Book Event: Taxation, Racial Capitalism, Slavery and International Law

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Taxation, Racial Capitalism, and the International Rule of Law: From Colonial Slavery to Global Governance

Wednesday, July 22, 2026, 12:00–1:30 PM EST.  This webinar brings into dialogue two important recent books:

The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America by Anthony C. Infanti (University of Pittsburgh School of Law)

Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow by Steven A. Dean (Boston University School of Law)

The discussion will explore how legal and fiscal systems have historically contributed to structures of domination, exclusion, and racialized inequality, from the fiscal architecture of colonial America to the contemporary global tax order. By placing these works in conversation, the webinar examines the relationship between taxation, racial capitalism, historical injustice, and the rule of law, while reflecting on the capacity of legal institutions to address past and present inequalities.

The event will be chaired by Paolo Davide Farah (The University of Tulsa College of Law), who will serve as moderator and discussant. Carliss N. Chatman (SMU Dedman School of Law) will also serve as discussant.

The conversation may be of particular interest to scholars working in taxation, international law, comparative law, legal history, civil rights, critical legal studies, race and the law, socio-economics, political economy, international human rights, and related fields.  Participation is free and open to all.  [Register here.]

Weekend Roundup

• 
  ASLH President Mitra Sharafi discusses Fear of the False, "her new book about colonial South Asia's critical role in the development of forensic science" on Law in Action, the podcast of the University of Wisconsin Law School.   

• From the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History: John Fea (Messiah University) on "Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students." 

• Another memorial to the late Gordon Wood, via History News Network x Bunk History. 

• "The History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) has released 'The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,' the first comprehensive report documenting and analyzing the Trump administration’s sweeping, coordinated effort since January 2025 to reshape how the American past is recorded, preserved, and shared with the public" (OAH).

• Steven Hahn reviews Born Equal: The Remaking of America’s Constitution, 1840–1920
  by Akhil Reed Amar (The Nation). 

• Via H-Disability: a memorial to Richard K. Scotch, author of multiple landmark histories of disability law and policy. 

• A call for papers for a conference on the Legal History of Tamilnadu.  Deadline for abstracts: June 15.  

• The conference "Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution" will take place at UMass Amherst from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 12, 2026 (H-Law).

• "Students from Stanford Law School’s Center for Racial Justice recently helped bring Wong [Kim Ark]’s story to life through a Bay Area public-history project that joins law, art, and community memory" (Stanford Lawyer).  

• U.S. Representative French Hill has introduced a bill to require the Department of the Interior to study the preservation and incorporation into the National Park System of the home of Scipio Jones (QQ) 

• A recording of the webinar, Equality and Exclusion: Israel's Constitutional Order and Its Palestinian-Arab Minority (1948–2025), with Ofra Bloch, moderated by Jon D. Michaels (UCLA).

•  ICYMI: Eric Segall asks that we "Please Stop Calling the Roberts Court Justices Originalists" (Dorf of Law). Jamelle Bouie discusses the so-called "Colored Conventions" of the nineteenth century in arguing that "The Supreme Court Doesn’t Own the Constitution" (NYT).

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

ASLH "New Works" Series

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series 
Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History

Deadline for Applications: June 30, 2026
 
The ASLH Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series aims to foster conversations and connections beyond the Annual Meeting about exciting new work in the field of legal history or publications likely to be of interest to legal historians. The series is hosted by the ASLH Committee on Digital Initiatives. 
 
Schedule: Most of the series events will be held on Zoom at 6-7 pm Central on Wednesdays. In addition, the committee plans to hold events outside of the regular schedule to accommodate for presentors and interlocutors living in different time zones. 
 
Event Structure: Each event opens with a brief introduction of the work by the author, followed by conversation between the author and an interlocutor of their choice, and closing with conversation with the audience. In panels featuring more than 1 book or article, we expect the authors to serve as interlocutors for each other. There is no expectation that audience members have read the work. 
 
Eligibility: Books, Articles, or Digital Legal Histories published January 2025-December 2026 
 
We encourage both U.S. based and international scholars at all career stages working in all geographic and chronological fields to apply. We welcome applications for events featuring one book, two books or articles in conversation, and events coordinated with another professional society. ASLH membership is encouraged, but not required. Books featured on a New Directions panel at the Annual Meeting are eligible. 
 
