Birthright Citizenship Roundup

Given the amount of commentary from historians on birthright citizenship this week (on the heels of President Trump's suggestion that he will attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order), we are giving this topic its own round-up:

• In the New York Times, you'll find an editorial by Eric Foner (Columbia University), on why "the president has birthright citizenship all wrong."

• Not surprisingly, in light of her recently published book on this very topic, Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins) has offered several commentaries. Here's a recent piece in the Atlantic; here is a segment she did for National Public Radio; here she is on Democracy Now! And here is a link to a piece that ran this past summer in the New York Times.

• Garett Epps (University of Baltimore) also has a piece in the Atlantic, titled "The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says."

• This Washington Post "retropolis" article on birthright citizenship and Wong Kim Ark highlights the work of a number of historians, including Lucy Salyer (University of New Hampshire), Bethany Berger (University of Connecticut), and Erika Lee (University of Minnesota). Last summer, the Washington Post's "Constitutional" podcast also devoted an episode to this topic.

If we've missed anything, please feel free to chime in in the comments and we'll update the post.

Weekend Roundup

• Does Thomas Ruffin's portrait deserve to "dominate" North Carolina's top courtroom? Historians Eric Muller (UNC Law) and Sally Greene (independent scholar) raise the question in the Raleigh-based News & Observer. 

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Allan J. Lichtman (American University) on the history of voting restrictions and the problem of low voter turnout. 

• The Environment, Law, and History blog has been running a series of posts on a recent issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law, on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50: Context, Precedents, and Afterlife." Here's a link to the first post. The most recent one is here.

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

Weekend Roundup

• You'd be well advised to read that HNN review of Mary Bilder's Madison's Hand in our last Sunday Book Review Roundup in the light of  Daniel Hulsebosch's very thoughtful assessment in his review of the book and Jack Rakove's A Politician Thinking in the latest American Historical Review.  “After Bilder’s work," Professor Hulsebosch writes, "no one can read editor Max Farrand’s The Records of the Federal Convention 1787, 3 volumes (1907), the standard source for a century . . . as a comprehensive or objective record of what transpired in Philadelphia.” 

• John D. Braithwaite, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University, will deliver the Mitchell Lecture for Fall 2018 in the John Lord O'Brian Hall, Charles B. Sears Law Library, of the University at Buffalo School of Law on Friday, November 9, 2018 at 2 p.m.  His topic is Tempered Power: Variegated Capitalism, Law and Society.

• The National Constitution Center announces a free, on-line college-level course, on The Supreme Court and American Politics.  Created by Lyle Denniston and members of the University of Baltimore law faculty it traces, “from origins deep in English legal history and American colonial history up through the Senate’s recent consideration of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, the role of the Court in safeguarding the right of political representation in the American Republic.”

• James D. Folts, head of Researcher Services at the New York State Archives, reports on recent research conducted in the historical court records there, on the blog of the Historical Society of the New York Courts. 

• Congratulations to UNC Law’s Eric Muller, who was named the 2018-2019 recipient of the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award by the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty. 

• Congratulations, as well, to Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation, who will be a visiting professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Law, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, November, 11-18, 2018.  She will lecture to undergraduates on American constitutional law.

• At the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library: an exhibit on Censorship and Information Control: A Global History from the Inquisition to the Internet.

•  Sessions of the Law and Public Affairs Seminar at Princeton University are by invitation only, but this one is so interesting we’re posting news of it here anyway.  On Monday, October 22, Corey Robin, Brooklyn College, will preside over a discussion of the paper Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas's Jurisprudence.  “A little known fact about Clarence Thomas,” Professor Robin writes, “is that during the formative period of his life, from 1968 to 1975, he was a black nationalist on the left. In this paper, I show that despite his right turn in the 1970s, Thomas never gave up his black nationalism. The fundamental ideas he formed about race and racism on the black nationalist left continue to structure his jurisprudence from the right. While that's true of his jurisprudence on issues ranging from the Second Amendment to the Takings Clause, I focus here on his opinions about affirmative action and desegregation, showing that his positions on those questions bear little resemblance to either conventional conservatism or liberalism."

