Weekend Roundup

• Last Thursday,  the Irish Women Lawyers’ Association sponsored “Lawful Attire,” a lecture on the history of lawyers’ clothing, by Hilary O’Kelly, lecturer in visual culture at the National College of Art and Design.  Irish Legal News.

• The Scotsman's obituary of Alan Watson, "Scots-born legal scholar who wrote groundbreaking texts on Roman law." 

• We were in the library with some time to kill when our eye fell on a recent acquisition, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla’s He Reo Wāhine (Auckland University Press), “a bold work that rediscovers the lost voices of Maori women in nineteenth-century New Zealand through their own words.”  Of course, legal sources are one place where the lost voices were found, especially in connection with land sales and testamentary matters.

• Jeffrey Winn reviews Jane Sherron De Hart’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf), in the New York Law Journal.

• Stanford Law School’s press release on Amalia D. Kessler’s receipt of the 2018 John Phillip Reid Book Award at this year’s annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History for Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877. 

• In September "the Tobin Project gathered ten scholars for the first meeting of our research inquiry on When Democracy Breaks. This project seeks to explore past cases of democratic collapse and identify the factors that led to decline, with the goal of better understanding why democracies fail and how we can sustain a robust democracy over time."  More.

• ICYMI: Francine Uenuma on The First Criminal Trial That Used Fingerprints as Evidence, in The Smithsonian.

• Medieval Digital Resources, a new site by the Medieval Academy of America, looks interesting on canon and Welsh law.

• Do you write to music or in silence? If the former: a recent Twitter thread with recommendations here. 

• This week marked the death anniversary (62nd) of B. D. Ambedkar (1891-1956), prime architect of India's Constitution and critic of the caste system. New book out on his thought and legacy here. Here is a fragment of his remarkable autobiographical piece, "Waiting for a Visa" (c.1935-6). 

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