Weekend Roundup

• The legal historians Sarah Barringer Gordon, Sophia Z. Lee and Serena Mayeri (and Dorothy E. Roberts and Tobias Barrington Wolff) reply to their University of Pennsylvania colleagues Amy Wax and Larry Alexander’s op-ed, “Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.” 

TR (NYPL)

• Just up on YouTube is An Evening at Theodore Roosevelt's Birthplace: Theodore Roosevelt & the Constitution, a lecture by Kermit Roosevelt, III, University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Young Lawyers Committee of the Historical Society of the New York Courts.

• In the pages of the New York Times book review section: Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law) on "Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Talk About Our Past."

• Laura Edwards, Duke University, on Why Confederate statues fail to represent Southern history, in The Hill.

• ICYMI: A story on the Originalism Summer Seminar at Georgetown Law, from the school’s website; Andrew Porwancher, assistant professor of constitutional history at the University of Oklahoma, asks, Was Hamilton Jewish?  Also, how HLS will celebrate its bicentennial.

• In the Chronicle of Higher Education: Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins) on "What Mark Lilla Gets Wrong About Students."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Jennifer Delton (Skidmore College) on "When 'free speech' becomes a political weapon," and Adam Goodman (University of Illinois at Chicago) on fear as "the core of Donald Trump's immigration policy."

• In the op-ed pages of the Chicago Tribune, Steven Lubet (Northwestern) and Alfred Brophy (University of Alabama) explain "Why Trump is wrong to equate George Washington with Robert E. Lee."

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

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" Section: Max Felker-Kantor (DePauw University) on "How the Olympics accelerated mass incarceration in Los Angeles"; and Carly Goodman (Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow, American Friends Service Committee) on "How the net neutrality debate exposes the consequences of a profit-driven Internet." Also, a few we missed from last week: Sam Lebovic (George Mason University), "Want to end the war on whistleblowers? Revise the Espionage Act"; and former LHB guest blogger Benjamin Coates (Wake Forest University), "How a WWI-era law set the stage for the Trump-Russia controversy."

•  The Junto put together a virtual roundtable on Teaching Amid Political Tension. Here's a contribution from former LHB guest blogger Gautham Rao (American University).

• The podcast In the Past Lane has an episode up on "The Zenger Trial and the Birth of the Free Press in America." 

• The historians' brief in the Emoluments Clause case, CREW v. Trump, is out.  Signatories are Jed Handelsman Shugerman, John Mikhail, Jack N. Rakove, Gautham Rao, and Simon Stern.

• The New England Law | Boston is hosting the conference The Importance of Theory in the Law School Classroom and in the Practice of Law on September 14.  We’re told that, for purposes of the conference, at least, “Theory” includes Legal History. 

• ICYMI: In The Indiana Lawyer, the Allen County Bar Association "collects oral histories from the legal community."  Also, Paula A. Monopoli, Maryland Law, reviews Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law, by Tracy A. Thomas, in the Journal of Legal Education.

• Update: according to a story in the Hartford Courant, with the cessation on August 25 of its use "for the purpose of a county courthouse," the land on which Litchfield's 250-year old courthouse sits will revert to "the heirs of the original six proprietors who leased the land to the county in 1803."

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

Anglo-Saxonism at the New York Constitutional Convention, 1915

[In honor of St. Patrick's Day, we're reposting this.  To see why it's in honor of St. Patrick's Day, though, you'll have to read to the end.  Caveat: it's a long way to go for a punchline that probably was funnier a century ago than it is today.]

The first reading in a unit on ethnicity and the bar in my legal history course is an exchange between the great corporation lawyer Elihu Root and the great German Jewish civil libertarian lawyer Louis Marshall (q.v. Victoria Saker Woeste's article in the Journal of American History 91 (2004).) In a 1916 address, published in the proceedings of the New York State Bar Association, Root argued that the appearance of millions of recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was endangering the Rule of Law. Coming from communities in which "the courts are part of the administrative system of the government, not independent tribunals" and "the law is contained in codes framed and imposed upon the people by superior power," they had never encountered "the principle of individual liberty which has grown out of the life of the Anglo-Saxon race." This great mass, Root warned, "will change us unless we change them."

Louis Marshall replied in a letter to the New York Times. He denied Root's implication that lawyers of foreign birth or parentage embraced traditions of State control over liberty. "An overwhelming proportion of our immigrants have come to America because of their aspirations for individual liberty and their revolt against state control over liberty," Marshall countered. Root would have immigrants sojourn "forty years in a political purgatory" before admitting them to "the 'promised land' of true Americanism." In fact, America's immigrants required "no external influence to expel from their blood the servile conditions prevailing in the lands of their fathers."

