Weekend Roundup

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts has posted the podcast Litchfield Law School’s Influence on NY State Bench & Bar and a Young Nation.  Host David L. Goodwin, Society Trustee, interviews Paul DeForest Hicks. 
  

• Joseph D. Kearney, Marquette Law, and Thomas W. Merrill, Columbia Law, “discuss the shenanigans that ultimately gave the city and the state of Illinois one of its most priceless parcels of land and preserves it for public use” in a podcast on the ABA Journal’s Legal Talk Network.  They are the authors of  Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Cornell University Press).
  

• The abstracts for papers in the Asian Legal History Conference, July 24-25, are here.
  

• Congratulations to William & Mary Assistant Professor of History Brianna Nofil, the recipient of the 61st annual Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians for her dissertation, “Detention Power: Jails, Camps, and the Origins of Immigrant Incarceration, 1900-2002.”  (More.)
  

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  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: From Disestablishment to Dartmouth College v. Woodward: How Virginia's Fight over Religious Freedom Shaped the History of American Corporations, by Alyssa Penick, and Policing, Profits, and the Rise of Immigration Detention in New York's “Chinese Jails,” by Brianna Nofil.
  

• More on those indexes to those unpublished Office of Legal Counsel opinions, on Just Security.
  

• More CRT: The New Hampshire attorney general says that “teaching about the country’s history of slavery, its racist Jim Crow Laws, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the modern Black Lives Matter movement won’t violate state law even if those lessons make students uncomfortable, according to legal advice from the state Attorney General’s Office" (Concord Monitor).  
  

• And still more: Over 140 organizations, have signed onto this Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism in American History, authored by American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and PEN America. 

• From the History News Network: Ronald A. Smith (Penn State University), "How Historians Convinced SCOTUS that the NCAA's Idea of Amateurism is a Myth."
  

• We recently discovered the "Now & Then" podcast, hosted by historians Joanne Freeman (Yale University) and Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College). For a particularly relevant recent episode, checkout "Judging the Supreme Court."   

• The Law Library of Congress invites you to a webinar on federal statutes.
  

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Adam R. Shapiro, "When opponents decry critical race theory, they’re really fighting against change: the lessons of the Scopes trial for today."
  

• Fire in the White House!  At 7 PM EDT on July 28, the Elk Rapids Area Historical Society hosts a live stream of Craig G. Wright, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, discussing the fire that gutted the West Wing and ruined the Oval Office on Christmas Eve, 1929.

• For anyone working on socio-legal history and technology: check out the new Law and Society Fellowship at the Simons Institute at Berkeley.

• ICYMI: George Thomas on America’s Imperfect Founding (The Bulwark). A notice of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero, by Peter S. Canellos (Courier Journal). Woman suffrage and Prohibition in Iowa (Cedar Rapids Gazette).  The Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project’s first historic marker recognizes “local gay rights activist Bob Uplinger,” whose battle in an entrapment case contributed to decriminalization in New York (Buffalo Rising).
  

• Update: Colbert King on Karen Hastie Williams (WaPo).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Guestblogger update: due to unforeseen circumstances, we'll be taking a rain check on Laurie Wood's posts this month. We look forward to welcoming Laurie back at a later date.

• Over at Riesenfeld Rare Books at Minnesota: the Law Library was recently honored with an award from the American Association of Law Libraries for the fall 2020 digital exhibit, "Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice: Selected Materials from the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center."  

• Congratulations to Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University, for winning the John Hope Franklin Prize of the Law and Society Association for her article “Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave,” and to recent LHB Guest Blogger Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Duke University for winning LSA’s James Willard Hurst Prize for A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  More.
  

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  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: The Conservative Press and the Interwar Origins of First Amendment Lochnerism, by Sam Lebovic; and The Enigma of a Taiping Fugitive: The Illusion of Justice and the Political Offence Exception” in Extradition from Hong Kong, by Jenny Huangfu Day.

