Treanor and Uelman on Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, and DEI

William Michael Treanor and Amy Uelmen, Georgetown University Law Center, have posted Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, and DEI, which is forthcoming in a special issue of the Jesuit Educational Quarterly entitled "Legal Education and the Society of Jesus."

The ability of Jesuit educational institutions to pursue a central part of their mission that of fostering diverse, equitable and inclusive educational environments is under attack. This essay outlines several dimensions of their religiously-grounded mission and the reasons to strongly protect from government interference the rights of Jesuit universities to implement programs and practices that align with DEI values. First, for Jesuit universities, these programs and practices are rooted in a much deeper culture of the more than 2,000-year old Catholic intellectual tradition and the now 500-year old tradition of Jesuit spirituality. Second, drawing on the classic work of Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, this essay highlights the important role that Jesuit universities play in protecting liberty and democracy. Third, a Jesuit university's control of its curriculum and admissions practices are protected by well-established First Amendment principles, including freedom of religion. In addition, the First Amendment principle of religious freedom also protects Jesuit universities' ability to have race-conscious programs of student support that advance the Jesuit pedagogic mission. The final section of this essay describes some of the curricular and co-curricular innovations and programmatic offerings at Georgetown University Law Center to illustrate how a Jesuit Law School might advance the Jesuit mission of creating an inclusive environment that supports reflective practices and the free exchange of ideas across differences. 

--Dan Ernst 

UVA's JD/MA History Program

Jason Vanger, a UVA law student, has published a full report in the Virginia Law Weekly of a recent information session on Virginia Law's longstanding joint J.D.-M.A. Program in Legal History.  The session was conducted by UVA professor Charles Barzun, who was himself an alumnus of the program.  Here is a taste:

The program is unique among joint degree programs at Virginia Law and elsewhere in that it imposes no additional time or financial burden on law students. Students earn both degrees in the same three years that it would take to earn a J.D., and students pay the same amount in tuition that they would pay for law school alone. The program accomplishes this by counting a number of classes toward both degrees, including required 1L courses like Torts or Constitutional Law, which have substantial historical content in the form of case law. On top of the regular course load for law students, participants will generally take one additional course in the history department for each semester of their 2L and 3L years.

--Dan Ernst

Ph.D. Program in Global History and Governance in Naples

[We have the following announcement of a Ph.D. Program in Global History and Governance.  DRE]

Seven 4-year doctoral scholarships are available at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli (Italy), a.y. 2022-2023

The Program: The Ph.D. in Global History and Governance consists of an advanced course of study and research at the end of which the student defends a thesis based on original and independent scientific work.

The course offers an educational program based on a multi-disciplinary approach centred on history and law and opened to contributions of other disciplines. The Ph.D. program in Global History and Governance is aimed at highly motivated students with a solid personal background and diverse language skills.

The Ph.D. in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original scientific research. The programme focuses on the comparisons, connections, and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet between the 16th and the 20th century and does so by concentrating on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes, and the organization of power; on the interconnections between economic, political, legal, cultural and social factors; and on circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, persons, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.

Program coordinator: Prof. Daniela Luigia Caglioti.  Ph.D. program’s webpage is here.  Funding amount: Annual stipend of € 19,000.00; 50% increase of the scholarship for research abroad; up to 20% of the scholarship in research funds per year; no tuition fees.   Starting date: November 2, 2022

Admission requirements: Candidates must possess an MA/MS degree, an excellent command of English, and possibly a second language other than their mother tongue. They must present a personal statement, a research proposal on a subject relevant to the Ph.D. program, and the discussion of a text that particularly inspired applicants in the choice to pursue their studies as well as in the conception and writing of the proposal itself.

Application deadline: August 24, 2022, 02:00 pm (CET)

Please visit the SSM website for full details of the funding of the award, eligibility, and how to apply:
English version.  Italian version.  For further information, please write to ghg@unina.it

Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship

[We have the following announcement from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.  DRE]

Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship

SHAFR invites applications for its dissertation completion fellowship. SHAFR will make one year-long award in the amount of $25,000 each, to support the writing and completion of the doctoral dissertation in each academic year. This highly competitive fellowship will support the most promising doctoral candidates in the final phase of completing their dissertations. Membership in SHAFR is required.

