ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

September 27, 2025  | 10 AM - 3 PM (CST)
Notre Dame Law School | Chicago, IL

Registration/Welcome, 09:45 - 10:05 AM
Coffee & Morning Refreshments

Paper #1: Property Law and Indian Removal, 10:05 - 11:00 AM

"Indigenous Incendiaries: Forest Fires, Arson Law, and Ute Removal in 1870s Colorado"

Author:     Jacquelyn M. Davila, Yale University 
Respondent:    M. Todd Henderson, University of Chicago Law School

Paper #2: Colonization and Property Law, 11:05 - 12:00 PM

"Property Law as Colonial Forerunner"

Author:     Nathan Lee, New York University 
Respondent:    Nadav Shoked, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Afternoon Break (Lunch), 12:05 - 1:00 PM

Paper #3: International Taxation, 01:05 - 2:00 PM

"Southern African Mining and the Modern Formation of Offshore Finance, 1860 - 1925"

Author:     Simon Rakei, University of Michigan
Respondent:    Ajay K. Mehrotra, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Paper #4: The Common Law and the Fourth Amendment, 02:05 - 3:00 PM

"What is a House? Investigating the Meaning of Curtilage at Common Law" 

Author:     Mitchell Del Bianco, University of Virginia 
Respondent:    R. H. Helmholz, University of Chicago Law School

Dinkel on Transnational Inheritances from the US

Also new online from Law and History Review: “The Rich Uncle from America”: Transnational Inheritance Transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia, 1840s–1980s, by Jürgen Norbert Dinkel, University of Leipzig:

This article examines cross-border inheritance transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia between the 1840s and the late 1980s. These transfers were not only characterized by private considerations and kinship networks but were also strongly intertwined with national and international political developments. This article argues that the history of transnational inheritance transfers since the 19th century can be subdivided into three distinct periods. The first period, from the mid-19th century to 1914, witnessed the gradual development and expansion of professional networks and legal agreements designed to facilitate cross-border estate transfers. By contrast, the second period, from World War I and the October Revolution of 1917 through the late 1960s, was a time of unprecedented global disruption. Unlike the half-century before World War I, governments and probate courts complicated, delayed, and prevented inheritance transfers across state borders due to military and ideological conflicts. During the third period, beginning in the 1960s, governments, international organizations, lawyers, and families resumed efforts to create structures that would legally protect and enable cross-border estate transfers in an increasingly globalized world.

--Dan Ernst

O’Brassill-Kulfan on Rent Distraint in Early New York

New online in Law and History Review: “Distressing the Distressed”: Rent Distraint in Early Republic New York by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Rutgers University:

This article documents the legal and social history of “distress for rent” (also known as rent distraint) in early Republic New York, a legal tool that allowed landlords whose tenants were in arrears to seize tenants’ belongings and sell them to offset the cost of the unpaid rent. Rent distraint was a practice and topic around which New Yorkers contested ideological and practical conceptions of class, the rights of property, the role of law, and welfare. In 1811, New York City officials began tracking tenants in arrears of rent, creating a deep archive of documents that reveal the nuances of landlord-tenant relations and subsistence in this period. This article follows that paper trail, exploring distraint in this context as a legal remedy, as an experience with major impacts on individuals’ lives, and of efforts to reform the law and the lived experience of law. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, poor, middling, and wealthy New Yorkers were engaged in knowledge exchange around distraint and the social categories and experiences associated with it. Their stories document a materialist sensibility that crossed class lines and was attuned to the practical dimensions of working people’s living conditions.

--Dan Ernst 

Brady on "Public Use" in State Constitutions

Maureen E. Brady, Harvard Law School, has posted Debates Over "Public Use" in the State Constitutional Conventions:

Historians and legal scholars alike have previously noted that the meaning of "public use" began to change in the nineteenth century, continuing into the twentieth. In the hands of some state courts, "public use" expanded from an approach dependent on "use by the public" to one that at least occasionally tolerated "use for the public benefit." This shift in meaning laid the groundwork for Berman v. Parker, the urban renewal decision from the United States Supreme Court that provided support for the broad reading of "public use" in the 2005 decision Kelo v. City of New London. 

