Weekend Roundup

• A notice of Daniel Gervais's book chapter, “Trade Secret Law in the United States: Evolution, Framework, and Federalization" (Vanderbilt Law).

• The Brennan Center for Justice has published a resource on "Countering Originalism." The Center explains: "This guide offers lawyers strategies, arguments, and citations to address originalist claims they encounter in litigation."

• Trump v. Slaughter Roundup, Round 2: Jane Manners and Lev Menand on the original meaning of a term of years (Notice & Comment).  Originalism, what originialism? (Slate). Menand fact checks the oral argument (Notice & Comment).  Noah Rosenblum on Vox's Today Explained. 
  Beau Baumann and Nathaniel Donahue discuss the oral arguments (PPT).

• 

  Credit: Highsmith (LC)

  Save Ben Shahn's "Meaning of Social Security"! (NR). 

• Paul Finkelman reviews Brad Snyder's You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads (LARB). 

• A new exhibit on foundational documents of Ohio constitutional history (CNO). 

• Time's "Made by History": The historians on Ken Burn's "American Revolution").    

• That National Constitution Center session on Robert H. Jackson with John Q. Barrett, Gerard Magliocca, and G. Edward White has now been posted to the NCC's YouTube channel.

• Robert Tsai discusses America’s Forgotten Constitutions (Democratic Constitution).

• ICYMI: Nick Salvatore (1943-2025) (Ithaca Voice).  More Lepore (Persuasion).  John Yoo on birthright citizenship (Fox). How the Immigration Act of 1924 Tried to Reshape America (History).

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

ASLH Burbank Article Prize to Fei

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize. About this prize: 

The Jane Burbank Article Prize in global legal history will be awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history published in the previous calendar year. Submissions may address any topic or period, and may focus on case studies in which the analysis relates to broader processes or comparisons. Articles on methodological or theoretical contributions are also welcome.

The 2025 Burbank Prize winner was Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections,” Past and Present 266:1 (2025): 40-74. The citation:

In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a collection of letters and documents which includes a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved people she owned, conducted in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels: the case summary itself and its process, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use.

An Honorable Mention went to Rui Hua (Boston University), for “The Cheese, the Worm, and the Law: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian Borderland, 1906-1927,” Modern Asian Studies 58:4 (2024): 1201-1221.

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani 

 

Petruccelli's History of the Origins of Interpol

David Petruccelli, Dartmouth College, has published A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe in the series Oxford Studies in International History:

As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity."

Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.

While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.

--Dan Ernst

Oldham's "Law and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court"

New from Hart/Bloomsbury: Law and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court 1970-75: "Rather Peculiar Things," by Peter Oldhan, K.C.:

 Constitutional and employment lawyers, and indeed anyone interested in the history of the times, will not want to be without this deeply researched yet entertaining work.

When the Heath Government came to power in 1970, it set up the National Industrial Relations Court to referee highly contentious disputes between unions and employers. Regarded with hostility by the labour movement from the start, the Court and its President, Sir John Donaldson, faced mounting suspicion, and were regularly front-page news. When Donaldson jailed five dockers in 1972 – the Pentonville Five – for defying the Court's orders, strikes erupted and the docks closed. With the country's food supplies dwindling, a state of emergency loomed. How had it come to this? Could a way through be found?

This is a revelatory account of the National Industrial Relations Court's defining crisis, set in the context of a wider, and frequently startling, exposition of how Donaldson went about his role as its President.

Peter Oldham KC combines decades of experience as a barrister with archival research to shine a bright new light on how and why the Court found itself doing – in Donaldson's own words – "rather peculiar things."

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump. 

ASLH Surrency Prize to Han & Xiangyi

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Surrency Prize. About this prize: 

The Surrency Prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the Society’s journal, the Law and History Review, in the previous year. The prize is named in honor of Erwin C. Surrency, a founding member and first president of the Society and for many years the editor of its former publication, the American Journal of Legal History. 

The 2025 Surrency Prize winners were Shumeng Han (University of California, San Diego) and Ren Xiangyi (University of Chicago) for their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Law and History Review 42:2 (2024): 319–42. The citation:

In their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Shumeng Han and Xiangyi Ren bring analytical clarity to a complex process of legal change. Through a sensitive and systematic reading of four decades of intergenerational property dispute cases in Jiangjin county, China, the authors illuminate a transformation of the fundamental Qing legal principle of filial piety. What began as a unified concept harmonizing individual filiality and morality with imperial loyalty and legitimacy, the authors explain, branched over time into multiple hybrid forms in Republican China. The article demonstrates how dual processes—changing legal rules and institutional nation-state building—coproduced forces within and without law that spun filial piety into different successor strands: individualist, nationalist, legal, and sentimental, each carrying forward a fragment of the original principle of filial piety. With precision, the article documents a Qing-Republican legal transition that is not a simple transplantation story of one order replacing another. Rather, as the authors conclude, “legal actors recreated and particularized the inherited conception [of filial piety] in their legal practice by drawing on sources from code, customs, and their specific historical context,” thus making and using diverse and even contradictory new strands. With this remarkable work of research and interpretation, “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality” shows how the meaning of legal concepts may be transformed amid wider societal and regime change—and how to study such transformation with nuance, rigor and imagination.

An Honorable Mention went to Kate Alba Reeve (Columbia University) for “Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations,” Law and History Review 42:3 (2024): 499–520.

Congratulations to all!

-- Karen Tani  

 

"Legal History in Times of Crisis": Stanford's Graduate Student Conference

[We have the following announcement.  DRE] 

The Stanford Center for Law and History invites paper submissions from graduate students for its eighth annual conference, "Legal History in Times of Crisis." This one-day conference will be held on Friday, May 15, 2026 at Stanford Law School.  We would be grateful if faculty forwarded this message to their graduate students and encouraged them to apply.

