Weekend Roundup

• A recording of that OAH Webinar with Professors Holly Brewer, Michael Klarman, and Donna Schuele on The Supreme Court in Historical Perspective is now available.
  

• John Witte, Emory University, will deliver The Great Awakenings of American Religious Freedom: Evaluating the Latest Supreme Court Teachings as the True Family Lecture at Notre Dame University on Wednesday, September 4, 2024, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm.
  

• A notice of Hendrik Hartog's  Nobody’s Boy and His Pals (Princeton Alumni Weekly).
  

• From Nursing Clio, Jakob Burnham (University of North Texas) on "Domestic Violence between Lived Realities and Colonial Meanings."

• It is paywalled, but Noah Feldman's review of Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind is in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 
  

• The Historians Project of the Brennan Center for Justice has filed a brief by Alex Keyssar, Carol Anderson, J. Morgan Kousser, and Orville Vernon Burton in Nairne v. Landry, a voting rights case.  
  

• “Penn History Department launches political history concentration for undergraduate majors”–which was “was spearheaded by assistant History professor Sarah Gronningsater and History professor Brent Cebul” (Daily Pennsylvanian).
  

• The American Historical Association is sponsoring a Congressional Briefing on American military alliances on Wednesday, September 11 at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2045.  The panelists are Renata Keller (University of Nevada, Reno), Jeremi Suri (University of Texas, Austin), and Colleen Woods (Univ. of Maryland, College Park).
  

• The University of Houston Law Center announces the hiring of, among others, Andrew Lanham, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University and "a legal historian who studies how social protest movements have reshaped civil rights and civil liberties law in the United States."

• The Library of Congress has announced an in person and online "Constitution Day event" on September 11 at 3 p.m. EDT in the Library’s Jefferson Building, room LJ119. "This event will feature Yale Law School’s Sterling Professor of Law Robert Post in an interview with the Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center William Treanor."

• Retired New York Court of Appeals Associate Judge Albert M. Rosenblatt has been designated the historian of New York State's Unified Court System in which capacity he will liaise with the Historical Society of the New York Courts (New York Law Journal).
  

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

Parrillo on Nondelegation and the Embargo Act of 1794

Nicholas R. Parrillo, Yale Law School, has posted Foreign Affairs, Nondelegation, and Original Meaning: Congress's Delegation of Power to Lay Embargoes in 1794, which appears in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review 172 (2024): 1803-1843:

Originalist proponents of a tougher nondelegation doctrine confront the many broad delegations that Congress enacted in the 1790s by claiming that each fell into some exceptional category to which the original nondelegation doctrine was inapplicable or weakly applicable, one being foreign affairs.  There is lively debate on whether the founding generation actually recognized an exception to nondelegation principles for foreign affairs.  This Article, commissioned for a symposium on “The Statutory Foreign Affairs Presidency,” intervenes in the debate by examining the Embargo Authorization Act of 1794, which empowered the President to lay an embargo on all ships in U.S. ports (and/or other classes of ships) if “the public safety shall so require,” for the upcoming five-month congressional recess.  This was a delegation of remarkable power over the U.S. economy, which at the time depended heavily on maritime transport.

An examination of the Act undermines the idea that there existed a foreign-affairs exception to cover it.  Originalist proponents of a tougher nondelegation doctrine claim the doctrine was meant to protect private individual rights of liberty and property, yet Americans in the late 1700s lived in an economy that was more dependent on foreign commerce than it has ever been since, in which a five-month international embargo could be disastrous for private business nationwide.  In this context, an “exception” for foreign affairs would be strange, turning economic reality on its head.  Furthermore, the Act itself flouted any objective or even workable distinction between the foreign and the domestic.  The Act’s unqualified use of the term “embargo” authorized the President to prohibit the departure of all ships, not only those sailing to foreign ports but also to other U.S. ports in the coastwise trade, which was then the main channel of U.S. domestic commerce.  And even if the President were to impose an embargo aimed mainly at international maritime trade, preventing evasion of such a restriction required regulation of the coastwise trade—regulation that contemporaries apparently understood the Act to authorize. 

--Dan Ernst

Fletcher and Lovelace, "Corporate Racial Responsibility"

We missed this one when it first appeared in the Columbia Law Review: Gina-Gail S. Fletcher and H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr. (both of Duke University School of Law), "Corporate Racial Responsibility." Here's the abstract:

The 2020 mass protests in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor had a significant impact on American corporations. Several large public companies pledged an estimated $50 billion to advancing racial equity and committed to various initiatives to internally improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. While many applauded corporations’ willingness to engage with racial issues, some considered it further evidence of corporate capitulation to extreme progressivism at shareholders’ expense. Others, while thinking corporate engagement was long overdue, critiqued corporate commitment as insincere.

Drawing on historical evidence surrounding the passage of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this Article engages with the debate on corporate “racial” responsibility to demonstrate that corporate engagement on race is not new. Indeed, during the struggle to desegregate public accommodations, corporate social responsibility was invoked to encourage voluntary desegregation and avoid federal intervention. Segregation was good business for some; for others, maintaining white supremacy justified any pecuniary losses.

While this Article argues that corporations have a role to play in achieving racial equity, it cautions against reliance on corporate social responsibility to advance racial equality. Past and current iterations of corporate racial responsibility have often represented a market-fundamentalist, value-extractive approach to racial equity that reifies existing racial hierarchies. By valuing racial equity in terms of its potential profitability, corporate racial responsibility can subordinate human dignity to wealth maximization. This Article argues for a more meaningful corporate racial responsibility that addresses the structures and laws undergirding racial inequities within corporations and our larger society.

The full article is available here.

-- Karen Tani

CFP: 2025 Meeting of the Law and Society Association

The Law and Society Association is soliciting participation in its 2025 Annual Meeting. The meeting will take place in Chicago, Illinois, from May 22-25, 2025.

The deadline for our Call for Submissions is October 15, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. ET (USA and Canada). The Program Committee welcomes any scholar studying sociolegal activities to submit an individual paper or session proposal. We recommend scholars interested in proposing a session with a creative format to consult with the Program Committee and the LSA Executive Office (melissa.king@lawandsociety.org) in advance of submitting their proposal. 

