Siddali to Speak on 19th-Century US Constitutions in Comparative Perspective

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

Please join the State Constitutions Lab on Thursday February 26 @ 1:00 PM (Eastern US) for a Zoom seminar with Silvana R. Siddali, [St. Louis University, to discuss her paper "Fire Eaters, Revolutionaries, and the Rule of Law: Nineteenth Century State Constitutions in Comparative Perspective."

[Professor Siddali's] area of specialization includes constitutional, legal, and political history of the United States, in particular, the role of human rights in the development of democratic and judicial institutions.  Her current book, Transatlantic Constitution-making: Struggles over Democracy, the Rule of Law, and Human Rights, 1820-1870 is under contract at Johns Hopkins University Press and focuses on nineteenth-century transatlantic political communities that were connected through an exchange of ideas, trade, migrations, and technological innovations.

This meeting will be held on Zoom and a copy of the paper will be sent to all who RSVP here.

Basile on the Splintering of American Public Law

Marco Basile, Boston College Law School, has published The Splintering of American Public Law in the University of Chicago Law Review:

Constitutional tradition has never mattered more for arguing about what the Constitution means. Yet the very idea of a constitutional tradition presents a shape-shifting target. Rather than an entirely distinct body of law, early U.S. constitutional law mixed and blurred with the law of nations in a broader category of “public law” that, unlike other forms of law, sought to govern the sovereign state itself through not only legal institutions but also political structures and actors outside courts.

This Article argues that U.S. constitutional law and international law diverged after the Civil War when courts came to apply them differently against the state as the United States consolidated a continental nation-state. On the one hand, the Supreme Court came to assert authority over constitutional law more aggressively in the context of gutting Reconstruction in the South. On the other, the Court stepped back from international law in deference to Congress as the United States conquered territories and peoples in the West. The simultaneous rise of judicial supremacy as to constitutional law and of judicial deference as to international law recast constitutional law as more legal than political and international law as more political than legal. As their modes of implementation diverged, their shared features became obscured.

By recovering the earlier understanding of public law, this Article challenges how we construct constitutional traditions from a past that did not categorize public law in the precise ways we do today. By integrating the legal histories of western expansion and the gutting of Reconstruction, it shows that regressive policies after the Civil War were enabled not only by judicial supremacy, as new scholarship emphasizes, but also by judicial deference--underscoring that the causes transcended the role of courts. And by showing that the earlier understanding of public law retreated for contingent reasons that obscured, rather than erased, constitutional and international laws’ shared features, the Article ultimately invites readers to reimagine public law in a more integrated way today.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur's amicus brief on birthright citizenship in a First Circuit immigration case.  They and others will participate in a Brennan Center event on the topic on June 12. 

• “Trust in the state: Negotiating legal and bureaucratic encounters," a special issue of the Journal of Legal Anthropology has published open access (H-Law).

• The Council of the ABA Section on Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has put out for notice and comment a proposal to double the the number of required credits of experiential education for JD graduates from 6 to 12.  One wonders what the move portends for enrollment in legal history courses and seminars.   

• Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions has awarded graduating senior Ben Woodard the Stephen Whelan ‘68 Senior Thesis Prize for Excellence in Constitutional Law and Political Thought for “Nature National, Slavery Sectional: Southern Judges’ Choice for Freedom in Antebellum Legal and Political Culture.”  

• Lawbook Exchange's latest catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History, including some letters from Louis Brandeis to Max Lowenthal. 

• ICYMI: Ex parte Merryman and current immigration battles (Maryland Reporter).  Inside Kenya’s Judiciary Museum (Star).  A slideshow on the Scopes Trial (msn).  Harvard Relinquishes Photographs of Enslaved Individuals (Harvard Crimson).  A defense of Bruen's originalism (Volokh Conspiracy). 

• Update: William G. Ross on the centennial of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (JURIST).

