In the fall of 2019, the Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable begins its 18th successful year. The Roundtable draws on Boston College Law School’s and Boston College’s strength and interest in legal history. It offers an opportunity for Boston College faculty and faculty from other area institutions, students, and members of the Boston College community to meet and discuss a pre-circulated paper in legal history. Meeting several times each semester, the Roundtable seeks to promote an informal, collegial atmosphere of informed discussion.
For the 2019-2020 academic year, Professor Mary Sarah Bilder, Professor Daniel R. Coquillette, Professor Frank Herrmann and Professor Daniel Farbman are conveners.
The Roundtable usually meets several times during the semester in the afternoon at 4:30 pm in the Library Conference Room of the Boston College Law School Library. Refreshments are available beginning at 4:15 pm, unless otherwise noted.
Papers will be available when appropriate before each presentation.
Thursday, September 19 (lunch talk)
Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University: Lunchtime, co-sponsored with the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy
Professor Jones will give a public book talk for a Constitution Day Lecture, discussing her prize-winning book.
Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans’ aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
Tuesday, October 24
Roundtable with Bryan Garner, Law Prose, Inc., co-sponsored with Law Library in honor of its upcoming Law Dictionary exhibit, "Dictionaries and the Law"
At his presentation, Garner will discuss the history of legal lexicography and his own work on Black's Law Dictionary and other law-related dictionaries.
Bryan A. Garner is a noted speaker, writer, and consultant regarding legal writing and drafting, and regularly teaches Advanced Legal Writing at the Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law. Garner is editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary among many other leading works on legal style, and he is president of LawProse, Inc., the foremost provider of CLE training in legal writing, editing, and drafting.
Thursday, January 30
Roundtable with Lael Weinberger, Harvard Law School, Berger-Howe Legal History Fellow 2019-20, "Judicializing International Relations: Internationalism, Courts, and American Lawyers in the Progressive Era"
This paper, part of Weinberger's project on internationalism in the legal profession, reconstructs an unfamiliar period at the start of the twentieth century when American lawyers across political divides tended to believe that world courts and robust international law were the future of international relations—even suggesting that law would replace diplomacy and that international litigation would replace war. From a modern vantage point the “legal internationalism” of the period looks unrealistic or even utopian. But its very unfamiliarity provides an ideal starting point for examining the intellectual, political, and legal conditions of possibility for legal internationalism.
Lael Weinberger is the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where he studies American legal history. Lael earned a JD with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for Judge Frank Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for Chief Justice Daniel Eismann on the Idaho Supreme Court. Lael is currently writing a dissertation on American lawyers’ ideas about international law, world order, and human rights in the first half of the twentieth century. His research interests include constitutional law, international law, civil procedure, law and religion, and the legal profession.
Thursday, February 27
Roundable with Professor Erin Braatz, Suffolk Law School, "Civilization & Sovereignty: The Birth of the “Native” Prison"
This paper describes the rise of so-called “native” prisons on the Gold Coast of Africa in the mid-nineteenth century (present-day Ghana) and argues that these prisons arose out of jurisdictional struggles between British colonial officials and indigenous leaders on the coast. It then situates these struggles within the history of the global spread of the prison during the nineteenth century, contending that the prison played a central role in defining civilization and articulating changing notions of sovereignty.
Erin Braatz is an assistant professor of law at Suffolk University Law School. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in Law and Society from New York University where she also held a Golieb Fellowship in Legal History. Prior to joining Suffolk’s faculty, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard Stearns of the District of Massachusetts and the Honorable Juan Torruella of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Her research examines the history of criminal law and punishment in British West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as the history of the Eighth Amendment.
Thursday, April 2
Roundtable with Kunal Parker, Professor and Dean's Distinguished Scholar, University of Miami Law School, "The Turn to Process: Law, Politics, and Economics in America, 1900 - 1970"
Over the course of the first three quarters of the twentieth century, American legal, political, and economic thinkers increasingly turned away from thinking in terms of ends to thinking in terms of means. Why did this happen? What did this transformation look like? Parker is working on a book-length study of the turn towards processes, means, methods, techniques, procedures, and protocols in twentieth-century American legal, political, and economic thought that looks at the connections and differences across these three fields to help make sense of this shift.
Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law. He is the author of Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790 - 1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600 - 2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
