CFP: New Approaches to Rape Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century

 [We have the following CFP.  H/t: H-Announce.  DRE]

New Approaches to Rape Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century

Co-Editors: Jolene Zigarovich (University of Northern Iowa, USA) & Doreen Thierauf (North Carolina Wesleyan University, USA)

Frances Ferguson’s foundational ‘Rape and the Rise of the Novel’ (1987) drew attention to the ‘perverse collusion between the structural passivity of the female body’ and legal as well as psychological obstacles in women’s capacity to consent. Toni Bowers powerfully asserts in Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760 (2011), ‘Eighteenth-century seduction stories … shed light on anxieties with “British” self-definition that remain pertinent in our own day’ and ‘reveal connections between resistance practices of many kinds’. Valuing these and other earlier debates, this special issue acknowledges that critical discourse has evolved in its priorities and politics.

To reflect new strategies of addressing rape, this special issue seeks to bring together writing by scholars of art, literature, history, feminist studies, and legal studies to engage current movements against sexual violence and assess how we approach gender-based violence in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Moving beyond the legal implications of Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale’s claim that rape was a charge ‘easily to be made and hard to be proved’, a context detailed at length by Gregory Durston (JECS 2005;2006), we invite contributions that consider rape from feminist, anti-racist, and/or queer perspectives with the goal to foster solidarity and transform the analysis of sexual violence in eighteenth-century studies.

The wide circulation of the #MeToo movement in online spaces since 2017 has renewed scholarly interest in eighteenth-century sexual violence and leads us to call for revisions of older methodological approaches. We take our cue from Erin Spampinato who, writing in differences (2021), deprioritizes ‘adjudicative’ methods of approaching rape in literature—that is, scholars’ legalistic weighing of characters’ motivation and criminal conduct. Spampinato offers a ‘capacious’ conception of sexual violence enabling critics to register a greater number of acts as harmful and worthy of scholarly engagement. Supporting Spampinato’s wider definition of rape, the editors particularly welcome articles on gender-based violence in nonheterosexual, queer, colonial, and working-class contexts to destabilise traditional critical approaches that center literary and historical representations of middle-class heterosexual violence. Questions articles may address, but are not limited to, include: What are the historical continuities—and discontinuities–between eighteenth-century sexual violence and contemporary definitions of ‘rape culture’? What methodological strategies can bring sexual assault in historic depictions from the margins to the centre of critical attention? What kinds of scholarly futures can a focus on sexual violence, broadly conceived, unlock? How can twenty-first century lenses resituate and reconfigure former methodologies and offer responsible ways to analyse literary and historical representations of sexual violence?

Please send 300-word abstracts with working title for a 6,000-8,000 word article and CV by 1 March 2024 to Jolene Zigarovich (jolene.zigarovich@uni.edu) and Doreen Thierauf (dthierauf@ncwu.edu). Authors will be notified if their proposals have been accepted by 15 March 2024 and complete articles will be due by 1 November 2024. This special issue is being considered at The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Contact Email: jolene.zigarovich@uni.edu

Richardson's "Before Environmental Law"

Benjamin J. Richardson has published Before Environmental Law: A History of a Vanishing Continent (Hart/Bloomsbury):

This landmark book unveils the history of defending Australia's natural environment and examines the subject's legal and political contexts from the birth of the nation in 1901 until the advent of the so-called modern era of environmental regulation in the late 1960s. It rejects the mythology that Australia lacked environmental law before the late 1960s in revealing how many of today's environmental laws, from pollution control to nature conservation, emerged from precedents or events much earlier in the 20th century.

This history however reveals a discrepancy between lawmakers' greater efficacy to exploit rather than protect the environment, a discrepancy that grew as nature's backlash intensified in a rapidly degrading continent colonised to build the Australian nation. In exploring these dynamics, the book offers a rich tapestry of case studies illustrated with historic photographs that show the origins of Australia's environmental laws and how they borrowed from international precedents or furnished lessons for other nations.

Through its multi-disciplinary enquiry, the book offers scholars and students of environmental law, legal history and the environmental humanities a unique story about the failures and successes in the making of environmental law.

--Dan Ernst

AJLH: 63:1

The American Journal for Legal History 63:1 (March 2023) is now fully published on line:

The best answer? Justice Nelson’s concurrence in Dred Scott v. Sandford
William B Meyer

‘I Laid Earl and Clementine on a Chair and Whipped Them’: Child Murder and Criminal Justice in the Jim Crow South
Jeffrey S Adler

Limping Marriages: Race, Class, and the Rise of Domicile-Based Divorce Jurisdiction in the British Empire
Priyasha Saksena

Book Reviews

Tamika Y.  Nunley.  The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), pp  243, $27.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-4696-7312-7

Terri L Snyder

Russell Sandberg, A Historical Introduction to English Law: Genesis of the Common Law
( Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,  2023), pp.  xiii +280. £90 (hardcover). ISBN 9781107090583

William Eves

 --Dan Ernst

Antimonopoly and American Democracy

New from Oxford University Press: Antimonopoly and American Democracy, edited by Daniel A. Crane and William J. Novak, both of the University of Michigan Law School.  TOC is here.

Americans today worry about concentrated power in private industry to an extent not seen in generations Not only do they find diminished diversity of service-providers and producers, but they are disquieted by the power of a few large companies to shape and constrain democratic processes. Americans across the political spectrum, from former President Donald Trump to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have sounded alarms about the overlarge power of business in both public and private life. While many of the technologies and industries that worry Americans are new, the concerns they've raised are not unprecedented.

Antimonopoly and American Democracy traces the history of antimonopoly politics in the United States, arguing that organized action against concentrated economic power comprises an important American democratic tradition. While prevailing narratives tend to treat monopoly as a risk to people mainly in their roles as consumers--by causing prices to increase, for example--this study broadens the conversation, recounting ways in which monopolism can hurt ordinary people without directly impacting their wallets. From the pre-revolutionary era to the age of Big Tech, the volume explores the effects that historical monopolies have had on democracy by using their wealth and influence to dominate electoral politics and regulation. Chapters also highlight a range of sites of economic concentration, from land ownership to media reach, and attempts at combating them, from labor organizing to constitutional revision. Featuring original scholarship from some of the world's leading experts in American economic, political, and legal history, Antimonopoly and American Democracy offers important lessons for our contemporary political moment, in which fears of concentrated wealth and influence are again on the rise.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Felicia Kornbluh, University of Vermont, discussed A Woman’s Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Her Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice last Tuesday at Northwestern University (Daily Northwestern).
  

