Schwartz on Compact Theory and the US Constitution

David S. Schwartz, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted The Birth of Compact Theory, which is forthcoming in the Journal of American Constitutional History:

"Compact theory" is the idea that the U.S. Constitution is a compact of the states: the act of sovereign states rather than that of "We the people of the United States." Compact theory interprets the Constitution as a confederative treaty according to international law principles of treaty interpretation: construing its grants of power narrowly, disfavoring implied powers and implied waivers of sovereign rights, and affording to each party to the compact the right to judge for itself whether the compact has been infringed. When was it first deemed plausible to interpret the Constitution according to these "confederationst" principles, as a compact of the states? This question is worth asking, not only for its intrinsic historical interest, but also for its implications for constitutional interpretation at a time when originalism has become so prominent. Historians have either ignored this question or simply assumed that compact theory began with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, ghost-written for those two state legislatures by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts of that year. But none have inquired into the provenance of compact theory ("its history before 1798") except for a handful of revisionists, who challenge the conventional assumption by arguing that a compact-theory interpretation of the Constitution was present throughout the founding. This article provides the first detailed account of the emergence of compact theory. Confirming the previously unsupported conventional belief, I argue that compact theory was pushed into the range of plausible constitutional discourse (the "Overton window" of constitutional interpretation) by the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Although hints of a confederationist interpretation of the Constitution were offered as part of Federalist propaganda during the ratification campaign, strict constructionists did not deem such an interpretation plausible for the next decade. Compact theory was not argued in any of the salient constitutional debates of 1788-1798"such as the debate over the First Bank of the United States"where strict constructionists or "enumerationists," had a strong incentive to develop compact theory. Only when the crisis of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts motivated Jefferson and Madison to assert that the Constitution was a compact of the states, did compact theory first emerge. 

--Dan Ernst 

Smith on Erie

Thomas A. Smith, University of San Diego School of Law, has posted a reconsideration of Eire Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, entitled, Overruled from the Chair: A Study in Umbesetzung

This Article reads Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938) not as the correction of a century-old error but as a conquest, and it borrows from Hans Blumenberg the concept of Umbesetzung, or reoccupation, to describe how the conquest was carried out. The classical order that Swift v. Tyson had restated, in which courts were understood to find a general law they had not made rather than to enact the law of a sovereign, was not moribund in 1938. It was alive, with a pedigree older than the Republic, and it would outlive its own obituary by the better part of a century. Erie did not refute that order; it redescribed it, adopting the delegitimating premise Holmes had pressed across three failed dissents, that law must be traceable to an identifiable sovereign author, and treating that premise as though the Constitution had supplied it. The Court then reached, sua sponte and past a narrower statutory ground a concurring Justice had shown to be sufficient, for a constitutional holding whose operative language it borrowed verbatim from Holmes’s own dissent. The result was a killing performed with the grammar of an autopsy, an overruling conducted from a chair its occupant had not vacated. The Article traces the emptying of the classical position across Holmes’s dissents and its formal occupation in Brandeis’s opinion and then turns to the modern general-law revival, which recovers the found-law form while leaving the classical substance where the conquest left it. It closes on the irony that the man who completed positivism’s victory was not a positivist but a moralist, evidence that a method has truly won when even its opponents must speak its idiom.

--Dan Ernst 

Federal History 18

Federal History 18 (2026) has been published.  Here is the TOC:

Editor's Note 

Benjamin Guterman

Roger R. Trask Lecture

“Girl From the North Country”: Pursuing History and Finding Community in the Nation’s Capital
Kristin L. Ahlberg

Articles

Bind Together Whom? The Internal Improvements Debate and Native Dispossession in the Early Republic
James R. Stocker

1870s House Investigations of Bureau Commissioner Oliver O. Howard and the Retreat from Reconstruction
Peter A. Porsche

Woodrow Wilson, American Power, and International Order at the Paris Peace Conference, 1918–1919
Peter Jackson

A Troublesome Reckoning: The Rediscovery of the U.S. Postwar Cover-up of Unit 731 and the Ethical Threat to Democracy
Emily Matson

Patients-in-Chief: The Public History of the President’s Physical Exam
Jacob M. Appel

