PhD Positions at the ASSER Institute

The ASSER Institute for European and International Law in The Hague is recruiting two PhDs with a focus on legal history in the framework of a research project on "The Global City: Challenges, Trust and the Role of Law."  The two PhD researchers will explore seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s intellectual history, that is, the early modern Portuguese Jewish body of social-political and legal thought on diversity, identity, and global trade relations as found in the holdings of Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos.

For more information please visit our website.  Deadline: 5 June 2016.

CFP: First Nations & James Douglas

Credit: Songhees Nation

[We have the following Call for Proposals from Pooja Parmar of the University of Victoria. She is co-organizer of the Law and Society Association's CRN 15: British Colonial Legalities. Note the deadline of June 21, 2016.]

First Nations, Land, and James Douglas:
Indigenous and Treaty Rights in the
Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, 1849-1864

The Songhees Nation and the University of Victoria Faculty of Law and History Department
invite your participation in a conference on this theme
at the Songhees Wellness Centre, Victoria, B.C. February 24-26th 2017.

We anticipate that there will be tours of Songhees traditional territory by land and sea on
Friday the 24th before the first presentations and that the conference will include
a mix of academic and community presentations.

We welcome individual and panel proposals for presentations from researchers, legal
professionals, and community members, on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

1) Relations between First Nations and James Douglas
2) Indigenous and Colonial Concepts of Land, Law and Territory
3) Hunting and Fishing Rights
4) The End of Treaty-Making
5) The Roles of the HBC and the Colonial Office
6) The History of Douglas Era Reserves
7) Current relevance of these historical events.

Please send a 250-500 word description of the proposed presentation and a one page resume
or cv to any of: Cheryl Bryce <Cheryl.Bryce@songheesnation.com>; John Rice Jr.
<John.Rice@songheesnation.com>; or John Lutz jlutz@uvic.ca.
Deadline for proposals is: June 21st, 2016.

Breen and Strang on the Golden Age of US Catholic Law Schools

John M. Breen, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and Lee J. Strang, University of Toledo College of Law, have posted The Golden Age that Never Was: Catholic Law Schools from 1930-1960 and the Question of Identity, Catholic Social Thought 7 (2010): 489-522:

This essay reviews part of the history of Catholic legal education and shows that, while the promise of a distinctively Catholic form of legal education was never fulfilled, the idea to provide students at Catholic law schools with such an experience was proposed and widely publicized by a number of leading Catholic academics. Yet the proposal was never realized. The call for reform of Catholic legal education went unanswered. We argue that a variety of causes account for the failure of the proposal. These factors made the vision of Catholic law schools as centers of Thomistic natural law theory seem an unnecessary distraction that might jeopardize the success these schools had already managed to achieve. We lastly offer some initial thoughts on the significance of this history with respect to the current debate concerning the identity of Catholic law schools.

Weekend Roundup

• Although we somehow missed the event until now, you an still watch the video of Justice Louis D. Brandeis: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of his Confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, with Jeffrey Rosen, Clyde Spillenger, Melvin Urofsky, Mark Tushnet and Tomiko Brown-Nagin. 

• And, speaking of Brandeis, the auction of William Howard Taft's letter to the journalist Gus Karger disparaging the nomination of "the People's Lawyer" failed last month.  H/t: HNN.

• The Princeton University Library has recently posted a 14-minute introduction to its exhibit, By Dawn’s Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War.

• Yale Law Library’s “Putting Together a Book Exhibit,” a “video teaser” for this exhibit scheduled for 2017, has won the Best Video prize in the American Association of Law Libraries’ “Day in the Life" contest.  

• At right, UC Berkeley legal historians (and fellow LHB Blogger) Karen Tani (with daughter) and Christopher L. Tomlins, from Berkeley Law's Mother's Day tweet. DRE

• The 2016 Spring Fellows Conference takes place May 12-13 at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.  The schedule is here.  Presenters include Nora Krinitsky on “Lawlessness in Law Enforcement: Police Violence and the Chicago NAACP Campaign Against Brutality”; Sarah Seo on “Rule of Law and the Culture of Due Process”; Benjamin Holtzman on “Promoting Development during Crisis: Tax Incentives and New Markets in 1970s New York"; and Sarah Coleman, “‘To reward the wrong way is not the American way’: Welfare, Immigrants’ Rights and the Battle Over Benefits 1990.”