Applications: (max. 1 page; 12 pt font)

• Book/Article/DLH Author, Title, Publisher (for articles: Journal title; for DLH: url) and Publication date
• Book/Article/DLH Abstract and explanation about the relevance of the work to an audience of legal historians (1-2 paragraph)
• Author Bio, including email & ASLH membership status (1 paragraph)
• Interlocutor Bio, including email & ASLH membership status (1 paragraph)

FAQ: 

Does the same 1-page limit apply to applications for more than 1 book or multiple articles? Yes. We are especially interested in hearing how featuring the works together would make for an interesting conversation.

Do I have to find my own interlocutor? Yes. Only complete submissions, including those with an interlocutor, will be considered. 
 
Please direct questions and submissions to Naama Maor, nmaor@tauex.tau.ac.il

Byrne's "Law in the New Democracy" and Book Launch

On Thursday, July 2, from 6 PM - 7 PM at the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Camperdown, NSW, Paula Jane Byrne speaks about her new book Law in the New Democracy exploring development of a legal system in colonial New South Wales. It is published by ANU press and with the assistance of the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History.  Here is the press's description of the book:

In the 1850s, opposition to the Crown in New South Wales made for unsteady ground for the administration of criminal law. This study of skirmishes between magistrates, constables and the metropolis reveals just how far understandings of law could be stretched and warped by recalcitrant local populations. At Carcoar, the local population entirely controlled how law worked; on the South Coast, ‘the people’ influenced how law intervened in their lives; in the north west of the colony, publicans dominated; on the north coast, violence against First Nations/Aboriginal people was forcibly meshed into the day to day working of the courts. This study shows a ‘frontier’ centred on the coasts and in the minds of legal officials of the metropolis, but elsewhere, some recognition of the Aboriginal polity and an early understanding of Aboriginal rights.

And here is the description of the book launch:

Democracy in the 1850s was felt to be fragile and uncertain. At any moment, the rhetoric of the Legislative Council and Assembly tells us, the rights obtained by the citizenry might be thwarted by the cunning manoeuvres of the English crown.

Such rhetoric would shape how colonial New South Wales viewed criminal law. Across the colony, desultory clerks filled sheets of paper with the words of victims and witnesses, words that would be carried to the metropolis, to the offices of legal officials. Dragging behind these words were the chained prisoners of the colony, eager on their journey to obtain money for a barrister in court.

This discussion examines the traces of such events and the role of the historian of 2026 in interpreting them. It addresses right of reply by Aboriginal people to history making. It questions the idea of a move into lawlessness the further we travel from Sydney and the idea of the frontier.

--Dan Ernst

Penna's "Byzantine Law" and Book Launch

Daphne Penna, University of Groningen and KU Leuven, has published Byzantine Law: The Law of the Eastern Roman Empire, in the "Elements in Rethinking Byzantium" series of the Cambridge University Press.  On May 28, she will speak about the book in the Law and Humanities Seminar Series of the Peking University School of Transnational Law.  Here is Cambridge's description of the book:

The purpose of this Element is to introduce the study of later Roman law (Byzantine law) to a wider academic audience. Currently a great deal of specialized knowledge is necessary to approach the field of Byzantine law. This Element works to break down the barriers to this fascinating subject by providing a brief, clear introduction to the topic. It makes a scholarly contribution by placing Byzantine law in a broader perspective and by reconsidering some of the aspects of the study of Byzantine law. The Element places Byzantine law outside of the box by comparing, for example, Byzantine law to the European legal tradition and highlighting the role that Byzantine law can have in unravelling the common legal past of Europe. It gives also information on the status of Byzantine legal studies and makes suggestions on how to study Byzantine law and why.

--Dan Ernst 

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.

Resnick's "Impermissible Punishments"

Judith Resnik, Yale Law School, has published Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy (University of Chicago Press):

Impermissible Punishments explores the history of punishment inside prisons and how governments grappled with obligations to justify the punishments they impose. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the creation of the corrections profession and weaves together the stories of people who made rules for prisons and the stories of those living under the resulting regimes.