Our contemporary world is in crisis—on this much, there is widespread agreement. But the nature, scope, and causes of our present crisis—indeed, crises—are subject to fierce debate, whether they be crises of democracy, technology, the rule of law, capitalism, public information and knowledge, local ecology, or global climate.

Crisis is, at its roots, a historical concept, deriving from the Greek krisis: a turning point. The conference will bring together scholars of law and history to examine crises of the past across time periods and geographies, focusing in particular on political, economic, and environmental turning points. A non-exhaustive list of possible topics spanning these three modes of crisis include:

    Turbulent transitions and periods of marked violence, instability, and/or uncertainty
    Inequalities in the social distribution of crisis
    Perceptions of crisis
    Systems and institutions prone to crisis
    Typologies of crisis, e.g. acute versus prolonged, discrete versus overlapping
    Seedbeds for future crises
    Generative possibilities of crisis
    The utility of history in times of crisis, i.e. what good is history during a crisis?

Application Information.  The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the recipient of the paper prize. The winner will present on one of the three conference panels. Funding for travel and accommodations will be provided. 

Application Requirements: CV and Paper abstract (500 words or less).  Submissions will be accepted via our website. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 1, 2026.  Please direct any questions to sclh@law.stanford.edu.

Cromwell Article Prize to Hall, Mallon

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, which is awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation "after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History." About this award:

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize is awarded annually to the best article in American legal history published in the preceding calendar year by an early career scholar. Articles published in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize. 

The 2025 Cromwell Article Prize went to two scholars: Aaron Hall (University of Minnesota) for “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” Journal of American History 111, no. 3 (2024): 469-96, and Grace E. Mallon (Oxford University), for “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2024): 687-720.

The citation for Hall's article:

Aaron Hall’s “Bad Roads” traces the making, significance, and effects of ordinary public ways that ran through the South in the age of slavery. This important article speaks to scholarship on legal history, state building, slavery, and the carceral state, and challenges existing ideas of public and private. In this piece, Hall draws upon an inchoate, rarely studied set of documents to explain how roads were a significant and singular site of governance in slave states. He shows how public power helped construct private planter authority, as well as gave rise to a unique carceral spatial regime. Hall’s article is beautifully written and works with complex archival materials in a way that makes truly intricate and difficult historical work feel effortless. “Bad Roads” ties together multiple topics in legal and political history, including the role of state power in road building, the mechanics of how roads enabled policing, and the way public roads structured and complicated slavery—much like, as he shows, public roads themselves both connected and bounded private property and enslaved people’s lives. This article has important implications for our understanding both of slavery and its development and the post-emancipation evolution of policing and turn toward mass incarceration. We know that slavery existed because state law sanctioned it, but Aaron gives us a chance to really see how in even the most quotidian ways, the state made slavery and slavery made the state.

The citation for Mallon's article: 

Grace Mallon’s “Negotiated Federalism” examines the federal government’s efforts to enforce its new authority after the Founding. Federal officials quickly realized that they required the participation and consent of state governments, as federal laws could not take effect without the legislation, investment, and manpower of state governments. The piece showcases how Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test case for negotiated federalism, where the federal government sought to exercise power in spaces where states had already entrenched their authority. As early federal officials set up customs and lighthouse services, rebuilt coastal fortifications, and enforced regulations, they had to negotiate with states to determine “which powers each level of government could exercise.” As a result, federal power depended on a state’s willingness to negotiate its authority. The crisply written article tackles big questions of federalism through granular details of practical problems and personality conflicts. Based in impressive primary source research in state and federal official records and correspondence, Mallon brings multiple areas of scholarship together to describe how power was worked out ‘in the course of ordinary government administration instead of in high theory. “Negotiated Federalism” takes something that we feel is well-understood (federalism at the founding) and through a creative path through the archive mines new and provocative ways of seeing the past that help us see the present more clearly.

Congratulations to both awardees!

-- Karen Tani

Adams and Stanger-Ross on Exiling Japanese Canadians

Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross have published Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution (UBC Press):

In September 1945, Canadian democracy faced a fundamental question of constitutional law: Could citizens be expelled on the basis of race? Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had already experienced uprooting, internment, and dispossession were now at risk of banishment. Challenging Exile investigates the origins, administration, litigation, and aftermath of this attempt at gross injustice, and shares the stories of resilience of those who faced it.

How did Japanese Canadians navigate the challenges arrayed against them? Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the proposed exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that forced them from their homes, stripped their livelihoods and possessions, and deprived them of fundamental rights. And they analyze the constitutional framework of the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race, and rights at a time of change in Canadian law and politics.

Unfolding in a context of global conflict, sharpened borders, and racist suspicion, the story told in Challenging Exile has enduring relevance for our own troubled times.

This meticulous and moving account of a shameful episode in Canada’s past tells a necessary story not only for scholars and historians of law, politics, and human rights, but also for lawyers, judges, and readers of Canadian history.

The University of Alberta's notice of the book is here. 

--Dan Ernst 

A Festschrift for W.N. Osborough

New from Four Courts Press: A Sense of Place: Studies in British and Irish legal history in memory of W.N. Osborough, edited by Sparky Booker and Kevin Costello:

W.N. Osborough was described by the Irish Times on his death in 2020 as Ireland’s ‘greatest legal historian’. He wrote prolifically on Irish legal history and culture for over fifty years, re-established legal history as an undergraduate option in university law degrees and was the moving force behind the establishment of the Irish Legal History Society in 1988.

Throughout this volume the authors uncover new insights into the evolution and practice of law in Britain and Ireland and honour Nial’s impressively wide-ranging interests, which spanned traditional periodizations and geographical divides.

