Welcome, Kimberly Welch!

We're delighted to welcome a new guest blogger for the month of April: Kimberly Welch. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches courses on U.S. Slavery, Southern History, Women and Gender, Law and Society, and Early American History. This academic year, she is also a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Digital Humanities.

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Professor Welch received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, under the direction of Ira Berlin. Prior to joining the faculty at Vanderbilt, she taught at West Virginia University and held residential fellowships at the Newberry Library and the American Bar Foundation.

Her research focuses on slavery, race, and the law in the American South. Cribbing from her faculty bio, she "is particularly interested in the world of free and enslaved African Americans, how they understood their place in southern society, and how they advanced it. Understanding how those confined to positions of subordination enlarged their rights has led her to the southern courthouse. There, to a surprising degree, they staked their claim and more often than not found it confirmed."

She explores these themes in depth in her new book, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press), as well as in two new projects, "a digital history project tracing kidnapping rings in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and a second book project on free black creditors."

Professor Welch is also the principal investigator for the National Science Foundation, Law and Social Sciences Research Grant, “Variation in Use of Courts by Legal Status and Jurisdiction."

For more on all of these projects, check out her website (which is definitely one of the best personal academic websites we've ever seen!).

Welcome, Kimberly Welch!

Welcome, Ronit Stahl!

It is our pleasure to welcome this month's second guest blogger, Ronit Stahl. Stahl received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan. She also holds a Masters degree in Social Sciences in Education from Stanford University. She is currently a Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her move to Penn, she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

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As this unique series of fellowships suggests, Stahl's work brings together research areas that are not often combined: religion, health policy, and the regulatory state. All are incorporated into her new book Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017). She is also the author (with Ezekiel J. Emanuel) of "Physicians, Not Conscripts - Conscientious Objection in Health Care," which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2017.

Welcome, Ronit Stahl!

Thank you, Kelly Kennington!

We are so grateful to Professor Kelly Kennington (Auburn University) for her recent series of guest posts, all crafted around the idea of balance:

Introduction ("Thank you and hello")

Balancing Interests

Balancing Feedback

Balancing a New Job

Balancing Book and Family

Balancing the Tenure Clock

Balancing Tenure and Promotion

If you also enjoyed these reflections, please join us in thanking Kelly Kennington!

Welcome, Kelly Kennington!

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It is our pleasure to welcome a new guest blogger this month: Professor Kelly Kennington. She is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University, where she teaches courses on the history of the South, American Slavery, and American Legal history, as well as survey courses in World history and U.S. history. She is the author of In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America, which was published by the University of Georgia Press in April 2017.

Prior to joining the faculty at Auburn, Kennington was the Law and Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Law School. She received her Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 2009.

Welcome, Kelly Kennington!

Thank you, Taisu Zhang!

It has been a pleasure to have Professor Taisu Zhang (Yale Law School) with us as a guest blogger for the month of December. 

Using his recently published book as a jumping-off point, he wrote terrific posts on "Cultural Norms, Property Institutions, and Patterns of Economic Development"; the value of comparative legal history; "Methodological Divergence between Legal Subfields"; and "Resources for Chinese Law and History."

Thank you, Taisu Zhang!

Welcome, Taisu Zhang!

We are delighted to welcome Taisu Zhang as a guest blogger for the month of December.

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Zhang is an associate professor at Yale Law School, where he focuses on comparative legal history, comparative law, property law, and contemporary Chinese law. He is the author of The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Other recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, Law and Contemporary Problems, and the Yale Journal of International Law. He has also already started work on a second book project, on "The Ideological Foundations of the Qing Fiscal State."

Prior to joining the faculty at Yale Law School, Zhang taught at Duke University School of Law, Brown University, Peking University Law School, the Tsinghua University School of Law, and the University of Hong Kong. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in History from Yale University, and as a graduate student received the ASLH's Kathryn T. Preyer award.

Welcome, Taisu Zhang! 

Zhang, "The Laws and Economics of Confucianism"

Out today from Cambridge University Press: The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England, by Taisu Zhang (Yale Law School). The book is part of the series Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society. A description from the Press:

Tying together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. The dominance of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies in Late Imperial and Republican China, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status, allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority in the far more 'individualist' society of early modern England, essentially excluding low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production.

