CFP: International Society for Chinese Law and History

[ We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH) is pleased to announce a call for paper for its Bi-annual Conference, to be held online on June 10 to 12, 2021. Established in 2013, ISCLH is now the primary international intellectual hub for Chinese legal historians. It hosts a workshop in North America every two years, and a larger conference in East Asia in the intervening years. Previously we have held our bi-annual conference at Fudan University, Shanghai (2015), China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing (2017), and National Taipei University, Taipei (2019). The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic might restrict our ability to travel and in-person scholarly exchanges, but we are committed to provide a forum for sharing the latest scholarship of Chinese legal history and facilitating intellectual conversations for scholars interested in Chinese law and history.

Weekend Roundup

• On Wednesday, February 17th, 2021, 16:30 Jerusalem, the Law and Humanities Workshop at IDC Herzliya, Israel will host Prof. Elizabeth S. Anker, Department of English, Cornell University, to discuss a chapter from her book in progress On Paradox: The Claims of Theory, with responses from Prof. Lior Barshack, IDC Herzliya, Prof. Emilios Christodoulidis, University of Glasgow, Dr. Irena Rosenthal, University of Amsterdam, and Prof. Christian Volk, Humboldt University of Berlin.  Zoom invitation here; pre-registration here.  For the draft chapter and for more details, please contact the workshop coordinator, Danielle Cohen, by email at: Daniellec2296@gmail.com. 

• ASLH Honorary Fellow Sightings: Stanley N. Katz here, and LHB Founder Mary Dudziak on "Learning the Scholar's Craft" over at H-Diplo.
  

• Syllabus alert: Foundations of American legal thought at YLS, with Moyn, Rodriguez, Torres and Witt.
  

• Available online in the LHR: Nora E. Jaffary, Maternity and Morality in Puebla's Nineteenth-Century Infanticide Trials. 

• From the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog: Ryan Greenwood on rare newspapers in the Minnesota Law collections.

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Shannon McSheffrey on murder in sanctuary, Krista Kesselring on pardons, and Cassie Watson on highway robbery in English legal history.

• Available online in the AJLH: Sean O’Reilly, Capturing Profit from Disaster: The Assets Company Ltd and the Afterlife of the City of Glasgow Bank.
  

• Celebrate Black History Month with Fordham Law!  Also: Annenburg Classroom is making "Thurgood, a production of the critically acclaimed play starring Laurence Fishburne as the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice" available to "teachers, educators and their students." 
• The CFP for American Historical Association's 2022 annual meeting in Ew Orleans is here.
  

• Well worth a browse: "The Artists of the WPA: Paintings, Prints, Photographs, Posters, Books & Related Ephemera by Artists Whose Careers Were Sustained by the WPA," on auction at Swann.
  

• ICYMI: What Reconstruction teaches us about white nationalism today, with Eric Foner (Vox).  Scott Gerber on the Muslim Ban and the Massachusetts Bay Anti-Quaker Law (Providence Journal).  Wading into Twitter, with Martha S. Jones (JHU Magazine).
  

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

Eldridge on Vinogradoff

Although it’s gated, we note the publication of Gone and forgotten: Vinogradoff's historical jurisprudence, by Lorren Eldridge, a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Law, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, online in Legal Studies:

Sir Paul Vinogradoff was once well known for his historically contextualised approach to legal theory which held that legal ideas were the contingent products of social factors. Law was necessarily engaged with other subjects, and ‘historical jurisprudence’ could produce real insight into the nature of law – in part by placing theories such as analytical jurisprudence in context, evaluating and modifying theoretical models by reference to the contingent social facts of an era. This was part of the nineteenth-century turn to ‘science’ in history and a focus on methodology. Sir Henry Maine argued that legal history proved the insufficiency of analytic theories, but his method met with many criticisms, some of which Vinogradoff sought to address. However, Vinogradoff's insights have rarely been pursued or developed, with legal history favouring Maitland's more doctrinal approach, and legal theory rejecting historical jurisprudence – at least explicitly. Despite its imperfections, historical jurisprudence offers a rich and valuable way to understand law, including to evaluate analytical models such of those of HLA Hart, and as a methodology for dialogue between comparative and historical legal scholarship. It has, in fact, continued to do so without explicit recognition in the 100 years since Vinogradoff's death.

–Dan Ernst

A Lecture Series on “Crisis in Constitutional Democracy" at WSC

The Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public and Public Service at Washington State University is hosting an excellent series of noon-hour lectures, on “crisis in constitutional democracy.”  Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton professor emeritus of history, Columbia University will deliver the opening Foley Distinguished Lecture, “The crisis in historical context: What the era of Reconstruction tells us,” on Feb. 16.  Bruce Ackerman, Sterling professor of law and political science, Yale University, will follow with his lecture, “Was Trump a Symptom of a Constitutional Dis-Ease?” on Thursday, Feb. 25.  Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit professor of political and social science, Yale University, will present the third lecture: “The wayward course of American presidential democracy” on Thursday, March 4.  Kim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller professor of sociology and international affairs, Princeton University, will deliver the final lecture in the series, “The crisis of democracy in global context” on Tuesday, March 16.

"All upcoming and recorded Foley Institute online events can be watched directly from the institute’s YouTube channel. To sign up to receive notifications via email of upcoming events, email tsfoley@wsu.edu.”

–Dan Ernst

Van Hulle's "Britain and International Law in West Africa"

Inge Van Hulle, Tilburg University, has just published Britain and International Law in West Africa: The Practice of Empire (Oxford University Press).  The book appears in the OUP series, The History and Theory of International Law.  Here is the abstract:

Africa often remains neglected in studies that discuss the historical relationship between international law and imperialism during the nineteenth century. When it does feature, focus tends to be on the Scramble for Africa, and the treaties concluded between European powers and African polities in which sovereignty and territory were ceded. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, Inge Van Hulle brings a fresh new perspective to this traditional narrative. She reviews the use and creation of legal instruments that expanded or delineated the boundaries between British jurisdiction and African communities in West Africa, and uncovers the practicality and flexibility with which international legal discourse was employed in imperial contexts. This legal experimentation went beyond treaties of cession, and also encompassed commercial treaties, the abolition of the slave trade, extraterritoriality, and the use of force.