Applicants should be candidates for the PhD in a humanities or social science doctoral program (most likely history), must have been admitted to candidacy, and must be at the writing stage, with all substantial research completed by the time of the award. Applicants should be working on a topic in the field of U.S. foreign relations history or international history, broadly defined, and must be current members of SHAFR.

Because successful applicants are expected to finish writing the dissertation during the tenure of the fellowship, they should not engage in teaching opportunities or extensive paid work, except at the discretion of the Fellowship Committee. At the termination of the award period, recipients must provide a one page (250-word) report to the SHAFR Council on the use of the fellowship, to be considered for publication in the society newsletter. The submission packet should include:

    A one page application letter describing the project’s significance, the applicant’s status, other support received or applied for and the prospects for completion within the year.
    A three page statement of the research
    A curriculum vitae
    A letter of recommendation from the primary doctoral advisor.

The research statement should run no longer than three double-spaced pages; statements exceeding this limit will not be reviewed. The letter may be single-spaced. Both the letter and statement should be formatted with 1-inch margins and 12 point font, Times New Roman preferred.

ONLINE APPLICATION

Questions can be sent by electronic mail to dissertation-fellowships@shafr.org.

The annual deadline for submissions is 1 April.

Fellowship awards will be decided by around May 1 and will be announced formally during the SHAFR annual meeting in June, with expenditure to be administered during the subsequent academic year.

The Fellowship Committee: Vanessa Walker, Ilaria Scaglia, Tore Olsson

Weekend Roundup

•  The 2021 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians will be virtual.
  

• Via the New York Times: "Pandemic Imperils Promotions for Women in Academia." The article quotes Northwestern's Susan Pearson, among others. 
  

• A number of history departments appear to be pausing graduate admissions, as they navigate COVID-related budgetary constraints and seek to support current students. The University of Pennsylvania recently announced such a pause -- but then clarified that it does not apply to applicants for the J.D./Ph.D. program in American Legal History. [KMT] 
  

• Paradoxes of Universalism, a hybrid but mostly Zoom con-
  
  ference on the fate of "European conceptions of universalism epitomized by the Enlightenment’s faith in the progress of reason," at the University of Helsinki, November 4–6, 2020.  Abstracts here.

•  More on the history of race, legislation, and ICU-bed shortages: recent interview with George Aumoithe (Stony Brook University) on Amanpour and Co. on his recent WaPo Made by History piece. You can watch the video here.

• The Historical Society of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana is hosting Reflections on the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,”  the second of a three sessions in the 13th annual Court History and Continuing Legal Education Symposium, which will take place virtually at 3 p.m. on Oct. 9, with Anita Morgan, senior lecturer in history at IUPUI.  More. 
  

• The Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society has announced the opening of “its newest gallery, The Enforcement Division: A History. This gallery tells the story of the Enforcement Division since its founding in 1972, as its attorneys were confronted again and again not only with the fraudsters who seem constantly to plague the securities markets, but with new schemes and stratagems made possible by political, economic, and technological change.”
  

• Legal historian Adnan Zulfiqar (Rutgers Law School) is guest blogging over at the Islamic Law Blog this month. 
  

• A biographical sketch of the nineteenth-century lawyer Edwin Willits in the Monroe (Michigan) News.
  

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

PhD Program in Global History and Governance, University of Naples

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

PhD Program in Global History and Governance.  Host Institution: Scuola Superiore Meridionale at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli (Italy).  Program coordinator: Prof. Daniela Luigia Caglioti.  Six 4-year doctoral fellowships are available at the newly instituted Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples (Italy) for the academic year 2020-2021

Scholarship amount: € 19,000.00 per year; 50% increase of the scholarship for research abroad; Up to 20% of the scholarship in research funds per year.  Starting date: 2 November 2020

The Program: The Ph.D. in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original academic research.  The course offers a multi-disciplinary training program based on history and law and open to contributions from other disciplines, such as economics and political science. The program focuses on the comparison, connections and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet since the first epoch of global imperialism and does so by focusing on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes and the organization of power, on the interdependencies between economic, political, juridical, cultural and social factors and on the circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, people, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.  For more information, visit here.

