Population Control, Immigration, and Environmentalism

Population controllers are some of the most fascinating characters to appear in After Roe. Some of these activists, like former Columbia student Judy Senderowitz, saw themselves as committed feminists. Others presented family planning as a necessary step in saving the environment. Some, like Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, saw reproductive rights as a side issue. Older population controllers even argued that women’s-rights questions were a waste of resources for a movement dedicated to stopping the nation from populating itself to death.

In After Roe, the population controllers’ story illuminates the changing relationship between the movements for legal abortion and women’s liberation. From the beginning, women played a crucial role in demanding legal access to abortion. Just the same, the early movement for abortion rights often shied away from women’s-rights arguments, and the relationship between the two movements was often rocky. At a time when women’s liberation remained controversial and women struggled for respect in the workplace, movement pragmatists believed that they would get results faster if they could convince voters and judges that legalizing abortion would have other desirable effects. Arguing that women had a right to abortion said nothing about how everyone else would benefit from legalization. By sometimes focusing on lower welfare costs, environmental benefits and reduced illegitimacy rates, movement members hoped to reach a larger audience.

All of that changed when the population-control movement found itself buried in scandal in the later 1970s. Sterilization abuse at home and abroad persuaded many observers that population policies were irrevocably racist and coercive. As population control became more controversial, feminists gained new influence in what would become the pro-choice movement. Population controllers also began staying away from the abortion issue, seeing it as another controversy that they could ill afford.

It seems that the implosion of population control had ramifications beyond the issues of abortion and family planning. In the 1970s, leading population organizations often advocated for abortion and family planning, environmental protection, and immigration limits. By contrast, organizations that lobby today for immigration limits, like NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), almost never discuss environmental issues. Conversely, groups like the Sierra Club consistently avoid arguments about the environmental damage some tie to overpopulation. Nor does FAIR or NumbersUSA identify family planning as a way of preventing the kind of harm members associate with immigration.

These changes came partly because both parties cemented their positions on abortion and family planning by the 1980s. While leading politicians in each party could be found on either side of the abortion issue for much of the 1970s, in the 1980s, it became costly for a candidate to depart from a party’s official position on reproductive issues.

I imagine that the story of party positions on immigration and environmental issues is equally surprising and rich. In the 1970s, it was far from obvious that environmentalism would be primarily embraced by Democrats. If we understood how the parties established a position on environmental issues and immigration in the decades after Roe, we might discover some of the lost possibilities for advocacy on either issue. 

Weekend Roundup

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Christopher Loss (Vanderbilt University) places our current woes in context. "[F]aculty work has always been challenging, . . . student indifference is not new, . . . business and government are necessary partners, . . . teaching and research have always existed in tension . . . ."

• Over at Environment, Law, and History, David Schorr writes about "Magna Carta and the environment."

• The University of Oregon's press release on Michelle McKinley's Fulbright is here. 

• Lyle Denniston, for the National Constitution Center, notes Tuaua v. United States, the DC Circuit decision on American Samoa and the Insular Cases decided last month, and quotes from the historians' brief.  Denniston writes that Tuaua raises “a basic inquiry into what the words of the Constitution stand for . . . that probably is best resolved by the Supreme Court” and could “provide a useful examination of whether the Insular Cases have survived into the 21st Century human rights era.”  In April, we noted Professors Erman and Perl-Rosenthal's op-ed.

• We’ve previously noted the release of more grand jury testimony in the Rosenbergs’ case.  Via HNN, here is Bruce Craig’s assessment.

