Weekend Roundup

• Via H-Net: a University of Chicago job posting for an "Instructional Professor in Law, Letters, and Society."  

• Daniel Kuehn discusses a paper W. E. B. Du Bois wrote when he was a Harvard graduate student that, Kuehn argues, anticipated important insights in marginalist wage theory (AEA).

• The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia has opened a new gallery, titled “America’s Founding.” Per local reporting, it "provides attendees with an interactive experience on the early conflicts leading up to the creation of the U.S. Constitution, including early protests, the American Revolution and the adoption of the Bill of Rights." 

• The National Constitution Center has announced the appointment of Jon Meacham as its Semiquincentennial Scholar, "a one-year appointment designed to anchor the Center’s intellectual and civic programming celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary" (NCC).

• In related news, the ARC Justice Clinic at Penn Carey Law, representing the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and The Black Journey, has filed an amicus brief in City of Philadelphia v. Burgum, et al. As the Clinic's website explains, "[t]he case concerns the removal of educational exhibits about slavery from the President’s House Site near Independence Hall, where President George Washington enslaved nine people in the late eighteenth century." Read the brief here. 

• From In Custodia Legis: an invitation to "watch a recording of a Kluge Center Event 'Testing for Witches in 16th Century Germany.'"  

• Rory Cox on Hittite Laws of War, summarizing a chapter in the fourth volume of Laws of Yesterday’s Wars (Brill), edited by Samuel White.   

• Alexandra Natapoff, Harvard Law School, has launched Rule of Law 101, a free, ten-part video series, which "features world-class legal experts from top law schools around the nation explaining and analyzing important decisions by the Supreme Court" (Harvard Law Today).  

• Jud Campbell, Jonathan Gienapp, and Orin Kerr discuss originalism before Stanford Law students in a recording appearing in the Institute for Justice's Short Circuit Podcast. 

•  On April 14, 2026 at 10:00am (EDT), the Modern Criminal Law Review will hold a book forum live on YouTube on  David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton 2025).  In addition to Professor Garland, the panelists include Amna Akbar, University of Minnesota, Law; Patricia Faraldo Cabana and José Ángel Brandariz García, University of A Coruña, Law; Katja Franko, University of Oslo, Criminology, Rocío Lorca, University of Chile, Law; and Sara Wakefield, Rutgers University, Criminal Justice.  Register here.

• ICYMI: Six Black Legal Trailblazers (Solove Law).  Trailblazing Black Ohio Lawyers (CNO).  The descendants of Plessy and of Ferguson at Tulane Law.   

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

Bugaric on Fulgosius on Just War

Max Kuhelj Bugaric, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government and a student in the Law School at Harvard University, has posted Raphael Fulgosius on Just War: Papal Adjudication of Conflicts and War as Judgment.  The paper was awarded the 2025 Irving Oberman Memorial Award in Legal History of the Harvard Law School. 

While Raphael Fulgosius (1367–1427) does advance a seemingly revolutionary notion—that in certain cases, the outcome of a war is itself a just verdict—it must be read in light of the overall framework he develops. But in what has been written on this topic, the emphasis rests almost entirely on his argument about the impossibility of judging the different sides’ claims to justice in a formal bellum. This paper attempts to correct the historical record and offer a more fully contextual interpretation of his claims. Fulgosius was willing to set aside the rigid theory of the just war framework and instead label conflicts between Christians “dissensions” (dissensiones) precisely in order to preserve the diplomatic power of the papacy. But the conclusion Fulgosius reaches in effect allows for an even stronger statement of the unilateral rights of war, as it is the pope himself who acts as judge in such disputes. There can be no appeal to his sentence, which also resolves the problem of potential ambiguity and doubt. Even if he thought papal adjudicative power should not be completely unconstrained in such scenarios, he likely would have wanted to preserve the general prerogative, motivated at least in part by the desire to rein in the constant warfare that characterized the Italian city-states in this period.

--Dan Ernst 

Benton's "They Called It Peace"

 Lauen Benton, Yale University, has published They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press):

Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries.

In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces insured the easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined “small” violence as essential to imperial rule and global order.

Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.

Two encomia:

“With characteristic lucidity, subtlety, and grace, Lauren Benton highlights how the boundary between private violence and public war was perpetually blurred and renegotiated across the imperial world. They Called It Peace demonstrates that small wars have had outsized consequences for world order both in the past and enduringly into the present.”—David Armitage, author of Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

“Our greatest historian of empire and law is at the height of her powers in this breathtaking reinterpretation of ‘small wars’ that did—and do—massive damage. Lauren Benton reads canonical writers against the backdrop of patterned and routine force across centuries and hears those often omitted from self-congratulatory stories of how the violent weaned themselves from their violence. The results decisively rebuke those exaggerating breakthroughs for humanity or peace in a world of contestation and domination—past and present.”—Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The Center for the Southwest at The University of New Mexico announces that Katrina Jagodinsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will deliver the 2023 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture in Western History and Culture, on Monday, March 20, from 5 to 6:30 p.m.  She will lecture on “The Many Faces of Habeas: Challenging Coercion and Confinement in the American West.”

• Johns Hopkins's notice on Martha S. Jones's appointment to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise (Hub).
  

• Former ASLH President Bruce Mann et uxor will each receive the Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University on May 15, 2023.
  

• In James Bradley Thayer, Legal Realist? Mathew J. Franck reviews The Prophet of Harvard Law: James Bradley Thayer and His Legal Legacy, by Andrew Porwancher and his three recently graduated students (Jake Mazeitis, Taylor Jipp, and Austin Coffey) in Public Discourse, the journal of the Witherspoon Institute.
  

• "The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars," a book series with Brill Nijhoff, “highlights the wider customs and norms that regulate warfare to offer alternate models of conflict regulation and resolution” (Articles of War).
  

• Martin Riker's The Guest Lecture is just terrific.  DRE
  

• ICYMI:  Judge Cites 1849 Slavery Law in Ruling Embryos Can Be Considered Property (NYT).  Clare Sears on Cross-Dressing Bans in US History (Jacobin). Joshua Shanes, College of Charleston, on What is a Progrom? (Akron Legal News).
  

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

Minow to Speak at UVA on Nuremburg Trials at 75

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

On Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EDT, the University of Virginia Jewish Studies Program will host Professor Martha Minow (Harvard Law School) for the 2021 Grob Lecture on American Jewish Life, “The Nuremberg Trials at 75: Lessons and Legacies.” Registration available here.

Gillespie on the causes of war (vol.4)

Alexander Gillespie (University of Waikato, New Zealand) has published The Causes of War, Volume IV: 1650-1850 with Hart. From the press: 

This is the fourth volume of a projected five-volume series charting the causes of war from 3000 BCE to the present day, written by a leading international lawyer, and using as its principal materials the documentary history of international law, largely in the form of treaties and the negotiations which led up to them. These volumes seek to show why millions of people, over thousands of years, slew each other. In departing from the various theories put forward by historians, anthropologists and psychologists, Gillespie offers a different taxonomy of the causes of war, focusing on the broader settings of politics, religion, migrations and empire-building. These four contexts were dominant and often overlapping justifications during the first four thousand years of human civilisation, for which written records exist.

Further information on this volume is available here. In 2011, we noted the publication of volumes 1-3 here.

--Mitra Sharafi