Robert M. Ireland (1937-2026)

Robert Michael Ireland has died.  For forty-one years after he obtain his Ph.D. in history at the University of Nebraska--he had earlier received a JD from Stanford--Professor Ireland taught in the Department of History at the University of Kentucky, where he taught introductory courses in U.S. history, American Legal History, United States Constitutional History, and a seminar on Famous American Criminal Trials.  He repeatedly won teaching awards at UK and was revered as a mentor to his students.  His publications included The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky (1972), The County in Kentucky History (1976), and Little Kingdoms: The Counties of Kentucky (1977).  Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau once wrote that if "the traditional Kentucky trilogy [was] good bourbon, fast horses, and beautiful women," Ireland's studies of the work of the state's county courts "altered it to a new tetralogy of horses, whiskey, hemp, and lawlessness."  Professor Ireland discusses his career briefly here and at greater length here.

Weekend Roundup

• Harvard Law's notice of Tanner Allread, newly appointed to the faculty.

• Andrea Scoseria Katz and Jane Manners have posted “Lost to History”: Uses and Abuses of the Past in Slaughter and Cook" (Just Security).  And see Lev Menand's  "The Federal Reserve Exception to the Slaughter Rule" (SSRN). 

• Yale's notice of Mark Peterson's The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History” (YaleNews). 

•  Aslı Ü. Bâli's review of Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind (LPE). 

• Over at Balkinization: Alec Ewald (University of Vermont) on why you should put Frederick Douglass in your syllabus.

•  ICYMI: An exhibit on the judicial history of Broward County, Florida (FBN).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Rosa Goluboff and G. Edward White reflect on the enduring legacy of the Declaration of Independence (Virginia Law). 

• William Novak reflects on Polan Fellowship and the Future of Democracy (Michigan Law).  

• Legal historian Jennifer Mnookin is now president of Columbia University (NYT). 

•  For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical: a preview of Rachel Shelden's forthcoming The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History (TPM).

• The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory is expanding its collaboration with India through the launch of the Centre for Legal History of India, in cooperation with the National Law School of India University in Bangalore and the NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad. 

• 
  
  The July newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here.  It includes a report of the Society's recent panel on U.S. v. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

• A new exhibit at the Law Library of Congress: The US Code at 100.

• From the Touro Law Review: a podcast episode featuring David S. Reynolds, interviewed by Rodger Citron, on Reynolds's recent book The Two Ships That Shaped America: The Mayflower, the White Lion, and the History of the Nation.  

• ICYMI: Sarah Trott on the five time the U.S. Constitution has come under threat (Conversation).   Anna Snyder asks, Why do historians complicate things? (Contingent).   Guénaël Mettraux on the history of war crimes (Articles of War).  The history of fireworks in Ohio (CNO). An interview with Jill Lepore on the Constitution (Jacobin).  Herbert Hovenkamp on the history of the rule of reason in antitrust law.  

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

Sunday Roundup

• Cynthia Nicoletti joins Duke Law faculty (Duke Law).    

• The National Archives of Asunción has opened the exhibit "Four Times of the Republic: The Constitutions of Paraguay" (Asunción Times). 

• Judge Thomas Logue reviews Akil Reed Amar's Born Equal (Florida Bar Journal).

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• ASLH President Mitra Sharafi's alternative to assigning undergraduate research papers in an age of AI (South Asian Legal History Resources).

• The recording of the National Constitution Center's session on the Constitution and the Courts, held in conjunction with the Federal Judicial Center, is now available.  It consists of a panel on the Constitution in the Founding Era with Akhil Reed Amar, Christopher Bonner, and Gerald F. Leonard, moderated by Thomas Donnelly, and a discussion on the Constitution and the federal judiciary with Kevin Arlyck, moderated by Julie Silverbrook.  

• Alison L. LaCroix's speech to the University of Chicago's graduates is here.  H/t: JDM. 

• From In Custodia Legis: "A Deep Dive into Library Resources on Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp." -- Part 1 and Part 2.   

• Saul Cornell appears in "The American Experiment," a five-part documentary on the nation’s founding that starts streaming on Netflix on June 24 (Fordham Law).

• Margaret Burnham and Brenda E. Stevenson on opening the federal archives on Civil Rights Cold Cases (AHA Perspectives). 