Contributors: Sir John Baker, Paul Brand, Jane Ohlmeyer, Colum Kenny, Robin Frame, Sparky Booker, Niamh Howlin, Thomas Mohr, Ian Williams, Kevin Costello, R.H. Helmholz, Charles Lysaght, Richard McMahon, Paddy Waldron, Paul O’Brien, Mary O’Dowd, Colm Lennon and John McCafferty. 

Sparky Booker is a historian of law, culture and society in late medieval Ireland. She is Assistant Professor in Irish Medieval history at TCD . Kevin Costello is an assistant professor at UCD. His principal research interests lie in the fields of Legal History and Administrative Law.

--Dan Ernst 

Johnson on Legality in the American Revolution

Donald F. Johnson, North Dakota State University, has published Popular Government and the Limits of the Law at the Outset of the American Revolution online in Law and History Review, we assume as an initial installment of a forthcoming, joint special issue with the William and Mary Quarterly, "New Legal Histories of the American Revolution."  here is the abstract to Professor Johnson's article:

The outbreak of the American Revolution thrust would-be revolutionaries into a paradoxical relationship with the law. As they overthrew colonial governments from New Hampshire to Georgia during the summer and fall of 1775, leaders of the resistance to Great Britain found themselves in the awkward position of having to justify rebellion against British authority while still professing to be law-abiding Britons. The revolutionaries’ mandate to govern rested on protecting rights to property and representation that many colonists believed had been violated by agents of the Empire, but the practicalities of war demanded extra-legal measures. The popular governments that replaced colonial administrations had to find a way to balance upholding many of the laws of the old regime while simultaneously organizing an armed insurrection against it. Much of this burden fell on revolutionary committees at the town and local level. As the Continental Congress and provincial elites vacillated between rebellion and reconciliation and struggled to assert control over the fast-growing revolutionary coalition, ad hoc governments comprised of ordinary citizens took on the tasks of governing their regions and organizing for armed struggle. For much of 1775 and early 1776, these popular regimes precariously balanced the need for extra-legal expediencies with the need to maintain at least a semblance of law to maintain their legitimacy.

--Dan Ernst 

Connolly's "Vested Interests"

Emilie Connolly, Brandeis University, has published Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States (Princeton University Press):

From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. In Vested Interests, Emilie Connolly describes how a system of “fiduciary colonialism” seized a continent from its original inhabitants—and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations.

Connolly documents two centuries of dispossession in the guise of fiduciary benevolence. Acting as both dispossessor and trustee, the federal government invested Native wealth in state bonds that financed banks, canals, and other infrastructural projects that enabled the country to expand further westward. Meanwhile, Native peoples protected the money they did receive for future generations, investing it in their own institutions and mounting legal challenges to hold their trustees accountable. Still, federal trusteeship placed tight constraints on Native economies with the aim of containing Native power, forcing nations to endure through sheer resilience and ingenuity. By chronicling the long history of Native land dispossession through financial paternalism, Vested Interests reveals the unequal dividends of colonialism in the United States.

--Dan Ernst 

Nebraska's Summer Research Institute in U.S. Law and Race

[We have the following call for applicants.  DRE] 

Graduate Fellows Summer Research Institute in U.S. Law and Race, June 7-26, 2026 

Call for Applicants: Deadline February 15, 2026

Funded by the Mellon Foundation, this three-week residential fellowship program supports four (4) graduate students in Summer 2026 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's U.S. Law and Race Initiative with the Digital Legal Research Lab. We seek proposals addressing race and racialization in U.S. law and history broadly, aiming to understand racialized people's use of the law to advance personhood, citizenship, rights, and sovereignty throughout American history.

The Fellowship: Fellows will workshop their research and writing, receive training in digital methods to support data structuring and analysis, contribute to an Open Educational Resource, and enjoy seminar-style discussion of shared readings. The 3-week program features tailored mentoring with U.S. Law & Race affiliate faculty and staff, along with opportunities to meet and network with UNL's History & Digital Humanities communities. Faculty mentors include William G. Thomas III (History), Katrina Jagodinsky (History and Women’s and Gender Studies), Jeannette Eileen Jones (History and Ethnic Studies), Donna Doan Anderson (History), Genesis Agosto (Law), Eric Berger (Law), Danielle Jefferis (Law), Laura Muñoz (History and Ethnic Studies), Jessica Shoemaker (Law), and Catherine Wilson (Law).

Benefits: $4,000 stipend; all housing and meals provided; and all travel costs are covered.

Eligibility: We seek Graduate Fellows researching topics broadly related to U.S. law and race. We are not able to accept proposals that are solely quantitative social science research. Fellows must be from Ph.D. programs in History or relevant humanities or humanistic social science disciplines, including joint J.D./Ph.D. programs. We are especially interested in applications from scholars who engage directly with traditionally underrepresented groups or attend Minority Serving Institutions. The University of Nebraska does not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and/or political affiliation in its programs, activities, or employment.

How to Apply: To be considered for the Fellowship, you should send (1) a letter of interest describing your research project, the writing you propose to workshop and how your work promotes deep historical assessment of U.S. law and race; and (2) a CV, and 3.) a list of two references the committee may contact. Please send materials to uslawandrace@unl.edu with the subject line "Mellon Graduate Fellows" by midnight on February 15, 2026. 

The University of Nebraska is a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the traditional territories of the Oceti Sakowin, Omaha, Oto, Pawnee, and Ponca Tribes, and those held by the relocated Ho Chunk, Iowa, and Sac & Fox Tribes. The UNL Department of History offers graduate fellowships for research in Digital History, Nebraska and the Great Plains, and the North American West that are ideal for potential graduate students pursuing projects in histories of race, gender, sovereignty, and the law.

Cromwell and ASLH Early Career Fellowships: 2025 Awardees

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the early career fellowships. 

The William Nelson Cromwell foundation has long awarded early career fellowships "to support research and writing in American legal history by early-career scholars." The ASLH has recently launched a complementary initiative, awarding funding to "early career scholars, publishing in English, who are working on projects in legal history relating to non-U. S. history topics." 