A few blurbs:

"In this lucid and thought-provoking study, Taisu Zhang creatively and empirically reinterprets the causal relationships among cultural norms, property institutions, and socioeconomic behavior in early modern China and England. This holds profound implications for the study of global economic history, Sino-Western comparison, and Chinese law and society. This important book will not fail to stimulate new inquiries and debates for many years to come."-- Li Chen 

"Marrying cutting-edge historical archival work with remarkable cross-disciplinary theoretical breadth, Taisu Zhang boldly and brilliantly raises vitally important questions about the interplay of culture, law, and economic institutions in pre-industrial China and England. Anyone interested in global economic history or in today’s China will want to engage this powerful but inviting book." -- William P. Alford

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

We are also excited to report that Taisu Zhang will be joining us as a guest blogger for the month of December. We look forward to hearing more about this project!

The Birth of the Blog

On November 27, 2006, at a kitchen table in Sharon, Massachusetts, the Legal History Blog was born. The first post was a simple hello, announcing the blog to come.

The next posts appeared with the sort of fare LHB readers have come to expect: posts about new SSRN papers, a call for papers, news about a new book and an honor bestowed on legal historian Morty Horwitz. The very first person to comment on the blog was legal historian Al Brophy, who is also a blogger. Readership began with a handful of visitors, and then built steadily as more of you came along.

In honor of LHB’s 10th anniversary, I thought I would tell you the story of LHB’s early days when I created the blog at my kitchen table. It is a story about how social media can enhance a field, and it is also a personal story about the way the blog mattered to my life as a scholar.

I began the Legal History Blog on my own after a couple of legal historians I’d asked to join me were too busy. Going it alone was a little terrifying, but had some advantages. I could give the blog the sort of tone and content that I thought it needed, and I hoped this would help LHB establish a readership. One important model for the blog was Lawrence Solum’s Legal Theory Blog devoted solely to posts about scholarship. Another model was History News Network and similar sites with news of the field and occasional opinion pieces. This sort of blogging was sustainable because it didn’t rely on a steady stream of original essays.

LHB was warmly welcomed into the law and history blogospheres. But sometimes fellow legal historians seemed surprised that I would devote time to blogging and wondered why on earth I did it. I started the blog because I felt that the field of legal history needed a more dynamic online presence. Scholars in other fields often had an outdated and narrow understanding of what legal historians did. I wanted to show that we weren’t antiquarians of formal law, and to illustrate the ways legal historians draw upon all the rich methodologies employed by others. Legal historians have long focused on social and intellectual history. I wanted to create a space that also emphasized transnational and comparative legal history and the sort of work that now falls within the field of the United States and the World. I hoped the blog would help scholars connect with each other and would bring new readers for the works posted about.

Although I created the blog because I thought legal history needed it, LHB also turned out to be very good for me. I was on leave in the fall of 2006 with a fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies to complete my book on Thurgood Marshall’s work in Africa. I found a creative way to “top off” that fellowship: my daughter and I moved in with my then-boyfriend (hence the blog’s Sharon, MA birthplace). We all long for those stretches of time for writing that come only with a leave, and the isolation of Sharon – way out in the Boston suburbs – helped me protect my writing time. But writing is not always exhilarating. Sometimes I would get to the end of the day with little more than a paragraph – and then I would delete it. On days when the writing made me feel worthless, the blog was something of a savior. There were visitors! People from around the country and the world were reading my posts. Social media can be a distraction, but especially in the blog’s first year, LHB was sustenance. It made me feel connected to a broader world of readers. That audience kept me going.

Continued below the fold.

What Are You?: Producing A First Book Amid Disciplinary and Geographic Migrations

Before I start laying out my blogging agenda for the next month, I wanted to extend my thanks to the LHB team for the invitation. As I will discuss later, my finding a home in the legal history world was an unplanned but fortuitous turn in my career. Over the years, this blog has helped to showcase for my own consumption not only the quality but also the diversity of scholars working under the legal history rubric.

Today, I want to provide a short road map of my upcoming blogs. Each of these will draw on one way in which producing my first book, The Futility of Law and Development: China and the Dangers of Exporting American Law, intersected with my background as a comparativist and as an anthropologist.