• "The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law is pleased to announce the 2026–2027 recipients of the Steven M. Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History: Kate Andrias, Olatunde Johnson, William Novak, Alice O’Brien, and Julie Suk."   

• 
  
  "Is the United States on the Road to a New Civil War?" David Blight's lecture to the American Academy in Berlin. 

• Edmarverson A. Santos on Doctrine of Discovery and Colonial Legal Order and Robert J. Miller on The International Law of Colonialism: The Doctrine of Discovery.

• ICYMI: More Gordon Wood tributes (LOA).  250 Years of State Constitutions (SCR). The NJ State Library's exhibit on the state's first constitution (tapinto).  Jesse Wegman discusses James Wilson (Fresh Air).  The University of Pennsylvania Almanac notes Serena Mayeri's receipt of the 2026 James Willard Hurst Book Prize From Law & Society Association.  The lessons of the Harry Raymond car bombing of 1938 for police accountability today (DJ).  When Robert E. Lee's daughter was arrested in a Jim Crow streetcar dispute (Alexandria Brief).

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

Weekend Roundup

• 
  ASLH President Mitra Sharafi discusses Fear of the False, "her new book about colonial South Asia's critical role in the development of forensic science" on Law in Action, the podcast of the University of Wisconsin Law School.   

• From the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History: John Fea (Messiah University) on "Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students." 

• Another memorial to the late Gordon Wood, via History News Network x Bunk History. 

• "The History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) has released 'The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,' the first comprehensive report documenting and analyzing the Trump administration’s sweeping, coordinated effort since January 2025 to reshape how the American past is recorded, preserved, and shared with the public" (OAH).

• Steven Hahn reviews Born Equal: The Remaking of America’s Constitution, 1840–1920
  by Akhil Reed Amar (The Nation). 

• Via H-Disability: a memorial to Richard K. Scotch, author of multiple landmark histories of disability law and policy. 

• A call for papers for a conference on the Legal History of Tamilnadu.  Deadline for abstracts: June 15.  

• The conference "Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution" will take place at UMass Amherst from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 12, 2026 (H-Law).

• "Students from Stanford Law School’s Center for Racial Justice recently helped bring Wong [Kim Ark]’s story to life through a Bay Area public-history project that joins law, art, and community memory" (Stanford Lawyer).  

• U.S. Representative French Hill has introduced a bill to require the Department of the Interior to study the preservation and incorporation into the National Park System of the home of Scipio Jones (QQ) 

• A recording of the webinar, Equality and Exclusion: Israel's Constitutional Order and Its Palestinian-Arab Minority (1948–2025), with Ofra Bloch, moderated by Jon D. Michaels (UCLA).

•  ICYMI: Eric Segall asks that we "Please Stop Calling the Roberts Court Justices Originalists" (Dorf of Law). Jamelle Bouie discusses the so-called "Colored Conventions" of the nineteenth century in arguing that "The Supreme Court Doesn’t Own the Constitution" (NYT).

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

YJLH 36.6: A Festschrift for Gordon Wood

We have of course noted the death of the great historian of the American Revolution Gordon Wood.  As it happens, the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities has just published online its 36.6 issue: Festschrift in Honor of the Scholarship of Professor Gordon Wood, with the following note:

On November 22-23 of 2024, Yale Law School hosted a special Conference on the Scholarship of Gordon Wood. The Yale Journal of Law & Humanities has the honor of publishing a festschrift volume of papers presented at this conference. Professor Wood was the leading historian of the US Revolution, and it was an honor to bring his work into dialogue with contemporary legal scholarship. This issue is dedicated to Professor Wood's memory.

The editorial team would like to note that Professor Wood, in addition to being a brilliant scholar and wonderful writer, was an extremely kind person. We were all deeply saddened to learn of his passing. It was our genuine pleasure to have had the chance to work with him in preparation of this special issue.

1. Akhil Reed Amar, The Revolution and the Constitution: Two Grand Narratives

2. Mary Sarah Bilder, The Character of the Constitution: Instrument and Constitution

3. Richard D. Brown, Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992): A Comment

4. Jane E. Calvert, Beyond Whig Constitutionalism: New Perspectives on the Constitutional Debates in Creation of the American Republic

5. John O. McGinnis, Gordon Wood’s Republic of Ideas

6. Johann N. Neem, Gordon Wood’s Anti-Elitism and the Crisis of the History Discipline

7. Jack N. Rakove, Being Schooled with Gordon Wood

8. Jeffrey Rosen, Gordon Wood's Radical Achievement

9. Coleen A. Sheehan, Gordon Wood, James Madison, and American Memory

10. William Michael Treanor, Creation and the Republican Revival

11. Michael Zuckert, Clio, Minerva, and the American Republic

12. Gordon S. Wood, Response

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Alison LaCroix on using history to advise the University of Chicago's graduating class (Chicago Maroon).

