Weekend Roundup

• On November 25, 2025, Susanne Brand delivered the annual lecture of the Centre for English Legal History at the University of Cambridge. Her topic was "Outlawry and its Consequences in Later Medieval English Law and Practice."  View it here. 

• Trump v. Slaughter Roundup: Christine Kexel Chabot (Notice & Comment).  “What do you do when the Supreme Court says its decisions are supported by history, but history doesn’t support the Supreme Court?” asks Craig Green, in an article quoting a number of other legal historians (Bloomberg Law).  The Yale Law bench memo (Just Security). Jed Shugerman and Gary Lawson reply to Richard Re (Divided Argument).  And a blog version of “Quasi-Judicial”: A History and Tradition, a paper that Beau J. Baumann and Jed H. Shugerman posted on SSRN yesterday (Notice & Comment).

• National Guard Deployment Roundup: Bernadette Meyler (SLS Blog).  What about the Whiskey Rebellion? (Lawfare).

• Vanderbilt Law's notice of Sara Mayeux's appointment to its Mildred Prescott Miller Chair. 

• Fordham Law's notice of Jamie Grischkan, a legal scholar and historian of financial regulation and antimonopoly law and policy. 

• Carl Landauer reviews Lauren Benton's  They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (2024) in the European Journal of International Law.  

• The American Historical Association will host a congressional briefing on the history of federal funding of science on Thursday, December 11, at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075. 

• A recording of the National Constitution Center's "town hall" on amending the U.S. Constitution may be viewed here.   And tune in Monday at noon for another town hall, in which John Q. Barrett, joins Gerard Magliocca, and G. Edward White to discuss Robert H. Jackson's "influential concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, his approach to constitutional interpretation, and the lasting legacy he left on debates over presidential power." 

• A briefing on Bush v. Gore and the State of U.S. Elections sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice on Tuesday, December 9 from 2–3 p.m. ET.

• John Lennon's lawyer recalls Lennon's and Ono's deportation case (ABA Modern Law Library). 

• The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's notice of the receipt by its "Petitioning Freedom" project of the Mary Dudziak Prize in Digital History from the American Society for Legal History. 

• ICYMI: The history of the University of Memphis School of Law. Tracing the roots of modern international refugee law (SCC Times).  The South Carolina Supreme Court Historical Society (Columbia Metropolitan)

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

ASLH Preyer Scholars Awards to Allread, Holub-Moorman

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars award. About this award:

Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to early career legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two early career legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. 

The 2025 winners were Tanner Allread (University of California, Los Angeles), for “‘This Series of Strong Laws’: Choctaw Governance and the Rise of Indigenous Constitutionalism, 1826-1830,” and Will Holub-Moorman (Princeton University/Penn Carey Law), for “Policing Parenthood: Child Support Law and the Enforcement of Austerity in Late Twentieth-Century America.”

Congratulations to both!

-- Karen Tani  

 

 

Postles on Arbitration in English Ecclesiastical Courts

Dave Fogg Postles, University of Hertfordshire, has published Pro Bono Pacis et Concordie: Arbitration in English Ecclesiastical Courts in the Late Middle Ages in Law and History Review:

In modern jurisprudence, it is recognized that courts will engage in arbitration, often under the rubric of Alternative Dispute Resolution. Recourse to arbitration further back in the English past has often been perceived as extra-legal, taking place outside the system of courts, and sometimes intended specifically to avoid those courts. This research has concentrated on the avoidance of secular courts, in particular the king’s courts and common law (see below). By contrast, arbitration in ecclesiastical courts has received less detailed investigation, although many salient aspects have been approached.

--Dan Ernst 

Maltz on Slaughter-House

Earl M. Maltz, Rutgers Law School, has posted Rehabilitating the Slaughter-House Cases:

The year 2023 marks the 150th anniversary of the decision in The Slaughter-House Cases.  In rejecting a constitutional challenge to a Louisiana statute that imposed stringent limitations on the operation of slaughterhouses in the New Orleans area, the Slaughter-House majority gave an extremely narrow reading to the scope of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  As a result, the Court effectively eliminated the possibility that that clause would become a source of significant constraints on the actions of state governments generally.

Most scholars have been extremely critical of the reasoning of the Slaughter-House majority, arguing that the meaning that had been attributed to the phrase “privileges and immunities of citizens” in other contexts during the relevant time period indicted that a more robust interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause would have more aptly reflected the original meaning of the language of the clause.  However, a small number of commentators such as Kurt Lash and Philip Hamburger take a different view, arguing that only a narrow reading of the concept of “Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States” is consistent with the historical record. 

Disagreements such as these were at least implicitly anticipated by some of those who were intimately involved in the process of drafting the Fourteenth Amendment.  Thus, for example, during the discussions of the proposed amendment on the Senate floor, Democratic Sen. Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who was a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, declared that he supported the Due Process Clause, but argued that the Privileges or Immunities Clause should be removed from section one because “I do not understand the effect of that.” Similarly, Republican Rep. George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, who had also been a member of the joint committee, would later recall that the “euphony and indefiniteness of meaning” of the Privileges or Immunities Clause was a “charm” to Republican Rep. John A.  Bingham of Ohio, the person who was the author of section one.

Against this backdrop, no amount of research is likely to provide a clear, unambiguous answer to the question of how one should interpret the Privileges or Immunities Clause from a traditional originalist perspective.  Cognizant of this reality, this essay approaches the analysis of The Slaughter-House Cases from a somewhat different direction.  The essay does not make any effort to examine the historical evidence of the original meaning of the concept of “Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States” in the abstract.  Instead, after briefly describing the arguments made by both the majority and dissenting opinions in Slaughterhouse itself, the essay seeks to place the decision to add the Privileges or Immunities Clause to the Constitution in historical context, focusing on the purposes that the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment as a whole was intended to serve and also discussing the circumstances that led to the decision to replace a simple prohibition on racial discrimination with the formulation of section one that was ultimately adopted.  The essay concludes by arguing that the position taken by the majority in Slaughter-House reflected a more accurate understanding of the goals that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to achieve than the more expansive reading advocated by the dissenters in the case.

--Dan Ernst 

JSCH 50:3

Journal of Supreme Court History 50:3 has been published.  Here is the TOC:

Louis D. Brandeis on the Supreme Court: An Oral History
Lewis J. Paper and Peter Scott Campbell

Behind the Scenes of Norman v. Reed with Justice Stevens: How a Local Chicago Political Battle Resulted in an Unlikely (and Rare) Supreme Court Case on the Rights of New Political Parties
Mathias W. Delort

The Lost Case of Solicitor General v. United States
G. Edward White

A New Era of Poverty Litigation: The Warren Court’s Consideration of the Rights of Aid Recipients in King v. Smith
Claire Shennan

The excerpts from the oral history interviews for Paper's biography of Brandeis are great fun.

--Dan Ernst 

Cambridge History of the American Revolution

Ken Burns isn't the only person who has been trying to get out ahead of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.  Just out is the three-volume Cambridge History of the American Revolution, edited by  Marjoleine Kars, Michael A. McDonnell, and Andrew M. Schocket (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Contributions that particularly address legal and constitutional history include:

Volume 1: Revolutionary Currents 

Richard J. Ross and Steven Wilf, “Legal Orders”
Geneva Smith, “Viewpoint: Slave Courts in Pre-Revolutionary Maryland”

Volume 2: Revolution 

Terry Bouton, “Constitutions”
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, “Confederation”
Lorri Glover, “Constitutional Convention”
Michael J. Klarman, “Ratification”

Volume 3: Continuities, Changes, and Legacies

Nora Slonimsky, “Law and Property”

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: RJR

Classroom Materials on the Supreme Court, 1874-1921

[We have the following announcement from the Supreme Court Historical Society.  DRE]

Rights, Commerce, and Reform: A New Era of Supreme Court History Classroom Resources

Discover Supreme Court History from 1874-1921 with a new era of resources from Beyond the Bench, our civics education website. The new era, Rights, Commerce, and Reform, includes over 20 new case summaries, resources, and life stories from the Waite, Fuller, and White Courts ready for classroom use.

Featured resources include:

• Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Boston native, Civil War soldier, and Associate Justice whose legal theories revolutionized modern understanding of the law; 

• Belva Lockwood: The educator, activist, and attorney who became both the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court and to run for President of the United States;  

• Civil Rights Cases (1883): The Supreme Court decision that held the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional and paved the way for Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Jim Crow segregation; 

• Muller v. Oregon (1908): The Supreme Court decision that upheld a gender-based state labor law and created a clear legal distinction between men and women in the workplace;  

• Standard Oil Co. v. United States (1911): The Supreme Court decision that established the “rule of reason” in antitrust law and demonstrated the government’s power to regulate monopolies and increase competition; and  

• The Judiciary Act of 1891: The law that created the United States Courts of Appeals and helped shape the modern Judiciary.

Call for Comparative Legal History Board

[We note the following call from the ESCLH's blog.  DRE]

The European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH) is seeking applications for positions on the editorial board of its flagship journal, Comparative Legal History, including at least an articles editor and a reviews editor.  These positions are not paid.

Evidence of scholarly ability, experience in editing or a willingness to learn quickly, willingness to contribute to journal projects beyond the narrow scope of the job title, and membership (or a commitment to become a member if appointed) of the ESCLH are requirements. Full training in the journal’s processes will be provided as needed.

You would contribute to the advancement of comparative legal history as part of a warm, supportive, and dedicated team.

The journal is an official academic forum of the ESCLH. It was first published in 2013 and aims to offer a space for the development of comparative legal history. The journal welcomes contributions that explore law in different times and jurisdictions from across the globe.

Applications, indicating to which position/s is being applied, with a brief cover letter and short CV (no more than 4 pages) should be sent to Luisa Brunori (Vice-President of the ESCLH), at luisa.brunori@ens.psl.eu, by 15 January 2026.

The ESCLH particularly welcomes applications from people underrepresented in academia generally, and in the ESCLH and the journal particularly.

Frampton, "The Radical Roots of the Representative Jury"

The Yale Law Journal has published "The Radical Roots of the Representative Jury," by Thomas Ward Frampton (University of Virginia School of Law). The abstract:

For most of American history, the jury was considered an elite institution, composed of “honest and intelligent men,” esteemed in their communities for their “integrity,” “reputation,” or “sound judgment.” As a result, jurors were overwhelmingly male, jurors were overwhelmingly white, and jurors disproportionately hailed from the middle and upper social classes. By the late 1960s, an entirely different, democratic conception of the jury was ascendant: juries were meant to pull from all segments of society, more or less randomly, thus constituting a diverse and representative “cross-section of the community.” This Article offers an intellectual and social history of how the “elite jury” lost its hegemonic appeal, with particular emphasis on the overlooked radicals—anarchists, socialists, Communists, trade unionists, and Popular Front feminists—who battled to remake the jury. This Article offers a novel look at the history and tradition of the American jury, demonstrating how the Sixth Amendment’s meaning was—gradually, unevenly, but definitively—reshaped through several decades of popular struggle, grassroots mobilization, strategic litigation, and social-movement contestation. 

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani  

William Twining (1935-2025)

 [We are grateful to David Sugarman for this notice.  DRE]

Professor William Twining, a leading figure in the world of legal education and scholarship, died peacefully at home on October 9 aged 91.  Twining’s work on Karl Llewellyn, with whom he had studied in the late 1950’s, notably, The Karl Llewellyn Papers (University of Chicago Law School, 1968) and Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (Cambridge University Press 1973, 2nd edn 2012), challenged many misconceptions concerning Llewellyn’s ideas and the legal realist movement and set in train a significant re-evaluation of their nature and significance. Twining donated his private collection of documents, published and unpublished, related to legal realism and pragmatism, to the Perelman Centre, Brussels, for scholars to use in the future: Le Centre Perelman - Centre Perelman.

For a more detailed treatment of Twining’s life and work, see https://www.slsa.ac.uk/sln-online-content#twining

Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Centre for Legal History of India

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The newly established Centre for Legal History of India (CLHI) at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany, has just advertised three PhD positions and a postdoc position in the field of Indian legal history, all of which are fully funded. 

[The CLHI] is dedicated to advancing research and academic collaboration in the field of Indian legal history. Its primary objective is to strengthen and professionalize the discipline by providing training, mentorship, and resources to doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, equipping them to produce high-quality scholarship.

The Centre seeks to foster a collaborative environment where scholars can engage in critical dialogue about both the current state and future scope of research and pedagogy in this diverse field. Building on a multilateral network connecting institutions and researchers within India and internationally, the Centre showcases the richness and breadth of Indian legal history, identifying areas of common ground while highlighting the diversity of legal traditions and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Indian legal history has long been a significant focus in the Department of European and Comparative Legal History, especially in the context of the study of legal transfers within the common law world. Given the central role of the Indian subcontinent in the history of the British Empire and the deep and varied legal traditions therein, the Centre aims to contribute towards developing legal history in India as a distinct and valuable field of study that merits dedicated resources and sustained scholarly attention.

The Centre maintains formal collaborations with leading Indian law schools NLSIU Bangalore and NALSAR. It is supported by a Centre Advisory Council and has a dedicated visitors’ programme.

More Congressional Material On-Line

[We are reproducing the following from In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress, on the latest "migration" of Congressional materials from "Century of Lawmaking" to the digital site, Congress.gov.  DRE]

 We have been working on migrating content from Century of Lawmaking to Congress.gov over the last few years. We kicked this off with migrating 30,000 Bills and Resolutions from 1799-1873. Then, in February 2024, we added the Annals of Congress to Congress.gov. In November last year, we added the Senate Journal to our site. The House Journal was added in the following release. If you are interested in more information on the journals, we have help pages for both the House Journal and Senate Journal.

Earlier this year, in February, we added the Congressional Globe. The Debates of Congress (Congressional Globe, The Annals of Congress, and the Register of Debates) are all predecessors to the Congressional Record, which goes back to 1873 on Congress.gov. The Globe was followed by the Senate Executive Journal going live on Congress.gov in April.

With today’s release we are adding the last item from the Debates of Congress, the Register of Debates. This is also the last area of content to migrate from Century of Lawmaking to Congress.gov. You can see the Register of Debates starting with the 18th Congress of the Browse page and through the 25th Congress.

ASLH names Backhouse, Benton, and Ngai as Honorary Fellows

At the 2025 annual meeting, the American Society for Legal History named three honorary fellows. As the ASLH website explains, "[e]lection as an Honorary Fellow . . . is the highest honor the Society can confer." This designation "recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others. Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand."

We quote in full the ASLH announcement of 2025 honorees Constance Backhouse, Lauren Benton, and Mae Ngai. 

Weekend Roundup

• Caitlin Tully, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Princeton University, has published an essay in The Atlantic: "The Court has an Easy Answer on the Fed."  

• From Time's "Made by History": Douglas Boin (Saint Louis University) on "How Patriarchy Undermined the Roman Republic."   

• Malick W. Ghachem, MIT, discusses his book The Company and the Colony: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble with Gerald Horne on the “Freedom Now” program on KPFK radio.

• Jill Hasday, Minnesota Law, discussed her book We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality with Kate Shaw on the Strict Scrutiny podcast.

• Allen Boyer reviews Kathryn Schumaker's Tangled Fortunes (Mississippi Books Page).   

• We've spotted an advertisement for a predoc university assistantship with Prof. Dr. Lena Foljanty, Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna. 

• Lawbook Exchange's November 2025 catalogue on Scholarly Law and Legal History (Part 1; Part 2).

• ICYMI:  A Very Short History of Freedom of Speech by Oliver Bramley (Constitution Society). How Germany's Nuremberg trial for Nazi crimes transformed international law (rfi).

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

ASLH Cromwell Book Prize to Gronningsater for "The Rising Generation"

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize. 

About the award: "The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference."

This year's award went to Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania) for The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). The citation:

Elegantly rendered and beautifully constructed, Sarah Gronningsater’s  traces the experiences of a formative generation of New Yorkers – people born into the quasi-freedom granted by New York’s emancipation laws. By using a varied and creative source base, Gronningsater chronicles how their lives were shaped by gradual emancipation, and how their experiences and struggles within that legal regime translated into political activism in their later years. Gronningsater convincingly shows how legal consciousness gained early in life connected a generation of freedpeople who later used that knowledge to influence the larger national conversation about citizenship and racial equality in the United States.

Congratulations to Professor Gronningsater!

-- Karen Tani  

ASLH John Phillip Reid Book Award to Parker for "The Turn to Process"

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the John Phillip Reid Book Award. 

About the award: This prize is "awarded annually for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The prize is named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues. When awarding this prize, preference is given to work that falls within Reid’s own interests in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-America and Native American law."  

This year's award went to Kunal M. Parker (University of Miami School of Law) for The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024. The citation:

Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process is a brilliant intellectual history of how social science thinkers in law, political science, and economics between 1870 and 1970 stopped emphasizing ostensibly knowable truths and focused instead on methods, techniques, and processes. Parker shows how this transformation was entwined with the rise of the administrative state. After documenting this major epistemological shift, he argues that during the Cold War, once-supple claims about the importance of process and method were narrowed and decontextualized, playing oppositional roles to democratization, civil rights, and managed capitalism. This highly effective, very creative book places law, as practice and as a field of inquiry, in a larger context and illuminates essential questions about the history of knowledge and intellectual authority.

Congratulations to Professor Parker! 

-- Karen Tani  

 

ASLH Peter Gonville Stein Book Award to Sommer for "The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China"

We are delighted to pass along news of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, starting with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. 

About the award: "The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award is awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history. To be eligible, a book must be published during the previous calendar year." 

This year's award went to Matthew Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024). The citation:

Looking back at a lifelong engagement with Chinese legal history in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with a special focus on gender and sexuality, Matthew Sommer breaks new ground in his most recent book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia, 2024), uncovering several cases with transpeople who have been hiding in plain sight in the source material. The core of the book is based on routine and palace memorials from the First Historical Archives in Beijing, but Sommer also supplements his deep source base with popular tales about “the strange,” treaty port journals and newspapers, case books, legal codes, and compendia of traditional Chinese medicine. In contrast to his previous two books, which theorized about gender and sexuality based on thousands of legal cases, this book presents a concise series of case studies that identify what Sommer calls “transgender paradigms” in Chinese legal and social history. Among the figures that appear in these microhistories, we encounter a diverse set of gender non-conforming individuals, including eccentric midwives, cross-dressing clergy, unconventional physicians, and fox spirit mediums. One of the most interesting findings of the book is that while magistrates who prosecuted cases against trans people tended to rely on legal provisions banning heterodoxy, they were often confronted with the fact that there were no appropriate statutes that could prosecute cases involving trans people. Instead, they had to resort to interpretations of law that reveal interesting assumptions about gender, the body, law, procreation, and the fear of the unknown. This compelling and generative book is both a deep dive into complex and dense sources as well as a refreshing intervention into several subfields of legal history.

Honorable Mentions went to: Lauren Benton (Yale University) for The Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024) and to Samuel Fury Childs Daly (University of Chicago) for Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire (Duke University Press, 2024).

Congratulations to all the honorees! 

-- Karen Tani  

Symposium on Sharafi's "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947"

A symposium in Modern Asian Studies is devoted to an article by Mitra Sharafi, Wisconsin Law, who is the new President of the American Society for Legal History.  Professor Sharafi's  article was "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947: A medico-legal history," published in Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021): 371–428.  The just-published symposium includes comments by Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University; Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University; and Philippa Levine, Emerita, University of Texas; with a response by Professor Sharafi.

--Dan Ernst 

Meyler and Setzer on the French Influence on Cardozo's Living Constitutionalism

Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School, and Elliot Setzer, Yale University, have posted Cardozo's Living Constitutionalism in Comparative Context, which appeared in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities:

Benjamin N. Cardozo (NYPL)

Although he served as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1932-1938, the source of Benjamin Cardozo’s preeminence has generally been his contributions to common law jurisprudence and his theories of common law judging. This essay argues that several of Cardozo’s unpublished writings suggest he also developed a significant constitutional theory in dialogue with continental—and particularly French—legal thinkers. Despite not appearing prominently in Cardozo’s published constitutional opinions, this theory influenced Chief Justice Hughes’s majority opinion in the case of Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), a case that not only stripped the Contract Clause of much of its adjudicatory power but also paved the way for the Supreme Court to undo the laissez-faire vision of the Lochner era.

Cardozo most clearly outlined his theory in an essay on “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power,” written shortly before his nomination to the Supreme Court, and in a draft concurrence in the Blaisdell case—one that he abandoned after Chief Justice Hughes modified his own opinion to incorporate several of Cardozo’s paragraphs. “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power” develops Cardozo’s views of judicial authority in America as refracted not only through Tocqueville’s account but also through that of contemporary French jurists, including the comparative law scholar Édouard Lambert. Reading his Blaisdell concurrence against that backdrop both highlights the transatlantic conversations about judicial review ongoing during the 1930s and the potential for a French influence on Cardozo’s understanding of rights.

--Dan Ernst 

Danaher, "The Second Amendment's Catholic Problem"

The Duke Law Journal has published a Note of interest, on "The Second Amendment's Catholic Problem." It is by J.D. candidate Jared Danaher. Here's the abstract:

After New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, history is the touchstone of Second Amendment analysis. Thus, this Note explores an understudied part of America’s long and complicated history with weapons: Catholic disarmament. By undertaking a detailed historical analysis of three Catholic disarmament measures in the late colonial United States, this Note attempts to determine what the history means for present day firearms law. It concludes that even though courts frequently cite America’s history of Catholic disarmament, they rarely use it in a historically accurate way. Modern courts use Catholic disarmament to justify weapons bans on people the state considers dangerous or disrespectful to its laws, but those uses are out of step with the history. The historical analysis in this Note demonstrates that Catholic disarmament laws were narrow measures that targeted a particularly suspect group during a time of national emergency. The history of Catholic disarmament can only justify modern laws based on similar principles of “immediate distrust” (a term this Note coins).

But the journey toward this conclusion reveals as much as the conclusion itself. By faithfully applying the rules laid down in Bruen and United States v. Rahimi, this Note exposes the limits of their historically focused test. On the path to developing the “immediate distrust” principle, this Note exposes historically erroneous claims courts make, illuminates the difficulty of scouring the historical record, and explores the challenges raised by tying modern regulation to context-bound historical episodes. 

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani 

CFP: Religions and Freedom c. 1776

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Papers: Deadline December 30, 2025

On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the John Carter Brown Library and the John C. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics at Washington University invite proposals for participation in a major conference to be held in Providence, Rhode Island, June 4-6, 2026, on the broad topic of religions and freedom c. 1776.  

There are many productive ways to investigate the histories, historical relationship, and legacies of religions and freedom across the breadth of early America. And religious freedom in America has a deep and important history, in which the conference location of Rhode Island itself plays a significant part. The conference aims to engage fresh scholarship and public interests in critical issues of religious freedom. Focused sessions will highlight new perspectives on classic questions, innovative methods, and new sources. We will host public events, including two evening keynotes, sessions for k-12 teachers, and programs dedicated to teacher professional development, in addition to panels dedicated to historical scholarship. 

The program committee encourages proposals on historical topics that address religions and freedom in the Revolutionary era, as well as proposals for a more limited set of sessions to consider legacies and ramifications of the relationship of religions and freedom in contemporary life. Topics might include: teaching religions and freedom, k-16; Indigenous knowledge systems; Africana religious studies; the development of denominations and religious institutions; the interest of governments in marking boundaries of religious freedom; betrayal and conflict within and between religious communities; slavery and definitions of religious freedom and unfreedom; the First Amendment and its antecedents and legacies; churches and clergy; and sacralization and state-building in the early Republic. These are simply suggestive of the wide range of topics that might be fruitfully explored. Those submitting proposals are encouraged to be ambitious and creative as they consider the interplay of religions and freedom in the proximate period of the American Revolution.

