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.

LHR 38:2

Law and History Review 38:2 (May 2020) is now available online.  Here are the contents:

In This Issue

Litigants in the English “Court of Poor Men's Causes,” or Court of Requests, 1515–25
Laura Flannigan

Law, Language and the Printing Press in the Reign of Charles I: Explaining the Printing of the Common Law in English
Ian Williams

Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India
Zak Leonard

Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia
Priyasha Saksena

Secularizing Islam: The Colonial Encounter and the Making of a British Islamic Criminal Law in Northern Nigeria, 1903–58
Rabiat Akande

Book Reviews

Stephan Dusil, Wissensordnungen des Rechts im Wandel: Päpstlicher Jurisdiktionsprimat und Zölibat zwischen 1000 und 1215. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 629. €135.00 hardcover (ISBN 9789462701526); €95.00 paper (ISBN 9789462701335); €71.00 ebook (ISBN 9789461662853).
Atria A. Larson

Charlene M. Eska, A Raven's Battle-Cry: The Limits of Judgment in the Medieval Irish Legal Tract Anfuigell. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xiv + 338. $119.00 hardcover (ISBN 9789004391987)
Joe Wolf

Zachary Chitwood, Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 236. $105.00 hardcover (ISBN 9781316861547).
Paolo Angelini

Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 405. $45.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780691178592); $27.99 ebook (ISBN 9780691185378).
Rowan Dorin

James E. Lewis Jr., The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 713. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780691177168); $21.95 paper (ISBN 9780691191553).
R. B. Bernstein

Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 384. $41.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780674737495).
Timo Schaefer

Philip Thai, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 408. $60.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780231185844).
Diana S. Kim

Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexican Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xv + 302. $32.50 hardcover (ISBN 9781469635491).
Felice Batlan

Ken I. Kersch, Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii + 407. $84.99 hardcover (ISBN 9780521193108); $34.99 paper (ISBN 9780521193109).
Logan Everett Sawyer

--Dan Ernst

Montoya on Immigration Restriction and U.S.-Mexican Diplomatic Relations, 1924–1932

The University of Nebraska Press has released Risking Immeasurable Harm: Immigration Restriction and U.S.-Mexican Diplomatic Relations, 1924–1932 (April 2020), by Benjamin C. Montoya (Schreiner University). A description from the Press: 

The debate over restricting the number of Mexican immigrants to the United States began early in the twentieth century, a time when U.S.-Mexican relations were still tenuous following the Mexican Revolution and when heated conflicts over mineral rights, primarily oil, were raging between the two nations. Though Mexico had economic reasons for curbing emigration, the racist tone of the quota debate taking place in the United States offended Mexicans’ national pride and played a large part in obstructing mutual support for immigration restriction between the United States and Mexico.

Risking Immeasurable Harm explains how the prospect of immigration restriction affects diplomatic relations by analyzing U.S. efforts to place a quota on immigration from Mexico during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The controversial quota raised important questions about how domestic immigration policy debates had international consequences, primarily how the racist justifications for immigration restriction threatened to undermine U.S. relations with Mexico.

Benjamin C. Montoya follows the quota debate from its origin in 1924, spurred by the passage of the Immigration Act, to its conclusion in 1932. He examines congressional policy debate and the U.S. State Department’s steady opposition to the quota scheme. Despite the concerns of American diplomats, in 1930 the Senate passed the Harris Bill, which singled out Mexico among all other Latin American nations for immigration restriction. The lingering effects of the quota debates continued to strain diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico beyond the Great Depression.

Relevant to current debates about immigration and the role of restrictions in inter-American diplomacy, Risking Immeasurable Harm demonstrates the correlation of immigration restriction and diplomacy, the ways racism can affect diplomatic relations, and how domestic immigration policy can have international consequences.

A few blurbs:

“This carefully researched and elegantly crafted book provides timely lessons on the importance of building and sustaining bilateral diplomatic relationships across the Mexico-U.S. border. Montoya’s new analysis of early twentieth-century legislative practices reminds us that marginalized immigrants have always been central to the discourses and practices of state sovereignty and nation formation.”—Mark Overmyer-Velázquez

“Timely and pathbreaking. . . . With a focus on diplomacy and politics from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Risking Immeasurable Harm sheds new light on U.S.-Mexican diplomatic developments as they relate to controversies over quotas, racism, sovereignty, and immigration restriction. This important book reveals how and why diplomacy factored centrally in the failure of congressional attempts to restrict Mexican migration, even as the United States implemented draconian cuts to overall immigration.”—Christopher McKnight Nichols

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Call for Contributors: Springer Global Encyclopaedia of Territorial Rights

Kevin W. Gray, in his capacity as editor of the Springer Global Encyclopaedia of Territorial Rights, is in search of contributors on several historical treaties and issues of international law. 