More information is available here. 

Information about the LSA's "Law & History" CRN is available here.

-- Karen Tani

CFP: A Research Handbook on Gender, History, and Law

[We have the folllowing CFP.  DRE]

Call for Contributions for Research Handbook on Gender, History, and Law (Edward Elgar)

As part of Edward Elgar's Research Handbooks in Gender and Law Series edited by Robin West and Alexander Maine, this volume on Gender, History, and Law aims to bring together critical and thought-provoking contributions on the most pressing topics, issues and approaches within legal and gender history. The collection aims to set the agenda in the field and serve as the most important and up-to-date point of reference for researchers as well as students, policy-makers, and lawmakers. 

We are aiming for about 30 essays of 8,000-10,000 words by scholars of legal and gender history on any topic that fits within the book's broad themes, including but not limited to gendered history within legal categories such as family, criminal law and international law, on particular historical periods, on specialist topics such as capitalism and labor, sexuality, race, identity, citizenship, the legal profession and courts, and on sources and methodology. 

The Research Handbook will be published in English, but we seek to provide a broad global perspective. To fulfill its aim of providing cross-cutting scholarship in law and history, each contribution should explore perspectives on what it means to do legal history in the chosen area in the context of the author's own approach.

Manuscripts must be original and not published elsewhere, and are due to the editors by July 1, 2025. Publication is anticipated to be in the summer of 2026.

Please submit abstracts by September 30, 2024. For questions and to submit abstracts, please feel free to reach out to any of us.

Rosemary Auchmuty (r.auchmuty@reading.ac.uk)

Caroline Derry (caroline.derry@open.ac.uk)

Danaya Wright (wrightdc@law.ufl.edu)

Reconstruction and Its Legal Legacy: An ICH Seminar

[We have the following announcement from the New-York Historical Society's Institute for Constitutional History, which is not to be confused with the Institute for Constitutional Studies directed  by Maeva Marcus at George Washington University.  DRE]

The New-York Historical Society's Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History's fall seminar has been announced.  The ICH seminar is produced twice per year and designed for graduate students, junior faculty, and other educators, in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. There is no tuition for this seminar. The fall seminar will take place in person throughout November.

Reconstruction and Its Legal Legacy

Meeting Dates & Times: Fridays, November 1, 8, 15, and 22, 2024 | 2–5 pm ET
Instructors: Laura F. Edwards, Martha S. Jones

This seminar will use the lens of legal history to explore the advent of Reconstruction’s short-lived experiment in democracy, through to its intended and unintended consequences today. Once an overlooked chapter labeled “the tragic era,” subsequent histories, beginning with W. E. B. DuBois’s 1935 Black Reconstruction, have examined the era’s transformations, terming it an “unfinished revolution,” a “second American revolution,” and, most recently, a “second American republic.” Reconstruction remade the nation’s legal regime and with it the economic, political, and social order. The same changes determined which Americans – women, immigrants, people of color, and workers – might claim rights and exercise them. Even today, Reconstruction is key to understanding power and governance in the United States. Provisions of 1868’s 14th Amendment – from birthright citizenship, to equal protection and due process, sanctions for insurrection, and voting rights – define core legal values and what people can expect of the government.

Although we encourage students to attend the class in person, livestream participation will be offered to admitted students who do not live in the New York Metropolitan Area or who are unable to attend a class in person.

Instructors: Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University and the author of five books, including A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights. Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

Application Process.  The seminar is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. All participants will be expected to complete the assigned readings and participate in seminar discussions. Although the Institute cannot offer academic credit directly for the seminar, students may be able to earn graduate credit through their home departments by completing an independent research project in conjunction with the seminar. Please consult with your advisor and/or director of graduate studies about these possibilities.

Space is limited. To apply, please submit the following material to ich@nyhistory.org by October 11, 2024: Your C.V. and a short statement on how this seminar will be useful to you in your research, teaching, or professional development.

Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter. For further information, please email Andrew Fletcher at ich@nyhistory.org.

Colonial Legacies in Public Law

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Call for Applications: Colonial Legacies in Public Law: histories, theories, pitfalls and potentials.  Tuesday, January 14, 2025 - Thursday, January 16, 2025, 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM.  Organisers: Mohsin Bhat, Tanzil Chowdhury and Eva Nanopoulos.

The Queen Mary Centre of Law and Society in a Global Context (CLSGC) is thrilled to announce a Masterclass with Professor Philipp Dann that will take place on 14-16 January 2025.

The legacies of empire and colonialism are becoming visible everywhere these days. They shape various debates in public law but also indicate a new phase of globalization. The Masterclass will study these legacies and discuss their various dimensions and implications in comparative constitutional, public international and European Union law. The Class will draw on history and political theory, especially post-/decolonial theories to contextualize public law. It will use examples (such as the concept of development and democracy) to understand how empire and colonialism have shaped constitutional, international and European Union law and their scholarly reflection over time. But it will also turn to the future and ask participants to explore the potentials (and pitfalls) for re-imagining public law and its scholarship in the 21st century through the colonial lens. The Class is an invitation to rethink public law and the role of legal scholarship in a truly global way mindful of the broader legacies of modernity and colonialism.

Please note the start and end times listed are provisional and will be confirmed at a later date.

Overview of the sessions

Session 1: Comparative Constitutional Law, the Southern Turn and Reflexive Globalization – argument and framing

On the first day, the general theme of the class will be introduced and a framework of analysis established. This includes a basic engagement with colonial history and postcolonial thought as well as a reflection on the attention of public law scholarship to these dimensions so far. The class will discuss the overarching argument that a ‘Southern Turn’ and an understanding of colonial legacies provides a foundation to rethink the conceptual vocabulary of public law in the 21st century. Comparative constitutional law is a paramount area for such reflexive rethinking of public law theory.

Session 2: International law and the concept of development

The second day will turn to international law, the scholarship of which was the first to engage with colonial legacies. The class will situate and discuss Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). It will then engage in particular with the concept of development as the central paradigm to structure South-North relations in the 20th century and study its implications for international institutional, economic and human rights law in shaping international law up until today.