Admission requirements: Candidates must possess an MA/MS degree by October 30, 2020, and an excellent command of English.  They must present a research project in a subject relevant to the Ph.D. program.

Required Application Materials:

- Online application form (and a € 50 fee payment for Italian citizens only);
- Copy of an ID document;
- CV (max 2 pages);
- Master’s degree thesis (plus abstract);
- Copy of publications, if present;
- Two letters of recommendation;
- A research proposal (max 3,500 words).

Application deadline: June 30, 2020, 02:00 pm (CET).  Details and application forms are to be found here in Italian and here in English.   For further information please write to ghg@unina.it.

PhD Program in Global History and Governance

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

PhD Program in Global History and Governance, Scuola Superiore Meridionale at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli (Italy).  Program coordinator: Prof. Daniela Luigia Caglioti

Six 4-year doctoral fellowships are available at the newly instituted Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples (Italy) for the academic year 2019-2020

Scholarship amount: € 19,000.00 per year; 50% increase of the scholarship for research abroad;
Up to 20% of the scholarship in research funds per year.  Starting date: 1 November 2019.

The Program: The PhD in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original academic research. The course offers a multi-disciplinary training program based on history and law and open to contributions from other disciplines, such as economics, political science and political philosophy. The program focuses on the comparison, connections and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet since the first epoch of global imperialism and does so by focusing on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes and the organization of power, on the interdependencies between economic, political, juridical, cultural and social factors and on the circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, people, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.  More information are available [here].

Candidates must possess a MA/MS degree by October 30, 2019 and an excellent command of English; They must present a research project in a subject relevant to the PhD program.

Required Application Materials:

• Online application form (and a € 50 fee payment for Italian citizens only);
• Copy of an ID document;
• CV (max 2 pages);
• Master’s degree thesis (plus abstract);
• Copy of publications, if present;
• Two letters of recommendation;
• A research proposal (max 3,500 words).

Application deadline: September 2, 2019, 12:00 (CET).  Details and application forms are to be found [here (Italian version) and here (English version)]. 

For further information, please contact Prof. Daniela Luigia Caglioti, danielaluigia.caglioti@unina.it

Cromwell Dissertation Prize

[We have the following announcement.]

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference.

The author of the winning dissertation receives $5,000. Anyone who received a Ph.D. in 2018 will be eligible for this year’s prize, which is awarded after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

To be considered for this year’s prize, please EITHER send a hard copy of the dissertation and author curriculum vitae to all committee members listed below OR simply e-mail an electronic copy of the dissertation and author curriculum vitae to John Gordan (johngordan3@gmail.com) and H. Robert Baker (robertbaker@gsu.edu) with the subject heading: CROMWELL DISSERTATION PRIZE SUBMISSION no later than June 7, 2019.

Law & Social Inquiry Graduate Student Paper Competition

[We have the following announcement.]

The 2019 Law & Social Inquiry Graduate Student Paper Competition is now open!

The editors of Law & Social Inquiry are pleased to announce our annual competition for the best journal-length paper in the field of law and social science written by a graduate or law student. Law & Social Inquiry publishes empirical and theoretical studies of sociolegal processes from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Entries will be accepted starting January 1, 2019 and must be received by March 1, 2019.

LSI invites direct submissions from graduate and law students and nominations of student work from faculty. The author must be a graduate student or law student at the time the paper was written and when submitted. Faculty nominations should include a short description along with the paper and contact details for the student. Submissions will be evaluated by our editors.  The winning submission will be sent to selected scholars for advisory reviews to aid with revisions prior to publication. All submissions (direct and faculty nominated) are weighted equally in the competition. The winning paper will be published in Law & Social Inquiry and the author(s) will receive a total cash prize of $500 (US).

