Eliason on the Blues Contracts of Trumpet Records

Antonia Eliason, University of Mississippi School of Law, has posted Lillian McMurry and the Blues Contracts of Trumpet Records, which is forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Journal:

Trumpet Records was a Jackson, Mississippi-based record label established and run by Lillian McMurry from 1950 until it folded in 1955. This article draws on archival material to evaluate the progression of the contracts entered into by Trumpet Records with its blues artists, arguing that this demonstrates the evolving contractual understanding of a young record label, showing increasing sophistication and an awareness of some of the potential pitfalls of signing artists. The contracts of Trumpet Records, when taken together with the correspondence of the label’s head with her artists, also show a commitment to fairness and a level of scrupulousness and honesty not often seen in the industry. The article also examines the legal dispute between Sherman Johnson and Trumpet Records, which reached the Mississippi Supreme Court. The article further turns to the subsequent copyright infringement of a number of Trumpet Record recordings by European record labels in the 1970s, which sheds light on the widespread practice of piracy prevalent in relation to older blues recordings.

Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection

[We have the following announcement from  Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.]

It is with great pride that I announce today’s opening of a landmark exhibit at the famed Grolier Club in New York City, entitled "Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection." This exhibit is co-curated by Michael Widener, our Rare Book Librarian, and Mark S. Weiner ’00 (Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School). It has already received coverage in the New Yorker, and additional major publicity is expected. See below for further description. I visited the exhibit yesterday and it is spectacular and quite extensive. Mike and Mark have done a tremendous job showcasing 140 of the many treasures in our collection.

"Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection" is on display September 13 - November 18, 2017, in the Grolier Club's main gallery at 47 East 60th Street in New York City. The gallery is open 10:00am – 5:00pm Monday - Saturday except holidays, and admission is free. Mike Widener and Mark Weiner will be conducting exhibition tours on September 21, October 5, and November 2, 1:00 – 2:00pm. 

On the evening of October 5, there will be a mini-symposium from 6:00 – 8:00pm at the Grolier Club, which will feature presentations by Mike Widener and Mark Weiner, followed by a panel discussion moderated by John Brigham (U. of Massachusetts-Amherst. Political scientist, a cultural studies of law scholar who has published on law as mapping) and featuring John Gordan III (lawyer, legal historian, book collector, Grolier Club member), Eric Hilgendorf (Professor of criminal law at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and author of one of the illustrated law books in the exhibit, Dtv-Atlas Recht (2 vols.; 2003-2008)), and Kathryn James (Curator of Early Modern Collections, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University; Grolier Club member). There will be a reception at 8:00pm following the panel. This event is open to the public but reservations are requested.

On November 8, the Law Library will host a talk in the Yale Law School that will include presentations by Mike Widener and Mark Weiner, with commentary by Judith Resnik.  A complementary exhibit, "Around the World with Law's Picture Books," is on view through December 15 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School (Library Level 2, Sterling Law Building, 127 Wall Street, New Haven CT). It is open to the public 10:00 – 6:00pm daily except holidays.

[Mike Widener's post on the exhibit on the blog of the Goldman Law Library is here.]

Davies on Curtis Wilbur, Judicial Parabolist

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University,  Antonin Scalia Law School, has posted A Generous Judicial Parabolist: Curtis D. Wilbur, which appears in the Green Bag 2d 20 (2017): 381-407:

Curtis Wilbur (LC)

We – we lawyers, at least – should know Curtis Dwight Wilbur (1867-1954) better than many of us do. He was an able, upstanding, and innovative lawyer and public servant. (He was also an imperfect human being in an imperfect world, and so he had warts. For now, though, we’re going to accentuate the positive.) He enjoyed an enviable legal career that included long service as a practitioner, a prosecutor, a state-court judge, a federal-court judge, a Cabinet secretary, and a storytelling philanthropist. This little essay touches on all of those pursuits, but it focuses on the last.

Yeager on Anglo-Saxon England

We missed this one a few years ago. We're posting it now because  there’s more on the LHB about Anglo-Saxonism (like this) than the actual Anglo-Saxons! Stephen Yeager, Concordia University published From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland with the University of Toronto Press in 2014. From the press:

The reappearance of alliterative verse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains one of the most puzzling issues in the literary history of medieval England. In From Lawmen to Plowmen, Stephen M. Yeager offers a fresh, insightful explanation for the alliterative structure of William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the flourishing of alliterative verse satires in late medieval England by observing the similarities between these satires and the legal-homiletical literature of the Anglo-Saxon era.
Unlike Old English alliterative poetry, Anglo-Saxon legal texts and documents continued to be studied long after the Norman Conquest. By comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland’s Piers Plowman and similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators. His conclusions establish a new genealogy for medieval England’s vernacular literary tradition and offer a new way of approaching one of Middle English’s literary classics.

A blurb:

“Yeager has an interesting and innovative thesis that sheds a great deal of light on the possible connection between Old English legal-homiletic writing and Middle English alliterative verse.” -Joyce Lionarons

And the TOC:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. From Written Record to Memory: A Brief History of Anglo-Saxon Legal-Homiletic Discourse
• Chapter 2. Leges Cnuti, Sermones Lupi: Homily, Law, and the Legacy of Wulfstan
• Chapter 3. Ecclesiastical Anglo-Saxonism in Thirteenth-Century Worcester:The First Worcester Fragment and The Proverbs of Alfred
• Chapter 4. Laȝamon’s Brut: Law, Literature, and the Chronicle-Poem
• Chapter 5. Defining the Piers Plowman Tradition
• Chapter 6. Documents, Dreams and the Langlandian Legacy in Mum and the Sothsegger
• Conclusion

You can read more about the book here.

Woodring on Shakespeare and Sanctuary Cities

Benjamin Woodring, who holds a PhD from Harvard and a JD from Yale and is currently clerking for a federal judge, has posted Liberty to Misread: Sanctuary and Possibility in The Comedy of Errors, which appears in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 28 (2016): 319 et seq.:

Today’s hotly contested debates about “sanctuary cities” would feel very familiar to someone living in Shakespeare’s London. In this piece, which is part of a larger forthcoming book project titled Shakespeare’s Sanctuary Cities, I argue that Shakespeare is fascinated by the dramatic possibilities inherent in an asylum space situated on the fault line of a jurisdictional battle. A refuge site sits between life and death. At the same time, Elizabethan sanctuary was a contradictory swirl of concepts: something both holy and debauched, something at the same time archaic and unpredictably present. Shakespeare’s use of a sanctuary in The Comedy of Errors is not a simple endorsement of Christian mercy. It is rather a deeper reflection on genre and possibility: comedy is predicated on some escape valve from accumulating conflicts and obligations, while tragedy is ultimately insulated from such releases. Shakespeare creates an asylum episode in this play different from anything in Plautus or Gower, his main sources. The abbey, which jealously defends its sanctuary rights, is a space allowing for recognition and reintegration after long sequences of confusion and chaos. But it is also, I argue, a site for further potential misreadings. The sanctuary in Shakespeare’s play does not provide perfect resolutions. The sanctuary’s Abbess arguably bungles the play’s moral. But in the end, this imperfection is not only vastly preferable to tragedy’s irreversible misunderstandings, it is also a sign of Shakespeare’s nuanced unpacking of a generative social and spatial concept still lingering in the streets of London.

Johnson on Cultural Representations of an Inuit Child Abandoment Case

Rebecca Johnson, University of Victoria Faculty of Law, has posted Justice and the Colonial Collision: Reflections on Stories of Intercultural Encounter in Law, Literature, Culture and Film, which appeared in No Foundations: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 9 (2012): 68-96:

In this paper, I explore the Canadian national imagination of Justice and Indigenous-Settler relations through an exploration of the case R v. Kikkik, a high profile trial from the 50s involving an Inuit woman accused of both murder and child abandonment. In particular, I ask what might be learned about both colonization and justice through exploring how this tale was told through 4 genres: the trial transcripts; a narrative account in a best-selling book; three Inuit sculptures; and a documentary film. Set alongside each other, these different texts make visible the many challenges for the legal imagination as it seeks to do justice at the encounter of settler and indigenous legal orders. Each genre of story, with its enabling and limiting conditions, provides us with a different field of vision. Taking inspiration from James Clifford’s work on juxtaposition (Clifford 1988, 10), the recasting and repositioning of those stories alongside each other can better help us understand how, in the space of intercultural encounter, we are both caught in and implicated in the stories of the other.

