Littleton-Griswold Prize to Seo for "Policing the Open Road"

The American Historical Association has just announced its annual prizes.  The winner of the AHA's Littleton-Griswold Prize "for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, broadly defined," is Sara Seo, Columbia Law School (and a former LHB Guest Blogger), for Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press).  Congratulations, Professor Seo!

--Dan Ernst

Zelden on Talking Legal History

 New on “Talking Legal History” with Siobhan M. M. Barco is her interview of Charles L. Zelden

"about the new expanded edition of his book, Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Growing Crisis in American Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2020). Zelden is a professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Nova Southeastern University’s Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches courses in history, government and legal studies.

"In this third expanded edition Zelden offers a powerful history of voting rights and elections in America since 2000. Bush v. Gore exposes the growing crisis by detailing the numerous ways in which the unlearned and wrongly learned “lessons of 2000” have impacted American election law through the growth of voter suppression via legislation and administrative rulings, and, provides a clear warning of how unchecked partisanship arising out of Bush v. Gore threatens to undermine American democracy in general and the 2020 election in particular."

–Dan Ernst

Kerber to Deliver Haskins Prize Lecture

[We are very please to note the following announcement from the American Council of Learned Societies.  DRE]

Linda K. Kerber to Deliver the 2020 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture

ACLS is pleased to announce that historian Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of History Emerita, Lecturer in Law at The University of Iowa, will deliver the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture virtually from the College of Law at The University of Iowa the afternoon of Wednesday, October 28, 2020, at 3 pm ET.  Register now for this virtual event.

Kerber received the AB from Barnard College and the PhD in history from Columbia University in 1968. In 2006 she was Harmsworth Professor of Amercan History at Oxford University.
 
Kerber is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She served as president of the American Studies Association in 1998, the Organization of American Historians in 1996-97, and  the American Historical Association in 2006-07.
 
In her writing and teaching Kerber has emphasized the history of  citizenship, gender, and authority.  Her teaching has been recognized by the University of Iowa Graduate College Special Recognition/ Outstanding Mentor Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts.   She is the author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998) for which she was awarded the Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in U.S. legal history and the Joan Kelley Prize for the best book in women’s history (both awarded by the American Historical Association).  Her other books include Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997), Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980), and Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (1970).  She is co-editor of the widely used anthology, Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (9th edition, 2020).
 
“The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other: A View from the United States,” appeared in the American Historical Review, February 2007 and is the foundation of her current research and writing.  She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, based in the Netherlands and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statelessness and Inclusion, based in Melbourne, Australia. Following her interest in strengthening academic exchange between the United States and Japan, she served for five years as a member of the Japan-U,S. Friendship Commission/CULCON, a federal agency.  She recently completed a term on the Permanent Committee of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, to which she was appointed by President Barack Obama.

Named for the first chairman of ACLS (1920-26), the Haskins Prize Lecture series is entitled “A Life of Learning” and celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance. The lectures are published in the ACLS Occasional Paper series and made available on the ACLS website (see Haskins Prize Lectures).

Edwards to Princeton

The Princeton University Department of History has announced the appointment of Laura Edwards to the faculty. From the announcement:

Credit

Laura Edwards specializes in legal history. She comes to Princeton this winter from Duke University, where she was hired as an associate professor in 2001 and appointed to full professor in 2005. Edwards previously was on the faculty of the University of California-Los Angeles from 1997-2001, and the University of South Florida from 1993-97.

Edwards is the author of four books on the legal history of the American South, including The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009), which received the Charles Sydnor Prize, awarded by the Southern Historical Association for the best book on Southern history, and the Littleton-Griswold Prize, awarded by the American Historical Association for the best book on the history of American law and society.

She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. from Northwestern University.

Congratulations to Princeton and to Professor Edwards!

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Samantha Barbas, University at Buffalo Law, on her receipt of an NEH grant for a "sociolegal history of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan."  More.  

• New and ungated in Studies in American Political Development: “No Bodies to Kick or Souls to Damn”: The Political Origins of Corporate Criminal Liability, by Anthony Grasso, Rutgers University.

