Cartoonists on Court Packing, 1937

With Court packing in the news, LHB readers might have occasion to consult this on-line collection of editorial cartoons from 1937, when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried his hand at it.  We have not definitely identified the creator of the the site (last updated in 1997), but the Paul Bachorz, identified as a contact was, I believe, a former Peace Corp worker and US Navy Seabee who taught social studies at Niskayuna High School for thirty-four years before retiring in 2001.  He died in 2010.  The staff at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum confirms that the originals reside in the Library’s Basil O’Connor Collection.  H/t: LK.

American Journal of Legal History Seeks New Co-Editor: Call for Applications

From our friends at the American Journal of Legal History, we have the following call for applications:

American Journal of Legal History – applications invited for post of US Editor-in-Chief 

Oxford University Press (OUP) is seeking to recruit a new co-Editor for the American Journal of Legal History (AJLH) with special expertise in the legal history of the United States. Professor Al Brophy, who currently co-edits the AJLH with Professor Stefan Vogenauer, is planning to step down due to ongoing health issues. Professor Brophy has been a key figure in the successful relaunch of the journal after it joined forces with OUP. The publishers are now seeking to appoint his successor for an initial term of three years, with effect from 1 September 2019.

The AJLH was founded in 1957 and was the first English-language periodical in the field. It was relaunched as an OUP publication at the beginning of 2016 with new editors, Professors Al Brophy (University of Alabama School of Law, Tuscaloosa) and Stefan Vogenauer (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt). The new AJLH aims to publish outstanding scholarship on all facets and periods of legal history. While retaining its focus on American legal history, it accommodates the enormous broadening of the intellectual horizon of the discipline over the past decade and is particularly interested in contributions of a comparative, international or transnational nature. Book reviews are a regular feature. The new AJLH is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal. 

For further information on the editorial role please visit https://academic.oup.com/ajlh/pages/ajlh_us_editor-in-chief_call_for_applications.

We at the Legal History Blog think of current co-editor Al Brophy often and are wishing him a return to good health. Our field is in his debt for his years of service on this journal and elsewhere.

Budiansky's "Oliver Wendell Holmes"

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas (Norton), by Stephen Budiansky, is not out until next month, but Lincoln Caplan’s review in Harvard Magazine (America’s Great Modern Justice) already is, so we’re posting now:

Oliver Wendell Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls missed his heart and spinal cord by a fraction of an inch at the Battles of Ball’s Bluff and Antietam. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity.

Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age sixty-one, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court’s reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms.

As a pioneering legal scholar, Holmes revolutionized the understanding of common law by showing how the law always evolved to meet the changing needs of society. As an enthusiastic friend and indefatigable correspondent, he wrote thousands of personal letters brimming with humorous philosophical insights, trenchant comments on the current scene, and an abiding joy in fighting the good fight.

Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky’s definitive biography offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure, whose zest for life, wit, and intellect left a profound legacy in law and Constitutional rights, and who was an inspiring example of how to lead a meaningful life in a world of uncertainty and upheaval

A Cultural History of Law

Out now with Bloomsbury is A Cultural History of Law, a six-volume collection examining law in western societies from antiquity to the modern age. From the press: 

How have legal ideas and institutions affected Western culture? And how has the law itself been shaped by its cultural context? 

In a work spanning 4,500 years, these questions are addressed by 57 experts, each contributing an authoritative study of a theme applied to a period in history. Supported by detailed case material and over 230 illustrations, the volumes examine trends and nuances of the culture of law in Western societies from antiquity to the present. 

Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. 

The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (2500 BCE-500 CE); 2 - Middle Ages (500-1500); 3 - Early Modern Age (1500-1680); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1680-1820); 5 - Age of Reform (1820-1920); 6 - Modern Age (1920-present). 

Themes (and chapter titles) are: Justice; Constitution; Codes; Agreements; Arguments; Property and Possession; Wrongs; and the Legal Profession. 

A Cultural History of Law is part of the Cultural Histories Series. 

More on each volume after the jump:

Happy Lochner Day!

Politico observes the 114th anniversary of Lochner v. New York.

Wurman on the Origins of Substantive Due Process

Ilan Wurman, Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, has posted The Origins of Substantive Due Process, which is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review:

In the antebellum nineteenth century, courts often voided legislative acts for substantive unreasonableness or for exceeding the scope of legitimate police powers. Contrary to the assertions of a number of modern scholars, however, this tradition does not support the concept of economic substantive due process. Courts voided municipal acts exceeding the scope of legitimate police powers on two grounds — the law of delegation and the law of municipal corporations — that did not apply to acts of state legislatures. The states themselves were limited to reasonable exercises of the police power only when their asserted authority came into potential collision with federal constitutional requirements, namely the commerce and contracts clauses.

It was only late in the century, after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, that a police-power version of substantive due process emerged as a limitation on state legislatures as courts began conflating, under the guise of “due process of law,” earlier doctrines that had used a similar vocabulary but for distinct purposes. Police-power limitations on state legislatures regulating purely internal matters therefore probably cannot be justified by any antebellum legal conception of due process of law. It is possible, however, that such limitations could find support in the privileges or immunities clause by analogy to antebellum commerce clause and contracts clause jurisprudence.

A Tribute to David Brion Davis

[We are grateful to Steven Wilf, the Anthony J. Smits Professor of Global Commerce at the University of Connecticut Law School, and Richard Ross, the David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Illinois, for this tribute to a great historian.]

David Brion Davis passed away on April 14th at the age of 92.  Although not technically a legal historian, his work was largely about the unjust law of slavery.  David's most celebrated work was a trilogy that traced slavery from its ancient beginnings through its critique in the midst of the eighteenth-century age of revolutions to its unravelling through emancipation.  He was a comparative historian focused largely on the North Atlantic when most scholars hewed to an American history set apart from the rest of the globe.  He was an intellectual historian who began in opposition to Charles Beard's economic determinism and later to popular trends in social history.  But his intellectual history was really cultural history-encompassing political movements, changes in sensibilities, and the importance of socio-economic factors in shaping ideology.  He was at his very best when describing what Raymond Williams called the structure of feelings-competing ways of thinking that are not yet crisply articulated by historical actors.

David often told his story about how he came to write for over six decades about American slavery.  He described how little was available on the subject when he began his research.  Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944), authored by a Swedish Nobel-Laureate economist, had just been published.  It unsettled an American belief in their own moral rectitude by underscoring the role of pervasive racism.  Not unexpectedly, it was written by an outsider. David described an important encounter with the young scholar Kenneth Stampp at Berkeley who was just beginning his own investigations into bound servitude.  But it was the personal stories that always received the most attention.  As a young security officer in the army during World War II, David was asked to go below to the hold of a troop transport en route to Europe where to his astonishment he discovered a large number of African Americans in a segregated, claustrophobic part of the ship. It evoked images of the transatlantic slave trade.  In Europe he met displaced persons freed from concentration camps and Nazi forced labor.  David called this his encounter with evil.