Raffield's "Art of Law in Shakespeare"

Paul Raffield, Professor of Law, University of Warwick, has just published The Art of Law in Shakespeare (Hart Publishing):

Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of The Art of Law in Shakespeare is that the ‘artificial reason’ of law was a complex art form that shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare.

Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences of Shakespeare's plays.  In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity.

Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love’s Labour’s Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter’s Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).

Aragoneses on Francoist Law after Franco

Alfons Aragoneses, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, has posted Legal Silences and the Remembrance of Francoism in Spanish Law, which is forthcoming in Law and Memory: Addressing Historical Injustice by Law, ed. Uladzislau Belavusau & Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias (Cambridge University Press):

Franco at Bilbao, 1939 (NYPL)

The political transition during the 1970s that allowed the continuity of Francoist institutions and legal behaviours beyond the transition to democracy also partially explains the Spanish anomaly in the Western European context. The legislator and the drafters of the Constitution decided not to completely erase the precedent Francoist law. They also opted for silence: no condemnations of the dictatorship and no references to the anti-Francoist opposition or the victims of Francoism are to be found. The consequence was what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls a ‘palimpsest of legal cultures’: the lack of regulation led to the creation of a legal culture combining elements of the old Francoist system and the new democratic one.

CFP: Images, Copyright, and the Public Domain in the Long Nineteenth Century

Via Legal Scholarship Blog, we have a call for papers for the conference Images, Copyright, and the Public Domain in the Long Nineteenth Century, to be held at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library on March 29-30, 2018.

A combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors during the long nineteenth century made images more readily available in a wider range of media than ever before. These transformations raised new questions about the ownership and use of images. . . .

This project aims to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines and fields (printing history, art history, law, literature, visual culture, book history, etc.) to explore the cultural and legal consequences of the proliferation of images in the long nineteenth century. Our geographic focus will be on Great Britain and the United States in connection with the wider world, not only their colonies and territories, but also their commercial and artistic links with other countries. Contributions that consider the transnational circulation of images, or provide a comparative perspective on copyright, are most welcome, as are case studies that reveal the local factors that shaped attitudes and practices related to the circulation of images. In referring to the “long 19th century,” we want to encourage specialists of earlier and later periods to help us elucidate the broader history of imaging and printing techniques and the legal and cultural norms that surrounded them.

More.

Jones on DuVernay's "13th"

Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan, here, advises that you “take off your historian’s hat” before watching "13th," Ava DuVernay’s film about mass incarceration, on Netflix.

Stern on Coke's "Marginal" Citation of Precedent

Sir Edward Coke (NYPL)

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has posted Margins of Authority: Coke's Institutes and the Epistemology of the String Cite:

Precedential authority has an important place in doctrinal explication and analysis in Anglo-American law. Efforts to manage these precedents visually, in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, display a variety of solutions to the question of where precedents belong and how to represent them. Sir Edward Coke’s approach, in his Institutes (1628-44), was to place the citations in the margin; this way of managing textual authority connected legal concepts in a way that lent new significance to the citations. The discussion examines this development by considering it in relation to the introduction of perspective in visual art, in the early fifteenth century, and the use of infinitesimals in the new mathematics of the early seventeenth century.

Weisberg on Law and Literature

Looking for a state-of-the-field overview of the Law and Literature movement? Richard Weisberg, Cardozo School of Law, has posted "What Remains 'Real' about the Law and Literature Movement? A Global Appraisal," which is forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Education. 