• Boyd van Dijk’s article Human Rights in War: On the Entangled Foundations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions is now available online in the American Journal of International Law. “The relationship between human rights and humanitarian law is one of the most contentious topics in the history of international law. Most scholars studying their foundations argue that these two fields of law developed separately until the 1960s. This article, by contrast, reveals a much earlier cross-fertilization between these disciplines. It shows how 'human rights thinking' played a critical generative role in transforming humanitarian law, thereby creating important legacies for today's understandings of international law in armed conflict.”

• CFP: the Canadian Law and Society conference will be in Vancouver (at UBC), June 3-5, 2019

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Slavery and Cartwright's case before Somerset by Krista J. Kesselring.

• At ShariaSource: a recent round-up on Islamic law scholarship including work on online fatwas about emergency contraception and DNA paternity testing in the Maghreb.

• ICYMI: more on that Barnette at 75 symposium at FIU and Ronald Chester's lecture on Tapping Reeve at the Litchfield Historical Society.  Also Renee Lettow Lerner’s review of Amalia D. Kessler’s Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 in the Summer 2018 issue of the Journal of Legal Education.  The incoming class at BYU Law has more women than men for the first time.  Trump effect?

Lessons from the Amistad at the CT SCHS

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

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

We’re told that

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

H/t: Mike Widener

Pardo on Federally Funded Slaving

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted Federally Funded Slaving:

This Article presents a new frame of reference for thinking about the federal government’s complicity in supporting the domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States. While scholars have accounted for several methods of such support, they have failed to consider how federal bankruptcy legislation during the 1840s functionally created a system of direct financial grants to slave traders in the form of debt discharges. Relying on a variety of primary sources, including manuscript court records that have not been systematically analyzed by any published scholarship, this Article shows how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 enabled severely indebted slave traders to reconstruct their financial lives and thus return to the business of enslaving black men, women, and children. Knowing this legal history gives us a richer understanding of the federalization of American slavery and its role in the development of the nation’s economy.

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AJLH: 58:3

Here’s the TOC for the American Journal of Legal History, 58:3 (September 2018).

Revisiting the Critiques of Those Who Upheld the Fugitive Slave Acts in the 1840s and ‘50s
Peter Karsten

The Law Wars in Massachusetts, 1830-1860: How a Band of Upstart Radical Lawyers Defeated the Forces of Law and Order, and Struck a Blow for Freedom and Equality Under Law   
Alexandra D Lahav; R Kent Newmyer

“O Amherst, Where is Thy Shame?”: Republican Opposition to Federalist Policies in a New England Town   
Susan J Siggelakis; Nicholas Mignanelli

Judicial Intervention in Early Corporate Governance Disputes: Vice-Chancellor Shadwell’s Lost Judgment in Mozley v Alston (1847)   
Victoria Barnes

Book Reviews

David Barker, A History of Australian Legal Education   
Mark Lunney

Dante Fedele, Naissance de la diplomatie moderne (XIIIe-XVIIe siècles). L’ambassadeur au croisement du droit, de l’éthique et de la politique   
Frederik Dhondt

Shaunnagh Dorsett, Juridical Encounters: Ma-ori and the Colonial Courts 1840 – 1852   
Katherine Sanders

Guido Rossi, Insurance in Elizabethan England. The London Code   
Dave De ruysscher

Mark Lunney, A History of Australian Tort Law 1901–1945: England’s Obedient Servant?
Henry Kha

Writing History Through Children

We are grateful to Joanna Grisinger, Northwestern University, for bringing to our attention the following panel at Writing History Through Children, a conference at Northwestern to be held on October 5-6:

Panel 3: Innocence and the Law,  Friday, October 5, 3:30-5:15 p.m

Chair:  Susan Pearson, Northwestern

Holly Brewer, University of Maryland: "The crucial role of children in the complex debates over slavery in England’s seventeenth century empire"

Michael Grossberg, Indiana University: “Keeping it From the Kids: Censorship and Childhood in Modern America”

Bianca Premo, Florida International University: “As a Complement to the Clinical History: Doctors, Photos, Early Puberty, and Children in Mid 20th- Century Peru and Beyond”

Comment:  Leslie Harris, Northwestern

Weekend Roundup

• From Time magazine's website: a Labor Day op-ed by Caitlin Rosenthal (University of California, Berkeley) on the Emancipation Proclamation as "among the most important [labor regulations] in American history." 

• This week in the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Walter D. Kamphoefner (Texas A&M) on "chain migration"; Mary Ziegler (Florida State University) on how "Brett Kavanaugh could shatter the alliance between the GOP and the antiabortion movement"; Michael D. Breidenbach (Ave Maria University) on "why the right to privacy should exist even after someone dies," and more.

• Thursday was a historic day for same-sex rights in India, where the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the "unnatural offences" provision of the Indian Penal Code (s.377). Great coverage of Navtej Singh Jauhar v. Union of India and the people behind it in the Indian Express, Scroll.in, and the Guardian (including photo highlights here). Here is a piece on how Indian legal academia influenced the judgment.

• Also on the Indian Penal Code via Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs' forum: Neeti Nair (UVA) has this historical take on religion and the limits of free speech in India.

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Jane M. Card on visual representations of the police in Victorian England.

• From Mother Jones, "An Old Anti-Irish Law Is at the Heart of Trump’s Plan to Reshape Legal Immigration," citing work by legal historian Hidetaka Hirota (Waseda University). 

• Update: Some last-minute ideas for teaching, as the new semester gets under way--here and here at South Asian Legal History Resources (MS).

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

Blackett on Fugitive Slaves

R. J. M. Blackett, Vanderbilt University, has published The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher:

This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

Praise for the book:

"I don’t use the word 'magisterial' lightly, but it is exactly the right description for Richard J. M. Blackett’s The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery. There is no better, deeper, or more comprehensive discussion of the struggle of fugitive slaves in the antebellum era." -Steven Lubet

"The Captive’s Quest for Freedom is the most important, thorough, and revealing study ever written of fugitive slaves in American history. The book is timely; it demonstrates in depth the nature and meaning of America's first great refugee crisis and the explosive politics that followed in its wake. May the whole of our reading public finally understand the significance of the Fugitive Slave Act in 'our history and our heritage'. It resonates still as a watch warning in our own time." -David W. Blight 

"Richard J. M. Blackett’s epic new history of the Fugitive Slave Law is both a brilliant analysis of the politics of disunion, and a compelling argument for the centrality of African American resistance to the great national unraveling of the 1850s. At the heart of the book, though, are the human beings whose decision to escape slavery prompted slaveholders to demand the Law in the first place, and whose determination to keep risking everything even after its passage pushed the United States towards a terrible and necessary reckoning." -Nicholas Guyatt 

Further information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• In the New York Times, Serena Mayeri (Penn Law) on "How Abortion Rights Will Die a Death of 1,000 Cuts."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" Section: Bradley Hays (Union College) on what constrains the pardon power.

• From Gizmodo, "the story of the American inventor denied a patent because he was a slave," spotlighting research by Brian Frye (Kentucky Law School).

• From The Hub, the magazine of Johns Hopkins University), an interview with Martha Jones on Birthright Citizens.

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

Weekend Roundup

• Greg Kaster, Gustavus Adolphus University, reflects on his participation in the NEH Summer Institute on Slavery and the Constitution, directed by Paul Benson and Paul Finkelman.
  

