Yesterday the mail brought another reminder of the value for legal historians of Quid Pro Books, a press created and run by Alan Childress of Tulane Law. First, it publishes out-of-print classics. Although the press publishes in all the electronic formats you'd expect, I'll reveal my biases and confess that it is a real pleasure to hold in my hands a paperback copy of Harry N. Scheiber’s The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties, 1917-1921. How nice as well that our students can download an electronic edition of Karl N. Llewellyn’s Bramble Bush, with an extensive introduction by Stewart Macaulay pointing out the continued relevance of the book after so much change in legal education since its appearance in 1930.
Second, Quid Pro has published festschriften and other conference volumes. My recent mailing inlcuded Law and the Quest for Justice, ed. Marjorie S. Zatz, Doris Marie Provine and James P. Walsh, a volume that honors John P. Frank, whose remarkable career took him from a realist legal education at the Wisconsin Law School of Lloyd Garrison and Willard Hurst, to a clerkship with Hugo Black, to an SJD at Yale and a somewhat peripatetic and prolific period in legal education, to the Phoenix bar, where he litigated Miranda, advocated for reforms of the federal judiciary and lawyered for the Arizona Democratic Party. (See his entry in the YBDAL.) Contributors to the collection include Charles Ogletree, Jack Greenberg, Anthony Lewis, Geoffrey Stone, Judith Resnik, Janet Napolitano, Lani Guinier, Robert Reich, Linda Greenhouse, and Erwin Chemerinsky.Finally, Quid Pro Brooks has published useful histories by working lawyers who might not otherwise find a press. Earlier we noted Andrew Fede’s Roadblocks to Freedom. Yesterday's package included Herbert James Lewis’s Clearing the Thickets: A History of Antebellum Alabama.