Here is the abstract: 

For several decades, the reincarnation of studies labeled Law and Literature has served to enliven, challenge, and threaten traditional legal discourse. Always in implicit competition with the interdiscipline of Law and Economics, Law and Literature has withstood (and been strengthened by at least some) criticism from within and without. Recognized in late century and beyond as one of the primary contributors to North American jurisprudence, Law and Literature continues to inspire from both sides of the aisle a discourse not so much of ironic abhorrence of the law as of an aspiration to just norms of law and an insistence that perennial deviations from such norms are neither inevitable nor inexplicable. In many iterations, and in what follows here, Law and Literature seeks the reunion of the fields, conjuring a 2000-year- old continuum from Cicero to Cardozo as a challenge to more obvious and more flawed trajectories, some of which — like the development of mainstream Western religious discourse — have arguably brought about these deviations. 

This essay first brings the non-specialist reader up to date on the various claims, counterclaims, and provocations connected to American Law and Literature scholarship. It reveals that the field has burst through to dynamic invocations in many other countries. Finally, it restates what is always already there in the modern version of the interdiscipline: the rigorous assessment through stories of the way law operates, of how it is interpreted by its major speakers, and of how — above all — its minor, major, and catastrophic errors can be traced through the unique medium of stories to idiosyncratic deviations in the words and deeds of authoritative lawyers and judges. The path to justice always is readily available in these stories; it is the identifiable reason for its denial that helps the practitioner understand and correct why law so often goes terribly wrong. The claim is that only fictional narratives, which move through time together with characters whose actions and words are revealed, permit us to understand dynamically the jurisprudence of our era.

(H/t: Law & Humanities Blog)

Rose, "Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright"

New from Harvard University Press: Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (June 2016), by Mark Rose (University of California, Santa Barbara). A description from the Press:

Through a series of vivid case studies, Authors in Court charts the 300-year-long dance between authorship and copyright that has shaped each institution’s response to changing social norms of identity, privacy, and celebrity. Authors’ self-presentations in court are often inflected by prevailing concepts of propriety and respectability. And judges, for their part, have not been immune to the reputation and standing of the authors who have appeared before them in legal dramas.

Some authors strut their roles on the public stage. For example, Napoleon Sarony—the nineteenth-century photographer whose case established that photographs might be protected as works of art—was fond of marching along Broadway dressed in a red fez and high-top campaign boots, proclaiming his special status as a celebrity. Others, such as the reclusive J. D. Salinger, enacted their dramas precisely by shrinking from attention. Mark Rose’s case studies include the flamboyant early modern writer Daniel Defoe; the self-consciously genteel poet Alexander Pope; the nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe; the once-celebrated early twentieth-century dramatist Anne Nichols, author of Abie’s Irish Rose; and the provocative contemporary artist Jeff Koons.

These examples suggest not only how social forms such as gender and gentility have influenced the self-presentation of authors in public and in court but also how the personal styles and histories of authors have influenced the development of legal doctrine.

A few blurbs:

“A literary historian by training, Rose is completely at home in the world of law, as well as the history of photography and art. This is the work of an interdisciplinary scholar at the height of his powers. The arguments are sophisticated and the elegant text is a work of real craftsmanship. It is superb.”—Lionel Bently

“Authors in Court is well-written, erudite, informative, and engaging throughout. As the chapters go along, we see the way that personalities inflect the supposedly impartial law; we see the role of gender in authorial self-fashioning; we see some of the fault lines which produce litigation; and we get a nice history of the evolution of the fair use doctrine. This is a book that should at least be on reserve for any IP–related course. Going forward, no one writing about any of the cases Rose discusses can afford to ignore his contribution.”—Lewis Hyde

More information is available here.

