Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's Made by History section: Leif Fredrickson on the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, aka OIRA, aka "the federal agency that few Americans have heard of and which we all need to know." Also Sarah Igo (Vanderbilt) on the legal history behind "credit reporting companies' immense power and lack of transparency" and Christy Ford Chapin (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) on what policymakers can learn from the history of Medicare.

• Women and the Supreme Court, a panel on the four women who have served on the US Supreme Court and the 726 (and counting) women who have argued before it, will take place on Thursday, October 5, 2017, at 7:00 pm, in the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives in Washington, DC.  Among the speakers is Marlene Trestman, author of Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin.  H/t: ConSource (a co-sponsor of the event). 

• On Thursday, October 5, 2017, from 5:30-7:30 pm, the University of San Francisco’s Thacher Gallery will host a panel discussion with members of the “Korematsu legal team” on the relevance of Executive Order 9066 for current immigration issues.  The event is in conjunction with the Gallery’s exhibit, Something from Nothing: Art and Handcrafted Objects from America’s Concentration Camps.  H/t: California Humanities.

• Next week's events sponsored or, as we assume in this case, co-sponsored by the Law and Public Affairs program at Princeton University include, on Wednesday, October 4, a session of the Workshop in Constitutional Development on "Dominus before Domination: Harriet Jacobs on Property and Slavery," by Desmond Jagmohan, Princeton University, and "Hidden in Plain Sight: The Alternative Tradition of Conservative Constitutional Theory, 1954-1980," by Ken I. Kersh, Boston College. (We don't believe the event is open to the public, but it is still of interest.)

• Best. Cover. Ever.  Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian, by Richard Aldous. [IMHO.  DRE]

•  ICYMI: Penn Law's press release on the lateral hiring of Herbert Hovenkamp.

• Big news recently in India with the Supreme Court's ruling that the triple talaq (in Muslim personal law) is unconstitutional. Here is the full 395-page decision. Zubair Abbasi offers a summary and reflections on Shariasource. 

• Also on the history of the personal law system in India: LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi's op-ed in the Times of India.

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

CFP: Omohundro Institute conference - deadline extended to Oct. 4

We have the following message from the Omohundro Institute:

There is still time to send your proposal in for the 2018 annual Omohundro Institute conference! The deadline has been extended until midnight on Wednesday, October 4, 2017. 

Set at the OI’s home base in Williamsburg, Virginia, June 14-17, 2018, the conference is also a celebration of the Institute’s 75th anniversary. 

The program committee welcomes panel, paper, roundtable, workshop, and poster session proposals and encourages diversity in all ways. All submissions can be made via the OI’s website at http://oieahc.wm.edu/conferences/24thannual/cfp.html. If you have any problems with your submission then please do not hesitate to contact Martha Howard, Director of Conferences and Communications at the OI, directly at Martha.Howard@wm.edu or 757-221-1115.

Likhovski on the Intellectual History of Law

Assaf Likhovski, Tel Aviv University School of Law, has posted Recent Trends in the Study of the Intellectual History of Law and Jewish Law Scholarship, which is forthcoming in the English section of Diné Yisrael:

This article identifies eight recent, and relatively recent, trends in the study of the intellectual history of law. It asks whether these trends also appear in works dealing with the history of Jewish law. By comparing developments in the study of the intellectual history of law and the study of Jewish law, this article points to some of the achievements and lacunae in contemporary Jewish law scholarship, and highlights some of the unique features that distinguish the study of the history of Jewish law from the study of the history of modern secular legal systems

Beauchamp on Repealing Patents

Christopher Beauchamp, Brooklyn Law School, has posted Repealing Patents:

The first known patent case in the United States courts did not enforce a patent. Instead, it sought to repeal one. The practice of cancelling granted patent rights has appeared in various forms over the past two and a quarter centuries, from the earliest U.S. patent law in 1790 to the new regime of inter partes review (“IPR”) and post grant review. With the Supreme Court’s grant of cert in Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group and its pending review of the constitutionality of IPR, this history has taken on a new significance.

This essay uses new archival sources to uncover the history of patent cancellation during the first half-century of American patent law. These sources suggest that the early statutory provisions for repealing patents were more widely used and more broadly construed than has hitherto been realized. They also show that some U.S. courts in the early Republic repealed patents in a summary process without a jury, until the Supreme Court halted the practice. Each of these findings has implications—though not straightforward answers—for the questions currently before the Supreme Court.

Patent lawyers have already found the paper and appreciated the insight it provides into a question to be argued before the US Supreme Court, whether “AIA-trials – trial-like administrative patent revocations–are Constitutionally proper.”

"New Books in Law" podcasts

The New Books Network is seeking hosts interested in conducting interviews with authors of new books on law, broadly construed. Hosting the channel is a good way to bring the work of legal scholars to the attention of large audiences.

Here are some recent legal history books that have been featured in New Books in Law podcast interviews:

• Tracy A. Thomas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law
• Joanna Neuman, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote
• John Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty
• Susanna L. Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture
• Edward J. Balleisen, Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff
• Christopher Lowen Agee, The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972
• Iza Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State

 Interested parties should write to Marshall Poe at marshallpoe@gmail.com (H/t H-Net)

Mirow on the "Patriot Constitution" of 1812

Patriot Constitution (FL State Library & Archives)

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has posted The Patriot Constitution and International Constitution-Making, which appears in the Texas Review of Law & Politics 21 (2017): 477-517:

Recent scholarship has begun to explore the international dimensions of American constitutions. This article is the first study of the Patriot Constitution of 1812, a document unknown to legal historians of Early Republic constitutionalism. The Patriot Constitution was drafted in 1812 by leaders of the Patriots, a group of Anglo-American adventurers from Georgia who sought to invade the Spanish province of East Florida and annex it to the United States. In the process of their military and political efforts, the Patriots promulgated this unusual document to bolster the chances of their international recognition by the United States. Divided into three sections, this article discusses the pretext surrounding the Patriots' actions, the text of the Patriot Constitution itself, and the context of the constitution within recent scholarship on international constitution-making and “constitutional portfolios.”

In appendices, the article provides the first scholarly transcription of the text of the Patriot Constitution based on its two known manuscripts and the text of the Patriot Articles of Cession.

