Sellers on Classical Influences on the Founders and on the French Revolution

Mortimer Newlin Stead Sellers, University of Baltimore School of Law, has posted two short essays will which appear in THE CLASSICAL TRADITION, Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most, Salvatore Settis, (eds.), Harvard, 2009. Here are the abstracts:

Classical Influences on the American Founding Fathers

The American Revolution was a Whig revolution, which made it also a neo-Roman revolution from the start. Americans petitioned, remonstrated, and eventually fought to preserve neo-Roman conceptions of mixed government, liberty, and the rule of law that had dominated British political discourse since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Roman example gave Americans heroes, vocabulary, and a constitution for their revolutionary experiment in government without a king. The most important of the many classical influences on the American founding fathers was the political history of the Roman republic, because the American Revolution was political, and could neither have taken place nor succeeded as it did without classical learning to guide it. With the Revolution’s triumph in the federal constitution, the new American republic supplanted its ancient models. Subsequent revolutions would look to the United States and to its sister republic in France for political inspiration, just as Americans and their predecessors once imitated Rome.

Classical Influences on the Law and Politics of the French Revolution

The French Revolution was the last great political event to take its inspiration, iconography and institutions primarily from classical antiquity. French revolutionaries depended heavily on Roman and Greek history for ideas, and for the courage to apply them. But even if their understanding of history had been accurate (it seldom was) French politicians could never settle which ancient model to follow. Classical antiquity provides innumerable conflicting moral and political examples and the French came close to having tried them all, running through the whole of Roman history in fifteen years. Eighteenth-century Frenchmen postured as Romans, Athenians and Spartans, without ever achieving liberty against arbitrary power, or any consistent rule of law. The French Revolution’s ostentatious classicism, comprehensive experimentation, and obvious failure, discredited Roman and Greek antiquity as practical models for political reform. Future revolutions would need new models, including the experience of France itself, and the transatlantic successes of the United States of America. The French Revolution discredited classical antiquity, by following it too capriciously, too blindly and to the bitter end.

Carroll on Carlson on "The Crimes of Womanhood"

Tamar W. Carroll, Cornell University, has posted on H-Law her review of A. Cheree Carlson, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). The review, entitled, "Gendered Rhetoric in the Victorian-era American Courtroom," commences:

In this interesting book, Carlson analyzes six highly publicized trials involving women defendants or principals in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Several of the cases remain well known today: the 1892 trial of Lizzie Andrew Borden, accused of murdering her father and stepmother; the multiple trials from 1840 to 1878 of Ann Trow Lohman, better known as the abortionist Madame Restell; and the 1925 Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case in which a wealthy white man sued his wife for fraud for failing to disclose her "colored" race prior to their marriage.

The other cases, those of Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard (1864), Mary Harris (1865), and Mary Todd Lincoln (1875), all involved questions of mental competency. Packard and Lincoln were both committed by male guardians to psychiatric hospitals against their will; juries eventually ruled that they were not insane and released them from their confinement. Harris shot and killed the man who had led her to believe they were to be married and then abandoned her for another woman. Harris was found not guilty by the jury, who believed her lawyer's claim that Harris was suffering from insanity brought on by emotional distress and menstrual disorder at the time of the murder. These courtroom dramas unfolded as the legal and medical professions sought to establish professional legitimacy and battled for authority to define criminal insanity.

More here.

Langbein, Lerner and Smith, History of the Common Law

For anyone considering a Fall 2009 adoption of John Langbein, Renee Lettow Lerner, and Bruce P. Smith, History of The Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions, I'm assured by the folks at Aspen that although the book won't be published until the week of August 17, copies can be in university bookstores in time for the start of classes. Page proofs for professors considering adoption are available now.

According to the publisher,

This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. [Its illustrations include] medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs.

Two great themes dominate the book: (1) the origins, development, and pervasive influence of the jury system and judge/jury relations across eight centuries of Anglo-American civil and criminal justice; and (2) the law/equity division, from the emergence of the Court of Chancery in the fourteenth century down through equity's conquest of common law in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The chapters on criminal justice explore the history of pretrial investigation, policing, trial, and sentencing, as well as the movement in modern times to nonjury resolution through plea bargaining. Considerable attention is devoted to distinctively American developments, such as the elective bench, and the influence of race relations on the law of criminal procedure.

Other major subjects of this book include the development of the legal profession, from the serjeants, barristers, and attorneys of medieval times down to the transnational megafirms of twenty-first century practice; the literature of the law, especially law reports and treatises, from the Year Books and Bracton down to the American state reports and today's electronic services; and legal education, from the founding of the Inns of Court to the emergence and growth of university law schools in the United States.

I'll have more to say about the book and the tradition it represents when it's out. Because I've noticed (and, truth to tell, felt) some sticker shock at the $159 price, I'll add now that I'm told that it is the first casebook by a major publisher of law school teaching materials to be published in full color, because so many of its more than 250 illustrations are in color. Also, the (1,184-page) book is likely to have a long life on a law student/lawyer's shelf as a reference work. Finally, Amazon appears to be discounting it.

Update: In my remarks on price, I may have been guilty of extrapolating from the last time I bought a casebook, which I believe was 1983. I've been assured that the price is quite comparable to other recently published casebooks of similar dimensions.

Bruce Mann Slated to Be ASLH President-Elect

From the election materials on the American Society of Legal History's website, we learn that Bruce H. Mann, Harvard Law School, is on the ballot as the ASLH's president-elect, whose two-year term as president would, assuming that he prevails in the uncontested election, follow that of Constance Backhouse, which commences later this year. The Nominating Committee reports:

Bruce H. Mann is the Carl F. Schipper, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, and the universities of Connecticut, Houston, Texas, and Michigan, and in the Department of History at Princeton. He has been a member of the Society and attended all but one or two annual meetings since 1976, when he was a graduate student. He has twice served on the Board of Directors and has chaired the Publications Committee since 2001. He has also been a member of the Nominating Committee, the Surrency Prize Committee, and three Program Committees, including as chair for the 1986 annual meeting in Toronto. He has presented or commented on papers and chaired panels at ten annual meetings. He was editor of Law & History Review from 1987-1993.

