Call for Applications: Constitutional Accountability Center Scholar-in-Residence program 2025-26

Via the Constitutional Accountability Center ("a nonprofit, public interest law firm and think tank dedicated to making real the progressive promise of our Constitution’s text, history, and values"), we have the following posting:

CAC invites applications for its 2025-2026 Scholar-in-Residence program. CAC’s Scholar-in-Residence will work independently on research and writing on a topic of mutual interest, for one year, while participating in the life of CAC’s ongoing work in litigation, joint scholarship, communications, and collaboration with progressive movement partners.  During this year, the Scholar-in-Residence may work remotely, but would also be expected to come to CAC’s office in Washington, DC on occasion throughout the residency. 

Constitutional scholarship is the foundation of CAC’s work. Our scholarship shows that across a broad range of key issues, the Constitution’s text and history command progressive results. CAC’s scholarly work provides the deep historical support that makes our legal arguments stand out, and builds a comprehensive narrative of the Constitution that is necessary to achieve lasting victories.

This scholar-in-residence program will provide the selected candidate an unprecedented opportunity to work on a project in an area that is congruent with the focus of CAC’s mission, including (but not limited to) Constitutional and Legal Studies, History, Political Science, African-American Studies, and the humanities more generally. Potential projects could focus on such subjects as lifting up often neglected voices in the constitutional story (for example, Black, Native American, and immigrant activists who helped shape the Constitution); the ways that structural reforms might better align our institutions toward democratic values and genuine inclusion; or the exploration of broader Constitutional understandings in advance of the upcoming 2026 commemoration of the 250^th anniversary of the United States, among others.

Responsibilities will include, but not be limited to, the following:

• Conduct research and scholarship in a field of inquiry that intersects with CAC’s mission;
• Produce written products that could include, but are not limited to, law review articles or other scholarly essays, and articles in popular media such as The New York Times and The Atlantic;
• Brief CAC staff on research progress, and help inform the direction of CAC’s existing scholarship;
• Give two public presentations at (in person or virtual) events to educate the public and organizational partners about research progress and findings.

The Scholar-in-Residence will work in collaboration with CAC’s Director of Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship, within the CAC Think Tank.  

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

ASLH William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize to Blaakman

The American Society for Legal History has announced the winners of its 2024 book prizes. This post is dedicated to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize. About this prize:

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty not yet tenured. 

This year's award went to Michael Blaakman (Princeton University) for Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). The citation:

Michael Blaakman’s Speculation Nation makes a compelling case for placing land speculation at the very center of our understanding of the American project.  Blaakman demonstrates how the public domain was constructed – and how legislators actively created a secondary market for futures and speculative rights to land on the frontier.  These land grants, contingent though they were, often predated and essentially presaged the dispossession of Native Americans.  Lucid, deeply researched, and beautifully rendered, Speculation Nation shows, in exquisite detail, how this process unfolded in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

Congratulations to Professor Blaakman!

-- Karen Tani

ASLH John Phillip Reid Book Award to Penningroth

The American Society for Legal History has announced the winners of its 2024 book prizes. This post is dedicated to the John Phillip Reid Book Award. About the award:

The John Phillip Reid Book Award is awarded annually for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The prize is named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues. 

This year's award went to Dylan C. Penningroth (University of California, Berkeley) for Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Livewright, 2023). The citation:

Grounded in extensive and painstaking research in local court records, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement brings to life ordinary African Americans’ multiple interactions with law and the legal system in the century that preceded the Civil Rights Movement. In making visible African Americans’ legal tenacity and sophistication when it came to everyday disputes over property, contract, and church governance, Penningroth shows not only that African Americans used the law for purposes that cannot be reduced to their struggles against racial oppression, but also how such uses of the law laid the groundwork for those struggles. As such, Before the Movement profoundly reshapes our understanding of the history of American civil rights.

Congratulations to Professor Penningroth!

-- Karen Tani

Powell Imagines the "Harlan [II] Court"

Relatedly, H. Jefferson Powell has published The Harlan Court: A Constitutional Alternate History, in a symposium for Walter Dellinger in the North Carolina Law Review:

Walter Dellinger shared the widespread perception that the Burger Court was characterized by “rootless activism” rather than principled constitutional adjudication, and for him this put in question the legitimacy even of decisions that reached outcomes he thought politically or morally desirable. To explain what was wrong with such decisions, he often imagined the Court as it might have been if Justice John Marshall Harlan, who died in 1971, had lived another decade, and inspired an era of constitutional decisions deeply rooted in constitutional tradition and characterized by careful adherence to legal method. This Essay seeks to explain Dellinger’s idea and its relevance today. The “Harlan Court” of Dellinger’s imagination would have reached its decisions through opinions that generally built on the legacy of the Warren Court by the logical development of precedent, a refusal to practice the Burger Court’s frequent tactic of obliquely undermining or underenforcing decisions a majority disapproved, and a commitment to persuading the reader’s judgment rather than imposing judgments by rhetorical fiat. Dellinger thought the characteristics of the “Harlan Court” he imagined were equally valuable to correctly identifying the most common error he saw in early twenty-first century constitutional law: the belief or assertion that difficult constitutional issues can be resolved through some method of decision that avoids the exercise of judgment by the decision-maker.

--Dan Ernst

Hogan on Holmes, Frankfurter, and Both Harlans

Gerard Hogan, Judge of the Irish Supreme Court, has published Spring-Cleaning the American Legal Pantheon? Reputations Rivalled: Justices Harlan the First and Holmes & Justices Frankfurter and Harlan the Second, in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal:

John Marshall Harlan II (wiki)

In the general common law world, few things are more contestable than what constitutes judicial greatness. Is it the capacity to anticipate developments in the law or to champion new ideas that, in time, will become accepted? Or is it the elegance of judicial style? Or is it a combination of some or all of these things? These are the subjects of endless jurisprudential debates. Yet no matter where you stand in this debate, one thing is clear: the U.S. Supreme Court has been fortunate in having had among its ranks some of the greatest judges which the common law world has ever produced. In this Article, I wish to explore the reputation of four great justices of that Court. While Oliver Wendell Holmes has his critics, his greatness can scarcely be denied. Yet I contend that that very aura which surrounds Holmes has somewhat obscured the real achievements of one of his erstwhile colleagues, John Marshall Harlan, who may be said to have outshone him in certain respects. So the first part of this Article seeks to compare and contrast Holmes and the first Harlan and to inquire why Holmes has won the prize of history, while Harlan's reputation nowadays rests almost exclusively on his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.