• John Quincy Adams’s notes in Head & Amory v. Providence Insurance Co, the first case he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court are for sale.  H/t: ATL.
  

• 
  Mike Davis, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, is the 2023 recipient of the Maurice Merrill Golden Quill Award by the Oklahoma Bar Association for the article, “Skinner v. Oklahoma: How Two McAlester Lawyers Derailed Criminal Sterilization in America and the U.S. Supreme Court Invented ‘Strict Scrutiny’ as a Result,” which appeared in the May 2023 issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal.
  

• ICYMI: Vikram David Amar on Hylton v. United States and the tax in Moore v. United States (Justitia).  

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

Howcroft's "Dickens and His Lawyers"

Now available for preorder from Talbot Publishing: Dickens and His Lawyers, by Paul Howcroft,  a retired English solicitor advocate who specialized in civil litigation:

The life and works of Charles Dickens were permeated by lawyers and the legal system. As a boy, he endured his father's imprisonment for debt. At 17, he became a solicitors' clerk. At 19, he became a court reporter and later a parliamentary reporter. As a successful author, he engaged in litigation to protect his copyright and campaigned for law reform. He had numerous friends and acquaintances in the legal world and, near the end of his life, his son Henry chose to follow a career at the bar. Most of Dickens' novels have legal themes and lawyers that are usually portrayed with his dark and ironic humour. Dickens' personal involvement and fictional creations within the legal world are drawn together and put into context by an author who has spent a career practicing as a lawyer in central London. He brings an in-depth knowledge and experience of a legal world that still reflects the one known to Dickens. This includes its lawyers, clerks, judges, courts, offices and ancient inns of court. This book is partly biographical and partly a study of the Victorian legal world based on the many descriptive extracts from the novels. The legal characters are examined in detail with extensive quoted passages, providing an entertaining anthology and a useful work of reference.

--Dan Ernst

Gerber's "Law and Religion in Colonial America"

Scott Douglas Gerber, Ohio Northern University, has published Law and Religion in Colonial America: The Dissenting Colonies (Cambridge University Press):

Law – charters, statutes, judicial decisions, and traditions – mattered in colonial America, and laws about religion mattered a lot. The legal history of colonial America reveals that America has been devoted to the free exercise of religion since well before the First Amendment was ratified. Indeed, the two colonies originally most opposed to religious liberty for anyone who did not share their views, Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually became bastions of it. By focusing on law, Scott Douglas Gerber offers new insights about each of the five English American colonies founded for religious reasons – Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts – and challenges the conventional view that colonial America had a unified religious history.

Here is an endorsement:

‘An invaluable compendium and analysis of all the laws and legal actions regulating or protecting religion in the five colonies founded by religious dissenters. Three founded to protect religious liberty for all (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island), and two founded to protect religious liberty only for the one-time dissenters who had gained a colony of their own, where they tried to suppress or exclude all other faiths (Connecticut and Massachusetts).'

Douglas Laycock - University of Virginia School of Law and author of the 5-volume Religious Liberty series

 --Dan Ernst

Pruitt on Junius Riggs

Paul M. Pruitt, Jr., University of Alabama Law School, has published Good and Faithful Servant: Marshal and Librarian Junius M. Riggs and the Supreme Court Library of Alabama, in the Law Library Journal 115 (2023): 435.  The article “follows the career of Junius Riggs (1851–1943), who was librarian of Alabama’s Supreme Court Library from 1874 to 1934. Riggs built the library’s holdings from 3,000 to 55,000 volumes. The article covers Riggs’s presence during controversial times; it also analyses his printed bibliographies.”

--Dan Ernst

Herman's "Parthenon Marbles Dispute"

Published by Hart: The Parthenon Marbles Dispute: Heritage, Law, Politics, by Alexander Herman:

Why are we still arguing over the Parthenon Marbles? This book offers a fresh take on the history of those famous pieces of ancient sculpture removed from the Acropolis in Athens by Lord Elgin's men in the early 19th century. It explains how they became the cause célèbre of the larger debates around cultural heritage and restitution now taking place. The subject is one that is currently embroiling museums, governments, universities and the public at large.

Herman provides a balanced, thorough and critical account of the history of the Marbles, while considering the legalities of their initial removal and the ethics of their retention by the British Museum. It incorporates the views of curators, museum directors, lawyers, archaeologists, politicians and others in both London and Athens. It explains why this particular dispute has not been satisfactorily resolved, and suggests new ways of seeking resolution – for the Parthenon Marbles and for the many other cultural treasures held in museum collections outside their countries of origin.

The book sets out a way forward for this famously intractable dispute, one based on evidence of past practice, legal rules around the transfer of cultural objects and the role of museums in negotiating international exchanges.

--Dan Ernst.  Table of Contents after the jump.

MacQueen's "Law and Legal Consciousness in Medieval Scotland"

Hector L. MacQueen, Emeritus Professor of Private Law at Edinburgh Law School, has published Law and Legal Consciousness in Medieval Scotland in Brill’s series, Medieval Law and Its Practice:

This book explores the rise of a Scottish common law from the twelfth century on despite the absence until around 1500 of a secular legal profession. Key stimuli were the activity of church courts and canon lawyers in Scotland, coupled with the example provided by neighbouring England’s common law. The laity’s legal consciousness arose from exposure to law by way of constant participation in legal processes in court and daily transactions. This experience enabled some to become judges, pleaders in court and transactional lawyers and lay the foundations for an emergent professional group by the end of the medieval period.

–Dan Ernst

New York's Ratification of the US Constitution

The Historical Society of the New York Courts is hosting The Struggle for Ratification: New York’s Role in Shaping the U.S. Constitution, a webinar open to the public on November 8 from 7:30-9:00 EST.