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

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Thomas M. Cooley (NYPL)
  

  The last known descendant of Thomas Cooley has given the document appointing him the first chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission to--Thomas Cooley! (Fox 17).  
  

• Brenda Wineapple discusses her book on the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial,  Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted A Nation, with Claire Potter on her Political Junkie podcast.
  

• In the September 2024 issue of the Journal of American History,  Myisha S. Eatmon “examines Black Americans’ use of tort law and damage suits to pursue and gain recourse for white-on-Black violence on trains during the early days of Jim Crow.”
  

• John Witte, Jr., reviews (some of) Rafael Domingo's Law and Religion in A Secular Age (Exaudi).
  

• A recording of that discussion on originalism at the National Constitution Center between Jonathan Gienapp and Stephen Sachs is now on YouTube.
  

• ICYMI: Mississippi’s oldest law firm will be memorialized with an historical marker (Vicksburg News). Andrew Lanham says The Supreme Court’s Originalists Are Fundamentally Wrong About History (TNR).  Rachel Shelden says that A Transformed Supreme Court Requires Different Solutions (Brennan Center).
  

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

LHR 42:2

Law and History Review 42:2 (May 2024) is now available online:

Legal Pluralism as a Category of Analysis
Jessica Marglin, Mark Letteney

Legal Pluralism's Other: Mythologizing Modern Law
Caroline Humfress

Legal Pluralism from History to Theory and Back: Otto von Gierke, Santi Romano, and Francesco Calasso on Medieval Institutions
Emanuele Conte

The Rise of the Indigenous Jurists
Clifford Ando

Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics
Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow

The Uses and Abuses of Legal Pluralism: A View from the Sideline
Tamar Herzog

Rethinking the Rethinking of Legal Pluralism: Toward a Manifesto for a Pluri-Legal Perspective
Ido Shahar, Karin Carmit Yefet

The Edicts of the Praetors: Law, Time, and Revolution in Ancient Rome
Lisa Pilar Eberle

The Carried-Off and the Constitution: How British Harboring of Fugitives from American Slavery Led to the Constitution of 1787
    Timothy Messer-Kruse

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South
Eric Eisner

Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949
Shumeng Han, Xiangyi Ren

Human Rights at the Edges of Late Imperial Britain: The Tyrer Case and Judicial Corporal Punishment from the Isle of Man to Montserrat, 1972–1990
Christopher Hilliard, Marco Duranti

An Instrument of Military Power: The Development and Evolution of Japanese Martial Law in Occupied Territories, 1894–1945
Kelly Maddox

“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law
Alan McPherson

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Saul Cornell’s contribution to the Slate series, “How Originalism Ate the Law,” is Why the Right Dominates When It Comes to Legal “History.”  (His answer?  “They’re invested in legal education, creating an originalist industrial complex with outsize influence.”)  Also, Thomas Wolf explains the Brennan Center's efforts to mobilize historians to counter the Supreme Court's historical claims.
  

• 
  For Members of the American Society for Legal History:  A reminder that the ASLH  has announce "a new virtual initiative – the Early Career (Virtual) Legal History Workshop – designed to provide support and intellectual community to early career scholars working in legal history, broadly defined.  Applications are invited from early career, pre-tenure scholars, publishing in English, who have completed PhDs or JDs (those working toward a JD/PhD must have completed the PhD)."  Deadline for Applications: June 30, 2024.  More.
  

• "History and the Law," a panel conversation "on important moments in American legal history, applying history education to the study and practice of the law, and more," presented as an introduction to the History Pre-Law Concentration at Villanova University (YouTube).

• Ariela Gross, UCLA School of Law, will lecture on  “Erasing Slavery – How Stories of Slavery and Freedom (in Natchez) Shape Battles Over the Constitution” at the Tuesday, May 28 meeting of the Natchez Historical Society (Natchez Democrat).
  

• LHB Founder Mary Dudziak, Emory Law, on the legacy of Korean War at the recent TCU Conference on the Korean War (YouTube).
  

• More on that recent conference on the political history of the New Deal at Vanderbilt University.
  