Resnik maps three centuries of shifting ideas, norms, and legal standards aiming to draw lines between permissible and impermissible punishments. Her account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement, and the pioneering prisoners who insisted that law should protect their individual dignity. Taking us to the present, Resnik analyzes the expansion of imprisonment, the inability of public and private prisons to provide safe housing, and the impact of abolition politics.

Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments examines what governments committed to equality owe to the people they detain and argues that many contemporary forms of punishment need to end. 

UCL Faculty of Laws will host an impressive book launch on May 14.  Also, horrifically, this.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• 
  A book launch was recently held for Confluences of Law and History: Irish Legal History Society Discourses, 2011-2021, edited by Niamh Howlin and Felix Larkin and published by Four Courts Press.  The volume “brings together an eclectic mix of papers on aspects of Irish legal history from the early modern period to the 20th century.” (Irish Legal Times).  

• An interesting notice of the St. Olaf College Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry team and its investigation of how, if at all, the 17th Amendment shifted the balance of power between rural and urban constituents.

• Katie R. Eyer, Rutgers Law School, has posted Institutional Challenges in an Authoritarian Age, a review essay inspired by Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege.

• Via Harvard Law Today: "Harvard Law School Library releases first complete set of digitized Nuremberg Trials records." 

• If, like me, you are trying to rethink a course on the legal history of the administrative state and presidential power in light of DJT's second term, you might find Eric Schickler's "What Donald Trump Has Taught Us about American Political Institutions," published in Political Science Quarterly, as helpful as I did.  DRE.  

• Jack Goldsmith's very interesting Constitution Day lecture at the American Enterprise Institute: Presidential Greatness and the Fragility of Judicial Supremacy. 

• The links to the recordings of two recent talks sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society, John Fabian Witt on The Radical Fund and G. Edward White and Gerard Magliocca's books on Robert H. Jackson are new available.  Also, Professor White draws upon his book in a post on the blog of the Oxford University Press.  

• Walter Stahr discusses his forthcoming biography of William Howard Taft (Executive Functions).

• Seth Barrett Tillman has posted Chancellor James Kent on Hamilton's Federalist No. 77 and Modern Academic Commentary.  Also, this. 

• The Brennan Center's Annotated Guide to Historians’ Amicus Briefs in the Slaughter and Cook Removal Cases.

• ICYMI: Gordon S. Wood's remarks upon receiving the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute.  John O. McGinnis and Mike Rappaport object to what they consider Jill Lepore’s “particularly shabby” treatment of Justice Scalia’s ideas in her recent Atlantic article on originalism (Law & Liberty).

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

Weekend Roundup

• The Heart of Suffolk: Witch Trials, "a new pop-up exhibition . . . exploring the stories of the women and men who faced execution after being accused of witchcraft in Suffolk, will be displayed at Sudbury Arts Centre until the end of October, before taking over The Bull pub in Long Melford and then Elmswell Library" (BBC). 

• The Balkinization symposium on John Fabian Witt's The Radical Fund continues with new contributions by Aziz Rana, Laura Weinrib, Larry Kramer, LHB Founder Mary L. Dudziak, David Pozen, Benjamin Sachs, David M. Schizer, Jamal Greene, and David E. Bernstein. 

• On Thursday, October 9, UVA Law hosted a panel on G. Edward White’s Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgement, consisting of Sarah A. Seo, Lucas A. Powe Jr., and Ross E. Davies. Dean Leslie Kendrick introduced the panel and Risa Goluboff moderated.  More.

• Samantha Barbas, University of Iowa College of Law, will speak on New York Times v. Sullivan in Marshall University’s lecture series on constitutional democracy at 7 p.m. Tuesday, October 28. 

• Jill Lepore will join National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep to discuss We the People at 8 p.m. (doors open at 7 p.m.) Nov. 6 at the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts on Boise State University’s campus (ICS).  

• Noah Rosenblum, NYU Law, is excellent on the history of the removal power in this episode of the Reconstruction Agenda podcast.  

