Federal History 2021

Federal History: Journal of the Society for History in the Federal Government 13: 2021 is available online.  Here’s the TOC:

Editor’s Note
Benjamin Guterman

Roger R. Trask Lecture
Bill Williams

The Case for John Jay’s Nomination as First Chief Justice
Benjamin Lyons

“This disease . . . knows no State boundaries”: The 1918 Spanish Influenza Epidemic and Federal Public Health
Jonathan Chilcote

“America must remain American”: The Liberal Contribution to Race Restrictions in the 1924 Immigration Act
Kevin Yuill

The Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Public Health Building, 1942–1946
Christopher Holmes

Federalism and the Limits on Regulating Products Liability Law, 1977–1981
Ian J. Drake

Gerald Ford’s Clemency Board Reconsidered
Alan Jaroslovsky

Interview An Interview with Chandra Manning
Benjamin Guterman

--Dan Ernst

Michael Stolleis (1941-2021)

Michael Stolleis, an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History since 2001, has died.  Here is the notice of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory:

Michael Stolleis passed away in Frankfurt on 18 March 2021, just a few months before his 80th birthday. The Max Planck Institute owes him a great deal. Since joining the Max Planck Society in 1991, he shaped our Institute like no other. He led it alone for many years, and even after his retirement, he took on the responsibility again. His approachability, his unconditional reliability and his rhetorical elegance have been exemplary for many members of staff. Without Michael Stolleis, we would not have this new building on the Westend Campus, something he was always quite pleased about – and without him, we would likely no longer exist as an Institute.

We have placed a book of condolence in the foyer of the Institute until the 16 April, which Institute staff members are invited to sign. We will also include letters in the book that are submitted to us; they can be addressed to the Managing Director Thomas Duve, for the attention of Nicole Pasakarnis.

Thomas Duve's obituary is here. 

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: DS

Michael de Laval Landon (1935-2021)

Michael de Laval Landon, professor emeritus at the University of Mississippi, passed away at his home in Oxford on Tuesday.  He went emeritus in 2009.  His publications included The Triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics, 1678-1689 (1970); The Honor and Dignity of the Profession: A History of the Mississippi State Bar Association, 1906-1976 (1979); Erin and Britannia: The Historical Background to a Modern Tragedy (1981); and The University of Mississippi School of Law: A Sesquicentennial History (2006).

I was not to surprised to learn from his obituary and another notice that, in addition to teaching and publishing scholarship, Professor Landon actively served his church and local government.  I first encountered him when, during his long service as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for Legal History (1988-1997), I chaired the Local Arrangements Committee in 1994 and got to know him as part of the Society’s Old Guard, who came to legal history because of the allure of the common-law tradition but stayed to do the administrative chores that kept a learned society run wholly by volunteers going. 

Since Professor Landon left the Secretary-Treasurership, the leadership of the ASLH has diversified beyond what I could have imagined when I met him.  If word of his death is an occasion for reflecting upon how much stronger the field of legal history is as a result, it is also a moment for recalling how much it was sustained because scholars like him did their part.

--Dan Ernst

Riedlberger and Niemöller on Krüger, Mommsen and the Theodosian Code

We note the publication, open access, of the monographic article “Paul Krüger, Theodor Mommsen, and the Theodosian Code,” by Peter Riedlberger and Isabel Niemöller, in Roman Legal Tradition 17 (2021), 1–112.  Here is the editor’s summary:

A very revealing set of correspondence between Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krüger is at the center of this fascinating article on the preparations for Mommsen’s edition of the Theodosian Code. Peter Riedlberger and Isabel Niemöller narrate the fraught relationship between the two great scholars: Krüger hoping to have his preparatory work used and acknowledged, Mommsen having a very different vision of the ultimate project and ultimately deciding to go it alone. Riedlberger and Niemöller burst many bubbles – e.g. that Mommsen’s powers were failing and that he appropriated Krüger’s work – but also use the correspondence to illustrate the widely misunderstood relation among the different sources for the Theodosian Code, above all relating to those texts which appear, sometimes profoundly altered, in the Codex Justinianus. The authors also make the case for a new edition of the Theodosian Code.

The article includes a transcription and English translation of 29 items of correspondence – published for the first time – interleaved with summaries of other correspondence and key facts from this monumental period in the history of Roman law scholarship.  