• Erika Rappaport, University of California, Santa Barbara, reviews The Rise of Mass Advertising, Law, Enchantment and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity, by Anat Rosenberg in the English Historical Review. Christopher Tomlins, Berkeley Law, reviews Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy in the Journal of Law and Political Economy.  And Ajay K. Mehrotra, Northwestern Law, reviews Andrew Koppelman's Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, also in JLPE.
  

• ICYMI: How America Tried and Failed to Stay White (WaPo). No, Congressman, TJ did not sign the Constitution (Mediatite).  Early Medieval England and Its Neighbors encounters some Anglo-Saxon attitudes.
  

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

Booth on Policing in Atlanta after Slavery

Jonathon Booth,  University of Colorado Law School, has posted Policing after Slavery: Race, Crime, and Resistance in Atlanta, which is forthcoming in the University of Colorado Law Review:

This Article places the birth and growth of the Atlanta police in context by exploring the full scope of Atlanta’s criminal legal system in the four decades after the end of slavery. To do so, it analyzes the connections Atlantans made between race and crime, the adjudication and punishment of minor offenses, and the variety of Black protest against the criminal legal system. This Article is based in part on a variety of archival sources, including decades of arrest and prosecution data that, for the first time, allow for a quantitative assessment of the impact of the new system of policing on Atlanta’s residents.

This Article breaks new ground in four ways. First, demonstrates that Southern police forces responded to the challenges of freedom: Atlanta’s police force was designed to maintain white supremacy in an urban space in which residents, theoretically, had equal rights. Second, it shows that white citizens’ beliefs about the causes of crime and the connections between race and crime, which I call “lay criminology,” influenced policing strategies. Third, it adds a new layer to our understanding of the history of order maintenance policing by showing that mass criminalization for minor offenses such as disorderly conduct began soon after emancipation. This type of policing caused a variety of harms to the city’s Black residents, leading thousands each year to be forced to pay fines or labor for weeks on the chain gang. Fourth, it shows that the complaints of biased and brutal policing that animate contemporary police reform activists have been present for a century and a half. Atlanta’s Black residents, across class lines, protested the racist criminal legal system and police abuses while envisioning a more equitable city where improved social conditions would reduce crime.

--Dan Ernst

Collins's "Tragedy on Trial"

Ronald K. L. Collins has published Tragedy on Trial: The Story of the Infamous Emmett Till Murder Trial (Carolina Academic Press):

Tragedy on Trial reveals as never before the entire and shocking story of the 1955 trial of Emmett Till's murderers. Based on extensive research, and accompanied by photos of the trial and a “For the Record” Introduction by Lonnie G. Bunch, III (Secretary of the Smithsonian), the brisk narrative brings the story alive, revealing all its manipulations of justice, including:

• the sheriff who from beginning to end put the fix in for the defendants;
• the ethically conflicted county attorney who selected the jurors;
• the successful scheme to never charge the guilty defendants with kidnapping;
• the defense lawyers who corruptly built their case on racism of the cruelest kind;
• the White woman who falsely accused Emmett Till, inflaming an already bigoted all-White male jury;
• the Black witnesses for the defense who were rounded up and secretly jailed in distant jurisdictions;
• the defense's medical “experts” who were not experts; and
• the defense's closing arguments (never recorded but now reconstructed) directed to “every Anglo-Saxon” member of the jury.

Ronald Collins offers an original and in-depth account that highlights the fearless efforts of Mamie Till and the courageous friends and family who testified. Collins also uncovers the truth behind the widely read 1956 Look magazine story, correcting falsehoods that persist to this day.

--Dan Ernst

Lowe to Discuss "Murder in the Shenandoah"

The Supreme Court Historical Society has announced its “first virtual event of 2024, a virtual lecture and conversation with Professor Jessica Lowe of UVA Law School on her book Murder in the Shenandoah. The lecture will focus on law in post-Revolution Virginia with some familiar names - John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson in the mix. It will be held at 12:00 PM (EST) on January 30, 2024, via Zoom and will be posted to YouTube following the event.”  Register here.

