Kelley's "Crimes Against Feeling"

Mark B. Kelley, an assistant professor of English at Florida International University, has published Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2026): 

Pirates have long occupied a central yet unstable place in American law and national identity. In the decades leading up to and including the U.S. Civil War, the charge of piracy was leveled against an unusually wide range of figures: foreign heads of state, imperial filibusters, transoceanic enslavers, enslaved mutineers, radical abolitionists, and others who challenged established forms of authority. Early American literature reflects this instability, portraying pirates who vary dramatically in politics, race, gender, and allegiance. As Mark B. Kelley shows, these characters are united less by ideology than by their challenge to landed social norms and fixed national belonging. The pirate, in both law and literature, emerges as an individual defined by multiplicity rather than political coherence. 

Crimes Against Feeling examines how Americans made sense of this ambiguous figure by turning to emotion. Drawing on legal materials including treaties, trial transcripts, congressional debates, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as popular sentimental fiction (often written by women), Kelley argues that piracy was codified as an offense against moral feeling rather than being a singular political position. Legal thinkers and writers such as John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Maria S. Cummins relied on shared affective frameworks—sympathy, sentiment, and domestic vulnerability—to render piracy legible and punishable. American pirate law, Kelley demonstrates, was shaped by the same emotional logics that structured the era’s popular fiction. 

By tracing piracy across debates over domestic sovereignty, global enslavement and abolition, imperial expansion, postbellum reparations, and international copyright, Crimes Against Feeling reveals the pirate as a key figure for understanding gender, home, family, and nation in early America. Reading law and literature together, the book shows how emotional judgment—not political consensus—became a foundational tool for managing oceanic violence and transnational disorder in the nineteenth-century United States. 

Professor Kelley will discuss the book at Marquette University on Tuesday, October 20. 

--Dan Ernst 

Yovel on the Dreyfus Affair in Law and Literature

Jonathan Yovel, University of Haifa Faculty of Law, has The Dreyfus Affair: A Law and Literature Account of a Law and Literature Affair, which appears in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities:

Alfred Dreyfus (NYPL)

 How does law become public? What happens to it when it does?

A note fished from a wastebasket, forged evidence, a secret court-martial, public humiliation and a republic stressed to its limits: in 1894–95 France convicted and degraded Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason he did not commit. Within years the Dreyfus Affair had engulfed France, reshaping politics and giving rise to a new public sphere. It was fought in courts and offices as much as in newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, open letters, and even real-time feature film. 

This article reads L'Affaire as a "law and literature event," a real-time contest over meaning and performance in which novelists and essayists pleaded, lawyers turned authors, and legal performances spilled into the streets and back into a series of courts. Treating law and literature as a phenomenon, not only a method, unsettles the divide between "law in" and "law as" literature.

Through discourse analysis drawing on Bakhtin, Perelman, and Barthes, it examines Labori's carnivalesque pleading, Zola's address casting the jurors as protagonists, Lazare's forensic pamphlets, Proust's studied distance, Méliès's 1899 docudrama, and the anti-Dreyfusard Barrès' emphatic report from Dreyfus' Rennes trial, whose rhetoric of names, race, and a fictive "everyone" is a rhetorical masterpiece expressing the later "friend-enemy" foundation of Schmittian political theory. It traces how material, technological, and legal conditions shaped the construction of a mass public sphere and the ways law and legal discourse interacted within it, constructing audienceship and modes of expression and participation. 

"L'Affaire" means different things to different people. It is a story of shame and of the nascent political culture that would ravage Europe, but also of courage, struggle and redemption. The paper follows L'Affaire past Dreyfus's 1906 rehabilitation into a darker, second-generation sequel: the son of his accuser, du Paty de Clam, became Vichy's Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs, while Dreyfus's granddaughter, a Resistance member, perished in Auschwitz. Vichy and Dreyfus's 2025 posthumous promotion each offer a chapter in an ongoing legal story, or stories: the article argues that "L'Affaire" has become a plurality of stories told to and by fractured audiences to this very day.