• As a faculty member at Georgetown University faculty, this one shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.  @dbqur

• In Nursing Clio's The Deathbed series: Julie Hardwick on abortion and infanticide in 17th-18th-c. France. 

• The CFP for the next conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, to be held in a hybrid format in Arlington, VA, June 17-20, 2021, is here.

• Constitution Day is around the corner.  (We never thought we'd say this, but, "Robert Byrd, would that you were with us in this hour!")  Boston College’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy is observing the date with The Equal Rights Amendment: A Constitution Day Conversation, with Julie Chi-hye Suk and Katharine Young.
  

•  The United States Capitol Historical Society announced that its 2020 National Heritage Lecture, delivered virtually on September 14, 2020, will be a discussion of “one of the most far-reaching accomplishments of mid-20th century American government: The comprehensive and strategic investment in our transportation infrastructure.”   The Supreme Court Historical Society and the White House Historical Association are also sponsors of the event.  More.
  

• ICYMI: A review of James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model (Concord Monitor).  Danielle Allen on The Flawed Genius of the Constitution (Atlantic)
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Anne C. Fleming is remembered, especially by other former Climenko Fellows, in Harvard Law Today. 

• The Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History, to be held virtually on December 5, 2020 has been announced.  Fergus Smith will present Civil Litigants in Nineteenth-Century Sheriff Courts.

•  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Turning a Blind Eye: Infanticide and Missing Babies in Seventeenth-Century Geneva, by Sara Beam

• Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943, by Richard F. Hamm, University of Albany at SUNY, has been published online in the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic.

• Over at Notches: Ishita Pande, Queen's University, on her new book, Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937.

• Over at Legal History Miscellany:  Sara M. Butler on Law Enforcement Officials and the Limits of Violence in Medieval England.

• Ryan Greenwood at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog: the University of Minnesota Law Library has an upcoming exhibit on the 1935 Commission on the Harlem Riot, Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

• “The Bangor Historical Society is presenting a virtual exhibit that will focus on the connection between fashion and women’s freedoms. ‘Interwoven: Women’s Fashion and Empowerment’ focuses on the history of women’s rights, including social, economic, legal and voting, while relating milestones and benchmarks with fashion trends by decade" (Bangor Daily News).  And the National Constitution Center also has a new exhibit on the 19th Amendment (Philly Voice).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued a catalogue of forty-one noteworthy titles on The Laws of War and Peace.

•  ICYMI: A review of Matthew Van Meter’s Deep Delta Justice (WaPo).  Mary Ziegler on What's Next for Abortion Law? (Boston Review).  UVA Law's first female students.

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

Anne Fleming: Balleisen Tribute/"Borrower's Tale" Ungated

Edward Ballesien's memorial of Anne Fleming is up on the Exchange, the blog of the Business History Conference.  In addition, Cambridge University Press has kindly made her article "The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City," Law and History Review 30, no. 4 (2012), 1053-1098, free to access for the remainder of the year.

--Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: A Canadian Business Law Tribute

Anne Fleming was to present a paper based on her research on Birmingham, Alabama’s innovative bankruptcy court at 100 Years of Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law, a conference that was to be held last May and now is to be held next May.  The conference papers are to be published in a special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal, edited by the two conference organizers, Thomas G.W. Telfer and Alfonso Nocilla.  The two have announced that they have decided to dedicate the volume to Anne Fleming and have added the following to its foreword.

We would like to acknowledge that one of our conference panelists, Professor Anne Fleming of Georgetown University Law Center, passed away earlier this year. Anne was scheduled to present "The Origins of the American Consumer Bankruptcy System" during our first panel on Historical Perspectives on Insolvency Law. At the time of her passing Anne was engaged in a new book project: Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960. Her preliminary findings can be found on her website: The Bankruptcy Capital of the World: Debt Relief in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s.  We dedicate this special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal to Anne Fleming.

--Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: Business Historians Remember

[We have been speaking of Anne Fleming as a legal historian, but her grasp of the small-sum loan industry in City of Debtors was so impressive that business historians claimed her, too.  Here is the message Neil Rollings, President of the Business History Conference, acting on behalf of the BHC Trustees and Executive Committee, sent to members BHC members.]

It is with a sense of utmost shock and deep sadness that I write to inform you all that Anne Fleming passed away on Tuesday 25th August due to an embolism. I am sure that you will be as stunned by this awful news as I am. Anne has been an extremely willing and able servant to the BHC, currently as trustee and chair of the Electronic Media Oversight Committee. She also played a leading role in helping to revise the BHC bylaws. Recently, she had agreed to be a member of the BHC’s new anti-racism committee. In the short period of time I had worked with Anne, her selfless willingness to help, her legal eye for detail and her capacity to contribute efficiently and effectively shone through.

Her intellectual contributions to business history were outstanding, as she received the 2016 Herman E. Kroos Prize for the best dissertation in business history and followed this up by winning the 2019 Ralph Gomory Prize for her book City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, 2018). Her current research projects promised to confirm and enhance her academic reputation.

But perhaps her most lasting contribution will be her warmth, generosity and interest in others. She will leave a large hole in the business history community and had already made a lasting contribution to it. It is tragic that such a blossoming career has ended so early and so abruptly.

Here is a link to a legal history blog In memorium of Anne. Our thoughts are with all who knew her and our deepest condolences go to her family and friends at this time.

Anne Fleming: Georgetown Law Remembers

Georgetown Law’s memorial notice for Anne Fleming, with remembrances from faculty, students and staff, is now online.  (A few other faculty members and students had earlier shared their memories on social media, including here and here.)  I’d like to provide some context for my quote in the notice, a sentiment I stammered out during an online convening of the Georgetown law faculty on Thursday.

I have attended quite a few panels at quite a few annual meetings of the American Society for Legal History, but I can remember only two in which I teared up.  One was “The Surprising Effects of Sympathy,” a memorial discussion of the work of Elizabeth B. Clark at the 1998 meeting in Seattle.  The other was a Kathryn T. Preyer Award panel in November 2011.  Named for a great mentor of legal historians, the Preyer Award is an annual prize contest for graduate students.  That year Mary Bilder chaired, with comments by two senior legal historians whose work I had admired since my own early days in the field, William Wiecek and Charles McCurdy.   I remember Chuck McCurdy’s comment in particular.  As Karen reported in a post, Chuck said, “Kitty would have loved these papers,” explained why, and concluded that, with new entrants like these, the field of legal history was certain to thrive for years to come.  A similar thought had occurred to me as I listened to the papers, and to hear Chuck articulate it, connecting a departed generation represented by Kitty Preyer through him and Bill Wiecek to an entering generation, was very moving.  Two of the award winners that year were Kevin Arlyck and Michael Schoeppner.  The third was Anne Fleming, for “The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City,” which she subsequently published in Law and History Review and as a chapter in City of Debtors.

In the brief time Anne Fleming wrote legal history, she more than delivered on the promise that was so evident in 2011.  As I told my Georgetown colleagues, she was the kind of person who, when you looked around and realized she was engaged in the same enterprise you were, made you think the activity must be worthwhile if someone that good was also committed to it.   Now when legal historians look around and realize Anne’s not there, we’ll feel diminished by her absence but also grateful for all she did when she was with us.

--Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: In Memoriam

Anne C. Fleming, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, died suddenly Tuesday night from natural causes.  We at the blog were fortunate to know her and we join her colleagues, students, friends, and family in mourning her passing. This post will not do justice to her life, but it is a first attempt to recognize the many ways in which she enriched our field.  We know that more remembrances will follow; when they do, we will post them here.

Anne was an honors graduate of Yale College and the Harvard Law School. Amidst her studies, she also found time to work at the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.  After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York and then with the Honorable Marjorie O. Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Third Circuit.  From there, she went to the Foreclosure Prevention Project in South Brooklyn Legal Services, where she served as a Staff Attorney from 2007 to 2009.

Anne Fleming (credit)

In 2009, Anne enrolled in the doctoral program of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, immediately impressing fellow students with her clear-eyed sense of purpose, her maturity, and her generosity of spirit.  She wrote her dissertation under the direction of Sarah Barringer Gordon, but had many other fans and supporters on the faculty, including dissertation committee members Thomas Sugrue and Michael Katz. 

She also earned recognition outside of Penn. As a graduate student, she was a fellow in the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute of the American Society for Legal History, a prestigious training ground for scholars entering the field of legal history. (Follow the link for some photos from the Hurst Institute class of 2013.) Two different learned societies awarded her their graduate paper prizes: the ASLH, for “The Borrower’s Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City” (subsequently published in the Law and History Review) and the Business History Conference, for “The ‘Very Fibre of Personal Finance’: Changing Beliefs about the Regulation and the Small Sum Lending Industry in New York, 1900-1940."  Her dissertation, completed in 2014, was similarly well received, winning the BHC’s annual dissertation prize.

In 2012, Anne returned to the Harvard Law School as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law. She taught legal writing and thrived as a scholar, drawing on the methodological diversity of her fellowship class to widen her own scholarly range. But she remained devoted to the research questions that had grown out of her public interest legal work and animated her history training. She was "just so committed to the truth," recalls a colleague from her time there. 

 

Anne joined Georgetown’s law faculty in 2014.  In that year she also published “The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the ‘Law of the Poor,’” which placed Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company in the context of a statutory transformation of consumer protection law.  The article remains revered by contracts law teachers for the way it reframes a canonical case.

Anne’s book, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, 2018), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the annual book prize of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers and the Ralph Gomory Book Prize of the Business History Conference, whose prize committee described it well:

In this deeply-researched, well-crafted, and timely book, Anne Fleming offers a rich history of the small loan industry, across most of the twentieth century.  Drawing on evidence from hundreds of court cases, among other sources, Fleming skilfully reconstructs the changing experiences and strategies of borrowers and lenders, as they navigated changing local and national regulatory regimes.  Using crisp prose, Fleming provides a clear discussion of a long and complex story about business and regulation, while highlighting the struggles of individual human characters.  City of Debtors is a detailed, scholarly study, but one that never loses sight of bigger, enduring problems and questions, including, as Fleming puts it, questions about the “meaning of justice within capitalism.”

She discussed the book in a series of posts on LHB. In characteristic fashion, Anne wrote about her work in a way that was the opposite of self-aggrandizing, studding her posts with words of wisdom for other writers.  She also discussed the book with the director of the American Bankruptcy Institute in the ABI’s podcast series.

At her untimely death, Anne had entered a new and ambitious phase of her scholarly career. For example, her 2019 article "The Public Interest in the Private Law of the Poor" explored "uncharted connections between private law and poverty law," showing "how concerns about public spending on poor relief have shaped debates over the private law of the poor for over a century." The article was aimed not only at legal historians and scholars of poverty law, but also at scholars of law and economics and policymakers concerned with contemporary economic inequality. 

Anne was also fully embarked on an enormously exciting book project, “Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960.” Anne planned to describe “how working-class households, both black and white, organized their financial lives and navigated the shifting matrix of legal rules and institutions that governed credit relationships and debt forgiveness in the first half of the twentieth century.”  Although she had conducted research on Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and expected to sample bankruptcy files in other cities, her research centered on Birmingham, Alabama, where, for over five years in the 1930s, an innovative “Debtors Court” adjudicated the filings of 10,000 wage earners seeking debt adjustment or forgiveness.  The court inspired Chapter 13 of the federal bankruptcy law, which extended its system of court-supervised repayment to the entire nation.  Further, its docket and case files, when linked to the census and city directories and geocoded, made possible a rich portrait of the financial lives of the working class and showed how race shaped access to credit and debt relief.  She captured her preliminary findings in a website, The Bankruptcy Capital of the World: Debt Relief in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s, which she was still revising at her death.  We link to it with permission.