–Dan Ernst

Sugarman on Fitzpatrick, Twining, and Brooks

David Sugarman, Professor Emeritus at the Lancaster University Law School and an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, has posted biographical essays of three legal scholars: Becoming Peter Fitzpatrick (1941-2020); William Twining: The Man Who Radicalized the Middle Ground; and Law, Law-Consciousness and Lawyers as Constitutive of Early Modern England: Christopher W. Brooks's Singular Journey.  The first is forthcoming in a special issue of International Journal of Law in Context 17:1 (March 2021), devoted to Peter Fitzpatrick and his scholarship.  The second will appear in another special issue of the same journal, devoted to Twining’s Jurist in Context: A Memoir.  The third appeared in Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England. Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Brooks, ed. Michael Lobban, Joanne Begiato and Adrian Green (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 32-57.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Celebrating Legal Heroes (during Black History Month) at UVA Law. 

• At the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center, University of Minnesota Law Library: this virtual exhibit on Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice.
  

• On February 17, Chris J. Brummer, Georgetown Law, delivered the keynote address in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s observance of Black History Month.  He drew upon his Brookings Working Paper, "What do the Data Reveal about (the Absence of Black) Financial Regulators?"  The text of the address is here.
  

• University at Buffalo’s notice of that symposium issue for John Henry Schlegel (UBNow).  Click for the pic! 
  

• Mark Graber on Their Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 and Ours, from his book in progress, The Forgotten Fourteenth Amendment (Just Security).
  

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Teal Acardi (Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University), "Texas’s power grid failing shows why Biden needs to go big on infrastructure"; Laura Briggs (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) on Biden's immigration bill and repairing the harms of family separation.
  

• Daniel Sharfstein, Vanderbilt University, will speak in the Dean’s Lecture Series on Racial Justice and Discrimination on February 25, 12:00pm - 1:00pm CST (1:00pm - 2:00pm EST).
  

• On February 26, “The History of Central Banking in Hong Kong, Mainland China and Singapore,” in the Greater China Legal History Seminar Series at CUHK LAW.  More.
  

• On March 5, 2021, from 13:15 - 15:00, Prof. Dr. Thomas Duve, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, will conduct, in German, the seminar Methods of Legal History  It will focus on “methodological issues that are especially important for the work in the department ‘Historical Normativity.’”  Registration for the event until February 25: sekduve@rg.mpg.de
  

• 
  Aimée Craft, University of Ottawa, receives CBA President’s Award for her work on Canadian indigenous law, including Breathing Life Into the Stone Fort Treaty (UBC Press, 2013) (CBA National).

• The deadline for submissions for the 2022 annual meeting of the American Historical Association has been extended to Monday, March 8.  More. 
  

• "The State Historical Society of Iowa has officially opened the 2021-2022 cycle of applications for our Research Grants for Authors."  More.
  

• Jay Sexton, University of Missouri, on political violence in American history, in conjunction with the Missouri Humanities Council panel, “A Nation Divided: How One Decade Can Change Everything" (Columbia Missourian).
  

• ICYMI: Laura Edwards on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (IBT).  James Goodman wants us to stop calling slavery America's "original sin" (CNN). The KKK Act and the Sack of the Capitol (WaPo). The National Security Archive et. al. v. Donald J. Trump saves White House records (NSA). Larry Wilmore on “Amend: The Fight for America” (K5).  More on "Amend," in Bustle.  Can't have a Green New Deal without a CCC (Civilian Climate Corps) (Next City).  More on section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (with Edwards, Hemel, and Magliocca) (abc6).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Robert B. Stevens (UCSC)
  

  Robert Bocking Stevens, the author of the indispensable Law Schools: Legal Education in America: 1850-1960 (1983), has died.  The UC Santa Cruz notice is here.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has updated its Demography of Article III Judges, 1789-2020.
  

• Over at Balkinization, a symposium is underway on former LHB Guest Blogger Mary Ziegler's  Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present (2020), including Mark Graber’s contribution, Constitutional Trench Warfare over Abortion. 
  

• On February 23, the Law Library of Congress hosts the webinar Evolution of Presidential Powers under the Turkish Constitutional System, with Kayahan Cantekin, the Law Library’s foreign law specialist for Turkic-speaking jurisdictions.
  

• Filippo Maria Sposini, PhD candidate, University of Toronto and Roy McMurtry Fellow, Osgoode Society, has published The rise of psychological physicians: The certification of insanity and the teaching of medical psychology, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (2021).  It argues that by giving doctors the authority to report “facts of insanity,” the 1853 Lunatic Asylums Act created the need for “psychological physicians” capable of certifying lunacy and sped the development of psychiatry as a medical specialty.
  

• The OAH has extended its CFP deadline for its annual meeting until February 17, 2021.
  

• ICYMI: "My Name is Pauli Murray" premieres at the Sundance Film Festival (Star Tribune). What Would U.S. Grant Do (about White Supremacy)? (Politico).  A history of unusual impeachments (Governing).  Amend, the Netflix documentary on the 14th Amendment (Philly Voice).  Reconstruction: A Timeline (History).