By 1787, six states had already ratified the U.S. Constitution — but New York had not. New York’s Constitutional Convention was divided between the Anti-Federalists advocating for states’ rights, and the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, fighting for a strong federal government. How did the Federalists become successful in swaying their counterparts to ratify the U.S. Constitution? Join us to find out.

The Society will bring together some of the nation’s finest scholars to dive into this question, the debates on the convention’s floor, and New York’s role in the development of the Bill of Rights.

Moderator: Hon. Albert M. Rosenblatt, Retired Associate Judge, New York Court of Appeals and President Emeritus & Inaugural Albert M. Rosenblatt Legal History Scholar, Historical Society of the New York Courts

Prof. John P. Kaminski, Co-Editor and Director, Center for the Study of the American Constitution, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Prof. Michael J. Klarman, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Harvard University Law School

Prof. Richard Leffler, Co-Editor and Deputy Director Emeritus, Center for the Study of the American Constitution, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Prof. Jack Rakove, COE Professor of History & American Studies and Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, Stanford University

--Dan Ernst

Frampton on the First Black Jurors

Thomas Frampton, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted The First Black Jurors and the Integration of the American Jury, which is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review:

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like Strauder v. West Virginia (1880). Legal scholars and historians unanimously report that free people of color did not serve as jurors, in either the North or South, until 1860. In fact, this Article shows, Black men served as jurors in antebellum America decades earlier than anyone has previously realized. While instances of early Black jury service were rare, campaigns insisting upon Black citizens’ admission to the jury-box were not. From the late 1830s onward, Black activists across the country organized to abolish the all-white jury. They faced, and occasionally overcame, staunch resistance. This Article uses jury lists, court records, convention minutes, diaries, bills of sale, tax rolls, and other overlooked primary sources to recover these forgotten efforts, led by activists who understood the jury-box to be both a marker and maker of citizenship. A broader historical perspective—one that centers Black activists in the decades before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between race, rights, citizenship, and the jury.

--Dan Ernst

AHA Prizes to Novak and Chira

The American Historical Association has announced the prizes to be awarded at its annual meeting in January.  Congratulations to William Novak, Michigan Law, for winning the Littleton-Griswold Prize, awarded "for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, broadly defined," for New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State (Harvard University Press, 2022).  And also to Adriana Chira, Emory University, who won the James A. Rawley Prize in the integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century for Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

--Dan Ernst

Congress Investigates the Titanic

The Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy at the Wayne State University Law School, in collaboration with the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, has released its latest Portrait in Oversight.  It is devoted to Congressional hearings in 1912 on the sinking of the Titanic, which led to such reforms as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea and the International Ice Patrol. 

--Dan Ernst

Studies in the History of Tax Law

New from Hart Publishing: Studies in the History of Tax Law, Volume 11, edited by Peter Harris and Dominic de Cogan:

This book is a continuation of the prestigious series which is drawn from the papers of the biennial Cambridge Tax Law History Conference. The authors are a mix of academics and senior tax professionals from the judiciary and practice with representatives from 9 countries. The series continues to investigate current tax policy debates in an historical context. The papers fall within three basic categories:

1.  UK and Irish tax, looking at a variety of topics such as tax administration, cases and judges (Whitney, Singer, Viscount Radcliffe), the taxation of royal forests, the taxation of spirits, and income tax transition in the Irish Free State; 

2.  International taxation, with chapters on the role of international organisations (OECD, League of Nations) and on South Africa's early attempts to address double taxation (tax treaties); and 

3.  Non-UK tax systems, including chapters on the legacy of colonial influence (Dutch East Indies), early developments in China, New Zealand, and the USA, an influential Canadian report (Carter Commission), development of the GAAR in Scandanavia, and the receipt of Roman tax law in Europe.

--Dan Ernst.  Table of Contents after the jump.

Friedman on the Rockefeller Foundation and the MPC

Daniel Friedman, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, has posted "Silent Revolution": The Rockefeller Foundation's Invisible Influence on the Model Penal Code, which is forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review:

For over a hundred years, rich families have been channeling their wealth through private foundations to remake American society, but their immense impact on law is still poorly understood. This article begins to fill that gap by studying the almost completely unknown origins of one of the most important reforms in the history of American criminal law: the Model Penal Code (MPC).

To show how the MPC was influenced by its funder, this article presents unpublished documents from the archives of two of the most important private organizations in American law: the American Law Institute (ALI) and the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave the ALI the money for some of its most important endeavors. The MPC is one such project, an enormous undertaking to create a complete code of criminal law that states could adopt in whole or in part to replace their messy mass of antiquated and contradictory common law crimes. Many did just that after the MPC’s completion in 1962.

The MPC was both directly and indirectly influenced by Rockefeller money. Their goals were progressive—aimed at bringing order to legal chaos based on new scientific understandings and humane ideals about how to help offenders—but have had some devastatingly oppressive unintended consequences. Rockefeller funding made sure that the MPC was far more focused on defendants’ potential dangerousness than the common law it replaced. As a result, judges and juries today often have to decide how dangerous they think defendants are, and they unwittingly draw on the prejudices most likely to reinforce the racial and economic disparities of mass incarceration.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The count-down is on to the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History (Oct. 26-28 in Philadelphia)! Note that if you missed the pre-registration deadline, you will be able to register on-site.

• Congratulations to Kim Nielsen (University of Toledo) on winning the William Best Hesseltine Award for Best Wisconsin Magazine of History Article of the Year for 2022. Her winning article is “Ott v. Ott: Family Violence, Divorce, and Women’s Agency in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 106/2 (Winter 2022). (h/t H-Net).
  

• Congratulations to Zach Jonas, a recent graduate of Georgetown Law, for winning the 2023 Hughes-Gossett Award for Students of the Supreme Court Historical Society for his article “FDR’s Court-packing and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” published in the July 2023 issue of the Journal of Supreme Court History and discussed here.
  

