Weekend Roundup

• On Jeffrey Rosen's "Blessings of Liberty" podcast Jed Shugerman and Ilan Wurman discuss the historical arguments underlying Trump v. Barbara and Trump v. Slaughter. Also, Reva Siegel says that Trump v. Barbara "shows popular constitutionalism in action" (Slate).  

•  A report of the conferral by the University of Edinburgh conferred the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa upon Jean-Louis Halpérin, “Professor Emeritus at the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm, Paris) and a most distinguished legal historian of international reputation” (Edinburgh Legal History Blog). 

• 
  In the latest episode of Breaking History," the podcast of the Supreme Court Historical Society,  "Brad Snyder interviews New York Times reporter Clay Risen about his new book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America"  (SCHS).

• A CFP for an on-line workshop on for scholars of American Political Development.  

• Jane E. Calvert and Jonathan Gienapp on John Dickinson’s secret effort to prevent the American Revolution (Law & Liberty).

• ICYMI:  David Blight's congressional testimony in defense of the Smithsonian (YouTube).  W. Caleb McDaniel on Why Regional Branches of the National Archives Matter.  A display on the Master of the Rolls at the UK National Archives (CTJ).    Bruen’s history-and-tradition test after Wolford v. Lopez (SCOTUSblog).  Reactions to the Supreme Court of Ohio's "Story of America: This Day in History” (CNO).  More on that exhibit on Arkansas's constitutional history (KUAF).  The Delaware Supreme Court Turns 75 (DPM)

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

Brady on Wolford and the Level-of-Generality Problem

Maureen E. Brady, Harvard Law School, has posted Property v. Guns: The Level-of-Generality Problem in Wolford:

Wolford v. Lopez presents the Supreme Court with a novel question: may states require property owners to affirmatively consent before armed persons enter private property that is held open to the public? Hawaii enacted such a default rule after New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen instructed courts to assess modern gun regulations by analogy to historical restrictions that are “relevantly similar” in “how and why” they burden the right to armed self-defense. In Wolford, the parties have turned to colonial-era hunting statutes limiting armed entry onto private land, but they disagree fundamentally about what those laws represent.

This Essay shows how Wolford crystallizes the level-of-generality problem embedded in Bruen’s historical framework. Outcomes often turn on the frame courts choose for “the relevant tradition”: defined too narrowly, no analogue fits; defined too broadly, almost anything does. Wolford poses that problem on both “why” and “how.” On “why,” the parties and lower courts dispute whether Founding-era hunting laws targeted “poaching” alone or broader concerns about armed trespass. On “how,” they dispute whether bans tied to “enclosed” or “improved” land map onto the modern category of “private property open to the public.”

Reexamining the record through property history clarifies what the hunting laws can—and cannot—do in the analogical analysis. Even an “anti-poaching” frame does not resolve whether the laws addressed theft of game or a broader bundle of concerns including trespass, property damage, and violence associated with armed strangers. And “enclosure” and “improvement” functioned as publicly legible property signals—proxies for claim and notice—rather than precursors to contemporary zoning-era distinctions between residential and commercial space. The Essay closes by arguing that when history is genuinely ambiguous and competing constitutional values are in tension, courts should be transparent about the level-of-generality choices that drive outcomes and candid about the extent to which those choices inevitably reintroduce means-ends reasoning under another name.

--Dan Ernst 

AHA Lepage Center Award to Cornell

Various prizes and awards were announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association, including the Lepage Center Award for Historical Work in the Public Interest. This year's award went to Saul Cornell (Fordham University):

For decades, Saul Cornell has directly influenced precedent-setting Supreme Court cases on gun safety by entering rigorously researched amicus briefs and expert witness reports into the legal record. Taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s “history-focused tests” for constitutionality, he provides plaintiffs with historical backing to keep firearms from dangerous people, literally saving lives. Moreover, his historical gun laws database is a model of generosity and rigor, as are his how-to workshops, editorials, podcasts, and blogs.

Congratulations to Professor Cornell!