Moral revulsion against slavery animated David's scholarship, while an acute awareness of the limits of moral outrage tempered that scholarship and gave it additional depth.  He was influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr's suspicion of moral posturing-and this, of course, was related to David's famous critique of abolitionist opponents of chattel slavery who simultaneously promoted wage slavery for the working men of the Northern states.  Niebuhr called the faith in one's own moral stance the Promethean Illusion.  David, who embraced Niebuhrian irony throughout all his writings, treated slavery with outrage and emancipation with skepticism-skepticism about its shortcomings, compromises, and checkered motivations.

David was a student of moral philosophy often filtered through religious writings.  In conversation, he would speak of the influence of German émigré social philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Hussy who taught him at Dartmouth.  Rosenstock-Hussy, a Protestant theologian who converted from Judaism, was part of an intellectual circle that included Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber which found inspiration in the complex layering of prophetic speech. At around the age of 60, David began studying for his conversion to Judaism.  At his bar mitzvah in June 2007, it gave him special delight to chant about the new month since-as he pointed out-it represented change in process.

A number of us members of the legal historian tribe are students of David or immeasurably influenced by his work.  And, as this is a day when in particular we think about cathedrals and loss, it is difficult to resist the epitaph inscribed on the gravestone of Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London: Si monumentum requiris circumspice-if you seek his monument, look around you.  David was part of a cohort of scholars, living through the early decades of the civil rights movement, who put slavery at the center of the research and teaching of American history.  Yet David's legacy is not only a deepened understanding of slavery.  This historian of sensibilities left us, through personal example, a sensibility-his peculiarly heady tonic of insisting upon the moral obligations of the historian while simultaneously never abandoning a sense of irony.

Weinrib to HLS

Via Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, we have word that Laura Weinrib has accepted a position at Harvard Law School. Currently at the University of Chicago Law School (with an associate membership in the Department of History), Professor Weinrib is the author of The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise (Harvard University Press, 2016). The book "traces the emergence during the first half of the twentieth century of a constitutional and court-centered concept of civil liberties as a defining feature of American democracy." Weinrib holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Congratulations to Professor Weinrib and to HLS!

CFP: Law, Difference, and Healthcare

[We share the following announcement. The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2019.]

The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Department of History at Princeton University are hosting a conference and workshop on “Law, Difference, and Healthcare: Making Sense of Structural Racism in Medico-Legal History,” organized by George Aumoithe (Davis Center postdoctoral research associate). Our gathering will be 1-1/2 days long to be held from Thursday to Friday afternoon of June 6—7, 2019. Our keynote speakers will be author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology Deirdre Cooper Owens and author of Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care Dayna Bowen Matthew.

Further information after the jump:

A Better Book: The Home Institution

              A choice I did not make that profoundly shaped Almost Citizens was that of USC Gould School of Law to hire me. Here, I lucked out. Writing the book I wanted required time, money, inspiration, guidance, autonomy, infrastructure, and publicity. Fortunately, my home institution was well stocked with all seven. (If your school takes a different approach to these questions or your recipe for success calls for different ingredients, please share in the comments.)

              Time was what I needed most. But it was easy to overinvest in teaching and service. I wanted to serve students and please senior colleagues, and there were so many new, interesting ways to contribute. Gould protected me against myself.  The dean assigned junior professors light service obligations and never asked them to develop new courses beyond their original three (we have a 2-1 load). Senior faculty protested any perceived erosion of the norm. And I got a semester-long sabbatical halfway through.

              I also found that my research, writing, and physical book all benefited from money.  Paid research assistants facilitated broader searches and more thorough reviews. Money for travel bought archival trips and conference presentations. It took funds to hire development editors and improve the book through subventions.  While I couldn’t spend my way to a good book, I could have been starved into a weaker one. Fortunately, I had a dean and institution that invested in scholarship. I never had a prepublication request denied. That support let me put my best foot forward, plan with confidence, and avoid the stress of committing personal funds to professional advancement.

              My book was also shaped by the scholarly cultures and institutionalized intellectuals spaces of the institutions where I researched and wrote. It was while taking part in Gould’s healthy culture of office, hallway, and faculty lounge chats that I had many important epiphanies. I gained key interlocutors and inspiration through my participation in USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and the multi-institution Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop that the center cosponsors. Gould also gave me the chance to present in an internal workshop each year. And every year the school’s senior faculty read and responded to all my works in progress.  As a result, I received an additional mountain of helpful tips and questions.

One of the  challenges of taking full advantage of opportunities for feedback at Gould was the knowledge that I was inviting criticism from the same people who would vote on my tenure case. Fortunately, engagement with my colleagues turned out to be a way to elevate my work while pleasing my electorate. Gould’s senior faculty stressed that I should ignore any advice that proved unhelpful.  The dean repeatedly insisted that it was the scholar’s job to bring critical judgment to the array of conflicting suggestions received. Never did I hear a complaint that I had ignored someone’s suggestion.

              Gould’s service-oriented library multiplied my research productivity. Its librarians acquired obscure sources, secured high-resolution scans of illustrations, undertook foreign-language correspondence with overseas repositories, and filed Freedom of Information Act requests. Whenever I asked them to compile reading lists, find statistics, create maps, or undertake targeted research, I could trust that it would be done and done well. In fact, Gould’s librarians were often better than me at finding sources and digging up facts. Having such skill on staff was the result of a decision to prioritize personnel above collection size. But Gould’s smaller collection never hampered me. Interlibrary loan, mass digitization, and the school’s willingness to buy otherwise inaccessible materials always did the trick. The end result was that I saved considerable time and mental energy. 

              When I was on the entry-level market, it never occurred to me to evaluate law schools in terms of their public-relations teams.  My mistake! After years of obscurity as a grad student, law clerk, and post-doc, my arrival as a professor brought ready access to the public sphere.  As I soon learned, I could give interviews, discuss topics on background, write op-eds and articles, post to blogs, secure press coverage and book reviews, do public events, send out promotional materials, and much more. (I invite those of you more media-savvy than me to take up the possibilities in the comments.)  I was enthusiastic to raise my profile and spread my ideas. But I worried about PR becoming a time sink, or worse, about making a fool of myself before a large audience.

Gould’s PR team helped me enter the public eye efficiently and on my own terms. They took care of logistics, safeguarded my time, and focused on how I could have an impact. They initially held my hand, practicing with me what I would say and helping me set expectations with reporters. As my confidence grew, my scholarship progressed, and world events unfolded, they had endless ideas about how to give me and my work a broader platform. With their help, I gravitated toward interviews and op-eds (a subject of an upcoming post). I eschewed forums that treated intellectual exchanges as battles, and sought out those favored conversational interactions. They even helped me be heard despite my general absence from most social media (LHB notably excepted!).

