Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization: a symposium has begun on Marital Privilege, by Serena Mayeri (Penn Carey Law).   

• Over at Notice & Comment: a symposium has begun on Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America, by Peter Conti-Brown & Sean Vanatta.

• What an interesting way to encourage student interest in legal historical research!  American Legal Histories is an exhibit at the Lillian Goldman Law Library of sources used in Yale University’s historical collections by students in YLS’s American Legal History course, “each week in class and over the semester in their final research papers. The exhibit highlights a document chosen by each student from their research in primary source collections, online and in person, from Yale and elsewhere.  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society, the White House Historical Association, and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, hosts the 2025 National Heritage Lecture on Thursday, October 9, at 6:00 PM at historic Decatur House.  Douglas Brinkley will lecture on Presidential Evolution: A History of Executive Orders Over 47 Presidencies.

• 
  Jill Lepore is appearing on various podcasts, including Dahlia Lithwick's Amicus and Kara Shwisher's On on her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (Norton). The WaPo review is here.  

• NYU Law's post on Sarah Seo, who recently joined its faculty (NYU).  

• Bob Bauer, Richard Pildes and Samuel Issacharoff have launched the NYU Law Democracy Project, which seeks to engage,"along many dimensions and from diverse ideological perspectives," the challenge of the "dissatisfaction with democratic government [that] has been pervasive for the last decade throughout the West."

• On the back end of the latest episode of Strict Scrutiny, hosts Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shaw speak with Justin Driver (Yale Law) about The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education.  

• You can always check in on the most recent, digitally published, and open-access articles and book reviews in Law and History Review at its First View page at the Cambridge University Press. 

•  Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect is now streaming on PBS.  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society's recording of John Q. Barrett's lecture, “Away Without Leave but Back in Washington, Briefly: Nazi Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson on the Road to Nuremberg, September 1945,” is now available on the Society's YouTube site.

• Gerard Magliocca, the winner of the Erwin N. Griswold Prize of the Supreme Court Historical Society, will discuss his new book Washington’s Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington at the Supreme Court of the United States on September 25, 2025 at 6:00 PM at the Supreme Court of the United States.

• Over at Just Security: my Georgetown Law colleagues Marty Lederman and John Mikhail's ongoing series of posts on birthright citizenship.  DRE 

• Lawbook Exchange's September 2025 list of Scholarly Law and Legal History is here.   

• We are not the first to note the irony that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Human Rights Violator Law Division is advertising for a historian.  Julia Rose Kraut's discussion of the history of ideological exclusion and deportation suggests that they been at it for a while (Unsung History).

• ICYMI: American Historical Association Sends Letter in Support of the State Historical Society of Iowa Research Center (AHA).  A century later, the gunshots from the historic Ossian Sweet house still echo (Detroit Free Press).

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

Goh on "Potential Legal History" in Art

New online from Law and History Review: Potential Legal History in the Art of Sonny Liew by Benjamin Goh, National University of Singapore:

Photographs, much less comic books, are not often seen to be focal sources of legal-historical research. This is so despite the growing momentum in the humanities and social sciences to take the visuality of culture, history, and law seriously. Notwithstanding the “visual turn” in law and humanities and socio-legal studies, it remains quite rare for legal history journals to carry images for the close reading of their pertinent implications. For the most part, legal scholarship has continued to exclude much of the optical media that arrange and compose the history of law, including the textual documents whose visuality produces, even contests, foundational legal concepts. This omission calls for intervention, not because legal history has failed to engage critically with dominant histories and the legal orders that they sustain, but rather because archived photographs and their (re)entry into visual modes of storytelling expand the range of historical sources that facilitate such critical projects. More fundamentally, the remediated photograph discloses the technological and theoretical assumptions of history-writing, prompting reflection on how far legal history should evolve to accommodate insights from its neighboring fields.

--Dan Ernst 

Aulakh's "Empire and the Peasant Proprietor"

Preet S. Aulakh,York University, has published Empire and the Peasant Proprietor: Inter-Colony Land Reform in the Victorian Era (Oxford University Press):

As the British Empire consolidated its geographical possession of distant lands by the 19th century, the agrarian nature of its colonies necessitated careful considerations about land tenure relationships. After intense debates around property rights and political economy, several land laws were enacted across the Empire between 1868 and 1875, which recognised the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators. Empire and the Peasant Proprietor examines this transformative shift in the imperial approaches to land tenure.

Through a comparative analysis of historical land tenure arrangements in three diverse colonial sites, Punjab, Ireland, and Prince Edward Island, the book identifies two crucial mechanisms which facilitated the institutionalisation of peasant proprietorship. One, there was a fortuitous ideological alignment between important governing agents in the three colonies. Two, the debate about the impact of land reform in the colonies on the 'sanctity' of English principles was redirected, allowing for inter-colony analogies and precedents to support the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators.

Empire and the Peasant Proprietor demonstrates the importance of these reciprocal influences within the imperial system and provides insight into contemporary challenges of secure land rights for a large proportion of the global population that continues to be dependent on agriculture for sustenance.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

--Dan Ernst

A Self-Paced Course on American Constitutional History

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is offering a “self-paced” course, The Fate of the American Constitution, led by John Fabian Witt, YLS.

Since 1787, the United States Constitution has aimed to hold together a divided political community around a set of basic agreements. Some now call it the oldest constitution in the world still in effect today; others insist that though the textual template has remained in many respects the same, we have actually had two or three, or maybe even four constitutional orders over time. Either way, its history has been one of tumult, controversy, and sometimes mass violence from the very start. This course takes up the social and political history of the document and the practices that have arisen around it, from the founding era to the 1937 transformation that now hangs in the balance. Readings and lectures draw on multiple disciplinary approaches to history and law and foreground competing perspectives on the past. 