Session 3: Constitutional thought in reflexive globalization: examples of temporality and democracy

On day Three, the class will return to the initial argument that basic notions and the conceptual vocabulary of public law are in (and need) a process of reflexive rethinking in order to grasp and structure the realities of public authority in the multipolar world of the 21st century. The class will turn to two examples that will demonstrate this process and possible outcomes of such reflexive rethinking. One is the perspective of time and temporality that allows us to highlight distinct elements of public law; the other example is democracy, a universally used notion, which still rests on conceptual considerations arising from 19th and early 20th century Europe even though it has traveled long ago.

Session 4: European Public Law and the legacies of Empires

Scholarship on the law of the European Union as well as the law of European states has been late in engaging with postcolonial perspectives. Day Four of the class will engage with reasons for this obliviousness – and then examine various colonial legacies in these two and entangled bodies of public law. Through the colonial lens, concept such as the state (and community of states), citizenship and the common market take on new contours and become more contested and less solid as generally assumed.

About Professor Philipp Dann.  Philipp Dann is Professor at Humboldt University Berlin, where he holds the Chair in Public and Comparative Law. His research focuses on the role of law in the encounter and entanglement between South and North – in international, comparative and European law, in legal theory and legal history. He has published three monographs, ten edited volumes and is the editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal “World Comparative Law”. He is a co-founder of the ‘Law and Development Research Network’, a co-chair of the ICON chapter Germany and a principal investigator at research clusters ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script’ and ‘Varieties of Constitutionalism’. He has advised governments and other parties on constitutional matters and questions of law and development.

Format.  The Class will be text- and discussion-oriented, based on a reader comprising texts by Professor Dann and other eminent works in the field. It will unfold through four sessions of 3 hours each.   Each session will be composed of three elements: An introductory lecture by Professor Dann on the theme; discussions among smaller groups on the lecture and the assigned readings guided by an open set of questions; and a plenary discussion on the theme with Professor Dann.

Application process.  The Class is addressed to academic researchers (including PhD and postdoctoral students) with research interests broadly aligned within the themes of the Class.  Applications should be sent to Eva Nanopoulos: e.nanopoulos@qmul.ac.uk by the 20 September, with the following information:  Name; Current institution; Country of origin; Gender; Statement of interest (500 words); CV upload (up to 3 or 4 pages).

Steilen on Magna Carta and Legislative Power

Matthew J. Steilen, SUNY at Buffalo Law School, has posted Magna Carta and the Origins of Legislative Power:

This article argues that Magna Carta has a central place in the development of debate and deliberative politics in parliament. Its focus is chapter 12 of the Magna Carta of 1215, in which the king promised not to levy certain taxes “unless by the common counsel of our realm.” Conventionally these words are interpreted to require consent before levying a tax. Against this view, the article argues that “common counsel” meant public deliberation or debate. The source of these ideas was the cathedral schools, the forerunners of the first European universities. Evidence for this “school theory” of common counsel is presented in two parts. First is a study of the career of Stephen Langton, who taught theology in the cathedral schools of Paris. Langton came to England in 1213 to serve as archbishop of Canterbury, and period sources suggest he played a central role in encouraging dissident barons and negotiating Magna Carta. The article addresses scholarly questions about the reliability of these sources. The second part is a study of London, its government, and political culture. The article argues that London’s political traditions provided a fertile environment for Langton’s advice to the dissident barons about how to pursue their grievances against King John. Finally, the article presents an argument against the conventional interpretation of “common counsel” as a requirement of consent, addressing the meaning of the relevant Latin terms, usage in Magna Carta and related documents, law and practice relating to taxation, theories of kingship, and the meaning of “parliament.”

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The Balkinization symposium on Alison LaCroix's The Interbellum Constitution has come to a close. All contributions are available here, including a response from LaCroix.

• 
  Hendrik Hartog, emeritus at Princeton University, discusses his new book, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2024) (Current). 
  

• Also on Current, Michael J. Douma, Georgetown University, on his new book, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700–1827 (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

• On September 20, the Arkansas Law Review will observe the centennial of the University of Arkansas School of Law with the symposium, Embracing the Past, Enhancing the Future: Exploring the Evolution of Legal Education.”  One panel is devoted to the history of legal education.
  

• The State of the American Idea, a podcast of the National Constitution Center, recorded February 9, 2024.  Charles Cooke, National Review, Melody Barnes, University of Virginia, and Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, “explore the debate about the core values of the American Idea—liberty, equality, democracy, and federalism—throughout American history and model the way in which Americans of different perspectives can come together in the spirit of civil dialogue.”
  

• ICYMI: Ronald K. L. Collins on Gitlow v. New York (FIRE).  New Study of the Forsa Ring (“the Oldest Scandinavian Legal Text”)  “Challenges Traditional Views of Viking Age Economy” (SciTechDaily).  A fundraiser, on October 12, for the David Brearley Center for the American Constitution (Trenton Daily).
  

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

Schor on American Exceptionalism and Democratic Erosion

Miguel Schor, Drake University Law School, has posted American Constitutional Exceptionalism and Democratic Erosion:

Contemporary scholars worry that democracy is being eroded from above by populist authoritarian leaders and from below by citizen polarization. These are not new concerns. The framers of the American Constitution understood that the twin diseases incident to republican government were demagogues and the violence of factions. They designed the Constitution with an eye towards what today we would call democratic erosion. The paradox of contemporary American constitutionalism is that the mechanisms put in place to temper these diseases in the late eighteenth century—presidentialism and institutional (and electoral) complexity—are not only exceptional among the world’s long-standing democracies but are also accelerating and facilitating democratic erosion in the twenty-first century.

Democratic erosion perches uneasily on supply and demand factors. On the supply side, presidentialism does a poorer job than parliamentarism in sustaining the constitutional-political conventions needed to support democracy for the long haul. On the demand side, institutional (and electoral) complexity coupled with citizen polarization has made the American government dysfunctional. Dysfunctional government, in turn, fuels the rise of populist authoritarians who claim that they alone can fix the nation’s ills. This Article argues that America’s exceptional constitution lies deep at the roots of her contemporary democratic travails. This Article, moreover, breaks new ground by providing an empirically grounded, historical and comparative account of democratic erosion in the United States.