• Update: In the LRB, read Erin Maglaque's essay on John Christopoulous' book on abortion in early modern Italy.

• Update: The American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies is hosting an online seminar for the next six weeks. "New Research in Sri Lankan History" includes several sessions on legal history. Register here.

• Update: The Middle Temple Library Blog has posted this handy list of online ecclesiastical law resources. 

• Update: The Einstein Foundation welcomes nominations from the humanities and social sciences for its Award for Promoting Quality in Research (due: March 31, 2021).

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

Max Planck Survey of Legal Historians on Virtual Events

[We have the following query from our friends at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.  DRE]

After roughly one year of covid-19 pandemic, working from home office, online team meetings and many other online things have come to shape our academic lives. Even academic conferences nowadays are starting to be organized as virtual events rather than be postponed indefinitely. However, no clear picture of benefits and drawbacks of virtual conference formats has emerged, let alone a common knowledge about best practices and about the many different forms that such virtual events can take.

At the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, we thus had the idea to launch a survey in order to solicit the opinions of the legal historians’ community on these things. This survey is meant to establish a glimpse of the state of virtual events in our discipline: the expectations and demands of scholars, the traps to avoid, and maybe even some ideas worth probing.

We cordially invite legal historians of all shades to participate and fill out our questionnaire. It contains about 40 questions in 5 groups/pages (General Questions, Activity Formats, Socializing, Publishing, General Comment) and it should take you roughly 15 minutes to complete. We will be very thankful for every response.

You can find the questionnaire at [here.]  The questionnaire will remain open throughout all of February, closing on Feb 28 at 23:59:59 UTC. Results will be published on our homepage and announced or reported on at various media like twitter, newsletters, blogs and journal sites. The survey adheres to very strict rules about data protection, which is one reason why we will not be able to send you a confirmation message or information about the results individually (the questionnaire is simply not asking for your e-mail address).

If you have any questions about the survey, please send a message to dlh@rg.mpg.de and we will be happy to answer.

Weekend Roundup

• The Viennese Legal History Society (Wiener Rechtsgeschichtliche Gesellschaft) holds its events online via Zoom during the pandemic and opens the talks now for the wider public.  On 19 January, at 18:50 Vienna, Professor Thomas Simon (Vienna) will give a talk in German with the title: "Christlich", "deutsch", "ständisch": Die sog. "Maiverfassung" 1934 und der "Autoritäre Ständestaat". Versuch einer verfassungsgeschichtlichen Einordnung.  Zoom link.

• Shannon McSheffrey, Concordia, on Disorder, Riot, and Governance in Early Tudor London: Evil May Day, 1517, in the Late Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, February 5, 2021, 5:30PM - 7:00PM.
  

• On Monday, March 8, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:00pm, former LHB Guest Blogger Thomas McSweeney, William and Mary Law School, will discuss his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2020) with Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard Law School.  Register and more here.

• The University of Nebraska, Lincoln is advertising a postdoctoral research associateship for “a project manager of a collaborative team collecting and processing habeas corpus petitions to design and populate a robust database that will allow researchers to demonstrate the many interpersonal and institutional relationships evident in these claims to freedom while also assessing their significance and value within the larger body of American jurisprudence.”  More.
  

• New Books in Law has an interview with Virginia Torrie on her book Reinventing Bankruptcy Law, which we've previously spotlighted.
  

• Jane Dailey, University of Chicago,  discusses her new book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History, and "what America’s history with lynch mobs can teach us about the attack on the Capitol" with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles on Legal Talk Network. 
  

• Nial Osborough, "Ireland’s greatest legal historian," is dead (Irish Times).
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has lesson plans for its video, "The Supreme Court and the 1876 Presidential Election."  
  

• The Organization of American Historians has issued a statement January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
  

• “The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is now accepting nominations for the 2020 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article in US intellectual history by an emerging scholar."
  

• Over at Environment, Law, and History, David Schorr notices Thomas Le Roux’s extended review of Chad Montrie's The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (U Cal Press, 2018).
  

• 
  Supervisory Curator Herman Eberhardt of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library explores “historic artifacts, documents, photographs, and film from the inaugural ceremonies of 1933, 1937, 1941, and 1945" on January 20 at 2PM.  More.
  

• Legal historical op-eds and other writings on self-pardons, the 25th Amendment, impeachment, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and related matters are legion.  Here is a smattering: The US Senate History office on the post-resignation impeachment of William Belknap. William Eskridge says self-pardoning isn't a thing (WaPo).  Mark Graber on the second impeachment (WBALTV).  How scholars interpret "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" (NatGeo).  John D. Feerick on our nation's history with presidential inability and succession (The Hill).  Eric Foner and Gerard N. Magliocca on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (WaPo).  Joanne Freeman ad Geoffrey Stone on sedition (NYT).  Gregory Ablavsky compares the assault on the Capitol with the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 (Stanford News).
  

• Also Phil Magness and the Pacific Legal Foundation on the 1619 Project (PLF).
  

• Update: Shirley Abrahamson's NYT obituary.
  

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

Serious Fun: A conference with & around Schlegel

John Henry Schlegel (credit)

Serious Fun: A conference with & around Schlegel! is now online in the Buffalo Law Review.  It honors John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law. We note that there are no women among the contributors.

Symposium Introductions

Foreword
David A. Westbrook

Tuesday Afternoons with Schlegel
Barry Cushman

Symposium Essays

The Tale of Two Harts; A Schlegelian Dialectic
Charles L. Barzun

Of Sheepdogs and Ventriloquists: Government Lawyers in Two New Deal Agencies
Daniel R. Ernst

Transmission of Mastery
James A. Gardner

The Schlegelians v. the Langdellians on Legal Education
Robert W. Gordon

John Henry Schlegel and The Muppet Show
Alfred S. Konefsky

Normativity and Objectivity in Historical Writing (My Dinner with Schlegel)
Matt Steilen

“Read What Was Never Written”
Christopher Tomlins

“I Am Better At Narrative Than Analytical History”: Schlegel’s Version of Intellectual History
G. Edward White

Symposium Afterword

Saying Thanks with Some Self-Reflection
John Henry Schlegel

--Mitra Sharafi

Getzler and Pitts Are New AJLH Editors-in-Chief

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The American Journal of Legal History and Oxford University Press are delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Yvonne Pitts and Prof. Joshua Getzler as Co-Editors-in-Chief, effective 1 January 2021.

Joshua Getzler is professor of law and legal history at the University of Oxford, and a fellow in law at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He trained in law and history in Australia, and then wrote a doctorate in legal and economic history at Oxford, resulting in his monograph A History of Water Rights at Common Law which was awarded the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2005.

Joshua works on the historical evolution of legal institutions of property, trust, fiduciaries, corporations, and charities, especially religious and welfare forms. He also studies the history of native title, and the jurisdiction and accountability of colonial, settler and imperial governments, principally in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Joshua has taught and researched at universities in Australia, USA and Israel. He serves on the council of the Selden Society for English legal history, the editorial boards of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Equity, and is co-editor of the OUP monograph series Oxford Legal History.

Yvonne Pitts is an associate professor of history at Purdue University - West Lafayette specializing in the legal histories of sexual regulation, disability, property, and legal culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. She is the author of Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth Century Kentucky, which was awarded the American Society of Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize in 2014. Her current research explores the U.S. military's system of licensing prostitutes and regulating sex work in Nashville, Tennessee during the American Civil War. She traces how regulatory practices around sexual danger, race relations, contagion, and the proper subjects of surveillance and legal discipline evolved in the context of a wartime military occupation. She is also working on a project examining the constitutional and legal understandings of the material texts and evidentiary practices in nineteenth century obscenity trials.

Joshua writes: "Under the vigorous editorial leadership of Alfred Brophy, Stefan Vogenauer, and Felice Batlan, the American Journal of Legal History stands out as a compelling publication, with every issue filled with erudition, originality, and thought-provoking discoveries. Stefan has described very well the growth of the journal to its current commanding form. The journal attracts great attention across North America, Britain, Europe, and the wider world. In a globalized society full of contention over justice and authority, livelihoods and identities, tradition and innovation, we need a vigorous and independent-minded legal history practice more than ever, to explore the shape of the past and its impact on the present. I am excited by the opportunity to carry forward and develop the mission of the AJLH, working closely with my co-editor Yvonne Pitts, the distinguished editorial board, the associate and review editors, and our OUP partners. We will strive to serve the legal-historical community by providing the best possible forum for scholarly work covering all periods and places."

Yvonne writes: "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to the field of legal history and work with diverse and international legal scholars as the co-editor of the American Journal of Legal History. The AJLH has a long tradition as a forum for highly respected, innovative legal historical scholarship across broad geographical, thematic, and temporal subfields. Under the able leadership of past editors Felice Batlan and Stephen Vogenauer, the AJLH has produced trenchant, influential research from early career and established scholars. I look forward to working with my co-editor Joshua Getzler to build on the AJLH's commitment to emerging questions and traditional themes in legal and constitutional history in local, national, and transnational contexts."

Oxford University Press would like to thank the outgoing editors, Prof. Stefan Vogenauer and Prof. Felice Batlan, for their skilled and dedicated work on AJLH. The AJLH was first published in 1957 and was the first English-language periodical in the field of legal history.

Weekend Roundup

• In the New Republic: Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz on the place where the meat industry meets anti-bestiality laws, past and present.

