CFP: Annual Meeting of the Law & Society Association

The Law & Society Association is now calling for participation at its Annual Meeting, June 2-5, 2011, in San Francisco. This year's theme is "Oceans Apart? Narratives of (Il)legality in Liminal Locations." Here's the announcement:

Law and Society scholars have consistently challenged both the fit and the applicability of these and other binaries, questioning what citizenship status, class, race, or politics really mean in myriad contexts. However, early in a new decade (and new century), many law and society scholars find ourselves in somewhat of a liminal space, facing whole new sets of border crossings, blurring boundaries, empirical challenges, and conceptual conundra. For example, in the U.S., the continued growth of mass incarceration coupled with the extended reach of criminal law and “civil” municipal regulations have destabilized entire communities, where categories of “incarcerated” and “free” are no longer clearly distinguishable. Around the world, political and legal responses to human migration have broken down lines between immigration law, economic regulation, and criminal justice in complex and often troubling ways.

As a result of these kinds of boundary dissolutions, notions about citizenship, sovereignty, illegality, and rights (to name a few) have all been complicated, challenging a number of longstanding assumptions underlying legal scholarship. How does the law in its many forms help or hurt the resulting conversations? The theme of the 2011 LSA Meeting–Oceans Apart? Narratives of (Il)legality in Liminal Locations–invites us to ponder the shifting and dissolving boundaries around us, empirical and conceptual, and also what they may tell us about law’s relevance, and limitations, in shaping our global future. It is fitting that we begin this exploration in San Francisco, one of the great transnational cities in the world. San Francisco, with its proximity to the Pacific Ocean, is located in a state that borders Mexico (and once was part of that nation), and which was once traversed only by native peoples. This locale is subject to tectonic forces, literal as well as environmental and social, which shape the human uses of law and responses to law. San Francisco constitutes an ideal setting for convening scholars who are concentrating their efforts on these issues.

You can find instructions for submitting paper and panel proposals here. The due date is December 8, 2010.

Leiter Poll Results are Up

The results from Brian Leiter's "Best Law School Faculties in 'Legal History'" poll are now up.  It goes without saying -- this is an unscientific poll that registers only how anonymous responders ranked schools/gamed the poll/whatever.  Many eminent legal historians do not teach at the schools listed.  Students interested in legal history should consider many factors when selecting a school.  Do your homework -- don't rely on someone else's list.

Update:  the raw data is here.  

Legal History in U.S. Law Schools (2

Here’s an update on the raw data that can be culled from the AALS Directory's list of Law Teachers by Subject. Between 1931 (the first year that the Directory provided subject of interest listings) and 1950 the average number of law teachers expressing interest in legal history was pretty stable at 21. In the 1950s the average increases modestly to 36, and in the 1960s to 55. The 1970s see the first big jump, to 180. Growth thereafter is pretty steady: 270 in the 1980s, 384 in the 1990s, and 426 in the decade beginning 2000. These numbers accord quite well with my general sense of when interest in legal history “took off” and what the interest curve has looked like over time.

Some words of caution. First, these are very simple numbers – I do not yet have counts on the number of law teachers expressing interest across all subjects, so we do not yet know to what extent growth of interest in legal history is simply a factor of growth in the overall number of expressions of interest in all subjects registered by law teachers. Second between 1940 and the early 1960s the Directory’s coverage of subjects of interest is decidedly spotty. Between 1940 and 1961 there are only eight listings – six in the 1940s and two in the 1950s. Still, it is unlikely that the absence of figures for most of the 1950s conceals any dramatic variation, because the numbers for the early 1960s fall below the average of the two listings for the 1950s.

Some points of interest. The early 1930s shows a jump upward in interest that peters out quickly. The rapid growth in the 1970s appears to begin in 1967. And throughout there are quite marked fluctuations above and below the secular trend line.

The next step is to look at the whole population of law teachers and their entire subject-of-interest profile over time. This will take a while!

Lahav, A Small Nation Goes to War: Israel's Cabinet Authorization of the 1956 War

Another new paper from Pnina Lahav, Boston University - School of Law:  A Small Nation Goes to War: Israel's Cabinet Authorization of the 1956 War.  It appears in Israel Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 61-86, Fall 2010.  Here's the abstract:

The Suez War had long term ramifications for Israel's status in the Middle East and for its relations with the U.S., Europe, and the USSR. This article is a first segment in the examination of the interplay between military and diplomatic means deployed by Israel in its quest to consolidate the gains of the 1948 war and secure its sovereignty. It provides a detailed analysis of the Israeli cabinet deliberations as it reached the decision to authorize war. The article examines the cabinet's opinions on the language of the motion to go to war, the list of casus belli offered, the secret agreement with France and Britain which precipitated the war, considerations of possible complications, the theory of war and peace, the likelihood of regime change in Egypt, and the preparedness of the home front. It raises the question of the relevance of the comparative size and strength of a nation as it ponders the option of launching a war.

D.C. Area Legal History Roundtable: Call for Papers

The D.C. Area Legal History Roundtable is an informal gathering of law professionals and historians who live and work around Washington, D.C.

The next meeting of the Legal History Roundtable will be held March 25, 2011 and hosted by the Federal Judicial Center’s Federal Judicial History Office at the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington D.C. (located adjacent to Union Station).

We invite papers from legal scholars and historians whose work touches on any aspect of the history of federal law or the federal judicial system. Topics may include, but are not limited to, development of court organization, federal criminal and civil jurisdiction, litigation in federal courts, the evolution of federal practice and procedure, constitutional law, or judicial biography.