--Dan Ernst

Sanders on NZ Judges' Extrajudicial Activity

Katherine Sanders, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, has posted Away from the Familiar: Judges in Public Debate and as Commissioners, which appeared in Challenge and Change: Judging in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by John Burrows and Jeremy Finn:

This chapter aims to act as a starting point for discussion of the New Zealand judiciary acting "away from the familiar" by introducing some historical examples of judges "speaking out" off the bench and serving as commissioners. Given the breadth of this topic, the chapter makes no claim to be a comprehensive survey of judicial engagement in public debate, or of judicial service on commissions of inquiry. Rather, it asks how the judiciary has negotiated the challenges of acting away from the familiar, and examines how norms regarding judicial conduct relate to constitutional values and social change. The examples explored have been chosen because they enable inquiry into these questions.

--Dan Ernst

Howlin on Female "Firsts" in the Legal Profession

Niamh Howlin, University College Dublin College of Business and Law, has posted Women as Both Insiders and Outsiders in the History of the Legal Profession:

The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 removed the legal barrier to women entering the legal professions. In November 1921, Frances Kyle and Averil Deverell were the first women to be called to the Irish bar. The experiences of these early women barristers have in recent years been documented and commemorated in exhibitions and portraiture, as well as through various conferences, other events, books, periodicals and poetry, particularly in the context of the centenary of the 1919 Act. These add to the growing body of literature examining the experiences of early women lawyers and judges in England and other jurisdictions.

Much recent focus has been on historic ‘firsts’ or ‘trailblazers’, but it is important not to let this obscure the broader story of how women experienced working in the legal professions. Indeed, this point was made twenty years ago by Bacik, Costello and Drew who observe, ‘[t]his phenomenon of the highly visible trailblazer woman should be understood not necessarily as an example of ‘advances’ made by women, but as a reminder of continuing male domination.’ Glazer and Slater identify strategies employed by early women professionals: superperformance, separatism, subordination and innovation. They add that while early women professionals did not consciously choose such strategies, ‘it quickly became clear to them that entrance into the elite world of professionalism would require special strategies for women.’ ‘Superperforming’ women were pioneers, and often achieved historic ‘firsts.’ Bacik, Costello and Drew refer to this as the ‘first woman to’ phenomenon, and caution that this ‘does not necessarily provide evidence of absence of discrimination, but rather often signals the continued and persistent exclusion of women – the exception that proves the rule.’

While recognizing the significance of the trailblazers and ‘famous firsts’, this paper seeks to go beyond commemoration, to consider the lived experiences of women at the Irish Bar in the twentieth century. It looks at the challenges they faced, the type of work they did and the strategies they adopted to succeed in a gendered environment. This paper draws on archival research as well as interviews conducted with men and women who were in practice at the Irish Bar from the 1950s until the late 1990s.

--Dan Ernst

LaCroix on Lepore on Constitutional Amendments

Alison L. LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, has posted Dispatches From Amendment Valley, which is forthcoming in the California Law Review:

Professor Jill Lepore’s Jorde Lecture seeks to broaden our understanding of what qualifies as constitutional debate by looking to “the philosophy of amendment.” In this essay, I offer a different account of how amendments fit into U.S. constitutional history. I argue that the six decades between the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 did not, as is commonly assumed, constitute a gap in national-level constitutional change. Examining the full sweep of the constitutional landscape between the War of 1812 and the Civil War shows that the Constitution was undergoing profound shifts in meaning. These inter-amendment decades overlap with the period of my recent book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms. The central claim of the book is that the decades between 1815 and 1861 – which I call the “interbellum period” – witnessed profound constitutional transformations, especially regarding the nature of the Union. A crucial domain in which this change occurred was Congress’s power to regulate commerce among the states, with foreign nations, and with Native nations. This change occurred not through text, but through debate. Early-nineteenth-century Americans did not feel bound to accept the textual Constitution as they inherited it. By de-sacralizing our view of how early-nineteenth-century Americans understood the Constitution, we discover that they were incessantly discussing ways to amend it. Ultimately, however, they saw the text of the Constitution as a relatively unimportant site of constitutional change. Instead, they prioritized argument, oratory, and practice.

--Dan Ernst

"Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America"

It's publication day for Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present, edited by Richard Huzzey, Maartje Janse, Henry Miller, Joris Oddens, and Brodie Waddell (Oxford University Press):

Throughout history, across very different types of state and society, petitions and petitioning have been ubiquitous practices and the interaction between petitioners and authority has been a crucial dynamic in exercising and contesting power. Consolidating and advancing a rapidly expanding field of research across history, law, and the social sciences, Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America is the first study of these venerable practices from their development in the late medieval period to the emergence of e-petitions in the twenty-first century. With a broad focus on Europe and North America, this ambitious volume breaks new ground by examining the concept, history, and practice of petitions and petitioning across chronological and geographical boundaries, opening up this important topic using an interdisciplinary approach across the humanities and social sciences.

The chapters include "Petitions Above Party: Representation and Congressional Petitioning, 1789-1950," by Maggie Blackhawk and Daniel Carpenter.

--Dan Ernst

Ambrose on Gunmaking at the Founding

Graham Ambrose, a recent graduate of the Stanford Law School, has posted his note, Gunmaking at the Founding, which is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review:

Homemade guns are being used in a growing number of crimes across the United States, creating what gun control organizations describe as the fastest-growing threat to public safety in America. States and the federal government are cracking down. New laws criminalize gunmaking without a license, prohibit the sale or transfer of homemade guns, and even ban some forms of gunmaking altogether.

But the constitutionality of these regulations is uncertain. After the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022), courts have begun to invalidate rules that are not “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Constitutional challenges to new gunmaking regulations have already created court splits on a pair of key questions commanded by Bruen: Does the plain text of the Second Amendment cover a right to manufacture firearms? Are modern restrictions on gunmaking consistent with this country’s historical tradition of firearm regulation?

This Note begins to answer these questions by recounting the history of gunmaking practices and regulations at the Founding. It uncovers evidence that the Second Amendment as originally understood did not cover gunmaking and that, in any event, early Americans regulated gunmaking extensively. In light of this history, Bruen should permit reasonable modern regulations. This case study makes two methodological arguments relevant to Second Amendment jurisprudence. First, non-statutory sources of law should play a role in illuminating original constitutional meaning. Second, after United States v. Rahimi (2024), modern regulations may be upheld by legal principles that emerge from disparate bodies of law.