• The records of President Harry Truman's Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion (1949-1952) have been digitized.  H/t Adam Rothman.   

• Time's Made By History: Revoking passports can backfire, by Denise Lynn. 

• ICYMI: David Noonan on Jackson at Nuremberg (Smithsonian). Jessica T. Mathews reviews Akhil Reed Amar’s Born Equal (Foreign Affairs). Time immemorial (ianVisits).  Failed Kansas constitutional amendments (KSNT 27 News). 

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

Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution

[We have the following announcement of a book launch to be held at the Library and Archives of Canada on Wednesday, November 12, from 7 - 8pm EST, with the doors opening at 6:30pm.  DRE]

Join us for the launch of Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution  [University of Chicago Press] by Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross, presented by Library and Archives Canada.

In September 1945, Canadian democracy faced a fundamental question of constitutional law: could citizens be expelled on the basis of race? Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had already experienced uprooting, internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment. Challenging Exile investigates the origins, administration, litigation and aftermath of this attempt at gross injustice and shares the stories of resilience of those who faced it.

How did Japanese Canadians navigate the challenges arrayed against them? Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the proposed exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that forced them from their homes, stripped their livelihoods and possessions, and deprived them of fundamental rights. They also analyze the constitutional framework of the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race and rights at a time of change in Canadian law and politics.

Unfolding in a context of global conflict, sharpened borders and racist suspicion, the story told in Challenging Exile has enduring relevance for our own troubled times.

This meticulous and moving account of a shameful episode in Canada’s past tells a necessary story not only for scholars and historians of law, politics and human rights, but also for readers of Canadian history.

About the authors

Eric M. Adams is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta. He has written widely on constitutional law, legal history, employment law, human rights and legal education.

Jordan Stanger-Ross is a professor of history at the University of Victoria. He is the author of numerous works on the history of migration and race in North America.

[Register here.] 

ASLH's Virtual New Books Series

[Here's another reason to join the American Society for Legal History: Members can virtually participate in this series on great new books in the field.  DRE]

Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series, 2025-2026 

All sessions will be on Zoom Wednesdays from 6:00-7:00 pm (Central Time).  We will send an email two weeks in advance of each event.  You must RSVP to receive the zoom link.  RSVP messages will be sent to membership approximately 1 week before the event.  ASLH Members can watch videos of previous events on our members page
 
September 17, 2025 – Esther Liberman Cuenca, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Sara M. Butler
 
October 22, 2025 – Sonia Gomez, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (NYU Press, 2024) & Kathryn Schumaker, Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South (Basic Books, 2025)
 
December 10, 2025 – Marla A. Ramírez, Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Kevin R. Johnson
 
January 21, 2026 – Omar Youssef Cheta, How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Nurfadzilah Yahaya
 
February 25, 2026 – Tadashi Ishikawa, Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Jisoo M. Kim
 
March 25, 2026 – Serena Mayeri, Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Yale University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Margot Canaday
 
April 15, 2026 – Kevin Arlyck, The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789–1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Alison LaCroix

Queen Mary Symposium on Wheatley's "Life and Death of States"

[We have word of the first event in a new collaboration between the Selden Society and the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London, an annual symposium on a “first book” of an author in the field of “historicising jurisprudence.’” A registration page for the event is still forthcoming.  DRE.]

Historicising Jurisprudence: First Book Symposium

2025 Selected Book: Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton UP, 2023)

Co-Sponsored by the Selden Society and the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.  Co-Hosted and Co-Organised by Maks Del Mar and Michael Lobban.  30 September 2025.  Room 313, Department of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus

2-3pm: Opening Conversation with Natasha Wheatley (Princeton), Michael Lobban (Oxford), and Maks Del Mar (QMUL)

3-3.15pm Break

3.15 - 4.45pm Panel 1 – Chaired by Isobel Roele (QMUL)
Thinking with the book: Roxana Banu (Oxford), Anat Rosenberg (IALS), and Gerry Simpson
(LSE)

4.45-5pm: Break

5pm - 6.30pm Panel 2 – Chaired by Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL)
Thinking with the book: Charlotte Johann (QMUL), Alvin Jackson (Edinburgh), and Angus
Nicholls (QMUL)