              --Sam Erman

Sethna, Davis and friends on travel for abortion

Out with Johns Hopkins University Press is Abortion Across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services, edited by Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa and Gayle Davis, University of Edinburgh. Many of the chapters are historical in approach, focusing on travel for abortion since the 1960s. From the press: 

Safe, legal, and affordable abortion is widely recognized as an essential medical service for women across the world. When access to that service is denied or restricted, women are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, seek backstreet abortionists, attempt self-induced abortions, or even travel to less restrictive states, provinces, and countries to receive care.

Abortion across Borders focuses on travel across domestic and international boundaries to terminate a pregnancy. Christabelle Sethna and Gayle Davis have gathered a cadre of authors to examine how restrictive policies force women to move both within and across national borders in order to reach abortion providers, often at great expense, over long distances and with significant safety risks. Taking historical and contemporary perspectives, contributors examine the situation in regions that include Texas, Prince Edward Island, Ireland, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Throughout, they take a feminist intersectional approach to transnational travel and access to abortion services that is sensitive to inequalities of gender, race, and class in reproductive health care.

This multidisciplinary volume raises challenging logistical, legal, and ethical questions while exploring the gendered aspects of medical tourism. A noticeable rollback of reproductive rights and renewed attention to border security in many parts of the world will make Abortion across Borders of timely interest to scholars of gender and women's studies, health, medicine, law, mobility studies, and reproductive justice.

Table of Contents after the jump: 

Scribes Award to Winkler for "We the Corporations"

Congratulations are in order for Adam Winkler (UCLA Law). His book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2018) received the 2019 Scribes Book Award from the American Society of Legal Writers.

A Better Book: The First Book Workshop

              Several years ago, LHB’s own Karen Tani and Mitra Sharafi wrote wonderful posts on their first book workshops (Karen’s is here; Mitra’s is here).  For those who missed them, a first book workshop is a manuscript workshop for a first-time author. Such sessios have grown increasingly common in legal history. Participants typically include a mix of home-school colleagues and outside commenters. Mine was incredibly valuable. This post uses that experience to build on Karen’s and Mitra’s insights. (If your experience as an author or participant was similar or to the contrary, please share it in the comments below.)

              An immediate benefit of staging a first book workshop is the deadline. Karen Tani declared it “a source of stress -- but also a source of motivation.” I would write “and” where she wrote “but.” The interim deadline improved my mood, productivity, and work product. It distracted me from the truly looming deadline: closure of my tenure file. I thus traded exhausting long-term stress for more energizing and motivating short-term stress. After all, getting a manuscript done sooner would mean more time to improve it later.

              The structure of the workshop can vary with the author’s goals. Mitra Sharafi described gathering 4-6 readers for an afternoon of conversation about the book. Karen Tani’s workshop had more than a dozen participants who presented on different parts of the book in panels across an entire day.  My workshop split the difference.  I gathered just shy of a dozen people for a single three-hour book conversation in the morning. There were opportunities to follow up and revisit matters during the lunch that followed and the dinner that I had with the out-of-town guests.

              My goal for the workshop was to come away with a plan for pulling the manuscript’s disjointed pieces together. I already had a clear vision of the characters, narrative, and argument of the book. I knew what I wanted to accomplish in each chapter and overall.  Plus, my tenure file would close in a year and a half, so I had to stay firmly in finish-the-book mode. Any deep exploration of new literatures or events would have to wait for follow-on projects. Instead, I hoped that my readers and I would put on the table competing visions for integrating what I already had. To keep the focus on the book as a whole, I decided against asking each reader to take primary responsibility for one or another chapter.

              Inevitably, I received conflicting advice and concerns. Here, it was crucial to have a trusted mentor present who could direct conversation toward achieving consensus on a concrete plan.  Ariela Gross served that role for me, and did a fantastic job.  Had she been unavailable, I’m confident that either of the ASLH series editors involved in the book – Sally Gordon and Reuel Schiller – could have stepped in.

              I would also recommend having someone in the room take notes. If (unlike me) you would listen to a recording later, consider following Karen Tani’s lead and asking participants’ permission to record the session. I also found it helpful to ask those who spoke to send me any notes they had afterward. I worried that asking people to pre-circulate notes as Karen Tani had might stifle free-flowing discussion.

              I aimed to be instrumental and substantive when inviting participants. My primary goal was to choose readers who would provide helpful feedback on the project. But the workshop was also an opportunity to secure buy-in and buzz for the book and to strengthen my relationships with others in the field. My ideal outside reader was someone who would value the project, become an interlocutor, and potentially write a tenure letter. I wanted inside readers to hear from outsiders why the project mattered and to be drawn more into the work. I also hoped that the discussion would cause all the participants to discuss the book with colleagues once the workshop ended.

              For my workshop, I chose equal numbers of external and internal readers.  Bob Gordon and Sophia Lee agreed to fly in for the event, as did Reuel Schiller in his capacity as the editor for the ASLH series that was publishing my book. Clyde Spillenger made the trek from UCLA, and my USC colleague from American Studies and Ethnicity, Nayan Shah, came as well.  At my home institution, the Gould School of Law, I invited senior colleagues in legal history and constitutional law.

All of this cost money. Mitra Sharafi and Karen Tani turned to grants to fund their workshops. I was fortunate to work at a law school willing to foot the bill. (Thanks, Dean!).

               In my case, the workshop was time and money and well spent. I came out of it with better key terms, a clearer sense of argument, and plans for streamlining the prose. I strengthened my relationships with scholars I admire and placed my book project on their radar.  Crucially, I also gained a renewed sense of the potential of the project.

              Though manuscript workshops are beneficial for junior scholars, they are not equally accessible. Certain educational trajectories and institutional homes make it easier to secure funds and participants – if one knows to seek them in the first place. It is that last barrier that made Mitra Sharafi’s post so valuable. It publicized the first book workshop when it was an emerging practice and possibility.

--Sam Erman

Independent Publisher Book Award to Newman for "Dark Inheritance"

Congratulations to Brooke N. Newman for receiving an Independent Publisher Book Award for A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press). The book "shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified hereditary African slavery and barred members of marginalized groups from claiming the inherited rights and liberties of British subjects." The Independent Book Publisher Awards "are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers."