In the course of producing a first book that was only inspired by my doctoral dissertation, I routinely had difficulty describing exactly what my book “is” in a disciplinary sense. I have at times said it is comparative, international or transnational legal history; and all these labels are to some degree true. It is a book that primarily involves events in a foreign setting, China, but is most directly, from my view, a work of American legal history. Furthermore, answering the question at the heart of the book led me to engage with legal history, but also religious and diplomatic history. And throughout these encounters my training as an anthropologist influenced how I read, interpreted, and synthesized the sources I drew on from disparate archives and literatures. All of which was deeply impacted by my own autobiographical migrations, both in a disciplinary and a geographic sense.

So over the coming weeks I will present six posts on these themes:

1)    The Affinities and Disjunctures of History and Anthropology

2)     Subjectivity, Intent and Impact: The Gordian Knot of Empathy and Interpretation

3)     Functionalism and Synthetic History

4)     The Challenges of Comparative Law and Transnational History

5)     Empire and Imperialism: (Mis)Framing Cross-Cultural Engagements

6)     The Young Interdisciplinary Scholar in a Global Academic Market

In these posts I will advance a variety of claims related to how I came to think about my own method and perspective as a scholar. But I should say that comments and criticisms are more than welcome. I believe myself lucky to have been brought into legal history during a time when so much productive novelty and ingenuity is opening and re-opening exciting avenues of research. But coming to grips with how to do well what is novel is recurrent scholarly challenge, and I am still far from having worked it all out myself!

Thank you, Gautham Rao!

A big thanks to Professor Gautham Rao for joining us as a guest blogger this past month. Links to his posts are below:

• On the long, slow road toward publishing National Duties (University of Chicago Press, 2016): "Sigh, Argh, Whoa" (including getting the question “are you sure you want to do history?”)

• On "Sexy History, Legal History and History Departments" (easily winning the prize for best-titled guest blogger post in recent memory)

• On "Legal History in History Departments"

• On his next big project: "The State the Slaveholders Made"

Welcome, Gautham Rao!

We are delighted to announce that Gautham Rao will be joining us as a guest blogger over the next month.

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Rao is an Assistant Professor of History at American University and a prolific scholar of U.S. law and governance in the early national period. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held the prestigious Samuel I. Golieb legal history fellowship at New York University School of Law.

He is the author, most recently, of National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which we hope he'll tell us much more about this month. His article, "The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America," received the Erwin Surrency Award from the American Society for Legal History, and the James Madison Prize from the Society for the History of the Federal Government. His work has also appeared in Law & Social Inquiry and Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (edited by William Novak, Jim Sparrow, and Stephen Sawyer).

Professor Rao is an active member of the American Society for Legal History (he has chaired the Kathryn T. Preyer award committee in recent years) and currently serves on the editorial board of Law and History Review.

Welcome, Gautham Rao!

Legal history meets the History of Science+

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (credit)

Are you working on the legal history of disasters, poisoning, animals, inventions, travel, hospitals, or forensic science? If so, your research probably sits at the intersection of legal history and the history of science, medicine, or technology.

This summer, we got in touch with scholars working in science-related historical fields that overlap with legal history. Our question was: what are your favorite websites in your own sub-field that could be of use to legal historians? Here's what people said--after the jump  

(* indicates special favorites).

Welcome, Mitra Sharafi (this time for keeps)!

More exciting blog news! We are delighted to announce that former guest blogger Mitra Sharafi has agreed to join Dan, Tomiko, and me (and now Brooke and Smita, our new Associate Bloggers) as a regular contributor to LHB.

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Professor Sharafi is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and holds law degrees from Cambridge and Oxford. She is the author of Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won the Law and Society Association's J. Willard Hurst Prize for socio-legal history in 2015.

Her current projects include a study of medical jurisprudence in colonial India, focusing on the role of medico-legal experts; a survey of the field of South Asian legal history; a study of Indian and West African members of London's Inns of Court; and a medico-legal history of abortion during the Raj.

We also note that she has also been heavily involved with the Hurst Institute, a crucial training ground for junior scholars, and the American Society for Legal History. 

Last but not least, Professor Sharafi is the creator of South Asian Legal History Resources, which includes research guides and other tools for scholars interested in the history of law in South Asia.

Welcome aboard, Mitra Sharafi!