In this Essay, I focus my attention on one of the vectors for the emergence of "public benefit" conceptions of the public use requirement: state constitutional text itself. In the nineteenth century, several states specifically authorized takings for private use in their state constitutions, usually to benefit local and economically critical industries. In other states, this approach was explicitly rejected. 

Although these private-use provisions have been noted by other scholars, this Essay collects and examines them as a group, including the lessons about "public use" that one might glean from the fruitful and fascinating debates that these provisions engendered among nineteenth-century lawyers at constitutional conventions. The conventions are an important site for understanding the logic underlying "public benefit" conceptions of "public use." And they might shape the future of "public use" doctrine by offering historical grounding for alternative conceptions of the line between permissible and impermissible takings, whether as a matter of federal or state constitutional law. 

Dan Ernst

JAH 112:1

 [The June 2025 issue of the Journal of American History is chock full of legal history.  We reprodcue its “In This Issue.”  DRE.]

M. Scott Heerman examines the contours of race, citizenship, and legal personhood abroad during the 1850s. He examines two freedom suits filed by John Lytle and Ben Newton, illegally enslaved African Americans in Cuba, and unpacks State Department policy covering rights to citizenship in those cases and others. His article shows that consular agents on the ground in Havana and high-ranking State Department officials in Washington, D.C., maintained a two-tiered system of protection that distinguished between granting legal protections based on birthright and conferring full rights afforded to citizens.

What is the place of law in the history of anti-immigrant violence in the United States? Seeking an answer, Hardeep Dhillon historicizes several attacks on immigrants from India between 1907 and 1910. She argues that the lack of protection or justice for immigrant communities in the face of mob violence is not a simple history of law gone wrong or even a history of discriminatory law, but a history of anti-immigrant fervor and impunity structured through the law. Her article reveals how laws on the books and laws in practice shaped both the violence immigrants experienced and possible forms of redress.

Despite the wealth of scholarship on mortgage discrimination, comparatively little is known about how redlining affected rental housing. During World War II, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) began underwriting new apartments for defense workers and war veterans. Brent Cebul and Michael R. Glass examine how developers such as Fred Trump and William Levitt abused FHA insurance programs by inflating their costs and reaping excess profits in a tactic known as “mortgaging out.” Drawing upon their original database of FHA-insured apartments, Cebul and Glass illuminate how developers not only deepened racial segregation but also transformed the landscape of rental housing across metropolitan America.

As historians debate the causes of the decline of American democracy—the backlash against civil rights, income inequality, changing media—the Iran-Contra scandal of the Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush years, over trading arms with Iran and funding rebels in Central America, never figures in this discussion. Iran-Contra has receded from history, regarded as a minor speed bump in the late Cold War. Reinterpreting the fiasco as an accelerant in the decay of U.S. democracy, Alan McPherson argues that the 1987 televised congressional hearings highlighted several major disparities in how Democrats and Republicans understood norms: Democrats warned of a broad assault on democracy, while Republicans dismissed the disturbing events as mere means to foreign policy ends. Unlike during the Watergate scandal, no one paid a price for Iran-Contra, and the behaviors worsened.

Weekend Roundup

• Notre Dame Law’s notice of its two prize winners at the recent annual meeting of the Supreme Court Historical Society, Barry Cushman and Dennis Wieboldt.   

• Harvard Law's notice of Kenneth W. Mack's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Harvard Law Today).

• More historians' amicus briefs from the Brennan Center for Justice: a third one on birthright citizenship by Martha Jones and Kate Masur (New Hampshire Indonesian Community Support et al. v. Trump) and another on voting rights by Alexander Keyssar, Carol Anderson, Orville Vernon Burton, and J. Morgan Kousser (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe). 

• The U.S. Department of Justice, Then & Now: Barbara McQuade, Michigan Law and a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, in conversation with John Q. Barrett at the Robert H. Jackson Center. 

• W.E.B. Du Bois and His Impact on America: David Levering Lewis in conversation with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center, Thursday, June 19, at Noon ET. Register here to attend online. 

• Also at the National Constitution Center, in person and online: The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed, on Monday, June 23 at 6:30 p.m. ET.  Register here to attend online.

• If, like me, you teach the rise of the residential subdivision, you might want to check out this post by the Library of Congress's Geography and Maps Division.  DRE 

• ICYMI: "The Constitution—Not Trump—Demands Allegiance" says Christian Fritz (Albuquerque Journal) (link fixed). The Cato Institute says history teaches that fighting tyranny requires mobilizing the people as well as the courts (Cato).  A history of the Antiquities Act in 1906 (Wilderness Society).