The aim of this encyclopedia is to bring together the expanding field of scholarship on "territorial rights" in a single tool for advanced researchers. The study of territorial rights has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. It combines the work of political scientists, philosophers, lawyers, geographers, demographers, scholars of war studies and many others. Until now, however, the literature on territorial rights has generally remained confined inside standard disciplines.

The goal of this new volume is to provide a reference tool for scholars working across traditional boundaries. Several hundred entries, researched by area experts with advanced knowledge of the scholarly literature, are written in language comprehensible to a wide academic audience. Each entry surveys typical concepts and terminology and offers an up-to-date synopsis of leading scholarship on one or more of the component disputes that surface when territorial rights are contested, such as cross-border migration, resource extraction, secessionism, state sovereignty, border-drawing, restorative justice. The most important conflicts about territorial rights in the world today are explored alongside some of history's pertinent and informative disputes.

The volume is a comprehensive introduction to these issues for non-specialists and for advanced students who wish to be acquainted with this growing field of study. Its principal objective is to consolidate interdisciplinary knowledge about territorial rights in a research tool designed to facilitate advanced scholarship in this critical area for years to come. 

In particular, Dr. Gray seeks contributors on the Treaty of Wanghia; the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Treaty of Ghent, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Gadsden Purchase, and the Florida Purchase.  Those interested should contact him at 1 647 990 6186 or kevinwgray@gmail.com.

Altwicker on Extraterritoriality from Thucydides to Grotius

Tilmann Altwicker, University of Zurich, has posted Justice Beyond Borders: Extraterritorial Obligations from Thucydides to Grotius, which is forthcoming in Rechtsphilosophie - Zeitschrift für die Grundlagen des Rechts:

The article traces the problem of extraterritorial obligations in the early history of ideas, spanning from Thucydides to Grotius. Extraterritorial obligations are defined here as moral obligations of a legitimate authority to perform or not to perform an act vis-à-vis individuals who are not its subjects. The article shows that arguments about justice beyond the border rely on transnational conceptions of the common good. In the early history of ideas concerning extraterritorial obligations, the following questions were central: Can there be a transnational meaning of moral concepts? Are extraterritorial obligations merely negative obligations? Is the extraterritorial pursuit of state interests limited by higher-ranking principles? Under which circumstances is the extraterritorial use of force permitted in order to protect individuals?

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The Organization of American Historians has cancelled its annual meeting. But you can still skim the excellent program that the organizers put together. Margot Canaday (Princeton University) and Craig Steven Wilder (MIT) co-chaired the program committee. AND, if you were scheduled to present, check out this invitation (via Twitter) from The Docket (the online companion to the Law & History Review): "We’re sad about all that awesome #legalhistory scholarship that was going to be at #OAH20 and we’d like to be of service. The Docket will publish abstracts, full papers, etc. for any law, policy, or politics related OAH panel!" 

• Two recent op-eds by Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont): "Will the Court Ignore Past Rulings in Its Zeal to Demolish Abortion Rights?" (American Prospect) and "The abortion issue is back in the Supreme Court. What would my mother, and Jewish feminists of her generation, think?" (Forward).

• From Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians, Greg Ablavsky (Stanford Law) writes about his recent Journal of American History article “Species of Sovereignty: Native Nationhood, the United States, and International Law, 1783–1795.

• For those who have moved to online teaching, Twitter is filled with good resources right now. For example, Aimi Hamraie (Vanderbilt University) tweeted out an excellent guide to "accessible teaching in the time of COVID-19," tapping into some hard-won wisdom from "disabled culture and community." 

• Law and History Review and Cambridge Core have posted two new articles: “Precocious Girls”: Age of Consent, Class and Family in Late Nineteenth-Century England, by Laura Lammasniemi, and Vernacularizing Justice: Age of Consent and a Legal History of the British Empire, by Ishita Pande. 