•  A notice of "Law and the Paranormal: A Critical Perspective on Legal Rationality," a doctoral thesis submitted to Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge by Andrew Michael Sagar, in 2023, "traces how English law transformed its treatment of witchcraft, astrology, spiritual mediumship, and fortune-telling from crimes of supernatural harm into issues of fraud, commerce, and consumer regulation" (USAHerald). 

• An appreciation of Tay-sheng Wang's Introduction to Taiwan’s Legal History by Shih-An Wang, Project Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Law, Kobe University (Taiwan Insight).

• New in Gale's "Making of Modern Law" series, British Colonial Law: Acts, Ordinances, and Proclamations from the Colonies, 1643–1900. 

• The webinar "Making the Founding Documents Relevant in the 21st Century" will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, commencing 1:30 PM (ET).  The panelists will be Paul Carrese, Arizona State University (moderator); Roosevelt Montás, Bard College; Jeremy Bailey, University of Florida; and Jocelyn Evans, University of West Florida.  Register here (PSNow). 

• 
  SHEAR's "Civics Exchange" "connects you with members of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR) who can speak to your organization, club, or institution about the history that has shaped our civic institutions and civic culture, and the relationship of the past to our present-day civic institutions and civic life."

• From In These Times: "Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Tony Mazzocchi, a Working-Class Hero" (and a major figure in 20th c. legal history). 

• An event of interest, on June 6: historian and archivist Daniel F. Gosling (UK National Archives) is offering an online intro to early modern legal records. (more)  

• Lawbook Exchange's May 2026 list of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: The history of Supreme Court leaks (SCOTUSblog).  What Jefferson and Madison would have thought about "rededicating" the US to God (The Conversation).  Hunting, Poaching, and the American Revolution (New York Almanack).

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

Weekend Roundup

• "On the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, Harvard Law historian and legal scholar Bruce H. Mann argues that colonists were fighting to uphold English common law rights and traditions" (Harvard Law Bulletin). 

• The Penn Carey Law School welcomes Christian Burset to its faculty. 

• An appreciation of the late John R Wunder (AHA Perspectives) .

• After appearing in "The Last Minute" segment of CBS's "60 Minutes," Jill Lepore wins the Pulitzer Prize in History for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. The National Review is not wholly persuaded.  

• A notice of Stanford’s “America at 250,” one-unit course, cross-listed in the History and American Studies departments and the Law School.  It is “an exploration of where America has been, and based on that, where it might be going or might need to go,” according to Jonathan Gienepp, who is one of its instructors, with Pamela Karlan (Stanford Daily).

• A Q&A with Len Niehoff about his new book, Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law (American Bar Association, 2026) (Michigan Law). 

• On Thursday, May 7, Christine Chabot, Jane Manners and Lev Menand presented papers on removal, with a comment Nick Parrillo, in one of the Academic Paper Workshops at the Spring conference of the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section of the American Bar Association."  

• "Alex Votta recently received Michigan Law’s Dimond Prize for his paper “The Great Rampart in Protecting Human Liberty: The Right to Education in Antebellum and Reconstruction Black Constitutional Consciousness.”  He credits Sam Erman, Rebecca Scott et al. (Michigan Law).

• The subsequent lives of the subjects of Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs (National Gallery of Art).  

• From the New York Times: "A Look Inside the Case That Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires" (Buckley v. Valeo).  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Elizabeth Papp Kamali on "Charles Donahue: Man, Magister, Inimitable Scholar" (Harvard Law Bulletin).  

• The HLS Library has scanned "Harvard’s full collection of 140,000 documents comprising more than 700,000 pages" to produce "the first complete, keyword-searchable online collection of the Nuremberg Trials records" (Harvard Law Bulletin).

• BU Law's notice of legal historian Rephael Stern. 

• Congratulations to Alison LaCroix, upon her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences!  Also William Baude and Elizabeth Clemens (UChicago News).  Professor LaCroix will be the speaker at the University of Chicago's 2026 Commencement this June.