In the second part of this Article, I seek to compare and contrast the achievements of Felix Frankfurter with those of the other John Marshall Harlan, the grandson of the first Harlan. I contend that Frankfurter's inflexibility, dogmatism, and personal vanity prevented him from achieving his full judicial potential and that, in this respect, he has been outshone by the Harlan II, whose flexibility, modesty, and a nuanced understanding of the judicial role has distinguished him as one of the great Justices of the post-World War II era.

--Dan Ernst

Online Workshop on Environment, Law, and History

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

While environmental history and legal history are well-developed fields with dedicated forums for discussion new scholarship, those of us interested in the intersection of these two fields have to date had a harder time meeting up with scholars with similar interests. After successful sessions at last year's conference of the European Society for Environmental History and this past summer's meeting of the World Congress of Environmental History, we will finally be kicking off an ongoing online workshop, in which we will discuss pre-circulated drafts with the authors from around the world. We plan to meet on Zoom a few times a year, for about an hour each time.
 
Our first workshop session will take place 15 November 2024 at 8 am GMT. We will discuss with David Wilson of the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde his paper, "Towards an Optimum Yield: Science, Technology, and Fisheries Development in Lake Malawi, 1930-1964". The following session, in January 2025, will feature Rebecca McLennan of the UC Berkeley History Department.
 
To receive a copy of David's paper and a Zoom link, or to ask to be put on the list for messages about future workshop sessions, please email one of us. 

Susan Bartie (susan.bartie[at]anu.edu.au)
David Schorr (dschorr[at]tauex.tau.ac.il)

ASLH Peter Gonville Stein Book Award to Yannakakis

The American Society for Legal History has announced the winners of its 2024 book prizes -- starting with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. About the award:

The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award is awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history. 

This year's winner is Yanna Yannakakis (Emory University) for Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke, 2023). The citation:

Yanna Yannakakis’ Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico is a magistral work in global legal history.  Yannakakis offers an innovative account of how the concept and significance of custom developed through interactions among multiple legal cultures spread over two continents.  The book seamlessly shifts registers as it moves across vast expanses of time and space — from 12^th century Europe to 18^th century Mexico – and multiple levels of analysis.  The stunning scope of Yannakakis’ examination of law and legal theory is matched by her fascinating analysis of how Spanish colonizers and their colonial subjects navigated plural legal traditions to strategically define indigenous custom.  Drawing from a diverse array of European and indigenous primary documents, including a large collection of indigenous codices and legal petitions and disputes, Time Immemorial weaves together multiple sources of European and indigenous law with a rich microhistorical analysis of legal practice.  The result is a compelling story of how indigenous subjects of diverse social rank participated in the history of Atlantic legal culture.

Congratulations to Professor Yannakakis!

-- Karen Tani

McKinley on Self-Purchase in 17th-C Andalucia

Michelle A. McKinley, University of Oregon, has published  Financing Freedom: Self-Purchase and Reenslavement in Seventeenth-Century Andalucía in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 81, no. 4 (October 2024): 651–86

This article explores cases in which slaveholders, enslaved and freed people, and courts battled over the customary interpretation of the rights of wage-earning slaves in seventeenth-century Andalucía. Throughout the Spanish Empire, enslaved people could purchase their freedom through the processes of cortación (later known as coartación) and ransom (rescate). People paid their purchase price in installments and eventually received freedom papers, which were notarized agreements that reflected the terms of both parties upon receipt of payment. However, freedom papers do not reveal what happened when contracting parties experienced changed circumstances, and many of the particularities of waged enslavement on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Spanish Empire have remained obscure to scholars. Wage-earning slaves inhabited an ambiguous legal space of conditional liberty with rights determined by custom or social practice rather than legislation. Legal cases can shed new light on how the conditions of waged enslavement and conditional liberty were understood and contested in historical moments of economic crisis in seventeenth-century Andalucía. By focusing on stressful moments of property confiscation and currency devaluation, we can see the meanings ascribed to conditional liberty and the attendant legal rights that people who inhabited this conditional status wielded or struggled to enforce in the absence of legislation or codified doctrine.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Hugo and the Law

“Hugo and the Law,” 8 May 2025, Maastricht University Faculty of Law, Maastricht, The Netherlands

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Actes et Paroles, the collection of Victor Hugo’s political speeches, the UM Law and Popular Culture Research Network organizes a Workshop on 8 May 2025 dedicated to the author’s conceptualization of several legal issues. The Workshop will take place at the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University (The Netherlands), with a fully in-person program.

Goal and Background of the Workshop.  In his several works, Victor Hugo has often delved into profound perspectives into the relationship between humanity and the law. Hugo was not merely a renowned novelist but a visionary thinker who engaged with multiple societal issues, including the intricacies of the legal system, the condition of women, the rise of socialism, and the future of Europe. On the 150th anniversary of the publication of Actes et Paroles – which perfectly captures such themes– this Workshop aims to examine Hugo’s conception of the law.

Hugo’s conception of the law is multifaceted, encompassing both its theoretical foundations and its practical implications. His writings often reflect a deep concern for the struggle for power and the ethical responsibilities of institutions. Through an examination of Hugo’s literary corpus, the Workshop will explore how his books’ characters grapple with the complexities of law and its impact on individuals and society. One key aspect of the Workshop is Hugo’s emphasis on the moral dimension of the law. His characters navigate questions of morality, duty, and conscience by their interactions with legal systems. At the same time, the Workshop will address Hugo’s critique of the legal machinery, shedding light on his observations regarding the potential for injustice and the abuse of power. Furthermore, this Workshop will investigate the historical context in which Hugo lived and wrote, considering the political and social upheavals that influenced his views on the law. From the aftermath of the French Revolution to the establishment of the Second French Republic, through the rise and fall of the Empire of Napoleon III, until the experience of the Commune, Hugo’s observations of the evolving legal landscape are integral to understanding his perspective on the nature of power, the State and the foundations of Europe, and the condition of women.

By examining the philosophical, historical, and theoretical underpinnings and practical implications of Hugo’s thoughts on law, the Workshop aims to illuminate the enduring relevance of his insights and their potential to inspire contemporary discussions on law and justice.