The book argues that, by the 1880s, the legal techniques that were fashioned in the language of international law in West Africa had largely developed their own substantive characteristics. Legal ordering was not done in reference to adjudication before Western courts or the writings of Western lawyers, but in reference to what was deemed politically expedient and practically feasible by imperial agents for the preservation of social peace, commercial interaction, and humanitarian agendas.

--Dan Ernst

Job Alert: History of Slavery in the City of London

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Postdoctoral Researcher: History of Slavery in the City of London, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Nuffield College seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher to research the role of the City of London and its commercial institutions in the eco-system of the transatlantic slave trade and ownership. Co-funded by the global law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, and under the supervision of Professor Andrew Thompson (Professor of Imperial and Global History, Nuffield College), the researcher will contribute to the growing body of scholarly literature on British imperialism and its intersection with transatlantic slavery, exploring the past and bringing it into close dialogue with the present. 

H/t: American Historical Association

CFP: ASLH-Sponsored Panels at the AHA

[We have the following Call for Proposals.  DRE]

Every year, the [American Society for Legal History] is invited to submit sponsored panel proposals for the American Historical Association’s annual meeting. The AHA’s next meeting, in 2022, will be held January 6-9 in New Orleans. If you would like to submit a panel for sponsorship by ASLH, please submit it by February 10 to affiliateproposals@aslh.net. If accepted, the panel proposal will be forwarded by ASLH to the AHA by February 15.

Questions? Use the email address listed above or visit the AHA’s affiliate annual meeting page.

von Bernstorff, Dann, and others on international law and decolonization

Jochen von Bernstorff (Tubingen Law) and Philipp Dann (Humboldt University Berlin) have co-edited The Battle for International Law: South-North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era, which came out with Cambridge University Press in 2019. From the press: 

This volume provides the first comprehensive analysis of international legal debates between 1955 and 1975 related to the formal decolonization process. It is during this era, couched between classic European imperialism and a new form of US-led Western hegemony, that fundamental legal debates took place over a new international legal order for a decolonised world. The book argues that this era presents in essence a battle, a battle that was fought out in particular over the premises and principles of international law by diplomats, lawyers, and scholars. In a moment of relative weakness of European powers, 'newly independent states' and international lawyers from the South fundamentally challenged traditional Western perceptions of international legal structures engaging in fundamental controversies over a new international law. The legal outcomes of this battle have shaped the world we live in today.

Contributions from a global set of authors cover contemporary debates on concepts central to the time, such as self-determination, sources and concessions, non-intervention, wars of national liberation, multinational corporations, and the law of the sea. They also discuss influential institutions, such as the United Nations, International Court of Justice, and World Bank. The volume also incorporates contemporary regional approaches to international law in the 'decolonization era' and portraits of important scholars from the Global South.

Table of Contents after the jump: 

Higdon on Migratory Divorce

Michael J. Higdon, University of Tennessee College of Law, has posted If You Grant It, They Will Come: The Enduring Legal Legacy of Migratory Divorce:

Fifty years ago, California became the first state to enact no-fault divorce, making it easier than ever before for individuals to dissolve unsuccessful marriages. Soon every state would follow suit, and over the years much has been written about this national shift in the law of divorce. What has thus far escaped scrutiny, however, is one of the prime casualties of that switch—the phenomenon of migratory divorce. That failure is somewhat ironic given that, although no-fault divorce has existed for just over fifty years, migratory divorce played a prominent role in American legal history for well over a hundred years. Migratory divorce is the process through which people who lived in states where a divorce was difficult to obtain would temporarily relocate to another state—one with more liberal divorce laws—in order to satisfy that state’s domicil so as to obtain a divorce there. Divorce in hand, that person typically returned home to continue life as an unmarried person. Many states, however, opposed recognizing such divorces, giving rise to multiple Supreme Court opinions dealing with when a state is constitutionally required to recognize such a decree. Contemporaneous with that debate, a large number of Americans fiercely opposed the practice of migratory divorce altogether, fearing the impact it was having on the sanctity of marriage. As a result, there were a number of proposals over the years for dealing with the “problem,” primarily involving constitutional amendments and uniform laws. In light of this history, it is the position of this Article that the era of migratory divorce offers an invaluable resource for those studying not only the development, but also the continuing evolution of the American family law. Accordingly, this Article chronicles that legal phenomenon, offering detailed analysis of the various social, legal, and political influences that ultimately shaped this unique time in American history. The purpose in doing so is to, first, ensure that this fascinating period in American history is not forgotten, but more importantly, to distill the legal lessons this era gave rise to—lessons that are highly instructive to contemporary scholars, courts, and policy makers alike as they continue to wrestle with the emerging problems facing the law of domestic relations. 

--Dan Ernst

"Painting Constitutional Law": Cortada's Depictions of Supreme Court Cases from Florida, With Legal Commentary

New from Brill is Painting Constitutional Law: Xavier Cortada’s Images of Constitutional Rights, edited M.C. Mirow and Howard M. Wasserman:

In May It Please the Court, artist Xavier Cortada portrays ten significant decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States that originated from people, places, and events in Florida. These cases cover the rights of criminal defendants, the rights of free speech and free exercise of religion, and the powers of states. In Painting Constitutional Law, scholars of constitutional law analyse the paintings and cases, describing the law surrounding the cases and discussing how Cortada captures these foundational decisions, their people, and their events on canvas. This book explores new connections between contemporary art and constitutional law.

