Legal History at the Foreign Relations History Conference

Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

For legal historians interested in global affairs, I highly recommend attending meetings of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.  SHAFR's 2011 Annual Meeting is later this week in Alexandria, VA.  The theme is Waging War, Making Peace, Crossing Borders.

It used to be that people thought of diplomatic historians as stodgy and old-fashioned.  But they said the same things about legal historians!  And the more comparative and transnational legal history becomes, the more important it is to pay attention to global politics.  So we need foreign affairs history now more than ever.

There is a lot of law on the panels this year, consistent with a turn to law among historians in many fields, perhaps as a consequence of renewed interest in the state.  Highlights of interest to legal historians include these panels:

Roundtable: Bringing the Law Back In: New Approaches to the History of the U.S. in the World
Chair: Daniel Margolies, Virginia Wesleyan College
Benjamin Coates, Columbia University
Allison Brownell Tirres, DePaul University College of Law
Robert McGreevey, The College of New Jersey

Stopped at the Gate: Crime, Diplomacy, and Immigration
Chair: Beatrice McKenzie, Beloit College
Diplomacy behind Deportations: Rights of Residency and Responsibly under the Criminal Provisions of U.S. Deportation Policy
Torrie Hester, Roanoke College
Italians on the Move: American Immigration Restriction and Illegal Immigration from Italy
Maddalena Marinari, American University
Extraditing Immigrants, Deporting Criminals: International Crime Control in an Era of Anarchy and Revolution
Katherine Unterman, Texas A&M University
Comment: Mark Choate, Brigham Young University

Rethinking the Impact of Refugees on Domestic and Foreign Policy
Chair: Carl Bon Tempo, State University of New York at Albany
Synchronizing Domestic and Foreign Policy Concerns: The Case of the 1980 Refugee Act
David W. Haines, George Mason University
The Distinction of Dragon-Boats: The Khmer Krom and the United States
Trude Jacobsen, Northern Illinois University
Encouraging Defection while Discouraging Admissions: Refugees from Hong Kong and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1950-1965
Philip E. Wolgin, University of California, Berkeley
Comment: Carl Bon Tempo

Conflicting Desires: American Commitment to AID and Human Rights during the Cold War, 1945-1985
Chair:
Nexus: National Interest, Human Rights, Foreign Aid and U.S. Response to the “Genocide” in East Pakistan, 1971
Richard Pilkington, University of Toronto
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine and Human Rights: Neoconservative Foreign Policy in the Reagan Administration
Bianca Rowlett, University of Arkansas
Comment: William Michael Schmidli, Bucknell University

Crossing Borders and Intersecting Empires
Chair: Daniel Margolies, Virginia Wesleyan College
The Struggle for the Northern Border: British Occupation and Insurgency in the Old Northwest 1783-1796
John C. Kotruch, University of New Hampshire
The Fenian Invasions: Territorial Sovereignty and Imperial Actors
Skye H. Lynch, College of William and Mary
The Friendly Address Movement and the Oregon Territory Boundary Dispute: Transatlantic Citizen‐Diplomacy, Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in the 1840s
Wendy E. Chmielewski, Swarthmore College Peace Collection
Comment: Daniel Margolies

And the following papers:

I Took Panama, Now You Justify it: Two Faces of Public Opinion in Early Twentieth Century International Law
Benjamin Coates, Columbia University

"Is the Emperor Fully Clothed?": The Iranian Student Movement and Transnational Human Rights Organizing
Matthew Shannon, Temple University

Army Operations against Non-state Actors: Peacekeeping, Law Enforcement, and the Extension of U.S. Sovereignty along the Southern Maritime Frontier, 1810-1830
Samuel Watson, United States Military Academy

Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, & Afghanistan: A Historical Analysis of “Freedom” in U.S. Foreign Policy
Andrew Hammond, University of Warwick

Condemning “Gender Apartheid”: The Taliban, Feminist Activism, and the Clinton Administration
Kelly Shannon, LaSalle University

Between Pacifism and Imperialism: The Frustration of the International Birth Control Movement
Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Brown University

And of possible interests, the first plenary, with yours truly, where I'll talk about law post-9/11:

PLENARY SESSION: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM, Thursday, June 23
9/11, the War on Terror, and U.S. International History
Andrew Bacevich, Boston University
Mary Dudziak, University of Southern California
Bassan Haddad, George Mason University
Melani McAlister, George Washington University
Marilyn Young, New York University

For more, the full program is here.