Abstract Submissions.  The “Hugo and the Law” Workshop will feature panel sessions. Submissions should relate to the overarching theme of the Workshop.

Submissions should indicate the title of the contribution, an abstract (max. 400 words), and the contact information and a short biography of the speaker (max. 150 words). Fully written papers are not required. We encourage submissions in English, and co-authored papers will be also considered.

Who Can Participate in this Workshop?  The “Hugo and the Law” Workshop is not restricted to lawyers. We welcome proposals that offer multi-disciplinary perspectives from various areas of law (including civil, criminal, tax, and labor law), as well as from scholars in e.g. the humanities and other social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science, sociology) with an interest in the Workshop’s theme. We welcome submissions from senior and junior scholars (including doctoral students) and interested practitioners.

How and When to Submit?  Send your submission to agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl.  The Call for Papers closes on 22 December 2024. Shortly after that, the authors will be informed whether their papers are selected for a presentation during the Workshop.

Conference Organizing Committee.  Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact a member of the Workshop Organizing Committee:

Eline Couperus(e.couperus@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Agustín Parise (agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Franco Peirone (franco.peirone@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Livia Solaro (l.solaro@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Arthur Willemse (arthur.willemse@maastrichtuniversity.nl)

2025 Hurst Summer Institute

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

The 2025 Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History will take place June 15-27, 2025. The Institute will be chaired by John Fabian Witt, Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 professor of law at Yale Law School, and Michelle McKinley, the Bernard B. Kliks professor of law at the University of Oregon School of Law.

Invitation.  The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) and the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School are pleased to invite applications for the 13th biennial Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History. The two-week program features presentations by guest scholars, discussions of core readings in legal history and analysis of the work of the participants in the Institute. The Hurst Institute is not primarily intended to provide time to write or work on a research project, but instead to present your work and discuss the craft of writing legal history.

Application Process.  Applications for the Institute will be available Friday, Nov. 1, 2024, and accepted until Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. To apply, applicants must:

• Submit the following materials as a single PDF document:
• Cover Letter
• Curriculum Vitae
• Research Agenda (of no more than 2,500 words)
•  Arrange to have two letters of recommendation uploaded as a PDF file. Recommendations must be on institutional letterhead and signed. Letters that contextualize the applicant’s scholarship and highlight the contributions it makes within the relevant subfield are most helpful to the committee in evaluating candidates. Comments on the applicant’s collegiality and participation in seminars and other scholarly events are also helpful.

Please note that incomplete applications will not be accepted. Applicants will be notified of a decision no later than Monday, March 3, 2025.

Applicant Qualifications.  Scholars in law, history and other disciplines pursuing research on legal history of any part of the world and all time periods are eligible to apply. The seminar and written materials are conducted in English, and we cannot consider non-anglophone applications. Applicants with no formal training in legal history are encouraged to apply.

Traditionally, the selection committee has sought to create a cohort of fellows with varying degrees of familiarity with the field, and welcome applications from scholars at an early stage of their career (beginning faculty members, doctoral students who have completed or almost completed their dissertations and J.D. graduates). 

The ASLH Hurst Selection Committee will select 12 Fellows to participate in this event.  Application Deadline: Wednesday, January 15, 2025.  [Apply and submit recommendations here.]  Email hurst@law.wisc.edu with questions or concerns.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 

  David S. Tanenhaus (UNLV)
  

  Heartfelt congratulations to David S. Tanenhaus on his receipt of the American Society for Legal History's Craig Joyce Medal, awarded to recognized extraordinary and sustained service to ASLH (UNLV Boyd School of Law).
  

• In Time Magazine's Made By History series: Ajay Mehrotra on The Tariff History Donald Trump Is Overlooking.
  

• Garrett Epps reviews Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World, "a fresh and readable one-volume history of the Court [that] explains how we got from Marbury to Dobbs" (Washington Monthly).

• On Saturday, November 9, from 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Alison L. LaCroix will discuss The Interbellum Constitution as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637.  The event is open to the public.

• The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has launched We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence, a "multi-year oral history and education project" commencing with the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

• On Monday, November 4, at Noon ET at the National Constitution Center, Keith Richotte, Jr., and Matthew L.M. Fletcher (University of Michigan) will discuss "Native American history and law through the stories of landmark Supreme Court cases."

• Christine Kexel Chabot, Marquette University Law School, is again making available the syllabus for her course Litigating the Lessons of History, in response to the revived debate making legal history part of the law-school curriculum.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Librarians of Congress): "Witchcraft and a Haunted Case of Torture in Joost de Damhouder’s Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1555)"; How a House Becomes Legally Haunted: Stambovsky v. Ackley, The “Ghostbuster” Ruling."

• Literary Hub's Ten Best Books on Reproductive Rights includes ones by Michele Goodwin, Leslie Reagan, and Mary Ziegler.  
  

• A notice of Molly Brady's  Brandeis Chair lecture at HLS, much of which she devoted to the legal history of single-family dwellings in the United States (Harvard Law Today).
  

• The University of Helsinki Faculty of Law "invites applications for a fixed term employment as a doctoral researcher or a postdoctoral researcher" with the project Comparing Early Modern Colonial Laws, led by Academy Professor Heikki Pihlajamäki.   More.

• 
  
  New online in Law & History Review: Weber in Jerusalem: The Rabbinical Debate over the Establishment of the Rabbinical Court of Appeals, 1918–1921, by Chagai Schlesinger.
  

• The Stanford Law School has announced its latest round of Sallyanne Payton Fellows.  I mentioned this here not simply because two legal historians, Greg Ablavsky and Bernadette Meyler, are their mentors, but because I gained lasting insights into the mindset of the first, postwar generation of Washington lawyers when then-Professor Payton shared her recollections of Charles Horsky when I presented at Michigan Law, some years ago.  DRE
  

• ICYMI:  Kristina M. Lee, University of South Dakota, on "What the history of blasphemy laws in the US and the fight for religious freedom can teach us today" (Akron Legal News).
  

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

Balkin on What Lawyers Want from History

 Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School, has posted What Lawyers Want from History:

This short essay, written for academic historians, explains how lawyers who argue and decide constitutional cases use history and what they want from history.