--Dan Ernst

Schafer on the Meaning of Press Freedom at the Founding

Matthew Schafer (Fordham University School of Law) has posted "'The Press': A Response to Professor Volokh." The abstract:

For more than a decade, Professor Eugene Volokh’s article—Freedom For The Press As An Industry, Or For The Press As A Technology? From The Framing To Today—has been recognized as the authoritative work on the meaning of press freedom at the Founding. In it, Volokh argued that the Press Clause’s reference to “the Press” meant the printing press as a technology rather than as the journalistic enterprise we recognize today. On that basis, he concluded that the Founding generation understood the Press Clause not as providing special rights for the institutional press but as securing every man’s right to use the printing press. Those in favor of a Press Clause that specially protected the press, he said, must look elsewhere than the text or history of that Clause. 

This Article calls Volokh’s into doubt. By examining his sources and reasoning, I show how he misunderstood the historical record and drew conclusions unsupported by it. Specifically, Volokh’s inquiry suffered from three problems: conceptual (defining “the Press” does not define the meaning of the Press Clause at the Founding), evidentiary (too little, too unpersuasive), and methodological (he followed none). I then explain that two premises on which Volokh based his article—that the newspaper industry at the Founding was insignificant and practiced no real journalism—are contrary to the historical record and academic consensus. Contrary to Volokh’s view that press-specific rights are a modern invention, I finally provide examples of them from the Founding era and posit that early Americans recognized such rights because they understood them ultimately to inure to the benefit of the public in the form of the news. The news, in turn, helped secure public liberty. I close by calling on Volokh to revisit his thesis.

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

OAH Webinar: The Supreme Court in Historical Perspective

[We have the following announcement from the Organization of American Historians.  DRE.]

The Supreme Court in Historical Perspective: A Future of the Past Webinar

Join us on Thursday, August 22, 6pm ET, for a conversation about the history of the Supreme Court and its role in American life and politics. Host Holly Brewer, from the University of Maryland, will be joined by panelists Michael Klarman of Harvard University and Donna Scheule of California State University-Los Angeles, for this hour-long conversation. Registration is required for this free event.

[We assume that, as it did for past webinars, OAH will post a recording of this one on its YouTube channel.]

State Constitutions Lab

[We have the following announcement.  It includes a CFP and a portal for joining the lab's mailing.  DRE]

The State Constitutions Lab is a new initiative being launched in Fall 2024 to advance interdisciplinary and comparative research and new methodological approaches to the study and understanding of American state constitutions and their seminal role in the development of democracy and self-government in the United States. As scholars and legal practitioners show newfound attention to the rights, provisions, and unique histories of these governing documents, we welcome historians, political scientists, and legal scholars and practitioners interested in engaging historically-informed research on how state constitutions have been written, amended, and used to legislate and litigate from the founding era to the present.

Supported by the Brennan Center for Justice, we will be holding monthly workshops during the academic year. Papers will be pre-circulated with a commenter, and meetings will be held in hybrid online/in-person formats and virtually according to the schedule.

We look forward to soliciting contributions for an edited essay collection exploring the importance of state constitutions at the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2026.

To propose a paper, please click to the form linked below and include a 1-2 page c.v. Work in progress will be preferred over more polished, already-accepted submissions. While our focus is on state constitutions, we also encourage submissions that engage interstate, federal, and comparative studies.

To be added to our mailing list or learn more, please contact co-conveners Brian Murphy (bm628@rutgers.edu), Grace Mallon (grace.mallon@rai.ox.ac.uk), or Nicholas Cole (nicholas.cole@history.ox.ac.uk).

Submit Your Proposal Here

Weekend Roundup

• The top three winners of the California Supreme Court Historical Society's Selma Moidel Smith student writing contest were recently celebrated (Daily Journal).
  

• Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History, and Manisha Sinha, join Thomas Donnelly “to explore the history of illiberalism in America and to assess illiberal threats facing our democracy today” in a National Constitution Center podcast.  The NCC's podcast on "The Constitutional Legacy of Watergate" is here.
  

• Lawbook Exchange’s August 2024 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History is here.
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman and Josh Blackman explain What [They] Did and Did Not Argue in United States v. Trump.
  

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

ASLH 2024: Draft Program Released

[We have the following announcement from the American Society for Legal History, including a link to the program for the annual meeting in San Francisco, October 24-26.  DRE]

Dear ASLH Members and Community,

Thanks to the hard work of the Program Committee, the draft program for the San Francisco meeting is now available! You can see the program here.

Now is a great time to start thinking about travel to the meeting. If you need to renew your membership, you can do so here. You can also register for the conference and book your hotel room here. Pre-registration for the meeting will close on October 1. After that, you will only be able to register for the meeting on-site. As a reminder, we ask that participants try to stay in the conference hotel. This helps the Society meet its contractual minimums, and ensures our longer-term financial health. You can read more about the economics of the annual meeting here.  

[On that last link: This is a really instructive list of FAQs, if you've never served on a local arrangements or annual meeting committee of a learned society.  DRE].

Thanks once again to the Program Committee (chaired by Karen Tani and Rowan Dorin), the Standing Committee on the Annual Meeting (chaired by Justin Simard), the Local Arrangements Committee (chaired by Amalia Kessler and Reuel Schiller), and our sponsors in the Bay Area (UC Law San Francisco, Stanford Law School, the Stanford Center for Law and History, the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program of Berkeley Law School, and the Robbins Collection and Research Center) for their hard work and support.

Also, please note that you will soon be receiving information about the annual ASLH election, which is scheduled to run from August 26 to September 13.

We look forward to seeing you in October!

Best,
Ari Bryen
ASLH Secretary

JACH (Summer 2024)

The Summer 2024 issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History is now online:

Noah A. Rosenblum, A Body Without a Head: Revisiting James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth on the Place of the President in the 19th Century Federal Government

Kate Masur & Gregory Downs, Designed to Ameliorate the Condition of People of Color: The Reconstruction Republicans and the Question of Affirmative Action

Symposium: Graber’s Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty and the Second Founding

[The following articles compose the first of a two-part symposium on “the Second Founding,” inspired by Mark Graber’s new book, Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty (U. Press of Kansas, 2024). The second part will be published in the Fall issue in November.]

