Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

[We have the following announcement.  DRE] 

The Legal History and Rare Books Special Interest Section (LHRB) of the American Association of Law Libraries, in cooperation with The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., is conducting its annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition.  Full- and part-time students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in law, history, library science, or related fields are eligible to enter.  Members of the Class of 2026 are also eligible.  Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives.  Criteria on which papers will be judged include originality of topic or approach, quality and depth of research and analysis, clarity of presentation, and contribution to the field.  The winner will receive a $1,000 prize from The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., and will present the essay at an LHRB sponsored webinar.  The authors of the winning and runner-up essays will have the opportunity to publish their essays in LHRB’s online scholarly journal Unbound: A Review of Legal History and Rare Books.  The Competition electronic submission deadline is 11:59pm EDT, Tuesday, 30 June 2026.
 
Full Competition details are available at the Cohen Essay Contest: Full Explanation web page, and the Application Form is available at the Cohen Essay Contest: Application web page.  Questions may be sent to John Moreland at JMoreland@phillipslytle.com.  The Competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, late Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School and recognized as “one of the towering figures of late 20th century law libraries.”  His scholarly work focused on legal research, rare law books, and historical bibliography.

William Twining (1935-2025)

 [We are grateful to David Sugarman for this notice.  DRE]

Professor William Twining, a leading figure in the world of legal education and scholarship, died peacefully at home on October 9 aged 91.  Twining’s work on Karl Llewellyn, with whom he had studied in the late 1950’s, notably, The Karl Llewellyn Papers (University of Chicago Law School, 1968) and Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (Cambridge University Press 1973, 2nd edn 2012), challenged many misconceptions concerning Llewellyn’s ideas and the legal realist movement and set in train a significant re-evaluation of their nature and significance. Twining donated his private collection of documents, published and unpublished, related to legal realism and pragmatism, to the Perelman Centre, Brussels, for scholars to use in the future: Le Centre Perelman - Centre Perelman.

For a more detailed treatment of Twining’s life and work, see https://www.slsa.ac.uk/sln-online-content#twining

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization: a symposium has begun on Marital Privilege, by Serena Mayeri (Penn Carey Law).   

• Over at Notice & Comment: a symposium has begun on Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America, by Peter Conti-Brown & Sean Vanatta.

• What an interesting way to encourage student interest in legal historical research!  American Legal Histories is an exhibit at the Lillian Goldman Law Library of sources used in Yale University’s historical collections by students in YLS’s American Legal History course, “each week in class and over the semester in their final research papers. The exhibit highlights a document chosen by each student from their research in primary source collections, online and in person, from Yale and elsewhere.  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society, the White House Historical Association, and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, hosts the 2025 National Heritage Lecture on Thursday, October 9, at 6:00 PM at historic Decatur House.  Douglas Brinkley will lecture on Presidential Evolution: A History of Executive Orders Over 47 Presidencies.

• 
  Jill Lepore is appearing on various podcasts, including Dahlia Lithwick's Amicus and Kara Shwisher's On on her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (Norton). The WaPo review is here.  

• NYU Law's post on Sarah Seo, who recently joined its faculty (NYU).  

• Bob Bauer, Richard Pildes and Samuel Issacharoff have launched the NYU Law Democracy Project, which seeks to engage,"along many dimensions and from diverse ideological perspectives," the challenge of the "dissatisfaction with democratic government [that] has been pervasive for the last decade throughout the West."

• On the back end of the latest episode of Strict Scrutiny, hosts Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shaw speak with Justin Driver (Yale Law) about The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education.  

• You can always check in on the most recent, digitally published, and open-access articles and book reviews in Law and History Review at its First View page at the Cambridge University Press. 

•  Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect is now streaming on PBS.  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society's recording of John Q. Barrett's lecture, “Away Without Leave but Back in Washington, Briefly: Nazi Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson on the Road to Nuremberg, September 1945,” is now available on the Society's YouTube site.

