Weekend Roundup

• Check out Claude Raymond Branch: Legendary American Attorney, a website prepared by his grandson, Lincoln Stephen Smith, whom we had the pleasure of meeting recently.  Branch was a 1911 graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was a Sears Prize winner and served on the law review when Robert T. Swaine was President.  Apparently he headed enforcement under the United States Food Administration for Rhode Island.  (An aside: why doesn’t someone pursue the legal history of that agency?  In his oral history, Jerome Frank recalled working with the legendary Joseph Cotton, chief of its Meat Division.)  As a Special Assistant to the Attorney General, he participated in the argument of scores of cases before the Supreme Court under Solicitor General Charles Evans Hughes, Jr.  Thereafter Branch was for many years a partner at Choate, Hall & Stewart.  Commander Smith’s website includes an audiorecording of Mr. Branch’s eulogy of his friend Harvard law professor Zechariah Chafee. 

• Lee University’s Department of History, Political Science & Humanities hosted the 7th Annual Constitution Bowl for local and regional high school students.   “It is a great way to celebrate Constitution Day and American history,” said Lee professor Ana Alves.  More.

• EURAXESS, located in the Netherlands, seeks a postdoctoral researcher in legal history.  More.

• ICYMI: Former LHB guest blogger Greg Ablavsky quoted in an NPR story on the acquittal of Ammon Bundy and his associates; Seth Barrett Tillman on President James Buchanan, Chief Justice Roger Taney, Copperheads—and the Quakers; John D. Gordan III  on the outlawry of the bail jumping Dennis defendants, in American Communist History.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.