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

Boyd's "Freedom Enterprise"

Kendra D. Boyd, Rutgers University, has published Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press):

The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit’s status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story. In Freedom Enterprise, Kendra D. Boyd uses “migrant entrepreneurship” as a lens through which to understand the entwined histories of Black-owned business, racial capitalism, and urban space.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners’ journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women’s business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants’ “freedom enterprise”—their undertaking of attaining freedom through business—was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans’ activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

--Dan Ernst 

A New Look at Domesday Book

Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick, and C. P. Lewis have published Making Domesday: Intelligent Power in Conquered England (Oxford):

Making Domesday presents a fresh interpretation of William the Conqueror's survey of England, made possible by a major collaborative study and a new online edition of Exon Domesday, the earliest of the three original manuscripts to survive from the Domesday survey. The book addresses big questions about pre-modern government, written records, and the use of intelligence in both senses: the minds behind the planning and execution of Domesday, and the information about England that Domesday gathered. It characterizes Exon as the surviving part of the 'working papers' of one of the writing offices that over a period of ten weeks in summer 1086 dealt with all seven 'circuits' (regional groupings of shires) of the Domesday survey. The circuit offices had the task of recasting the manorial descriptions assembled in an earlier stage of the survey into an interim form intended for further redaction as Great Domesday Book by rearrangement, rewording, and abbreviation. A new deep understanding of the codicology and palaeography of Exon underpins every part of the analysis, and offers a model of documentary production for royal government at an exceptionally early period in western Europe. Part I describes and analyses each Exon text in unprecedented detail; Part II places Domesday in context and in broad comparative perspective, ranging across and beyond the Latin West. The dual approach provides a new interpretation of Domesday and a deeper understanding of both the Domesday survey and Domesday Book. It emerges that the survey was even more complex than we had dared to imagine, involving the production of different kinds of text intended to meet a range of fiscal and political needs. It is also clear that the survey was immediately effective, transforming the politics of land in a newly conquered society. Domesday has always been thought awesome, as its very name shows; Making Domesday contends that it was also a feat of intelligent government deployed by an aggressive and ambitious regime. As such it speaks to broader concerns with the colonial domination of conquered societies through the purposeful collection of systematic statistical information.

--Dan Ernst

Fleming's "Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurisprudence"

 Christopher T. Fleming has published Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurisprudence in the British Academy Monographs of Oxford University Press:

This monograph outlines the core principles of Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit jurisprudence (Dharmasastra) and traces their application in the practical legal administration of religious and charitable endowments throughout Indian history. Dharmasastra describes phenomena that, in Anglo-American jurisprudence, are associated with courts of equity: the management of religious and charitable trusts; and the guardianship of those who lack legal capacity. Drawing on Sanskrit jurisprudential and philosophical texts, ancient inscriptions, Persian legal documents, colonial-era law reports, and contemporary case law, Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurispudence demonstrates that India's rulers have drawn on rich and venerable Sanskrit jurisprudential principles of equity and trusts in their efforts to regulate religious and charitable endowments. This book presents the history of India as a history of trusts, revealing how the contemporary law of Hindu religious endowments is subtended by a rich mélange of Sanskritic, Persianate, British, and constitutional jurisprudential principles.

--Dan Ernst

Cronan on the Patroon System and NY Landlord-Tenant Law

Liam Cronan, who currently serves as a law clerk in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, has posted Rent, Riots, and Rensselaer: The Patroon System of New Netherland and Its Lasting Influence on the History of Landlord-Tenant Law:

