Weekend Roundup

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  A head's up to those thinking about submitting proposals for the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Banff, November 12-14: the deadline is March 24.   

• This year's Bancroft Prizes have gone to two works of legal history: Emilie Connolly’s Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States and Beth Lew-Williams’s John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (NYT).

• Legal history bulks large among the finalists for the book division of the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Awards for Media and the Arts: The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder that Inspired the Abolition of Slavery, by Siddharth Kara; The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America, by John Fabian Witt; We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, by Jill Lepore; You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon's Fight for Free Speech, by Brad Snyder; American Scare: Florida's Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, by Robert Fieseler; and The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, by Michelle Adams.  

• The Irish Legal History Society has announced its 2026 essay prize.  "Submissions are invited by 31 May on any topic within Irish legal history, broadly conceived, from both undergraduates and postgraduates."

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  The latest two volumes in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930, by Robert C. Post, Yale Law School, and The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941, by Mark V. Tushnet, Harvard Law School, are now available as paperbacks from Cambridge University Press.

• The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that a museum devoted to its past will open in July 2026. 

• Anna Snyder on the "odd omission" of lawyers in commemorations of the 250th anniversary of independence (AHA Perspectives). 

• A notice of Maria Fletcher, Charlie Peevers, and Seonaid Stevenson-McCabe's chapter on "Madge Easton Anderson, the first woman in Scotland and the UK to become a professional lawyer," in Celebrating Women in Legal History: Making and Shaping a Discipline (Scottish Legal News). 

• "The 1957 executive order signed by President Dwight Eisenhower to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School is one of the documents on display at the Clinton Presidential Center at a new exhibit chronicling the history of the 27 amendments to the Constitution" (Arkansas Advocate).    

• Michele Goodwin’s Presidential Address to the Law & Society Association prompted June Carbone to reflect on teaching Johnson v. McIntosh and Dred Scott in the comment Claiming History.

• A Harvard Law Review note: Making the Rules of the Rules of the Game: The Use, Misuse, and Disuse of the Rulemaking Grant in the Act of 1842.

• Robert L. Tsai reviews Cliff Sloan's The Court at War (Washington Monthly). 

• Lawbook Exchange's March catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History.

• ICYMI:  Phillip W. Magness on Justice Thomas's dissent in the IEEPA decision (Law & Liberty). A notice of Vernon Burton's talk, “The First Amendment and Lincoln’s Constitutional Legacy" at Clemson's "week of celebrating First Amendment rights and history" (Clemson News). Tarun Choudhury on Sir Garfield Barwick (Legal Service India).  Ernie Walton thinks that Originalists Need the Classical Legal Tradition (Public Discourse).

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

ASLH 2023

Have you registered for the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History?  It will take place in Philadelphia, October 26-28.  You may also reserve a room at the conference hotel, Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown.

--Dan Ernst

Pre-Registration for ASLH 2023

[We have the following announcement from the American Society for Legal History.  DRE]

Pre-register for Philadelphia 2023!

The registration portal for the 2023 Annual Meeting is now open. We encourage early registration.

The 2023 ASLH Annual Meeting will be held at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 26-28. The conference room rate is $199.00. Reserve rooms here. Booking rooms in the conference hotel is important for the financial health of the Society.

Attendance at the annual luncheon is included in the price of the meeting.  If necessary, you can renew your membership here.  Only one registration at a time is permitted.  If you wish to register a guest, you will need to register your guest independently.

In registering for the conference you agree to conform to AHA standards for professional conduct adopted by the ASLH.

We look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia!

Legal Histories of Empire

We hear that the third "Legal Histories of Empire" conference, held this year in Maynooth, Ireland, was terrific.  For those who missed it, here is the final program and abstracts.

--Dan Ernst

Register for ASLH 2022!

Pre-registration for the 2022 annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, to be held November 10-12 in Chicago is now open.  The ASLH encourages early registration. “Registration is fully refundable until October 19, 2022.”  More.

Legal Histories of Disease: The Stanford Legal History Conference

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Stanford Center for Law and History is delighted to share the full information for our Center's fourth annual conference, which will be held on April 29, 2022 as a hybrid event in-person at the Stanford Humanities Center and online via Zoom. The conference theme is Legal Histories of Disease.

The conference will explore how the law has historically responded to health crises and what contemporary insights can be drawn from this history. The one-day conference will be held on Friday, April 29, 2022, and is cosponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center; Program in History & Philosophy of Science, Stanford University; and Medical Humanities and the Arts Program (Medicine & the Muse).

The conference will include three panels followed by a keynote session featuring Professor John Witt of Yale Law School who will take part in a discussion of his recently published book, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 with Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens of the University of Nebraska.

The complete schedule and panel abstracts are available here.

Register here to reserve your in-person space at the Stanford Humanities Center or to receive the Zoom link details which will be sent about a week before the event.  All are welcome to attend every session or particular sessions of interest. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be served for those who attend in-person. Note: in-person registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and seating is limited.

We also ask all those who attend in-person to comply with current Stanford event guidelines regarding COVID which can be found here.

This event is open to the general public, as well as the Stanford community, both in-person and online. If you have any questions, please contact sclh@law.stanford.edu

Conference funding for scholars in Global South

 [We share the following announcement, from the Max Planck Institute. It is also posted on the Legal Histories of Empire website here.]

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is delighted to offer a bursary scheme for scholars who wish to attend and deliver a talk at the Legal Histories of Empires conference (29 June-1 July 2022 at Maynooth University, Ireland) and who are currently based in the Global South. The Institute is promoting research on, among others, legal transfers in the common law world, where the development of law on the Indian subcontinent is of particular interest, and the legal history of Ibero-America.

The Institute offers a bursary to attend the conference comprised of: flights to and from the conference, the registration fee, accommodation, a daily stipend, and the expenses associated with a visa application. Applicants must be currently based at an institution in one of the G77 Group of countries at the United Nations.

In order to apply for the scholarship, candidates will be asked to submit the following information: a statement of interest, the proposed topic to be delivered, and a short CV (no more than 3 pages). Applications should be sent to vogenauer@lhlt.mpg.de by 31 October 2021. Acceptances will be sent around mid-December.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• The American Historical Association has canceled its annual meeting scheduled for Seattle from January 7–10, 2021.  More.

• Annie Virginia Stephens Coker, the first Black woman to graduate from Berkeley Law. (Berkeley News). 

• Research for our times: Emily Prifogle, University of Michigan Law, has brought together this compilation of online archival materials and primary sources. For when you can't go to the archives in person.

• Mary Ziegler, Florida State University Law, discusses Abortion and the Law in America over at Nursing Clio.

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

ASLH 2020: Stay Tuned

The officers of the American Society for Legal History recently sent its members the following message about the annual meeting scheduled for Chicago in November:

In such uncertain times, we know you may be wondering about the status of our annual meeting, which is scheduled for November 11-13, 2020 in Chicago. The Society will make a decision about whether to hold or cancel this meeting in mid August. We will not provide members with registration information until we are certain that the meeting will go on as planned.

In the meantime, we are very grateful to the Program Committee, which is proceeding with its work in planning the program.

Once again, we send our best wishes to all our members and hope that you are well and safe.

--Dan Ernst

Women's Enfranchisement: Beyond the 19th Amendment

[We share the following announcement about an upcoming conference on women's enfranchisement at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. The conference is in honor of the centennial of the 19th Amendment's ratification, and has a significant emphasis on legal history.]

The University of Colorado Law School’s Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law, directed by Professor Suzette Malveaux, will host its 2020 Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. Conference on Constitutional Law on Friday, April 3, 2020, on the topic:  “Women’s Enfranchisement: Beyond the 19th Amendment.”  This year's conference will feature three exciting panels of diverse scholars and lawyers with a Keynote Address by Reva Siegel. 

2020 marks the centennial of the 19th Amendment, formally extending suffrage to some, but not all, women. This conference will use the centennial to take stock of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in terms of formal political enfranchisement, as well as the social and economic empowerment of women more broadly. 

6 general CLE credits have been approved for this free conference, and breakfast and lunch will be served to attendees. Register by March 30.

Location: Wittemyer Courtroom | Wolf Law Building (2450 Kittredge Loop Dr, Boulder, CO 80305)

Time: Friday, April 3, 2020 |8:30 am-5:00 pm

Speakers include: 
• Keynote: Reva Siegel (Yale Law)  
• Panelists: 

Historical Perspectives
• Carolyn Ramsey (Colorado Law)
• Susan Schulten (University of Denver, Dept. of History)
• Julie Suk (CUNY, Graduate Center)
• Mary Ziegler (Florida State Law)

Barriers to Political Representation
• Ming Chen (Colorado Law)
• Atiba Ellis (Marquette Law)
• Justin Levitt (Loyola Law)
• Bertrall Ross (Berkeley Law)
• Dara Strolovitch (Princeton University, Gender & Sexuality Studies)

Lived Equality:  Beyond Formal Political Rights 
• Chinyere Ezie (Center for Constitutional Rights)
• Diana Flynn (Lambda Legal)
• Cary Franklin (University of Texas Law)
• Aya Gruber (Colorado Law)
• Scott Skinner-Thompson (Colorado Law)

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• CFP: Performing Law, Staging History: The (Re)Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar, a “one-day interdisciplinary roundtable [that] aims to bring together academics and practitioners from various fields including law, history, military studies, theatre, visual culture, politics and literature to analyse the Uprising of 1857 and the subsequent trial of the last Mughal Emperor of India at the Red Fort in Delhi.”  More.

• We don't know how many LHB readers teach Sanborn v. McLean in a law-school Property course, but those who do really owe it to themselves and their students to consult the illustration on page 117 of Robert M. Fogelson's Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930 (Yale University Press, 2005), a gem of a book on restrictive covenants. 

• Available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core is “South Africa is the Mississippi of the world”: Anti-Apartheid Activism through Domestic Civil Rights Law, by Joanna L. Grisinger, Northwestern University.

• Patrick S. O'Donnell has posted the latest in his series of extraordinary bibliographies: North American Indians: History, Culture, Politics, and Law—A Bibliography.

• Having created Women Also Know History, Emily Prifogle and friends are now launching Women Also Know Law. Both databases offer a way to increase diversity on conference panels and beyond.

• "The Law Society of British Columbia has moved to require Indigenous cultural competency training for all practising lawyers in the province" (Coast Mountain News).  More.

• “The Delaware State Bar Association is set to host a CLE program titled “Delaware and Desegregation: Belton v. Gebhart and a History of Desegregation in Delaware” from 9 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Dec. 17" (Law.com).  More.

• Seth Barrett Tillman has posted A Religious Test in America?: New Sources on the 1809 Motion to Vacate Jacob Henry’s North Carolina State Legislative Seat.

• ICYMI:  David Dismore on Alice Paul in Ms. David Blanchette on Teaching LGBT history in the Illinois Times. Matthew Walther on The English history of impeachment in The Week. The State Historical Society of Missouri--which, we should add, opened a stunning, new research center in Columbia earlier this year--has awarded its 2020 fellowships, including one on “laws that tried to keep Native Americans out of the state,” in the Missourian.  Noah Feldman on Trump and the Meaning of Impeachment: My Testimony Before Congress, in the NYRB.

• Update: Submission deadline for Policy History Conference had been extended to January 15, 2020.  Registration for the May 2020 annual meeting of Law and Society Association has opened.
  

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