Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Law at the AHA

There is so much legal history at the 2010 American Historians Association annual meeting that a search for "law" and "legal" in the on-line program turns up 178 hits. Among the highlights are these sessions:

An Archeology of Agency in the Civil Law Tradition: Early Modern Spain, France, and Colonial Spanish America
with Amalia Kessler, Stanford University, as commentator.

(Dis)Inheriting Slavery: Property, Power, and Belief in the Last Requests of Masters and Slaves with Ariela J. Gross, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, as commentator.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Marry, with panelist Elizabeth L. Hillman, University of California Hastings College of the Law.

Marriage on Trial: Historians and Lawyers in Same-Sex Marriage Cases, with Nancy F. Cott, Harvard University, Joan Heifetz Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley Law School, Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa, and others.

The Law and Its Uses? A View from South America

A World of Hurt: Medieval Marriage Practice and Law in a Century of Crisis

Control, Discipline, and Order in Modern China

And these papers:

At the Border of Law and Politics: The Bakke Case and Affirmative Action, Laura Kalman, University of California, Santa Barbara

A Mississippi Mockingbird: The Legal Lynching of Willie McGee, 1945–51, Patricia Michelle Buzard Boyett, University of Southern Mississippi

Status, Race, and Marriage: French Continental Law versus French Colonial Law, Valérie Gobert-Sega, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

Redefining Chinese: Nationality Law, Borderlands, and State Succession, 1909–90s, Shao Dan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Enemy Combatants: African American Soldiers in Confederate Prisons, Thomas J. Ward Jr., Spring Hill College

Other panels featuring legal historians:

Barack Obama and the American Democratic Tradition, with Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School, and David J. Garrow, University of Cambridge, as commentators.

Gay Marriage and Proposition 8: Reflections with A More Perfect Union, 1975–2007 by Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania,

And my panel: Oceans Apart? Global Influences on Progressive-Era American Politics and Thought. I will comment, along with Paul Kramer, Vanderbilt University.

For more, search the full program.