Weekend Roundup

• Over at JOTWELL, we've noticed several reviews of interest: Maya Manian (American University Washington College of Law) wrote about Aziza Ahmed's Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS (2025); Martha Ertman (University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law) reviewed Dorothy Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past (2026); Jedidiah Kroncke (University of Hong Kong) spotlighted María E. Montoya's A Workplace of Their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle Over Industrial Democracy (2026). 

• The California Law Review's podcast has posted an episode on Michael Banerjee's "What Harvard’s Lawsuit Should Have Said" (published in the journal's online companion in August 2025).

• On the history-of-higher-ed theme, Banerjee also alerted us to this interesting Portland Press Herald article, on "How Maine’s elite private colleges sold Wabanaki land to bankroll early construction."  

• Vicki Jackson, HLS, delivered the  2026 Malyi Lecture at the University of Chicago Law School on “Knowledge Institutions and Constitutional Democracy.”   

• Jack Rakove will speak on Theory of Constitutional Failure: The American Case at Notre Dame Law on Friday, April 24, 2026, from 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm.

• Congratulations to Kunal Parker, Miami Law, on his selection as Beatrice Webb Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics! 

• And congratulations to Edward J. Balleisen, the new Provost of George Washington University! (GW Today)

• Nathan Dorn on Lodovico Carerio: Heresy, Lawbooks, and the Inquisition in the Kingdom of Naples (In Custodia Legis).   

• Haris A. Durrani, a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University, has published Engineering the Law: The Complicated Legal History of a Satellite in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History.

• "The 1874 Arkansas Constitution and records from the convention that produced it are now available online through a collaboration between the University of Arkansas Libraries and the Quill Project at the University of Oxford" (Arkansas News) 

• Lawbook Exchange's April catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History.     

• The National Constitution Center has announced the opening on May 15 of "Governing the Nation, a new permanent gallery exploring the Constitution’s system of separated powers."  Its development was guided by "a distinguished scholarly advisory board representing leading universities and research institutions, ensuring a rigorous and balanced exploration of the separation of powers and federalism," including H. W. Brands, Cristina Rodríguez, Yuval Levin, Michael Klarman, Gail Heriot, and Ilan Wurman.

• Deborah Rosen reviews Andrew Fede's A Degraded Caste of Society in the Journal of Southern History.

• That E.O. on the PRA:  The American Historical Association and American Oversight file suit (CBS News).  The Trump Administration Is Trying to Erase Its Own History (Atlantic Daily).  Joyce Vance with the court filing (Civil Discourse).  The AHA's notice of the lawsuit.

• More on Birthright Citizenship: Steve Vladeck, Georgetown Law, on the "pitched battle within the legal academy over the fairly transparent efforts of a small cohort of right-wing law professors to provide a fig leaf of historical support for the Trump administration’s legally and morally odious position in the birthright citizenship case" (One First). Philip Hamburger, Columbia Law, on Allegiance, Birthright, and Citizenship (Law & Liberty).  For a brief time only, you may read, open access, the introduction to Anna O. Law's Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, here.

• ICYMI:  In the National Constitution Center's series, "Constitutional Voices": W.E.B Du Bois and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  Kevin Kruse rethinks the Civil Rights Movement (Campaign Trails).

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

Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

We have word that the Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium will reconvene on March 7, 2026, from 10 AM to 3 PM on the Notre Dame Law School campuses in South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. The organizers write that "All students and faculty, regardless of institutional affiliation, are welcome," that all "presenters and attendees will receive complimentary lunch and refreshments," and that virtual opportunities to participate will be available for those unable to attend in-person.  

Those wishing to attend should register here, a form that reproduces the schedule for March 7 at right.  More information about the Colloquium can be learned here or via email to Dennis Wieboldt at dwiebold@nd.edu. 

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From Time's "Made by History" section" Anthony Lee Gregory, "Republicans’ Calls for ‘Law and Order’ Have Democratic Roots"; Alison Lefkovitz, "The Right Aims to Turn Back the Clock on American Divorce Law."
  