Cutterham's "Gentlemen Revolutionaries"

We note the publication of Gentlemen Revolutionaries Power and Justice in the New American Republic (Princeton University Press), by Tom Cutterham, Lecturer in United States History at the University of Birmingham.

In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation.

Tom Cutterham examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone. They also sought personal prestige and cultural preeminence. Cutterham describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's "lower sort" as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else.

Lively and elegantly written, Gentlemen Revolutionaries demonstrates how these elites, far from giving up their attachment to gentility and privilege, recast the new republic in their own image.

Ho on Hart and the Chinese Legal Tradition

Norman P. Ho, Peking University School of Transnational Law, has posted Internationalizing and Historicizing Hart's Theory of Law, which is forthcoming in the Washington University Jurisprudence Review 10 (2018):

In "The Concept of Law" – which continues to enjoy the central position in the field of analytical jurisprudence five decades after its initial publication – H.L.A. Hart makes two powerful claims. He argues that his theory of law is universal (in that it can apply to any legal culture) and timeless (in that it can apply to different times in history). Despite the sweeping, bold nature of these claims, neither Hart nor the large body of scholarship that has responded to, criticized, and refined Hart’s model of law over the past few decades has really tested whether Hart’s geographic and temporal claims are true. Hoping to correct this scholarly deficit, this Article attempts to internationalize and historicize Hart’s theory of law by applying it to the Chinese legal tradition – a non-Western, secular, and largely homegrown legal tradition that remained free from Western influence and enjoyed remarkable continuity for approximately 1,500 years. Through using specific legislative and judicial debates from the Chinese legal tradition as a testing ground for Hart’s theory (rather than simply focusing on Chinese premodern codes and statutes, which cannot illuminate law in practice), this Article argues that Hart’s theory of law – namely, his signature concept of the rule of recognition – can be said to be generally applicable to the Chinese legal tradition, and hence, has stronger claims to being universal and timeless. However, when applied to the Chinese legal tradition, Hart’s model of law makes certain incorrect, Western-centric assumptions regarding the function of the rule of recognition in a legal system, namely, his argument that the rule of recognition solves the deficiency of uncertainty in the primary rules. Put another way, although Hart claims his theory of law is descriptive and morally neutral, it may nevertheless contain certain Western-centric normative assumptions. This problem is not, however, fatal to the general applicability of Hart’s model of law to the Chinese legal tradition, but acknowledgement of such a problem can help legal theorists put forth a truly general “general jurisprudence.”

Yale Legal History Forum, 2017-2018

We have the schedule for the Yale Legal History Forum for 2017-2018.  It meets from 4:15-5:45 p.m., with a reception starting at 4:00 p.m., in the Yale Law School Faculty Lounge, unless otherwise  specified.

FALL

Rohit De | Yale University (History)
Tuesday, September 26, SLB 122
Defending Kenyatta: Decolonization, Mobility, and a Global History of Rebellious Lawyering

Li Chen | University of Toronto (History)
Tuesday, October 10
The Security Regime and Emergency Governance of Colonial Empires in Late Qing China

Mira Siegelberg | Queen Mary University of London (History and Law)
Tuesday, November 14
The Fate of Non State Legal Order in the Twentieth Century: On Intellectual History and International Legal History

Mitra Sharafi | University of Wisconsin Law School
Tuesday, December 5
Forensic Experts and Corruption in Colonial India: Graphology as a Suspect Science

SPRING

Erika Hermanowicz | University of Georgia (Classics)
Thursday, February 22, 5:00pm-6:30pm, HGS 211, co-sponsored by Archaia and the Departments of Classics, Religious Studies
The Roman Legal Understanding of Church Property in Late Antiquity

Walter Scheidel | Stanford (Classics and History)
Tuesday, February 27, co-sponsored by the Law, Economics & Organization Workshop
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Making of the Modern World

Cynthia Nicoletti | University of Virginia School of Law
Tuesday, March 20
Emancipation and Its Challengers in the South Carolina Sea Islands

Matthew Sommer | Stanford University (History)
Tuesday, April 17
Gender Passing and Official Panic in Qing Dynasty China

For more information, please contact Katharina Schmidt (katharina.i..schmidt@yale.edu) or José Argueta Funes (jose.arguetafunes@yale.edu).

Bilsky's "Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law"

Leora Bilsky, Tel Aviv University, has published The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law: Unfinished Business with the University of Michigan Press:

The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law explores the challenge posed by the Holocaust to legal and political thought by examining issues raised by the restitution class action suits brought against Swiss banks and German corporations before American federal courts in the 1990s. Although the suits were settled for unprecedented amounts of money, the defendants did not formally assume any legal responsibility. Thus, the lawsuits were bitterly criticized by lawyers for betraying justice and by historians for distorting history.

Leora Bilsky argues class action litigation and settlement offer a mode of accountability well suited to addressing the bureaucratic nature of business involvement in atrocities. Prior to these lawsuits, legal treatment of the Holocaust was dominated by criminal law and its individualistic assumptions, consistently failing to relate to the structural aspects of Nazi crimes. Engaging critically with contemporary debates about corporate responsibility for human rights violations and assumptions about “law,” she argues for the need to design processes that make multinational corporations accountable, and examines the implications for transitional justice, the relationship between law and history, and for community and representation in a post-national world. Her novel interpretation of the restitution lawsuits not only adds an important dimension to the study of Holocaust trials, but also makes an innovative contribution to broader and pressing contemporary legal and political debates. In an era when corporations are ever more powerful and international, Bilsky’s arguments will attract attention beyond those interested in the Holocaust and its long shadow.