Chapter 1 May It Please the Court: Of Florida, from Florida, for Florida
Howard M. Wasserman

Chapter 2 Legal Iconography and Painting Constitutional Law
M.C. Mirow

Chapter 3 Xavier Cortada: Socially Engaged Activist Artist
Renée D. Ater

Chapter 4 Gideon v. Wainwright: The Surprising Power of a Prisoner Petition
Paul Marcus and Mary Sue Backus

Chapter 5 Williams v. Florida: What’s in a Number? Jury Function and Jury Numbers
Jenny E. Carroll

Chapter 6 Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo: Freedom of Speech for Whom?
Leslie C. Kendrick

Chapter 7 Proffitt v. Florida: Distorting Death
Corinna Barrett Lain

Chapter 8 Palmore v. Sidoti: The Troubling Effects of ‘Private Biases’
Linda C. McClain

Chapter 9 Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah: The Meaning of Free Exercise: Equality and Beyond
Kathleen A. Brady

Chapter 10 Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida: Sovereignty and the Eleventh Amendment Imag(in)ed
James E. Pfander

Chapter 11 Bush v. Gore: Haste Makes Mistakes
Erwin Chemerinsky

Chapter 12 Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection: On Art, Law, and the Power of the Sea
Laura S. Underkuffler

Chapter 13 Florida v. Jardines: The Distortions of Implied Artistic License
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

--Dan Ernst

Malcolm to Lecture on Benedict Arnold

The first lecture in a four-part series sponsored by the Norwich Historical Society in collaboration with the Connecticut League of History Organization will be delivered by Joyce Lee Malcom, George Mason University, the author of The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold: An American Life, on that Norwich-born figure's "complicated life."  The lecture, which will be held Thursday, Jan. 28, at 3 p.m. via Zoom, is is "free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required, here.

--Dan Ernst

Barzun on Skinner and Taylor

Charles L. Barzun, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted Quentin Skinner v. Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reasoning in History, Philosophy, and Law, which is forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities:

One can ask two different questions about a given social, political, or legal practice. First, how, if at all, do the ideas embodied in that practice explain its development or current prevalence? Second, should the practice be advanced, abandoned, or revised in some way? According to today’s disciplinary conventions, the first question is an historical or explanatory one, whereas the second is a philosophical or normative one. But this prompts more questions. Specifically, how, if at all, do the answers to these two questions depend on each other? That is, to what degree, if any, must one evaluate or assess a practice in order to explain its social acceptance? And conversely, how, if at all, should the historical explanation of a practice bear on our normative evaluation of it?

This short essay takes up these questions. It does so by examining a debate that took place over several years between the historian Quentin Skinner and the philosopher Charles Taylor. That debate illustrates well the assumptions of each scholar’s home discipline because both scholars give voice to, yet also challenge, those assumptions. Indeed, I will argue that, despite their apparent disagreements, Skinner and Taylor end up forging common methodological ground with respect to the relevance of historical explanation to philosophical evaluation and vice versa. It turns out that Taylor’s philosophical anthropology looks a lot like Skinner’s intellectual archeology. I conclude by suggesting that traditional common-law reasoning proceeds on that same common methodological ground occupied by Taylor and Skinner. If that’s right, their exchange may tell us something important about the perennial question of whether law qualifies as a distinct discipline of knowledge.

–Dan Ernst

ASIL certificate of merit for Hirsch

Francine Hirsch (University of Wisconsin-Madison) has received recognition for her book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II. The book has been awarded a 2021 Certificate of Merit for a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship by the American Society of International Law (ASIL). We announced the book's publication here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Breen on "The Origins of Immigration’s Home within the Department of Justice . . ."

The University of Hawai'i Law Review has published "Labor, Law Enforcement, and 'Normal Times': The Origins of Immigration’s Home within the Department of Justice and the Evolution of Attorney General Control over Immigration Adjudications," by Jennifer Breen (Syracuse University College of Law). Here's the abstract:

This article aims to contribute a new perspective to the extensive scholarship historicizing the evolution of immigration law and policy in the United States by examining the 1940 move of the immigration agencies out of the Department of Labor and into the Department of Justice. This initiated a fundamental reorganization of the administrative state surrounding immigration, by moving immigration enforcement and adjudication out of a civilian agency focused on labor standards and other humanitarian concerns into an agency tasked with criminal law enforcement. With this reorganization as context, the second part of this article examines the Attorney General’s power to review immigration adjudications, arguing that the Attorneys General of President George W. Bush worked a profound transformation in the norms and actual use of this power. Specifically, Attorney General review is now accomplished solely via self-referral, a previously rare use of the power that has now become the exclusive means of Attorney General review.

Studying these two issues in tandem reveals an administrative system designed in crisis to respond to the threat of war yet stubbornly persistent in its growth and entrenchment over the years. The historical analysis of this article foregrounds the question of whether these roles are appropriate or whether a reorientation of the purpose and goals of our immigration system around the issues of labor and humanitarian concerns would better serve the individuals within the system and the nation as a whole. 

The full article is available here.

-- Karen Tani

CFP: ASLH 2021

 [We have the following, updated Call for Papers for the 2021 annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.  DRE]

The Program Committee of the ASLH invites proposals for complete panels and individual papers for the 2021 meeting to be held November 4-6 in New Orleans. Panels and papers on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome.  We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography.  Due to the cancellation of the Society’s 2020 in-person conference, some of the panel slots for the 2021 conference will be filled by previously accepted proposals. However, there is ample room on the program for new submissions and we look forward to developing a rich and diverse program for our meeting in New Orleans.

The Program Committee welcomes traditional panel proposals (1 chair, 1-2 commentators, 3-4 paper presentations), and other forms of structured presentation for a 90-minute slot, including lightning round (1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters for a few minutes each on projects in a related field at any stage of development), skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters), or roundtable format (1-2 chairs, 3-4 presenters). The Committee will also consider author-meets-reader panel proposals concerning books with a publication date of 2020. We encourage panels that put two or three books in conversation, with up to three commentators total. Requirements for proposals each type of session are outlined below.