Please send your article as a Microsoft Word document to lsi-abf@abfn.org. Please indicate that (1) you intend to be considered in the competition, (2) you are currently a graduate student, and (3) you have not submitted your article to other journals for publication. Submissions are limited to one paper per student; articles may not be altered or resubmitted with corrections once they have been received by our office.

Submissions must include a title page with a mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number, and an abstract of no more than 200 words. The total length of submissions, including references and footnotes, must not exceed 15,000 words.

For additional information, please go [here].   Questions regarding the competition can be directed to Willa Sachs: wsachs@abfn.org, (312) 988-6517

CFP: A PhD Workshop on Minorities in Finland

[We have the following CFP.]

Writing In, Writing Out: Historcizing Agency, Mobility and Possibility.  Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, April 26th 2019

We invite papers for the PhD Workshop organised in conjunction with the Åbo Akademi's annual seminar in the minority research taking place on April 25th.  The annual seminar of the Åbo Akademi University minority research profile will explore histories and historiographies of minority positions. It will trace practices of exclusion and inclusion, agency and mobility through archives and the materialities of class, race, body, gender and religion. How, what and whose stories are being told and untold - and by whom? How can they be told otherwise?

Confirmed seminar speakers are Milinda Banerjee (Presidency University), Daniel Blackie (University of Oulu), Gunlög Fur (Linnaeus University), Mona Oraby (Amherst College), Dorottya Szikra (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Miika Tervonen (University of Helsinki).

Speakers will also act as commentators at the doctoral workshop.  The organizers invite doctoral researchers approaching histories and historiographies of minority position from diverse disciplinary angles to submit paper proposals critically exploring dominant and marginalized minority narratives, subjectivities and identities they produce/have produced and resistance they engender/have engendered.

Interested PhD students can submit abstracts not exceeding 500 words by January 15th to both magdalena.kmak[at]abo.fi and pamela.slotte[at]abo.fi Selected speakers will be asked to submit full papers of approx. 3000 words by March 30th.  The organizers are not able to pay for travels or accommodation of selected workshop speakers.

ASLH Student Research Colloquium: Deadline Approaching

[We have the following reminder of the approach of another deadline.]

The American Society for Legal History will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, Nov. 7, and Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018, immediately preceding the ASLH’s annual meeting in Houston, Texas. The SRC annually enables eight Ph.D. students and law students to discuss their in-progress dissertations and articles with distinguished ASLH-affiliated scholars. This year, the Department of History at Rice University will host the event.

The SRC’s target audience includes early-post-coursework Ph.D. students and historically minded law students. The colloquium seeks to introduce such students to legal history, to each other, and to the legal-historical scholarly community.  Students working in all chronological periods, including ancient and medieval history, and all geographical fields, including non-U.S. history, are encouraged to apply, as are students who have not yet received any formal training in legal history.  Applicants who have not had an opportunity to present their work to the ASLH are particularly encouraged to apply.  A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group. The group will discuss these papers at the colloquium, under the guidance of faculty directors. The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.

The application deadline is July 15, 2018. Applicants should submit:

• a cover letter describing, among other things, how far along you are and how;
• many years remain in your course of study;
• a CV;
• a two-page, single-spaced “research statement” that begins with a title and proceeds to describe the in-progress research project that you propose to present at the colloquium; and
• a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from, or together with, the other materials.

Organizers will notify all applicants of their decisions by August 15, 2018. Please direct questions and applications to John Wertheimer at: srcproposals@aslh.net.