Anne Twitty, Resuscitating a Forgotten Fourteenth Amendment

Rogers M. Smith, The Reconstruction Amendments, American Constitutional Development, and the Quest for Equal Citizenship

Rachel A. Shelden, Finding Meaning in the Congressional Globe: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Problem of Constitutional Archives

--Dan Ernst
 

Chaudhry's "South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought"

Faisal Chaudhry, University of Massachusetts School of Law, has published South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford University Press):

This book delves into the legal history of colonial governance in South Asia, spanning the period from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a notable shift in the way sovereignty, land control, and legal rectification were conceptualized, particularly after 1858. During the early phase of the rule of the East India Company, the focus was on 'the laws' that influenced the administration of justice rather than 'the law' as a comprehensive normative system. The Company's perspective emphasized absolute property rights, particularly concerning land rent, rather than physical control over land. This viewpoint was expressed through the obligation of revenue payment, with property existing somewhat outside the realm of law. This early colonial South Asian legal framework differed significantly from the Anglo-common law tradition, which had already developed a unified and physical concept of property rights as a distinct legal form by the late 18th century. It was only after the transfer of authority from the Company to the British Crown, along with other shifts in the imperial political economy, that the conditions were ripe for 'the law' to emerge as an autonomous and fundamental institutional concept. One of the contributing factors to this transformation was the emergence of classical legal thought. Under Crown rule, two distinct forms of discourse contributed to reshaping the legal ontology around the globalized notion of 'the law' as an independent concept. The book, adopting a historical approach to jurisprudence, categorizes these forms as doctrinal discourse, which could articulate propositions of the law with practical and administrative qualities, and ordinary language discourse, which conveyed ideas about the law, including in the public domain.

--Dan Ernst

Ferguson on Cicero and Early American Law

Jack Ferguson, a law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, has posted The Ciceronian Origins of American Law and Constitutionalism:

Cicero (NYPL)

In his treatise on American constitutionalism, John Adams wrote that “as all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight.”  This Article considers the Founding generation’s intellectual debt to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the classical Roman statesman-philosopher, and what it tells us about how the Founders approached law and constitutionalism.  There are ongoing scholarly efforts to recover the general law tradition and classical lawyering of the eighteenth century, but as of yet, no account has been given of Cicero’s prominent role in that era.  This Article gives that account.

This Article first examines Cicero’s legal thought and how it shaped notions of natural law and the law of nations (or general law) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Grotius, Pufendorf, Coke, Vattel, Blackstone, Lord Mansfield, James Wilson, Joseph Story, and others grounded their work in Cicero’s writings on law.  As a case study, this Article shows how Cicero contributed to the formation of American judicial review.  Cicero’s interpretive principles dealing with hierarchies of law were adopted by Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton’s prominent defense of judicial review.

This Article then considers Cicero’s work on republicanism and constitutionalism.  The Founding generation’s concepts of popular sovereignty, mixed government, checks and balances, and the rule of law can be traced back to Cicero, who was the primary expositor of the classical republican tradition.

Finally, this Article evaluates Cicero’s influence on eighteenth-century notions of the ideal executive.  As a constitutional theorist, Cicero laid the conceptual groundwork for Hamilton’s unitary energetic executive.  And by his historical example as consul of Rome, Cicero inspired Hamilton’s efforts in the Washington administration to put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an early historical precedent on insurrection and the domestic use of military force.

Cicero influenced the Founders’ work in numerous ways.  To the extent their law is ours today, his relevance endures.

Mr. Ferguson cites a classic essay that should be read by anyone interested in the nineteenth-century American legal profession:  Stephen Botein's Cicero as Role Model for Early American Lawyers: A Case Study in Classical “Influence," Classical Journal 73 (1978).

Friedman on Work Accidents

Lawrence M. Friedman, Stanford Law School, has published Work Accidents: A Drama in Three Acts in the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal.  The acts are Farwell, workers compensation statutes, and their administration.  An admirably compact essay, by the master.  And, while we're on the subject, we recently viewed this, which was part of the exhibit, American Art: The Stories We Carry, at the Seattle Art Museum.

--Dan Ernst

Puder on Thibaut and Von Savigny's Codification Debate

Markus G. Puder, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, has posted Dystopian or Not: Alternate Realities for Thibaut and Von Savigny's Codification Debate:

Friedrich Carl von Savigny (wiki)

In 1814, after Napoleon’s military defeat and with major European political re-alignments afoot, two German law professors of Huguenot lineage—Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut and Friedrich Carl von Savigny—debated the question of whether Germany was ripe for a national code that could replace the motley patchwork of legislated and customary laws swirling amidst the German law and language space.

Savigny—with his position that neither the German legal profession nor the German language was ready for such a leap—initially prevailed, at least inasmuch as the remainder of the nineteenth century is concerned. Still, the private law codification so vigorously fought by Savigny ultimately emerged with the German Civil Code of 1900.

In addition to delving deeply into the legal, political, and cultural contents of the Thibaut-Savigny debate, this Article enquires about the consequences of alternate outcome realities—whether dystopian or not. These alternatives include a much earlier codification as well as the possibility of no codification at all. Both scenarios are vetted against the themes of law and language, code and unity, and codification and democracy.

Both Protestants.

--Dan Ernst

Funk on Codification and Protestantism

Kellen R. Funk, Columbia Law School, has published Sect and Superstition: The Protestant Framework of American Codification open access in the American Journal of Legal History:

Elite lawyers who debated codification in the nineteenth-century United States treated codification as inseparable from a liberal Protestant textualism that had taken hold in the early national era. Legislators declared codification to be the necessary final step of the Protestant Reformation and frequently characterized common law lawyers as beholden to ‘superstition’ and ‘priestcraft’. Their opponents denounced the codifiers’ idea that texts alone could adequately convey common meanings and delighted to point out the endlessly fracturing glosses on supposedly ‘clear’ texts that divided the positivists into an ever-increasing number of sects.