• Legal historian Danaya Wright is doing the Lord's work at the University of Florida (Alligator). 
  

• Legal historian Farah Peterson received the Pushcart Prize for her essay, “Alone with Kindred,” which first appeared in the Threepenny Review.  
  

• 
  We spotted two recent book reviews by Reuel Schiller, UC Law San Francisco.  First up is Schiller's Jotwell review of Margot Canaday's  Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America (2023)., entitled Liberation Without Law: Queer Workers and the Limits of Legal Liberalism.  Then there's From Binding Arbitration to Shareholder Activism: Labor History and the History of Modern Liberalism, his Reviews of American History essay on two books by masters of the history of American labor relations, Sanford M. Jacoby's Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank, and Ronald W. Schatz's The Labor Board Crew: Remaking Worker-Employer Relations from Pearl Harbor to the Reagan Era.
   
  

• Stephen Sedley reviews The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls in the London Review of Books.  

• Jessica Lowe, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted her review essay on Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell's The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s-1830s, which will appear in a symposium in Federal History.

• Over at Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog, Otto Vervaart on repetitiones, "a kind of special lectures by medieval professors on selected themes in Roman and canon law," in Early Modern editions of medieval legal treatises.
  

• Joan Howarth discusses the history of the bar exam in an episode of the ABA's The Modern Law Library devoted to her book, Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing.
  

• The National Constitution Center has posted a new podcast: Randy Barnett, Georgetown Law and the author of the memoir A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, “joins Jeffrey Rosen to discuss his role in the evolution of originalism from a philosophy of judicial restraint to one of constitutional conservatism dedicated to restoring ‘the lost Constitution.’”
  

• The Oklahoma State Department of Education has issued its “Standards Guidelines for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year,” which are to be “immediate[ly] and complete[ly] implemented.  “This memorandum and the included standards must be provided to every teacher as well as providing a physical copy of the Bible, the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Ten Commandments as resources in every classroom in the school district. These documents are mandatory for the holistic education of students in Oklahoma.”  More.
  

• ICYMI: Daniel Rodgers, Nell Irvin Painter, Aziz Rana, and Abram Van Engen on President Biden's withdrawal from the presidential campaign (WaPo).  Michael McConnell discusses Trump v. United States with Pam Karlin (SLS).  Jay Rubenstein says that although the decision might put presidents above the law, kings never were (The Conversation).
  

• Update: Join Their "Quest for the Truth"?  The Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida is hiring. 
  

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

Banerjee, Deland, Tefoya - Prize-winning Essays on California Legal History

Earlier this week we posted the CFP for the Student Writing Competition on California Legal History, sponsored by the California Supreme Court Historical Society. Last year's prize-winning essays have now been published in California Legal History:

Kyle Deland (University of California, Berkeley), The End of Free Land: The Commodification of Suscol Rancho and the Liberalization of American Colonial Policy

Michael Banerjee (University of California, Berkeley), California's Constitutional University:  Private Property, Public Power, and the Constitutional Corporation, 1868–1900

Miranda Tafoya (University of California, Irvine), A Shameful Legacy: Tracing The Japanese American Experience of Police Violence and Racism From the Late 19th Century Through the Aftermath Of World War II

This issue (Vol. 18) of California Legal History also includes other articles of interest, which we will profile in a separate post. The full issue is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Over at the Blog of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, Jordan T. Watkins has posted on Mormons and the Making of Constitutions on the Margins.

•  The University of Vermont has posted a notice of Felicia Kornbluh's A Woman’s Life is a Human Life (2023).
  

•  If you missed Northwestern University's Kate Masur at the Supreme Court Historical Society on Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, the YouTube video is here.
  

• On January 20, Ada Kuskowski, University of Pennsylvania, will speak on her book, Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France, at the Stanford Center for Law and History.  Register here.
  

• Karen Tani (University of Pennsylvania) appeared on the Death Panel podcast to discuss the legal historical backdrop to Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski and the potential ramifications of the pending Supreme Court decision.  
  

• For their project, "Anti-CRT Bills Come to Campus: New Threats to Free Expression & Academic Freedom from State Legislatures,” Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder, Carlton College, “are eager to interview faculty, historians in particular, who have been affected by these laws.”
  