--Dan Ernst 

Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West

New from Oxford University Press: Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West, edited by Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli, and Diego Pirillo:

The history of peacemaking has traditionally been reduced to isolated case studies and seen as the prelude to the presumed 'universal' and 'modern' international order. Countering this one-dimensional and Eurocentric narrative, this multi-authored volume reconceptualizes peace treaties as a range of successful and failed agreements, settlements, truces, leagues, and other forms of conflict resolution, thus recovering their multilayered history throughout the medieval and early modern period. Rather than a series of 'great' treaties, peacemaking is reframed as a flexible phenomenon; a 'political grammar', whose complexity is reflected in its variety of forms and sources. Drawing on both diplomatic history and international relations studies, this volume traces the central role that peacemaking has played in the political history of the Western World.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

McClain on Chinese Immigrants in the California Supreme Court

We missed this one when it first came out: Charles J. McClain, “Chinese Immigrants in the California Supreme Court: The Earliest Cases," California Legal History, vol. 19 (2024). Here's an excerpt from the introduction (footnotes omitted):

In April, 1862 California enacted a law that imposed a capitation tax of $2.50 per month on all adult “Mongolians” residing in the state, with a few exceptions. According to its caption, its purpose was to discourage the immigration of the Chinese into California. A San Francisco Chinese named Lin Sing, acting almost certainly with the support of Chinese organizations, challenged the law and his challenge was sustained by the California Supreme Court. In the case of Lin Sing v. Washburn it ruled that the law was an attempt by a state to regulate foreign commerce, which included immigration, and as such trenched impermissibly on a federal power that was paramount in this domain. The case is of considerable significance for what it had to say about the extent of the federal immigration power vis-a-vis the states. It was also the first instance in which Chinese litigants succeeded in having a California law declared unconstitutional.

Lin Sing was not the first time that Chinese immigrants found themselves involved in major Supreme Court civil litigation. In the previous decade, roughly the first decade of substantial Chinese immigration into the state, Chinese civil litigants appeared six times before the California tribunal either as petitioners or respondents. The purpose of this article is to examine these very early cases, as much for what they reveal about the structure and dynamics of the early immigrant community as for what they may tell us about the court or for any legal significance they might have. I reserve until the end a more detailed discussion of the Lin Sing case.

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

An Exhibit and Conference on German Constitutional History

We have word of a library exhibit and panel at the Washington & Lee University School of Law: Locating the Law: Places of German Constitutional History.  First, the exhibit, which runs from September 4 – October 31, 2025:

Locating the Law explores the places where Germany’s constitutional identity has taken shape—from medieval cathedrals and Enlightenment-era town halls to postwar courthouses and modern office buildings. Featuring photographs by Alexander Telesniuk and adapted from the book Verfassungorte/Constitutional Places by Russell A. Miller, Markus Lang, and Kai-Michael Sprenger, the exhibition considers how democracy is rooted not just in texts but in physical spaces and shared public memory.

Spanning over five centuries, the exhibition highlights sites where constitutions were debated, drafted, or defended. Telesniuk’s images reflect the symbolic and practical importance of these locations, reminding viewers that building and maintaining a constitutional society is a collective, ongoing effort. The project builds on an original book project funded and published by Stiftung Orte der deutschen Demokratiegeschichte (The Foundation for the Places of the History of German Democracy).

The panel discussion is Wednesday October 22, 2025, 4:00–5:30 pm in Lykes Atrium, with a light reception following.  The panelists are:

Alexander Telesniuk, Constitutional Places Photographer, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Russell Miller, Co-author of Constitutional Places, W&L University School of Law
Kish Parella, W&L University School of Law
Richard Wetzell, German Historical Institute, Washington DC 

--Dan Ernst 

Cheta's "How Commerce Became Legal"

Omar Youssef Cheta, Syracuse University, has published How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press):

When Egypt's markets opened to private capital in the 1840s, a new infrastructure of commercial laws and institutions emerged. Egypt became the site of profound legal experimentation, and the resulting commercial sphere reflected the political contestations among the governors of Egypt, European consulates, Ottoman rulers, and a growing number of private entrepreneurs, both foreign and local. How Commerce Became Legal explores the legal and business practices that resulted from this fusion of Ottoman, French, and Islamic legal concepts and governed commerce in Egypt.

Focusing on the decades between the formalization of Cairo's practical autonomy within the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s and its incorporation into the British Empire in the 1880s, Omar Cheta considers how modern laws redefined the commercial sphere, shaping a mode of market governance that would persist for decades to come. He highlights the demarcation of a new law-defined commercial realm separate from the land regime and from civil or family-centered exchanges, and reconstructs these changes through both legal codes and state orders, as well as individual merchant voices preserved in court documents. As this book documents both individual experiences and structural explanations, it offers a rare perspective on the scope and reach of market governance over the mid nineteenth century, revealing changes simultaneously from within and without state institutions.

--Dan Ernst 

Hughes's "Shattered Idol"

Tom Hughes has published A Shattered Idol: The Lord Chief Justice and his Troublesome Women (Marble Hill Publishers):

After the death of his first wife, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge’s unmarried daughter Mildred was expected to serve as housekeeper, hostess and companion to her father, one of the best known figures in Victorian England. But Mildred wanted to marry Charles Warren Adams, the irascible secretary of the Victoria Street Society for which Mildred worked. After disputed accounts of an incident “in a darkened room,” Lord Coleridge forbade the two to meet. And so began a scandal of the rich peer’s daughter and the fortune-hunting journalist that intrigued London society.

Worse was to follow - the threat of a breach-of-promise action as Lord Coleridge tried to end his attachment to a much younger divorcée with whom he had had an affair on a liner returning from America, a libel suit that revealed every squalid detail of his tyranny over his daughter, and public humiliation as he was questioned in his own court by his would-be son-in-law.

Tom Hughes has written the first full-length account of a scandal that enthralled Britain for more than a decade. This is a thrilling and wonderfully told story of “a family which has gone to ruin itself.”

Sir Paul Coleridge, KC, provides a foreword.

–Dan Ernst

Stern to Lecture on Reclaiming the Constitition at UNLV

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  DRE]

On September 17, 2025, 4:30pm to 6:30pm, in the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art/Harry Reid Center,
Mark Joseph Stern will deliver the 2025 UNLV Constitution Day Lecture, "Reclaiming the Constitution From the Shadows of an Authoritarian Presidency":

In recent years, the Supreme Court has awarded the president an ever-growing amount of power, elevating the executive branch to the apex of the government. This alarming expansion of presidential authority comes at the expense of Congress and the courts, disrupting the Constitution’s carefully calibrated separation of powers. Restoring American democracy will require reining in the imperial presidency—first, by rejecting the Supreme Court's theory of a "unitary executive," then by restoring constitutional checks that prevent the president from becoming a king.

