Weekend Roundup

• On the Amicus podcast: Who Gets Left Out of Originalism? with Mark Joseph Stern, Maggie Blackhawk, and Greg Ablavksy.  A machine-generated, unedited transcript is here.  

• Carl Wilén, Lund University, will deliver The Haitian Revolution and the Concept of the Legal Form: Capitalism, Slavery and the Universality Paradigm in the Distinguished Speaker series of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo Law School on October 3 from 12:30 to 2p.m with a noon reception.  Zoom registration here.

• 
  
  The Georgia Historical Society has announced its program for the 250 anniversary of the founding, Restoring Trust in American Institutions: History and the Foundations of American Democracy (Saporta Report).   
  

• First 125 Years of AALS: a "coffee table book" on the Association of American Law Schools (ABA Journal).

• Adam Cox, NYU Law, "contests the origins of 'immigration exceptionalism,' the doctrine holding that the political branches of government exercise extraordinary discretion over immigration policy, subject only to limited oversight from the courts" (Regulatory Review).

•  In United States ex rel Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates, LLC, James Pfander, Diego Zambrano, and Jared Lucky submitted an amicus brief “to correct the district court’s misstatement of the historical record and mischaracterization of their work" on qui tam proceedings at the Founding (JD Supra).   

• "The American Constitution Society’s Chicago Lawyer Chapter has named Geoffrey R. Stone, '71, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, as the inaugural recipient of the Geoffrey R. Stone Award, established in his honor" (Chicago Law). 

• Leah Litman speaks with Richard Primus about his book, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Strict Scrutiny). 

• Balkinization Symposiums--A Continuing List 

• 
  
  ICYMI: Jamelle Bouie asks, What if Dred Scott Had Been Decided Correctly? (NYT). LHB Founder Mary Dudziak on the Trump Administration's takeover of the DC National Guard and police (CSM).  A review of Jere Nash's Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877 (Clarion Ledger). 

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

Weekend Roundup

• "History in Action: A Conversation with Professor Felicia Kornbluh"(UVM). 

• Richard Epstein on his career as a legal scholar (and other topics) in the "Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century" podcast series of the Hoover Institution (Hoover).  

• Lindsay Chervinsky joins Saikrishna Prakash, Virginia Law, online to discuss her book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic, and “how the Constitution and the presidency were shaped by the demands of the times and how both continue to evolve.”  Thursday, September 4, 2025, 11 a.m.-12 p.m.  Sponsored by the UVA Miller Center (UVA Law).

• The University of Chicago Law School's notice of Alison LaCroix's receipt of that SHEAR book prize for The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms.

• Mary Ziegler, UC Davis School of Law, and Stephen Gilles, Quinnipiac University School of Law discuss Professor Ziegler’s book Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction in a National Constitution Center podcast.   

• 
  "Gerard Magliocca is the winner of the Erwin N. Griswold Prize [of the Supreme Court Historical Society] for his book Washington’s Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington (Oxford University Press, 2022). The Griswold Prize is awarded on an occasional basis when a book about the history of the Supreme Court" (SCHS).

• Jonathan Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism has been longlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.  

• This year, University of New Mexico School of Law is looking to hire in the fields criminal law, civil procedure, Law and Indigenous People, clinic and legal research and writing 

• ICYMI: Joyce Vance on Judge Frank Johnson on the Right to Protest (Substack).  Charles Apple on the history of the US Census (Spokane Spokesman-Review).  An interview with William Treanor (HIL Podcast)

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

Weekend Roundup

• The University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative (SDRI) has put together an amazing resource on state constitutions, the 50 Constitutions project, which it continues to update. Of particular interest: the "Tracking Constitutional Change" feature. This feature "allow[s] users to see how [constitutions] have taken shape over time and to learn about important historical moments." Nine states so far "have full Tracking Constitutional Change capabilities," including the just-added Pennsylvania. SDRI reports that "[m]ore states will be added in the coming year."   

• Katrina Jagodinsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will present in the Monday Seminar of the Department of History of Johns Hopkins University on September 22, from 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm. 

• 

  Children Gathering Wildflowers above Trondhjem (LC)

  Elin Hofverberg on "110 Years of the Norwegian Castbergian Child Laws" (In Custodia Legis).
  

• Zachary S. Price, UC San Francisco Law, on “Trumpian Impoundments in Historical Perspective” (SLR).

• "Durham Cathedral has unveiled a new exhibition featuring three versions of Magna Carta, the historical charter that first established the Rule of Law"  (Palatinate). 

• The historian of administrative state Joy Milligan has moved from Virginia Law to UC Berkeley Law (UC Berkeley Law). 