• Catch this virtual event with Ashley Rubin on her forthcoming book, The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829-1913: Jan.5 at 6-7pm EST. 

• The Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust, at the Sourasky Central Library, Tel Aviv University, has put some of its collections online, including prosecutions for distributing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Nazi Justice Collection, which "contains information on the judiciary in Nazi Germany and hundreds of trial transcripts."  H/t: JQB
  

• “The new feature documentary, My Native Air: Charles Evans Hughes and the Adirondacks, co-produced by MDT Publishing and Snarky Aardvark Films, is premiering on-demand in a limited run from January 15th to February 15th, 2021.”  H/t: JQB
  

• Brittany Nichole Adams, Special Collections, Digitization, and Archival Services Librarian, Northwestern University is profiled in the Bright Young Librarians series at FineBooks and Collections.
  

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Anya Jabour (University of Montana) on why "Referring to female PhDs as ‘Dr.’ promotes equal treatment and values women’s work," including a discussion of trailblazing law reformers (and PhD holders) Sophonisba Breckenridge and Edith Abbott.

• ICYMI:  University of Mississippi fires Garrett Felber, a tenure-track assistant professor in the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History, who has studied the American carceral state. (Mississippi Free Press).  Greg Melleuish on Constitutional History in Australia (Telos Press Podcast).

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

Anne Fleming Tributes

Several tributes to my Georgetown Law colleague Anne Fleming have been launched or otherwise transpired since her death on the eve of the present academic year.  I know of four.  The first is a joint effort of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) and the Business History Conference (BHC), the Anne Fleming Article Prize.  As the BHC explains:

The sudden and unexpected death of Anne Fleming in August 2020 was a tragic loss to academia. Anne's work was at the interface of legal and business history. The central concerns in Anne’s work related to poverty, economic justice, finance and banking, debt, consumer protection, bankruptcy, and other questions of financial equity.  

The prize is awarded every other year to the author or authors of the best article published in the previous two years in either Law and History Review or Enterprise and Society on the relation of law and business/economy in any region or historical period. It is awarded on the recommendation of the editors of the Law and History Review (the official journal of ASLH) and Enterprise and Society (the official journal of Business History Conference). No submission is necessary. The prize will be awarded in 2022, for work published in 2020 and 2021. The prize is for the amount of $250.

Second, at this year's virtual annual meeting of the ASLH, Laura Kalman, a past president of the Society, noted Professor Fleming's passing at a session devoted to Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars.  Professor Fleming was herself a Preyer Scholar, and she was serving on the selection committee when she died.  “She became the anchor of our committee,” Professor Kalman said.  “She would circulate spread sheets to organize us at the beginning of our deliberations, she was incisive, and she modeled good humor. . . . She combined excellence with humanity, and we join everyone who mourns her premature loss.”

The last two tributes involve Georgetown Law.  The editors and staff of the Georgetown Law Journal have dedicated Volume 109 to Professor Fleming's memory.  I contributed a tribute.  Finally, Dean William M. Treanor has announced that a set of four-year research professorships for recently tenured scholars has been renamed the Anne Fleming Research Professorships.

--Dan Ernst

Legal Histories and Historians in Socialist East Central Europe

Socialism and Legal History: The Histories and Historians of Law in Socialist East Central Europe, edited by Ville Erkkilä and Hans-Peter Haferkamp has been published in the series Routledge Research in Legal History:

This book focuses on the way in which legal historians and legal scientists used the past to legitimize, challenge, explain and familiarize the socialist legal orders, which were backed by dictatorial governments.  The volume studies legal historians and legal histories written in Eastern European countries during the socialist era after the Second World War. The book investigates whether there was a unified form of socialist legal historiography, and if so, what can be said of its common features. The individual chapters of this volume concentrate on the regimes that situate between the Russian, and later Soviet, legal culture and the area covered by the German Civil Code. Hence, the geographical focus of the book is on East Germany, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland and Hungary. The approach is transnational, focusing on the interaction and intertwinement of the then hegemonic communist ideology and the ideas of law and justice, as they appeared in the writings of legal historians of the socialist legal orders. Such an angle enables concentration on the dynamics between politics and law as well as identities and legal history.

Studying the socialist interpretations of legal history reveals the ways in which the 20th century legal scholars, situated between legal renewal and political guidance gave legitimacy to, struggled to come to terms with, and sketched the future of the socialist legal orders. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal History, Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law and European Studies.

About the editors: Ville Erkkilä is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for European Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Hans-Peter Haferkamp is Full Professor of Private Law and History of German Law. He is the Director of the Institute of Modern History of Private Law, German and Rhenish Legal History, University of Cologne.

TOC after the jump.

