Making Legal History: A Conference in Honor of William E. Nelson commences today and continues tomorrow at the NYU School of Law. It is a tribute to a wide-ranging and influential American legal historian who, with the help of his NYU colleagues, made the Golieb Fellowship and Legal History Colloquium major sources of support for the field. Many on the program are former Golieb Fellows.Thursday, May 6, 2010
COMMON LAW AND STATUTORY REGULATION
Chair: Liam Murphy, NYU School of Law
Barry Cushman, University of Virginia School of Law, “Ambiguities of Free Labor Revisited: The Convict-Labor Question in Progressive-Era New York”
Nina Dayton, University of Connecticut, “Was the Warning of Strangers Unique to Colonial New England? ”
William Forbath, University of Texas School of Law, “The Law of Nation Making and State Building Looks Different in the Archives”
TRIBUTE I: Colleagues Discuss Bill’s Influence on the Field of Legal History
Chair: John Phillip Reid, NYU School of Law
Morton Horwitz, Harvard Law School
David Konig, Washington University
Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University
Larry D. Kramer, Stanford Law School
Lauren Benton, New York University
Friday, May 7, 2010
NINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S. LEGAL HISTORY
Chair: Troy McKenzie, NYU Class of 2000
Sally Gordon, University of Pennsylvania Law School, “The Landscape of Belief: Disestablishment and Property”
Daniel Hamilton, University of Illinois College of Law, “The Congressional Record and the Interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment”
Thomas Mackey, University of Louisville, “‘It cant be cald stealin’: Legal Culture Among Civil War Soldiers”
WRITING THE LEGAL HISTORY OF RACE
Chair: Deborah Malamud NYU School of Law
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, University of Virginia School of Law, “Discovering a Pragmatic Tradition of Civil Rights Lawyering”
Mark Weiner, Rutgers School of Law, “Style and Interpretation in Legal History”
John Wertheimer, Davidson College, “The Legalist’s Quantification: Counting as a Tool of Legal History”
TRIBUTE II: Golieb Fellow Alumni Celebrate Bill’s Influence
Chair: Daniel Hulsebosch NYU School of Law
Christopher Beauchamp, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Jed Shugerman, Harvard Law School
Steven Wilf, University of Connecticut School of Law
Panel VI COURTS AND JUDGES
Chair: Barry Friedman, NYU School of Law
Susanna Blumenthal, University of Minnesota Law School, “Moral Sense and Insensibility: The Plea of Moral Insanity in the Nineteenth-Century American Courtroom”
Harvey Rishikof, National War College, “In Pursuit of Heroes – The Culture of Judicial Biography: The Search for Clues of Integrity in the Legal Reasoning Process”
Reuel Schiller, Hastings College of Law, “An Unexpected Antagonist: Courts, Deregulation, and Conservative Judicial Ideology, 1980-1992”
John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School, “The Political Economy of Pain and Suffering: A Chapter in Honor of William E. Nelson”
Update: NYU's press release on the conference is here.