Grosswald Curran on Law and Human Suffering in Vichy France

Vivian Grosswald Curran, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has posted Law and Human Suffering: A Slice of Life in Vichy France, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Literature:    

This essay discusses three diaries from the Vichy era, the period of the Nazi Occupation of France: Jean Guéhenno’s Journal des années noires 1940-1944, Hélène Berr’s Journal, and Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar’s Ceux qui ne dormaient pas. Guéhenno was an educator and writer who entered the Resistance in 1940. His diary offers deep moral reflection as well as accounts of the dishonorable peace Vichy imposed and the ignoble servitude to which the new collaborationist French State and the Nazi occupier subjected France. In the final pages, as Leclerc’s army marches into Paris, with a victory he understands to be thanks to the help of the Allied forces, Guéhenno dares to rekindle his former faith in humankind. Berr was a young university student born into a wealthy old French Jewish family, the daughter of a famous scientist. Sensitive and generous-spirited, she lived an unusual life inasmuch as her family seemed to suffer no material hardship throughout the years that culminated in their deportation in the spring of 1944. Among the memorable events of her diary is her experience of the first day she was forced to wear the yellow star. Finally, Mesnil-Amar’s diary spans just one month at the end of the war in France, the month in which her husband has been detained and is about to be deported on the last train to leave Paris. The diary evokes her embracing of Jewish identity as a result of being identified as Jewish by anti-Semites. The lyricism of her writing approaches poetry in a work that is both a retrospective and a love letter to her husband. These diaries show us a slice of life of the times, but they also spur us to reflection on law and humanity, their limitations, potentials and fluctuations.

Weiner's "Preservation Waltz"

On his website "Worlds of Law," Mark S. Weiner has posted Preservation Waltz, the latest video in his series “about Austrian concepts of law and the Austrian experience of landscape . . . .Rare books, forests, and domestic architecture.  Sustainability is the key principle.”  He discusses the video in this guest post on Environment, Law and History.

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Professors John Hudson and Lorna Hutson, co-directors of University of St Andrews’s Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature, upon their election to the British Academy.  More.

• And congratulations to Michelle McKinley upon being named director of the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society.  The press release notes that the Cambridge University Press will publish Professor McKinley's book, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700, in September. 

• The Library of Congress has placed on-line 6,000 items from the Martin Van Buren Papers and released a new on-line version of the Federal Register for the years 1936-1993, together with a Beginner's Guide.  More: Library of Congress Blog.

• Out this month from Prometheus Books: Trials Of The Century: A Decade-By-Decade Look at Ten of America's Most Sensational Crimes, by the father-daughter team, Mark J. Phillips and Aryn Z. Phillips.  Before clicking, try guessing the authors' choice for each decade.

• Paul Burgess, a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, has published Should Entick v Carrington be on our Rule of Law Radar? an essay inspired by Entick v. Carrington: 250 Years of the Rule of Law (Hart, 2015), on Jus Politicum.

• ICYMI: New York Times reporter Rachel Swarms follows up on her story about the 1838 sale of some 272 slaves by the Jesuit priests who ran what became Georgetown University by following the current president John J. DeGioia’s encounters with their descendants.  The Senate approved Carla Hayden as the new Librarian of Congress.  Ronald Collins interviews Michael J. Graetz and Linda A. Greenhouse about The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (Simon & Schuster, 2016) on SCOTUSblog.  Seth Barrett Tillman on the impeachment of Associate Justice Samuel Chase, and Roland Nikles, a San Francisco attorney, on Worcestor v. Georgia.

• Save the dates: Although this is still a year away, you may want to note that the Commission on Legal Pluralism will have its next biennial conference in Syracuse, NY on Aug.9-11, 2017. It will host a course on legal pluralism right before the meeting--on Aug.4-7, 2017.

• Via H-Law: "Additional Essays Needed for Edited Collection on 18th-Century Literature & Law." 

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

CFP: Law and Literature From the Global South

[Via H-Law we have the following CFP.]

The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Spring 2018 Special Issue: Law and Literature from the Global South.  Guest Editors: David Babcock (James Madison University) and Peter Leman (Brigham Young University).  Deadline for Submissions (approximately 4,000-5,000 words): December 20, 2016.