His first book, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut, was published in the Society's Studies in Legal History series. His other publications include The Many Legalities of Early America, which he co-edited with Christopher Tomlins, and articles and essays in various history journals and law reviews. His most recent book, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence, received prizes from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the American Historical Association, and the Law and Society Association. His primary research interest is the relationship among law, economy, and society in early America, although he occasionally writes on the law of wills and charitable foundations.

He is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and an elected Member of the American Antiquarian Society, and is a long-time member of the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia.

According to the University of Ottawa's website, Constance Backhouse, whose tenure as president begins this year,

holds the positions of Distinguished University Professor and University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. She teaches in the areas of criminal law, human rights, legal history, and women and the law.

Professor Backhouse's most recent book is Carnal Crimes: Sexual Assault Law in Canada, 1900-1975 (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2008). She is the co-author, along with her sister, the Hon. Justice Nancy L. Backhouse, of The Heiress versus the Establishment: Mrs. Campbell’s Campaign for Legal Justice (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), which was named by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the five “books most likely to become classics of their kind” for the year 2004. It was also selected by The Beaver magazine as a “Book Club Title” for 2005, and short-listed for the Toronto Book Award in 2005. She is the author of Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada,1900-1950 (Toronto: U of T Press, 1999), which was awarded the 2002 Joseph Brant Award as the “best book in multicultural history published within the past three years” by the Ontario Historical Society. Her book, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991), was awarded the 1992 Willard Hurst Prize in American Legal History by the Law and Society Association. Another of her books, Challenging Times: The Women’s Movement in Canada and the United States (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s U. Press), co-edited with David H. Flaherty, was named the 1993 “Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights in the United States” by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the U.S. She is the co-author with Leah Cohen of two books on sexual harassment: Sexual Harassment on the Job (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981) and The Secret Oppression: Sexual Harassment of Working Women (Toronto: Macmillan, 1979). The latter was the first book published in Canada on the topic, and the second in North America.

The members of the nominating committee are Barbara Welke (Chair), Christina Duffy Burnett, Christopher Capozzola, Amalia Kessler, and David S. Tanenhaus.

Update: A column summarizing an account of the sexism prevalent during Professor Backhouse's law school days is here.

Seminar on Lincoln's Constitution at NY Historical Society

THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY OFFERS ITS FIRST

SEMESTER-LENGTH SEMINAR ON CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY IN AUTUMN 2009,

FOCUSING ON “LINCOLN’S CONSTITUTION”

Akhil Reed Amar (Yale University) and James Oakes (CUNY)

to Teach Graduate-Level Course About Constitutional Issues Raised by Lincoln’s Presidency

In its capacity as the New York City home of the Institute for Constitutional History (ICH)—an organiza
tion that is co-housed in Washington, DC, at the George Washington University Law School—the New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce that its first semester-long graduate course will take place in autumn 2009 as the Robert H. Smith Seminar. In keeping with the Lincoln Bice
ntennial theme of the Historical Society’s programs in 2009, including its major exhibition Lincoln and New York, the seminar will focus on the constitutional issues arising from the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and will be taught under the title of Lincoln’s Constitution.

Designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law and related disciplines, the seminar will be taught by the distinguished scholars Akhil Reed Amar (Yale College and Yale Law School) and James Oakes (CUNY Graduate Center).

“We are proud to be taking this major new step in advancing the mission of ICH,” stated Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the Historical Society. “The history and use of the Constitution are central to American history and culture, but do not constitute a central field of historical st

udy at any university in the New York metropolitan area. The New-York Historical Society offers an optimal site for such a program, given its collections, location, reputation for high standards, and ability to provide a neutral ground that can convene scholars from a wide variety of institutions.”

The collections of the Historical Society’s Museum and Library are extraordinarily rich in materials related to the Constitution and its history. Among these are papers, letters, maps, caricatures and other documents having to do with the John Peter Zenger case, the Stamp Act, the events of the early Federal period (including the crises of the 1790s) and the political battles of the early 19th century; Rufus King's notes on the Constitutional Convention; William Livingston's draft of the Constitution, marked up during the Convention; John McKesson’s notes on New York State’s ratifying convention; John Jay’s draft of Federalist #64; and Jay’s marked copy from the ratifying convention.

Commented Maeva Marcus: “As director of the Institute for Constitutional History, I am very pleased that N-YHS will be the home for ICH programs in the New York metropolitan area. Lincoln's Constitution, taught by two eminent scholars, will be a splendid beginning for the Robert H. Smith seminars in constitutional history.”

The Lincoln’s Constitution seminar at the Historical Society will move beyond the period when the Constitution was framed and first interpreted to consider some of the critical yet unresolved questions that Lincoln addressed during his years in public life. Among these were:

• What rights and protections did slaveholders have under the Constitution?


• Was secession lawful, or was the Union perpetual under the Constitution?


• What were the constitutional war powers of the presidency?


• Under what conditions could the president suspend habeas corpus?


• Did emancipation violate the constitutional right of property?


• What was the citizenship status of former slaves, and of free blacks generally?


• And who got to decide these issues: Congress, the Supreme Court, or Lincoln?

Akhil Reed Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. Co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking, Amar has also written several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, and most recently America’s Constitution: A Biography.

James Oakes is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a winner of the 2008 Lincoln Prize for his book The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. His previous books include The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders and Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South.

Applications for admission to the seminar may be made by email only, in care of Mmarcus@nyhistory.org, and will be accepted until August 30. Applicants should include a copy of their curriculum vita and a short statement on how this seminar will be useful in their research, teaching, or professional development. Successful applicants will be notified by email. For further information, please contact Maeva Marcus at (202) 994-6562 or e-mail icsgw@law.gwu.edu.