Some endorsements:

“Bilsky’s groundbreaking works reveal how the Holocaust reparations litigation represents a new mode of accountability directed at the institutional dimension of atrocity missed by the traditional criminal law model. Bilsky's skillful account illuminates the larger significance of those cases not only for Holocaust responsibility itself, but also for accountability for grave violations of human rights. It makes a vital contribution to both fields, shedding new light on the complex relationship between law and history.” 
—Mayo Moran, University of Toronto

“A terrific combination of fascinating historical detail, clear and accessible political and legal theory, and practical wisdom about an extremely important topic, the transnational Holocaust litigation (THL) brought in American courts in the 1990s using tort law to win reparations for victims. Bilsky shows that THL overcame some of the weaknesses of both criminal trials and truth commissions, and opens up new possibilities for theorizing about corporate responsibility for human rights and the relationship between law and history. Even those who ultimately disagree with her optimism about THL will have to reckon with this important book.”
—Ariela Gross, University of Southern California

Liptak on the Emoluments Kerfluffle

Here's the link to New York Times reporter Adam Liptak's story on the exchanges, in blog posts and court pleadings, between various scholars (including a Georgetown Law colleague of mine) over the emoluments clauses as they relate to litigation against President Trump.  Seth Barrett Tillman's latest SSRN posts on the controversy are here and here.

Pardo on Bankrupt Slaves

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted Bankrupt Slaves, which is forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review 71 (2018):

Responsible societies reckon with the pernicious and ugly chapters in their histories. Wherever we look around, there exist ever-present reminders of how we failed as a society in permitting the enslavement of millions of black men, women, and children in the first centuries of this nation’s history. No corner of society remains unstained. As such, it is incumbent on institutions to confront their involvement in this horrific past so as to fully comprehend the kaleidoscopic nature of institutional complicity in legitimating and entrenching slavery. Only by doing so can we properly continue the march of progress, finding ways to improve society, not letting the errors of our way define us, yet at the same time never forgetting them.

This Article represents a contribution toward this progress, by telling what has been, until now, an untold story about institutional complicity in antebellum slavery—that is, the story of how the federal government in the 1840s became the owner of hundreds, if not thousands, of slaves belonging to financially distressed slaveowners who sought forgiveness of debt through the federal bankruptcy process. Relying on archival court records that have not been systematically analyzed by any published scholarship, this Article tells the story of how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 and the domestic slave trade inevitably collided to create the bankruptcy slave trade, focusing on a case study of the Eastern District of Louisiana, home to New Orleans, which was antebellum America’s largest slave market. Knowing the story of bankrupt slaves is a crucial step toward recognizing how yet another aspect of our legal system—one that has brought in its modern incarnation financial relief to millions upon millions of debtors—had deep roots in antebellum slavery.

Sunday Book Review Roundup

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, by Yale law professors Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, is gaining more celebrity than the obscure international treaty it seeks to resurrect. The authors argue that the Kellogg-Briand pact (1928) marked “the beginning of the end” of “war between the states,” and “reshaped the world map, catalyzed the human rights revolution, enabled the use of economic sanctions as a tool of law enforcement, and ignited the explosion in the number of international organizations that regulate so many aspects of our daily lives.” Max Boot (in the NY Times) is skeptical, as are Margaret MacMillan (in the Financial Times), Adam Roberts (in the Telegraph, and behind a paywall) and Louis Menand (in the New Yorker). The Economist--addressing a theme that all of the reviewers reference--worries that Hathaway and Shapiro’s “new world order” is in jeopardy: “But perhaps the greatest danger at present is the incumbency of an American president who despises international norms, who disparages free trade and who continually flirts with abandoning America’s essential role in maintaining the global legal order. The “internationalists”—the heroes of this important book—must be spinning in their graves.” Jack Goldsmith interviewed the authors at the Hoover Institution (podcast here).

In the NY Times, Sean Wilentz reviews Richard White’s history of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, in which, Wilentz writes, “the ambiguous liberal ideals of contract freedom and self-regulation that helped eradicate slavery became instruments for brute and chaotic corporate power.”

In the London Review of Books, Diarmaid MacCulloch reviews Facing the Revocation: Huguenot Families, Faith, and the King’s Will by Carolyn Chappell Lougee, Susan Pedersen reviews Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late 20th Century by James Hinton, and Pankaj Mishra reviews five books in which “apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again,” including The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla. The first two reviews are behind a paywall.

In the LA Review of Books, Stephen Lurie reviews John Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. In the City Journal, Clark Welton reviews Law and Disorder: the Chaotic Birth of the NYPD, by Bruce Chadwick.

In the NY Review of Books, Adam Hochschild reviews three books about the United States during WWI (a time “when the United States, despite its victory in the European war, truly lost its soul at home”). He covers America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History by Margaret E. Wagner, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918 by Michael Kazin, Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism by Nick Fischer, as well as The Great War a three-part television series produced by Stephen Ives and Amanda Pollak for PBS’s American Experience.

Finally, the Atlantic features an interview with Max Perry Mueller about his new book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, and the New Books Network features an interview with Sarah Haley about her new book, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity and one with Mairaj Syed about his Coercion and Responsibility in Islam: A Study in Ethics and Law.  

Weekend Roundup

• In the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Lauren McIver Thompson (Kennesaw State University/Georgia State University College of Law), "A century ago, women fought for access to contraception. The Trump administration threatens to undo their work."

• From the blog Boston 1775: "Finding Revolutionary Massachusetts Legislative Records Online." (h/t: @lizcovart) 

• The Library of Congress Blog has a lovely interview with Ross Davies, George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, on his use of the Manuscript Division’s collections, including a picture of his class proudly displaying their LC reader identification cards.

• Over at the Faculty Lounge, Al Brophy has the call for papers for The Thirteenth Amendment and Economic Justice, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law, March 2-3, 2018.

•  Who knew?  An app version of the Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation.

• Although it won’t be out until May 2018, we noted with interest the Yale University Press’s copy for the Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History, by the late Morris L. Cohen and John B. Nann.

• From the New Orleans Advocate: University of New Orleans historian Raphael Cassimere, Jr. recalls his role in civil rights movement in New Orleans

• ICYMI: Anders Winroth is one of the historians developing a new series of global history courses at Yale, reports the Yale Daily News.  The North Carolina Historical Commission has delayed discussion of the removal of Confederate monuments from state property in downtown Raleigh, reports the Progressive Pulse.  Huff Po reports that the children of Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu and Minoru Yasui have filed an amicus brief challenging the travel ban.  The Law Society of Upper Canada is considering changing its “anachronistic” name, reports the National Post.  NYU Law has a great appreciation of the late Norman Dorsen by Atticus Gannaway.  H/t: Brad Snyder.