For more than two-and-a-half centuries, a Dutch aristocracy thrived in upstate New York. Known as “patroons,” these powerful landlords controlled vast tracts of land, claimed by the Netherlands in the 1620s, and extracted rents from those lands well into the nineteenth century. Among the first and most influential patroons was Kiliaen van Rensselaer, whose interactions with colonial agents left behind a rich and extensive body of legal records. As these sources reveal, the patroon system’s unique constitution, derived from Dutch civil law, granted the patroon a seemingly feudal right with no analog in Anglo-American legal history: the ability to sell part of his land yet still require rent payments from his former “tenants.” Despite initial efforts to curtail it, this system persisted long after New York transitioned from a colony to a state, perplexing courts and lawyers alike for generations. After a violent uprising known as the Anti-Rent Movement failed to end the patroon’s claims to perpetual rent, New York courts faced a slew of cases challenging the patroon system’s legality. These cases exposed, and attempted to harmonize, the inherent conflict between English common law and Dutch civil law, which continued to shape New York law long after Dutch colonial rule ended, setting lasting precedents for property rights, landlord-tenant law, and the ability to bind property with perpetual conditions. But despite this significance, the patroon system has long been undervalued by legal historians, with most recent scholarship mentioning it only in passing. In resurrecting this neglected area of property law, this article seeks to impart a historically informed understanding of the patroon system and its enduring impact on landlord-tenant law. It will begin by tracing the origins of the patroonship as a tool to aid Dutch colonization. Drawing on careful analysis and translation of the records Van Rensselaer and his agents left behind, it will then demonstrate how the patroonship formed an interlocking system of property rights that provided patroons like Van Rensselaer with not only the right to collect rent but also to control his tenants’ labor, direct local commerce, broker debts, and even establish his own laws and courts. Finally, it will examine a series of key nineteenth-century cases and treatises, illustrating the nuanced legacy of the patroon system and its complex interactions with Dutch and English legal traditions. By connecting the patroon system to the broader evolution of American property law, from contemporary landlord-tenant statutes to cases on COVID-19 mask requirements, this article will reveal its lasting influence on property law and its rightful place in American legal history.

--Dan Ernst

Ruskola on the Making of the Chinese Working Class

Teemu Ruskola, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, has posted The Making of The Chinese Working Class, which is forthcoming in the New Left Review.

This essay, forthcoming in the New Left Review, is an advance excerpt from a book entitled The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: The Global Limits of Capitalism, to be published by Verso Books in 2026. The title of the essay is a deliberate nod to E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class. The English working class constituted the paradigmatic proletariat in the initial stages of industrial capitalism in the West. It provides an ideal lens for examining the emergence of another proletariat of global significance on the opposite edge of the Eurasian landmass, one that is emblematic of capitalism’s latest stage.

Thompson framed his analysis in terms of the Enclosure Movement, which expropriated peasants of their land and left them with no option but to sell their labor. In China, too, there is occurring a similar dispossession of peasantry that is sometimes described as a New Enclosure Movement. However, the two enclosure movements differ notably in their temporal and spatial scope.  First, processes that took place over a period of several centuries in England are being telescoped into just three decades in China.  Second, they are taking place in the opposite order:  the initial commodification of industrial labor in the 1990s was accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of migrant laborers into cities even without the large-scale commodification of rural land.  Why, then, dispossess a peasantry that has already submitted to capital voluntarily, i.e., under economic duress without the need to resort to forcible dislocation?  This essay, and the book of which it is a part, address this question by focusing on distinctive forms of ownership of rural and urban land in China—a legal distinction that has no precedent in Chinese history, Marxian thought, or Soviet praxis.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Penn Carey Law’s notice of Dean Sophia Lee's recent article on "the evolution of Fourth Amendment privacy from weak pre-Reconstruction protections through its development over the years, culminating in Boyd v. United States."
  

• A Q&A with Felicia Kornbluh and LHB Guest Blogger Jill Hasday on Professor Hasday’s new book We the Men in Ms. Magazine.  Her post on OUPblog is here.
  

• The League of Women Voters of Pullman and Whitman County will host the virtual event, “History of Disability Rights” on 7-8:30 p.m. March 31 over Zoom (Lewiston Tribune).
  

• James E Hurford reviews The Legal History of the Church of England: From the Reformation to the Present, by Norman Doe and Stephen Coleman (Law Society Gazette).

• Stephen B. Presser review Jonathan Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism for the Federalist Society.

• From In Custodia Legis: an announcement of a new collection release, "Pre-1901 Legal Documents of New Spain/Mexico." Also, a profile of "Bessie Margolin, Labor Lawyer."
  

• Zachary M. Schrag on the New Crisis in Urban History (AHA Perspectives).

• ICYMI: Black History, Birthright Citizenship & Civil Rights (New York Almanack).  Jim Crow Laws (Historian).  Confiscation in the American Revolution (New York Almanack). A pardon for Ruth Ellis?  (Legal Cheek).

