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. 

Weekend Roundup

• ASLH President Mitra Sharafi's alternative to assigning undergraduate research papers in an age of AI (South Asian Legal History Resources).

• The recording of the National Constitution Center's session on the Constitution and the Courts, held in conjunction with the Federal Judicial Center, is now available.  It consists of a panel on the Constitution in the Founding Era with Akhil Reed Amar, Christopher Bonner, and Gerald F. Leonard, moderated by Thomas Donnelly, and a discussion on the Constitution and the federal judiciary with Kevin Arlyck, moderated by Julie Silverbrook.  

• Alison L. LaCroix's speech to the University of Chicago's graduates is here.  H/t: JDM. 

• From In Custodia Legis: "A Deep Dive into Library Resources on Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp." -- Part 1 and Part 2.   

• Saul Cornell appears in "The American Experiment," a five-part documentary on the nation’s founding that starts streaming on Netflix on June 24 (Fordham Law).

• Margaret Burnham and Brenda E. Stevenson on opening the federal archives on Civil Rights Cold Cases (AHA Perspectives). 

• "The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law is pleased to announce the 2026–2027 recipients of the Steven M. Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History: Kate Andrias, Olatunde Johnson, William Novak, Alice O’Brien, and Julie Suk."   

• 
  
  "Is the United States on the Road to a New Civil War?" David Blight's lecture to the American Academy in Berlin. 

• Edmarverson A. Santos on Doctrine of Discovery and Colonial Legal Order and Robert J. Miller on The International Law of Colonialism: The Doctrine of Discovery.

• ICYMI: More Gordon Wood tributes (LOA).  250 Years of State Constitutions (SCR). The NJ State Library's exhibit on the state's first constitution (tapinto).  Jesse Wegman discusses James Wilson (Fresh Air).  The University of Pennsylvania Almanac notes Serena Mayeri's receipt of the 2026 James Willard Hurst Book Prize From Law & Society Association.  The lessons of the Harry Raymond car bombing of 1938 for police accountability today (DJ).  When Robert E. Lee's daughter was arrested in a Jim Crow streetcar dispute (Alexandria Brief).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Alison LaCroix on using history to advise the University of Chicago's graduating class (Chicago Maroon).

•  A notice of "Law and the Paranormal: A Critical Perspective on Legal Rationality," a doctoral thesis submitted to Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge by Andrew Michael Sagar, in 2023, "traces how English law transformed its treatment of witchcraft, astrology, spiritual mediumship, and fortune-telling from crimes of supernatural harm into issues of fraud, commerce, and consumer regulation" (USAHerald). 

• An appreciation of Tay-sheng Wang's Introduction to Taiwan’s Legal History by Shih-An Wang, Project Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Law, Kobe University (Taiwan Insight).

• New in Gale's "Making of Modern Law" series, British Colonial Law: Acts, Ordinances, and Proclamations from the Colonies, 1643–1900. 

• The webinar "Making the Founding Documents Relevant in the 21st Century" will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, commencing 1:30 PM (ET).  The panelists will be Paul Carrese, Arizona State University (moderator); Roosevelt Montás, Bard College; Jeremy Bailey, University of Florida; and Jocelyn Evans, University of West Florida.  Register here (PSNow). 

• 
  SHEAR's "Civics Exchange" "connects you with members of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR) who can speak to your organization, club, or institution about the history that has shaped our civic institutions and civic culture, and the relationship of the past to our present-day civic institutions and civic life."

• From In These Times: "Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Tony Mazzocchi, a Working-Class Hero" (and a major figure in 20th c. legal history). 

• An event of interest, on June 6: historian and archivist Daniel F. Gosling (UK National Archives) is offering an online intro to early modern legal records. (more)  

• Lawbook Exchange's May 2026 list of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: The history of Supreme Court leaks (SCOTUSblog).  What Jefferson and Madison would have thought about "rededicating" the US to God (The Conversation).  Hunting, Poaching, and the American Revolution (New York Almanack).