• Justice Stephen Breyer, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, and Michael Klarman on taking the bar--or not (Harvard Law Today). 

• Thanks to Liz Sepper (UT-Austin), the talk of law professor Bluesky is the painting "Supreme Court Beach." Jay Willis at "Balls & Strikes" did a deep dive on the painting's history -- including which former Justice owns the original. [KMT] 

• The latest "SCOTUS Scoop" from the Supreme Court Historical Society is Still at Work: How the Justices Spend Their Summer Months.  But we thought they were at the beach!

• For over 30 years, Daytonites "have put on a play every July using the trial transcript" form the Scope Monkey Trial.  "Destiny in Dayton" explains "the complexities of the town captured by history" (Akron Legal News).  Also, the ABAJ looks "back at the Scopes trial 100 years later." 

• Upcoming book talks in the America's Town Hall series of the National Constitution Center include Akhil Reed Amar on Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 (September 16) and Eric Foner on Our Fragile Freedoms (September 24).  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Penn Law's notice of Serena Mayeri's new book, Marital Privilege.  

• BC Law's notice of Aziz Rana's receipt of the annual book prize of the Society for US Intellectual History for The Constitutional Bind. 

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has a series of short videos, Breaking History, based on recent or forthcoming content in the Journal of Supreme Court History.   Helen J. Knowles-Gardner discusses "Without a Little Help from Your Friends: The Supreme Court's Rejection of the American Jewish Congress Amicus Brief in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson (1958)" and Jonathan Lurie discusses his forthcoming review of Robert C. Post’s new contribution to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History. 

• Asheesh Kapur Siddique, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, on "the long history of governments attempting to restrict access to documents about their inner workings" (HNN).

• Katherine Gregory, Mississippi State University, on the threat funding cuts pose to political archives deposited in state universities (The Conversation).  

• Over at Balkinization: a symposium has begun on Richard Primus's The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power. Look out for contributions from Will Baude (Chicago), William Ewald (Penn), Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford), Abbe Gluck (Yale), Sandy Levinson (Texas), John Mikhail (Georgetown), and Christina Ponsa-Kraus (Columbia). 

• "Tulane Law Students Explore the Origins of Maritime Law in Greece" (Tulane Law). 

• "Quentin Skinner responds to a wide range of questions centred primarily on the arguments of his Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (2025) (GIH). 

• Time's Made by History:  Crushing Dissent is as American as Protest Itself by Shira Lurie.   The Founders Knew Great Wealth Inequality Could Destroy Us by Daniel Mandell.  Why American Revolutionaries Fought to Protect Habeas Corpus by Zara Anishanslin.  Inherit the Wind and the Scopes Trial in Memory by Charlotte M. Canning. 

• The Jacksonville University College of Law is hosting “250 Years of Independence: Fortifying America’s Commitment to Democracy for All," a traveling exhibit curated by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress (Florida Bar). 

• At the American Prospect: Joseph A. McCartin (Georgetown University), "Requiem for the Wagner Act" (h/t: Bunk)

• ICYMI: The decline of postliberalism (Vox). Michael Kazin on the Scopes Trial at 100 (NYT). Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern ask, "Can Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Take on History Be a Corrective to Amy Coney Barrett’s?" (Slate).  Gerard N. Magliocca on Robert Jackson's Youngstown concurrence as "the Greatest 'No Kings' Essay in History" (Slate).  The Harvard law faculty's summer reads. John Yoo on Richard Epstein on the original understanding of the war powers (AEI).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Northwestern Law has a post on the grants Ajay K. Mehrotra received in support of his book project, “American Outlier: Economic Inequality and the U.S. Historical Resistance to National Consumption Taxes.”  On that NEH grant, though, see this and this. 

• Columbia Law's notice of new faculty member and legal historian Kate Redburn.     

• 
  Congratulations to Laura Flannigan, University of Oxford, for winning the Royal Historical Society's first book prize for Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

• Balkinization has completed its symposium in honor of Ken Kersch.  Contributors were Jack Balkin, Rogers M. Smith, Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, George Thomas, Mary Ziegler, James E. Fleming, Linda C. McClain, Carol J. Nackenoff, Logan E. Sawyer III, and Dennis J. Wieboldt III. 

• Also over at Balkinization, Gerard Magliocca ponders "The Mystery of Birch Bayh's Amicus Brief in Reed v. Reed."   

• Samantha Barbas, Iowa Law, recently spoke on the history of freedom of speech and press at the Aspen Ideas Festival.     

• Over three days in October, Maggie Blackhawk, NYU Law, will deliver the 2025 Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government at the University of Oklahoma.  Professor Blackhawk's topic is Colonial Administration: Empire, Civilization, and the Making of Political Science.

• "The Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana has embarked on an ambitious project to create the Indian Law Portal – a comprehensive digital archive of legal documents from each of Montana’s tribal nations" (University of Montana).  

• "Preliminary report into Indian boarding school history lays the groundwork for dismantling policies that have harmed Indigenous people" (Washington State Attorney General).

• “Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect,” a new one-hour documentary, premieres on Tuesday, September 9, on PBS.  "What sets this film apart is that for the first time, [Thurgood] Marshall’s story is told in his own words—drawn from a rare eight-hour oral history recording" Chicago Defender).

• Time's Made by History:  Ryan LaRochelle and Kate Flynn say that History Shows us Why a Non-Partisan U.S. Military is Essential.

• At Inside Higher Ed: Michael Bannerjee (UC Berkeley) draws on the 1819 Dartmouth College case to argue that "Universities Need to Go Corporate"; doing so could "preserve institutional autonomy and defend academic freedom." 

• How the Heritage and the US Department of Education would have us observe the 250th. 

• The Institute of Historical Research has posted online its archive of interviews with UK historians, including Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, E P Thompson, Dorothy Thompson, and Maurice Cowling (History and Policy). 

• The comments on that proposal of the American Bar Association to double the number of required experiential credit hours from six to twelve have been posted online and are summarized here.  Mine is one of them.  DRE 

• The July 2025 newsletter of the Historical Society of the D.C. Circuit is now available here.

• ICYMI:  Brandan Buck on the Lost Liberalism of America First (Cato). Noria Doyle on How Plessy v. Ferguson sparked early civil rights activism from Milwaukee’s Black community in 1896 (Milwaukee Independent).  Alexis Coe, American History columnist for the NYTBR, lists some books to read on the US Supreme Court in "this moment of constitutional crisis" (NYT).  The rare book collection of the the Indiana Supreme Court Law Library (Indiana Lawyer).  Justice Jackson's inclusive original public meaning (Slate).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Notre Dame Law’s notice of its two prize winners at the recent annual meeting of the Supreme Court Historical Society, Barry Cushman and Dennis Wieboldt.   

• Harvard Law's notice of Kenneth W. Mack's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Harvard Law Today).

• More historians' amicus briefs from the Brennan Center for Justice: a third one on birthright citizenship by Martha Jones and Kate Masur (New Hampshire Indonesian Community Support et al. v. Trump) and another on voting rights by Alexander Keyssar, Carol Anderson, Orville Vernon Burton, and J. Morgan Kousser (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe). 

• The U.S. Department of Justice, Then & Now: Barbara McQuade, Michigan Law and a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, in conversation with John Q. Barrett at the Robert H. Jackson Center. 

• W.E.B. Du Bois and His Impact on America: David Levering Lewis in conversation with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center, Thursday, June 19, at Noon ET. Register here to attend online. 

• Also at the National Constitution Center, in person and online: The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed, on Monday, June 23 at 6:30 p.m. ET.  Register here to attend online.

• If, like me, you teach the rise of the residential subdivision, you might want to check out this post by the Library of Congress's Geography and Maps Division.  DRE 

• ICYMI: "The Constitution—Not Trump—Demands Allegiance" says Christian Fritz (Albuquerque Journal) (link fixed). The Cato Institute says history teaches that fighting tyranny requires mobilizing the people as well as the courts (Cato).  A history of the Antiquities Act in 1906 (Wilderness Society).

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

Weekend Roundup

• The National Constitution Center’s Town Hall on Executive Authority: Presidential Power From America’s Founding to Today, with Gillian Metzger, Columbia Law School, and Saikrishna Prakash, University of Virginia School of Law, is now available online.

• Congratulations to Michael Schoeppner, University of Maine at Farmington, upon his receipt of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for his proposed book, “‘Living Illegally,’ which tells the stories of free Black people whose illicit migrations belie the oft-told story of America’s open borders in the era before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882" (UMF). 

• Congratulations to Adelina Miceli, this year’s recipient of the University of Connecticut Law School’s Distinguished Alumni Professor Kent Newmyer Award in American Legal History, “established in honor of Kent Newmyer to recognize a student who demonstrates excellence in the study of American legal history.”  

•  A wide-ranging interview of Seth Barrett Tillman (Ami).

• On June 21 at 2 pm, the Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site will host Megan Rhodes Victor, Queens College, who will present “‘We’ll Be Free’: Molly Houses, Community, & Homosexuality in the 18th C. English Colonial World.”  The event is free and open to the public (New York Almanack).

• The Brennan Center has announced its Steven M. Polan Fellows in Constitutional Law and History for  2025–2026: Michele Goodwin, Brian Highsmith, Alan Jenkins, Joy Milligan, Bertrall Ross, and Robinson Woodward-Burns.  