Interview

An Interview with Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani
Sean T. Byrnes

Law & Constitution Roundtable

The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, by Alison L. LaCroix
Introduction: Gerald Leonard, Boston University
Review: Austin Allen, University of Houston–Downtown
Review: James A. Gardner, University at Buffalo School of Law
Review: Grace Mallon, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford
Review: Gautham Rao, American University
Author’s Response: Alison L. LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School

Reviews in Legal History

Richard Primus, “Sins and Omissions: Slavery and the Bill of Rights”
Terri Diane Halperin

Roger A. Bailey, “‘Intercourse . . . of the Most Friendly Nature’: The U.S. Navy, State Power, and William Walker’s Invasion of Mexico,     1853–1854”
Stephen J. Rockwell

Anna O. Law, “The Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments’ Effects on Citizenship and Migration”
Kelly Marino

Andrea Scoseria Katz, “A Regime of Statutes: Building the Modern President in Gilded Age America (1873–1921)”
Benjamin Guterman    

Benjamin Wetzel, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Unionist Memory of the Civil War: Experience, History, and Politics, 1861–1918”
Evan C. Rothera

Hardeep Dhillon. “The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law”
Amelia Flood

Kathryn E. Kovacs. “From Presidential Administration to Bureaucratic Dictatorship” 
Lisa K. Parshall

--Dan Ernst

Fritz on the States as Monitors of the Federal Government

Christian G. Fritz, emeritus at the University of New Mexico School of Law, has published Sounding the Alarm: The Role of States in Monitoring the Federal Government.  It is in a series on political ideas and issues for school teachers published by the Center for the Study of Federalism.  From the introduction:

 In December 2025, more than 40 bipartisan state legislative leaders from over 30 states, working through the National Conference of State Legislatures, issued a resolution titled “Federalism Restoration and State Empowerment.” This resolution reflects an important tradition that dates back to the founding and deserves attention in K-12 classrooms.

The distinctive feature of American federalism has long been understood to be the distribution of powers between the national and state governments. James Madison captured this idea of shared authority or sovereignty when he said the Constitution created a “compound republic” (Federalist 51). The compound republic distributes power both among the branches of the national government (separation of powers) and between the national government and the state governments (federalism). Madison envisioned a double security for liberty in which the states played a prominent role in monitoring and checking the power of the national government and the national government could check the states.

This foundational element of our system of government—shared sovereignty—warrants revisiting by K-12 teachers and students. Although states may attempt to limit national power in ways such as withholding cooperation, exerting political pressure, and challenging federal authority through legal and institutional channels, this Digest focuses on the role and responsibility of state governments to “sound the alarm” when the federal government exceeds its authority.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington University Law Review Online: Michael Bannerjee (UC Berkeley) on "Land-Grant Universities."  

• 
  The Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology announces the establishment of its Research Centre for Legal History.

• Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, discusses the history of conceptions of federalism in the United States on the Stationary Bandit podcast. 

• "His Majesty The King has approved the appointment of Professor Wim Decock, of the Universities of Louvain and Liège, as the new Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford. He will take up the post on 1 October 2026 and succeeds Professor Wolfgang Ernst." [No relation.  DRE]  H/t: ESCLH Blog, which has the link to the press release.

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts is staging a historical reenactment of proceedings in the Amistad case on Monday, February 2, 2026, from 6:00 - 8:00 PM at the Appellate Division, First Department Courtroom in New York City.  

• Laurence H. Tribe reviews Jill Lepore's We the People (NYRB).

• ICYMI: Andrea Katz and John Guida ask, Has the Supreme Court Backed Itself into a Corner (on removal)?  Britt Tevis on Ben Shahn’s mural, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" at Syracuse University (Daily Orange).  Meet Edward Bennett Williams (Daily Record).  Return Jonathan Meigs, Jr., Ohio's First Chief Judge (CNO).  What Were the Palmer Raids and What Tactics Did They Use? (History).  Citywide general strikes in US history, including in Minneapolis (Jacobin). 

• Update: A review of Old Courthouse, that book on the Merced County court--where Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. was filed. 

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

AHA Littleton-Griswold Prize to LaCroix

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society ("an annual award for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, broadly defined"). This year's award went to Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago) for The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Gorgeously crafted and scrupulously researched, this original synthesis introduces the “interbellum constitution”: an era, stretching from 1815 to 1865, marked by ferment over the overlapping, unsettled boundaries of local, state, and federal power in the United States. Alison L. LaCroix is utterly persuasive in analyzing the competing “federalisms” that drove public debates over concurrent powers, the regulation of commerce, and states’ rights. Her book illuminates a constitutional maximalism more dynamic, peopled, and capacious than we knew.

Congratulations to Professor LaCroix!

-- Karen Tani 

Bradley and Goldsmith on Erie and Originalism

Curtis Bradley, University of Chicago Law School, and Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law School, have posted General Law Revivalism and the Problem of 1938:

From the constitutional Founding until Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), federal courts routinely applied a body of "general law" to resolve a wide range of legal issues, including issues relating to commercial law, torts, international law, conflict of laws, equity, and procedure. This general law regime became politically fraught and difficult to administer, and the Supreme Court finally repudiated it in Erie, declaring that "there is no federal general common law" and requiring the federal courts to ground all rules in either federal or state law. Erie and its progeny created what this Article terms the "Erie algorithm," which requires every pre-Erie doctrine to be reconceptualized through nonoriginalist principles relating to the proper sources of law and the nature and scope of federal judicial power. This algorithm undergirds nearly every corner of contemporary federal courts doctrine. Despite their willingness to rethink other major structural constitutional law precedents, the originalists on the Supreme Court have accepted--and, indeed, embraced--the Erie algorithm and incorporated it throughout modern public law. By contrast, a number of scholars in recent years--primarily but not exclusively originalists--have sought to revive the pre-Erie general law. "General law revivalism," this Article argues, overlooks how dysfunctional the general law regime had become before Erie and fails to appreciate the incompatibility of that regime with the post-Erie constitutional order. In addition, those who suggest jettisoning Erie have not made the case for absorbing the massive system costs that such an effort would generate. The Article concludes that the Erie transformation leaves many versions of originalism with "the problem of 1938": the necessity of reconciling originalist commitments with a legal system fundamentally shaped by Erie's non-originalist foundations. 

--Dan Ernst 

Cromwell Article Prize to Hall, Mallon

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, which is awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation "after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History." About this award:

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize is awarded annually to the best article in American legal history published in the preceding calendar year by an early career scholar. Articles published in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize. 

The 2025 Cromwell Article Prize went to two scholars: Aaron Hall (University of Minnesota) for “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” Journal of American History 111, no. 3 (2024): 469-96, and Grace E. Mallon (Oxford University), for “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2024): 687-720.

The citation for Hall's article:

Aaron Hall’s “Bad Roads” traces the making, significance, and effects of ordinary public ways that ran through the South in the age of slavery. This important article speaks to scholarship on legal history, state building, slavery, and the carceral state, and challenges existing ideas of public and private. In this piece, Hall draws upon an inchoate, rarely studied set of documents to explain how roads were a significant and singular site of governance in slave states. He shows how public power helped construct private planter authority, as well as gave rise to a unique carceral spatial regime. Hall’s article is beautifully written and works with complex archival materials in a way that makes truly intricate and difficult historical work feel effortless. “Bad Roads” ties together multiple topics in legal and political history, including the role of state power in road building, the mechanics of how roads enabled policing, and the way public roads structured and complicated slavery—much like, as he shows, public roads themselves both connected and bounded private property and enslaved people’s lives. This article has important implications for our understanding both of slavery and its development and the post-emancipation evolution of policing and turn toward mass incarceration. We know that slavery existed because state law sanctioned it, but Aaron gives us a chance to really see how in even the most quotidian ways, the state made slavery and slavery made the state.

The citation for Mallon's article: 

Grace Mallon’s “Negotiated Federalism” examines the federal government’s efforts to enforce its new authority after the Founding. Federal officials quickly realized that they required the participation and consent of state governments, as federal laws could not take effect without the legislation, investment, and manpower of state governments. The piece showcases how Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test case for negotiated federalism, where the federal government sought to exercise power in spaces where states had already entrenched their authority. As early federal officials set up customs and lighthouse services, rebuilt coastal fortifications, and enforced regulations, they had to negotiate with states to determine “which powers each level of government could exercise.” As a result, federal power depended on a state’s willingness to negotiate its authority. The crisply written article tackles big questions of federalism through granular details of practical problems and personality conflicts. Based in impressive primary source research in state and federal official records and correspondence, Mallon brings multiple areas of scholarship together to describe how power was worked out ‘in the course of ordinary government administration instead of in high theory. “Negotiated Federalism” takes something that we feel is well-understood (federalism at the founding) and through a creative path through the archive mines new and provocative ways of seeing the past that help us see the present more clearly.

Congratulations to both awardees!

-- Karen Tani

SHEAR Book Prize to LaCroix for "The Interbellum Constitution"

Via Bluesky, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) announced the prize winners from this year's annual meeting. 

The SHEAR Book Prize ("awarded to the book that makes the best primary scholarly contribution to the history of the early American republic") went to Alison L. LaCroix (University of Chicago) for The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press).

Congratulations to Professor LaCroix!  

-- Karen Tani 

 

Primus's "Oldest Constitutional Question"

Richard Primus, University of Michigan Law School, has published The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press):

Every law student learns that the federal government is constrained to act only according to its enumerated powers, meaning that Congress can do what the Constitution expressly authorizes it to and nothing more. Yet Richard Primus contends that this longstanding orthodoxy—allegedly required by the text of the Constitution, the Framers’ vision, and the logic of federalism—is fundamentally flawed.

Through careful analysis of constitutional text and history, and of the structure of American federalism, The Oldest Constitutional Question builds a powerful argument for broad congressional authority. In particular, Primus shows that the primary function of enumeration is to rule listed powers in, not to rule other powers out. The Framers were more worried that the federal government might be fragile and anemic than that it would be overwhelmingly strong. Enumerating congressional powers is thus best understood as a way of ensuring that the federal legislature has an incontestable warrant to exercise the powers specified there, not as an exhaustive description of all that Congress can do.

In practice, the enumeration of powers does little to limit Congress. But most constitutional lawyers—including many Supreme Court justices—think this means something has gone wrong, such that the courts must aggressively strike down federal laws exceeding Congress’s enumerated powers. Primus’s meticulous examination explodes the prevailing view, revealing its underlying errors. The constitutional system does place limits on Congress, and crucially so, but the enumeration of powers is not, and never has been, a sensible means for creating and enforcing those limits

Michigan Law's interview of Professor Primus about his book is here. 

 --Dan Ernst

Poole and Clark on Adam Smith's Concept of "The Federative"

Thomas Poole and Martin Clark have published The Fragile Power of Political Nations: Adam Smith’s Federative open access in Modern Intellectual History:

Adam Smith (NYPL)

This article examines Adam Smith’s concept of the federative: the double-facing constitutional power to conduct international relations today called the treaty or foreign-affairs power. We reconstruct Smith’s account of the federative from his major and minor works and demonstrate its importance in his account of law and empire. We first examine Smith’s early “internal federative,” where the power grows from the internal constitutional organization of the state. What starts as a democratic right to wage war and make peace becomes concentrated over time in the sovereign and its advisers as a “senatoriall” power. We then turn to the “external federative” in Smith’s later works, where the federative is redesigned as a power to unify colonial legislative bodies, connecting the familial sentiments of Britain and America, and forming a model for moving, slowly, towards the conditions Smith deemed necessary for international justice.

--Dan Ernst

Smith and O'Neill on Younger v. Harris

Fred O. Smith, Jr., Emory University School of Law, and Peter O'Neill, Stanford Law School, have posted The Forgotten Face of "Our Federalism,” which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal:

Younger v. Harris is canonical in the field of Federal Courts, distinguished by its seminal role in federal civil rights litigation. The decision’s memorable exposition of “Our Federalism” produced the Younger abstention doctrine, which limits federal courts’ authority to address constitutional violations in state criminal proceedings. Today, this doctrine significantly impacts litigation challenging systemic illegalities in areas like pre-trial detention systems and child welfare programs. Yet, the origins of the case—a stark narrative of racialized surveillance, censorship, and police violence—remain largely unknown.