--Dan Ernst

Book Launch for "Gaskell and the Law"

We have word that the Legal Humanities at QM Network will host a book launch symposium for Paul Mitchell’s Gaskell and the Law in Room 313, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM.  Professor Mitchell, UCL, will introduce the book.  Luiza Tavares da Motta, University of Liverpool, Jinal Dadiya, QM, and Matt Ingleby, QM, will comment.  Maks Del Mar will chair.  All the details, including booking, are here.

--Dan Ernst 

Marsh's "Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race"

Sarah Marsh, Seton Hall University, has published Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race: A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1688–1818 (Oxford University Press): 

Novel Constitutions argues that Anglo-American racial slavery emerged from a seventeenth-century English constitutional crisis exported into the western Atlantic through Stuart imperial expansion. In this crisis, divine-right absolutism collided with the English people’s ancient constitutional claims to life, liberty, and property. As the Stuart monarchy pursued policies that elevated royal prerogative over the common law, imperial governance developed new procedures that severed kinship, alienated labor, and converted human persons of African descent into perpetual chattels—simultaneously transforming some English subjects into colonial slavocrats. These practices of asserting absolute power over other human beings constitute the original sin of American slavery: a profane attempt to assume godlike dominion over human beings. This study names these transatlantic legal improvisations “novel constitutions,” practices that infused absolutism into the very constitutional idioms meant to restrain it. Reading literature alongside statutes, slave codes, charters, and landmark legal decisions, the book traces the rise of racial, chattel slavery as a constitutional process through which race itself was produced in its modern form, binding hereditary rights and constitutional protections to human complexion. By reconceiving slavery and anti-slavery as competing constitutional projects in the anglophone Atlantic world, Novel Constitutions reframes the American founding as both an outcome of imperial slavocracy and a still-unfinished anti-slavery ambition.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Legal historian Sarah Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania, has been appointed to the Evan C Thompson Chair for Excellence in Teaching (Almanac). 

• "William G. Ross, the Albert P. Brewer Professor of Law and Ethics at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, was honored with the Thomas W. Woolley Scholarly Achievement Award during the university's 185th Opening Convocation on Aug. 25."  More. 

• UVA's Sarah Milov was quoted in a recent New York Times article on "Social Media and the Myth of the Big Tobacco Moment."

• In "The Maritime Origins of Judicial Review," Thomas H. Lee, Fordham Law, reviews The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789-1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2025), by Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law (Lawfare).   

• Matthijs Wibier, an assistant professor of Classics at the University Of Cincinnati, has "edited and translated a Latin legal text [about taxes] he pieced together from fragments that surprisingly survived in the Egyptian sands for more than 1,600 years" (UC News).  

• Charles Plambeck, Adjunct Professor of Law, and Kathleen DuVal, Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History, will lecture on the 1776 North Carolina Constitution at UNC Law from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm on September 23.

• Karin Wulf interviews Anna O. Law about her new book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants  (Commonplace).

• The exhibit, "Pennsylvania’s Founding: How a City and a Colony Shaped America’s Civic DNA," a joint project of the National Constitution Center and Drexel University, will be on display at the NCC from September 30 through January 3.  In conjunction with the exhibit is the NCC town hall, "The Holy Experiment: Religious Liberty, Pennsylvania, and the Making of America" which will take place on September 29.  (Metro Philadelphia).   

• 
  The American Antiquarian Society will hold a book event on Peter Jaros's The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature (2026) on November 19, 2026, from 2 - 3pm (AAS).

• UConn Law's notice of new faculty and fellows includes Brianne Felsher, "a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at Berkeley" who "studies the legal history of queer families and marriages in the United States from the early 1800s through World War I." 

• "Do We Need a New Approach to Our Origin Stories?" Ned Blackhawk (Yale University) discusses this question and others in an interview for the Nation.

• A notice of Vox Mercatoria, a podcast growing out of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project, “Migrating commercial law and language: Rethinking lex mercatoria (11th-17th cent.),” which is directed by Stefania Gialdroni, University of Padua. 

• The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory Partner Group, “The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade,” will hold a discussion workshop on September 4, 2026, 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM (Local Time Germany) (More).

• ICYMI: The one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court of Ohio's "Women in the Law" exhibit (CNO).  Rachel Shelden writes that For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical (TPM).  Kelsey Dallas on Alcohol at the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUSblog).

