CFP: Annual Forum of Young Legal Historians

[Via ESCLH Blog, we have the following CFP.  SRE]

Annual Forum of Young Legal Historians: “Values in law through the ages,” Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan

Legal traditions, community, harmonization and integration have been the hallmarks of the Association's Annual Forums for 29 years. Values in law, which is the main topic of the 30th anniversary edition of the Meeting of Young Legal Historians, is an excellent opportunity to look at the issues discussed at previous forums from a wider perspective. The legal maxim Ubi societas ibi ius, which dates back to ancient times, is a simple affirmation of common sense: wherever there are people, wherever there is a community, wherever relationships and bonds are formed, there must be a certain order, which is referred to as ius — law. The conference “Values in law through the ages”, organized by the Faculty of Law and Administration and the Faculty of History of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, will be a space for discussion on the transdisciplinary issues of axiological matters present in various cultures and legal systems.

Conference theme.  We are planning to include various contexts for the use of the main topic at the conference. We invite you to submit proposals for papers from various fields of law and other fields related to law, clearly linked to historical and legal analysis and the topic of the conference. The proposed topics, which are not exhaustive, include in particular issues such as principles of law, rule of law, legal unlawfulness, revolutions in law, crises of values in law, inter-systemic and intra-systemic contrasts of values, history of human rights, theoretical concepts of values in law or constitutional protection of values.

Requirements for submitting abstracts.  We invite submissions on essentially any aspect of the values in the legal history. Authors may approach the topic dogmatically, historically or comparatively, they may focus on a specific period and place or present general reflections on the axiology of law in a historical context. Authors are encouraged to use innovative approaches and transdisciplinary research.

If you would like to present a paper during the conference, please send an application including an abstract of not more than 300 words and your CV to aylhforum2026@amu.edu.pl before 30 April 2026. Acceptance letters will be sent out by the end of May. Please send documents in PDF format.

In justified individual cases, the forum's scientific committee may consider abstracts earlier. To do so, please contact the organizing committee, indicating “EARLY APPLICATION” in the subject line of your message.

Presentations have to be in English and should not exceed 15 minutes each. Since one of the primary goals of the conference is to allow young researchers to get to know each other personally, we only accept presentations in person.

Publication.  We intend to publish the presented papers. The organizing committee intends to resume publication with Peter Lang Publishing, which was associated with the first editions of our forums. Depending on the number of interested parties and financial possibilities, we plan to publish another volume of the Yearbook of Young Legal History, or a monograph, or a special issue in a Polish academic journal. The related details will be sent in advance to the accepted participants.

Conference fee.  Two types of conference fees are anticipated for this year's forum:

1. The conference fee without post-conference publication costs is 200 € and does not include travel or accommodation costs.
2. The conference fee including post-conference publication costs is 300 € and also does not include travel or accommodation costs.

After the announcement of the abstract selection results on May 31, 2026, the Organizing Committee will contact the selected participants with further information on registration by paying the conference fee.

Other information.  The Forum will be in English, and each paper presentation should not exceed 15 minutes, so there is time for discussions in the last part of each panel. 

The submission deadline is 30th April 2026. Abstracts received after the submission deadline will be declined. Please indicate in your application the type of participation (without publication or with publication).

Keep in mind that registration is limited to a number of people. Therefore, early registration is strongly recommended!

Event organization.  The forum will last four days: the first day will be a welcome day with the participation of keynote speakers and a special guest, the next two days will feature many parallel sessions, and on the last day we are planning a jubilee meeting on organizational matters of the Association for Young Legal Historians.

Our meeting will take place in Poznan, the capital of Greater Poland. The city can be reached by plane or other means of transport (train, bus). We recommend planning your travel and accommodation in advance. The organizing committee will provide recommendations in this regard at a later date.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts and we will uncompromisingly endeavor to provide a conference that is both academically and socially fulfilling. We wish you all the best for this time!

Organizing Committee:

Dawid Szulc, MA, Department of Government Systems Studies and Political and Legal Thought – Committee Chair
Patryk Mackowiak, MA, Department of Source Analysis and Auxiliary Historical Sciences – Vice Committee Chair
Fatma Mejri, MA, Department of Government Systems Studies and Political and Legal Thought
Maria Kola, MA, Department of Roman Law, Legal Traditions and Cultural Heritage Law
Szymon Siuda, MA, Department of Public Economic Law
Kamil Gawel, MA, Department of Medical and Pharmaceutical Law at the Poznan University of Medical Sciences

"Performing Law"

Performing Law: Actors, Affects, Spaces, edited by Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law, Anna Jayne Kimmel, George Washington University, and Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School (Cambridge University Press), is now available open access on Cambridge Core:

The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from performance studies, theatre history, aesthetics, dance, film, history, and law provide critical analyses of the sites, dramas and stage directions to be found in the orchestration of the tragedies and comedies acted out in multiple forums of contemporary legality.

--Dan Ernst

Chowdhury to Lecture on the British Constitution, Capitalism and Constitutional Change

Tanzil Chowdhury, Queen Mary University of London, will lecture on The British Constitution, capitalism and constitutional change at ANU Law School on March 4 2026 from 1:00pm - 2:00pm:

This talk is from Associate Professor Chowdhury's current book project that examines the transformation of the British Constitution over the last century. His argument is that we cannot understand significant changes to the British constitution without understanding the broader historical developments in capitalist social relations and the significant social antagonisms that have occurred throughout the last 100 or so years. Capitalism is a totality of different social relations and processes oriented around the value form; different social relations (economic, but also political, legal, cultural, moral etc) which are all important to the reproduction of that social totality. 

Contrary to heteronomous theories of constitutional change (including some Marxist ones), this project seeks to understand constitutions (the different institutional combinations of state and social power, subject formations, forms of mediation and characterisations of legality) as having an internal relation with capitalist social relations. In that sense, constitutions cannot be abstracted from capitalist social relations and are in fact, as he will argue, historically specific to capitalism. 

However, even though constitutions are internally related to capitalist social relations, that does not mean that capitalist societies are not fraught with all manner of tensions, contradictions and ruptures. This is not therefore a rigid economistic and deterministic theory of constitutional development, but one which takes seriously the historical distinctness of the legal form, constitutionalism, and the specific work they do (or not) in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. 

Constitutionalism, as he will argue, operates at different levels within the contradictory totality of capitalist social relations. Changes to the British constitution are the results of specific forms of struggle over the reproduction of capitalist social relations. In this paper, he will set out some examples of this theoretical approach and focus on how I will periodise the last century of the British constitution which connect to distinct forms of what I will call historical forms of capitalist constitutionalism.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Hardeep Dhillon (University of Pennsylvania), who received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.  

• The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's notice of Katrina Jagodinsky's NEH grant to "reveal [the] untold history of habeas corpus" (Nebraska Today).  