• ICYMI: Farrell Evans on How Neighborhoods Used Restrictive Housing Covenants to Block Nonwhite Families Communities across the U.S. (History).  Stephen Halbrook, Should Courts Appoint Historians as Experts in Second Amendment Cases? (Volokh Conspiracy).  Nate Raymond, Judge doesn't need historian to review gun law, say prosecutors, defense counsel (Reuters).  Debra Cassens Weiss, Justice Jackson uses originalism to undercut "conservative juristocracy" (ABAJ).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Former ASLH President Constance Backhouse delivered the 14th Annual DeLloyd J. Guth Visiting Lecture in Legal History at the University on Manitoba on her forthcoming book on the RDS case, “in which the Supreme Court of Canada struggled with a claim of racial bias against Canada’s first Black female judge" (UM Today).
  

• The exhibit of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the history of abortion in the U.S. will open on October 24.  It is curated by Mary Ziegler, UC Davis School of Law (Harvard Gazette).
  

• Randall Kennedy, HLS, interviewed on Walker v. City of Birmingham, one of the cases he will discuss in his forthcoming book, From Protest to War, Triumphs and Defeats in Struggles for Racial Justice, 1950 to 1970 (wbhm). 
  

• Kate Redburn, an Academic Fellow at the Columbia Law School and a JD-PhD candidate at Yale University reviews Anna Lvovsky’s Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall in the University of Chicago Law Review. 
  

• I previously noted my Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail’s research on the North Carolina judge William Gaston and slavery.  He and Georgetown's Adam Rothman have updated a list of the 163 people Gaston enslaved and posted it with Professor Mikhail’s letter to the Georgetown Slavery Archive. See also this separate page on Gaston's estate inventory.  (A link to another one on Gaston's will is pending.)  DRE
  

• “In 2006 and again in 2016, the University of Pennsylvania denied having any connections to the institution of slavery. In 2017, five students under the direction of history professor Kathleen Brown formed the Penn and Slavery Project to investigate those claims, ultimately concluding that Penn both supported and relied on the institution of slavery in its early days”  (AHA Perspectives).
  

• 
  The Lawbook Exchange has published The Comparative Method in the Science of Law, written in Ukrainian by Lev Rebet in 1947-48 and now edited and translated by William E. Butler and O.V. Kresin.  “This study, previously unknown to the world of comparative law, may be considered to be the first monograph in the world devoted to the methodology of comparative jurisprudence.”
  

• "The Big in Jewish Law: A Day Conference on the Legal Issues, Phenomena, and Epochs that Often Seem ‘Too Big’ for Scholarly Analysis.”  Jewish Law Association. November 1, 2022, 08:50–17:15 EDT, CUNY Graduate Center 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY.  More.
  

• ICYMI: The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in an appeal seeking to overturn The Insular Cases  (NPR).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Over at JOTWELL Christopher Schmidt (Chicago-Kent College of Law/Illinois Tech) has posted an admiring review of Mary Ziegler's Abortion and the Law in America (2020): "In her important and insightful new book, . . . Mary Ziegler explains how the debate over Roe has evolved and why it endures."
  

• From the Washington Post's Made by History section: Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Loyola University Chicago), "75 years of reforms have failed to fix our college financial aid system."

• India's former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee has died of covid-19 at the age of 91. Tributes here, here, here, and here.

• Over at In Custodia Legis, a post about a new acquisition by the Library of Congress: "the memorable legal study aid, Memoriale Insitutionum Juris (Ratzeburg, 1672), written by the seventeenth-century German minister and secondary school instructor Johannes Bun."

• Tribute to the memory of Vice President Walter Mondale from Ryan Greenwood at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog, U. of Minnesota Law School.

• 
  Out next month: The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero by Peter S. Canellos (Simon & Schuster).
  

• John Fabian Witt discusses American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 in the ABA Journal.
  

• John Q. Barrett, in the Jackson List, on Sally Falk Moore (1924-2021).