Through examination of diverse sources—including original interviews, newly acquired FBI files, press coverage, court transcripts, legislative records, memoirs, protest materials, and the archival papers of four Supreme Court justices—this Article reconstructs the case of John Harris, a Black civil rights activist and former SNCC organizer. While Harris’s Mississippi arrests in 1965 are clearly legible as Jim Crow oppression, his subsequent Los Angeles indictment in 1966 for similar activism became harder to recognize as racial persecution because it fell outside the Southern “Jim Crow paradigm.” This differential recognition helped courts maintain their image as champions against Southern injustice while limiting federal intervention elsewhere. Moreover, FBI files reveal extensive federal-state cooperation in suppressing Black political activism, contradicting Younger’s conception of federalism as “separate spheres.”

This case illustrates “legitimacy laundering”—a novel framework to describe the obscuring of canonical influential decisions’ original context and implications, conferring legitimacy on otherwise questionable legal practices. The Article also reveals how some modern courts have expanded Younger abstention beyond its carefully negotiated scope, undermining the doctrine’s origins in preserving federal courts’ power to prevent irreparable harm.

--Dan Ernst

Schwartz on the Deceptive Federalist 37

David S. Schwartz, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted a further contribution to anti-enumerationist constitutional history, The Rhetoric of Deception: Madison's Federalist 37 and the Structure of the Ratification Debates:

James Madison (wiki)

James Madison's Federalist 37 is widely regarded by scholars as a political philosophy ur-text or a theoretical exposition of the now-trendy concept of "liquidation." These accounts tend to obscure Madison's very specific purpose in writing the essay: to persuade moderate "swing" voters in the ratification campaign that the Constitution's enumeration of powers could safely be understood as a limitation on the proposed national government's powers. Pro-ratification Federalists were in a bind: the Constitution's text was so plainly ambiguous about whether the enumeration was exhaustive and limiting, or instead illustrative and open-ended, that this textual ambiguity could not be plausibly denied. Yet Federalists were compelled by the political and rhetorical structure of the ratification campaign to deny this ambiguity. Their solution was to make what modern public meaning originalists call a "contextual enrichment" argument, that a facial ambiguity can be resolved by reference to background interpretive principles. For this case, they concocted the now familiar argument that all "federal" constitutions"including both the proposed Constitution and the Articles of Confederation"presumptively limited the central government to its enumerated powers. The argument was dubious and widely disbelieved; worse, as Madison knew, the ambiguity was in fact the intentional product of a compromise at the Philadelphia Convention between nationalist advocates of broad legislative powers and "enumerationist" advocates of limited enumerated powers. Anyone looking to the Framers' intentions to resolve the ambiguity would confirm Anti-Federalist suspicions that the enumeration of powers was intended to allow a post-ratification Federalist government to exercise broad powers.

This article argues that Federalist 37 was written to address this specific problem. Madison realized the need to obscure the Framers' intentions and cover up the compromise over the enumeration of powers. He sought to do so in Federalist 37 by arguing that ambiguity about the "line of partition" between federal and state power resulted entirely from unintentional and innocent causes: the limits of language and human capacities, rather than an intentional, behind-closed-doors compromise. This argument, Madison hoped, would clear the way for him to elaborate the Federalists' "federal constitutions" argument in Federalist Nos. 39-45 that the enumerated powers were presumptively, and therefore unambiguously limited. In this light, the concept of "liquidation" briefly mentioned in a single sentence in Federalist 37 was of no value, since moderates concerned about excessive national powers would hardly be reassured by having this ambiguity "liquidated" by the Federalist-dominated governments that the ratifiers anticipated.

--Dan Ernst

Kastor's "Creating a Federal Government"

We note with interest the website Creating a Federal Government, created by Peter J. Kastor, Washington University, St. Louis, which

combines a book that chronicles how the federal government operated in
 its first decades of existence with a major digital archive that will reconstruct the scope and scale of the early federal workforce. The Website will contain a full listing of federal officials, both civil and military, and will enable users to analyze the careers of these officials at both the individual and aggregate levels. Creating a Federal Government continues Kastor’s commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry by bridging the gap between history and political science, engaging questions in American political development, presidential history, and institutional behavior.  This project also reflects over three decades of work in digital history.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: GR

Weekend Roundup

• 

  David S. Tanenhaus (UNLV)
  

  Heartfelt congratulations to David S. Tanenhaus on his receipt of the American Society for Legal History's Craig Joyce Medal, awarded to recognized extraordinary and sustained service to ASLH (UNLV Boyd School of Law).
  

• In Time Magazine's Made By History series: Ajay Mehrotra on The Tariff History Donald Trump Is Overlooking.
  

• Garrett Epps reviews Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World, "a fresh and readable one-volume history of the Court [that] explains how we got from Marbury to Dobbs" (Washington Monthly).

• On Saturday, November 9, from 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Alison L. LaCroix will discuss The Interbellum Constitution as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637.  The event is open to the public.

• The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has launched We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence, a "multi-year oral history and education project" commencing with the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

• On Monday, November 4, at Noon ET at the National Constitution Center, Keith Richotte, Jr., and Matthew L.M. Fletcher (University of Michigan) will discuss "Native American history and law through the stories of landmark Supreme Court cases."

• Christine Kexel Chabot, Marquette University Law School, is again making available the syllabus for her course Litigating the Lessons of History, in response to the revived debate making legal history part of the law-school curriculum.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Librarians of Congress): "Witchcraft and a Haunted Case of Torture in Joost de Damhouder’s Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1555)"; How a House Becomes Legally Haunted: Stambovsky v. Ackley, The “Ghostbuster” Ruling."

• Literary Hub's Ten Best Books on Reproductive Rights includes ones by Michele Goodwin, Leslie Reagan, and Mary Ziegler.  
  

• A notice of Molly Brady's  Brandeis Chair lecture at HLS, much of which she devoted to the legal history of single-family dwellings in the United States (Harvard Law Today).
  

• The University of Helsinki Faculty of Law "invites applications for a fixed term employment as a doctoral researcher or a postdoctoral researcher" with the project Comparing Early Modern Colonial Laws, led by Academy Professor Heikki Pihlajamäki.   More.

• 
  
  New online in Law & History Review: Weber in Jerusalem: The Rabbinical Debate over the Establishment of the Rabbinical Court of Appeals, 1918–1921, by Chagai Schlesinger.
  

• The Stanford Law School has announced its latest round of Sallyanne Payton Fellows.  I mentioned this here not simply because two legal historians, Greg Ablavsky and Bernadette Meyler, are their mentors, but because I gained lasting insights into the mindset of the first, postwar generation of Washington lawyers when then-Professor Payton shared her recollections of Charles Horsky when I presented at Michigan Law, some years ago.  DRE
  

• ICYMI:  Kristina M. Lee, University of South Dakota, on "What the history of blasphemy laws in the US and the fight for religious freedom can teach us today" (Akron Legal News).
  

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

State of the Field of State Constitutional Studies

Today, at 2:30 EST, “the State Constitutions Lab and the Brennan Center for Justice will host a seminar discussion about the “State of the Field of State Constitutional Studies” that will center on past and current scholarly work, future directions and areas of research, and new methodological approaches.”  Participants include the historian Jane Manners, Jessica Roney, and Robinson Woodward-Burns.  Register here.  (H/t: H-Law).

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

•  The Balkinization symposium on Alison LaCroix's The Interbellum Constitution continued this week. Since our last Weekend Roundup, there have been contributions from John Mikhail, Connor M. Ewing, David S. Schwartz, and Christian G. Fritz.

• "The Bar Exam: Then and Now" -- via In Custodia Legis.
  

•  From Process (the blog of the Organization of American Historians): Cindy Hahamovitch on "The Peculiar World of American Sheriffs."

• Independent scholar Patrick S. O'Donnell has posted some thoughts on the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with a helpful roundup of relevant secondary sources. 