• Overt at Jotwell, Marin Levy reviews Kevin Arlyck's The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789–1825 (2025). 

• "Reclaiming the Founders’ Frameworks": Stanford Law's notice of Jud Campbell. 

• We've learned of several historians' briefs in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. This one is by Jed H. Shugerman and Evan Bernick, and this one, prepared in cooperation with the Brennan Center for Justice, is by Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur.  Eric Muller's brief describes the recognition of the birthright citizenship of the children of interned Japanese parents without allegiance to the United States.  Keith Whittington's brief includes the heading, "Revisionist History Cannot Hold Water."  And the Cato Institute weighs in here.

• A recording, with a very substantial timeline, of the American Historical Association's congressional briefing on the history of vaccines, with Elena Conis, David Oshinsky, and former ASLH president Michael Willrich. 

• “The Rule of Law and the Common Good,” a conference on March 12 and 13 at Boston College, "will explore the synergy between legal theory and Catholic social thought."

• "A short piece for lay readers" on Youngstown by William Baude, University of Chicago Law.  

• Mary Arden, Lady Arden of Heswall, the former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, will lecture on Magna Carta on Friday, April 24, at Soulton Hall, Shropshire (Star). 

• The Historical Society of Michigan is hosting the virtual event The 1962 Michigan Constitutional Convention: Policy, Politics, and Citizen Engagement, with Doug Brook and Aria Dwoskin, on Tuesday, March 3, at 12:00 p.m.  Free for members; $7 for everyone else.

•  ICYMI: A report of a panel on the New Hampshire Constitution of 1776, with Lorianne Updike Schulzke (Concord Monitor).  The New York State Bar Association notes its sesquicentennial (NYSBA).  Eric Segall argues that "If 'It Takes a Theory to Beat a Theory,' Originalism Loses" (Dorf).  Robert Morton Duncan, the first Black justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio (CNO).

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

Manners and Menand on the Removal Power

Jane Manners, Fordham University, and Lev Menand, Columbia Law School, have posted The Power to Remove For Cause:

This Article reconstructs the common law of for cause removal in the United States. Drawing on extensive new analysis of state and federal materials, it shows that legislators typically paired fixed terms in office with “for cause” removal language to strike a balance: to protect officers from political termination while enabling the discharge of officials unable to carry out their duties effectively. Where a statute conferred a fixed term and authorized removal “for cause,” nearly all courts treated removal as an adjudicatory act—requiring notice, an opportunity to be heard, and de novo judicial review of the legal sufficiency of the asserted cause. By contrast, in schemes lacking fixed terms, some courts treated “for cause” language as merely admonitory, leaving process and review to political actors. Building on these findings, this Article recovers the significance of Reagan and Shurtleff, two largely forgotten Supreme Court cases from the early 1900s. These decisions form the doctrinal foundation on which much of the federal administrative state was subsequently built including institutions like the Federal Reserve Board. Our recovery provides a framework for evaluating ongoing disputes between the President and federal administrators. It cuts strongly against the government’s current position that “for cause” removals are nonreviewable and can be conducted without formal process—and offers concrete legal bases that courts today can use to police the outer limits of presidential removal power.

--Dan Ernst 

Price on Congress's "Power of the Purse"

Zachary Price, UC Law, San Francisco, has posted Effectuating Congress's Power of the Purse:

Congress’s power of the purse—its authority to control government spending—is one of its most important authorities. Yet its hold on the executive branch may be fraying, as recent presidents have applied appropriations statutes inventively and the current administration seems poised to assert still greater control over spending.  In part because advocates have advanced tendentious historical claims to support such unilateral executive action, this Article explores the history of how Congress in the past has effectuated its constitutional power over government spending.

The Article explains that although Congress’s power of fiscal control has generally been quite potent across U.S. history, Congress’s grip on executive spending was in some ways weaker before the development of the modern administrative and national-security state.  In the nineteenth century, although Congress exercised considerable informal influence over administration, executive officials frequently overran their appropriations, shifted money creatively between accounts, and spent money for purposes for which Congress did not clearly appropriate funds; in addition, they sometimes did the opposite and “impounded,” or declined to spend, funds that Congress did appropriate.  Such actions, however, occurred in a markedly different practical, legal, and institutional context from contemporary administration.

This history has at least three important implications in the present.  First, it undermines contemporary arguments for a unilateral executive prerogative based on nineteenth century spending practices.  Second, the history sheds new light on the fraught debate over presidential administration and the unitary executive branch, suggesting that congressional control over spending is an essential complement to presidential control over the executive branch.  Finally, the history may support greater contemporary application of mechanisms for holding individual officers liable for unlawful expenditures.

--Dan Ernst

Baronia et al. on Private Enforcement at the Founding

Nitisha Baronia, Jared Lucky, and Diego A. Zambrano have published Private Enforcement at the Founding and Article II in the California Law Review:

Article II vests the executive power in the President. Yet Congress routinely empowers private plaintiffs, not just the President, to enforce public regulatory laws. Because of this, in almost every area of law—from environmental and antitrust law to civil rights and securities law—the bulk of enforcement occurs through private civil suits rather than government-initiated litigation. Scholars and originalist judges are, for the first time, seizing on this apparent contradiction to argue that this mode of “private enforcement” may be an unconstitutional delegation of executive power. In TransUnion v. Ramirez, the Supreme Court observed that a “regime where Congress could freely authorize unharmed plaintiffs to sue defendants” would “infringe on the Executive Branch’s Article II authority.” This, along with invitations by Justices Alito and Thomas, ignited a series of lower court cases and historically grounded critiques of private enforcement. In an emblematic case, Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom drew on TransUnion and other cases to argue that “Article II’s vesting of the ‘executive Power’ in the President . . . prevents Congress from empowering private plaintiffs to sue for wrongs done to society.”

This emerging “Article II Challenge” relies, at its core, on a particular reading of Founding Era history and the original meaning of the Vesting Clause. Challengers argue that the Take Care Clause’s command that the President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” combined with Founding Era history, establishes that public rights claims—those seeking civil penalties or enforcement of regulatory violations against society—must be enforced exclusively by the executive branch. If the Supreme Court embraces this argument, hundreds of statutory schemes and thousands of claims will crumble.