• From the Senate Historical Office: "In the early 20th century, a group of progressive senators from midwestern and western states arrived in Washington committed to expanding the role of the federal government to address the economic and social challenges of industrialization. To accomplish these goals, they had to tackle another challenge—the power of the federal judiciary." (Senate Progressives v. Federal Courts).

• Hosted by UVA and the Royal Society for Asian Affairs: a recent symposium on "Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India." Video now up here.

• ICYMI: Two Yale law students have organized the Immigrant History Initiative, “a nonprofit that produces curricula on Asian American histories for schools and communities” (Yale Daily News). The Advocates Library: "a vital resource with an illustrious history" (The Scotsman).  Laura Edwards, Oak Ridge High School alumna (Oak Ridger).  Ariela Gross, Harvard Radcliffe Institute 2021–2022 Fellow (HRI). 
  

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

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Book Roundup

H-Net has a review of Brendan C. Lindsay's Murder State: California's Native American Genocide 1846-1873 (University of Nebraska Press).

Salon has an excerpt from Dream Chasers: Immigration and the American Backlash by John Tirman (MIT Press).

New Books has an interview with the editors of Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemma of the New Public Participation (NYU Press)--Caroline Lee, Michael McQuarrie, and Edward Walker.

Kevin Kruse has an excerpt of his new book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic), published in Salon.

In The Washington Post, Frank Bruni's Where You Go is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (Grand Central) is reviewed.

Steven Brill's America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System (Random House), is reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

On Slate Gregory P. Downs's After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard University Press) is reviewed.

Also from New Books is an interview of Leigh Ann Wheeler, discussing her book, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (Oxford University).

Sunday Book Roundup

In The New Rambler, Martha Minow reviews Sherry L. Smith's Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford University Press).

"Sherry L. Smith examines another true but unlikely alliance in Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power.  Here, members of the American counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s offered help and collaboration as American Indians struggled for political and legal power and recognition. This nuanced analysis underscores the central role of Indian activists and the often ignorant and inconsistent contributions of non-Indians, but nonetheless shines light on the efforts of hippies, Quakers, and other non-Indians in the uphill struggle for fishing rights, land claims, and self-determination by Indian tribes."

Fareed Zakaria's In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton) is reviewed at The Daily Beast.

H-Net has a review of James E. David's Spies and Shuttles: NASA's Secret Relationships with the DOD and CIA (University Press of Florida).

An excerpt from American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy (Viking) has been published by Salon, "America's not a force for good."

The Los Angeles Review of Books examines Adam Zamoyski's Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848 (Basic).

Also in the L.A. Review of Books is a review of Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador).

HNN has a review of Danielle Allen's Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright).

James Whitman discusses his book, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Harvard University Press) with New Books in History.

David Garrow reviews Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin) in The Washington Post.

"Yet Burrough bestows anonymity upon several crucial Weather participants, including a close Dohrn colleague who went on to be a prominent San Francisco lawyer and who spoke to him extensively. Weather veterans who did not cooperate are given no such favor. A one-sentence characterization of one such person does not explicitly name him, but I immediately realized that Burrough was identifying a man who has been a selfless and celebrated Midwest policy advocate for many years now, as well as a valuable mentor to a close family member of mine. Only in the now-digitized newspapers of almost half a century ago can one discover the Weather leadership role he played in 1969-1970 or his indictment as one of 15 accused bombers several years later. (The charges were later dropped on account of government misconduct.) Having visited his home, and having last shared a meal with him only two years ago, I am taken aback by just how easy it is indeed to pal around with terrorists."

The Nation has an adapted excerpt from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser (Little, Brown, and Co.).

Sunday Book Roundup

This week there's a review of Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? (Portobello Books) written by Katrine Marcal and translated by Saskia Vogel in the New Statesman.

Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life by Sally G. McMillen (Oxford University Press) is reviewed by Janet Napolitano in the Los Angeles Times.

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony are memorialized as leading suffragists in a marble statue in the Rotunda in our nation's Capitol. In this thought-provoking new biography, Sally G. McMillen argues persuasively that one person is missing from that Mt. Rushmore of women: Lucy Stone."