Lincoln’s Constitution will be taught at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, on Thursday afternoons from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. The seminar will be held on September 17 and 24 and on October 1, 15, 22, and 29, 2009.

Image source.

Copyeditors dish on authors

Authors and copyeditors need each other, but on both sides of the aisle, it is not always a cheerful relationship. If you've ever had one of those experiences when you read through your copyedited manuscript, and wondered...what was he/she thinking? Well, now you get to hear the other side.

A top ten list of authors' most common mistakes, and "what drives copyeditors crazy," is being unveiled at the Oxford University Press blog. The target is writers for medical and scientific journals, but this likely carries over to other fields. While the author of the post is attempting to be helpful, one of copyeditors' top ten complaints, "Making life difficult for the copy editor," seems instead to illuminate the way communication problems can plague both sides of the relationship. The first three are here, and then stay tuned for more views about your "particularly charming" behavior.

Legal History Syllabi

If you are working on syllabi for next year's courses, a useful source of ideas is a collection of legal history syllabi on the Triangle Legal History Seminar's website.

Some of the links don't work, but you can find your way to Tom Russell's American Legal History syllabus, University of Denver College of Law, along with his links to documents; Elizabeth Dale's course at the University of Florida; and Barbara Welke's U.S. Women's Legal History Course at the University of Minnesota.

There is English Legal History, for example Robert Palmer's course at the University of Houston; Roman and Ancient Law, including Bernard Hibbet's course at University of Pittsburgh Law School; and a section on Global/Comparative/Non-Anglo American Legal History, with Sue Peabody's course, WSU-Vancouver, on Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World.

Also on the site is a link to the Center for History and New Media's helpful Syllabus Finder.

Image.

Brown on Thurgood Marshall's Jurisprudence

Rebecca L. Brown, USC Law School, has posted Deep and Wide: Justice Marshall's Contributions to Constitutional Law on bepress. It is forthcoming in the Howard Law Journal 52 (2009). Here is the abstract:

This essay, a contribution to a symposium marking the 100th anniversary of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s birth, explores Justice Marshall’s singular understanding of equality as a driving force underlying all of constitutional law. His theory of equality as giving rise to an obligation on government to provide reasons for its actions reflects a sophisticated and under-appreciated perspective on American constitutionalism, as illustrated by several examples offered in the essay.

Info for Law Review Submissions

For those planning to submit an article to law reviews, Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit, University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law, have a useful guide listing the submissions information for 192 law reviews. [Careful readers will notice that the abstract says "about 188" journals, but the document itself says 192.] It was updated in June.

And for essays intended for law review on-line supplements, Colin Miller, John Marshall Law School, has posted a Submission Guide for Online Law Review Supplements, covering 19 reviews.

Davis and Brophy on Trusts and Estates in the Antebellum South

Stephen Duane Davis II, Law Clerk, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Alabama, and Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, have posted The Most Esteemed Act of My Life: Family, Property, Will, and Trust in the Antebellum South. Here is the abstract:

This paper combines an empirical study of probate in Greene County, Alabama, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States in the years leading into Civil War, with a qualitative examination of property doctrine and ideology at that time. The data address three key themes in recent trusts and estates literature. First, what testators did with their extraordinary wealth; in particular, how they worked to maintain property within their families, and especially how male testators were suspicious of loss of their family's wealth through their daughters' marriages. Second, the testators used sophisticated trust mechanisms for both managing property and keeping it within their families. In the antebellum era, Americans celebrated the ways they harnessed technologies, from the steam engine to the telegraph and printing press, to create wealth and improve society. This study reveals that trusts should be added to that list of technologies that assisted in the creation and management of wealth. Finally, the data reveal the salience of enslaved human property, often managed through trusts after their owners died and also frequently divided between family members, to the maintenance of family wealth.

While some in the United States at the time, including some jurists, as well as politicians and novelists, questioned the desirability to our country of inheritance, the Greene County data show an extraordinary devotion to maintenance of family wealth. The findings in 'The Most Esteemed Act of My Life' invite further study in other places in the South, as well as in the North, to test the extent to which the existence of wealth (particularly a wealth based on human property) led to different patterns of bequest from those seen among some of our nation's wealthiest individuals at critical period of American history.

Image credit.

Book review round-up

Greg Grandin, NYU, discusses William Appleman Williams in The Nation. Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy has been released in a 50th anniversary edition. Also in The Nation in June, Scott Saul, U.C. Berkeley, reviewed Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas J. Sugrue.

Greg Grandin's new book, FORDLANDIA: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City is reviewed by Ben Macintyre in the New York Times and by Aaron Leitko in the Washington Post. Also in the Washington Post, Michael Grunwald reviews THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLITICS: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams and the Election of 1828 by Lynn Hudson Parsons, and W. Ralph Eubanks' memoir THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE ROAD: The Story of Three Generations of An Interracial Family in the American South is reviewed by Martha A. Sandweiss.

More in the NY Times: KISSINGER: 1973, the Crucial Year by Alistair Horne is reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn; and David M. Kennedy, Stanford, takes up DANGEROUS GAMES: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan. A MORE UNBENDING BATTLE The Harlem Hellfighters’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home, by Peter N. Nelson, gets a brief mention.

Round-up of recent history posts

Updated: Al Brophy at Faculty Lounge, Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors, and other bloggers have had important history-related posts recently, covering topics I missed while traveling/too busy with other things. (Warning: I'm having trouble getting to Feminist Law Profs today -- which may be my connection. It is usually easy to access. If you have trouble, using a browser other than Explorer might help. I believe following the direct links to posts will be ok -- since the hang-up is probably due to a video on the blog's front page....) Here's a round-up:

Al recently noted the passing of Kenneth Stampp, leading historian of slavery and author of The Peculiar Institution. More remembrances are here.