For further information and to submit a paper proposal, contact Ryan Rowberry, at rrowberry@fjc.gov. The deadline for proposals is January 31, 2011.

Law and Marriage in Medieval and Early Modern Times

[Here's the Call for Papers for the conference "Law and Marriage in Medieval and Early Modern Times," to be held May 4-6, 2011, at the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen, Denmark. The keynoters are Charles Donahue, Jr., Harvard Law School, and Philip L. Reynolds, Emory University, Candler School of Theology.]

We are happy to announce the upcoming eighth Carlsberg Academy conference in the interdisciplinary series on medieval legal history and therefore invite colleagues whose research touches upon aspects of law and marriage in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times to submit proposals for papers of 20 minutes duration. A title and an abstract of 200-250 words should be sent by e-mail to the following members of the organising committee: Helle I. M. Sigh, Institute for History and Area Studies, University of Aarhus: hishim@hum.au.dk; or Kirsi Salonen, Department of History and Philosophy, University of Tampere: kirsi.l.salonen@uta.fi

The deadline for proposals is December 15, 2010. The final programme will be published soon thereafter. All proposals and presentations should be in English. The selected speakers will be notified in advance.

Suggested themes are:

Contracting a marriage, marital life, dissolving a marriage, continuation of marital traditions from the Middle Ages to the Reformation Period, and the effects of marriage institutions on politics and society.

The list is by no means exhaustive and other proposals touching on the main theme of law and marriage in medieval and early modern times are most welcome. All papers will, as usual, be published in our series of proceedings.

The conference on Law and Marriage is the eighth in an interdisciplinary series which aim at discussing new approaches to the study of medieval law and legal practice. The first, held in May 2003, examined the question of how 'Nordic' the medieval Scandinavian law books actually were. The outset was the prevalent notion of a recent paradigm shift in the study of medieval laws, in which focus has been moving towards a perspective in which regional laws were seen in a much broader context as part of a general European development. The second conference, in 2005, threw the nets even wider and covered a broad range of aspects concerning the development of medieval learned law, with speakers coming from Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, and the United States. For the third, held in November 2006, we invited a number of internationally distinguished scholars to contribute papers on aspects of law and jurisprudence in the period before the systematization of law, signified by the emergence of Gratian's Decretum. The fourth conference in 2007 continued along these interdisciplinary lines with 16 papers covering various aspects of a broad theme of the interrelation between law and power in medieval societies. Finally, in May 2008 we once more invited a select number of scholars of international distinction to discuss the use (and misuse) of the concept of 'custum' in medieval legal history. In April/May 2009 the focus was on law and private life, and in the coming December it will be on law and Archaeology. Proceedings from all conferences are or will be published in our series.

The conference will be held at the Carlsberg Academy, formerly the family residence of the founder of the Carlsberg Breweries, J. C. Jacobsen. The Academy buildings are beautifully situated, easy to reach by public transportation and close to the centre of Copenhagen.

The registration fee for non-speakers will be EUR 100 or 750 Danish Kroner payable upon arrival at the conference. The fee includes lunch on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and the conference dinner on Wednesday, all drinks and snacks, as well as an excursion on Friday to the medieval sites and museums in Roskilde. Speakers are of course exempt from paying the conference fee.

Please use the registration form which will be available here in the beginning of January 2011.

The deadline for non-speakers' registration is 15th March 2011. The Academy lecture room can only contain a limited number of participants so please do not hesitate to register as soon as possible.

Gerstle on "Federalism in America: Beyond the Tea Partiers"

Based on the number of recent Tea Party-related articles, blog posts, and books, it seems fair to conclude that academics -- historians, in particular -- find the Tea Party fascinating and confounding. Alan Brinkley, in a recent review essay on the anatomy of the Tea Party, wrote that "[t]rying to describe the ideas of the Tea Party movement" was "a bit like a blind man trying to describe the elephant." Others have devoted long hours to refuting Tea Party interpretations of cherished American concepts, documents, and historical figures. Still others have tried to explain why "Tea Partiers" find those interpretations so compelling.

Now comes Gary Gerstle (Vanderbilt University): in the Fall 2010 issue of Dissent, he takes a concept that is foundational to American governance -- federalism -- and attempts to move it "beyond the Tea Partiers."

Here's the first paragraph of the essay, in which Gerstle offers his understanding of the trajectory of American federalism (by which, I think, he means both the idea and the political practice):

We hear a lot today about federalism, the doctrine that emphasizes the rights and powers of the states versus those of the federal government. The political Right expresses alarm at the dramatic expansion in central government power that began under George W. Bush during the 2008 financial crisis and that continued during Barack Obama’s first eighteen months in office, first through the government’s bailouts of financial institutions and the auto industry and then through the passage of the landmark national health care bill. Liberal groups, on the other hand, have turned to federalism in response to the perceived failure of the federal government during the Bush years to address major economic, social, and ecological challenges. Progressive Californians, for example, have been pushing ecologically friendly bills in their state, given the obstructions such legislation has faced in Congress. Massachusetts enacted its own government health care bill in response to a long period of federal inaction on the issue. Many gay marriage and marijuana legalization advocates now believe that they can accomplish more in state rather than national arenas. These advocates want to “free” their states from the grasp of federal authority on the issues that matter most to them. In this essay I explore the historical background to the current interest in federalism and argue that the powers possessed by state governments throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were more capacious, influential, and resilient than we customarily recognize them to have been. The durability of the states as a force in economic, social, and cultural affairs can only be understood by reference to an expansive and constitutionally sanctioned doctrine of police power. Police power endowed state governments (but not the federal government) with broad authority over civil society for at least the first 150 years of the nation’s existence. The Civil War posed a sharp challenge to this doctrine, and, for a time, it seemed as though Reconstruction would inter it. But in the late nineteenth century, state legislatures, backed by the federal courts, rehabilitated this doctrine to attack and, in many cases, to reverse the centralization of power in the federal government that the Civil War seemed to have done so much to advance. Federalism finally did weaken in the 1930s and 1940s, but not until the 1960s and 1970s can we say that the central government had superseded the states as the premier center of political authority in America. Federalism’s demise, then, is still a relatively recent phenomenon, a fact that fuels the hopes of those who want to see it revived.

