-12:30 Lunch 

12:30-1:30: Brad Snyder, University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School
“Frankfurter as Popular Constitutionalist”
Comment: Cara Drinan, Catholic University

1:30-2:30: Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation
“Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech”
Comment:   TBA

2:30-3:00: Coffee Break

3:00-4:00: Danaya C. Wright, University of Florida College of Law
“Is the Trope of Separate Spheres Useful in Post-Modern Family Law History?  A Question, an Excursus, and a Hypothetical”
Comment: TBA

4:00-5:00: Caroline Sherman, Catholic University,  History
“Jacques Godefroy's Florilegium and its Afterlife”
Comment: Ryan Max Rowberry , Georgia State University

On the LHB Facebook Page: The History of American Legal Thought

We’re spotlighting the history of American legal thought with links to posts on the topic over the next week on the Facebook page, including suggestions for sources such as the papers of Honorable John Feikens, American Law and Lawyers,  and Wesleyan’s Collection on Legal Change.  We’ll also have links to recent scholarship and ideas on American legal thought including Dan Ernst’s great series of posts on Roscoe Pound and the administrative state.

And we’ll have more all week on the Facebook page. 

Historical Archives and Cultural Centers Suspending Operations

Although it has long been reported that archives and cultural centers across the U.S. are cutting staff and reducing or even eliminating their hours of operation due to the economic realities of the recession, I have recently experienced the affects directly. I was attempting to research the provision of legal aid during the turn-of-the century at New Jersey’s Whittier settlement house and learned that the collection manager of the New Jersey Historical Society is on permanent furlough. Even more disturbing, the Chicago Jewish Archives at the Spertus Institute closed its archive three years ago. As far as I know, it is the only archive that possesses significant documents relating to Minnie Low, often called the Jewish Jane Addams. For many years, Low supervised Chicago’s Bureau of Personal Service which provided both social work and legal aid to poor Chicago Jews. Not being able to access these documents is a tremendous setback in writing about the history of legal aid.  I have been informed that the Spertus Institute plans to reopen its Jewish archives, but there is no definite timeline.   For the time being, rich archival material will be left unseen and researchers will be forced to look elsewhere or make special arrangements to see the collections.  Aside from archives departments, important centers of social reform are also closing its doors.  The storied Jane Addams Hull House Association in Chicago, which relies heavily on state funding, recently closed down because of economic hardships. That Chicago will no longer have this extraordinary institution is shocking.  Aside from its important history, Hull House provided services that included programs for abused and neglected children who were wards of the Chicago courts. 

Urban History Association Awards

The Urban History Association announces its 2012 competition for best scholarship in urban history.  The association will make awards for best book, best article, and best dissertation.  All entries must have a publication or completion date of 2011.The entry deadline for each award is April 16, 2012. More information about the competition is available here.

Public History, Judicial Independence and the Michigan Bar

[The State Bar of Michigan, it seems, has realized the value of legal history in contemporary debates over judicial independence.]

The State Bar of Michigan is starting a new Law Day tradition in 2012 by launching a statewide contest to highlight the theme “Michigan: No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom,” utilizing SBM's Michigan Legal Milestones.

The Michigan Legal Milestones is a 25-year-old State Bar program that commemorates important jurists and court cases that have contributed to our rich legal history. Bronze plaques detailing the background and importance of each case, event, or personality have been placed throughout the state. There are 36 milestones to date.

To participate, contestants should familiarize themselves with the milestones and tie those that are appropriate into the 2012 Law Day theme in a creative project. Examples of acceptable projects include dramatic or musical plays, debates, video game designs, essays, podcasts, commentaries, re-enactments, mock trials, short documentaries, and more.

More (from the Iona Sentinal-Standard)

Living History: Julian Bond and Attorney Michael Cody Discuss "The Final Days" of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Attorney Michael Cody and Julian Bond, SNCC co-founder, former NAACP chairman, and UVA history professor, discussed their relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a University of Virginia forum, "The Final Days of Martin Luther King Jr.," this week.  Cody represented King during the Memphis sanitation workers' strike. Cody and his firm worked to reverse a federal injunction against a civil rights march. See Cody discuss meeting with his client at the Lorraine Hotel on the day before the civil rights martyr's death, as well as Bond's discussion of his "up-and-down" relationship with King, here.

LGBT Legal History at Rutgers-Camden Law

Rutgers-Camden Law (may it always be known as such!) has posted an interesting press release on Professor N.E.H. Hull's new course, “Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexual, and Transgender Individuals in American Law and History.”  "It follows the many threads of the legal struggles of the LGBT community from the 17th century through present day."  More.

Sawers on Race and the Closed Range after Emancipation

Brian Sawers, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, has posted The Right to Exclude after Emancipation: A Quantitative Study.  Here is the abstract:

During the nineteenth century, the landowner's right to exclude expanded while the public's rights contracted. Landowners gained the right to exclude roaming livestock and wandering hunters with the closing of the open range. In theory, expanding the autonomy of private owners allows them to make more efficient use of their land. Empirical validation, however, is limited since only a handful of studies have examined the closing of the range. In the South, the first counties to close with those with the largest black populations. If the range remained open, blacks could graze their animals, hunt, fish, and forage on the open range; if the range were closed, blacks would have no alternative to sharecropping. This Article examines the closing of the range and restrictions on hunting in the postwar South using previously unexamined data. Preliminary results suggest that labor control, not economic efficiency, motivated the closing of the range.

Hat tip.

Paul Murphy Prize in the History of Civil Liberties

Call for Nominations: Paul Murphy Prize

The American Society for Legal History announces the Paul Murphy Prize to support the completion of a book on the history of civil liberties that addresses any topic or any time in American history. The award will be given out two times only, in 2012 and 2013. Recipients will receive $5000 to support their work. Nominees at all levels of seniority will be considered, however the award is not for the completion of a dissertation.

The award honors Paul L. Murphy (1923-1997), who spent much of his career at the University of Minnesota where he rose to the rank of Regent’s Professor of History and American Studies. At the time of his death, he was in the second year of his term as president of the ASLH. During his tenure at Minnesota he became one of the nation’s leading constitutional historians and a mentor to generations of undergraduate and graduate students. Among his most important books were: The Meaning of Freedom of Speech: First Amendment Freedoms from Wilson to FDR (1972); World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (1979); Historic Background of the Bill of Rights, Vol. 1 (1990); and The Shaping of the First Amendment: 1791 to the Present (1991). In addition, civil liberties played a fundamental role in the argument he developed in what was likely his most influential book, The Constitution in Crisis Times 1918-1969 (The New American Nation Series, 1972). Murphy’s commitment to civil liberties and his passion for the subject was evident in his deeds as well as his words. He was an ardent and committed member of the American Civil Liberties Union throughout his life. For additional information on Murphy please see the tribute to him in the Law and History Review, 16 (Spring 1998), ix-xi.

To be considered for this award, authors or nominators should send a book proposal with chapter descriptions, a discussion of the book’s contributions, and a time-line for completion; a sample chapter; and a c.v. to committee chair Mary L. Dudziak (email here). Submissions via e-mail are preferred, and attachments can be in Word or PDF. Please put “Murphy Prize” in the subject line. If you must submit by hardcopy, please send four copies of these materials to arrive by the deadline to this address: Professor Mary L. Dudziak, USC Gould School of Law, 699 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90089. The deadline for receipt of proposals for this year’s award is June 30, 2012.

Members of the Murphy Prize Committee are:
Mary L. Dudziak, Chair, University of Southern California
Robert Kaczorowski, Fordham University
Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania
David M. Rabban, University of Texas