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

Henderson on the Oresteia's Jury Trial

Stephen E. Henderson, University of Oklahoma College of Law, has published An Honest Verdict:

In America, we’ve now had 250 years of criminal juries. And our high court will soon decide whether, everywhere in this country, they must consist of the mythic number of twelve. So, there is no better time to turn to where it all began: Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Written and first performed nearly 2500 years ago, and today the only remaining Classical Greek trilogy, it provides the earliest surviving description of jury trial. It is the jury’s very origin story, written to justify and celebrate the transition from clan vengeance to this democratic adjudicatory form of State-monopolized violence, and it speaks as poignantly today as when it won first prize at the Great Dionysia thousands of years ago. For that first jury was not only a voice of the people, but also, and critically, a voice of mercy. 

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Berkeley Law's notice of its new legal historian, Aaron Hall (UC Berkeley Law).  

• Daniel F. Gosling, Principal Legal Records Specialist at UK's National Archives, has announced the completion of his searchable database of 

• Legal Histories of Empire has posted a "save the date" for its fifth conference, 13-15 July 2028, at NLSIU Bengaluru.   

• The University of Kansas's notice of Raj Bhala's article on the rule of law in “Measure for Measure" (KU News).

• The Library of Congress has a new research guide on the Legal Tender Act of 1862.

• Kevin Kruse on The Rise, Fall, and Possible Rebirth of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division (Talking Feds with Harry Litman). 

• Julia Rose Kraut, Sam Lebovic and Ellen Schrecker's amicus brief in an ideological deportation case, AAUP v. Rubio (1st Cir.) (Brennan Center).   

• The legal historian Patti Minter has been appointed to Kentucky’s Board of Education (College Heights Herald). 

• 
  Noticed in the New York Almanack: Carol Kammen's Smut: An 1883 Obscenity Trial and Its Echoes Today (Paul Dry Books, 2026), on an 1883 trial for “selling and exhibiting obscene pictures.” 

• Rosemarie Zagarri on The Grievances of the Declaration of Independence: a National Constitution Center podcast.  

• Danielle Allen and Mary Bilder on the Declaration of Independence on Preet Bharara's podcast. 

• Robert P. George, Princeton University, and Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford University, on the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s “promissory note” (SLS Podcasts).

• Did the Constitution Lay the Groundwork for Abolition? A Federalist Society webinar with Timothy Sandefur and Kenneth Williams.  The recording of the National Constitution Center's book even for Mr. Sandefur's new book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence is here.  

• "Founding Friends, Founding Foes": Kurt Graham and Steve Light on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, at the Harry S. Truman Library on September 23.   

• A notice of Gautham Rao's course, HIST-196 America at 250: Revolution (AU Magazine).

• Check out Drafting the Past: "a new home to celebrate nonfiction history books." 

• ICYMI: Hangings in Jefferson County, PA (ExploreJefferson).  What the Framers Were Really Thinking (Harvard Gazette).  Ohio in the oleomargarine wars (CNO) .

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.

Ritger's "Houses of Correction"

Matthew Ritger, Dartmouth College, has published Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press):

More than 250 years before the rise of the modern penitentiary, houses of correction pioneered the use of forced labor and individualized sentences within institutions of confinement, promoting reform and the “hope of amendment” for every individual. Yet these earlier carceral institutions faced many of the problems that remain familiar today: corruption scandals, recidivism, and abuses of power.

In Houses of Correction, Matthew Ritger turns to the archives of England’s first house of correction, Bridewell, to show how humanist reformers provided ideas, justifications, and administration for what came to be called bridewells, workhouses, and “Literary worke-houses,” even as repeated scandals made it clear that these coercive institutions would forever be at odds with the ideals of humanist culture. Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism’s entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe’s most influential carceral institutions. 

--Dan Ernst 

Mitchell's "Gaskell and the Law"

Paul Mitchell, University College London, has published Gaskell and the Law (Hart/Bloomsbury):

Elizabeth Gaskell is best known today as a novelist of social realism. Until now, however, her use of law, which is crucial to her portrait of society, has never been systematically explored. This book shows that Gaskell's fiction is rich with insights into the law of her time, and that reading her work with a lawyer's eye deepens and enriches the reading experience.