6.30pm: drinks / nibbles

Forum on Wang's "Making of Felony Procedure"

[We have word from the Modern Criminal Law Review of From Treason to Trump: Felony’s Medieval Origins and Modern Resilience, a forum on Elise Wang's Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature.  DRE]

In The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature (Oxford 2024), Elise Wang explores the medieval origins and surprising modern resilience of “felony” in contemporary criminal law. Since its appearance as the ur-crime of Anglo-Saxon proto-criminal law, commentators, historians, and judges have waxed poetic about the radically exclusive evil attached to those who are branded, “attainted,” and just plain despised “with words of felony.”

The following passage from Pollock & Maitland’s classic history of medieval English law gives a nice flavor:

When the adjective felon first appears it seems to mean cruel, fierce, wicked, base. Occasionally we may hear in it a note of admiration, for fierceness may shade off into laudable courage; but in general it is as bad a word as you can give to man or thing, and it will stand equally well for many kinds of badness, for ferocity, cowardice, craft.

That’s memorably harsh, even for medieval law. More startling yet, talk of “felony” and “felons” survives to this day. Courts continue to quote the passage above to give their modern audience a flavor of what felony means today. In public discourse, the “branding” of a criminal defendant as a “felon”–as opposed to a mere “convict”–still appears as definitive evidence of that person’s (more or less permanent and total) exclusion from the political community, i.e., a type of civil death or outlawry (incl. disenfranchisement, deportation, and ineligibility for jobs, benefits, or privileges).

How can this be? What did felony mean in medieval law and literature? What does (and should?) it mean today? Does felony have a place in modern criminal law discourse and practice?

Why Legal Historians Need to Read Literature
Sara M. Butler

Felony, Fact-Finding, and Medieval Due Process
Jennifer Jahner

Law, Not-Law, and the Felon in Between
Alice Ristroph

Felon, Felonesse, President
Jamie Taylor

Felony and the Interdisciplinary Frounce
Elise Wang

In preparation for this Forum, MCLR+ hosted a book panel, live streamed on our YouTube channel, on January 17, 2025. The video of that event is available here; the audio is accessible here, or on any of the usual podcast outlets (Spotify, Apple, etc.). For additional materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources (“Felony”).

To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website; to receive notifications about new video content, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization: a symposium on Dylan C. Penningroth's Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023), featuring contributors Evelyn Atkinson (Tulane), Ian Ayres (Yale), Mark Graber (Maryland), Steve Griffin (Tulane), Carol Rose (Yale), and Mark Tushnet (Harvard).
  

• Aditya Bamzai, University of Virginia School of Law, Johann Neem, Western Washington University, Farah Peterson, University of Chicago Law School, and Jack Rakove, Stanford University, on the Articles of Confederation at the National Constitution Center (YouTube). 
  

• Thomas J. McSweeney, William & Mary Law School, a recipient of the university's 2025 McGlothlin Award for Exceptional Teaching.

• On Tuesday, June 10, 2025, 12PM – 1PM (Pacific) the Oregon Historical Society will host, as part of its series, "Historians and the News," the virtual event Free Speech, Misinformation, and National Security, a conversation with Sam Lebovic and Christopher McKnight Nichols.  Register here.

•  Stephanie Hall Barclay, Georgetown University Law Center, responds to

  

  John Marshall Harlan (LC)

  Jud Campbell’s “Determining Rights” in the Harvard Law Review.

• ICYMI: Harvard's Magna Carta (The Crimson). Charles Barzun on the quiet radicalism of Justice Souter (SCOTUSblog).  Centre College's sculpture of John Marshall Harlan (Lane Report). Bruce Ackerman and Susan Rose-Ackerman on the APA and Postwar Fears of Executive Power (Slate). Wong Kim Ark's great grandson and birthright citizenship (Post Reports).

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

A Conference for Charles Donahue

[Congratulations to Professor Donahue.  We wish we could be there!  DRE]

The Learned and Lived Law: A Celebration in Honor of Charles Donahue, May 19, 2025, Lewis 214, Harvard Law School.

Please join us for a celebration honoring Professor Charles Donahue and marking the publication of The Learned and Lived Law:  Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue.  We will have a day of presentations by chapter authors as well as a display of medieval manuscripts in the Harvard Law Library in the early afternoon.

Welcome
8:45 – 9:00 am
Interim Dean John C.P. Goldberg
Saskia Lettmaier and Elizabeth Papp Kamali

Panel 1: Roman Law
Chair: James Townshend
9:00 – 10:00 am

Charles Bartlett, Roman Property, Corporate Personhood, and the Politics of Natural Law in Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy: Venice, Baldus, and the res communes omnium

Wim Decock, “For the Sake of Mental Health and Mutual Peace”: The Transactio-Agreement in Early Modern Law and Theology

Panel 2: Medieval and Early Modern Law
Chair: Elizabeth Papp Kamali
10:15 – 12:15 pm

Samantha Kahn Herrick, Getting Ahead in a Twelfth-Century City: The Ambitious Monks of Saint-Clément, Metz

Ryan Rowberry, The Papal Constitution Execrabilis (1317) and Clerical Justices in the English Royal Courts

Elizabeth Mellyn, Suicide in Early Modern Italy

Carol Symes, The “Desire of Deeds”: On Cherishing Medieval English Charters

12:15 – 1:15 pm
Lunch available in Lewis 202

Medieval Manuscript Display
Harvard Law Library, 4th floor, Caspersen Room
1:15 – 2:15 pm
Arranged by Sarah Wharton, Historical & Special Collections
Co-Hosts: Carol Symes and Charles Bartlett

Panel 3: American Legal History
Chair: Ryan Rowberry
2:30 – 3:30 pm

Sally Hadden, Lawyers and Their Book Collections: Notes from the Eighteenth Century

Amalia Kessler, The American Importation of the Comparative Accusatorial/Inquisitorial Divide: Francis Lieber’s Failed Transplant and Its Early Twentieth-Century Resurgence

Panel 4: Literature and Legal Theory
Chair: Saskia Lettmaier
3:45-4:45 pm

Anton Chaevitch, Faust: Goethe’s Guide to Legal Progress

Bharath Palle, Wesley Hohfeld’s Modernist Imagination

Closing Reflection
Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas, De Magistro eruditissimo et beneficentissimo

BU Spring 2025 History of International Law Speaker Series

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future [at Boston University] is pleased to announce the International History Institute’s (IHI) Spring 2025 “History of International Law” speaker series. All three events will be held in the Pardee School of Global Studies’ Riverside Room at 121 Bay State Road. The series is open to the public. Please register to attend here.

Thursday, January 30 | 5:00-6:30 pm
Keynote Lecture: “The Law of International Society: Remarks on a Domesticated Notion”

Martti Koskenniemi, Professor Emeritus of International Law, University of Helsinki

Wednesday, February 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm
Book Talk: “Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law & the Making of Latin America”

Edward Jones Corredera, Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for
Comparative Public Law and International Law

Discussant: Felipe Ford Cole, Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School

Wednesday, March 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm
Book Talk: “Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion & the Transformation of International Law”

Allison Powers Useche, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Discussant: Andrei Mamolea, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University

Weekend Roundup

• On February 21, 2025, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University will convene a day-long event titled "The Law in Times of Emergency and Transition: Legal Perspectives on 40 Years of Democracy in Brazil." Registration is open to the public.  
  

• In Time Magazine's Made By History series: Karin Wulf on John Marshall's dinner with John Adams, Rachel Rosenbloom notes that Birthright Citizenship Has Been Challenged Before, and Bruce W. Dearstyne discusses TR's DOGE.
  

• Reviews of Jonathan Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism in the online journal of the Liberty Fundby John O. McGinnis and Mike Rappaport and Aaron N. Coleman.
  

• Keith Whittington discusses why free speech can't be taken for granted on the Inside Yale Law School podcast.

•  From ProMarket: Elizabeth Popp Berman (University of Michigan) on "How Industrial Policy Gave Us the Sherman Act." (H/t LPE Blog)
  

• A reminder: Amanda Tyler will speak on Mitsuye Endo and Japanese Incarceration on Zoom for the Supreme Court Historical Society on January 23 at 12 pm EST.
  

• Chelsea Gibson interviews Kenyon Zimmer, a historian of transnational radicalism, on his “comprehensive digital archive of Red Scare deportees” (SHGAPE Blog).
  

• Online and at the Signet Library in Edinburgh, Chloe Kennedy will discuss her book Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law on January 30, 6 - 8pm GMT.  More.
  

• Paul Finkleman discussed the complicated history of “John McLean: Southern Ohio’s Homegrown Anti-Slavery Justice" (UCNews).
  

• The Lillian Goldman Law Library at the Yale Law School, has a new exhibit.  Running through May 25, 2025, Flowers at Lambach "follows the history of a single manuscript volume: a collection of texts relating to canon law, produced by the scriptorium at the Benedictine Abbey of Lambach in Austria in the late 15th century, and entering into the collections of the Yale Law Library in 1949.
  

• An excerpt from Michelle Adams's The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (Literary Hub) and Michigan Law's notice of the book.
  

• Just out from Oxford University Press: Redefining Comparative Constitutional Law: Essays for Mark Tushnet, edited by Madhav Khosla and Vicki C. Jackson.

• ICYMI: Eric Muller on what federal workers in a second Trump administration can learn from the lawyers of the War Relocation Authority (Chicago Tribune).  Therese O'Neill discusses the famous Mrs. Packard on the This Day In Esoteric Political History podcast. Egbert Benson: New York’s first Attorney General (New York Almanack). Alicia Gutierrez-Romine on the legal history of abortion bans (Perspectives in American History).  
  

• Update: Kenneth W. Mack and other historians (including Sarah Igo, Donald Critchlow, and Sean Wilentz) on Biden's presidential legacy (Politico).  An obituary of Shirah Neiman (1943-2025), who, some years after Eunice Hunton Carter left the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, joined its by then all-male Criminal Division and became its expert on criminal tax law (NYT).  Holly Brewer on becoming a Friend of the Court (Perspectives in History).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Binghamton University's notice of Nathanael Andrade's forthcoming Killing the Messiah: The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth (Oxford University Press).
  

• The National Constitution Center will hold a Town Hall on the Evolution of the Presidential Pardon from Jefferson to Trump on Thursday, March 27, from 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm with Brian Kalt, Michigan State College of Law, and Jeffrey Toobin.  Jeffrey Rosen will moderate.
  

• 
  Lawbook Exchange's January 2025 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History books, including the one pictured below right. 
  

• Two book events will be live at and streamed from the FDR Library: Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR's 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal with David Pietrusza on January 15, 2025, at  2pm ET, and Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany with Rebecca Brenner Graham on January 27, 2025, at 2pm ET.   
  

• CFP: "The Yale Whitney Humanities Center Working Group 'Cultural Foundations of Law and Public Administration' plans on publishing an edited volume on Cultures of Good Legislation/Good Administration that will address different cultural contexts (West/Global South/Asia). A hybrid symposium at Yale is also intended to foster the dialogue between the contributors."  H-Law.

• ICYMI, American Expansionist Edition: Why Thomas Jefferson Faced Opposition to the Louisiana Purchase (History Channel).  How the U.S. could in fact make Canada an American territory (The Conversation).

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

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Balkinization has been hosting a symposium on Kunal Parker's The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).  So far, Aziz Rana, Ajay K. Mehrotra, Paul Gowder, Amalia D. Kessler, and John Fabian Witt have contributed.
  

• The Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London has announced the establishment of the Law and the Humanities Hub (LHub), led by Anat Rosenberg.  It “aims to foster academic expertise, creativity, and intellectual leadership in law and the humanities.”  Here are its 2024/25 Visitors.
  

• The Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission has digitized approximately 3,700 case files from 1819 to 1865.  Its "freely accessible and user-friendly website . . . will be publicly available within the next few months."  More.
  

• The University of Chicago Law School will host a book launch for Curtis Bradley’s Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: Constitutional Authority in Practice, with comments by Will Baude and David Strauss, on Wednesday, December 3, 12:15pm to 1:10pm, at the Law School.  The event is open to the public.
  