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

Two PhD Researcher in Legal History Positions at Tilburg

From Academic Transfer:

The Department of Public Law, Jurisprudence and Legal History at Tilburg University invites applications for the following position Two Positions of PhD Researcher in Legal History (2 x 1.0 FTE): Collateral rights and Bankruptcy in Early Modern Amsterdam and Frankfurt. 

The Department of Public Law, Jurisprudence and Legal History is seeking for two full-time PhD researchers (48 months) who will be working within the project ‘Analysing Coherence in Law Through Legal Scholarship’ (CLLS), which is funded by the European Research Council (ERC, ERC Starting Grant 2016, nr 714759). The project started in January 2017 and will be finalized in 2021.

The project focuses on analyzing local and regional legal scholarship of the early modern period (c 1500 – c 1800), concerning the theme of collateral rights (securities) and bankruptcy. The two doctoral researchers will analyze the municipal law and legal practices of two cities of commerce in the early modern period, as well as doctrinal texts commenting on the municipal law of these cities. The first position is concerned with Amsterdam, the second one with Frankfurt.

 More

Annual Meeting of the Israeli History and Law Association

[We have the following announcement of the program for the 13th Annual Conference of the
Israeli History and Law Association, Monday, 12 Tishrei 5778 (02 October 2017), Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 14 Ibn Gvirol, Jerusalem.]

09:00-09:15     Gathering

09:15-09:30     Opening Comments

09:30-11:00     Parallel Sessions

Session 1 - Law on the Margins, Margins in Law: Ethnic, Civic, and Gender Peripheries in Israeli Law and Society during the Early Decades

Chair: Orit Rozin (Tel Aviv University)
Haggai Ram (Ben-Gurion University), Hashish, Police Enforcement, Society and Law in the Passage from the Mandate Period to the State of Israel
Oded Heillbronner (Shenkar College), The Legal and Pedagogical Discourse around Consuming Pornographic Literature in Israel's First Decades
Omer Aloni (Tel Aviv University), Bigamy,Polygamy and Socio-Cultural Dilemmas in Early Israeli Law
Rawia Aburabia (Hebrew University), Excluded from the Law: The Criminal Prohibition against Polygamy in Mandatory Palestine and the Exemption Provided for Muslim Palestinians

Session 2 - Legal Practices and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Chair: Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar (University of Haifa)
Quamar Mishirqi-Assad (University of Haifa), The Case of Susya from a Legal-Geographic Historical Standpoint
Gal Amir (University of Haifa), Official Policies toward Palestinian Lawyers in Israel, 1948-1952
Naama Ben Ze'ev (University of Haifa and Tel-Hai College), A Palestinian Struggle Against Expropriation of Agricultural Produce in the Galilee, 1950-1953
Giora Goodman (Kinneret College), Hasbara and House Demolitions in the West Bank and Gaza in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War

11:00-11:30 Break

11:30-13:00 Parallel Sessions

Session 3 - Courts, Jurisdictions and the Trans-Border Flow of Legal Ideas

Chair: Ori Aronson (Bar-Ilan University)
Celia Wasserstein Fassberg (Hebrew University), Extraterritorial State Courts: Consular Courts in the Nineteenth Century
Ziv Bohrer (Bar-Ilan University), Nuremberg Was Not the First International Criminal Tribunal
Nitzana Ben David (Tel Aviv University), Juvenile Courts in Colonial Palestine
Irit Ballas (Tel Aviv University), Emergency Law and the Making of a Movement Regime

Session 4 - Family and Community across Borders

Chair: Amihai Radzyner (Bar-Ilan University)
Avishalom Westreich (College of Law and Business), Blurring the Historicity of Jewish Law: The Enactments of Toledo in Israeli Rabbinical Court Rulings
Ayelet Segal (Bar-Ilan University), The Right of a Childless Widow to Receive her Ketuba Without Haliza
Hila Ben Eliyahu (Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University), From "Custom of the Place" to "Custom of the Place They Came From": A Cross-Border Ruling in the 16th Century Ottoman Empire
Levi Cooper (Ben-Gurion University), The Proposed Ban on Fur Trading: An Historical Perspective

Session 5 - Constitutional Moments

Chair: Adam Shinar (IDC)
Hanna Lerner (Tel Aviv University), The Indian Founding: The Constituent Assembly Debates and Strategic Constitutional Incrementalism
Arianne Renan-Barzilay (University of Haifa), Parenting Title VII: Rethinking the History of the Sex Discrimination Prohibition
YairSagy (University of Haifa),A Case that Made History: A Historiographical Inquiry into the Mizrahi Bank Case

13:00-14:00 Lunch Break

14:00-15:30 Plenary Session

Best Legal History Article Award will be awarded to Binyamin Blum (Hebrew University) for his article Hounds of Empire: Forensic Dog Tracking in Britain and its Colonies 1888-1953

Authors Meets Readers Session:

Chair: Yoram Shachar (IDC)
Assaf Likhovski's book Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2017) will be discussed by Orit Rozin (Tel Aviv University)
Yoram Meital's book Revolutionary Justice: Special Courts and the Formation of Republican Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2016) will be discussed by Avi Rubin (Ben-Gurion University)

15:30-16:00 Break

16:00-17:30 Parallel Sessions

Session 6 - Lawyers and Legal Transplants

Chair: Binyamin Blum (Hebrew University)
Rotem Giladi (Helsinki), Lauterpacht in Jerusalem: Between Cosmopolitanism and Zionism
Rephael Stern (Harvard), Uncertain Comparisons: Zionist and Israeli Perceptions of India and Pakistan during Decolonization
Rivka Brot (Bar-Ilan University), "It is Necessary to Educate Judges in the PD Problem": Legal Transplants in Military Government Courts in Germany
Shimon-Erez Blum (Sapir College), "Our Struggle is Fierce and Dreadful": "The Judicial Underground" vs. The "Arab National Fund" Lawyers in the Village of al-Zawiya Case