Doctoral Program in Global History and Governance

We have word of the establishment of a Ph.D. program in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy:

The PhD in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original academic research.  The course offers a multi-disciplinary training program based on history and law and open to contributions from other disciplines, such as economics, political science and political philosophy. The program focuses on the comparison, connections and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet since the first epoch of global imperialism and does so by focusing on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes and the organization of power, on the interdependencies between economic, political, juridical, cultural and social factors and on the circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, people, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.
Members of the PhD board can offer training and preparation for research at the level of the best international centers in the following areas:

    History and historiography
    European empires of the modern and contemporary age
    States, wars and violence in the nineteenth and twentieth century
    History of slavery and forced labor
    The legal heritage of Europe and its integration
    Religions and the sacred in the modern and contemporary world
    Ideas, conceptions and practices of citizenship
    States, nations, languages, peoples, classes
    The globalization of law

The PhD course in Global History and Governance is designed for highly prepared and motivated students who also manage different languages and willing to study in multi and interdisciplinary environment.  Classes are taught either in Italian or English.  Candidates for the PhD are normally expected to hold a master’s degree (or an equivalent qualification) in a subject relevant to the intended topic of study.  The Coordinator is Daniela Luigia Caglioti and the PhD Board for 2018-2019 is here.  The deadline for applying is August 24, 2018.

Balancing interests

In today’s post, I will share how I ultimately landed on the research project that became my book.  Like many of your stories, I imagine, it is one that involves dedicated teachers, visceral reactions to the material they taught me, a bit of luck, and a willingness to make adjustments to my plans along the way.

Before entering Tulane as a bright-eyed undergraduate, I knew I loved history and wanted to major in it, but I also planned to go to law school when I finished college. My love for history only grew as I began my studies. I took a course during my sophomore year of college on slavery and freedom in the antebellum South taught by Dr. Betty Wood, a visiting scholar from the University of Cambridge.  I was hooked.  I remember feeling so frustrated by my history education to that point and angry that I knew practically nothing about the system of chattel slavery that existed for so much of the history of the European colonies in America and the United States.  I read Solomon Northup’s narrative, recently made famous by the movie Twelve Years a Slave.  I read scholarly analyses of slavery and debated its meaning in class. The indignation of not knowing the extent or the horrors of this topic lit a fire under me that lingered long after my initial exposure in Dr. Wood’s class.  I imagine that other researchers must have similar stories of being drawn to the topics left out of high school history courses. 

After a couple of years of college, my interest in law school waned.  I was still drawn to the study of law, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer.  If I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure that I had a good sense of what being a lawyer was actually like, either.  I didn’t want to spend three years away from full-time reading and studying history (though I recognize now that law school does involve quite a bit of history, too!). While having these doubts about law school, I had the great fortune to take an American Legal History class with the late Dr. Judith Schafer.  Dr. Schafer made everything click.  I realized I could combine my interests in history and law by pursuing a graduate degree in legal history.

Dr. Schafer was also a scholar of the legal history of slavery, so her course introduced me to this particular sub-field.  While I was searching for a senior thesis topic, Dr. Schafer sent me to meet with the late Marie Windell (an archivist at the University of New Orleans, where the manuscript records of the Louisiana Supreme Court are housed).  With Ms. Windell’s advice, I wrote a senior thesis on a Louisiana Supreme Court case, Eulalie and her children v. Long & Mabry (9 La. Ann. 9 (1854)), which has since become the subject of the brilliant plenary address (at the ASLH meeting in Miami in 2013) and an article by the most recent ASLH President, Rebecca J. Scott (“Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status: The Puzzle of Prescription”, Law and History Review, 35:1(2017): 9-30).  My senior thesis was my first effort at archival research, and I loved it.

With some basic research skills in hand, and my newfound passion for issues related to slavery and freedom, I applied to graduate school.  I was delighted to be accepted to the Ph.D. program at Duke, where I planned to work with Laura Edwards and Peter Wood.  That part of my plan worked out.  My tentative dissertation project idea?  Not so much.  At the time, I had hoped to shift my interests in slavery, freedom, and law from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth.  I was fascinated with the seeming contradictions between the rhetoric of the Revolution and the existence of chattel slavery among the nation’s founders.  Like many students, I discovered that a few other scholars had thought about this issue, so I returned to the drawing board. 