Her colleagues, students, and fellow historians all remember her warmth, generosity, utter lack of pretension, and above all her kindness.  A colleague at South Brooklyn Legal Services recalled her as “fiercely dedicated to her clients, a brilliant and selfless advocate.”  Tom Sugrue, one of her dissertation advisors, writes that she was “quietly brilliant and deeply humane.” “Losing a good scholar is bad enough,” writes Bruce Mann, who advised her when she was a Climenko, “but losing such a good person is far worse.”

We at the blog will miss her dearly and treasure her memory.  

-- Dan Ernst, Mitra Sharafi, and Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Drinking with Historians, a webinar hosted by Matt Gabriele and Varsha Venkatsubramanian, has hosted Gautham Rao and now Karl Shoemaker to chat about their research this summer. You can sign up for the Friday 6pm ET sessions here. The videos go up afterwards here. 

• For your syllabi: ideas for teaching legal history through fiction (here) and film (here and here), from the past couple of summers.

• Congratulations to UVA Law’s Cynthia Nicoletti for her receipt of the Supreme Court Historical Society’s Hughes-Gossett Award for the best article in the Journal of Supreme Court History for “Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and the Permanency of the Union.”

• The Lawbook Exchange has published a new catalogue, Noteworthy Publications Related to Early English Law. 

• The Organization of American History has suspended the name of the Avery Craven Award for its award in Civil War and Reconstruction History.  

• Bernard Bailyn has died. (NYT)

• The documentary "Vote HERE" draws upon the insights of Charles Zelden, Nova Southeastern University.

• ICYMI: How the Electoral College Was Nearly Abolished in 1970 (History Channel). 

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

Weekend Roundup

• Two new posts at Talking Legal History.  Guest Host Lesa Redmond, a first year student in the Department of History at Duke University, interviews Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz College, on his recently published Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, 2d ed. (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020).  Siobhan M.M. Barco discusses Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with authors Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross.

• Congratulations to Annette Gordon-Reed on her University Professorship at Harvard University (Crimson; Gazette).

• Now available as a free download, Racism in America: A Reader, with a Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed. (HUP).  “At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black racism through the eyes of our most incisive commentators.”  TOC here.

• Also available as a free download, the latest issue of the journal Capitalism, including the article Capitalism when Labor was Capital: Slavery, Power, and Price in Antebellum America, by Caitlin Rosenthal.

• We've learned from Cambridge University Press that, after a Covid-19 related delay, the latest Law and History Review has been printed and will soon be mailed.

• The directors of the FDR and LBJ Libraries discuss the friendship between the two presidents on Wednesday, August 5, at 2pm on Facebook Premiere in a session entitled The New Deal to the Great Society.

• The National Constitution Center announces the opening of its exhibit The 19th Amendment: How Women Won the Vote on August 26.

• Much of interest in the latest (34:1) issue of Studies in American Political Development.  Check out, for example, Paul Musgrave, “Bringing the State Police In: The Diffusion of U.S. Statewide Policing Agencies, 1905–1941.”

• Now available as an e-pub on Amazon Kindle: Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection.

• White Supremacy and Historical Memory: Collegiate and Suburban Division.  University of Chicago and Stephen A. Douglas. UNC Chapel Hill and Charles B. Aycock, Julian S. Carr and Josephus Daniels.  Chevy Chase Advisory Neighborhood Commission and Francis G. Newlands.

• Cindy Ewing (University of Missouri) has won the Lynne Rienner Publishers Award for Best Dissertation (ISA) and the Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History (SHAFR) for her 2018 dissertation (Yale), "The Asian Unity Project: Human Rights, Third World Solidarity, and the United Nations, 1945-1955."

• Fei-Hsien Wang (Indiana University) received a commendation from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing's DeLong Book History Prize for Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China. The book was featured in the International Society for Chinese Law and History's last Summer Book Talk on July 30.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Lindsay M. Chervinsky (Institute for Thomas Paine Studies/nternational Center for Jefferson Studies), "George Washington invoked executive privilege. But he’d reject Barr’s version"; Dana Frank (University of California, Santa Cruz), "Congresswomen of color have always fought back against sexism"; and more.  

