Teaching Legal History Online

I imagine that many of you, like me, are devoting part of the summer to reconfiguring a legal history course for online--and not merely remote--instruction.  If so, in addition to whatever guidance your home institution is providing, consider consulting the American Historical Association’s recent initiative, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Confronting a Pandemic: Historians and COVID-19,” which includes the AHA Online Teaching Forum, and a Remote Teaching Wiki.  Among the resources is a link to Steven Minz’s twenty-two minute video, Engaging Students Online.  I’ve also been learning from some of the webinars conducted by teachers of business-school cases hosted by Harvard Business Publishing, as well as its audio series, Online Teaching Survival Guide.

The American Society for Legal History has created a Google Group Discussion, originally (as its title, Legal History Records Discussion Group, suggests) to promote exchange about digitized legal history sources but subsequently widened to include discussion of online teaching.  The recently updated Legal History on the Web, hosted by Duke University, includes a portal to Primary Source Databases/Web Archives, but I do not know of a legal-history-specific wiki, where we might make available to each other, say, short lectures to use as asynchronous components in our courses.  (John Fabian Witt’s short lectures on the legal history of contagious disease in the United States would be an example.)  We cannot maintain such a wiki on Legal History Blog, but we do encourage interested legal historians to join the ASLH discussion group–especially if they are already members or promptly join ASLH–and I’ll monitor comments to this post to gauge interest.

Update: @RachelGurvich is way ahead of me. H/t: LPK

--Dan Ernst

Today: An Online Class with Ken Burns on the Constitution in Crisis Times

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns will be teaching an online class for students, entitled “The Constitution in Times of Crisis,”  April 3, with the National Constitution Center on the role of the U.S. Constitution during crises at 1pm today, EST, via Zoom.   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

• Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, University of Michigan Law School, has posted Why Study Tax History?, a review of volume 9 of Studies in the History of Tax Law, ed. P. Harris and D. de Cogan (Hart, 2019). 

• Congratulations to Emory Law's Deborah Dinner upon her being selected for an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship.  She received it for A Nation at Risk: Private Insurance and the Law in Modern America.  Congratulations, too, to Erik Linstrum, Associate Professor, History, University of Virginia, for Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire.

• Mary Dudziak recently tweeted out a link to the panel she moderated at SHAFR on in 2017 on War, Law, and Restraint, with Rosa Brooks, Jack Goldsmith, Helen Kinsella and John Fabian Witt.

• Some thoughts on epidemics in South Asian legal history: how the 1896 bubonic plague hit legal Bombay (-MS).  Voting during the Spanish Flu (Slate) and in today's NYT.  Polly J. Price (Emory) on quarantine in US history.  Frank Snowden’s lectures on “Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600,” including the final one, which calls “SARS, avian flu, and swine flu as ‘dress rehearsals’ for ‘something more serious.’” H/t: John Fabian Witt

• Ellen Carol DuBois on The Thorny Road to the Nineteenth Amendment (Smithsonian).

• There's a ton of ideas flying around as instructors switch to online teaching. Our Twitter favorites: a timely assignment idea if your other lesson plans fall through, some online archives you may not know about, academic resources going open-access, and even kindly guest lecture offers. And of course: "I Will Survive" and the horse drawing.  Also, it turns out you aren't funnier than Arkansas Law's Alex Nunn.  (Wait for it!)

•  Last weekend we mentioned Reuel Schiller's chapter in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, edited by Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).  Here's another chapter of interest: Sophia Z. Lee (University of Pennsylvania): "Rights in the New Deal Order and Beyond."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: William Horne (Villanova University), "In the hands of racist officials, the covid-19 pandemic may be a weapon." 

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