Wednesday, May 25, 2011

New and Forthcoming from the D.C. Circuit Historical Society

For those of you who haven’t looked in on the website of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit lately, here’s an update. As before the website is the portal to more than fifty oral histories of Washington lawyers and judges (including Robert Bork, Lloyd Cutler, Sam Dash, Warner Gardner, Erwin Griswold, and Joseph Rauh), brief biographies and a guide to the archived papers of the judges of the capital's federal courts, and links to two articles relating to the Circuit's history published in the National Archives's journal, Prologue: “Sweltering with Treason”: The Civil War Trials of William Matthew Merrick by Jonathan W. White and "You have the body": Habeas Corpus Case Records of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, 1820–1863 by Chris Naylor.  More recently posted are videos of the Society’s programs, including Timeless Elements of a Great Closing Argument: Lessons from the Teapot Dome Trials; FCC Indecency Cases in the D. C. Circuit: An Historical Perspective; The Steel Seizure Case in Historical Perspective; The Pentagon Papers: Did the Courts Get it Right?; The Watergate Cover-Up Trial. Forthcoming is the video of a program I had a hand in, The D.C. Circuit in the McCarthy Era: United States v. Lattimore, held on May 12. Here’s a teaser: descendants of two of the depicted were in the audience!