The book explores Gaskell's work as a whole. It gives careful attention to her most famous novels, but also engages with the lesser-known novels and the shorter fiction, showing that these often overlooked works contain a wealth of original ideas and legal interest. Gaskell's fiction is shown consistently demonstrating a skilled, accurate and critical handling of legal rules and a sensitivity to law's personal and social effects. She does not limit herself to mid-nineteenth century issues, but enters into such fundamental questions as the individual's obligation to obey the law, and the relation between law and fiction. The book shows that a hitherto unappreciated aspect of Gaskell's genius as writer is that she integrates this sophisticated engagement with law seamlessly, so that it contributes to the cumulative artistic effect of her work.

As a leading scholar of Victorian legal history, Paul Mitchell brings an in-depth knowledge of the law to his close readings of Gaskell. He brings out the richness and sophistication of Gaskell's engagement with the law, and proposes both new readings and new valuations of this important novelist's work.

--Dan Ernst 

Green Bag Does Doyle's "One Crowded Hour"

Our friends at The Green Bag have published the latest in its series of coffee table books under the series title Regulation & Imagination.  As its title suggests, it is centered on a short story: Legal, Historical & Literary Perspectives on Highway Robbery, featuring the autograph manuscript of Arthur Conan Doyle's One Crowded Hour.  The volume includes not only facsimile reproductions of the published article (in the August 1911 issue of The Strand Magazine) and the autograph manuscript but also an introduction from the editor, Ross E. Davies, and commentary by Professor Davies and ten others.  I especially liked Michael A. Perino's essay, "The Wolves of Wall Street," which could enliven a Securities Regulation class with its summary of fictional accounts of early financial speculation and Udo Keppler's arresting cartoons of stock manipulators.

Dan Ernst 

Forum on Wang's "Making of Felony Procedure"

[We have word from the Modern Criminal Law Review of From Treason to Trump: Felony’s Medieval Origins and Modern Resilience, a forum on Elise Wang's Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature.  DRE]

In The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature (Oxford 2024), Elise Wang explores the medieval origins and surprising modern resilience of “felony” in contemporary criminal law. Since its appearance as the ur-crime of Anglo-Saxon proto-criminal law, commentators, historians, and judges have waxed poetic about the radically exclusive evil attached to those who are branded, “attainted,” and just plain despised “with words of felony.”

The following passage from Pollock & Maitland’s classic history of medieval English law gives a nice flavor:

When the adjective felon first appears it seems to mean cruel, fierce, wicked, base. Occasionally we may hear in it a note of admiration, for fierceness may shade off into laudable courage; but in general it is as bad a word as you can give to man or thing, and it will stand equally well for many kinds of badness, for ferocity, cowardice, craft.

That’s memorably harsh, even for medieval law. More startling yet, talk of “felony” and “felons” survives to this day. Courts continue to quote the passage above to give their modern audience a flavor of what felony means today. In public discourse, the “branding” of a criminal defendant as a “felon”–as opposed to a mere “convict”–still appears as definitive evidence of that person’s (more or less permanent and total) exclusion from the political community, i.e., a type of civil death or outlawry (incl. disenfranchisement, deportation, and ineligibility for jobs, benefits, or privileges).

How can this be? What did felony mean in medieval law and literature? What does (and should?) it mean today? Does felony have a place in modern criminal law discourse and practice?

Why Legal Historians Need to Read Literature
Sara M. Butler

Felony, Fact-Finding, and Medieval Due Process
Jennifer Jahner

Law, Not-Law, and the Felon in Between
Alice Ristroph

Felon, Felonesse, President
Jamie Taylor

Felony and the Interdisciplinary Frounce
Elise Wang

In preparation for this Forum, MCLR+ hosted a book panel, live streamed on our YouTube channel, on January 17, 2025. The video of that event is available here; the audio is accessible here, or on any of the usual podcast outlets (Spotify, Apple, etc.). For additional materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources (“Felony”).