After the Root-Marshall exchange, the following document probably is surplusage, but I usually assign it anyway. It's an excerpt from a report by Charles B. Sears on the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1915 for the Thursday Club of Buffalo, a literary and social circle. (Sears would later become a highly regarded appellate judge; the University at Buffalo's law library is named after him.)

A few episodes, not very important in the final work of the Convention, stand out in the minds of the delegates. Mr. C. H. Young, Delegate-at-large from Westchester County, proposed and had reported by the Committee on Suffrage the following new section to the Constitution:

After January 1, 1918, no person shall become entitled to vote on attaining majority by naturalization or otherwise unless such person is also able, except for physical disability, to read and write English.

Upon the debate which ensued a marked racial clanishness was exhibited. Mr. Gordon Knox Bell from New York [pictured, below left] made a speech on behalf of the English, Judge Clearwater of Kingston on behalf of the Dutch, Louis Marshall on behalf of the Jews, and Convention seemed about to resolve itself into hostile camps on the subject of pedigree. Bell, in his excitement, walking down into the well, thundered forth his praise of England at a speed which baffled the stenographer, and little of his remarkable speech appears in the record. I quote, however, from the meagre record a few of his sentences and some words of an interruption:

“Gentlemen, we must stop to think what we are. This is not a question of Nations, it is a question of races, and when all is said and done, there is not a man in this room who can deny that we are an English race, born and bred and brought up with the traditions of the men of England, of Anglo-Saxon stock. It is idle to bring to my view that that race is in the minority in our country–a little leaven leavens the whole lump, and if there is only one Anglo-Saxon left we cannot forswear our heritage. History shows, or your own hearts will show, if you stop to reason, it is true, we are Anglo-Saxon.* * *

Take the country where most of our ancestors came from, those bleak islands now so sadly at war. In that country they spoke all sorts of languages, resembling the medley spoke all sorts of languages, resembling the medley as in our country today. The came the French conquest, and then Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the fourteenth century saw that by popularizing all of the English languages, taking what he could at the time as far as he was able in the Canterbury Tales, he made a vehicle of thought of which the people began to talk. And then came along the great reign of which my friend Mr. Beach spoke, of Prince Hal, when he came to the throne, and that was the first time that the Englishmen, as such, were solidified as a nation.

Mr. Unger – Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield to a question?

Mr. Chairman – Will the gentleman permit a question?

Mr. Bell – Certainly.

Mr. Unger – Will the gentleman advise whether or not it was Sir William Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, who wrote the immortal lines:

For he himself hath said it,
(And it’s greatly to his credit)
That–he–is–an–Englishman;
He might have been a Prooshan,
A Frenchman, Turk, or Rooshan,
Or an Eye-tal-i-an;
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remained an Englishman,
He remained an Englishman!

Mr. Bell – I thank you for the quotation. That is exactly what I would like to hear, but I am bold to say that there is a greater word that “Englishman.”

This speech was too much for Mr. Louis Marshall, and he bellowed forth his defense of the Jews in a voice which rang to every corner of the hall. Hear Mr. Marshall, who offered an amendment to change the word “English” in the proposed new section to “any language”:

There is not one drop of Anglo-Saxon blood that courses through my veins, and yet I think that I have as much appreciation of the spirit and genius of our institutions as has any member of this body.***

Let me tell you, for example, that there is in this State a body of people numbering over a million who read the Yiddish language. Many of them cannot read any other language. Most of them read newspapers published only in that language. I have before me a list of five newspapers published in the city of New York, whose average daily circulation, in Yiddish, is upwards of 500,000 in the aggregate–whose daily circulation combined is upwards 500,000 in the aggregate. There is one of those which has a daily circulation of 175,000 and that is on a very fair estimate of its circulation. It is the sworn statement of the editor of that newspaper. These newspapers are wide-awake. They reach an intelligent reading public, a reading public which obtains its opinions with regard to public affairs largely through their columns. They are publishing daily reports concerning what is going on in this Convention, with regard to the work which is here done. I have had occasion to read a number of those papers in the last few weeks and I find that they treat this Convention much more fairly than has a certain portion of the English press of the city of New York–much more fairly and much more intelligently and much more with a desire to instruct the people as to what is being done here and what the aspirations are to those who are seeking to draft a Constitution for the people of this State.***

They [the Jewish people] will tell you that at a time when the barons at Runnymede had to sign their marks to that document, the Magna Charta, their ancestors, who had no English or Anglo-Saxon blood flowing through their veins, were able to read and write. And although they did not participate in the Magna Charta and although they were made the objects of hateful discrimination in that document, those of their speech had previously educated the world in the Decalogue. They had developed a literature rich in every department of thought and one branch of them had given to the world the Sermon on the Mount. Yet we are told here that these people, because they may not be able to read the English language, because they come to our shores as refugees from oppression, ready to devote themselves and their thoughts and their hearts and their minds to the development of this country, who are able to read and write a language through which they can gain knowledge and information in regard to the affairs of this country, are unfit to exercise the right of franchise.