• Nicholas Bagley, Philip Hamburger, Jennifer Mascott, Nicholas Parrillo, and Judge Neomi Rao discuss originalism and the nondelegation doctrine on the Federalist Society's YouTube channel.
  

• "The Tamil Nadu National Law University will be hosting the second All India Legal History Congress on May 21 and 22" (The Hindu).
  

• The Law and Humanities Workshop of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, will host a symposium on Eric Nelson's The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God on Wednesday, June 16th 2021, 16:30 Jerusalem / 09:30 EST, with Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study; Paul Horwitz, University of Alabama; Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya; and Micah J. Schwartzman, University of Virginia.  Register here.
  

• ICYMI: "Royal archives that we pay for but aren’t allowed to read: a brief history" (LSE British Politics and Policy).
  

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

Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair

Queen Caroline (NYPL)

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

"Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair," the joint exhibition of Yale University's Lewis Walpole Library and Lillian Goldman Law Library, is now available online.

Drawing on the Lewis Walpole Library's strengths in graphic satire and the Law Library's collections of trial accounts and illustrated legal texts, "Trial by Media" documents the media frenzy provoked two centuries ago by the attempt of King George IV of England to divorce his consort Queen Caroline on the grounds of adultery. The items range from mocking caricatures to political screeds and sober, journalistic accounts. Today these sources serve as a lens for studying gender roles, class divisions, publishing, political satire, and British politics.

In addition to digital text and images of the Fall 2019 exhibition, the digital version includes a collection of ten scholarly essays and a bibliography. The essays include:

-- Andrew Bricker, "Between Words and Images: Visual Satire, Libel Law and the Queen Caroline Affair"
-- Jocelyn Harris, "Jane Austen, Caroline of Brunswick, and the Prince of Wales"
-- William Anthony Hay, "Robert Cruikshank, A Scene in the New Farce of the Lady and the Devil, June 1820"
-- Richard Kopley, "Caroline and Edgar Allan Poe’s 'The Purloined Letter'"
-- Ryan Martins, "The Legal Legacy of the Queen's Trial: The Rise and Fall of Caroline's Rule"
-- Kristin Samuelian, "Looking at the Case against Her: Intertextuality in Queen Caroline Prints"
-- Mark Schoenfield, "Henry Brougham Per(for)ming the Defense"
-- Simon Stern, "John Bull, Public Sentiment and the Reasonable Man"
-- Dana Van Kooy, "The Queen Caroline Affair as a Theatrical and Dramatic Spectacle"
-- Susannah Walker, "TRIAL IN ABSENTIA? Criminal Proceedings and Public Personae"

A special attraction of the online exhibit is a digital reproduction of the Humphrey Shop Album, created by prominent London satiric print publisher George Humphrey (1773?-1831?) to market prints to his clients. Virtually all of its 131 hand-colored prints are contemporary satires of the Queen Caroline scandal by artists such as George Cruikshank, Robert Cruikshank, and Theodore Lane. The survival of this shop album in its original binding is itself extraordinary, as most such albums were broken up and sold as individual prints by later dealers. The album is one of the treasures of the Lewis Walpole Library.

"Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair" was co-curated by Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library. The online exhibition was designed by Kristen McDonald of the Lewis Walpole Library.

More Than a Contract II, Premo with J. Mansilla

In the last blog, we discussed how improvised legal deals made far from notarial offices helped the inhabitants of Lima get back on their feet again after a massive earthquake and tidal wave in 1687. But even in ordinary times, informal tratos were recognized as legally—and socially-- binding. (cont'd)

Cartoonists on Court Packing, 1937

With Court packing in the news, LHB readers might have occasion to consult this on-line collection of editorial cartoons from 1937, when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried his hand at it.  We have not definitely identified the creator of the the site (last updated in 1997), but the Paul Bachorz, identified as a contact was, I believe, a former Peace Corp worker and US Navy Seabee who taught social studies at Niskayuna High School for thirty-four years before retiring in 2001.  He died in 2010.  The staff at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum confirms that the originals reside in the Library’s Basil O’Connor Collection.  H/t: LK.