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

The National Bankruptcy Archives

[We've recently had our attention drawn to this important collection at the Biddle Law Library of the Penn Carey Law School.  DRE]

In October 2000, the Biddle Law Library and the American College of Bankruptcy collaborated to create a special collection entitled the National Bankruptcy Archives (NBA), a national repository of materials relating to the history of debtor-creditor relations, bankruptcy and the reorganization of debt. The NBA collects records from the American College of Bankruptcy as well as from other organizations whose activities have been relevant to the history of bankruptcy and insolvency legislation, regulation, and administrative and judicial determination. The NBA also houses papers of individuals who have influenced the field, and other collections documenting the history of bankruptcy law.

Weekend Roundup

• Elizabeth Papp Kamali on "Charles Donahue: Man, Magister, Inimitable Scholar" (Harvard Law Bulletin).  

• The HLS Library has scanned "Harvard’s full collection of 140,000 documents comprising more than 700,000 pages" to produce "the first complete, keyword-searchable online collection of the Nuremberg Trials records" (Harvard Law Bulletin).

• BU Law's notice of legal historian Rephael Stern. 

• Congratulations to Alison LaCroix, upon her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences!  Also William Baude and Elizabeth Clemens (UChicago News).  Professor LaCroix will be the speaker at the University of Chicago's 2026 Commencement this June.

• A notice of Jill Lepore's HLS seminar, “The History of Evidence,” devoted to "two key questions: 'What counts as proof?' and 'How has that changed over time?'” (Harvard Law Today).  She discussed her book We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

• Mary Sarah Bilder and Sarah Isgur will "explore Virginia's central role shaping the nation's founding" as part of the 2026 Founding Debates Program of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and the Virginia Law Foundation on September 24, 2026, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.  (More.)

• ICYMI: Martin v Hunter’s Lessee (History is Now).  Michael D. Ramsey, Keith Whittington, Kurt Lash, and Lawrence Solum on birthright citizenship (Regulatory Review). The Forgotten History of the School Choice Movement (AEI).

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

U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs on Internet Archive

[We have the following announcement from Merrilee Proffitt of Democracy's Library.  DRE]

Thanks to a generous gift of materials from the Wolf Law Library at the William & Mary Law School, and the Internet Archive’s mission to digitize and provide universal access to knowledge, we are pleased to share more than 125,000 U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs. These materials which span nearly two centuries of American law are now freely accessible online. 

Why This Matters.  Most people are familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court opinions as public documents. But the opinions are only part of the story. Behind every landmark ruling lies a vast archive of briefs, petitions, appendices, and supporting records; these are the the arguments, evidence, and voices that shaped each decision. The Supreme Court may receive 7,000-8,000 petitions each year, but only grants a writ of certiorari to hear the case for about 80 cases. This collection includes records and briefs received by the court, both those granted certiorari and those denied certiorari; the latter category is much more voluminous than the former. Until now, these important public documents have only been available in limited ways — in print form in a limited number of law libraries, and in other formats in other libraries but not generally available for all people to freely access. 

That has now changed. As part of Democracy’s Library, the Internet Archive’s large-scale effort to preserve and open government information, this collection includes records and briefs spanning cases from 1830 through 2019, making it one of the most comprehensive archives of freely available Supreme Court materials ever assembled in one place. 

What’s Now Available.  The collection covers three kinds of materials:

• The first is the official records from the lower court(s): the trial transcripts, evidence, and procedural documents that travel with each case up through the federal judiciary.  

• The second is the briefs: the petitions, responses, amicus filings, and supporting appendices submitted by the litigants themselves and by interested third parties. These briefs are the raw material of American constitutional argument. They capture the perspectives of individuals, corporations, civil society organizations, and government agencies pressing their cases before the nation’s highest court.  

• The third category is the opinions (for cases that are heard by the Supreme Court): the ultimate decisions reached by the highest court in the United States, demonstrating the logic and reasoning of the court.

Taken together, they form a detailed documentary record of how legal arguments, social concerns, and political priorities have evolved over nearly two hundred years of American life.

Weekend Roundup

• Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, delivers the 2026 Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lecture at the University of Chicago Law School on Catherine Macaulay's 1767 pamphlet, "Loose Remarks." 

• The Columbia Law Library tells the law school's history through an exhibit of its "artifacts and treasures" (CLS).  

• And the Princeton University Library has opened the exhibit “Nursery of Rebellion’: Princeton and the American Revolution,” featuring original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (Daily Princetonian).

• From In Custodia Legis: a post on "William Paca, Deliberator and Declaration Signer.

• On April 28, Foley partner Harlan Levy will moderate a discussion with Akhil Reed Amar on The Declaration's Impact on American History, Law and the Constitution at the NYC Bar Series.  Also here.

• Over at Nursing Clio: Dori Hobbie on "British Reactions to the 1992 Irish X Case."

• Greg Ablavsky, Stanford Law, on Native Nations, Federal Indian Law, and the Birthright Citizenship Case (SLS Podcasts).  Also, the National Constitution Center's resource guide for classroom discussions of the birthright citizenship.

• More on that PRA EO: Marty Lederman, Georgetown Law, and Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law, on who owns Presidential Records (Executive Function Chat).   Christopher Fonzone says that the Presidential Records Act is Constitutional (Just Security).  Gary M. Stern, a former general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration, is astonished by the executive order (WaPo). 

• ICYMI: Jane Manners and Lev Menand summarize their argument on "The Law of For Cause Removal" (Oxford Business Law Blog).  Live from Penn Carey Law via WHYY: Kermit Roosevelt and Amanda Shanor of the history of the U.S. Supreme Court (YouTube).  Larry Solum takes issue with Richard Primus on enumeration and constitutional interpretation (Legal Theory Blog).

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

New Resource: The Supreme Court Indian Law Database

[The following is an invited guest post by Keith Richotte, Jr. (Director, Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program, and Professor of Law, University of Arizona), introducing The Supreme Court Indian Law Database.]

A critical new resource for scholars of the Supreme Court and Native America is now available: The Supreme Court Indian Law Database. Recently launched, this website offers a number of important features.

• It identifies every Indian law case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court (680 and counting). Listed chronologically, the list has a search function to allow a researcher to find a particular cases or cases easily 

• It places each case in one or more categories for identification and comparison. The site has forty-three categories, including plenary power, criminal jurisdiction, treaties, and many others 

•  It lists every justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and their participation in the cases on the list. It also identifies how the justice voted and if they wrote in a particular case 

•  The pages for each individual case identifies the other cases on the list that it cites and the cases where it has been cited. For example, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia cites three cases and has been cited forty-eight times 

In the future additional search functions will be added to the site. Once running a researcher will be able to easily identify cases decided between a certain date range, or cases that fall under the same four categories, or find out which three justices participated in the same cases or any combination of all three of these things and more.

 

In addition, there is room for debate for what counts as an Indian law case or for which category a particular case belongs. While acknowledging this certain subjectivity, quite a bit of thought and care went into curating the list. If you have questions about the list or would like to know how it was crafted please visit the methodology page.

 

Finally, while a lot of thought and care has been put into the list and the website, it is still very new and there is always room for improvement. To that end, if you have any constructive feedback you would like to share please send it to Keith Richotte, the curator of the site and Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. His email address is at the bottom of the main page.

 

The hope is that this website will be a valuable resource for practitioners, scholars, students, tribal nations and peoples, and anyone else with an interest in Native America and a desire to see Indigenous peoples thrive. Thank you and happy searching on SCILDB.com!

Weekend Roundup

• Over at JOTWELL, we've noticed several reviews of interest: Maya Manian (American University Washington College of Law) wrote about Aziza Ahmed's Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS (2025); Martha Ertman (University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law) reviewed Dorothy Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past (2026); Jedidiah Kroncke (University of Hong Kong) spotlighted María E. Montoya's A Workplace of Their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle Over Industrial Democracy (2026). 

• The California Law Review's podcast has posted an episode on Michael Banerjee's "What Harvard’s Lawsuit Should Have Said" (published in the journal's online companion in August 2025).

• On the history-of-higher-ed theme, Banerjee also alerted us to this interesting Portland Press Herald article, on "How Maine’s elite private colleges sold Wabanaki land to bankroll early construction."  

• Vicki Jackson, HLS, delivered the  2026 Malyi Lecture at the University of Chicago Law School on “Knowledge Institutions and Constitutional Democracy.”   

• Jack Rakove will speak on Theory of Constitutional Failure: The American Case at Notre Dame Law on Friday, April 24, 2026, from 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm.

• Congratulations to Kunal Parker, Miami Law, on his selection as Beatrice Webb Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics! 

• And congratulations to Edward J. Balleisen, the new Provost of George Washington University! (GW Today)

• Nathan Dorn on Lodovico Carerio: Heresy, Lawbooks, and the Inquisition in the Kingdom of Naples (In Custodia Legis).   

• Haris A. Durrani, a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University, has published Engineering the Law: The Complicated Legal History of a Satellite in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History.

• "The 1874 Arkansas Constitution and records from the convention that produced it are now available online through a collaboration between the University of Arkansas Libraries and the Quill Project at the University of Oxford" (Arkansas News) 

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

• The National Constitution Center has announced the opening on May 15 of "Governing the Nation, a new permanent gallery exploring the Constitution’s system of separated powers."  Its development was guided by "a distinguished scholarly advisory board representing leading universities and research institutions, ensuring a rigorous and balanced exploration of the separation of powers and federalism," including H. W. Brands, Cristina Rodríguez, Yuval Levin, Michael Klarman, Gail Heriot, and Ilan Wurman.

• Deborah Rosen reviews Andrew Fede's A Degraded Caste of Society in the Journal of Southern History.

• That E.O. on the PRA:  The American Historical Association and American Oversight file suit (CBS News).  The Trump Administration Is Trying to Erase Its Own History (Atlantic Daily).  Joyce Vance with the court filing (Civil Discourse).  The AHA's notice of the lawsuit.

• More on Birthright Citizenship: Steve Vladeck, Georgetown Law, on the "pitched battle within the legal academy over the fairly transparent efforts of a small cohort of right-wing law professors to provide a fig leaf of historical support for the Trump administration’s legally and morally odious position in the birthright citizenship case" (One First). Philip Hamburger, Columbia Law, on Allegiance, Birthright, and Citizenship (Law & Liberty).  For a brief time only, you may read, open access, the introduction to Anna O. Law's Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, here.

• ICYMI:  In the National Constitution Center's series, "Constitutional Voices": W.E.B Du Bois and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  Kevin Kruse rethinks the Civil Rights Movement (Campaign Trails).

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

Karl Llewellyn Archive at the Perelman Centre in Brussels

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE.  H/t: DS]

The Twining-Llewellyn Fund is a unique collection of several hundred documents and works collected by William Twining (1934-2025) over the course of his career. The collection is housed at the Perelman Centre in Brussels. A significant portion of these documents illuminate the life and work of Karl N. Llewellyn. The documents in the archive, sometimes original, often commented on by Twining, date from the 1910s to the 1960s. The collection contains the bulk of Llewellyn’s publications, the transcription of several dozen unpublished works and some of his lecture notes. Researchers will also be able to read many of his personal and professional letters, as well as dozens of documents related to his research and the development of the UCC. The archive is open to the public and can be consulted by researchers.  The full catalogue of the Llewellyn archive can be accessed here.

[The main body of Llewellyn's papers are at the University of Chicago, but this is an impressive collection, particularly for as a comprehensive bibliography of Llewellyn's writings, published and unpublished.]

Weekend Roundup

• Boston College Law's notice of its new legal historian, Marco Basile (BC Law).   

• Mary Bilder, BC Law, will deliver “The Perils of Sex: Catharine Macaulay’s Constitution of Liberty” as the 13th Annual John Patrick Diggins Memorial Lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center on Wednesday, February 25, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.  The event will be livestreamed. 

• Over at Legal History Miscellany: Identifying Women Jurors and Institutionalising Women’s Citizenship, by Kay Crosby. 

• G. Edward White, UVA Law, discusses his new biography Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgement on the American Bar Association's Modern Law Library podcast.  

• Jessica Lake, Melbourne Law School, discusses her book Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (UVA Law). 

• Clare Cushman discusses US Supreme Court Justice Day helped establish the Court's recusal practice (SCHS).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued its February catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• Columbia University's new Obama Presidential Oral History collection includes quite a few interviews of interest to legal historians.

• A notice of Confluences of Law and History. Irish Legal History Society Discourses and Other Papers, edited by Niamh Howlin and Felix M. Larkin (Irish Catholic).

• ICYMI: The groundbreaking legal career of Judge Lucile Watts (Michigan Public Radio).  The “Renaissance” in Civic Education: Beyond the Salmon P. Chase Center (The Lantern).  Bhagat Singh Thind and his Citizenship Case (New York Alamanck).

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

Street & Runyon, "The Library of Congress at a Crossroads: Executive Overreach and the Future of Public Knowledge"

This article is not legal history, but may be of interest to readers of the blog -- many of whom have likely made use of the Library of Congress or have other reasons to care about its functions: Leslie Street (William and Mary Law School) and Amanda Runyon (Penn Carey Law), "The Library of Congress at a Crossroads: Executive Overreach and the Future of Public Knowledge," Seattle University Law Review Online & Seattle Journal of Technology, Environment, & Innovation Law (forthcoming 2026). The abstract:

In May 2025, President Trump's removal of the Librarian of Congress and attempted removal of the Register of Copyrights precipitated a constitutional crisis that exposed fundamental structural vulnerabilities in the nation's knowledge infrastructure. This Article argues that the Library of Congress faces a dual threat: a constitutional breach of separation of powers and a cultural threat to the preservation of America's intellectual heritage. The Library's structural ambiguity — its simultaneous identity as a legislative library, national library, and copyright agency — has left it vulnerable to executive overreach that threatens both constitutional integrity and its role as custodian of national memory.

Drawing on separation-of-powers doctrine, mandatory deposit jurisprudence, and the emerging Supreme Court framework on presidential removal authority, this Article demonstrates that the Copyright Office's exercise of executive functions within a legislative institution creates irreconcilable constitutional tensions. The D.C. Circuit's decision in Valancourt Books further undermines the mandatory deposit system that has sustained the Library's comprehensive collections for over 150 years.

To resolve these crises, this Article proposes a comprehensive three-part legislative solution: (1) modernizing mandatory deposit to authorize electronic submissions and create constitutional protections through voluntary compliance mechanisms; (2) codifying the Library's status as a wholly legislative branch entity with congressional appointment of the Librarian; and (3) severing the Copyright Office from the Library and relocating it to the Executive Branch. Without decisive congressional action, the erosion of the Library's statutory independence threatens the constitutional balance of powers, the preservation of American cultural heritage, and the future of public knowledge in a democratic society.

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

ASLH Dudziak Prize to "Petitioning for Freedom"

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to one that is close to our hearts: the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize. About this prize: 

The Dudziak Prize, named in honor of Mary L. Dudziak, a leading scholar of twentieth century U.S. legal history and international relations as well as a digital history pioneer, is awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project. These projects may take the form of either traditionally published peer reviewed scholarship or born-digital projects of equivalent depth and scope.

The 2025 Dudziak Prize winner was “Petitioning for Freedom,” directed by Katrina Jagodinsky and the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. The citation:

“Petitioning for Freedom,” developed by Katrina Jagodinsky and her team at the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, offers a deeply researched and carefully curated online database of over 2,000 habeas petitions filed across the American West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The database inventory continues to be updated monthly with a diverse array of petitions from those challenging slavery, peonage, removal and deportation, state custody over Indigenous wards, and abusive husbands’ custody over their dependents. The database offers a regularized schema of records whose handwritten originals are often buried under the haphazard organization and inconsistent recording practices of their rendering courts, and alongside this, the project site provides numerous essays and stories drawn from the habeas proceedings to help researchers at all levels understand the records and make informed interpretations about the deployment of legal power against and on behalf of the less empowered peoples of the American West.

An Honorable Mention went to Stephen Robertson's Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani

Classroom Materials on the Supreme Court, 1874-1921

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

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

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

Featured resources include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Congressional Material On-Line

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

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

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

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

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution on the Stand: Revisiting the Scopes Trial at 100

[From Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections, we have word of a new digital exhibit at the University of Minnesota Law Library.  DRE]

“Evolution on the Stand: Revisiting the Scopes Trial at 100” 

The new digital exhibit commemorates the centennial anniversary of one of America’s most storied courtroom dramas, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. The 1925 trial of John Scopes, accused of violating a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, became a national sensation and the focal point of a public debate over the roles of science and religion in public education. The digital exhibit highlights the Library’s preeminent collection of famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s letters, publications, photographs, and trial materials, preserving and building on a physical exhibit open in the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center throughout 2025. The new digital site adds to and expands the digital research sites and exhibits available as part of the Library's digital special collections. 

The Scopes Trial digital exhibit features a trove of material drawn from the Riesenfeld Center's collections, including letters, original trial documents, witness statements, inscribed books, speeches, and debates. The exhibit includes daily trial summaries and transcripts, and sets the trial within a longer history of evolutionary thought and debate on the roles of science and religion in American public education.

Defend the National Archives!

 [The Organization of American Historians will host a webinar today on the National Archives.  Here is its announcement.  DRE.]

The future of America’s archives is at stake. Join us at 3pm ET for an open-access webinar on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—the institution that preserves and provides access to the documents that tell our nation’s story.

Panelists will discuss:

• how NARA safeguards democracy through record preservation;
• why the Federal Records Act matters to every citizen;
• the potential impact of proposed budget cuts on access to public information; [and]
• simple, actionable steps anyone—not just historians—can take right now

And here’s why this can’t wait: amid widespread disruptions and layoffs, we don’t truly know who is safeguarding the “history of now.” That uncertainty is exactly why informed, immediate advocacy for NARA is essential.

Secure your spot now to help protect access to America’s past, [here.]

An Oral History of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

RBG in 1993 (LC)

The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit has just announced the opening of an oral history of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg conducted by Maeva Marcus, the general editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States and a past-president of the American Society for Legal History.  The interviews were conducted between 1995 and 2000 with a final session in 2014.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Rachel Rothschild, University of Michigan Law School, has been chosen to receive the 2025–2026 Pace Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award for scholarship that “sits at the intersection of environmental law, history, and policy,” including Poisonous Skies: Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and The Origins of the Major Questions Doctrine. 

• 

  Thurgood Marshall, assisted by Wife and Family (LC)

  “Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect,” a documentary on the life and career of Thurgood Marshall, premiers Tuesday, September 9, 2025, on PBS.  The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago hosts and preview and discussion on August 21 (WTTW)

• "David Carrillo, executive director of UC Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center, will become editor-in-chief of California Legal History in 2026" (UC Berkeley Law).

• From the online companion to the California Law Review: Michael Bannerjee (UC Berkeley) on "What Harvard’s Lawsuit Should Have Said." 

• Richard Primus, University of Michigan Law School, and John Harrison, University of Virginia School of Law discuss Professor Primus’s The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power.  "Their conversation traces how this fundamental disagreement has shaped key moments in American constitutional history, from the Founding Era to the New Deal, and why the debate remains unsettled today" (National Constitution Center).  Also on YouTube.  

• Also: the first-rate Balkinization symposium on Professor Primus's Oldest Constitutional Question:  is now complete. 

• Stefan Kadelbach on the "Frankfurt Documents" and the birth of a new constitutional order for Germany in 1948 (Goethe-Universität).

• Have you browsed that online collection of legal history papers by YLS students lately?    

• Jill Lepore will discuss her forthcoming book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, at  Congregation Beth Israel in San Diego on Sunday, September 7, 2025 from 4 PM to 5:30 PM

• The district court opinion in that lawsuit over the cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants. The American Historical Association's update.  An update on new awards (NYT).

• If you happen to be in Hyde Park, NY, on August 13, you can take in a showing of William Randolph Hearst's authoritarian fantasy from March 1933, Gabriel over the White House, at the FDR Library and Museum. 

• Lawbook Exchange 's August list of Scholarly Law and Legal History.  

• Time's Made by History:  The History of How the Car Seat Made American Kids Safer by Gary Scales.

• ICYMI: The Adam Liptak column behind all those skeets: As the Supreme Court Focuses on the Past, Historians Turn to Advocacy (NYT).  David Blight asks, What If History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance? (New Republic/Bunk). Eric Segall asks How the Hell To Teach Constitutional Law in 2025?  (Many of his questions involve history) (Dorf on Law).  NAACP LDF's historical timeline on the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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