• A notice of the 44th German Legal History Conference (Goethe Universität).

• A notice of a conference at Kings College London in support of the Cambridge History of International Law volume on the Pacific from circa 1500 until 1920 (KCL).
  

• The National Constitution Center will hold a symposium on The Life and Constitutional Legacy of Gouverneur Morris at Noon ET on Thursday, December 12 with Dennis Rasmussen, Melanie Randolph Miller, and William Treanor.  Jeffrey Rosen will moderate.
  

• The next session in the American Society for Legal History series, Making Connections: New Works in Legal History, will occur on Wednesday, December 11, 6-7pm Central Time. Chlöe Kennedy will discuss her Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law (2024) with interlocutor Catherine Evans.  ASLH President Barbara Welke will moderate.  Register here.
  

• On Lawfare's "Chatter" podcast, Rachel Shelden, Penn State University, discusses how widespread violence and another civil war were avoided as the nation resolved the disputed presidential election of 1876.
  

• Thomas McSweeney's Jot on Ada Maria Kuskowski's, "The Time of Custom and the Medieval Myth of Ancient Customary Law," 99 Speculum 143 (2024).
  

• ICYMI: Sandra Day O'Connor was no conservative (HNN).  The price America paid for the Chinese Exclusion Act (NPR).  Open access (for a few more days): The Case of the Slave Ship Zong (History Today).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• 

  David S. Tanenhaus (UNLV)
  

  Heartfelt congratulations to David S. Tanenhaus on his receipt of the American Society for Legal History's Craig Joyce Medal, awarded to recognized extraordinary and sustained service to ASLH (UNLV Boyd School of Law).
  

• In Time Magazine's Made By History series: Ajay Mehrotra on The Tariff History Donald Trump Is Overlooking.
  

• Garrett Epps reviews Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World, "a fresh and readable one-volume history of the Court [that] explains how we got from Marbury to Dobbs" (Washington Monthly).

• On Saturday, November 9, from 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Alison L. LaCroix will discuss The Interbellum Constitution as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637.  The event is open to the public.

• The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has launched We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence, a "multi-year oral history and education project" commencing with the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

• On Monday, November 4, at Noon ET at the National Constitution Center, Keith Richotte, Jr., and Matthew L.M. Fletcher (University of Michigan) will discuss "Native American history and law through the stories of landmark Supreme Court cases."

• Christine Kexel Chabot, Marquette University Law School, is again making available the syllabus for her course Litigating the Lessons of History, in response to the revived debate making legal history part of the law-school curriculum.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Librarians of Congress): "Witchcraft and a Haunted Case of Torture in Joost de Damhouder’s Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1555)"; How a House Becomes Legally Haunted: Stambovsky v. Ackley, The “Ghostbuster” Ruling."

• Literary Hub's Ten Best Books on Reproductive Rights includes ones by Michele Goodwin, Leslie Reagan, and Mary Ziegler.  
  

• A notice of Molly Brady's  Brandeis Chair lecture at HLS, much of which she devoted to the legal history of single-family dwellings in the United States (Harvard Law Today).
  

• The University of Helsinki Faculty of Law "invites applications for a fixed term employment as a doctoral researcher or a postdoctoral researcher" with the project Comparing Early Modern Colonial Laws, led by Academy Professor Heikki Pihlajamäki.   More.

• 
  
  New online in Law & History Review: Weber in Jerusalem: The Rabbinical Debate over the Establishment of the Rabbinical Court of Appeals, 1918–1921, by Chagai Schlesinger.
  

• The Stanford Law School has announced its latest round of Sallyanne Payton Fellows.  I mentioned this here not simply because two legal historians, Greg Ablavsky and Bernadette Meyler, are their mentors, but because I gained lasting insights into the mindset of the first, postwar generation of Washington lawyers when then-Professor Payton shared her recollections of Charles Horsky when I presented at Michigan Law, some years ago.  DRE
  

• ICYMI:  Kristina M. Lee, University of South Dakota, on "What the history of blasphemy laws in the US and the fight for religious freedom can teach us today" (Akron Legal News).
  

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