• Reuel E. Schiller has published “Regulation and the Collapse of the New Deal Order, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Market,” in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, ed. Gerstle, Lichtenstein, and O’Connor (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Elisa Minoff (Center for the Study of Social Policy) on why "work requirements are catastrophic in a pandemic"; Brendan Shanahan (Yale University), "Counting everyone — citizens and non-citizens — in the 2020 census is crucial"; Ariela Gross (University of Southern California) and Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard University), "The history of slavery remains with us today"; and more.

• The Library of Congress may be closed to the public, but we believe its “crowdsourcing initiative By the People” continues.  The newest campaign to enlist the public’s help in making "digital collection items more searchable and accessible online is Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents includes thousands of pages of historical documents in Spanish, Latin and Catalan."

• Jayanth K. Krishnan, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, has posted "Lawyers for the Undocumented: Addressing a Split Circuit Dilemma for Asylum-Seekers," which is forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal.  A section treats the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), a federal statute adopted in 1980.

• ICYMI: An exhibit at the Lombard Historical Society on “the first woman to ever vote in an Illinois municipal election, an attorney named Ellen Martin.”  Patti Smith’s blurb of Ralph Nader’s cookbook: “A wonderful blend of consumer protection and consumer pleasure.” H/t: JLG

• And if you can face it: Duke University Press has put together this Navigating the Threat of Pandemics collection--free to read online until June 1 (books) and Oct.1 (articles). LHB readers may appreciate this one especially.

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

SHAFR Dissertation Completion Fellowship

[We have the following announcement. DRE]

SHAFR Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) invites applications for its dissertation completion fellowship. SHAFR will make one year-long award in the amount of $25,000 each, to support the writing and completion of the doctoral dissertation in each academic year. This highly competitive fellowship will support the most promising doctoral candidates in the final phase of completing their dissertations. Membership in SHAFR is required. Applicants should be candidates for the PhD in a humanities or social science doctoral program (most likely history), must have been admitted to candidacy, and must be at the writing stage, with all substantial research completed by the time of the award. Applicants should be working on a topic in the field of U.S. foreign relations history or international history, broadly defined, and must be current members of SHAFR. Because successful applicants are expected to finish writing the dissertation during the tenure of the fellowship, they should not engage in teaching opportunities or extensive paid work, except at the discretion of the Fellowship Committee. At the termination of the award period, recipients must provide a one page (250-word) report to the SHAFR Council on the use of the fellowship, to be considered for publication in the society newsletter. The submission packet should include:

• A one page application letter describing the project’s significance, the applicant’s status, other support received or applied for and the prospects for completion within the year.

• A three-page statement of the research

• A curriculum vitae

• A letter of recommendation from the primary doctoral advisor.

The research statement should run no longer than three double-spaced pages; statements exceeding this limit will not be reviewed. The letter may be single-spaced. Both the letter and statement should be formatted with 1-inch margins and 12 point font, Times New Roman preferred.

To apply, please use the online application. Questions can be sent by electronic mail to dissertation-fellowships@shafr.org. The deadline for submissions is 1 April. Fellowship awards will be decided by around May 1 and will be announced formally during the SHAFR annual meeting in June, with expenditure to be administered during the subsequent academic year.

The Fellowship Committee
Hidetaka Hirota, Chair
Vanessa Walker
Ilaria Scaglia

Weinberger at BC Legal History Roundtable

 [We have the following from our friends at the Boston College Law School.  DRE]

We invite you to join us Thursday, January 30, at 4:30 in the Rare Book Room for our first event of the spring semester of the BC Legal History Roundtable 2019-2020.  

Our guest will be  Lael Weinberger, Harvard Law School, Berger-Howe Legal History Fellow 2019-20.   He will be presenting a paper, "Judiciaries, Domestic and International: The Election of 1912" from his larger project, "Judicializing International Relations: Internationalism, Courts, and American Lawyers in the Progressive Era."

The paper is available on the Roundtable website. (Instructions for accessing the paper are in the final paragraph of the website introduction.)

Lael Weinberger is the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where he studies American legal history. Lael earned a JD with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for Judge Frank Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for Chief Justice Daniel Eismann on the Idaho Supreme Court. Lael is currently writing a dissertation on American lawyers’ ideas about international law, world order, and human rights in the first half of the twentieth century. His research interests include constitutional law, international law, civil procedure, law and religion, and the legal profession. 

