Weekend Roundup

• 

  William Howard Taft (LC)

  Andrea Scoseria Katz on "Taft at the Beach: What the Supreme Court Misses About a Key Unitary Executive Precedent" (Can We Still Govern?) 

• Michael Dreeben looks back at Humphrey's Executor (Just Security). 

• Martha Jones's illustrated story in the New York Times Magazine on Elizabeth Freeman, who sued for her own freedom, is here. 

• That Modern Criminal Law Review workshop, "Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective," may be viewed here and just heard here.  

• A notice of the "Slavery and the Judiciary Collection" of the Law Library of Congress, which "provides digital access to more than one hundred books and manuscripts documenting issues related to slavery and the courts from 1740 to 1860." Also from the hardworking law librarians of Congress: "Code and Policy in Action: Shared Legislative Targets Between the Yurok and Other Sovereign Entities," and Nathan Dorn, Rare Books Curator, continues his series of posts on Anglo-American natural law theorists with "A Textbook for the Laws of Nature’s God: Thomas Rutherforth’s Institutes."

• On July 16, 2026 at 2:00 PM ET, the Foreign and Comparative Law Webinar Series of the Law Librart of Congress will host the webinar Colonialisation, i, and an Unwritten Constitution: Understanding Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Legal System, presented by visiting scholar, librarian, and American Association of Law Libraries Schaffer Grant recipient, Theresa Buller, who is the subject librarian for law and criminal justice at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.

• A notice of "Myths and Misunderstandings in Modern Irish History," by Patrick Geoghegan, the 2026 Hardiman lecture at the Supreme Court (Law Society Gazette). 

• A Q&A with Hadar Aviram's Behind Ancient Bars: Narratives of Incarceration in the Hebrew Bible (University of California Press) (UC SF Law). 

• Michael Dorf asks What Weight, If Any, Should Be Given Racist Laws In A History-and-Tradition Test? (Dorf on Law.)

• Nineteenth-Century NY Law and Birthright Citizenship: New York v. Miln (1837) (New York Almanack).  

• A notice of Stacey Patton's Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press, 2026) (New York Almanack).

• "Reflecting on America’s 250th anniversary: Revolution, the Constitution, and the founders" in the Princeton University Press's list (PUP).  And, while we're at it, Princeton University and the Revolution.  

• Lawbook Exchange's June 2026 list in Scholarly Law and Legal History.   

• State Constitution Roundup: What made Pennsylvania's first ever constitution so radical that it only lasted 14 years?  (WHYY).  1776 NC Constitution exhibit [is] part of ‘Capitol 250’ July 4 fest (Coastal Review).  Bayard v. Singleton: Judicial review’s NC origins (Carolina Journal).  The Hawaii Constitution (State Court Report). 

• ICYMI: HIAS's illustrated history of US immigration (HIAS).  Eugene V. Debs, Constitutional Voice (NCC).  An appreciation of Raphael Lemkin, "the author of the concept of genocide" (UJE).  Benjamin Perry and the fight against secession (Greenville Journal). 

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

Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

On June 24, 2026 (at 12pm Eastern), join us for an international workshop featuring contributors to a forthcoming Modern Criminal Law Review Special Issue on “Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective,” guest edited by Clifford Ando (University of Chicago).

Recent years have witnessed several revolutions in the study of ancient law. These include new models for the study of ancient states, deriving in particular from comparative study; new interpretive emphasis on the limits of state infrastructural power; detailed study of the pluralist nature of legal authority in ancient empires in particular; and the extraordinary recovery of previously unknown documentary materials, especially in central Asian and East Asian contexts. This issue seeks to bring these new insights to bear on the study of criminal law in a global array of contexts:  the Ancient Near East, classical Athens, Qin and Han period China, the high Roman empire, and rabbinic Judaism.

Participants include: 

Clifford Ando, University of Chicago (moderator)
Beth Berkowitz, Columbia University
Ari Bryen, Vanderbilt University
Liang Cai, University of Notre Dame
Benjamin Gallant, Harvard University
Adriaan Lanni, Harvard University
Mark Letteney, University of Washington
Seth Richardson, University of Chicago
Andrew Wolpert, University of Florida

To join us for this free online event, please register here. Registration is encouraged, but not required; if you prefer to join the event directly, head over to the MCLR+ YouTube channel at the time of the event (please note the time zone). All attendees will have the opportunity to post questions and comments via YouTube live chat.