•  From Balkinization: Bruce Ackerman (Yale Law School) on "The Original Understanding of the Sixteenth Amendment."The post pertains to the Moore v. United States case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.  
  

• 
  UC Santa Barbara’s notice of Giuliana Perrone’s Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023) is here.
  

• The “second-annual flagship conference," Current Perspectives on the History of Guns and Society, of the Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University took place October 13-14. Historians, museum curators, legal scholars, journalists, filmmakers, and other experts attended.
  

• The National Constitution Center takes you on a tour of its exhibit on the Civil War and Reconstruction, via YouTube. 
  

• Peter Grajzl will deliver An Economist’s Walk Through English Legal and Cultural History, his inaugural lecture as the John F. Hendon Professorship at Washington and Lee University’s Ernest Williams II School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics, on Thursday, Nov. 2 at 5 p.m. in W&L’s Northen Auditorium.
  

• A notice of Saul Cornell’s research in advance of the oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi (Fordham News).
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has just added a new resource to our civics website, which  is designed to provide educators and students with resources about the Supreme Court, written at a secondary level, that are easy to incorporate into existing lessons. It is a case summary for Barron v. Baltimore.
  

• A Section 3 Conference.  “On October 30, the University of Minnesota Law School, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the American Constitution Society, and the Federalist Society, will hold a conference bringing together legal and policy experts to discuss the ongoing lawsuits to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot.”  Presenters include Josh Blackman, Mark Graber, Kurt Lash, and Eric Segall, q.v. this.  For the livestream option for virtual attendees, this.
  

• ICYMI: Legal Historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin and Sherrilyn Ifill discussed the immediate aftermath of the Students for Fair Admissions’ suit against Harvard (Harvard Crimson).  Joe Jackson, Plaintiff, vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club, Defendant: Never-Before-Seen Trial Transcript (ABAJ).  David Adler on Brandeis’s opinion in Whitney v. California (Laramie Boomerang).  George Will takes up the Pacific Legal Foundation's antiregulatory campaign to reverse Slaughter-House on the privileges and immunities clause (WaPo). Andrew Porwancher, Arizona State University, notes that Jews had to demand equality in revolutionary America (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Chance Bonar, Tufts University, on ancient slavery (Akron Legal News).  Scott Douglas Gerber on Georgia’s anti-slavery origins (Albany Herald).
  

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

Honorary Fellows of the ASLH

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

 The Honors Committee of the American Society for Legal History solicits nominations of senior scholars for consideration for election as Honorary Fellows of the Society.  Election as Honorary Fellow is the highest honor the Society can confer.  It recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.  Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand.  The Society seeks to recognize scholars who are not simply distinguished in their fields, but who also have given back to the discipline and made their fields stronger by creating communities of scholars and scholarship and by helping other (often younger) scholars to stand on their shoulders.  In other words, scholars who are as committed to building a future for their fields as they are to studying the past.  Commensurate with the growing international reach of the Society, we seek nominations of senior scholars who, collectively, similarly encompass the wide scope of scholarship in legal history.

Nominations should be submitted to Bruce H. Mann, chair of the Honors Committee, by email (mann@law.harvard.edu) before December 1, 2023.  Each nomination should include a statement of why the nominee merits election.  Statements should address the nominee’s scholarly distinction and their citizenship in the field.  A list of current and past honorary fellows is [here].

Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars

 [We have the following “Call for Participation.”  DRE]

Georgetown University Law Center, Stanford Law School, UCLA School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California Center for Law, History, and Culture invite submissions for the 23d meeting of the Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, to be held at the UCLA School of Law, on June 9-10, 2024.

About the Workshop.  The workshop is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and independent scholars working in law and the humanities. In addition to drawing from numerous humanistic fields, including Black and Indigenous studies, history, literature, political theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and philosophy, we welcome critical, qualitative work in the social sciences, including anthropology and sociology. While the scope of the Workshop is broad, we cannot consider proposals that are focused solely on quantitative social science research or that are limited to purely doctrinal legal research. We are especially interested in submissions from members of traditionally underrepresented groups and submissions touching on themes of anti-racism and anti-subordination. We welcome submissions from those working at regional and teaching-intensive institutions.

Based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, between six and eight papers will be chosen for presentation at the Workshop. At the Workshop, two senior scholars will comment on each paper. Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to subject and methodology. The selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation among all the participants that may include themes connecting all of the projects, as well as discussion of the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in interdisciplinary scholarship.

The selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network; there is no other publication commitment. (We will accommodate the wishes of chosen authors who prefer not to have their paper posted publicly with us because of publication commitments to other journals.) However, we will only accept Workshop participants whose papers are true works in progress; articles or chapters that are already in page proofs or are otherwise unable to be revised by the time of the Workshop are ineligible.

The Workshop will pay the domestic travel and hotel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation. For authors requiring airline travel from outside the United States, the Workshop will cover such travel expenses up to a maximum of $1250.

Submission Instructions.  Applications should include:

• a 1500-2000 word summary of the paper (including footnotes or endnotes),
  

• a 1-2 page bibliography,
  

• in Microsoft Word (not PDF) and, 
  

• if your paper is a chapter in a book or dissertation, an optional 1-page chapter outline of the larger project.
  

Applications are due on December 15, 2023.  If your application advances to the final stage of consideration, you will be asked to submit the full paper on February 1, 2024. Please do not apply if you will not have a full paper on February 1. The application is intended to be a summary of existing, ongoing work rather than a proposal for new or planned work.

Final paper submissions must be works-in-progress that do not exceed 10,000 words in length (including footnotes/ endnotes). A dissertation chapter may be submitted, but we strongly suggest that it be edited so as to stand alone as a piece of work with its own integrity. A paper that has been submitted for publication is eligible for selection so long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time of the Workshop; it is important that authors still be in a position at the time of the Workshop to consider comments they receive there and to incorporate them as they think appropriate in their revisions.

We ask that those submitting applications be careful to omit or redact any information in the paper summary or the body of the paper that might serve to identify them, as we adhere to an anonymous or "blind" selection process.