-- Karen Tani 

Sunday Roundup

• Now available on-line, a recording of that National Constitution Center town hall, The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed. 

• Also newly available online: Michael McConnell and Noah Rosenblum's debate on originalism at NYU Law on November 19, 2025. 

• William M. Treanor, the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Constitutional Law and Constitutional History and Dean Emeritus of Georgetown Law, will deliver the 2025 Gouverneur Morris Endowed Lecture of the Bronx County Historical Society at Fordham Law, which is co-sponsoring the event, on Wednesday, January 28, 2025 at 6:30 pm.  Dean Treanor’s topic: “The Constitution’s Penman, Gouverneur Morris" (New York Almanack).  

• Jeremy Kessler on the law and history of bans on history of viewpoint discrimination at a Columbia Law School alumni luncheon.  (The event is called the "Stone Circle" Luncheon, and I'm embarrassed to say I was slow to get the reference.)  (Columbia Law School). 

• 
  Heidi Kitrosser reviews Patrick G. Eddington, The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley to Eisenhower (Georgetown University Press, 2025) (Lawfare).

• ICYMI: The 1924 Immigration Act is back, unfortunately (The Guardian).  The Rise of Scholars' Amicus Briefs.  "Gun carry regulation was always the norm" (The Hill).  "A (very) short history of Crimes Against Humanity" (EJIL Talk!).  "Historic Dispute Over ‘Unitary Executive’ Advances in Trump Era"--a very full and thoughtful explainer (CT Examiner).  

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• 

  David Sugarman (credit)

  The Socio-Legal Studies Association has awarded David Sugarman its 2025 prize for  “Outstanding Contribution to the Socio-Legal Community."  Professor Sugarman's contribution to “modern socio-legal historical studies” was specially noted.  SLSA's informative notice is here.  See also the notices of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford and of Lancaster University.

• News from the National Constitution Center: President and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Rosen is transitioning to the role of CEO Emeritus.  

• YLS’s notice of New Perspectives on the Legal Treatise (Hein), edited by Femi Cadmus and Nicholas Mignanelli, a collection of essays resulting from the Second Yale Legal Information Symposium, entitled “The Legal Treatise: Past, Present, and Future” and held in March 2023.  New Perspectives opens with an essay by John Langbein that traces “the decline of legal treatise writing in the American legal academy to the rise of legal realism.”

• 
  
  UVA Law's notice of Saikrishna Prakash's The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History (Harvard University Press) (pub. date 1-20) with a discussion of the book by Professor Prakash. 

• On February 23, Michael Klarman, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, will deliver the Robert L. Levine Distinguished Lecture at Fordham Law, entitled, “How did we get here?” (Fordham Law).

• Daniel E. Thompson has posted Litigating Originalism in Bruen: A Brief-Level Coding Study of History, Evidence, and Argument Form.  "This ["descriptive and provisional"] article offers a pilot, brief-level coding analysis of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Corlett (No. 20-843) at the certiorari stage and the same docket at the merits stage (NYSRPA v. Bruen). Using a transparent scoring rubric, it codes ten briefs on four dimensions: Originalist Evidentiary Strength (0–4), Historical-to-Doctrinal Rigor (0–4), Rhetorical Force (0–3), and Consequentialist Overlay (0–3)." 

• From Bunk: "Best History Writing of 2025."  

• Recently published: The Old Alcalde: Life and Times of a Texas Fire-Eater, Oran Milo Roberts, by John A. Adams, Jr.  Roberts was, in addition to much else, Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and the president of Texas's Secession Convention in 1861 (Ricochet).

• Jack Goldsmith on Edward Levi's Department of Justice (Executive Functions). 

• ICYMI: Ilan Wurman on birthright citizenship (Compact).  Stephen Halbrook on "history and tradition" and the Second Amendment in Joel Alicea's amicus brief in the Hawaii "no carry case" (Volokh Conspiracy). A terrifically interesting HLR case comment, bridging Roman Law, Norman Rockwell and FDR's White House, on Elam v. Early (4th Cir. 2025).

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

Weekend Roundup

• A historian's' amicus brief, sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice, has been filed in United States v. Hemani, "a constitutional challenge to a federal statute prohibiting any individual who 'is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance' from possessing a firearm." The signatories are Holly Brewer, Saul Cornell, Brian DeLay, Randolph Roth, Simon Stern, Stephen Taylor, and William Treanor.  

• The life and legacy of John Hope Franklin, an episode of the radio program, Black America (KUT).

• A recording of that Federalist Society panel on originalism and birthright citizenship, including Kurt Lash, Amanda Frost, and Keith Whittington, is here.   

• The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, seeks a research associate to "undertake directed research and produce public-facing and scholarly work on histories and legacies of religions and freedom in the early Americas with an emphasis on the eighteenth century." 

• Jessica Lake will discuss her book, Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law at UVA Law on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, from 5-6 p.m.  

• The schedule has been announced for that symposium at Boston College on February 20 to honor the life and work of the late  Ken Kersch.   

• In memoriam: Daniel Walker Howe (UCLA).

• Lady Margaret Hall's notice of the ASLH and Cromwell Foundations award of its William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize to Grace Mallon.

• The January 2026 newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here. 

• 
  The Merced County [CA] Historical Society has released its book, Old Courthouse: 150 Years, 150 Stories (Merced Sun-Star). 

• "Talbot Publishing, an imprint of The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., is pleased to announce the publication of M.H. Hoeflich and John Moreland’s Little Law Books."

• Alex Wellerstein discusses his new book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (LGM Podcast). 

• The finalists for the African American Intellectual History Society's Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History (Black Perspectives).

• Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur on "Jan. 6 and the Long Shadow of Civil War- and Reconstruction-Era Political Violence" (Talking Points Memo).

• ICYMI: Jack Rakove on what’s wrong with The American Revolution by Ken Burns (Washington Monthly).  Anna O. Law on birthright citizenship, in an interview heralding her book (The Redoubt).  Max Skjönsberg on Maitland, Smith, and Laissez-Faire (Law and Liberty).  Ilya Somin on Chief Justice Roberts on the Declaration of Independence (Volokh Conspiracy). A Timeline of Divorce in America (History).

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

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). 

• Update: "Feds Grant Nearly $1 Million to Develop Second Amendment History Curriculum" (Reload).

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

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 

Tyler on Originalism in the Supreme Court's 2d Amendment Decisions

Amanda L. Tyler, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, has posted Levels of Generality, the Limits of Originalism, and the Supreme Court's Second Amendment Jurisprudence:

Just how originalist is the Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence after United States v. Rahimi? This is perhaps one of the biggest questions left in the decision’s wake. As it turns out, the answer is not altogether clear post Rahimi. This is because the case produced some seven separate opinions, many of which—even though they agree as to the bottom line—get there by very different paths. This Article suggests that Rahimi, perhaps more than any other recent decision by the Court, underscores the crucial role that levels of generality in constitutional interpretation play, while illustrating the problems with originalism and how, when faced with a choice between strict adherence to originalism’s core ideals and avoiding deeply undesirable results, many justices—even those who purport to be originalists—will forsake originalism for a far more pragmatic approach to constitutional interpretation. In the end, when the various opinions in Rahimi are dissected, one finds considerable support for the notion that the Justices are “look[ing] for the central purposes of the relevant constitutional provision and tr[ying] to apply it in a vastly different world.” Whatever it is, such an approach is decidedly not originalism.

--Dan Ernst 

Tillman on Citing Bellesiles

Seth Barrett Tillman, National University of Ireland Faculty of Law, has posted A Phenomenon in Search of a Theory/Recent Citations to Michael Bellesiles' Publications:

I intend to describe a phenomenon. I do not intend to explain it. Perhaps others can do so. By way of background … Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University, published a variety of journal articles on gun ownership during the colonial era and post-independence period. In 2000, he published a book: Arming America. In 2001, it won the Bancroft Prize. In 2002, the prize was rescinded. It was rescinded in large part in response to scholarly criticism. Unsurprisingly, Bellesiles' articles and book influenced public debate, scholarship, and judicial opinions in regard to gun control. Bellesiles and his publications were once cited actively, and then such citations dried up. But now, it appears that his publications are being cited again. 