To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website; to receive notifications about new video content, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Poldnikov on Dialogical Narrative in Comparative Legal History

Dmitry Poldnikov, MGIMO University, Moscow, has posted Dialogical Narrative in Comparative Legal History:

As a well-established academic discipline, legal history offers a wide range of methodological tools. Many among them are rooted in the classical paradigm and face the challenge of the "postclassical turn" in humanities. This paper advocates a dialogical approach for legal history, asserting that profound understanding arises from an active "communication" with past legal systems through historians posing meaningful questions to historical documents, a concept drawing from comparative law. It first examines legal history's "vocation," touching upon Savigny's "Volksgeist" and the historicism-universalism debate, before critiquing the limitations of isolated traditional approaches like legal positivism, natural law theory, and sociological jurisprudence, which risk oversimplification or anachronism. As a constructive alternative, the paper advocates for a communicative, narrative-based approach, viewing legal history as a historian-constructed narrative in line with post-classical legal thought. A methodological framework for this dialogical and comparative legal history-encompassing descriptive reconstruction, causal explanation, and critical evaluation-is proposed. This framework is then vividly applied to a detailed comparative analysis of a single casus: the collision of carts from the Digest (D. 9.2.52.2). The paper examines how Roman law, English common law, Romano-canonical ius commune, Sharia (Fiqh), and Imperial Chinese law might have uniquely approached this problem. This micro-historical comparison reveals that the distinct style and substance of these legal traditions are fundamentally shaped by the specific questions they pose and the methods they employ for resolution. The paper concludes by affirming that such a sustained, questioning dialogue with historical legal sources is indispensable for constructing meaningful narratives that illuminate both the particularity of past legal systems and their enduring relevance to contemporary legal understanding. 

--Dan Ernst 

A Conference for Charles Donahue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Mellyn, Suicide in Early Modern Italy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bharath Palle, Wesley Hohfeld’s Modernist Imagination

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

Stern on Criminal Law, Literature, and History

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has posted Introduction: Crime and Literature, Narrative and Doctrine:

This Introduction to a special issue of the Modern Criminal Law Review+ discusses the history of criminal law as a focus within the field of Law and Literature, from the early 20th century to the present, including bibliographies anthologies, and critical studies. Work in this area once focused primarily on the depiction of crime, criminals, and criminal trials in literary narratives (“law in literature”). Over the last thirty years, scholars have moved far beyond this focus, asking more foundational and conceptual questions, such as how literature can help us understand the epistemology and analysis of evidence, the structure of the trial, the development of doctrines and concepts such as attempt and mens rea, the changing treatment of crimes such as treason and conspiracy, and the representation of intention in forensic advocacy and judicial writing. What these investigations share is a concern with literary form and modes of representation, on the one hand, and structures of legal analysis, on the other. Instead of asking how crime and criminals are portrayed in imaginative works, scholars have inquired into the conditions that make these portrayals possible. This more foundational approach has been far more productive and continues to open up new avenues for research. After reviewing these developments, the introduction turns to the contributions in this special issue by Elise Wang, Hannah Walser, Anna Schur, Abhinav Sekhri, and Daria Bayer, discussing them in relation to this recent line of scholarship. All the contributions may be found on the MCLR+ site.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization, John Q. Barrett lets us, too, read Charles Reich's mail as Reich decides between Paul, Weiss and Arnold Porter & Fortas in 1955.

•  Harold Koh et al.: Bills of attainder are back, but shouldn't be (Just Security).
  

• Evan Bernick's posts on birthright  citizenship (Volokh Conspiracy).
  

• The Florida Supreme Court Historical Society invites judges, lawyers, law professors, and other citizens to serve on its board of trustees.
  

• Modern Criminal Law Review 1:2 (2025) is a special issue, edited by Simon Stern, University of Toronto, devoted to Criminal Law, Literature, and History.

• We missed it, but on Thursday the American Constitution Society held the session,  Can New Histories of Reconstruction Transform the Constitution? with Khiara M. Bridges, Aderson François, Olatunde Johnson, Martha S. Jones, Osagie Obasogie, and Farah Peterson. 
  

• "The Supreme Court of Ohio announces the development of a new exhibit, Women in the Law, which celebrates the trailblazing contributions of women to Ohio’s legal history" (Court News Ohio).

• 
  
  The Florida Supreme Court Historical Society invites judges, lawyers, law professors, and other citizens to serve on its board of trustees.

• UMass Law Professor Faisal Chaudhry spoke on his book, South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Towards a Historical Ontology of the Law at the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Oxford and at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (UMass Law).
  

• 
  A (paywalled) review of Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South (Basic Books) by Kathryn Schumaker, University of Sydney (WSJ).

• Here's the CFP for the annual meeting of the Organization of American  Historians in April 2026 in Philadelphia.

• This year's Summer Civic Institute of the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University will be devoted to the Declaration of Independence.
  

• ICYMI: For the legal history of Dorset, be sure to stop in at the Shire Hall Museum in Dorchester (Dorset Echo). Two Fourth Circuit Judges visited Constitutional history class at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI).  David Corn on the War on History (Mother Jones).  ProPublica on the origins of the income tax and Window + Door on the history of tariffs.  Alexander Keyssar and Sean Wilentz quoted on the SAVE Act (Election Law Blog).

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

From Treason to Trump: Felony’s Medieval Origins and Modern Resilience

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

From Treason to Trump: Felony’s Medieval Origins and Modern Resilience (Jan 17, 2025)

In The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature (Oxford 2024), Elise Wang explores the medieval origins and surprising modern resilience of “felony” in contemporary criminal law. Since its appearance as the ur-crime of Anglo-Saxon proto-criminal law, commentators, historians, and judges have waxed poetic about the radically exclusive evil attached to those who are branded, “attainted,” and just plain despised “with words of felony.” The following passage from Pollock & Maitland’s classic history of medieval English law gives a nice flavor:

When the adjective felon first appears it seems to mean cruel, fierce, wicked, base.  Occasionally we may hear in it a note of admiration, for fierceness may shade off into laudable courage; but in general it is as bad a word as you can give to man or thing, ad it will stand equally well for many kinds of badness, for ferocity, cowardice, craft.

That’s memorably harsh, even for medieval law. More startling yet, talk of “felony” and “felons” survives to this day. Courts continue to quote the passage above to give their modern audience a flavor of what felony means today. In public discourse, the “branding” of a criminal defendant as a “felon”–as opposed to a mere “convict”–still appears as definitive evidence of that person’s (more or less permanent and total) exclusion from the political community, i.e., a type of civil death or outlawry (incl. disenfranchisement, deportation, and ineligibility for jobs, benefits, or privileges).

How can this be? What did felony mean in medieval law and literature? What does (and should?) it mean today? Does felony have a place in modern criminal law discourse and practice?

Join our interdisciplinary panel of commentators as they engage with Professor Wang’s book live on YouTube:

Elise Wang (Cal State Fullerton, English) (author)
Elizabeth Papp Kamali (Harvard, Law) (moderator)
Sara Butler (Ohio State, History)
Jennifer Jahner (Cal Tech, English)
Alice Ristroph (Brooklyn Law School)
Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr, English)

The event proceedings, including the panelists’ commentaries and the author’s response, will appear in a special online MCLR+ book forum.  For additional materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources (“Felony”).  January 17, 2025 @ 12:30pm (EDT)

To join us for this free online event, please register here. Registration is encouraged, but not required; if you prefer to join the event directly, head over to the MCLR+ YouTube channel at the time of the event (please note the time zone). All attendees will have the opportunity to post questions and comments via YouTube live chat.

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Hoeflich and Moreland's "Gold Mines and Law Books"

M.H. Hoeflich and John Moreland have published the chapbook, Gold Mines and Law Books: H.H. Bancroft's California Bookshop (Talbot Publishing):

The California Gold Rush not only brought thousands of miners seeking to make a fortune to California's gold fields, but also those who served their needs such as merchants and lawyers. Lawyers needed law books, and H.H. Bancroft, an entrepreneurial merchant and bookseller, established a large scale bookselling operation that overcame the difficulties of transcontinental shipping and financing. His creation lasted more than a century and published and sold scores of important legal texts without which the California Bar would have been far less successful. This chapbook takes the reader back to Gold Rush California, clipper ships, and overland mail and evokes the triumphs of H.H. Bancroft, one of the great entrepreneurial booksellers of antebellum America.   