• Over at LPE Blog, a symposium is underway on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. 

• The American Political Science Association's advice to members those traveling between the United States and Canada for its annual meeting in Vancouver in September.  (ASLH 2026 is set to meet in Alberta.)

• His Honour Peter Collier, KC, reviews The Legal History of the Church of England, edited by Norman Doe and Stephen Coleman (Church Times). 

• ICYMI: Scott Bomboy on Four Cases When the Writ of Habeas Corpus Was Suspended  (NCC).  Rachel Barkow on the history of presidential pardons (NPR). A new website illuminates the history of Indigenous enslavement in New England (R.I. PBS). Victoria Sutton on "the other slavery," with a lovely shout out to her teacher James May (NNO).  An awkward moment at the Supreme Court Historical Society (WaPo).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization: a symposium on Dylan C. Penningroth's Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023), featuring contributors Evelyn Atkinson (Tulane), Ian Ayres (Yale), Mark Graber (Maryland), Steve Griffin (Tulane), Carol Rose (Yale), and Mark Tushnet (Harvard).
  

• Aditya Bamzai, University of Virginia School of Law, Johann Neem, Western Washington University, Farah Peterson, University of Chicago Law School, and Jack Rakove, Stanford University, on the Articles of Confederation at the National Constitution Center (YouTube). 
  

• Thomas J. McSweeney, William & Mary Law School, a recipient of the university's 2025 McGlothlin Award for Exceptional Teaching.

• On Tuesday, June 10, 2025, 12PM – 1PM (Pacific) the Oregon Historical Society will host, as part of its series, "Historians and the News," the virtual event Free Speech, Misinformation, and National Security, a conversation with Sam Lebovic and Christopher McKnight Nichols.  Register here.

•  Stephanie Hall Barclay, Georgetown University Law Center, responds to

  

  John Marshall Harlan (LC)

  Jud Campbell’s “Determining Rights” in the Harvard Law Review.

• ICYMI: Harvard's Magna Carta (The Crimson). Charles Barzun on the quiet radicalism of Justice Souter (SCOTUSblog).  Centre College's sculpture of John Marshall Harlan (Lane Report). Bruce Ackerman and Susan Rose-Ackerman on the APA and Postwar Fears of Executive Power (Slate). Wong Kim Ark's great grandson and birthright citizenship (Post Reports).

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

Justice Browning Awarded Texas Legal History Fellowship

[Congratulations to Justice Browning on this fellowship!  DRE]

The Texas State Historical Association has selected Justice (ret.) John G. Browning (law professor and Distinguished Jurist in Residence at Faulkner Law School in Montgomery, Alabama) as the winner of the 2025 Larry McNeill Research Fellowship in Texas Legal History. This award, which includes a stipend, is presented annually " for the best research proposal on some aspect of Texas legal history." Established in 2019 in honor of Larry McNeill ( a past president of both the Texas State Historical Association and the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society), it " recognizes his commitment to fostering academic and grassroots research in legal history."  Justice Browning's winning proposal was for " Forgotten Firsts: Uncovering the Lives and Legacies of Texas' Early Black Lawyers." Justice Browning's work on America's early Black lawyers has appeared in multiple law reviews, bar journals, and the Journal of Supreme Court History.  The award and check were presented at a luncheon on February 28, 2025, during the TSHA's Annual Meeting in Houston.

A Conference for Charles Donahue

[Congratulations to Professor Donahue.  We wish we could be there!  DRE]

The Learned and Lived Law: A Celebration in Honor of Charles Donahue, May 19, 2025, Lewis 214, Harvard Law School.

Please join us for a celebration honoring Professor Charles Donahue and marking the publication of The Learned and Lived Law:  Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue.  We will have a day of presentations by chapter authors as well as a display of medieval manuscripts in the Harvard Law Library in the early afternoon.

Welcome
8:45 – 9:00 am
Interim Dean John C.P. Goldberg
Saskia Lettmaier and Elizabeth Papp Kamali

Panel 1: Roman Law
Chair: James Townshend
9:00 – 10:00 am

Charles Bartlett, Roman Property, Corporate Personhood, and the Politics of Natural Law in Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy: Venice, Baldus, and the res communes omnium

Wim Decock, “For the Sake of Mental Health and Mutual Peace”: The Transactio-Agreement in Early Modern Law and Theology

Panel 2: Medieval and Early Modern Law
Chair: Elizabeth Papp Kamali
10:15 – 12:15 pm

Samantha Kahn Herrick, Getting Ahead in a Twelfth-Century City: The Ambitious Monks of Saint-Clément, Metz

Ryan Rowberry, The Papal Constitution Execrabilis (1317) and Clerical Justices in the English Royal Courts