--Dan Ernst

Balogh's "Not in My Backyard"

Brian Balogh, University of Virginia, emeritus, has published Not in My Backyard: How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs (Yale University Press):

This social history of local political activism tells the story of the decades-long fight to save Green Springs, Virginia, illuminating the economic tradeoffs of protecting the environment, the origins of NIMBYism, the changing nature of local control, and the surprising power of history to advance public policy.

Rae Ely faced long odds when she launched a campaign in 1970 to stop a prison, then a strip mine, in Green Springs. The local political machine supported both projects, promising jobs for impoverished Louisa County, Virginia. But Ely and her allies prevailed by repurposing the same tactics used by the Civil Rights movement—the appeal to federal agencies and courts to circumvent local control—and by using new historical interpretations to create the first rural National Historic Landmark District.

The Green Springs protesters fought to preserve the historic character of their neighborhood and the surrounding environment in a quest that epitomized the conflict in late twentieth-century America between unbridled economic development for all and protecting the quality of life for an economically privileged few. Ely's tactics are now used by neighborhood groups across the nation, even if they have been applied in ways she never intended: to resist any form of development.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• On C-SPAN, Jeffrey Rosen, National Constitution Center, discusses Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s The Common Law (1881), which the Library of Congress identified as one of the Books That Shaped America.  Library of Congress historian Ryan Reft provides a tour of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library at LC and a view of Holmes's "black book."  A caller--self-described as a "mechanic," who came to Holmes by reading Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club--aptly asks whether the justice could fairly be described as result-oriented and whether Buck v. Bell was his worst decision.  Rosen also previews his forthcoming book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (YouTube).  
  

• From In Custodia Legis: "A history of blasphemy laws in the United States"; "Clara Barton and the Geneva Convention."
  

• The U.S. Intellectual History Blog has published a roundtable on Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St Martins, 2022), by Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern Law). Here's a link to the final post, which references earlier contributions. (h/t Balkinization)

• For the Brennan Center, Gautham Rao, Richard John, and Jane Manners have filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce on the history of judicial deference to administrative agencies.
  

• A special episode of the podcast All Things Judicial celebrated North Carolina Constitution Day with “excerpts of a discussion between Chief Justice Paul Newby and former University of North Carolina School of Law Professor John Orth on the history of the North Carolina Constitution”  (NC Judicial Branch).
  

• Over at Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians: "Recovering Histories of Gendered State Violence," by Sonia Hernández (Texas A&M University).

• 
  Located at the University at Buffalo School of Law, the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy "plans to award post-doctoral and senior or mid-career fellowships to scholars pursuing important topics in law, legal institutions, and social policy. " More. 
  

• New online and open-access in the AJLH:  The Abolition of the Right to Trial by Jury in Civil Cases in England, by Charles S. Bullock.

• On the Stanford Legal podcast, Richard Thompson Ford and Pamela Karlan discuss Ford's book, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (SLS Blogs)
  

• David Armitage on J.G.A. Pocock (Folgerpedia).
  

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

Clemons on Coercive Ideology

Tyler Rose Clemons, Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering, N.Y.U. School of Law (and a former student of mine) has posted Coercive Ideology, which is forthcoming in the Maryland Law Review:

Confederate Statue, Pontotoc, MS (LC)

Current equal protection jurisprudence does not permit challenges to discriminatory government expression, no matter how blatant or extreme. This doctrine, which I label the discriminatory treatment requirement, is a manifestation of anticlassification, the prevailing equal protection framework since the mid-1970s. According to anticlassification, only suspect government classifications implicate the Equal Protection Clause. In this article, I contend that discriminatory government expression violates the Clause because it contributes integrally to racial subordination. Through a process I call coercive ideology, discriminatory government expression serves as a veiled threat that manipulates individuals into performing public compliance with the dominant ideology. Like the script of a stage play, the aggregate of individual decisions to comply with its instructions translates the dominant ideology into a social reality. Coercive ideology reveals how both Lost Cause Confederate monuments and Jim Crow segregation signage contributed to racial subordination as discriminatory government expression in the New South. Because anticlassification fails to account both for the subordinating effects of discriminatory government expression and for the expressive effects of government classification, coercive ideology ultimately raises doubts about its continuing validity as the dominant approach to equal protection jurisprudence.

