Stanford Graduate Student Paper Prize

[We share the following announcement.]

Stanford Center for Law and History Graduate Student Paper Prize

The Stanford Center for Law and History invites paper submissions from graduate students for its second annual conference, which will center on the theme of the upcoming centennial of the 19th Amendment. SCLH’s goal is to bring together faculty, postdocs, and students for workshops, conferences, and lectures examining the relationships between law and history, broadly defined.

The one-day conference will be held on Friday, May 3, 2019, at Stanford Law School. It will include three panels featuring prominent legal historians presenting on suffrage, women's rights, citizenship, and related themes. The conference will conclude with a keynote conversation with distinguished judges about women in the legal profession, past and present. 

The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the winner of the SCLH Graduate Student Paper Prize. This student will present on a panel that includes papers at the intersection of women's rights, family citizenship, and immigration. Funding for travel and housing will be provided.

The application deadline is Friday, November 30, 2018. For more detail and to apply, click here. Please direct any questions to SCLH@law.stanford.edu.  

Call for Student Papers on US Supreme Court History

[We have the following Call for Student Papers.]

The Supreme Court Historical Society invites submissions for the Hughes-Gossett Award for the best student paper on some aspect of the Supreme Court’s history. Authors must have been enrolled as students at the time the paper was written. Past winners have been law school students or doctoral students in the departments of history, government, and political science. Papers may be of any length and may be submitted on an ongoing basis to Clare Cushman, Managing Editor, at ccushman@supremecourthistroy.org

The winner will be awarded a $500 cash prize and the paper will be published in the Journal of Supreme Court History. The recipient will be awarded the prize at a ceremony in the Supreme Court Courtroom on the first Monday in June.

Past winners of the Hughes-Gossett Student Prize after the jump.

Deadline for Cromwell Dissertation Prize Extended to June 29

[Recent Ph.Ds who wrote a dissertation related to legal history, what are you waiting for?  Submit now!  H/t: H-Law.]

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation has generously funded a dissertation prize of $5,000. The winning dissertation may focus on any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies; topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. Anyone who received a Ph.D. in 2017 will be eligible for this year’s prize. The Foundation awards the prize after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

To be considered for this year’s prize, please send one hard-copy of the dissertation and the curriculum vitae of its author to John D. Gordan, III, Chair of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee, and each member of the Cromwell Dissertation Prize Advisory Subcommittee with a postmark no later than June 29, 2018.

John D. Gordan, III, Chair, Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee
1133 Park Avenue
New York, NY, 10128

H. Robert Baker
Department of History
Georgia State University
20th floor, 25 Park Place
Atlanta, GA 30302

Lisa Ford
Room 344, Morven Brown
School of Humanities & Languages
The University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW 2052
Australia

 Laura Weinrib
University of Chicago Law School
1111 E. 60th St., Room 410
Chicago, IL 60637

Please contact the dissertation prize committee chair Lisa Ford (l.ford@unsw.edu.au) if you have any questions.

John Phillip Reid Book Award

John Phillip Reid (NYU)

[We have the following announcement.]

Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the American Society for Legal History, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history, with a preference for work that falls within Reid’s own interests in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-America and Native American law. The award is given on the recommendation of the Society’s Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award. [First books, written wholly or primarily while the author was untenured, should be sent to the Cromwell Book Prize committee of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. The Reid Award and the Cromwell Book Prize are mutually exclusive.]

For the 2018 prize, the Reid Award Committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book that bears a copyright date in 2017. Nominations for the Reid Award should be submitted by June 15, 2018, by sending a curriculum vitae of the author and one copy of the book to each member of the committee:

Prof. Richard J. Ross (Chair)
College of Law and Department of History
University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign, Illinois 61820

Prof. Deborah Rosen
Department of History
Ramer History House
Lafayette College
718 Sullivan Road
Easton, PA 18042

Prof. Susan Carle
5605 Wilson Lane
Bethesda, MD 20814

Prof. Laura Edwards
221 Stable Rd.
Carrboro, NC 27510

Prof. Christian McMillen
1526 Rutledge Avenue
Charlottesville, VA 22903

Tenth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

Morris L. Cohen (AALL)

[We have the following announcement.]

The Legal History and Rare Books (LH&RB) Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), in cooperation with Cengage Learning, announces the Tenth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition. The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, late Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.

The competition is designed to encourage scholarship and to acquaint students with the AALL and law librarianship, and is open to students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, and related fields. Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives. The winner will receive a $500.00 prize from Cengage Learning and up to $1,000 for expenses to attend the AALL Annual Meeting.

Winning and runner-up entries will be invited to submit their entries to Unbound, the official journal of LH&RB. Past winning essays have gone on to be accepted by journals such as N.Y.U. Law Review, American Journal of Legal History, University of South Florida Law Review, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and French Historical Review.

The entry form and instructions are available at the LH&RB website.  Entries must be submitted by 11:59 p.m., April 16, 2018 (EDT).

Surrency Prize to Adler

At the recently concluded Annual Meeting of the ASLH, the Society's Surrency Prize for 2017 was awarded to Jeffrey S. Adler, University of Florida, for “The Greatest Thrill I Get is When I Hear a Criminal Say, ‘Yes, I Did It’: Race and the Third Degree in New Orleans, 1920-1945," Law and History Review 34 (Number 1, 2016): 1-44.   The citation reads:

Adler draws on a rich array of sources, including coroner reports and other archival materials, to correct our understanding of the history of police interrogation practices, specifically the use of the “third-degree” interrogations designed to secure confessions. Even as law enforcement professionalized and foreswore coerced confessions, police chiefs continued to defend the practice as a crime fighting tool. In a local study of New Orleans, Adler shows how the use of third-degree interrogation practice shifted from whites accused of crimes to blacks, and came to play a role in enforcing Jim Crow.

This outstanding article contributes to a wide range of conversations: the birth of modern due process; evolving professional conceptions of policing; law enforcement and race; and the relation of professional and popular justice. Importantly, Adler’s argument suggests how racial hierarchy can change in form without necessarily improving the welfare or standing of minorities. As public authorities increasingly repudiate lynching, these forces of popular justice were then channeled into the enforcement of the criminal law.

The Surrency Prize Committee was chaired by Kenneth F. Ledford, Case Western Reserve University.  Its other members were Shaunnagh Dorsett, University of Technology, Sydney; Malick W. Ghachem, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Maribel Morey, Clemson University; and Reva Siegel, Yale University.

Sutherland Prize to Brand

At the annual meeting of the ASLH, the Sutherland Prize Committee, chaired by Neil Jones, Cambridge University, announced its unanimous selection of a Prize winner and an honorable mention.  Here is the citation for the Prize winner:

The Sutherland Prize for 2016 is awarded for an article addressing the far-reaching question of the extent to which the outcome of late-medieval common law litigation in England was determined by ‘official’ legal doctrine found in law reports, plea roll arguments and Inns of Court readings, rather than generally being determined by juries exercising their own normative discretion. In an article published in 1989 in the Wisconsin Law Review, David Millon argued that ‘Perhaps … the premodern common law supposed that local communities speaking through juries, rather than official agents of the state, should enjoy the power to decide the normative questions on which judgment rested.’ With a focus on civil litigation in the period around 1300, and by means of a detailed, scholarly, and illuminating examination of evidence provided by plea rolls and law reports, the author shows that ‘Millon’s pessimism about the value of attempting to reconstruct substantive legal doctrine from Year Books and plea rolls in the pre-modern period is misplaced’, and that this is so for three main reasons. Firstly, ‘there is much more evidence for the effective judicial control of juries than Millon’s model … might suggest’, operating, for example, through judicial control of the presentation of ‘evidence’ to juries; judicial ‘charging of juries’; judicial examination of juries as to the basis for their verdicts; and judicial consideration of verdicts before giving judgment. Secondly, evidence from the period around 1300 suggests that ‘the straight judicial application (and on occasion making) of substantive legal rules in cases that did not involve any jury fact-finding’ was ‘of much greater significance and importance’ than Millon’s account suggested, for example in cases where judgment was given simply on the basis of undisputed facts which had emerged in pleading. And thirdly, that Millon’s approach underestimated the role and significance of ‘official’ rules at the pleading stage, which seems to have involved ‘a considerable amount of argument not just about matters of procedure … but also about substantive legal matters’, which helped to shape the issues which went to jury trial. The article, by an author intimately familiar with the sources, serves not only to shed new light upon the litigation process at common law in the period, but is of much wider, and indeed fundamental, significance for the historiography – past, present and future – of the medieval common law, showing, as it does that ‘The “official” legal rules were important and legal historians have not been wasting their time in attempting to reconstruct their development from the early Year Books and still earlier law reports and the plea rolls.’ For these contributions the Sutherland Prize for 2016 is awarded to Professor Paul Brand for his article ‘Judges and Juries in Civil Litigation in Later Medieval England: The Millon Thesis Reconsidered’, 37 Journal of Legal History (2016), 1-40.

In addition the Committee unanimously recommended “that honourable mention be made of Professor Tim Hitchcock and Professor William J. Turkel’s article ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1913: Text Mining for Evidence of Court Behavior’, 34 Law and History Review (2016), 929-955."  The Committee explained that the article

breaks new ground through its statistical and ‘data mining’ approach to the entire body of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online 1674-1913. The authors provide a detailed analysis of the shape of the Proceedings as a whole, showing how the distribution of text between both sessions and individual trials evolved between the late seventeenth century and the early twentieth century; compare the resulting measures of a changing text to statistics reflecting court behaviour so as to examine how changes in the text reflect or hide changing patterns of court behaviour; and, by combining these two approaches, assess the reliability of the Proceedings as evidence of practice at the Old Bailey in the eighteenth century, and of changing court behaviour in the nineteenth century, providing in the process further evidence as to the development of the practice of plea-bargaining. The article will provide a fundamental reference-point for all future work on the Old Bailey Proceedings. . .  .

A Prize on the History of the US Treasury

[We have the following announcement.]

For over two hundred years, the United States Treasury has been at the forefront of American history and the history of the federal government. From Alexander Hamilton to the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, the Treasury has faced wars, panics, and a rapidly changing American and global economy.

To promote and preserve the history of this institution, the Treasury Historical Association (THA) invites essay submissions for the inaugural 1500 Penn Prize.  Named in honor of the location of the Treasury’s historic main building, the prize seeks to reward outstanding scholarship on the history and significance of the Treasury to American history—widely conceived. The THA welcomes scholarly essays that cover any period of American history, as well as any aspect of the Treasury’s past, including studies of policies, politics, architecture, people, and culture.

Essays will be judged by a panel of historians and Treasury experts.  The winner of this contest will receive a $250 honorarium as well as an invitation to speak at the THA’s prestigious Noontime Lecture Series in the historic Cash Room of the Treasury building in Washington, D.C. Past speakers have included leading scholars and former Secretaries of the Treasury.  The THA will cover travel costs to Washington D.C. up to $750.

Submissions must be double-spaced, 12-point font, and no more than 12,000 words including footnotes Submissions should also include a current CV and a cover page. The cover page should include contact information and author’s affiliation.  Essay submissions should be sent via email as a PDF attachment to Michael Caires via email to mtc2p@virginia.edu.

For questions on the 1500 Penn Prize or the THA Noontime Lecture Series, contact Michael Caires via email at mtc2p@virginia.edu.  For more information on the Treasury Historical Association visit here.  The deadline is January 31, 2018. The winner will be announced in April 2018.

AHA Book Prizes to Garfinkel, Goluboff and Haley

The American Historical Association has announced its book prizes for 2017.  The Littleton-Griswold Prize in "US law and society, broadly defined” goes to Risa Goluboff, Virginia Law, for Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (2016).  Other award of interest to legal historians include the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for women’s history and/or feminist theory to Sarah Haley, UCLA, for No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016) and the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian history or Italian-American relations to Paul Garfinkel, Simon Fraser University, for Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy (2016).

Update: UVA Law's press release on Vagrant Nation is here.

Stanford Center for Law and History & Inaugural Graduate Student Paper Prize

[We have the following announcement.]

We are pleased to announce the creation of the new Stanford Center for Law and History (SCLH). SCLH brings together faculty, postdocs, and students from across Stanford University’s many schools and departments—and beyond—to participate in a broad range of conferences, workshops, and lectures devoted to examining the multifaceted interrelationships between law and history (without geographic, temporal, or other subject-area limitations).

On April 20, 2018, SCLH will host its inaugural one-day conference, titled “Legal Histories of Policing and Surveillance.” The event will include a keynote address by Professor Michael Willrich and three panels featuring a range of prominent legal historians entitled: “Broadening the State’s Criminal Oversight Power,” “Surveillance Technologies and Legal Culture,” and “Policing Intimate and Family Life.”

The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the inaugural winner of the SCLH Graduate Student Paper Prize. This student will be added to one of the three panels—alongside distinguished faculty working on related topics—based on the fit between the proposed paper and the three panel themes. Funding for travel and housing will be provided.

To apply, submit the following in a single PDF here. The deadline is Friday, December 1, 2017.

• CV
• 500 word paper abstract
• Briefly describe (75 words or less) which of the three panels is the best fit for your paper and why.

The organizers will inform the selected graduate student by early January 2018. The prize winner must circulate a fifteen to twenty page paper to the organizers by Monday, April 9, to share with other conference attendees.

For any questions, please email: akessler@law.stanford.edu and edkatz@stanford.edu

Selden Society David Yale Prize

[We have the following announcement.]

The Selden Society David Yale Prize competition was established in 1998 in honour of Mr D.E.C. Yale, QC, FBA, a past President and Literary Director of the Society.

The prize is for an outstanding contribution to the history of the laws of England and Wales, from scholars who have been engaged in research on the subject for not longer than ten years.

A competition for the prize will be held again in 2017. The value of the prize will be £1000.
Entries must be of work published after 1 January 2014, or of works accepted for publication.

Nominations for the prize should be sent to the Secretary, Selden Society, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, to arrive no later than 31 September 2017 (selden-society@qmul.ac.uk). Please send two copies of the work to be considered, and a curriculum vitae of the author. In the case of works as yet unpublished, please provide confirmation by the relevant editor or publisher of acceptance for publication.

H/t: H-Law