Weekend Roundup

• In Law & Liberty, Dennis Weiboldt (J.D., Ph.D. candidate, Notre Dame) writes about "Bob Jones's Warning." "By recalling the circumstances under which Bob Jones University v. United States reached the Court, both conservatives and progressives will find lessons about the perils that accompany the aggressive use of executive power to reform American colleges and universities." 

• 
  Rohit De and Ornit Shani have received the 2026 ICON-S Book Prize to historians for Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History (American Bazaar). 

• The Docket's interview of Anna O. Law about her book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2026) Ilya Somin's Jotwell review of the book. 

•  An update on and review of the Constitutional History Project of the American Historical Association (AHA).    

• Regnat Populus: Digitizing 190 Years of Arkansas Constitutional History opened at the Mullins Library on the University of Arkansas campus (KUAF). 

•  The Morris/Sussex Vicinage of New Jersey Courts recently opened a self-guided exhibit on more than 270 years of Morris County's legal and civic history.

• On September 10 and 11, Lafayette College will host Democracy: Past, Present, and Future, a symposium featuring plenary talks by Hélène Landemore, political science at Yale, and Akhil Reed Amar, YLS, with a series of panel discussions, including more than twenty members of the Lafayette faculty.  

• The June 2026 issue of the Journal of American History has two articles of special interest to legal historians: The Empire of Military Necessity: General Orders No. 100, Atrocity, and the Law of Occupation between the Civil and Philippine Wars, by Justin F. Jackson and H. R. Haldeman, Dynastic Politics in California, and the Dismissal of University of California President Clark Kerr by Nick Fischer. 

• A series of satirical paintings of legal professionals by "the contemporary artist and fabulist Cassou."

• Lawbook Exchange's July catalog of Scholarly Law & Legal History. 

• ICYMI: David Blight on DJT and the Smithsonian (NYT).  Michael Dorf on Historical Analogies in Second and Seventh Amendment Cases (Dorf on Law).  Noah Feldman says that the Supreme Court’s originalism is dead, dead, dead (Seattle Times).  Lawyers Should Spend More Time Studying Legal History (Above the Law).  White House Defends 1882 Immigration Law Excluding Chinese Immigrants (Forbes).  A history of justices testifying before Congress (SCOTUSblog). What the American Founders Did Was a Reluctant Revolution: An Interview with Lee J. Strang (Hungarian Conservative).

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

CLH 14:1

Comparative Legal History 14:1 (2026) has been published. 

Editorial
David Schorr & Agustín Parise

Comparative law today – tomes, themes, trends
Ralf Michaels

This essay surveys recent themes and trends in comparative law scholarship, with a particular eye towards the connections between comparative law and legal history. The author observes a significant movement towards encyclopaedisation, marked by a proliferation of handbooks and encyclopaedias that attempt to systematise knowledge, though these works often struggle with comprehensiveness and persistent Eurocentrism. While traditional treatises continue to show fealty to established functionalist models, there is an observable shift away from the historical dominance of private law towards holistic, post-doctrinal, and interdisciplinary approaches. A primary concern raised is the ‘turn to method’, where the discipline has become increasingly self-absorbed with methodological pluralism and theory, sometimes resulting in ‘method without comparison’. Furthermore, the survey highlights the vital emergence of decolonial and postcolonial scholarship originating from the Global South, facilitating South-South comparison and challenging the field's colonial and Eurocentric foundations. Finally, the author examines the uneasy relationship between comparative law and legal history, questioning whether the discipline can move beyond viewing legal systems as separate entities towards a more integrated world law approach.

Early conflict-of-laws rules: Vietnam’s Lê Code (1483) in East Asian and global contexts
Thào Anh Hoàng

This article examines one of the earliest codified conflict-of-laws rules in East Asia and its overlooked reception in Vietnam. While systematic codifications of conflict rules in Europe developed much later, the Tang Code of China (652 CE) had already incorporated a provision regulating disputes involving foreigners within its territory. This rule was subsequently received in the legal systems of several Sino-sphere countries, including Vietnam. Vietnam’s Lê Code, in force from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, preserved this conflict rule even after its removal from later Chinese codes beginning in the thirteenth century. This renders the Lê Code the only known continuation of the Tang conflict-of-laws provision.