Mark Joseph Stern is a senior writer covering courts and the law for Slate and co-host of the Amicus podcast. He regularly appears on MSNBC. Based in Washington, D.C., he has covered the U.S. Supreme Court since 2013. He holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Admission is free.  Contact College of Liberal Arts Dean's Office (702-895-3401; liberalarts@unlv.edu).

CFP: Legal History in Asia and Beyond

 [We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Call for Papers – Legal History in Asia and Beyond: Lessons from the Past for the Present

The Transnational Legal History Group, part of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law withinthe Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Oxford Programme in Asian Laws of the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and the Asian Legal History Association are jointly hosting a conference on “Legal History in Asia and Beyond: Lessons from the Past for the Present.” The conference will take place in two parts: first on 17 and 18 March 2026 in Hong Kong, and then on 23 March 2026 in Oxford. Applicants should specify at which venue they would prefer to present when making their application. There is no obligation or expectation to attend both sessions, but participants are welcome to do so.

This unique cross-jurisdictional event will also serve to mark the institutionalization of the Asian Legal History Association (ALHA). The ALHA, which has its Secretariat at CUHK, brings together faculties and institutes from more than a dozen jurisdictions, collectively committed to promoting the study and knowledge of transnational legal history generally, enhancing the status and role of Asia as a generator and hub of global legal history knowledge, and developing collaborative relationships between universities in Asia and around the world.

Click here for the call for papers. The submission deadline is 31 October 2025.

Katz on the First US Women Judges

Elizabeth D. Katz, University of Florida Levin College of Law, has posted May It Please Her Honor": The United States' First Women Judges, 1870-1930, which is forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review:

Catherine Waugh McCulloch (LC)

Between 1870 and 1930, hundreds of women served as judges in the United States. While a small number compared to the men who served, these pathbreaking officials were particularly visible and influential in women's efforts to secure political rights and advance in the legal profession. Women's progress in obtaining judgeships developed in a regional pattern, with women in the Midwest and West able to secure earlier and broader jurisdiction positions than their counterparts in the Northeast and South. Seeking access to the judiciary, women in conservative states made gendered arguments about women's supposed superiority in overseeing cases involving women, children, and families. Some demonstrated women's skill in handling juvenile and family matters through service as the country's first probation officers, a step that supported women's selection as judges in juvenile and family courts. Regardless of location or type of court, women judges attracted significant attention because they seemed to embody the promise and perils of women's increasing political and professional power. Yet since most served in local trial courts, nearly all are forgotten today. This Article recovers the stories of these overlooked trailblazers, offering the most comprehensive account of the obstacles they faced and the strategies they deployed to join the country's judicial benches. 

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Reminder: at noon on September 10, the Supreme Court Historical Society will sponsor a virtual lecture and conversation with John Q. Barrett, “Away Without Leave but Back in Washington, Briefly: Nazi Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson on the Road to Nuremberg, September 1945.”  Register here.  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society’s latest episode in its Breaking History video series treats “two extraordinary behind-the-scenes stories from the latest Journal of Supreme Court History” concerning Reed v. Reed (1971) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

• In an episode of Historians & Their Histories, the Massachusetts Historical Society spoke with Cornelia H. Dayton, University of Connecticut, about her her research into the life of John Peters, the husband of acclaimed poet Phillis Wheatley, as well as abour Professor Dayton’s “path to becoming an historian, her early interest in constitutional law, and the challenges of researching subaltern subjects, such as Peters, who left few firsthand accounts.”  The transcript is here.

• Over at ESCLH Blog: a post on the "(Dis)continuity of Legal Systems in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland after WWII: Difficult Heritage." 

• On Monday, September 8, at 6:30 p.m. at Paul Sawyier Public Library in Frankfort, Kentucky, Thomas C. Mackey, University of Louisville emeritus, will discuss his book, Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime (State-Journal).  

• Also on Monday, September 8, Aziz Rana, BC Law, will give the 2025 Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture, "The Constitution in crisis: how Americans came to idolize a document that fails them," at Cornell University, from 12-1 p.m.  More.  

• In C-SPAN’s “Bell Ringer” series, Joseph Crespino, Emory University, talks about “the changes in society, politics, institutions and the U.S. Senate in the 20th and 21st centuries.”  

• Keith Whittington, Yale Law School, will deliver the Constitution Day address at Washington and Lee University at 5 p.m. on September 18 on “By Birth Alone: The Original Meaning of Birthright Citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment" (More). 

• Notre Dame Law’s notice of the second ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium.

• A columnist praises the appointment of Lee Strang to direct the new Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University because the center promises to address "the partisan biases that have oozed into the teaching of American history and civic responsibility" (Columbus Dispatch).   

• The 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at the Howard University School of Law has launched a newsletter, The Refounding.

• ICYMI:  How a Chinese Laundryman Shaped US Civil Rights (KQED).  The Evolution of the Bail System in America (History). The Volatile History of Flag Burning in the US (History).  The "Founders Museum" from White House and PragerU blurs history, AI-generated fiction (NPR).  Speaking of Founders: How about the one who lost a leg?  (Smithsonian).  And there's no rest for the Madison revisionist: “'If we truly want to look at the birthplace of the United States Constitution, it’s not in Philadelphia, it’s on the second floor of this home,' Montpelier’s Director of Interpretation and Visitor Engagement Kyle Stetz said." (29News).

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

Masur and Posner on the Political Origins of Originalism (and CBA)

Jonathan S. Masur and Eric A.  Posner, University of Chicago Law School, have published The Common Political Foundations of Originalism and Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Administrative Law Review:

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and originalism are rarely discussed together and seem to belong to different worlds of legal scholarship. The two methods are used by different  institutions in different spheres of lawfor different puwposes; what could they have in  common?  Nothing or so it would seem. Yet closer inspection reveals surprising commonalities-both in terms of structure and function, on the one hand, and in historical pedigree and political economy, on the other. CBA and originalism are what we will call midlevel legal methods.   Midlevel legal methods are neither normative commitments nor legal doctrines, but recurrently used methodologies that are applied to multiple substantive areas of law. What is peculiar and interesting about these two particular midlevel methods is that, despite the fact that they cover such divergent domains, they have developed similar structures to fill similar roles. 