This Article provides a historical corrective and refutes the emerging Article II Challenge. Our original historical investigation of “penal statutes”—a category of Founding-Era regulatory legislation that anticipated modern private rights of action—uncovers the deep constitutional foundation of this tradition of private enforcement. We offer three key historical contributions. First, we demonstrate that Founding Era lawmakers passed reams of statutes empowering private plaintiffs to sue for wrongs done to society, at both the state and federal levels. Private enforcement of regulatory law was ubiquitous in England, colonial America, and the Early Republic, a broader legal history that originalist proponents of the Article II Challenge have overlooked or misunderstood. Second, we show that post-ratification contemporaries saw no conflict between executive power and private enforcement, even when these suits vindicated public rights. Third, we reveal that the Crown, governors, and presidents could not control private penal statute claims through the writ of nolle prosequi or other mechanisms. We demonstrate this by surfacing a previously neglected 1791 case in which President Washington and Secretary Hamilton concluded that the President could not control civil litigants seeking statutory penalties, even when they proceeded nominally on behalf of the United States. This historical evidence weakens both the Article II Challenge and the “unitary executive” theory because it shows that Congress was free to empower private plaintiffs to execute the law. We then supplement those historical insights with an analysis of contemporary legal doctrines governing executive control over private enforcement. We conclude that private enforcement does not violate Article II, except under extremely narrow conditions. Our proposed constitutional test would leave most private enforcement schemes untouched. Ultimately, this Article provides a comprehensive historical and doctrinal defense of private enforcement writ large.

--Dan Ernst

Hayes on Antitrust Reform in Postwar Japan

Gregory Hayes, a 2025 graduate of Northwestern Law, has published The Failings of Post-War Japanese Antitrust Reforms, in the Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business:

This paper discusses the antitrust reform measures taken during the occupation of Japan following the end of World War I. These antitrust reforms included the dissolution of the zaibatsu business groups and the adoption of the Antimonopoly Act. However, the trust-busting and antitrust measures taken by Japan failed to prevent the eventual rise of keiretsu business groups and lower the concentration of corporate ownership in Japan. The primary reasons behind this failure were the inability of the reformers to fully dismantle the zaibatsu business groups and the changing priorities of the reformers due to the growing threat of the spread of communism in Asia. Despite the shortcomings of the Japanese antitrust reforms, the existence of the keiretsu business groups within Japan did not prevent Japan from successfully democratizing, experiencing significant economic growth, or reducing income inequality.

--Dan Ernst 

Strange on Penal Expertise and the Death Penalty in the 1950s

Carolyn Strange, Australian National University, has published, open access, The Contestation of Penal Expertise in the Age of the Expert: Thorsten Sellin and the Death Penalty in the 1950s, in Law and History Review:

Readings of the history of penal expertise trace its rise to the late nineteenth century and its decline to the late twentieth century, with the crumbling of the welfare state. Despite stark differences along Whiggish and Foucauldian lines in evaluations of that history, a consensus has emerged that the penal-welfare complex peaked around mid-century, dependent on correctional experts. Most studies of that phenomenon have focused on the institutionalization and “treatment” of “problem” populations while neglecting the role of penal expertise in critiques of capital punishment. When Britain and Canada undertook major inquiries into the death penalty in the 1950s, they turned to the world’s foremost expert on the subject: sociologist Thorsten Sellin. Yet, these government-appointed studies devalued his academic capital in favor of the lived expertise of police. By examining the contestation of Sellin’s sources, methods, and conclusions, this paper puts the chronology of penal welfarism and its experts into question. Not simply a case of ill-informed opinion prevailing over criminological evidence, the dismissive treatment of this penal expert highlights the need to apply a more capacious understanding of contending forms of expertise at numerous points in penal history, rather than setting the devaluation of penal expertise in the recent past.

--Dan Ernst 

MAH: Symposium on Birthright Citizenship

Modern American History 8:3 (November 2025) includes an open-access symposium on birthright citizenship:

The Historical Paths to and from Wong Kim Ark
Hardeep Dhillon, Beth Lew-Williams, Maddalena Marinari, Heather Ruth Lee, Anna Pegler-Gordon

Birthright citizenship, as a common law principle, was a cornerstone of the American Republic at its founding. Like many “universal” rights at the time, it was presumed to apply to white people, routinely denied to enslaved people, and deeply contested for free people of color. After the Civil War, amid the effort to rebuild a fractured Union and answer the decades-long Black freedom struggle, Congress sought to affirm and extend the principle of birthright citizenship in the U.S. Constitution. In 1868, Congress recognized the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The language of the Fourteenth Amendment was clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This included—as the congressional record reveals—the children of immigrants regardless of race, nationality, or desirability of their parents.

The Meaning of Alienage for Wong Kim Ark
Beth Lew-Williams

When Congress debated the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chinese immigration was not at the forefront of legislators’ minds. They were primarily focused on granting citizenship to newly emancipated Black people while continuing to deny it to Native people living outside of America’s jurisdiction. Their ultimate choice of words reflected these desires. The first sentence of the amendment proclaimed, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The Struggle for America’s Ballot Box and the Making of Wong Kim Ark
Hardeep Dhillon

On July 4, 1895, U.S. flags fluttered alongside red Chinese lanterns outside 753 Clay Street, the newly claimed San Francisco headquarters of the Native Sons of the Golden State (NSGS).1 Inside, NSGS president Chun Dick rose to speak. Standing at five feet two inches with short-cropped black hair, he shared that at least fifty men in NSGS were birthright citizens and ready to vote, and that more Chinese American voters would follow.2 Chun Dick, members of the Chinese community in attendance, their guests, and journalists in the room reflected a new political reality: Chinese American children, born in the United States, were coming of age and claiming a place in U.S. politics. Chinese immigrants constituted the largest racial minority in the state, and while many were ineligible to vote, their children who could were organizing to do so. Therefore, this moment on July 4 in San Francisco marked a turning point.

The Right to Return: Chinese Merchants, the Scott Act, and Legal Knowledge in an Era of Exclusion
Heather Ruth Lee

On October 7, 1888, approximately 176 Chinese passengers arrived in San Francisco aboard the S.S. Belgic. They carried laborer return certificates—documents that, until just days earlier, had guaranteed their right to reenter. But on October 1, President Grover Cleveland had signed the Scott Act into law, abruptly voiding those certificates. Officially, the act barred only Chinese laborers from returning. In practice, however, Chinese merchants and U.S.-born children of Chinese parents also traveled with laborer return certificates. They, too, would now be denied readmission.

Documenting Birthright Citizenship under Chinese Exclusion
Anna Pegler-Gordon

Following the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898, ethnic Chinese, other Asians, and almost all individuals born on U.S. soil secured the right to jus soli birthright citizenship. They could not, however, secure recognition of their citizenship without documentation, the key that linked birth to birthright. At a time when birth registration was not common, ethnic Chinese were able to establish U.S. citizenship in two main ways: through an order by a U.S. District Court or certification by U.S. immigration authorities.1 However, this documentation did not settle questions of the holder’s identity, immigration or citizenship status. Immigration inspectors generally doubted testimony given in these cases and believed that it was used to obtain fraudulent documentation of lawful immigration or citizenship status.