Napolitano has another review in The Washington Post, "Higher education isn't in crisis," which reviews two books: Ryan Craig's College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palsgrave) and Kevin Carey's The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere (Riverhead).

Leonard L. Richards's Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight Over the Thirteenth Amendment (University of Chicago Press) is reviewed by the Washington Independent Review of Books.

In Salon there is an excerpt, "Religious Ignorance kills kids: How two Richard Nixon aides sneakily altered a law that still costs children's lives," from Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (Basic) by Paul Offit.

There's a new issue of Common-Place up online here, with a review of Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger's Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonia Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press).

"Historians have perceived warning, which was distinctive to New England, as an expression of the region's distaste for outsiders and stinginess with relief for the poor. Some scholars have interpreted the concept literally—as physical banishment of those who did not have legal habitancy in the towns from which they were being warned. Other scholars have recognized that warning did not require eviction, but they have nonetheless misunderstood its purpose, presuming that declarations like Love's were intended to inform sojourners that they were not legal inhabitants of the town and therefore could not receive poor relief. Dayton and Salinger, however, expose the limits of these conventional interpretations of warning. New Englanders were no xenophobic penny-pinchers, they argue; on the contrary, the region's warning system was integral to what was arguably the most generous welfare system in the British Empire."

Barney Frank's memoir, Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

New Release: Lee on the History of Academic Freedom at American Universities

New from Lexington Books: Academic Freedom at American Universities: Constitutional Rights, Professional Norms, and Contractual Duties (November 2014), by Phillip Lee (University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law). A description from the press:

This book details the legal and historical development of institutional and professorial academic freedoms to better understand the relationship between these concepts. While some judges and scholars have focused on the divergence of these protections, this book articulates an aligned theory that brings both the professorial and institutional theories together. It argues that while constitutionally based academic freedom does its job in protecting both public and private universities from excessive state interference, or at the very least it asks the right questions, it is inadequate because it fails to protect many individual professors in the same way. This solution entails using contract law to fill in the gaps that constitutional law leaves open in regard to protecting individual professors.

Contract law is an effective alternative to constitutional law for three reasons. First, unlike constitutional law, it covers professors at both public and private universities. Second, it allows for the consideration of the custom and usage of the academic community as either express or implied contract terms in resolving disputes between universities and professors. Third, contract law enables courts to structure remedies that take into account the specific campus contexts that give rise to various disputes instead of crafting broad remedies that may ill fit certain campus environments.

The proposed reconceptualization of academic freedom merges constitutional protection for institutions and contractual protection for individual professors. This combined approach would provide a more comprehensive framework than is currently available under the predominantly constitutional paradigm of academic freedom.

A few blurbs:

Philip Lee makes a major and welcome contribution to the burgeoning literature on academic freedom through his current and cogent analysis of major court cases. He devotes special and justifiable attention to the singular role of the American Association of University Professors, which providentially observes its centennial this very year. The constitutional evolution of academic freedom which Lee traces through the past century also receives meticulous understanding in the broader context of higher education law and policy. Perhaps most notable is a concluding chapter which uniquely addresses contract (rather than constitutional) law as an alternative basis for protecting free expression on the university campus. -- Robert O'Neil

In Academic Freedom at American Universities Philip Lee skillfully details how conceptions of academic freedom in higher education have developed over time. Further, he proposes a stronger legal defense of academic freedom, based in contract law. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in legal, historical, and political issues around academic freedom in higher education. -- Natasha Kumar Warikoo

More information is available here.

Hat tip: Chronicle of Higher Education

New Release: Wattley on "Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and Her Fight to End Segregation"

New from the University of Oklahoma Press: A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education: Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and Her Fight to End Segregation, by Cheryl Elizabeth Brown Wattley (University of North Texas, Dallas, College of Law). A description from the Press:

In 1946 a young woman named Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (1924–1995) was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma College of Law because she was African American. The OU law school was an all-white institution in a town where African Americans could work and shop as long as they got out before sundown. But if segregation was entrenched in Norman, so was the determination of black Oklahomans who had survived slavery to stake a claim in the territory. This was the tradition that Ada Lois Sipuel sprang from, a tradition and determination that would sustain her through the slow, tortuous path of litigation to gaining admission to law school. A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education—the first book to tell Fisher’s full story—is at once an inspiring biography and a remarkable chapter in the history of race and civil rights in America.

