A Business History Doctoral Colloquium on Globalization & De-Globalization

[We have the following announcement.]

The BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History will be held once again in conjunction with the 2019 BHC annual meeting. This prestigious workshop, funded by Cambridge University Press, will take place in Cartagena de Indias, Columbia on Wednesday March 13th and Thursday March 14th, 2019. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to doctoral candidates who are pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history, from any relevant discipline (e.g., from economic sociology, political science, cultural anthropology, or management, as well as history).  Most participants are in year 3 or 4 or their degree program, though in some instances applicants at a later stage make a compelling case that their thesis research had evolved in ways that led them to see the advantages of an intensive engagement with business history.

The theme of the 2019 BHC annual meeting is "Globalization and De-Globalization: Shifts of Power and Wealth."  We welcome proposals from students working within the conference theme, as well as any other thematic area of business history.  Topics (see link for past examples) may range from the early modern era to the present, and explore societies across the globe.  Participants work intensively with a distinguished group of BHC-affiliated scholars (including the incoming BHC president), discussing dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and career trajectories.

Applications are due by 15 November 2018 via email to amy.feistel@duke.edu and should include: a statement of interest; CV; preliminary or final dissertation prospectus (10-15 pages); and a letter of support from your dissertation supervisor (or prospective supervisor).  All participants receive a stipend that partially defrays travel costs to the annual meeting.  Applicants will receive notification of the selection committee’s decisions by the end of 2018.

This year’s faculty participants are:

Edward Balleisen (Director), Professor of History and Public Policy, Duke University
              American Business, Legal, and Policy History

Ann Carlos, Professor of Economics, University of Colorado-Boulder
              Early Modern Empires/Trade in North America

Paloma Fernandez-Perez, Professor of Economic and Business History, University of Barcelona Business School
              Spanish and Latin American Business History

Takafumi Kurosawa, Professor of Economic Policy, Kyoto University
              European and Japanese Business History

Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History, Williams College
              African Business History

Questions about the colloquium should be sent to its director, Duke Professor of History Edward Balleisen, eballeis@duke.edu. 

Peterson to Lecture on Monuments and Memory

Farah Peterson, University of Virginia School of Law, will deliver the 2018 Sherman Lecture,

“Monuments and Memory: How the Law Writes American History" tomorrow at 7:30 p.m.in the Warwick Center of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Ngai to Lecture on "A Nation of Immigrants"

We’ve just realized that, starting today, Mae M. Ngai, the Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University will be delivering the Lawrence Stone Lectures for 2018 at Princeton University.  Here three lectures are collectively entitled A Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea.  The series is co-sponsored by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and Princeton University Press.  Lectures will be held at 4:30pm in 010 East Pyne and are open to the public.   reception follows immediately after each lecture.

Monday, October 15: "A Short History of an Idea"
Tuesday, October 16: "Immigration at the Turn of Two Centuries"
Wednesday, October 17: "Impossible Subjects"

Lessons from the Amistad at the CT SCHS

The Connecticut Supreme Court Historical Society will hold its fall meeting at the Hartford Club (46 Prospect Street, Hartford) on Wednesday, October 24, 2018, with refreshments starting at 5:30 p.m. and the program at 6:15 p.m.  The event is open to all without charge.

Jeanette Zaragoza De León, a PhD Visiting Research Scholar at the Yale Divinity School, will present “Lessons from the Amistad: Interpreting, Litigation Strategies, and Solidarity,” followed by remarks by Chief Justice Richard A. Robinson, a member of the “Discovering Amistad's National Advisory Council” and by “The Amistad:  Justice for Slavery,” a video created by students of Bristow Middle School, West Hartford.

We’re told that

Ms. Zaragoza De León, a graduate of Lesley College, holds a Master of Divinity from Pacific School of Religion, Master of Arts in Translation from University of Puerto Rico, and Master of Arts in Translation and Interpretation Studies Research from Universitat Jaume, Valencia, Spain.  She is a PhD candidate in Applied Languages, Literature and Translation from Universitate Juame.  This fall Ms. Zaragoza De León will defend her dissertation entitled “The Critical Translation and Interpreting Stories of the Amistad Case.”  She is a certified Spanish-English court interpreter.