--Dan Ernst

Richard Polenberg (1937-2020)

Richard Polenberg, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University and the author of Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court and Free Speech and many other works, has died.   Here is Cornell's notice.

Gordon Named ASLH Honorary Fellow

Robert W. Gordon (SLS)

[The third and final posting of citations for the new Honorary Fellows of the American Society for Legal History is for Robert W. Gordon.  Amalia Kessler of the Honors Committee read Professor Gordon’s; we ought to have mentioned that Bruce Mann, a past president of the ASLH, read the citations for Professors Brand and Scott.  DRE]

It gives me enormous personal and professional pleasure to announce that my teacher and now colleague Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law at Stanford University and the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History (Emeritus) at Yale, is being named an Honorary Fellow of the ASLH.  Through his extraordinarily influential scholarship and his remarkable generosity as a mentor, Professor Gordon has had a profound, transformative, and enduring influence on the field of legal history.  

Gordon completed his law degree at Harvard in 1971.  Thereafter, he went on to assume professorships at a series of excellent universities-SUNY Buffalo, Wisconsin, Stanford, and Yale.  So too, he has held visiting professorships at top institutions around the globe, such as Harvard, Oxford, Toronto, and the European University Institute.  He has given on the order of two dozen named lectures at leading universities and been awarded a broad range of prestigious fellowships.  A deeply respected expert on legal ethics and the legal profession, he has served as a member of various task forces and advisory boards focused on such matters.  And his service to the field of legal history has been especially extensive.  Among many other activities in this arena, he served as a past president of the ASLH.
 
Professor Gordon has published more than 80 articles, essays, and book chapters.  He has also published a number of edited volumes and is working on two book manuscripts.  His writings have spanned a variety of topics, including the history of the legal profession and contracts.  But he is most widely known for his highly influential essays on legal history and historiography.
    
Perhaps first and foremost within this remarkable groups of essays is "Critical Legal Histories."  In an extraordinary survey of myriad past approaches to understanding the relationship between law and society through time, Professor Gordon highlights their otherwise neglected commonality-namely, a "functionalist" conception of law as emerging to address social "needs," which are naively (or cynically) imagined as somehow pre-existing and thus pre-political.  Demolishing such functionalism, Gordon calls instead for an approach to history that respects the many contingencies in legal-historical development and attends to the ways that law and society are mutually constitutive.  It is impossible to overstate the extraordinary influence of these ideas in shaping the legal history scholarship produced over the last forty or so years, and not only by scholars of U.S. legal history.  Indeed, even as efforts have been made to question the paradigm of context and contingency, it remains quite clearly the reigning paradigm-or as one colleague puts it, the nature of Professor Gordon's influence has been such that we all "operate in a Harold Bloomian anxiety of influence."
 
Professor Gordon is also widely recognized as a, if not the, preeminent historian of the legal profession in the United States.  Among the many distinctive virtues of his work in this arena is his tracing of the interconnections between on-the-ground efforts to pursue professional reform, on the one hand, and high legal thought, on the other.  So too, it bears emphasis that his scholarship is widely admired not only for its substantive contributions, but also for its inimitable style.  As another colleague writes, Professor Gordon is "our field's greatest essayist," whose "vintage . . . aperçus . . . make one laugh aloud and nod one's head at Bob's wisdom.  No one is more fun to read.  No one is smarter."  

Professor Gordon's remarkable influence on the field of legal history, however, extends well beyond his scholarship.  He has played a key role in training an incredible number of people in this (virtual) room, amounting to two or even three generations of legal historians.  And they all both admire and adore him.  He is always open to new ideas and to new people-and while he might not always agree with the ideas, he is unstinting in his willingness (and eagerness) to engage with them, respectfully and thoroughly.  Indeed, as all in his wide orbit know, he spends untold hours on activities that do not earn a line on the CV but that mean everything in terms of creating and sustaining a vibrant and welcoming intellectual community.  He teaches numerous one-on-one directed reading and research classes, comments extensively on papers and dissertation chapters, and writes a near endless stream of recommendation letters.  And he does all of this in a way that combines his unique, Gordian mix of great generosity of spirit, on the one hand, and hard-headed, trenchant critique, on the other.  The end result is that the beneficiaries of his wisdom are always lifted up-and in all possible senses.

For lifting us all, and the field of legal history as a whole, we are thrilled to welcome Professor Gordon as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Scott Named ASLH Honorary Fellow

Joan Wallach Scott (IAS)

 [We continue our posting of the citations, prepared by the Honors Committee of the American Society for Legal History, for the three legal historians named Honorary Fellows of the ASLH at its November 2020 meeting.  Today’s honoree is Joan Wallach Scott.  DRE]

Our next Honorary Fellow is Joan Wallach Scott, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.  Professor Scott is a transformative scholar of French social and labor history, the history of gender and feminism, and the history of civil liberties in the United States and in France. 

