Cornett and Bosau on Country Lawyers

Judy M. Cornett, University of Tennessee College of Law, and Heather H. Bosau, a 2020 graduate of Tennessee Law, have published The Myth of the Country Lawyer in the Albany Law Review 83 (2020): 185-167:

Everyone knows what a “country lawyer” looks like. He (it’s always a “he”) is middle-aged or older, an avuncular mix of wisdom and good humor. He is a generalist, in a small town, deeply connected to his community. He is trusted and respected. The person who is called upon when trouble threatens. Figures as diverse as Sam Ervin Jr. and Gerry Spence have called themselves “country lawyers,” and many lawyer obituaries claim that their subjects were “simple” country lawyers. The familiarity of the country lawyer qualifies it as an archetype in American culture.1 But, surprisingly, as familiar as the country lawyer archetype is, there has been little analysis of the history, characteristics, or role of the country lawyer in American culture. This Article will examine how the country lawyer came to be a familiar figure in American culture, tracing the archetype through its fictional and non-fictional manifestations. The Article will also analyze how the country lawyer archetype has affected the public perception of the American legal profession.

–Dan Ernst

Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany"

Cambridge University Press has published Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany (Aug. 2020), by Douglas Morris (Federal Defenders of New York). A description from the Press:

The Jewish leftist lawyer Ernst Fraenkel was one of twentieth-century Germany's great intellectuals. During the Weimar Republic he was a shrewd constitutional theorist for the Social Democrats and in post-World War II Germany a respected political scientist who worked to secure West Germany's new democracy. This book homes in on the most dramatic years of Fraenkel's life, when he worked within Nazi Germany actively resisting the regime, both publicly and secretly. As a lawyer, he represented political defendants in court. As a dissident, he worked in the underground. As an intellectual, he wrote his most famous work, The Dual State – a classic account of Nazi law and politics. This first detailed account of Fraenkel's career in Nazi Germany opens up a new view on anti-Nazi resistance – its nature, possibilities, and limits. With grit, daring and imagination, Fraenkel fought for freedom against an increasingly repressive regime.

A few blurbs:

'German-Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel is remembered for his study of Nazi Germany, The Dual State. But talented historian Douglas Morris goes far beyond reconstructing Fraenkel’s biography, and following his path to his classic book, in order to dramatize the difficult choices of a pivotal lawyer in resistance. The result is an absorbing contribution not just to the history of German law in the twentieth century. It helps us to ponder the dilemmas of resistance for believers in the rule of law anywhere and even today.' -- Samuel Moyn

'There is a rich biographical and analytical literature on the lawyer and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel. We know his clear description of the Nazism as a 'dual state', we also know how important he was for the modernization of political theory, especially in Western Germany. But an investigation of his activities as a lawyer and author in the underground after 1933, based on all available sources, has not yet been carried out. It is presented here in an excellent manner, and at the same time it sheds light on the old problem: How can one use the legal order as a means of sabotage against a system of tyranny?' -- Michael Stolleis

More information is available here. H/t: New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Soares Pereira and Ridi on the "Invisible College of International Lawyers"

Luiza Leão Soares Pereira, University of Cambridge, and Niccolò Ridi, University of Liverpool, have posted Mapping the "Invisible College of International Lawyers" through Obituaries, which is forthcoming in the Leiden Journal of International Law

Since Oscar Schachter’s famous articulation of the concept, scholars have attempted to know more about the composition and functioning of the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’ which makes up our profession. They have done this though surveying public rosters of certain sections of the profession (arbitrators, International Court of Justice counsel), providing general anecdotal accounts about informal connections between members, or establishing certain individuals’ influence in the development of discrete legal concepts. Departing from these approaches, we use the obituaries published in the British Yearbook of International Law (1920-2017) to draw a map of the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’. Obituaries are a unique window into international law’s otherwise private inner life, unveiling professional connections between international lawyers and their shared career paths beyond a single academic or judicial institution. Employing network analysis, a method commonly used in social sciences to describe complex social phenomena such as this, we are able to demonstrate the ubiquity of informal networks whereby ideas move, and provide evidence of the community’s homogeneity. Exploring the connections between international lawyers and their shared characteristics in this novel way, we shed light on the features of the community and the impact individual personalities have on the law. These characteristics of the profession and its members may be obvious to insiders, but are seldom acknowledged. Graphic representation is a powerful tool in bolstering critiques for diversity and contestation of mainstream law-making narratives. More than an exercise in exhaustive mapping, we seek to take the ‘dead white men’ trope to an extreme, provoking the reader to question the self-image of the profession as an impersonal expert science.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: JFW