The editors of this special issue of JCPCS seek essays that respond to the question: what does it mean to study law and literature from the global south? “Law and Literature,” as a field, has responded in recent years to criticism of its longstanding attention to Anglo-American contexts, and more and more, scholars are turning to regions of the global south in thinking about the literary in relationship to international, colonial, and post-colonial forms of law. Though this widening geographical scope is praiseworthy and necessary, there remains the question of method: can the literatures and legal cultures of the global south inflect, augment, or otherwise reshape not only where we direct our critical attention as scholars of law and literature but how?

In posing this question, we take as initial inspiration Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff’s Theory From the South (2012), in which they question the tendency of theory work to be unidirectional, emerging from the north and then circulating within and being “applied to” the south. If, however, the global south has played an essential role in “world-historical processes” (7) and can, therefore, afford “privileged insight into the workings of the world at large” (1), then perhaps theory—including law and literature—ought to take this into account. When we speak of “postcolonial law and literature” or “law, literature, and the global south,” are we speaking of the conventional critical paradigms of law and literature as it emerged from Anglo-American contexts in the 1970s and 80s, or does the postcolonial/global open us up to new configurations of the legal and the literary? If so, what might these configurations look like? What new concepts emerge? Are there forms of law, justice, obligation, harm, personhood, etc. that originate in but circulate beyond the cultures of the global south that might provoke us to think differently about the dominant normative assumptions of the field at large? Are there colonial legal practices that still survive in contemporary states, and if so, what creative concepts or images of law can we see emerging in literary responses to these problematic legacies? In what ways has international law been adapted, reimagined, or otherwise modified in its years of deployment throughout the global south—for good or for ill—that can be understood through the lens of the literary and brought back to our conventional assumptions about law as it has developed in the north? Are there forms of intersection between law and literature in the global south that make even the implied distinction of “and” irrelevant? Submissions should seek to demonstrate how the literatures and cultures of the global south, broadly conceived, offer provocative ways for scholars throughout the world to think about the field of law and literature and the fluid nature of its most fundamental terms.

Manuscripts must be written in English and follow the MLA Style Manual. JCPCS uses a double-blind review process. Full, formatted manuscripts should be submitted to jcpcs.lawlit@gmail.com by December 20, 2016.

Weekend Roundup

• Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard Law School, “spoke about her experiences combining legal analysis and historical research at a March 9 event hosted by the Class Marshals as part of” a series that “invites HLS professors to give a lecture as if addressing the graduating class for the last time.”  Watch it here. 

David M. Rabban (credit)

• Congratulations to David M. Rabban, Texas Law, for being named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow for 2016

• Wait, you mean it wasn't an April Fool's joke?  It's for reals?  After this, we're still not entirely convinced.

• From Notches: Alison Lefkovits (New Jersey Institute of Technology) draws on her expertise on the history of divorce law to explore "The Clinton Sex Scandal as Queer History."

• The Future of the African American Past: a conference in Washington DC, May 19-21, 2016.  Sessions include the opening roundtable, “The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom.”

• Lawrence Solum, Georgetown Law, has updated the entry on Originalism in his Legal Theory Lexicon.  

• The latest issue of Ronald K. L. Collins’s First Amendment News (FAN 103) is up on Concurring Opinions.  It features a notice of Stephen Solomon’s forthcoming Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech (St. Martin’s Press).

• “The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the Mid-Hudson Antislavery History Project will present 'Slavery and the Church in New York' with Reverend Charles Kramer on Sunday, April 10, 2016. The program will begin at 2:00 p.m. in the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center. This event is free and open to the public.”  More.

• "Conflict Resolution in Historical Perspectives," at Cardiff University, September 14, 2016.  More, via H-Law.

• We're very sorry to have missed noting the conference Theodore Roosevelt and the Law in a timely fashion.  Better late than never, we hope. 

• From Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog: a post on "An age of lawyers and literature" (drawing in part on the "Age of Lawyers" exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library).