Session 7 - Politics and Violence in Times of Nation-Building

Chair: Anat Stern (Israel National Defense College)
Ofira Gruweis-Kovalsky (Zefat Academic College), Politicization, Fabrication of Evidence and Terror: The Case of "Brith Kana'im"
Nomi Levenkron (Tel Aviv University), "We Weren't Nursery School Teachers, Either": The Sailors Strike in Court
Omri Pelerman (Tel Aviv University), The Politicization of Violent Demonstrations in the State of Israel
Guy Lurie (Israeli Democracy Institute), 'Police for the Natives': The History of the Establishment of the Police Prosecution

Organizing Committee:
Ely Aaronson (Chair), University of Haifa
Iris Agmon (Ben-Gurion University)
Binyamin Blum (Hebrew University)
Doreen Lustig (Tel Aviv University)
Avishalom Westreich (College of Law and Business)

John Marshall: His Landmark Cases and Legacy

[We have the following announcement of the event, "John Marshall: His Landmark Cases and Legacy," which, as we have it from one of the sponsors,  is open to members of the public (who pay the registration fee).]

John Marshall Statue, DC (Highsmith/LC)

The John Marshall Foundation, the James Wilson Institute and The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource) cordially invite you to attend John Marshall: His Landmark Cases and His Legacy, Monday, October 2nd, 1:30pm-5pm, DACOR Bacon House, 1801 F St. NW, Washington, DC
   
Panel Discussions:

Panel 1: John Marshall's Landmark Cases
1:30pm-3:00pm
Prof. David Forte, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
Prof. Melvin Urofsky, American University
Prof. Hadley Arkes, James Wilson Institute (Moderator)

Panel 2: The Legacy of John Marshall on Our Jurisprudence Today
3:00pm-5:00pm
Prof. Kevin Walsh, University of Richmond Law School
Derek Webb, Sidley Austin LLP
Judge Richard J. Leon, District Court for the District of Columbia (Moderator)

Closing Reception
Drinks & Light Fare (5:00pm-6:30pm)

Co-Hosts: This program is co-sponsored with James Wilson Institute, the John Marshall Foundation, and The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource).

RSVP: The cost of this program is $50/person. Please register here.
As space is limited, we will honor requests for attendance on a first-come basis and then form a waiting list.

CLE: We are in the process of securing CLE credit for lawyers attending from the Virginia Bar. The fee to obtain 2 CLE credit hours will be an additional $50. We will share credit card payment instructions once we have confirmed your request to attend, and any requests for CLE credit. We hope you'll be able to join us for what will be a unique and timely program. Please send any questions to info@consource.org.

Richotte, Jr., "Claiming Turtle Mountain's Constitution"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Claiming Turtle Mountain's ConstitutionThe History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation's Founding Documents (August 2017), by Keith Richotte, Jr. (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). A description from the Press:

In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce’s choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day.

In this book, Keith Richotte Jr. offers a critical examination of one tribal nation’s decision to adopt a constitution. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond.

A few blurbs:

"An important contribution not only to Native American law and legal history but also to American legal history--a well-written, well-researched story that engages the reader."--Sidney L. Harring 

"Keith Richotte Jr. has given us the most detailed and thorough telling of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians' complex legal history ever written. A richly researched contribution to the field."--Robert A. Williams

More information is available here.

Seven from Dorsett on NZ and Australian Legal History

Shaunnagh Dorsett, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law, has posted seven recent papers from her backlist on SSRN.

Dorsett's "Juridical Encounters"

Shaunnagh Dorsett, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law, has published Juridical Encounters: Maori and the Colonial Courts 1840-1852 (University of Auckland Press, 2017):

From 1840 to 1852, the Crown Colony period, the British attempted to impose their own law on New Zealand. In theory Maori, as subjects of the Queen, were to be ruled by British law. But in fact, outside the small, isolated, British settlements, most Maori and many settlers lived according to tikanga. How then were Maori to be brought under British law?

Influenced by the idea of exceptional laws that was circulating in the Empire, the colonial authorities set out to craft new regimes and new courts through which Maori would be encouraged to forsake tikanga and to take up the laws of the settlers. Dorsett examines the shape that exceptional laws took in New Zealand, the ways they influenced institutional design and the engagement of Maori with those new institutions, particularly through the lowest courts in the land. It is in the every-day micro-encounters of Maori and the new British institutions that the beginnings of the displacement of tikanga and the imposition of British law can be seen.

Juridical Encounters presents one of the first detailed studies of the interactions of an indigenous people in an Anglo-settler colony with the new British courts. By recovering Maori juridical encounters at a formative moment of New Zealand law and life, this book reveals much about our law and our history.

Professor Dorsett has also posted a number of recent papers on New Zealand and Australian legal history from her backlist.  We'll have a separate post on them shortly.

Lund on Medieval Year Books

We missed this one in 2015, when Thomas Lund (University of Utah) published The Creation of the Common Law: The Medieval Year Books Deciphered with the Lawbook Exchange. From the press:

In this modern compilation and commentary, the most important medieval cases are paraphrased and analyzed, making this interesting and entertaining litigation accessible to everyone. Although Maitland's classic History of English Law ends at Henry III's death, until now no one has explained in clear modern language the transformative events that followed. After Edward I became king, Chief Justice Bereford took charge of the legal system, and created law in accord with his own sense of justice. The book puts his innovations into the context of contemporary American and English law.

Praise for the book:

"It is a staple of popular fiction - The Da Vinci Code is a prominent recent example - for a scholar, after inspired and painstaking work, to reveal hidden mysteries encoded in ancient manuscripts that alter our understanding of ourselves and our civilization. Remarkably, the legal scholar Thomas Lund, has, in real life, done just that. Here, after hundreds of years, is a readable, brilliant, and deep study of the sources of the basic principles of the Anglo-American Legal System still in use today - the medieval Year Books - until now utterly inaccessible except to a few specialists in the most arcane legal history. This amazing and delightful book will be of profound interest to anyone who has ever believed that the rule of law is about more than the arbitrary machinations of politicians. Simply stated, Thomas Lund has given us one of the most important works on law in this generation." -Stephen B. Presser

Further information is available here. 