Via the ASLH, we have the following list of fellowship recipients, along with the titles of their projects:

Cromwell Early Career Fellowship Recipients

Thalia Chrysanthis, Unexpected Soldiers: Civil War Militaries and Gender Multiplicity in the Ranks 

Aaron Freedman, The Securities State: Washington and the Making of Modern Wall Street, 1979-1992 

Hannah Hicks, In Her Defense: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War U.S. South

Madison Ogletree, A Peculiar Freedom: Law, Free People of Color, and the Making of the Old South, 1790-1860

Alex Reiss-Sorokin, Trust in Search: Credibility and Doubt in Legal Research Technologies

Hannah Reynolds, Gendering Settler Property: Women, Families, and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Land Policy

Joseph Wrobleski, Wabanaki Legalities and the Making of Property on the Maritime Peninsula, 1620 – Present: Survivance, Sovereignty, and the Contest for Land

Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowship Recipients

Shachar Gannot, “Defending the Indefensible: Nazi Defense Attorneys in the Post-War Era,” Ph.D. History candidate Princeton (expected 2028).

Aden Knapp, “Judging Empires: International Court of Justice and Decolonization 1945-71,” Ph.D. History, Harvard, 2023, Postdoctoral Fellow Yale University (2024-26).

Stephanie Painter, “Women’s Defiance in Late Imperial China,” Ph.D. History University of Chicago, 2023, Assistant Professor of East Asian History, SUNY.

Ayse Polat, “Statelessness, Ottoman Empire 1850-1900,” Ph.D. History, University of Cambridge, 2023, Postdoctoral Fellow Cornell University (2024-26).

Alexander Williams, “Elite Corporate Lawyers’ Role in the Political Economy of Capitalism since the late 19th century in India,” Ph.D. History candidate, Yale (expected 2027).

Congratulations to all!

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• On November 25, 2025, Susanne Brand delivered the annual lecture of the Centre for English Legal History at the University of Cambridge. Her topic was "Outlawry and its Consequences in Later Medieval English Law and Practice."  View it here. 

• Trump v. Slaughter Roundup: Christine Kexel Chabot (Notice & Comment).  “What do you do when the Supreme Court says its decisions are supported by history, but history doesn’t support the Supreme Court?” asks Craig Green, in an article quoting a number of other legal historians (Bloomberg Law).  The Yale Law bench memo (Just Security). Jed Shugerman and Gary Lawson reply to Richard Re (Divided Argument).  And a blog version of “Quasi-Judicial”: A History and Tradition, a paper that Beau J. Baumann and Jed H. Shugerman posted on SSRN yesterday (Notice & Comment).

• National Guard Deployment Roundup: Bernadette Meyler (SLS Blog).  What about the Whiskey Rebellion? (Lawfare).

• Vanderbilt Law's notice of Sara Mayeux's appointment to its Mildred Prescott Miller Chair. 

• Fordham Law's notice of Jamie Grischkan, a legal scholar and historian of financial regulation and antimonopoly law and policy. 

• Carl Landauer reviews Lauren Benton's  They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (2024) in the European Journal of International Law.  

• The American Historical Association will host a congressional briefing on the history of federal funding of science on Thursday, December 11, at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075. 

• A recording of the National Constitution Center's "town hall" on amending the U.S. Constitution may be viewed here.   And tune in Monday at noon for another town hall, in which John Q. Barrett, joins Gerard Magliocca, and G. Edward White to discuss Robert H. Jackson's "influential concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, his approach to constitutional interpretation, and the lasting legacy he left on debates over presidential power." 

• A briefing on Bush v. Gore and the State of U.S. Elections sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice on Tuesday, December 9 from 2–3 p.m. ET.

• John Lennon's lawyer recalls Lennon's and Ono's deportation case (ABA Modern Law Library). 

• The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's notice of the receipt by its "Petitioning Freedom" project of the Mary Dudziak Prize in Digital History from the American Society for Legal History. 

• ICYMI: The history of the University of Memphis School of Law. Tracing the roots of modern international refugee law (SCC Times).  The South Carolina Supreme Court Historical Society (Columbia Metropolitan). 

• Update: "Feds Grant Nearly $1 Million to Develop Second Amendment History Curriculum" (Reload).

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

ASLH Preyer Scholars Awards to Allread, Holub-Moorman

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars award. About this award:

Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to early career legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two early career legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. 

The 2025 winners were Tanner Allread (University of California, Los Angeles), for “‘This Series of Strong Laws’: Choctaw Governance and the Rise of Indigenous Constitutionalism, 1826-1830,” and Will Holub-Moorman (Princeton University/Penn Carey Law), for “Policing Parenthood: Child Support Law and the Enforcement of Austerity in Late Twentieth-Century America.”

Congratulations to both!

-- Karen Tani

Postles on Arbitration in English Ecclesiastical Courts

Dave Fogg Postles, University of Hertfordshire, has published Pro Bono Pacis et Concordie: Arbitration in English Ecclesiastical Courts in the Late Middle Ages in Law and History Review:

In modern jurisprudence, it is recognized that courts will engage in arbitration, often under the rubric of Alternative Dispute Resolution. Recourse to arbitration further back in the English past has often been perceived as extra-legal, taking place outside the system of courts, and sometimes intended specifically to avoid those courts. This research has concentrated on the avoidance of secular courts, in particular the king’s courts and common law (see below). By contrast, arbitration in ecclesiastical courts has received less detailed investigation, although many salient aspects have been approached.

--Dan Ernst 

Maltz on Slaughter-House

Earl M. Maltz, Rutgers Law School, has posted Rehabilitating the Slaughter-House Cases:

The year 2023 marks the 150th anniversary of the decision in The Slaughter-House Cases.  In rejecting a constitutional challenge to a Louisiana statute that imposed stringent limitations on the operation of slaughterhouses in the New Orleans area, the Slaughter-House majority gave an extremely narrow reading to the scope of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  As a result, the Court effectively eliminated the possibility that that clause would become a source of significant constraints on the actions of state governments generally.

Most scholars have been extremely critical of the reasoning of the Slaughter-House majority, arguing that the meaning that had been attributed to the phrase “privileges and immunities of citizens” in other contexts during the relevant time period indicted that a more robust interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause would have more aptly reflected the original meaning of the language of the clause.  However, a small number of commentators such as Kurt Lash and Philip Hamburger take a different view, arguing that only a narrow reading of the concept of “Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States” is consistent with the historical record. 

Disagreements such as these were at least implicitly anticipated by some of those who were intimately involved in the process of drafting the Fourteenth Amendment.  Thus, for example, during the discussions of the proposed amendment on the Senate floor, Democratic Sen. Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who was a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, declared that he supported the Due Process Clause, but argued that the Privileges or Immunities Clause should be removed from section one because “I do not understand the effect of that.” Similarly, Republican Rep. George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, who had also been a member of the joint committee, would later recall that the “euphony and indefiniteness of meaning” of the Privileges or Immunities Clause was a “charm” to Republican Rep. John A.  Bingham of Ohio, the person who was the author of section one.

Against this backdrop, no amount of research is likely to provide a clear, unambiguous answer to the question of how one should interpret the Privileges or Immunities Clause from a traditional originalist perspective.  Cognizant of this reality, this essay approaches the analysis of The Slaughter-House Cases from a somewhat different direction.  The essay does not make any effort to examine the historical evidence of the original meaning of the concept of “Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States” in the abstract.  Instead, after briefly describing the arguments made by both the majority and dissenting opinions in Slaughterhouse itself, the essay seeks to place the decision to add the Privileges or Immunities Clause to the Constitution in historical context, focusing on the purposes that the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment as a whole was intended to serve and also discussing the circumstances that led to the decision to replace a simple prohibition on racial discrimination with the formulation of section one that was ultimately adopted.  The essay concludes by arguing that the position taken by the majority in Slaughter-House reflected a more accurate understanding of the goals that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to achieve than the more expansive reading advocated by the dissenters in the case.

--Dan Ernst 

JSCH 50:3

Journal of Supreme Court History 50:3 has been published.  Here is the TOC:

Louis D. Brandeis on the Supreme Court: An Oral History
Lewis J. Paper and Peter Scott Campbell

Behind the Scenes of Norman v. Reed with Justice Stevens: How a Local Chicago Political Battle Resulted in an Unlikely (and Rare) Supreme Court Case on the Rights of New Political Parties
Mathias W. Delort

The Lost Case of Solicitor General v. United States
G. Edward White

A New Era of Poverty Litigation: The Warren Court’s Consideration of the Rights of Aid Recipients in King v. Smith
Claire Shennan

The excerpts from the oral history interviews for Paper's biography of Brandeis are great fun.

--Dan Ernst 

Cambridge History of the American Revolution

Ken Burns isn't the only person who has been trying to get out ahead of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.  Just out is the three-volume Cambridge History of the American Revolution, edited by  Marjoleine Kars, Michael A. McDonnell, and Andrew M. Schocket (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Contributions that particularly address legal and constitutional history include:

Volume 1: Revolutionary Currents 

Richard J. Ross and Steven Wilf, “Legal Orders”
Geneva Smith, “Viewpoint: Slave Courts in Pre-Revolutionary Maryland”

Volume 2: Revolution 

Terry Bouton, “Constitutions”
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, “Confederation”
Lorri Glover, “Constitutional Convention”
Michael J. Klarman, “Ratification”

Volume 3: Continuities, Changes, and Legacies

Nora Slonimsky, “Law and Property”

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: RJR

Classroom Materials on the Supreme Court, 1874-1921

[We have the following announcement from the Supreme Court Historical Society.  DRE]

Rights, Commerce, and Reform: A New Era of Supreme Court History Classroom Resources

Discover Supreme Court History from 1874-1921 with a new era of resources from Beyond the Bench, our civics education website. The new era, Rights, Commerce, and Reform, includes over 20 new case summaries, resources, and life stories from the Waite, Fuller, and White Courts ready for classroom use.

Featured resources include:

• Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Boston native, Civil War soldier, and Associate Justice whose legal theories revolutionized modern understanding of the law; 

• Belva Lockwood: The educator, activist, and attorney who became both the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court and to run for President of the United States;  

• Civil Rights Cases (1883): The Supreme Court decision that held the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional and paved the way for Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Jim Crow segregation; 

• Muller v. Oregon (1908): The Supreme Court decision that upheld a gender-based state labor law and created a clear legal distinction between men and women in the workplace;  

• Standard Oil Co. v. United States (1911): The Supreme Court decision that established the “rule of reason” in antitrust law and demonstrated the government’s power to regulate monopolies and increase competition; and  

• The Judiciary Act of 1891: The law that created the United States Courts of Appeals and helped shape the modern Judiciary.

Call for Comparative Legal History Board

[We note the following call from the ESCLH's blog.  DRE]

The European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH) is seeking applications for positions on the editorial board of its flagship journal, Comparative Legal History, including at least an articles editor and a reviews editor.  These positions are not paid.

Evidence of scholarly ability, experience in editing or a willingness to learn quickly, willingness to contribute to journal projects beyond the narrow scope of the job title, and membership (or a commitment to become a member if appointed) of the ESCLH are requirements. Full training in the journal’s processes will be provided as needed.

You would contribute to the advancement of comparative legal history as part of a warm, supportive, and dedicated team.

The journal is an official academic forum of the ESCLH. It was first published in 2013 and aims to offer a space for the development of comparative legal history. The journal welcomes contributions that explore law in different times and jurisdictions from across the globe.