•  A book launch we wouldn’t have minded attending: The Seychelles Islands And Its First Landowners, by Julien Durup.

• In April, Menaka Guruswamy and Richard Albert (both visiting at Yale Law School) hosted the Symposium on Founding Moments in Constitutionalism at Yale Law School. The workshop took a truly global view of constitutionalism, and included papers on Brazil, Chile, Iraq, Israel, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Taiwan. The program is posted here.

• On May 6, Saumya Saxena and Alastair McClure of Cambridge University convened a legal history conference, "Refining the Legal Lens: New Directions in Modern Indian Legal History," at Corpus Christi College Cambridge. The day featured panels on subjects and categories of law; sovereignty and violence; and scale (the local, national, and beyond). The keynote address was delivered by Upendra Baxi (University of Warwick). 

• The American Association for the History of Medicine met recently in Minneapolis for its annual meeting, and included a good crop of medico-legal research. We noted talks on the history of drugs and pharmacy, forensic science, psychiatry, prisons, risk and disaster studies, doctor-patient confidentiality and privilege, disability, and informed consent. Some interesting conference format ideas too here, including posters (a first at the AAHM), a women's breakfast (40+ attended), and a handy Guidebook conference app. There was plenty of live tweeting, too: #AAHM16. Here is the program.

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

Goebel on the Anti-Imperial Metropolis

Michael Goebel, Freie Universität Berlin has published  Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge 2015), a portrait of anti-imperial networks of colonial and exiled non-Europeans in interwar Paris. For us legal historians, there is lots to chew on here. The book uses police records and explores naturalization, citizenship, and the law governing intermarried couples (especially colonial men marrying French women). Many of Geobel's key figures were also law students. 

From the publisher: 

This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese, and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international, and global history as well as migration, race, and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea.

Some blurbs:

Newell on Indigenous Slavery

Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery by Margaret Ellen Newell of Ohio State University (Cornell University Press, 2015) reveals the story of enslaved native Americans in colonial New England. It is the winner of this year's James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations in the US, awarded by the Organization of American Historians. 

From the press:

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675–76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676–1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.
Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations.
Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.

Two blurbs:

Weinberg on Proof of Identity and Racial Policing in US History

Jonathan Weinberg, Wayne State University Law School, has posted Proving Identity:    

Harriet Bolling’s Certificate of Freedom (1851) (LC)

United States law, over the past two hundred years or so, has subjected people whose race rendered them noncitizens or of dubious citizenship to a variety of rules requiring that they carry identification documents at all times. Such laws fill a gap in the policing authority of the state, by connecting the individual’s physical body with the information the government has on file about him; they also entail humiliation and some degree of subordination. Accordingly, it’s not surprising that we’ve almost always imposed such requirements on people outside our circle of citizenship -- African-Americans in the antebellum South, Chinese immigrants, legally resident aliens. Today, though, there’s reason to think that we’re moving closer to a universal identity-papers regime.

A Symposium on Woeste's "Henry Ford's War on the Jews"

Just out online in the (gated) 40:4 (Fall 2015) issue of Law and Social Inquiry is a symposium on Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012), by Victoria Saker Woeste, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation (and a former LHB Guest Blogger).

Donna C. Schuele, Reflections on Henry Ford's War on Jews

This essay provides an introduction to and overview of four essays that emerged from an “Author Meets Readers” session at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, considering Victoria Saker Woeste's book, Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech. Three essays are authored by panelists (Aviam Soifer, Carroll Seron, and Clyde Spillenger) and a final essay is provided by Woeste. The essays explore larger themes suggested by the book, including what the involvement of Louis Marshall reveals about the rise and role of spokespeople purporting to represent Jewish interests; whether the arc of Aaron Sapiro's education and career challenges our understandings of the development of the legal profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and how the law of group libel intersected with government attempts to regulate hate speech during the twentieth century. Woeste ends the symposium with a reconsideration of Henry Ford's War and how it fits into the new civil rights history.

Aviam Soifer, The Spokesman Conundrum: “Is It Good for the Jews?”

Battles concerning who legitimately speaks for minority groups pervade US history. The historically decentralized organization of American Jewry affords a prime example of this key leadership dilemma. Competing approaches to how to deal with Henry Ford's virulent anti-Semitism and extensive hate speech in the 1920s underscore the familiar, yet seldom carefully analyzed, tension between confrontation and negotiation that is often faced by outside groups and their spokesmen who seek change, wish to defend themselves, and/or hope for increased inclusion.

