Saturday, May 7, 2011

Weekend Round-Up

  • The Tennessee Bar Association has announced the winners of its "YouTube Video Contest" for middle and high schoolers. Competitors are to address some aspect of the state's "unique history of law and liberty." The entry of the middle schooler, Anna Whittemore , addresses minimum wage laws in the state's textile mills. The high school winner is Vivian Hughbanks for a video on "the Battle of Athens," which takes up "the citizen fight to restore integrity" after illegal electoral activity in McMinn County in 1946. Wikipedia reports that the proponents of the ownership of fire arms sometimes cite the event as an example of the value of the Second Amendment for citizens subject to tyrannous governments.
  • A post by Michael Perino, St. Johns Law and the author of a biography of Ferdinand Pecora, looks to Felix Frankfurter's lobbying for James Landis's appointment to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 for perspective on the pending appointment of a chief for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  • Among the newsreels from the 1920s and 1930s recently mounted at the Virtual Museum of the SEC Historical Society is this one, in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt defends his economic policies in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in August 1934.
    The Weekend Round-up is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History Bloggers.