• Gerard Magliocca, the winner of the Erwin N. Griswold Prize of the Supreme Court Historical Society, will discuss his new book Washington’s Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington at the Supreme Court of the United States on September 25, 2025 at 6:00 PM at the Supreme Court of the United States.

• Over at Just Security: my Georgetown Law colleagues Marty Lederman and John Mikhail's ongoing series of posts on birthright citizenship.  DRE 

• Lawbook Exchange's September 2025 list of Scholarly Law and Legal History is here.   

• We are not the first to note the irony that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Human Rights Violator Law Division is advertising for a historian.  Julia Rose Kraut's discussion of the history of ideological exclusion and deportation suggests that they been at it for a while (Unsung History).

• ICYMI: American Historical Association Sends Letter in Support of the State Historical Society of Iowa Research Center (AHA).  A century later, the gunshots from the historic Ossian Sweet house still echo (Detroit Free Press).

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

Duke Human Rights Archive

We've been told that the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University is offering research travel grants to work with the Human Rights Legal Collections of the Duke Human Rights Archive.   The DHRA director explains that the archive "has strong collections on legal history related to immigration law, international human rights law, Guantanamo, Attica, and the death penalty," detailed here.  For example, it has the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney's files on its pro bono representation of Bahraini detainees at Guantánamo Bay and the papers of Juan E. Méndez, who served as the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture and the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide. 

--Dan Ernst  H/t: AZB

Weekend Roundup

• Over at the New Republic: John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) reviews Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024). 
  

• In the Talking about Methods podcast series over at Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, Linda Mulcahy talks to Michael Lobban, All Souls College, Oxford, about working with archives as a legal historian.

• Writing for Justia: Rodger Citron (Touro University, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center) on "The Continuing Relevance of The Rosenberg Espionage Case—for Judge Aileen Cannon."
  

• The commentaries continue on the U.S. Supreme Court's use of history (and various reflections on the use of history in judicial decisionmaking) in the recently decided Second Amendment case United States v. Rahimi: Eric Segall at Dorf on Law; Mark Tushnet at Balkinization; Jennifer Tucker at CNN; Saul Cornell at Slate.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the law librarians of Congress): LGBTQ+ Legal History in the U.S. Reports Collection. 
  

• "Australia’s first civilian jury was entirely female. Here’s how ‘juries of matrons’ shaped our legal history," by Alice Neikirk, University of Newcastle (The Conversation).
  

• From Time's "Made by History": Supreme Court Opinions Don’t Have to Be the End of the Fight for Justice, by Robert Tsai.  A Mistake in the Early 1970s Still Haunts Supreme Court Ethics, by Michael Bobelian.  (Yup, it involved Abe Fortas.)
  

• Balkinization is hosting a symposium on Mark A. Graber's Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform after the Civil War (University of Kansas Press, 2023).  The first posts are by Anne Twitty, David S. Schwartz, and Evan D. Bernick.
  

• In “What’s Left of Originalism?” Andrew Koppelman reviews Jack M. Balkin’s Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  

• Queens University has noted the prizes won by two of its doctoral candidates.  Michael Borsk received two awards for his article, “Conveyance to Kin: Property, Preemption, and Indigenous Nations in North America, 1763-1822,” William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 1 (January 2023): 87-124.  They are the Peter Oliver Prize in Canadian Legal History from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, awarded to the best published work by a student, and the 2024 Jean-Marie Fecteau Prize by the Canadian Historical Association, awarded to the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal.  Margaret Ross won the best article prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality for her article, “‘Your Town Is Rotten’: Prostitution, Profit, and the Governing of Vice in Kingston, Ontario, 1860s–1920s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 32 (May 2023).
  

• Over at Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog: Otto Vervaart on Viewing Roman Slavery from Bonn.
  

• ICYMI:  Washington [State's] legal history, including West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, captured in murals for a Wenatchee courtroom (NCWLIFE). John A. Lupton on John Doe and Richard Roe.  Mark Tushnet thinks some more about originalism (after stopping trying to make sense of originalism) (X).  Blake Emerson puts Jarkesy in historical context (Marketplace).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• The Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at New York University invites applications for Visiting Fellows-in-Residence for the 2024-25 academic year. "Ideal candidates are legal scholars with sabbatical funding who seek to undertake research and writing, organize events, and otherwise collaborate on projects focused on women’s rights and gender equity and justice."
  
  
• Judge Ryan Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, will be teaching Constitution in the Early Republic next semester at Berkeley Law.  H/t: Orin Kerr.
  

• The latest episode in the Stanford Legal podcast series is From Sumptuary Laws to Senate Suits: Dress Codes in History and Today.
  

• The Oral History Center at the University of California, Berkeley, has announced "the launch of the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project, featuring 100 hours of oral history interviews with 23 Japanese American narrators who are survivors and descendants of two World War II-era sites of incarceration." 
  

• More on “Legacies of 1619: Law and Race at Jamestown,” a public education project, in which the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation has partnered with the William & Mary Law School’s Legal History Society, a student organization advised by Thomas McSweeney.  The public historian Mark Summers explains that the project will “connect programs looking at the early days of race-based slavery in Virginia and the First Assembly, the first representative governing body to meet in the Americas” (Virginia Gazette).
  

• “Himanshu Agarwal, an associate professor at Jindal Global Law School; Sebastian Spitz, a doctoral student in Sociology at Harvard; and Rohit Sharma, a researcher at the Mittal Institute”  “presented archival research on the history of punishment in India during a webinar panel Monday morning hosted by Harvard’s South Asia Institute. ... The event was moderated by Adaner Usmani, an assistant professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard (Harvard Crimson).
  

• The Law Society of Ireland’s Barry Whelan will speak about the life of Michael Noyk, “legal advisor to Michael Collins during the War of Independence” and “one of the principal solicitors acting on behalf of arrested Republican figures,” on Wednesday, January 24 (6pm to 8pm) at the Moya Quinlan Lecture Theatre, Education Centre, Law Society of Ireland, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7 (Law Society Gazette).
  

• ICYMI: Prosecuting a Wobbly in Iowa in the 1920s (Cedar Rapids Gazette). Amanda Levendowski on Barbara Ringer, from 2014, but on the 50th anniversary of Ringer's appointment as the first female Register of Copyrights (The Atlantic, via Internet Archive).  Joshua Getzler joins Cornerstone Barristers as an associate member (Local Government Lawyer).

• Update: Malta's Notarial Registers Archive has been inaugurated (Malta Business Weekly).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Bianca Premo, Florida International University, discusses her research on the legal history of the Spanish Empire here.
  

• Zach Jonas, a recent graduate of Georgetown Law, discusses his article “FDR's Court-packing and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” published in the July 2023 issue of the Journal of Supreme Court History, with the Journal’s editor Timothy S. Huebner in the Supreme Court Historical Society’s YouTube series, Breaking History.
  

• Over at Legal History Miscellany, Daniel Gosling and Charlotte Smith, Legal Records Specialists at The National Archives, discuss the documents on display during the inaugural Legal Records Jamboree last June and “reflect on the different types of legal record held at The National Archives.”  The first post is here.
  

• Notre Dame Law's notice of a book event for Christian Burset's Empire of Laws is here. 
  

• On October 26, Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago Law School, will deliver The Warren Court v. The Roberts Court, the fall 2023 Annual Distinguished Lecture at Boston University. 

• Kate Morgan has sold The Walnut Tree–Women, Violence and the Law: A Hidden History to Mudlark, an imprint of HarperCollins.  MudLark describes the book as “a vivid work of historical non-fiction [which] explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law" (Bookseller).
  

• James A. Deeken, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and an adjunct lecturer at SMU’s Dedman School of Law, reviews A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court by A. C. Pritchard and Robert B. Thompson in the Securities Regulation Law Journal.
  