Panel Type: Traditional

Format: 1 chair, 3-4 participants, 1-2 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, up to 300 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Lightening Round
Format: 1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Skills/Pedagogical Session
Format: 1 chair, 3-4 presenters
Session abstract/description: Yes, up to 300 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Roundtable
Format: 1-2 chairs, 2-3 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Author meets Readers
Format: 1-2 chairs, 2-3 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: No
Panelist CVs: Yes

As a general matter, we will not be able to accommodate special scheduling requests, so prospective presenters, chairs, and commentators at the main conference should plan to be available on Friday, November 5, and Saturday, November 6.  The ASLH has a strict one-appearance policy. Prospective participants may submit proposals for multiple sessions, with the understanding that the panel chair will be responsible for promptly finding an appropriate substitute member for any session from which a participant has to withdraw.

The Program Committee encourages panels that include participants from groups historically under-represented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

Limited financial assistance (covering airfare and ground transportation only) is available for presenters in need, with priority given to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and scholars from abroad.

The members of the Program Committee are Fahad Bishara, Eliga Gould, Sophia Lee, Tahirih Lee, Alison Lefkovitz, Cynthia Nicoletti, Bhavani Raman, Karl Shoemaker, Simon Stern, and Victor Uribe. The co-chairs of the Program Committee are professors Kristin Collins (collinsk@bu.edu) and Ari Bryen (ari.z.bryen@vanderbilt.edu).

All program presenters must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. All proposals must be submitted through the ASLH website, which will be available to take submissions shortly.

The submission portal will open on February 15, 2021 and will close on March 15, 2021.

Weekend Roundup

• The Fordham Law Review recently published a symposium on the legacy of Senator Birch Bayh, whose accomplishments include helping draft the 25th Amendment. It's titled "Celebrating the Impact of Senator Birch Bayh: A Lasting Legacy on the Constitution and Beyond." The symposium is among the many 25th amendment resources on the Fordham Law website.
  

• Our friends at the Federal Judicial History Office of the Federal Judicial Center has posted a new contribution to its Spotlight on Judicial history series: A Woman Appears In the Supreme Court: Belva Lockwood’s Career in the Federal Court, by Christine Lamberson, Director of the Office.

• In Made by History at the Washington Post: Elizabeth D. Katz on Kamala Harris and the history of women's right to hold office. 

• Here's what happened when Courtney E. Thompson (whose book we announced recently here) ran the 1776 Report through TurnItIn. 

• 
  Our blogger Mitra Sharafi won a teaching award at Wisconsin.
  

• New online in the AJLH: Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen, “From Disputation Hall to High Office: Swedish Students' Legal Dissertations at German and Dutch Universities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.”

•  We were reminded that James Boyd White’s Keep Law Alive (Carolina Academic Press, 2019) speaks to recent events.
  

• ICYMI:  Matthew Gabriele on Vikings, Crusaders, Confederates: Misunderstood Historical Imagery at the January 6 Capitol Insurrection (AHA Perspectives).  Mary Frances Berry et al. on DJT's legacy (BBC News).  Patti Minter on the inauguration (13WBKO).  Annette Gordon-Reed on slavery and today (Texas Public Radio).
  

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

Schmidt on Theodor Sternberg and the "Closet of Conceptualism"

Over at the blog "History | Sexuality | Law," Katharina Isabel Schmidt, a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University and a JSD candidate in law at the Yale Law School, has posted Theodor Sternberg and the Closet of Conceptualism.  The essay commences:

Sometime in the mid-1930s, German jurist Theodor Sternberg (1878-1950) concluded that law and love were incompatible. In one of his “erotosophical” fragments, he claimed that affective bonds thrived under anarchy. Love, for Sternberg had to be free from egoism and compulsion, eschew both duty and obligation. “Coitus,” especially, was divine in origin—God’s love for the world incarnate—and just like God’s love was limitless, sexuality knew no law.

--Dan Ernst

Barnes, "What Were Shareholder Rights in the Wake of the American Revolution?"

The Florida State University Business Review has published "What Were Shareholder Rights in the Wake of the American Revolution?" by Victoria Barnes (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History). The abstract:

This Article investigates the common law rights of shareholders in the wake of the American Revolution. It analyzes the rights and powers that shareholders relied on in litigation about corporate governance disputes, in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The relevant rules were imported into the literature of Anglo-American commercial law and linked to the later development of fiduciary duties and the business judgment rule. This Article shows that, at this point in history, these doctrines did not exist, as such, in the fiber of Anglo-American corporate law. The analysis demonstrates that shareholders had strong powers which could be exercised through litigation. These powers included the ability to dissolve the company, remove management, and stop further use of the corporate name. This discussion of shareholder rights at the time of the foundation of the United States is of particular importance to those states that still have a strong equitable jurisdiction.

The full article is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Pardo on Bankruptcy and Slavery in New Orleans

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted On Bankruptcy’s Promethean Gap: Building Enslaving Capacity into the Antebellum Administrative State, which is forthcoming in the Fordham Urban Law Journal:

As the United States contends with the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal bankruptcy law is one tool that can be used to resolve the financial distress suffered by individuals and businesses. When implementing this remedy, the question arises whether the law’s application should be viewed as limited to addressing private debt matters, without regard for the public interest. This Article answers the question by looking to modern U.S. bankruptcy law’s first forebear, the 1841 Bankruptcy Act, which Congress enacted in response to the depressed economic conditions following the Panic of 1837. That legislation created a judicially administered system that nationalized bankrupts’ assets, some of which featured prominently in the business of slavery. This Article focuses on a specific episode from New Orleans, which at the time was the nation’s third-most-populous city, had the nation’s largest slave market, and had one of the nation’s largest money markets. One of the bankruptcy cases commenced in that city involved the administration and sale of Banks Arcade, which was a premier commercial exchange for auctioning enslaved Black Americans. This history about how the federal administrative state restructured one component of the U.S. slavery complex should prompt critical reflection on how present-day bankruptcy law manages the fallout from a financial crisis. This Article concludes that courts have the authority to permit the public to advocate for its interests in distressed assets redeployed through the federal bankruptcy system.