Professor Scott received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1962 and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1969.  She began her teaching career at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and from there moved to Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Brown University, where she was the founding director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.  In 1985 she joined the Institute for Advanced Study, where she was Harry F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science.

Through a dozen monographs, another dozen edited volumes, and articles and book chapters too numerous to count, Professor Scott has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history.  Her challenges have repeatedly won recognition from her colleagues in the profession.  The American Historical Association alone has bestowed four awards on her, starting with the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in 1974 for her first book, The Glassworkers of Carmaux:  French Craftsmen and Political Action in a 19th-Century City; followed by the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in 1989 for her book, Gender and the Politics of History; the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 1995; and the Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2008.  She holds honorary degrees from universities in the United States and Europe, and in 1999 the Hans Sigrist Foundation at the University of Bern awarded her its prize for her groundbreaking work in gender history.  The influence of her work is truly international-her books and even some of her articles have been translated into multiple languages.

Professor Scott may not be a legal historian, but scholars who study the legal history of gender, feminist legal thought, or the legal history of secularism or of academic freedom-to take four core areas of modern legal historical scholarship-could not imagine their scholarship without her powerful and inescapable presence.  For many of us in legal history, she is best known as the author of a series of path-breaking articles on methodology in history, which have had immense impact on our field as well as on others.

Taking just the legal history of gender, her work has transformed the practices of nearly everyone who works in the field.  Her now-classic article, 'Gender:  A Useful Category of Historical Analysis"-in which she argued that studying gender explains not only women's history, but history generally-challenged the reigning conventions in women's history and continues to inspire innovative research.  Without question, engagement with her scholarship has deepened what legal historians do.

Professor Scott's survey of the history of French feminism opened up the history of feminism to legal historians.  Beginning with her book, Only Paradoxes to Offer:  French Feminists and the Rights of Man, she has explored the gendering of citizenship and rights in modern representative democracies.  Her demonstration that the concept of citizenship was from the start gendered as male and defined against a female "other" illuminated the dilemmas at the heart of rights claims, such as the paradox of women claiming "the rights of man."  In examining the continuing difficulties faced by feminists in their struggle for equality, her analysis has assisted scholars and activists focused on women, people with disabilities, and members of racial, ethnic, and sexual minority groups.

Her interest in the ways in which difference poses problems for democratic practice continued in subsequent books-most notably Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism and The Politics of the Veil.  Her work on the veil enmeshed her as a willing and provocative combatant in legal controversies both in France and the United States about the meanings of secularism. Her careful analyses of the headscarf controversies in France became a model of how to explore such issues.  Writ large, her scholarship traces the limits of liberalism, whether among French feminists or the American historical profession.  Her work has made her an important voice for academic freedom.

Professor Joan Scott has also been an active and generous citizen of the profession.  The center she created at Brown became a site for exploring feminist theory by historians and others in the humanities and social sciences who until that point had been mostly hostile to social theory.  At the Institute for Advanced Study, she brought in generations of younger scholars, encouraged them, and guided them, as her work has guided so many others, legal historians included.  

Professor Scott has always been a challenging presence.  She has been described-admiringly-as spiky and uncompromising.  Her work has often been controversial, good both to argue over and engage and argue with.  Yet, it has always been essential.  She does not need our accolades, but we have needed her and are grateful for what she has taught us.  We are pleased and honored to welcome her as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Brand Named ASLH Honorary Fellow

 [This week, we will be posting the citations for the three legal historians named Honorary Fellows of the American Society for Legal History at its November 2020 meeting.  The first is Paul Brand.  DRE]

Our first Honorary Fellow is Paul Brand, emeritus Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford,

Paul Brand (ASLH)

and William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan.  Professor Brand is, in the estimation of his many admirers, the finest living historian of the constitution and law of medieval England.

Professor Brand took his B.A. and M.A. at Oxford and his D.Phil., also at Oxford, in 1974.  He was Assistant Keeper at what was then the Public Record Office in London from 1970 to 1976.  From 1976 to 1983 he was Lecturer in Law at University College, Dublin, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London from 1983 to 1993.  In 1997 he was appointed Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.  He is currently an emeritus Fellow of All Souls and, since 2013, William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan.  He has also held visiting positions at the law schools of Columbia University, Arizona State University, Emory University, and New York University, and at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.  He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in both the history and law sections in 1998 and of the Medieval Academy of America in 2012.  He has been a councillor of the Selden Society since 1990 and its vice-president since 2002.  He is an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple, London.