The influence of my former mentor, Judy Schafer, made a major difference in the trajectory of my career for a second time.  She emailed me about the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, which includes hundreds of freedom suit case files that had recently been scanned and made available online: a grad student’s dream! (As a side note, in addition to the freedom suits files, the Project also contains collections of cases related to Native Americans, Lewis and Clark, and the fur trade.)  Although I wrote my senior thesis on a nineteenth-century topic, I continued to want to look into the earlier era, but I also needed a masters’ thesis topic for the first-year research seminar I was taking that semester. 

I decided to give the project a try. I soon discovered that this nineteenth-century topic allowed me to dive into the same core issue that sparked my interest in the American Revolution: the relationship between slavery and freedom.  St. Louis was a border city on the Mississippi River with a relatively small—but powerful—elite slaveholding population.  Its location and its population made the city a crossroads between slavery and freedom.  The relationship of St. Louis to the free state of Illinois, for example, raised important questions for the courts. St. Louis judges and juries had to grapple with interstate comity issues in a region with wide variations in personal status.  The richness of the freedom suit files is undeniable. Its vast material on the lives and experiences of enslaved people continues to enthrall me to this day.  Once I read the case files and began writing about them, I knew I had found my long-term project.  Twelve years later, I published my book on the same topic.

In my next post, I will discuss the challenges of balancing feedback from a variety of sources in the writing and publishing process.

Weekend Roundup

• James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale University. presents The Two Primitive Modes of Imagining Property: Owning Land, Owning Human Beings at the Barat House, Boston College Law School, on Monday, September 18, 2017, at 5:00 p.m.  The event is sponsored by BC’s Legal History Roundtable and Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.  

• We were pleased to note, in a back issue of the Minnesota Law Library's publication The Colophon, that among the student notebooks dating from 1948-1952 it had acquired was one for Stefan Riesenfeld's course, Modern Social Legislation.

•  We’ve previously noted the publication of the second volume of The Causes of War, by Alexander Gillespie, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Professor of Law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand with Hart Publishing.  Hart has just announced the publication of the third volume, covering the years 1400 CE to 1650 CE.  Mention Legal History Blog for a 20 percent discount!

• We have an announcement, in Portuguese, of a Postgraduate Specialization in Ethics, Law and Political Thought - a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts, Philosophy Center (CIFUL) and Theory and History of Law, Research Center of the University of Lisbon (THD-ULisboa). 

• Via the Faculty Lounge, we have word that Peking University School of Transnational Law is inviting applications for entry-level and lateral tenure track scholars of severl fields, including all areas of China Law and Legal History.  Inquiries should be addressed to Professor Mark Feldman, Chair, Faculty Appointments Committee, at mfeldman@stl.pku.edu.cn or mfeldman97@gmail.com.

• Sam Erman, Associate Professor of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, presented "The Constitution and the New U.S. Expansion: Debating the Status of the Islands" at the University of Wisconsin Law School on September 13, 2017.  H/t: Legal Scholarship Blog.

• Richard H. Underwood, University of Kentucky College of Law, will celebrate the release of his new book, Gaslight Lawyers: Criminal Trials & Exploits in Gilded Age New York, at Lexington, Kentucky's Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7.p. on Tuesday, September 19.  H/t: UK

• "This fall, NYU Law students and Steinhardt education doctoral students are partnering with public school teachers on a new more in depth Constitutional history curriculum that invites New York City high schoolers to 'think as lawyers,' exploring how different Supreme Court cases have shaped have shaped the way the nation's founding document has been interpreted over time."  More.

• ICYMI: Robert L. Tsai, in Politico, on Law And Order: The Troubling Sheriffs’ Movement That Joe Arpaio Supports.

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

The Young Interdisciplinary Scholar in a Global Academic Market

Working historically almost always implies some sort of critical position on past scholarship. Hardly any topic of investigation is fully novel, so new sources or new theories of interpretation are brought to bear on old sources or old theories of interpretation to advance the state of knowledge in one’s respective field. In the context of transnational and comparative legal history, this is almost a given as past scholarship is often presented as an active enabler of colonialism, imperialism and all manner of undesirable cross-cultural practices.