Many covered Robert Post's appointment as Dean of Yale Law School, bringing another history-friendly dean to a major law school. Adding to this two new historian law deans, Davison Douglas at William and Mary, Bruce Smith at Illinois, it has been a favorable year for legal history, at least when it comes to bringing legal history and its fans, into law school leadership roles. Al noted another implication of Post's deanship: the question of whether it will have an impact on "Post's much-anticipated tenth volume of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, Constitutional Rights and the Regulatory State, 1921–30."

With more news of cuts, Al also worries about the state of university presses.

At Feminist Law Professors, Bridget Crawford has had a number of excellent history-related posts, including a link to a new on-line exhibit commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, news on a new Nixon tape release, a post on A Feminist Legal History of U.S. Patriotism, discussing a review of Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (UNC Press 2005). Bridgett also links to an art exhibit on woman suffrage in Iowa.

Kim Krawiec at Faculty Lounge discusses News From 1930 and Washington Irving's The Great Mississippi Bubble.

Claire Potter, Tenured Radical, has thoughts on the California budget crisis, its impact on universities, and responses.

"A festschrift can be like a witness protection program for scholarship"

In the course of his helpful new review of Daniel Hamilton and Albert Brophy's edited collection, Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz, Stuart Banner discusses a problem with festschrift volumes: it is often difficult for scholars to find the essays. Banner finds the essays in the Horwitz volume to be interesting and valuable. Nevertheless,

The problem is that the papers published in these books can be nearly impossible for researchers to find. The articles in a special issue of a law review are indexed just like regular articles, and they are word-searchable in the same electronic databases. There is no comparable research infrastructure for essays in books, with one exception – Michael Taggart’s index of common law festschriften (Taggart 2006) – but even that index is not widely known....A festschrift can be like a witness protection program for scholarship....

Festschriften for law professors were once very rare, but they are becoming much more common. This may be a function of the turn toward interdisciplinarity in legal scholarship. The normal vehicle for honoring a law professor was once a special issue of a law review, and that is probably still the most common way, but the legal academy has shifted toward the norms of disciplines like history and philosophy, and the festschrift is one of them. There are still relatively few American law professors, compared with professors in other disciplines, who send enough students on to academic careers to populate a festschrift. The ones that do are usually the ones, like Morton Horwitz, with one foot in another discipline, so it is not surprising that most of these recent volumes have honored law professors in interdisciplinary fields like legal history, jurisprudence, and international law.

The solution to the invisibility of this work?

Publish festschriften online. Harvard University Press has not done so with this book, nor, to my knowledge, have any of the other publishers of festschriften in recent years. If the reason is that publishers need to sell [*504] enough copies to recoup printing costs, perhaps the ultimate answer is to dispense with physical books and move toward the virtual festschrift. Maybe one day Google Books will rescue festschrift chapters from oblivion; even if you cannot read the full text, at least you can find out that a given search term is in the book somewhere. An intermediate solution would be for the authors to post pre-prints of their contributions online themselves. The Social Science Research Network would be a natural location for the chapters in this book, but when I checked in June 2009, only four of the eighteen authors had posted their chapters there. It is a shame, because all of these essays are worth reading.

Banner's full review in at the Law and Politics Book Review.

Photo: Marshalls protect witness in witness protection program.

Banner reviews Hamilton & Brophy's Horwitz collection

Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz, by Daniel W. Hamilton and Alfred L. Brophy (eds), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009, has been reviewed by Stuart Banner, UCLA Law School, for the Law and Politics Book Review. Banner writes:

This book is the first of two planned festschrift volumes in honor of the legal historian Morton Horwitz, who has been teaching at Harvard Law School since 1970. Horwitz’s most well known books are both called THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN LAW (Horwitz 1977 and 1992), which explains the title of this volume. Seventeen of the eighteen contributors are former students who are now law professors or historians themselves. The eighteenth is Horwitz’s longtime colleague Charles Donahue. As is often true in collections like these, there is no common theme to the chapters. Most of the authors have contributed substantive historical essays within their various fields of expertise. The exceptions are William Treanor and Daniel Hamilton, who offer short appreciations of Horwitz himself, and Donahue, who appraises the state of legal history generally. The authors of the substantive historical pieces make varying degrees of effort to connect their work to Horwitz. On one end of the spectrum, Daniel Hulsebosch prefaces his discussion of the early American judges James Kent and Joseph Story with a few pages analyzing what Horwitz had to say about them, and Assaf Likhovski frames his research in the law of British Palestine as “Horwitzian journeys.” On the other end, a few of the authors do not mention Horwitz at all.

Some of the essays suggest the influence of Horwitz’s own work. Polly Price’s chapter on “Stability and Change in Antebellum Property Law” is reminiscent of Horwitz’s first Transformation book, both in its subject and in the way Price amasses early reported court opinions to build up a sense of what judges believed they were doing. Dalia Tsuk’s essay on “Pluralism, Individualism, and Democracy” in the twentieth century recalls Horwitz’s second Transformation book, which was more of a high-level intellectual history of legal thought. But the chapters are in a wide variety of styles, most of which are very different from Horwitz’s. Stephen Siegel traces the doctrinal origins of “strict scrutiny,” an important concept in constitutional law in the second half of the twentieth century. Alfred Brophy examines the role of utilitarian thinking in debates over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Elizabeth Blackmar contributes a history of the “free rider,” who has played a leading role in the economic analysis of law. Gregory Mark offers what he calls a “speculative essay” on the shifting purposes served by the limited liability of corporate shareholders. Mary Bilder and Alison LaCroix each explore the colonial origins of different aspects of early republican constitutionalism. It is hard to draw any conclusion from these diverse essays, other than that Horwitz’s former students evidently do not [*503] constitute any particular school. They span the full range of approaches to legal history.