Lawyers’ use of history is both normative and prescriptive. They construct a lawyerly version of the past to tell us what we should do in the present. This lawyerly construction of history has three basic features. First, lawyers use history to establish authority for their own arguments and to undermine claims of authority by their opponents. Second, lawyers channel history through standard forms of legal argument that shape what they see in history and what they look for in history. Third, lawyers construct memory. They are memory entrepreneurs who try to get their audiences to remember the past in particular ways.

Lawyers remake history in law’s image and for lawyers’ purposes. They beat history into shape so that they can use it in their quest for authority. To understand the legal uses of history, one must be clear-eyed about what lawyers want from history. Their practices follow their desires. 

I found the essay to be quite helpful, when harnessed to Cass Sunstein's Administrative Law's Grand Narrative, in framing a comment for that ASLH panel.

–Dan Ernst

P&P Special Issue: Ordering the Oceans

Past & Present has published a supplemental issue, Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World: Law, Violence, and European Empires, edited by Jeppe Mulich and Renaud Morieux:

Once the primary domain of naval and social historians, the field of maritime and oceanic history has become in the last decade part of larger and ongoing conversations in the historical discipline. Rather than simply riding the wave of global and transnational history, maritime and oceanic history has been contributing decisively to the recent inflexions of these fields. It has brought attention to issues of disconnection, power asymmetry, frictions, and material and environmental factors. It has questioned the capacity of European empires to control distant spaces, by focusing on legal geography and zones of blurred sovereignty, and by foregrounding the experience of non-European people. It has offered new methods, reflecting critically on how to combine scales of analysis and challenge inherited framings. What all these approaches share is a concern with the relationship between global processes and issues of governance.

Oceanic history is a particularly good laboratory in which to think about order-making in a global context. Many oceanic histories now share the premise that the oceans were governed and not lawless spaces. Yet many authors still focus, on the one hand, on governance and regulatory frameworks, and on the other, on forms of resistance. The concept of ‘ordering’ enables historians to bypass a dichotomy that is, in many ways, unsatisfactory. Focusing on oceans allows us to explore the unstable nature of any order in a more dynamic way than would be possible if confined only to studying the land. The processes taking place on and around the oceans were not always distinct from those on land — but they were often heightened, more experimental and in some cases pre-dated their terrestrial counterparts. Oceans rarely feature in classic accounts of the emergence of the modern state and international order, tied as these are to notions of territorialization and centralization. Focusing on oceans and oceanic contact zones underlines that the structural changes that took place between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, with respect to state formation, empires, global trade and migrations, were inherently the product of inter-imperial and interpolitical dynamics. Furthermore, a focus on the water margins and the polyglot peoples inhabiting them shows how much these changes were shaped from below and from the peripheries. State and social transformation was caused as much by actions at the margin of empires as it was by policies coming from their centres.

 --Dan Ernst.  H/t: KR

Congress Investigates the Vietnam War

[We have the following announcement from the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy of its latest "Portrait in Oversight."  DRE.]

The Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, with the support of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, has released a new Portrait in Oversight describing a series of oversight hearings led by the Senator J. William Fulbright and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from 1966-1971, addressing issues related to the Vietnam War. By engaging in factfinding, collecting evidence, and publicizing what the committee learned, the Fulbright hearings forced greater scrutiny of U.S. military actions, exposed misrepresentations by the Johnson and Nixon administrations about the war, legitimized dissent, and helped bring an end to American involvement.

“The nationally televised Fulbright hearings educated Congress and the public about the devastation in Vietnam, U.S. military failures, and the harrowing impact on American soldiers, and it changed the conversation about the war,” said Jim Townsend, director of the Levin Center. “The Fulbright portrait demonstrates how congressional oversight can inform Americans about their government, influence public opinion, and change the course of U.S. history.”

“The 'Fulbright hearings' represented a watershed moment for American society,” said President and CEO of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, Jane L. Campbell. “Our involvement in Vietnam began with good intentions from both parties. But the hearings revealed a massive chasm between U.S. military objectives, the reality on the ground, and the narrative being shared with American citizens. One of the era's most important lessons is this: if the United States is to remain a beacon of freedom and hope across the world, it must begin with transparency and accountability at home. Congressional oversight is the foundation of that accountability.”

The Fulbright portrait is being released now to pay tribute to two Vietnam War memorials celebrating anniversaries in November. The first is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., marking its 42nd anniversary. The black granite memorial bears the names of over 58,000 servicemembers who were killed or remain missing in action due to U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1957-1975. The second is the nearby Vietnam Women’s Memorial, marking its 31st anniversary. The only memorial on the National Mall dedicated solely to women who served in the U.S. military, it honors the 265,000 military and civilian women who served during the Vietnam War.

This portrait is the latest in a series of profiles developed by the Levin Center of notable congressional investigations and key figures in the history of congressional oversight from 1792 to the modern era.

2025-2026 Berger-Howe Fellowship

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Harvard Law School invites applications for the Raoul Berger-Mark De Wolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship for the academic year 2025-2026.  Eligible applicants include those who have a first law degree, who have completed the required coursework for a doctorate, or who have recently been awarded a doctoral degree.  A J.D. degree is preferred, but not required.

The purpose of the fellowship, which is awarded annually, is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined, as the fellow seeks to begin or establish an academic career in legal history.  There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period. Previous fellows have gone on to pursue faculty appointments or other fellowships in American universities, primarily on law faculties.

The fellow is expected to spend the majority of their time on their own research. The fellow will also help coordinate the Harvard Law School Legal History Workshop.  The term of the fellowship is July 1 through June 30, and the fellow will be required to be in residence at the law school during the academic year (September through May).

Applicants for the fellowship for 2025-2026 should submit their applications and supporting  materials electronically to Professor Bruce H. Mann.

Each interested applicant should submit:

• a detailed (five pages maximum) description of a proposed project,
  

• a writing sample,
  

• a comprehensive résumé or curriculum vitae that gives the applicant’s educational background, publications, works in progress, and other relevant experience,
  

• two academic letters of reference, which may be submitted electronically by the recommenders to Professor Mann at the above email address, and
  

• copies of official transcripts of all academic work done at the graduate level, which may be sent electronically or by regular mail to Professor Mann at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

The deadline for applications is January 24, 2025, and announcement of the award will be made by February 28, 2025.

The fellow selected will receive a stipend of $60,000.  [Former Berger-Howe Fellows here.]

Milov on the Labor Origins of Whistleblowing

Sarah Milov, University of Virginia, has published the very substantial essay, Gags and Grievance: The Labor Origins of Whistleblowing on the website of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.  The essay treats "the forgotten history of the Lloyd-La Follette Act and of whistleblowing in the federal workforce."

Gronningsater's "Rising Generation"

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania, has published The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press):

The Rising Generation chronicles the long history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a generation of black New Yorkers. Born into precarious freedom after the American Revolution and reaching adulthood in the lead-up to the Civil War, this remarkable generation ultimately played an outsized role in political and legal conflicts over slavery’s future, influencing both the nation’s path to the Civil War and changes to the US Constitution.

Through exhaustive research in archives across New York State, where the largest enslaved population in the North resided at the time of the American Revolution, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater begins by exploring how English colonial laws shaped late eighteenth-century gradual abolition acts that freed children born to enslaved mothers. The boys and girls affected by these laws were born into a quasi-free legal status. They were technically not enslaved but were nonetheless required to labor as servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of these “children of gradual abolition” found multiple ways to protect and nurture the boys and girls in their midst. They supported and founded schools, formed ties with white lawyers and abolitionists, petitioned local and state officials for better laws, guarded against kidnapping and cruelty, and shaped New York’s evolving identity as a free state. Black fathers used their votes during annual state elections in the early 1800s to influence legislative antislavery efforts. After many but not all black men in the state were disfranchised by a race-based property requirement in 1822, black citizens across New York organized to regain equal suffrage and to expand and protect other crucial, non-gendered features of state citizenship. Women and children were critical participants in these efforts.

Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into midcentury campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable common school education, and the expansion of freedom across the nation.

--Dan Ernst

Stories on the Cutting Room Floor

This month, I’ve had the opportunity to share some of the challenges that came with writing Family Matters. Some of them were methodological. Telling a story of national change through state and local law required piecing together disparate events and narratives. Others were practical, like collecting oral histories and getting through the pre-publication gauntlet. In this last post, I want to address a challenge that all authors face: leaving stories on the cutting room floor.

When I began the process of turning my dissertation into a book, my editor, Reuel Schiller, told me to foreground people and stories. Doing so would make the book more interesting for readers, which would get them invested in the argument. (Reuel is a series editor for the ASLH’s Studies in Legal History. He is incredibly kind, patient, and talented. If you have the chance to work with him, take it!)
 
The problem wasn’t finding compelling stories—it was deciding which ones would make the cut. Some were easy decisions. The self-proclaimed “Groucho Marxist” who literally shut the mouth of anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant by shoving a pie into her face? No question that one would go in the introduction. Others were harder calls. I read accounts of hundreds of lesbian mothers who lost custody of their children because of their sexual orientation. Each one illustrated the pain, heartache, and injustice of anti-queer family court doctrines in the 1970s. I had to limit myself to a handful, trusting that they would adequately represent the stories of many parents and children who suffered at the hands of a biased legal system.
 
I agonized most over the stories from my chapters on anti-queer violence in the 1980s. Researching those chapters was emotionally devastating. I had to spend hours in the archives, going through thousands of pages detailing vicious hate crimes. I found the research process so painful that I could not bring myself to work on the chapters for more than three years. When I finally drafted them, I wanted to bring the events to life. At the same time, I did not want to veer into the voyeuristic, unnecessarily using the tragedies that people suffered to grab readers’ attention. It took many rounds of edits to find that balance.
 
The chapter that required me to leave the most material on the cutting room floor was the final one, on marriage equality. Numerous scholars and journalists have written entire books on the movement for same-sex marriage rights. I had to give a comprehensive account in just one chapter! I focused on the arguments and strategies that advocates had honed through previous campaigns for queer family rights. That meant I had reams of material that did not make it into the manuscript. Within that pile, there were two stories that have stayed with me, and that I fervently wish I could have included.
 
Robbie Kaplan Comes Full Circle
 

 

Photograph of Roberta (Robbie) Kaplan by Sylvia Rosokoff, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The first involved famed litigator Roberta (Robbie) Kaplan. She represented Edie Windsor in the case challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA defined marriage under federal law as a union of different-sex couples and released states from their obligation to recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions. In 2009, after her wife died, Windsor had to pay more than $350,000 in estate taxes because the federal government did not recognize her marriage. Windsor decided to sue. She invited Kaplan to her home to discuss the case she wanted to bring.
 
When Kaplan walked in, she was stunned. She recognized the living room—she had been there in the early 1990s. It looked exactly the same as it had eighteen years earlier.
 
That apartment was where Kaplan had met with psychologist Thea Spyer for counseling sessions after coming out as a lesbian. Kaplan had stayed in the closet throughout her undergraduate years, fearing that her family and friends would abandon her if she disclosed her sexual orientation. Indeed, when she finally told her parents she was gay, that fear seemed to materialize. Her mother walked to the side of the room and literally began banging her head against the wall! Kaplan’s friends recommended she seek out a therapist for support, which led her to Spyer.
 
During their sessions together, Spyer assured the litigator that lesbians could have fulfilling lives. To prove the point, Spyer even revealed an important aspect of her personal life: since the 1960s, she had lived with another woman, who she described as a brilliant mathematician. Kaplan did not learn the name of Spyer’s partner until almost two decades later, when Windsor invited her over to discuss mounting a legal challenge to DOMA.
 
Kaplan agreed to represent Winsor, even though she had little expectation that the lawsuit would succeed. Several years earlier, Kaplan had taken on New York’s discriminatory marriage laws, only to lose the case before the state’s highest court. But the litigator nevertheless agreed to move forward, in part to repay Spyer for helping her through some of her darkest days.
 
The serendipity of this story was striking. So too was its poignancy. Kaplan first met Spyer at an extremely low point in her life, when she feared rejection from those closest to her simply because of who she was. By the time she represented Spyer’s widow, she had married her wife and they had had a son together. Kaplan’s work reflected just how much her life—and American society—had changed dramatically.
 
Evan Wolfson’s Low Grade
 

Photograph of Evan Wolfson by David Shakbone, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

 
There was a second story I had to cut that also illustrated how much American law had transformed over the course of a single generation. That one involved another attorney, named Evan Wolfson. Wolfson had been an advocate for same-sex marriage rights since before the marriage equality movement’s inception. In 1983, as a third-year law student at Harvard University, he had written his graduation thesis arguing that the Constitution protected same-sex couples’ right to marry.