Mr. Marshall’s amendment was defeated[.] Mr. Young’s proposition was carried in the Committee of the Whole, but defeated in the Convention after numerous delegates had explained their votes; for example, Mr. Donovan said:

“Mr. Bell said here the other day that the Anglo-Saxon race settled the country. I concede that they did. They settled it, fixed the stage and arranged everything for the Irish to come and take possession. And they have had it ever since.”

Image Credit: Bell

Weekend Roundup

• For those interested in the upcoming "Law As . . . " Symposium that we recently mentioned (hosted at UC Berkeley this December 2-3), note that papers are now available on the symposium website.

• Montgomery (Indiana) Circuit Court Judge Harry A. Siamas discussed the history of his court in the Journal Review. 

• The American Historical Association has issued a statement on the aftermath of the recent Presidential election.  

• Here is the University of Virginia's release on Fahad Bishara, an assistant professor of history, who “specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and the Islamic world. His current book, ‘A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1940' is a legal history of economic life in the western Indian Ocean during the 19th century."

• St. Mary’s University Twickenham London continues its symposia on the First Women Lawyers in Great Britain and the Empire, with "Individual Struggles of the 'Successful': Williams, Morrison, Normanton and the Rest of the 1922 Cohort," on June 29, 2017.  H/t: Legal Scholarship Blog.

• Last Tuesday, Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania, presented "'The Army’s Business is Martial, Not Maternal': Unwed Mothers, Single Parents, and the Military Welfare State," in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University.  After Thanksgiving, LAPA sponsors or cosponsors "Distraction Framed: Guardianships for Mental Incapacity in Early New England," a paper by Cornelia Dayton, LAPA Fellow; University of Connecticut, on Monday, November 28, 2016, and "The Honest but Unfortunate Debtor: American Constitutional Development and Debtors' Movements to Change the Law," by Emily Zackin, Johns Hopkins University.

• On Monday, Nathan D.B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University, presented A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Making of Jim Crow South Florida, in the History at the Intersections series of Georgetown Institute for Global History.

• Annette Gordon-Reed on Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination, as recorded on Utah Access.

• Via The Junto, Nora Slonimsky (Graduate Center of the City University of New York) on why steamboats deserve a place in your US history class: "they illustrate the intersecting stories of the porous boundaries between art and science, competing understandings of intellectual property, and its relationship with centralized governance in the early national period."

• Over at the World Legal History Blog, Iza Hussin (Cambridge University) shares this post drawing from her new book, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

• Update: On November 16, Suzie Chiodo successfully defended her LLM thesis at Osgoode Hall Law School, entitled "Class Roots: The Genesis of the Ontario Class Proceedings Act, 1966-1993."  Her thesis supervisor was Philip Girard.  H/t: Canadian Legal History Blog.

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

Meier on Teaching Pierson v. Post

Oh, you know I like this one!  And so, I'm sure, does Angela Fernandez!!  Just in time for the new academic year, Luke Meier, Baylor University Law School, has posted Teaching Pierson v. Post:

This paper explains my approach to teaching Pierson v. Post. The case of Pierson v. Post is “one of the old chestnuts of property law.” It is usually included as one of the first cases in a first-year Property casebook, which means that Pierson is often one of the first cases that incoming law students struggle with during their first week of law school. This exposure, coupled with the fact that Pierson involves an accessible (and somewhat entertaining) fact pattern, explains why many practicing attorneys can still remember “the fox case.”

Chused and Williams's "Gendered Law in American History"

[We've posted on this work before, but we're told it's available for purchase this week, and so we're
moving it up.]

Just out from the Carolina Academic Press is Gendered Law in American History, by my esteemed former colleagues Richard Chused (now of New York Law School), and Wendy Williams (now emerita Georgetown Law):

Gendered Law in American History is a remarkable compendium of over thirty years of research and teaching in the field. It explores an array of social, cultural, and legal arenas from the turn of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, including concepts of citizenship at the founding of the republic, the development of married women’s property laws, divorce, child custody, temperance, suffrage, domestic and racial violence before and after the Civil War, protective labor legislation, and the use of legal history testimony in legal disputes. It is both an invaluable reference tool and an important new teaching text. 

The TOC is here.  Request an examination copy here.

Weekend Roundup

• The Law and Society Association has launched a new Teaching Materials Repository, which is accessible to LSA members (via "Teaching Materials" on the LSA website after logging in). As more of us contribute syllabi, there should be more and more legal historical content. You can add your PDF syllabi here.

• The ESCLH blog notes the positing of a job listing for a Recrutement d'un vacataire en Histoire du Droit (TD, LD1, sem. 1 & 2), for September 2016-June 2017, at the Université deVersailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France. 

• Congratulations to our own Guest Blogger Sarah Barringer Gordon, Penn Law, for receiving the Lester J. Cappon Prize, “which honors the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in the previous year,” for “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America.”  More.

• Some Late Thoughts on the American Civil War and Southern Identity, from Seth Barrett Tillman.

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

Crowdsourcing Assessment for Legal Historians

Here’s a post principally for law-school-based legal historians, although I gather those who teach in other university departments face an analogous challenge.  Viewing the law school, as I do, as a hybrid institution, part precinct of the academe, part portal to the profession, I’ve been witnessing the coming of assessment-based pedagogy to legal education with mixed emotions.  I believe the relevant American Bar Association standards are as follows:

Standard 301. Objectives of Program of Legal Education

(a) A law school shall maintain a rigorous program of legal education that prepares its students, upon graduation, for admission to the bar and for effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession.

(b) A law school shall establish and publish learning outcomes designed to achieve these objectives.

Standard 302. Learning Outcomes

A law school shall establish learning outcomes that shall, at a minimum, include competency in the following:

(a) Knowledge and understanding of substantive and procedural law;

(b) Legal analysis and reasoning, legal research, problem-solving, and written and oral communication in the legal context;

(c) Exercise of proper professional and ethical responsibilities to clients and the legal system; and

(d) Other professional skills needed for competent and ethical participation as a member of the legal profession.

Standard 314. Assessment of Student Learning

A law school shall utilize both formative and summative assessment methods in its curriculum to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students.

Standard 315. Evaluation of Program of Legal Education, Learning Outcomes, and Assessment Methods

The dean and the faculty of a law school shall conduct ongoing evaluation of the law school’s program of legal education, learning outcomes, and assessment methods; and shall use the results of this evaluation to determine the degree of student attainment of competency in the learning outcomes and to make appropriate changes to improve the curriculum.

I suspect that legal historians are at different stages in their thinking about these standards.  I’m on sabbatical, and I'm sticking with denial for a few months longer.  I imagine that some have tried resistance, others have proceeded to acquiescence, and a few have made it all the way to welcoming the standards as an “opportunity for us to think anew and more carefully about what we want students to learn, how we teach those things, and how to assess whether students are learning them."

Of course, every legal history course is unique, like a snowflake.  I know mine are.  But perhaps enough commonalities exist to permit us to take a free ride on learn from each other.  Perhaps the AALS Section on Legal History will take up the issue.  Even though panels at the ASLH's annual meeting are best used for scholarly exchange, perhaps assessment merits an exception.  And perhaps a law review or legal history journal could host a symposium.

In any event, we’re offering Legal History Blog as a forum and clearinghouse on legal history and the assessment process.  At some point in the months ahead, I expect to report on my own experience of Georgetown’s rendezvous with destiny reaccreditation.  In the interim, if you're willing to share any insights, advice, or models, please send them to us.  I'm sure your legal history colleagues would be grateful.

Studying Roman Law: Juno, It’s More Useful than You’d Think

That's not our pun; blame the Guardian's headline writer.  The story includes the following quote from a former Latham & Watkins partner: “As a lawyer who practised in international, multi-jurisdictional litigation, I have seen first-hand how Roman law concepts are woven like a thread into fundamental aspects of cases I have been involved in, both as a matter of the private and public international law.”  Something for law-school based legal historians to keep in mind as our institutions implement the ABA's new, assessment-based accreditation standards.

Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs

[We’re abetting a campaign by the Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) to publicize its work.]

The Consortium, formed in 2003, is an organization for colleges and universities that have interdisciplinary programs geared toward undergraduate education about law and justice in the United States and internationally. The CULJP supports and promotes Legal Studies programs, Law and Society programs, Criminal Justice and Criminology programs, programs in Law and Justice Studies, and other relevant programs. We are a clearinghouse for information about teaching in and administering these programs. More information about the Consortium is available here; information about institutional membership can be found here.

The Consortium website maintains a list of undergraduate socio-legal programs (all such programs, not just member programs); if you are at such a program, or know of a program that should be included, please email [culjp.admnstrtr@gmail.com]. We also have lots of other great teaching and advising resources here, including syllabi, primary source links, undergraduate fellowships, etc.

[We also want] to spread the word about the following Consortium awards: the Teaching Innovation Award and the Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. The deadline for both is March 28, 2016.  Details [after the jump]; application information is available here.

The ABA/FJC Summer Institute for Teachers

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the Federal Judicial History Office of the Federal Judicial Center.]

The American Bar Association and the Federal Judicial Center will host the 11th Annual Summer Institute for Teachers from June 19th to June 24th in Washington, D.C. Designed especially for teachers of U.S. History, Government, Civics, and Law, the Federal Trials and Great Debates Summer Institute deepens participants’ knowledge of the federal judiciary and of the role the federal courts have played in key public controversies that have defined our constitutional and other legal rights. Participants will work closely throughout the week-long Institute with leading historians, federal judges, and curriculum consultants, focusing on three landmark federal trials using curriculum developed by the Federal Judicial Center. The cases that participants will study at the 2016 Institute are the Debs Case, the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, and the Rosenberg Trial.

Applications are currently being accepted. Here is the link to the ABA site for more information and to submit an application.  Participation will be limited to 20 teachers. Travel, lodging, and meal expenses will be reimbursed to Institute participants according to U.S. government per diem rates.  Applications must be postmarked by March 2, 2016.

Weekend Roundup

• On November 5-6, 2015, the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London, along with the London Centre for Social Studies, will host a conference on Fighting Femicide: Cultural and Legal Interventions. The conference organizers welcome participation by legal historians.

• From the Canadian Legal History blog: Congratulations to the winners of the Osgoode Society's annual prizes. The Peter Oliver Prize (for best published writing by a student) was awarded to Edward Cavanagh (University of Ottawa, Ph.D. candidate) and Tyler Wentzell (a recent graduate of the University of Toronto Law School). The R. Roy McMurtry Fellowship in Canadian Legal History went to Elizabeth Koester to support her studies at the University of Toronto. The Society awarded the John T. Saywell Prize in Constitutional Legal History to Hakeem O. Yusuf (University of Strathclyde Glasgow) for Colonial and Post-Colonial Constitutionalism in the Commonwealth: Peace, Order and Good Government.

•  If you use Twitter for the purpose of scholarly engagement, you might enjoy this post from The Junto on "Twittiquette." 

• The ABA's Silver Gavel winners have been announced.  

• Lindsay G. Robertson, the author of Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (Oxford University Press), has just been named the University of Oklahoma’s first Chickasaw Nation Native American Law Chair.

• Congratulations to John Bessler, University of Baltimore School of Law, whose The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution has just won the American Society of Legal Writers’ Scribes Book Award.  It has also been named the Gold Winner in the history category of the INDIEFAB Book Awards competition and First Prize winner in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century category of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Award competition.

• American, British, English and other legal history courses in American law schools: a view from the demimonde of for-profit, student-generated law outlines.  

• The July 2015 newsletter of the DC Circuit Historical Society is here.   Among other things, it includes information on tributes and eulogies for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson and Judge Louis Oberdorfer.

• From HistPhil: Maribel Morey (Clemson University) interviews Larry Kramer, constitutional historian and now President of the Hewlett Foundation.

• We've continued to update our post on historians and the Obergefell decision, here.

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

Weekend Roundup

• Twitterstorians have been hard at work on the #charlestonsyllabus, "a list of readings that educators can use to broach conversations in the classroom about the horrendous events that unfolded in Charleston, South Carolina on the evening of June 17, 2015." The list includes work by legal historians Sally Hadden, Dylan Penningroth, Christopher Waldrep, and others. Check it out here.  

• John Q. Barrett has announced on his “Jackson List” that Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University, “will deliver Chautauqua Institution’s eleventh annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States.  Professor Tribe will give the Jackson Lecture on Wednesday, July 8, 2015, at 4:00 p.m. in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy.” 

• In light of the Chief Justice Roberts's opinion in King v. Burwell, I'm indulging in a reprise link to my posts on NFIB, which likened the Chief Justice to Charles Evans Hughes .  While I'm at it, I'll note, as someone who studies the role of lawyers within political institutions, that, in accounting for the ACA's "more than a few examples of inartful drafting," Chief Justice Roberts put the blame where it belongs, on the legislators, not the staffs of the House and Senate's legislative counsels.  DRE

• The “best place to bone up on Chicago’s legal history”?  The Chicago Reader says it’s the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court archives.  “I’ve seen authors write biographies of Chicagoans, and they never came in to look at the court records,” [archivist Phil] Costello says. “I’m thinking, ‘I know we’ve got a probate file on that guy.’” 

• Check out the Irish Legal History Society's spiffy new website.  H/t: @Law&HistoryReview

• The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library has announced “a special digitization project made possible through the support of AT&T” that will bring “together for the first time the President's Master Speech File and the FDR Speech Audio Recordings and makes them available through FRANKLIN, the Library's online digital repository hosted by Marist College.” 

• Mark Wayne Podvia, West Virginia University College of Law, has posted a history of the Legal History and Rare Books Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries, written on the occasion of its 25th Anniversary.

•  ICYMI: "The Man Who Lost the Gideon Case: An Interview with Bruce R. Jacob," on HNN.

• On October 23, 2015, the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy will host a conference to mark the 30th anniversary of David Engel's The Oven Bird’s Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community.

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

A Remembrance of Stanley Kutler, by Donald Rogers

Donald Rogers

[This is the fourth in a series of posts in which the students of Stanley I. Kutler share memories of their mentor.  Donald Rogers is Adjunct Lecturer in History at Central Connecticut State University, Housatonic Community College, and Albertus Magnus College.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1983.  His dissertation was "The Rise of the Administrative Process: Industrial Safety Regulation in Wisconsin, 1880-1940."]

No sooner had I arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison history department in 1973 as a graduate student that I learned that Stanley Kutler was something of a force of nature.  My first contact came as one of his teaching assistants in 1974 when he was immersed in his post as editor of Reviews in American History and in his research on the manuscript that would later become his book The American Inquisition.  As a green, very green, graduate student, I found him in a large, cluttered office that—I soon learned—was testimony to his remarkable energy and wide-ranging scholarly interests.  From my view as I went on to become one of his doctoral students, many of my graduate colleagues mistook brusqueness for what was really a sign that Stanley was always very busy and passionate about his scholarly work.  “Passion” is exactly the right word for what I will recollect about him as a mentor:  passion for good historical craftsmanship, passion to be a scholarly producer, passion for getting to the bottom of things, and passion for his students.  I observed a semester of his packed undergraduate constitutional history course which kept all of the students in rapt attention with his analytical precision, enthusiasm and especially humor.  I appreciated the tight argumentation of his book Privilege and Creative Destruction, his book on the Charles River Bridge Case that he assigned for reading his graduate seminar.  I attended his press conference when he announced that news reports found him listed on the Nixon White House’s “enemies list,” an eventuality he declared would not dissuade him from investigating the history of the Watergate scandal, leading to his subsequent Freedom of Information suit and subsequent books The Wars of Watergate and Abuse of Power.  I certainly grew intellectually from our give-and-take as he shepherded me toward completion of my dissertation.  I benefitted from his support when he got me started as a newly-minted Ph. D. by appointing me as an instructor in UW’s American Institutions Program (which he headed) before I headed off into a terrible job market.  Despite my own ups and downs, he kept in touch with his always enthusiastic reports for ongoing projects.  I’ll remember Stanley Kutler as a ball of energy, a constant intellectual stimulus, and an unstoppable devotee for good constitutional history.

Remembrances of Stanley Kutler from Jon Teaford and Andrew King

Here are two more in a series of remembrances of Stanley I. Kutler by his students.  The first is from Jon C. Teaford, Professor Emeritus of History, Purdue University.  Professor Teaford received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1973.  His dissertation was “The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650-1825”

I was a graduate student working under Stanley Kutler in the early 1970s.  As has been too often the case over the past four decades, academic jobs were in short supply when I received my Ph.D. in 1973.  Moreover, I was relatively clueless about how to get a job or how to survive and get ahead in the academic world.  Stanley Kutler, however, came to the rescue.  He seemingly knew everyone in the history profession, and he was not reluctant to tell them all that they should hire me.  He was not one to shed his commitment to his graduate students once they had dotted the last "I" in their dissertations.  Instead, he was ready and willing to remain a mentor and aide.

I eventually obtained a tenure-track position, and throughout my years teaching United States Constitutional History I assigned Stanley Kutler's reader The Supreme Court and the Constitution.  Though I eventually left the field of legal history, I remained indebted to Stanley Kutler for his aid and guidance during the early years of my career when I very much needed the help he provided. 

The second is from Andrew King, Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.  Professor King received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1976.  His dissertation was “Law and Land Use in Chicago: A Prehistory of Modern Zoning.”

Andrew King

I remember Stan with fondness.  He served as my dissertation advisor at Wisconsin during the 1970s.  Stan was a wonderful major professor.  He was always on the alert to ease my life as a graduate student coming to school after service in Vietnam.  He made sure that I had access to whatever sources of financial aid were available.  I worked as his research and teaching assistant.  All too often, major professors neglect the more mundane aspects of a graduate student's life.  Stan did not.  He was helpful to me in more unorthodox ways.  For example, he convinced the History Department to consider my law degree as proof of competence in one of the "foreign languages" required by the program.  That certainly simplified my entrance into the Ph.D. program.  He helped me choose a dissertation topic  and then took care in selecting the members of my dissertation review committee to guarantee that there would be no problems at the oral examination.  He took an active interest in casting about for jobs when I went "on the market" and, correctly, urged me to take on the Daniel Webster project with Fred Konefsky.  In retrospect that turned out to be great advice.  I will always cherish the active support and encouragement Stan gave me in my career.

A Remembrance of Stanley Kutler, from William Wiecek

William M. Wiecek

[This is the second in a series of remembrances for Stanley I. Kutler by his students.  William M. Wiecek is the Congdon Professor of Public Law, Emeritus, Syracuse University College of Law.  Professor Wiecek received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1968.  His dissertation was “The Guarantee Clause of the United States Constitution: A Sleeping Giant.”]

Stanley Kutler's death is a melancholy milestone of sorts in the study of American constitutional history.  He was one of the last of the great mentors in the field.  Decades ago, Maeva Marcus began to worry about the impending loss of mentors who produced the faculty who today teach constitutional history in history departments and law schools.  (It is no consolation that a similar disappearance seems to be taking place in the public law subfield of political science.)  She responded by laboring indefatigably to create and sustain the Institute for Constitutional History, now housed jointly by the New-York Historical Society and the George Washington University Law School.  It remains to be seen whether this valiant effort can provide a substitute for the role played by great teachers like Kutler, Harold M. Hyman, Paul L. Murphy, and James G. Randall in mentoring the constitutional history teachers now reaching senior status and beginning to retire or pass from the scene.  Constitutional history courses have nearly disappeared from history department catalogues as intellectual currents in the field have swung in other directions.  Making matters worse, many of those teachers (myself included) moved over to law schools, enriching the intellectual life of their new homes but depriving undergraduates of the opportunity to explore the development of the Constitution.

These reflections are prompted by memories of Stan's first seminar in American constitutional history at the University of Wisconsin from 1965 to 1967.  Gordon Bakken, Michal Belknap, and I were Stan's original students.  Stan was at that time writing Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics (1968), and he invited us to share in that work.  The exchange of ideas in that seminar was particularly exciting because we knew that our seminar efforts were helping shape and enrich a book about to be published. After that our careers and research interests went in different directions.  Mike has become a leading scholar of legal aspects of the Cold War and McCarthyism, while Gordon went on to be the nation's foremost historian of the public and private law of the western states.  Stan first moved backwards in time to produce Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (1978) before finding his life's work in ferreting out the misdeeds of the Nixon White House (The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon [1990]; Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes [1997]).   

In the seminar as well as in his undergraduate classes, Stan was a dynamo of energy.  He was excited by doing history and cherished the opportunity that it provided him and us to think anew about the past. As a graduate teacher and mentor, that was his greatest gift to us.  Because of his dogged pursuit of the Nixon tapes, people who did not know him well assumed that he was just another anti-Nixon zealot.  The truth was more complicated and more interesting.  It was a point of pride to discover himself on Nixon's notorious "hit list."  But like all of us who study Nixon, he found the man fascinating, amusing, exasperating, even sympathetic to some degree.  Stan was above all a historian, determined to pursue the truth for its own sake, especially in new kinds of primary sources like the White House tapes. He was zealous, but his zeal was for the integrity of the past and its truthful exposition. 

The graceful tributes to Stan that have appeared in the weeks since his death chronicle his achievements and extol his stubborn struggles with those who would suppress historical truth by cutting off access to evidence and sources.  It is there, I think, that we find his most enduring legacy.  Stan would be pleased.

[Remembrances continue here.]

A Remembrance of Stanley Kutler, from Michal Belknap

[I've invited several of Stanley I. Kutler's students to share their memories of their mentor.  Here is a remembrance from Michal R Belknap, Earl Warren Professor of Law, California Western School of Law.  Professor Belknap received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1973.  His dissertation was “The Smith Act and the Communist Party: A Study in Political Justice."]

Michal R. Belknap

In the beginning there were only four of us.  When Stan Kutler arrived at Wisconsin in 1964 as an associate professor the department cobbled together a seminar for him. Bill Wiecek, was a new Harvard JD and I had just received my bachelors degree from UCLA.  Both of us had expressed some interest in law and the Constitution.  The department gave us to Stan, along with Susan Previant Lee, who would eventually abandon history for newspaper writing,  and Gordon Bakken, who still had a few credits to go to finish his BA at Madison.  Not a lot to work with.  But with the energy and infectious enthusiasm  for which he would become noted (and a great deal of the hard work he demanded from us), Stan Kutler managed to turn this unpromising little band into a group of pretty productive historians.

Two years later Bill, Gordon, and I had all passed our prelims.  They were soon well on the way to writing their dissertations.  I, on the other hand, was off for a two-year hitch in the Army, the result of an ROTC scholarship that had helped to pay for my undergraduate education. When I returned, Bill and Gordon were heading out to first jobs, Bill at Missouri and Gordon at Cal State Fullerton.  About all I had to show for the intervening two years was an Army Commendation Medal for (forgive me Stan) protecting Richard Nixon. 