A Tale of Two Families: Birthright Citizenship and Family Reunification for Chinese Migrants in 1925
Maddalena Marinari

On July 11, 1924, the Lincoln reached Angel Island, the desolate and remote location of the infamous immigration station in California. Aboard the ship were nine Chinese wives, hopeful that they would soon reunite with their spouses who had preceded them to the United States. Until then, despite harsh immigration laws, many Chinese women had been admitted to the country because they were married to noncitizen merchants or to American citizens. Building on coverture principles that a man’s care and comfort were so important that his wife’s status should follow his, Chinese husbands had often argued successfully that their right to reunite with their families took precedence over existing immigration laws, which excluded Chinese immigrants because of their race. It was these laws, they contended, that had forced many Chinese migrants into transnational marriages in the first place. Despite these precedents, the immigration officers who inspected the women on the Lincoln rejected them all, regardless of their age, education, and class.

--Dan Ernst 

Lamoreaux and Eisenberg on Patents and Separation of Powers

Take this, Arthrex!   Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Yale University, and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, University of Michigan Law School, have posted Separation of Powers or Division of Labor? Patent Interference Disputes, the Grand Narrative, and the History of the Administrative State, 1790-1940:

US Patent Office, 1891 (LC)

We use the history of the Patent Office to challenge the Grand Narrative of separation of powers that the current Supreme Court is using to invalidate congressional designs for administrative agencies.  Focusing on the adjudication of patent interference disputes—cases in which two or more inventors applied for patents for essentially the same technology—we find that the division of labor between the Patent Office and the courts shifted repeatedly and dramatically over the century and a half preceding the Administrative Procedure Act.  Rather than worries about separation of powers, the main drivers of change were (1) the Patent Office’s efforts to curb inventors’ exploitation of interference procedures to delay the award of patents to rivals and (2) the need to manage the workload that interference appeals imposed on the overburdened Patent Office and courts.  Innovations in Patent Office procedures led to dramatic improvements in the efficiency of its frontline adjudication of interferences, but officials found it much more difficult to prevent losing parties from abusing appeals opportunistically.  At the behest of the Patent Office, Congress repeatedly revised the appeals process for interferences, trying out direct review by ad hoc arbitration panels, individual judges, and variously constituted courts.  It even eliminated direct appeals of interference decisions from 1870 until 1893, while continuing to provide for appeals from rejections of patent applications (where opportunistic delays posed less serious problems).  Although interference parties sometimes raised legal challenges to these review structures, they reached a dead end in the Supreme Court, which throughout the nineteenth century deferred to Congress’s authority to design the system.  Finally, in 1939, after a century of trial and error, the Patent Office convinced Congress to eliminate all internal appeals in interference cases within the Patent Office, to authorize the Patent Office to issue patents based on its frontline adjudications of priority, and to shift review of interference decisions entirely to the courts.  Again, this change did not apply to rejections of patent applications, which were still reviewed internally before they could be appealed to the courts. Both the great variety of appeal structures enacted over the years and the repeated divergence in the treatment of appeals of interferences and rejections support our emphasis on the primary role that pragmatic concerns played in the evolving division of labor between the Patent Office and the courts.  This history reveals flexible adaptation over time rather than conformity to a standard model of separation of powers traceable to the framers. 

--Dan Ernst

JCWE: Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis

The Journal of the Civil War Era 16:1 (March 2026) is a special issue of interest to legal historians, assembled by its editors, Kate Masur, Northwestern University, and Gregory Downs, University of California, Davis.  In addition to a review essay and book reviews, it includes the following:

What Is To Be Done? Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis
Gregory P. Downs, Kate Masur

Burrowed in the Bloodline: The Stories That Sustain Me
Ryan W. Booth

The Specter of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 Today
Justene Hill Edwards

Parodic Exaggeration, Transparent Lying, and Conspiracy Thinking in US History
Elaine S. Frantz

A-Mouldering in Our Graves?
John W. Hall

Survival with Sanity: Sarah Cook, Black Optimistic Realist
Scott Hancock

Lessons From My Grandfather's FBI File
Martha S. Jones

Slouching Towards Arlington House
W. Caleb Mcdaniel

The Current Situation of 2025: Thoughts on Media, the Public Sphere, and Education
Scott Reynolds Nelson

Storytelling, Digital Archives, and Black Women's Reproductive History in Real Time
Tamika Y. Nunley

A Guide to Surviving Interesting Times: Lessons from an Unpredictable Past
Erika Pani

We the People State of Mississippi": Letter Writing, Archiving, and Democracy from Reconstruction to Today
Lindsey R. Peterson

In 2025, an Echo of the 1800s: The Fight for Black Citizenship in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations
Alaina E. Roberts

Habits of Mind: How History Teaches Humility
Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Empathy, Humility, and Good Faith: Studying History in Times of Crisis
Margaret M. Storey

Meeting the Moment at Elizabeth City State University
Melissa N. Stuckey

The Freedman's Memorial
Robert K. Sutton

Exceptional Times
Michael Vorenberg

The Civil War's Unfinished Business
Fay A. Yarbrough

--Dan Ernst

Larsen and McSweeney on the Judicial Use of Medieval Treatises

Alli Orr Larsen and Thomas McSweeney, William & Mary Law School, have posted Medieval Treatises and the Judicial Search for a Usable Past, which is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review:

Bracton (HLS)

The Supreme Court’s recent turn to history and tradition has prompted a renewed interest in the far distant past – the laws and customs of the Middle Ages. But medieval treatises are full of traps for the unwary. This article – a joint enterprise between a medieval legal historian and a Supreme Court scholar – carefully explores what makes these treatises uniquely complicated and easy to get wrong. To start, they are written in Latin and, sometimes, Old French. In many instances, the underlying medieval decisions they reference are destroyed and gone forever. Because there was no photocopier or even printing press back then, treatises often come in competing versions reflecting not only multiple authors but also successive copyists who made substantive changes. And legal texts were just different in the thirteenth century. Treatises were used for purposes as diverse as passing on cultural values, advising rulers on how to govern, and even teaching people the ideals of friendship. Put simply: medieval law is hard to find, hard to read, and even harder to put into context.

For the American judge or law clerk who is strapped for time but wants to make a point about a long tradition, the understandable temptation is to reach for an authority like a medieval treatise that feels familiar. After all, modern legal treatises (think Wright and Miller) are recognized as trustworthy authorities to cite. And today translated versions of medieval treatises are easy to find digitally. But that ease of access and familiarity of authority are illusory. Often the very things that make these medieval texts feel familiar to modern readers would have made them idiosyncratic to thirteenth century audiences. Our goal in this article is to raise the caution flag for judicial consumption of medieval treatises: a user-friendly useable past can lead modern lawyers and jurists astray and should not be consumed without scrutiny and care. 