OAH Barnouw Award to "The Chinese Exclusion Act"

One more bit of legal history news from the recent Organization of American Historians meeting. The film The Chinese Exclusion Act received the Erik Barnouw award for "outstanding programming on television, or in documentary film, concerned with American history, the study of American history, and/or the promotion of American history." The film is a co-production of Steeplechase Films and the Center for Asian American Media. It was directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu and produced and written by Ric Burns, Robin Espinola, and Li-Shin Yu. Executive Producers: Stephen Gong and Donald Young, Center for Asian American Media; Mark Samels, American Experience.

A Better Book: Development Editors

              Today’s post concerns the secret weapon of many an excellent (legal history) author, the development editor. I worked with two on my book, Almost Citizens. They were crucial to my learning curve. Without them, I would never have crafted a book that resembled the vision in my head.

              Before starting my book, I had never contemplated paying someone to help me improve my writing. Legal history is a specialized area, and I chose my words carefully to hew to what the sources supported. I worried that someone from outside the field would seek to simplify or expand my claims in ways that I would just end up reversing. The problem was that I also knew that I could benefit from fresh eyes on my writing. By the time I’d drafted a few chapters and signed with Cambridge University Press, I felt confident about my narrative structure and cast of characters. But I found it more difficult to do smaller-scale reorganizations and line edits. This was partly because I was so close to the manuscript. It was also because writing is a skill, and I had more to learn.

Despite having many generous readers, none seemed likely candidates to become writing mentors. Colleagues and reviewers grappled with my work and provided incisive comments. But that feedback almost always involved the substance of the argument rather than its tone and constituent sentences. Given the economic realities of book publishing, many publishers hardly do any editing of manuscripts in progress. I did have the good fortune to publish with American Society for Legal History’s book series (which I discuss here). Sally Gordon was my editor there, and she was a tireless and skilled reader. But she soon saw that the book and I could both gain from more editorial engagement than she could devote to a single book in her series. So she recommended that I consider a development editor.

              I had never heard the term. Perhaps because I live just down the road from Hollywood, my mind immediately went to the entertainment executives who tell show runners that their sitcoms need more dogs or a kooky sister to really draw in the millennials. But (spoiler alert!) that was not whom I was to encounter. The editors I would work with helped me produce the best possible version of my book. Sometimes, such work is called development editing. Sometimes it goes by different names.

              I sought someone who could help me make my prose sing (or at least hum occasionally) without sacrificing nuance and accuracy. Given my topic, that meant an editor who could engage legal and historical arguments, had a sense of the evidentiary norms in the field, and understood the potential audiences for the work. But finding such an editor is a bit like turning up a good contractor for a renovation; you ask around, check out samples of the person’s work, and ultimately take a leap of faith that the (intellectual) place that you lay your head will be transformed for the better.

              I had the good fortune to work with two excellent development editors. I learned of both through admired colleagues who sang the praises of having collaborated with them. The first was Grey Osterud, an accomplished academic historian. Rather than teach, she complements her research with editing colleagues’ work. I was thus confident from the outset that she knew and honored the standards of academic history. Once I had the manuscript drafted, I undertook a rewrite with Pamela Haag, an author of serious histories for broader audiences. Notably, she also has a contract with Yale University Press for a style guide for the scholar-writer that I look forward to adding to my shelf soon.

              As Grey and Pamela helped me improve the book’s prose, they were also teaching me to be a better writer. One set of lessons had to do with the difficulties of evaluating choices about organization when one is too close to the text. Because I was circulating individual chapters to colleagues for feedback, I tried to put enough at the front of each chapter to orient them. The result was bloated chapter introductions. My development editors saw the problem immediately. They worked with me to shorten the chapter introductions and have them serve more as bridges between chapters than as introductions to standalone essays. Similarly, my immersion in the particularities of the book’s events had led me to subdivide the book’s chronology into overly narrow chronological bands. As Grey and Pamela perceived, such fine distinctions muddied the broader argument rather than clarifying it. Thus, a chapter that I had written with six sections, one for each of three characters at each of two times (ABCABC), came to contain just three character-centered sections (ABC).

              Careful editing by others is a wonderful way to discover one’s own writing tics. I had been particularly blind to two. I wrote long, intricate sentences and was overly fond of metaphors. I had to learn to reduce clauses and interjections, break up sentences, and clarify which verbs and nouns went together in what ways. Similarly, I had to unmix metaphors and close them out before they ceased to clarify. The difficulty in both cases was less fixing the problems than perceiving them in the first place. Grey and Pamela sensitized me to my propensity to create these tangles, which was all I needed to start fixing them.

              Like many historians, I revel in the details and complexity of what I study. Seeing the danger, my dissertation committee co-chair Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof counseled that my job was to over-claim and that his job was to rein me in. But knowing that I should trim and sum up did not wholly cure me. My development editors urged me to go further. Curate evidence. Don’t cut one of five quotations; leave just one. Remove tangents. Lead with bold claims. Qualify them later. Or don’t. The result was much more accessible prose. Arguments rose to the surface, no longer drowned by my sea of evidence.

There is one big downside to a development editor: she costs money. How much varies by who you hire, for how long, and for what. But price tags in the thousands of dollars would be common. The best solution is to have someone else pay. My law school (USC’s Gould School of Law) is extremely generous in its support for junior scholars’ work. While schools and departments may vary substantially in what they are able to offer, it is always worth asking. Knowing that peer institutions have offered similar funding can sometimes help shake out extra funds.

Had I had to pay for my development editors entirely out of pocket, I might have balked at using them or using them so extensively. In my case, that would have been a mistake. Their services were worth far more than the cost. As an early-stage scholar, the benefits were quite large. I have many productive years left in which to benefit from what I have learned in terms of writing and argumentation. The book is stronger too. That matters because the book is my debut in legal history as a mature scholar. It was also the centerpiece of my file for tenure (which I just received--Yay!).

My biggest fear when I began working with development editors was that I would not recognize the final text of the book as my own prose. In fact, the opposite was true. By the time I began working with Grey, I largely knew what I wanted to argue, which historical actors and narratives I wanted to feature, and what evidence I wanted to rely upon. But I found it frustratingly hard to translate the book that I had in my head into words on the page. As Grey and then Pamela and I worked on the prose, the gap between it and my envisioned book narrowed considerably (albeit with some nice additions suggested by my development editors that I had not foreseen). Almost Citizens ended up being very much my book—even more so than I had at first hoped.

--Sam Erman

OAH John D'Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award to De Orio

At the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians, another major prize went to a legal historian: Scott De Orio (currently a post doctoral fellow at Northwestern University) received the John D'Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award for “Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights." De Orio completed his dissertation at the University of Michigan under the direction of advisers Matthew Lassiter [Chair], David Halperin, Gayle Rubin, and William Novak.

Congratulations to Dr. De Orio!

OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award to Jones for "Birthright Citizens"

At the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians last week, Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins University) received the Liberty Legacy Foundation award for Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press).