Carroll Seron,  Prestige, Networks, and Social Mobility Among Lawyers: A View from California of Woeste's book, Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech

In Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012), Victoria Saker Woeste raises provocative questions for students of the legal profession. Aaron Sapiro, an Eastern European, Jewish immigrant to California, rose to international prominence through his corporate specialization in agricultural cooperatives. Our understanding of the social structure of the legal profession, based on studies of the East and Midwest, shows that for most of the twentieth century, the structure of the bar was highly stratified around markers of ethno-religious status. The trajectory of Sapiro's career does not fit this story. A focus on the West generally or California in particular complicates our understanding of how factors such as ethno-religious background, social networks, career mobility, and prestige interact.

Clyde Spillenger, Hate Speech, Group Libel, and “Ford's Megaphone”

This essay on Victoria Saker Woeste's Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012) emphasizes that what made Ford's broadsides against Jews in the 1920s so dangerous was technology—his command of an unparalleled network of distribution, through his nationwide Ford dealerships. In addition, at the time of Ford's libels, US legal culture had not yet absorbed the idea that ideological and psychological subordination of minority groups was the principal harm worked by what would later be called “hate speech.”

Victoria Saker Woeste, Framing Henry Ford's War: Representation, Speech, and the New Civil Rights History

In this essay, I respond to three readers of my book, Henry Ford's War and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, by embracing the opportunity to reconsider the book's theoretical and historiographical frames. I synthesize the contributions that Clyde Spillenger, Carroll Seron, and Aviam Soifer make in their deep readings of the book and respond to their criticisms. I then place the book into a new interpretive frame that is emerging in the field of the “new civil rights history,” as it is now being conceptualized in the work of Risa Goluboff, Kenneth Mack, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, and others writing on civil rights advocacy in the twentieth-century United States.

Weekend Roundup

• It was a pleasure to see Catherine Fisk, University California Irvine School of Law, workshop some draft chapters from her forthcoming book Authors at Work: Writing for Hire in Twentieth Century Film, Television, and Advertising, in the Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) Seminar at Princeton University last Monday.  Think Dalton Trumbo meets Don Draper! 

• While we're mentioning LAPA events, the program hosts a book talk by Sophia Lee, Penn Law, on The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (Cambridge University Press, 2014) on Monday, October 26, at 12:15, and a workshop presentation by my fellow LAPA Fellow Sherally Munshi on Immigration, Imperialism, and the Legacies of Indian Exclusion.  DRE 

• Welcome to the Blogosphere: The Historical Society of the New York Courts has a blog! 

• Duke U. Observes 100th Birthday of John Hope Franklin: We missed the Oct. 15 lecture by Thomas C. Holt, “John Hope Franklin and the Black Intellectuals of The Greatest Generation,” but other events (including a symposium featuring Harvard's Drew Faust) are upcoming.

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

Wald on the Jewish Law Firm

Eli Wald, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, has posted The Jewish Law Firm: Past and Present, the typescript, pre-publication version of a chapter appearing in Jews and the Law, ed. Marc Galanter, et al (New Orleans: Quid Pro Press, 2014), 65-124.

The rise and growth of large Jewish law firms in New York City during the second half of the twentieth century was nothing short of an astounding success story. As late as 1950, there was not a single large Jewish law firm in town. By the mid-1960s, six of the largest twenty law firms were Jewish, and by 1980, four of the largest ten prestigious law firms were Jewish firms. Moreover, the accomplishment of the Jewish firms is especially striking because, while the traditional large White Anglo-Saxon Protestant law firms grew at a fast rate during this period, the Jewish firms grew twice as fast, and they did so in spite of experiencing explicit discrimination.

What happened? This book chapter is a revised, updated study of the rise and growth of large New York City Jewish law firms. It is based on the public record, with respect to both the law firms themselves and trends in the legal profession generally, and on over twenty in-depth interviews with lawyers who either founded and practiced at these successful Jewish firms, attempted and failed to establish such firms, or were in a position to join these firms but decided instead to join WASP firms.