Elizabeth Mellyn, Suicide in Early Modern Italy

Carol Symes, The “Desire of Deeds”: On Cherishing Medieval English Charters

12:15 – 1:15 pm
Lunch available in Lewis 202

Medieval Manuscript Display
Harvard Law Library, 4th floor, Caspersen Room
1:15 – 2:15 pm
Arranged by Sarah Wharton, Historical & Special Collections
Co-Hosts: Carol Symes and Charles Bartlett

Panel 3: American Legal History
Chair: Ryan Rowberry
2:30 – 3:30 pm

Sally Hadden, Lawyers and Their Book Collections: Notes from the Eighteenth Century

Amalia Kessler, The American Importation of the Comparative Accusatorial/Inquisitorial Divide: Francis Lieber’s Failed Transplant and Its Early Twentieth-Century Resurgence

Panel 4: Literature and Legal Theory
Chair: Saskia Lettmaier
3:45-4:45 pm

Anton Chaevitch, Faust: Goethe’s Guide to Legal Progress

Bharath Palle, Wesley Hohfeld’s Modernist Imagination

Closing Reflection
Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas, De Magistro eruditissimo et beneficentissimo

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Nursing Clio, Kylie Smith (Emory University) brings history to bear on "RFK’s ideas about 'wellness farms' for young people." 
  

• The next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop will take place on May 16 at 12 noon UTC.  Sara Limao Papa, a doctoral student at Goethe University Frankfurt, will present "The Pathways of the People: Access to Water in 18th-Century Maranhão and Bahia."  Tamar Herzog, Harvard University, will comment. (More and h/t: H-Law).

• 
   HLS's notice of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (Harvard Law Today).

• Throughout this week, we've mentioned legal-historical works that won prizes at the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Another legal history--Marie-Amélie George's Family Matters--won an Honorable Mention, for the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award.  For more on the book, check out the wonderful series of posts that Professor George wrote for the blog last fall. Congratulations, Professor George!
  

• Mary Ziegler, UC Davis, discusses her new book, Personhood, on the NPR show Here & Now.

• NYU Law's notice of its lateral hiring of Sarah Seo.  
  

• Linda Colley has received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
  

• The Organization of American Historians hails its new president, Annette Gordon-Reed.

• Gerard N. Magliocca on Vice Presidential Inaugural Addresses (Green Bag).
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman's reflections on civility and the debate over Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Review.

• ICYMI:  Chief Justice Roberts, a Buffalo native, will help celebrate 125th anniversary of the Western District of New York.  Robert H. Jackson and John Lord O'Brian would be pleased!  (WGRZ). Originalism in a gun-control case in the Fourth Circuit (Bloomberg Law).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Sam Tanenhaus reviews former ASLH president Michael Willrich’s American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Basic) in the New York Times.
  

• "Old Courthouse reopening shines light on Louis Brandeis’ early legal career in St. Louis" (STL Jewish Light).

• Evan Bernick, Northern Illinois University College of Law, debates birthright citizenship with Ilan Wurman, University of Minnesota Law School, at a Federalist Society event.
  

• Judge Beryl Howell used originalist arguments in ordered the reinstatement of a member of the National Labor Relations Board (FedSoc).  And be sure to read Judge Howell's latest, on the Perkins Coie litigation, including its references to Shakespeare, John Adams, et al.

• Litigating History: Practical Observations on the Use of History in Litigation by Matthew L. Schafer, in the ABA's Communications Lawyer.
  

• Legal scholars on the Liberty Justice Center's brief in the litigation against the recent tariffs include Steven Calabresi (Northwestern), Harold Koh (Yale), Richard Epstein (NYU), Michael McConnell (Stanford, also former federal judge), Alan Sykes (Stanford), and Gerard Magliocca (Univ. of Indiana) (Volokh Conspiracy).

• A notice of the legal historian Michael Klarman's "Last Lecture" (although presumably not his last lecture) at HLS.

• ICYMI: Supreme Court of Ohio Honors Judicial Legacy with Melhorn Exhibit for Law Day (Court News Ohio).  Sundry historians on whether Trump 2.0 is unprecedented (NYT). Rick Baldoz on the long history of politically motivated deportations (The Conversation).
  

• Update: Kathy Hermes on Hartford's "Exploding School house" incident (Patch).

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

Weekend Roundup

• A recording of that National Constitution Center debate on birthright citizenship is now online.   Gabriel Chin of the University of California, Davis School of Law; Amanda Frost of the University of Virginia School of Law; Kurt Lash of the University of Richmond School of Law; and Ilan Wurman of the University of Minnesota Law School joined Jeffrey Rosen.
  