This paper, part of Weinberger's project on internationalism in the legal profession, reconstructs an unfamiliar period at the start of the twentieth century when American lawyers across political divides tended to believe that world courts and robust international law were the future of international relations—even suggesting that law would replace diplomacy and that international litigation would replace war. From a modern vantage point the “legal internationalism” of the period looks unrealistic or even utopian. But its very unfamiliarity provides an ideal starting point for examining the intellectual, political, and legal conditions of possibility for legal internationalism.

Refreshments are available beginning at 4:15 pm. outside the Library Conference Room.

Kostal, "Laying Down the Law The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan"

New from Harvard University Press: Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan, by R. W. Kostal (Western University, Ontario). A description from the Press:

A legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries.

Following victory in World War II, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes.

In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions.
Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened U.S. credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan.

In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.

Advance praise:

“In 1945, Americans boldly set out to remake the legal systems of occupied Japan, where they knew nothing about Japanese law, and Germany, where they often ignored German experts. Kostal’s book is a wonderfully novel, clear, and caustic history of the successes and failures of these endeavors.”—Robert W. Gordon

“This much-needed and compelling book examines American legal reform in occupied Germany and Japan, emphasizing the centrality of individual rights and the rule of law to American conceptualizations of democratic transformation. Kostal’s close attention to the successes, hypocrisies, and shortcomings of these American efforts offers vital insights while highlighting the intellectual, institutional, and moral limits of American visions of postwar democratization.”—Jennifer M. Miller

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Law of Nations and the Early American Constitution: An ICH Seminar

[We're moving this up, as the deadline for applications (December 30, 2019) will soon be upon us.;  DRE]

The Law of Nations and the Early American Constitution: How Citizens, Aliens, Slaves, and Indians Struggled to Build a “Civilized Nation.”  A New-York Historical Society/Institute for Constitutional History Seminar.

Constitution-making in the United States originated in an international war and for decades remained a cosmopolitan drama in which Americans claimed to be constituting a “civilized nation.” In four sessions, David Golove and Daniel Hulsebosch will lead an exploration of the ways that early Americans invoked the law of nations to make sense of, for example, what it meant to be a revolutionary republic in a world of nations; statebuilders in the evening of Enlightenment; African-Americans in an “empire of liberty”; and Native Americans caught between encroaching settlers and a fragmented but powerful government. In these contests, the law of nations functioned as a dynamic field of principles, practices, and keywords through which diverse actors filled in constitutional meanings while arguing about how to structure their relationship with each other and the wider world.

Workshop leaders.  David M. Golove (N.Y.U.) and Daniel J. Hulsebosch (N.Y.U.).  Professors Golove (Hiller Family Professor of Law) and Hulsebosch (Charles Seligson Professor of Law) have published separately and together about the international dimensions of early American constitutionalism, including in jointly-authored articles entitled “A Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition” in the New York University Law Review (2010); “The Law of Nations and the Constitution: An Early Modern Perspective,” in the Georgetown Law Journal (2018), and “‘The Known Opinion of the Impartial World’: Foreign Relations and the Law of Nations,” forthcoming next year in The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist.

Logistics.  The seminar will be held at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York City on the following dates, January 31, February 14, 28, and March 13.

Application process.  The seminar is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. All participants will be expected to complete the assigned readings and participate in seminar discussions. Although the Institute cannot offer academic credit directly for the seminar, students may be able to earn graduate credit through their home departments by completing an independent research project in conjunction with the seminar. Please consult with your advisor and/or director of graduate studies about these possibilities. Space is limited, so applicants should send a copy of their C.V. and a short statement on how this seminar will be useful to them in their research, teaching, or professional development. Materials will be accepted only by email at MMarcus@nyhistory.org until December 30, 2019. Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter. For further information, please contact Maeva Marcus at (202) 994-6562 or send an email to Mmarcus@nyhistory.org.

Additional information. There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own.