–Dan Ernst

Ireton on freedom suits in the early Spanish empire

Chloe L. Ireton (University College London) has published "Black Africans' Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire" in the Renaissance Quarterly (23 Dec. 2020) 1-43. Here's the abstract: 

This article explores how some enslaved Black Africans litigated for their freedom in Spanish royal courts in the sixteenth century on the basis that—as Christians—they had been unjustly enslaved in Africa. With a focus on the port cities of Seville and Cartagena, I explore how freedom litigation suits illuminate how individuals from starkly different social worlds and intellectual milieus—who inhabited the same urban sites—affected and shaped one another's intellectual landscapes. I trace how enslaved Africans’ epistemologies of just slavery shaped broader discourses on the just enslavement of Africans in the Spanish Empire.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Chin, "A Nation of White Immigrants: State and Federal Racial Preferences for White Noncitizens"

The Boston University Law Review has published "A Nation of White Immigrants: State and Federal Racial Preferences for White Noncitizens," by Gabriel Jackson Chin (University of California, Davis). The abstract:

U.S. law, of course, drew many lines based on race from the earliest days of slavery and colonialism. It is also well known that the government discriminated against noncitizens in favor of citizens in areas such as licensing and land ownership. This Article proposes that during the long Jim Crow era, there was an additional body of racially discriminatory state and federal law that discriminated against noncitizens of particular disfavored races. This body of law has not been fully recognized or described. Because the federal government and many state governments had policies encouraging white immigration, they sought methods to discriminate against nonwhite noncitizens, primarily Asians, without also burdening white noncitizens. The “declaration of intention” to naturalize, a required part of the naturalization process, was a key device used to effectuate this policy. Between 1790 and 1952, eligibility for nationalization was racially restricted, such that only members of preferred races could file a declaration of intent. Therefore, offering benefits to so-called “declarants” intentionally and effectively favored white immigrants. Hundreds of state and federal laws offered benefits to declarants with respect to a wide range of opportunities, including voting, land ownership, public benefits, military service, public employment, government contracting, and occupational licensing. This combination of state and federal law offered white immigrants in many parts of the United States an opportunity for substantial equality with white citizens from the moment they arrived in the United States, while it simultaneously restricted competition from—and maintained the subordinated status of—noncitizens of color. This body of law should be considered when evaluating the history of racial discrimination in this country and its present effects. 

The full article is available here. 

-- Karen Tani

de la Rasilla's "International Law and History Modern Interfaces"

Ignacio de la Rasilla, Wuhan University, has published International Law and History
Modern Interfaces with cambridge University Press as part of the series Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law:

This interdisciplinary exploration of the modern historiography of international law invites a diverse assessment of the indissoluble unity of the old and the new in the most global of all legal disciplines. The study of the history of international law does not only serve a better understanding of how international law has evolved to become what it is and what it is not. Its histories, which rethink the past in the present, also influence our perception of contemporary matters in international law and our understandings of how they may potentially unfold. This multi-perspectival enquiry into the dominant modes of international legal history and its fundamental debates may also help students of both international law and history to identify the historical approaches that best suit their international legal-historical perspectives and best address their historical and legal research questions.

Some endorsements:

'A fascinating and comprehensive analysis of scholarly trends in international legal history. In recent decades, the historical study of international law has expanded dramatically. De la Rasilla surveys the many perspectives and methodologies brought to the subject, offering both a guide and a thoughtful analytic perspective of his own.' David Kennedy, Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Institute of Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School

'In recent years, the interest in the history of international law as a field of academic scrutiny has exploded. The rapid expansion of international law’s historiography and the proliferation of different approaches and methodologies have created an urgent need for guidance for the scholar who wants to survey the field and plot the course of her own contributions. In combining insightful discussions with an impressive knowledge of older and recent literature, Ignacio de la Rasilla has provided them with both a compass and a map.' Randall Lesaffer, Professor of Legal History at the Universities of Leuven and Tilburg and Series Editor of The Cambridge History of International Law

'Ignacio de la Rasilla has done a great scholarly service by digesting and organising the vast and various literatures on history and international law. His lucid, learned and comprehensive book is now an indispensable guide to this burgeoning field.' David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Harvard University and Affiliated Faculty, Harvard Law School

--Dan Ernst

Thompson on crime, violence, and phrenology

Courtney E. Thompson (Mississippi State University) has published An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America with Rutgers University Press. From the publisher: 

An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.

 Praise for the book:

"Courtney Thompson provocatively measures the face, head, and soul of American phrenology and invites us to a discovery of the historical origins of scientific criminology." - Stephen Casper

"In this compelling book, Courtney Thompson takes readers to the prisons, courtrooms, and streets of antebellum cities to expose just how phrenology claimed authority on criminality. Rich in detail and analysis, An Organ of Murder vividly illustrates the long history of making criminal minds and bodies into objects of medical and scientific inquiry." - Carla Bittel

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Tulsa Law Review's Annual Book Review Issue

Tulsa Law Review 55:2 (2020), a book review issue, includes essays of interest to legal historians:

Reassessing the Historical Foundations of Originalism, by Lee Borocz-Johnson

The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, by Jonathan Gienapp

Forging the American Nation, 1787-1791: James Madison and the Federalist Revolution, by Shlomo Slonim

Triangulating Law and Political-Economic Development, by Jonathan Chausovsky

The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History, by James Ely Jr.