• The new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences include Ned Blackhawk, Martha Jones, and Kenneth Mack. 
  

• Julia Rose Kraut discussed her book, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States on Lawfare.
  

• Mauni Jalali has posted "Founders as Administrators: Historical Precedents for the Modern Regulatory State" (Notice & Comment).
  

• The University of Maryland, Baltimore's notice of Mark Graber, upon his naming as a Guggenheim Fellow (The Elm). 
  

• The University of Arkansas School of Law will celebrate the life of Mark Killenbeck, who delivered two Silverman lectures at the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Alison L. LaCroix has been named one of the 2025 recipients of the University of Chicago’s Academic Communicators Network Excellence Awards, which recognize "scholars who excel in sharing their research and scholarship with public audiences" (University of Chicago Law).
  

•  Kate Redburn has received the Yale Law Journal’s Emerging Scholar of the Year Award (YLJ)

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

• ICYMI: The Alien Enemies Act: Annotated (JSTOR Daily).  Michael Klarman, Vicki Jackson, Robert Post, Jack Balkin et al. on DJT’s war on the universities (NYT).
  

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

Federal History

Federal History 17 (2025) has now been published open-access.  It includes much legal history, including book reviews (including a posthumously published one by Ken Kersch) and an interview with Michael Willrich, a former president of the American Society for Legal History.  Here is the TOC:

Editor’s Note
Benjamin Guterman

Roger R. Trask Lecture 

Guardians of History at the Library of Congress
John Y. Cole

Articles

“The Duty of Government”: The Politics of the Domestic Postal Money Order, 1837–1911
 Christopher W. Shaw

Shipowners and Seamen in the Establishment of the Department of Commerce and Department of Labor, 1898–1920
Kathleen S. Sullivan

The Judgeships of the U.S. Commerce Court, 1910–1913: How Their Ambiguous Status Threatened Judicial Independence and Guided the Creation of Future Specialized Federal Courts
Jake Kobrick

“A living force”:  Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vision of American Democracy
Iwan Morgan

The Defense Logistics Agency in Operation Enduring Freedom, 2001–2014: The Commodity Side of Logistics Efficiency
Colin Jay Williams

Interview

An Interview with Michael Willrich
Benjamin Guterman

Roundtable 

Prohibition, The Constitution, and States’ Rights, by Sean Beienburg

Introduction by Robinson Woodward-Burns, Howard University
Review by Ken I. Kersch, Boston College
Review by Susan McWilliams Barndt, Pomona College
Review by Review by Emily Pears, Claremont McKenna CollegeReview by George Thomas, Claremont McKenna College
Author’s Response by Sean Beienburg, Arizona State University

Reviews in Legal History

Terri Diane Halperin
Timothy Messer-Kruse, “The Carried-Off and the Constitution: How British Harboring of Fugitives from American Slavery Led to the Constitution of 1787”
Kevin Arlyck, “The Executive Branch and the Origins of Judicial Independence”

Reid Arno
Norrinda Brown, “Black Liberty in Emergency”
Christopher S. Havasy, Joshua C. Macey, Brian Richardson, “Against Political Theory in Constitutional Interpretation”
Carla LaRoche, “Black Women and Voter Suppression”

Benjamin Guterman
Kate Andrias, “Constitutional Clash: Labor, Capital, and Democracy”

Amelia Flood
Amy McMeeking, “Citizenship, Self-Determination, and Cultural Preservation in American Samoa”

Lisa Parshall
William M. Carter Jr., “The Second Founding and Self-Incrimination”

Weekend Roundup

• Ajay K. Mehrotra reviews Dylan C. Penningroth's Before the Movement in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• A notice of the Legal History Consortium at Penn, led by LHB Blogger Karen Tani, with due credit given to Past ASLH President Susan Barringer Gordon, who was Professor Tani's predecessor as director of the consortium.  Also Professor Tani is among those faculty quoted by the Daily Pennsylvanian on teaching during Trump 2.0.  DRE 
  

• The Reed Gallery of the Dunedin Public Library has mounted an online exhibition of its Mary Downie Stewart Collection, a collection of portraits and autographed specimens of New Zealand judges, some of whom I discussed in this.  H/t: MW.  DRE

• A recording of that Tenement Museum-sponsored conversation, Receiving The Irish: The Origins of American Immigration Policy, with Hidetaka Hirota and Kevin Kenny. 
  

• The April 2025 issue of the Newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is now available here.  It includes a summary of the recently opened oral history of Judith Areen.

• Brian Leiter reports on the Oxford University Press's current policy on review copies (Leiter Reports).
  

• 
  We've heard that the movie option for Victoria Saker Woeste's Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech has been picked up and look forward to seeing it on the big screen.

