Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Weinrib

Via H-Law we have word that at last week’s meeting of the American Society for Legal History, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation’s Dissertation Prize for 2012 went to “The Liberal Compromise: Civil Liberties, Labor, and the Limits of State Power, 1917-1940,” by Laura M. Weinrib, who completed it at Princeton University.  Professor Weinrib is now a member of the law faculty at the University of Chicago.  Here is the citation:

In this gracefully written, deeply researched and incisively presented study, Laura Weinrib offers a sophisticated account of how the current American conception of civil liberties emerged. The study rests not only on a sure command of the secondary sources but on a careful examination of the papers of the ACLU--in particular its early records and those of its predecessor organization--between the two World Wars. Weinrib demonstrates how an initial theory of civil liberties, aligned with a commitment to labor radicalism and a "right of agitation" by the working-class, gradually developed into a commitment to a politically neutral protection of the civil rights of each individual as embodied in the Bill of Rights. Weinrib traces this transformation through a series of contested organizational shifts during the 1920s and 1930s and shows how this evolving vision of civil liberties shaped the post-New Deal constitutional order and left a legacy far different from earlier understandings.

An honorable mention was awarded to “From Slave to Litigant: African Americans in Court in the Post-War South, 1865-1920,” by Melissa Milewski, New York University.

Looking Back on Sarbanes-Oxley

Tune in tomorrow at 4:00 at the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society for the webcast “A Measured Response?  The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 as a Case Study of  Public Outrage Inspiring Financial Legislation.”  Participants are Daniel Goelzer, former Board Member, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board; Peggy Peterson, Baker Hostetler LLP and former Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee; Dean Shahinian, Senior Counsel, U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; and Linda Chatman Thomsen, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and former Director, SEC Division of Enforcement; with moderator Robert K.D. Colby, History Associates, Inc.

H-Law's "New Books in U.S. Constitutional/Legal History"

Just out from H-Law: the fall 2012 edition of New Books in U.S. Constitutional/Legal History.

Timothy S. Huebner (Rhodes College) has once again performed yeoman service to the field by compiling this list:

Amar, Akhil Reed.  America’s Unwritten Constitution:  The Precedents and Principles We Live By.  New York:  Basic Books, 2012.  640 pp.  (paper, $29.99).

Argersinger, Peter H.  Representation and Inequality in Late Nineteenth-Century America:  The Politics of Apportionment.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2012.  352 pp.  (cloth, $95.00).

Ball, Howard.  At Liberty to Die:  The Battle for Death with Dignity in America.  New York:  New York University Press, 2012.  224 pp.  (cloth, $30.00).

Banks, Christopher P. and John Blakeman.  The U.S. Supreme Court and New Federalism:  From the Rehnquist to the Roberts Court.  Lanham, Md.:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.  362 pp.  (cloth, $49.95, ebook).

Bergmann, William H. The American National State and the Early West. New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2012.  304 pp.  (cloth, $90.00, ebook).

Boessenecker, John. When Law Was in the Holster: The Frontier Life of Bob Paul.  Norman, Okl.:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.  464 pp.  (cloth, $34.95).

Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2012.  608 pp.  Paperback ed. (paper, $24.95).

Casto, William R.  The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth.  Columbia, S.C.:  University of South Carolina Press, 2012.   Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.  296 pp.  Paperback ed.  (paper, $24.95, ebook).

Erwin Surrency (1924-2012)

Edwin Surrency (credit)

We note the passing last weekend of Erwin Surrency (1924-2012), a founding member and president of the American Society for Legal History, a president of the American Association of Law Libraries, and for twenty-four years editor of the American Journal of Legal History.  Surrency served thirty-five years as a law librarian, first at Temple University School of Law and then at the University of Georgia School of Law.  Earlier this year, he was inducted into the AALL Hall of Fame.  He wrote or edited some fourteen books.  He is the namesake for the ASLH’s Surrency Prize, awarded annually to the person or persons who wrote the best article published in Law and History Review the previous year.  More.

