Weekend Roundup

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  Robert B. Stevens (UCSC)
  

  Robert Bocking Stevens, the author of the indispensable Law Schools: Legal Education in America: 1850-1960 (1983), has died.  The UC Santa Cruz notice is here.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has updated its Demography of Article III Judges, 1789-2020.
  

• Over at Balkinization, a symposium is underway on former LHB Guest Blogger Mary Ziegler's  Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present (2020), including Mark Graber’s contribution, Constitutional Trench Warfare over Abortion. 
  

• On February 23, the Law Library of Congress hosts the webinar Evolution of Presidential Powers under the Turkish Constitutional System, with Kayahan Cantekin, the Law Library’s foreign law specialist for Turkic-speaking jurisdictions.
  

• Filippo Maria Sposini, PhD candidate, University of Toronto and Roy McMurtry Fellow, Osgoode Society, has published The rise of psychological physicians: The certification of insanity and the teaching of medical psychology, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (2021).  It argues that by giving doctors the authority to report “facts of insanity,” the 1853 Lunatic Asylums Act created the need for “psychological physicians” capable of certifying lunacy and sped the development of psychiatry as a medical specialty.
  

• The OAH has extended its CFP deadline for its annual meeting until February 17, 2021.
  

• ICYMI: "My Name is Pauli Murray" premieres at the Sundance Film Festival (Star Tribune). What Would U.S. Grant Do (about White Supremacy)? (Politico).  A history of unusual impeachments (Governing).  Amend, the Netflix documentary on the 14th Amendment (Philly Voice).  Reconstruction: A Timeline (History).

• Update: In the LRB, read Erin Maglaque's essay on John Christopoulous' book on abortion in early modern Italy.

• Update: The American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies is hosting an online seminar for the next six weeks. "New Research in Sri Lankan History" includes several sessions on legal history. Register here.

• Update: The Middle Temple Library Blog has posted this handy list of online ecclesiastical law resources. 

• Update: The Einstein Foundation welcomes nominations from the humanities and social sciences for its Award for Promoting Quality in Research (due: March 31, 2021).

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

Diamond v. Chakrabarty at 40

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

WEBINAR: Patents on Life: Diamond v. Chakrabarty at 40 (June 17, 1pm EDT), Wednesday, June 17, 2020, 1:00 – 2:30 PM (EDT).  This webinar is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.  CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE LIVE WEBINAR.

In June 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Diamond v. Chakrabarty authorized the first patent on an intentionally genetically modified organism and concluded that patents may be granted for “anything under the sun that is made by man.” The decision contributed to the rise of the modern biotechnology industry and reshaped the agriculture industry. Less well known, the Plant Protection Act of 1930 had previously allowed intellectual property protection for selectively bred and cloned plants. On the 40th anniversary of Diamond v. Chakrabarty and the 90th anniversary of the Plant Protection Act, our expert panel will discuss breakthroughs in agricultural biotechnology and explore the impacts – economic and environmental – of these two major historical turning points. How did the rise of patented, GMO crops change farming? How did the Supreme Court’s decision change the patent system? How did developments in biotechnology reshape America’s innovation system?

 We will take questions through the web portal following brief opening presentations and an initial discussion among the panelists.

PANELISTS:

• Ananda M. Chakrabarty, inventor and distinguished professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine

• Dan Charles, science writer, National Public Radio food and agriculture correspondent

• Daniel Kevles, Stanley Woodward Professor Emeritus of History, History of Medicine & American Studies, Yale University

• Jennie Schmidt, farmer, registered dietitian nutritionist, and blogger at The Foodie Farmer

• Moderator: Arthur Daemmrich, Director, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Closing Remarks: Sean O’Connor, Executive Director & Senior Scholar, Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Details here.  Real-time captioning (CART) for the live webinar will be provided. Please send an email to nmahprograms@si.edu with any other accessibility needs.  This webinar is co-presented by The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, and the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

Colloquium: Legal History of Epidemics

The Legal History of Epidemics: A Colloquium, will take place on Monday, May 25, 2020.  It is
sponsored by the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University and will be conducted (and recorded) on Zoom.  To register, please email berg@tauex.tau.ac.il

Session 1 (15:00 GMT/11:00 EDT):
Mario Ascheri (Rome 3): Treatises on Plague Law in the Italian Renaissance
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg (Harvard): Early Modern Jewish Legal Sources on Epidemics
Noga Morag-Levine (Michigan State): Pestilence and Governance in Early Modern England
Alex Chase-Levenson (Penn): Lazaretto Law in the Early Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean
Felice Batlan (Chicago-Kent): Rights, Quarantines, and Inequality in U.S. History
John Witt (Yale): American Contagions: A Short History of Law and Democracy in Crisis

Session 2 (16:15 GMT/12:15 EDT):
Roundtable discussion: Issues and challenges in the legal history of epidemics
Moderator: David Schorr (Tel Aviv)

--Dan Ernst

Witt on History of Public Health Emergencies in the US

John Witt, Yale Law School, has published The Law of Salus Populi: Epidemics and the Law in the Yale Review.  “For better and for worse,” he writes, “past American public health emergencies have reproduced the preexisting patterns and practices of law and politics, with all the vices and perhaps some of the virtues those patterns entail, reinforcing rather than revising the major themes of American life.”

--Dan Ernst