Yale Law's New NAACP Collection

[Our friends at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, send us the following announcement.]

The Beinecke has recently acquired an archive of publications, ephemera, and other materials related to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The forty-two items total nearly 700 pages, spanning more than sixty years, beginning in 1915, with much documentation of the NAACP's early efforts to end lynching in the United States, including "The Waco Horror" by Elizabeth Freeman, "Brief in Support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill" by Moorefield Storey, a 1930's "Stop Lynching NAACP Legal Defense Fund" pin-back button, etc. Also included are two ephemeral items, representing Anti-NAACP racist publications in the United States. The large majority of publications in the collection are unrecorded by OCLC (or otherwise known in only a few institutional holdings). A detailed list of the collection contents is available here.  (NOTE: this document includes images and language that some my find disturbing).

Oglethorpe’s Nightmare: Lawyers in Savannah

Oglethorpe’s Nightmare: Lawyers in Savannah, is a conference sponsored by the Georgia Legal History Foundation, in the United States Courthouse, Wright Square, in Savannah, Georgia, on May-24-25, 2012.  Although some fully credentialed historians are among the presenters, practicing lawyers and sitting judges predominate, including, among the members of the bar, my college classmate Wade W. Herring, II, of the Hunter Maclean firm, who will kick off the affair by speaking on the life and legacy of Malcolm Maclean.  Hat tip.

Michael J. Pfeifer on Lynching in the U.S.

Michael J. Pfeifer’s new book, The Roots of Rough Justice:  Origins of American Lynching (Univ. of Illinois Press 2011), is reviewed by Stephen Leonard this month on H-Law.  A follow-on to Pfeifer’s seminal work, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1847—1947 (2004), this book tackles “the foundational problem” beginning in the 1830s.  As Leonard writes, “the contest was between those who held differing views of the legacy of the American Revolution”:

Thanks to Pfeifer we now know that the lynching of the post-Civil War decades rested in part on massive pylons of popular sovereignty, white supremacy, and class preservation and advancement. Those sturdy foundations, in the eyes of lynching apologists, raised extralegal punishments from the trash heap of necessary evils to the level of positive goods. Realizing the importance of these foundations, we can better understand why the practice was so difficult to eradicate and why elements of lynching’s DNA still remain in our criminal “justice” system.

Read the full review here.

Gowder on Equality and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens

Equality and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens has just been posted by Paul Gowder, Ph.D. candidate, Stanford University, Department of Political Science, and incoming new faculty member this fall at the University of Iowa College of Law.  Here's the abstract:

In this paper, I defend three claims.

First, contra some classicists and legal historians, classical Athens during the democratic period substantially satisfied the demands of the rule of law (excepting its treatment of women, noncitizens, and slaves). I show that arguments to the contrary mostly represent an unduly narrow conception of what might count as law in Athens, one that inappropriately excludes common-knowledge social customs.

Second, Athenians saw the rule of law as serving the equality of mass and elite, oligarchs and democrats: there was no contradiction (again contra some classicists) between the democratic power of the masses and the rule of law. This equality consisted in two topoi frequently deployed in the Athenian legal and social discourse. First is the respect topos, according to which the laws represent respect for the democratic polis. To disregard them is to reveal one's lack of respect for the polis and one’s oligarchic character. Second is the strength topos, according to which the laws are the way that the democratic polis exercises its power: weak members of the masses cannot stand up to strong members of the elite alone, they need the backing of the whole community, and that backing is coordinated through the law; to undermine the law is thereby to undermine the political power of the masses.

Third, this connection between equality and the rule of law explains the most striking fact about Athenian legality, to wit, the otherwise puzzling effectiveness of the amnesty enacted for crimes committed under the Thirty Tyrants. The strength topos explains why the democrats in Athens refrained from avenging themselves against the Thirty despite their opportunity to do so: by doing so, they would have undermined the law, and thereby their own equality. The strength topos led the Athenians to take the internal point of view on the law.

The account of the rule of law deployed in this paper is that developed in my Equality Under the (Rule of) Law, also available on SSRN. This paper serves the function, in part, of demonstrating the cross-cultural applicability of the conception of the rule of law developed in that paper.

UPDATED: Jus Soli in Historical Perspective

While we await the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Arizona, other weighty issues of immigration and citizenship continue to defy resolution and generate academic debate.  Take, for instance, the issue of territorial birthright citizenship:  Will the United States abandon its historical practice of jus soli?  Debates on this issue frequently invoke historical antecedents.  Not just domestic history, either.  The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness favors jus soli by stipulating the norm that an important measure to avoid statelessness at birth is to provide nationality to children born on the territory who would otherwise be stateless.

I was fortunate to participate in a superb conference on this subject (April 19-21 at Boston College), titled Citizenship in Question:  Evidentiary Challenges for Jus Soli.  The co-sponsors included The Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice, the Institute for the Liberal Arts, Boston College Law School, the University of Pennsylvania, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Northeastern University.  The program, with list of participants and paper titles, is available here.  Look for speedy publication of the papers, which will be of great benefit particularly with respect to comparative citizenship practices. Update:  A conference report, with summaries and paper abstracts, is now available here.

The conference touched on what has always struck me as an intriguing historical phenomenon.  Citizenship by birth on the territory – the jus soli – is largely a New World phenomenon:  Not just the United States and Canada, but Mexico, and, with one or two exceptions, all of central and south America.  The rest of the world primarily follows the jus sanguinis.  What is interesting is that jus soli is customarily associated with common law legal systems, while civil law countries are committed to jus sanguinis.  Except in the Americas.  Perhaps there is a hemispheric treatment of the historical origins of jus soli in the Americas.  If not, a timely opportunity beckons... 

The Civil War on Trial

Via H-Law, we have news of The Civil War on Trial: Legal Issues That Divided a Nation,” a conference to be held June 7–9, 2012, at the Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom, 4th Floor, Albany Law School, Albany, New York.  The co-chairs are Harold Holzer, Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School.  Sponsors are New York State Archives Partnership Trust, Government Law Center of Albany Law School, Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York, Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, and New York State Bar Association

The announcement invites you to “[j]oin us in New York State’s capital for a one-of-a-kind conference with some of the nation’s preeminent scholars on the Civil War and the law as we consider legal issues that led to and defined the Civil War and post-war reconstruction.”

Topics include the Fugitive Slave Act and Secession, Rights of Secession/States’ Rights,    Emancipation and Presidential Power, Civil Liberties: Free Press, Civil Liberties: Habeas Corpus, Recruitment of Black Troops, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and Military Justice

Presenters include (in addition to the co-chairs) Diane Barnes, Youngstown State University, Hon. Joseph Bellacosa, New York State Court of Appeals (Retired), Spencer Crew, George Mason University, Eric Freedman, Hofstra University School of Law, William Freehling, University of Kentucky, Nelson Lankford, Virginia Historical Society, James Oakes, City University of New York, Rex Smith, Albany Times Union, John Stauffer, Harvard University, David O. Stewart, Attorney and author, James Swanson, The Heritage Foundation, Craig Symonds, U.S. Naval Academy, Nikki Taylor, University of Cincinnati, Hon. Richard Wesley, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, Hon. Frank J. Williams, Rhode Island Supreme Court (Retired).

Welcome to Polly Price

Polly Price

The Legal History Blog welcomes Polly Price, who will be guest blogging for the next month. Polly is a Professor of Law at Emory, where she teaches citizenship and immigration law, torts, legislation and regulation, American legal history, and Latin American legal systems. Her first book, Property Rights: Rights and Liberties under the Law (2003), was “highly recommended” by Choice magazine.  Polly’s second book, Judge Richard S. Arnold: A Legacy of Justice on the Federal Bench (2009), features a Forward by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Her recent publications include Federalization of the Mosquito: Structural Innovation in the New Deal Administrative State, 60 EMORY L. J. 325 (2010).

Polly’s talents are well-known in the legal history world. She co-chaired with Lynn Hogue, Georgia State University, the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2011 American Society for Legal History annual meeting in Atlanta, and planned a spectacularly successful meeting.

Welcome to Polly!

Law & Hist. Rev. (May 2012): Book Reviews

Following up on our coverage of the articles in the latest issue of the Law & History Review, we are now spotlighting the book reviews. Here's what you'll find in the May 2012 issue:

Ken I. Kersch reviews David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (University of Chicago Press).

Roman J. Hoyos reviews Christian Fritz, American Sovereigns: The American Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (Cambridge University Press).

Stephen Siegel reviews Kunal M. Parker, Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900: Legal Thought before Modernism (Cambridge University Press).

Carole Hough reviews Lisi Oliver, The Body Legal in Barbarian Law (University of Toronto Press).

Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak reviews Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Walter F. Pratt reviews Kevin Costello, The Court of Admiralty of Ireland, 1575–1893 (Four Courts Press).

Christian Promitzer reviews Svetla Baloutzova, Demography and Nation: Social Legislation and Population Policy in Bulgaria, 1918–1944 (CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine, vol. I) (Central European University Press).

Peter H. Solomon reviews Norman M. Naimark, Stalin's Genocides (Princeton University Press).

Paul D. Halliday reviews Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Yale University Press).

Paul Gregory reviews Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton University Press).

Anthony J. Steinhoff reviews Klaus-Gert Lutterbeck, Politische Ideengeschichte als Geschichte administrativer Praxis. Konzeptionen vom Gemeinwesen im Verwaltungshandeln der Stadt Straßburg/Strasbourg 1800–1914 (Vittorio Klostermann).

Helle Vogt reviews Per Andersen, Legal Procedure and Practice in Medieval Denmark (Brill).

Keith M. Baker reviews Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton University Press).

Subscribers may access full content here.

A Million!

Sometime today the Legal History Blog had its one millionth visitor.  A million thanks for stopping by!  We do this for you.

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Rose on Medieval Estate Planning

Medieval Estate Planning: The Wills and Testamentary Trials of Sir John Fastolf  has just been posted by Jonathan Rose, Arizona State University College of Law.  Here's the abstract:

Medieval will-making has often been associated with efforts right before death. But estate planning activity at an earlier time was also possible and was pursued by the upper reaches of English society. Sir John Fastolf (1380-1459), a wealthy East Anglian knight, made substantial efforts to plan his estate. He made several wills and charters enfeoffing land to his use. But his efforts faced many obstacles and ultimately failed, resulting in a contest regarding the validity of his death-bed will.

This essay documents those estate planning activities. It does so by recounting a story of longstanding interest to medieval historians and other scholars. Using extensive primary sources, the essay, for the first time, explores completely and orderly all the relevant wills, charters, and other documents as well as the voluminous testimony in the will contest.

The full story shows that Fastolf’s estate planning efforts were ultimately frustrated by deathbed changes, other claims on the property, the need for royal approval, political factors, conflicts among executors, and papal intervention. Nor is it clear whether they ever could have been successful or whether medieval estate planning could ever be secure.

Beam reviews Fosi, Papal Justice

Our friends at H-Law have published a review of Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500-1750 (Catholic University of America Press), by Irene Fosi. Originally published in Italian (2007), the book has been translated to English by Thomas V. Cohen. According to reviewer Sara Beam (University of Victoria), Fosi has also "expanded the text and footnotes with a North American audience in mind," producing a book that is "an invaluable addition to the English-language scholarship on criminal justice in early modern Italy." Here's a bit more of the review:

Papal Justice is an effective call to the archives, an appeal to readers unfamiliar with the landscape of Italian justice and its rich historiography to dig into and learn from the wealth of materials available. Fosi peppers her narrative with primary sources that evoke the diversity of responses to papal justice and the wide range of sources available for studying its functioning. Most of these documents are Roman--that is to say, they were either generated by Roman courts or addressed to curial officials located there. Fosi freely admits that her geographic center is Rome itself; as a result, we are rarely offered more than a glimpse of local politics and concerns, an imbalance that can addressed by future researchers. Precisely because it so effectively stimulates further investigation into criminal justice, Papal Justice should attract a wide readership and could be profitably assigned in either an upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses.

Read on here.

2012 Hiring Update: Lefkovitz to Rutgers-Newark/NJIT

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After a dedicated search, the Federated Department of History at Rutgers University-Newark and the New Jersey Institute of Technology has hired Alison Lefkovitz to be the new Director of the B.A. Program in Law, Technology and Culture.

Professor Lefkovitz holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Chicago.  She is currently revising her dissertation, "The Politics of Marriage in the Era of Women's Liberation," into a book manuscript.  For the past two years, Lefkovitz has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Miami University.  She was a 2012 Hurst Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 

Congratulations to Alison Lefkovitz!

Ruskola on the East Asian Legal Tradition

Teemu Ruskola, Emory University School of Law, has posted The East Asian Legal Tradition, which is forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Comparative Law (Mauro Bussani & Ugo Mattei eds., Oxford University Press 2012).  Here is the abstract:

This essay is a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Comparative Law. It provides a brief description of an East Asian legal tradition - namely, what I call the classical legal tradition of East Asia, or by way of analogy, a kind of East Asian ius gentium. Although it is a historically significant tradition, by no means does it exhaust the entire East Asian legal universe. The essay intentionally focuses only on the central and shared aspects of that tradition. Yet the very notion of an East Asian legal tradition itself requires further methodological observations. First, just what does the term `East Asia' encompass? Second, what do we mean by a `legal tradition'? The answer to neither question is obvious. After addressing these preliminary considerations, the essay turns to developing the broad outlines of a classical East Asian legal tradition.

LBJ, the Causes and Conduct of War, and More: This Week in the Book Pages

The New York Times has former President Bill Clinton’s review of Robert Caro’s, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf) , the fourth book in his biography series on the 36^th president.  The Passage of Power takes up the five years between the 1960 presidential election and a few months after the assassination of JFK when Johnson secured the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America.”  Clinton writes “[i]n sparking detail, Caro Shows the new president’s genius for getting to people—friends, foes and everyone in between—and how he used it to achieve his goals.”  You can find the review as well as a slideshow with images of LBJ from the period and a podcast that includes editor Sam Tanenhaus’s interview with Caro, here.  The Los Angeles Times  also has a review of the book and as Karen noted last week, the Wall Street Journal has a review, here.

There are several reviews about war this week from World War II to the War on Terrorism.  On WWII: The New York Times has Timothy Snyder’s review of Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (Penguin Press)  Snyder writes:

If World War II were only about bad ideas, as we like to think, then we are all safe. Who among us admires Hitler, Himm­ler or Hirohito? But if the war and its atrocities had to do with material want, we cannot so easily separate ourselves from evil. Lizzie Collingham soberly argues that the expansionist designs of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan must be understood within a world political economy in which the single crucial commodity was food.

You can read the full review, here.  As Karen noted last month, you can also read reviews of The Taste of War (here) in The Nation and The Wall Street Journal (here). 

On Vietnam: The “Fall of Saigon” in April, 1975 generally marks the end of the Vietnam War.  “Yet unlike the war’s earlier episodes,” Mark Moyar writes “the final act has received only cursory treatment from historians.”  According to Moyar, George J. Veith’s Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-1975 (Encounter) “fills the gaping historical void, and in extraordinary fashion.”  Moyar’s review of Veith’s book is here, in the Los Angeles Times.

On America at war from 9/11 to the death of Bin Laden: Just after the one year mark of the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan by U.S. special forces, The New York Times has a review of Peter Bergen’s Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad (Crown Publishers).   And The Wilson Quarterly has a  review of Jonathan M. Hansen’s Guantanamo: An American History (Hill &Wang).  As Michael Bustamante, a doctoral candidate at Yale, writes, "[p]erhaps no single word evokes images of the divisive legacy of the war on terror more vividly than 'Gauntanamo": orange jumpsuits, chainlink fences, "enhanced interrogations."  No wonder we forget that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a beautiful place, and not solely the site of one of the world's most notorious prisons." 

Bharati Mukherjee reviews Katherine Boo's, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House) in The Wilson Quarterly.  Mukherjee begins:

In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a portrait of a slum in Mumbai, India, Katherine Boo sketches characters with Dickensian vividness against the black machinations of communal enmities, caste and ethnic politics, class prejudice, sexism, and corruption. Boo, whose long-form journalism on the American poor has earned her a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and other awards, set herself a difficult task with this, her first book: to dramatize the effects of poverty and corruption on everything they touch.

Read the rest of the review, here.  You can also find Basharat Peer's review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers in Foreign Affairs, and Laila Lalami's review in The Nation.  

Other reviews this week: Jeremy Adelman has a review essay in Foreign Affairs on two books by Charles Mann 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf) and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Knopf).  The New Republic: The Book has a review of Steven Nadler's A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton University Press and Lawrence Scott Sheets, Eight Pieces of Empire: A Twenty Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse (Crown), here.  In the Wall Street Journal you'll find a review of Paul Ingrassia's Engines of Change (Simon & Schuster) on the history of car buying habits.  And for those interested in the history of baseball, the WSJ has a review of Donald Spivey's If You Were Only White (Missouri), a book about Satchel Paige who played for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro American League and the New York Times has Sam Roberts's take on three books on "Radicals, Baseball and Broadway."

Happy reading!

Weekend Roundup

• Joanna Grisinger, Northwestern Center for Legal Studies, has posted an appreciation of Kimberley S. Johnson's "Racial Orders, Congress, and the Agricultural Welfare State, 1865-1940," 25 Studies in American Political Development 143 (October 2011) on Jotwell.

• “From the Streets to the Courts: Doing Grassroots Legal History of the Civil Rights Era,” Ariela Gross’s review for the Texas Law Review of Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s Courage to Dissent is here.
  

• The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars will hold a book launch for Deidre Molony’s National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy Since 1882, on Thursday, May 10, 2012, from 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. at Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor, Moynihan Board Room, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW,  Washington, D.C. 20004.  A reception will follow.  To RSVP acceptance, send an email to Maria-Stella Gatzoulis at maria-stella.gatzoulis@wilsoncenter.org

• Two postings on the Library of Law and Liberty are of possible interest to LHB readers.  One is Colleen Sheehan's Sound the Alarm to the People: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and the Principles of 1798. The other is John Witte Jr.’s From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition.

• Just in case anyone out there is harboring pretensions of learnedness that require deflating, you might want to check out the post by Marc Herman, Conference Review: Legal Heterodoxy in Islamic and Jewish History: Late Antique and Medieval Transformations, University of California, Berkeley, April 23-24, and an accompanying comment.

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

On the LHB Facebook Page: Labor

If you checked in on the blog’s Facebook page this week, you saw suggested reading on International law including Jenny Martinez’s new book, The Slave Trade and the Originsof International Human Rights Law, David Golove and Daniel Hulsebosch’s article “A Civilized Nation: the Early American Constitution, the Law ofNations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition,” and this post from last year by Ben Coates on “Law, Expertise, and Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations.”  Plus, some suggested viewing: John Fabian Witt's February 2011 lecture at Yale Law School on "Lincoln's Code: The Puzzling History of the Laws of War."

Since we just celebrated both May Day (International Workers' Day) and Law Day (more on that, here) this week, it seems appropriate to spotlight labor law.  So this upcoming week, we’ll have suggested readings and sources on labor and legal history, starting with our own Dan Ernst’s book, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism on the lawyers who worked against trade unions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Check out the Facebook Page all week for more on labor and the law.

Gartner, "Foreign Relations, Strategic Doctrine and Presidential Power"

Foreign Relations, Strategic Doctrine and Presidential Power is a new article by David Gartner, Arizona State University - Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.  It appears in the Alabama Law Review, Vol. 63, No. 3, p. 499, 2012.  Here's the abstract:

There is a central debate in foreign relations law between scholars who argue that the President inherited great power from the founding and those who contend that only after World War II was there a significant shift in the balance of powers over foreign relations. This Article highlights a third perspective by focusing on the significance of presidential assertions of power during the decade after the Spanish-American War. In this period, presidents asserted unprecedented power to dispatch the armed forces of the United States into foreign conflicts and to independently enter into binding international agreements without the participation of Congress. The Article concludes that shifting international relations, shaped by strategic foreign policy doctrine, have been central drivers of presidential assertions of authority over foreign relations.

Mack on "Representing the Race"

An interview of Kenneth Mack, Harvard Law, about his recently published book, Representing the Race, appears on "The Browser."  In it, Professor Mack explains:

Representing the Race is about the paradoxical nature of the demand that was continually made of these lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that they be representative of their race – resemble them and act like them – but at the same time that they be unlike their race, able to speak to the white community and navigate institutions of power. It's a demand that is still made of prominent African Americans as different from one another as Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama.

Monuments of Imperial Russian Law at YLS

The Yale Law School Library announces "Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," an exhibition talk by William Butler, the John Edward Fowler Distinguished Professor of Law and International Affairs at Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University, on Wednesday, May 9, 2012, from 1:00 - 2:00pm, in Room 121, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven CT.  The Library explains:

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"Monuments of Imperial Russian Law," now on display in the Yale Law Library, is perhaps the first rare book exhibit in the U.S. to focus on the history of Russian law. The lead curator of the exhibit, Professor William E. Butler of Penn State, will give a talk on the exhibit May 9 in the Yale Law School.  The exhibition was co-curated by Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian in the Lillian Goldman Law Library. It features principal landmarks in Russia's pre-1917 legal literature.  Among these are the first printed collection of Russian laws, the 1649 "Sobornoe ulozhenie", and three versions of the "Nakaz", the law code that earned Empress Catherine the Great her reputation.

The exhibit is on display through May 25, 2012 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, located on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street. The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily. The exhibit is also online in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

 Hat tip: H-Law

Cochran on Brandeis's MIT Lectues

Robert F. Cochran Jr., Pepperdine University School of Law, has posted the introduction to his edition of Louis D. Brandeis's MIT Lectures on Law (Carolina Academic Press).  Here is the abstract:

Credit: Library of Congress

This is an introduction to “Louis D. Brandeis’s MIT Lectures on Law,” recently published for the first time by Carolina Academic Press. In the mid-1890s, Louis Brandeis taught a course on law to undergraduates at MIT. Brandeis later said, “Those talks at Tech marked an epoch in my own career.” At the time of the lectures, Brandeis had been practicing law for 15 years, had published the Harvard Law Review “Right to Privacy” article, was head of one of the nation’s most successful law firms, and had begun the public interest advocacy for which he would soon earn the title “The People’s Lawyer.” In the lectures, Brandeis presents his views of areas of law in which he would lead the country over the next five decades as activist lawyer and Supreme Court Justice — anti-trust, labor, privacy, criminal procedure, legal ethics, legislation, evidence, the judicial role, and jurisprudence. In some areas of the law, we see the foundations of Brandeis’s later work. In others, we find Brandeis taking positions that were the opposite of those he would take in the future. A careful examination of the lectures reveals that the “epoch” he identified in his career was his change of views as to the value of legislation. Prior to the lectures, Brandeis was a strong supporter of the common law and was skeptical about legislation. During the lectures, he grew to believe that legislation was a necessary response to the rapidly developing industrial and economic challenges of the day. He would become the foremost defender of legislation in the following century.

Meeting of the Western Ass'n of Women Historians

Bay Area readers: This weekend the Western Association of Women Historians will meet in Berkeley. Here are a few items of interest:

Vicki Ruiz (image credit)

The keynote speech, by Vicki Ruiz (University of California, Irvine), titled "Las Dos Luisas: Latina Feminist Thought, 1900-1930."

The special session honoring Eileen Boris (University of California, Santa Barbara), featuring comments by Felicia Kornbluh, Lisa Levenstein, Jennifer Klein, and others.

The panel on "Women Challenging, Making, and Using Law," chaired by Victoria Belco (Portland State University). The papers are: "Beginning to be Citizens: Emerging Critiques of Marital Naturalization/Expatriation and Women’s Political Consciousness in the 1910s," by Shiori Yamamoto (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), "'Such Wretched Creature': Women, Crime, and Criminal Transportation in the British Atlantic World, 1607-1783," by Tess Rond (Washington State University), and "The Case of Isabella Nitti and the Transformation of the Right to Counsel in Criminal Cases," by Sara Mayeux (Stanford University).

Additional details are here. The full program is here.

Student Writing Competition: California Legal History

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Graduate students: The California Supreme Court Historical Society invites you to enter the 2012 Student Writing Competition:

AWARD: The winning author will receive a prize of $2,500 and publication in the Society’s journal, California Legal History. Second and third place winners may also be chosen, and all winning papers will be posted on the Society’s website.

TOPIC: Original, unpublished scholarly writing on any aspect of California legal history, ranging from the Supreme Court itself, and its justices and decisions, to local events of legal historical importance—including biography, significant cases, independent state interpretation, the California Constitution, and reorganization of the court system, as well as areas of law such as criminal law, civil rights, family law, tort liability, environmental law, and taxation—in any time period from 1846 to the present.

On the leading position and nationwide influence of the California Supreme Court, see the article on “Followed Rates” by Jake Dear and Edward W. Jessen.

The deadline is June 30, 2012.

Feminist Legal Scholarship: A History Through the Lens of the California Law Review by Katherine Bartlett

Legal historians interested in gender history and related theoretical scholarship may want to note "Feminist Legal Scholarship: A History Through the Lens of the California Law Review" by Katherine T. Bartlett (Duke-Law), published in this month's issue of the California Law Review.  The abstract follows.

This Essay tells the story of U.S. feminist legal scholarship through the lens of some of the important work published in this field by the California Law Review (CLR). Its purpose is not to survey every contribution of feminist legal thought. Rather, through a few “deep dives,” it examines the significance of six specific exemplars, using them to explain the evolution and contributions of feminist legal scholarship, as well as the role CLR has played in the development of this field. I examine six articles: Herma Hill Kay’s Making Marriage and Divorce Safe for Women, Christine Littleton’s Restructuring Sexual Equality, Kathryn Abrams’s "Hearing the Call of Stories," Francisco Valdes’s "Queers, Sissies, Dykes, and Tomboys: Deconstructing the Conflation of “Sex,” “Gender,” and “Sexual Orientation” in Euro-American Law and Society," Linda Krieger’s "Civil Rights Perestroika: Intergroup Relations After Affirmative Action," and Reva Siegel’s "Constitutional Culture, Social Movement Conflict and Constitutional Change: The Case of the De Facto ERA."

More on Mary Dudziak and Emory Law

Emory Law's press release on the hiring of Mary Dudziak and the creation of her Project on War and Security in Law, Culture and Society is here.

Liemer on the Origins of Le Droit Moral

Susan Liemer, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale School of Law, has posted On the Origins of Le Droit Moral: How Non-Economic Rights Came to Be Protected in French IP Law, which will also appear in volume 19 of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law.  Here is the abstract:

In France, le droit moral, the moral right, provides legal protection for the non-economic interests of writers, visual artists, and performing artists. The received wisdom is that le droit moral developed from the work of German philosophers like Kant and Hegel, as well as many French theorists. In this article, however, I argue that these rights developed in France long before German philosophers and French scholars articulated the theoretical underpinnings.

This article identifies the origins of le droit moral in the history of French intellectual property law. It reports on such disparate influences as Cicero’s complaints against his publisher, a 1504 Parisian court decision finding for a writer against an unauthorized printer, and the detailed regulations imposed on the playwrights of the Comédie Française during the ancient regime. Although le droit moral was not included in the core copyright statutes forged during the French Revolution, court decisions in the next decades protected le droit moral in matter-of-fact language. I submit that the sensibility to protect these rights was already developed in the culture of France, thanks to its eighteenth century dramatists.

Celebrating "the rule of law"

In the U.S., May Day is also "Law Day" (est. 1958), "a national day to celebrate the rule of law and its contributions to the freedoms Americans enjoy."

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This 2010 LHB post discusses Law Day's origins and its changing meaning over time.

The Library of Congress archives presidential Law Day proclamations. In 2010, the theme was "Law in the 21st Century: Enduring Traditions and Emerging Challenges." In his proclamation, President Obama highlighted our "increasingly interconnected world," in which "legal issues of human rights, criminal justice, intellectual property, business transactions, dispute resolution, human migration, and environmental regulation affect us all." The 2011 theme, by contrast, looked inward: Law Day celebrants reflected on "The Legacy of John Adams: From Boston to Guantanamo." The 2012 theme is "No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom."