Blumenthal Named Prosser Professor

Congratulations to Susanna Blumenthal on her appointment as the William L. Prosser Professor of Law!  From the University of Minnesota Law School’s announcement:

Susanna Blumenthal (credit)

Blumenthal has been teaching at the Law School since 2007. Her work focuses on American legal history and emphasizes the historical relationship between law and the human sciences. She is the author of an award-winning book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) and articles that have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Law and History Review. She has also received several research fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Forbath to Be LAPA Fellow

The Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University has announced its fellows for 2018-2019.  They include the constitutional and legal historian William Forbath, Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law, Associate Dean of Research, and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.  The other fellows are  Amna Akbar, Associate Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University; Jay Butler, Assistant Professor of Law, William & Mary Law School; Yukiko Koga, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Hunter College, City University of New York; and Elizabeth Sepper, Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law.

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Honor Sachs, University of Colorado at Boulder, upon her naming as a National Humanities Center fellow for her project, “Freedom by a Judgment: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family.”  H/t: Chronicle of Higher Education. 

• Here are an obituary and another press release on the death of Joseph Gordon Hylton.

• We were intrigued by a report of the publication of “A Guide to Researching Land in Oklahoma at the Oklahoma Historical Society,” by Katie Bush, a research librarian at the Oklahoma History Center.  According to The Oklahoman, the guide “condenses Oklahoma land history to the basics, from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to the Free Homes Act of 1900.”

• The SEC Historical Society has archived a podcast of a Roundtable of SEC Enforcement Directors, held on April 3 at Georgetown Law.  “Dr. Harwell Wells, Professor, Temple University Beasley School of Law, discusses key issues and challenges that occurred during the tenures of current Enforcement Division co-directors, Stephanie Avakian and Steven Peikin, and former division directors Andrew J. Ceresney, Stephen Cutler, Robert Khuzami, Gary Lynch, William McLucas, Stanley Sporkin, Linda Thomsen, and Richard Walker.”  Topic include “the origins of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the development of insider trading, and the impact of technology on the markets and the retail investor.”

• Via H-Law, we have the CFP for "A Century of Internationalisms: The Promise and Legacies of the League of Nations."

• The draft program for the Policy History Conference at Arizona State is out.  As in the past, it includes much legal history!  

• The remaining, May 2018, sessions in the “Uma Justiça para o Século XXI” at THD-ULisboa are listed here.

• ICYMI:  Cokie Roberts on the history of EPA.  You hardly need us to follow reviews of the new documentary on RBG, but here's one anyway.

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

Siegel elected to American Philosophical Society

We have learned that Reva Siegel (Yale Law School) has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. More.

Other members of this year's class of 35 include Eric Foner (Columbia University), Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada, and Janet Napolitano (President, University of California).  

Congratulations to all!

Weekend Roundup

• The Organization of American Historians recently announced the winners of its annual awards. You can see them all here.

• Over in JOTWELL's Worklaw section, you'll find an admiring review of legal historian Deborah Dinner's "Beyond 'Best Practices': Employment-Discrimination Law in the Neoliberal Era," Indiana Law Journal (2017). Reviewer Henry L. Chambers, Jr. (Richmond School of Law) suggests that it should be required reading for anyone studying employment discrimination law.  

• On May 14, 2018, from 14:15 - 15:15, the seminar Legal Transfer in the Common Law World continues at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History with a presentation by Valentin Seidler, University of Vienna, Legal Transfers and Development in British Colonies in the 20th Century?

• “Harvard Law School Professor Intisar Rabb has been awarded the Trailblazer Award by the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association.  Rabb, the director of Islamic Legal Studies at HLS, was recognized on March 22 at the organization’s 45th anniversary gala.”  More.

• Congratulations to Anne Fleming, Georgetown Law, upon her election to the Board of Trustees of the Business History Conference.

• Keith Whittington’s Workshop in Constitutional Development at Princeton had quite a double bill last Monday: "The Jacksonian Makings of the Taney Court," by Mark Graber, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law; and "Building the Administrative State: Courts and the Admission of Chinese Persons to the United States, 1870s-1920s," by Carol Nackenoff, Swarthmore College, and Julie Novkov, State University of New York-Albany. 

• A recording of the ceremony for my installation at Georgetown Law as Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal History is here.  DRE

• ICYMI:  A powerful memorial in Montgomery remembers the victims of lynching in WaPo.  And here.  Also the HLS press release on Tomiko Brown-Nagin's appointment as dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.  Rebeca Zietlow on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, over at Faculty Lounge.

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

Two Business History Prizes to Balleisen

Congratulations to Edward J. Balleisen, Duke University, for his receipt of two prizes at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference’s annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, April 5-7, 2018.  The first was the Harold F. Williamson Prize, awarded biannually to a mid-career scholar who has made significant contributions to the field of business history.  Previous recipients include Christopher McKenna, Sally Clarke, Richard R. John, Kenneth Lipartito, and Naomi Lamoreaux.  Professor Balleisen also received the Ralph Gomory Prize, awarded for “historical work on the effects of business enterprises on the economic conditions of the countries in which they operate,” for Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton University Press, 2017).

While we’re at it, we’ll note that the Philip Scranton Prize for the best article published in Enterprise & Society went to two articles with legal themes: David Higgins and Aashish Velkar, “’Spinning the yarn’: Institutions, law, and standards, c. 1880-1914,” 18 (3): 591-631, and Patricio Sáiz and Rafael Castro, “Foreign direct investment and intellectual property rights: International intangible assets in Spain over the long term,” 18 (4): 846-892.  H/t: Anne Fleming.

Goluboff Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has announced its newly elected members. Among them is legal historian Risa Goluboff (University of Virginia Law). Here's an excerpt from the University of Virginia press release:

Goluboff, a nationally renowned legal historian who became the first female dean of UVA Law in 2016, is also the first woman on the school’s faculty to be elected to the academy. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century. She is an affiliated scholar at the Miller Center and a faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2017. 

“It’s a privilege to be elected to the academy and to join such an esteemed group of scholars,” Goluboff said. “I’m deeply honored. I’m also thankful for the support the Law School and UVA have given me over the years, which has been critical to my growth as a legal historian and scholar.”

Congratulations to Risa Goluboff!

Immigration & Ethnic History Society Awards to Kang, Hirota

The Immigration and Ethnic History Society just announced the winners of its annual awards, and legal history fared well.  

According to the Society's Twitter account, the Theodore Saloutos Book Award, "for the book judged best on any aspect of the immigration history of the United States," went to S. Deborah Kang (California State University, San Marcos) for The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 (Oxford University Press, 2017). Julian Lim (Arizona State University) received an honorable mention for Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

The First Book Award went to Hidetaka Hirota (City College of New York) for Expelling the Poor:
Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Congratulations to all!

Cromwell Book Prize Call for Nominations:

We have the following announcement, about the upcoming nomination deadline for the Cromwell Book Prize:

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards annually a $5,000 book prize for excellence in scholarship in the field of American Legal History by an early career scholar.  The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty not yet tenured.  The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference.  The prize is limited to a first book, wholly or primarily written while the author was untenured.  The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. The Committee will consider books bearing a copyright date of 2017. The Committee shall consider a book in the year of its copyright date or of its actual publication. However, no book shall be considered for the prize more than once.

To nominate a book, please send copies of it and the curriculum vitae of its author to John D, Gordan, III, Chair of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee, and to each member of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Committee with a postmark no later than May 30, 2018.

John D. Gordan, III
Secretary of the Cromwell Foundation
1133 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10128

Prof. Sophia Z. Lee, Chair
Professor of Law and History, Deputy Dean
University of Pennsylvania Law School
3501 Sansom St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Prof. Felice Batlan
130 South Canal Street, Unit 9Q
Chicago, Il. 60606

Prof. Jonathan Levy
1126 E. 59th Street
Department of History
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL 60637

Prof. Thomas Mackey
101 Gottschalk Hall
Department of History
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292

Past winners here.

Golieb Fellowships to Basile, Hall

The New York University School of Law has just released the names of next year's Samuel I. Golieb Fellows in Legal History. They are Marco Basile and Aaron Hall.

Marco Basile holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, as well as an M. Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge. Prior to starting the Golieb fellowship, he will have completed two judicial clerkships, for the Hon. David J. Barron on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for the Hon. Paul J. Watford on the Ninth Circuit. Following his year as a Golieb fellow, he is scheduled to clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court. His research focuses on the slave trade and U.S. international legal thought. Published work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, among other venues.

Aaron Hall is currently a fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to starting the Ph.D., he received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, clerked for the Hon. Lawrence E. Kahn in the Northern District of New York, and worked as an associate at Ropes & Gray.  His dissertation is titled “Claiming the Founding: Slavery and Constitutional History in Antebellum America.” Published and forthcoming work appears in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, Law & Social Inquiry, and the Law & History Review. 

Congratulations to Marco Basile and Aaron Hall! If you have fellowship or post-doc news to report, feel free to contact us.

Sharafi Receives Honors

The University of Wisconsin Law School is justly proud over the support LHB Blogger Mitra Sharafi has won for "her latest book project, 'Fear of the False: Forensic Science in Colonial India,' a cross-disciplinary examination of Indian law and forensics under British rule."  Read all about it here.

Davis Center Fellows in 2018-19

[We have the following announcement of Davis Center fellows at Princeton's History Dept. for the 2018-19 year (theme: Law and Legalities).]

2018-19 Davis Center Fellows

Tatiana Borisova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, “‘For My Enemies, the Law’: A Social History of Law, Justice, and Terror in Russia, 1860–1918,” spring 2018

Tom Johnson, University of York, “Legal Artifacts: Fabricating Law in Medieval England,” year

Lena Salaymeh, Tel Aviv Law School, “Secularislamization: Secularization and Contemporary Islamic Law,” year                  

Franziska Seraphim, Boston College, “Geographies of Justice: Japan, Germany, and the Allied War Crimes Program, 194­3–1958,” fall 2018


 Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin Law School, “Fear of the False: Forensic Science in Colonial India,” fall 2018


Elizabeth Thornberry, Johns Hopkins University, “Imagining African Law: South Africa, 1870–1927,” year

Barbara Welke, University of Minnesota, “The Course of a Life,” year                                        

2018-19 Law & Difference Postdoctoral Fellows

George Aumoithe, PhD in History 2018, Columbia University

Jon Connolly, JD and PhD in History 2017, Stanford University

Further information is available here.

Sullivan Named Berger-Howe Fellow

The Program in Law and History at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce that William P. Sullivan will be the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow for 2018-2019.  A graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School, he is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of classics and history at the University of Chicago, where his dissertation is entitled, “Relevance in the Civil Law Tradition: The Emergence of the Roman-Canon Law of Positions.”  He was a Legal History Fellow at Yale Law School and is currently clerking for Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

ACLS Fellowships to Ghachem, Sharafi

We've learned that the American Council of Learned Societies has awarded residential fellowships to two legal historians: Malick Ghachem (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and our own Mitra Sharafi (University of Wisconsin).

Ghachem will be in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during academic year 2018-2019, working on a project titled "In the Name of the Colony: The Revolt against the Indies Company in Haiti, 1720-1725."

Sharafi will be in residence at the National Humanities Center during academic year 2020-2021 and plans to work on "Fear of the False: Forensic Science in Colonial India."

You can see a full list of the fellows here, as well as read abstracts of their projects. Congratulations to all!

H/t: Martha Jones

A Post-Doc at Northwestern's Center for Legal Studies

[We have the following announcement.]

Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies invites applications from outstanding candidates for a full-time, two-year, non-renewable teaching and research post-doctoral fellowship beginning fall 2018. The purpose of the fellowship is to recognize and support original interdisciplinary research and teaching in the study of law and inequality in race, crime, policing, mass incarceration, civil rights, and related subject areas.

Eligible candidates will hold a PhD in sociology, political science, history, psychology, economics or related disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields by the start of the appointment (August 15, 2018) and have a record of excellence in teaching and research in law and racial inequality.

The fellowship will be held in residence in Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies for two academic years (2018-19 & 2019-20).  Fellows will teach two (2) undergraduate courses per year of the fellowship (4 total) and participate in the intellectual life of the Center including attending speaker events, workshops and reading groups in interdisciplinary legal studies.

Application info here.

Baldy Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, 2018-2020: Call for Applications

UPDATE: The deadline for these fellowships has been extended to March 9.

We have the following call for applications:

The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo plans to award several fellowships to scholars pursuing important topics in law, legal institutions, and social policy. Applications are invited from junior and senior scholars from law, the humanities, and the social and natural sciences. 

Fellows are expected to participate regularly in Baldy Center events, but otherwise have no obligations beyond vigorously pursuing their research. Fellows receive standard university research privileges (access to university libraries, high-speed Internet, office space, computer equipment, phone, website space, working paper series, etc.), and are encouraged to develop collaborative research projects with faculty members where appropriate. 

Post-Doctoral Fellowships are available to individuals who have completed the Ph.D. or J.D. but have not yet begun a tenure-track appointment. Post-Doctoral Fellows will receive a stipend of $40,000, up to $2000 in annual professional travel support, and appropriate relocation assistance. Post-doctoral fellowships are ordinarily for a period of two academic years. Information on current and past Baldy Post-Doctoral Fellows is available here.

Senior Fellowships are available for established scholars who wish to work at the Center, typically during a funded sabbatical or research leave. Awardees will receive a living expense allowance of $1,800 per month during the period of their residence as well as appropriate relocation assistance. Senior Fellows typically spend one semester in residence, but other terms are possible. Information on current and past Baldy Senior Fellows is available here.

For more information and to apply, follow the link: Baldy Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies 2018.

Research Grants at State Historical Society of Iowa

[We have the following announcement.]

The State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) announces a grant program for the 2018/2019 academic year. SHSI will award up to ten stipends of $1,000 each to support original research and interpretive writing related to the history of Iowa or Iowa and the Midwest. Preference will be given to applicants proposing to pursue previously neglected topics or new approaches to or interpretations of previously treated topics. SHSI invites applicants from a variety of backgrounds, including academic and public historians, graduate students, and independent researchers and writers. Applications will be judged on the basis of their potential for producing work appropriate for publication in The Annals of Iowa. Grant recipients will be expected to produce an annotated manuscript targeted for The Annals of Iowa, SHSI’s scholarly journal.

Applications for the 2018/2019 awards must be postmarked by April 15, 2018. Download application guidelines from our website or request guidelines or further information from:

Research Grants
State Historical Society of Iowa
402 Iowa Avenue
Iowa City  IA  52240-1806

Phone: 319-335-3931
e-mail: marvin-bergman@uiowa.edu

The Charles W. McCurdy Fellowship in Legal History

[We are pleased to have this announcement from our friends at the University of Virginia School of Law.]

In partnership with the National Fellows Program, the University of Virginia School of Law is soliciting applications for outstanding junior scholars for the 2018-19 Charles W. McCurdy fellowship in legal history.  The fellowship allows scholars to complete dissertations in legal history while in residence at the Law School, and the fellow will be expected to spend the majority of his or her time on dissertation research.  The University’s nationally renowned legal history program, which includes a workshop, a writing group, a JD/MA program in legal history, and an engaged community of interested scholars, provides a rich environment for a junior scholar.  The fellow will also help coordinate the legal history workshop and has the opportunity to present their work there.  As a part of the National Fellows Program, the McCurdy fellow is paired with a “dream mentor” – a senior scholar in the fellow’s field from anywhere in the world – who will provide critical guidance during the year.  The fellow will also participate in the National Fellows’ fall and spring conferences and will receive training on how to reach broader scholarly and non-scholarly audiences.  The fellow will receive a stipend of $32,000 for the year. 

Applicants must have completed the coursework toward a Ph.D. in history.  Strong preference will be given to applicants who hold a J.D. and who will complete their dissertation by the end of the fellowship year.  For the application, please see the National Fellows Program website.  Please direct any questions to Professor Cynthia Nicoletti at cln4x@virginia.edu.  Applications will be accepted until February 28, 2018.

Balancing feedback

One of the greatest blessings I’ve had in my journey to book publication is the feedback I’ve received along the way.  While feedback from others is invaluable to the scholarly process, it can also present some challenges on how to proceed when readers don’t agree.  Today’s post will attempt to offer some advice, or at least share some experiences, related to incorporating others’ suggestions for your work.

As someone who suffers regularly from imposter syndrome, I continue to ask for feedback on nearly everything I write.  I have benefitted enormously from the generosity of mentors, peers, and senior scholars who have offered suggestions for improving my work.  Writing my book’s acknowledgments section was a highlight of the publication process for me, and it ended up being pretty lengthy (and I’m still sure I missed somebody!).  But sometimes, receiving lots of feedback can present its own challenges.

Graduate students often face this dilemma when committee members disagree.  Sometimes the disagreements are loud and unpleasant.  Sometimes the student gets caught in the middle of personal feuds or professional differences.  Luckily for me, my committee members never reached this level of disagreement, though they did not always see eye-to-eye on how I should write my dissertation.  At a couple of moments during the writing and revision process, sets of comments from my different committee members even directly contradicted each other—i.e. “needs more historiography”, “historiography should be relegated to the footnotes”.  At my dissertation defense, I did my best to use these varying perspectives to my advantage by allowing the committee to debate some of their differing suggestions. 

Someone once told me that the best dissertation defenses involved the committee talking more about the future direction of the work than the student. If that’s the case (and in my experience at my own and subsequent defenses, it is), my defense was top notch.  At the time, I thought this was great because it got me off the hook. I scribbled furiously to capture as much of their combined wisdom as possible and had to say relatively little.  But this was more than an avoidance technique; I soaked in the feedback as much as possible, hoping to get a sense of how scholars from varying perspectives might respond to my work.  Bringing together a strong, diverse committee of interests helps your work speak to wider audiences. 

I followed my Ph.D. graduation with a memorable year in Madison as the Law and Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s law school.  My postdoc kicked off with the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute, a gathering of junior scholars who spend a week reading and discussing various works of legal history together.  The group then uses a second week to read and comment on each other’s article-length writing samples (I highly recommend the Hurst Institute to any junior scholars who might be reading this!).  That week, I collected a giant binder full of feedback from my fellow “Hursties” and our fearless leader Barbara Welke. 

Shortly after the Hurst Institute, the supervisor for my postdoc, Howard Erlanger, convened a meeting with several Wisconsin history and law faculty who generously read and commented on my entire dissertation.  Once again, I soaked in lots of excellent advice, rushing to get it all down (thanks again to these excellent readers!).  The meeting felt a bit like a second dissertation defense—in a good way.  I learned so much from the broad perspectives represented. 

During my year in Madison, I followed the advice of my Duke mentors.  They recommended I spend the year reading broadly, working on broader conceptual issues, and digging into some of the new research I added to the book.  [side note: this advice might have been different if I did not already have a job at Auburn lined up after my postdoc!] I sat in on a graduate course in the African Diaspora, and I plowed through reading lists on various topics (legal culture, the history of the jury, etc.) with an assistant professor working on similar conceptual issues.  I also completed significant additional research in appellate freedom suit opinions.  At the end of the year, I drafted an article that I submitted to the Journal of Southern History and awaited the first anonymous responses to my research. 

If by this point, my experience with feedback sounds typical, the readers’ reports from the JSH are definitely not the norm.  Six months of waiting to hear news of my article resulted in six readers’ reports.  Sorting through comments like “this is a good but not great article” left me humbled but determined to guide the article to publication.  Digesting so many different sets of written comments left me with patches of hair missing as I struggled to make contradictory suggestions somehow line up. Some reviewers wanted additional detail about the statutes and particular legal forms of the freedom suits, while other comments suggested that I should streamline this information or cut it. All of the readers wanted additional historiographical context, but they varied in terms of what historiographies I should primarily address.

It would never have occurred to me at that stage to call the editor of the Journal. While I cannot remember who suggested that I do that, I can strongly advise anyone in a similar situation to ask for this type of conversation.  Sometimes when dealing with multiple sets of (contradictory) comments, the best thing to do is to try to bring in someone from the outside.  Whether the person is from the publishing side or a trusted colleague, mentor, or senior scholar, an outside perspective can really help you make sense of things.  More on this after the jump…

CEU Fellowships in Demise of Constitutionalism

[We are moving this up because the deadline is fast approaching: Jan.15, 2018]

The Central European University's Legal Studies Department is offering two 12-month postdoctoral/research fellowships as part of its Demise of Constitutionalism Project. The deadline is Jan.15, 2018, but "applications are welcome continuously until the fellowships are awarded to suitable candidates."

Full details after the jump.
H/t: LSAtalk