Weekend Roundup

• The Organization of American Historians has cancelled its annual meeting. But you can still skim the excellent program that the organizers put together. Margot Canaday (Princeton University) and Craig Steven Wilder (MIT) co-chaired the program committee. AND, if you were scheduled to present, check out this invitation (via Twitter) from The Docket (the online companion to the Law & History Review): "We’re sad about all that awesome #legalhistory scholarship that was going to be at #OAH20 and we’d like to be of service. The Docket will publish abstracts, full papers, etc. for any law, policy, or politics related OAH panel!" 

• Two recent op-eds by Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont): "Will the Court Ignore Past Rulings in Its Zeal to Demolish Abortion Rights?" (American Prospect) and "The abortion issue is back in the Supreme Court. What would my mother, and Jewish feminists of her generation, think?" (Forward).

• From Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians, Greg Ablavsky (Stanford Law) writes about his recent Journal of American History article “Species of Sovereignty: Native Nationhood, the United States, and International Law, 1783–1795.

• For those who have moved to online teaching, Twitter is filled with good resources right now. For example, Aimi Hamraie (Vanderbilt University) tweeted out an excellent guide to "accessible teaching in the time of COVID-19," tapping into some hard-won wisdom from "disabled culture and community." 

• Law and History Review and Cambridge Core have posted two new articles: “Precocious Girls”: Age of Consent, Class and Family in Late Nineteenth-Century England, by Laura Lammasniemi, and Vernacularizing Justice: Age of Consent and a Legal History of the British Empire, by Ishita Pande. 

• Reuel E. Schiller has published “Regulation and the Collapse of the New Deal Order, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Market,” in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, ed. Gerstle, Lichtenstein, and O’Connor (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Elisa Minoff (Center for the Study of Social Policy) on why "work requirements are catastrophic in a pandemic"; Brendan Shanahan (Yale University), "Counting everyone — citizens and non-citizens — in the 2020 census is crucial"; Ariela Gross (University of Southern California) and Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard University), "The history of slavery remains with us today"; and more.

• The Library of Congress may be closed to the public, but we believe its “crowdsourcing initiative By the People” continues.  The newest campaign to enlist the public’s help in making "digital collection items more searchable and accessible online is Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents includes thousands of pages of historical documents in Spanish, Latin and Catalan."

• Jayanth K. Krishnan, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, has posted "Lawyers for the Undocumented: Addressing a Split Circuit Dilemma for Asylum-Seekers," which is forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal.  A section treats the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), a federal statute adopted in 1980.

• ICYMI: An exhibit at the Lombard Historical Society on “the first woman to ever vote in an Illinois municipal election, an attorney named Ellen Martin.”  Patti Smith’s blurb of Ralph Nader’s cookbook: “A wonderful blend of consumer protection and consumer pleasure.” H/t: JLG

• And if you can face it: Duke University Press has put together this Navigating the Threat of Pandemics collection--free to read online until June 1 (books) and Oct.1 (articles). LHB readers may appreciate this one especially.

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

Welcome, Elizabeth Thornberry!

We are excited to introduce our guest blogger for February 2019. Elizabeth Thornberry is Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

Professor Thornberry is a historian of South Africa. Her work spans the history of gender, sexuality, empire, and law in Southern Africa and across the continent. Her first book, Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape was published recently by Cambridge University Press (we noted it here).

After doing a BA at Harvard and a Master's degree at Oxford, Professor Thornberry obtained a PhD in History at Stanford. She taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges from 2011-16 and has been a member of the History department at Johns Hopkins since 2016. Prof. Thornberry was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Law and Society at the University of Cape Town in 2013. In 2018-19, she is a Davis Center fellow at Princeton's History department.

Prof. Thornberry has published articles on sexual and domestic violence, virginity testing, forced marriage, and custom in journals including the Journal of Southern African Studies and the African Studies Review. With Richard Roberts and Emily Burrill, she is co-editor of the volume, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2010). Elizabeth Thornberry is currently working on her second book, whose provisional title is Imagining African Law: Black Intellectuals and the Politics of Custom in South Africa, 1880-1927. 

For further information on Prof. Thornberry's research, see her faculty profile here.

Thornberry on Rape in South Africa

Out this month with Cambridge University Press is Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape by Elizabeth Thornberry, Johns Hopkins University. From the publisher: 

Elizabeth Thornberry uses historical evidence to shed light on South Africa's contemporary epidemic of sexual violence. Drawing on over a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry reconstructs the history of rape in South Africa's Eastern Cape, from the precolonial era to the triumph of legal and sexual segregation, and digs deep into questions of conceptions of sexual consent. Through this process, Thornberry also demonstrates the political stakes of disputes over sexual consent, and the ways in which debates over the regulation of sexuality shaped both white and black politics in this period. From customary authority to missionary Christianity and humanitarian liberalism to segregationism, political claims implied theories of sexual consent, and enabled distinctive claims to control female sexuality. The political history of rape illuminates not only South Africa's contemporary crisis of sexual violence, but the entangled histories of law, sexuality, and politics across the globe.

Here is the Table of Contents:

• Introduction: writing the history of rape
• 1. Custom and consent in Xhosaland
• 2. Sex and spiritual power
• 3. Liberalism and the colonial law of sexual violence
• 4. Rape and racial boundaries
• 5. Navigating the politics of consent
• Conclusion: rape and the postcolony.

Further information is available here.