Applications (in Microsoft Word-no pdf files, please) will be accepted until December 15, 2023, and should be sent by e-mail to: Lawandhumanitiesworkshop@gmail.com. Please be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), and phone and email contact information in your covering email, not in the paper itself.

For more information, please send an email inquiry to Lawandhumanitiesworkshop@gmail.com or visit our new website

Program Committee, 2024 Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars
Simon Stern, University of Toronto, Law & English, Chair
Martha Jones, Johns Hopkins University, History
Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University, Law
Riaz Tejani, University of Redlands, School of Business & Society
Nomi Stolzenberg, Law, University of Southern California
Martha Umphrey, Amherst College, Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought

The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars is committed to anti-racism both inside and outside the academy.

Stern on Blackstone's Colon and Trollope's Dash (Typographically Speaking)

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has posted Blackstone’s Page and Trollope’s Jurisprudence: From Doctrine to Fiction, which will appear in A History of Punctuation in English Literature, ed. Elizabeth M. Bonapfel, Mark Faulkner, Jeffrey Gutierrez, and John Lennard  (Cambridge University Press, 2024):

This book chapter explores connections between law and literature by attending to print format, page layout, and typography. It considers William Blackstone’s use of the colon in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), showing how he exploits the sign as a means of achieving the balance, rationality, and clarity that he seeks to attribute to the common law more generally. The chapter then turns to Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873). Chapter 25 provides Mr. Dove’s opinion letter as to the legal status of the diamonds that drive the plot. Trollope noted in his autobiography that this chapter was composed by the barrister Charles Merewether. What has not been recognized is that Merewether transcribed most of the letter from a leading work on inheritance and estate law, A Treatise on the Law of Executors and Administrators by Edward Vaughan Williams. It is hard to tell whether Trollope or Merewether (or both) were responsible for the differences in wording (though some are likely to be Trollope’s). However, the letter also features a very Trollopean use of the dash to signal hesitation and temporization, generally at Mr. Dove’s expense. These examples from Blackstone and Trollope show how the conjunction of the legal and the literary may present distinctive typographical features, in addition to more frequently studied features involving legal norms, analytical styles, and doctrinal questions.

--Dan Ernst

Raoul Berger-Mark De Wolfe Howe Fellowship

Harvard Law School invites applications for the Raoul Berger-Mark De Wolfe Howe Fellowship for the academic year 2024-2025.  Eligible applicants include those who have a first law degree, who have completed the required coursework for a doctorate, or who have recently been awarded a doctoral degree.  A J.D. is preferred, but not required.  The purpose of the fellowship, which is awarded annually, is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined, as the fellow seeks to begin or establish an academic career in legal history.  There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period. With occasional exceptions, previous fellows have gone on to pursue faculty appointments or other fellowships in American universities, primarily on law faculties.

The fellow is expected to spend the majority of their time on their own research. The fellow will also help coordinate the Harvard Law School Legal History Workshop.  The term of the fellowship is July 1 through June 30, and the fellow will be required to be in residence at the law school during the academic year (September through May).

Applicants for the fellowship for 2024-2025 should submit their applications and supporting materials electronically to Professor Bruce H. Mann (mann@law.harvard.edu).

Each interested applicant should submit:

• a detailed (five pages maximum) description of the proposed project,
  

• a writing sample,
  

• a comprehensive résumé or curriculum vitae that gives the applicant’s educational background, publications, works in progress, and other relevant experience,
  

• two academic letters of reference, which may be submitted electronically by the recommenders to Professor Mann at the above email address, and
  

• copies of official transcripts of all academic work done at the graduate level, which may be sent by regular mail to Professor Mann at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

The deadline for applications is January 26, 2024.  Announcement of the award will be made by February 29, 2024.  The fellow will receive a stipend of $60,000.  Links to additional information may be found here.

Harvard Law School selects individuals for fellowships without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions, or any other characteristic protected by law.

--Dan Ernst

Rasmussen on "Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter"

The University Press of Kansas has published The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter (2023), by Dennis C. Rasmussen (Syracuse University). A description from the Press:

Strikingly few Americans know who wrote the Constitution. Even fewer know that he was a peg-legged ladies’ man with a wicked sense of humor, a staunch opponent of slavery, and an unabashed elitist. Gouverneur Morris, who has been described as “the most colorful man in North America” at the time of the founding, was a dominant figure at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. In fact, he spoke more often, proposed more motions, and had more motions adopted than any other delegate. He also put the Constitution into its final form, choosing the arrangement and much of the wording of its provisions, not to mention composing the famous preamble (“We the People of the United States . . .”) nearly from scratch. The Constitution’s Penman is the first book to explore the constitutional vision of this fascinating, neglected, and influential American.

As Dennis Rasmussen deftly shows, some aspects of Morris’s political thought were intriguingly idiosyncratic, such as his argument that the Senate should be an aristocratic body whose members would serve life terms without pay. Other aspects of his vision for America’s constitutional order, however, were astoundingly prescient. Morris saw as clearly as any of the framers the need for a powerful executive with a popular mandate, the central role that parties would play in American politics, and the unfathomable evils that slavery would visit on American life. Rasmussen demonstrates that it is impossible to fully understand the Constitution without appreciating the central role that Morris played in shaping it.

More information is available here. An interview with Professor Rasmussen is available here, at New Books Network.

 

-- Karen Tani

Venema, ed., "Supreme Courts Under Nazi Occupation"

Amsterdam University Press has published Supreme Courts Under Nazi Occupation (2022), edited by Derk Venema (Open University, Netherlands). A description from the Press:

This is the first extensive treatment of leading judicial institutions under Nazi rule in WWII. It focusses on all democratic countries under German occupation, and provides the details for answering questions like: how can law serve as an instrument of defence against an oppressive regime? Are the courts always the guardians of democracy and rule of law? What role was there for international law? How did the courts deal with dismissals, new appointees, new courts, forced German ordinances versus national law? How did judges justify their actions, help citizens, appease the enemy, protest against injustice? Experts from all democracies that were occupied by the Nazis paint vivid pictures of oppression, collaboration, and resistance. The results are interpreted in a socio-legal framework introducing the concept of ‘moral hygiene’ to explain the clash between normative and descriptive approaches in public opinion and scholarship concerning officials’ behaviour in war-time.