--Dan Ernst 

Karl Llewellyn Archive at the Perelman Centre in Brussels

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE.  H/t: DS]

The Twining-Llewellyn Fund is a unique collection of several hundred documents and works collected by William Twining (1934-2025) over the course of his career. The collection is housed at the Perelman Centre in Brussels. A significant portion of these documents illuminate the life and work of Karl N. Llewellyn. The documents in the archive, sometimes original, often commented on by Twining, date from the 1910s to the 1960s. The collection contains the bulk of Llewellyn’s publications, the transcription of several dozen unpublished works and some of his lecture notes. Researchers will also be able to read many of his personal and professional letters, as well as dozens of documents related to his research and the development of the UCC. The archive is open to the public and can be consulted by researchers.  The full catalogue of the Llewellyn archive can be accessed here.

[The main body of Llewellyn's papers are at the University of Chicago, but this is an impressive collection, particularly for as a comprehensive bibliography of Llewellyn's writings, published and unpublished.]

Weekend Roundup

• Boston College Law's notice of its new legal historian, Marco Basile (BC Law).   

• Mary Bilder, BC Law, will deliver “The Perils of Sex: Catharine Macaulay’s Constitution of Liberty” as the 13th Annual John Patrick Diggins Memorial Lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center on Wednesday, February 25, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.  The event will be livestreamed. 

• Over at Legal History Miscellany: Identifying Women Jurors and Institutionalising Women’s Citizenship, by Kay Crosby. 

• G. Edward White, UVA Law, discusses his new biography Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgement on the American Bar Association's Modern Law Library podcast.  

• Jessica Lake, Melbourne Law School, discusses her book Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (UVA Law). 

• Clare Cushman discusses US Supreme Court Justice Day helped establish the Court's recusal practice (SCHS).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued its February catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• Columbia University's new Obama Presidential Oral History collection includes quite a few interviews of interest to legal historians.

• A notice of Confluences of Law and History. Irish Legal History Society Discourses and Other Papers, edited by Niamh Howlin and Felix M. Larkin (Irish Catholic).

• ICYMI: The groundbreaking legal career of Judge Lucile Watts (Michigan Public Radio).  The “Renaissance” in Civic Education: Beyond the Salmon P. Chase Center (The Lantern).  Bhagat Singh Thind and his Citizenship Case (New York Alamanck).

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

Dripps on Sentencing Discretion

Donald A. Dripps, University of San Diego School of Law, has published Sentencing Discretion and the Constitution: Due Process of Time (Oxford University Press).  It includes a very substantial chapter on the history of sentencing discretion.

The U.S. Supreme Court maintains that prosecutorial discretion to charge different offenses authorized by the penal code is practically limited only by the penal code itself. Because typical offense conduct violates multiple statutes carrying different maximum  and minimum  sentences, by choosing the charge, the prosecution commonly also chooses the sentence. The Court, however, holds that when judges exercise sentencing discretion, due process requires impeccable neutrality and adversary hearings.

Sentencing Discretion and the Constitution: Due Process of Time addresses the fundamental incompatibility of the U.S. Supreme Court's approach to the sentencing power of judges as compared to prosecutors. The Court says that when prosecutors induce a guilty plea by filing lesser charges than the code allows, the defendant is getting a break rather than being strong-armed. This doctrinal fiction persists because neither dissenting justices nor academic critics have yet justified a baseline by which the infliction of years  or even decades  in prison for refusing to plead guilty or to provide information, should be treated as a coercive threat rather than an offer permitted in the "give and take" of plea bargaining. In theory, the charges filed should be proportional to culpability, not the most severe the code permits. This raises another hard problem: theorists have not to date advanced a persuasive account of proportionate punishment.

Unlike prior works, Sentencing Discretion and the Constitution exposes the connections between these problems and proposes a unified solution. The right against excessive punishment, like the right against erroneous conviction, is best understood as a right to procedural justice. More broadly, curtailing prosecutorial sentencing is an essential step toward curtailing mass incarceration  a problem that otherwise is more likely to get worse than better. 

--Dan Ernst 

CFP: Forum on International Legal History & Philosophy

[We have the following CFP for a Forum on International Legal History & Philosophy at the Chanakya National Law University in Patna, India.  DRE]

This Call for ideas (in the form of detailed abstracts) invites scholars working in International Law, Constitutional Law, and Legal Philosophy, whether individually or through interdisciplinary approaches. The contours of the forum are outlined below in two overlapping and porous themes.

Aims.  We intend to stimulate discourse on international legal history and theory employing regional and archival lens. We expect a rough sketch of your clearly formulated idea to make such stimulations. We aim to discuss the vitality of your research ideas for them to be transformed into future research (beyond this forum). 

Thematic Background: Legal History.  The word 'civilization' has re-entered academic discourse, only this time it is the East which is assertive of it. India is asserting its civilizational heritage by calling itself the 'mother of democracy'. However, the evidence of it (for example, Sangha) points more towards democratic values, like public participation, than a political system of democracy. Alongside this civilizational assertion is a renewed emphasis on "decolonizing" India, including in the field of law, though both the efficacy of these efforts and the normative framework of "decolonization" itself remain contested. While these debates have gained traction in International Relations (see the March 2023 issue of International Affairs on "India as a 'civilizational state'"), their implications for international law, legal history, and legal philosophy remain underexplored.

This Call invites scholars of international law, legal history, and legal philosophy to intervene in this debate through a focused regional and archival lens. While earlier works, such as C. H. Alexandrowicz's discussion of the Mandala system situating Kautilya within the Law of Nations (1965), have addressed cognate themes, this project concentrates specifically on Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, including their pre-modern formations. Thus, Pataliputra, Azimabad, and Patna, while essentially the same site, retain their individuality and continuity across time and space. Contributions on neglected princely states and provinces such as Arah, Awadh, Benaras, Baksar, Betiyah, Champaran, Darbhanga, Sasaram, Sagauli, among others, are especially welcome. 

Many of these entities were classified as "Zemindari estates" rather than "Princely states." Colonial Bihar thus reveals how international law sustained empire not by outright denial of sovereignty, but by withholding international legal personality from polities that governed in every meaningful sense. The contemporary relevance of these discriminatory practices persists, as illustrated by the 1st and the 26th Amendment to the Indian Constitution, land reform Act of Bihar and U.P. 1950, State of Bihar v Radha Krishna Singh & Ors (1983) and The Vesting of Bettiah Raj Properties Act, 2024.

The Call also encourages works on figures such as Veer Kunwar Singh and Begum Hazrat Mahal, particularly research drawing on archives from the National Archives of India, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, and the Khuda Baksh Oriental Library (Patna). Finally, it seeks renewed readings of colonial constitutional instruments, such as the Pitt's India Act (1784) and the Government of India Act (1833), and the constitution-like document drafted during the early days of the 1857 revolt.

