Weekend Roundup

• Reminder: Applications for the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards to support research and writing in American legal history by early-career scholar are due on July 1.  (The Committee for Research Fellowships and Awards of the American Society for Legal History reviews the applications and makes recommendations to the Foundation.)  More.

• This year’s recipients of Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships include Tamar Menashe, Columbia University, for "People of the Law: The Imperial Supreme Court and Jews in Cross-Confessional Legal Cultures in Germany, 1495–1690," and Lila Teeters, University of New Hampshire, for “Native Citizens: The Fight For and Against Native Citizenship in the United States, 1866–1924.”

• Process, the blog of the Journal of American History and the Organization of American Historians, has put out a call for submissions on "all aspects of the history of disability in the United States."

• Two new articles online in the American Journal of Legal History: “Law at a Critical Juncture: The US Army’s Command Responsibility Trials at Manila 1945–1947,” by Jamie Fellows; and “Reforming Criminal Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Police, Courts and Prisons in Rusçuk, 1839-1864,” by Mehmet Celik.

• Here is the Harvard Law School faculty's open letter condemning "a series of acts by President Trump and other public servants that endorse violence and are inconsistent with a democratic legal order." Signatories include every legal historian we can think of who teaches there.

• The Consortium for Undergraduate Law & Justice Programs recently announced its 2020 awards for teaching and best undergraduate paper.

• Justin W. Aimonetti, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, has posted his student note Colonial Virginia: The Intellectual Incubator of Judicial Review, published in the Virginia Law Review 106 (2020): 765-810.  He thanks UVA Law’s Cynthia Nicoletti.

• From the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog at the University of Minnesota: Law in Times of Crisis, II

• ICYMI: Dean Risa Goluboff draws on her own historical research in her message to UVA law students.  David Blight on Frederick Douglass and "the tortured relationship between protest and change" (The Atlantic). Alexander Zhang on this history of "school-to-prison pipeline" policing in Minneapolis (Slate).

• ICYMI, Insurrection Act Edition:  Gautham Rao on the Posse Comitatus and Insurrection Acts (CNN).  The History Channel on the Jeffersonian origins of the Insurrection Act.  Still more, in WaPo's Retropolis.
  

• Over at Balkinization, Stephen Griffin develops an aspect of his recent SSRN post "Optimistic Originalism and the Reconstruction Amendments."Also at Balkinization: Gregory Ablavsky (Stanford Law School) on "PROMESA and Original Understandings of the Territories’ Constitutional Status."

• Lots of important content in the Washington Post's "Made by History" section this week, including Elizabeth Kolsky (Villanova University) on "how autopsies can uphold white supremacy."
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History invites doctoral students and young researchers to participate in study sessions on “the basic tools for beginning research in the archives of the Holy See and of other Roman ecclesiastical institutions as well as to provide elements for a critical interpretation of the sources and their contextualization through the most current literature.”  More. 

• Congratulations to Emory Law's Deborah Dinner and the other Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University for 2020-2021! 

• Robert Pigott on Elihu Root and New York City real estate in Judicial Notice, the journal of the Historical Society of the New York Courts.

• Over at Talking Legal History, Maddalena Marinari, Assistant Professor in History; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; and Peace Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, speaks to Siobhan M. M. Barco about her book Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

• The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America. 

• Law in Times of Crisis at the University of Minnesota Law Library's Riesenfeld Rare Books Center 

• Have you checked out Annenberg Classroom's videos and other materials on the Constitution, including Supreme Court landmarks, including Miranda v. Arizona and New York Times v. Sullivan, as well as The Story of the Bill of Rights.

• ICYMI: A notice and query on the female lawyer Mary Anderson Matthews (1878-1948) of  Palmyra, Mo.  The quarrel over originalism within the right (National Review).  Charly B. Gay and Nancy Phillips on Constance Baker Motley in The Gramblinite.

• Update: WHYY and the Philadelphia Tribune on that Ken Burns series on the Constitution in Times of Crisis at the National Constitution Center.  Also: TR descendants heard from, here and here.

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

A week in the world of Rare Law Books

Every second summer, the Rare Book School offers a weeklong intensive course that legal

From the Special Collections of Yale's Lillian Goldman Law Library

historians should know more about. Designed for librarians, scholars, and collectors, the “Law Books: History and Connoisseurship” course took place at Yale Law School last week (June 11-15, 2018). It was taught by Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, and Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center, University of Minnesota Law Library. This LHB blogger (Mitra Sharafi) took the course. I’m happy to report on its many wonders.

I was the only legal historian in the group of twelve participants. Everyone else was a librarian, whether based at a law library, special collections, or both. When I first heard about the course, I had doubts about how useful it might be for me, given my focus on research and teaching more than on managing collections. Happily, I was wrong to worry. It was fascinating and extremely useful to gain insights into the ways university special collections operate. Among other things, I gained a better sense of which law libraries in the US are actively collecting rare books in various research areas.

More after the jump.