To give a sense where Gerstle takes the essay, here's an excerpt from the end, in which he talks about what "progressive" forms of federalism might look like:

These federalisms would stress the capacious power of government that resides in the states, would call on states to act in the public interest, and would seek to turn state governments into what the liberal jurist Louis Brandeis once celebrated as “laboratories of democracy.” These “government labs” would, in the best-case scenario, develop creative, local, and diverse solutions to economic and social problems that America confronts, with the most successful ones being adopted by the federal state and adapted to problems that are national in scope. Such a process, too, might even resuscitate a popular belief in the capacity of active governments at all levels to expand opportunity and promote equality.

You can read the full essay here. It is adapted from “The Resilient Power of the States Across the Long Nineteenth Century: An Inquiry into a Pattern of American Governance,” in Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King, eds., The Unsustainable American State (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 61–87.

Mehrotra on Taxation and American Economic Development

Ajay K. Mehrotra, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, has posted American Economic Development, Managerial Corporate Capitalism, and the Institutional Foundations of the Modern Income Tax, which also appears in Law and Contemporary Problems 73 (2010). Here is the abstract:

Histories of the modern American income tax have generally focused on the role that social and political forces have played in the development of a new tax system. This article seeks to move beyond the social and political determinants to examine the economic factors that facilitated the adoption of the modern, graduated income tax. Without marginalizing the importance of social and political factors, the central aim of this article is to make a modest contribution to the legal and political historiography of the U.S. income tax by highlighting how changing material economic conditions afforded social groups, political reformers, and lawmakers with a unique, historically-contingent opportunity to transform the American tax system. More specifically, this article investigates how American economic growth and the advent of managerial corporate capitalism provided governments with new and crucial “tax handles” to assess and collect personal and business income. With an increasing amount of economic output and income moving through formal markets, public officials were more easily able to tap the growing tax base. And as income and economic power became concentrated in larger organizational units, namely large-scale, integrated business corporations, it became easier for taxing authorities to identify and access sources of tax revenue.

Was John Marshall a Bad Historian?

Many thanks to Mary for inviting me to contribute! I have been a beneficiary of the blog in countless ways in the past few years, so it is an honor to be able to participate. I recently had occasion to delve into a new area of research as I prepared to moderate a faculty workshop at the University of Illinois with the lofty title "Indigenous Subjects in Imperial Law: Johnson v. McIntosh in Hemispheric Perspective" (thanks to the kind invitation of fellow legal historian Daniel Hamilton). As many of you will know, in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Chief Justice John Marshall declares the sovereignty of the United States government over American Indian property. According to Marshall, the government had inherited this dominion from Great Britain, which had acquired it through the doctrine of "discovery." The case granted American Indians a "right of occupancy," but no more. I was familiar with the Johnson case largely through teaching it in my first-year property course. Among property professors Marshall is praised for having created at least a modicum of rights for Native Americans and for protecting native land from incursions by white settlers (since Indians could only sell to the U.S. government under his ruling, not to individual citizens). The case later served in the mid-twentieth century as a precedent for American Indian land claims. But as I prepped for the workshop, I discovered that recent work in legal history paints a different view, one that brings into question Chief Justice Marshall's motivations and also demonstrates his own questionable use of history. Stuart Banner's book How the Indians Lost Their Land, Brian Slattery's essay in the edited volume Despotic Dominion, and Lindsay Robertson's book-length treatment Conquest by Law, all come to a similar conclusion: Marshall's interpretation of colonial history was woefully inadequate. To complicate matters, the historical portions of the opinion, which are lengthy, are drawn from Marshall's own prior work: a five-volume biography of George Washington, published in 1804 and later excerpted as the History of the American Colonies, published in 1824. Banner and Robertson also go into great detail about Marshall's hidden motivations for deciding the case in the way he did, namely to protect state grants of preemption rights to white settlers who wanted to purchase Indian land. So it seems we have two conflicting views of the Johnson case and of Marshall's role in particular (and forgive the oversimplification): property professors view the case as good law, in the sense of having created a leg, albeit a weak one, for Indian property rights to stand on; whereas legal historians view the case as bad law, in the sense of being based on inaccurate history (and guided by suspect motivations). So one question that comes to mind for me is this: can bad history make good cases? Does inaccurate history make a case any less legally legitimate? I wonder also if there are other examples of landmark cases based on history that is demonstrably wrong.