Associate Bloggers: Departure and Arrivals

A passing of the torch takes place tomorrow here at Legal History Blog.  Since July 2013, Emily A. Prifogle has performed the duties of the office now known as Associate Blogger.  (Clara Altman, now Director of the Federal Judicial History Office of the Federal Judicial Center, originated the role.)  Emily has a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is ABD in History at Princeton.  This semester I’ve had the pleasure of reading a chapter on school consolidation from her dissertation-in-progress, “Views from the Midwest: Rural Communities, Law, and Nation in the Twentieth Century.”  To clear the decks for her return to Indiana and the start of a judicial clerkship in the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, she has decided to join the ranks of LHB bloggers emeritae.  All of us at LHB could not be more grateful to Em for all her work over the years and wish her our best.

We’re fortunate that two other ABDs are willing to take up her duties and serve as co-Associate Bloggers.  Brooke Depenbusch is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota.  Her dissertation is “Working on Welfare: Down and Out in the United States, 1935-1962.”  It explores the nexus between social provision and low-wage and insecure labor from the New Deal to the War on Poverty.  Focusing on the interaction of low-income working families and public relief, it foregrounds the political and economic conditions that fostered persistent insecurity and precarity among many working families notwithstanding the sustained economic growth of the postwar period. 

LHB readers may recall Smita Ghosh’s panel recaps for the ASLH's annual meeting and recent conferences at Columbia on incarceration and at Princeton on life and law in rural America.  She is a student in Penn's JD/PhD program in American Legal History and has already completed the law-school leg of her education and is now studying the history of immigration and civil rights law.  In 2016-2017, she will be a judicial clerk in the District of Connecticut.

Thank you, Em, and welcome, Brooke and Smita!

Weekend Roundup

• Al Brophy discusses his vision for the American Journal of Legal History on OUPblog. 

• "The Supreme Court in Historical Perspective: Politics and Legal Change," a panel discussion held on Thursday, April 14th, 2016 at Columbia University with Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton Professor of History, Michael J. Graetz, Columbia Alumni Professor of Tax, Sidney Rosdeitcher, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, and Herb Sloan, Professor Emeritus (United States), viewable online here.

"Katie," Jacob Riis (LC)

• The April 2016 newsletter of the Historical Society of the DC Circuit is here.  It includes a link to Judge Patrica Wald's entry on Judge J. Skelly Wright in the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law.  (How's that for clickbait?) 

• The Library of Congress’s Jacob Riis exhibition opened Thursday (right). 

• International Legal History Day at HLS, via the Crimson.

• We can't tell you how cross we were with ourselves for not getting this one.

• Justice Antonin Scalia to Seth Barrett Tillman on the indeterminate meaning of “shall” at the Framing.

• ICYMI: R. B. Bernstein, Annette Gordon-Reed, Sean Wilentz et al. weigh in on "Hamilton; at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, a panel on Wilson's legacy on race (in the Daily Princetonian.)

• Hey, graduate students: the American Historical Association is seeking summer bloggers.

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

Weekend Roundup

• From In Custodia Legis: "Becoming the Plutarch of Renaissance Lawyers"

•  From Rachel Hermann over at The Junto: "Evolution of an Article" (or, as she later puts it, a "thrilling romp through the wild and tangled forests of peer review"). Lots of good tips for junior scholars, including "A dissertation chapter is not a book chapter! And a book chapter is not an article!" and, my favorite, "This. Sh-t. Takes. Time." [KMT (alteration mine)]

• Via the Legal Scholarship Blog, word that former guest blogger Sophia Lee (University of Pennsylvania) presented a paper titled "Barnette and the First Amendment Right to Privacy" to the University of Texas faculty workshop.  

• At a town hall meeting on Tuesday, April 5, at 2 p.m. in the University at Buffalo Law School, New Yorkers turn to the constitutional historian Peter J. Galie, professor emeritus in political science at Canisius College, among others, for insight into the November 2017 referendum on whether to convene a constitutional convention.

• On courtroom artists in Indiana and the Library of Congress, via the Indiana Lawyer and the New York Times.

• ICYMI: HNN's roundup on the Supreme Court confirmation fight and the Onion's savage satire, from somewhere beyond the realm of good taste.

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

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law upon being named a finalist for the George Washington Prize for Madison's Hand.

• Welcome to the blogosphere to H–Law’s World Legal History Blog, edited by Nurfadzilah Yahaya, a Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore who received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 2012.