Disabilities and Women in Ancient Rome

The workshop Disabilities and Women in Ancient Rome: Legal, Social and Cultural Perspectives will be held at the University of Helsinki Main Building, Room U3039 (3rd floor). It will begin at 10.00 am (EEST) May 4 with the keynote. Remote participation is possible through this Zoom link.  Both in-person and remote participants should register.  For in-person participants, we would like to ask whether you are participating in the lunch (at the expense of participants) and the afternoon coffee.  Please register through this form.

10-11.15 Keynote

Prof. Christian Laes: Women and disabilities in Antiquity: between presentism and daily life 

11.30-13.00 session 1: Disabled Women in the Roman Narratives 

Sofia Vierula: The case of Harpaste: Lived experience of disability in Seneca’s letter to Lucilius 

Mathilde Chartrand: The Daily Life of a Furiosa: On the Gendered Consequences of Mental Illness

Fran Geldard: Enslavement and Disability in Eusebian Martyr Narrative

14.00-15.30 session 2: Women, Disability and Roman Law

Arnaud Paturet: Some Reflections on the Status of Deaf People by Roman Jurists 

Kaius Tuori: Infirmity and monstrosity: on the legal construction of female disability in law

Jana Mauri Marlborough: Against All Odds: The Legal Position of Wet Nurses in Roman Law 

16.00-17.30 session 3: Intersections of Gender and Disability in Late Antiquity 

Gaetana Balestra: Muta puella fuit: The Mute Woman between tutela mulierum and Justinian's Legislation.

Elena Pezzato Heck: Mental Illness as Grounds for Repudiation in Late Antiquity and the Justinian Era

Arttu Alaranta: Vulnerable Life-Cycle Moments and Disabilities in Women’s Asceticism during Late Antiquity

--Dan Ernst 

Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective

Modern Criminal Law Review has announced Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective, an international workshop to be held at 12 PM ET on June 24, 2026, featuring contributors a special issue, guest edited by Clifford Ando, University of Chicago.  Other participants include Beth Berkowitz, Columbia University; Ari Bryen, Vanderbilt University; Ernest Caldwell, St. Mary’s, London; Benjamin Gallant, Harvard University; Adriaan Lanni, Harvard University; Mark Letteney, University of Washington; Seth Richardson, University of Chicago; and Andrew Wolpert, University of Florida.  The organizers add:

To join us for this free online event, please register here. Registration is encouraged, but not required; if you prefer to join the event directly, head over to the MCLR+ YouTube channel at the time of the event (please note the time zone). All attendees will have the opportunity to post questions and comments via YouTube live chat.

--Dan Ernst

James's "Laws of All the Greeks"

Jesse James, Grinnell College, has published Laws of All the Greeks: International Law as Social Reality in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press):

The ancient Greek world was permeated with international law, the binding rules of behavior that Greeks across the Mediterranean followed and enforced for centuries. But why was international law effective in this world? Laws of All the Greeks offers an original answer rooted in contemporary social theory, presenting a definitive account of ancient Greek international law while delving into the social and psychological foundations that made it potent and durable.

Challenging recent claims that international law did not exist in the Greek world, Laws of All the Greeks makes a robust case not only for its existence, but for the importance of taking ancient Greek international law as an historical subject in the first place. It provides an updated history of select elements of that law, including the right to private self-help; judicial treaties known as symbola; and piracy.

Combining the findings of recent scholarship on Greek history, identity, and social networks, novel readings of documentary and literary sources, and the lessons of sociology and psychology, Jesse James demonstrates how the webs of identity binding the Greek world together affected both the rules of international law and their effectiveness at guiding legal and economic behavior. This study thus complicates and enriches prevailing approaches that emphasize formal institutions, structural features, or economic rationalism, offering instead a model for applying legal sociology to the historical study of international law.

--Dan Ernst 

Studies in the History of Tax Law

New from Hart/Bloomsbury: Studies in the History of Tax Law, Volume 12, edited by Peter Harris and Dominic de Cogan, University of Cambridge:

Collecting papers from the biennial Cambridge Tax Law History Conference, the book is a key resource for those interested in tax law and legal history [and continues a] prestigious series investigating current tax policy debates in an historical context.  The authors are a mix of senior tax professionals from academia, the judiciary, and practice, with representatives from 9 countries. The chapters fall within 3 basic categories:

1. UK tax, looking at a variety of topics ranging from income tax (introduction and deduction at source), tax administration (Scotland), cases and judges (Lord Wilberforce), to the Peasants' Revolt, indirect taxation (tonnage tax and excise), and tax concepts (beneficial ownership).