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

Bilder on Democracy as White Male Aristocracy

Perhaps you, like me, have been revising your legal history course to help students make sense of the grave challenges to liberal democracy we might be confronting in the United States next semester.  If so, you might be thinking through how to address the question of when, if at all, did the United States become a liberal democracy, given that the expansion of the suffrage coincided with a limiting of the electorate to white males. Fortunately, Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell published The Partisan Republic (2020) in time for my summer reading, and now comes an interview in BC Law of Mary Sarah Bilder, Expecting Deference: America as a white male aristocracy.  Talk about "ripped from the headlines": it illuminates both the controversy within the Society for the History of the Early Republic, as reported in the New York Times, and the Yoho/Ocasio-Cortez exchange, as reported everywhere.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Adam Laats (Binghamton University (SUNY)), "Religious animus did not drive the laws the Supreme Court just overturned"; Carissa Harris (Temple University), "Women have been fighting for abortion rights for 500 years"; Lisa Levenstein (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), "With schools and daycare closed, the coronavirus is worsening women’s inequality"; and more. 

• Not only has Elizabeth Papp Kamali, “a scholar specializing in medieval legal history,” been tenured and promoted to professor of law at Harvard Law School, she’s been deputy deaned! (Harvard Law Today).

• From Keisha Blain (University of Pittsburgh), writing for Inside Higher Ed: tips for early career scholars on publishing journal articles.

• "Erasing History or Making History? Race, Racism, and the American Memorial Landscape," an American Historical Association Webinar, with David W. Blight and Annette Gordon-Reed, moderated by AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman.  (Facebook)

• ICYMI: Aderson Bellegarde François (Georgetown Law), on Robert Smalls and Woodrow Wilson (New Republic).  The renaming of US Coast Guard Cutter Taney (Fox Baltimore).  A nicely illustrated history of the ballot (Quartz).  Jack Rakove (Stanford University) on what TJ meant by "all men are created equal" (Stanford News)

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

Talking Legal History: Chase's "We Are Not Slaves"

A new episode of Talking Legal History, a podcast hosted by Siobhan M. M. Barco, is now up on the website of the American Society of Legal History.

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University.

In We Are Not Slaves, Chase draws from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners to narrate the struggle to change prison from within. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

--Dan Ernst

Dingle's Conversations with Prichard

Lesley Dingle, University of Cambridge, has posted Conversations with Michael J. Prichard: The Fun of Legal History and the Triumph of Research Over Administration:

Michael Prichard was born before the Second world war and lived through the bombing and destruction of much of London. When he entered university in 1945, King’s College London had reoccupied its old quarters in the badly-damaged Somerset House, and along with LSE and UCL had pooled teaching resources to overcome staff shortages and accommodation damage. This inadvertently gave Michael a rich pool of mentors upon which to found his career, and who served him well in later years. He entered Queens’ College Cambridge in 1948 and experienced the unique post-war phenomena of the “returning warriors”, which continued, along with the “weekenders”, when he became a fellow at Gonville & Caius in 1950. Here he has remained, and is still a Fellow, seventy years later.

Michael Prichard (Squire Law Library)

His legacy is a fund of memories of a life-long journey through changing landscapes of legal research, teaching, and college and faculty administration. I first interviewed Michael for the Eminent Scholars Archive in 2012, where his biography and general academic reminiscences are set forth. I now revisit aspects of these, following a conversation I had with David Yale for ESA in November 2019. David was Michael’s career-long colleague, and his interview shone new light on their decades of joint endeavour unravelling the development of maritime law in the British Isles. Shortly after David’s reminder of the magnitude of their project, an encounter with Professor David Ibbetson, and most-recently a meeting with Michael, now in his 93rd year, have spurred me to summarise particular aspects of Michael’s varied research projects. In the process, I shall emphasise the overall sense of adventure, and enjoyment - in short “fun”, with which he explored the history and jurisdictional intricacies of the Admiralty Court (jointly with David Yale), presented his enlightened insights into the evolution of aspects of tort law, and explained his research of the few esoteric conundrums in which a retiree was able to indulge.