How did these two methods with such similar structural and functional characteristics arise? We argue that the answer lies with their shared political history. Both methods have been propelled forward by significant financial support from an overlapping web of business groups and intellectual support from academic supporters associated with pro-market trends in intellectual and political circles in the 1970s and 1980s. Accordingly, both methods were originally backed largely by conservatives and associated with the conservative legal movement. But even that has shifted over time, and roughly contemporaneously. Yet the story of originalism and CBA is one of dynamic instability. New political forces and new populist trends pose threats to the continued preeminence of both methods.

--Dan Ernst

Pasker on Black Testimony in Antebellum Courts

Robert B. Pasker, City University of New York, has posted "Which History has Condescended to Notice": Black Testimony in Antebellum Courts:

This study investigates the contested admissibility of Black testimony in American courts between 1790 and 1865, analyzing 73 appellate opinions across 11 states and the District of Columbia. Contrary to the prevailing historiography that portrays antebellum statutes as universally excluding Black voices, these cases reveal that judges frequently exercised discretion to admit testimony where exclusion threatened the courts’ procedural capacity to adjudicate. The analysis demonstrates that judicial reasoning prioritized institutional functionality rather than moral or rights-based considerations.

A central challenge was methodological: appellate case law is vast, dispersed, and embedded in archaic legal language that resists conventional search tools. To overcome this, I developed Roscoe, a machine-learning system designed to perform conceptual searches, generate topical classifications, and produce plain-language summaries of nineteenth-century case law. Named for Roscoe Pound, the system allowed efficient retrieval and categorization of relevant cases from hundreds of thousands of digitized opinions. Roscoe not only enhanced recall and precision in identifying Black testimony cases but also facilitated thematic grouping across jurisdictional boundaries, making possible a genuinely national analysis.

The findings expose the structural contradiction at the core of antebellum jurisprudence: statutes that categorically barred Black testimony collided with the judiciary’s pragmatic need for probative evidence. Appellate decisions show how Black participation forced courts to adapt in ways that preserved institutional authority while reinforcing racial hierarchy. This duality—judicial flexibility without recognition of Black rights—complicates prevailing narratives of antebellum legal history and demonstrates how digital methodologies can expand the evidentiary base of legal historiography.

 I'm trying to decide whether Roscoe Pound would appreciate the hommage.

--Dan Ernst 

Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court

 Now out from Palgrave/MacMillan: Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities, edited by Emma Rhatigan and Jackie Watson:

This collection of essays presents recent research on the Inns of Court and their place in the literature and culture of the early modern world. The volume is structured in three sections. Section One looks at the institutional spaces of the Inns themselves. The chapters consider how the Innsmen’s identities and writings were shaped by their participation in the communal life of the legal Societies. Section Two looks at the Inns in the context of early modern London. The chapters attend to the intellectual and cultural traffic between the Inns and the city in which they were located by examining the role of Innsmen in the book trade, the circulation of manuscripts, playhouses, and musical culture. Finally, Section Three sets a wider international context. The chapters focus on the role of Innsmen in translation, nation-building, and early colonisation. Together these sections attend to the Innsmen not only as writing communities in themselves, but as participants in a complex of intersecting networks reaching out into London and beyond.

TOC here.  A book launch is scheduled at Middle Temple Library (and also online) at 6.15 pm on Tuesday, September 9.  For details, email MappingInns@gmail.com. 

--Dan Ernst

Legal History Colloquium at NYU Law

[We have the schedule for the Legal History Colloquium at NYU Law.  For more information about these talks, offered as part of a course, please contact one of its organizers (Daniel J. Hulsebosch, David Golove, and Noah Rosenblum).  DRE]

August 27
Nathaniel Donahue, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History, NYU School of Law
“Officers at Common Law”

September 17
Joanna Grisinger, Associate Professor of Instruction & Director of Legal Studies, Northwestern University 
“My magic carpet ride”: Discount Air Fares, Youth Culture, and Bureaucratic Expertise

October 1
Mark Peterson, Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History, Yale University 
The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution (tentative title)

October 15
Jud Campbell, Professor of Law, Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School; Visiting Professor of Law, NYU School of Law
The Myth of American Constitutional Exceptionalism (tentative title)

October 29
Hannah Farber, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University
Title TBA

November 12
Greg Conti, Associate Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Title TBA

November 26
Lauren Benton,  Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law, Yale University 
“Piracy as Political Prism: Becoming International in the Counterrevolutionary Atlantic”

Barbas on Beauharnais

Samantha Barbas, University of Iowa College of Law, has posted The Story of Beauharnais v. Illinois, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Free Speech Law:

In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark First Amendment decision in Beauharnais v. Illinois, upholding an Illinois hate speech law. Beauharnais, involving a white supremacist “hate group” leader in Chicago, was the Supreme Court’s first encounter with racist speech. The Illinois statute, enacted in 1917, was one of several hate speech or “group defamation” laws that existed in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Commentators believed that the Supreme Court’s approval of the Illinois statute would lead other jurisdictions to enact hate speech laws. Yet Beauharnais facilitated the demise of hate speech laws. This article tells the story of Beauharnais v. Illinois and explains why the Supreme Court’s ruling helped bring about the end of hate speech laws in America.

--Dan Ernst 

White's "Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment"

G. Edward White,. UVA Law, has published Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment (Oxford University Press):

Until he joined the U.S. government in 1934, Robert H. Jackson had been a lawyer in private practice in Upstate New York who was admitted to the bar without going to college and after completing only one year of law school. Once part of FDR's administration, Jackson became, in rapid succession, United States Solicitor General and United States Attorney General, where he successfully defended New Deal programs before the Supreme Court, including the legality of Lend Lease, which helped the U.S. give war supplies to England in exchange for grants of territory and harbors. Jackson played a central role in formulating the arguments justifying a number of initiatives on constitutional grounds and in drafting the policy statements that accompanied them. In 1941, FDR nominated him to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, on which he served until his death in 1954, only months after his adding his vote to the unanimous decision in Brown V. Board of Education.