Perhaps we should ask why? 

--Dan Ernst 

Blocher and Siegel on History, Tradition and Guns

It’s “history and tradition” (HAT) Friday.  Our first post is Joseph Blocher, Duke University School of Law, and Reva Siegel, Yale Law School, The Ambitions of History and Tradition in and Beyond the Second Amendment, which is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review:

This Article examines the ambitions of history-and-tradition review in and beyond the Second Amendment. In Bruen and Rahimi the Roberts Court rejected means-end review in favor of a historical-analogical approach, claiming to constrain the exercise of judicial discretion, and thus to promote the democratic decisions of the founders. But our examination of these cases shows that the Court has created new opportunities for judges to advance their values in considerably less transparent ways. We identify contexts in which Second Amendment doctrine enables judicial discretion, key among them that it allows judges to reason about gun rights and regulation at disparate levels of generality, extending rights protection to modern guns while requiring gun laws to resemble ancient analogues. When applied in this asymmetric fashion, the historical approach deregulates in ways that are neither acknowledged nor justified. An eight-member majority objected to this strategy in Rahimi and voted to uphold a federal gun law. Yet numerous Justices wrote separately to limit Rahimi’s reach—and, a year later, to suggest that the Court should take a case involving an assault-weapons ban to clarify the method set forth in its earlier cases.

Our close reading of the history-and-tradition (HAT) cases shows that there is a persistent gap between what the Court says and does—between the judicial constraint the Roberts Court promises and the actual decisions it delivers. Understanding this dynamic in the Second Amendment cases helps us recognize it in the First Amendment and Substantive Due Process cases as well.

We can better appreciate the Court’s reasoning in extending HAT review if we excavate the arguments advanced in the decade between Heller and Bruen for substituting the HAT approach for means-ends review. This retrospective shows us that HAT approaches exhibit the very problems imputed to means-ends review: HAT review is not grounded in original understanding and employs shifts in generality to provide judges discretion to enforce value-based understandings. We can see this dynamic unfolding inside and outside the Second Amendment context.

HAT decisions pose distinctive threats to democracy. First, Bruen has implemented HAT through judicial review with a strong presumption of unconstitutionality, a counter-majoritarian practice lacking precedent at the founding. Second, HAT review is not transparent, obscuring reasons for judicial decisions from the people and thus obstructing democratic dialogue. Third, the HAT framework encourages judges to decide the constitutionality of public safety laws on grounds that ignore the public’s most urgent reasons for enacting the laws.

This reading of the Court’s Second Amendment cases indicates that the push to adopt HAT approaches in First Amendment, Due Process, and other areas of constitutional law is likely to compound the problems it is supposed to solve, while insulating the Court’s control of the Constitution from the public governed by it. 

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur's amicus brief on birthright citizenship in a First Circuit immigration case.  They and others will participate in a Brennan Center event on the topic on June 12. 

• “Trust in the state: Negotiating legal and bureaucratic encounters," a special issue of the Journal of Legal Anthropology has published open access (H-Law).

• The Council of the ABA Section on Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has put out for notice and comment a proposal to double the the number of required credits of experiential education for JD graduates from 6 to 12.  One wonders what the move portends for enrollment in legal history courses and seminars.   

• Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions has awarded graduating senior Ben Woodard the Stephen Whelan ‘68 Senior Thesis Prize for Excellence in Constitutional Law and Political Thought for “Nature National, Slavery Sectional: Southern Judges’ Choice for Freedom in Antebellum Legal and Political Culture.”  

• Lawbook Exchange's latest catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History, including some letters from Louis Brandeis to Max Lowenthal. 

• ICYMI: Ex parte Merryman and current immigration battles (Maryland Reporter).  Inside Kenya’s Judiciary Museum (Star).  A slideshow on the Scopes Trial (msn).  Harvard Relinquishes Photographs of Enslaved Individuals (Harvard Crimson).  A defense of Bruen's originalism (Volokh Conspiracy). 