Banner notes that "as with many festschriften, most of the chapters read like small parts of larger works in progress or already published. The contributors are all very good at what they do, so the essays are all interesting and well crafted, but few would likely have been published on their own." Still, he writes, "all of these essays are worth reading."

Banner also comments on the genre of the festschrift, which will be the topic of a separate post. The full review is here.

Reece Reviews the Lincoln Legals

H-Law has posted a review of Daniel W. Stowell, ed., The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases, 4 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008) by Lewie Reece, Anderson College. In part, Reece writes:

For many years, Lincoln’s law practice was so bound up with the romanticized image that it was hard to approach, in a sustained way, Lincoln as a practicing lawyer. When older historical studies examined Lincoln’s study of law it often became a tug of war between those examining Lincoln as a legal theorist and those who pursued a more anecdotal approach to Lincoln as he practiced on the circuit. Yet presenting a more analytical approach to Lincoln’s legal career was often difficult due to a lack of access to the relevant sources. Some were provided in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1951), edited by Roy Basler, but they were only a slight selection of a much larger legal correspondence that was largely buried in Illinois country archives. This deficiency was finally resolved by a massive publication of Lincoln's legal correspondence in 2000 of a three CD-ROM collection, The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition (2000), edited by Martha Benner and Cullom Davis. The last few years have also seen an expansion of interest in Lincoln’s legal career, with a very useful study of Lincoln’s years as a lawyer by Brian Dirck, Lincoln the Lawyer (2007). Dirck’s study was but part of a larger reexamination of Lincoln’s years as a practicing lawyer, and his legal career has been receiving renewed attention from a growing number of scholars.

While The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln was an exceptional work, it was no substitute for a letterpress edition that could put these documents into book form. . . .

The rest, here.

CFP: Toronto Group for International, Transnational and Comparative Law

The Toronto Group for International, Transnational and Comparative Law is holding its Third Annual Conference in Toronto January 29-31, 2010, entitled "Concerning States of Mind, Disturbing the Minds of States", and loosely themed around a renewed focus on historicism in international and transnational legal scholarship.

The principal aim of this conference is to encourage critical inquiry and collaborative discussion among graduate students and junior faculty members, providing a forum in which to explore the work at play in various projects aimed at historicizing and redefining international, transnational, and comparative law and legal scholarship.

Keynote speakers will include Martti Koskenniemi, Academy Professor, University of Helsinki.

The abstract submission deadline is Oct.19th, 2009. Please see the call for papers for additional submission details and contact information, and note that presenters at the Conference will have the opportunity to publish their papers with the Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy Paper series (CLPE).

Washington and Lee and Lincoln

Surface mail recently brought the announcement and schedule for the conference "Lincoln for the Ages: Lessons for the 21st Century," at Washington and Lee University, on September 25-26, 2009. Justice Clarence Thomas deliver the opening address Friday night; Saturday's three panels are "Character: the Personal in the Political," "Politics: Self-Government in Principle and Practice," and "Civil-Military Affairs: the Executive Goes to War." More information is here; you may also contact Dr. Lucas Morel of Washington and Lee's Politics Department, at morelL@wlu.edu. A $30.00 registration fee gets you admission to the symposium and a luncheon.

Mason on Wrongful Death at Common Law

Malcolm S. Mason, an independent scholar, has posted Civil Liability at Common Law for Wrongful Death: A Footnote to the Dictum of Lord Denman in O'Connell v. The Queen. Here is the abstract:

Since the enactment in Britain of Lord Campbell’s Act (The Wrongful Death Act) (1846) it has been widely but erroneously assumed that the Common Law provided no civil remedy for wrongful death. This mistaken view is sometimes thought to rest on the maxim, Actio personalis moritur cum persona, or on the thought that the value of a human life is beyond estimation, or on the doctrine of merger in felony, or on the obsolete right of appeal, or on the need of a contract. None of these justify the belief in lack of civil remedy at common law. The common practice of American courts, including some made up of learned lawyers, shows the contrary. If we now return to a close examination of the English precedents, we find the existence of the remedy confirmed. Why was the mistaken view accepted. Speculatively, it was because of the rise of railroad accidents and of Lord Campbell’s gifts as an orator which exceeded his gifts as a lawyer.

Mr. Mason was a research fellow of the Foundation of Research in Legal History at the Columbia Law School under Julius Goebel. In the 1930s he was an attorney at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the National Labor Relations Board. He was General Counsel of the Office of Alien Property during World War II and, later, Chairman of HEW's Departmental Grant Appeals Board.

Image credit: Lord Campbell.

Hughes on the Origin of Intellectual Property

Notes on the Origin of Intellectual Property: Revised Conclusions and New Sources is a new paper from Justin Hughes, Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Here's the abstract:

Following work published in 2006, this article explores the history of the phrase 'intellectual property' as it was used in the 19th century and early 20th century by jurists speaking French, Spanish, Italian, and English. During this period 'intellectual property' was used by many commentators to refer to copyright alone; indeed, in Spanish, the phrase unambiguously meant just copyright. The article sketches out how officials in WIPO's predecessor organization rechristened it an 'intellectual property' entity and helped establish the modern, umbrella sense of the term for patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc. Finally, the manuscript explores how the property-or-not debate has animated discussions of copyright theory throughout the history of copyright law.