Many works have addressed the relationship between populism and positivism over the course of the codification debates in the United States. What these works have missed is the Protestantism. Understanding how lawyers of another generation approached these questions can help us to appreciate the varieties of American textualism, and the fact that today’s textualism may be as foreign to textualisms of the past as to other methods entirely. Rather than the forerunners of a modern, rationalist ‘Republic of Statutes’, the codifiers were the literal and figurative sons of a post-Calvinist generation that was unquenchably optimistic about the clarity of texts and the common sense of individuals reading them. This lens also helps us better understand the defenders of the common law, who were not so much the retrograde servants of property rights and judicial supremacy as they are often presented, but were more often practically minded lawyers who understood the limits to which legislative texts could change the complex practices of law on the ground.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

•  The Balkinization symposium on Alison LaCroix's The Interbellum Constitution continued this week. Since our last Weekend Roundup, there have been contributions from John Mikhail, Connor M. Ewing, David S. Schwartz, and Christian G. Fritz.

• "The Bar Exam: Then and Now" -- via In Custodia Legis.
  

•  From Process (the blog of the Organization of American Historians): Cindy Hahamovitch on "The Peculiar World of American Sheriffs."

• Independent scholar Patrick S. O'Donnell has posted some thoughts on the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with a helpful roundup of relevant secondary sources. 

• Some JOTWELL items of interest: Ilya Somin reviews David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs; Scott Cummings reviews Ann Southworth's Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending (2023); Jedidiah Kroncke reviews J. Benton Heath's "Economic Sanctions as Legal Ordering," forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of International Law.
  

• ICYMI: Justin Simard on the Citing Slavery Project (Mississippi Free Press). James H. Coleman Jr., the first Black associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, has died (northjersey.com).
  

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

White on New York Times v. Sullivan

G. Edward White, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted Reconsidering the Legacy of New York Times v. Sullivan:

This Article argues that the “actual malice” standard for recovery in defamation cases should be abandoned outside cases in which the plaintiff is a “public official,” currently defined as an employee of the government whose office invites public scrutiny and comment. The actual malice standard prevents many categories of plaintiffs from recovering substantial amounts of damages without showing, by clear and convincing evidence, that a defendant either intentionally made a false and damaging statement about the plaintiff or made it with reckless disregard as to whether the statement was true or false. The Article identifies four features affecting defamation cases not involving public officials that point in the direction of reconsidering the actual malice standard in those cases. Two are doctrinal: the Court’s failure, in New York Times v. Sullivan, to clearly articulate the source of the actual malice standard because of its concern about southern states’ use of defamation law to deter criticism of their resistance to racial integration; and its subsequent misguided application of the actual malice standard to defamation cases that did not raise the constitutional issues it identified in New York Times. Two are cultural. The first of those is changes in the landscape of media communications in the sixty years since the Times decision, notably the more ideological character of mainstream media and an increased frequency of communications on the internet by anonymous persons. The second is the advent of media insurance, which makes it possible even for defendants who have violated the actual malice standard to secure themselves immunity from defamation judgments. The combination of those features has made it very difficult for persons injured by false and damaging statements about them to sue successfully in defamation. Meanwhile the Court’s departure in post-New York Times cases from the principal First Amendment concerns in defamation actions, a “chilling effect” on speech that invites media self-censorship unless a “breathing space” for some false and damaging communications is afforded, has served to obscure the central meaning of New York Times. The Article proposes a framework for defamation cases that deconstitutionalizes actions in which the plaintiffs are not public officials, restoring much of defamation law to its common law roots. That alteration would not necessarily result in more successful defamation actions, as the common law of defamation contains its own privileges and available defamation defendants will continue to be difficult to identify in today’s media landscape. The Article invites litigators to consider bringing cases to the current Court in which it has an opportunity to revisit its decisions in Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, Associated Press v. Walker, and Gertz v. Robert Welch.

--Dan Ernst

Brown on Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury and the Pennsylvania Council of Censors

This is gated but extremely interesting.  Angus Harwood Brown has published Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury, the Pennsylvania Council of Censors, and the Debate on the Conservative Power in the French Revolution in the Journal of the History of Ideas 85 (July 2024): 479-508:

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (wiki)

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s 1795 proposal for a Constitutional Jury is usually portrayed as the first proposal for an institution to control the constitutionality of laws, and thus the ancestor of the modern constitutional court. Challenging this view, this article resituates the Constitutional Jury in a broader transatlantic tradition concerned with creating a conservative power, a non-judicial and explicitly political constitutional guardian, and demonstrates the influence of the 1776 Pennsylvania Council of Censors on Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury. Drawing upon the insights provided by this tradition, it then reevaluates the history of constitutionalism and the contemporary crisis of constitutional guardianship.

--Dan Ernst

Kuokkanen on Dispossessing the Sámi

Rauna Kuokkanen, University of Lapland, has posted From Indigenous Private Property to Full Dispossession: The Peculiar Case of Sápmi:

The concept of dispossession has become ubiquitous in contemporary critical theory, including analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous scholarship. It suggests that in addition to being colonized, Indigenous peoples have been deprived of their lands and territorial foundations of their societies. Critics, however, allege that theories and arguments of Indigenous dispossession are inconsistent, arguing that Indigenous peoples did not have conceptions of land as property or possession. The critics' question goes, how can there be an act of dispossession if there was no prior possession or Indigenous concept of ownership? This article examines a case where there was both prior possession and a concept of ownership adopted by and extended to an Indigenous people, the Sámi, and upheld by the colonial court system. I ask, what can the Sámi case of individual (family) land ownership tell us about the concept of dispossession, Indigenous conceptions of ownership and property? The objective is to demonstrate how the concept of dispossession has different histories in different contexts, and how individual land ownership has not historically been alien to Indigenous peoples.