•  Ronald Collins & David Hudson have a special issue of First Amendment News devoted to 38 Women Who Argued First Amendment Free Expression Cases in the Supreme Court: 1880-2018.  The essay draws upon studies by Julie Silverbrook, Emma Shainwald, Marlene Trestman, and Clare Cushman.  And don't forget Mary L. Clark’s "Women as Supreme Court Advocates, 1879-1979,” Journal of Supreme Court History (2005).
  

•  ICYMI:  Josh Blackman & James C. Phillips on Corpus Linguistics and the Second Amendment on Harvard Law Review Blog.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" Section: Torrie Hester (Saint Louis University), Mary E. Mendoza (Penn State University), Deirdre Moloney (author of National Insecurities) and Mae Ngai (Columbia University) comment on a new proposal from the Trump Administration that would essentially punish legal immigrants for being poor; Julian Maxwell Hayter (University of Richmond) on the controversies over Confederate monuments and why "our history educations must be better"; Rachel Louise Moran (University of Texas) discusses why American policy is leaving millions hungry; and much more.  

• Past Punditry is streaming a new podcast, A12. Created by UVA Miller Center historian Nicole Hemmer, the podcast is about what happened last August 12 in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the history behind it. 

• Update: Gerard N. Magliocca and Kurt Lash at the National Constitution Center on John Bingham and the Fourteenth Amendment.

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

Chacon and Jensen on Constitutional Referenda in Antebellum US

Mario Chacon and Jeff l. Jensen, New York University Abu Dhabi, have posted Direct Democracy, Constitutional Reform, and Political Inequality in Post-Colonial America:

The ratification of constitutional changes via referendum is an important mechanism for constraining the influence of elites, particularly when representative institutions are biased. While this constitutional mechanism is commonly employed, its use is far from universal. We investigate the determinants of mandatory constitutional referendums by examining the divergence between Northern and Southern U.S. states in the early 19th century. We first explore why states in both regions adopted constitutional conventions as the mechanism for making revisions to fundamental law, but why only Northern states adopted the additional requirement of ratifying via referendum. We argue that due to distortions in state-level representation, Southern elites adopted a norm of discretionary referendums as a mechanism for protecting slave interests. We support our argument with both qualitative and quantitative evidence, including an analysis of votes from various Southern conventions in 1861 on whether to condition secession from the Union on receiving popular ratification.

Samito, ed., "The Greatest and the Grandest Act: The Civil Rights Act of 1866 from Reconstruction to Today"

New from Southern Illinois University Press: The Greatest and the Grandest Act: The Civil Rights Act of 1866 from Reconstruction to Today (May 2018), edited by Christian G. Samito. A description from the Press:

In this volume ten expert historians and legal scholars examine the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal civil rights statute in American history. The act declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery. Designed to give the Thirteenth Amendment practical effect as former slave states enacted laws limiting the rights of African Americans, this measure for the first time defined U.S. citizenship and the rights associated with it. 

Essays examine the history and legal ramifications of the act and highlight competing impulses within it, including the often-neglected Section 9, which allows the president to use the nation’s military in its enforcement; an investigation of how the Thirteenth Amendment operated to overturn the Dred Scott case; and New England’s role in the passage of the act. The act is analyzed as it operated in several states such as Kentucky, Missouri, and South Carolina during Reconstruction. There is also a consideration of the act and its interpretation by the Supreme Court in its first decades. Other essays include a discussion of the act in terms of contract rights and in the context of the post–World War II civil rights era as well as an analysis of the act’s backward-looking and forward-looking nature.

More information is available here.

Jones's "Birthright Citizens"

Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University, has published Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, in the Studies in Legal History series of the Cambridge University Press:

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

Professor Jones's op-ed on protesting NFL players may be accessed via the SLH website. Endorsements after the jump.

Herrmann on Black Loyalist Food Laws in Sierra Leone

Here's an article from 2016 that we missed and that is now available Open Access for six months: Rachel Hermann, "Rebellion or riot?: black Loyalist food laws in Sierra Leone," Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Volume 37 (2016): 680-703. The article bears noting for a few reasons. For one, it recently won the Belasco Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. For another, Professor Hermann (Cardiff University) wrote a really useful post on The Junto describing the process of writing it and reflecting on how one turns a dissertation chapter into an article. Here's the abstract:

In 1800 black Loyalists in Sierra Leone participated in an event that historians have called a rebellion. Reinterpreting the 1800 rebellion as a food riot reveals more extensive black Loyalist political activity in the 1790s, greater cooperation between black Loyalists and white councilmen, and increased animosity between black Loyalists and Africans. Black Loyalists created food legislation with the approval of the Sierra Leone Council, but those laws fostered disagreements with Africans. When the Sierra Leone Council revoked the black Loyalists’ law-making abilities, colonists rioted to reclaim the political and legal rights that they developed through their food legislation.

Read on here.

Weekend Roundup

• From the Los Angeles Times: an op-ed by Kristin Collins (Boston University Law), Serena Mayeri (Penn Law), and Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA Law). They bring a historical perspective to bear on current immigration policy and the family separations occurring at the U.S.-Mexico border.

• From History News Network, a roundup of commentary on Juneteenth.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Allison K. Lange (Wentworth Institute of Technology) on the Equal Rights Amendment - is it on "the verge of a comeback"?; Also Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Kennesaw State University) and Lina-Maria Murillo (University of Iowa) on "The Trump Administration's Assault on Contraception"; Christian Hosam (New America) on "The Supreme Court's long war against voting rights."

• From the New York Times: Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law) on a new exhibit at Monticello, in which "Sally Hemings Takes Center Stage."

•  Now available from the DC Public Libraries: over 600 images documenting the 1968 Poor People's Campaign.

• Aaron T. Knapp reviews former LHB Guest Blogger Gautham Rao’s National Duties in the latest issue of Law and Social Inquiry.

• From the newsletter of the SEC Historical Society: “Maybe you've heard of the Buttonwood Agreement, an effort to organize securities trading in 1792 and preceding the formation of the New York Stock and Exchange Board...but have you ever seen it?”

• Coming up: a workshop on "Cultural Expertise in Ancient and Modern History," convened by Livia Holden at Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, July 4-5, 2018. Participants will explore dispute resolution and cultural expertise in legal history, while also tracing the historical development of recent trends in cultural expertise. More here.

• And later this summer: a 900-year commemoration of the first Icelandic laws, the Hafliðaskrá, at the 17th International Saga Conference in Reykjavik and Reykhold (Aug.12-17, 2018). Otto Vervaart has a handy overview at his Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog.

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

Weekend Roundup

• We were saddened to learn of the death of Ira Berlin (1941-2018), an extraordinary scholar and a mentor to so many, including many legal historians. Here are some of the notices from around the web: the Washington Post; the New York Times; the Nation (by Eric Foner); and the Harvard University Press Blog. Scroll through the remembrances on Twitter, too.

• From The Panorama, the on-line companion to the Journal of the Early Republic, Saul Cornell (Fordham University) on "The Persistence of a Mythic Second Amendment in Contemporary Constitutional Culture." And stay tuned to the site for more content on guns in American history.

• The Supreme Court has released its much-anticipated decision in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. For one historian's take on it, see this Washington Post op-ed by Jim Downs (Connecticut College).

• From the New York Times: Tera W. Hunter (Princeton University) on "the long history of child-snatching."

• From the History Network: Dan Abrams & David Fisher on The Grisly Murder Trial That Helped Raise Abraham Lincoln's National Profile.

• From The Green Bag: Ross Davies on Vanity Fair's and The Bookman's 1922 rankings of influential thinkers, et al.

• From WGNO, ABC’s New Orleans’s affiliate: Louisiana slave database has over 100,000 entries to explore.

• Cambridge University Press reports that, on behalf of the American Bar Foundation, it will now publish Law & Social Inquiry (edited by our recent guest blogger Christopher Schmidt).