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

• Made by History, via Time Magazine: Michelle Bezark on What the Children’s Bureau Teaches us About Promoting Federal Programs.  Brendan A. Shanahan says that A Century-Long Battle Over the Census is Brewing.  Jeanne Theoharis on How Newspapers Struggled to Cover Martin Luther King Jr. and Segregation in the North.  Hidetaka Hirota on The Long American Tradition of Categorizing Immigrants as Either Good or Bad.

• ICYMI: Lorianne Updike Schulzke makes an originalist case against overturning Humphrey's Executor (Volokh Conspiracy).  Mark Tushnet on why he signed the HLS faculty's letter to their students (Balkinization).  Andrew Wender Cohen on the history of tariffs (PBS). The lesson of Loving for the Roberts Court (Minnesota Star Tribune). A Short Course in Justice: the Freedmen’s Bureau Courts (JSTOR Daily).  Ellen Schrecker says that the current assault on the university is worse than McCarthyism (The Nation).

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

Weekend Roundup

• A recording of David Sugarman's lecture, “Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case,” which he delivered at the University of Cambridge on December 3, 2024, is now on-line. 
  

• This March 11 event is open only to the YLS community; still, we want to note Historical Roots of the Current Catastrophe: A Conversation, with John Fabian Witt and James Q. Whitman.
  

• A podcast of Heather Cox Richardson in conversation with Dylan Penningroth on February 26 on the evolution of the Republican Party and what gives her hope for America (Berkeley Talks).

• 
  Over at Regulatory Review, a symposium has been underway on How Government Built America, by Sidney A. Shapiro, Wake Forest University School of Law and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati College of Law.  It includes and exchange with Edward Balleisen: here and here.

• The Brennan Center has posted a report of the session at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on originalism and the Supreme Court.  The participants were Thomas Wolf, Jane Manners, Jack Rakove, and Jennifer Tucker.

• “We should look for judges who are likely to display good judgment in their rulings," says Mark Tushnet on the Modern Law Library podcast, "and we shouldn’t care whether they have a good theory about how to interpret the Constitution as a whole—and maybe we should worry a bit if they think they have such a theory."  He also his experience as law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall.
  

• The Organization of American Historians has launched an oral history project for federal employees.   
  

• The legal historian (and University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor) Jennifer Mnookin's message on that "Dear Colleague" letter and recent executive order affecting colleges and universities.    The legal historian (and Dean of Georgetown Law) William M. Treanor replies to (Interim) U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin's DEI letter. 
  

• David W. Blight, Beth English, and James Grossman on the Executive Order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” (New Republic).

• The American Enterprise Institute has named Philip Hamburger a nonresident fellow in its Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies research division.
  

• The Smithsonian Magazine's notice of Martha S. Jones's The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. The book is among Ebony's "must reads" and New York Times's Six Books We Recommend This Week.
  

• The Special Collections Department at the Williams & Mary Law Library has posted a digital recreation of its recent exhibit, Women in History & the Law. 
  

• A notice of Emma Kaufman's recent article on the history of private criminal prosecution (NYU Law). 
  

• An AP story has put Justin Simard's Citing Slavery Project back in the news. 

•  Jedidiah Kroncke reviews Allison Powers's Arbitrating Empire (Jotwell).

• The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History, by Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls, has been reviewed in the English Historical Review.
  

• ICYMI, Birthright Citizenship Edition:  Kate Masur on the Strict Scrutiny podcast.  Eric Segall and Anthony Michel Kreis on Dorf on Law.  Gerard N. Magliocca on Balkinization.

• ICYMI:  Researchers uncover stories of Black Londoners who escaped slavery (Guardian). The Long History of Executive Excess (Governing). 
  

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

Sunday Roundup

• 

  Robert H. Jackson (LC)

  Adam Liptak on the Sassoon Resignation and Robert Jackson's "The Federal Prosecutor," with a quote from John Q. Barrett (NYT). 
  

• Daniel Richman invokes Henry Stimson, Emory Buckner, Felix Frankfurter, and William Wirt in his op-ed on DJT's DOJ (NYT).

• Holly Brewer waits for word on her National Archives grant "to study the legal structures that governed slavery in the British Empire and early American society" (NYT).  
  

• Kenneth Mack's video explainer on birthright citizenship (HLS YouTube).
  

• More officials have resigned at the National Archives (WaPo).
  

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at JOTWELL, Josh Gupta-Kagan has posted an admiring review of Laura Briggs, Haaland v. Brackeen and Mancari: On History, Taking Children, and the Right-Wing Assault on Indigenous Sovereignty, 56 Conn. L. Rev. 1121 (2024).
  

