A few items came to our notice too late for our Saturday Weekend Roundup, so here is an addendum.
- In The Globe and Mail, James Phillips, University of Toronto, observes that historians are wish to have discussions among the justices of Canada’s Supreme Court closed for some time to ensure that the justices don’t self censor, but fifty years?
- Time Magazine asked seven historians for suggestions of people for President Trump to pardon. We agree with the NFL players that taking up the president's suggestion risks obscuring the need for a systemic response to mass incarceration, but if you’d care to see the historians’ choices, they’re here. H/t: Mary Bilder.
- Amy Westbrook, Washburn University School of Law, and David A. Westbrook, SUNY Buffalo Law School, have posted Snapchat's Gift, a paper on a recent offering of non-voting common shares by Snap, the company that owns Snapchat. They refer to some of the usual suspects in the history of corporate law (Berle & Means; Dodge v. Ford) but more extensively to a less familiar source, Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay, “The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies.”
- Over at the Faculty Lounge, Eric Muller comments on Steve Vladeck’s tweeted alert that the "Defense Department submitted a brief to a military commission favorably citing and extensively quoting Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943)." Professor Muller calls this "a fateful moment," in which a lamentable precedent threatens to escape the "anti-canon." DOD quoted Hirabayashi for the proposition that “The war power of the national government is ‘the power to wage war successfully.’” That internal quotation is to an essay by Charles Evans Hughes, in which the once and future member of the US Supreme Court insisted that the United States could fight a total war while remaining under the Constitution. (Matthew Waxman, Columbia Law School, has written the indispensable article on the essay.) So far as I can tell from the reproduced portion of the DOD brief, it argued for unreviewable discretion in military officials in wartime, which was nearly the opposite of Hughes's position.
Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.