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Hugo and the Law

“Hugo and the Law,” 8 May 2025, Maastricht University Faculty of Law, Maastricht, The Netherlands

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Actes et Paroles, the collection of Victor Hugo’s political speeches, the UM Law and Popular Culture Research Network organizes a Workshop on 8 May 2025 dedicated to the author’s conceptualization of several legal issues. The Workshop will take place at the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University (The Netherlands), with a fully in-person program.

Goal and Background of the Workshop.  In his several works, Victor Hugo has often delved into profound perspectives into the relationship between humanity and the law. Hugo was not merely a renowned novelist but a visionary thinker who engaged with multiple societal issues, including the intricacies of the legal system, the condition of women, the rise of socialism, and the future of Europe. On the 150th anniversary of the publication of Actes et Paroles – which perfectly captures such themes– this Workshop aims to examine Hugo’s conception of the law.

Hugo’s conception of the law is multifaceted, encompassing both its theoretical foundations and its practical implications. His writings often reflect a deep concern for the struggle for power and the ethical responsibilities of institutions. Through an examination of Hugo’s literary corpus, the Workshop will explore how his books’ characters grapple with the complexities of law and its impact on individuals and society. One key aspect of the Workshop is Hugo’s emphasis on the moral dimension of the law. His characters navigate questions of morality, duty, and conscience by their interactions with legal systems. At the same time, the Workshop will address Hugo’s critique of the legal machinery, shedding light on his observations regarding the potential for injustice and the abuse of power. Furthermore, this Workshop will investigate the historical context in which Hugo lived and wrote, considering the political and social upheavals that influenced his views on the law. From the aftermath of the French Revolution to the establishment of the Second French Republic, through the rise and fall of the Empire of Napoleon III, until the experience of the Commune, Hugo’s observations of the evolving legal landscape are integral to understanding his perspective on the nature of power, the State and the foundations of Europe, and the condition of women.

By examining the philosophical, historical, and theoretical underpinnings and practical implications of Hugo’s thoughts on law, the Workshop aims to illuminate the enduring relevance of his insights and their potential to inspire contemporary discussions on law and justice.

Abstract Submissions.  The “Hugo and the Law” Workshop will feature panel sessions. Submissions should relate to the overarching theme of the Workshop.

Submissions should indicate the title of the contribution, an abstract (max. 400 words), and the contact information and a short biography of the speaker (max. 150 words). Fully written papers are not required. We encourage submissions in English, and co-authored papers will be also considered.

Who Can Participate in this Workshop?  The “Hugo and the Law” Workshop is not restricted to lawyers. We welcome proposals that offer multi-disciplinary perspectives from various areas of law (including civil, criminal, tax, and labor law), as well as from scholars in e.g. the humanities and other social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science, sociology) with an interest in the Workshop’s theme. We welcome submissions from senior and junior scholars (including doctoral students) and interested practitioners.

How and When to Submit?  Send your submission to agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl.  The Call for Papers closes on 22 December 2024. Shortly after that, the authors will be informed whether their papers are selected for a presentation during the Workshop.

Conference Organizing Committee.  Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact a member of the Workshop Organizing Committee:

Eline Couperus(e.couperus@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Agustín Parise (agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Franco Peirone (franco.peirone@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Livia Solaro (l.solaro@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Arthur Willemse (arthur.willemse@maastrichtuniversity.nl)

Legal History at Queen Mary University of London

The Department of Law, Queen Mary University of London, has announced three upcoming events of interest to legal historians.  All are free and everyone is welcomed.

16 October
Law, Labour, and Economy in the 19th Century
With Jonathan Connolly, Bronwen Everill, Erik Mathisen, and Miles Ogborn

23 October
The Devil in Medieval Legal Culture
With Karl Shoemaker

20 November
Law, Logic, Literature: A Symposium on "The Logical Renaissance"
With Katrin Ettenhuber, Kevin Killeen, Lorna Hutson, Julie Stone Peters, and Maksymilian Del Mar

--Dan Ernst