Cheryl Elizabeth Brown Wattley gives us a richly textured picture of the black-and-white world from which Ada Lois Sipuel and her family emerged. Against this Oklahoma background Wattley shows Sipuel (who married Warren Fisher a year before she filed her suit) struggling against a segregated educational system. Her legal battle is situated within the history of civil rights litigation and race-related jurisprudence in the state of Oklahoma and in the nation. Hers was a test case organized by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and, as precedent, strike another blow against “separate but equal” public education.

Fisher served as both a litigant, with Thurgood Marshall for counsel, and, later, a litigator; both a plaintiff and an advocate for the NAACP; and both a student and, ultimately, a teacher of the very history she had helped to write. In telling Fisher’s story, Wattley also reveals a time and a place undergoing a profound transformation spurred by one courageous woman taking a bold step forward.

A blurb:

“Cheryl Wattley has written a carefully researched and very relevant account of the legal and human-relations significance of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher's trailblazing court case. But her book offers much more, including the many compelling backstories that made Ada Lois a hero to those of us who dared challenge racial segregation and discrimination in Oklahoma and elsewhere. This book should be read by everyone, especially legal scholars, civil rights activists, historians, social scientists, and students.” —George Henderson

More information is available here.

Sunday Book Roundup

Public Books has added two reviews this week, both dealing with higher ed. The first is a review by Neil Gross, "The Politics of For-Profit Higher Education," which reviews Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher education Sabotaged the American Dream by Suzanne Mettler (Basic Books). The second is a review from Salamishah Tillet, "Race and Campus Rape: Equal Under The Law?", which looks at Estelle Freedman's Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press).

"The rise of campus rape activism is only a small part of Stanford historian Estelle Freedman’s latest book, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, but her attention to the unique interdependence between racial justice and sexual assault activism in American political history might give us some insight into the limits and the potential of our current moment. Using extensive newspaper articles, court records, and conference reports, as well as personal letters and memoirs, Freedman covers the history of anti-rape activism in the United States and reminds us that “for almost two centuries a regionally, racially, and politically varied group of reformers has tried, in the face of formidable obstacles, to change legal understanding of rape.”"

The Washington Post reviews To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson (Basic).

On H-Net, The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights (University of Pittsburgh Press) edited by Javier Corrales and Mario Pecheny is reviewed.

"The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America represents a trailblazing contribution to the study of same-sex sexuality in Latin America. Its move beyond questions of sexual identity to the politicization of that identity, disciplinary and regional breadth, attempts to include studies of lesbians and the transgendered, and publication of primary sources by activists and politicians ensure that a wide audience—scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as law and public policy—will find it useful. Several of the chapters would work well in graduate seminars, while more general pieces, as well as those by activists and politicians, will prove invaluable in undergraduate courses."

The New Republic reviews Jonathan Eig's The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (Norton).

"Jonathan Eig chronicles the decades-long effort to make that fantasy a reality. In his telling, this transformation is thanks to a unique alliance between feminists and scientists: the spotlight-seeking activist Margaret Sanger, the rebel researcher Goody Pincus, the single-minded heiress Katherine McCormick, and the photogenic family doctor John Rock. These four people provide a formula for what it takes to create scientific breakthroughs that are ahead of their time politically: an incredible amount of drive and little concern for traditional values, a willingness to flout powerful institutions and their rewards, a tremendous amount of money, and, eventually, a way to appeal to the mainstream." 

Over at New Books in American Studies Phillip Kretsedemas's Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside (Routledge) is discussed.

And, from New Books in Law, there's an interview with Susan Haack about her book Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press).

Sunday Book Roundup

Here's a few book reviews, interviews, and excerpts that might be of interest to blog readers this weekend:

Public Books has a review of Terry Golway's Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (Liveright).

