Around the State Historical Journals

Much legal history is out in recent issues of the journals of state historical societies.  Perhaps the most notable is the March 2015 issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, guest edited by former Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Randall Shepard:

Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, examines how Indiana’s statehood and its 1816 constitution functioned as part of the new American republic’s westward expansion of empire. Thomas D. Hamm, Professor of History and archivist at Earlham College, considers how courts in Indiana adjudicated the issue of church and state from 1816 until the second Indiana constitution of 1851. Paul Finkelman, Senior Fellow at the Penn Program for Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how the 1816 constitution and its ban on slavery and indentured servitude was interpreted in important early state court cases. Finally, George T. Patton Jr., partner at Bose McKinney & Evans LLP, and Julianne Sicklesteel, a law student at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University Bloomington, look at the 1851 constitution and how the modern Indiana State Supreme Court has interpreted that document.

Race and civil rights figure in Lou Falkner Williams, "Federal Enforcement of African American Voting Rights in the Post-Redemption South: Louisiana and the Election of 1878," Louisiana History 55 (2014), 313-43; Beth Kressel Itkin, "Creating `What Might Have Been a Fuss': The Many Faces of Equal Public Rights in Reconstruction-era Louisiana," Louisiana History 56 (2015), 42-74; and Noel K. Wolfe, "Shaping a Civil Rights Vanguard: The Earliest Influences on Constance Baker Motley," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 38 (Aug. 2014), 37-82.  Property gets its due in Stephanie M. Lang, "`Titles Must be Perfect': The Broad Form Deed, Politics, and Landownership in Eastern Kentucky at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 113 (2015), 27-57.