--Dan Ernst

Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Cors

At its annual meeting last month, the American Society for Legal History announced the winner of the  Cromwell Dissertation Prize, awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation in consultation with an committee of the ASLH.  The winner was Alexander M. Cors, “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Settlement, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820,” Emory University, 2022.  Here is the citation:

Alexander M. Cors

This dissertation represents a sparkling contribution to what Cors terms “the legal geography of settler colonialism in the Mississippi River Valley” during a pivotal time of contact between Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans. Utilizing sources in three languages from Spain, France, and four states, Cors seamlessly weaves together narratives of bottom-up experiences of individuals making claims to land under Spanish law with the expansion of state power and control over the Mississippi River territory prior to and after the Louisiana Purchase. Instead of focusing on one or two large tribal nations, Cors takes the land as his analytical frame, beautifully telling the story of how parts of four tribes moved to lands west of the river and then used Spanish land grants to protect their claims against those later made by European-Americans. The tribal claimants were surprisingly adept at achieving their goals, at least for a time, helped by Spanish legal regimes that were much friendlier to first-comers than Anglo-American law later proved to be. By focusing on the river as geography and ecosystem, Cors is able to reveal dimensions of the slave economy that relied on the mobility the river enabled. Instead of cordoning off Louisiana as a civil law territory that had little influence on surrounding states and national legal development, Cors makes Louisiana’s physical position at the mouth of the river central to the movement and migration that undergirded the expansion of slavery in the South. Settlement patterns conferred social structure, he notes, and they also conveyed legal knowledge that proved essential to maintaining property ownership during periods of transition in governance. Indeed, Cors reveals that many non-European settlers along the river resisted the imposition of colonial state power and non-native legal systems, persuading the committee of his broader argument that local land claims drove territorial law and legal practice more than treaty negotiations and national sovereignties. What makes this new history possible are the Spanish-language sources that Cors deftly mines, both for the revealing family narratives he pieces together and for new cartographic data. Cors’s maps are things of beauty, wholly original to this project, that show how indigenous communities spread along the river for decades prior to the Louisiana Purchase. The committee marveled at the way Cors advanced a deeply complex argument with beautifully crafted prose. This novel and original thesis was a joy to read and will, the committee believes, make an important and influential book.

--Dan Ernst

Pruitt on Junius Riggs

Paul M. Pruitt, Jr., University of Alabama Law School, has published Good and Faithful Servant: Marshal and Librarian Junius M. Riggs and the Supreme Court Library of Alabama, in the Law Library Journal 115 (2023): 435.  The article “follows the career of Junius Riggs (1851–1943), who was librarian of Alabama’s Supreme Court Library from 1874 to 1934. Riggs built the library’s holdings from 3,000 to 55,000 volumes. The article covers Riggs’s presence during controversial times; it also analyses his printed bibliographies.”

--Dan Ernst

Werner on the Tobacco Trust

George F. K. Werner, a student at Duke Law School, has posted his note in the Duke Law Journal, Norm Commandeering and the Tobacco Trust: 

(NYPL)

In the early 1870s, Durham became a major center of tobacco marketing. Farmers brought their crops to auction warehouses, which then sold them to the town’s manufacturers. This was a process facilitated by a well-developed system of social norms. But the formation of the American Tobacco Company’s “tobacco trust” in the 1890s threatened that arrangement—buyers conspired to pay less per pound of tobacco, and warehousemen lost the ability to police buyers’ conduct. When farmers attempted to organize in response, geographic and social distance caused their efforts to fail. By the time federal courts dissolved the trust in 1911, the damage had already been done. This Note’s historical analysis will be relevant for scholars of both informal ordering and competition law. For the former, it shows that some norm systems depend on the presence of competition. Informal ordering can, of course, also be a response to a lack of competition. But the possibility of collective action problems means that attempts to organize in reaction will often fail. For scholars of competition law, the possibility of norm commandeering provides a concrete example of how concentrated market power can affect economic and social dynamics.

--Dan Ernst

May's "Madman's Will"

Gregory May, a lawyer who practiced thirty years in New York and Washington, has published A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom (Liveright/Norton):

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773–1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph’s cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph’s wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves—and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen’s dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman’s Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.

The NYT review is here.

–Dan Ernst

Farbman, "Plantation Localism"

The Fordham Urban Law Journal has published "Plantation Localism," by Daniel Farbman (Boston College Law School). It is part of a symposium on "Local Government Structure through a Legal Lens: Conversations of Law and Local Governance." Here's the abstract:

Before the Civil War and emancipation, millions of human beings were enslaved across the United States. Most of these people lived on farms and plantations across the southern part of the nation. Scholars have tended to think of slavery as a form of private despotism — oppression undertaken under the color of the private law of property. Alongside this despotic private sphere, ran a weak public sphere of county court government dominated by the planter elite. These counties provided few services, and authorized the planters who controlled them to act as they pleased on their private plantations. The people that were enslaved were thus outside of the scope of public governance — brutally excised from the exclusively white and male political community. This Essay asks: What if, instead of dividing antebellum government into a weak public sphere protecting a despotic realm of private control by white elites, we conceived of the project of government and domination as unitary? What if we rejected the distinction between public and private and looked instead at where power was being wielded and by whom? What if we understood government not as a formal institution but rather as the place where governance happened in day-to-day life? What if, in short, we understood the plantation as a form of local government? Once we understand the plantation as a form of local government that was prevalent and, in some places, dominant across the South, a few things become clear. First, that the idea of the antebellum South as a place of little government and enlarged personal freedom is a fiction. The despotic government of millions of humans on the plantation was extremely intrusive on the lives and liberties of those who were governed. More than this, county governments were not weak so much as they were shells that both delegated power to planters and protected those planters from public oversight and accountability as they governed as despots. This reframing is primarily a historical intervention, but it also raises questions about the nature of localism today. Many local governments in the United States today appear weak but, in practice, operate as “public” shells through which power is delegated to property owners so that they may protect their “communities” from integration, redistributive taxation, and collective regulation. Although the chains of causation between past and present are attenuated, plantation localism echoes through these structural resonances in ways that should unsettle us. 

The full article is available for download here.

-- Karen Tani

Wertheimer's "Race and the Law in South Carolina"

John William Wertheimer, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History at Davidson College, has published Race and the Law in South Carolina: From Slavery to Jim Crow (Amherst College Press).  It is available open access:

This first title in the “Law, Literature & Culture” series uses six legal disputes from the South Carolina courts to illuminate the complex legal history of race in the U.S. South from slavery through Jim Crow. The first two cases—one criminal, one civil—both illuminate the extreme oppressiveness of slavery. The third explores labor relations between newly emancipated Black agricultural workers and white landowners during Reconstruction. The remaining cases investigate three prominent features of the Jim Crow system: segregated schools, racially biased juries, and lynching, respectively. Throughout the century under consideration, South Carolina’s legal system obsessively drew racial lines, always to the detriment of non-white people, but it occasionally provided a public forum within which racial oppression could be challenged. The book emphasizes how dramatically the degree of legal oppressiveness experienced by Black South Carolinians varied during the century under study, based largely on the degree of Black access to political and legal power.

As Professor Wertheimer writes in the Acknowledgements, “Each of this book’s six chapters began as a class-wide collaborative project in HIS 455: Law and Society in American History, an undergraduate research seminar that I teach in the History Department at Davidson College. In all, eighty students cowrote these pages.”

Here are some endorsements:

“Recent arguments in African American History have emphasized the theme of continuity... Race and Law in South Carolina recovers the theme of change over time by showing just how things have changed, and it does so through patient, thick description.” — H. Robert Baker, Georgia State University

“This book and its concomitant student project is an exciting endeavor...The cases are captivating and accessibly written, making this a possible college classroom read.” —Vanessa Blanck, Rowan University 

--Dan Ernst

Lowe on Ruffin and Hartog

Jessica Lowe, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted"Our Experiences Make Us Who We Are": Lessons from Thomas Ruffin and Dirk Hartog:

It was 1804, and Thomas Ruffin, future Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, was having doubts about slavery. Ruffin was a young student at what would become Princeton University, experiencing New Jersey's debate over gradual emancipation; looking for help, he wrote home to his father in Virginia. The elder Ruffin was a recent convert to Methodism, but despite the anti-slavery leanings of that sect, Sterling Ruffin took a hard line: he advised his son that, whatever moral qualms there might be, southern slavery needed to be based on “servile fear” for it to operate. That stark advice would echo twenty-five years later in Judge Ruffin’s notorious opinion in the slave law case of State v. Mann. This essay, originally prepared for the retirement conference of legal historian Hendrik Hartog, delves into the striking similarities between Sterling Ruffin’s letter and Judge Ruffin’s opinion, meditating on the other options available to Ruffin and the importance of the choices we make when our worldviews are threatened. A version will be published in a forthcoming volume edited by Kenneth Mack and Jacob Cogan.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Former ASLH President Constance Backhouse delivered the 14th Annual DeLloyd J. Guth Visiting Lecture in Legal History at the University on Manitoba on her forthcoming book on the RDS case, “in which the Supreme Court of Canada struggled with a claim of racial bias against Canada’s first Black female judge" (UM Today).
  

• The exhibit of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the history of abortion in the U.S. will open on October 24.  It is curated by Mary Ziegler, UC Davis School of Law (Harvard Gazette).
  

• Randall Kennedy, HLS, interviewed on Walker v. City of Birmingham, one of the cases he will discuss in his forthcoming book, From Protest to War, Triumphs and Defeats in Struggles for Racial Justice, 1950 to 1970 (wbhm). 
  

• Kate Redburn, an Academic Fellow at the Columbia Law School and a JD-PhD candidate at Yale University reviews Anna Lvovsky’s Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall in the University of Chicago Law Review. 
  

• I previously noted my Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail’s research on the North Carolina judge William Gaston and slavery.  He and Georgetown's Adam Rothman have updated a list of the 163 people Gaston enslaved and posted it with Professor Mikhail’s letter to the Georgetown Slavery Archive. See also this separate page on Gaston's estate inventory.  (A link to another one on Gaston's will is pending.)  DRE
  

• “In 2006 and again in 2016, the University of Pennsylvania denied having any connections to the institution of slavery. In 2017, five students under the direction of history professor Kathleen Brown formed the Penn and Slavery Project to investigate those claims, ultimately concluding that Penn both supported and relied on the institution of slavery in its early days”  (AHA Perspectives).
  

• 
  The Lawbook Exchange has published The Comparative Method in the Science of Law, written in Ukrainian by Lev Rebet in 1947-48 and now edited and translated by William E. Butler and O.V. Kresin.  “This study, previously unknown to the world of comparative law, may be considered to be the first monograph in the world devoted to the methodology of comparative jurisprudence.”
  

• "The Big in Jewish Law: A Day Conference on the Legal Issues, Phenomena, and Epochs that Often Seem ‘Too Big’ for Scholarly Analysis.”  Jewish Law Association. November 1, 2022, 08:50–17:15 EDT, CUNY Graduate Center 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY.  More.
  

• ICYMI: The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in an appeal seeking to overturn The Insular Cases  (NPR).

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