The YLS Exhibit, “Precedents So Scrawl'd and Blurr'd,” Now Online

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

If distance or the coronavirus shutdown prevented you from viewing the Yale Law Library's Spring 2020 rare book exhibition, "Precedents So Scrawl'd and Blurr'd: Readers' Marks in Law Books," there is good news. The exhibition is now online, as part of the Yale University Library's Online Exhibitions website.

The 39 volumes in the exhibition, spanning seven centuries and three continents, were selected for their research potential and for the insights they provide into the roles law books have played in people's lives. The marks left by readers document the lived experience of the law, and remind us that law is above all a human endeavor. The exhibition is the latest in a series that examine law books as physical artifacts, and the relationships between their form and content.

The exhibition's title comes from John Anstey's verse satire of the legal profession, "The Pleader's Guide" (1796): "Precedents so scrawl'd and blurr'd / I scarce could read one single word."

Weekend Roundup

• Barbara Allen Babcock, the first woman member of the Stanford Law School faculty, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita, the author of Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (2011, and a great promoter of the history of women in the legal profession has died. Here's Stanford's press release. 

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts concludes its Celebrate Diversity Month in Common Threads of Justice by joining with Supreme Court Historical Society in the program Ladies of Legend: The First Generation of American Women Attorneys.

• Here's a "sixty-second lecture"  on the legal history of epidemics in Modern America by Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. And by LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi: Pandemic or poison? How epidemics shaped Southasia's legal history

• Congratulations to Jennifer Mnookin, a historian of the law of evidence, Erika Lee, a historian of immigration law and policy, and my law dean William Treanor, a constitutional historian of the Founding, upon their induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  I was also very pleased to see my Georgetown colleague Michael Kazin among the inductees.  DRE

•  Have you noted the National Archives and Records Administration platform, History Hub?  It “connects agencies, researchers, and a bevy of citizen archivists within its online community to help the public through its research journeys.”  The latest episode announces Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series: A Match Made in History.

• Julian Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley’s attack on the originalist case for the nondelegation in American constitutional law has prompted two responses on SSRN by Ilan Wurman and Aaron Gordon. 

• ICYMI: Richard Lazarus’s Rule of Five, on Massachusetts v. EPA, in Harvard Law Today.The NYT obit of Richard Sobol, who went from Columbia Law to Arnold, Fortas & Porter to the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in 1965.

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

Legal History of Epidemics

Two online scholarly engagements with the legal history of epidemics have come to our attention.  The first, over at Environment, Law and History, is Legal History of Epidemics: Selected Sources, compiled by David Schorr, the Director of the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at the Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law.  (He would be pleased to receive additional suggestions.)  The second is Salus Populi, a five-segment Panopto lecture on the legal history of epidemics John Fabian Witt delivered to his American Legal History students at the Yale Law School last week.

Update: Via the American Historical Association's "Fortnightly News," we’ve learned that “the Stanton Foundation is launching a weekly contest to identify the best new applied history article or op-ed that analyzes history to clarify the medical, political, economic and/or international impact of COVID-19 and identifies lessons or clues for policymakers. Each week's winner will receive $1,000, with an additional $2,500 prize for the best overall.”  More.

--Dan Ernst

American Constitutional History Online

From posts on Volokh Conspiracy, we are aware of two sets of digital materials on constitutional history that are now freely accessible to promote online teaching.  The first is the Oxford University Press’s companion website to Gillman, Graber, and Whittington’s American Constitutionalism.  (More.)  The second is Randy Barnett and Josh Blackman’s “63-video series explaining the Supreme Court cases normally covered in every Con Law I and II course. "  (More.)

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The New Books Network has a new podcast up on Richard J. Ross and Brian Owensby’s Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (NYU Press, 2018).

• The article No-Fault Divorce Reform in the 1950s: The Lost History of the “Greatest Project” of the National Association of Women Lawyers, by Laura Oren, professor emerita at the University of Houston Law Center, is now available from Law and History Review via the Cambridge Core

• ICYMI: Jan Lewis's Rutgers obituary.  The Switch-in-Time rides again.  GQ endorses the rule of law and "the System."

• May we recommend The Scout Report? It's a good way to find out about humanities resources on the internet. You can sign up for the weekly e-mail (every Friday) here.

•  From the Washington Post's Made by History section: Carly Goodman (American Friends Service Committee) on "the shadowy network shaping Trump's anti-immigration policies"; Claire Potter (the New School) on "why lying, rather than sexual assault, could topple Brett Kavanaugh"; Kimberly A. Hamlin (Miami University in Ohio) on "what happens when women talk to Congress about sex"; Sarah Milov (University of Virginia) on how "like the tobacco industry, e-cigarette manufacturers are targeting children"; and more.

• Someone at the Hagley Museum and Library read guest blogger Laura Phillips Sawyer's recent posts about her research there. They encourage more legal historians to come take advantage of their collections.

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