• Congratulations to legal historians who have received ACLS fellowships for 2015: Brian Cuddy, Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, for “Wider War: American Force in Vietnam, International Law, and the Transformation of Armed Conflict, 1961-1977"; Philip Thai, Luce/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in China Studies, for “The War on Smuggling: Law, State Power, and Illicit Markets in Coastal China”; and Michael Willrich, ACLS Fellowship, for “The Anarchist’s Advocate: War, Terror, and the Origins of America’s Surveillance State.”  H/t: ASLH

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

Schorr on Art and the History of Environmental Law

David Schorr, Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law, has posted Art and the History of Environmental Law, which is forthcoming in Critical Analysis of Law:

This article is an initial exploration of what the history of environmental law can learn from the arts. Looking at visual art (mainly paintings, with some drawings, prints, photographs, and poster art), supplemented by occasional glances in the direction of literary works, it asks what, if anything we can learn about the environmental law of the industrialized West of nineteenth and twentieth centuries before 1970, when environmental problems certainly abounded but before there was "environmental law". The focus is on pollution law, especially air pollution, with some attention paid also to land use law.

The paper explores, first, how art may be read as reflecting the conditions against which environmental laws developed (or did not); next, indications in art of the effects of environmental law; and finally environmental law itself as depicted in art.

Sunday Book Roundup

Jim Grimsley's How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood (Algonquin) is reviewed in the Washington Post.

History Today has a review of Presidential Faith and Foreign Policy: Jimmy Carter the Disciple and Ronald Reagan the Alchemist by William Steding (Palsgrave Macmillan).

"Steding is surely right to emphasise the importance of understanding the mindset a president brings to the momentous foreign policy decisions that are unavoidable for the occupant of the White House. Traces of the book's origins in a doctoral thesis are evident, such as calling these mindsets 'cognetic narratives' or 'cognetics'. Such jargon aside, the author succeeds in illuminating the way the presidents looked at the world. He makes the valid point that even historians who are interested in the values and beliefs of leaders tend to pass lightly over their religious convictions – clearly a mistake with Jimmy Carter and, perhaps less obviously, with Ronald Reagan."

Over on H-Net is a review of Leslie Rosenthal's The River Pollution Dilemma in Victorian England: Nuisance Law versus Economic Efficiency (Ashgate).

"In this well-researched book, Leslie Rosenthal examines ten legal conflicts over river pollution, and shows how judges balanced the formal upholding of the law with the management of the nuisance. While the polluters were held liable for causing the nuisance, in none of the case studies was a town’s sewer outlets physically stopped by the courts. Instead, the court took on a supervisory role on the process of abating the nuisance by ordering injunctions, but not actually enforcing them until a certain date, thus allowing the towns the time to adjust their sewers’ outflows. An important theme of the book is that the existing nuisance law was ill-equipped as a protector of the environment, as complainants could be paid compensation or sewage could be diverted, which solved the legal case but did not actually address the pollution itself. In addition, the technological options for treating the sewage were limited at the time. As a result, Rosenthal argues, the cases in which the court induced a town to reduce the nuisance of its pollution should be considered a success “worthy of celebration” (p. 231)."

Also on H-Net is a review of Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press) by James Clifford.

And from New Books in American Studies is an interview with author Michael G. Miller about his book, Subsidizing Democracy: How Public Funding Changes Elections and How it Can Work in the Future (Cornell University Press).

Joseph on "Islamic Law and the Management of Natural Resources in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Ottoman Syria"

The May 2015 issue of Environment and History includes an article of interest: "Islamic Law and the Management of Natural Resources in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Ottoman Syria," by Sabrina Joseph (Zayed University). Here's the abstract:

Drawing on evidence from seventeenth and eighteenth century Islamic legal sources in Ottoman Syria, the paper examines the laws governing the use and management of natural resources, particularly for agricultural production. Islamic jurists played a key role in mediating the state's relationship with local populations and legitimising local practices and customs that governed land and water use. Often, this translated into laws which prioritised protecting the public good while not necessarily challenging existing power structures. The paper also explains how pious endowments (waqfs) were integral to the management of land and water resources in Ottoman Syria. The study sheds light on indigenous narratives regarding the environment and how Islamic law adapted to social and economic circumstances on the ground. Ultimately, the law contributed to ensuring the socio-cultural sustainability of ‘management’ strategies implemented by local populations vis à vis the environment.