According to the informants interviewed in this chapter, while Jewish law firms benefited from general decline in anti-Semitism and increased demand for corporate legal services, a unique combination of factors explains the incredible rise of the Jewish firms. First, white-shoe ethos caused large WASP firms to stay out of undignified practice areas and effectively created pockets of Jewish practice areas, where the Jewish firms encountered little competition for their services. Second, hiring and promotion discriminatory practices by the large WASP firms helped create a large pool of talented Jewish lawyers from which the Jewish firms could easily recruit. Finally, the Jewish firms benefited from a flip side of bias phenomenon, that is, they benefited from the positive consequences of stereotyping.

Paradoxically, the very success of the Jewish firms is reflected in their demise by the early twenty-first century: because systematic large law firm ethno-religious discrimination against Jewish lawyers has become a thing of the past, the very reason for the existence of Jewish law firms has been nullified. As other minority groups, however, continue to struggle for equality within the senior ranks of Big Law, can the experience of the Jewish firms serve as a “separate-but-equal” blueprint for overcoming contemporary forms of discrimination for women, racial, and other minority attorneys? Perhaps not. As this chapter establishes, the success of large Jewish law firms was the result of unique conditions and circumstances between 1945 and 1980, which are unlikely to be replicated. For example, large law firms have become hyper-competitive and are not likely to allow any newcomers the benefit of protected pockets of practice. While smaller “separate-but-equal” specialized firms, for instance, ones exclusively hiring lawyer-mothers occasionally appear, the rise of large “separate-but-equal” firms is improbable.

Berger on Birthright Citizenship

Bethany Berger, University of Connecticut School of Law, has posted Birthright Citizenship on Trial: Elk v. Wilkins and United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which is forthcoming in the Cardozo Law Review:

Wong Kim Ark (NA)

The constitutional dimensions of birthright citizenship revolve around two cases decided at the end of the nineteenth-century, Elk v. Wilkins (1884) and United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). The first held that an American Indian man born in the United States was not a citizen under the fourteenth amendment; the second, that a Chinese American man born in the United States was indeed a citizen under the amendment. This Article juxtaposes the histories of the decisions and provides previously neglected facts about the litigants, lawyers, and communities in each to provide new perspectives on the cases and their continuing repercussions.

First, although John Elk’s non-Native lawyers presented him as seeking to assimilate and abandon his tribe, Elk was part of a Winnebago community and likely sought only freedom from the federal government’s aggressive policies of land acquisition and domination. Second, while Wong Kim Ark’s lawyers were products of an organized Chinese migrant community, Wong also likely sought citizenship less as a quest for full assimilation than as an effort to maintain his transnational family in the face of exclusionary immigration policies. The histories also show the limits of judicial action, as the effect of each opinion was quickly undermined by congressional action, and used to justify expanded administrative power. Together, these histories challenge idealized concepts of citizenship, freedom, and individual action that remain with us today, and provide a richer understanding of race, constitutional doctrine, and administrative structure in the United States.

Coulson on Revisting US v. Thind

Doug Coulson, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of English, has posted British Imperialism, the Indian Independence Movement, and the Racial Eligibility Provisions of the Naturalization Act: United States v. Thind Revisited, which appears in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives 7 (2015): 1-42.

This article reexamines the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in United States v. Thind, which held that high caste Hindus were not “white persons” and were therefore racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship, through a rhetorical history of the briefs, judicial opinions, National Archives and Records Administration documents, and British intelligence documents related to the case. As the Court’s final statement on the racial eligibility provisions of the early Naturalization Act, Thind has been the subject of significant scholarly commentary regarding race and citizenship in the United States and heralded as a crucial Asian American civil rights case. The article begins by analyzing the case’s overruling of the majority of lower courts which had found high caste Hindus to be racially eligible for naturalization, two of which the Court had expressly approved of only three months earlier in Ozawa v. United States, a reversal of the Court’s own position not addressed in Thind or by prior studies of the case. In an effort to account for this reversal, the article considers Thind’s political activities in furtherance of Indian independence and the effort of British and American intelligence officials to oppose his naturalization on the basis of his political activities, the parties’ competing citations of British authorities on the significance of India’s caste system for the racial classification of Asian Indians, and how Justice Sutherland’s opinion both responds to and evades the arguments in the case in a manner that suggests a political decision. The article concludes by considering the rhetorical dimensions of race, citizenship, and law.