• In a recent episode of Strict Scrutiny, Kate Shaw and Leah Litman speak with Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford University) "about what originalists get wrong about history and how the founders thought about the law."
  

• Another report of that “wide-ranging discussion” at Stanford Law between Jonathan Gienapp and Michael McConnell “on how history, law, and politics intersect in constitutional interpretation” (SLS).
  

• 
  Is it surprising that, in these times, so many of the new leaders of the Organization of American Historians are scholars of legal and constitutional history? Congratulations to Annette Gordon-Reed, President; Marc Stein, President Elect; and Donna Clare Schuele, a new member of the Executive Board. Margot Canaday is a continuing member of the Executive Board.

• Melissa Murray, NYU Law, will discuss History and the Courts with Christen Hammock Jones, doctoral student in American legal history at University of Pennsylvania; Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus, professor at Columbia Law, and Noah Rosenblum, NYU Law, at Brooklyn College on April 2 from 11:00 am to 12:15 pm.  Anna Law, Brooklyn College, will moderate.
  

• The recording of that terrific National Constitution Center town hall on Reconstruction and the Constitution: A Historical Perspective is now available online.

• John Q. Barrett on FDR's plans to resist a negative decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Gold Clause Cases (Jackson List). 
  

• Julie Novkov reviews Anthony Michael Kreis’s Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development (S-USIH).
  

• Talbot Publishing has published an edition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Model of Certainty or Demonstrations in Law Expounded in the Doctrine of Conditions (1669), “a unique, unprecedented collection of Roman and canon law rules regarding the application of conditions in contract, inheritance and marriage law. “

• ICYMI: Jack Goldsmith on Departmentalism and DJT (Executive Functions).  Scott Bomboy on the History of the Constitution and Tariffs (NCC). 
  

• Update: A compilation of trackers of DJT's executive orders by the Pence Law Library at American University-Washington College of Law.  H/t: MD.

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

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Rabiat Akande, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, upon being named the 2025 Wilson H. Elkins Professor by the University System of Maryland, which comes with “an award of $80,000 over two years to support a research project titled ‘Law and the Histories of Empire’” (The Elm). 
  

• A nice notice by Ronald A. Brand of his University of Pittsburgh School of Law colleague and legal historian Bernard Hibbitts upon Professor Hibbitts's retirement.
  

• In the wake of President Trump's Executive Order on "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," many historians and legal scholars are weighing in on the history of birthright citizenship: Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins) spoke to WBUR; Rachel Rosenbloom (Northeastern University School of Law) wrote for Made by History; Evan Bernick (Northern Illinois University) spoke to Time.
  

• The American Historical Association is hosting a congressional briefing on the history of the U.S. House of Representatives.  It will take place on Wednesday, January 29 at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075.  The panelists are Kathryn Cramer Brownell (Purdue University), Matthew Green (Catholic University of America), and Rachel Shelden (Pennsylvania State University).
  

• 
  Guillaume Tusseau will speak on Bentham's constitutional thought on February 7 at Sciences Po.  The discussants will be Peter Niesen and Xiaobo Zhai.
  

• Pamela Brandwein reviews Mark Graber's Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War (Lawfare). 
  

• Paul Moreno reviews Stuart Banner’s The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States (Law & Liberty).
  

•  Talbot Publishing, an imprint of The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., has published G. I. Tunkin: Selected Works, edited and translated by William E. Butler.

• ICYMI: The Constitution disappears from the White House website (Newsweek).  Rockingham County (Virginia) Circuit Court is celebrating the restoration and digitization of “a Burnt Deed Book from 1815, a Land Book from 1878, and a Land Tax Book dating as far back as 1812" (WHSV).  "Harvard Outsources Program to Identify Descendants of Those Enslaved by University Affiliates" (Harvard Crimson).
  

• Update: Mary Frances Berry on the Executive Order suspending civil rights enforcement (Yahoo/The Grio).  John Yoo on birthright citizenship (AEI).
  

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

Kenneth Ira Kersch

With the assistance of his friends, we note more remembrances of Ken Kersch, who died last month at the age of 60 from cancer.  The obituary in Newsday, composed by his father and by a long-time college friend, noted his B.A. from Williams College, J.D. from Northwestern University, and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University before identifying Professor Kersch as "a preeminent scholar of the United States Constitution, American political and constitutional development, and conservative constitutional thought."  It continued, "He truly enjoyed teaching, and he was greatly admired and appreciated by his students.  . . . Ken was a lover of art, music, literature, an history, and had a passion for the outdoors."

Boston College's very full and impressive memorial is here.  Recollections of him by colleagues and a former student are here.

Update: Professor Kersch's family asks that donations be made in his memory to The Trevor Project.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: JEF