Long mistranslated as a criminal clause concerning ‘minority ethnic groups’, the relevant provision in the Lê Code is re-evaluated here as a conflict-of-laws rule applicable to both civil and criminal matters. This reinterpretation is situated within the context of East Asian legal culture with a functional equivalence approach. The study shows that Vietnamese law should not be viewed only as a marginal recipient of Chinese legal influence, but rather as a key site where an early conflict-of-laws rule was preserved, adapted, and given historical significance within the development of conflict-of-laws regulations across different jurisdictions. The paper also offers a comparative analysis with other legal traditions of the same period as Tang law, including those of early medieval Europe and the Islamic world.

Ius commune, Venetian governance, and Croatian Glagolitic culture: testaments from the countryside of Šibenik in the early modern period (1637–1713)
Henrik-Riko Held

In the article, I discuss the entanglement of ius commune and Croatian Glagolitic culture under the auspices of Venetian rule in the early modern period. I analyse 222 testaments written in the Croatian language and Glagolitic script between 1637 and 1713 by Glagolitic priests in the countryside of Šibenik, on the eastern Adriatic coast, then under Venetian rule. I address in particular the terminology employed, as well as the structure of the testaments. I compare them with models found elsewhere in Europe, as evidenced by relevant notarial formularies. Finally, I examine the issue of the validity of testaments composed by ostensibly unauthorised persons (parish priests).

The Polish Blackstone: an examination of nineteenth-century Polish scholars’ interpretations of Blackstone and his Commentaries
Lukasz Jan Korporowicz

The principal goal of this article is to address the reception of William Blackstone's legal thought and the awareness of his contributions within the context of nineteenth-century Polish legal scholarship. Despite the considerable differences between English and Polish legal traditions, the limited proficiency in the English language within Poland, and the relatively gradual evolution of Polish legal thought, Blackstone's works were acknowledged by academic circles in Poland in the nineteenth century. Over time, this awareness manifested in direct engagement with certain aspects of Blackstone's perspectives. Nonetheless, the temporal disparity between Blackstone's period of influence and the evolution of legal scholarship in partitioned Poland significantly limited the practical opportunities for the integration and application of Blackstonian jurisprudence.

Re-enacting the judicial philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Saunders v Vautier and Claflin v Claflin compared
Ann Mumford

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sat on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 1889, when, in the case of Claflin v Claflin, he joined the decision that a trust may not be modified if the intention of the testator would be undermined. Claflin rejected Lord Cottenham’s reasoning in Saunders v Vautier that, under certain circumstances, beneficiaries may compel the termination of the trust and transfer the property to them. Claflin v Claflin and Saunders v Vautier are perhaps the two most famous cases in Anglo-American Equity. Through a detailed examination of manuscripts, this article offers a comparative expansion of the US and English histories, and particularly considers the role played by Holmes. Re-enactment theory offers the possibility of creating, or reliving, the intellectual process that led to Claflin, thus revealing a significant moment in the history of US federalism.

--Dan Ernst.  Book Reviews after the jump.

Weekend Roundup

• Via the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA): a recording is now available of the recent webinar on "Indigenous Legal Orders, Legal Pluralism, and the Coloniality of Method Across Comparative Law, International Law, IP, and Trade Governance."

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Library of Congress): "Introducing Chew Heong and Chinese Exclusion: A New Story Map from the Law Library"; "Supporting Art Through Hardships: The Federal Theatre Project." 

• ICYMI:  The lower house of the Rhode Island legislature has unanimously approved a bill to rescind the state's "approval–in May 1861–of a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have permanently protected slavery from federal interference" (Providence Journal).  The Supreme Court’s long history of racial profiling in immigration (SCOTUSblog). The "idea of changing the number of Supreme Court justices is hardly new" (NCC)--just ask Rachel Shelden, who says as much in Made by History (now behind a paywall at the Philadelphia Inquirer).

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

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington University Law Review Online: Michael Bannerjee (UC Berkeley) on "Land-Grant Universities."  

• 
  The Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology announces the establishment of its Research Centre for Legal History.

• Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, discusses the history of conceptions of federalism in the United States on the Stationary Bandit podcast. 

• "His Majesty The King has approved the appointment of Professor Wim Decock, of the Universities of Louvain and Liège, as the new Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford. He will take up the post on 1 October 2026 and succeeds Professor Wolfgang Ernst." [No relation.  DRE]  H/t: ESCLH Blog, which has the link to the press release.

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts is staging a historical reenactment of proceedings in the Amistad case on Monday, February 2, 2026, from 6:00 - 8:00 PM at the Appellate Division, First Department Courtroom in New York City.  

• Laurence H. Tribe reviews Jill Lepore's We the People (NYRB).

• ICYMI: Andrea Katz and John Guida ask, Has the Supreme Court Backed Itself into a Corner (on removal)?  Britt Tevis on Ben Shahn’s mural, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" at Syracuse University (Daily Orange).  Meet Edward Bennett Williams (Daily Record).  Return Jonathan Meigs, Jr., Ohio's First Chief Judge (CNO).  What Were the Palmer Raids and What Tactics Did They Use? (History).  Citywide general strikes in US history, including in Minneapolis (Jacobin). 

• Update: A review of Old Courthouse, that book on the Merced County court--where Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. was filed. 

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

Goh on "Potential Legal History" in Art

New online from Law and History Review: Potential Legal History in the Art of Sonny Liew by Benjamin Goh, National University of Singapore:

Photographs, much less comic books, are not often seen to be focal sources of legal-historical research. This is so despite the growing momentum in the humanities and social sciences to take the visuality of culture, history, and law seriously. Notwithstanding the “visual turn” in law and humanities and socio-legal studies, it remains quite rare for legal history journals to carry images for the close reading of their pertinent implications. For the most part, legal scholarship has continued to exclude much of the optical media that arrange and compose the history of law, including the textual documents whose visuality produces, even contests, foundational legal concepts. This omission calls for intervention, not because legal history has failed to engage critically with dominant histories and the legal orders that they sustain, but rather because archived photographs and their (re)entry into visual modes of storytelling expand the range of historical sources that facilitate such critical projects. More fundamentally, the remediated photograph discloses the technological and theoretical assumptions of history-writing, prompting reflection on how far legal history should evolve to accommodate insights from its neighboring fields.

--Dan Ernst 

Artists and the Law in Baroque Rome at UAM

[With help from an automatic translator, we have the following announcement.  DRE]

The next session of the Coloquios Historia Derecho at the Universidad Autnóma de Madrid will take place on Wednesday, March 6, at 3:00 p.m., in Seminar VIII of the Faculty of Law.

Professor Antonia Fiori (Università degli studi di Roma – La Sapienza), will speak about her research on artists' contracts in Baroque Rome, with the presentation titled “ Rome wasn't built in a day: Artists and the Law in Renaissance and Baroque Rome.”  More information on the Ccolloquim is here.

To connect via Zoom: Meeting ID: 829 1079 8716 / Passcode: 609743

The next session, taught by Professor María Teresa Calderón, will now be held on March 22.

Herman's "Parthenon Marbles Dispute"

Published by Hart: The Parthenon Marbles Dispute: Heritage, Law, Politics, by Alexander Herman:

Why are we still arguing over the Parthenon Marbles? This book offers a fresh take on the history of those famous pieces of ancient sculpture removed from the Acropolis in Athens by Lord Elgin's men in the early 19th century. It explains how they became the cause célèbre of the larger debates around cultural heritage and restitution now taking place. The subject is one that is currently embroiling museums, governments, universities and the public at large.

Herman provides a balanced, thorough and critical account of the history of the Marbles, while considering the legalities of their initial removal and the ethics of their retention by the British Museum. It incorporates the views of curators, museum directors, lawyers, archaeologists, politicians and others in both London and Athens. It explains why this particular dispute has not been satisfactorily resolved, and suggests new ways of seeking resolution – for the Parthenon Marbles and for the many other cultural treasures held in museum collections outside their countries of origin.

The book sets out a way forward for this famously intractable dispute, one based on evidence of past practice, legal rules around the transfer of cultural objects and the role of museums in negotiating international exchanges.

--Dan Ernst.  Table of Contents after the jump.

CFP: A Virtual Conference on Law, History, and Visual Culture

 [We have the following Call for Papers.  DRE.]

Through a Legal Lens: Law, History, and Visual Culture, May 26, 2022 (virtual)

Law is often seen, and indeed often presents itself, as image-less, a text-based discourse. Perhaps for this reason, the use of images in legal historical research is an undervalued and under-researched--if fascinating--area.