• A recording of that "Town Hall" on the modern American Presidency at the National Constitution Center is now available online.  
  

• The NRA's Institute for Legislative Action has a  notice of Robert J. Cottrol and Brannon P. Denning’s To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment University Press of Kansas, 2023).
  

• ICYMI: Mark Brown, Capital University Law School, on DJT and Section 3 (Justitia). Jeffery Tyler Syck, University of Pikeville, thinks “the time has come for the right to discover the greatness of the New Deal and to improve it” (The American Conservative).
  

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

A History and Inventory of the Records of the New York State Supreme Court

With financial help from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the New York State Court of Appeals and the New York State Archives have published a second edition of "Duely & Constantly Kept:” A History of the New York Supreme Court and an Inventory of Its Records, 1691–1847:

In 1691 the Assembly of New York Colony passed an act establishing a Supreme Court of Judicature and provided that the court should be "Duely & Constantly Kept" at times to be provided. After over 350 years of political revolution and independence from Great Britain, four State constitutions, and four major reorganizations of the judiciary, the Supreme Court continues as the State’s court of “general, original jurisdiction." Extending the meaning of the phrase, a comprehensive collection of New York’s earliest court records, covering the period of 1690 to 1847, are now "duly and constantly kept" at the State Archives.

--Dan Ernst

On Sources, Silences, & Research Spaces

     When white Americans and European immigrants began to settle on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, they were so unnerved by the deathly silence, broken only by the keening wind, that some of them went mad. Or at least this is the proposition investigated in a recent article by paleoanthropologist Alex Velez. Since he neither fully replicated their sensory experiences (omitting howling wolves as well as the creatures that shared settlers' sod homes) nor considered the cultural and historical context that would have conditioned their interpretations of said experiences, his study doesn't really explain the reports of "prairie madness."

    But it does raise questions about what counts as silence, how silences are created, and how that relates to the physical spaces in which we find ourselves. Scholars have been, well, voluble about silences in the archives over the past several years. Therefore when I was writing my book The Dreadful Word and attempting to mentally reconstruct eighteenth-century criminal speech prosecutions, I was acutely aware of whom I was largely not hearing: white women, indigenous people, and African-descended people. Why were their voices so rarely in these records? And what would this silence have signified in eighteenth-century courts?

    I also began wondering where, if not in prosecutions, I might hear these people's profane, abusive, or vulgar speech, or alternately, what sources might record their legally or politically significant behavior. I'm currently attending the Bright Institute at Knox College, a summer workshop for professors of early American history at liberal arts colleges. This year's theme is material culture, and in the course of our discussions I've had occasion to consider an inherited cupboard, a gifted dress, and stolen cloth as potential sources for legal history, particularly when trying to better hear the voices of women and enslaved people.

    The spaces where our sources for legal history exist is especially on my mind this summer, as joyful tweets about "returning to the archive at last!" pop up in my timeline. These tweets are often accompanied by a photograph of a repository of documents, text-based sources with which legal historians are perhaps most comfortable. I intend to work in just such an archive in a few weeks. But I'm also thinking about what spaces might hold other kinds of sources that allow different voices to be heard. I'm wondering about the implications of marginalized people using objects to exercise legal power, and what it would mean to write their actions into the story of colonial New England.

    None of these ideas is fully fleshed out; I'm essentially sitting in my sod house, listening to the wind and the wolves, trying to sort out my thoughts (without all the settler colonialism, I hope). I am beginning work on my next book, focusing on women's testimony in eighteenth-century New England courts. I am especially interested in the kinds of knowledge and expertise they brought to legal settings (both civil and criminal), how they established their credibility, and how the nature and extent of their participation in court business changed over time.

    This is my final guest post for LHB. Thanks again to Dan Ernst for offering me the opportunity to guest blog this past month; I've really enjoyed the experience. 

--Kristin A. Olbertson

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.)
  

• 
  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.
  

• 
  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.