Child Labor in America: The Epic Struggle to Protect Children, by John A. Fliter

Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic, by Eric Lomazoff

Popular Legitimacy: A Tenuous Proposition, by Emily Pears

Building a Revolutionary State: The Legal Transformation of New York, 1776-1783, by Howard Pashman

We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution, by George Van Cleve

The Many Faces of American Captivity and Its Legal Matrix: A Review Essay, by Christian Pinnen

University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War, by Alfred L. Brophy

Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court, by Paul Finkelman

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest, by William Kiser

Free Speech Idealism, by Timothy Zick

The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Compromise, by Laura Weinrib

Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, by Keith E. Whittington
 
Who Is Responsible for Presidential Supremacy? by Kathleen Tipler

Supreme Court Expansion of Presidential Power: Unconstitutional Leanings, by Louis Fisher

President Obama: Constitutional Aspirations and Executive Actions, by Louis Fisher

Reclaiming Accountability: Transparence, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, by Heidi Kitrosser

--Dan Ernst

Mistry & Gurman, eds., "Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy"

Columbia University Press has published Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (2021), edited by Kaeten Mistry (University of East Anglia) and Hannah Gurman (New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study). A description from the Press:

The twenty-first century witnessed a new age of whistleblowing in the United States. Disclosures by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others have stoked heated public debates about the ethics of exposing institutional secrets, with roots in a longer history of state insiders revealing privileged information. Bringing together contributors from a range of disciplines to consider political, legal, and cultural dimensions, Whistleblowing Nation is a pathbreaking history of national security disclosures and state secrecy from World War I to the present.

The contributors explore the complex politics, motives, and ideologies behind the revelation of state secrets that threaten the status quo, challenging reductive characterizations of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors. They examine the dynamics of state retaliation, political backlash, and civic contests over the legitimacy and significance of the exposure and the whistleblower. The volume considers the growing power of the executive branch and its consequences for First Amendment rights, the protection and prosecution of whistleblowers, and the rise of vast classification and censorship regimes within the national-security state. Featuring analyses from leading historians, literary scholars, legal experts, and political scientists, Whistleblowing Nation sheds new light on the tension of secrecy and transparency, security and civil liberties, and the politics of truth and falsehood.

Advance praise:

As Kaeten Mistry and Hannah Gurman demonstrate in this brilliant and compelling collection, the fates of national security whistleblowing and democracy are linked. These sharply written essays examine the characteristics of whistleblowers, the way secrecy and whistleblowing have changed over time, the interests at stake when the government prosecutes whistleblowers, and much more. Whistleblowing Nation is essential reading on the tensions between government secrecy and the transparency essential in a democracy. -- Mary L. Dudziak

For a list of contributors, check out the Table of Contents. More information is available here. 

H/t New Books in Law, where you can find an interview with the editors.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• The Viennese Legal History Society (Wiener Rechtsgeschichtliche Gesellschaft) holds its events online via Zoom during the pandemic and opens the talks now for the wider public.  On 19 January, at 18:50 Vienna, Professor Thomas Simon (Vienna) will give a talk in German with the title: "Christlich", "deutsch", "ständisch": Die sog. "Maiverfassung" 1934 und der "Autoritäre Ständestaat". Versuch einer verfassungsgeschichtlichen Einordnung.  Zoom link.

• Shannon McSheffrey, Concordia, on Disorder, Riot, and Governance in Early Tudor London: Evil May Day, 1517, in the Late Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, February 5, 2021, 5:30PM - 7:00PM.
  

• On Monday, March 8, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:00pm, former LHB Guest Blogger Thomas McSweeney, William and Mary Law School, will discuss his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2020) with Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard Law School.  Register and more here.

• The University of Nebraska, Lincoln is advertising a postdoctoral research associateship for “a project manager of a collaborative team collecting and processing habeas corpus petitions to design and populate a robust database that will allow researchers to demonstrate the many interpersonal and institutional relationships evident in these claims to freedom while also assessing their significance and value within the larger body of American jurisprudence.”  More.
  

• New Books in Law has an interview with Virginia Torrie on her book Reinventing Bankruptcy Law, which we've previously spotlighted.
  

• Jane Dailey, University of Chicago,  discusses her new book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History, and "what America’s history with lynch mobs can teach us about the attack on the Capitol" with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles on Legal Talk Network. 
  

• Nial Osborough, "Ireland’s greatest legal historian," is dead (Irish Times).
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has lesson plans for its video, "The Supreme Court and the 1876 Presidential Election."  
  

• The Organization of American Historians has issued a statement January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
  

• “The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is now accepting nominations for the 2020 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article in US intellectual history by an emerging scholar."
  

• Over at Environment, Law, and History, David Schorr notices Thomas Le Roux’s extended review of Chad Montrie's The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (U Cal Press, 2018).
  

• 
  Supervisory Curator Herman Eberhardt of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library explores “historic artifacts, documents, photographs, and film from the inaugural ceremonies of 1933, 1937, 1941, and 1945" on January 20 at 2PM.  More.
  

• Legal historical op-eds and other writings on self-pardons, the 25th Amendment, impeachment, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and related matters are legion.  Here is a smattering: The US Senate History office on the post-resignation impeachment of William Belknap. William Eskridge says self-pardoning isn't a thing (WaPo).  Mark Graber on the second impeachment (WBALTV).  How scholars interpret "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" (NatGeo).  John D. Feerick on our nation's history with presidential inability and succession (The Hill).  Eric Foner and Gerard N. Magliocca on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (WaPo).  Joanne Freeman ad Geoffrey Stone on sedition (NYT).  Gregory Ablavsky compares the assault on the Capitol with the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 (Stanford News).
  

• Also Phil Magness and the Pacific Legal Foundation on the 1619 Project (PLF).
  

• Update: Shirley Abrahamson's NYT obituary.
  

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

Knowles on Learning the Law in 1830s Massachusetts

Helen J. Knowles, SUNY Oswego, has posted Learning the Law in 1830s Massachusetts: The Contrasting Experiences of Wendell Phillips and Lysander Spooner:

Wendell Phillips (NYPL)

Lysander Spooner (NYPL)

In the 1840s, Lysander Spooner and Wendell Phillips espoused opposing abolitionist interpretations of the United States Constitution. The former argued that the document did not sanction the enslavement of human beings, the latter denounced the text as a proslavery “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” This essay explores the effects of their contrasting legal educations on these theories. In the 1830s, Spooner worked as a legal apprentice under the tutelage of John Davis, Charles Allen, and Emory Washburn, three prominent lawyers (and politicians) working in Worcester, Massachusetts. By contrast, Phillips, consistent with his Boston Brahmin ancestry, attended the then-nascent Harvard Law School. The essay concludes that Spooner’s legal philosophy shows a far greater indebtedness to his legal education than does Phillips’s. This argument is defended by drawing on the voluminous correspondence and papers of both Phillips and Spooner, and the writings of their legal tutors and mentors.