• Update: William G. Ross on the centennial of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (JURIST).

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

JACH: Spring 2025

The Spring 2025 issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History is now online.   

Dictatorship in the American Founding
Adam Lebovitz

Throughout the Revolutionary War, America experimented extensively with forms of emergency governance explicitly modeled on the Roman dictatorship, at both the national and the state levels. Surprisingly, America’s leading authors and statesmen rejected dictatorship in the Constitution, not primarily from fear of concentrated authority, but because they deemed this institution ill-suited to the rigors of modern statecraft.

Originalism and the Path to Partisan Jurisprudence: The Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation inside the Reagan Administration
Logan Everett Sawyer III+

Documents from the National Archives and elsewhere reveal why Reagan’s DOJ first adopted originalism, and then transformed it to serve a deeply contested, partisan legal-policy agenda.

Infringed
Daniel D. Slate

The legal concept of “infringement” at the time of ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 meant that a right could be regulated—that is, given more definitive shape or partially curtailed or restricted—if the process by which the regulation came about was regulated through a duly elected legislature acting with the public good in mind.

Farm-Bloc Federalism: The Rise, Fall (and Rise Again?) of a Constitutional Coalition
Roderick M. Hills, Jr.+

Between 1832 and 1932, politicians from a “farm bloc” of states in the South, Midwest, Prairie, and Mountain West embraced and then rejected the idea that the Constitution limited the federal government’s power over a variously defined set of issues. This history of federalism’s ups and downs illustrates how political parties generally craft doctrine to achieve stability in the face of disagreement about values and interests.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Nursing Clio, Kylie Smith (Emory University) brings history to bear on "RFK’s ideas about 'wellness farms' for young people." 
  

• The next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop will take place on May 16 at 12 noon UTC.  Sara Limao Papa, a doctoral student at Goethe University Frankfurt, will present "The Pathways of the People: Access to Water in 18th-Century Maranhão and Bahia."  Tamar Herzog, Harvard University, will comment. (More and h/t: H-Law).

• 
   HLS's notice of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (Harvard Law Today).

• Throughout this week, we've mentioned legal-historical works that won prizes at the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Another legal history--Marie-Amélie George's Family Matters--won an Honorable Mention, for the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award.  For more on the book, check out the wonderful series of posts that Professor George wrote for the blog last fall. Congratulations, Professor George!
  

• Mary Ziegler, UC Davis, discusses her new book, Personhood, on the NPR show Here & Now.

• NYU Law's notice of its lateral hiring of Sarah Seo.  
  

• Linda Colley has received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
  

• The Organization of American Historians hails its new president, Annette Gordon-Reed.

• Gerard N. Magliocca on Vice Presidential Inaugural Addresses (Green Bag).
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman's reflections on civility and the debate over Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Review.

• ICYMI:  Chief Justice Roberts, a Buffalo native, will help celebrate 125th anniversary of the Western District of New York.  Robert H. Jackson and John Lord O'Brian would be pleased!  (WGRZ). Originalism in a gun-control case in the Fourth Circuit (Bloomberg Law).

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

Shusterman on the English Standing Army Controversy and the 2d Amendment

Noah Shusterman, Chinese University of Hong Kong, has posted England’s Standing Army Controversy (1697-99) and the Origins of the Second Amendment:

This article explores the writings of England's Standing Army Controversy at the end of the seventeenth century, and the links between those writings and the debates over military policy during the founding era that would eventually lead to both the Constitution’s militia clause and the Second Amendment. Staring in 1697, a small group of British authors turned what had been a long-standing but undertheorized distrust of professional armies into an elaborate theory in favor of citizens’ militias. These authors argued that standing armies were inconsistent with a free society; that militias were superior fighting forces; and that maintaining a professional army would inevitably result in the army's leaders becoming despots. To prove their arguments, the authors used a combination of historical examples and theoretical discussions, drawing on Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, and their understandings of what would or would not motivate soldiers. These writings became relevant to colonists in North America once the British began stationing troops around Boston during the buildup to the American Revolution. The ideas of the Standing Army Controversy provided colonists with a framework and vocabulary that linked Britain's action to those of other tyrannies, because of the use of professional soldiers against a civilian population. As states began issuing their own constitutions in 1776, several included language that grew out of the Standing Army Controversy, including the claim that "standing armies, in times of peace, are dangerous to liberty." These fears of standing armies, and the belief in citizen-soldiers rather than professional soldiers, remained the basis for the Second Amendment and for the broader debates it grew out of. The claim that a well-regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state grew out of the writings of the Standing Army Controversy.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Firearms Law Works-in-Progress Conference