• A notice of Jill Lepore's HLS seminar, “The History of Evidence,” devoted to "two key questions: 'What counts as proof?' and 'How has that changed over time?'” (Harvard Law Today).  She discussed her book We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

• Mary Sarah Bilder and Sarah Isgur will "explore Virginia's central role shaping the nation's founding" as part of the 2026 Founding Debates Program of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and the Virginia Law Foundation on September 24, 2026, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.  (More.)

• ICYMI: Martin v Hunter’s Lessee (History is Now).  Michael D. Ramsey, Keith Whittington, Kurt Lash, and Lawrence Solum on birthright citizenship (Regulatory Review). The Forgotten History of the School Choice Movement (AEI).

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

Berger-Howe Fellowship to Reiss

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolf Howe Legal History Fellowship for 2026-2027 at Harvard Law School has been awarded to Jennifer Reiss.  A doctoral candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania, she received her B.A. from Penn and her law degree from Harvard, as well as two master’s degrees in law and history from the University of Cambridge.  Before graduate school, she practiced law in New York and London.  During her fellowship year she will revise her dissertation, “Undone Bodies: Women and Disability in Early America,” for publication and work on a new project on disability and abolitionism in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. 

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William E. Nelson Memorial Celebration

[We have the following announcement from our friends at NYU Law.  DRE]

The New York University School of Law invites you to celebrate the life and legacy of William E. Nelson ’65, Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law Emeritus, on Tuesday, April 21, at 5:30 p.m. in Greenberg Lounge, located in Vanderbilt Hall at 40 Washington Square South.  Doors will open at 5:00 p.m.  A reception will follow.

Welcome remarks by Troy McKenzie ’00, Dean and Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Reflections from

John Sexton, President Emeritus, New York University; Dean Emeritus; Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Noah Rosenblum, Associate Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Daniel Hulsebosch, Russell D. Niles Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History Emerita, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Laura Kalman, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara

Harvey Rishikof, Visiting Professor, Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology

Hendrik A. Hartog, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty Emeritus, Professor of History Emeritus, Princeton University

William LaPiana, Dean of Faculty; Rita and Joseph Solomon Professor of Wills, Trusts, and Estates, New York Law School

Robert Kaczorowski, Professor of Law, Fordham School of Law

Leila Nelson

Sunday Roundup

• The legal historian David Langum has died.  He was a professor or research professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University as a professor of law from 1985 until his death.  His publications include the Hurst Prize-winning Law and Community on the Mexican-California Frontier: Anglo-American Expatriates and the Clash of Legal Traditions, 1821-1846 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) and Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (University of Chicago Press, 1994).  More.

• The Hoover Institution's Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosts "Historical Thinking and Democratic Citizenship" with Mary Clark, Suzanne Marchand, Jeffrey Collins, and Jonathan Gienapp on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, from 9:00–10:00 a.m. PT.

• The recent turn in the originalism wars has moved Dan Farbman, BC Law, to "an Emersonian polemic."

• On Sunday, April 19, 2026, from 2-4 pm, Michael Ross, University of Maryland, will lecture on “The Constitution They Argued Over: Power, Democracy, and Compromise in 1787” at the historic Rice’s Hotel/Hughlett’s Tavern, 73 Monument Place, Heathsville, Maryland (RealRadio).  

• Stephen Lubet, Northwestern Law, on John Brown's Trial and Birthright Citizenship (Slate).   

• A review of James Q. Whitman's From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World by Jane Webster, Newcastle University (BHR).

--Dan Ernst

Allison Tirres to Co-Edit AJLH

Congratulations to Allison Brownell Tirres, University of San Francisco School of Law, and to the American Journal of Legal History on Professor Tirres's selection as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the AJLH!  The Oxford Journals' announcement is here.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Hardeep Dhillon (University of Pennsylvania), who received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.  

• The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's notice of Katrina Jagodinsky's NEH grant to "reveal [the] untold history of habeas corpus" (Nebraska Today).  

• Overt at Jotwell, Marin Levy reviews Kevin Arlyck's The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789–1825 (2025). 

• "Reclaiming the Founders’ Frameworks": Stanford Law's notice of Jud Campbell. 

• We've learned of several historians' briefs in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. This one is by Jed H. Shugerman and Evan Bernick, and this one, prepared in cooperation with the Brennan Center for Justice, is by Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur.  Eric Muller's brief describes the recognition of the birthright citizenship of the children of interned Japanese parents without allegiance to the United States.  Keith Whittington's brief includes the heading, "Revisionist History Cannot Hold Water."  And the Cato Institute weighs in here.