--Dan Ernst

A Blurb for Bartie's "Free Hands and MInds"

Some time ago, we posted a notice of Susan Bartie’s Free Hands and Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars.  At the time, we had no endorsement to post with it.  We have one now:

Free Hands and Minds is centered in absolutely first rate, short-form—longer than an article and shorter than a book—intellectual biographies of three Australian legal scholars, each active at the time when Australian law teaching was professionalizing years after World War II.  Peter Brett who took a Harvard JSD under Henry Hart centered his work  on Criminal Law; Alice Erh-Soon Tay, first on comparisons with and between the Marxist legal systems of China and Russia and later on Human rights; and Geoffrey Sawer the law governing Australian federalism seen from the perspective of political and social circumstances at the time of the relevant decisions.  For each, the scholarship is taken seriously, the life is taken seriously and the academic surround is taken seriously, pretty much all at the same time.  No one could ask more from work in this form.

                    --John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo School of Law

--Dan Ernst

Gooday, Wilf and friends on patent cultures

 Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds) and Steven Wilf (University of Connecticut) have co-edited Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

This book explores how dissimilar patent systems remain distinctive despite
international efforts towards harmonization. The dominant historical account describes harmonization as ever-growing, with familiar milestones such as the Paris Convention (1883), the World Intellectual Property Organization's founding (1967), and the formation of current global institutions of patent governance. Yet throughout the modern period, countries fashioned their own mechanisms for fostering technological invention. Notwithstanding the harmonization project, diversity in patent cultures remains stubbornly persistent. No single comprehensive volume describes the comparative historical development of patent practices. Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective seeks to fill this gap. Tracing national patenting from imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century to our time, this work asks fundamental questions about the limits of globalization, innovation's cultural dimension, and how historical context shapes patent policy. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the contested role of patents in the modern world.

 Here's the Table of Contents:

Part I. Introductory

1. Diversity versus harmonization in patent history: an overview · Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf

2. The 1883 Paris Convention and the impossible unification of industrial property · Gabriel Galvez-Behar

3. One for all? The American patent system and harmonization of international intellectual property laws · Zorina Khan

Part II. Americas: Technical Imaginaries

4. US patent models as specimen and specification · Courtney Fullilove

5. Mexico and the puzzle of partial harmonization: nineteenth-century patent Law reconsidered · Edward Beatty

6. An early patent system in Latin America: the Chilean case, 1840s–1900s · Bernardita Escobar Andrae

Part III. Southern Europe

7. The Italian patent system during the long nineteenth century: from privileges to property rights in a latecomer industrializing country · Alessandro Nuvolari and Michelangelo Vasta

8. Industrial 'property', law, and the politics of invention in Greece, 1900–1940 · Stathis Arapostathis

9. Mediation and harmonization: construction of the Spanish patent system in the twentieth century · Ana Romero de Pablos

Part IV. Central and Eastern Europe

10. The struggle over 'the social function of intellectual work in the economy of nations': engineers, patent law, and enterprise inventions in Germany and their European significance · Karl Hall

11. Multiple loyalties: hybrid patent regimes in the Habsburg empire and its successor states · Karl Hall

12. Patent debates on invention from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union · Karl Hall

Part V. Asia

13. Patent policy in India under the British Raj: a bittersweet story of empire and innovation · Rajesh Sagar

14. The India twist to patent culture: investigating its history · Tania Sebastian

15. The life and times of patent no. 2,670: industrial property and public knowledge in early twentieth-century Japan · Kjell Ericson

Part VI. Epilogue

16. Postscript · Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

A Panel on Presidential Self-Pardons

We have word of a panel co-sponsored by the Miller Center for Public Affairs and the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy at the University of Virginia School of Law: Can the president pardon himself? with John Harrison, Brian Kalt, Bernadette Meyler, and Micah Schwartzman, Friday, January 15, 2021, 11:00AM - 12:00PM (EST):

As President Trump prepares to leave office, can he give himself a presidential pardon? What are the legal arguments for and against self-pardoning? What does the original meaning of the Constitution say about this issue, and is there precedent for it? This expert panel will focus on the constitutional basis of the pardon power, its history and limits, the relationship between pardoning and impeachment, and the legal and political implications of an attempt by the president to self-pardon.

--Dan Ernst

Wozniakowski on Tax Policy and US Territorial Expansion

Tomasz P. Wozniakowski, Hertie School of Governance, has posted The Fiscal Origins of American Power: Federal Tax Policy and US Territorial Expansion in the Nineteenth Century:

In this working paper, I argue that United States (US) territory quadrupled within the first three generations since 1789 because, in the nineteenth century, the US developed a fiscal-military state capable of mobilizing considerable resources without provoking any major tax rebellion. Relying on indirect taxes—customs duties and excises—meant that the federal government could draw on a stable and uncontentious stream of revenue. This fiscal capacity allowed the US government to finance different methods of its territorial expansion, including warfare and purchase.

–Dan Ernst

Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History

We’ve received word of a new book series, Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History, edited by Aniceto Masferrer, University of Valencia, and Heikki Tapio Pihlajamäki, University of Helsinki:

This series covers the general area of comparative legal history, including contributions focusing on both 'internal' legal history, i.e., doctrinal and disciplinary developments in the law, and 'external' legal history, i.e., legal ideas and institutions in wider contexts. Considering the various legal traditions worldwide, the series also welcomes works dealing with other laws and customs from around the globe. Temporal or geographical in approach, the series will consider both legal and similar law-like normative traditions. Works encompassing views from different schools of thought and contributions from comparative and transnational historiography, including interdisciplinary approaches, are encouraged. With a focus on higher level research in the form of monographs and edited collections, proposals for supplementary reading and textbooks are also welcomed.