It was a meteoric rise for someone from outside the elite, and essentially self-trained. That didn't stop Jackson from becoming one of the most influential and independent-minded judges of his day, unafraid to question the status quo and leave his mark on a number of landmark cases, including West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett, which guaranteed First Amendment rights by holding that students in public schools did not have to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He dissented from the notorious decision in Korematsu v. U.S., which condoned the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. To many, however, Jackson's most significant contribution was as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials following the war.

Drawing on Jackson's extensive personal papers in the Library of Congress and the Jackson Center, as well as a substantial oral history, G. Edward White's biography offers the first full-length portrait in decades of this fascinating and seminal figure.

--Dan Ernst

Donahue on Officers at Common Law

Nathaniel Donahue, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at the New York University School of Law, has posted a terrific paper, Officers at Common Law, which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal:

The Framers of the federal Constitution said almost nothing about how subordinate officers would be held accountable. This Article provides one overlooked explanation for this longstanding puzzle. The Constitution was enacted against a well-defined jurisprudence that has largely fallen from view: a law of officers. When using the term “Officer” and its framework of “Duties,” the Constitution invoked a distinctive method of regulating state power, in which officers were personally responsible—and liable—for discharging duties defined by law. The Framers and Ratifiers of the Constitution expected that these common-law rules would fill the gap left by the document’s silence.

This Article weaves together the strands of statutory and common law that constituted and regulated the early American officer. This system of legal organization, drawn from longstanding English and colonial practice, empowered officers to create a decentralized governing apparatus that blurred the line between public and private. Its regime of harsh personal liability and individual empowerment impeded efforts to construct a top-down hierarchy by empowering and encouraging officers to resist orders from their superiors. As Americans developed a bureaucratic state over the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, judges and lawmakers replaced this officer-based paradigm of governance with a system of administrative law that was more conducive to the modern state.

The legal regime of early American officeholding is inconsistent with many originalist justifications of the “unitary executive theory,” which assert that the Constitution relies on a combination of managerial control and presidential elections to discipline the state. Because the traditional law of officers centered officers’ independent obligations to law rather than to the executive hierarchy, it actively frustrated efforts to construct the command-and-control executive branch that unitarists believe the Constitution requires. The unitarists implicitly impose a theory of the state that developed as the early American law of officers was fading from view. 

--Dan Ernst 

Smith on Petitioning in 18th-Century Russia

Alison K. Smith, University of Toronto, has published “To Each Their Grievance Is Bitter and Unbearable”: Petitions, Autocracy, and the Rule of Law in Eighteenth-Century Russia in Law and History Review:

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Russian rulers released dozens of decrees about petitions. First, the decrees regulated the format of petitions, emphasizing their formulaic nature and moving them away from the personal appeals with supplication and abasement that were present in earlier centuries. These decrees recognized that petitions were essential to the administrative functioning of the imperial Russian state but saw them as akin to forms or applications. Second, the decrees stated firmly that petitioners should not approach the ruler directly. In part, these decrees reflect the rulers’ irritation at being endlessly bothered by personal requests, but Russia’s rulers also gave a more serious justification for the ban on personal appeals: they had established the rule of law, which meant that their subjects did not need to bother them personally and instead should clearly know other authorities—courts, governors—to address for aid. While efforts to change the format of petitions largely succeeded, efforts to curtail petitions directly to the ruler largely failed. That failure likely reflects several factors: inefficiencies in the judicial or administrative system, contradictory laws that still made space for petitions because they were useful, and because they held the promise of getting help quickly.

--Dan Ernst 

Balkin & Levinson, "Casebooks, Canons, and Constitutional Memory"

Jack M. Balkin (Yale Law School) and Sanford Levinson (University of Texas Law School) have posted "Casebooks, Canons, and Constitutional Memory." The abstract:

Why edit a constitutional law casebook? One might want to shape how professors teach the subject and how students learn it. But the influence of casebook editors is limited. Most students at most law schools will never practice constitutional law, and those that do probably deal with subjects not in the standard introductory course.

Editing a casebook involves the construction of a canon. The canon in literature is organized around  great works of excellence. By contrast, the canon in constitutional casebooks does not reflect the best opinions ever written; instead it reflects generations of political and legal struggles over the Constitution.

There are three kinds of canons in constitutional law, and in constitutional law casebooks: (1) the pedagogical canon of materials that students need to know to be well-trained lawyers; (2) the cultural literacy canon of materials that citizens need to know to understand their constitutional system; and (3) the constitutional theory canon of materials that are grist for the mill of serious academic discussion. Each of these canons has a politics, and different casebooks may align themselves with different political and legal visions and movements.

Casebooks are also sites of collective memory. A casebook foregrounds what teachers and students are likely to focus on and remember. What is left out of teaching materials is more likely to be forgotten. Hence constitutional law casebook authors are almost inevitably memory entrepreneurs, who seek to get people to remember certain things or remember them differently. But casebook editors are hardly all-powerful memory entrepreneurs. Authors must work with their coauthors to decide what materials to include and delete in successive editions. Casebook authors face serious constraints from publishers. Publishers demand frequent new editions to undercut sales of used casebooks; and they want casebooks to be ever shorter and simpler to understand.

Perhaps most important, casebook authors feel obliged to cover contemporary issues in constitutional law. Those issues are not in their control. They are shaped by the continuous interaction and collision between the political branches and the courts, and especially the United States Supreme Court. In this way the Supreme Court exercises vast control over the content and organization of constitutional law casebooks. This creates important problems of constitutional memory. If the Supreme Court overrules a line of cases, those cases are likely to be flushed down the memory hole unless casebook editors are willing to sacrifice other valued content.

The Supreme Court constantly destroys existing canons of constitutional law and reconstitutes them through its choice of cases to decide. Casebook authors must carefully consider how much of this constant churning and change is noise and how much is genuinely important and lasting for understanding the U.S. Constitution. This makes casebook authors' limited choices about what to remember especially important.