Duxbury on Lord Wright

Neil Duxbury, London School of Economics Law Department, has posted Lord Wright and Innovative Traditionalism. Here is the abstract:

This study presents the mid-twentieth century English lord of appeal, Lord Wright, as an innovative traditionalist judge. Judges have a duty to be creative, Wright believed, but only within the framework of existing legal authority. Wright explained his innovative traditionalist perspective in relation to precedent, public policy and legislation, and he illustrated his perspective particularly by way of contributions to decisions on worker compensation, commercial contracts, restitution and international criminal law. He was not always a bold judge, as is especially evident from his contribution to Liversidge v. Anderson. But his efforts to develop the law without undermining established precedents and statutory authority could be subtly effective. In contract and tort decisions he consistently argued that personal liability should attach only to outcomes which could reasonably have been expected to come about. He was realistic, and believed courts must be realistic, about the tendency of the business world to be guided primarily by its own norms. He incisively criticized implied contract theory and advanced a conception of unjust enrichment which, in England, was considerably ahead of its time. In employment law, he added a twist to freedom-of-contract reasoning, arguing that if it is permissible for individuals to use their economic advantage to impose contractual terms on weaker parties then it should also be permissible for those parties to combine and gain the upper hand. After World War II, he argued that the positive laws necessary for punishing war criminals already existed. This study draws these arguments together in an effort to capture Wright’s judicial style and to show that some of his contributions to legal thought and doctrine run deep and are historically significant.

Hat tip: Legal Theory Blog

Morris L. Cohen Fellowship Winner Announced

From David Warrington, Harvard Law School Library, we have the following:

The Harvard Law School Library is very pleased to announce that the winner of the inaugural Morris Cohen Fellowship in American Legal Bibliography and History is Sara Mayeux, a JD – History Ph.D. student at Stanford University. Ms. Mayeux will be conducting research in the Library’s manuscript collections for her project, "A Cultural History of the Criminal Defense Attorney, 1900-1930," a project that she began as a student in Stanford Law School's Legal Studies Workshop. This project seeks to explore perceptions of the criminal defense bar both among the general public and the legal elite in the first decades of the 20th century---the era in which the American legal profession became more specialized and stratified, the national drama of Prohibition fueled popular fears about crime, and Progressive thinkers proposed sweeping legal reforms.

The fellowship was created in honor of Morris L. Cohen, Librarian of the Harvard Law School Library from 1971 until 1981 [pictured at left]. One of the country’s leading authorities in legal research and bibliography, Mr. Cohen’s Bibliography of Early American Law (1998) is the definitive work on the topic. Author of more than a dozen books, he is currently Professor of Law Emeritus at the Yale Law School.

Image credit.

Recipients of Canadian Legal History Awards Announced

According to the Law Times:

The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History has unveiled a group of recent award recipients.

Mary Stokes, a doctoral student in legal history at Osgoode Hall Law School who is working on the history of municipal law in 19th century Ontario, will receive the R. Roy McMurtry Fellowship in Legal History. The fellowship supports scholars conducting research in Canadian legal history.

Myles Leslie, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, will claim the Peter Oliver Prize in Canadian Legal History for his article, “Reforming the Coroner: Death Investigation Manuals in Ontario 1863-1894,” published in Ontario History, 2008. The prize is awarded annually for a published work in Canadian legal history written by a student.

Janet Ajzenstat, professor emerita at McMaster University, is the first winner of the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History for her book, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament [which is reviewed here].

The Saywell Prize is given biannually to the best new book in Canadian legal history that makes an important contribution to an understanding of the constitution and/or federalism.

Abrams on the history of the Oregon initiative process

The Majority Will: A Case Study of Misinformation, Manipulation, and the Oregon Initiative Process is a new article by Paula L. Abrams, Lewis & Clark Law School. It is forthcoming in the Oregon Law Review. Here's the abstract:

The controversy over the use of the initiative process to enact social policy began in the progressive era and remains heated today. Direct legislation eliminates the deliberative process of legislative and executive review, circumventing the checks and balances that define representative democracy. The absence of these checks and balances poses a high risk that voters will act on the basis of inaccurate or biased information. Appeals to voter prejudice can be a particularly potent and harmful strategy to agitate the majority against minority groups.

This article examines deception and discrimination in the initiative process by presenting a case study of one of the earliest and controversial initiatives, the Oregon School Bill. The School Bill mandated public education for all children, effectively destroying private, particularly Catholic, education. The challenge to Oregon’s compulsory public education law yielded a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters. This article offers case-specific insight into how voters can be manipulated by misinformation and prejudice. It explores the tension between representative democracy and direct legislation, particularly how the initiative undermines the deliberative process. The article analyzes how voter ignorance, fear, and prejudice toward minority groups may taint the initiative process. Finally, the article examines legal solutions and recommends that the courts closely scrutinize direct legislation that harms historically disadvantaged groups.

Photo credit.

Gedicks on the Originalist Roots of Substantive Due Process

Originalist Roots of Substantive Due Process: Higher-Law Constitutionalism and the Fifth Amendment has been posted by Frederick Mark Gedicks, Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School. This short essay for the BYU Law School magazine is based on Gedick's longer article on the same subject. Here's the abstract:

The notion of “substantive” due process originated in Sir Edward Coke’s notion of a “higher-law” constitutionalism that understood natural and customary rights as limits on crown prerogatives and perhaps even parliamentary lawmaking. The American colonies adopted higher-law constitutionalism in their revolutionary struggle, carried it with them through independence and constitutional ratification, and constitutionalized it in the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause.

Substantive due process of law is made textually consistent with the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause by the normative definition of “law” inherited from the classical natural law tradition, which maintained that an unjust law was not really a law. Deprivations of life, liberty, or property effected on the authority of unjust legislative acts did not comply with the law of the land or the due process of law, because regardless of the process such acts afforded, the deprivations they imposed were not accomplished by a true “law.” The classical understanding of law and the substantive understanding of the due process of law that it underwrote are evident in legal dictionaries and in judicial decisions and arguments of counsel during the years immediately before and after ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. On balance, these authorities show that one widely held public understanding of the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause in the late eighteenth century included judicial protection of unenumerated substantive rights against congressional encroachment.