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

Gallanis on Revolutions in American Trust Law

Thomas P. Gallanis, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, has posted American Revolutions in the Law of Trusts, which is forthcoming in the ACTEC Law Journal:

American trust law is revolutionary. It departs in fundamental ways from the trust law of other major common-law jurisdictions, such as England, Australia, Canada, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and Singapore. It also differs greatly from the trust law of the major civil-law countries that have adopted the trust, such as mainland China and Japan.

This Article identifies five revolutions in American trust law. Each revolution is examined in its historical context and with regard to its lasting effects. Together, the five revolutions explain American trust law's distinctiveness. The Article's primary aim is to shape how American trust law is understood, historically and today.

The Article's contribution is as fundamental as periodization. We used to teach that the "Roman Empire" was followed by the "Early Middle Ages." This periodization was transformed by the pioneering scholarship of the historian Peter Brown. Professor Brown is credited with creating the field of Late Antiquity, approximately AD 250-750. Analogously, this Article's framework of the five revolutions is designed to shape our understanding of the history and development of America's distinctive trust law.

Part I of the Article identifies and analyzes the five revolutions. Part II offers a personal assessment of American trust law's distinctiveness. A brief conclusion follows.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Jonathan Gienapp continues his engagement with "original public meaning" originalists.  "[O]riginalists assume that historians’ primary contribution is that they know that something happened or that a word had a certain meaning in the past," he writes. "Historians, meanwhile, tend to believe that their principal skill is in knowing how to decode historical utterances in all their guises. The knowing that is thus built on the knowing how, or, better put, the knowhow" (Process).

• 

  Raulston,J., charges the Scopes Trial jury (NYPL).

  On March 20-21, the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania will host a hybrid event on "The Scopes Trial at 100: Secularism, Race, and Education." More information is available here. 
  

• Edward Larson will deliver the Palmer Hotz Endowed Lecture in the History of Science on the Scopes Trial at the University of Arkansas at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, March 6, in the Gearhart Auditorium.
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society lecture, "The Life and Times of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth," by William R. Casto will be held at 12:00 PM (EST) on February 24, 2025, via Zoom.  The Society will subsequently post a recording on its YouTube channel.  Register here.
  

• At the next meeting of the Helsinki Legal History Series seminar, on February 25 and conducted over Zoom, Susanne K. Paas of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, will speak on “Josef Esser: A German Jurist in Four Systems.”  More.

• At the next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop, Benjamin Richardson, University of Tasmania Faculty of Law, will present the previously circulated paper, “Conservation Covenants in Castlecrag, Sydney: Walter Burley and Marion Griffin’s Legal Innovation in the Interbellum.”  Carol Rose will comment.  The session will take place on March 27 at 9 pm UTC.  (Convert to your time zone, if necessary, here.)(H-Law).
  

• "Christian, Jewish, Islamic & Secular Law in American & International History," a Zoom panel, will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 3:30 EST. Panelists include Deina Abdelkader, David Novak, Peter N. Stearns, and R. Charles Weller.  Register here  (H-Law).
  

• Five top public law scholars have responded to the Barnett/Wurman NYT op-ed on birthright citizenship (Just Security).  And Jonathan Schaub, after reviewing the exchange, adds an argument based on expatriation (Lawfare).
  

• Mark Tushnet, Stephen Skowronek, and John A. Dearborn discuss “the destruction of the public service” on the Scholars’ Circle podcast.
  

• ICYMI, State Constitutional History Edition: The New Hampshire Department of Education has launched a series of digital resources on the New Hampshire Constitution (Discovery).  Also, "Iowa's unique civil rights history must be taught, not suppressed" (Des Moines Register).  The inalienable rights clause of the North Dakota Constitution figures in a reproductive rights brief files by the Constitutional Accountability Center (CRR).  Teaching Americanism in New York classrooms, 1919-1922 (New York Almanack).  
  

• Karin Wulf on "Abigail Kimball's law book...1785" in Princeton's Lapidus Collection (BlueSky).

• ICYMI: The Charter of the Forest of 1225, the Magna Carta of 1215, and the Forest Charter of 1217 are on display at Lincoln Castle until June 1, 2025 (Lincolnshire Today).  A new library at Adams State University will preserve "the water, land and cultural history of the Upper Rio Grande River Basin" (KRCC). Vittorio Bufacchi's short history of separation of powers (The Conversation).  The six sentences George Washington cut from his farewell address (Slate). 
  