H/t: Mike Widener

Weekend Roundup

• From 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm on Sunday, October 21, Ronald Chester of the Boston College Law School will give a talk on "The Legal Philosophy of Tapping Reeve" at the Litchfield Historical Society.  He will discuss “Reeve's importance as a transitional figure in the movement of early American law. He will  highlight Reeve's progressive, activist views concerning the rights both of married women and of enslaved people, as evidenced in Reeve's publication The Law of Baron and Femme and through his work on Elizabeth Freeman's (Mum Bett) case for her freedom.”  The event is free for members of Litchfield Historical Society and $5 for non-members.  Registration Required.

• On September 31, Dean Risa Goluboff, Annette Gordon-Reed and others addressed a conference on the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.  Cavalier Daily. 

• On Friday, October 12, the University of Aberystwyth’s Department of Law and Criminology hosts the Annual Legal Wales Conference.  Prior to the conference, at 6:15 pm on Thursday October 11, the Welsh Legal History Society and the National Library will host a lecture and dinner at the National Library “to celebrate ‘The Legal Treasures of Wales,’ including the Boston Manuscript of the Laws of Hywel Dda, purchased by the Library in 2012.”  H/t: Cymru 247.  Also Welsh: this.

• The American Political Science Association has posted its call for proposals for next year's annual meeting, which has the theme Populism and Privilege.

• ICYMI: The History Channel on the Thirteenth Amendment and convict labor.  CNN on controversial Supreme Court nominees from Fortas to Kavanaugh.  Oklahoma's oldest law firm.

• Get some penny dreadfuls into your work with Price One Penny: A database of cheap literature, 1837-60. It's is full of crime and prison-related stories from Victorian England, with American and French connections. 

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

NHC Briefing on History of US Refugee Policy

The National History Center has announced its next Congressional briefing.  It is on the History of US Refugee Policy and will take place on Monday, October 1, 2018 from 9:00 am-10:00 am
Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2045.

The United States has provided a haven for refugees from other countries since it was created. Yet their arrival has often provoked political controversy and spurred calls to close borders. What has driven past waves of refugees and how has the federal government responded? How can the history of US refugee and asylum policy inform our understanding of current debates over refugee admittance and protections?

The speakers will be Maria Cristina Garcia, Cornell University, and Carl Bon Tempo, SUNY Albany.  The moderator will be Alan Kraut, American University.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization, David Pozen has an important post on the debate prompted by Matthew Connelly’s report, State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It.  The takeaway: "A crisis in the national archives, all of the authors agree, is a crisis in American democracy."
  

• Michael Les Benedict, emeritus at Ohio State University, will deliver The Transformative 14th Amendment: The Constitutional Amendment that Reshaped America as the 2018 Richard W. Smith Lecture in Civil War History at Ohio Wesleyan University at 7:30 p.m. on September 20 in Benes Rooms A and B of Hamilton-Williams Campus Center, 40 Rowland Ave., Delaware, OH. 

• Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights has made the longlist for the National Book Critics Award for Nonfiction.  H/t: New Yorker

• If a legal historian appeared in your school's annual "new hires and visitors" press release, please send us the link.  Here is Georgetown Law on Kevin Arlyck. 

• “Attorneys filed a lawsuit Thursday on behalf of historian Heather Thompson, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy was censored by Illinois prison officials.” H/t: The Beachwood Reporter.

• Book Reviews: Over at Jotwell: Anders Walker’s Did Black Baptists Join the War on Drugs?, a review of James Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.  In The Globe and Mail, A review of Claire L’Heureux-Dubé: A Life, a biography written by former ASLH president Constance Backhouse. In the New York Law Journal, Jeffrey Winn reviews James Simon’s Eisenhower vs. Warren:  The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties.

• ICYMI:  A Short History of Land Transfers and Title in Georgia on the practitioner Dale J. Jackson's Real Estate Legal Blogs.  Wayne State's Robert Sedler develops a point about treason that Stephen Vladeck frequently makes on Twitter: the constitution defines it narrowly, and for good reason.  And, in the WSJ, Joseph J. Ellis urges that "all justices should take a vow of humility, content themselves with incremental reforms of the law...."