Applications, indicating to which position/s is being applied, with a brief cover letter and short CV (no more than 4 pages) should be sent to Luisa Brunori (Vice-President of the ESCLH), at luisa.brunori@ens.psl.eu, by 15 January 2026.

The ESCLH particularly welcomes applications from people underrepresented in academia generally, and in the ESCLH and the journal particularly.

Frampton, "The Radical Roots of the Representative Jury"

The Yale Law Journal has published "The Radical Roots of the Representative Jury," by Thomas Ward Frampton (University of Virginia School of Law). The abstract:

For most of American history, the jury was considered an elite institution, composed of “honest and intelligent men,” esteemed in their communities for their “integrity,” “reputation,” or “sound judgment.” As a result, jurors were overwhelmingly male, jurors were overwhelmingly white, and jurors disproportionately hailed from the middle and upper social classes. By the late 1960s, an entirely different, democratic conception of the jury was ascendant: juries were meant to pull from all segments of society, more or less randomly, thus constituting a diverse and representative “cross-section of the community.” This Article offers an intellectual and social history of how the “elite jury” lost its hegemonic appeal, with particular emphasis on the overlooked radicals—anarchists, socialists, Communists, trade unionists, and Popular Front feminists—who battled to remake the jury. This Article offers a novel look at the history and tradition of the American jury, demonstrating how the Sixth Amendment’s meaning was—gradually, unevenly, but definitively—reshaped through several decades of popular struggle, grassroots mobilization, strategic litigation, and social-movement contestation. 

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani  

William Twining (1935-2025)

 [We are grateful to David Sugarman for this notice.  DRE]

Professor William Twining, a leading figure in the world of legal education and scholarship, died peacefully at home on October 9 aged 91.  Twining’s work on Karl Llewellyn, with whom he had studied in the late 1950’s, notably, The Karl Llewellyn Papers (University of Chicago Law School, 1968) and Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (Cambridge University Press 1973, 2nd edn 2012), challenged many misconceptions concerning Llewellyn’s ideas and the legal realist movement and set in train a significant re-evaluation of their nature and significance. Twining donated his private collection of documents, published and unpublished, related to legal realism and pragmatism, to the Perelman Centre, Brussels, for scholars to use in the future: Le Centre Perelman - Centre Perelman.

For a more detailed treatment of Twining’s life and work, see https://www.slsa.ac.uk/sln-online-content#twining

Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Centre for Legal History of India

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The newly established Centre for Legal History of India (CLHI) at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany, has just advertised three PhD positions and a postdoc position in the field of Indian legal history, all of which are fully funded. 

[The CLHI] is dedicated to advancing research and academic collaboration in the field of Indian legal history. Its primary objective is to strengthen and professionalize the discipline by providing training, mentorship, and resources to doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, equipping them to produce high-quality scholarship.

The Centre seeks to foster a collaborative environment where scholars can engage in critical dialogue about both the current state and future scope of research and pedagogy in this diverse field. Building on a multilateral network connecting institutions and researchers within India and internationally, the Centre showcases the richness and breadth of Indian legal history, identifying areas of common ground while highlighting the diversity of legal traditions and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Indian legal history has long been a significant focus in the Department of European and Comparative Legal History, especially in the context of the study of legal transfers within the common law world. Given the central role of the Indian subcontinent in the history of the British Empire and the deep and varied legal traditions therein, the Centre aims to contribute towards developing legal history in India as a distinct and valuable field of study that merits dedicated resources and sustained scholarly attention.

The Centre maintains formal collaborations with leading Indian law schools NLSIU Bangalore and NALSAR. It is supported by a Centre Advisory Council and has a dedicated visitors’ programme.

More Congressional Material On-Line

[We are reproducing the following from In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress, on the latest "migration" of Congressional materials from "Century of Lawmaking" to the digital site, Congress.gov.  DRE]

 We have been working on migrating content from Century of Lawmaking to Congress.gov over the last few years. We kicked this off with migrating 30,000 Bills and Resolutions from 1799-1873. Then, in February 2024, we added the Annals of Congress to Congress.gov. In November last year, we added the Senate Journal to our site. The House Journal was added in the following release. If you are interested in more information on the journals, we have help pages for both the House Journal and Senate Journal.

Earlier this year, in February, we added the Congressional Globe. The Debates of Congress (Congressional Globe, The Annals of Congress, and the Register of Debates) are all predecessors to the Congressional Record, which goes back to 1873 on Congress.gov. The Globe was followed by the Senate Executive Journal going live on Congress.gov in April.

With today’s release we are adding the last item from the Debates of Congress, the Register of Debates. This is also the last area of content to migrate from Century of Lawmaking to Congress.gov. You can see the Register of Debates starting with the 18th Congress of the Browse page and through the 25th Congress.

ASLH names Backhouse, Benton, and Ngai as Honorary Fellows

At the 2025 annual meeting, the American Society for Legal History named three honorary fellows. As the ASLH website explains, "[e]lection as an Honorary Fellow . . . is the highest honor the Society can confer." This designation "recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others. Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand."

We quote in full the ASLH announcement of 2025 honorees Constance Backhouse, Lauren Benton, and Mae Ngai. 

Weekend Roundup

• Caitlin Tully, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Princeton University, has published an essay in The Atlantic: "The Court has an Easy Answer on the Fed."  

• From Time's "Made by History": Douglas Boin (Saint Louis University) on "How Patriarchy Undermined the Roman Republic."   

• Malick W. Ghachem, MIT, discusses his book The Company and the Colony: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble with Gerald Horne on the “Freedom Now” program on KPFK radio.

• Jill Hasday, Minnesota Law, discussed her book We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality with Kate Shaw on the Strict Scrutiny podcast.