Members of the editorial board appear here.

–Dan Ernst

Serious Fun: A conference with & around Schlegel

John Henry Schlegel (credit)

Serious Fun: A conference with & around Schlegel! is now online in the Buffalo Law Review.  It honors John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law. We note that there are no women among the contributors.

Symposium Introductions

Foreword
David A. Westbrook

Tuesday Afternoons with Schlegel
Barry Cushman

Symposium Essays

The Tale of Two Harts; A Schlegelian Dialectic
Charles L. Barzun

Of Sheepdogs and Ventriloquists: Government Lawyers in Two New Deal Agencies
Daniel R. Ernst

Transmission of Mastery
James A. Gardner

The Schlegelians v. the Langdellians on Legal Education
Robert W. Gordon

John Henry Schlegel and The Muppet Show
Alfred S. Konefsky

Normativity and Objectivity in Historical Writing (My Dinner with Schlegel)
Matt Steilen

“Read What Was Never Written”
Christopher Tomlins

“I Am Better At Narrative Than Analytical History”: Schlegel’s Version of Intellectual History
G. Edward White

Symposium Afterword

Saying Thanks with Some Self-Reflection
John Henry Schlegel

--Mitra Sharafi

Tuori on Europe and scholars in exile

 Kaius Tuori (University of Helsinki) has published Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars and the Battle for the Future of Europe with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: 

European legal integration is often justified with reference to the inherent unity of European legal traditions that extend to ancient Rome. This book explores the invention of this tradition, tracing it to a group of legal scholars divided by the onslaught of Nazi terror and totalitarianism in Europe. As exiles in Britain and the US, its formulators worked to build bridges between the Continental and the Atlantic legal traditions, incorporating ideas such as rule of law, liberty and equality to the European heritage. Others joined the Nazi revolution, which promoted its own idea of European unity. At the end of World War Two, natural law and human rights were incorporated into the European project. The resulting narrative of Europe, one that outlined human rights, rule of law and equality, became consequently a unifying factor during the Cold War as the self-definition against the challenge of communism.

 Praise for the book:

"Kaius Tuori convincingly demonstrates how a narrative from Roman law to European identity was constructed in the twentieth century, and the ideological purposes the fiction was made to serve, including across the divide between National Socialist Europe and a self-styled continent of human rights. There is much to learn from Tuori's erudition and insight." - Samuel Moyn

"Tuori is to be commended for producing a rich and textured work filled with important insights. This book will undoubtedly reframe the debate about the ideologies supporting the narratives of European legal history to a significant extent." - Paul J. du Plessis

"A deeply learned investigation of a somber history, Kaius Tuori's Empire of Law tracks the fate of the study of Roman law through the Nazi years and into the post-War effort to rebuild Europe. Indispensable reading for understanding the Roman legal tradition in Western history." - James Whitman

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Mirow on Spanish Justice for British Residents in Colonial Florida

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has posted Judges for British Subjects in Spanish East Florida, which is forthcoming in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy:

Great Britain transferred East Florida with its capital St. Augustine to Spain in 1783. From the early months of 1783 until November 1785, the province experienced overlapping assertions of jurisdiction during a protracted transitional period. Arriving in mid-1784, Spanish Governor Zéspedes encountered a massive British population that did not leave as quickly as imperial authorities or treaty drafters anticipated. Lacking a legal adviser and instructions from Spanish authorities, Zéspedes asserted Spanish sovereignty through various ad hoc legal innovations. This article addresses his creation of “Judges over His Britannic Majesty’s Subjects” resident in Spanish East Florida. The judges appointed were not trained in English law; British subjects resisted their assertions of jurisdiction, the procedures they employed, and their attempts to provide Spanish justice for their British guests. This episode exposes jurisdictional battles tied to sovereignty in a legally plural, imperially liminal place and moment. It reveals gaps in legal understanding between imperial actors and established prejudices between British common law and Spanish colonial law (derecho indiano) in criminal civil, and procedural matters. This distance was exacerbated by a lack of informed legal experts. British residents yearned for a stable place and stable law as they settled their affairs and departed East Florida. The Spanish leadership responded to these desires with assertions of absolute sovereignty and instances of legal ingenuity such as Judges for British Subjects.

–Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Amanda Frost, Bronfman Professor of Law & Government, American University Washington College of Law, will be speaking on her book You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers online at Politics & Prose on January 28.  More. 
  

• Linda Kerber and Lisa Moses Leff will comment at the first Washington History Seminar of 2021 on at 4 PM ET Monday when David Nasaw discusses his new book, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War.  Register here; watch here.

• Applications for the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History are due on January 15.  This two-week program of the American Society for Legal History for early career scholars will take place June 13-26, 2021.  Information here.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Gregory P. Downs (UC Davis) and Kate Masur (Northwestern University), "Yes, Wednesday’s attempted insurrection is who we are."
  

• If you're working on death, this Call for a Royal Holloway virtual conference (15-16 April 2021) may be of interest. Proposals for Until Death Do Us Part: Historical Perspectives on Death and Those Left Behind, 1300-1900 are due Jan.29, 2021.

• And here's another Call for a virtual conference, from the University of Reading (27 April 2021): Medieval Government Finance: Innovation and Experimentation. Proposals due by 19 Feb. 2021.

• “When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of conferences and public talks, the editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era organized a series of webinars with historians to discuss new books and research in Civil War era scholarship. The webinars are free, registration required, and the recordings are posted on the JCWE’s YouTube channel.”  The lineup for the first five months of 2021 lineup is here. 

• New from the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore: a brief introduction to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution.

• ICYMI:  Holly Brewer explains that Thomas Jefferson did not rig the 1800 election (Washington Monthly).  George F. Will doesn’t care for the Slaughterhouse Cases (WaPo).
  

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