 [We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Firearms Law Works-in-Progress Conference 2025, June 5-6, 2025, Laramie, WY

The University of Wyoming Firearms Research Center and the Duke Center for Firearms Law invite applications to participate in the seventh annual Firearms Law Works-in-Progress Conference. The conference will be held at the University of Wyoming College of Law in Laramie, Wyoming, on June 5 & 6, 2025. We ask all those interested in presenting a paper at the conference to submit an abstract by February 17, 2025.

At the Firearms WIP Conference, scholars and practitioners present and discuss works-in-progress related to firearms law and policy broadly defined, including Second Amendment history and doctrine, federal and state gun regulation, and the intersection between firearms law and other areas of law. The Firearms WIP Conference is the only legal works-in-progress event specifically focused on firearms law and policy. Summaries of past conferences, including paper titles and attendees, are available here: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Conference sessions are lively discussions among authors, discussants, and participants. Each accepted paper is assigned to a panel of three to four scholars with a moderator who will summarize the papers and then lead a discussion. Sessions run from Thursday afternoon through Friday afternoon. There will be a casual dinner and social event Thursday evening following the afternoon session. All conference participants are expected to read the papers in advance and to attend the entire conference.

We accept papers on a wide array of topics related to firearms, including from scholars who are new to the field and interested in exploring the interaction between firearms law and other disciplines. Although participation at the conference is by invitation only, we welcome paper proposals from scholars and practitioners all over the world. Please feel free to share this call for submissions widely.

Titles and abstracts of papers should be submitted electronically to frc@uwyo.edu no later than February 17, 2025. Abstracts should be no longer than one page, and should be submitted as a PDF file saved under the file name “[last name, first name] – [paper title].” Please use the subject line “WIP Paper Submission” in your email.
Authors will be informed whether their paper has been accepted no later than March 10, 2025.

Workshop versions of accepted papers will be due in mid-May, so that they can be circulated to moderators and other conference participants in advance of the conference.

We expect that participants’ home institutions will cover travel expenses to the extent possible. However, the Wyoming FRC and Duke CFL are able to cover some costs of lodging and travel expenses for authors who would not otherwise be able to attend. This support is intended to encourage submissions from junior faculty, especially those who are new to the field.

The Docket 7:3-4

A double issue (7:3-4) of The Docket, the on-line companion to Law and History Review, has been posted:   

Gautham Rao: Dispatches from a Challenging Year

Tim Thornton: The Isle of Man, Channel Islands and Statutes of the English Parliament to 1640

Lawrence Goldstone: Arms and the Common Man: Standing Army, Militia, and the Second Amendment in the United States.

Ryan Reft: United States v. Nixon

Allen Boyer reviews Tate, Power and Justice in Medieval England and Eldridge, Law and the Medieval Village Community

Jerry Edwards reviews Barbas, Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From In Custodia Legis, "Orange Shirt Day and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative."
  

• The Roots of Reality podcast ("[a] podcast by historian Ben Baumann that uses history from the formation of the universe to the present, illustrating how our world came to be") has posted an episode on "Treason According to the Founding Fathers," featuring Carlton Larson.
  

• Mr Justice [Sir Stephen William Scott] Cobb, delivered "Justice must be seen to be done”: One Hundred Years since R v Sussex Justices [1924] as the Conkerton Memorial Lecture in Liverpool on October 10. 
  