• A recording, with a very substantial timeline, of the American Historical Association's congressional briefing on the history of vaccines, with Elena Conis, David Oshinsky, and former ASLH president Michael Willrich. 

• “The Rule of Law and the Common Good,” a conference on March 12 and 13 at Boston College, "will explore the synergy between legal theory and Catholic social thought."

• "A short piece for lay readers" on Youngstown by William Baude, University of Chicago Law.  

• Mary Arden, Lady Arden of Heswall, the former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, will lecture on Magna Carta on Friday, April 24, at Soulton Hall, Shropshire (Star). 

• The Historical Society of Michigan is hosting the virtual event The 1962 Michigan Constitutional Convention: Policy, Politics, and Citizen Engagement, with Doug Brook and Aria Dwoskin, on Tuesday, March 3, at 12:00 p.m.  Free for members; $7 for everyone else.

•  ICYMI: A report of a panel on the New Hampshire Constitution of 1776, with Lorianne Updike Schulzke (Concord Monitor).  The New York State Bar Association notes its sesquicentennial (NYSBA).  Eric Segall argues that "If 'It Takes a Theory to Beat a Theory,' Originalism Loses" (Dorf).  Robert Morton Duncan, the first Black justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio (CNO).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Boston College Law's notice of its new legal historian, Marco Basile (BC Law).   

• Mary Bilder, BC Law, will deliver “The Perils of Sex: Catharine Macaulay’s Constitution of Liberty” as the 13th Annual John Patrick Diggins Memorial Lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center on Wednesday, February 25, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.  The event will be livestreamed. 

• Over at Legal History Miscellany: Identifying Women Jurors and Institutionalising Women’s Citizenship, by Kay Crosby. 

• G. Edward White, UVA Law, discusses his new biography Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgement on the American Bar Association's Modern Law Library podcast.  

• Jessica Lake, Melbourne Law School, discusses her book Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (UVA Law). 

• Clare Cushman discusses US Supreme Court Justice Day helped establish the Court's recusal practice (SCHS).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued its February catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• Columbia University's new Obama Presidential Oral History collection includes quite a few interviews of interest to legal historians.

• A notice of Confluences of Law and History. Irish Legal History Society Discourses and Other Papers, edited by Niamh Howlin and Felix M. Larkin (Irish Catholic).

• ICYMI: The groundbreaking legal career of Judge Lucile Watts (Michigan Public Radio).  The “Renaissance” in Civic Education: Beyond the Salmon P. Chase Center (The Lantern).  Bhagat Singh Thind and his Citizenship Case (New York Alamanck).

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

JACH (Winter 2026)

The Winter 2026 issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History is now available online:

Sovereign Power and the Sweeping Clause
John Mikhail

Contemporary disputes involving the separation of powers take on a different light when they are framed in terms of powers of the Government of the United States itself. The “all other powers” provision of the Necessary and Proper Clause distinguishes government powers from executive powers and gives Congress distinct legislative authorities with respect to each of these categories.

Symposium: A Tribute to Kenneth Kersch

Ken Kersch and the New Legal History: Beyond the Internalist/Externalist Divide
Dennis J. Wieboldt III

For Ken Kersch, developments in twentieth-century American constitutional law could not be adequately explained by either neat doctrinal evolution or the raw exercise of political power.

Ken Kersch as a Scholar of “The Other”
Sanford Levinson

Ken Kersch’s remarkable scholarship generates profound questions about the difficulties—and even limits—of truly engaging with those who do not share certain ontological or epistemological commitments.

Ken Kersch and the Meaning of Development: Law, Ideas, and the Politics of Constitutional Change
Michael A. Dichio and Paul E. Herron

Ken Kersch showed us that constitutional development is not a story of inevitable progress, but of contested traditions, shifting coalitions, and the discontinuous, non-linear unfolding of political development.

Broadening The Terrain of Political and Constitutional Thought, Unmasking Delusional Constitutional Arguments
Carol Nackenoff

By broadening the terrain of political and constitutional thought, Kersch brilliantly examined how constitutional faiths are forged and “law stories” are woven to create common identities.