More information is available here. An interview with Professor Venema is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

University College of London Faculty of Laws Research Scholarship in Legal History

The University College of London is offering scholarships for doctoral research into legal history and private international law:

Recipients of these scholarships will be expected to contribute to teaching in the Faculty for up to 6 hours per week on average, and this work is remunerated in addition to the stipend received for the scholarship.  Teaching will primarily be on the Faculty’s Notarial Practice Course, with the recipient of the legal history scholarship teaching on the Roman Law module, and the recipient of the private international law scholarship teaching on the Private International Law module.

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Bianca Premo, Florida International University, discusses her research on the legal history of the Spanish Empire here.
  

• Zach Jonas, a recent graduate of Georgetown Law, discusses his article “FDR's Court-packing and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” published in the July 2023 issue of the Journal of Supreme Court History, with the Journal’s editor Timothy S. Huebner in the Supreme Court Historical Society’s YouTube series, Breaking History.
  

• Over at Legal History Miscellany, Daniel Gosling and Charlotte Smith, Legal Records Specialists at The National Archives, discuss the documents on display during the inaugural Legal Records Jamboree last June and “reflect on the different types of legal record held at The National Archives.”  The first post is here.
  

• Notre Dame Law's notice of a book event for Christian Burset's Empire of Laws is here. 
  

• On October 26, Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago Law School, will deliver The Warren Court v. The Roberts Court, the fall 2023 Annual Distinguished Lecture at Boston University. 

• Kate Morgan has sold The Walnut Tree–Women, Violence and the Law: A Hidden History to Mudlark, an imprint of HarperCollins.  MudLark describes the book as “a vivid work of historical non-fiction [which] explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law" (Bookseller).
  

• James A. Deeken, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and an adjunct lecturer at SMU’s Dedman School of Law, reviews A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court by A. C. Pritchard and Robert B. Thompson in the Securities Regulation Law Journal.
  

• A recording of that "Town Hall" on the modern American Presidency at the National Constitution Center is now available online.  
  

• The NRA's Institute for Legislative Action has a  notice of Robert J. Cottrol and Brannon P. Denning’s To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment University Press of Kansas, 2023).
  

• ICYMI: Mark Brown, Capital University Law School, on DJT and Section 3 (Justitia). Jeffery Tyler Syck, University of Pikeville, thinks “the time has come for the right to discover the greatness of the New Deal and to improve it” (The American Conservative).
  

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

Clemson University seeks to hire an Assistant Professor in "Legal History, Nineteenth through Twenty-First Century."

We missed this job posting earlier this fall, but there is still time to apply: Clemson University seeks to hire an Assistant Professor in "Legal History, Nineteenth through Twenty-First Century."

Description

The Department of History at Clemson University invites applications for a tenure-track position in legal history from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin August 16, 2024. The search is open to legal historians who focus on any geographical area. A J.D. is preferred but not required.

Clemson is an R-1 research institution and therefore applicants should have a strong record of scholarship or demonstrate promise of scholarship. Applicants moreover should be prepared to contribute to the History Department's new legal history emphasis area by teaching courses in legal history and advising undergraduate students interested in law-related fields. Applicants are also encouraged to demonstrate how their research and teaching interests fit into the department's new digital history Ph.D. program.

Qualifications

Ph.D. must be in-hand by August 1, 2024.

Application Instructions

Applicants should make electronic submission of a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and an article-length writing sample to Prof. Lee B. Wilson, Legal History Search Chair, Dept. of History, Clemson University, by means of Interfolio link:

http://apply.interfolio.com/132170

The committee will conduct interviews via Zoom.

Applications received by October 15, 2023 will receive full consideration.

-- Karen Tani

Updike Toler on "Right-Sizing" Madison

Lorianne Updike Toler, Northern Illinois University College of Law, has posted Un-fathering the Constitution:

James Madison (NYPL)

Supreme Court Justices and judges of all stripes frequently turn to James Madison to understand the Constitution. This because he is almost universally acclaimed by legal elites as its father. However, Madison’s constitutional parentage sounds more in lore than logic.

As this study shows, a careful review of recent historiography, Madison’s own writings, and new analytics tools available on the Quill Project reveal Madison as just one of a cast of characters who brought about the Convention, the Virginia Plan, and the ultimate Constitution. Immediately after the Convention, Madison considered himself and the Constitution a failure, and disclaimed any singularly unique role in its framing. His influence grew post-Convention in writing the Federalist Papers and drafting the Bill of Rights but was more modest for the unamended Constitution. James Madison is not the Constitution’s father, especially in the singular sense.

Un-fathering the Constitution has significant ramifications for constitutional law and politics. One such ramification may be seen in executive removal jurisprudence, wherein the Court’s justifications for this constitutional source of power in the absence of a removal clause turns on Madison’s vision of the Constitution. Right-sizing Madison’s role in this realm of constitutional law calls for revisiting presidential removal.

--Dan Ernst

Werner on the Tobacco Trust

George F. K. Werner, a student at Duke Law School, has posted his note in the Duke Law Journal, Norm Commandeering and the Tobacco Trust: 

(NYPL)

In the early 1870s, Durham became a major center of tobacco marketing. Farmers brought their crops to auction warehouses, which then sold them to the town’s manufacturers. This was a process facilitated by a well-developed system of social norms. But the formation of the American Tobacco Company’s “tobacco trust” in the 1890s threatened that arrangement—buyers conspired to pay less per pound of tobacco, and warehousemen lost the ability to police buyers’ conduct. When farmers attempted to organize in response, geographic and social distance caused their efforts to fail. By the time federal courts dissolved the trust in 1911, the damage had already been done. This Note’s historical analysis will be relevant for scholars of both informal ordering and competition law. For the former, it shows that some norm systems depend on the presence of competition. Informal ordering can, of course, also be a response to a lack of competition. But the possibility of collective action problems means that attempts to organize in reaction will often fail. For scholars of competition law, the possibility of norm commandeering provides a concrete example of how concentrated market power can affect economic and social dynamics.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Columbia University Knight Institute Symposium on "Managing Government Employee Speech in a Democracy"

We have the following Call for Papers:

Permission to Speak Freely? Managing Government Employee Speech in a Democracy

Symposium to be held at Columbia University on April 5, 2024 

The Knight Institute invites submissions for a spring symposium, “Permission to Speak Freely? Managing Government Employee Speech in a Democracy,” to be held at Columbia University on April 5, 2024. The symposium, organized in partnership with the Institute’s Senior Visiting Research Scholar Sam Lebovic, will explore the law and politics of public employee speech. A more detailed discussion of the theme of the symposium is below, followed by logistical information for those who wish to participate. 