Lieblich on Kelsen's Assimilation through Law

Eliav Lieblich, Radzyner School of Law, Interdisciplinary Center, has posted a pre-submission version of Assimilation Through Law: Hans Kelsen and the Jewish Experience, which is forthcoming in The Law of Strangers: Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought, ed. James Loeffler and Moria Paz:

Hans Kelsen was perhaps the foremost continental lawyer of the 20th century. The founder of the immensely influential Pure Theory of Law, he is primarily remembered as a groundbreaking Austrian jurist. However, Kelsen was also a Jew, albeit an extremely assimilated one. His life story – from his early days in Vienna until his death in California – is truly representative of the tragedy of European Jewry in the 20th century. This Chapter discusses Kelsen in light of the ever-present tensions between Jewish and European identity, with particular attention to his position as an international lawyer. Focusing on the period surrounding the publication of the first edition of his Pure Theory of Law (1934), the Chapter discusses Kelsen along three interrelating themes relevant to the Jewish experience of the time. The first part situates Kelsen in relation to a key dilemma of Jewish politics: the tension between Jewish nationalism and assimilationism. It highlights the different constructions of Kelsen’s identity, and their uses by various actors. The second theme focuses on assimilationist politics in Kelsen’s jurisprudence, suggesting a reading of Kelsen’s Pure Theory which I call “assimilation through law.” The third theme pitches Kelsen’s Pure Theory of (international) law against the ideology of progress – a key idea in the thought of assimilated Jewish internationalists. As I demonstrate, although Kelsen’s Pure Theory famously claimed to be “anti-ideological,” the notion of progressivism still shines through its cold and analytic reasoning.

Weekend Roundup

Hong Yen Chang (credit)

• The California Supreme Court’s reversal on Monday of its 1890 decision denying Hong Yen Chang’s application to the bar generated several news reports, including one in the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and on NPR.  UC Davis Law's APALSA student group describes the work of  its Hong Yen Chang Project, in advocating for the reversal here. 

• On Monday, April 20, the Lewis & Clark Community College, Godfrey, Illinois, will host a session in the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission’s History on Trial series devoted to the Alton School Cases, “a series of seven circuit court trials and five Illinois Supreme Court appeals from 1897 to 1908, in which Scott Bibb, an African-American father of two school-age children, resisted the newly imposed racial segregation in the Alton school system.” More and hat tip: Riverbender.com

• Over at her Wartime blog, LHB Founder Mary Dudziak reflects on Edward S. Corwin's notion of "totality" in his book on the World War II state, Total War and the Constitution.

• A study of the legal history of Clermont County, Kansas, is underway, according to this report  in the Clermont Sun.

• On May 1, the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society will open its thirteenth (virtual) gallery.  Curated by Teresa Koncick, The Open Door: Roles of Women in Securities Regulation “looks at the roles and progressive participation of women in two key and contemporaneous regulatory agencies–the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Association of Securities Dealers (now FINRA)–from the 1930s to the 2000s.”

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

The Trial of Henry Ford

Former LHB Guest Blogger Victoria Saker Woeste has alerted us to the trailer for the documentary The Trial of Henry Ford, which when completed, will take up the trial that figured prominently in her book Henry Ford's War on the Jews.  (Caution: among the disturbing images in the trailer is that of a lynching.)  The documentarian, Michael Rose, explains:

 This is the trailer for our film, currently gearing up for production, that's about one of the most important libel lawsuits in American history, Sapiro v. Ford. This case pitted the richest and most famous man in America, Henry Ford, against an idealistic young lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, who was making a name for himself organizing farmers into cooperative associations during the early 1920s. Ford saw Sapiro as the vanguard of an international Jewish conspiracy bent on taking over America. Ford used his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to conduct a smear campaign against him. After failing to convince Ford to retract his wild allegations, Sapiro sued him in Federal Court for libel. This set in motion a two year-long roller coaster ride of battles and skirmishes in the courts and in the press until Ford finally publicly apologized in 1927.

This film will chronicle the characters, the actions, the issues and the themes of the trial that are embedded in the twisted history of American race relations, ethnicity and class.

New York's Asian-American Judges and Learned Hand

Two upcoming events sponsored by the Historical Society of the New York Courts are of especial interest to legal historians.  The first is the 2014 Stephen R. Kaye Memorial Program, Asian-Americans and the Law: New York Pioneers in the Judiciary, to be held Monday, December 15, 2014, 6:30 - 8:15 PM, at the New York City Bar Association (42 W. 44th Street, NYC).  It will consist of  a “presentation on Asian-American legal history featuring historic photographs,” by Hon. Denny Chin, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. and Kathy Hirata Chin, Esq., Partner, Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP; and a conversation with the first three Asian American judges in New York: Hon. Randall T. Eng, Presiding Justice, Appellate Division, Second Department, New York State Supreme Court; Hon. Peter Tom, Associate Justice, Appellate Division, First Department, New York State Supreme Court; and Hon. Dorothy Chin-Brandt, New York State Supreme Court, Queens County Criminal Court.  Judge Chin will moderate.

The second event, jointly sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society, is The Legendary Learned Hand Up Close and Personal: 15 Years on the District Court and Beyond, to be held on Thursday, April 23, 2015, at 5:00 PM at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse (40 Centre Street, NYC). “This program will provide a unique look at the life and career of the celebrated jurist Learned Hand,” including “The Influence of Judge Hand,” by Hon. John M. Walker, Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, and “Judge Hand's Life: As told through his personal letters,” by Constance Jordan.  Jordan is Professor of English & Comparative Literature Emerita at Claremont Graduate University, editor of Reason and Imagination: The Selected Correspondence of Learned Hand, and a granddaughter of Judge Hand.  The event is also to include “recollections from Judge Hand's colleagues, clerks, friends and others.”

New Immigration and Immigration Histories, 1965-2015

[We have a conference call for papers for Immigrant America: New Immigration and Immigration Histories from 1965 to 2015, “an interdisciplinary conference marking the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Immigration Act.”  It will take place on Friday, October 23, and, Saturday, October 24, 2015, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN.  The conference is cosponsored by “the Immigration History Research Center and Archives (University of Minnesota), which promotes interdisciplinary research on migration, race, and ethnicity in the U.S. and houses the largest archive of immigrant and refugee life in North America, and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the premier professional association of historians who study immigration and ethnicity. Both organizations will be celebrating their 50th anniversaries in 2015.”]

1965 was a turning point in the long history of immigration to the United States. That year, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law the 1965 Immigration Act, a law that removed national origins quotas, reshaped immigration to the United States, and led to the creation of new immigrant communities. This conference uses the anniversary of the 1965 Immigration Act to explore the connections between contemporary and historical migrations and communities in the U.S. We invite faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, artists, community advocates, and public history professionals from a wide range of disciplines to join us in examining all aspects of post-1965 immigration, including the ways in which it has affected the study of immigration before 1965. In examining how immigration has transformed the United States in the past fifty years, we hope to contribute to the development of migration studies across disciplines and to identify key directions for future scholarship.

Possible conference themes may include (but are not limited to) the following:

Borders and borderlands
Childhood and migration
Citizenship and belonging
Community advocacy
Comparative ethnic studies
Comparative North American experiences and perspectives
Culture and arts
Digital history and digital storytelling
Families and generations
Gender and migration
History, historiography, and memory
Identity and ethnicity
Immigrant rights and activism
Immigration law and policy
Immigration and settler colonialism
Labor and labor movements
Migration theories and frameworks
Public health
Public history and archives
Race and racial formation
Refugee resettlement, communities, and identities
Sexuality and migration
Transnational and diasporic identities, networks, organizations
Transracial and transnational adoption
Unauthorized Migration

Proposals due: January 9, 2015
We encourage full-panel submissions (including chairs/commentators) that highlight new research and perspectives, consider the state(s) of various specific fields and topics, and span the broad scope of immigration history and migration studies, including comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. Single paper submissions will also be given full attention. Final selection of participants will be made by the program committee. Limited funding is available for graduate student presenters through an application process. The selection process will begin shortly after the deadline. Notifications will be sent by email in May 2015.

For panel submissions, please submit the following (in 1 .pdf file):
(1)  One paragraph description of the panel, including chairs/commentators, and identification of the conference theme(s) the panel will address
(2)  Descriptions of each paper (1-2 paragraphs)
(3)  One-page CV per panelist

For single-paper submissions, please submit the following (in 1 .pdf file):
(1)  Description of paper (1-2 paragraphs) and identification of conference theme(s) it addresses
(2)  Presenter's one-page CV

To submit your paper/panel proposal, visit [here].

Conference Proposal Portal will be open on December 1, 2014.

Binnema, "Protecting Indian Lands by Defining Indian: 1850-76"

Another great find from our friends at the Canadian Legal History Blog: "Protecting Indian Lands by Defining Indian: 1850-76," by Ted Binnema (University of Northern British Columbia). The article appears in the Spring 2014 issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes. Here's the abstract:

In 1850, the government of the Province of Canada defined Indian for the first time. In the twentieth century, the legal provisions by which generations of status Indian women in Canada lost their status when they married non-status men became among the most controversial aspects of Canadian legislation relating to First Nations peoples. The government’s decision to define Indian, and its actual definitions, came to exemplify the coercive nature of Canadian Indian policy. This essay challenges many assumptions regarding the history of Canada’s definition of Indian. A close examination shows that officials only reluctantly decided to define Indian in law in 1850 in efforts to protect Indian land in Lower Canada. The evidence also shows that the first legal definition of Indian was intended to conform to the “ancient customs and traditions” of these Indigenous communities. Furthermore, government officials consulted meaningfully with Aboriginal leaders when they revised the definition between 1851 and 1876. During the entire period, the Aboriginal political elite were effective advocates for their own interests.

Subscribers to Project Muse may access full text here.

ASLH Workshop on Medieval Legal History

[We have the following announcement.]

The ASLH Workshop on Medieval Legal History will take place on Thursday, 6 November 2014, from 9am - 1pm.  Three selected papers will be discussed:

1.           “’Varied are the opinions of doctors’: canon law and the expulsion of the Jews in the late middle ages” by Rowan Dorin (Harvard), with commentary by Karl Shoemaker (Wisconsin)

2.           “The devil’s daughter of hell fire: the role of anger in medieval English felony adjudication” by Elizabeth Papp Kamali (Michigan), with commentary by David Seipp (Boston U)

3.           “Writing Fiction as Law: The Story in Grágás,” by Thomas J. McSweeney (William & Mary), with commentary by Stefan Jurasinski (Brockport)

The Workshop is not an open session and attendees of the ASLH annual meeting who would like to participate must register to attend.  During the Workshop, authors will not present or speak about their own papers.  Papers will be sent to all registered attendees in advance.  Each paper will be discussed by the commentator for half an hour and by all attendees for another half hour.  To register, please contact the ASLH Workshop Coordinator, Lena Salaymeh, at aslh.workshop@gmail.com.

"Jews and the Law": An Essay Collection

Just out from Quid Pro Books is Jews and the Law, edited by Ari Mermelstein, Victoria Saker Woeste, Ethan Zadoff, and Marc Galanter.  This collection of essays on is now available as an ebook ($9.99) and in paper ($36.99); it may be purchased in hardback next month.  The press explains:

Jews are a people of law, and law defines who the Jewish people are and what they believe. This anthology engages with the growing complexity of what it is to be Jewish - and, more problematically, what it means to be at once Jewish and participate in secular legal systems as lawyers, judges, legal thinkers, civil rights advocates, and teachers. The essays in this book trace the history and chart the sociology of the Jewish legal profession over time, revealing new stories and dimensions of this significant aspect of the American Jewish experience and at the same time exploring the impact of Jewish lawyers and law firms on American legal practice.

And here are the blurbs:

"This superb collection reveals what an older focus on assimilation obscured. Jewish lawyers wanted to 'make it,' but they also wanted to make law and the legal profession different and better. These fascinating essays show how, despite considerable obstacles, they succeeded."
- Daniel R. Ernst, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

"This fascinating collection of essays by distinguished scholars illuminates the distinctive and intricate relationship between Jews and law. Exploring the various roles of Jewish lawyers in the United States, Germany, and Israel, they reveal how the practice of law has variously expressed, reinforced, or muted Jewish identity as lawyers demonstrated their commitments to the public interest, social justice, Jewish tradition, or personal ambition. Any student of law, lawyers, or Jewish values will be engaged by the questions asked and answered."
- Jerold S. Auerbach, Professor Emeritus of History, Wellesley College

I hear from the publisher, Alan Childress, that Quid Pro Book’s republication of C. Herman Pritchett's The Roosevelt Court is out as an ebook.  A paper version is soon to follow, as is a republication of H. N. Hirsch's The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter.  Check out other forthcoming books at QP's website.