Weekend Roundup
- You'd be well advised to read that HNN review of Mary Bilder's Madison's Hand in our last Sunday Book Review Roundup in the light of Daniel Hulsebosch's very thoughtful assessment in his review of the book and Jack Rakove's A Politician Thinking in the latest American Historical Review. “After Bilder’s work," Professor Hulsebosch writes, "no one can read editor Max Farrand’s The Records of the Federal Convention 1787, 3 volumes (1907), the standard source for a century . . . as a comprehensive or objective record of what transpired in Philadelphia.”
- John D. Braithwaite, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University, will deliver the Mitchell Lecture for Fall 2018 in the John Lord O'Brian Hall, Charles B. Sears Law Library, of the University at Buffalo School of Law on Friday, November 9, 2018 at 2 p.m. His topic is Tempered Power: Variegated Capitalism, Law and Society.
- The National Constitution Center announces a free, on-line college-level course, on The Supreme Court and American Politics. Created by Lyle Denniston and members of the University of Baltimore law faculty it traces, “from origins deep in English legal history and American colonial history up through the Senate’s recent consideration of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, the role of the Court in safeguarding the right of political representation in the American Republic.”
- James D. Folts, head of Researcher Services at the New York State Archives, reports on recent research conducted in the historical court records there, on the blog of the Historical Society of the New York Courts.
- Congratulations to UNC Law’s Eric Muller, who was named the 2018-2019 recipient of the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award by the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty.
- Congratulations, as well, to Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation, who will be a visiting professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Law, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, November, 11-18, 2018. She will lecture to undergraduates on American constitutional law.
- Sessions of the Law and Public Affairs Seminar at Princeton University are by invitation only, but this one is so interesting we’re posting news of it here anyway. On Monday, October 22, Corey Robin, Brooklyn College, will preside over a discussion of the paper Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas's Jurisprudence. “A little known fact about Clarence Thomas,” Professor Robin writes, “is that during the formative period of his life, from 1968 to 1975, he was a black nationalist on the left. In this paper, I show that despite his right turn in the 1970s, Thomas never gave up his black nationalism. The fundamental ideas he formed about race and racism on the black nationalist left continue to structure his jurisprudence from the right. While that's true of his jurisprudence on issues ranging from the Second Amendment to the Takings Clause, I focus here on his opinions about affirmative action and desegregation, showing that his positions on those questions bear little resemblance to either conventional conservatism or liberalism."
- Boyd van Dijk’s article Human Rights in War: On the Entangled Foundations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions is now available online in the American Journal of International Law.
“The relationship between human rights and humanitarian law is one of
the most contentious topics in the history of international law. Most
scholars studying their foundations argue that these two fields of law
developed separately until the 1960s. This article, by contrast, reveals
a much earlier cross-fertilization between these disciplines. It shows
how 'human rights thinking' played a critical generative role in
transforming humanitarian law, thereby creating important legacies for
today's understandings of international law in armed conflict.”
- CFP: the Canadian Law and Society conference will be in Vancouver (at UBC), June 3-5, 2019