The organizers invite proposals for individual papers or full panels (the committee reserves the right, given needs and coverage, to make adjustments to the latter). For full panel proposals, we encourage a diverse representation of career stages, institutions, and perspectives. For both individual paper and panel proposals, please type into the linked form: the panel title and all paper titles, abstract for the panel and each paper not to exceed 250 words, name, affiliation, email and phone contact information for each participant. Please also attach to the form a one page cv (as a PDF) for each participant. For panel proposals, please identify the organizer and suggest a panel moderator and chair.

The program committee will make decisions by mid-January so that the conference program can be settled and announced by early February. Questions may be directed to the conference organizers, Mark Valeri and Karin Wulf via jcb-director@brown.edu.

Weekend Roundup

• 
  A book launch was recently held for Confluences of Law and History: Irish Legal History Society Discourses, 2011-2021, edited by Niamh Howlin and Felix Larkin and published by Four Courts Press.  The volume “brings together an eclectic mix of papers on aspects of Irish legal history from the early modern period to the 20th century.” (Irish Legal Times).  

• An interesting notice of the St. Olaf College Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry team and its investigation of how, if at all, the 17th Amendment shifted the balance of power between rural and urban constituents.

• Katie R. Eyer, Rutgers Law School, has posted Institutional Challenges in an Authoritarian Age, a review essay inspired by Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege.

• Via Harvard Law Today: "Harvard Law School Library releases first complete set of digitized Nuremberg Trials records." 

• If, like me, you are trying to rethink a course on the legal history of the administrative state and presidential power in light of DJT's second term, you might find Eric Schickler's "What Donald Trump Has Taught Us about American Political Institutions," published in Political Science Quarterly, as helpful as I did.  DRE.  

• Jack Goldsmith's very interesting Constitution Day lecture at the American Enterprise Institute: Presidential Greatness and the Fragility of Judicial Supremacy. 

• The links to the recordings of two recent talks sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society, John Fabian Witt on The Radical Fund and G. Edward White and Gerard Magliocca's books on Robert H. Jackson are new available.  Also, Professor White draws upon his book in a post on the blog of the Oxford University Press.  

• Walter Stahr discusses his forthcoming biography of William Howard Taft (Executive Functions).

• Seth Barrett Tillman has posted Chancellor James Kent on Hamilton's Federalist No. 77 and Modern Academic Commentary.  Also, this. 

• The Brennan Center's Annotated Guide to Historians’ Amicus Briefs in the Slaughter and Cook Removal Cases.

• ICYMI: Gordon S. Wood's remarks upon receiving the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute.  John O. McGinnis and Mike Rappaport object to what they consider Jill Lepore’s “particularly shabby” treatment of Justice Scalia’s ideas in her recent Atlantic article on originalism (Law & Liberty).

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

Gadson's "Sedition"

Marcus Alexander Gadson, UNC Law, has published Sedition: How America's Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis (NYU Press):

Since protestors ripped through the Capitol Building in 2021, the threat of constitutional crisis has loomed over our nation. The foundational tenets of American democracy seem to be endangered, and many citizens believe this danger is unprecedented in our history. But Americans have weathered many constitutional crises, often accompanied by the same violence and chaos experienced on January 6. However, these crises occurred on the state level. In Sedition, Marcus Alexander Gadson uncovers these episodes of civil unrest and examines how state governments handled them.

Sedition takes readers through six instances of constitutional crisis: The Buckshot War, Dorr’s Rebellion, Bleeding Kansas, the Brooks-Baxter War, a successful terrorist campaign to overthrow South Carolina’s government during Reconstruction, and the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. He chronicles these turbulent periods of violent anti-government conflict on the state level, explaining what it was like to experience coup d’états, rival governments fighting in the streets, and disputed elections that gave way to violence. As he addresses constitutional breakdown, Gadson urges Americans to pay increased attention to the risk of constitutional instability in their home states. His sweeping historical analysis provides new insights on the fight to protect democracy today.

As Americans mobilize to prevent future crises, Sedition reminds us that our constitutional order can fail, that democratic collapse is possible, and offers us advice on how to save our constitutional system

--Dan Ernst

CFP: American Revolution International

[We have the following CFP from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI) for its next annual conference, American Revolution International.  DRE]

The American Revolution was an international event. Its causes, origins, consequences, and trajectory all had roots in places beyond the thirteen colonies, from neighboring Indigenous nations to Asian cities thousands of miles away. Over the last few decades, there has been increasing scholarly attention to the United States in the world and an enlarged geography for early America. Yet, beyond works specifically on international diplomacy and war, the American Revolution has been largely resistant to such treatment, remaining sturdily provincial especially in popular understandings.

This conference will consider the challenges and advantages of making the American Revolution international in ways that move beyond simply European high politics and diplomacy. The Revolution was at the center of a number of global processes, from colonialism to Enlightenment. The interplay of these dynamics and the specific American trajectory furnishes an excellent avenue of approach to re-invigorate and widen perspectives on older stories about colonial resistance, unity, and war.

This EMSI Annual Conference, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, will take place at the Huntington Library on November 6-7, 2026; publication of a special issue may follow. Travel and accommodation for participants will be covered by EMSI. The conference will include a range of panels devoted to various aspects of the American Revolution International.

Themes include but are not limited to:

• The relations between the international and the national (international systems and processes and their effects on local contexts, and vice-versa);
• Slavery, diaspora, and rebellion;
• Anti-colonial movements, imperialism, and Indigenous resistances;
• Atlantic and global networks (including commercial, communication, and ecological);
• Gender, family, and household authority;
• Sovereignty and independence; and
• The challenges of war and peace

The conference will include both shorter presentations and pre-circulated longer pieces (~5000 words). We solicit expressions of interest by January 10, 2026. Please email a short proposal (no more than 500 words) and brief CV to amrevinternational@gmail.com.

Organizing committee:
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (USC)
Christopher L. Brown (Columbia)
Brian DeLay (UC Berkeley)
Elizabeth Ellis (Princeton)
Sarah Pearsall (Johns Hopkins)

CFP: Intellectual Property: Historical Perspectives

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Intellectual property: Historical perspectives.  Special Issue of Revista Chilena de Historia del Derecho

The Revista Chilena de Historia del Derecho, a fully electronic journal, invites original, unpublished contributions for a special issue on the histories of intellectual property.

Since the 15th century and the invention of printing in Europe, intellectual property has gradually developed into a legal institution, marked by the meeting of the logics of creation, economics and law. Its history and dissemination evidence the changing relationship between the author, inventor, creator, or breeder, society and the State.

The aim of this special issue is to examine this institution over the long term and beyond European borders. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the historical conditions that led to the emergence of the various forms of intellectual property from the 18th century onwards (literary and artistic property, copyright, patents, etc.).

Contributions may focus on, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• History of copyright and related rights
• History of pharmaceutical patent and drug law
• Brand history and trade mark registration
• History of scientific property (inventions, discoveries)
• History of corporate law and its relationship with employees' skill and knowledge
• History of the legal professionalisation of intellectual property rights (specialised lawyers, agents and courts)
• History of the protection of plant varieties and living organisms
• The historical challenges of protecting intangible heritage.

Contributions may also address specific methodological or theoretical issues, provided they have a historical dimension.

Proposals for articles (title, an abstract between 300 and 500 words, accompanied by a 5-line bio-bibliographical note) should be sent to the coordinators of this special issue (J.A.Bellido@kent.ac.uk and gabriel.galvez-behar@univ-lille.fr), with a copy to the editorial board of the Revista Chilena de Historia del Derecho at the following address: aargouse@derecho.uchile.cl

Provisional timetable
Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2025
Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2026
Closing date: August 31, 2026
Publication date: December 2026

Articles, written in French, Spanish or English, must be between 7000 and 9000 words (approx.), and comply with the magazine's editorial standards (available [here]).

Smith-Drelich on the Right of Free Movement

Noah Smith-Drelich, Chicago-Kent College of Law, has posted The Forgotten Fundamental Right to Free Movement, which appears in the Northwestern University Law Review:

There is a powerful fundamental right hiding in plain sight: the fundamental right to free movement. This right goes beyond the consistently acknowledged—though infrequently applied—fundamental right to interstate travel. The true scope of the Constitution's protection of movement through substantive due process safeguards local, interstate, and international travel. Though overlooked today, the fundamental right to free movement has deep roots in history and tradition, and in the decisions of numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court. 

This Article is the first to examine freedom of movement using the history and tradition test for unenumerated fundamental rights. This Article begins by tracing the right to free movement from the Magna Carta, through Blackstone's Commentaries, colonial America, early state constitutions, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. As this analysis shows, repressive governments have routinely sought to limit movement across and within boundaries. But the English and U.S. legal traditions are marked by repeated affirmations of the right—there is strong and persistent historical support for a fundamental right to free movement. 

This Article then turns to judicial discussions of movement rights, both historical and contemporary. Drawing on several previously unconnected lines of decision, this examination surfaces a vibrant picture of the fundamental right to free movement recognized by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. 

--Dan Ernst 

BC Law's Legal History Roundtable

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

The Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable has announced their schedule for the upcoming spring 2026 semester. Please see the schedule below for details.

BC Law's legal history group–Mary Sarah Bilder, Felipe Cole, Daniel Farbman, Aziz Rana, Adnan Zulfiqar, Marco Basile, Daniel R. Coquillette, and Frank R. Herrmann, S.J.–welcome anyone in the Boston area to join us. The Roundtable meets and discusses a pre-circulated paper in an informal, collegial atmosphere of informed discussion. We meet in the Boston College Law Library, Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room. More information can be found on the website or by contacting Chris Fitzgerald (fitzgefk@bc.edu).

Thursday, January 22, 4:30 p.m.
Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Harvard Radcliffe Institute & Harvard Law School

Thursday, February 26, 4:30 p.m.
Jelani Hayes, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Harvard University

Luo on Usury Law in Early Modern China

Weiwei Luo, Grinnell College, has published Beyond State/Market: Usury Law in Late-Ming China in Law and History Review:

This article examines the interdependent relationship between the state, law, and market in early modern China. Focusing on usury statutes, it analyzes how the Chinese state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed its legal framework to regulate a burgeoning money economy. The study underscores the critical role of law as an instrument of statecraft, essential for sustaining market functionality and social stability. Law’s multifaceted nature—encompassing legislation, specialist interpretations, adjudication, legal education, professional manuals, and popular knowledge—challenges the simplistic view of Confucian values as inherently anti-commerce. Instead, it shows how these values supported the uniformity and practicality of legal interpretations and judicial decisions. Moreover, the Chinese case points to a broader analytical framework with cross-cultural relevance: economic justice and market efficiency are not inherently opposed but can be mutually reinforcing when grounded in a shared set of values and legal regulations.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

•  Joseph Thorndike’s "Three Compelling Historical Arguments Against the Trump Tariffs" (Forbes). 

• The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation has released "the 'Michigan Constitutional Archive,' an online resource that gives Michigan residents full and easy access to the state’s founding documents. The archive compiles and organizes every proposed amendment, the 1961 convention debates, and other key documents related to Michigan’s constitutional history."

• "The Constitution Society invites applications for a Research Fellowship dedicated to promoting the life and constitutional contributions of Richard Haldane (1856-1928)."  More. 

• John Fabian Witt discusses The Radical Fund on The Nation's podcast.   

• Paul Moreno on G. Edward White's Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment (Law and Liberty). 

• We note the filing of two historian's amicus briefs in  Trump v. Slaughter:  one for the Brennan Center for Justice by Jane Manners, Fordham Law; the other by Noah Rosenblum and Nathaniel Donahue, NYU Law. 

• Rebecca Ciota on researching the University of Colorado Law School's early Black graduates (The Conversation).

• Q&A with Camille Robcis, the new chair of Columbia University's history department (Columbia News). 

• Times's "Made by History": The Fight Over Birthright Citizenship Has Always Been Political, Not Just Legal by Philip Yaure.

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

JACH Fall 2025

The Fall 2025 issue of Journal of American Constitutional History is now online:

Of Guilty Property and Civil/Remedial Punishment: The Implications and Perils of “History” for the Excessive Fines Clause and Beyond by Beth A. Colgan

Contrary to the Supreme Court’s historically based determination that in rem forfeitures are nonpunitive, substantial historical evidence—including the Court’s own early opinions—show that in rem forfeitures were understood to constitute punishment.

The Birth of the Dead Constitution: Arthur Machen Jr.’s Early Twentieth-Century Originalism by Austin Steelman

Arthur Machen Jr.’s 1900 Harvard Law Review article “The Elasticity of the Constitution” influenced the long rise of originalism—revealing many of originalism’s now essential features--and helped give birth to a dead Constitution that proved ironically vital and ever-evolving.

Dialogue

Madisonian Liquidation Unliquidated by Jack Rakove

William Baude’s provocative essay on “Constitutional Liquidation,” published five years ago, is the best treatment of the subject. Whether the liquidation of constitutional indeterminacies, to Madison’s way of thinking, is equivalent to the fixation of constitutional meaning, is another matter entirely.

Liquidation, Then and Now by William Baude

If it is true that liquidation did not “deeply engage Madison’s interest,” as Rakove writes, James Madison’s “interest”-level is not something that binds constitutional lawyers. Our historical accounts should be accurate, but our reasons for caring about historical accounts are reasons of our own.

Symposium: Tenth Anniversary of Obergefell—Queer Constitutional History

Queer as U.S. Constitutional History by Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George

Most of queer constitutional history is loss, as well as consolation and survival in the face of devastation. This is a fairly easy conclusion after two decades of the Roberts Court, in the wake of Skrmetti, and amid ongoing efforts to repeal Obergefell.

The Tenth Anniversary of Marriage Equality: How Traditional Marriage Law Led to Constitutional Protection for Same-Sex Marriage by Joanna L. Grossman

Had the history of marriage law been more uneven, it might not have been so relevant to this analysis. But the federal government’s longstanding deference to states in determinations of marital status made clear that this was a case of anti-gay exceptionalism.

The Missing History of Romer v. Evans by Marie-Amélie George

Although the outcome of Romer is well-known, as is its reasoning, the events that produced the jurisprudential turn have largely been forgotten. Uncovering this missing history helps explain how and why the Supreme Court inaugurated a new era in queer rights jurisprudence.

Good Plaintiffs: The Women of Marriage Equality by Zoe M. Savitsky

The early women who sought marriage equality did not look like “perfect plaintiffs.” Neither did many of the successful female plaintiffs in this study. There are, clearly, limits to the current perfect plaintiff tale if we have failed to see these women, intersectionally and multidimensionally.

A Queer Constitutional History of Loss: Mayes v. Texas (1974), Privacy, and the Struggle for the Right to Be Trans in Public in the 1970s by Scott De Orio

The history of privacy and substantive due process rights is usually narrated from the perspective of those cases the Supreme Court decided and that advocates for gender and sexual rights won. But it is also crucial to pay attention to losses, and even cases the Court turned down and to which it declined to grant cert.

“I’m Not Sleazy and I Don’t Frequent Bars”: Respectability as a Legal Strategy in Transsexual Employment Discrimination Lawsuits, 1971-1995 by Shay Ryan Olmstead

Transgender workers did more than simply assert their own normativity—they also actively distanced themselves from other gender crossers.

Williams to Lecture on Precedent in Star Chamber

On Thursday, November 20, from 18:00 to 19:30, Ian Williams, St. John’s College, Oxford University, will speak on "Precedent and Sovereignty in Early-Modern Equity: The View from the Star Chamber" as the annual History of Law and Governance Centre lecture at the University of Nottingham in Room B55 Law & Social Sciences Building.  Here is Dr. Williams’s abstract:

In this lecture I shall investigate the history of precedent in early-modern equity. Precedent played a central role in equity changing from its origin as exceptional discretionary justice to its more familiar form as a body of law within the English legal system. However, the sources for examining the role of precedent in equity are very limited, if we constrain ourselves to the major private law equity courts of Chancery and Exchequer. Using the reports of cases in the criminal equity court of Star Chamber provides a much larger body of sources. Star Chamber material also enables us to consider an early-modern theorisation of equity as an emanation of sovereignty, in which deciding cases could be understood as an aspect of sovereignty and precedent as a form of legislation, and see this legislative activity in operation.

The lecture will draw upon Dr. Williams's ongoing research on the court of Star Chamber, including his editing of a volume of seventeenth century law reports and a study of the court as a provider of criminal equity.

--Dan Ernst 

Tour of the Million-Dollar Courtroom Cancelled

Million Dollar Courtroom (LC)

[Because the shutdown of the federal government may not be ended in time, the tour of the Detroit federal courthouse, previously announced in the post below, is cancelled.  DRE]

[We have word of an excursion on Thursday, November 13, that might interest attendees of the upcoming annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, a tour at 3:00 pm of the "Million Dollar Courtroom" of the Theodore Levin Federal Courthouse, which is located just a block or so away from the conference hotel in Detroit.  It is not an ASLH-sponsored event but has been arranged Victoria Saker Woeste, an ASLH member who sent us the following.  DRE]

Anyone attending the ASLH meeting in November is welcome to take a tour of the famous “Million Dollar Courtroom” on the 7th floor of the Theodore Levin Federal Courthouse, 231 W. Lafayette Blvd., less than a five-minute walk from the conference hotel. The tour is free and open to ASLH members and guests. We will get an architectural tour of the space, originally (and lavishly) constructed in 1896 and then lovingly preserved and reinstalled in the current courthouse which was completed in 1935. The room was renovated again in 2015.

Our docent will be Barbara Radke of the Michigan Federal Court Historical Society, and she will give a detailed presentation on the decoration and furnishings in the room, which remains an active courtroom today. We will also learn about important trials held in the space both before and after the relocation. Meet me in the lobby of the hotel at the front doors (at the Washington Blvd. entrance) and we will walk to the courthouse at 2:45 pm rain or shine. You’re also welcome to meet us at the courthouse. You won’t need to register ahead of time but courthouse rules prohibit phones inside the courtrooms, so, unless you are a lawyer with a bar registration card in your possession, prepare to leave your phone in your hotel room or store it in a secure cubby on the first floor of the Levin building. Courthouse security will show us where that is located.

I look forward to showing off this beautiful space. This is not an official ASLH event, so please direct any questions to me at vswoeste@icloud.com.

Black on Education and State Constitutions in Reconstruction

Griffin Black has recently published Reconstruction State Constitutional Conventions and the Rebirth of American Schooling as a student note in the Yale Law Journal:

A rebirth of American education occurred in the state constitutional conventions of the Reconstruction South. At a moment of national constitutional reformation, biracial coalitions of delegates constitutionalized universal public-school systems, viewing them as a core component of remaking their states in the image of the U.S. Constitution. These delegates succeeded in keeping their constitutions free from the language of segregated schooling. This ill-understood history severely troubles the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the schoolhouse. This Note fills gaps in the ongoing conversation emanating from the Court about the relationship between our nation’s history and its current educational landscape.

--Dan Ernst 

Ahmed, "Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS"

Cambridge University Press has published Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS, by Aziza Ahmed (Boston University School of Law). A description from the Press:

How did women come to be seen as 'at-risk' for HIV? In the early years of the AIDS crisis, scientific and public health experts questioned whether women were likely to contract HIV in significant numbers and rolled out a response that effectively excluded women. Against a linear narrative of scientific discovery and progress, Risk and Resistance shows that it was the work of feminist lawyers and activists who altered the legal and public health response to the AIDS epidemic. Feminist AIDS activists and their allies took to the streets, legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts to demand the recognition of women in the HIV response. Risk and Resistance recovers a key story in feminist legal history – one of strategy, struggle, and competing feminist visions for a just and healthy society. It offers a clear and compelling vision of how social movements have the capacity to transform science in the service of legal change. 

Praise from reviewers:

"Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS is a moving and meticulous study about the grass-roots activists who made visible women’s plight during a time when AIDS treatment and funding were entirely focused on men. The initial definition of AIDS as ‘a gay men’s disease’ led to long-term distributional injustices: the exclusion of women from clinical trials, from disability benefits, and even from being counted in the statistics of its devastation. Aziza Ahmed has crafted a magnificent genealogy of specific organizational strategies that linked individual women into powerful communities of patients, medical researchers, service providers, and litigators. Their advocacy reframed not merely responses to the AIDS crisis but to all subsequent epidemics including COVID. This book is the chronicle of hard-fought interventions that redirected the course of legal and medical history and that transformed social outcomes to the betterment of all." -- Patricia Williams 

"Risk and Resistance is a tour de force. It is the book that was missing from the catalogue about HIV/AIDS and the catastrophic health, legal, and political crises in its wake. In beautiful prose and rich story-telling, Aziza Ahmed corrects the historical record, rewriting women and crucial, feminist activism into the folds of a devastating era in global history. With this book, Professor Ahmed has penned a pathbreaking contribution to law and feminist theory." -- Michele Bratcher Goodwin

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani  

Weekend Roundup

•  A Q&A with Jane Manners, who joined Fordham's law faculty this fall (Fordham Law News).

• The death of former Vice President Dick Cheney has prompted reflections on his significance for U.S. legal history, including this one at the Conversation and this one at the New York Times. 

• Marlene Trestman has updated her database of 817 women who have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court (through May 15, 2025).  It is now live on the Supreme Court Historical Society's website.

• The Law & Economics Center at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School will host the symposium, The Un-Forgotten Founder: A Celebration of George Mason's Legacy on the Occasion of His 300th Birthday, on December 8, 2025.  The panelists include Akhil Reed Amar, Yale Law School; Michael S. Greve, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School; The Honorable Edith Hollan Jones, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; and The Honorable William C. Mims, Senior Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia.

• Mitchell Del Bianco, who graduated this year from UVA Law's famed JD-MA program, has won the Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition for his paper, “What Is a House? An Exhibit Investigating Common Law Origins of the Open Fields Doctrine.” He wrote it for Professor Paul Halliday’s legal history class. (UVA Law).    

• Speaking of UVA Law, new courses taught in the January term and Spring 2026 semester include "Citizenship: The Law, History and Politics of U.S. Citizenship," co-taught by Karsh fellow Anja Bossow and Professor Amanda Frost; "Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence," co-taught by Charles Barzun and David Plunkett, visiting from Dartmouth's philosophy department; and "Roman Law of Family, Property and Succession," taught by Michael Doran.

• Cultural Critique Online has published a roundtable on The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America's Universities (Duke University Press, 2023), by Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (Whitman College). It features responses by Joshua Barkan (Georgia), Michael Banerjee (UC Berkeley), and Adam Sitze (Amherst), along with a reply by Kaufman-Osborn.  

• Julian Zelizer interviews John Fabian Witt on his book The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.

• 
  Miloš Vec, University of Vienna, will deliver the lecture After 1919 and after 1945: How Two World Wars Shaped German Thinking on International Law, at Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana on November 14, 2025, at 3:00 pm.  More.  

• If you don't know who Sam Thorne was, consult this, which, for reasons known only to the algorithm, found its way to us this week.

• Lawbook Exchange's November catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: More Lepore (Harvard Crimson). Kenya's new judiciary museum (Eastleigh Voice).  An essay on Abortion, the 1966 book by the journalist Larry Nadler and the birth of the reproductive rights movement (Public Books).  The history of China's legal exam (World of Chinese).

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