Wald on In-House Counsel

Eli Wald, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, has published Getting In and Out of the House: The Worlds of In-House Counsel, Big Law, and Emerging Career Trajectories of In-House Lawyers in the Fordham Law Review:

The traditional story of in-house counsel is of a transformation and triumph over “Big Law” in a zero-sum game for power, prestige, and money. That story, however, is inaccurate descriptively, prescriptively, and normatively. Descriptively, in-house lawyers were part of the legal elite dominating corporate counseling before large law firms first rose to power and prominence. In-house counsel then lost ground and the position of general counsel to Big Law lawyers between the 1940s and 1970s, only to mount an impressive comeback to elite status beginning in the 1970s. Yet the in-house comeback was not a simple power struggle with Big Law. Rather, modern in-house lawyers including the “new” general counsel came from within the ranks of Big Law, an offshoot rather than a competitor of large law firms, sharing Big Law’s background, training, and, more importantly, professional values, ideology, and ethos. Thus, the story of in-house lawyers and their relationship with Big Law is one of a complex symbiotic affiliation, not a competitive zero-sum game.

--Dan Ernst

Bradley and Rowland on women's access to law in England

 Kate Bradley (University of Kent) and Sophie Rowland (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) have published "A poor woman's lawyer? Feminism, the labour movement, and working-class women's access to the law in England, 1890-1935," Women's History Review (17 Aug. 2020). Here's the abstract: 

Women were excluded from both branches of the legal profession before the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act 1919. Whilst campaigning for women's entry to the law was also part of wider efforts to make the law more accessible. Before and after the 1919 Act, middle-class women were able to offer legal support to working-class women, through feminist and trade unionist networks and the professions that were open to them—factory inspection and social work. By examining key women’s organisations between the 1890s and 1930s, we trace the development of work to both educate women and girls on their legal rights and to directly tackle problems and breaches of the law. We argue that, by looking at the legal activism of women in the factory inspectorate, social work, trade union and women's organisations, fresh insight into the development and ‘mainstreaming’ of working-class claims on citizenship in the early twentieth century can be found.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Sackar on Lord Devlin

Out this month by Justice John Sackar (Supreme Court of New South Wales) is Lord Devlin with Hart Publishing. From the press:

Lord Devlin was a leading lawyer of his generation. Moreover, he was one of the most recognised figures in the judiciary, thanks to his role in the John Bodkin Adams trial and the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry. It is hard then to believe that he retired as a Law Lord at a mere 58 years of age. This important book looks at the life, influences and impact of this most important judicial figure. Starting with his earliest days as a school boy before moving on to his later years, the author draws a compelling picture of a complex, brilliant man who would shape not just the law but society more generally in post-war Britain.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Networks and Connections in Legal History

Just out from Cambridge University Press: Networks and Connections in Legal History, edited by Michael Lobban, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Ian Williams, University College London:

Network and Connections in Legal History examines networks of lawyers, legislators and litigators, and how they shaped legal development in Britain and the world. It explores how particular networks of lawyers - from Scotland to East Florida and India - shaped the culture of the forums in which they operated, and how personal connections could be crucial in pressuring the legislature to institute reform - as with twentieth century feminist campaigns. It explores the transmission of legal ideas; what happened to those ideas was not predetermined, but when new connections were made, they could assume a new life. In some cases, new thinkers made intellectual connections not previously conceived, in others it was the new purposes to which ideas and practices were applied which made them adapt. This book shows how networks and connections between people and places have shaped the way that legal ideas and practices are transmitted across time and space.

TOC after the jump. [DRE]

Rosenblum on Hugo Black and Cause Lawyering

Noah A. Rosenblum, the incoming Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at NYU School of Law, has posted Power-Conscious Professional Responsibility: Justice Black’s Unpublished Dissent and a Lost Alternative Approach to the Ethics of Cause Lawyering, which is forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics:

Public interest impact litigation as currently practiced raises significant legal ethics concerns. This Article excavates the historical foundations of two of these difficulties and, on the basis of original archival research, uncovers a way around them.