Update: The University of Georgia's notice, via H-Law.

CFP: OAH Annual Meeting 2014

The Organization of American Historians has issued a call for proposals for its 2014 annual meeting, to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 10-13, 2014. Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

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The theme for the 2014 OAH Annual Meeting will be “Crossing Borders.” The history of the United States is a product of migrations – internal and international. Along with people, goods and ideas crossed these borders, reshaping the composition and character of the American people. Sometimes the borders and boundaries were physical, as when international migrants crossed oceans and continents, or when large numbers of individuals migrated from one region of the country to another, or when the lure of wealth and influence led to foreign invasions and conquests. Those on the move were accompanied by bacteria or viruses, microorganisms whose migration across borders also shaped human experience. Borders were also framed by culture – racial, ethnic, class, and gender differences that perennially redefined our population and social order. The theme for the 2014 conference seeks to examine, in all their complexity, a broad array of border crossings and “encounters” in US history, highlighting the contributions and challenges presented by those who transcended borders to redefine their lives or flee the constraints of their pasts.

The 2014 OAH Program Committee seeks a broad, wide-ranging program that treats the rich expanse of the American experience, from the pre-Columbian era to the twenty-first century, and the thematic breadth that defines the work of contemporary historians on the page and in their classrooms. The committee enthusiastically encourages proposals from those teaching at universities, colleges, community colleges, and secondary schools, as well as public historians and independent scholars.

In pursuit of inclusivity and diversity, the program committee invites the submission of panels and presentations that deal with the themes of the conference, but also other important themes and issues in American history. We welcome teaching sessions, particularly those involving the audience as active participants or those that reflect collaborative partnerships among teachers, historians, and history educators at all levels. Professional development sessions are always welcome.

Submissions will be accepted starting January 1, 2013; the submission deadline is February 15. More details are available here.

Mayeri Wins Littleton-Griswold

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The American Historical Association has announced the prizes, awards, and honors to be conferred at the 127th annual meeting (January 24, 2013). We're excited to see that Serena Mayeri (University of Pennsylvania) has won the Littleton-Griswold prize for Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press).

The Littleton-Griswold prize is awarded "for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society" and is "administered by a joint committee of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History."

Congratulations to Serena Mayeri!

Preyer Prizes to Levine-Gronningsater, Zhang

We're pleased to announce the winners of this year's Kathryn T. Preyer award.

Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to young legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two younger legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. (Whether there is a Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Panel at the meeting, as there was this year, or whether the Preyer Scholars present their papers as part of other panel depends on the subject-matter of the winning papers and on what is on the rest of the program.) The generosity of Professor Preyer's friends and family has enabled the Society to offer a small honorarium to the Preyer Scholars and to reimburse, in some measure or entirely, their costs of attending the meeting. The competition for Preyer Scholars is organized by the Society's Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee.*

In 2012, the Preyer Memorial Committee** chose two Preyer Scholars:

• Sarah Levine-Gronningsater (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago), for her paper “Poor Law, Slave Law, God’s Law: Quaker Antislavery and the Early Modern Origins of New York’s Gradual Emancipation”

• Taisu Zhang (Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University; Visiting Assistant Professor, Duke University School of Law), for his paper “Kinship Networks, Social Status and the Creation of Property Rights in Early Modern China and England”  

The Preyer Scholars presented their papers at a special panel, chaired by Gautham Rao (American University). William Wiecek (Syracuse University) and James C. Oldham (Georgetown University) served as commentators.

* Language is from the ASLH website.

** Gautham Rao (Chair), Sally Hadden (Western Michigan University), Christopher W. Schmidt (Chicago-Kent College of Law), Michael A. Schoeppner (California Institute of Technology), Karen Tani (University of California, Berkeley).

Sharfstein Wins Cromwell Book Prize

We’ll be having several posts on last week’s annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in St. Louis.  Our first is the news that the Cromwell Book Prize went to Daniel J. Sharfstein, Vanderbilt University School of Law, for The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011).  Here is the citation:

In this thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and intensely moving book, Daniel Sharfstein tracks the experiences of many generations of three families originally classified as "black" as they found new identities across the color line.  His massive research, which combines a tireless and ingenious search for sources and sensitive interviews of living subjects, is almost invisible, thanks to prose that combines the lawyerly virtues of clarity and precision with the literary ones of sympathy and grace.  The people in this book become almost palpable as they navigate the treacherous waters of racial identity.  So does an important historical fact.  The color line was never simply a matter of black and white; it was a legal and social construction that accommodated the informal perceptions of color that neighbors and associates acted on every day.  Whatever the law in the books, courts were often reluctant to change the racial status of persons who had been acting white or had been treated as white or had white friends and enjoyed high social status.  The Invisible Line makes a major breakthrough in the study of the law of race by showing how it was performed in the lives of ordinary people throughout American history.

Kadens on "The Continuing Problem of Culture"

A recording of Emily Kadens’s lecture while a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, delivered July 19, 2012, and entitled "The Continuing Problem of Custom,” is now available on the Kluge Center’s website.  Also available is Samuel Moyn’s lecture, “Imperialism, Self-Determination & Human Rights.”

Deal on Collapsing Customs in the Whaling Industry

Robert C. Deal, Department of History, Marshall University, has posted The Environment for Litigation: The Sea of Okhotsk Bowhead Fishery and the Collapse of Whaling Dispute Resolution Customs.  Here is the abstract:

Far from formal legal institutions, the international cast of whalemen created their own rules governing property disputes at sea. The dispute resolution techniques of American whalemen were, in particular, so successful that only four cases were tried in American courts during the nineteenth century. A fifth matter – involving an American and a German ship – was heard before the Supreme Court of Hawaii. What the Hawaiian and American cases share is that all were generated between 1852 and 1867 from disputes in the bowhead fishery of the Sea of Okhotsk. That the small and relatively unimportant grounds, situated between the Siberian coast and the Kamchatka Peninsula and hunted only from 1848 to 1870, should loom so large in the history of whaling property law is, indeed, curious. Scholars have struggled to understand why whalemen hunting bowheads in the Sea of Okhotsk fishery suddenly lost the ability to settle disputes that had effectively served their close knit community for generations

Credit: Library of Congress

The answer is not that with whale stocks plummeting and the industry in economic decline, whalemen in the Sea of Okhotsk decided after 1850 to defect from community norms in the belief that the established customs were no longer in their best financial interests. The suggestion that the transition by midcentury from ferocious sperm whales targeted off the coast of South America to the reputedly slow and docile bowheads necessitated different customs which whalemen were slow to adopt is also erroneous. The answer can, instead, be found in the icy waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. A confluence of bowhead biology and the gravitational circulation, tides, river inflow, shallow depth, and ice melt patterns of the Sea of Okhotsk created – even by the standards of an unpredictable industry – a fishery marked by inconsistent seasons of feast or famine which overwhelmed the ability of whalemen to resolve their disputes over contested whales short of the courthouse. Yearly variations in Sea of Okhotsk conditions, the paucity of bowheads in the fishery, and the distance to other desirable hunting grounds also served to disrupt dispute resolution customs. The conditions in the western Arctic bowhead grounds which were hunted in the same time period by many of the same whalemen produced – by way of comparison – relatively consistent returns and did not, as a result, generate disputes that required litigation.

Professor Sir John Baker to Deliver Skadden Lecture

Professor Sir John H. Baker, the Downing Professor Emeritus of the Laws of England, St. Catherine's College, at the University of Cambridge, will deliver the Skadden Lecture on Legal History in the Skadden, Arps Honors Program in Legal Studies at The City University of New York on lecture on Thursday, November 29th at 12:30 p.m. in NAC 4/133.  His topic is “The Birth of the Common Law."