• Some JOTWELL items of interest: Ilya Somin reviews David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs; Scott Cummings reviews Ann Southworth's Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending (2023); Jedidiah Kroncke reviews J. Benton Heath's "Economic Sanctions as Legal Ordering," forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of International Law.
  

• ICYMI: Justin Simard on the Citing Slavery Project (Mississippi Free Press). James H. Coleman Jr., the first Black associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, has died (northjersey.com).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Over at Balkinization, a terrific slate of contributors has been reflecting on Alison LaCroix's The Interbellum Constitution. Posts are now available by Aaron Hall, Evelyn Atkinson, Jane Manners, Simon Gilhooley, Anne Twitty, Anna Law, Rachel Shelden, Greg Ablavsky, and Jonathan Gienapp, with more to come.  

• Noah Rosenblum, NYU Law, discusses Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy in WilmerHale's podcast series. "Leveraging his background as a legal historian, Rosenblum provides historical context and explains how applying a traditional Constitutional interpretation to the case increases its complexity."
  

• The Securities and Exchange Commission held a 90th Anniversary Celebration, including remarks by Michael Beschloss and Joel Seligman.  The recording is here.
  

• George Garnett asks why constitutional history is coming back in fashion in university history departments in Britain (History Today).
  

• Learning to teach Milliken v. Bradley at “a two-week institute, 'Democracy in Education: A View from Detroit,' at the Walter P. Reuther Library” at Wayne State University (Chalkbeat).
  

• The Evolution of the U.S. Constitution: A Constitution Day Look Back and Forward, sponsored by the Historical Society of the New York Courts, et al.  It is a conversation with my former student, Tyler Rose Clemons, St. John’s University School of Law.  DRE
  

• The Comfort Fund of the University of Sydney’s law school, founded in July 1940 “to keep legal men and students in the Services in touch with the school and the legal professions, but the main object of the fund was to provide reading matter to those whose name was on the roll.”
  

• George Yin, UVA Law, on what Stanley Surrey would have made of the New Textualism (UVA Law).

• From In Custodia Legis: The Life and Trial of Anne Bonny.

• ICYMI: “Explore the history of politics and the Constitution in ‘A More or Less Perfect Union’” with Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg (NBC Montana).

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

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Thomas McSweeney, William & Mary Law, discusses his book, Priests of the Law, on the Ius Commune podcast.
  

• New on the Talking Legal History podcast, Siobhan M. M. Barco, interviews past ASLH president Michael Willrich, Brandeis University, on his book, American Anarchy, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
  

• Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago, discusses her book, The Interbellum Constitution, on the History Unplugged podcast.
  

• Via JOTWELL: Ezra Rosser (American University) reviews Vanessa Ann Racehorse, "Tribal Health Self-Determination: The Role of Tribal Health Systems in Actualizing the Highest Attainable Standard of Health for American Indians and Alaska Natives," which is forthcoming in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The article includes a discussion of "the history of the legal framework for the federal government’s provision of health care in Indian Country."  
  

• The  FDR Library has posted to YouTube a recording of that book event on Diana B. Henriques’s Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR's Fight to Regulate American Capitalism. 
  

• Just opened at the National Museum of American History: Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism.
  

• Lawbook Exchange has posted its July 2024 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History. Update: for more antiquarian books, check out the auction of the library of the now-defunct Birmingham-Southern College, including a bound report of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.  H/t: GV.
  

• ICYMI: Zachary S. Price says “The President Has No Constitutional Power of Impoundment” .(Notice & Comment).  Someone at the New Yorker is reading past ASLH president Lauren Benton's They Called It Peace.
  

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

Sunday Roundup

• 
  A notice on the retirement of the legal historian Daniel R. Coquillette (BC Law).
  

• Alison LaCroix discusses The Interbellum Constitution on  the Groks Science Podcast.
  

• Carl Schmitt, "The Nazi Jurist Who Haunts Our Broken Politics" (NYT).
  

• Update: In the National Constitution Center’s We the People podcast series, Sai Prakash, University of Virginia Law School, and Michael McConnell, Stanford Law School, discuss the history of presidential power and immunity from the founding to present day, and whether the Court’s decision comports with the original understanding of the Constitution.
  

--Dan Ernst