In my own work on China, I routinely feel this pull as I trace back misconceptions about Chinese law in American legal culture through different eras. Perhaps no better example is the long-standing impact of Max Weber’s characterizations of Chinese law as developed in his four-fold typology of legal ideal types. The academic and popular life of Weber’s use of Chinese law, parallel to his use of Islamic law, grew out of its redeployment in negative normative contrasts with Western law (even though Weber’s critique of the common law is generally elided in the process). In particular, Talcott Parson’s embedding of his interpretation of Weber in modernization theory helped normalize many of these pernicious characterizations, which have achieved near hegemonic status in legal studies.

This may seem odd as a way of opening a post on the globalizing market for young academics. But I am motivated to do so because much advice regarding new opportunities for teaching beyond one’s home country is so focused on entry-level hiring. This is understandable for numerous reasons. The intense competition for scarce academic position induces a now well-recognized anxiety for most graduate students throughout their training. And as someone who made the leap to securing my first full-time teaching post abroad, I often get very detailed questions about how to engage the emerging market for international legal teaching from those facing these anxieties.

I am generally happy to do so with the caveat that as increasingly common it is for US-trained legal academics to teach abroad, most experiences are still fairly singular. A quick comparison of the internet resources for the entry-level hiring markets in economics and law reveals a wide-gulf in expectations. There are both demand and supply reasons for the late-coming US participation in the international legal market, many of which anyone who works in comparative or transnational law understands well.

But I preface this post with comments on Weber with the same objective as when I carry out conversations about how to access the international legal academic market(s). For all my criticism of Weber’s comparative legal sociology, much of which has been twisted beyond his own intentions, I generally consider Weber an inspiration, and singularly brilliant. When I teach socio-legal courses, I always try to relay to students how pioneering and innovative Weber’s work was in founding modern social science and legal sociology specifically.

But in the realm of comparison, for his work on both economics and religion, Weber was limited by the possibilities of his era. He could not flick a switch and encounter Chinese legal discourse in real-time, nor was he likely to have Chinese interlocutors at the conferences he attended. More concretely, the material sources on Chinese law that he had access to were filtered through the decisively Sinophobic turn that had afflicted European studies of China in the 19^th century. To his credit, his use of comparative examples in his legal sociology was aimed at better explaining Europe than it was to specifically diagnose foreign developments. In fact, when I read Weber’s opus Economy and Society, I am still struck by the industry required to produce such an interdisciplinary and synthetic work in an age with quite different informational technologies readily available. If Weber were alive today, I have little reservation that his depictions of foreign law would not mirror those he produced almost a century past.

Weekend Roundup

• • The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research is accepting proposals for research fellowships for advanced-standing PhD students. Deadline: Feb.15, 2017. Full details here.
  
  
  • The 2017 Law & Social Inquiry Graduate Student Paper Competition is now open--until March 1, 2017. The announcement is here.
  
  
  • And on the topic of the LSI competition: congratulations to Evelyn Atkinson, University of Chicago, who is the winner of the 2016 competition with her article, "The Burden of Taking Care: Children, Attractive Nuisance, and the Safety First Movement." Watch for it in LSI in 2017!
  
  
  • A legal history classic made its way into the pages of the New York Times last week. "Pet Pigs of New York: Illegal, Embattled, Beloved" includes a link to Hendrik Hartog's famous 1985 Wisconsin Law Review article, "Pigs and Positivism." (H/t: @jessicaklowe)
   
  • "Columbia Unearths Its Ties to Slavery": The New York Times article, via HNN
  
  
  • ICYMI: This starts out as a familiar lament but takes a surprising (for us) turn, until we saw that it appears on the website of the Philadelphia Church of God.  Also, those radical professors are really up to.  H/t: Joanna Grisinger.
  
  
  • The Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University is hosting a graduate student conference on May 19, 2017 on punishment and its discontents. The deadline is just around the corner: Feb.1, 2017. Details here. H/t: Law and History CRN
  
  
  Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.