The Call, therefore, asks: How does colonial legal invisibility structure postcolonial international law? What legal techniques differentiated Zemindari estates and Princely states? How do colonial legal categories shape postcolonial constitutional disputes? What do colonial legislations tell us about the constitutional origins of international law? How did British colonial rule transform indigenous sovereignty into quasi-sovereign authority without formal annexation (of places like Betiyah-Raj and Darbhanga-Raj)? 
           
Thematic Background: Indian Legal Philosophy.  A related interest of this call is Indian (legal) philosophy. While no Indian philosophical school explicitly identifies itself as "legal", the Nyaya tradition, through its sustained engagement with Pramana, Prameya, Tarka, Nirnaya, Sabda, Artha etc., offers a systematic framework grounded in logic and epistemology.

This project is interested in works exploring the connections between the Nyaya school and decolonization and retains the regional focus. Gotama (or Aksapada Gautama) who composed Nyaya Sutras, Panini (composer of Astadhyayi), Gangesa (pioneer of Navya-Nyaya branch), Udayanacarya (defended Nyaya school against Buddhist critiques), Vachaspati Misra (Critique of Nyaya school), Kautilya (whose thoughts on Anviksiki was used by Gotama for Nyaya school) were all either based in the Bihar region or wrote their works here. 

We, therefore, encourage scholars to explore the fields of Nyaya, Vaisesika, Navya- Nyaya (through works of Gangesa), and of Panini's Astadhyay1. While Panini tells us how reasoning works Nyaya explains why reasoning works. Scholars working exclusively in the field of philosophy, and those working on legal philosophy are welcome to respond to this call.

Participation details.  If your research aligns with either of these themes or questions, we invite you to participate in this Forum, as:

1.    Presenters.  If you would like to present your research, you are requested to submit a 500-word abstract, clearly setting out

• the central theme(s) of your research, 
• your core research question(s),  
• three to five literatures you are engaging with,
• your name, position and affiliation. 

We will select abstracts based upon the novelty, strength and coherence. The selected participants will then be required to submit a preliminary draft of not more than 1500 words one week before the Forum, i.e. on 8th April 2026 for thorough academic engagement with your research. Participants will have ten minutes to present their work at the forum. 

There will be no sections or panels at the forum. Each participant will be expected to attend all the presentations. This is aimed at breaking departmental barriers and fostering interdisciplinary engagements from which both lawyers, historians and philosophers can gain.

2.    Engaged Listeners.  Scholars from the field of law, history and philosophy (including teachers, PhD Scholars) and students (including graduate and post graduate students) who are interested in understanding and potentially developing future work on these themes with us are invited to join the forum as Engaged Listeners. Engaged listeners will have access to all presentations at the forum and will have chance to interact with the presenters within and outside the forum, providing an opportunity to refine their research interests and to contribute to the project in the future.

For participating as engaged listeners, individuals are requested to submit a 200-word statement outlining their reasons and motivations for participating, and their primary areas of interest (identifying two to three such areas), and their name, position and affiliation. 

Presenters and Engaged Listeners should send their abstracts to ilhilpf@gmail.com.

Date and Venue.  10 AM to 5 PM, 15 April 2026 at Chanakya National Law University, Patna, Bihar, India.

Key dates:
15 March 2026.  Submission of abstracts (by presenters) & interests (by engaged listeners)   
25 March 2026   Communication of selection (for presenters & listeners)   
5 April 2026       Registration   
8 April 2026       Research outline submission (by presenters)  
 

Registration details:  
For presenters:

• For undergraduate, postgraduate students and PhD scholars: Rs. 500/- 
• For teachers and practitioners: Rs. 1000/- 

There is no participation fee for the engaged listeners.

The Project is being led by Aman Kumar, PhD Candidate at the Australian National University, Canberra. The Forum is convened by Dr Swati Singh Parmar (DNLU, Jabalpur) and Dr Aditya Roy (CNLU, Patna).

Colburn on Navigable Waters

Jamison E. Colburn, Penn State Dickinson Law, has posted Nineteenth-Century Navigable Waters:

The Supreme Court's doctrinal Odyssey with "navigable waters" began in the nineteenth century and spanned a tremendous range of constitutional and statutory disputes. Indeed, by century's end, the Court had taken more opportunities to opine on what comprised "navigable waters" than perhaps any other doctrinal term. The Court's misadventures with the term continued in the twentieth century, but those contests were shaped in largest part by the confusing cross currents churned up from the nineteenth. Today, as the Court so regularly acts by doctrinal fiat, this history should be under a great deal more scrutiny than it has been in a long time. What it reveals, beyond considerable judicial conceit, is the treachery inherent in judges deciding for the republic what our real interests in these waters are and why and how they should be governed. 

--Dan Ernst 

"Essays on the History of Equity"

Essays on the History of Equity, edited by David Foster and Charles Mitchell, University College London, has been published by Bloomsbury/Hart.  The contributors are quite eminent and able.

When we speak of 'equity', do we mean Aristotelian epieikeia, civilian aequitas, a theological or juridical conscience, the common law concept of the 'equity of the statute', or merely the rules applied by the Court of Chancery before 1875? The purpose of this volume is to chart the evolution of equity in English legal history from the medieval period to the present day. Whether by investigating the historical foundations of the modern law, the jurisprudential underpinnings of the equitable jurisdiction, or the socio-political context of discrete legal developments, this collection exposes the strands of thought which 'equity' comprises and the mechanisms by which its rules evolved.

 --Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

The Julien Mezey Dissertation Award

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities is excited to announce that we are accepting submissions for the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.

The Association seeks the submission of outstanding work from a wide variety of perspectives, including but not limited to law and cultural studies, law and critical race studies, law and gender and sexuality, legal theory and environmentalism, law and literature, law and psychoanalysis, law and visual studies, legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence. Scholars completing humanities-oriented dissertations in SJD and related programs, as well as those earning PhDs, are encouraged to submit their work. Applicants eligible for the 2026 award must have defended their dissertations successfully between March 2025 and March 2026.

The Association will cover the Mezey Prize winner’s travel and lodging costs to our annual meeting at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, Illinois.  Nominations for the 2026 award must be received on or before March 15, 2026.  For submission instructions, please see our website.

Barnett and Barnett on the Burwood Ejectment Case

Katy Barnett, Melbourne Law School, and Lynne Barnett have posted "Equity’s Darling" and the Burwood Ejectment Case: A Turning Point in Colonial Australian Law, which appeared in Australian Law Journal:

The Burwood Ejectment case arose when the ad hoc executor and trustee of a will in early colonial Sydney sold off Burwood Estate to meet the testator's debts, after receiving a court order empowering him to do so. Twenty years later, the testator's de facto wife and children successfully voided the sale. The purchaser was ejected, notwithstanding the fact that he was a bona fide purchaser for value without notice. The decision undermined confidence in security of transactions in the Colony and created a political furore and ongoing disputes. It is suggested that the case was a contributing factor to the creation of the Judge in Equity in New South Wales and illustrates broader issues with security of title and the political and legal organisation of early colonial Australia. 