• Patricia Bell-Scott, professor emerita at the University of Georgia, will be giving a book talk at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library on March 3, 2016 at 7:00 PM on The Firebrand and the first Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice.

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has announced a lecture for its members by Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School, at the Court on March 9, 2016, at 6 pm, to commemorate the 215th anniversary of John Marshall's appointment as Chief Justice of the United States. 

• We imagine that some future historian of originalism will find in commentary following an announcement of Justice Scalia's an unusual opportunity to compare popular understandings of that concept with versions advanced by law professors, judges and other legal experts.  ICYM them, here is Nina Totenberg on NPR and OXY on The Liberal Yale Law Prof Who Agrees With Scalia.

• "Northwestern University and Duke University are holding a week-long workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference . . . at Northwestern Law School” on August 1-5, 2016.

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

Signing Off

[By Anne Kornhauser]

I write this time  to say what I hope is a temporary "good-bye" as a blogger for the LHB and to thank once again Karen Tani and Dan Ernst for their generosity and patience as I test-piloted the blogging genre. I found it both fascinating and challenging to combine the short form and frequent deadlines of my erstwhile career as a journalist with the presentation of complex and nuanced ideas demanded by my current role as an academic. I also wrestled with tonal issues: how to match the more informal tenor of the blog post with the seriousness of the points I wished to make. I appreciate the indulgence of readers as I explored this new territory. 

The academic blog, I am convinced, is a great way for cloistered scholars to engage with the world, even if that world is still largely the one they already inhabit. Sheer numbers make it increasingly difficult to know of, let alone converse with, those in one's own field, never mind reaching across the disciplinary aisle. (My father once told me that in his day, in the 1950s, graduates students were expected to read everything in their field!) The internet facilitates all this and more by removing intellectual roadblocks and eroding hierarchies of status and significance. There are also dangers for intellectual life lurking in our digital age--of downplaying rigor, both substantive and formal, and of saying what need not be said, unburdened as bloggers are by limitations of space and the review process. But these issues are for another time.

For now, I wish to express my gratitude to those who created and those who have sustained this blog, to readers and tweeters and passers-by for allowing me to engage in a kind of reflexivity I would have never thought possible when I entered graduate school. I will end with a few questions about this evolving form of intellectual life. Do readers of this blog have any thoughts about why academic blogs appear to elicit fewer comments than many other kinds of blogs? Do we have more outlets for expressing our views? Should academic bloggers be more provocative? Are there certain types of posts that elicit more discussion than others? After all, the academic blog, at least those not written by an individual, has already developed some conventions of its own. One is that bloggers not wander too far outside their area of expertise, another is to be reasonable, and a third is that participants secure some sort of invitation or right of the blogger, as it were. I see advantages in all. But, I wonder, where did they come from? How did the academic blog evolve into its current form?

Thank You, Samantha Barbas!

It was a pleasure to have Samantha Barbas, SUNY Buffalo Law School, with us last month, blogging about her new book, Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford University Press, 2015). 

Welcome, Samantha Barbas!
Laws of Image
The Right to "Privacy"
Image-consciousness and the Law
Privacy and Public Image
Libel law and "image consciousness"    
Privacy and Freedom of Speech
An Age of Images
Privacy and Freedom of the Press in Time, Inc. v. Hill
The Law and Personal Image Into the Digital Age

Thank you, Professor Barbas!

Weekend Roundup

• A sighting of ASLH past president Bruce Mann in the Washington Post.

•  QVC Meets the NCC: "Mike George, president and CEO of QVC, will become chairman of the National Constitutional Center Corporate Council on Sept. 1."

• The new website of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History (logo at right) is up and running.

• From The Junto: How to use research technology to make the most of your time in the archives.  

• Over at the Faculty Lounge, Al Brophy (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) offers "quick takes" on some legal historical aspects of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman.  
  

• Via John Q. Barrett's "Jackson List," we have some pointers for Professor Laurence H. Tribe's 11^th annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States, delivered at the Chautauqua Institution on July 11.  Topics included Jackson’s judging on the Supreme Court.  Video of the lecture, with brief introductions and a Q&A, are here.  The text of Professor Tribe's lectures, here and here.  Excerpts from Professor Tribe's interview at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, NY, on July 9^th are here.

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