At most, by placing certain materials before professors and students,  casebook authors can provide opportunities to recall and absorb what is most important about our constitutional traditions. Yet what others do with those materials--and those memories--is ultimately beyond casebook authors' control. 

Read on here.

 

--Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Over at JOTWELL, Bethany Berger (Iowa College of Law) has posted an admiring review of Alexandra Fay's "Courts of Indian Offenses, Courts of Indian Resistance," which is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review. Sida Liu (University of Hong Kong) praises Jedidiah J. Kroncke's "Legal Complicity in an Age of Resurgent Authoritarianism," forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. And Allison Brownell Tirres (University of San Francisco School of Law) spotlights Eric R. Schlereth's Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (2024).

• Columbia Law is offering two new legal history courses, The 14th Amendment, taught by Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus, George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History, and Legal Conflict and Change During the Civil War and Reconstruction, taught by Kerrel Murray, Associate Professor of Law and Milton Handler Fellow.  

• At the back end of this episode of Strict Scrutiny, Kate Shaw (Penn Carey Law) chats with Serena Mayeri (Penn Carey Law) about Mayeri's new book Marital Privilege. 

• William Baude, University of Chicago Law, weighs in on birthright citizenship (Divided Argument). 

• Paul Moreno, Hillsdale College, reviews Private Finance, Public Power by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta in "the Forever Bank Wars" (Law and Liberty). 

• ICYMI: Historians say the professional study of history ain't over until history is over (and it's never over) (WaPo). The National Review on the Japanese American Internment.  The Heritage Foundation on Separation of Powers at the Founding.

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

Addae on Anti-Blackness in Liquor Licensing

Angela E. Addae, University of Oregon School of Law, has published Booze, Bars, and Bias: Anti-Blackness in Liquor Licensing Enforcement in the Washington and Lee Law Review:

This Article explores the disharmonious and disturbing influence of race in the enforcement of liquor licenses. Across the length and breadth of this nation, attentive Black revelers bear witness to an all-too-familiar trend signified by the disproportionately frequent closures of Black entertainment businesses. This Article argues that the punitive disposition toward Black entertainment businesses is not just a contemporary phenomenon; rather, it is a set of practices rooted in centuries of exclusion and regulatory abuse.

Over the past two centuries, state liquor licensing agencies have emerged as contentious battlegrounds where legal, social, and economic factors converge—often to the detriment of the very businesses they were intended to regulate. Throughout the colonial, post-revolutionary, and antebellum eras, state boards and commissions used liquor license regulations to maintain systems of control and preserve the racialized status quo. By unveiling these historical and ongoing practices, this Article reconceptualizes how legal reform might rectify the structural obstacles that disproportionately affect Black entertainment businesses.

Additionally, this Article challenges the perception of drinking establishments as trivial or controversial by highlighting their significance as profound sites for meaning-making, cultural production, and reclamation. This exploration presents an emic perspective that counters the negative and inaccurate stereotypes often associated with spaces of Black entertainment, leisure, and recreation.

--Dan Ernst

Holmes: The Movie

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE] 

On September 11, 2025, at 5 p.m., join the Law Library of Congress and the Supreme Court Historical Society for a special film screening to celebrate Constitution Day in the Coolidge Auditorium. This event will feature a screening of “Holmes.” This film depicts Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, on his 90th birthday, reflecting on his life on the Supreme Court of the United States and his service to the Union Army in the United States Civil War.

This event will also feature remarks by Law Librarian of Congress Aslihan Bulut, Supreme Court Historical Society Director of Publications Clare Cushman, and Senior Counsel of Legal Programs and Initiatives for the Library of Congress Jeanne Dennis. We hope you can join us.

Please register here. 

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

September 27, 2025  | 10 AM - 3 PM (CST)
Notre Dame Law School | Chicago, IL

Registration/Welcome, 09:45 - 10:05 AM
Coffee & Morning Refreshments

Paper #1: Property Law and Indian Removal, 10:05 - 11:00 AM

"Indigenous Incendiaries: Forest Fires, Arson Law, and Ute Removal in 1870s Colorado"

Author:     Jacquelyn M. Davila, Yale University 
Respondent:    M. Todd Henderson, University of Chicago Law School

Paper #2: Colonization and Property Law, 11:05 - 12:00 PM

"Property Law as Colonial Forerunner"

Author:     Nathan Lee, New York University 
Respondent:    Nadav Shoked, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Afternoon Break (Lunch), 12:05 - 1:00 PM

Paper #3: International Taxation, 01:05 - 2:00 PM

"Southern African Mining and the Modern Formation of Offshore Finance, 1860 - 1925"

Author:     Simon Rakei, University of Michigan
Respondent:    Ajay K. Mehrotra, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Paper #4: The Common Law and the Fourth Amendment, 02:05 - 3:00 PM

"What is a House? Investigating the Meaning of Curtilage at Common Law" 

Author:     Mitchell Del Bianco, University of Virginia 
Respondent:    R. H. Helmholz, University of Chicago Law School

Katz, Rosenblum, and Manners on Removal and Historical Argument

Andrea Scoseria Katz, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, Noah A. Rosenblum, New York University School of Law, and Jane Manners, Fordham University, have posted Disagreement and Historical Argument or How Not to Think About Removal:

William Howard Taft (LC)

Scholars have debated the reach of the President’s power to remove government officers for over one hundred years. This old fight is now suddenly urgent as President Trump asserts far-reaching powers to control the federal bureaucracy and the Supreme Court transforms Unitary Executive Theory into caselaw. Yet the scholarly case for an indefeasible presidential removal power has never been weaker.

This Essay continues an ongoing conversation about how to read some critical early republic evidence about removal. It briefly recapitulates the stakes of the disagreement before offering in-depth analyses of developments in Pennsylvania removal practice, including a reading of the Council of Censors’ Report from 1784. Along the way, it responds to some recent criticisms of our work by Professors Saikrishna Prakash and Aditya Bamzai.