About ICH:  The Institute for Constitutional History (ICH) is the nation’s premier institute dedicated to ensuring that future generations of Americans understand the substance and historical development of the U.S. Constitution. Located at the New York Historical Society and the George Washington University Law School, the Institute is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Political Science Association. The Association of American Law Schools is a cooperating entity. ICH prepares junior scholars and college instructors to convey to their readers and students the important role the Constitution has played in shaping American society. ICH also provides a national forum for the preparation and dissemination of humanistic, interdisciplinary scholarship on American constitutional history.

History and International Law: An Essay Collection

From Edward Elgar: History and International Law: An Intertwined Relationship, ed. Annalisa Ciampi, Professor of International Law, University of Verona, Italy.

There is a deep and multifaceted relationship between international law and history – political events have legal implications, and international norms and institutions may influence the course of history. This incisive book unveils and illuminates this nexus, providing examples from a wide range of domains of global governance.

Analysing this intertwined relationship with particular reference to international human rights, humanitarian and criminal law, this timely book features contributions from leading scholars and practitioners in international law, history and diplomacy. History and International Law, with a foreword by ICJ Judge Giorgio Gaja, covers topics ranging from the connections between current and historical events and human rights protection in the EU, to the ways in which ICC investigations and prosecutions continue to affect political developments in Africa. The authors offer examples of original analysis, establishing innovative paradigms of interdisciplinary research in the field.

International lawyers and academics will find this book both useful and insightful. It will also prove valuable to scholars and students of the history of international law, diplomacy and international relations.

Contents after the jump

Wuerth on the Constitutional Rights of Foreign Nations

Ingrid B. Wuerth, Vanderbilt University Law School, has posted The Due Process and Other Constitutional Rights of Foreign Nations, which appeared in the Fordham Law Review 88 (2019): 1-58:

The rights of foreign states under the U.S. Constitution are becoming more important as the actions of foreign states and foreign state-owned enterprises expand in scope and the legislative protections to which they are entitled contract. Conventional wisdom and lower court cases hold that foreign states are outside our constitutional order and that they are protected neither by separation of powers nor by due process. As a matter of policy, however, it makes little sense to afford litigation-related constitutional protections to foreign corporations and individuals but to deny categorically such protections to foreign states.

Careful analysis shows that the conventional wisdom and lower court cases are wrong for reasons that change our basic understanding of both Article III and due process. Foreign states are protected by Article III’s extension of judicial power to foreign-state diversity cases, designed to protect foreign states from unfair proceedings and to prevent international conflict. The Article III “judicial power” over “cases” imposes procedural limitations on federal courts that we today associate with due process. In particular, Article III presupposes both personal jurisdiction and notice for all defendants, not just foreign states. Under the Fifth Amendment, foreign states are “persons” due the same constitutional “process” to which other defendants are entitled. “Process” only reaches defendants within the sovereign power, or jurisdiction, of the issuing court, clarifying the obscure relationship between due process and personal jurisdiction for all defendants.

Examining the Constitution from the perspective of foreign states thus reveals the document in a new light, illuminating its core features in ways that advance our historical and theoretical understanding of Article III and due process. The analysis also lays the groundwork for determining whether foreign states have additional constitutional rights.

--Dan Ernst

Lemberg on How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media

Columbia University Press has published Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media, by Diana Lemberg (Lingnan University, Hong Kong). A description from the Press:

Freedom of information is a principle commonly associated with the United States’ First Amendment traditions or digital-era technology boosters. Barriers Down reveals its unexpected origins in political, economic, and cultural battles over analog media in the mid-twentieth century. Diana Lemberg traces how the United States shaped media around the world after 1945 under the banner of the “free flow of information,” showing how the push for global media access acted as a vehicle for American power.

Barriers Down considers debates over civil liberties and censorship in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere alongside Americans’ efforts to circumvent foreign regulatory systems in the quest to expand markets and bring their ideas to new publics. Lemberg shows how in the decades following the Second World War American free-flow policies reshaped the world’s information landscape, though not always as intended. Through burgeoning information diplomacy and development aid, Washington diffused new media ranging from television and satellite broadcasting to global English. But these actions also spurred overseas actors to articulate alternative understandings of information freedom and of how information flows might be regulated. Bridging the historiographies of the United States in the world, human rights, decolonization and development, and media and technology, Barriers Down excavates the analog roots of digital-age debates over the politics and ethics of transnational information flows.

Excerpts from advance reviews:

Barriers Down refutes the cliché that "information wants to be free." Instead, Lemberg details how the notion of barrier-free flow of information was contested in the late twentieth century and how a group of predominantly American diplomats, business leaders, and scholars secured its freedom. It is both timely and historically wise. David Engerman

Historians of U.S. global power have been curiously disinterested in the history of the media. In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking book, Diana Lemberg steps into the breach, reminding us just how many intellectuals, politicians, and diplomats spent the Cold War arguing about the future of global communications. Sam Lebovic

More information is available here. Professor Lemberg has published a related article here, at Foreign Affairs.

Weekend Roundup

• Katherine Hermes, Central Connecticut State University, will present “Connecticut’s Indigenous People and Their Use of the Law,” on September 25 at the Torrington Historical Society in Torrington, CT.  The Torrington Register Citizen reports that Professor Hermes’s “current work is on the Wongunk (Wangunk), a Native tribe whose lands stretched from Hartford to Saybrook along the Connecticut river, some of whom later joined the Brothertown Movement and moved westward with the Tunxis, or went to live near the Schaghticoke.”  More, and also here. 

• The Supreme Court Historical Society's website on the Court-Packing Plan of 1937 is now online.

• New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Law, Language and the Printing Press in the Reign of Charles I: Explaining the Printing of the Common Law in English, by Ian Williams. 

• Among this fall's additions to the HLS facultry profiled in Harvard Law Today are Molly Brady and Laura Weinrib.

• The Constitutional Accountability Center seeks applicants for the Douglas T. Kendall Fellowship, “a one-year fellowship for recent law school graduates to join CAC’s litigation team” and help it develop arguments “rooted in the text, history, and values of the whole Constitution.”  H/t: JLG.

• We've received a CFP, with a deadline of September 30, 2019) for the next Research Forum of the European Society of International Law, to take place April 23-24, 2020 at the Department of Law, University of Catania, Italy.  It "targets scholars at an early stage of their careers. Approximately 15-25 paper submissions will be selected. During the Forum, selected speakers will receive comments on their presentations from members of the ESIL Board and invited experts. The Forum will address the topic ‘Solidarity: The Quest for Founding Utopias of International Law’ and it aims to further a dialogue between scholars working within the broad discipline of law in history." More.

• The Italian Society of Law and Economics welcomes submissions of papers, including those on “History of Law and Economic Thought,” for its 15th annual conference to be held in Milan at the University of Milan (La Statale) on December 19-21, 2019.  Deadline: September 15, 2019.

• Over at History and the Law: "Law is more than words. It’s buildings and boxes, filled with people; it’s images and sounds." More here from Paul Halliday on envisioning law's empire in Ceylon.

• ICYMI: Why we set up Legal History Society of Nigeria, by John Austin Unachukwu.  Before Drafting the Bill of Rights, James Madison Argued the Constitution Was Fine Without It, writes Lesley Kennedy on the History Channel.  Couples challenge racial labels to get married in Virginia, in WaPo.

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

Roberts on Emergency and Rule of Law in the British Empire

Christopher M. Roberts, Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, has posted From the State of Emergency to the Rule of Law: The Evolution of Repressive Legality in the Nineteenth Century British Empire, which is forthcoming in Chicago Journal of International Law 20 (2019):

Why are contemporary laws and techniques that state authorities use to crack down on political dissent so similar across countries? This Article argues that at least part of the answer may be found by turning to colonial history. The Article has two Parts. In the first Part, the Article explores the manner in which, over the course of the nineteenth century, the British deployed various different legal and institutional approaches in response to an Irish polity that consistently refused to submit to British authority. In the second Part, the Article examines the manner in which the approaches developed in Ireland were exported to other parts of the empire, in particular to India, South Africa, and Nigeria, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along the way, the Article considers the big picture significance of such developments relative to the nature of the rule of law. While, over time, the deployment of increasingly legalized and formalized approaches may have played a positive role insofar as they served to soften and displace the potential for more direct violence, enabled by declarations of martial law, such developments came at the cost of the incorporation of much of the repressive approach employed in contexts of emergency rule into everyday legality. Far from conflicting with the rule of law, this development represented the form in which the expansion of the rule of law primarily occurred — serving to entrench and legitimize the repressive practices in question.

--Dan Ernst

Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable

[We have the following announcement from our friends at Boston College.]

