- Floyd Abrams reviews Wendell Bird’s The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act” over at First Amendment News.
- The Federal Judicial Center has arranged its collection of its Notable Federal Trials series in this nifty timeline.
- Bound By Every Tie of Duty: John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice of Van Diemen’s Land, by Jacqueline Fox (Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd), has made the short list for the Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History.
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| Robert A. Taft (LC) |
- We felt late to the party when we saw how many legal historians had done Brian Frye's Ipse Dixit podcast. We aren't scanning all 556 episodes but can report they include Christopher Tomlins, Nicholas Bagley and Julian Davis Mortenson Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Thomas McSweeney, Elizabeth Katz, Taja-Nia Henderson and Lutie A. Lytle, Jilll Hasday, Seth Barrett Tillman, and Justin Simaud. Also, from February 1947, Robert A. Taft calls for "curbs on the power of the executive branch of the government"!!
- Sure, you're on lock down, but that doesn't mean you can't (virtually) browse the George Wythe Room at the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary. H/t: Tom McSweeney.
- The sixth edition of Borkowski's Textbook on Roman Law, by Paul J. du Plessis, is now available.
- A more accessible version of John Fabian Witt's lecture on the legal history of infectious diseases is here.
- Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Can you steal a peacock? A post by Krista J. Kesselring on animals in early modern law.
- The Hoover-Roosevelt Transition premiers on the Facebook page of the FDR Library on Wednesday, May 13. FDR Library Director Paul Sparrow and Hoover Library Director Thomas Schwartz discuss the relationship between FDR and HH “during the 1932 campaign and the transition between their presidencies, examining their different philosophies in the role of government and the protection of individual liberty and freedom. Followed by a Q&A in the comments.
- The Tagore Law Lectures (1870-1986) are now available here on the University of Calcutta Digital Library.
- And also on South Asia: check out this Twitter thread by Kalyani Ramnath (@kalramnath) on epidemics, contagion, migration, and law.
- ICYMI: Mary Ziegler interviewed on Abortion and the Law in America in Mother Jones and on WORT. WaPo's obituary of Barbara Babcock.
- I was very sorry to learn of the death of John M. Murrin, from whom (and Douglas Greenberg) I took a marvelous reading course on early America while a graduate student at Princeton. Vast knowledge, zero pretension, kind, and witty (especially if you went in for atrocious puns). His essays include a landmark study of the colonial legal profession and the brilliant "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity." They are collected in Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic, ed. Andrew Shankman (Oxford University Press, 2018), reviewed here. John Fea's remembrance is here. H/t: Al Brophy. DRE
