Saturday, November 21, 2015

Weekend Roundup

CJ Roger B. Taney (LC)
  • According to the Frederick (MD) News-Post, Michael Powell, a professor of history at Frederick Community College and an adjunct instructor of history at Hood College, will speak at 7 p.m. this evening to the annual meeting of the Frederick County Landmarks Foundation on A Subtle and Seismic Shift: Taney, the Civil War and Memory.
  • Magna Carta in Singapore.  In the Straits Times and an SSRN post, Simon Chesterman, Dean of the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Law, takes on The Myth of Magna Carta.  How did a “misogynistic, anti-Semitic, failed peace treaty . . . . come to be regarded as the font of English liberty?”  “Lawyers,” Dean Chesterman answers, especially American ones.  Eugene Kheng Boon Tan and Jack Tsen-Ta Lee, Singapore Management University School of Law, followed with the SSRN post Magna Carta Then and Now: A Symbol of Freedom and Equal Rights for All, Today (2015): 16-17.  And, yes, as you probably surmised, "the rule of law doctrine has been the topic of considerable disagreement and debate” in Singapore.
  • Over at the Faculty Lounge, Eric Muller, North Carolina Law, explains to the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, why he should be embarrassed to have invoked the internment of Japanese America as a precedent for excluding Syrian refuges. In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Laurel Reiman Henneman observe that the mayor's statement shows how “fear makes us stupid and careless.”
  • Here's a plea for storing court records in the cloud that invokes a fire that destroyed many Brooklyn court records
  • Eric Rauchway on FDR, Keynes, and American and monetary policy on HNN.
  • Over on his "Jackson List," John Q. Barrett, St. John's Law, has a very informative post on Jim Donovan, the hero of "Bridge of Spies."  Spoiler alert: although Donovan did handle insurance work, he had also been general counsel of the OSS.
  • On November 17, Ariela Gross, USC Law, spoke on Race Citizenship in the Constitution at Cal Poly campus in honor of Constitution Day–which the university could recognize then because it wasn’t yet in session on September 17.
  • The Organization of American Historians has made available some of the lectures from its Distinguished Lecture series, including this one by Martha Jones (University of Michigan).
Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers