Weekend Roundup

• Ronald Collins interviews David O. Stewart, who clerked for Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., in OT 1979, about the writing of Justice Powell's opinion in the commercial speech landmark Central Hudson.

• Idaho's attorney general is in search of missing volumes of his predecessors' reports. 

• Mississippi State University to receive rare book collection: “The donations were assembled from the private library of John Robinson Block, publisher of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade.... [It] spans books printed from 1801 to 1898 and includes the scarce first publication of the laws of the Mississippi Territory from 1801, session laws from the territory, the first digest of laws in the territory, Civil War-era imprints along with reconstruction and post reconstruction laws through 1898.  [H/t: Starkville Daily News]

• On AHA Today: Philippa Strum on Why Americans Get to Talk So Much.  Hint: Anita Whitney had something to do with it. 

• Balinkinization has been posting essays by participants in advance of a conference, organized by Texas Law’s Joseph Fishkin and Willy Forbath, on The Constitution and Economic Inequality on January 29 and 30th, 2016.  Pretty much all of them have a historical dimension, but see especially those of Mark Graber, Gerard N. Magliocca, Ajay Mehrotra, William J. Novak, and James Gray Pope.

• As part of a report for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program on the legal issues associated with driverless vehicles, Santa Clara Law’s Dorothy Glancy. Robert Peterson, and Kyle Graham include an interesting section “on early legal response to technologies such as steamboats, railroads, telegraphy, automobiles, airplanes, and computers, with an emphasis on how the law has been invoked to address the perceived risks associated with these devices and systems.”

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