New Books in American Studies has a new interview with Amy Stambach about her new book Confucius and Crisis in American University: Culture, Capital and Diplomacy in US Public Higher Education (Routledge).

New Books in History has an interview with David Williams, author of I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press).

On Salon there is an excerpt of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A.J. Baime (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) titled "Henry Ford's reign of terror: Greed and murder in Depression-era Detroit."

There is also an excerpt of American Spring: Lexington, Concord, and the Road to Revolution by Walter Borneman (Little, Brown & Co.) titled "John Hancock and Samuel Adams' fascinating alliance: Family, economics and the road to the American Revolution."

Slate has a review of Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (Basic).

H-Net has two new reviews of note. The first is a review of Neville Kirk's Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia 1900 to the present (Manchester University Press).  The second is a review of The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom by Glenn David Brasher (University of North Carolina Press).

New Books on Higher Education

Every so often, the Chronicle of Higher Education spotlights "New Books on Higher Education." Here are some items of interest from the most recent list.

Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, by Michael S. Roth (Yale University Press). The Press explains:

Contentious debates over the benefits—or drawbacks—of a liberal education are as old as America itself. From Benjamin Franklin to the Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, believed that nurturing a student’s capacity for lifelong learning was useful for science and commerce while also being essential for democracy. In this provocative contribution to the disputes, university president Michael S. Roth focuses on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education. 

Conflicting streams of thought flow through American intellectual history: W. E. B. DuBois’s humanistic principles of pedagogy for newly emancipated slaves developed in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s educational utilitarianism, for example. Jane Addams’s emphasis on the cultivation of empathy and John Dewey’s calls for education as civic engagement were rejected as impractical by those who aimed to train students for particular economic tasks. Roth explores these arguments (and more), considers the state of higher education today, and concludes with a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, since the founding of the nation, cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future.

Should I Go to Grad School? 41 Answers to an Impossible Question, edited by Jessica Loudis and others (Bloomsbury). A description from the Press:

The decision to attend graduate school is easy for future doctors and lawyers: they must have a professional degree to get started. But for young creative workers, aspiring artists, and intellectuals, grad school is an existential fork in the road. An M.F.A. or a humanities Ph.D. can give you time to invest in studying something you love among like-minded intellectuals and qualify you to teach a new generation of students; but it can also uproot you geographically, expose you to backstabbing competitors, and saddle you with debt. Given the current job market, is grad school really worth it—financially, professionally, and emotionally?

In Should I Go to Grad School?, a wide range of people who lead intellectually and creatively interesting lives—sculptors and philosophers, activists and poets, a cocktail designer and a movie star—tell their own stories about choosing to go to grad school—or steering clear—and what that decision has meant in their lives. They give us an inside look at what grad school today is really like, and share the wisdom they wish they could have had going in. They reflect on their divergent paths to success, and muse about the path not taken.

With contributors including David Orr, James Franco, Simon Critchley, Terry Castle, Sheila Heti, and many more, Should I Go to Grad School? is a must read for anyone seriously considering that titular question.

New Books in Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education occasionally rounds up new books in higher education. Here are some items of interest from the most recent roundup:

Jerry A. Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2013). The Press explains:

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity is illusory and that critiques of established disciplines are often overstated and misplaced.

Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.

Robin L. West, Teaching Law: Justice, Politics, and the Demands of Professionalism  (Cambridge University Press, 2013). From the Press:

Teaching Law reimagines law-school teaching and scholarship by going beyond crises now besetting the legal academy and examining deeper and longer-lasting challenges. The book argues that the legal academy has long neglected the needs to focus teaching and scholarship on the ideals of justice that law fitfully serves, the political origins of law, and the development of a respectful but critical relationship with the legal profession. This book suggests reforms to improve the quality of legal education and responds to concerns that law schools eschew the study of justice, rendering students amoralist; that law schools slight the political sources of law, particularly in legislative action; and that law schools have ignored the profession entirely. These areas of neglect have impoverished legal teaching and scholarship as the academy is refashioned in response to current financial exigencies, and addressing them is long overdue.

Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2013). The Press describes the book as follows:

The Value of the Humanities provides a critical account of the principal arguments used to defend the value of the Humanities. The claims considered are: that the Humanities study the meaning-making practices of culture, and bring to their work a distinctive understanding of what constitutes knowledge and understanding; that, though useful to society in many ways, they remain laudably at odds with, or at a remove from, instrumental use value; that they contribute to human happiness; that they are a force for democracy; and that they are a good in themselves, to be valued 'for their own sake'. Engaging closely with contemporary literary and philosophical work in the field from the UK and US, Helen Small distinguishes between arguments that retain strong Victorian roots (Mill on happiness; Arnold on use value) and those that have developed or been substantially altered since. Unlike many works in this field, The Value of the Humanities is not a polemic or a manifesto. Its purpose is to explore the grounds for each argument, and to test its validity for the present day. Tough-minded, alert to changing historical conditions for argument and changing styles of rhetoric, it promises to sharpen the terms of the public debate. 

Weekend Roundup

• Paul Finkelman, Albany Law, will speak on the subject How a Railroad Lawyer Became the Great Emancipator: Abraham Lincoln, The Emancipation Proclamation, and Spielberg's Movie at 7 p.m. Jan. 29 in the amphitheater of the William F. Walsh Science Center of St. Bonaventure University.

• Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit (both from University of Missouri at Kansas City - School of Law) have posted an updated version of their popular resource, "Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals." (Hat tip: Legal Theory Blog)

•  From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "How Liberal-Arts Majors Fare Over the Long Haul" (spoiler alert: not bad).

• Via the Canadian Legal History Blog, we have word of a Graduate Student Essay Prize in socio-legal studies for students at Canadian universities. 

•  The Teachout-Tillman colloquy continues: Zephyr Teachout, Constitutional Purpose and the Anti-Corruption Principle: A Reply to Seth Barrett Tillman, 108 NW. U. L. REV. COLLOQUY (forthcoming circa Jan. 2014).

• The Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience in Newark, New Jersey, has announced the 34th annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, "Tending the Light: Community Organizing and the Modern Civil Rights Movement," to be held  February 15, 2014. Speakers include Bob Moses, Diane Nash, Charles Payne, and Barbara Ransby. (Hat tip: H-Law)
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• A few items of interest at The Junto: Joseph Adelman considers using blogs in the classroom; Tom Cutterham reflects on Indians, Property, and International Law.

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Cost of a Ph.D.: Students Report Hefty Debt Across Many Fields."

• Over at Books&Ideas.net, you can read a translation of  Paul-Loup Weil-Dubuc's essay on the origins of the patient's "right to know." 

• Via H-Law, we have word that a database of the Constitutions of Sub-Saharan Africa is now online.

• Also via H-Law: scholars of late twentieth-century politics and policy should consider applying for a research grant from the Robert J. Dole Archive and Special Collections.

• David Schorr's Environment, Law and History blog has been posting lots of interesting things lately, including this post, on Animals on Trial, and this one, on the Valencian water court.

• Via the Faculty Lounge: Historical data on law school entering class sizes (here and here).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Attention all potential book reviewers! H-Law is seeking to update its list: "If you are interested in possibly reviewing a book for H-Law please send your name and contact information (as well as the time periods, geography and/or areas of expertise) to hlawbookreview@gmail.com. Reviewers at all levels of experience (grad student through senior scholar) and position (historians, law professors, independent scholars) are encouraged to reply."

• From Past Imperfect (the blog of the Smithsonian magazine): an old-fashioned tale of breach of promise ("The Football Star and the Wrath of his Would-Be Bride").

• With a campaign finance case, McCutcheon v. FEC, coming on for argument, Ronald Collins has a post over at Concurring Opinions on the Supreme Court’s conference notes in Buckley v. Valeo and FEC v. National Conservative Political Action Committee.

•  From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "'Report Card' on the Humanities Finds Light Amid the Gloom."

• NYC-area readers: CUNY School of Law invites you to celebrate the publication of Dressing Constitutionally, by Ruthann Robson.

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