2. International taxation, with chapters on the origins of the international income tax order, the UN (1950s and 60s), and VAT (origins and procedure).

3. Non-UK tax systems, including chapters on income tax in Singapore and early developments in Japan, South Africa (GAAR), an influential Canadian report (Carter Commission), taxation in classical Athens, and in the medieval Italian city-states.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump 

Malka on Witness and Judging in Antiquity

New online from Law and History Review: Witnesses, Judges: A Revolution Untold, by Orit Malka, Hebrew University:

Witness testimony in a judicial setting is commonly viewed as a form of evidence—a means
to inform a judicial body of relevant facts in a given case. In this perspective, witnesses are merely instrumental to the process of adjudication. While this viewpoint provides a useful account of how we think of witness testimony in courts today, it is ill-suited to the way witnesses and their role were perceived in the ancient world. Drawing on a cross-cultural analysis of ancient and late antique texts, the article recovers a different perception of the role of witnesses that once prevailed in the societies that gave rise to Western civilization. According to this alternate view, witnesses were not seen as passive providers of information but rather as active agents with the power to adjudicate—a role that we would now associate with judges. The article offers a new conceptualization of this historical transformation, outlining two paradigms that can help us critically examine the implied assumptions about the role of witnesses in adjudication: “the instrumental paradigm,” which is dominant in contemporary thought, and “the authoritative paradigm,” emerging from ancient texts, wherein witnesses held a far more authoritative role than the contemporary understanding suggest. The study argues that the instrumental paradigm reflects a radical transformation in the meanings of testimony and witness as legal concepts—a shift that marks an unexamined revolution in the history of legal thought.

--Dan Ernst

Herz's "God and the Bueaucrat"

Zachary Herz, University of Colorado, Boulder, has published The God and the Bureaucrat
Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories (Cambridge University Press):

Why is Roman law so boring? In this book, Zachary Herz argues that the bureaucratic, positivistic world of Roman law is not a distraction from the violent autocracy of the Roman empire, but an imagined escape. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and even emperors used legal writing to think about worlds that were safer or fairer than the one in which they lived. This archive of political imagination slowly became a law-code, and now guides readers through a legal system about which its authors could only dream. From Augustus to Justinian, this book shows how law symbolized order in chaotic times, and how that symbol eventually took on a life of its own. From the enlightened judgements of Hadrian to the great jurists and child rulers of Severan Rome, Herz reveals what Romans were really talking about when they talked about law.  

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

A Festschrift for David Ibbetson

Essays in Law and History for David Ibbetson, edited by Joe Sampson and Stelios Tofaris is published today by Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury:

Over the last 40 years, David Ibbetson has paved the way in a remarkably broad range of fields.  In ancient law, his scholarship has spanned both the detailed doctrine of the Roman law of obligations and the cross-pollination of legal influences around the ancient Mediterranean. His work on English legal history has ranged from the earliest days of the common law through to the turn of the 20th century, combining forensic archival research with a sensitivity to how lawyers thought about their subject. In European legal history, he has shown the porousness of the civil law and the extent to which it has been shaped by other areas of intellectual life, from theology to rationalist philosophy.

The contributions to this volume in his honour mirror both the breadth and the depth of Ibbetson's scholarship. The book combines chapters from leading legal historians, close colleagues and over a dozen of Ibbetson's students. Some chapters build upon or respond to Ibbetson's ideas, others his areas of interest. The contributions are introduced by Ibbetson's valedictory lecture on the importance of legal history to modern practice and scholarship, and the work yet to be done.

–Dan Ernst.  Table of Contents after the jump.

Weekend Roundup

• From Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians: "The American Public’s Role in Financial Regulation," by Christopher Shaw.

• Via Nursing Clio: An interview with Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, author of A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain.
  

• 
  Paula J. Giddings will discuss “The Prescient Life of Ida B. Wells,” “a crusading journalist and pioneer in the fights for women’s suffrage and against segregation and lynchings” in conversation with FDR Library Director William Harris, in the Library’s Henry A. Wallace Center at 6:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 26, 2024, and streaming on YouTube and Facebook.  Register here.
  

• Congratulations to John Cairns, University of Edinburgh, upon the announcement that he is to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow.
  

• Heikki Pihlajamäki, Professor of Comparative Legal History at the University of Helsinki, has “won the Gad Rausing Prize for Outstanding Humanities Research. Pihlajamäki was awarded the prize, worth 1.5 million Swedish krona.”  More.
  