Description and Aims

In our polarized, paranoid politics, the speech of public employees is fraught as perhaps never before. During the Trump presidency, much hope and fear was invested in the notion of a “deep state” with the capacity, depending on one’s preferences, to either maintain or derail the legitimacy of the federal government. Leaks and rumor and background briefings—always a central form of U.S. politics—became ever-more charged sites of conflict: the New York Times ran a symptomatically infamous op-ed in which one anonymous insider declared themselves to be the “the resistance.” The war over the regulatory and administrative state, meanwhile, directly implicates the rights and political activity of the civil service—particularly in those branches ostensibly committed to the neutral production of knowledge. Public sector unions, now a bulwark of the labor movement, are likewise under assault, on the grounds that union dues implicate the speech rights of nonmember employees. And the culture wars, playing out particularly over discussions of race and gender in the classroom, directly implicate the speech acts of educators—by far the largest class of public employees in the nation.

Each of these domains has been subject to considerable controversy, as well as deep debate in many fields of academic inquiry. But they have not been treated as instances of a broader problem: how a modern, bureaucratized democracy should manage the speech of its government employees. The issues are complex, requiring the balancing of competing democratic values: transparency v autonomy; delegation v supervision; objectivity v diversity; tolerance of debate and disagreement v the need to reach some form of functional consensus for collective governance to continue. They require parsing the intersection of First Amendment law, administrative law, labor law, democratic theory, and the brute science of American political contestation.

This symposium will bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore these problems. The stakes are significant. There are some 22 million public employees in the U.S.—to determine their speech rights is to determine the speech rights of a population twice as large as the entire population of Cuba or Greece or Hungary or Israel. To think holistically about the problems and politics of public employee speech offers an opportunity to clarify normative and doctrinal problems in vexed subfields of the law: academic freedom; whistleblowing and transparency; public sector employment and unions.

Such a conversation also promises to be generative, to shed light on two deeper problems of U.S. democratic life. The first is the legitimacy crisis of the administrative state. Since at least the New Deal, those seeking to legitimize the U.S. state have done so by seeking to place the bureaucracy outside of politics—by appealing to the expertise and objectivity of the bureaucrat, and by establishing elaborate rules and procedures to ensure neutrality. As the ongoing assault on the regulatory state reveals, they have not succeeded in protecting the bureaucracy from accusations that it is an undemocratic, elitist threat to the liberties of ‘ordinary’ Americans; such efforts to ensure procedural neutrality may also have eroded the political capacity to substantively govern. Rethinking the political speech of public sector employees may help us rethink the relationships between objectivity, expertise, and democratic governance, and thus the normative foundations of the modern state itself.

Second, rethinking the politics of public employee speech may provide a space to imagine a more realistic and robust role for the First Amendment in modern democratic society. Our philosophies of free speech are, by and large, anachronistic, rooted in a set of classically liberal assumptions about the opinions of autonomous individuals, the exchange of ideas in so-called free markets, and the self-righting processes of unregulated systems. For the past half-century, this vision of the First Amendment has been taken up with particular force by the libertarian right, and turned into a tool to wage war on the very possibility of administrative governance. In reaction, progressives have begun to retreat from their former embrace of First Amendment speech rights.

A central challenge today, therefore, is to find a way to delineate a philosophy and doctrine for the First Amendment that maximally protects civil liberties without destabilizing the very possibility of collective governance. The question of public employee speech rights is a particularly promising place to seek such a philosophy. The questions involved automatically preclude thinking in straightforwardly individualistic terms of the sort favored by abstract, neoliberal theories of the First Amendment, or by the classical liberalism of contract law. They require thinking less about the value of speech-acts to the speaker, and more about the social value of speech and the public’s right to knowledge; less about “marketplaces of ideas” and more about collectively produced and managed spaces for expressive activity. Cracking the riddle of speech in the administrative state may thus provide new ways to think about the problem of contemporary First Amendment rights more generally.

We welcome papers that take up the law and politics of public employee speech from any angle. Papers that compare these issues across differing doctrinal domains, differing national traditions, or different time periods are particularly welcome, as are papers that seek to shed new light on the following themes . . .

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

The Legacy of Stanley Surrey

The Legacy of Stanley S. Surrey, a special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems, has been published.   Its editors are Ajay K. Mehrotra and Lawrence Zelenak.

Foreword: The Legacy of Stanley S. Surrey
Ajay K. Mehrotra & Lawrence Zelenak

When an Aspiring Tax Lawyer Considered Labor Unions Important to the Future of Capitalism
Catherine L. Fisk

Stanley Surrey, The New Deal, and the Virtues of Incremental Tax Reform
Joseph J. Thorndike

The Surprising Surrey: Stanley S. Surrey as Educator, Mentor, and Institution Builder
Ajay K. Mehrotra

Surrey’s Silence: Subpart F and the Swiss Subsidiary Tax that Never Was
Steven A. Dean

Stanley Surrey, the Shoup Mission, and Tax Administration in Japan
W. Elliot Brownlee & Eisaku Ide

Textualism, the Authoritativeness of Congressional Committee Reports, and Stanley Surrey
George K. Yin

Stanley Surrey, the American Law Institute Income Tax Project, and the Normative Structure of the Income Tax
Charlotte Crane

Stanley Surrey and Taxing Unreallized Appreciation
Lawrence Zelenak

Stanley Surrey’s Lasting Influence
Assaf Harpaz & C. Eugene Steuerle

What Would Surrey Say? The Long Reach of Stanley S. Surrey
Reuven Avi-Yonah & Nir Fishbien

The (Tax) Policy Entrepreneur
Mirit Eyal-Cohen

‘Moralist’ Versus ‘Scientist’: Stanley Surrey and the Public Intellectual Practice of Tax Policy
Daniel Shaviro

Women in Legal History: A Networking Event

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Women in Legal History Networking Event
School of Law and Social Justice Building (Events Space) Liverpool, L69 7ZR
Fri 8th December 2023

Scholars of all genders, disciplines, and career stages are invited to attend a day of networking and discussion about women in legal history.