• Allen Boyer reviews Kathryn Schumaker's Tangled Fortunes (Mississippi Books Page).   

• We've spotted an advertisement for a predoc university assistantship with Prof. Dr. Lena Foljanty, Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna. 

• Lawbook Exchange's November 2025 catalogue on Scholarly Law and Legal History (Part 1; Part 2).

• ICYMI:  A Very Short History of Freedom of Speech by Oliver Bramley (Constitution Society). How Germany's Nuremberg trial for Nazi crimes transformed international law (rfi).

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

ASLH Cromwell Book Prize to Gronningsater for "The Rising Generation"

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize. 

About the award: "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 early career faculty. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference."

This year's award went to Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania) for The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). The citation:

Elegantly rendered and beautifully constructed, Sarah Gronningsater’s  traces the experiences of a formative generation of New Yorkers – people born into the quasi-freedom granted by New York’s emancipation laws. By using a varied and creative source base, Gronningsater chronicles how their lives were shaped by gradual emancipation, and how their experiences and struggles within that legal regime translated into political activism in their later years. Gronningsater convincingly shows how legal consciousness gained early in life connected a generation of freedpeople who later used that knowledge to influence the larger national conversation about citizenship and racial equality in the United States.

Congratulations to Professor Gronningsater!

-- Karen Tani  

ASLH John Phillip Reid Book Award to Parker for "The Turn to Process"

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the John Phillip Reid Book Award. 

About the award: This prize 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. When awarding this prize, preference is given to work that falls within Reid’s own interests in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-America and Native American law."  

This year's award went to Kunal M. Parker (University of Miami School of Law) for The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024. The citation:

Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process is a brilliant intellectual history of how social science thinkers in law, political science, and economics between 1870 and 1970 stopped emphasizing ostensibly knowable truths and focused instead on methods, techniques, and processes. Parker shows how this transformation was entwined with the rise of the administrative state. After documenting this major epistemological shift, he argues that during the Cold War, once-supple claims about the importance of process and method were narrowed and decontextualized, playing oppositional roles to democratization, civil rights, and managed capitalism. This highly effective, very creative book places law, as practice and as a field of inquiry, in a larger context and illuminates essential questions about the history of knowledge and intellectual authority.

Congratulations to Professor Parker! 

-- Karen Tani

ASLH Peter Gonville Stein Book Award to Sommer for "The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China"

We are delighted to pass along news of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, 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. To be eligible, a book must be published during the previous calendar year." 

This year's award went to Matthew Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024). The citation:

Looking back at a lifelong engagement with Chinese legal history in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with a special focus on gender and sexuality, Matthew Sommer breaks new ground in his most recent book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia, 2024), uncovering several cases with transpeople who have been hiding in plain sight in the source material. The core of the book is based on routine and palace memorials from the First Historical Archives in Beijing, but Sommer also supplements his deep source base with popular tales about “the strange,” treaty port journals and newspapers, case books, legal codes, and compendia of traditional Chinese medicine. In contrast to his previous two books, which theorized about gender and sexuality based on thousands of legal cases, this book presents a concise series of case studies that identify what Sommer calls “transgender paradigms” in Chinese legal and social history. Among the figures that appear in these microhistories, we encounter a diverse set of gender non-conforming individuals, including eccentric midwives, cross-dressing clergy, unconventional physicians, and fox spirit mediums. One of the most interesting findings of the book is that while magistrates who prosecuted cases against trans people tended to rely on legal provisions banning heterodoxy, they were often confronted with the fact that there were no appropriate statutes that could prosecute cases involving trans people. Instead, they had to resort to interpretations of law that reveal interesting assumptions about gender, the body, law, procreation, and the fear of the unknown. This compelling and generative book is both a deep dive into complex and dense sources as well as a refreshing intervention into several subfields of legal history.

Honorable Mentions went to: Lauren Benton (Yale University) for The Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024) and to Samuel Fury Childs Daly (University of Chicago) for Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire (Duke University Press, 2024).

Congratulations to all the honorees! 

-- Karen Tani  

Symposium on Sharafi's "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947"

A symposium in Modern Asian Studies is devoted to an article by Mitra Sharafi, Wisconsin Law, who is the new President of the American Society for Legal History.  Professor Sharafi's  article was "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947: A medico-legal history," published in Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021): 371–428.  The just-published symposium includes comments by Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University; Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University; and Philippa Levine, Emerita, University of Texas; with a response by Professor Sharafi.

--Dan Ernst 

Meyler and Setzer on the French Influence on Cardozo's Living Constitutionalism

Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School, and Elliot Setzer, Yale University, have posted Cardozo's Living Constitutionalism in Comparative Context, which appeared in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities:

Benjamin N. Cardozo (NYPL)

Although he served as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1932-1938, the source of Benjamin Cardozo’s preeminence has generally been his contributions to common law jurisprudence and his theories of common law judging. This essay argues that several of Cardozo’s unpublished writings suggest he also developed a significant constitutional theory in dialogue with continental—and particularly French—legal thinkers. Despite not appearing prominently in Cardozo’s published constitutional opinions, this theory influenced Chief Justice Hughes’s majority opinion in the case of Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), a case that not only stripped the Contract Clause of much of its adjudicatory power but also paved the way for the Supreme Court to undo the laissez-faire vision of the Lochner era.

Cardozo most clearly outlined his theory in an essay on “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power,” written shortly before his nomination to the Supreme Court, and in a draft concurrence in the Blaisdell case—one that he abandoned after Chief Justice Hughes modified his own opinion to incorporate several of Cardozo’s paragraphs. “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power” develops Cardozo’s views of judicial authority in America as refracted not only through Tocqueville’s account but also through that of contemporary French jurists, including the comparative law scholar Édouard Lambert. Reading his Blaisdell concurrence against that backdrop both highlights the transatlantic conversations about judicial review ongoing during the 1930s and the potential for a French influence on Cardozo’s understanding of rights.