• Frances M. Clarke, University of Sydney, is the first Australian to win the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which “rewards the finest scholarly work published in the prior year in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era.” She and her coauthor, Rebecca Jo Plant, University of California, San Diego, won the prize for Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University Press).
  

• Reshaping American Life: Today’s Supreme Court in Historical Context, and its Potential Impact on our Future, a discussion/debate between Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Case Western Reserve Law Professor Jonathan Adler, moderated by California Supreme Court Justice Carol Corrigan, will take place on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, 12:15 p.m. (PT) / 3:15 p.m. (ET).  It is to last 75 minutes and will take place in-person and virtually.  Register here.
  

• The University of Edinburgh Press seeks proposals for its new book series, New Approaches to Ancient Greek Institutional History.  The series editors are Mirko Canevaro, Edward Harris, and  David Lewis.
  

• ICYMI: "Maricopa County Honors Public Defenders and Landmark Legal Victories [such as Gideon v. Wainwright] During 'Public Defense Recognition Week'” (Hoodline).  "How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans" (Time--the new home of Made by History).
  

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

AJLH 63:2

The American Journal of Legal History has published its 63:2 (June 2023) issue.  It is devoted to the symposium "Status in Ancient and Medieval Law."

Status in Ancient and Medieval Law: Introduction
Timothy Lubin

Empire, Status, and the Law
Clifford Ando

Metics and Freedmen: Conflicts of Social and Juridical Status in the Classical and Hellenistic Greek World
Elizabeth A Meyer

Religious Endowments in Ancient India and the Institutionalization of Brahmin Caste Status
Timothy Lubin

Belief as Status: Premodern Islamic Law, Duties, and the Martyr Conundrum
Adnan A Zulfiqar

The Matter of Personae in Medieval Italy
Melissa Vise

‘Our Practice Has a Superiority:’ Debt Enforcement, Bills of Exchange, and Credit in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow
Hunter Harris

Book Reviews

Eric L Muller, Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America’s World War II Concentration Camps
Gabriel J Chin

Brent Salter, Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951
Oren Bracha

 --Dan Ernst

van den Berge, "Phersu, Prosōpon, Persona: On Legal Personhood, Roman Sculpture and the Art of Law"

Lukas van den Berge (Utrecht University) has posted "Phersu, Prosōpon, Persona: On Legal Personhood, Roman Sculpture and the Art of Law." The abstract: 

Many legal scholars and philosophers have recently embraced the idea of granting legal personhood and rights to entities other than human beings or their collective organisations. In search for effective innovations, however, it is also important to rethink the notions of legal personhood and rights themselves. This article aims to contribute to such a process of rethinking by examining the intellectual history of legal personhood. Tracing down the modern concept of the legal person not only to Latin persona, but also to Greek prosōpon and Etruscan phersu, it supplements (and partly also corrects) leading analyses of that concept’s history such as those of Hannah Arendt. Concurringly, it will not only connect (as Arendt and others have done) Roman legal personhood to ancient drama, but also to ancient sculpture. Finally, it will be argued that a deeper and broader understanding of the concept’s intellectual history may serve as a surprising source for future renewal.

Read on here, at SSRN.

h/t Legal Theory Blog

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Over at the Jus Commune podcast, Paul du Plessis, Edinburgh Law School, discusses litigation in the Roman Republic.
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology, has been awarded the North Carolina Society of Historians’ 2021 Award of Excellence for Outstanding Contribution to the Preservation and Perpetuation of North Carolina History and Heritage in connection with his two publications on Jacob Henry: "What Oath (if any) did Jacob Henry take in 1809?;Deconstructing the Historical Myths," American Journal of Legal History 61 (2021): 349-384; and "A Religious Test in America?: The 1809 Motion to Vacate Jacob Henry’s North Carolina State Legislative Seat—A Re-Evaluation of the Primary Sources," North Carolina Historical Review 98 (2021): 1-41.
  

• The transcript of Judith Heumann’s Jefferson Lecture, a conversation with Karen Tani introduced by Christopher Tomlins, on the long fight for disability rights has now been posted.

• Congratulations to Professor Tamika Nunley (Cornell University): The Journal of Southern History reports that her article "Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts" has won the (first ever!) Anne Braden Prize in southern women's history from the Southern Historical Association.
  

• For those on Twitter, you can find updates from the ongoing American Society for Legal History conference via the hashtag #ASLH2022.
  

• Congratulations to David B. Schorr (Tel Aviv University): the Israel Association for Law and History recently awarded its best article prize to his article "Horizontal and Vertical Influences in Colonial Legal Transplantation: Water By-Laws in British Palestine."
  