The Essay makes two overarching arguments: First, there was no consensus in the early republic that the executive power included an indefeasible power of removal. Second, legal historians must take dissensus seriously. Historical disagreement is a fact that lawyers wishing to make legal meaning out of history need to confront. In this case, it straightforwardly undermines the notion there was a shared understanding in the early republic that the executive power included an indefeasible power of removal. 

--Dan Ernst 

Sheehan on Charles Fahy's New Mexican Murder Case

Charles J. Sheehan has published Only the Moon to Shed Light on What Occurred: Charles Fahy and Frontier Justice in New Mexico in the Journal of the Southwest 67:1 (Spring 2025): 134-163: 

The tale had the homeliest beginning. One night of bitter cold in northern New Mexico three companions settled into a horse-drawn sleigh. The trail through the Tusas Mountains lay under deep, new snow. Under moonlit skies they made their way westward from Tres Piedras toward warm hearths in Tusas, 9 miles distant, but just two travelers arrived. At dawn on January 23, 1929, the postman on his route from Tusas to Tres Piedras came upon the frozen body of Miguel Sánchez. In New Mexico and far beyond, that lonely night began a path of greater rights for men and women at the mercy of powerful systems and institutions.

--Dan Ernst 

Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable

[We have the following announcement.  DRE] 

This year, the Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable begins its 24th successful year. 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, October 30, 4:30 PM
Professor Michael Glass, Boston College

Thursday, November 20, 4:30 PM
Professor Emilie Connolly, Brandeis University

Quinn on Female Shareholding in the Middlesex Canal

Brian JM Quinn, Boston College Law School, has posted Economic Lives of Women: Shareholding by Women in the Middlesex Canal Corporation, 1793-1859:

Middlesex Canal (LC)

This Article explores the participation of women as shareholders in early American corporations, focusing on the Middlesex Canal Corporation. Corporate records reveal that many women, including many women in elite economic and political circles, became shareholders of the Canal Corporation. During the early Republic, the corporate form, as well as corporate equity securities, were still relatively uncommon. The Middlesex Canal Corporation was one of the earliest, and most high-profile, business corporations at the time of its incorporation in 1793. With the subsequent development of the modern corporate form came the proliferation of corporate equity securities. The creation of corporate equity securities generated passive income earning opportunities that permitted elite women to remain economically active and independent in ways that were previously impossible. Thus, the Middlesex Canal Corporation marks an important, but understated, milestone in the economic lives of women in the United States. This Article uses historical corporate records to tell the stories of the first women shareholders of the Middlesex Canal Corporation and the beginnings of financialization of the American economy. 

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Adam Sitze (Amherst College) on "The Strange History of University Autonomy — and Why We Need It More Than Ever."

• "Miscarriage is a Crime Again": over at Nursing Clio, Lara Freidenfelds draws connections between the contemporary U.S. and early modern England.   

• A recording of Kim Lane Schepple's really terrific Robert H. Jackson Lecturer on the Supreme Court of the United States.at the Chautauqua Institution is here.  "Professor Scheppele’s lecture focused on Robert H. Jackson and constitutional separation of powers": Court-packing, destroyers for basis, North American Aviation, Nuremberg, Youngstown, and Trump v. United States.  With an introduction by John Q. Barrett.

• 
  MIT's notice of Malick Ghachem’s new book, The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble, which "examines the pre-revolutionary changes that set Haiti’s long-term economic structure in place." 

• Patrick S. O'Donnell on "The Haitian Revolution and Jacob Lawrence: Exemplifying Historical Narrative, Values and Purposes through Art."

• Check out A.B. Hart's Suggestions on the Study of History (1893).  H/t: MSB. 

• "The Supreme Court of Ohio is staying open late to the public on Sept. 9 with two evening tour offerings. ... See Ohio’s rich history on full display at the Thomas J. Moyer Ohio Judicial Center" (CNO).  

• "Three UMass Dartmouth School of Law 2L students, Patrick Wilson, Adyen Artica, and Nathan Gudas, helped North Shore government officials verify approximately 200 property deeds containing racist or discriminatory language, contributing to a broader effort to clean "dirty deeds" in southern Essex County, as part of their legal internships at the Essex Registry of Deeds" (UMass Law).

• "Patrick T. Conley has donated his 1,500-volume private collection on American legal and constitutional history to the Roger Williams University School of Law" (Warwick Beacon). 

• The Brennan Center Fellows Eric Ruben and Andrew Willinger's essay on the Supreme Court's reliance  on historical scholarship in Second Amendment case.  

• Patrick O'Donnell also has an essay on the criminal defense and cause lawyer Charles R. Garry (1909-1991).

• On September 21, 2025, 5:00 pm -6:00 pm, Jill Lepore will discuss her new book on the Constitution, We the People, at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC PoPVille). 

• "Tulane University School of Law invites applications from entry-level and lateral candidates for one or more tenure-track faculty positions.  We welcome applications from candidates with teaching and research interests in all topics, but we are particularly interested in candidates who focus on torts, business organizations, and commercial law."  More. 

• ICYMI:  Thomas Edsall on the Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump, with quotes from Terri Bimes, Matt Dallek, Bruce Miroff, Jack Rakove, Rogers Smith, Jeremi Suri, Sean Wilentz et al. (NYT).

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

Whittington on Birthright Citizenship

Keith E. Whittington, Yale Law School, has posted By Birth Alone: The Original Meaning of Birthright Citizenship and Subject to the Jurisdiction of the United States:

The citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment entrenched birthright citizenship into the Constitution. Building on a recent revisionist scholarly literature, President Trump's executive orders have asserted that the scope of birthright citizenship should be understood to exclude children born on American soil to parents who are unauthorized to be in the country or authorized to be in the country for only a limited purpose and period. This asserted limitation of birthright citizenship is at odds with the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and the antecedent common-law rule of nativity that the language of the Fourteenth Amendment embodied and declared.