Hugh Davis Graham research grant in 20th century political/policy history

The Institute for Political History, a nonprofit foundation, is pleased to announce that it is accepting applications for the Hugh Davis Graham Award. The purpose of this grant, named in honor of the late Professor Hugh Graham, is to assist scholars undertaking archival research in the fields of Twentieth-Century American Political/Policy History and American Political Development. Applications must include the following materials:

1. Application cover page (see template available here)
2. One (1) page double-spaced description of research proposal that also explains the historiographical significance of the project
3. One (1) page budget of monies to be used and specific research collections to be consulted during the award period
4. One (1) page vitae
5. One (1) page letter of recommendation. This letter must be in a signed, sealed envelope and be included with the application packet.

E-mailed and late applications will not be considered. Preference will be given to doctoral students and untenured faculty.

Applications must be received by November 2, 2009 and the award in the amount of up to $2000 will be announced at the Policy History Conference to be held at the Hyatt on Capitol Square Hotel in Columbus, Ohio from June 3-6, 2010. The award is taxable. Please send materials to Hugh Davis Graham Award, c/o Journal of Policy History, Saint Louis University, 3800 Lindell Blvd., P.O. Box 56907, St. Louis, MO 63156-0907.

Mashaw and Perry on Administrative Statutory Interpretation in the Antebellum Republic

Administrative Statutory Interpretation in the Antebellum Republic is a new article by Jerry Louis Mashaw and Avi Perry, Yale Law School. it is forthcoming in the Michigan State Law Review. Here's the abstract:

There are many reasons to doubt whether administrative interpretation was an important part of lawmaking in the early American republic. The conventional wisdom of contemporary lawyers seems to be that until the Chevron case, statutory interpretation was primarily the role of courts. The modest attention to agency statutory interpretation prior to Chevron, combined with the avalanche of post-Chevron scholarly commentary, suggests that from the founding until 1984 the law followed the pattern of Chief Justice Marshall’s pronouncement in Marbury v. Madison, that saying “what the law is” was the province of the federal courts. Post-Chevron, of course, scholars have discovered not only that administrators interpret statutes, but have even argued that administrative interpretation has displaced adjudication in courts as the primary means by which federal common law is developed.

Historians and scholars of American political development have focused our attention in a similar direction. Professor Theodore J. Lowi famously declared that “[t]he first century was one of government dominated by Congress and virtually self-executing laws.” Equally famously, Stephen Skowronek labeled the pre-1877 national government a state of “courts and parties.” If statues were specific and self-executing, as Lowi claims, administrative interpretation could hardly be of much importance. Self-executing statutes contain their own behavioral requirements and
presumably, enforcement is through prosecution in the courts. Similarly, a government that is composed primarily of courts and parties is necessarily a government in which administrators play minor roles. Therefore, the interpretations of these bit players in the legal system are hardly worthy of sustained attention.

But nineteenth century congressional government followed by the twentieth century emergence of an administrative state is not the whole story. In short, well before the Civil War, national administration in the United States was substantial, and statutes were never self-interpreting. Moreover, statutory interpretation was largely an administrative function at the national level because administrative action was virtually free from appellate-style judicial review. This was not a system in which administrators had Chevron or some other form of deference. It was a system in which administrators had absolute and final authority to interpret the law.

In this Article, we explore two aspects of administrative interpretation in the antebellum republic. We first look at the structures and processes of administrative interpretation. Modern lawyers know where to look for agency interpretations. The Federal Register bristles with agency interpretive material, and formal opinions in agency adjudications are compiled and reported in much the same fashion as judicial opinions. Every agency is required by the Federal Register Act to publish a description of its internal organization and the processes by which it conducts business. Outsiders seeking an interpretation are generally informed about how to petition for a ruling of some sort, what types of interpretive statements an agency issues, and where the final authority to make binding pronouncements lies.

The structures and processes for agency interpretation were informal and eclectic in the nineteenth century, and certainly in the antebellum period. The internal processes of departments were opaque and no single source compiled or reported administrative decisions. There was no widely available process for unifying interpretation where administrative and judicial approaches diverged. Within departments there was a constant struggle between center and periphery for interpretive authority. The role of the Attorney General in unifying administrative interpretation across departmental jurisdictions was quite uncertain, and then, as now, the position of the President as “Interpreter-in-Chief” was contested.

Part I will address these structural and procedural issues. In Part II, we turn to the question of interpretive methodology. Evidence here is sketchy and conclusions must be quite tentative. Agencies, like courts, tend to address questions of methodology directly only when there is interpretive disagreement requiring an agency to explain its reasoning process. This is common today in hotly-contested adjudicatory or rulemaking proceedings. By contrast, in antebellum America, most administrative adjudication was informal and there was no required rulemaking process.

In this context, interpretive methodology must be discerned mostly from the administrative practices of line agencies. Officials provided interpretations in various documentary forms but only rarely attended to the meta-question of how statutes should be interpreted. In Part III, the interpretive practices of Attorneys General are considered. Opinions of the Attorneys General tended to be somewhat more self-conscious about method, particularly as these officers began to see their opinion-writing function as quasi-judicial. We will look at both sources of methodological evidence, but the results thus far are suggestive at best. The Article then concludes with some reflections on lessons learned and mysteries yet unsolved concerning agency interpretation in antebellum America.

The Question of Rights

Recently announced is the program and other information for the conference "The Question of Rights in U.S. Society," to be held September 17-18, 2009, on the campus of San Francisco State University:

In September 2009, San Francisco State University will host a conference exploring the question and place of rights in American history, politics, and society. The conference will meet on the campus of San Francisco State University on September 17 and 18, 2009. Americans have fought over questions of individual and collective rights since the nation’s founding. Our goal is to bring together a wide variety of people from a range of academic, activist, legal, and community spaces to examine the place of rights within the broader context of American society.

General information is here; the program is here.