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

Barrett to Lecture on Jackson as Antitrust AAG

From the Jackson List, run by John Q. Barrett, St. Johns Law, we learn of the creation earlier this year by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice of the the Jackson-Nash Address, created “to recognize the contributions of former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson and Nobel Laureate economist John Nash, and to honor the speaker, recognizing and celebrating the role of economics in the mission of the [Antitrust] Division.”

As Professor Barrett explains:

Robert H. Jackson (LC)

Robert H. Jackson headed the Antitrust Division during 1937.  As the Division explained when it announced this new lecture series, Jackson’s leadership set the stage for the expanded role of economics in antitrust, replacing vague legal standards with the “protection of competition” as the goal of antitrust law.  And Dr. John Nash’s research provides Antitrust Division economists with analytic tools necessary to protect competition.  In particular, Division economists commonly rely on Nash’s strategic theory of games and his axiomatic bargaining model to guide investigations and to help evaluate the effects of mergers, monopolization, and collusion.

The next event in this series will take place Thursday, September 20, 2018, at 3:00 p.m. in the Great Hall at the U.S. Department of Justice, The Robert F. Kennedy Building, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. (unfortunately, right when we’re teaching!) The program will consist of

introductory remarks by Department of Justice leadership; [Professor Barrett’s] lecture, “Competition: Robert H. Jackson as Assistant Attorney General—Antitrust (January 21, 1937–March 5, 1938); and an address by Dr. George A. Akerlof, University Professor at Georgetown University.

Yale Legal History Forum: 2018-19 Schedule

The Yale Legal History Forum has announced its 2018-19 speaker schedule:

Sergei Antonov | Yale University (History)
Tuesday, September 18, Faculty Lounge
The Fracturing of Tsarist Russia: Criminal Upperworlds and the Great Trials of the 1870s

Brian R. Cheffins | University of Cambridge Faculty of Law
Thursday, September 20, 12:15 p.m., Room 128, co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Corporate Law
The Public Company Transformed

Natasha Wheatley | Princeton University (History)
Tuesday, October 23, Room 120
Legal Pluralism as Temporal Pluralism: Historical Rights, Legal Vitalism, and Non-Synchronous Sovereignty

Johann Chapoutot | Sorbonne University (History)
Thursday, November 29, Room 122
Law between “Recht” and “Gesetz’”: Studies on Nazi Normativity

Philippe Sands | UCL Faculty of Laws
Tuesday, January 15, Faculty Lounge, co-sponsored by the Center for Global Legal Challenges

William Ewald | University of Pennsylvania Law School (Law and Philosophy)
Tuesday, February 12, Faculty Lounge

H. Timothy Lovelace | Indiana University Maurer School of Law (Law and History)
Tuesday, March 5, Faculty Lounge

Miranda Johnson | University of Sydney (History)
Tuesday, April 9, Room 128

Madeleine Zelin | Columbia University (History and Chinese Studies)
Tuesday, April 16, Faculty Lounge

Questions may be directed at this year’s Legal History Fellows, George Remisovsky (george.remisovsky@yale.edu) and Laura Savarese (laura.savarese@yale.edu).

Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop: Fall 2018 Schedule

Via the Canadian Legal History Blog, the Fall 2018 lineup for the Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop:

Wednesday September 19: Carolyn Strange, Australian National University: ‘Capital Punishment and Sex Crimes in Canada, 1867-1950’

Wednesday October 10: Virginia Torrie, University of Manitoba: ‘Federalism and Farm Debt during the Great Depression’

Wednesday October 24: Jim Phillips and Tom Collins, University of Toronto: ‘The Origin of the Division of Powers in the BNA Act’

Wednesday November 7: Ian Radforth, University of Toronto: ‘The Sad Story of the Minister's Daughter: A Botched Abortion in Victorian Toronto’

Wednesday November 21: Shelley Gavigan, Osgoode Hall Law School: "Settling In: Civil Justice on the Indigenous Plains, 1876-1886"

Wednesday December 5: Heidi Bohaker, University of Toronto: TBA

Stanford Center for Law and History Workshop: 2018-19 Schedule

The Stanford Center for Law and History has announced the lineup for its 2018-19 workshop:

September 25 – Catherine Baylin Duryea, Stanford History Department, They the People: Imposed Constitutionalism and Judicial Review in Afghanistan

October 23 – Alix Rogers, Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, The Civil War’s Tranformational Effect on the Legal Status of Human Remains

November 13 – Dylan Penningroth, UC Berkeley Law and History, Law for a Gospel Church: African American Religion and Civil Rights, 1865-1970

January 15 – Benjamin Hein, Stanford History Department, Germany’s GmbH: Securing the Liberal Order in an Age of Mass Migration, 1873-1892

February 5 – Elise Dermineur, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Umea University, Debt and Bankruptcy in Pre-Industrial Europe

February 26 – Rowan Dorin, Stanford History Department, Reception or Resistance? Episcopal Lawmaking in Late Medieval Europe 

April 9 – Reuel Schiller, UC Hastings College of the Law, The Surprising Origins of Deregulation: The New Left, the Counterculture, and the Demise of the New Deal Regulatory Order 

April 30 – Kathryn Olivarius, Stanford History Department, Seasonal Gerrymandering: Yellow Fever, Statecraft, and Citizenship in Antebellum New Orleans

May 21 – Allyson Hobbs, Stanford History Department and Director of African and African American Studies, Far from Sanctuary: African American Travel & the Long Road to the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Center for the Study of Law & Society - Fall Speaker Series Line-up

The Center for the Study of Law & Society at Berkeley Law has posted the schedule for its Fall 2018 speaker series. Here are a few speakers likely to interest our audience:

• Monday, September 24 – Christopher Muller, Assistant Professor of Sociology, U.C. Berkeley. “Freedom and Convict Leasing in the Postbellum South”

• Monday, October 8 – Holly Brewer, Burke Chair of American History and Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland. “’Most agreeable to the monarchy under which we live’: Slavery, Power, and the Restoration”

• Monday, October 15 – Justin Driver, Professor of Law, University of Chicago. The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (Pantheon, 2018)

• Monday, October 29 – Constance Backhouse, Professor of Law and Distinguished University Professor, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. “Lessons from Legal History for the #MeToo Movement”

At the Folger: The Corporation in Early Modern Political Thought

[Via H-Law, we have the following announcement.]

The Corporation in Early Modern Political Thought
Philip Stern
Spring Semester Seminar

Sponsored by the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought

The corporation was a foundation of medieval and early modern political, religious, and commercial life and a central feature of early modern European thought about overseas expansion. This seminar will trace the evolution of the corporation as an idea and an institution, particularly in relation to European commerce and empire in Asia, Africa, the Atlantic, and Mediterranean worlds. It will engage with questions about legal and institutional pluralism and the composite nature of imperial sovereignty, the intimate relationship between political economy and political thought, the development of ideas about the distinctions between “public” good and “private” interest, and the ways in which encounters with other Europeans as well as indigenous peoples outside Europe influenced European political and economic thought. Readings will include works by Giovanni Botero, Johannes Althusius, Gerard de Malynes, Thomas Smith, Richard Hakluyt, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Josiah Child, Charles Davenant, Samuel Pufendorf, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, as well as various texts—such as administrative records, legal documents, and institutional correspondence—critical to excavating the political thought of corporations in the early modern world.

Director: Philip Stern is Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and the author of The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (2011). He is currently working on two projects, one tracing the history of the colonial corporation and another that explores problems in legal geography in the early modern British Empire.

Schedule: Fridays, 1:00–4:30 p.m., 1 February through 12 April 2019, excluding 15 March and 22 March.  Apply: 4 September 2018 for admission and grants-in-aid; 7 January 2019 for admission only.