--Dan Ernst 

Siddali to Speak on 19th-Century US Constitutions in Comparative Perspective

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

Please join the State Constitutions Lab on Thursday February 26 @ 1:00 PM (Eastern US) for a Zoom seminar with Silvana R. Siddali, [St. Louis University, to discuss her paper "Fire Eaters, Revolutionaries, and the Rule of Law: Nineteenth Century State Constitutions in Comparative Perspective."

[Professor Siddali's] area of specialization includes constitutional, legal, and political history of the United States, in particular, the role of human rights in the development of democratic and judicial institutions.  Her current book, Transatlantic Constitution-making: Struggles over Democracy, the Rule of Law, and Human Rights, 1820-1870 is under contract at Johns Hopkins University Press and focuses on nineteenth-century transatlantic political communities that were connected through an exchange of ideas, trade, migrations, and technological innovations.

This meeting will be held on Zoom and a copy of the paper will be sent to all who RSVP here.

Reynolds's "Instruments of Peacemaking 1918-1941"

New from Hart Law: Instruments of Peacemaking 1918-1941: The Failure of Diplomacy, by Michael Reynolds:

This book is a sequel to Instruments of Peacemaking 1870-1914 in that it considers how attempts were made to settle disputes between states without recourse to war after 'the war to end all wars'.

It considers the idealism of President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points which formed the basis for the Armistice in 1918, and his scheme for a League of Nations providing for self-determination of nations and 'collective security' for European states.

It goes on to analyse the key challenges that faced statesmen and jurists in attempting to resolve disputes under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. It considers the consequences of the Peace Conference of 1919 as well as defects in the treaty as an instrument for resolving future disputes and tensions between the victors and the vanquished.

Cases referred to the Reparations Commission and to arbitration under the Treaty of Versailles regarding boundary, industrial property, and shipping including the Lusitania claims are considered. More importantly, it analyses the diplomatic challenges faced by statesmen after 1919. The decline and failure of Wilsonian idealism, the League of Nations, collective security, and diplomacy are traced through the various diplomatic exchanges that took place between governments from official records and contemporaneous accounts of the times as well as academic sources. Mr Chamberlain's private diplomacy to appease Hitler is critically analysed. The final chapter briefly considers aspects of America's isolationism resulting in the attack on Pearl Harbor and her peacetime state of unreadiness.

--Dan Ernst 

Blackhawk on Time and the Constitution

Maggie Blackhawk, New York University School of Law, has posted Foreword: The History of the Constitution is Our Future, which is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review:

As constitutional interpretation becomes rooted ever more deeply into the past the Constitution seemingly has less and less to say about our present. It seems to offer little principled direction for navigating what many describe as a constitutional crisis. On questions ranging from birthright citizenship and territorial acquisition to aggressive federal immigration enforcement, executive intervention beyond U.S. borders, and the “history and tradition” of annexed territories such as Hawai’i, the Constitution’s familiar sources of authority and traditional narratives seem to falter. These domains appear to tread into empty constitutional landscapes and newly discovered territory.  

Scholars have increasingly traced this backward-looking orientation to conservative legal movements of the last half century. But the impulse to seek constitutional meaning in the past is not new. Long before the Supreme Court embraced originalism, and long before the modern turn to “history and tradition,” jurists and scholars assumed that the Constitution could not be understood apart from its origins and development. Constitutional meaning was thought to emerge from historical inquiry. The question, then, was not whether constitutional interpretation should engage with the past, but which past—and through what historical method. 

This Foreword argues that our present constitutional impasse stems, at least in part, not solely from excessive attention to the past but from fixation on a particular kind of past. Modern constitutional theory, I suggest, has been increasingly bounded by what scholars in the historical and social sciences call a methodological nationalism. By nationalism, I do not mean to invoke familiar federalism debates. Nor do I use the term nationalism as a pejorative or a critique of those whose research centers the United States and its founders. 

Rather, I seek to draw attention to a shared theory of the Constitution as the legal expression of a bounded people, unfolding within a stable territorial space, and progressing through a coherent national narrative over time. Within this account, constitutional history exalts moments of founding, amendment, and judicial interpretation, resting on the premise that the nation sprung, whole cloth, from those moments. This account presses to the periphery histories that fall outside the modern nation-state—including, for example, the movement and establishment of borders, the acquisition and governance of new lands and peoples, and processes of development that led to stable borders and the presumed homogeneity of institutions, peoples, and laws over time. 

This Foreword recovers an alternative approach to constitutional history, one developed by the founders of American history and since largely abandoned, but once central to constitutional thought. Because these earlier methods developed before the consolidation of a stable nation, they did not take the modern nation-state as their starting point. Instead, they examined how the Constitution was used to produce the nation itself: to draw and redraw borders, to acquire and govern territory, to organize and govern non-subject populations, to determine the terms of political membership, and to authorize the projection of power across the continent and beyond. 

By centering a constitutional history that unsettles the presumption of timeless nationalism, this Foreword shows that many of the most pressing constitutional controversies are not beyond the reach of the Constitution but are, instead, at its core. 

--Dan Ernst 

JACH (Winter 2026)

The Winter 2026 issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History is now available online:

Sovereign Power and the Sweeping Clause
John Mikhail

Contemporary disputes involving the separation of powers take on a different light when they are framed in terms of powers of the Government of the United States itself. The “all other powers” provision of the Necessary and Proper Clause distinguishes government powers from executive powers and gives Congress distinct legislative authorities with respect to each of these categories.

Symposium: A Tribute to Kenneth Kersch

Ken Kersch and the New Legal History: Beyond the Internalist/Externalist Divide
Dennis J. Wieboldt III

For Ken Kersch, developments in twentieth-century American constitutional law could not be adequately explained by either neat doctrinal evolution or the raw exercise of political power.

Ken Kersch as a Scholar of “The Other”
Sanford Levinson

Ken Kersch’s remarkable scholarship generates profound questions about the difficulties—and even limits—of truly engaging with those who do not share certain ontological or epistemological commitments.

Ken Kersch and the Meaning of Development: Law, Ideas, and the Politics of Constitutional Change
Michael A. Dichio and Paul E. Herron

Ken Kersch showed us that constitutional development is not a story of inevitable progress, but of contested traditions, shifting coalitions, and the discontinuous, non-linear unfolding of political development.

Broadening The Terrain of Political and Constitutional Thought, Unmasking Delusional Constitutional Arguments
Carol Nackenoff

By broadening the terrain of political and constitutional thought, Kersch brilliantly examined how constitutional faiths are forged and “law stories” are woven to create common identities.