In the fall of 2019, the Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable begins its 18th successful year. The Roundtable draws on Boston College Law School’s and Boston College’s strength and interest in legal history. It offers an opportunity for Boston College faculty and faculty from other area institutions, students, and members of the Boston College community to meet and discuss a pre-circulated paper in legal history. Meeting several times each semester, the Roundtable seeks to promote an informal, collegial atmosphere of informed discussion.

For the 2019-2020 academic year, Professor Mary Sarah Bilder, Professor Daniel R. Coquillette, Professor Frank Herrmann and Professor Daniel Farbman are conveners.

The Roundtable usually meets several times during the semester in the afternoon at 4:30 pm in the Library Conference Room of the Boston College Law School Library. Refreshments are available beginning at 4:15 pm, unless otherwise noted.

Papers will be available when appropriate before each presentation.

Thursday, September 19 (lunch talk)
Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University: Lunchtime, co-sponsored with the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy

Professor Jones will give a public book talk for a Constitution Day Lecture, discussing her prize-winning book.

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans’ aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

Tuesday, October 24
Roundtable with Bryan Garner, Law Prose, Inc., co-sponsored with Law Library in honor of its upcoming Law Dictionary exhibit, "Dictionaries and the Law"

At his presentation, Garner will discuss the history of legal lexicography and his own work on Black's Law Dictionary and other law-related dictionaries.

Bryan A. Garner is a noted speaker, writer, and consultant regarding legal writing and drafting, and regularly teaches Advanced Legal Writing at the Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law. Garner is editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary among many other leading works on legal style, and he is president of LawProse, Inc., the foremost provider of CLE training in legal writing, editing, and drafting.

Thursday, January 30
Roundtable with Lael Weinberger, Harvard Law School, Berger-Howe Legal History Fellow 2019-20, "Judicializing International Relations: Internationalism, Courts, and American Lawyers in the Progressive Era"

This paper, part of Weinberger's project on internationalism in the legal profession, reconstructs an unfamiliar period at the start of the twentieth century when American lawyers across political divides tended to believe that world courts and robust international law were the future of international relations—even suggesting that law would replace diplomacy and that international litigation would replace war. From a modern vantage point the “legal internationalism” of the period looks unrealistic or even utopian. But its very unfamiliarity provides an ideal starting point for examining the intellectual, political, and legal conditions of possibility for legal internationalism.

Lael Weinberger is the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where he studies American legal history. Lael earned a JD with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for Judge Frank Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for Chief Justice Daniel Eismann on the Idaho Supreme Court. Lael is currently writing a dissertation on American lawyers’ ideas about international law, world order, and human rights in the first half of the twentieth century. His research interests include constitutional law, international law, civil procedure, law and religion, and the legal profession.

Thursday, February 27
Roundable with Professor Erin Braatz, Suffolk Law School, "Civilization & Sovereignty: The Birth of the “Native” Prison"

This paper describes the rise of so-called “native” prisons on the Gold Coast of Africa in the mid-nineteenth century (present-day Ghana) and argues that these prisons arose out of jurisdictional struggles between British colonial officials and indigenous leaders on the coast.  It then situates these struggles within the history of the global spread of the prison during the nineteenth century, contending that the prison played a central role in defining civilization and articulating changing notions of sovereignty.

Erin Braatz is an assistant professor of law at Suffolk University Law School.  She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in Law and Society from New York University where she also held a Golieb Fellowship in Legal History.  Prior to joining Suffolk’s faculty, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard Stearns of the District of Massachusetts and the Honorable Juan Torruella of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.  Her research examines the history of criminal law and punishment in British West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as the history of the Eighth Amendment.

Thursday, April 2
Roundtable with Kunal Parker, Professor and Dean's Distinguished Scholar, University of Miami Law School, "The Turn to Process: Law, Politics, and Economics in America, 1900 - 1970"

Over the course of the first three quarters of the twentieth century, American legal, political, and economic thinkers increasingly turned away from thinking in terms of ends to thinking in terms of means. Why did this happen? What did this transformation look like? Parker is working on a book-length study of the turn towards processes, means, methods, techniques, procedures, and protocols in twentieth-century American legal, political, and economic thought that looks at the connections and differences across these three fields to help make sense of this shift.

Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law. He is the author of Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790 - 1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600 - 2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Adanan & Higgins on UK's Regulation of the 20th-Century Slave Trade

Amina Adanan and Noelle Higgins, Maynooth University, have posted Britain’s Influence on the Regulation of the Slave Trade in the Twentieth Century, which appeared in British Influences on International Law, 1915-2015, ed. Robert McCorquodale and Jean-Pierre Gauci (BRILL/Martinus Nijhoff, 2016):

This chapter analyses how Britain shaped the current international legal regime regulating slavery during the 20th century up to the present day. It provides a brief historical account of Britain’s pioneering efforts to regulate the slave trade by means of bilateral treaties and the formulation of a right of search on the seas prior to the 20th century before focusing on Britain’s contribution to the drafting of the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1956 Supplementary Convention at the League of Nations and the United Nations. The Chapter also addresses the reasons why Britain was at the forefront of the regulation of this area of law.

--Dan Ernst

Johnston on the CIA under JFK

James H. Johnston, “a lawyer, writer, and historian in Washington, DC,” has published Murder, Inc.: The CIA under John F. Kennedy with Potomac Books, a division of the University of Nebraska Press. Mr. Johnston’s post on the book is here.

Late in his life, former president Lyndon B. Johnson told a reporter that he didn’t believe the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy. Johnson thought Cuban president Fidel Castro was behind it. After all, Johnson said, Kennedy was running “a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean,” giving Castro reason to retaliate.

Murder, Inc., tells the story of the CIA’s assassination operations under Kennedy up to his own assassination and beyond. James H. Johnston was a lawyer for the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, which investigated and first reported on the Castro assassination plots and their relation to Kennedy’s murder. Johnston examines how the CIA steered the Warren Commission and later investigations away from connecting its own assassination operations to Kennedy’s murder. He also looks at the effect this strategy had on the Warren Commission’s conclusions that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no foreign conspiracy.

Sourced from in-depth research into the “secret files” declassified by the JFK Records Act and now stored in the National Archives and Records Administration, Murder, Inc. is the first book to narrate in detail the CIA’s plots against Castro and to delve into the question of why retaliation by Castro against Kennedy was not investigated.

--Dan Ernst

Casto to Speak on Robert H. Jackson and FDR

William R. Casto, the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor at Texas Tech University, will speak on his book Advising the President: Attorney General Robert H. Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, published last year by the University Press of Kansas, at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum on Wednesday, July 31, 2019 at 4:00 p.m.  Click here to register. 

It is broadly understood that a president might test the limits of the law in extraordinary circumstances -- and does so with advice from legal counsel. Advising the President is an exploration of this process, viewed through the experience of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Robert H. Jackson on the eve of World War II. The book directly grapples with the ethical problems inherent in advising a president on actions of doubtful legality; eschewing partisan politics, it presents a practical, realistic model for rendering -- and judging the propriety of -- such advice.

Jackson, who would go on to be the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, was the US solicitor general from 1938-1940, US attorney general from 1940-1941, and Supreme Court justice from 1941-1954. William R. Casto examines the legal arguments advanced by Roosevelt for controversial wartime policies such as illegal wiretapping and unlawful assistance to Great Britain, all of which were related to important issues of national security. Putting these episodes in political and legal context, Casto makes clear distinctions between what the adviser tells the president and what he tells others, including the public, and between advising the president and subsequently facilitating the president's decision.

Based upon the real-life experiences of a great attorney general advising a great president, Casto's timely work presents a pragmatic yet ethically powerful approach to giving legal counsel to a president faced with momentous, controversial decisions.

--Dan Ernst

d'Aspremont on Critical Histories of International Law

Jean d'Aspremont, Sciences Po Law School and the University of Manchester School of Law, has posted Critical Histories of International Law and the Repression of Disciplinary Imagination, which is forthcoming in volume 7 of the London Review of International Law (2019):

This article engages with international lawyers’ growing historiographical appetites. It makes the argument that the critical histories that have come to populate the international legal literature over the last decades continue to be organised along the very lines set by the linear historical narratives which they seek to question and disrupt. It makes a plea for radical historical critique, that is, for critical histories that move beyond the markers, periodisation and causal sequencing they seek to displace or disrupt and that embrace a consciously interventionist history-writing attitude with a view to unbridling disciplinary imagination.

--Dan Ernst