The Roberts Court and the Past and Future of Religion as a Constitutional Concern
Julie Novkov

The Roberts Court’s reconfiguration of free exercise and anti-establishment doctrine is not a simple conservative backlash. Rather, it creates a viable path for empowering a right-wing religious political project.

The Roberts Court’s Reconstruction of Church and State
George Thomas

Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) breaks with past understandings of the Free Exercise Clause by merging a state discriminating against religious individuals with a state declining to fund religious institutions.

Five Lessons from Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution for the Present Moment
James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain

Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution helps us see the second Trump Administration, not as an aberration, but as the fulfillment of certain conservative ideas that have been “hiding in plain sight.”

Forgetting Nothing, Learning Nothing: Constitutional Scholarship and the Political Development of the Modern Supreme Court
Calvin TerBeek

The "Lochner Era" was invented decades after the fact, and the 1970s were legal liberalism's zenith, not its decline. Constitutional law professors' standard story of legal liberalism gets it wrong on the front and back ends.

States’ Rights and Civil Rights: Barry Goldwater, Bill Buckley, Richard Nixon, and Southern Realignment
Sean Beienburg

Did invocations of states’ rights by southern segregationists permanently discredit constitutional federalism? A re-examination of the 1960s political realignment suggests Americans can embrace—or re-embrace—this feature of our Constitution, while remembering state autonomy is a strong presumption but one that has always been checked by the Constitution’s rights guarantees.

The Phenomenal Constitution
Austin Steelman

In Conservatives and the Constitution, Ken Kersch demonstrated that the continually reimagined Constitution is a “phenomenon” in American life, not an epiphenomenal result of more substantial politics.

Orthodox Originalism and Conservative Identity after Ken Kersch
Logan Everett Sawyer III

Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution showed not just that the conservative political movement shaped arguments about the Constitution, but that arguments about the Constitution were key to transforming a varied group of interests disaffected by New Deal and Great Society Liberalism into a coherent political identity and thus a powerful political order.

Sunday Roundup

• NYU Law's notice of Ashraf Ahmed, Lev Menand, and Noah Rosenblum's article, "The Making of Presidential Administration,” upon its naming as winner of the annual Award for Scholarship in Administrative Law from the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. The notice also includes a Q&A with Rosenblum. 

• Historical research figured prominently in the decision of Judge Chad F. Kenney, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, turning aside a challenge to the qui tam provisions from the False Claims Act on unitary executive grounds (JDSupra). 

• A notice of UC Berkeley professor David Henkin's legal-history-laden course on love, sex and marriage. 

• In March, SWOP NSW will host walking tours of Sydney’s historic "red light district."  “With 8 speakers each evening, the tour will cover both the personal anecdotes of those involved in sex work and the legislation that has shaped their lives. Speakers will share their stories on various topics, including current, historical, and future laws that aim to protect sex workers, as well as the advocates who have been instrumental in achieving these legal advancements." 

• Vice President Mike Pence and former Deputy Assistant to the President Greg Jacob are teaching the course, The Character of the American Constitution, at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government.  The first class “walked students through the origins of the Declaration of Independence, exploring what the Declaration meant and where the writers got the ideas.”  (GMU).

--Dan Ernst 

Eldridge, Ireland and Derry's "Celebrating Women in Legal History"

Lorren Eldridge, Emily Ireland, and Caroline Derry have published Celebrating Women in Legal History: Making and Shaping a Discipline (Hart/Bloomsbury):

This book champions the work of women in legal history, and their contributions to both the discipline and feminist activism over nearly two centuries.

It considers women in academia, which was, in theory, open to women before they could become lawyers in most European countries. And it considers women working beyond the academy: many studied legal history in other ways; in local history societies, through archival work, and via activism.

Women legal historians have been under-recognised or forgotten altogether, even where they made substantial scholarly contributions. In focusing on the work of women in legal history, this book lays the foundations for a transformational reassessment of the discipline. It asks searching questions about what counts as legal history. It demonstrates that work by and about women should appear in our legal history courses, be discussed in our seminars, and be cited in our academic work. If the field of legal history is lively, innovative, and wide-ranging, everyone working in it benefits. By shining a light on undervalued scholarship, and areas which have received insufficient attention, we challenge assumptions in our discipline and advance its methods. 

Whilst some women were pioneers and worked to change gendered aspects of the law, others led more ordinary lives, disappearing from the gaze of legal history even as they contributed to it. This book tells some of their stories.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.