The Roberts Court and the Past and Future of Religion as a Constitutional Concern
Julie Novkov

The Roberts Court’s reconfiguration of free exercise and anti-establishment doctrine is not a simple conservative backlash. Rather, it creates a viable path for empowering a right-wing religious political project.

The Roberts Court’s Reconstruction of Church and State
George Thomas

Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) breaks with past understandings of the Free Exercise Clause by merging a state discriminating against religious individuals with a state declining to fund religious institutions.

Five Lessons from Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution for the Present Moment
James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain

Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution helps us see the second Trump Administration, not as an aberration, but as the fulfillment of certain conservative ideas that have been “hiding in plain sight.”

Forgetting Nothing, Learning Nothing: Constitutional Scholarship and the Political Development of the Modern Supreme Court
Calvin TerBeek

The "Lochner Era" was invented decades after the fact, and the 1970s were legal liberalism's zenith, not its decline. Constitutional law professors' standard story of legal liberalism gets it wrong on the front and back ends.

States’ Rights and Civil Rights: Barry Goldwater, Bill Buckley, Richard Nixon, and Southern Realignment
Sean Beienburg

Did invocations of states’ rights by southern segregationists permanently discredit constitutional federalism? A re-examination of the 1960s political realignment suggests Americans can embrace—or re-embrace—this feature of our Constitution, while remembering state autonomy is a strong presumption but one that has always been checked by the Constitution’s rights guarantees.

The Phenomenal Constitution
Austin Steelman

In Conservatives and the Constitution, Ken Kersch demonstrated that the continually reimagined Constitution is a “phenomenon” in American life, not an epiphenomenal result of more substantial politics.

Orthodox Originalism and Conservative Identity after Ken Kersch
Logan Everett Sawyer III

Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution showed not just that the conservative political movement shaped arguments about the Constitution, but that arguments about the Constitution were key to transforming a varied group of interests disaffected by New Deal and Great Society Liberalism into a coherent political identity and thus a powerful political order.

Penningroth in Conversation at the University of Nebraska

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the U.S. Law and Race Initiative of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  DRE.]

Join us this Friday, Feb 20 from 1:30-2:30pm (cst) for an in-depth conversation between Dylan Penningroth and Will Thomas on the power of family and local archives in telling Black legal histories. Register now to join the discussion via zoom.

Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective

Modern Criminal Law Review has announced Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective, an international workshop to be held at 12 PM ET on June 24, 2026, featuring contributors a special issue, guest edited by Clifford Ando, University of Chicago.  Other participants include Beth Berkowitz, Columbia University; Ari Bryen, Vanderbilt University; Ernest Caldwell, St. Mary’s, London; Benjamin Gallant, Harvard University; Adriaan Lanni, Harvard University; Mark Letteney, University of Washington; Seth Richardson, University of Chicago; and Andrew Wolpert, University of Florida.  The organizers add:

To join us for this free online event, please register here. Registration is encouraged, but not required; if you prefer to join the event directly, head over to the MCLR+ YouTube channel at the time of the event (please note the time zone). All attendees will have the opportunity to post questions and comments via YouTube live chat.

--Dan Ernst

Sunday Roundup

• NYU Law's notice of Ashraf Ahmed, Lev Menand, and Noah Rosenblum's article, "The Making of Presidential Administration,” upon its naming as winner of the annual Award for Scholarship in Administrative Law from the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. The notice also includes a Q&A with Rosenblum. 

• Historical research figured prominently in the decision of Judge Chad F. Kenney, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, turning aside a challenge to the qui tam provisions from the False Claims Act on unitary executive grounds (JDSupra). 

• A notice of UC Berkeley professor David Henkin's legal-history-laden course on love, sex and marriage. 

• In March, SWOP NSW will host walking tours of Sydney’s historic "red light district."  “With 8 speakers each evening, the tour will cover both the personal anecdotes of those involved in sex work and the legislation that has shaped their lives. Speakers will share their stories on various topics, including current, historical, and future laws that aim to protect sex workers, as well as the advocates who have been instrumental in achieving these legal advancements." 

• Vice President Mike Pence and former Deputy Assistant to the President Greg Jacob are teaching the course, The Character of the American Constitution, at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government.  The first class “walked students through the origins of the Declaration of Independence, exploring what the Declaration meant and where the writers got the ideas.”  (GMU).

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Via H-Net: a University of Chicago job posting for an "Instructional Professor in Law, Letters, and Society."  

• Daniel Kuehn discusses a paper W. E. B. Du Bois wrote when he was a Harvard graduate student that, Kuehn argues, anticipated important insights in marginalist wage theory (AEA).

• The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia has opened a new gallery, titled “America’s Founding.” Per local reporting, it "provides attendees with an interactive experience on the early conflicts leading up to the creation of the U.S. Constitution, including early protests, the American Revolution and the adoption of the Bill of Rights." 

• The National Constitution Center has announced the appointment of Jon Meacham as its Semiquincentennial Scholar, "a one-year appointment designed to anchor the Center’s intellectual and civic programming celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary" (NCC).

• In related news, the ARC Justice Clinic at Penn Carey Law, representing the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and The Black Journey, has filed an amicus brief in City of Philadelphia v. Burgum, et al. As the Clinic's website explains, "[t]he case concerns the removal of educational exhibits about slavery from the President’s House Site near Independence Hall, where President George Washington enslaved nine people in the late eighteenth century." Read the brief here. 

• From In Custodia Legis: an invitation to "watch a recording of a Kluge Center Event 'Testing for Witches in 16th Century Germany.'"  

• Rory Cox on Hittite Laws of War, summarizing a chapter in the fourth volume of Laws of Yesterday’s Wars (Brill), edited by Samuel White.   

• Alexandra Natapoff, Harvard Law School, has launched Rule of Law 101, a free, ten-part video series, which "features world-class legal experts from top law schools around the nation explaining and analyzing important decisions by the Supreme Court" (Harvard Law Today).  

• Jud Campbell, Jonathan Gienapp, and Orin Kerr discuss originalism before Stanford Law students in a recording appearing in the Institute for Justice's Short Circuit Podcast. 

•  On April 14, 2026 at 10:00am (EDT), the Modern Criminal Law Review will hold a book forum live on YouTube on  David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton 2025).  In addition to Professor Garland, the panelists include Amna Akbar, University of Minnesota, Law; Patricia Faraldo Cabana and José Ángel Brandariz García, University of A Coruña, Law; Katja Franko, University of Oslo, Criminology, Rocío Lorca, University of Chile, Law; and Sara Wakefield, Rutgers University, Criminal Justice.  Register here.

• ICYMI: Six Black Legal Trailblazers (Solove Law).  Trailblazing Black Ohio Lawyers (CNO).  The descendants of Plessy and of Ferguson at Tulane Law.   

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