• From Dan Farber (Berkeley Law) at LegalPlanet: "The Supreme Court’s Earliest Pollution Cases." h/t Environment, Law and History
  

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

Cammack on Popular Courts and Athenian Democracy

Daniela Cammack, University of California, Berkeley, has posted The Popular Courts in Athenian Democracy:

Accounts of Athenian democracy often emphasize the composition, procedures, and functions of the assembly: openness to all citizens, the right of each citizen to speak publicly, and the power of ordinary citizens to decide policy. Yet a series of legal reforms that enhanced the powers of judges at the end of the fifth century BC suggests that the Athenians perceived their popular courts as their most “demotic” institution, that is, the institution most likely to support the interests of ordinary citizens against the political elite and thus most crucial to democracy. Key features of the courts, such as greater numbers of poorer and older citizens, random selection, restrictions on speech, the secret ballot, and the power of ordinary citizens to decide justice, were more important to the idea and practice of democracy in Athens than has been recognized, with significant implications for understanding its differences from democracy today.

--Dan Ernst

Gagarin's "Democratic Law in Classical Athens"

Michael Gagarin, the James R. Dougherty, Jr. Centennial Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, has published Democratic Law in Classical Athens in the University of Texas Press’s Fordyce W. Mitchel Memorial Lecture Series:

The democratic legal system created by the Athenians was completely controlled by ordinary citizens, with no judges, lawyers, or jurists involved. It placed great importance on the litigants’ rhetorical performances. Did this make it nothing more than a rhetorical contest judged by largely uneducated citizens that had nothing to do with law, a criticism that some, including Plato, have made?

Michael Gagarin argues to the contrary, contending that the Athenians both controlled litigants’ performances and incorporated many other unusual features into their legal system, including rules for interrogating slaves and swearing an oath. The Athenians, Gagarin shows, adhered to the law as they understood it, which was a set of principles more flexible than our current understanding allows. The Athenians also insisted that their legal system serve the ends of justice and benefit the city and its people. In this way, the law ultimately satisfied most Athenians and probably produced just results as often as modern legal systems do. Comprehensive and wide-ranging, Democratic Law in Classical Athens offers a new perspective for viewing a legal system that was democratic in a way only the Athenians could achieve.

--Dan Ernst

Frier on the Roman Origins of the Public Trust Doctrine

Bruce W. Frier, University of Michigan Law School, has posted The Roman Origins of the Public Trust Doctrine, a review essay published in the Journal of Roman Archeology 23 (2019): 641-647:

Villa on the Seashore (NYPL)

The modern Public Trust Doctrine, one of the pillars of environmental law, originates in the efforts of Roman jurists to regulate the building of private villas alone the coast of Central Italy. The jurists begin by recognizing the seashore as public property and requiring public permission for private building; but this doctrine is eventually fortified by incorporating the widespread social construction of certain property as "common to all" (communes omnibus) or even "owned by all" (communes omnium). The result is the Roman creation of a sort of equitable trust in which the State owns property for the benefit of all of its citizens — broadly similar in concept to the modern Public Trust, although without the immediate environmental concern.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Topography of Roman Administration

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Call for papers: "Space and Governance: Towards a New Topography of Roman Administration" conference, 3-4 April 2020, Royal Academy of Spain at Rome (Real Academia de España en Roma)

The purpose of the conference is to explore the transformation of public space and administrative activities in Republican and Imperial Rome through an interdisciplinary exploration of the topography of power. The emergence of the Roman Republic produced a reorganization of the administrative structures, leading to the emergence of various entities and institutions responsible for organization and governance of Rome, its civic life and public spaces. In different ways, this spatial model was exported to the colonies with the expansion of the Republic. Throughout the Roman world, building projects created spaces, the topography of the city, for different civic purposes: for the meetings of assemblies, senate meetings, the administration of justice, the public treasury, and the management of the city through different magistracies, offices and even archives. These administrative spaces –open and closed– characterized the Roman life throughout the Republic and High Empire, until the profound administrative and judicial transformations of the Dominate. This conference aims to study the public and private spaces related to administration through the urban development, the existing interrelation between the different administrative bodies, the analysis of the architecture of the spaces already discovered and the study of the written sources. We will try to find an answer to the dilemmas such as where did the administration work? Were there offices and where were they located? Were there social class differences between the different levels of administration?