Johnson on US Civil Rights Leaders and UN Human Rights

“How U.S. Civil Rights Leaders' Human Rights Agenda Shaped the United Nations,” Howard Human and Civil Rights Law Review 1 (2016-2017): 33-44, by Darin E.W. Johnson, Howard Law School, appears as part of the downloadable pdf of the entire issue.  Borrowing from its introduction:

This essay comprises remarks that I delivered as part of the Howard University School of Law C. Clyde Ferguson Lecture on March 31, 2016. The C. Clyde Ferguson lecture honors C. Clyde Ferguson, former Dean of Howard Law School, U.S. Ambassador to Uganda, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for civilian relief in the Nigerian civil war, and U.S. Representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Given C. Clyde Ferguson’s distinguished history as both a U.S. civil rights lawyer and a human rights advocate within the United Nations, the lecture was a fitting forum to speak about the foundational role that U.S. civil rights leaders played in shaping the United Nations human rights system.

The issue commences with a very substantial foreword by Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald on three civil rights lawyers who taught at the Howard Law School: Charles Hamilton Houston, C. Clyde Ferguson, and Goler Teal Butcher.

Phillips and White on a Corpus Linguistic Analysis of the Emoulments Clauses

James Cleith Phillips, a PhD candidate at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and Sara White, the inaugural Corpus Linguistic Research Fellow at the Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School, have posted The Meaning of the Three Emoluments Clauses in the U.S. Constitution: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of American English, 1760-1799:

The recent flurry of scholarship seeking to understand the meaning of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution, particularly the Foreign Emoluments Clause, in the wake of President Trump’s election and subsequently filed lawsuits, has relied on a host of interpretive methodologies. To the extent scholars now (and courts later) seek to understand what the term emolument(s), used thrice in the Constitution, would have meant to the founding generation, their methodologies in determining such have generally relied on small, unrepresentative samples of language usage and founding era dictionaries. But the former cannot confidently provide insights that we can generalize to the greater population (either overall or of lawyers) from the time, and the latter are simply not up to the task of determining usage patterns. Instead, corpus linguistics—what Professor Lawrence Solum had predicted “will revolutionize statutory and constitutional interpretation”—is needed to answer that question.

This paper tackles the meaning of emolument(s) in the founding era using the first (that we can find) full-blown corpus linguistic analysis of constitutional text in American legal scholarship. While at least three others (Randy Barnett, Jenn Mascott, and Joel Hood) have done corpus linguistics-like analysis in constitutional interpretation, none have used all of the tools of a corpus (collocation, clusters/n-grams, frequency data, and concordance lines) and used a sufficiently large and representative corpus of the relevant time period—here the underlying data of the soon-to-be released Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA)—to make confident conclusions about probably founding-era meaning. 

Cushman on the "Constitutional Revolution" of 1937

Barry Cushman, Notre Dame Law School, has posted Inside the "Constitutional Revolution" of 1937, which appeared in the Supreme Court Review 2016 (2107): 367-409:

The nature and sources of the New Deal Constitutional Revolution are among the most discussed and debated subjects in constitutional historiography. Scholars have reached significantly divergent conclusions concerning how best to understand the meaning and the causes of constitutional decisions rendered by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Though recent years have witnessed certain refinements in scholarly understandings of various dimensions of the phenomenon, the relevant documentary record seemed to have been rather thoroughly explored. Recently, however, a remarkably instructive set of primary sources has become available. For many years, the docket books kept by a number of the Hughes Court justices have been held by the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court. These docket books supply a wealth of information concerning the internal deliberations of the justices. Justice Pierce Butler’s docket book in particular provides a remarkably rich set of notes on the Court’s discussions of cases in conference. Yet the existence of these docket books was not widely known, and access to them was highly restricted. As a consequence scholars knew very little about the Court’s internal deliberations in the landmark cases of its 1936 October Term.

This article, which is based upon a review of all of the surviving docket books from that Term, considers what those sources can teach us about the cases comprising what some have called the “switch-in-time”: West Coast Hotel Co v Parrish, which upheld Washington State’s minimum wage law for women and overruled Adkins v Children’s Hospital; the Labor Board Cases, which upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act; and the Social Security Cases, which upheld the constitutionality of provisions of the Social Security Act establishing an old-age pension system and a federal-state cooperative plan of unemployment insurance, as well as corresponding state unemployment compensation statutes. Considered in concert with information previously known, the data revealed by these docket books shed considerable new light on the nature of the Court’s deliberations in each of these three sets of cases, on the reasons for its decisions, and on the contention that the justices wrought a “Constitutional Revolution” in the spring of 1937.

LHR 35:3

Volume 35, No. 3 of the Law and History Review is now in print: 

Articles

Natural Rights Dissected and Rejected: John Lind's Counter to the Declaration of Independence
Neil L. York 

“The Law of the New Hebrides is the Protector of their Lawlessness”: Justice, Race and Colonial Rivalry in the Early Anglo-French Condominium
Kate Stevens 

The Hounds of Empire: Forensic Dog Tracking in Britain and its Colonies, 1888–1953
Binyamin Blum 

Enemy Women and the Laws of War in the American Civil War
Stephanie McCurry 

‘My land is worth a million dollars’: How Japanese Canadians contested their dispossession in the 1940s
Jordan Stanger-Ross, Nicholas Blomley, The Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective 

Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law: On New Ways of Not Being a State
Natasha Wheatley 

Culture and the Courts in France: the Plaidoirie Sentimentale in the Nineteenth and EarlyTwentieth Centuries
James M. Donovan 

Book Reviews 

Jedidiah Joseph Kroncke , The Futility of Law and Development: China and the Dangers of Exporting American Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp 376. $74.00 cloth (ISBN: 9780190233525)
Rande Kostal 

Andrew Porwancher , John Henry Wigmore and the Rules of Evidence: The Hidden Origins of Modern Law. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2016. Pp. 233. $40.00 cloth (ISBN 9780826220868).
Michael Ariens 

Jeffrey Rosen , Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. 256. $25.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780300158670).
Joel K. Goldstein 

Brett Christophers , The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 348. $45.00 (ISBN 978-0-674-50491-2).
Judge Glock 

Katherine Turk , Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 284. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8122-4820-3).
Catherine L. Fisk

CFP: Law and Society Association meeting

Toronto (credit)

The Law and Society Association's Call for Papers (and panel proposals) is now out. The upcoming LSA will be in Toronto,  Canada, June 7-10, 2018. The deadline for submissions is Oct.18, 2017. 

Here is the write-up on the conference theme of "Law at the Crossroads: Le Droit de la Croisée des Chemins."  

Don't forget to contact the relevant Collaborative Research Network organizers if you'd like your panel to be sponsored by a CRN. CRN sponsorship helps people interested in the same themes or regions find each other at the LSA. Among others, there are CRNs for Law and History, South Asia, East Asian Law and Society, British Colonial Legalities, and Law and Colonialism.

Full information on the submission process is available here.

Gerber on Law and Catholicism in Colonial Maryland

Scott D. Gerber, Ohio Northern University-Pettit College of Law, has posted Law and Catholicism in Colonial Maryland, which appears in the Catholic Historical Review 103 (2017): 465-90:

George Calvert (Wiki)

Montesquieu famously concluded in The Spirit of the Laws that each form of government has an animating principle — a set of “human passions that set it in motion” — and that each form can be corrupted if its animating principle is undermined. Maryland is a compelling case study of Montesquieu’s theory: founded in 1632 by Lord Baltimore as a haven for Catholics, a mere two decades later that animating principle was dead. This article explores why. More specifically, the article examines the birth, death, and resurrection of Maryland’s animating principle by identifying with as much precision as possible the impact of the law itself on regime change in colonial Maryland.

Mikhail on "Foreign Born Framers"

[ICYMI: Here's a pointer to my Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail's recent post on Balkinization, “Foreign-Born Framers.”]

On this Constitution Day, it is worth recalling that seven of the thirty-nine delegates to the Philadelphia convention whose names are affixed to the Constitution were foreign-born, i.e., born outside of the territories that became the United States.  These original dreamers who “got the job done” were:

Alexander Hamilton (NY) – born in the West Indies
Thomas Fitzsimmons (PA) – born in Ireland
Robert Morris (PA) – born in England
James Wilson (PA) – born in Scotland
William Paterson (NJ) – born in Ireland
James McHenry (MD) – born in Ireland
Pierce Butler (SC) – born in Ireland

[More.]

BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History

[We have the following announcement.] The BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History willbe held once again in conjunction with the 2018 BHC annual meeting. This prestigious workshop, funded by Cambridge University Press, will take place in Baltimore on Wednesday April 4th and Thursday April 5th. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to doctoral candidates who are pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history, from any relevant discipline (e.g., from economic sociology, political science, cultural anthropology, or management, as well as history). Most participants are in year 3 or 4 or their degree program, though in some instances applicants at a later stage make a compelling case that their thesis research has evolved in ways that suggest the value of an intensive engagement with business history.

Topics (see link for past examples) may range from the early modern era to the present, and explore societies across the globe. Participants work intensively with a distinguished group of BHC-affiliated scholars (including the incoming BHC president), discussing dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and career trajectories.

Applications are due by 15 November 2017 via email to BHC@Hagley.org and should include: a statement of interest; CV; preliminary or final dissertation prospectus (10-15 pages); and a letter of support from your dissertation supervisor (or prospective supervisor). All participants receive a stipend that partially defrays travel costs to the annual meeting. Applicants will receive notification of the selection committee’s decisions by 20 December 2017.

Questions about the colloquium should be sent to its director, Duke Professor of History Edward Balleisen, eballeis@duke.edu, and/or this year’s graduate student liaison, Alexi Garrett, asg4c@virginia.edu (who participated last year).

Eliason on the Blues Contracts of Trumpet Records

Antonia Eliason, University of Mississippi School of Law, has posted Lillian McMurry and the Blues Contracts of Trumpet Records, which is forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Journal:

Trumpet Records was a Jackson, Mississippi-based record label established and run by Lillian McMurry from 1950 until it folded in 1955. This article draws on archival material to evaluate the progression of the contracts entered into by Trumpet Records with its blues artists, arguing that this demonstrates the evolving contractual understanding of a young record label, showing increasing sophistication and an awareness of some of the potential pitfalls of signing artists. The contracts of Trumpet Records, when taken together with the correspondence of the label’s head with her artists, also show a commitment to fairness and a level of scrupulousness and honesty not often seen in the industry. The article also examines the legal dispute between Sherman Johnson and Trumpet Records, which reached the Mississippi Supreme Court. The article further turns to the subsequent copyright infringement of a number of Trumpet Record recordings by European record labels in the 1970s, which sheds light on the widespread practice of piracy prevalent in relation to older blues recordings.

Landmark Cases in Intellectual Property Law

New from Hart Publishing: Landmark Cases in Intellectual Property Law, edited by Jose Bellido, Senior Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School, University of Kent.:

This volume explores the nature of intellectual property law by looking at particular disputes. All the cases gathered here aim to show the versatile and unstable character of a discipline still searching for landmarks. Each contribution offers an opportunity to raise questions about the narratives that have shaped the discipline throughout its short but profound history. The volume begins by revisiting patent litigation to consider the impact of the Statute of Monopolies (1624). It continues looking at different controversies to describe how the existence of an author's right in literary property was a plausible basis for legal argument, even though no statute expressly mentioned authors' rights before the Statute of Anne (1710). The collection also explores different moments of historical significance for intellectual property law: the first trade mark injunctions; the difficulties the law faced when protecting maps; and the origins of originality in copyright law. Similarly, it considers the different ways of interpreting patent claims in the late nineteenth and twentieth century; the impact of seminal cases on passing off and the law of confidentiality; and more generally, the construction of intellectual property law and its branches in their interaction with new technologies and marketing developments. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of intellectual property law.

Mention you saw it on Legal History Blog for a 20 percent discount!  Table of Contents after the jump.

Sunday Book Review Roundup

In The Atlantic is a review of James Delbourgo's Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum.

The Guardian has a review of Chris Renwick's Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State.


There are several interviews of interest up at the New Books Network.  Sarah Haley speaks about her No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity.  Aled Davies describes his The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain.  Finally, Keri Leigh Merritt is interviewed about her Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South.