At the time, same-sex marriage was such a radical notion that Wolfson struggled to find anyone who would supervise his project. After approaching the obvious candidates—faculty members who worked in family law, constitutional law, or gay and lesbian rights—he finally convinced a property law scholar to oversee the graduation requirement. The paper that Wolfson produced set out the arguments the movement would later rely upon to change American law, but the professor was unimpressed. Wolfson got a B.
 
Wolfson was undeterred. As an attorney for Lambda Legal, he pressed the organization to lead the movement for marriage rights. Later, he founded Freedom to Marry, a national advocacy organization devoted to pursing marriage equality. In 2015, when he heard the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Obergefell v. Hodges, he cried tears of joy.  By that point, he had spent thirty-two years working to secure marriage rights for gays and lesbians. Wolfson was thrilled to finally be out of a job.
 
I love the story about Wolfson’s low grade for so many reasons. The first is how clearly it illustrates the change American law has experienced over time. In the early 1980s, Harvard Law professors could easily dismiss Wolfson’s arguments as absurd. Thirty-two years later, these same points helped the Supreme Court to rule in favor of marriage equality. The second is more personal. As a law professor, I regularly supervise student papers. When I read arguments that seem far-fetched, I think of Wolfson and hope that my students remain as dedicated to their vision of justice as he was to his.
 
* * *
 
I wish I could have included the stories of Wolfson, Kaplan, and so many others in the book. I’m so very glad to have the chance to share them with you now! Dozens of stories ended up on the cutting room floor, but I hope readers enjoy the ones that did make it into the pages of Family Matters.

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium: November 2024 Session

The ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium will convene on November 23, 2024. Virtual participation remains an option for those who want to attend. Register here. The schedule:

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium
November 23, 2024 | 10 AM - 3 PM (EST)
Notre Dame Law School | South Bend, IN

Registration/Welcome 09:45 - 10:05 AM

Paper #1: Legal History of State Court Jurisdiction 10:05 - 11:00 AM

“Grounding Pennsylvania's King's Bench Jurisdiction”

Author: Benjamin Pontz, Harvard Law School 

Respondent: Samuel L. Bray, John N. Matthews Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

Paper #2: Criminal Law in the British Atlantic 11:05 - 12:00 PM

“Slave Courts, Compensation, and the Politics of Petitioning in the Eighteenth Century British Atlantic” 

Author: Geneva Smith, Yale Law School/Princeton University

Respondent: Lee B. Wilson, Associate Professor of History, Clemson University

Afternoon Break (Lunch) 12:05 - 1:00 PM

Paper #3: Legal History of Arbitration & Investment Treaties 01:05 - 2:00 PM 

“State Counterstrategies Against Investor-State Dispute Settlement” 

Author: Daniel Loebell, Northwestern University

Respondent: Roger P. Alford, Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

Paper #4: Early American Legal History 02:05 - 3:00 PM

“John Dickinson at the Middle Temple: Bridging Worlds of Law in the British Atlantic”

Author: Sophie Rizzieri, University of Notre Dame

Respondent: Samuel K. Fisher, Assistant Professor of History, The Catholic University of America

More information about the colloquium, from a May 2024 announcement:

With the financial support of the American Society for Legal History, Notre Dame Law School and the University of Notre Dame Graduate School will host the ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium during the 2024-2025 academic year.

Dennis Wieboldt, a joint J.D./Ph.D. student in history, is spearheading the forum. Associate Dean Randy Kozel and Professor Christian Burset have worked with Wieboldt to launch the colloquium at Notre Dame next year.

. . . The forum will provide budding legal scholars and practitioners with feedback on works-in-progress—an important step in fine-tuning research to a point where it can be submitted for publication. “As the federal judiciary increasingly turns its attention to ‘history and tradition,’” Wieboldt noted, “it is crucial for future leaders in the legal profession to develop the skills necessary to employ historical methodologies and make historically informed claims about the meaning of legal texts.”

“Notre Dame is an excellent place to think seriously about the role of history in contemporary legal practice,” Wieboldt added. “I am excited to welcome students and faculty from other institutions to engage in conversation with members of the Notre Dame community.”

. . . 

For further information about the Colloquium, please visit here.  If you have any questions, please contact Dennis Wieboldt at dwiebold@nd.edu.

-- Karen Tani

Fraley on Court-Packing and Brown

Jill M. Fraley, Washington and Lee University School of Law, has published What Roosevelt Did to Brown v. Board of Education, or Race and Court Packing in the Nebraska Law Review:

Roughly one-third of American schools remain segregated. Scholars have offered a variety of explanations, mostly social and cultural, but sometimes legal, for why desegregation did not proceed effectively after Brown v. Board of Education. This Article articulates a less expected
and previously undocumented cause: President Roosevelt's prior attempt at court packing slowed-even derailed-desegregation.

The story of what Roosevelt's court packing did to make the work of integration harder is a cautionary tale, particularly for those who want to alter the U.S. Supreme Court now in furtherance of a modern cause. The only reasonable route for reforming the Supreme Court must be based on furthering the stability and legitimacy of the Court. The lesson of Roosevelt and Brown further provide that this reform must be done with a deep knowledge of the public understanding of the Court.

When the Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Roosevelt's court packing attempt was within living memory, and strongly influenced reactions to the Court's decree that American schools must integrate. Members of the public and southern lawmakers capitalized on Roosevelt's attacks on the Court, rearticulating those claims to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Brown. Other opponents of integration argued that Roosevelt had succeeded in packing the Court (if by less direct means), and that the Brown Court did not legitimately have the authority to determine constitutional law. Both lines of argument proliferated through the media, reducing public acceptance of the Brown decision.

The impacts of Roosevelt's court packing attempt, however, went beyond questions about the legitimacy of the Court. Roosevelt had another legacy in authoring a playbook of strategies for manipulating both state and federal courts. The public and southern lawmakers attacked Brown by employing these strategies, often directly claiming validity for their actions by way of Roosevelt's endorsement.

In the decades when Roosevelt's court packing attempt remained in lived memory, Brown was never going to fully succeed in the South, where it did not have the majority support of the population. The Court simply did not have the power to demand public acquiescence or sway
public opinion. This understanding of the Court's power matters today, as both court packing and court reforms are brewing in American politics. Any future changes must be done with a nuanced understanding of how the public will view the Court and what precedents we set that will be mirrored at the state level.