Morag-Levine on The Common Law Origins of American Regulatory Culture

Common Legalism: On the Common Law Origins of American Regulatory Culture is a new paper by Noga Morag-Levine, Michigan State University College of Law. Here's the abstract:

At least since Tocqueville, American legal practices and institutions have been seen as different in key respects from those of both England and continental Europe. Within this three-way comparison, evident Anglo-American differences diverted the search for the origins of U.S. legal culture away from explanations rooted in the common law tradition. It is widely accepted that the distinguishing features of American legal institutions, beginning with the primacy of adjudication within the administrative process, and continuing with the emphasis on juries and litigants in court procedure, closely correspond with key common law principles. Nonetheless, the prominent line of explanation, evident in Robert Kagan’s work on American adversarial legalism, has highlighted elements intrinsic to American political structure and history as explanation for trans-Atlantic institutional differences.

This paper argues that notwithstanding differences between England and the United States, common law ideology and institutions played a crucial role in the creation of a distinct administrative state model in the United States. The paper accounts for the divergence between England and the United States through the fact that in England the common law has long competed with countervailing continental legal and political traditions. Common law ideology existed across key junctures of English history as an oppositional ideology aimed at curtailing perceived abuses of the king’s prerogative, and later parliamentary social legislation. Once we view the common law’s role in England through this oppositional lens, it becomes easier to see how and why common law ideology might explain distinctive elements of American legal culture, not only vis a vis continental Europe, but England as well. With this goal in mind, the paper draws on key works in English legal history to explain the coexistence of competing common law and continental legal ideologies in England over time, and the implications of this struggle where both similarities and differences between England and the United States are concerned. With this history in place, the role of legal traditions in the creation and persistence of contemporary differences between American and European legal cultures can come into clearer view.

Sunday book review round-up: books on conservatives, California, Lena Horne, Satchel Page, and more

THE CONSERVATIVES: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History by Patrick Allitt in the Boston Globe by former congressman Mickey Edwards.

Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 by Kevin Starr is reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Civil rights history is a part of Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne by James Gavin, reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. Another civil rights story, SATCHEL: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye is taken up in the Washington Post.

DANGEROUS GAMES: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan is reviewed in the Washington Post.

Still "Ugly" After All These Years, is an essay in the NY Times on William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 novel The Ugly American. And the New York Times remembers Lloyd Gaines, who mysteriously disappeared after winning his civil rights case against the University of Missouri in 1938, a stepping stone to Brown v. Board of Education.

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Inching cautiously into the 21st century...

The Legal History Blog now feeds directly to twitter, so if you prefer to get your legal history updates that way, you can follow the blog here.

A plea for proper cites to archival records...

While sifting through a few different collections of records this week, I wanted to be sure to track down a couple of sources mentioned in secondary works, and also to see what else might have been alongside those documents in the same files. One citation had the author and recipient of a letter, and its date. That's all. The bibliography disclosed the collections consulted, so I could narrow it down to a couple of possible collections. But the citations contained no box or file numbers. It should have been easy to find the letter, but it was not in any of the files I examined.

Citations sometimes get truncated in a different way. Readers of law review articles will be familiar with a citation practice unknown elsewhere: "on file with the xyz law review," or "on file with author." Twice I have tried to consult such sources, and contacted an author and a law review about them. Both times the sources could not be located.

I suspect that both sorts of citation practices are often used to save space. A press might ask an author to cut down the length of endnotes. Fewer pages mean lower publishing costs, of course. Sometimes law review editors try to streamline cites, without realizing that those pesky record group numbers and unwieldy file names are a precise road map to the author's source material.

So what's an author to do when faced with an editor's effort to trim your citations? For starters: just say no. And to back yourself up: most archives have guidelines for how to cite to their materials, like the guidelines from the National Archives of the U.S., and the Canadian Library and Archives.

Please. Your colleagues will love you for it.

Images 1 and 2.

Digitizing the Year Books: The Next Step

David J. Seipp, Boston University School of Law, announces that his index and paraphrase of printed Year Book reports is now complete in the sense that all reports in the chronological series from 1268 through 1535, with all Year Book material from 1399 through 1509 printed only in Abridgements, have been indexed and either fully paraphrased or summarized. This project is sponsored by the Ames Foundation, and will continue by reconstructing missing Year Books of 31 to 37 Edward III from the Abridgements. The database as now updated remains freely searchable [here]."

Hat tip: H-Law

FDR & FF, part II: The Justice gets Mothballed

There was much serious correspondence between Justice Felix Frankfurter and President Franklin Roosevelt during the early 1940s. But their letters were often personal and affectionate. Another round between the soldier and his Commander-in-Chief was set off by a letter Frankfurter received in September 1943. (The opening round is here.) Major General Myron C. Cramer wrote:

Since you have passed the age of sixty, fixed by Congress for the retirement of officers of the Regular Army below the grade of general officer, you have, by direction of the President, been transferred, effective this date, to the Inactive Reserve.

Frankfurter wrote to the president that he had been “placed on the martial shelf as a superannuated major.”

“My dear ‘General’ Frankfurter,” Roosevelt replied.

I regret that you have been retired. You should always remember, however, that General Napoleon Bonaparte was retired to Elba while still in his forties.

I think there is an error in General Cramer’s statement to you that you have been transferred to the “Inactive Reserve”. I think he meant the “Inactive Preserve”. The status is somewhat akin to the process of pickling alcohol!

Always sincerely,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
C. in C.

And Frankfurter responded:

My dear C-in-C:

Allow me to say that your letter of even date is doubly gratifying, to wit:

1. That you should compare my case to that of General Napoleon Bonaparte again proves how deeply rooted your are in legal tradition. Even in your military administration in time of war you rely on precedent.

2. More heartening still, is your correction of General Cramer’s designation of my status. For you to assure me that I am transferred to the “Inactive Preserve”, which gives me a status “somewhat akin to the process of pickling in alcohol”, affords me justifiable grounds for assuming that I can rely on you for my good spirits in the future.

Respectfully and gratefully yours,

Image credit: FF, FDR.