Hugo Black, J. (LC)

The Article focuses on two modern ethical dilemmas posed by impact litigation: conflicts of interest and the use of litigation as an improper end run around legislative policy-making. It argues that, as a historical and doctrinal matter, these ethical problems trace back to Justice Brennan’s decision to set cause-lawyering on a putatively neutral First Amendment basis in NAACP v. Button. That rationale, however, was not the case’s original ratio decidendi. In fact, the egalitarian neutralism Brennan embraced had initially provided a reason for finding impact litigation improper. Only unusual circumstances transformed it into a foundation for cause-lawyering. Meanwhile, a suppressed, unpublished draft opinion would have grounded impact litigation in Equal Protection and Carolene Products-type considerations. This race- and power-conscious alternative, championed by Justice Black, provided a competing ethical foundation for public interest impact litigation that would have better addressed our contemporary legal ethics concerns.

This Article elucidates Justice Black’s argument for the first time. It reconstructs the complicated dynamics that led to the abandonment of his dissent and its transformation into Justice Brennan’s majority opinion. In telling this story, the Article denaturalizes the ethical regime that governs impact litigation today by showing how nearly it was radically different. The Article’s contributions are descriptive and normative. On the descriptive level, it offers a revised account of NAACP v. Button on the basis of new archival finds. Normatively, it seeks to champion Black’s race and power consciousness against Brennan’s neutralism, showing what Black’s approach might have to offer legal ethics today.

--Dan Ernst

Baier's Biography of Frederick Bernays Wiener

Paul R. Baier, LSU Law, has published Written in Water: Biography of Frederick Bernays Wiener (Twelve Tables Press/Carolina Academic Press):

Frederick Bernays Wiener, was a leading advocate at the Bar of the Supreme Court in the last century. Colonel Wiener argued, and won, cases that set the legal boundaries between the military and civilians, as well as those between what is public and what remains private. No cases could carry greater social weight; ergo, few collections of papers could be more important. Written in Water is not the usual legal tome. There is nothing usual about Frederick Bernays Wiener just as there is nothing usual about Mr. Justice Frankfurter or Frederic William Maitland. Both of whom also appear in these pages. Written in Water is a lively celebration of Frederick Bernays Wiener and his times. We experience his slightly angular personality and his inimitable legal pursuits. Colonel Wiener was of the old school: charming, courteous, elegant, learned, witty, generous. True, Colonel Wiener did not suffer fools lightly. He did not suffer them at all. Frederick B. Wiener abhorred stupidity. He and Margaret Thatcher would have enjoyed a London pub together. Written in Water fulfills both halves of Horace's dictum. It charms; it instructs. And we fortunate readers, will smile as we learn. Paul came to know Colonel Wiener well. He produced a television interview with Colonel and Mrs. Doris Merchant Wiener at the LSU Law Center. The thought of a book saving Colonel Wiener for all time followed at the suggestion of Washington, D.C. lawyer Jacob A. Stein, founding partner of Stein, Mitchell & Muse.

The Twelve Tables Press notice is here.

--Dan Ernst.  Hat tip: Brad Snyder

Mayeux's "Free Justice"

Out this month is Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press), by Sara Mayeux, Vanderbilt Law School.  It appears in the book series Justice, Power and Politics, edited by Heather Ann Thompson and Rhonda Y. Williams.

Every day, in courtrooms around the United States, thousands of criminal defendants are represented by public defenders--lawyers provided by the government for those who cannot afford private counsel. Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender has a surprisingly contentious history--one that offers insights not only about the "carceral state," but also about the contours and compromises of twentieth-century liberalism.

First gaining appeal amidst the Progressive Era fervor for court reform, the public defender idea was swiftly quashed by elite corporate lawyers who believed the legal profession should remain independent from the state. Public defenders took hold in some localities but not yet as a nationwide standard. By the 1960s, views had shifted. Gideon v. Wainwright enshrined the right to counsel into law and the legal profession mobilized to expand the ranks of public defenders nationwide. Yet within a few years, lawyers had already diagnosed a "crisis" of underfunded, overworked defenders providing inadequate representation--a crisis that persists today. This book shows how these conditions, often attributed to recent fiscal emergencies, have deep roots, and it chronicles the intertwined histories of constitutional doctrine, big philanthropy, professional in-fighting, and Cold War culture that made public defenders ubiquitous but embattled figures in American courtrooms.

Here are some endorsements:

"This is an excellent work of legal history that speaks to the present as we systemically think about the connections between poverty, race, incarceration, and the criminal justice system."--Felice Batlan, author of Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945

"Mayeux reveals core features of American political culture and political economy across a changing twentieth century. This is a brilliant book that should be read by everyone interested in the dimensions of the contemporary American legal regime."--Hendrik Hartog, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus, Princeton University

"Sara Mayeux brilliantly uses the contested history of public defenders as a lens to examine and illuminate American conceptions of democracy, liberalism, socialism, and even our broader political culture.  Free Justice marks the dazzling debut of a supremely gifted legal historian."--Justin Driver, author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind

"Free Justice details a remarkable transformation in the attitudes of white-shoe lawyers, Supreme Court justices, and law professors. In the early 1900s, they envisioned indigent criminal defense as an endeavor for private charity and equated public defense with totalitarianism. By mid-century, they insisted on public defense in criminal trials as a Cold War imperative. And by the end of the 1960s, necessity had forced them to redefine it as a vital element of the War on Crime. Only in the United States! Sara Mayeux's important, beautifully written book shows us the elite legal profession shaping and being shaped by society and reminds us of the tension between the Warren Court's great ideals and their implementation. Brava!"--Laura Kalman, author of The Long Reach of the Sixties: LBJ, Nixon, and the Making of the Contemporary Supreme Court

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

•  Over at Jotwell, Deborah Dinner has a notice of Nate Holdren's  forthcoming Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press).

• “Katrina Jagodinsky will use a three-year, $460,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore how habeas corpus was used in the American West by various marginalized groups to claim freedom and establish their rights between 1812 and 1924.”  More.

• Now available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: “The Work of Some Irresponsible Women”: Jurors, Ghosts, and Embracery in the Irish Free State," by Mark Coen.  “This article examines a campaign of jury intimidation conducted by female Republicans in the Irish Free State from 1926 to 1934.”

• Ronald K.L. Collins has posted Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Fight for the Free Press: When Benjamin Franklin’s Grandson was Jailed for Critiquing His President (Part I), over at First Amendment Watch.

• Over at the blog of the Historical Society of the New York State Courts is a post summarizing John Oller’s article, forthcoming in Judicial Notice, entitled “George Wickersham: ‘The Scourge of Wall Street.’”  The video of the Society’s webinar, "Lessons Learned from the 1918 Flu Pandemic," is here; its video, "The Evolution of Slavery, Abolition in NY, and the NY Courts: The Lemmon Slave Case," is here.

• ICYMI: Lizabeth Cohen on The Lessons of the Great Depression (The Atlantic)  David Bernstein on administrative constitutionalism (Volokh Conspiracy).  Transcribing manuscripts as a productive escape from pandemic blues (WaPo).

• Sadly but not surprisingly, the Law Books course at Rare Books School, taught by Mike Widener (assisted by Ryan Greenwood) has been cancelled for summer 2020. 

• If you're not already zoomed out: Fridays at 6pm Eastern Time is Drinking with Historians, hosted by Matt Gabriele (Virginia Tech) and Varsha Venkatsubramanian (UC-Berkeley) and with a different guest each week. Registration is here.

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

Stella Akin (1897-1972)

[My annual exam in American Legal History also includes a biographical essay.  Last year’s was on the father-daughter duo Gaius and Jane Bolin; otherwise, I just have my students consider a single person (as here and here).  With the help of Hannah Kim-Miller, Special Collections Librarian at the Georgetown University Law Library, I did pretty well on this year’s subject--an unsung member of "Portia's Deal"--but, as you’ll see, holes remain that require presently inaccessible sources to fill.  DRE]

Stella Akin (1897-1972) was the first of four daughters born to a businessman and his wife (both white) in Savannah, Georgia, a coastal city located across the Savannah River from South Carolina.  She attended public schools and attended a local business college for a year to learn stenography.  In 1914, at age 17, Akin took a job in the law office of D.H. Clark, whom she recalled as “a nice old codger.”  When Clark learned she intended to prepare for the bar by reading law in his office after hours, he voiced his disapproval “with amazing strength and frequency.” In time, however, he came around.  First, he told her she was reading the wrong books and pointed out the right ones.  Next, he started quizzing her on her reading.  At last, he mapped out a complete course of study for her. 

The law was far from an obvious career choice for a female Georgia teenager in 1914.  In 1911, Atlanta newspapers that local courts had refused the admission of a female graduate of the local law school.  In the same year, an attempt to overturn the ban in the state legislature failed.  When, in 1912, the Georgia State Bar Association put the issue on the agenda for its annual meeting, the result was a vote in the negative.  One lawyer opined:

We must rally, men of the Bar of Georgia.  In this State at least, we have kept our profession as a refuge....  In it, we daily strive in forensic combat to settle causes by reason and precedent.  Shall it come to pass that they shall be won by curves and complexions, and lost by our lack of pulchritude?  Jury trials now have their grave faults, yet [they] cannot approach in fundamental catastrophe the grievous hour when languorous eye and scarlet lip shall deprive of liberty and property, or open-work stockings interpret the Constitution.

Not until August 1916, well after Akin commenced her studies, was a bill allowing women to be lawyers enacted.  Georgia women would not get the vote until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.  They would not serve as jurors until 1954.  Still, in December 1917, the day before her twentieth birthday, Akin was admitted to the Georgia bar, the first woman to do so in Savannah.

Weekend Roundup

• The first 2020 issue of The Docket, the online sidekick of Law and History Review, is now live.

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts has kicked off its Celebrate Diversity Month with a blog post on Jane Bolin by its Board member David L. Goodwin and a link to last year's panel on the lawyer and judge at the Yale Law School.  See also this.

• When contemplating your viewing options as you shelter in place, remember the Leon Silverman lectures of the Supreme Court Historical Society archived at C-SPAN. The complete list of lectures is here.

• New from Hart: Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies, vol. 1: National Reports, edited by Richard L Abel, Ole Hammerslev, Hilary Sommerlad and Ulrike Schultz.

• ICYMI: John Fabian Witt on How the Republican Party Took Over the Supreme Court in the New Republic.  Heather Cox Richardson on vote suppression and the Republican Party on HNN.  Garrett Epps in the Atlantic on Adrian Vermuele's "Common Good Constitutionalism."  Jacobson v. Massachusetts back in the news after being deployed in anti-abortion litigation.

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

Wood on law in the early modern French empire

Out soon by Laurie Wood, Florida State University, is Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire, published by Yale University Press. From the publisher: 

This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial subjects sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, particularly regarding slavery, war, and trade. Through court records and legal documents, Wood reveals how courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions.

Praise for the book:

 “Laurie Wood makes innovative and sophisticated use of hitherto ignored legal sources to reconstruct the complex socio-political relationships that shaped life in the eighteenth-century French Caribbean and Indian Ocean.”—Richard B. Allen

"Laurie Wood has written an innovative, original book that will be of great value to anyone interested in early modern France and its overseas empire. She shows, lucidly and on the basis of exhaustive research, how ordinary people throughout the empire, in vastly disparate territories, were able to make use of a remarkably uniform legal system, based in the so-called conseils supérieurs. In short, she shows convincingly how this legal system helped to knit the empire together."—David Bell

“Archipelago of Justice combines local and transnational frames of reference to show how the magistrates and litigants of a far-flung network of courts at the outer limits of the monarchy’s sphere of authority helped tie France’s global empire together into a largely unified and cohesive whole.”— Michael Breen

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• The conference Critical Legal Studies: Intellectual History and the history of the present, will be held at Princeton University, on February 27-28, 2020.  “Prompted by plans to create a Critical Legal Studies Archive at the Princeton University Mudd Library, the conference will bring together those who participated in CLS in its heyday; key figures from contemporaneous movements in the US and abroad; and people interested today in this history and its contemporary significance.”  The conference is free and open to the public and sponsored by Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs.

• Over at Lawfare: Matthew Waxman, Columbia Law, on The Mexican-American War and Constitutional War Powers.

• Kellen Funk, Columbia Law, has Twitter-reviewed Mortenson and Bagley's Nondelegation at the Founding.

• At The Historical Society of the New York State Courts: A biographical sketch of Harold Arnoldus Stevens.  Also, a YouTube video in which member of the Society's Board of Trustees discusses "how we have tragically lost details of historic NY events of national importance."
  

• ICYMI: Exploring the history of Underground Railroad, in the Youngstown Vindicator.  Brooklyn’s courts celebrate Black History Month, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.  One barrister's love for the horse hair wig, courtesy of the ABC and Law Fuel.   Law in frontier Oregon, in the Redmond Spokesman.  Better late than never: The NYT obituary of Homer Plessy.

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

Farbman, "Resistance Lawyering"

The California Law Review has published "Resistance Lawyering," by Daniel Farbman (Boston College Law). The abstract:

This is the story of a group of abolitionist lawyers who devoted themselves to working within a legal system that they considered to be fundamentally unjust and illegitimate. These “resistance lawyers” used the limited and unfriendly procedural tools of the hated Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to frustrate, oppose, and, if possible, dismantle the operation of that law. Abolitionist resistance lawyers were forthrightly committed both to ensuring that their clients remained free and to using the cases that arose under the Fugitive Slave Law to wage a proxy war against the institution of slavery. Their daily direct service practices were inextricably linked to their movement politics and aspirations for systemic reform. Using new archival research that upends the existing historical consensus, I show that this linked practice was dramatically more effective than previously thought, both in protecting individual clients and as a means of building political opposition to slavery in local and national politics. This history should serve as a provocation for contemporary resistance lawyering. Many lawyers today practice within a legal system that they oppose in the hope of frustrating or dismantling that system. I suggest that today’s resistance lawyers can learn from the abolitionists’ integration of politics and daily practice as they fight to increase the political power and salience of their own work.

The full article is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Sovereignty, Law, and Emancipation in the South Atlantic at Emory

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Sovereignty, Law, and Emancipation in the South Atlantic, 1850-1900.  Emory University, February 7, 2020.  Organizers: Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis

12:00-1:00 pm Lunch and Welcome

1:00 pm-3:30 pm Fragile Freedoms: Law and Dispossession in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Mariana Candido, Associate Professor of History, Notre Dame University.  “Legal Changes, Dispossession and Land Commodification in Angola during the 19th Century”

Jon Connolly, Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University.  “Indenture as Free Labor: British Ideologies of Freedom in the Shadow of Cuban Slavery”

Mariana Dias Paes, Researcher, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.  “Lawyers, Courts and Resistance: Fighting Land Dispossession in Colonial Angola”

Anjuli Webster, Graduate Student, Emory University.  “The Dingane-Retief Encounter and the Afterlives of British Abolition in Southern Africa”

Commentators: Kristin Mann (Emory University) and Walter Rucker (Emory University)

3:30 pm-4 pm: Coffee Break

4:00 pm- 6:30 pm Reconfiguring Sovereignty: Subjecthood and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation

Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of History, Emory University.  “From Plantations to Penal Colonies: Militarism in Cuba and Equatorial Guinea, 1840s-1890s”

 Anne Eller, Associate Professor of History, Yale University.  “What Does Independence Mean? Popular Parameters for Caribbean Sovereignty in the 1890s”

Natasha Lightfoot, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University.  “Plassy Lawrence's British Subjecthood and Her Struggle against Reenslavement in the Spanish Caribbean”

Dalia Muller, Associate Professor of History, SUNY-Buffalo.  “‘Free Men and Foreigners’: Representation, Afro-Diasporic Thought and Cuban Politics ca. 1900”

Commentators: David Sartorius (University of Maryland) and Brian Vick (Emory University)

Support has been provided by: The American Society for Legal History; The Hightower Fund; Latin American and Caribbean Studies; The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The James Weldon Johnson Institute, Institute of African Studies, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and the History Department.

Weinberger at BC Legal History Roundtable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend Roundup

• Legal scholars and historians on the uproar over changes to India's citizenship laws: read this by Shubhankar Dam, this by Rohit De and Surabhi Ranganathan, this by Madhav Khosla, this by Gautam Bhatia, and this by Neeti Nair. Here's a useful microsyllabus on citizenship and provisional belonging in South Asia, by Swati Chawla, Jessica Namakkal, Kalyani Ramnath, and Lydia Walker.

• On January 14, 2020, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History hosts a colloquium on Decolonial Comparative Law, with Ralf Michaels and Lena Salaymeh.

• Yesterday Katie Watson, JD, Associate Professor of Medical Social Sciences, Medical Education, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine delivered Contextualizing Abortion: The History of Morality Laws and the Legal Personhood of Women, which was the Annual Women’s Reproductive Health Scholarly Concentration Lecture at Brown University.

• "The [British] National Archives have provoked outcry from academics by announcing a new trial restricting readers to 12 documents a day” (Telegraph, via HNN).

• Over at SCOTUSblog: Amanda Frost, "Academic highlight: Sohoni on the 'lost history' of nationwide injunctions."

• Now available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Expert Testimony in the Social Sciences: A Historical Overview of Contemporary Issues, by Lawrence Rosen.

• Trey Gaines, Director of the Bartow History Museum, is to speak on the history of the 1869 Courthouse in Cartersville, Georgia, on January 15 from noon to 1 p.m.  (More)

• ICYMI: “31 women who blazed trails” in Oregon history, including Mercedes Deiz, the state’s first black female lawyer  (Statesman Journal).  Robert Caro's papers bound for the New-York Historical Society (NYT).  In praise of the library of the Queens County Supreme Courthouse.

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