This one-day conference aims to encourage the asking of questions, to reflect the growing interest and scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of law, history and visual culture. The conference offers a forum for discussion, debate and the presentation of research. The conference will construe ¡¥visual culture¡| widely, to attract papers from a range of disciplines. With a focus on images in and of law, subjects for papers may include, but are by no means limited to:

• television, film and theatre
• artworks (including sculpture), photography and graffiti
• architecture and maps
• legal artefacts and objects
• clothing and costume associated with the law
  

The organizers are keen to welcome scholars from any stage in their career and, as the conference is held online, submissions are invited from all jurisdictions.

Submit a 250 word abstract to: la.visualimagesconference@northumbria.ac.uk.  The deadline for submissions is the 1st February 2022.  The organisers are: Victoria Barnes, Helen Rutherford, Clare Sandford-Couch and Sarah Wilson.

Brauneis on Fine Art and the Copyright Act of 1870

Robert Brauneis, George Washington University Law School, has posted Understanding Copyright's First Encounter With the Fine Arts: A Look at the Legislative History of the Copyright Act of 1870, which appeared in the Case Western Reserve Law Review 71 (2020):

In 1870, Congress made its single largest addition of categories of copyrightable subject matter, expanding copyright protection to cover “painting[s], drawing[s], chromo[s], statue[s], statuary, and . . . models or designs intended to be perfected as works of the fine arts.” For the first time, it included works not designed or intended to be created and distributed in multiple copies, and it aligned copyright with the “fine arts” as opposed to the “mechanical arts,” a revision of the earlier understanding that copyright would cover “Science” as opposed to the “Useful Arts.” Why did Congress so act?

A thorough examination of the legislative history of the 1870 Act, and associated historical documents, leads to the following conclusions. First, artists sought protection for paintings and drawings in part to ensure enforceable exclusive rights for prints as the industrial organization of print production changed. Second, the drive for protection of paintings and drawings was also motivated by advances in reprographic technology, particularly color lithography. Third, expansion of an existing scheme of protection is politically easier than creating a new scheme of protection and negotiating all of the dimensions from scratch. Fourth, artists became better organized in associations like the National Academy of Design, and art publishers became substantial industrial ventures that employed dozens of workers in large factories, which increased their political visibility and power. Fifth, the proponents of expansion faced no organized opposition. Sixth, the 1870 Act’s expansion had few ties or references to earlier English expansion, reflecting the increasing independence of US legal culture from English legal culture after the Civil War.

--Dan Ernst

"Painting Constitutional Law": Cortada's Depictions of Supreme Court Cases from Florida, With Legal Commentary

New from Brill is Painting Constitutional Law: Xavier Cortada’s Images of Constitutional Rights, edited M.C. Mirow and Howard M. Wasserman:

In May It Please the Court, artist Xavier Cortada portrays ten significant decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States that originated from people, places, and events in Florida. These cases cover the rights of criminal defendants, the rights of free speech and free exercise of religion, and the powers of states. In Painting Constitutional Law, scholars of constitutional law analyse the paintings and cases, describing the law surrounding the cases and discussing how Cortada captures these foundational decisions, their people, and their events on canvas. This book explores new connections between contemporary art and constitutional law.

Chapter 1 May It Please the Court: Of Florida, from Florida, for Florida
Howard M. Wasserman

Chapter 2 Legal Iconography and Painting Constitutional Law
M.C. Mirow

Chapter 3 Xavier Cortada: Socially Engaged Activist Artist
Renée D. Ater

Chapter 4 Gideon v. Wainwright: The Surprising Power of a Prisoner Petition
Paul Marcus and Mary Sue Backus

Chapter 5 Williams v. Florida: What’s in a Number? Jury Function and Jury Numbers
Jenny E. Carroll

Chapter 6 Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo: Freedom of Speech for Whom?
Leslie C. Kendrick

Chapter 7 Proffitt v. Florida: Distorting Death
Corinna Barrett Lain

Chapter 8 Palmore v. Sidoti: The Troubling Effects of ‘Private Biases’
Linda C. McClain

Chapter 9 Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah: The Meaning of Free Exercise: Equality and Beyond
Kathleen A. Brady

Chapter 10 Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida: Sovereignty and the Eleventh Amendment Imag(in)ed
James E. Pfander

Chapter 11 Bush v. Gore: Haste Makes Mistakes
Erwin Chemerinsky

Chapter 12 Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection: On Art, Law, and the Power of the Sea
Laura S. Underkuffler

Chapter 13 Florida v. Jardines: The Distortions of Implied Artistic License
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

--Dan Ernst

Mirow on Legal Iconography

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has posted Legal Iconography and Painting Constitutional Law, which is forthcoming in Painting Constitutional Law: Xavier Cortada's Images of Constitutional Rights, edited by M.C. Mirow and Howard M. Wasserman (Brill):

Predominantly a European phenomenon, the study of legal iconography has expanded to the common law world and informed approaches to Anglo-American legal development. European painting, sculptures, and other artwork were used in forensic settings to channel behavior of judges, lawyers, and litigants. Such artwork often combined religious perspectives, such as depictions of the Last Judgement, but might also reflect more secular notions such as Justice. Cultural historians and theorists have supplemented these more traditional approaches by expanding the scope of the analysis of the relationship between image and law. This study illustrates the potential for legal iconography to offer deeper insights into law, legal institutions, justice, injustice, and legal change in modern society.

--Dan Ernst

Campbell and Jewel, "Death in the Shadows"

Mary Campbell and Lucy A. Jewell (University of Tennessee College of Law) have posted "Death in the Shadows," which appears in the most recent issue of the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal. Here's the abstract:

This paper is about the law and visual culture. Its centerpiece is Parson Weems’ Fable (1939), a painting by the American artist Grant Wood (1891-1942) that depicts the apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree. At first glance, Wood’s image appears to celebrate an enduring myth of American virtue, namely Washington’s precocious inability to tell a lie. Studying the picture more closely, however, one finds a pair of black figures, presumably two of the Washingtons’ slaves. Stationed beneath dark storm clouds and harvesting cherries from a second tree, these slaves invoke yet another national myth, that of the domestic serenity that supposedly reigned on Virginia’s colonial plantations. In the process, they quietly invoke the country’s grievous history of racial oppression, coercion, and brutality.

This isn’t the only place where Woods’ painting speaks of racial violence. To the contrary, Parson Weems’ Fable also raises the specter of lynching. Examining the shadows directly beneath the Washingtons and their fabled tree, one discovers a hanging black body. Intentional or not, this dangling corpse conjures the spectacular acts of theatrical violence that mobs of Euro-Americans inflicted on African Americans during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. By the 1930s, heated protests emerged against lynching—in popular songs, magazines, and art exhibitions, as well as more traditional political arenas. Unlike the painters most closely associated with him, Wood didn’t participate directly in such moments of artistic protest. Nonetheless, he would have been exposed to them as he painted Parson Weems’ Fable in the winter of 1939.

Regardless of Wood’s intentions, the work he created persistently connects the country’s origin myths to the murderous violence the U.S. has repeatedly inflicted on persons of color. Moreover, as the painting itself seems to realize, the law and culture forged by colonial Virginia planters like George Washington eventually morphed into a collective white psychopathy that found vicious expression in the practice of spectacle lynching. This colonial legal regime was deeply visual—a fact that accounts for not only its power, but also for the fundamental influence it continues to exert on current American conceptions of race.

A deep reading of Parson Weems’ Fable in the context of both its time (1939) and its setting (1736) reveals the extent to which the law is visual and the visual is legal. Indeed, the painting gives us a valuable lens for perceiving the pervasive connections that run between the two. Our thesis is that the profoundly visuo-legal nature of the country’s racial foundations helps explain the lack of progress the nation has made in dismantling the color line. As a result, the impulse to join the seemingly unrelated disciplines of legal study and art history isn’t an academic gimmick, but rather a necessity. For centuries, images have worked in tandem with statutes, judicial decisions, and various forms of legal (and illegal) punishment to indelibly imprint a logic of racial violence in our collective mindset. In order to fully excavate this logic, we need scholars who can analyze pictures as well as the law.

In terms of structure, we begin by introducing the painting and our analytical framework and method. After that, we explain the theoretical foundations for studying law and culture in this context. Finally, we connect colonial Virginia’s legal and cultural landscape to the traumatic racial violence that continues to haunt our national mythology.

The full article is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Exhibit: HLS and the Bauhaus

[We have word a new exhibit at the Harvard Law Library: Creating Community: Harvard Law School and the Bauhaus.]