Subscribers may access full content here.

Hat tip: Environment, Law, and History

Ryan on the Mono Lake Case

Erin Ryan. Lewis & Clark Law School, has posted The Public Trust Doctrine, Private Water Allocation, and Mono Lake: The Historic Saga of National Audubon Society v. Superior Ct., which is forthcoming in Environmental Law 45 (2015): 101-71

Mono Lake (Carol M. Highsmith/LC)

This article tells the epic tale of the fall and rise of Mono Lake — the strange and beautiful Dead Sea of California — which fostered some of the most important environmental law developments of the last century, and which has become a platform for some of the most potentially important developments in the new century. It shares the backstory and legacy of the California Supreme Court’s famous decision in National Audubon Society v. Superior Court, 658 P.2d 709 (Cal. 1983), known more widely as “the Mono Lake case.” Inspired by innovative legal scholarship and advocacy, the decision spawned a quiet legal revolution in public trust ideals, which has redounded to other states and even nations as far distant as India.

The Mono Lake dispute pitted advocates for the local ecosystem and community against proponents of the continued export of Mono Basin water to millions of thirsty Californians hundreds of miles to the south. The controversy itself spanned decades, but the story leading up to the litigation stretches back more than a hundred years, adding depth and dimension to the tale that is easily missed on a casual reading of the Audubon Society decision itself. It is a case study on the challenges and possibilities for balancing legitimate needs for public infrastructure and economic development with competing environmental values, all within systems of law that are still evolving to manage these conflicts. And at this particular moment in time, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct that would threaten the lake and the twentieth anniversary of the State Water Board’s ultimate decision to save it, the Mono Lake story is especially worth revisiting.

Part II introduces the main cast of characters in the Mono Lake story, starting with the public trust and prior appropriations doctrines around which the legal controversy unfolds. Part III introduces the three places at the center of the drama — Los Angeles, the Owens Valley, and the Mono Lake Basin — in recounting the history of the Californian water struggles leading up to the Mono Lake case. Part IV discusses the Audubon Society litigation itself and its aftermath, reviewing the court’s conclusion and the subsequent decision by the California Water Resources Control Board implementing the judicial directive. After analyzing the most important doctrinal developments in the opinion, it discusses subsequent critiques and new developments in public trust law.

Part V concludes with parting reflections about important questions that the Mono Lake story leaves us to ponder, including whose interests count when we talk about the “public” trust, how they differ from aggregated private interests, and which to account for when balancing the economic, cultural, and environmental considerations in public trust conflicts. It considers the extent to which the doctrine creates substantive or procedural obligations, and the responsibilities of different legal actors and institutions in implementing them. The contested answers to these questions are what make the public trust doctrine so fascinating, so powerful, and so critical as we continue to confront the inevitable crises between competing natural resource values.

New Release: Cannon on "The Green Movement and the Supreme Court"

New from Harvard University Press: Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court (April 2015), by Jonathan Z. Cannon (University of Virginia School of Law). The Press explains:

The first Earth Day in 1970 marked environmentalism’s coming-of-age in the United States. More than four decades later, does the green movement remain a transformative force in American life? Presenting a new account from a legal perspective, Environment in the Balance interprets a wide range of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, along with social science research and the literature of the movement, to gauge the practical and cultural impact of environmentalism and its future prospects.

Jonathan Z. Cannon demonstrates that from the 1960s onward, the Court’s rulings on such legal issues as federalism, landowners’ rights, standing, and the scope of regulatory authority have reflected deep-seated cultural differences brought out by the mass movement to protect the environment. In the early years, environmentalists won some important victories, such as the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision allowing them to sue against barriers to recycling. But over time the Court has become more skeptical of their claims and more solicitous of values embodied in private property rights, technological mastery and economic growth, and limited government.

