- We heard that the recently concluded "Unsettling Law," a conference on Law, Culture and the Humanities at Emory Law included several presentations by legal historians, including the roundtable,"Dignity, Indignation, and Unsettling: Disability and Legal History," chaired by Susanna Blumenthal, Professor of Law and History, University of Minnesota, with presentations by Nathan Stenberg, PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota; Nate Holdren, Associate Professor, Drake University; and Rabia Belt, Associate Professor, Stanford Law School.
- Here is the book of abstracts for the European Society for Comparative Legal History Biennial Conference. H/t: ESCLH Blog.
- The historians' response to Dobbs and Bruen has blown up as we go to press, and we can't keep up, but here are a few: Mary Ziegler discussed her new book, Dollars for Life, on Fresh Air on Thursday and on Friday wrote in The Atlantic that If the Supreme Court Can Reverse Roe, It Can Reverse Anything. Patricia Cline Cohen writes that Dobbs "relies on history to rescind the constitutional right to a legal abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s just one problem: the history it relies on is not correct" (WaPo). Also: an interview of Geoffrey R. Stone on the history of American thought on abortion (CSM).
- We've been struck by historians' exasperated reactions to the publication by the Harvard law students Stephanie Nicole Miller and Mary Kay Bacallao of an essay in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Per Curiam using corpus linguistic methods to counter the AHA brief. Gillian Frank, a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion remarks, "Just because you don't find evidence in one database when you type in the word 'abortion,' doesn't mean a practice didn't exist.” Digitized anachronism! DRE
- It feels crushingly ironic to note that the Supreme Court Historical Society's 2022 Annual Lecture has just been posted to YouTube. "Chief
Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the United States Court of Appeals for the
Sixth Circuit is joined by California Supreme Court Justice Leondra
Kruger for conversation inspired by his book, Who Decides? States as
Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation." Between Bruen and Dobbs, I believe we just found out. DRE
- If you're a second- or third-year at Columbia and you haven't signed up for this course, you aren't doing law school right.
- "E-archive to collate data on ancient, colonial Indian laws" (Times of India).
- ICYMI: Scott Douglas Gerber says America’s religious history is more complicated than the Supreme Court’s liberal justices understand (New York Post). Another notice of that LGBTQ archive at William & Mary (Virginia Gazette). And a notice of a mock trial of Donoghue v Stevenson, the "snail in a bottle" case, at St. Andrews (Daily Record).
- Update: "Reva Siegel will give Chautauqua Institution’s 18th annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States, on Monday, July 11, 2022, at 3:30 p.m. She will speak about Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision." More. H/t: John Q. Barrett.
- Update: Martha S. Jones looks for traces of Harriet Tubman on Maryland's Eastern Shore 200 years after her birth (NYT).
Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.