• The DC Bar has published a nice profile of William Eskridge (Yale Law School), for its "member spotlight" series.

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

Weekend Roundup

• In response to news of child-parent separation at the U.S. border, scholars have stepped up to offer historical perspective. Some instances we've come across: Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins) on WNYC's "The Takeaway"; Rebecca Ederling in the Washington Post. 

• Also in the Washington Post this week: Christopher B. Daly (Boston University) on "why we shouldn't criminalize political speech--even the worst of it"; Martha Jones on President Trump's suggestion that protesting NFL players don't belong "in [this] country"; Robert L. Tsai (American University) on a prior president's stance toward enforced patriotic rituals; 

• In the New York Times: Andrew Kahrl (Univerity of Virginia) on "the North's Jim Crow."

• ICYMI: Legal historian Ariela Gross (University of Southern California) has been one of the moving forces in the (successful) campaign for a change in leadership at USC. (Here's a news story about the events that gave rise to the campaign.) Here's her L.A. Times op-ed on how she hopes the university will move forward. 

• PBS recently aired a special on the Chinese Exclusion Act.

• “Shirley Abrahamson, the longest-serving Wisconsin Supreme Court justice in state history and the first woman to serve on the high court [and a former graduate student and research assistant of James Willard Hurst], said Wednesday she will not seek re-election.”  More.

• Hendrik Hartog was one of four recipients of the Graduate Mentoring Award at Princeton University.  One of his mentees–and a former LHB Associate Blogger!–Emily Prifogle will be a National Fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia next year.

• Via H-Law we learn of the posting of the ninth installment its its podcast series, conducted by Siobhan Barco.  It is with Holly Brewer, University of Maryland, and discusses her article in the October 2017 issue of the American Historical Review.

• Now online: The Task of History: An MIT Community Dialogue, held on May 3, 2018, in which “four MIT historians–Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Malick Ghachem, Tanalis Padilla, and Craig Steven Wilder–“ spoke on “how understanding the past can be a powerful tool for shaping the future.,” based on their experiences with the “MIT and Slavery” project.

• The Special Collections Department of the Georgetown Law Library has recently acquired Metropolitan Police Blotter 27, of the 22nd Precinct New York City.  It spans the dates July 29, 1864 to October 8, 1864. 

• Don't forget those excellent Institute for Constitutional History seminars upcoming in the fall, led by Robert Gordon, Daniel Rodgers and James Oakes.  The deadline is June 30.

• Over at the Freedom Forum Institute, LHB guest blogger Chris Schmidt's The Sit-Ins is described as "a most compelling read."  

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

Schmitt and the Backlash to Prigg

Jeffrey M. Schmitt, University of Dayton School of Law, has posted Courts, Backlash, and Social Change: Learning from the History of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which is to appear in the Penn State Law Review 123 (2018):

Scholars have repeatedly looked to the history of cases like Dred Scott, Brown, and Roe for guidance on whether courts should issue broad decisions on contentious issues. Some scholars contend that these cases triggered backlash that undermined the very causes the Court sought to promote, while others minimize the Court’s role in creating backlash and emphasize the decisions’ positive results. This Article contributes to this debate by providing a new account of the social and political consequences of Prigg v. Pennsylvania. The Court in Prigg rendered a broad interpretation of the Fugitive Slave Clause that was not necessary to resolve the facts of the case before it. The Court did so because the Justices sought to head off sectional conflict over fugitive slaves. Using original historical research, this Article argues that the decision had the effect, however, of helping to create a national policy on fugitive slaves that provoked an antislavery backlash in the North and strengthened the case for secession in the South. A more restrained decision from the Court could have produced a less divisive regime that provided greater legal protections for people claimed as fugitive slaves. The history of Prigg therefore suggests that courts should consider issuing limited and incremental rulings when attempting to produce social change on divisive issues.