As the OAH website explains, the award was "inspired by OAH President Darlene Clark Hine’s call in her 2002 OAH presidential address for more research on the origins of the civil rights movement in the period before 1954." It is given annually "to the author of the best book by a historian on the civil rights struggle from the beginnings of the nation to the present."

Congratulations to Professor Jones!

Weekend Roundup

• Ohio University seeks an instructor of Law, Justice, and Culture. The deadline for applications is May 6.

• Congratulations to legal historians recently named John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow for 2019-20.  These include ASLH President-Elect Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University, for "Legalities of Small Wars in European Empires, 1400-1900"; Lena Salaymeh, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University for "Revolutionary Islamic Law"; and Brad Snyder, Georgetown Law, for "Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, Judicial Restraint, and the Creation of the Liberal Establishment." The complete list of recipients is here.

• Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins) has been elected to the Society of American Historians. Congratulations! 

• Samuel Moyn has been designated the Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at the Yale Law School.  Congratulations, as well!

• California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, an exhibit curated by Tyree Boyd-Pates and Taylor Bythewood-Porter, is at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles through April 28.

• I'm grateful to Virginia Law's Aditya Bamzai for posting his amicus brief in PDR Network et al. v. Carlton & Harris Chiropractic, Inc., early in the same week in which I got to the Office of Price Administration in my legal history course, even though its discussion of Yakus is not the only treatment at hand of how the US squared the need for speedy wartime price control with the dictates of Article III. [DRE]

• From Tocqueville 21, William Novak (University of Michigan Law School) on "Honneth, Dewey, and the Depths of Democracy." And from AHA Perspectives, Katherine Benton-Cohen (Georgetown University) on How Experts and Their Facts Created Immigration Restriction.

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

In Memoriam: Kenneth Karst

Via UCLA law, we have learned of the unfortunate death of Professor Kenneth Karst, "an influential constitutional law scholar, teacher and longtime faculty member who had a profound effect in shaping UCLA School of Law." Of particular note to legal historians, Karst was the author of Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution (Yale University Press, 1989), which received the James A. Rawley Prize from the American Organization of Historians. UCLA's remembrance continues here.

An Essay Collection on International Arbitration

Newly published by the Cambridge University Press is Experiments in International Adjudication: Historical Accounts, edited by Ignacio de la Rasilla, Wuhan University Institute of International Law, and Jorge E. Viñuales, Cambridge University:

The history of international adjudication is all too often presented as a triumphalist narrative of normative and institutional progress that casts aside its uncomfortable memories, its darker legacies and its historical failures. In this narrative, the bulk of 'trials' and 'errors' is left in the dark, confined to oblivion or left for erudition to recall as a curiosity. Written by an interdisciplinary group of lawyers, historians and social scientists, this volume relies on the rich and largely unexplored archive of institutional and legal experimentation since the late nineteenth century to shed new light on the history of international adjudication. It combines contextual accounts of failed, or aborted, as well as of 'successful' experiments to clarify our understanding of the past and present of international adjudication.

W. Wesley Pue Remembered

The American Society for Legal History has posted a memorial of Professor W. Wesley Pue on its website.

Golieb Fellowships to Katz, Khalil

Via New York University School of Law, we have word of the Samuel I. Golieb Fellows in Legal History for the 2019-20 academic year. They are Andrea Scoseria Katz and Mina E. Khalil.

Andrea Scoseria Katz holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. After graduation, she clerked for Judge András Sajó on the European Court of Human Rights and Judge Michael A. Ponsor on the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. Her dissertation is titled "The President and His Labyrinth: Checks and Balances in the New Pan-American Presidentialism." Other recent work will appear this spring in the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Mina E. Khalil is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a current Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. His research focuses on the modern legal, social, and political history of the Middle East and draws on intensive periods of work, study, and teaching in Egypt, among other countries. He is the author of "Early Modern Constitutionalism in Egypt and Iran," which appeared in the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law in 2016,

New Online Source on Austrialian Investigations of Japanese War Crimes

The National Archives of Australia has just launched Dr Narrelle Morris’ new archival guide to Australia’s war crimes records: Japanese War Crimes in the Pacific: Australia’s Investigations and Prosecutions (National Archives of Australia, 2019).

The guide of more than 150,000 words covers Commonwealth government records (principally holdings of the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial) on the World War II war crimes investigations of Sir William Flood Webb (1943-46), the United Nations War Crimes Commission (1943-48), the Australian Army’s Directorate of Prisoners of War & Internees, post-war investigations, the War Crimes Act 1945 (Cth) and preparation for trials, the 300 Australian Military Court war crimes trials (1945-51), the Australian War Criminals Compounds, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946-48), and the repatriation, parole and release of convicted war criminals. Each chapter begins with a substantial, footnoted discussion of the subject matter before listing relevant records in sections. Appendix B contains an alphabetical name index with more than 950 entries of all war criminals tried by Australia with details of their trial(s) and outcome(s). Appendix D contains a basic index to finding key documents within the (now archival files) of the 300 Australian trial proceedings.

The guide can be downloaded as a free e-book (pdf format) here (at the bottom of the page). Or it can be viewed online in HTML format, which links directly to the catalogue (thus straight to the digitised online records in many cases). The guide is under a Creative Commons license, so it can be freely shared and copied.

Narrelle is an editor of and contributor to Australia’s War Crimes Trials, 1945-51 (Brill, 2016) and the law reporter for the forthcoming law reports series on the Australian Military Courts war crimes trials of the Japanese. She can be contacted at narrelle.morris@curtin.edu.au.

Cromwell Dissertation Prize

[We have the following announcement.]

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference.

The author of the winning dissertation receives $5,000. Anyone who received a Ph.D. in 2018 will be eligible for this year’s prize, which is awarded after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

To be considered for this year’s prize, please EITHER send a hard copy of the dissertation and author curriculum vitae to all committee members listed below OR simply e-mail an electronic copy of the dissertation and author curriculum vitae to John Gordan (johngordan3@gmail.com) and H. Robert Baker (robertbaker@gsu.edu) with the subject heading: CROMWELL DISSERTATION PRIZE SUBMISSION no later than June 7, 2019.

LASA Article Prize to Chira

At its annual meeting this spring, the Latin American Studies Association awarded the prize for "best article" to Adriana Chira (Emory University), for "Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68," which appeared in Volume 36 of the Law and History Review (Winter 2018). Congratulations to Professor Chira!

Rackley, Auchmuty and friends on women's legal landmarks in the UK and Ireland

Erika Rackley, University of Kent and Rosemary Auchmuty, University of Reading have co-edited the volume, Women's Legal Landmarks celebrating the history of women and law in the UK and Ireland with Hart. From the press: 

Women's Legal Landmarks commemorates the centenary of women's admission in 1919 to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland by identifying key legal landmarks in women's legal history. Over 80 authors write about landmarks that represent a significant achievement or turning point in women's engagement with law and law reform. The landmarks cover a wide range of topics, including matrimonial property, the right to vote, prostitution, surrogacy and assisted reproduction, rape, domestic violence, FGM, equal pay, abortion, image-based sexual abuse, and the ordination of women bishops, as well as the life stories of women who were the first to undertake key legal roles and positions. Together the landmarks offer a scholarly intervention in the recovery of women's lost history and in the development of methodology of feminist legal history as well as a demonstration of women's agency and activism in the achievement of law reform and justice.

 Table of Contents after the jump:

de la Rasilla on Groatian Revivals in International law

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral, Wuhan University, Institute of International Law, has posted Grotian Revivals in the Theory and History of International Law, which is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius, edited by R. C. H. Lesaffer and J. Nijman (Cambridge University Press, 2019):

This chapter examines how the title of founder of the law of nations was bestowed upon Grotius and how the liberal internationalist interpretation of the existence of a Grotian tradition in international law came into being. It also reviews the extent to which both historical constructs have been challenged by new historical research and contemporary re-interpretations of Grotius’ works and figure. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part accompanies the reception of Grotius by international lawyers from the time of the discovery of his De Jure Praedae in 1864 to the establishment of the Grotius Society in England during the First World War. The second part examines the revivals of Grotius among international lawyers in the aftermaths of both world wars and considers a number of Grotius-related historiographical developments during the Cold War period. The third part examines how, in recent decades, on the one hand Grotius has become more mainstreamed and further institutionalised as a global symbol of international law while on the other hand his reputation has suffered from him being labelled a handmaiden of European colonialism and exploitation. The concluding section reflects on the lasting fame of the ‘miracle of Holland’ among international lawyers and suggests that the history of international law as a research field should now take a break from Hugo Grotius.

Two by Kadens on Custom, the Learned Law, and Early Modern Cheating

Emily Kadens, Northwestern University School of Law, has posted two writings.  The first is  Convergence and the Colonization of Custom in Pre-modern Europe, which appears in Comparative Legal History (2019), edited by Olivier Moreteau & Kjell Modeer.  It argues that “once men trained in the learned laws during the Middle Ages, they could no longer conceive of custom in the traditional manner, but rewrote the narrative of custom to fit into the framework of law established by the Roman law.”

The second is Cheating Pays and is forthcoming in volume 119 of the Columbia Law Review:

Common private-ordering theories predict that merchants have an incentive to act honestly because if they do not, they will get a bad reputation and their future businesses will suffer. In these theories, cheating is cheating whether the cheat is big or small. But while reputation-based private ordering may constrain the big cheat, it does not necessarily constrain the small cheat because of the difficulty in discovering certain types of low-level cheating and the consequent failure of the disciplining power of reputation. Yet the small cheat presents a significant challenge to modern contracting, both between businesses and in the contracts of adhesion imposed on consumers. To encourage private law scholars to address the unique governance challenges posed by low-level cheating, this Essay describes the conditions under which low-level cheating can flourish and become widespread. It demonstrates this so-called “Cheating Pays” scenario using a historical case study in which a seventeenth-century London grocer, trading under precisely those conditions that private-ordering theories predict will incentivize honesty, not only cheated extensively but also successfully remained in business after having been caught and publicly punished. Identifying the scenarios in which cheating pays has implications for how firms use contracts and how consumers might use the courts to try to reduce opportunistic behavior.

Salter to Stanford Center for Law & History; Katz to Wash U

Via the Stanford Center for Law and History, we have the following news:

The Stanford Center for Law and History is pleased to announce that Brent Salter will be its fellow for 2019-2021. Salter currently teaches at Yale College and is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where his dissertation and ongoing research examines the laws and practices of the performing arts in the United States. He received a LL.M. from Yale Law School, LL.B. from Macquarie University, and Arts and Commerce undergraduate degrees from the University of Sydney. He has authored and edited articles, chapters, and books on legal histories of creative communities, as well as the laws of the first colonial courts of Australia. His forthcoming book “Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre” is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Elizabeth Katz, the Center’s inaugural fellow, is joining the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. She holds a J.D. and M.A. from the University of Virginia and is receiving her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University this year. Prior to the fellowship, she clerked for the Honorable J. Frederick Motz on the United States District Court for the District of Maryland and worked as a litigation associate at Covington & Burling. She is a previous recipient of the ASLH's Kathryn T. Preyer award, as well as the author of several articles and book chapters, including a forthcoming article in the University of Chicago Law Review, a prize-winning Note in the Virginia Law Review, and an article in the William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law. Her research focuses on the regulation of American families through civil and criminal laws.

Do you have hiring/appointments/fellowship news to share? Please feel free to email us!

Executive Reorganization at the FDR Library

[We have the following announcement from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.]

On Sunday, April 28, 2019, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the Baruch College Newman Library of the City University of New York will commemorate the 80th anniversary of FDR's 1939 reorganization of the executive branch -- the elusive goal of Presidents since Teddy Roosevelt and a timely topic today. The symposium, "Making Democracy Work: FDR's Bitter Struggle to Modernize the Presidency" -- beginning at 2:00 p.m. in the Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home -- is based on Baruch College's historic collection of the papers of one of FDR's administrative geniuses, Luther Halsey Gulick, III. Click here to register.

Discussing the most momentous restructuring of the government since 1787 will be three leading scholars: Susan Dunn, Massachusetts Professor of Humanities at Williams College and author of several histories including Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party; David Woolner, Senior Fellow and Resident Historian of the Roosevelt Institute, Professor of History at Marist College, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, and author of The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace; and Kenneth Meier, Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University, and coauthor, Politics and Bureaucracy.  The discussion will be moderated by Ralph Blumenthal, Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College and a New York Times reporter from 1964 to 2009

A Better Book: Living Descendants

              Three and a half years ago, I had the good fortune to join Barbara Welke, Mitra Sharafi, and Daniel Sharfstein at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History for a roundtable on working with the living descendants of historical actors.  As we explained:

Online databases and communication technologies, the transnational turn, the study of memory and agency, and genealogy all lead legal historians to work with descendants of subjects. . . . Scholar-descendant exchanges shape and enrich legal history, making the past recoverable and vivid.  Joint projects that broaden arguments and audiences can result. . . . The scholar offers new strands in family or community histories.  Descendants’ experiences and understandings reveal impacts, limits, and reverberations of legal dynamics or push scholars to move beyond legal frames in productive and unfamiliar ways.

I joined the panel to discuss the topic of today’s post, my experience working with a descendant of a central character in Almost Citizens. The story began around eight years ago.

Just weeks after receiving final approval of my dissertation, which centered on a 1904 Supreme Court litigant names Isabel Gonzalez, I received an email from Belinda Torres-Mary.  She was also researching Isabel Gonzalez and had been for years.  I held my breath.  She was fascinated to learn new details about Gonzalez’s unsuccessful experience as the first Puerto Rican person to demandU.S. citizenship from the Supreme Court.  She was not an academic historian.  Gonzalez was her great-grandmother. Belinda was a passionate genealogist. Exhale.

Soon, Belinda and I were trading research leads.  She told me anecdotes.  Tacking back and forth, we discovered many more records. A long-passed woman I had spent years getting to know came to life once again, now in a new way.  As a result, the book’s account of Gonzalez is much richer than the dissertation’s.

As our collaboration deepened, we discussed how we each understood Isabel Gonzalez.  I saw her as a tragic hero of sorts. When she sought to migrate from San Juan to a better life in New York, Ellis Island inspectors discovered that she was an unmarried mother who was also pregnant and ordered her to be deported as an undesirable alien. Gonzalez filed a suit that eventually reached the Supreme Court. She argued that Puerto Ricans could not be deported because they had become U.S. citizens after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1899. The claim tapped into longstanding interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment as making citizens of all Americans other than American Indians. But the justices ruled more narrowly: Puerto Ricans were not aliens, hence not subject to deportation. Nothing needed to be said regarding citizenship. The tentativeness was typical of the early-twentieth-century Insular Cases, through which the Court contributed to a sea change in constitutional law alongside lawmakers, bureaucrats, presidents, and private actors. But the sum result was momentous, a turn away from the Reconstruction Amendments, rights, citizenship, and statehood and toward colonialism.

Belinda declared Gonzalez to be the Puerto Rican Rosa Parks. Initially, the comparison typified for me the difference between our projects.  Belinda saw her ancestor as a heroic figure in a long U.S. march toward inclusion and liberty.  If asked, I probably would have said that even Rosa Parks was no Rosa Parks.  Certainly, the professional historian in me felt compelled to emphasize differences between the women.  Gonzalez’s activism had not made her famous.  It had not arisen out of a commitment to a mass social movement or come to be supported by one.  She had engaged in legal maneuvers rather than direct action.  She did not prevail.  The unmarried and pregnant Gonzalez was not a model of respectability.  She was from a different community and drew on a heritage of Spanish rather than U.S. rule.  It was not clear that she had African ancestry; she seemingly never identified as of color.

              But the deeper I have delved, the more wisdom I have found in Belinda’s analogy.  However Gonzalez self-identified, racial prejudice lay behind the effort to deny her U.S. citizenship and behind the Court’s tepid response to her challenge.  Both controversies were profoundly shaped by being launched by women.  Law played crucial roles in both cases, in part because its future shape was uncertain.  Although neither dispute resulted in a constitutional ruling, both quickly came to be understood as signal events in processes of major constitutional change.  Both cases asked federal courts to reinvigorate legal legacies of Reconstruction.  Gonzalez and her allies deployed honor in ways that prefigured later uses of respectability.  They argued that Puerto Ricans’ honor made them worthy of equal treatment, and that denial of such treatment unjustly dishonored them.  In both cases, a modestly situated actor meaningfully influenced constitutional change.  Both disputes were key events in iterative processes of legal transformation involving a diverse array of officials.  And as recent events sharply remind us, the constitutional revolutions that resulted in both cases were incomplete and unstable.

              Working with Belinda also made my process of researching Almost Citizens feel similar to my experience of reading good fiction.  The book’s characters, themes, insights, and events kept overrunning the interpretive bounds within which I sought to contain them.  I found the world that emerged from the archives to be immersive and consuming.  I aimed to capture these novelistic sensations with a character-driven approach that attended to narrative and people as much as it did to analysis and argument.  Of course, I did not have the luxury of inventing plot turns and characters at will.  But I did have characters who were real and compelling.  Their struggles helped form the world we now inhabit.  For Belinda, that was doubly true.  Isabel Gonzalez’s decisions brought Belinda’s ancestors into existence.  Unsurprisingly, strongly felt familial ties linked great-granddaughter to great-grandmother.  Perceiving Belinda’s passion for Gonzalez’s story inspired me to deepen my depictions of Gonzalez, her choices, and their consequences – all to the book’s benefit.

That Belinda and I even met reflects a sea change in the practice of history.  Since I began graduate school, innumerable primary documents have become text-searchable online.  Books, census manuscripts, passenger manifests, judicial documents, legislative hearings, and newspaper articles that required research trips, microfilm readers, hours of painstaking review, and no small amount of luck now spit up information on a person or theme of concern with little more than an entry in a search box.  In many cases, the impetus behind this mass digitization and metadata creation has not been the needs of academic historians, but the demands of genealogists and the growing sophistication of character recognition software.  Increasingly, scholars seeking to learn about particular historical figures find themselves working in tandem or collaboration with genealogists investigating their roots.  One additional reason is that the digitization revolution has made scholars' output ever more accessible, as Belinda discovered when she began searching mentions of her great-grandmother.

              The rise of genealogy and new research technologies has transformed the ethics of researching and telling history. I am lucky not to have encountered the more acute conflicts that can arise. Belinda encouraged me to make my own decisions about what to include in the book and how. Here, it helped that Belinda had developed her own writerly voice.  She expressed aspirations soon after we met to write a young adult biography of Isabel Gonzalez.  I think it’s a great idea. With any luck, I’ll interest her in letting me assist while she takes her turn in the author’s chair.

Even in functional partnerships, working together involves give, take, and the question of whether each person is doing their share of both. Early on, I worried that I was more of a taker. Belinda offered up family history that I had no other way to access.  To my delight, I came to realize that the scarce commodity that I could contribute was undigitized archival material and historical methods with which to make better use of what was online. I was pulling my own weight because history had something unique to contribute.

If I stumbled, it was in over-skepticism. When Belinda recounted the family lore that Gonzalez had married a gentleman before migrating to New York, my first thought was that many more families claim ancestral earls than actually have them. Silly me. As our research continued, Belinda remembered that the story was told in Spanish. Gonzalez had married a “caballero.” Perhaps that was a last name, not an adjective? Some searches in digitized church and county records confirmed it. Gonzalez’s first husband, Juan Caballero, died of tuberculosis in his early 30s, shortly after Gonzalez became pregnant with his second child.

              Working with Belinda was also a reminder that Gonzalez has many other living descendants. Some knew her well. All share in her history. Few would accept every interpretive choice that I made. Yet I am obliged to them, especially Belinda. I hope they recognized Isabel Gonzalez in what I wrote, even as they also saw her in a new light.

--Sam Erman

Daly on Biafra

In 2018, Samuel F. Daly, Duke University published "The case against Victor Banjo: Legal process and the governance of Biafra," pp.95-112 in A. Dirk Moses and Lasse Heerte, eds., Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide, out with Routledge. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

In June of 1968, Chief Justice of the Biafran Court of Appeal Sir Louis Mbanefo confidently assured a British diplomat that "all Biafra not in enemy hands was committed without distinction to independence." In fact, the Biafran government feared that the situation in the new country was divided from within; there were many within Biafra who did not see themselves as "Biafrans." In the opening months of the war, Biafra’s leadership became increasingly paranoid about threats of subversion and espionage; Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu found internal enemies everywhere he looked, and no one was above suspicion. It was true that many Biafrans had reservations about the war, even though few were actually engaged in the kind of cloak-and-dagger espionage that Ojukwu feared went on behind every closed door. This fear shaped Biafra’s internal administration in important ways. Law occupied an important place in Biafra’s administration and its national imaginary, and the fact that the legal system continued to operate throughout the war suggests that the Biafran government was animated by the law to a greater extent than historians have appreciated, or at least that the secessionist government saw value in the performance of legal processes. The present chapter looks inward on Biafra through the lens of its legal system, which reveals dimensions of Biafra’s internal life not captured in its propaganda and other sources. Using a treason trial from early in the war it investigates how Biafra’s political culture came to be characterized by paranoia, and how the application of military justice shaped questions about the ethnic identity, political ideology and administration of the new state.

Kornbluh and Parker to be LAPA Fellows

The Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University has announced its fellows for 2019-20.  Among them are Felicia Kornbluh, Professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont, and Kunal Parker, Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law.

Ostdiek and Witt on the International Arbitration of Escaped Slaves in the Early Republic

Bennett Ostdiek, a student at the Yale Law School, and John Fabian Witt, a professor there, have posted The Czar and the Slaves: Two Puzzles in the History of International Arbitration, which appeared in the American Journal of International Law (2018):

In 1822, the Russian Czar Alexander decided an arbitration between the United Kingdom and the United States over the fate of 5,000 enslaved persons who fled to British lines at the end of the War of 1812. American observers have asserted for more than a century that the Czar’s decision, which has gone down in history as one of the canonical Anglo-American arbitrations of the Early Republic, favored the United States. But did the U.S. really win? Secretary of State John Quincy Adams complained at the time that the decision was not sufficiently clear. And new debate has broken out in the historical literature. This article resolves the question, relying in part on new evidence from diplomatic archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. We show that, as a formal matter, the Czar sided with the United States, though the arbitration proved useful to U.K. statesmen as well. The curious case of the Czar and the slaves also poses a second puzzle about the relationship between slavery and the emergence of modern international law. Even as the U.K. was beginning to use international law to oppose the slave trade, the United States aimed to turn some of international law’s institutions into powerful bastions of support for slavery.

A Better Book: The ASLH Book Series

              Perhaps the most important decisions of my transition from dissertation to book was mine to publish with the American Society of Legal History’s book series at Cambridge University Press and theirs to have me.  In a word, the reason was: editing.  In a person, it was: Sally Gordon.  More specifically, I gained a mentor, a booster, a reader, a quarterback, and a promoter.

              From the outset, Sally shared and shaped my vision for the project. I first reached out to her about the book on the suggestion and introduction of my mentor Dan Ernst, himself a former editor of the series.  To my amazement, she read my entire dissertation with her discerning and constructive eye. She saw the same promise in the dissertation that I did. It already had characters, a narrative, and evidence that constitutional change sometimes occurred outside of courts. The promising strands it had left dangling included the place of Reconstruction in U.S. empire, mechanics and details of who drove what legal change how, the relationship between Puerto Ricans and both American Indians and mainland women and minorities, and the shadow that U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines cast over everything.

              An unexpected (but not surprising) benefit of publishing with the ASLH series is that it brings instant credibility with society members. At the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Sally also introduced me as an up-and-coming scholar with plans to publish in the series.  Anyone who’s seen Sally in action knows that means meeting a lot of society members. I’ve always felt welcome at the annual meetings, but since then the meetings have been a sea of friendly faces.

               Joining the series also meant receiving a level of editing and mentorship that I associate with literary presses of yore, not the tight margins of modern academic publishing.  Almost Citizens was my first book, so I had no experiences identifying – much less making – many of the decisions that book writing  requires. Fortunately, as I wrote (and rewrote), Sally read (and re-read)–the book proposal, an annotated table of contents, individual chapters, and finally the full manuscript.  Every major element of the book bears her mark. Through emails, phone calls, and coffees, she pressed me to specify and “surface” my biggest claims and to open my geographic and temporal lenses wide enough to bring those claims fully into focus. We discussed what books I liked, how they were structured, what writerly voice the authors had employed, who read those volumes, and who might read mine.

Equally important, Sally was an enduring source of encouragement. She kept me optimistic and energized throughout the long and lonely endeavor that is book writing. Our conversations spanned years. During each she reminded me what I had accomplished, then identified the further progress now within reach.

As my draft chapters accumulated, Reuel Schiller joined Sally as a co-editor of the series, to its and my good fortune. Sally and Reuel were a crack pair of text massagers and arrangers. They also knew how to leverage their insights. When they saw room for improvement but lacked the time to provide detailed feedback (the series had other authors; they had day jobs–and lives), they recommended that I use development editors (a subject of an upcoming post).

Working with the series also meant that I had experienced editors in my corner as I navigated the unfamiliar, far-from-intuitive publishing process.  When I negotiated my contract, Sally knew which details mattered: commit to a number of images and ask for preapproval; ensure that the series can choose the copy editor and indexer; choose a publication deadline that can slip a month or two without endangering your tenure case.  Someone had to pay for editing, indexing, and the like. The series helped me ask my home institution for the funds by providing me evidence that peer institutions were already providing such funds to their junior faculty. When I became concerned with one or another of the press’s decisions, Sally and Reuel helped me sort out which items were worth raising in what ways. They were always willing to speak on my behalf to Cambridge, with whom they maintained a strong and cooperative relationship.

Mostly, the series steered me away from pitfalls. I never had to contemplate the disadvantages of a machine-made index because my contract let me hire the wonderful Derek Gottlieb. Where some authors tell horror stories of overseas copy editors who insert more typos than they correct, the series snagged for me the excellent Julie Hagen.

              With my book now out under the series imprint, I can add that I am happy being judged by the company I keep. Cambridge University Press’s august imprimatur makes it more likely that readers will pick up the book. The American Society for Legal History is my foremost academic home. It has also published many of the legal historians that I most admire, including the first books of several of the best up-and-coming scholars in the field.

--Sam Erman