ICH Seminars: Deadlines Approaching

Just a reminder that June 30, the deadline for registering for the two upcoming seminars, is fast approaching.  The two are Legal Thought in an Age of Fracture, led by Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School, and Daniel T. Rodgers Princeton University, and Antislavery Constitutionalism, led by James Oakes, Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

US Legal History Roundtable at the ABF

Yesterday the American Bar Foundation held its annual United States Legal History Roundtable at the ABF.  The papers were:

• Kate Masur, Northwestern University, “Poverty, Mobility, and Race in the Early Republic,” with comments by Dan Farbman, Boston College, and Kunal Parker, University of Miami;

• Rabia Belt, Stanford University, “Race, Disability, and the Vote,” with comments by Susan Pearson, Northwestern History, and Dan Sharfstein, Vanderbilt Law;

• Timothy Lovelace, Indiana University, “Taking Affirmative Action Around the World,” with comments by Joanna Grisinger, Northwestern University, and Ken Mack, Harvard University; and 

• Tracy Steffes, Brown University, “School Finance and Property Tax Reform,” with comments by David Freund, University of Maryland, and James Sparrow, University of Chicago. 

 H/t: LHB Guest Blogger Christopher W. Schmidt.

Legal Thought in an Age of Fracture: An ICH Workshop

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the Institute for Constitutional History.]

The Institute for Constitutional History is pleased to announce another seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty, “Legal Thought in an Age of Fracture.”  The Workshop Leaders are Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School, and Daniel T. Rodgers Princeton University.

In 2011 the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers published Age of Fracture (Harvard University Press). The book was awarded the Bancroft Prize for the best work in American history in 2012. Drawing on a dazzling variety of sources in political rhetoric, economic thought, social theory, and cultural dispute, the book described the dissolution of intellectual assumptions that had “defined the common sense of public intellectual life” since World War II. The idea of “the common good”, the reality of “society” or of “America” with their call to fulfill relational duties of sacrifice and common purpose seemed to dissolve with the end of the Cold War. New conceptions of institutions like churches, families, corporations, and the government disaggregated them into individuals making “choices” in “markets”; gender and racial identities were not fixed and objective, but fluid and contestable; the idea of American history itself as a story of gradually realizing liberal ideals came under question. All these tendencies have made themselves felt in law, including Constitutional law – among other places in the battles over racial integration and affirmative action; gay rights and abortion; the role of the state in public choice theory and movements toward deregulation; state policies favoring voucher and charter schools; speech codes and curricula in universities; criminal justice policy; intellectual movements in the legal academy; and debates over the meaning of history in the Supreme Court.

This Workshop will draw from legal sources – cases, speeches, policy statements, and academic articles -- illustrating facets of the Age of Fracture, each tied to a different chapter in Rodgers’ book.

Logistics.  Friday afternoons, 2:00-5:00 p.m., September 7, 21, October 5, and 19, 2018. The seminar will be held at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York City.

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 atMMarcus@nyhistory.org until June 30, 2018. 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.

Workshop Leaders.  Robert W. Gordon is Professor of Law at Stanford University. He has previously taught at SUNY/Buffalo and the University of Wisconsin, and at Yale University, where he is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, and Professor of History, Emeritus. He is a past President of the American Society for Legal History. His book on embedded histories in legal argument, Taming the Past: Law In History And History In Law was published in 2017.  Daniel T. Rodgers is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, Emeritus. He is the author, in addition to Age of Fracture, of The Work Ethic in Industrial America, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence, and Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.

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.  The Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is supported, in part, by the Saunders Endowment for Constitutional History and a “We the People” challenge grant.

Oakes to Lead ICH Seminar on Antislavery Constitutionalism

[Our friends at the Institute for Constitutional History have announced another seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty, "Antislavery Constitutionalism," led by James Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the author of Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 and The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War.]

Credit: James Oakes

Description.  Sooner or later every major political dispute becomes a dispute over the Constitution.  This is as true today for issues such as abortion rights, gun control, and the war powers of the president, but if anything it was even more true in the nineteenth century, when differences over banks and tariffs became differences over what the Constitution did or did not allow.  But nowhere did the Constitution figure more prominently than in the increasingly rancorous debates over slavery.  Indeed, what the Constitution did or did not allow the federal government to do about slavery was present at the creation of the Constitution in the Philadelphia convention of 1787.  For decades scholars have investigated the proslavery compromises embedded within the Constitution, but much less attention has been paid to antislavery constitutionalism.  This was a body of thought that carefully specified what the federal government could and could not do to put slavery on what Abraham Lincoln called a “course of ultimate extinction.”

Logistics.  Thursday nights, 6:00–8:00 p.m., September 6, 20, October 4, 18, November 1, and 15, 2018. The seminar will meet at The George Washington University Law School, 2000 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20052.

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 June 30, 2018.  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.

Norgren on "Trailblazing Women Lawyers"

On Monday, May 7, in the Washington History Seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, Jill Norrgen, professor emerita of political science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and University Graduate Center, CUNY, will present Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers:

Beginning immediately after World War II and continuing through the 1970s changes in U.S. public policy, along with the impact of the second women’s movement, and women’s increased reproductive control, upended longstanding resistance to female participation in the profession of law. Award-winning legal historian Jill Norgren describes the lives of 100 women lawyers who were on the front lines fighting for access to law schools and good legal careers. Her book, based on oral interviews carried out by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession and the Senior Lawyers Division, reveals the profound changes that began in the late 1960s, ending the near-exclusion of women from law schools and slowly increasing the career opportunities available to them. In her talk Norgren uses the words of these trailblazers to tell their stories, words that evoke pain as well as celebration, somber reflection, and humor.

Weekend Roundup

• On Wednesday, April 25, at 6 p.m., the American Bar Foundation will host a launch for The Sit-Ins: Protest & Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era, by Christopher W. Schmidt, an ABF Faculty Fellow who teaches at Chicago-Kent College of Law.  Refreshments will be provided and copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. Registration is "free and required.” 

• On Wednesday, April 11, at 2 pm, Richard Breitman, coauthor of FDR and the Jews, will deliver the inaugural Holocaust Remembrance Day Morgenthau Lecture at the Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home. His topic is The United States Government's Reaction to Kristallnacht.

• Among the upcoming public events-of-interest at Princeton University are SNCC to BLM: Robert Moses Discusses the Evolution of Racial Justice Organizing in the U.S., in conversation with Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University in 101 McCormick Hall, on April 8, at 4:00 p.m., and, on April 9, at 4:30 pm, Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, by Keith E. Whittington, Princeton University, with a response from Nicholas Rosenkranz, Georgetown University Law Center, in 222 Bowen Hall.

Belmont County Court House (wiki)

•  Last Wednesday, interested residents of St. Clairsville, Ohio, gathered at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to hear Belmont County Court of Common Pleas Judge Frank Fregiato and lawyer Daniel Frizzi Jr. discuss “historic Belmont County court cases.”  More. 

• Last Thursday, Mary Bilder, Founders Professor of Law at Boston College Law School, delivered James Madison and Constitutional Compromise, the 2018 Quinlan Lecture, at the Oklahoma City University School of Law.

• Also last Thursday, Sophia Z. Lee, University of Pennsylvania, spoke on her book, The Workplace Constitution: From the New Deal to the New Right, as part of the Amicus Curiae Lecture Series at Marshall University.  More.

• Department of Unidentified Identifiers: The Providence Journal editorializes about those Rhode Island court records, spotted on auction by "an alert legal history researcher at the University of Pennsylvania." And the sitter for that nineteenth-century portrait of a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice has been identified, thanks in part to “a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan” who had “written his thesis at Columbia” on the judge in question. (H/t: Joanna Grisinger.) 

• Over at the website of Studies in Legal History, Edward Kolla, Georgetown University Qatar, “delves into the history of the idea of popular sovereignty, its roots in the French Revolution, and its relevance to territorial claims in more modern times,” in conjunction with the publication of his Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017).  

• The exhibit # 1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis closes on April 15, with several events scheduled this week.  More.

• The latest newsletter of the Historical Society of the DC Circuit is out.

• ICYMI: Lori Aratani in WaPo on the secret use of census info helped send Japanese Americans to internment camps in WWII.  Duke Today reports on the university’s recent conference, Examining Slavery’s Legacy in Politics, Economics and in Stone. Scientific American on how to think about "implicit bias."  WaPo on less-visited DC museums, including drug enforcement, patents, Carter Woodson, and women’s equality.  Also: Perfectionism and Its Discontents.
  

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

Tinker Talks!

The video of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit’s recent historical reenactment of the argument in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, is now online.  Judges Srinivasan, Tatel, and Ketanji Brown Jackson heard the argument; Judge Tatel's law clerks argued.  The video includes an interview of Mary Beth Tinker about the case and answering questions from DC-area high school students who attended the event.