“It is the sun and not the laws of man than determines daylight and darkness”

Benjamin Franklin

At about 6:00 a.m. one morning in Paris, Benjamin Franklin was awakened by a sudden noise, and was surprised to find “my room filled with light; and I imagined at first that a number of those lamps had been brought into it; but, rubbing my eyes, I perceived the light came in at the windows.  I got up and looked out to see what might be the occasion of it, when I saw the sun just rising above the horizon., from whence he poured his rays plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.”  Franklin wrote to the Journal of Paris that “your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon...will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early.”  Franklin goes on to consider all the candles that might be saved if Parisians went to bed and arose earlier.  Some consider Franklin the first proponent of what we now call Daylight Savings Time.

At this point, dear reader, you might pause to change your clocks, since the occasion for this post is that early this morning the United States switched from Daylight Savings to Standard Time.

There is a legal history of daylight savings, complete with a Holmes opinion upholding a Massachusetts daylight saving law.  My interest in the subject, however, stems from the fact that another name for daylight saving in World War II was “war time.” Daylight saving was first instituted in the United States as an energy saving measure during World War I.  While some liked an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, farmers and others who worked early in the morning complained.  "God knows more about time than President Wilson,” one person protested. 

photo source

While some states and localities adopted daylight savings in later years, in World War II the federal government moved the clock forward an hour, imposing daylight saving all year long.  Secretary of War Henry Simson supported it to save energy and keep war production up.  But many Americans objected, sometimes rather colorfully.  At hearings on a repeal bill in 1944, Congressman Joseph P. O’Hara of Minnesota read this excerpt from a constituent letter into the record:

To delude one’s self that it is 6 o’clock when the sun, moon and stars and God in heaven have ordained that it is but 5 o’clock, I believe justifies the...statement that the so-called daylight saving time probably stands at the head of the list as an example of complete asininity.

Although standard time itself was a human construct, many persisted in the idea that standard time was natural or God-given, like the Oklahoma State Senate, which passed an anti-daylight saving resolution insisting that “It is the sun and not the laws of man than determines daylight and darkness.”

Many of the tensions over war time stemmed from the ways clock time had come to be experienced as an essential element of culture.  While the timing of much farm work was dictated  by the sun, “people want to live by the clock,” a Farm Bureau representative explained.

A “war time” repeal bill passed Congress not long after V-J Day, and daylight saving ended September 30, 1945.  Following a period of “clock chaos,” when some states and localities adopted daylight savings but others did not, Congress adopted national, standardized daylight savings time in 1966.

The basic story of daylight savings time appears in David Prerau, Sieze the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time.

Lahav on American Influence on Israeli Law: Freedom of Expression

American Influence on Israeli Law: Freedom of Expression is a new essay by Pnina Lahav, Boston University - School of Law.  It is forthcoming in THE U.S. AND ISRAEL: SIX DECADES OF RELATIONS, Robert O. Freedman, ed. (Westview Press, 2011).  Only the abstract is posted:

This chapter provides a historical overview of the American influence on Israel’s jurisprudence of freedom of expression from the 1950s to the first decade of the twenty first century. The chapter uses the format of decades, presenting representative cases for each decade, to record the process by which Israeli judges incorporated and sometimes rejected themes from the U.S. jurisprudence of freedom of expression. In the course of discussing the jurisprudential themes the chapter also highlights the historical context in which the cases were decided, from the war in Korea and McCarthyism in the 1950s, to the process of globalization which dominated the first decade of the twenty first century. The chapter asserts that over the decades the Israeli understanding of freedom of expression has matured so that today the appearance of U.S. law is invoked primarily for rhetorical purposes. In contrast to the 1950s, contemporary Israeli courts have enough authentic jurisprudence to guide them in their decisional law.

Best Legal History Faculties: Voting is Open

Also in the "for what it's worth" category:  Brian Leiter's polling on the best faculties in legal history is now open.  Twenty-five faculties are listed.

Elazar on the Invention of Negative Liberty

New from Yiftah Elazar (Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton University Department of Politics) is a paper likely to interest intellectual and legal historians, as well as those who study the American Revolution. It is titled "The American Debate and the Invention of Negative Liberty."

Here's the abstract:

The argument that the idea of liberty is “negative” first appeared in the work of three 18th century utilitarian writers – Jeremy Bentham, John Lind, and Richard Hey – who were all involved in arguing against the American Revolution. Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit have suggested that the utilitarians revived the Hobbesian notion of freedom and utilized it against the neo-classical conception of freedom that was employed in support of the American cause.

While acknowledging the similarity between the Hobbesian definition of liberty and the eighteenth century utilitarian definition of liberty, the paper argues for the uniqueness of the latter. Hobbes was arguing for an absolute monarchy, while the eighteenth century utilitarians shared with most advocates of the American cause a respect for the British mixed constitution. In contrast to Hobbes, the utilitarians had an idea of civil or political liberty that included some form of security against the arbitrary will of the government, and they shared the neo-classical idea that protecting the liberty of individuals in society requires a free constitution of government.

The paper argues that the utilitarian invention of negative liberty should be understood in the context of a debate in which neo-classical assumptions about freedom and government were, to some extent, shared, and the question at the heart of the debate was the question of democratic participation.

You can download the full version here.

Hat tip: bookforum

Cliopatria Awards

Nominations are open for this year's Cliopatria Awards for the best in history blogging:

Click here to nominate candidates for Best Post, Best Series of Posts, Best Individual Blog, Best Group Blog, Best New Blog, and Best Writer.

Hat tip.

Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop

Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop
CALL FOR PAPERS

University of Southern California Center for Law, History & Culture, Georgetown University Law Center, Columbia Law School, and UCLA School of Law invite submissions for the eighth meeting of the Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop to be held at USC Gould School of Law in Los Angeles on June 5 & 6, 2011.

PAPER COMPETITION:

The paper competition is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students and post-doctoral scholars in law and the humanities; in addition to drawing from numerous humanistic fields, and welcomes critical, qualitative work in the social sciences. Between five and ten papers will be chosen, based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, for presentation at the June Workshop. At the Workshop, two senior scholars will comment on each paper. Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to subject and methodology. Moreover, the selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation among all the participants about the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as about the nature of interdisciplinarity itself.

Papers should be works-in-progress between 10,000 and 15,000 words in length (including footnotes/endnotes), and must include an abstract of no more than 200 words. A dissertation chapter may be submitted but we strongly suggest that it be edited so that it stands alone as a piece of work with its own integrity. A paper that has been submitted for publication is eligible so long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time of the Workshop. The selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network; there is no other publication commitment. The Workshop will pay the travel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation.

Submissions (in either Word or Wordperfect, no pdf files) will be accepted until January 7, 2011, and should be sent by e-mail to:

Center for the Study of Law and Culture
culture@law.columbia.edu

Columbia Law School
435 W. 116th Street
New York, N.Y. 10027

Please be sure to include your contact information. For more information: Terry Hua, 212.854.7946 or culture@law.columbia.edu.

Best Faculties in Legal History: The Leiter Poll

In the "For What Its Worth" Department, we note that Brian Leiter is conducting one of his "best faculties" polls for American law schools on the field of legal history, here.

History of the Federal Government Prizes

[We have the following call for submissions for two prizes sponsored by the Society for the History of the Federal Government.]

The Society for History in the Federal Government awards two prize each year for outstanding scholarship in a published article or essay related to the history of the federal government. We are inviting submissions for the 2010 prizes, for articles or essays published during calendar year 2010. (The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2010.)

1. The James Madison is an annual award given for excellence in an article or essay that deals with any aspect of the federal government’s history.

2. The Charles Thomson Prize is awarded for the best article or essay on a topic in federal history. The nominated article or essay must have been prepared by a federal historian or for a federal history program, including history offices in the federal agencies and history-related programs in other federal entities.

An entry for either prize should consist of a copy of the published article and a letter indicating the significance and merits of the article (a cover letter from the journal’s editor is preferred,although a letter from the author is acceptable). For articles published late in the year, the Committee will accept photocopies of the galleys in lieu of the final published article. A copy of the submission should be sent separately to each of the members of the Prize Committee:

1. Larry DeWitt, Social Security Administration Historian’s Office, Rm. 1532 OPS, Baltimore, MD. 21235. (email: larry.dewitt@ssa.gov)

2. Michele Lyons, 875 Hunting Lake Drive, Huntingtown, MD 20639 (e-mail: lyonsm@mail.nih.gov)

The Madison Prize commemorates the nation’s fourth President and the principal author of The Federalist Papers. The Thomson prize commemorates the nation’s first federal archivist. Both prizes are awarded at the Society’s annual conference in February.

More information regarding the Society and its prizes is here.

Image credit

Ransel on the Ability to Recognize a Good Source

I'm a big fan of the "Art of History" column in the American Historical Association's monthly newsmagazine (Perspectives on History). According to the latest installment, by David Ransel (Indiana University), one of the "arts of history" is "the ability to recognize a good source."

Here's a brief excerpt:

We know about the extraordinary influence of books such as Montaillou by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg. These talented historians were able to tell a compelling story and explain its meaning for us. But the initial success was their ability to recognize what could be learned from the trial transcripts they came upon during their work on the Inquisition. Indeed, Le Roy Ladurie’s principal source had been published a decade before his study. He was the first to realize its possibilities. Ginzburg had been struck by a reference in a document in the Udine archives to a defendant who held that the world had its origin in putrefaction. Because he was busily searching for material on a different topic, Ginzburg merely noted the number of the trial about the world’s beginnings for future reference. Luckily for us, the defendant’s curious belief stirred Ginzburg’s memory from time to time, prompting him years later to return to the trial document to see if he could understand what the man we now know as Menocchio had meant by his statement about the world’s origin.

My favorite example of a master of the art of recognizing a good source is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. She was not the first person to encounter the diary of Martha Ballard, on which she based her book A Midwife’s Tale. Several historians had looked through the diary at the Maine Historical Society and set it aside because, as Ulrich recounted, they found that it contained much the same thing day after day. Most likely, they also rejected it because the daily life of a midwife did not qualify as history with a capital H. Laurel Ulrich, by contrast, was interested in learning about how women served their communities, and a knowledge of textiles suggested to her that the patterns of family obligation and professional work evident in the diary wove a revealing fabric of the social and economic contributions of women.

[footnotes omitted]

You can read the rest of the column here. Ransel goes on to consider why recognizing a good source is so difficult, even when it is easily accessible. He concludes by suggesting how historians "can stay open to discoveries that lead to fresh insights."

Amann on Cecelia Goetz, Woman at Nuremberg

Cecelia Goetz, Woman at Nuremberg has just been posted by  Diane Marie Amann, University of California, Davis - School of Law.  The essay is forthcoming in the International Criminal Law Review.  Here's the abstract:

Cecilia Goetz at Nuremberg

Among the many women who played a role in the post-World War II trials of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators was a 30-year-old American, Cecelia Goetz. This essay, part of ongoing research on women at Nuremberg, to be published in “Women and International Criminal Law,” a forthcoming special issue of the International Criminal Law Review, discusses Goetz. Included are not only details on how and why she became a prosecutor in the Krupp trial at Nuremberg, but also a life story marked by many “first woman” chapters, on law review, at the Department of Justice, and, after Nuremberg, in the federal judiciary.

Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellowships

The Center for Law, Society, and Culture at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law—Bloomington will appoint up to three Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellows for the 2011-2012 academic year. We invite applications from pre-tenure scholars, recently awarded PhDs, and those with equivalent professional degrees to conduct research at Indiana University and participate in the activities of the Center, which include an annual symposium, a colloquia series, and regular workshop series.

Scholars of law, the humanities, or social sciences working in the field of sociolegal studies are encouraged to apply. Advanced graduate students may also apply, but evidence of completion of the doctoral degree or its equivalent is required before beginning the fellowship. The Center encourages applications from scholars focusing on global or transnational law and society research projects. Fellows will devote a full academic year to research and writing in furtherance of a major scholarly project. The stipend will be $25,000 plus a research allowance, health insurance, other benefits, and workspace at the Maurer School of Law. Fellows are expected to be in full-time residence in Bloomington in order to take advantage of the rich intellectual life of the Center, the Maurer School of Law, and Indiana University.

A complete application consists of: (1) a research proposal (up to 10 pages); (2) curriculum vitae (with address and complete contact information); and (3) three letters of recommendation (must be sent separately)

Law, War and the History of Time this week at the Kennedy School

For those in and around Cambridge and Boston -- I'm giving a talk this Thursday, November 4, at the Harvard Seminar on History and Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.  My topic is Law, War and the History of Time -- I'll be discussing the book version, rather than the essay version.  The seminar is organized by Moshik Temkin and Alex Keyssar.   This lecture and workshop series intends to

examine the relationship between our interpretation of the past and our approach to policy issues. Typically, each meeting features a presentation by an invited scholar whose cutting edge historical work-in-progress is informed by, or seeks to influence, ongoing policy debates. The aim of the seminar is to bring historical perspective to bear on the work and challenges facing policy makers, and to foster more awareness among historians of how their work can inform contemporary public concerns.

Thursday November 4, 2010, 4:00p.m. (Perkins Room, Rubenstein Building).  Please contact Michelle Lussier for more information.  The abstract for the talk is posted here.

HoSang, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California

Racial Propositions:  Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California by Daniel Martinez HoSang has just been published by the University of California Press.  Here's the book description:

This book looks beyond the headlines to uncover the controversial history of California's ballot measures over the past fifty years. As the rest of the U.S. watched, California voters banned public services for undocumented immigrants, repealed public affirmative action programs, and outlawed bilingual education, among other measures. Why did a state with a liberal political culture, an increasingly diverse populace, and a well-organized civil rights leadership roll back civil rights and anti-discrimination gains? Daniel Martinez HoSang finds that, contrary to popular perception, this phenomenon does not represent a new wave of "color-blind" policies, nor is a triumph of racial conservatism. Instead, in a book that goes beyond the conservative-liberal divide, HoSang uncovers surprising connections between the right and left that reveal how racial inequality has endured. Arguing that each of these measures was a proposition about the meaning of race and racism, his deft, convincing analysis ultimately recasts our understanding of the production of racial identity, inequality, and power in the postwar era.

 And the blurbs:

"With narrative fluency and deftness, constructed on a bedrock of prodigious archival research, HoSang's book provides a sorely needed genealogy of the 'color-blind consensus' that has come to define race and recode racism within US politics, law and public policy. This will be a book that lasts."—Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy

"An important analysis of both the exact contours of white supremacy and the failures of electoral anti-racism."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

"Racial Propositions brilliantly documents the history of race in California's post-World War II ballot initiatives to show that nothing is what it seems when it comes to race and politics in America's ethnoracial frontier. Daniel HoSang provides readers with a sharply focused interdisciplinary lens though which to see how the language and politics of political liberalism veil what are ultimately racialized ballot initiatives. If California is a harbinger for the rest of the country, then HoSang's tour de force is required reading for anyone interested how the United States will negotiate diversity in the 21st century."—Tomás R. Jiménez, author of Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity

An excerpt is here, and more book info is here.

How and Why History Matters for Development Policy

Mary recently wrote a great post on why legal historians, particularly those on the job market, need to be prepared to talk about the "cash-out value" of their scholarship. For those struggling to think through that question, a recent policy research working paper by Michael Woolcock (World Bank - Development Research Group), Simon Szreter (University of Cambridge), and Vijayendra Rao (World Bank - Development Research Group) may be of interest. It is titled "How and Why Does History Matter for Development Policy?"

Here's the abstract:

The consensus among scholars and policymakers that "institutions matter" for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that "history matters," since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognize that historians (and not only economic historians) might also have useful and distinctive insights to offer. This paper endeavors to open and sustain a constructive dialogue between history -- understood as both "the past" and "the discipline" -- and development policy by (a) clarifying what the craft of historical scholarship entails, especially as it pertains to understanding causal mechanisms, contexts, and complex processes of institutional change; (b) providing examples of historical research that support, qualify, or challenge the most influential research (by economists and economic historians) in contemporary development policy; and (c) offering some general principles and specific implications that historians, on the basis of the distinctive content and method of their research, bring to development policy debates.

Part IV identifies ways in which history matters for the authors' policy area. Here's the first paragraph of that section:

There are broadly three ways in which history matters for development policy. The first is through its insistence on the methodological principles of respect for context, process and difference when addressing the study of societies and policy efforts to bring about change in them. History views change as a complex causal process requiring a diversity of forms of knowledge, and a corresponding variety of methods for acquiring and interpreting that knowledge. Second, history is a resource of critical and reflective self-awareness about the nature of the discipline of development itself, its current preoccupations, why those preoccupations (and not others) have come to take their present form, and how they differ from past motives and aims, along with the crucial issue of how particular sources and forms of evidence are rendered salient. Third, history brings a particular kind of perspective to development problems; it is a vantage point for framing and viewing the nature of development which is relatively long-term and comparative.

[footnotes omitted]

New USC Humanities Postdocs

This postdoc has just been announced.  This is a great opportunity for folks who will have completed a Ph.D. between July 2007 and July 2011.  There is a robust law and humanities community at USC, and the terms for this postdoc are quite generous.

Doheney Library, USC

University of Southern California

Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities

Call for Applications

The University of Southern California is pleased to announce a new opportunity for outstanding young scholars, the Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities.  The program has two overarching goals.  First, we seek to further the professional development of scholars in the humanities by providing time for research and writing, an opportunity to establish an independent teaching portfolio, and faculty mentoring to help scholars prepare for careers as tenure-track faculty.  Secondly, we seek to add new voices from other institutions to our conversations within and across disciplines in the humanities, as well as to our conversations about the value and place of the humanities within the university and in society at large.

Appointments are for two years, with a start date of August 15, 2011.  Provost’s scholars will teach three courses over four semesters, with one semester free for full-time research.  They are expected to reside in the Los Angeles area during the academic year and to participate in the scholarly life of the host department and the university through seminars and other scholarly activities.  The salary is $50,000 per year plus fringe benefits, with a research and travel account of $6,000 per year.  It is understood that scholars may get jobs and leave the program after the first year.

Venice Beach

Candidates should choose one of the following programs as their proposed host department and explain the choice briefly in their cover letter:  American Studies, Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, Critical Studies (Cinema), East Asian Languages and Cultures, English, French, History, Linguistics, Musicology, Philosophy, Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Applicants will be evaluated based on their prior academic accomplishments, the significance and intellectual merit of the proposed project, and their potential to contribute to the intellectual life of their host department and the community of scholars at USC.  Candidates must have received the Ph.D. no earlier than July 1, 2007 and must have the degree in hand by July 1, 2011.  The provost expects to make five to eight postdoctoral awards per year in order to maintain a full cohort of approximately 10 scholars.

Application materials

Applicants should submit the following items as .pdf files to http://grad.usc.edu/PostDocApp :

• Cover letter including explanation of desired program affiliation 

• CV 

• Writing sample of one chapter or one article (up to 30 pages double-spaced) 

• Research proposal describing applicant’s plans for the period of the grant.  This may include revising the dissertation for publication and/or plans for the candidate’s next academic project (up to three pages double-spaced) 

• Teaching statement (up to two pages double spaced) 

• Names, institutional affiliations, and email addresses of three faculty members who can supply letters of reference directly to USC.

Notification

Recipients of the USC Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar awards will be notified in mid March 2011.

Further about the program can be found by visiting the program website [note:  the program is so new that the website is not yet up and running.  check back later].  For information regarding postdoctoral policies and benefits, look under the heading “postdoctoral research associates” here.  Inquiries about the USC Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities should be directed to Vice Provost Sarah Pratt.

Legal History in U.S. Law Schools

Greetings to the Legal History Blog, and thanks to Mary, Dan, Karen and Clara for all the great services the blog provides.

A recent paper of Bill Novak's, wending its way toward publication in the Michigan State Law Review, adverts to the unparalleled interest in legal history among current U.S. law teachers. Bill references the 2009-10 AALS Directory's list of Law Teachers by Subject. He aroused my curiosity and so I did some rough counts, based on names per column and columns per subject. Nearly 500 teachers name Legal History as a subject of interest, well above the mean number per subject (about 340) and nearly double the median (about 260). Legal History sits between Civil Rights (more than 600 teachers) and Criminal Justice and Employment Discrimination (each about 440). Legal History is by considerable measure the most heavily populated among the subjects one might term "theory/perspective," outpolling Law and Social Science (about 340), Law and Economics (fewer than 300), Law and Literature (fewer than 200), and Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory (both fewer than 100). It also outpolls major substantive law subjects such as Antitrust and Labor Law (each about 370), Women and the Law (fewer than 300) and Immigration Law (about 220). I am now interested enough to be working on this measure over time. Hopefully more figures will emerge over the course of the coming month!

"An age without surrender ceremonies"

Here’s a snippet from the book I’m finishing up this fall.  This passage is about what I think of as President Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, and it raises questions about how to think about the role of wartime in American history during a period when wars don’t seem to end.

U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Kimberly Hackbarth

On August 18, 2010, the conflict in Iraq ended, live on NBC.  “It’s gone on longer than the civil war, longer than World War II,” said NBC news anchor Brian Williams.  “And tonight, U.S. combat troops have pulled out of Iraq.”  The station and its cable affiliate MSNBC broadcast live footage of Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, embedded with the 4th Stryker Brigade, as soldiers drove across the border from Iraq into Kuwait.  “This has been a historical moment that we have just seen,” noted Engle, although the history-making quality of this episode required some explaining.  50,000 American troops were remaining in Iraq, fully armed, and reports of American casualties in Iraq would continue.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, progressives’ favorite new media celebrity, explained in her reporting from the Green Zone:  “War’s end like this....They end with a political settlement.”  NBC and its cable affiliate had been given an exclusive ability to cover these events, yet this moment’s ambiguity seemed to necessitate their insistence that this really was an ending of the war.  The evidence that this day was historic came only from the reporters’ insistence that it was historic.  There were no dramatic images like those accompanying the American pullout from Vietnam, with refugees clambering after a departing helicopter on the rooftop of the U.S. embassy.  There were no photographs of the signing of an armistice agreement.  Just troops in trucks.  Maddow said: “As the combat mission ends, that means the war is ending...The combat mission is over; the war is over.”

Then, on August 31, President Obama announced “the end of combat operations in Iraq” in a televised speech to the American people.  As mid-term elections neared, the president sought to turn attention to domestic matters, including a struggling economy.  He called it a “historic moment,” coming after “nearly a decade of war.”  Obama persisted in a rhetorical effort to ratchet back the “war on terror.”  Rather than casting the many years of conflict as a wartime in which the nation battled a militant form of Islam, he instead invoked a more limited set of ideas.  In Obama’s words, President Bush had simply “announced the beginning of military operations in Iraq.” Compared to Bush’s fiery rhetoric at the opening of the Iraq campaign, Obama’s description seemed technocratic.  His delivery was dispassionate.  He seemed more bureaucrat than war leader.  It was as if, rather than declaring an end to violent state-sponsored killings to serve a compelling national interest, he was announcing the close of a bloodless government program.  

Although the nation’s unity was tested during this era, Obama argued, there was one constant:  “At every turn, America’s men and women in uniform have served with courage and resolve.”  American troops had “completed every mission they were given.”  The nature of that mission seemed obscure, but once deployed, the personalization of American war support by the president and others meant that the nation could rally behind its soldiers without engaging the war’s broader purpose and what it may have accomplished.  The pullout of the last combat brigade was simply “a convoy of brave Americans, making their way home.”  Of the members of the Fourth Stryker Brigade who had “made the ultimate sacrifice,” Obama quoted a staff sergeant who said equivocally: to them, “this day would probably mean a lot.”

Even as Obama announced that “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended,” he also said that troops would remain “with a different mission.” It would also have a new name: Operation Iraqi Freedom was replaced by Operation New Dawn.  Just how different the mission would be was clarified when practical questions surfaced.  If combat was over, would American troops no longer be eligible for hostile fire pay, or for combat service medals?  The Army responded with a message to all troops: The “end to combat operations in Iraq” was effective September 1, “however, combat conditions are still prevalent.  Due to the nature of combat conditions, wartime awards will continue to be issued in theater until a date to be determined.”   Other combat service benefits would still be available.  “It is unusual for the Army to come right out and say the emperor has no clothes,” noted reporter Thomas E. Ricks, “but I think it had to in this case, because soldiers take medals seriously.”  And Associated Press pushed back from the White House message.  “Whatever the subject, we should be correct and consistent in our description of what the situation in Iraq is,” said an internal AP memo.  “To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months.”

Perhaps the paradoxical nature of this ending that was not an ending explains the absence in Obama’s speech of the president’s usual rhetorical power.  Grasping for metaphors, he emphasized that American troops “are the steel in our ship of state.  And though our nation may be travelling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.”  And so the mission had devolved to supporting the troops, while the troops themselves gave the mission meaning.  The circularity befitted what the president called “an age without surrender ceremonies;” an age when conflict could end, even as it remained on-going.

Cross-posted from Balkinization.

Welcome to Chris Tomlins and Allison Brownell Tirres

The Legal History Blog welcomes Allison Brownell Tirres, De Paul College of Law, and Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Irvine, School of Law, who will be guest blogging during the month of November.

Allison is an Assistant Professor at De Paul, where she had been teaching since 2007.  She received her JD and Ph.D. in History from Harvard, and practiced law before entering teaching.  Allison's publications includeThe View from the Border: Law and Community in the Nineteenth Century, in Transformations in American Legal History, vol. 2 (ed. Daniel W. Hamilton & Alfred Brophy) (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011), Lawyers and Legal Borderlands, 50 Am. J. Legal Hist. 157 (2008-2010), and her Note, Law, Race, and the Border: The El Paso Salt War of 1877, 117 Harv. L. Rev. 941 (2004).  She is at work on a book, based on her dissertation:  American Law Comes to the Border: Law and Colonization on the Edge of the U.S./Mexico Divide (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 2008).

Chris is the Chancellor's Professor of Law at Irvine.  He moved to Irvine in 2009 after eighteen years as a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.  Chris's book Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge University Press, 1993) was awarded the James Willard Hurst Prize of the Law & Society Association, and the Littleton-Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History.  He has edited many works, including The Cambridge History of Law in America, 3 volumes (Cambridge University Press, 2008) (co-edited with Michael Grossberg).  His newest book is Freedom, Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Welcome to Allison and Chris!

Campaign Finance and American Democracy

The Miller Center of Public Affairs and the Campaign Finance Institute co-hosted a panel recently on Citizens United v. FEC. In the word of the Miller Center's announcement, the panelists discussed "this controversial case and the legislation that has been proposed to amend it, and the critical relationship between campaign expenditures and American democracy." The panelists included campaign finance experts, journalists, political theorists, and others. I note the event here because of the talk by Gerald Berk, University of Oregon, which provided useful historical context on the case. (You may read the transcript or listen to the podcast here.) See also Kurt Hohenstein's Coining Corruption: The Making of the American Campaign Finance System.

Image credit: MatadorNights/Kate Sedgwick