Professor Brand has been one of the leading and most prolific historians of English law for many decades.  In two monographs, eight volumes of edited original texts, and over eighty book chapters, articles, and essays, he has reshaped the field.  A scholar of remarkable range, he is as comfortable in the Anglo-Norman and Angevin periods as he is with the early Plantagenets.  He has also read deeply in the Anglo-Saxon and later medieval periods.  Within that span, it is the thirteenth-century-a period considered the most important formative period of English law-that he has made particularly his own.  Even his most distinguished colleagues in the field remark with no little awe at his total mastery of the sources.   He has used his vast knowledge to shape profoundly our knowledge of early legal literature, legal education, the emerging legal profession, the development of statute law, the relationship of developments in Ireland to the early common law, the relationship of Jews with the early common law, and the ways in which law shaped family relationships.

Professor Brand's monographs are fundamental reading on thirteenth-century English law.  His first, The Origins of the English Legal Profession, became the standard work on the subject, marked by its lucidity and deep learning.  His second, Kings, Barons and Justices:  The Making and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England, explores the interaction of law, society, and politics in the era of baronial reform under Henry III.

Professor Brand's four volumes of Earliest English Law Reports for the Selden Society are truly magisterial.  They include all the earliest surviving law reports from 1268 to 1290-from Westminster, the eyres and assizes, and the Exchequer of the Jews-as well as the plea roll enrollments for the cases when they can be identified.  With these volumes Professor Brand made accessible the very first discussions of many aspects of the common law and revealed the first known occurrences of much of our legal terminology.

Professor Brand's scholarship is impressive in its own right and amply merits electing him an Honorary Fellow of the Society.  He has been honored with not one, but two festschriften, which attest to the fact that his immense and generously shared learning is a vital resource for all others working in the field.  This latter quality-his generously shared learning-speaks to another qualification for election as Honorary Fellow.  Professor Brand builds fields of scholarship.  He is an inspiration and great support for scholars young and old.  His generosity in commenting on the work of others is legendary.  In fact, every colleague whose opinion the committee solicited commented with more than a little awe on Professor Brand's remarkable unselfishness in helping others with their work.  If Honorary Fellows of the Society are the scholars on whose shoulders we stand, Professor Brand has actively lifted scores of other scholars to his shoulders in pursuing new and invariably important questions in legal history.

In sum, Professor Brand has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.  Throughout his long career, he has modeled how historians should engage with the law-understanding and respecting its technical complexity, but constantly aware of the social and political contexts within which that technical complexity worked and which constantly shaped what it could achieve.  He also models how historians should engage with their profession-publishing meticulous and path-breaking articles and books, editing and re-editing texts which allow others to expand the boundaries of the field, and engaging in collegial exchanges at gatherings large and small, with colleagues old and new, in a way which makes English legal history accessible and welcoming to all.

We are pleased and honored to welcome Professor Brand as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Julio Capó Jr. (Florida International University) and Melba Pearson (Florida International University’s Center for the Administration of Justice ) on Florida voter suppression as "Jim Crow Esq."; Ashley Farmer (University of Texas, Austin) on Black women running for Congress;
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has just launched The Supreme Court & the Presidential Election of 1876, "a documentary on the 15-member Electoral Commission (including 5 Supreme Court Justices) appointed to resolve the disputed election."
  

• New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Counterterrorism in American Civil Courts: The Role of Letelier v. Republic of Chile, by Alan McPherson.
  

• "Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and Social Justice," a discussion featuring Georgetown Law’s Brad Snyder, who is the author of House of Truth, and Jennifer Lowe, the Director of Programs and Strategic Planning of the Supreme Court Historical Society, will be conducted online on November 18, 2020 at 3 pm.  It is sponsored by the National Archives, the Supreme Court Historical Society, and the Capital Jewish Museum.  Register here.
  

• Street Law, with the help of the Supreme Court Historical Society, has revamped its site, Landmark Cases of the US Supreme Court. 

• A Call for an upcoming event at the Université de Neuchâtel on historical sources of Swiss law here (9-10 Sept. 2021).

• Update: a profile of Buffalo Law's Michael Boucai and his article "Before Loving" (UB Now).
  

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

Ohnesorge: A Hurstian View on Chinese Econonomic Development

John K.M. Ohnesorge, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted Development is Not a Dinner Party: A Hurstian Perspective on Law and Growth in China, which is forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review Forward:

Much has been written, and remains to be written, about the many roles law has played in China’s economic development since 1978. Without minimizing the value of what has been written so far, this essay seeks to broaden the discussion by applying to China’s recent history certain ideas of the great historian of 19th Century American law and economic development, James Willard Hurst. The essay proceeds by providing a brief introduction to Hurst and his work on law and economic growth in the United States, then explores how those ideas might be applied to assist our understanding of what has happened in China.

--Dan Ernst