--Dan Ernst

The Gienapp Backlist

Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford University, has posted some of his backlist on SSRN:

Using Beard to Overcome Beardianism: Charles Beard's Forgotten Historicism and the Ideas-Interest Dichotomy, Constitutional Commentary 29 (2014)

Historicism and Holism: Failures of Originalist Translation, Fordham Law Review 84 (2015)

The Foreign Founding: Rights, Fixity, and the Original Constitution, Texas Law Review Online 97 (2019)

The Myth of the Constitutional Given: Enumeration and National Power at the Founding,
American University Law Review Forum 69 (2020)

In Search of Nationhood at the Founding, Fordham Law Review 89 (2021)

Democratic Culture and Democratic Shocks: The Limits of Constitutional Cycles, Missouri Law Review 86 (2021)

Representing the Nation: Gouverneur Morris's Nationalist Constitutionalism, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy 21 (2023)

Removal and the Changing Debate over Executive Power at the Founding, American Journal of Legal History 63 (2023)

--Dan Ernst

Balkin and Sobkowski on Teaching Constitutional History

History figures in two recent posts on the teaching of Constitutional law in American law schools.  The first is Teaching Constitutional Law Historically, by Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School:

This short essay explains why I teach the introductory constitutional law course historically. It explains the advantages of a historical approach and the problems of canon formation inherent in an introductory course, which for many students, is the only constitutional law course they will ever take. A historical approach is also a great way to bring constitutional theory into the introductory course, including debates about originalism and the uses of history in constitutional interpretation.

The historical approach helps students learn to think about constitutional law from both internal and external perspectives; each perspective is essential to learning constitutional law, and each enriches the other. A historical approach also helps students understand the nature of constitutional revolutions, including the current changes wrought by the Roberts Court. Finally, a historical approach can help students understand the current moment of democratic backsliding in the United States and the country's periodic episodes of constitutional rot and constitutional renewal. 

The second, in which the Warren Court figures, is The Enduring Crisis in Teaching Constitutional Law, by Patrick J. Sobkowski, Marquette University:

Constitutional law is in crisis. The 6-3 conservative majority of the Supreme Court has generally produced the desired results of the current Republican Party. This has led to calls of illegitimacy, activism, and partisanship from left liberal and progressive scholars and politicians. In 2024, Jesse Wegman published an opinion essay in the New York Times documenting these criticisms from progressive law professors. In this essay, I argue that there is not much unique about the current crisis. Rather, the political nature of cases is a result of "juristocracy," which knows no party. In light of this, I provide important context and argue for more principled views on the current Supreme Court on the part of liberals and progressives. Finally, I propose several suggestions for progressives who teach constitutional law while strongly disagreeing with the results.

--Dan Ernst

Penn Legal History Workshop Lineup: Fall 2024

The Fall 2024 lineup for the University of Pennsylvania Legal History Workshop is below:

September 12th, 2024: Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford University), "The People of the United States: The Lost Constitution of National Popular Sovereignty".

September 26th, 2024: Ofra Bloch (Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law), “Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the Memory Wars”

October 10th, 2024: Beth Lew-Williams (Princeton University), “John Doe China Man: Race and Law in the American West.”

October 17th, 2024: Sarah Seo (Columbia Law School), "The Necessity of the Circumstantial Case"

November 14th, 2024: Gautham Rao (American University), excerpts from White Power: Policing American Slavery (manuscript under contract) (introduction and chapter 5, "The Other Reconstruction: The Enslavers State After Emancipation”)

November 21st, 2024: Saul Cornell (Fordham University), "The Paradox of Heller’s Anti-Originalist Originalism: The Original Understanding of Rights, Regulation, and Firearms

Do you have a legal history workshop series or event you'd like us to publicize? Shoot us an email and let us know.

-- Karen Tani

Nahrstadt's "Alton B. Parker"

Bradley C. Nahrstadt, formerly, a practicing attorney, has published Alton B. Parker: The Man Who Challenged Roosevelt (SUNY Press):

This first full-length biography of Alton Brooks Parker provides an in-depth look into the life, career, and legacy of one of the most important New Yorkers of the Gilded Age. Parker had the courage to challenge Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency in 1904—at the height of Roosevelt’s popularity—and was a transition point between the conservative and the new, progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Based on new archival research, this book contributes to our understanding of how political campaigns were conducted during the Gilded Age/Progressive Era, in comparison to modern campaigns. It also provides insights into the changing Democratic Party as it transformed from the presidency of Grover Cleveland to the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

An endorsement:

“An excellent, long-overdue study of one of the most prominent judicial statesmen of his era, Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, Democratic presidential nominee in 1904, and senior judicial and political leader.” — Bruce Dearstyne, author of The Spirit of New York and The Crucible of Public Policy

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Over at Balkinization, a terrific slate of contributors has been reflecting on Alison LaCroix's The Interbellum Constitution. Posts are now available by Aaron Hall, Evelyn Atkinson, Jane Manners, Simon Gilhooley, Anne Twitty, Anna Law, Rachel Shelden, Greg Ablavsky, and Jonathan Gienapp, with more to come.  

• Noah Rosenblum, NYU Law, discusses Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy in WilmerHale's podcast series. "Leveraging his background as a legal historian, Rosenblum provides historical context and explains how applying a traditional Constitutional interpretation to the case increases its complexity."
  

• The Securities and Exchange Commission held a 90th Anniversary Celebration, including remarks by Michael Beschloss and Joel Seligman.  The recording is here.
  

• George Garnett asks why constitutional history is coming back in fashion in university history departments in Britain (History Today).
  

• Learning to teach Milliken v. Bradley at “a two-week institute, 'Democracy in Education: A View from Detroit,' at the Walter P. Reuther Library” at Wayne State University (Chalkbeat).
  

• The Evolution of the U.S. Constitution: A Constitution Day Look Back and Forward, sponsored by the Historical Society of the New York Courts, et al.  It is a conversation with my former student, Tyler Rose Clemons, St. John’s University School of Law.  DRE
  

• The Comfort Fund of the University of Sydney’s law school, founded in July 1940 “to keep legal men and students in the Services in touch with the school and the legal professions, but the main object of the fund was to provide reading matter to those whose name was on the roll.”
  

• George Yin, UVA Law, on what Stanley Surrey would have made of the New Textualism (UVA Law).

• From In Custodia Legis: The Life and Trial of Anne Bonny.

• ICYMI: “Explore the history of politics and the Constitution in ‘A More or Less Perfect Union’” with Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg (NBC Montana).

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