Rare Book School: Seats Still Available

We hear that there are still a few open seats for the Rare Book School course, "Law Books: History & Connoisseurship," which will be offered June 9-14 in the Yale Law School Library, New Haven, CT.  As we said in an earlier post, the instructors are Mike Widener (rare book advisor, retired curator), who has taught the class since 2010, and Kathryn James (rare book librarian, Yale Law Library), who has been the co-instructor since 2023. The class features extensive hands-on experience with the Yale Law Library's outstanding rare book collection. Details on the class, including comments from past students and links to registration information, are available here.

--Dan Ernst

Law Books: History and Connoisseurship

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Kathryn James and Mike Widener will be co-teaching the Rare Book School course, “Law Books: History and Connoisseurship,” at the Yale Law School next summer, June 9-14. Drawing on the Yale Law Library’s outstanding rare book collection,  the course offers an intensive week-long introduction to the history of law materials in print and manuscript, and to developing and using historical collections for teaching and research. Kathryn James became the Yale Law Library’s rare book librarian in 2021 upon Mike Widener’s retirement. If you’ve waited and wondered about the course, know that this will be the last opportunity to take the class with Mike Widener [emphasis supplied], who will be hanging up his Rare Book School boots on June 15 after fourteen years.

Details on registration are available on the Rare Book School website.

Weekend Roundup

• Guestblogger update: due to unforeseen circumstances, we'll be taking a rain check on Laurie Wood's posts this month. We look forward to welcoming Laurie back at a later date.

• Over at Riesenfeld Rare Books at Minnesota: the Law Library was recently honored with an award from the American Association of Law Libraries for the fall 2020 digital exhibit, "Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice: Selected Materials from the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center."  

• Congratulations to Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University, for winning the John Hope Franklin Prize of the Law and Society Association for her article “Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave,” and to recent LHB Guest Blogger Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Duke University for winning LSA’s James Willard Hurst Prize for A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  More.
  

• 
  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: The Conservative Press and the Interwar Origins of First Amendment Lochnerism, by Sam Lebovic; and The Enigma of a Taiping Fugitive: The Illusion of Justice and the Political Offence Exception” in Extradition from Hong Kong, by Jenny Huangfu Day.

• Nicholas Bagley, Philip Hamburger, Jennifer Mascott, Nicholas Parrillo, and Judge Neomi Rao discuss originalism and the nondelegation doctrine on the Federalist Society's YouTube channel.
  

• "The Tamil Nadu National Law University will be hosting the second All India Legal History Congress on May 21 and 22" (The Hindu).
  

• The Law and Humanities Workshop of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, will host a symposium on Eric Nelson's The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God on Wednesday, June 16th 2021, 16:30 Jerusalem / 09:30 EST, with Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study; Paul Horwitz, University of Alabama; Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya; and Micah J. Schwartzman, University of Virginia.  Register here.
  

• ICYMI: "Royal archives that we pay for but aren’t allowed to read: a brief history" (LSE British Politics and Policy).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Anne C. Fleming is remembered, especially by other former Climenko Fellows, in Harvard Law Today. 

• The Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History, to be held virtually on December 5, 2020 has been announced.  Fergus Smith will present Civil Litigants in Nineteenth-Century Sheriff Courts.

•  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Turning a Blind Eye: Infanticide and Missing Babies in Seventeenth-Century Geneva, by Sara Beam

• Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943, by Richard F. Hamm, University of Albany at SUNY, has been published online in the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic.

• Over at Notches: Ishita Pande, Queen's University, on her new book, Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937.

• Over at Legal History Miscellany:  Sara M. Butler on Law Enforcement Officials and the Limits of Violence in Medieval England.

• Ryan Greenwood at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog: the University of Minnesota Law Library has an upcoming exhibit on the 1935 Commission on the Harlem Riot, Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

• “The Bangor Historical Society is presenting a virtual exhibit that will focus on the connection between fashion and women’s freedoms. ‘Interwoven: Women’s Fashion and Empowerment’ focuses on the history of women’s rights, including social, economic, legal and voting, while relating milestones and benchmarks with fashion trends by decade" (Bangor Daily News).  And the National Constitution Center also has a new exhibit on the 19th Amendment (Philly Voice).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued a catalogue of forty-one noteworthy titles on The Laws of War and Peace.

•  ICYMI: A review of Matthew Van Meter’s Deep Delta Justice (WaPo).  Mary Ziegler on What's Next for Abortion Law? (Boston Review).  UVA Law's first female students.

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

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.