--Dan Ernst

Bilder on Newmyer and the Constitution's "Heroic Age"

Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, has written The Emerging Genre of The Constitution: Kent Newmyer and the Heroic Age, which is forthcoming in the Connecticut Law Review.  Professor Bilder delivered it last November art the symposium, Celebrating Kent Newmyer.

In written celebration of Kent Newmyer’s intellectual and collegial influence, this essay argues that the written constitution was an emerging genre in 1787-1789. Discussions of the Constitution and constitutional interpretation often rest on a set of assumptions about the Constitution that arose in the years and decades after the constitutional Convention. The most significant one involves the belief that a fixed written document was drafted in 1787 intended in our modern sense as A Constitution. This fundamental assumption is historically inaccurate. The following reflections of a constitutionalist first lay out the argument for considering the Constitution as an emerging genre and then turn to Kent Newmyer’s important influence.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Reminder: Applications for the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards to support research and writing in American legal history by early-career scholar are due on July 1.  (The Committee for Research Fellowships and Awards of the American Society for Legal History reviews the applications and makes recommendations to the Foundation.)  More.

• This year’s recipients of Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships include Tamar Menashe, Columbia University, for "People of the Law: The Imperial Supreme Court and Jews in Cross-Confessional Legal Cultures in Germany, 1495–1690," and Lila Teeters, University of New Hampshire, for “Native Citizens: The Fight For and Against Native Citizenship in the United States, 1866–1924.”

• Process, the blog of the Journal of American History and the Organization of American Historians, has put out a call for submissions on "all aspects of the history of disability in the United States."

• Two new articles online in the American Journal of Legal History: “Law at a Critical Juncture: The US Army’s Command Responsibility Trials at Manila 1945–1947,” by Jamie Fellows; and “Reforming Criminal Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Police, Courts and Prisons in Rusçuk, 1839-1864,” by Mehmet Celik.

• Here is the Harvard Law School faculty's open letter condemning "a series of acts by President Trump and other public servants that endorse violence and are inconsistent with a democratic legal order." Signatories include every legal historian we can think of who teaches there.

• The Consortium for Undergraduate Law & Justice Programs recently announced its 2020 awards for teaching and best undergraduate paper.

• Justin W. Aimonetti, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, has posted his student note Colonial Virginia: The Intellectual Incubator of Judicial Review, published in the Virginia Law Review 106 (2020): 765-810.  He thanks UVA Law’s Cynthia Nicoletti.

• From the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog at the University of Minnesota: Law in Times of Crisis, II

• ICYMI: Dean Risa Goluboff draws on her own historical research in her message to UVA law students.  David Blight on Frederick Douglass and "the tortured relationship between protest and change" (The Atlantic). Alexander Zhang on this history of "school-to-prison pipeline" policing in Minneapolis (Slate).

• ICYMI, Insurrection Act Edition:  Gautham Rao on the Posse Comitatus and Insurrection Acts (CNN).  The History Channel on the Jeffersonian origins of the Insurrection Act.  Still more, in WaPo's Retropolis.
  

• Over at Balkinization, Stephen Griffin develops an aspect of his recent SSRN post "Optimistic Originalism and the Reconstruction Amendments."Also at Balkinization: Gregory Ablavsky (Stanford Law School) on "PROMESA and Original Understandings of the Territories’ Constitutional Status."

• Lots of important content in the Washington Post's "Made by History" section this week, including Elizabeth Kolsky (Villanova University) on "how autopsies can uphold white supremacy."
  

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

Dudziak on the Global Consequences of Trump's Militarist Turn

LHB Founder Mary Dudziak, Emory Law, has an op-end in the New York Times, The Damage Trump Has Done This Week Extends Far Beyond America’s Borders.  DRE.