While I was away, things  had changed quite a bit.  The tiny band I had joined in 1965 had grown into a large and vigorous seminar.  As its senior member, I was supposed to be writing a dissertation.  But I did not even have a topic.  I started proposing ones I thought would be interesting and Stan started shooting them down, one after another.  Then one day he took me to lunch.  The Chicago Conspiracy trial was dominating the news, and he suggested political trials might make a good topic.  That sounded much more exciting than the ones I had been proposing.  But after a week or two of reading, I concluded it was just too big.  There did seem to be a lot of parallels, however, between what was then going on in Chicago and the 1949 conspiracy trial of the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States.  Unlike most of my previous ideas (which in all honesty were duds), that one appealed to Stan.  Little did either of us realize that he had guided me to a topic that would come to dominate my academic career and to which, after a book and numerous articles on Dennis v. United States, I have now returned to write a revisionist book attacking my own earlier work.

While immensely productive, my mentor-student relationship with Stan Kutler was not always an easy one.  In 1970 the history TAs went out on strike.  Because I was on a fellowship and had not been a TA since before I left for the Army, I was ineligible for membership in the union.  But my roommate was a shop steward, and when he asked me to participate in the picketing, I agreed.  I did so  despite being aware that Professor Kutler was opposed to the strike.  I considered joining the TAs who were picketing 4:00 a.m food delivers to the Lakeshore Dorms, a safe demonstration of solidarity with the union that I knew he would never ever learn about. But that seemed like a rather cowardly way to demonstrate my support for the strikers.  So instead I joined a group of  TAs who were picketing the building in which Stan’s office was located.  To put it mildly, that did not go over well with my mentor.  After reading me the riot act, he threw me out of his office.  For several agonizing hours, I was sure my academic career was over.  Then the phone rang.  It was Stan, calling to apologize.

Rather than being over, our relationship grew closer and more productive as the years passed.  It seemed Stan was always coming up with ways to make my ideas into something better.  In my book on Dennis, I had included a fragmented and unexciting discussion of the disciplinary actions taken against the defendants’ lawyers.  In Stan’s hands that subject became a chapter in his prize-winning book, The American Inquisition.  My dry academic monograph on the Court martial of Army Lieutenant William Calley for Vietnam’s My Lai Massacre inspired him to write an off-Broadway play. That too was a vast improvement on what I had done.

The last time I ever saw him, Stan was still at it.  Initially, he greeted my idea of doing a second book on Dennis with what could charitably be called extreme skepticism.  Later, although not in good health, he came all the way over from Madison to Milwaukee, where I was presenting a paper on the subject at the Marquette Law School.  We had dinner, and as always, he was full of suggestions about how I could improve what I was planning on doing.  That dinner was quintessentially Professor Stanley Kutler, and it is a memory I will treasure forever.

[Remembrances continue here.]

Why Reconstruction (Still) Matters

ICYMI, Eric Foner's very teachable op-ed in today's New York Times is here.

Online Aids for Teaching Your Book

This post is not about sharing my book-related experiences but soliciting yours. As Sally Gordon mentioned in an earlier post, the series in which my book appears, the ASLH's Studies in Legal History, is interested in developing online materials to facilitate teaching legal history books. We've started conversations about using my book as a test run so I'd be eager to hear from readers of the blog if you have any ideas about what types of resources would be useful or if you know of model websites that do online history teaching aids well.

Thank you in advance for your suggestions. You can comment here or email me (slee@law.upenn.edu) or Sarah Barringer Gordon (sbgordon@law.upenn.edu).

Query: Online Resources for Teaching the Scholarly Monograph

[As a former editor of  Studies in Legal History, I'm always interested in thinking about how to teach scholarly monographs in law-school seminars and upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes in the arts and sciences.  The current editors have asked us to post the following query, which seeks advice, particularly from teachers of such courses, about what authors might provide online to help them teach their books. Although this idea has been percolating for some time, it happens that our current Guest Blogger, Sophia Lee, wrote the book that the editors propose for a trial run.]

The editors of Studies in Legal History, the official book series of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH), are interested in developing teaching materials based on books published in the series.  We are committed to producing materials that are both useful and interactive, posting them on our website (aslh.net/bookseries).  Thanks to generous funding from ASLH, we have the opportunity to explore different formats in the interest of generating lively and thought-provoking course materials. 

We seek your advice and counsel on how best to achieve these goals. We would value your suggestions both on how best to produce such materials, and who might have useful experience in what works best.  We hope to include both video and documentary materials (with proper permissions, of course).  Our test will be run with Sophia Lee, whose book The Workplace Constitution was published recently, and our hope is to generate a format that will be useful to any author who would like to use it.

Please send us your suggestions for teaching materials and tell us what you have found works most reliably.  We hope to have a first set of materials by the end of the spring semester, and look forward to working with authors to help spread the use of legal history in undergraduate, graduate, and professional courses.

[Comments here are welcome, but in any event please send your suggestions to one of the current editors, Sarah Barringer Gordon: sbgordon@law.upenn.edu.]