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

Fernandez on Henderson, "Creating Legal Worlds"

Over at JOTWELL, Angela Fernandez (University of Toronto - Law) has posted an admiring review of Creating Legal Worlds: Story and Style in a Culture of Argument (2015), by Greig Henderson (University of Toronto - English Department). Here are the first two paragraphs of the review:

Creating Legal Worlds, a new book by Greig Henderson, an English professor at the University of Toronto, is about rhetoric and the law and how story-telling is intrinsic to the law. Henderson revisits famous cases (and introduces readers to new cases) in which judges use a variety of rhetorical techniques to engage in persuasive (and, it turns out, at times, not so persuasive) story-telling.

Legal scholars will find value, especially for teaching, in Henderson’s analysis of judgment-writing as craft. However, I think the book has especial purchase power for legal historians, who can contrast Henderson’s approach to cases with the way they generally approach cases and their context. Rather than emphasizing the details of a case and its surrounding circumstances, Henderson emphasizes the technique of the judge as a writer. He explains the literary and rhetorical techniques that judges use (consciously and unconsciously) in order to paint a scene, play on a presumption or prejudice, generate empathy or reassurance that the right result has been reached with cool, clear and unemotional speech.

Read on here. 

Sunday Book Roundup

Of Courtiers and Kings: More Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks edited by Todd C. Peppers and Clare Cushman (UVA Press) is reviewed in The New Rambler.

"Nevertheless, some good stories make it through the encomiastic firewall; and some of the portraits are more than two-dimensional. One can’t help but empathize with such a character as Potter Stewart – the genuine humanity of the guy – when one learns, via his 1972- and 1973-term clerks, that he hated Warren Burger (his Chief Justice), was frightened of William Rehnquist, and had the habit of chewing the ends of his neckties.
And it tells you something about Rehnquist to read the story of him and his 1974 clerk, going to play ping-pong in an upstairs room, next to the Supreme Court gym. As they were entering the room, a janitor walked out, leaving the place reeking of marijuana. But Rehnquist never reported the matter, so the janitor kept his job. Someone should have told Potter Stewart that he really had nothing to fear from the old softie."

From H-Net comes a review of On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South Central Pennsylvania, 1820-1870 by David G. Smith (Fordham University Press).

New Statesman has a review of Joan Brady's America's Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged (Skyscraper Publications).

"The one-sentence summary of this extraordinary book is that it is about the dirty tricks employed by Richard Nixon and his allies in the late 1940s and early 1950s to secure the conviction of Alger Hiss, a former government official, on a trumped-up charge of perjury. That leaves out many material facts. Joan Brady was only eight years old when a former Communist Party member, Whittaker Chambers, told the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Hiss was a communist. She was not quite ten when Hiss was convicted in January 1950. But in 1960 she was living with Dexter Masters, whom she later married. Masters was an old friend of Hiss. Hiss came to dinner and remained friends with Brady until his death in 1996."

The Federal Lawyer has a new issue out with several reviews of note, all found here. One is of Harold H. Bruff's Untrodden Ground: How Presidents Interpret the Constitution (University of Chicago Press). There's also a review of Jilly Leovy's Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (Spiegel & Grau), and a review of Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions edited by Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier (University of Chicago Press).

In The Washington Post there is a review of Fergus M. Bordewich's The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (Simon & Schuster).

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanore Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott (Knopf) is reviewed in The New York Times.

"The February 1953 issue of Ebony included an article entitled “Some of My Best Friends Are Negroes.” The byline was Eleanor Roosevelt’s, though the headline, apparently, was not. “One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer — Pauli Murray, who has been quite a firebrand at times but of whom I am very fond,” Roosevelt wrote. “She is a lovely person who has struggled and come through very well.” Indeed, nothing was ever easy for Murray, a black woman born in 1910, a woman attracted to women and also a poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist and Episcopal priest. But her tender friendship with Roosevelt, sustained over nearly a quarter-century and more than 300 cards and letters, helped. It is the rich earth Patricia Bell-Scott tills for “The Firebrand and the First Lady,” a tremendous book that has been 20 years in the making."

Also from The New York Times is a review of Mannish Sinha's The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press).