Themes:

•    Urban development and dynamics related to the expansion of the administration
•    New discoveries on the institutions and spaces of Roman administration
•    Architecture of spaces for public meetings and trials: Assemblies, Senate, courtrooms, basilicas
•    Private spaces in the administration: Residences of magistrates and the elite
•    Magistracies, offices and archives
•    Epigraphy related to the Roman administration
•    Development of institutions between early Republic and Late Antiquity
•    New methodologies in Roman topography
•    Gender, intersectionality and public space

Keynote speakers: Paolo Liverani (Università degli Studi di Firenze), Elena Isayev (University of Exeter) and Pier Luigi Tucci (Johns Hopkins University).

The conference is organized by the ERC-funded project Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition (SpaceLaw), based at the University of Helsinki. There is no conference fee. The organizers are unfortunately unable to aid in either travel or accommodation arrangements or the cost of travel or accommodation.

Abstracts should be 300 words maximum, for 20-minute papers to be delivered in English. Abstracts should be sent to lawgovernanceandspace@gmail.com. The deadline for abstracts is 1st December 2019. Questions may be sent to Antonio Lopez Garcia (antonio.lopezgarcia@helsinki.fi).

Spaces of Roman Constitutionalism

[We have the following announcement.]

Spaces of Roman Constitutionalism.  26-28 September 2019.  University of Helsinki

From the fora to the assemblies and beyond, public space in ancient Rome was both political and contested, reflecting changing notions of community, citizenship and the values and norms behind them. The purpose of this conference is to explore the political, cultural and legal notions of public space and public realm in Rome. By observing the place of magistrates in the public spaces of Rome and more generally in the ideas behind Republican governance, it seeks to question and unpack the notions that have been built into the concept of Roman republican governance. On one hand we have the notion of Republicanism and public law, which has a rich history of modernizing interpretations and reuses in European history. On the other, there is the equally rich tradition of rituals, ceremonies, religious convictions and beliefs that surround the practices of governance. By examining the spacial aspect, how these were situated and interlinked and how public and private spaces and roles intermingled, we are hoping to shed new light into cultural and social dimension of Roman republicanism and its transformation from the Republic to the Principate. By setting ideas into their dynamic spatial, social and cultural contexts, we hope to subvert the traditional story of Roman constitutionalism.

Keynote speakers of the conference are Harriet Flower (Princeton), Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp (Cologne), Catherine Steel (Glasgow), and Clifford Ando (Chicago).

The conference is open to all and there is no registration required.  For more information and the programme, please visit [here].

--Dan Ernst

Conference: Status and Justice in Law, Religion and Society

A conference on “Status and Justice in Law, Religion, and Society” will be held at Washington and Lee University School of Law, November 1-3, 2019. It will include lots of interest for legal historians. The organizers are Timothy Lubin and Kemilya Atanasova, both of Washington and Lee University. Clifford Ando (University of Chicago) and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Indiana University) will give keynote lectures on citizenship and the legacy of the Antonine constitution and on religious status under secular law, respectively. The list of presenters is here. An excerpt from the conference description: 

This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together historians of religious, ancient, and medieval law systems from around the world with scholars of modern legal systems, on the hypothesis that comparative discussion can throw new light on the role of status-considerations in shaping how individuals experience and use the law, in defining what counts as a fair or just outcome, and in changes to the legal landscape in times of social change.  It may be that the role of statuses (both legal and societal) in premodern and religious legal orders may hold lessons for understanding the role of statuses in the law of republican polities, despite their aspiration to ensure equality of individuals before the law.

Further information is available here.

-posted by Mitra Sharafi

A Cultural History of Law

Out now with Bloomsbury is A Cultural History of Law, a six-volume collection examining law in western societies from antiquity to the modern age. From the press: 

How have legal ideas and institutions affected Western culture? And how has the law itself been shaped by its cultural context? 

In a work spanning 4,500 years, these questions are addressed by 57 experts, each contributing an authoritative study of a theme applied to a period in history. Supported by detailed case material and over 230 illustrations, the volumes examine trends and nuances of the culture of law in Western societies from antiquity to the present. 

Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. 

The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (2500 BCE-500 CE); 2 - Middle Ages (500-1500); 3 - Early Modern Age (1500-1680); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1680-1820); 5 - Age of Reform (1820-1920); 6 - Modern Age (1920-present). 

Themes (and chapter titles) are: Justice; Constitution; Codes; Agreements; Arguments; Property and Possession; Wrongs; and the Legal Profession. 

A Cultural History of Law is part of the Cultural Histories Series. 

More on each volume after the jump: