Duxbury on Lord Kilmuir

Back in 2015, LSE’s Neil Duxbury published Lord Kilmuir: A Vignette with Hart Publishing. From the press:

This short book examines the career and achievements of Lord Kilmuir (David Maxwell Fyfe), a British politician and former Lord Chancellor who is mainly remembered for some poor and unpopular decisions but who nevertheless made a considerable mark on twentieth-century legal development. After the Second World War, Kilmuir not only excelled as a fellow prosecutor with Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg but also played a significant role in the effort to restore European unity, particularly through his involvement in the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights. Drawing on archival and other primary sources, this book considers Kilmuir's initiatives both at home and in Europe, and concludes by marking out his achievements as a pro-European Conservative who not only favoured the right of individual petition to a supranational, Convention-enforcing court but who also favoured Parliament legislating to replicate Convention norms in domestic law. 

Praise for the book:

“This short book goes a long way to explaining the Tory commitment to the ECHR at its inception. The case for our continued commitment to the European Court of Human Rights remains compelling. Duxbury's triumph is to explain why Kilmuir would agree.” -Sara Ibrahim

“This text is enlivened with acute asides on matters from the 'research assessment exercise' for British universities to the 'non-political' judge.” - Ross Cranston

Further information is available here. 

Legal History Turns from Schultz and friends

Here is another Commonwealth title we missed from The Federation Press in 2015: a volume edited by Griffith University's Karen Schultz, Legal History Turns. From the publisher:

This volume concerns legal history turns – that is, new directions or volte-faces  in legal history and its interdisciplinarity. Legal history turns include deviations from historically-situated interpretations and practices in law and legal scholarship. The papers in this volume grew from the Griffith Law School’s Legal History Seminar Series, a public lecture initiative intended to contribute to the interest in legal history of the profession, judiciary, academe, and the public. Written by a cast that includes authors with internationally-impressive legal history credentials, this collection illustrates legal history turns’ dynamism and diversity, and is introduced with a foreword by The Honourable Justice Susan Kiefel AC.

Table of Contents after the jump.

Rosen & Mosnier, "Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights, by Richard A. Rosen (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Joseph Mosnier (independent scholar). A description from the Press:

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark.

In this biography, Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier connect the details of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, they reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.

A few blurbs:

“This is a terrific book. Telling the story of Chambers and his law firm, Rosen and Mosnier have added a chapter that has long been missing from the history of the North Carolina civil rights movement. Many other historians have touched on aspects of Chambers’s life and work, but no one has ever done it this well, or in such detail.” --Davison M. Douglas

"A rich and engrossing biography of a courageous, pioneering litigator whose landmark contributions to U.S. civil rights law should be much more widely known than they are." --David J. Garrow

More information is available here.

Silber on Monroe Freedman and Domestic Anticommunism

Norman I. Silber, Hofstra University School of Law, has posted Monroe Freedman and the Morality of Dishonesty: Multidimensional Legal Ethics as a Cold War Imperative, which appears in the Hofstra Law Review 44 (2016): 1127-60.

This Article reaches into the personal history of Monroe Freedman, a pioneer in multi-dimensional legal ethics, to advance an explanation for his advocacy and his signal contributions to legal ethics - particularly his landmark article of 1966, Professional Responsibility of the Criminal Defense Lawyer: The Three Hardest Questions, where he inquired into situations in which candor might not be either moral or professional. It argues that his outspoken defense of lying as sometimes necessary and even moral behavior in the adversary system should be understood as an outgrowth of his early religious perspective about the nature of moral obligations, as well as a response to excesses of the Cold War that touched him personally. It contends that Monroe’s confidence in the fundamental fairness of government rules, processes, and punishments—and that of hundreds of other young lawyers - was undermined by experience with the National Lawyers Guild, inquisitions, and FBI surveillance during the 1950s, and that understanding the history does at least as much to explain his attitude about ethics in an adversary system as his better-known encounters with the problems of criminal defense lawyers in more immediate contexts. Focusing on these earlier events offers insight not just into Monroe and the genesis of his position in that article, but offers an alternative explanation for the modern development of multidimensional professional ethics.

Domnarski on Judge Posner

New from Oxford University Press: Richard Posner, by William Domnarski. A description from the Press:

Richard Posner (credit)

Judge Richard Posner is one of the great legal minds of our age, on par with such generation-defining judges as Holmes, Hand, and Friendly. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the principal exponent of the enormously influential law and economics movement, he writes provocative books as a public intellectual, receives frequent media attention, and has been at the center of some very high-profile legal spats. He is also a member of an increasingly rare breed-judges who write their own opinions rather than delegating the work to clerks-and therefore we have unusually direct access to the workings of his mind and judicial philosophy.

Now, for the first time, this fascinating figure receives a full-length biographical treatment. In Richard Posner, William Domnarski examines the life experience, personality, academic career, jurisprudence, and professional relationships of his subject with depth and clarity. Domnarski has had access to Posner himself and to Posner's extensive archive at the University of Chicago. In addition, Domnarski was able to interview and correspond with more than two hundred people Posner has known, worked with, or gone to school with over the course of his career, from grade school to the present day. The list includes among others members of the Harvard Law Review, colleagues at the University of Chicago, former law clerks over Posner's more than thirty years on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and even other judges from that court.

Richard Posner is a comprehensive and accessible account of a unique judge who, despite never having sat on the Supreme Court, has nevertheless dominated the way law is understood in contemporary America.

More information is available here.

Sunday Book Roundup

The Law and Politics Book Review has put online a July book review of Finding Justice: A History of Women Lawyers in Maryland Since 1642 edited by Lynne A. Battaglia (Thompson Publishing).

"This engaging volume was produced as part of the Finding Justice Project, a collaborative effort among a small group of judges, lawyers, and legal academics to recover and illuminate neglected histories of women in law in Maryland. Sponsored by the Maryland Women’s Bar Association Foundation, the project sought to identify and learn about the work and lives of as many women lawyers as possible practicing in Maryland since 1642."

Stuart Banner reviews R.H. Hemlholz's Natural Law in Court: A History of Legal Theory in Practice (Harvard University Press) for the Journal of Legal Education.

Concurring Opinions notes a review from the Journal of Legal Education: Duncan Farthing-Nichol reviews Justin O'Brien's The Triumph, Tragedy, and Lost Legacy of James M. Landis: A Life on Fire (Hart Publishing).

New Books adds an interview with Marc Simon Rodriguez, who discusses his new book, Rethinking the Chicano Movement (Routledge).

H-Net has a review of Tameka B. Hobbs's Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida (University Press of Florida).

The Washington Independent Review of Books offers a review of Baz Dreisinger's Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons around the World (Other Press).

Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World by Linda Hirshman (Harper) is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The Atlantic has a review of Daniel K. Williams's Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press). 

"In a new book, Defenders of the Unborn, the historian Daniel K. Williams looks at the first years of the self-described pro-life movement in the United States, focusing on the long-overlooked era before Roe. It’s somewhat surprising that the academy hasn’t produced such a history before now, although Williams says that’s partially because certain archives have only recently opened." 

The Federal Lawyer has a new issue posted, with a review of Untrodden Ground: How Presidents Interpret the Constitution by Harold H. Bruff (University of Chicago Press), alongside many others--all available here.

Judith S. Kaye, Dies at 77

We have to note the passing today of the path-breaking and history-making lawyer and judge, Judith S. Kaye, as reported on the website of the New York Times.

Legal Life Writing: Workshop and Book Launch

[We have the following announcement.]

The Legal Biography Project at the LSE
Legal Life Writing: Marginalised Subjects and Sources -
A Workshop and Book Launch

Tuesday 20 October 2015 | 4-6pm Moot Court Room, 7th Floor, New Academic Building, London School of Economics (LSE), 54 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3LJ. Followed by Drinks Reception: 6-7pm.

‘Life writing' is an increasingly popular field of scholarship but much work to date has focused on charting the lives of the elite; most often white male judges and lawyers. Scholarship in this field has also been limited in its inter-disciplinary scope. This workshop will discuss a new book, Legal Life Writing: Marginalised Subjects and Sources (Wiley, 2015), edited by Linda Mulcahy (LSE) and David Sugarman (Lancaster) that explores the gaps in existing literature by focussing on the lives of those usually marginalised or treated as outsiders. It also endeavours to expand the range of sources it is considered legitimate to use when researching legal lives. The collection aims to ignite debate about the nature of the relationship between socio-legal studies and legal history; explore how gaps in the existing literature can be filled when sources about the marginalised are often scant; and challenge the methodologies employed in conventional accounts of legal lives.

David Sugarman's scene-setting essay analyses ways in which legal life writing has been enlarged to embrace a wide range of subjects, sources and methods. This chapter, and the collection as a whole, advances a broader, more pluralistic, democratic conception of legal life writing that encourages inter-disciplinary dialogue, helping legal historians, historians and socio-legal scholars to develop new skills and embrace a wider range of participants and audiences, thereby enhancing their ability to engage with public issues in public history. Specific articles in the collection complement these general discussions by providing detailed accounts of particular actors whose stories have remained largely untold. Fiona Cownie discusses Clare Palley, the first woman professor of law at a United Kingdom University, and, playing with the notion of outsider-insider, Catharine MacMillan examines the life of the outwardly successful Jewish-born lawyer, Judah Benjamin. Several essays explore the alternative sources that can be turned to in order to fill gaps in existing knowledge. Rosemary Auchmuty focuses on the sources one might use to explore the lives of women in law. 

Other essays address the use of visual sources. Leslie Moran examines the use of images of judges, and their capacity to illustrate how authority is performed. Linda Mulcahy's study of the trial spectator utilises images of trials in popular journals and fine art which indicate how women participated in the public sphere of the courts.  The focus on gaps in the existing literature has also been extended in this book to cover other academics who have been much written about from a particular's perspective in ways which have obscured their broader contribution to law and the public sphere. Thus, Mara Malagodi considers the life of Ivor Jennings, one of Britain's most prominent constitutional law scholars of the twentieth-century. Malagodi contends that his oft-neglected work in South Asia during the early years of the Cold War allows us to see the man and his work through a very different lens.

Presentations about the book will be led by Professor Nicola Lacey (LSE) and Professor Michael Lobban (LSE) and chaired by Professor Phil Thomas (Journal of Law and Society).

For further details of the LSE Legal Biography Project see [here]

New Release: Mulcahy and Sugarman, "Legal Life-Writing: Marginalised Subjects and Sources"

New from Wiley-Blackwell: Legal Life-Writing: Marginalised Subjects and Sources (April 2015), by Linda Mulcahy (London School of Economics) and David Sugarman (Lancaster University). A description from the Press:

Legal Life-Writing provides the first sustained treatment of the implications of life-writing on legal biography, autobiography and the visual history of law in society through a focus on neglected sources, and on those usually marginalized or ignored in legal biography and legal history, such as women and minorities.

• Draws on a range of sources and disciplinary approaches including legal history, life-writing, sociology, history, art history, feminism and post-colonialism, seeking to build a bridge-head between them
• Challenges the methodologies employed in conventional accounts of legal lives
• Aims to ignite debate about the nature of the relationship between socio-legal studies and legal history
• Aims to enlarge the fields of legal biography, legal history, history and socio-legal studies, and to foster a closer and more inter-disciplinary dialogue between these disciplines 

More information is available here.

Hat tip: Mitra Sharafi

Was Terry Francois Ahead of His Time?

Terry Francois
(Source:SFAAHS/FoundSF)

If you lived in San Francisco in the 1960s or 1970s, you’d have heard of Terry Francois. Indeed, unlike most of the other people who appear in Forging Rivals, Francois has a street named after him. (I’ll leave it to you to decide how flattering this is. Terry A. Francois Boulevard runs for a mile along the coast of the Bay, starting just south of AT&T Park and McCovey Cove. Presumably, San Francisco’s city fathers hope this neighborhood will soon develop into yet another tech-centered fountain of riches, but for now this vision is still aspirational.) Francois was classic Talented Tenth. Born in New Orleans, he received a BA (from Xavier University) and an MBA (from Atlanta University) before joining the Marines in World War II. After the War he moved to San Francisco, got a law degree from UC Hastings and began a successful career as a civil rights attorney in the city. He became the president of the local chapter of the NAACP, served on the boards of the San Francisco Urban League and the Council for Civic Unity, and was one of the inaugural commissioners of San Francisco Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity. In 1964, he became the first African American to serve on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a position he held until 1978. He was involved in most every civil rights-oriented event that occurred in San Francisco in the three decades that followed the War.

Yet Francois’ relationship with other African American civil rights advocates was rocky at best. Younger, more nationalist activists found him (along with many black leaders of his generation) to be hopelessly sedate. (“A cocksucker who’s forgot he’s black,” according to one.) But even many of his peers, San Francisco’s postwar, African American bourgeoisie, disliked him, and sought to marginalize him. He was seen as too power-hungry, too close to downtown business interests, and insufficiently tied to the black community. His support for urban renewal projects in the predominantly black Western Addition neighborhood was the last straw. In the late 1970s, when San Francisco began to elect its Supervisors from local districts rather than at large, Francois was quickly ousted from office, unable to garner sufficient support in the black community.

Francois is not exactly lost to history, but his life is certainly underexplored. He is representative of a certain element of the postwar African American elite who tried to blend a deep commitment to racial egalitarianism with more conservative political and economic instincts. In 1960s and 1970s San Francisco, this was not a recipe for political success. Indeed, San Francisco’s most successful African American power broker of Francois’ generation – Carlton Goodlett, the editor and publisher of San Francisco’s African American newspaper, the Sun-Reporter – traced a much more savvy political path on the leftmost edge of California’s Democratic Party. (Goodlett got a street named after him too. It’s quite short -- maybe two hundred yards -- but it is directly in front of San Francisco’s City Hall.) A generation later, however, the story would be different. Francois had one very successful protégé: Willie Brown, for thirty years one of the most powerful politicians in the state. Brown was exceptionally successful at combining business-friendly economic policies with liberal social policies in a manner that attracted support both within the black community and among powerful white elites. It may be that Francois’ political instincts were better suited for the 1980s than the 1960s.