Reviewed in both The Guardian and The Economist is David Kynaston's Till Time's Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England 1694-2013.

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward is reviewed in both The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Also in The New York Times is a review essay based on historian Rita Chin's The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History and Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

At H-Net is a review of Douglas Baynton's Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics.  Also reviewed at H-Net is Jefferson Decker's The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government.

Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America is reviewed in the New Republic.

At History News Network is a review of Noam Maggor's Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age.

In The Baffler Kimberlé Williams Krenshaw has written a brief essay in response to Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal.

At In These Times, historian Mark Bray speaks about his Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.

Finally in The New Inquiry is a review of Kelly Lytle Hernández's City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965.

Weekend Roundup

• James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale University. presents The Two Primitive Modes of Imagining Property: Owning Land, Owning Human Beings at the Barat House, Boston College Law School, on Monday, September 18, 2017, at 5:00 p.m.  The event is sponsored by BC’s Legal History Roundtable and Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.  

• We were pleased to note, in a back issue of the Minnesota Law Library's publication The Colophon, that among the student notebooks dating from 1948-1952 it had acquired was one for Stefan Riesenfeld's course, Modern Social Legislation.

•  We’ve previously noted the publication of the second volume of The Causes of War, by Alexander Gillespie, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Professor of Law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand with Hart Publishing.  Hart has just announced the publication of the third volume, covering the years 1400 CE to 1650 CE.  Mention Legal History Blog for a 20 percent discount!

• We have an announcement, in Portuguese, of a Postgraduate Specialization in Ethics, Law and Political Thought - a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts, Philosophy Center (CIFUL) and Theory and History of Law, Research Center of the University of Lisbon (THD-ULisboa). 

• Via the Faculty Lounge, we have word that Peking University School of Transnational Law is inviting applications for entry-level and lateral tenure track scholars of severl fields, including all areas of China Law and Legal History.  Inquiries should be addressed to Professor Mark Feldman, Chair, Faculty Appointments Committee, at mfeldman@stl.pku.edu.cn or mfeldman97@gmail.com.

• Sam Erman, Associate Professor of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, presented "The Constitution and the New U.S. Expansion: Debating the Status of the Islands" at the University of Wisconsin Law School on September 13, 2017.  H/t: Legal Scholarship Blog.

• Richard H. Underwood, University of Kentucky College of Law, will celebrate the release of his new book, Gaslight Lawyers: Criminal Trials & Exploits in Gilded Age New York, at Lexington, Kentucky's Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7.p. on Tuesday, September 19.  H/t: UK

• "This fall, NYU Law students and Steinhardt education doctoral students are partnering with public school teachers on a new more in depth Constitutional history curriculum that invites New York City high schoolers to 'think as lawyers,' exploring how different Supreme Court cases have shaped have shaped the way the nation's founding document has been interpreted over time."  More.

• ICYMI: Robert L. Tsai, in Politico, on Law And Order: The Troubling Sheriffs’ Movement That Joe Arpaio Supports.

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

Blogger's Query: Acquiring Federal Judges' Papers

My extracurricular activities include advising the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit.  For that work, I would be grateful to learn from any archivist or special collections librarian what factors might incline him or her to acquire the papers of a federal trial or appellate judge.  In addition, I’d be grateful to learn of any publications heralding the acquisition of such papers, such as Katherine Hedin, “The University of Minnesota Law Library Named Recipient of the Papers of Judge James M. Rosenbaum,” The Colophon (Spring 2011): 3-5.  Please reply to ernst@georgetown.edu.

ASLH Seeks Nominations of Honorary Fellows

[We have the following announcement.] The Committee on Honors of the American Society for Legal History solicits nominations of senior scholars for possible election as Honorary Fellows of the Society.  Election as an Honorary Fellow is the highest honor the Society can confer.  It
recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.  Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand.  Nominees may work in any field and any country.

Please submit nominations by email to the chair of the committee, Bruce H. Mann, at mann@law.harvard.edu by Friday, October 27.  Nominations should include a brief statement describing how nominees and their scholarship have helped define their fields and influenced other scholars—in short, why they should be honored as leading citizens of the community of scholars.  Formal dossiers or c.v’s are not required at this stage.

Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection

[We have the following announcement from  Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.]

It is with great pride that I announce today’s opening of a landmark exhibit at the famed Grolier Club in New York City, entitled "Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection." This exhibit is co-curated by Michael Widener, our Rare Book Librarian, and Mark S. Weiner ’00 (Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School). It has already received coverage in the New Yorker, and additional major publicity is expected. See below for further description. I visited the exhibit yesterday and it is spectacular and quite extensive. Mike and Mark have done a tremendous job showcasing 140 of the many treasures in our collection.

"Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection" is on display September 13 - November 18, 2017, in the Grolier Club's main gallery at 47 East 60th Street in New York City. The gallery is open 10:00am – 5:00pm Monday - Saturday except holidays, and admission is free. Mike Widener and Mark Weiner will be conducting exhibition tours on September 21, October 5, and November 2, 1:00 – 2:00pm. 

On the evening of October 5, there will be a mini-symposium from 6:00 – 8:00pm at the Grolier Club, which will feature presentations by Mike Widener and Mark Weiner, followed by a panel discussion moderated by John Brigham (U. of Massachusetts-Amherst. Political scientist, a cultural studies of law scholar who has published on law as mapping) and featuring John Gordan III (lawyer, legal historian, book collector, Grolier Club member), Eric Hilgendorf (Professor of criminal law at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and author of one of the illustrated law books in the exhibit, Dtv-Atlas Recht (2 vols.; 2003-2008)), and Kathryn James (Curator of Early Modern Collections, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University; Grolier Club member). There will be a reception at 8:00pm following the panel. This event is open to the public but reservations are requested.

On November 8, the Law Library will host a talk in the Yale Law School that will include presentations by Mike Widener and Mark Weiner, with commentary by Judith Resnik.  A complementary exhibit, "Around the World with Law's Picture Books," is on view through December 15 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School (Library Level 2, Sterling Law Building, 127 Wall Street, New Haven CT). It is open to the public 10:00 – 6:00pm daily except holidays.

[Mike Widener's post on the exhibit on the blog of the Goldman Law Library is here.]