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

Fernandez Interviewed on Pierson v. Post

The Long Island History Project has posted a recording of its interview of Angela Fernandez, University of Toronto, on Pierson v Post:

When Jessie Pierson and Lodowick Post argued over a fox in early 19th century Southampton, they probably didn’t think the resulting court case would echo down the ages. Yet here we are 220 years later talking with legal historian Angela Fernandez about the odd, improbable history of Pierson v Post.

A professor of law and history at the University of Toronto, Fernandez has delved deep into the case. Her “legal archaeology” uncovered important, presumed-lost information on the early phases of the proceedings. Her 2018 book Pierson v. Post, The Hunt for the Fox: Law and Professionalization in American Legal Culture, unpacks more of the impact and context around the decision.

On today’s episode we discuss the local history surrounding the case, more about the Piersons and the Posts, and the surprisingly whimsical inner life of the legal profession.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: New York Almanack

Aston and Anderson's "Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce"

Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales: ‘For Wives Alone,” by Jennifer Aston and Olive Anderson (Hart/Bloomsbury) has been published:

Tens of thousands of women used this little-known section of the Act to apply for orders from local magistrates' courts to reclaim their rights of testation, inheritance, property ownership, and (dependent on local franchise qualifications) ability to vote. By examining the orders that were made and considering the women who applied for them, the book challenges the mistaken belief that Victorian England and Wales were nations of married, cohabiting couples.

The detailed statistical analysis and rich case studies presented here provide a totally new perspective on the legal status and experiences of married women in England and Wales. Although many thousands of orders were granted between 1858 and 1900, their details remain unknown and unexamined, primarily because census records did not consistently record dissolved marriages and there is no central index of applications made.

Using sources including court records, parliamentary papers, newspaper reports, census returns, probate records and trade directories, this book reconstructs the successful – and unsuccessful – experiences of women applying to magistrates' courts and the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes to protect their assets across regions and decades.

TOC after the jump.  The unusual collaboration the book represents is discussed here.

--Dan Ernst

ASLH William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize to Blaakman

The American Society for Legal History has announced the winners of its 2024 book prizes. This post is dedicated to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize. About this prize:

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty not yet tenured. 

This year's award went to Michael Blaakman (Princeton University) for Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). The citation:

Michael Blaakman’s Speculation Nation makes a compelling case for placing land speculation at the very center of our understanding of the American project.  Blaakman demonstrates how the public domain was constructed – and how legislators actively created a secondary market for futures and speculative rights to land on the frontier.  These land grants, contingent though they were, often predated and essentially presaged the dispossession of Native Americans.  Lucid, deeply researched, and beautifully rendered, Speculation Nation shows, in exquisite detail, how this process unfolded in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

Congratulations to Professor Blaakman!

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• 

  David S. Tanenhaus (UNLV)
  

  Heartfelt congratulations to David S. Tanenhaus on his receipt of the American Society for Legal History's Craig Joyce Medal, awarded to recognized extraordinary and sustained service to ASLH (UNLV Boyd School of Law).
  

• In Time Magazine's Made By History series: Ajay Mehrotra on The Tariff History Donald Trump Is Overlooking.
  

• Garrett Epps reviews Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World, "a fresh and readable one-volume history of the Court [that] explains how we got from Marbury to Dobbs" (Washington Monthly).

• On Saturday, November 9, from 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Alison L. LaCroix will discuss The Interbellum Constitution as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637.  The event is open to the public.

• The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has launched We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence, a "multi-year oral history and education project" commencing with the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

• On Monday, November 4, at Noon ET at the National Constitution Center, Keith Richotte, Jr., and Matthew L.M. Fletcher (University of Michigan) will discuss "Native American history and law through the stories of landmark Supreme Court cases."

• Christine Kexel Chabot, Marquette University Law School, is again making available the syllabus for her course Litigating the Lessons of History, in response to the revived debate making legal history part of the law-school curriculum.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Librarians of Congress): "Witchcraft and a Haunted Case of Torture in Joost de Damhouder’s Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1555)"; How a House Becomes Legally Haunted: Stambovsky v. Ackley, The “Ghostbuster” Ruling."

• Literary Hub's Ten Best Books on Reproductive Rights includes ones by Michele Goodwin, Leslie Reagan, and Mary Ziegler.  
  

• A notice of Molly Brady's  Brandeis Chair lecture at HLS, much of which she devoted to the legal history of single-family dwellings in the United States (Harvard Law Today).
  

• The University of Helsinki Faculty of Law "invites applications for a fixed term employment as a doctoral researcher or a postdoctoral researcher" with the project Comparing Early Modern Colonial Laws, led by Academy Professor Heikki Pihlajamäki.   More.

• 
  
  New online in Law & History Review: Weber in Jerusalem: The Rabbinical Debate over the Establishment of the Rabbinical Court of Appeals, 1918–1921, by Chagai Schlesinger.
  

• The Stanford Law School has announced its latest round of Sallyanne Payton Fellows.  I mentioned this here not simply because two legal historians, Greg Ablavsky and Bernadette Meyler, are their mentors, but because I gained lasting insights into the mindset of the first, postwar generation of Washington lawyers when then-Professor Payton shared her recollections of Charles Horsky when I presented at Michigan Law, some years ago.  DRE
  

• ICYMI:  Kristina M. Lee, University of South Dakota, on "What the history of blasphemy laws in the US and the fight for religious freedom can teach us today" (Akron Legal News).
  

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

Lodz Anglo-American Legal Workshop

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Lodz Anglo-American Legal Workshop

Organized by the Centre for Anglo-American Legal Tradition, University of Lodz, Academic Year 2024/2025

23 October 2024 – Jan Kunicki (University of Warsaw), The Significance of Roman-Dutch Law
in Scope of the Law of Marriages in Contemporary Zimbabwe.

19 November 2024 – Prof. Cynthia Nicoletti (University of Virginia), The Grant of “Possessory
Title” and the Special Field Orders No. 15.

04 December 2024 – Dr Ashley Hannay (University of Manchester), "Damna Usuum":
Rethinking the Passage of the Statute of Uses (1536).

29 January 2025 – Rosalind Ackland (University of Cambridge), Edward Coke’s Classical
Common Law.

05 February 2025 – Michał Zapała (University of Lodz), Life and Codification Activity of David
Dudley Field.

19 March 2025 – Prof. Jan Halberda (Jagiellonian University), The Introduction of Good Faith
and Fair Dealing into American Contract Law. Between Common Law and Civil Law.

All workshops will take place in hybrid format. In-person par9cipants are invited to join us at the Centre for Anglo-American Legal Tradi9on (Faculty of Law and Administration building, room 0.09, ground floor). Online viewers must register to aIend each workshop. The registration form will be distributed online via social media approximately one week before the workshop. All workshops start at 5PM (Poland and most European countries) / 4PM (UK and Ireland) / 11AM (US Eastern Coast). In case of any question please don’t hesitate to contact us by emailing Anglo-AmericanLT@wpia.uni.lodz.pl.

Chaudhry's "South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought"

Faisal Chaudhry, University of Massachusetts School of Law, has published South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford University Press):

This book delves into the legal history of colonial governance in South Asia, spanning the period from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a notable shift in the way sovereignty, land control, and legal rectification were conceptualized, particularly after 1858. During the early phase of the rule of the East India Company, the focus was on 'the laws' that influenced the administration of justice rather than 'the law' as a comprehensive normative system. The Company's perspective emphasized absolute property rights, particularly concerning land rent, rather than physical control over land. This viewpoint was expressed through the obligation of revenue payment, with property existing somewhat outside the realm of law. This early colonial South Asian legal framework differed significantly from the Anglo-common law tradition, which had already developed a unified and physical concept of property rights as a distinct legal form by the late 18th century. It was only after the transfer of authority from the Company to the British Crown, along with other shifts in the imperial political economy, that the conditions were ripe for 'the law' to emerge as an autonomous and fundamental institutional concept. One of the contributing factors to this transformation was the emergence of classical legal thought. Under Crown rule, two distinct forms of discourse contributed to reshaping the legal ontology around the globalized notion of 'the law' as an independent concept. The book, adopting a historical approach to jurisprudence, categorizes these forms as doctrinal discourse, which could articulate propositions of the law with practical and administrative qualities, and ordinary language discourse, which conveyed ideas about the law, including in the public domain.

--Dan Ernst