Today, facing the looming threat of global warming, environmentalists struggle to break through a cultural stalemate that threatens their goals. Cannon describes the current ferment in the movement, and chronicles efforts to broaden its cultural appeal while staying connected to its historical roots, and to ideas of nature that have been the source of its distinctive energy and purpose.

A few blurbs:

"A remarkable and important book. Cannon approaches environmental law as both legal expert and humanist, seeking always the broad cultural context in which to view the Supreme Court’s uncertain ecological jurisprudence. He is an intent and perceptive reader of the Court’s decisions and what goes into them. He is also a fluent and convincing writer. Environment in the Balance will be widely read and largely influential.”—Peter Brooks, Princeton University

“Highly persuasive and insightful. Cannon reveals how the Supreme Court’s opinions reflect a larger culture war over environmentalism in American society. The scope and depth of his analysis is remarkable, and it allows him to offer a series of lessons for environmentalists hoping to meet the challenges of the future.”—Daniel Farber, University of California, Berkeley

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

Ahlers on the Origins of the Clean Air Act

Christopher D. Ahlers has posted Origins of the Clean Air Act: A New Interpretation, which is forthcoming in Environmental Law 45 (2015) :75-127:    

Given the increased national attention to the use of the Clean Air Act to address climate change, an analysis of the origins of the Clean Air Act is instructive for understanding the law in its current form. Contrary to the traditional view, the formation of the Clean Air Act was not the result of the events of the Year of the Environment, but rather, the gradual evolution of a federal regulatory approach to the medium of air between 1955 and 1970. Far from being weak and ineffectual, the federal air pollution laws of 1955, 1963, 1965, and 1967 laid the legal and conceptual framework for the modern Clean Air Act.

Peck on Legal Responses to Kansan Drought

Drought Committee Meeting, Scott City, 1936 (LC)

John C. Peck, University of Kansas School of Law, has posted Legal Responses to Drought in Kansas, which appeared in the Kansas Law Review 62 (2014).  Here is the abstract:

In this article I examine legal responses to drought in Kansas since statehood in 1861 by persons and various levels of government. An article about drought should probably use or create a definition for the term. Although precision in such definitions can be important in some legal contexts, it is not required here. The term drought has many meanings. I have not adopted any one definition against which to examine the legal responses, but rather have chosen to accept and use some periods of Kansas drought identified by experts.

Even after identifying drought periods since statehood, one finds it difficult to discern whether a legal event during or following a drought has necessarily been a direct response to a particular drought or instead just a part of sound, long-term water resources planning efforts. Some state water planning efforts, such as the State Water Plan in Kansas, involve attempts to deal with droughts generally.

This article is essentially retrospective and descriptive, not prospective and analytical. Analyses of state drought programs outside Kansas have been conducted, including a recent one published by the American Water Resources Association, which described and analyzed case studies in proactive drought management in Texas, Oregon, Hawaii, and Oklahoma. Such a study of responses to drought in Kansas, along with comparative analysis with other states' drought management techniques and experience, would be a worthy project.

Weekend Roundup

• Around the colloquia: On March 5, Eric Hilt, Wellesley College, presented "Investment Banks as Corporate Monitors in the Early 20th Century United States," in the Yale Law School’s Workshop in Law & Finance.  (H/t).  On March 9, at the Law and Public Affairs Seminar at Princeton, James Q. Whitman, Yale Law School, presents Presumption of Innocence or Presumption of Mercy?: Weighing Two Western Modes of Justice. On Monday, March 30, 4-6pm, William Forbath and Joseph Fishkin, University of Texas Law School, will present "The Constitution of Opportunity: Reclaiming Constitutional Political Economy" in Harvard University’s Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, with support from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. (H/t)  

• William H. Chafe on The Moynihan Report: Then and Now, via HNN. 

Donald A. Ritchie (credit)

• Donald A. Ritchie announced his retirement as Historian of the US Senate, although, as Ritchie explained, "Historians never retire, they just have more time to research." H/t:  The Hill

• The February 2015 issue of The American Historian, a publication of the Organization of American Historians, includes the i essay, "Western Resistance to Federal Land Control Didn’t Start or End with Cliven Bundy," by Joseph E. Taylor III, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University.  (This essay is gated, but The American Historian is available online to OAH members).