--Dan Ernst 

Danaher, "The Second Amendment's Catholic Problem"

The Duke Law Journal has published a Note of interest, on "The Second Amendment's Catholic Problem." It is by J.D. candidate Jared Danaher. Here's the abstract:

After New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, history is the touchstone of Second Amendment analysis. Thus, this Note explores an understudied part of America’s long and complicated history with weapons: Catholic disarmament. By undertaking a detailed historical analysis of three Catholic disarmament measures in the late colonial United States, this Note attempts to determine what the history means for present day firearms law. It concludes that even though courts frequently cite America’s history of Catholic disarmament, they rarely use it in a historically accurate way. Modern courts use Catholic disarmament to justify weapons bans on people the state considers dangerous or disrespectful to its laws, but those uses are out of step with the history. The historical analysis in this Note demonstrates that Catholic disarmament laws were narrow measures that targeted a particularly suspect group during a time of national emergency. The history of Catholic disarmament can only justify modern laws based on similar principles of “immediate distrust” (a term this Note coins).

But the journey toward this conclusion reveals as much as the conclusion itself. By faithfully applying the rules laid down in Bruen and United States v. Rahimi, this Note exposes the limits of their historically focused test. On the path to developing the “immediate distrust” principle, this Note exposes historically erroneous claims courts make, illuminates the difficulty of scouring the historical record, and explores the challenges raised by tying modern regulation to context-bound historical episodes. 

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani 

CFP: Religions and Freedom c. 1776

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Papers: Deadline December 30, 2025

On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the John Carter Brown Library and the John C. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics at Washington University invite proposals for participation in a major conference to be held in Providence, Rhode Island, June 4-6, 2026, on the broad topic of religions and freedom c. 1776.  

There are many productive ways to investigate the histories, historical relationship, and legacies of religions and freedom across the breadth of early America. And religious freedom in America has a deep and important history, in which the conference location of Rhode Island itself plays a significant part. The conference aims to engage fresh scholarship and public interests in critical issues of religious freedom. Focused sessions will highlight new perspectives on classic questions, innovative methods, and new sources. We will host public events, including two evening keynotes, sessions for k-12 teachers, and programs dedicated to teacher professional development, in addition to panels dedicated to historical scholarship. 

The program committee encourages proposals on historical topics that address religions and freedom in the Revolutionary era, as well as proposals for a more limited set of sessions to consider legacies and ramifications of the relationship of religions and freedom in contemporary life. Topics might include: teaching religions and freedom, k-16; Indigenous knowledge systems; Africana religious studies; the development of denominations and religious institutions; the interest of governments in marking boundaries of religious freedom; betrayal and conflict within and between religious communities; slavery and definitions of religious freedom and unfreedom; the First Amendment and its antecedents and legacies; churches and clergy; and sacralization and state-building in the early Republic. These are simply suggestive of the wide range of topics that might be fruitfully explored. Those submitting proposals are encouraged to be ambitious and creative as they consider the interplay of religions and freedom in the proximate period of the American Revolution.

The organizers invite proposals for individual papers or full panels (the committee reserves the right, given needs and coverage, to make adjustments to the latter). For full panel proposals, we encourage a diverse representation of career stages, institutions, and perspectives. For both individual paper and panel proposals, please type into the linked form: the panel title and all paper titles, abstract for the panel and each paper not to exceed 250 words, name, affiliation, email and phone contact information for each participant. Please also attach to the form a one page cv (as a PDF) for each participant. For panel proposals, please identify the organizer and suggest a panel moderator and chair.

The program committee will make decisions by mid-January so that the conference program can be settled and announced by early February. Questions may be directed to the conference organizers, Mark Valeri and Karin Wulf via jcb-director@brown.edu.

Weekend Roundup

• 
  A book launch was recently held for Confluences of Law and History: Irish Legal History Society Discourses, 2011-2021, edited by Niamh Howlin and Felix Larkin and published by Four Courts Press.  The volume “brings together an eclectic mix of papers on aspects of Irish legal history from the early modern period to the 20th century.” (Irish Legal Times).  

• An interesting notice of the St. Olaf College Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry team and its investigation of how, if at all, the 17th Amendment shifted the balance of power between rural and urban constituents.

• Katie R. Eyer, Rutgers Law School, has posted Institutional Challenges in an Authoritarian Age, a review essay inspired by Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege.

• Via Harvard Law Today: "Harvard Law School Library releases first complete set of digitized Nuremberg Trials records." 

• If, like me, you are trying to rethink a course on the legal history of the administrative state and presidential power in light of DJT's second term, you might find Eric Schickler's "What Donald Trump Has Taught Us about American Political Institutions," published in Political Science Quarterly, as helpful as I did.  DRE.  

• Jack Goldsmith's very interesting Constitution Day lecture at the American Enterprise Institute: Presidential Greatness and the Fragility of Judicial Supremacy. 

• The links to the recordings of two recent talks sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society, John Fabian Witt on The Radical Fund and G. Edward White and Gerard Magliocca's books on Robert H. Jackson are new available.  Also, Professor White draws upon his book in a post on the blog of the Oxford University Press.  

• Walter Stahr discusses his forthcoming biography of William Howard Taft (Executive Functions).

• Seth Barrett Tillman has posted Chancellor James Kent on Hamilton's Federalist No. 77 and Modern Academic Commentary.  Also, this. 

• The Brennan Center's Annotated Guide to Historians’ Amicus Briefs in the Slaughter and Cook Removal Cases.

• ICYMI: Gordon S. Wood's remarks upon receiving the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute.  John O. McGinnis and Mike Rappaport object to what they consider Jill Lepore’s “particularly shabby” treatment of Justice Scalia’s ideas in her recent Atlantic article on originalism (Law & Liberty).

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