• Catherine Kelly and Gwen Seabourne, University of Bristol Law School, have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Historical Society. 
  

• President Biden has appointed Justin Driver, the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law, Yale Law School, to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise (YLS).
  

• Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, on How History Rhymes at the Supreme Court on Michael Lewis's Against the Rules podcast.
  

• 
  Douglas Rooks, "a seasoned journalist with over 40 years of experience," will deliver a virtual lecture sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society on October 30th at noon, based on his new biography, Calm Command: U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller in His Times, 1888–1910.  Register here.  
  

• Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Guns and Society, the third annual fall conference of the Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University concludes today. 
  

• Via Time's "Made by History" section: The Debate That Gave Us the Electoral College by Jane E. Calvert (John Dickinson Writings Project); What Christian Nationalism Looked Like in Practice by William Horne (University of Maryland, College Park).
  

• Justice Joseph Bradley and the Civil Rights Cases (New York Almanack).
  

• "Columbia Law School marked the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education with a discussion of the civil rights record of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1953 paved the way for the decision holding school segregation unconstitutional."  Jeremy Kessler discussed Eisenhower's first steps to integrate the army at the end of World War II--at the battalion but not the platoon level (Columbia Law).
  

• A notice of the Program in Politics, Law and Social Thought at Rice University, the brainchild of former ASLH president Harold Hyman.
  

• A recording of that National Constitution Center book event in which Kenneth Mack interviewed David Greenberg on his biography of John Lewis is now up on the NCC's YouTube channel. 
  

• A notice of Akhil Reed Amar’s Constitution Day lecture at the Stanford Law School,  The Constitution, Originalism, and the Presidency: Questions and Answers–and his book signing for The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840. 
  

• Brian Leiter's list of the ten most-cited legal historians on U.S. law faculties. [We note this with some caution -- recalling LHB founder Mary Dudziak's critique of such lists, echoed by Brian Tamanaha. KMT]

• Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) spoke with NPR's Fresh Air this week about "where . . . things stand with reproductive rights as we head into the election."
  

• My former and present colleagues Mark Tushnet and Louis Michael Seidman have a podcast, "Supreme Betrayal:  How the Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Have Failed America."  The first episode is downloadable from Apple and Spotify.  DRE. 
  

• The Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University also has a new podcast, This Constitution.  The first episode is “Above the Law? Executive Privilege and Presidential Immunity.”
  

• ICYMI: T.F.T. Plucknett, in 1941, on why the London School of Economics should have its own publications program.  Eric Segall on Originalism and the Emperor's New Clothes (Dorf on Law).
  What the history of blasphemy laws in the US can teach us today (The Conversation).
  

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

Heniford and Still on a Ballroom Weapons Ban and Bruen

Kellen Heniford, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Kari Still, Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions have posted Panic! At the Ballroom: The 1804 New Orleans Ballroom Weapons Ban in a Post-Bruen Context, which is forthcoming in the Buffalo Law Review:

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decisions in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen in 2022 and United States v. Rahimi in 2024, history has taken a central role in the adjudication of Second Amendment cases. Researchers, courts, and litigators across the country have taken on the arduous task of sifting through archives of our nation’s history in order to compile a record of early American arms regulations. Litigation moves quickly, and too often, historical context is missing or selectively marshaled in these cases. This article builds upon efforts to provide that crucial context, specifically in relation to the history of the United States’ earliest enactments that banned weapons in ballrooms. Within, we (1) identify an as-of-yet uncited ballroom weapons ban in 1804 New Orleans, which is the earliest known regulation of its kind; (2) explicate the historical context surrounding that regulation, as well as the even stricter 1808 and 1817 bans that followed it; and (3) suggest general principles that may be distilled from these restrictions when they are considered within a larger historical tradition. We explain that these early nineteenth-century regulations can be understood as part of a historical tradition of weapons bans under either of two different types of sensitive places: places where there is a high probability of conflict and places where the presence of weapons is incompatible with the actual functioning of the place itself.

--Dan Ernst

Ambrose on Gunmaking at the Founding

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

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

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

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

--Dan Ernst