Joseph Sax (Credit: UM)

• The annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, to be held March 19, 2015, at the Washington Marriott, Washington, DC, has a panel of special interest to legal historians, "The Multifaceted Legacies of Joseph Sax, 1936-2014: Pioneer Emissary of the Public Trust Doctrine."  Panelists include Thomas Kline of Andrews Kurth; Laura Watt, Sonoma State University; Margot Higgins, University of California, Berkeley; Karl Brooks, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Zygmunt Plater, Boston College Law School, and my Georgetown Law colleague Hope Babcock. [DRE] 

• Scholars of Latin American legal history may be interested in a new release from the Universidad of the Andes and Icesi University: The History of the Supreme Court of Colombia, 1886-1991, by Mario Cajas (Icesi Law School). Volume I is titled "From the Regeneration to the Military Rule; 1886-1958"; Volume II is titled "From the National Front to the Constituent Assembly; 1958-1991." More information is available here (in Spanish).

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

New Release: Bohme, "Toxic Injustice"

New from the University of California Press: Toxic Injustice: A Transnational History of Exposure and Struggle (Dec. 2014), by Susanna Rankin Bohme (Harvard University). A description from the Press:

The pesticide dibromochloropropane, known as DBCP, was developed by the chemical companies Dow and Shell in the 1950s to target wormlike, soil-dwelling creatures called nematodes. Despite signs that the chemical was dangerous, it was widely used in U.S. agriculture and on Chiquita and Dole banana plantations in Central America. In the late 1970s, DBCP was linked to male sterility, but an uneven regulatory process left many workers—especially on Dole’s banana farms—exposed for years after health risks were known.

Susanna Rankin Bohme tells an intriguing, multilayered history that spans fifty years, highlighting the transnational reach of corporations and social justice movements. Toxic Injustice links health inequalities and worker struggles as it charts how people excluded from workplace and legal protections have found ways to challenge power structures and seek justice from states and transnational corporations alike.

More information is available here.

Sunday Book Roundup

After a two week vacation, we have several book reviews to highlight for Legal History Blog readers.

The Nation has a review of Naomi Murakawa's book, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison in America (Oxford University Press).

"This is the fundamental thesis of Murakawa’s book: legal civil rights and the American carceral state are built on the same conceptions of race, the state and their relationship. As liberals believe that racism is first and foremost a question of individual bias, they imagine racism can be overcome by removing the discretion of (potentially racist) individuals within government through a set of well-crafted laws and rules. If obviously discriminatory laws can be struck down, and judges, statesmen or administrators aren’t allowed to give reign to their racism, then the system should achieve racially just outcomes. But even putting aside the fact that a removal of individual discretion is impossible, such a conception of “fairness” applies just as easily to producing sentencing minimums as school desegregation."

The Civil Rights Movement was especially prominent in book reviews over the last few weeks. Both the The Washington Post (here) and The New York Times reviewed Jason Sokol's All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics From Boston to Brooklyn (Basic Books).

"If, as many believe, America’s experiment in postracialism is over, then “All Eyes Are Upon Us” is a prescient book that offers a great deal to explain a national self-deception of stunning brevity. According to Jason Sokol, whose anecdotally rich first book, “There Goes My Everything,” tracked white Southerners variously coping in the civil rights era, historians have paid insufficient attention to the Janus-faced responses of white Northerners to the struggles of black Americans."

Also in Civil Rights Movement history is Darryl Pinckney's Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (NY Review of Books), reviewed in The Washington Post. Pinckney also has a piece, "In Ferguson," in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

Salon has published an excerpt from The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House by Stephen Hess (Brookings Institute Press).

An excerpt from Mark Dostert's Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago's Other Side (University of Iowa Press) titled, "My juvenile confinement horror: What it's like inside Chicago's infamous jail for kids," is published in Salon.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a review of William Maxwell's F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton University Press).

"With an approach that is both empirical — Maxwell has pored over thousands of pages of government files — and Foucauldian in its inquiry into historical concepts, F.B. Eyes reveals the canon of modern black literature to have been powerfully and dialogically shaped by Hoover’s ghostreaders."

Julian Zelizer's new book, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin) is discussed by Zelizer and Scott Porch.

Continuing with a focus on race, there were several reviews of books on slavery. For example, New Books in History has a new interview with Randy Sparks discussing his book, Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press). H-Net has a review of Rebecca Shumway's The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (University of Rochester Press). And, The Daily Beast has an excerpt about "The Black Man Who Replaced Jefferson Davis in the Senate," from Phillip Dray's book, Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Mariner Books, 2010).

There's more Civil War history in a H-Net review of Kathryn Shively Meier's Nature's Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (University of North Carolina Press).

Defining Democracy: Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City is discussed with the book's author, Daniel Prosterman on New Books in History.

In international law, H-Net adds a few reviews of note: the first is a review of the volume edited by Jeffrey Runoff and Mark Pollack, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art (Cambridge University Press). Also on H-Net is a review of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico by Julie Avril Minich (Temple University Press), as is Ryan Irwin's Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (Oxford University Press) (here).

Salon has yet another excerpt, this time from The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic Books) by Don Doyle.

And finally, Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

And, if you're interested in that kind of thing, there continue to be several end-of-year booklists that include legal history, including this one from The Washington Post.

Weekend Roundup

• A reminder of all the legal history offerings at this year's meeting of the American Historical Association (taking place right now in New York City).

• Also this weekend: The annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. Over at the Faculty Lounge, guest blogger James Fox (Stetson Law School) has a post about "Justice Ginsburg and Women’s Legal History at AALS."

• From Slate: James Salzman on the history of the Safe Drinking Water Act. (Hat tip: Environment, Law and History)

• Also from Slate: a roundup of 2014's best digital history exhibits and archives (here and here).

• From Books&Ideas.net: "A Tale of a Chinese Lawyer" (reviewing the memoir of Zhang Sizhi).

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

Wester's "Land Divided by Law"

Here's something else to consume, along with turkey and tales of Pilgrims and Wampanoags, this Thanksgiving Day.  Just out, in multiple formats, from Quid Pro Books is Land Divided by Law: The Yakama Indian Nation as Environmental History, 1840-1933, by Barbara Leibhardt Wester:

Wester’s environmental history of Yakama and Euro-American cultural interactions during the 19th and early 20th century explores the role of law in both curtailing and promoting rights to subsistence resources within a market economy. Her study, using original source files, case histories, and contemporary writings, particularly describes how the struggle to assert treaty rights both sprang from and impacted the daily lives of the Yakama people.

The study is now widely available in this new paperback (and digital) edition, adding a 2014 foreword by Harry N. Scheiber, professor of law and history at Berkeley. This book, he writes, “is a masterful study of the complex, extended series of confrontations between the native Indian cultures of the Yakima region and the regime of the conquering white nation. Her analysis is based on a blending of materials from rich archival sources and from the literatures of legal history, administrative history, anthropology, ecology, and cultural theory. Most remarkably, the book makes important new contributions to all these fields of scholarship.”

“In her remarkable book Land Divided by Law, Barbara Leibhardt Wester eloquently portrays the Yakama Indians of the Columbia River Basin as actors defending a threatened, living landscape from encroachments by settlers. Using federal officials and the courts to advocate for their rights, they reasserted a spiritual heritage of the earth as body, heart, life, and breath. Anyone interested in Native peoples and their interactions with Euro-Americans will want to read this lively, engaging account.”
— Carolyn Merchant
Professor of Environmental History
University of California, Berkeley

“This is a remarkable work that brims with insight about the inter-relatedness of nature, work, law, and culture. Wester blends expertise in several different academic disciplines with a superb gift for narrative into her analysis of the Yakama people’s defense of their traditional way of life. The book is a testament not only to the skill and resilience of its subjects but also to the power of the author’s empathy and respect for them.”
— Arthur F. McEvoy
Associate Dean for Research, and Paul E. Treusch Professor of Law
Southwestern Law School

Sunday Book Roundup

The History Roll has a review of Kurt T. Lash's The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship (Cambridge University Press).

"It does not definitively settle the debate over the nascent Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning, but it should initiate a new generation of scholarly debates over the meaning of Reconstruction and the Republicans’ willingness to protect newly freed slaves."

The New York Times reviews Zephyr Teachout's Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press).

Also in the NY Times is a review by Sean Wilentz of Jonathan Darman's Landside: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America (Random House).

Michael A. Ross's Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Oxford University Press) is also reviewed in the NY Times:

"Those twists, recounted by Mr. Ross in “The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law and Justice in the Reconstruction Era,” published this week by Oxford University Press, include psychic consultations, a shadowy “House of Secret Obstetrics” and the derring-do of a crack Afro-Creole police detective versed in the latest “French” techniques — seemingly the first black detective in the United States to take part in a case that received national attention, Mr. Ross says.
The story also offers something else that was all but unheard-of in pre-Civil Rights-era trials involving African-Americans accused of crimes against whites: genuine suspense about the outcome."

HNN adds a review of Edmund Fawcett's Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton University Press).

New Books in American Studies interviews Anthony Santoro about his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press).

New Books in Law interviews Lynette J. Chua about her book, Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in a n Authoritarian State (Temple University Press); and New Books also talks with Joshua Fershee about his book, Energy Law: A Context and Practice Casebook (Carolina Academic Press).

Rector, "Environmental Justice at Work"

The September 2014 issue of the Journal of American History includes an article of interest: "Environmental Justice at Work: The UAW, the War on Cancer, and the Right to Equal Protection from Toxic Hazards in Postwar America," by Josiah Rector (Wayne State University). Here's the abstract:

Josiah Rector analyzes a series of campaigns by midwestern autoworkers to secure stronger protections against cancer-causing chemicals after World War II. Although most historians of the environmental justice movement have neglected the contribution of labor unions, in the 1960s and 1970s, however, activists in unions and community organizations combined concerns about race, class, and gender inequality with related patterns of pollution exposure. In the process, these activists began to use popular epidemiology to link chemical exposures to disease. Emphasizing the role of working-class people in challenging pollution, Rector argues for a more inclusive history of the environmental justice movement.

Subscribers to the journal may access full content here.

Hat tip: Environment, Law & History

Szymanski on Baltimore's Anti-Smoke Movement, 1895-1931

Although access is gated, the property teachers amongst us may be interested in Regulatory Transformations in a Changing City: The Anti-Smoke Movement in Baltimore, 1895–1931, by Ann-Marie Szymanski, University of Oklahoma, which appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13 (2014): 336-76.  Here is the abstract:

Baltimore, 1939 (LC)

This study of the Baltimore anti-smoke movement illustrates how Americans altered their approach to environmental regulation during the Progressive Era. After citizen groups came to recognize the limits of common-law regulation, they became enamored with administrative regulation and the promise of rationalized, professional agencies. While Baltimore did mirror the national regulatory trends, the city's unique circumstances limited its capacity to reduce the sooty, black smoke that provoked episodes of public activism. Fearful about the city's economic future, regulators exempted manufacturing from the city's early anti-smoke measures. Furthermore, although railroads were major polluters, they balked at electrifying the bulk of their tracks. Finally, the anti-smoke movement was narrowly based in the northeastern, more affluent parts of the city and failed to expand its support to working-class whites and African Americans. Hence, while the ideas about what constituted appropriate regulation “modernized” in Baltimore, the city did not alter its regulatory practices until the 1930s, long after other cities had done so.

Weekend Roundup

• “Samuel Clemens’ fight for the intellectual property rights to Mark Twain’s works helped protect the nation’s authors at home and abroad.”  From Mark Twain & Copyright on Library of Congress Blog.

• History Departments, Law Schools, and the Abyss in Between, a post on the US Intellectual History Blog by Andrew Porwancher, University of Oklahoma.  Hat tip: Brad Snyder.

• Over at New Books in History podcast: Bad Water: Nature, Pollution & Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014), by Robert Stolz, "guides readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods in Japan."

• David O. Stewart is to lecture on Aaron Burr's treason trial at the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy at Marshall University, according to HuntingtonNews.net.

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

Weekend Roundup

• The Historical Society for the DC Circuit announces that Robert S. Mueller III, Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, will deliver the Sixth Annual Judge Thomas A. Flannery Lecture on Thursday, October 23, 2014 in the Ceremonial Courtroom of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse at 5 p.m.

• David Adler, director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University, celebrated the 225th anniversary of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as “a cornerstone for constitutional uniformity.”

• On Tuesday, October 28, from 3:30-5:00 p.m., in the Historical Presidency Series of the Miller Center for Public Policy at the University of Virginia: Elizabeth Varon, University of Virginia, speaks on Andrew Johnson's Impeachment and the Legacy of the Civil War.

• From the Journal of American History's podcast: a conversation with Barbara Welke (University of Minnesota) on her recent article "The Cowboy Suit Tragedy." For more on this terrific article, check out my recent review on JOTWELL, here. (KMT)

• More from JOTWELL: An appreciative review, but Stephen Urice (University of Miami), of Valentina Vadi, War, Memory, and Culture: The Uncertain Legal Status of Historic Sunken Warships Under International Law, 37 Tul. Mar. L. J. 333 (2013).

• From Environment, Law, and History: a guest post by Leona Skelton (University of Bristol) on what can be learned from the Tyne’s River Court Books, 1644-1834.

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

Lifset's "Power on the Hudson"

Earlier this year, my Georgetown Law colleague William W. Buzbee published Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That Transformed New York City (Cornell University Press).  Now another great episode in the legal history of environmentalism in New York State has its book-length history with the publication of Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (University of Pittsburgh Press. 2014), by Robert D. Lifset, University of Oklahoma.

The beauty of the Hudson River Valley was a legendary subject for artists during the nineteenth century. They portrayed its bucolic settings and humans in harmony with nature as the physical manifestation of God’s work on earth. More than a hundred years later, those sentiments would be tested as never before. In the fall of 1962, Consolidated Edison of New York, the nation’s largest utility company, announced plans for the construction of a pumped-storage hydroelectric power plant at Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River, forty miles north of New York City. Over the next eighteen years, their struggle against environmentalists would culminate in the abandonment of the project.

Robert D. Lifset offers an original case history of this monumental event in environmental history, when a small group of concerned local residents initiated a landmark case of ecology versus energy production. He follows the progress of this struggle, as Con Ed won approvals and permits early on, but later lost ground to environmentalists who were able to raise questions about the potential damage to the habitat of Hudson River striped bass.

Lifset uses the struggle over Storm King to examine how environmentalism changed during the 1960s and 1970s. He also views the financial challenges and increasingly frequent blackouts faced by Con Ed, along with the pressure to produce ever-larger quantities of energy.

As Lifset demonstrates, the environmental cause was greatly empowered by the fact that through this struggle, for the first time, environmentalists were able to gain access to the federal courts. The environmental cause was also greatly advanced by adopting scientific evidence of ecological change, combined with mounting public awareness of the environmental consequences of energy production and consumption. These became major factors supporting the case against Con Ed, spawning a range of new local, regional, and national environmental organizations and bequeathing to the Hudson River Valley a vigilant and intense environmental awareness. A new balance of power emerged, and energy companies would now be held to higher standards that protected the environment.