On what Civil Rights groups thought of Court-packing in 1937, see  Zach Jonas, “FDR’s Court-packing and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” Journal of Supreme Court History (July 2023).

--Dan Ernst

Senior Lecturer in Law, History and Society at Vanderbilt

[Via H-Law, we have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Department of History at Vanderbilt University seeks candidates for an instructional position at the rank of Senior Lecturer in Law, History, and Society. We seek a U.S. historian with a demonstrated record of teaching excellence in law and society or legal history. We are especially interested in candidates with teaching interests in immigration, civil rights, criminal law, human rights law, or environmental law. The position will begin in Fall 2025 and is non-tenure-track. The teaching load is six courses per academic year, including a two-semester survey in the history of law in the United States and elective courses in the candidate’s area of expertise. The initial appointment is for three years, with the potential for continuing reappointment, contingent upon institutional review.

Law, History, and Society is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary major at Vanderbilt that serves a diverse student body. We approach law from both a historical and an interdisciplinary perspective with emphasis placed on close reading of legal documents, broadly defined, research, and analytical writing. Students are encouraged to study topics that stretch across national and chronological boundaries, and to think comparatively. All faculty in the History Department teach classes at all levels of the curriculum, from introductory lectures to majors’ seminars, and also serve in an advisory capacity for honors students and undergraduate majors.    

Qualifications. Candidates should have evidence of teaching experience in law and society or legal history and a commitment to undergraduate teaching and programming. All requirements for the PhD in History must be completed no later than August 1, 2025.

Application Instructions.  Applications are accepted via Interfolio here. To be considered, please submit the following materials: cover letter, curriculum vitae, teaching statement, teaching evaluations for all available courses, two sample syllabi (at least one for an introductory lecture course), and three letters of reference. Review of application files will begin on December 9, 2024.

Equal Opportunity Employer.  At Vanderbilt University, we are intentional about and assume accountability for fostering advancement and respect for equity, diversity, and inclusion for all students, faculty, and staff. Our commitment to diversity makes us who we are.  We have created a community that celebrates differences and lets individuality thrive. As part of this commitment, we actively value diversity in our workplace and learning environments as we seek to take advantage of the rich backgrounds and abilities of everyone. The diverse voices of Vanderbilt represent an invaluable resource for the University in its efforts to fulfill its mission and strive to be an example of excellence in higher education.

Vanderbilt University is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

A Festschrift for Hendrik Hartog

In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries, a festschrift of Hendrik Hartog, edited by Kenneth W. Mack and Jacob Katz Cogan (Oxford University Press), has been published online and will appear in print on December 11, 2024.

The boundaries between the history of law and the history of everything else are quite blurry nowadays. Whether one is asking questions about the origins of the carceral state, the relationship between slavery and capitalism, the history of migration flows and empires, the longer story of human rights, the building of the straight state, the role of religion in public life, or many other topics, there is a shared belief that law and its history matters. In fact, legal historians have begun to focus on the blurring of boundaries such as those between markets and politics, between identity and state power, as well as between national borders and the flows of people, capital, and ideas around the world. Legal history, broadly conceived, seems to mark much of the most exciting work that is redrawing the boundaries of historical scholarship in many areas of study. In Between and Across: Legal History without Boundaries gathers some of the newest and freshest work by both younger and established scholars who are carrying forward that project and extending it into new areas of historical inquiry. It captures the best of the new and innovative tools and questions that have made law a central plane of inquiry, charts novel directions for the field, and poses broader questions concerning the past, present, and future. Crossing a wide variety of geographic areas (from British-ruled Australia, to colonial India, to the United States), the authors sketch new boundaries for the field to cross—boundaries of time, geography, and method—and claim that legal history provides the language to talk across national borders.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: LCH 2025

[We have the following announcement from Simon Stern, President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture & the Humanities.  DRE.]

We are excited to announce that we are now accepting submissions for the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. The conference will be held in person (with some online components) on June 17-18, 2025 at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C. This year's theme is "Speech Matters."  You can find the call for papers on our website or view the PDF version.

We are also accepting applications for our annual Graduate Student Workshop, which will take place the day before the conference on June 16, 2025. Information on how to apply for the workshop can be found in the PDF or on our website here.

Rechtsgeschichte-Legal History 31

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.  DRE]

The recent issue of our Institute’s journal Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History (Rg) presents high-level research contributions and candid reviews of books on topics that are relevant for the field of legal history, in Germany and worldwide.

Three essays are dedicated to the legal history of slavery in the early modern and modern periods: Carlo Bersani traces the European legal discourse on servi and personae (16th–18th century). Matilde Cazzola looks at the efforts to abolish slavery in British Caribbean, and Tamar Herzog analyses some aspects of the historiography of the legal history of slavery, a field so far dominated by Atlantic history.

The way in which jurists translated traditional knowledge bases for their present time in order to get a grasp on colonial realities in 16th-century Latin America is analysed in Christiane Birr’s Research contribution on Gregorio López. It shows how López’ ubiquitously used edition (including glossary) of the medieval Siete Partidas, by reverting to seemingly old knowledge, resulted in answers to new problems in the 16th-century Iberian empires. A set of entirely different, long-neglected sources of law is highlighted by Paolo Revilla Orias and Pablo Quisbert Condori. They offer an introduction to the local archives and the normative knowledge of indigenous communities in the ‘Plurinational State of Bolivia’.

Writing about the early modern Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat), Tobias Schenk asks to what extent our view as legal historians is still influenced by the paradigm of statehood and makes the case for research along the lines of praxeology and the history of knowledge. Finally, Andrew Harding presents a case study on the transfer of rights under common law, the Six Widows' case, which dates back to the early 20th century in Singapore.

Like the other segments, the Critique section and its numerous reviews of recent publications reflect the mpilhlt's research areas. The assessed volumes cover topics such as imperial and colonial legal history, the history of codification and constitutional history, the history of international law and of EU law, and the connection between the theory and the history of law.

Two Marginalia conclude this volume. Paul Kahn offers a critical commentary on a chapter from The Cambridge Legal History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective, which was published this year; and Erk Volkmar Heyen writes about stairs as settings for gender-specific glorification and condemnation, opening the reader's eye to legal aesthetics. His contribution settled the question of what motif we would use for the image spread of the print issue: stairs of all shapes and sizes, reflecting a great diversity of epochs and world regions.

Rechtsgeschichte--Legal History 32 is available in print from the Vittorio Klostermann publishing house, and online in Open Access via the journal's website.

Weekend Roundup

• Dylan C. Penningroth (UC Berkeley) recommends "Seven Essential Texts That Show the Human Side of Black Legal History" (Literary Hub).   
  

• Earlier this week, Judge Amul R. Thapar of the Sixth Circuit delivered "Why Originalist Courts Need Originalist Classrooms,” the 17th Joseph Story Distinguished Lecture of the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.  Judge Thapar faults the "overwhelmingly anti-originalist" legal academe for teaching "widely accepted originalist methods through a distorted, uncharitable, and often inaccurate lens.  This means that most students never engage with originalism in a serious way during their law school careers, much less learn how to do originalism in practice.”  He proposes solutions.

• Cynthia Neville, Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, will give the Annual Lecture of the Stair Society in the Mackenzie Building, Old Assembly Close, Edinburgh on Saturday 16 November 2024.  Her title is “March Law as Auld Law in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Legal Traditions.”
  

• Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford) asks Why is the Supreme Court Obsessed with Originalism?
  

• Along similar lines, James Kloppenberg (Harvard) explains to readers of Commonweal "Why History Matters Now" (subtitle: "A Commonweal Catholic on the mess made by Supreme Court Catholics").  
  

• A notice of that Penn conference on the political and legal history of voting (Daily Pennsylvanian).
  

• We spotted a notice for a three-year postdoc at Radboud University in the Netherlands on the project "The Social Life of Early Medieval Normative Texts," headed by Dr Sven Meeder, who "aims to describe and contextualise the spread of social norms as articulated in specific combinations of canons in a bottom-up approach starting from the vast corpus of manuscript witnesses of canonical collections in every shape and form (4th-12th centuries)" (I Am EXPAT).
  

• The Center for International and Comparative Law at the University of Michigan will hold a Junior Scholars Conference on April 25-26, 2025, in Ann Arbor, MI.  The deadline for submitting abstracts is January 5, 2025. The Center seeks submissions from pre-tenure track faculty, as well as Ph.D. and S.J.D. candidates, in law and related fields. 

• From History News Network: Richard R. John (Columbia University) on "The Other Sherman’s March: How the younger brother of the famous general set out to destroy the scourge of monopoly power." 
  

• Rebecca Brenner Graham’s essay, Frances Perkins: Breaking Glass Ceilings in the Cabinet, has recently been posted to the website of the White House Historical Association.
  

• "Justice O'Connor's Papers Show She Would Have Dissented in Chevron" -- so writes Tracy Thomas (University of Akron) over at the Gender and the Law blog.
  

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

LDF's Civil Rights Legal Archives

[We reproduce part of the October 16 announcement by the Legal Defense Fund of its launch of a digitized collection of its archives.  We've added a link to our earlier post on a related digital collection of the Library of Congress.  DRE.]

Today, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF)’s Thurgood Marshall Institute announced the launch of Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archives, a first-of-its kind, searchable archival collection of oral histories, legal briefs, press releases, and correspondence related to more than 6,000 cases the organization has litigated since its founding. This effort is the culmination of five years of work by LDF’s dedicated team of archivists.

Recollection will give litigators, advocates, researchers, students, and the general public insight into eight decades of records on history-making work in educational equity, political participation, economic justice, and criminal justice. This archival website is a “living” resource that will be continuously updated to include newly digitized materials, including oral histories and editorial content that highlights LDF’s critical work to advance racial justice in the United States.***

Today’s announcement comes after a major portion of LDF’s early records were recently made available online for the first time through the Library of Congress in September 2024. About 80% of the approximately 80,000 items have been digitized thus far, resulting in approximately 210,300 images in the digital collection. The digitization significantly expanded research access to primary source materials for scholars and students studying the civil rights movement.

Lyons on the Law of Nations and Diplomacy in the American Revolution

Published online open access in Law and History Review: The Law of Nations in the Diplomacy of the American Revolution by Benjamin C. Lyons.

Historians have long known that leaders of the American Revolution looked to the law of nations for insight into the rights and obligations of independent states. In so doing, Americans relied largely on the writings of European legal theorists, such as Hugo Grotius and Emerich de Vattel, whose treatises on the law of nations are regarded today as having laid the foundations of international law. As this article demonstrates, however, early modern statesmen did not base their conduct on such treatises, but on a customary law of nations that they derived from precedent and the text of earlier treaties. This article elucidates the distinction between the customary and theoretical branches of the law of nations. It then goes on to examine the law of nations’ impact on revolutionary-era diplomacy, drawing particular attention to a series of wartime negotiations over rights to the Mississippi River. As the article shows, most American emissaries lacked experience with the customary laws of diplomacy and struggled to use that law effectively in their negotiations. The most serious consequences were averted due in part to French legal advice, and because one American, John Jay, acquired enough competence in customary law to guide his colleagues toward an effective negotiation of peace.

--Dan Ernst

State of the Field of State Constitutional Studies

Today, at 2:30 EST, “the State Constitutions Lab and the Brennan Center for Justice will host a seminar discussion about the “State of the Field of State Constitutional Studies” that will center on past and current scholarly work, future directions and areas of research, and new methodological approaches.”  Participants include the historian Jane Manners, Jessica Roney, and Robinson Woodward-Burns.  Register here.  (H/t: H-Law).

--Dan Ernst

ASLH 2024

Starting today, your Legal History Bloggers will be in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, for which Karen served as co-chair of the Program Committee.  This year, we appear on the same panel, Foundations of the Modern Administrative State, at 3:00 tomorrow.  Karen will chair, and I will comment.  The papers and their authors are:

A Presidency of Statutes: Gilded Age Reform and the Roots of the Modern Executive (1868-1921)
Andrea Scoceria Katz, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law

The Progressive Origins of Centralized Administrative Review
Edgar Melgar, Yale Law School

The Lost English Roots of Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking
Rephael Stern, Harvard University/Harvard Law School

The Origins of the Major Questions Doctrine
Rachel Rothschild, University of Michigan Law

As in the past, we welcome otherwise unsolicited reports of sessions at the meeting, and we expect to post on the prizes announced there after the meeting concludes.

--Dan Ernst