2019 marks the centennial of the Bauhaus, and Harvard is celebrating! The Bauhaus, considered the twentieth century's most influential school of art and design, has deep connections to Harvard, including the Law School. Did you know that Harvard's first example of modern architecture is on the HLS campus and was designed by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus? Or that Gropius commissioned Bauhaus pioneers to create site-specific artwork for the buildings?

If you are in the Boston area, come explore HLS's connection to the Bauhaus and its role in shaping campus life. The exhibit, curated by Karen Beck and Lesley Schoenfeld, is on view daily 9 to 5 through 31 July 2019 in the Caspersen Room, Langdell Hall. A sampling of the exhibit is online. If you are a Bauhaus fan, be sure to visit all of Harvard's Bauhaus-related exhibits, tours, and events happening in 2019.

Adler on “The Masses” and the First Amendment

Amy Adler, New York University School of Law, has posted Art's First Amendment Status: A Cultural History of The Masses, which appears in the Arizona State Law Journal:

This Article explores a little-known chapter in the cultural history of The Masses, the radical, iconoclastic, and artistically cutting-edge publication that was the subject of Learned Hand's landmark First Amendment decision in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten (1917). The Article sets forth the story of an internal battle about freedom of expression in the arts that had shaken The Masses to its core in the year leading up to Hand's famous decision. The Masses was founded on two central premises: first, that absolute freedom of expression was necessary for its mission; and second, that art and politics must be inextricably intertwined in pursuing this mission because creativity was itself an act of political rebellion against capitalism. Yet this marriage between art and politics was a fragile one; indeed it collapsed in the year before Hand's opinion, as editors tried to constrain the political messages of the artists, leading to an artists' strike that forever changed the magazine. At stake in this conflict were urgent questions about the nature of art and the relationship between art and politics. Ultimately the magazine devoted to free speech and free artistic expression - the magazine that would later be pursued by the government for speaking too frankly - set limits on the free expression of its own artists.

By exploring the artistic significance of The Masses and by unearthing this internal censorship battle at the magazine, my goal is to show how the conflict over art at The Masses presaged contemporary debates about the role of art in the First Amendment. The bitter internal struggle over freedom of expression at The Masses anticipated a longstanding problem in free speech law: how do we justify protection for art, often apolitical, irrational, and hard to reduce to a “particularized message,” under a vision of the First Amendment that prizes political discourse and assumes a rational marketplace of ideas. The history of The Masses sheds light on our ongoing discomfort about the place of art in the First Amendment.

H/t: Legal Theory Blog

Weekend Roundup

• From Government Technology a story on HLS's  Caselaw Access Project: “A new free website spearheaded by the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School makes available nearly 6.5 million state and federal cases dating from the 1600s to earlier this year, in an initiative that could alter and inform the future availability of similar areas of public-sector big data.”  More.

• The chance to snap up a portrait of Horace Binney we know you’ve been waiting for has arrived.

• Reviews of Jane Sharon De Hart's biography of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the NYT and Minneapolis Star Tribune.

• Seth Barrett Tillman comments on Richard H. Fallon, Jr., "Judicial Supremacy, Departmentalism, and the Rule of Law in a Populist Age," 96 Texas Law Review 487 (2018), on the “duty of subordinate Executive Branch officers to obey conflicting commands and policies emanating from the President and the federal courts.”

• ICYMI: Sandra Day's law-school suitors, via NPR.  The Scottsboro "boys" get a historical marker.

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

Khorakiwala on judicial iconography

Rahela Khorakiwala (Jawaharlal Nehru University) has published "Legal Consciousness as Viewed through the Judicial Iconography of the Madras High Court," Asian Journal of Law and Society (pub. online 8 Jan. 2018), 1-23. The article takes a historical interest in the architecture and statuary of the court. Here is the abstract: 

The Madras High Court located in Chennai, India, was established in 1862 when India was under colonial rule. It continues to exist in post-independence India after merging into the Indian legal system. In this study, I argue that the architecture and judicial iconography of the Madras High Court building reflects a recurring historical tension between Indian and British concepts of justice. This is continually reflected in the semiotics of the legal space of this high court which in turn influences the legal consciousness of the court personnel who utilize this
space. This architecture and iconography of the Madras High Court constitutes, preserves, and reinforces the ambivalent legal consciousness of those who created, occupy, and visit this space. The contemporary legal consciousness of the court personnel is thus seen to have deep historical roots. 

Further information is available here.