--Dan Ernst 

Palau-McDonald on Farrington v. Tokushige

MJ Palau-McDonald, University of Hawai’i at Manoa--William S. Richardson School of Law, has posted Farrington v. Tokushige: Language & Power in Hawai’i:

In Farrington v. Tokushige (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Fifth Amendment grounds a series of laws enacted by the Territory of Hawai'i to control and ultimately eradicate private Japanese language schools. Legal commentary on Tokushige is sparse. The case is often characterized as a straightforward application of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) and Meyer v. Nebraska (1923). Together, Tokushige, Pierce, and Meyer are often cast as the Court’s public education chapter of the Americanization period. However, viewing Tokushige as a simple extension of Meyer and Pierce alienates the case from its historical context of white elites’ attempts to maintain political and economic control in the Territory in the face of a growing population of Nisei (U.S.-born children of first-generation Japanese immigrants), who, unlike their parents, were U.S. citizens with the right to vote. In this way, the Territory’s anti-Japanese movement was distinct from concurrent Japanese exclusion initiatives in California and Washington, which revolved around attempts to prevent Japanese land ownership and economic ascension, though the fear of the “yellow peril” was the fulcrum around which these movements metastasized. Through an examination of the social and legal history behind Tokushige, this article reinserts the significant racial dynamics that undergirded the events, the cultural depictions, and the legal justifications for the Japanese school control legislation that was lost in the Court’s sterilized decision. It also resituates Tokushige within the context of U.S. colonization and the forces that justified control over Hawai’i’s politics, land, and culture. The case’s unique history is inextricably intertwined with the establishment and maintenance of U.S. hegemony in the Pacific. Recontextualized, Tokushige implicates core questions of power that are increasingly relevant today, including who has access to political and economic power and who creates the conditions for access to that power.

--Dan Ernst 

Dabhoiwala's "What Is Free Speech?"

Fara Dabhoiwala, Princeton University, has published What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea (Harvard University Press):

Every premodern society, from Sumeria to China to seventeenth–century Europe, knew that bad words could destroy lives, undermine social order, and create political unrest. Given the obvious dangers of outspokenness, regulating speech and print was universally accepted as a necessary and proper activity of government. Only in the early 1700s did this old way begin to break down. In a brief span of time, the freedom to use words as one pleased was reimagined as an ideal to be held and defended in common.

Fara Dabhoiwala explores the surprising paths free speech has taken across the globe since its invention three hundred years ago. Though free speech has become a central democratic principle, its origins and evolution have less to do with the high-minded pursuit of liberty and truth than with the self-interest of the wealthy, the greedy, and the powerful. Free speech, as we know it, is a product of the pursuit of profit, of technological disruption, of racial and imperial hypocrisy, and of the contradictions involved in maintaining openness while suppressing falsehood. For centuries, its shape has everywhere been influenced by international, not just national, events; nowhere has it ever been equally available to women, the colonized, or those stigmatized as racially inferior.

Rejecting platitudes about the First Amendment and its international equivalents, and leaving no ideological position undisturbed, What Is Free Speech? is the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood.

Here is a recording of Professor Dabhoiwala's recent book talk at Politics and Prose.

--Dan Ernst

Center for the Study of Law and Society Speaker Series Fall 2025

The Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, has announced the lineup for its Fall 2025 speaker series. Of particular interest to readers of this blog:

• August 25: Stephanie Jones-Rogers (UC Berkeley), "Puer Sequitur Parentis and Coniugis Sequitur Coniugis?: British Laws of Slave Descent on the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast" 

• November 3: Justin Simard (Michigan State University College of Law), “Agents of Commerce: Transactional Lawyering in the 19th Century United States”

The full line-up is available here.

If your institution runs a legal history workshop and you'd like us to post your schedule, please be in touch! 

-- Karen Tani 

CFP: American Political History Conference

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Proposals: American Political History Conference, June 4-6, 2026, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center, Washington D.C.  Proposal Deadlines: December 31, 2025

“American Democracy as Political History: Challenges across the Past, Present, and Future"

 A strong understanding of the past is critical to strengthening American democracy and to navigating the seismic shifts happening in our nation today. This conference will explore the social, economic, and cultural pathways that created this current political moment and provide essential insights on how to address pressing issues of polarization, injustice, inequality and democratic erosion. This event will bring political historians and other historically minded scholars into conversation with one another and the broader public to grapple with the democratic challenges facing the vast “American project” at the nation’s semiquincentennial. It will challenge the traditional categories of political history — liberal and conservative, elite and populist, rural and urban — as well as subfield divisions that have produced disciplinary silos. It will create opportunities to build networks, share new research, debate ideas, think about the contemporary implications of this research, and discuss strategies for public engagement.

We invite panel and paper submissions that reflect the diversity of the field of American political history, from the colonial era to recent history. We especially encourage roundtable and workshop ideas that will foster dynamic conversations about how we write and understand political history across time periods, subfields, and disciplines. We welcome sessions that challenge traditional paradigms in political history and address broad historical time periods. We especially encourage conversations that include scholars working in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. We also welcome historians from different arenas—including academia, public history, public policy, journalism, documentary film, television, podcasting, and radio—to launch conversations about the contemporary meaning and uses of history. More than just sharing specific historical insights, this conference aims to bring together an intellectual community of historians within and beyond academia to inspire conversations about the uses of history, the public responsibilities of historians to engage broader audiences, and the skills needed to do this.

The program committee is deeply committed to inclusion and diversity. Successful session proposals will be attentive to gendered, racial, and career diversity among participants. In service of this goal, we have limited funds available to support graduate students and contingent faculty. The conference will be held in-person, with provisions made for international scholars concerned about entry into the U.S.

Submissions should be up to 500 words with proposals for individual papers or panel, roundtable, or workshop sessions. Each proposal should also include a biographical statement for each participant of up to 150 words that includes contact information. Please submit proposals in one Word or PDF document to brownell@purdue.edu by December 31, 2025.

Program Committee:

Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Purdue University (co-chair)
Nicole Hemmer, Vanderbilt University (co-chair)
Leah Wright, Johns Hopkins University (co-chair)
A.J. Bauer, University of Alabama
Kellie Carter Jackson, Wellesley College
Bobby Cervantes, Harvard University
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon
Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University
John S. Huntington, Houston Community College
Michael Koncewicz, New York University
Cecilia Márquez, Duke University
George Derek Musgrove, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Gautham Rao, American University
Rachel Shelden, Penn State University

This conference is made possible in part by funding from the Johns Hopkins Nexus Award grant.