Refreshments and lunch will be provided. There is a limited amount of funding for travel within the UK and accommodation expenses, priority for which will be given to postgraduate and early-career scholars. Please submit any queries to seldenssister@gmail.com.

Selden’s Sister are a collaborative body of legal historians across multiple UKHE institutions. We seek to champion the work of contemporary female legal historians, and highlight past contributions of women to legal history. 

[Register here.]

A Symposium on Thind

For a limited time, the University of California Press is providing ungated access to One Century After Thind, a special issue of Ethnic Studies Review.  Here’s the TOC:

One Century After Thind: An Introduction
Soniya Munshi, Linta Varghese

“Gilded Cages”: Race, Labor, Citizenship, and the Fabrication of the “Hindu” in the American West
Amrit Deol

The Afterlives of Thind: Denaturalizations and the Changing Legal Definitions of Whiteness
Janna E. Haider

Doctorji the Divorcé: Understanding Bhagat Singh Thind Through His Marriage to Inez Buelen
Philip Deslippe

US v. Thind and the Rhetorical Labors of “Where Are You From?”
Andrew Parayil Boge

Thind and Belonging across the Edges of Time
Stanley Thangaraj

Remembering Thind
Sherally Munshi

Caste-ing White Supremacy: Thind, Cisco, and the Politics of Belonging
Falu Bakrania

On Brown Blood: Race, Caste, and the Bhagat Singh Thind Case
Arjun Shankar

South Asian and Indigenous Experiences at the US–Mexico Border: From US v. Thind to the War on Terror
Soham Patel

Barnett and Solum on Originialism after Dobbs, Bruen & Kennedy

Randy E. Barnett and Lawrence B. Solum have published Originalism After Dobbs, Bruen, and Kennedy: The Role of History and Tradition in the Northwestern University Law Review:

In three recent cases, the constitutional concepts of history and tradition have played important roles in the reasoning of the Supreme Court. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relied on history and tradition to overrule Roe v. Wade. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen articulated a history and tradition test for the validity of laws regulating the right to bear arms recognized by the Second Amendment. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District looked to history and tradition in formulating the test for the consistency of state action with the Establishment Clause.

These cases raise important questions about the Court’s approach to constitutional interpretation and construction. Do Dobbs, Bruen, and Kennedy represent a new theory of constitutional interpretation and construction based on history and tradition? In the alternative, should the references to history and tradition in these opinions be understood through the lens of Constitutional Pluralism as modalities of constitutional argument? Finally, can the use of history and tradition in Dobbs, Bruen, and Kennedy be reconciled with the Supreme Court’s embrace of Public Meaning Originalism?

Part I of this Article elucidates the constitutional concepts of history and tradition. Part II lays out four distinct roles that history and tradition can play: (1) as evidence of original meaning and purpose, (2) as modalities of constitutional argument within a constitutional pluralist framework, (3) as a novel constitutional theory, which we call “Historical Traditionalism,” and (4) as an implementing doctrine. Part III investigates the roles of history and tradition in Dobbs, Bruen, and Kennedy. Part IV articulates a comprehensive strategy for the incorporation of history and tradition in constitutional jurisprudence

--Dan Ernst

Sources of Early Modern Colonial Law

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Workshop: Sources of Early Modern Colonial Law - Global and Comparative Perspectives.  CoCoLaw Project, University of Helsinki.  November 9th and 10th, 2023

The CoCoLaw Project (University of Helsinki) is organizing a workshop that delves into the exploration of legal sources in early modern colonial law from a comparative perspective, shedding light on the perspectives of various European empires. Key questions to address include:

• What were the foundational legal sources that shaped colonial legal systems?
• How did courts, lawyers and subjects utilize these legal sources?
• In what ways did colonial legal sources differ from those in the metropolitan centers?
• What changes and trends emerged during the early modern period in this context?

Participants in the workshop are encouraged to address these questions by presenting case studies or broader syntheses related to a specific empire. Throughout the discussions, we anticipate drawing comparisons among the empires, examining the legal sources available and employed within colonial territories.

For this workshop, we are excited to announce our distinguished keynote speakers, including Alejandro Agüero from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Alicia Schrikker from Leiden University, and Naveen Kanalu from École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

The workshop is open to all interested participants, whether attending in person or online.

You can register using [this] link.  More information about the CoCoLaw Project and its activities [is here]. 

[Schedule after the jump.]

Slaughter-House at 150 at Rutgers Law

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

On Thursday, October 19th, a conference marking the 150th anniversary of the decision in The Slaughter-House Cases will be held at Rutgers Law School in Camden, New Jersey.  The conference will begin at 9:30 a.m., and the keynote address will be given by Mark Graber.  Other participants will include Evan Bernick, Craig Green, Larry Lessig, Earl Maltz, Cynthia Nicoletti and Ilan Wurman.  CLE credit is available.  A livestream of the conference will be available on Zoom.

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Salmon P. Chase (LC)
  

  Here is a recording of The Tenth Annual Salmon P. Chase Distinguished Lecture, “What History and Historians Have Gotten Wrong About Salmon Chase” by Walter Stahr, the author of Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln’s Vital Rival and the recipient of the Georgetown Center’s Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize.  The event was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.  James Oakes provides a quite interesting assessment of Chase in his introduction. 
  

• The Larry McNeill Research Fellowship in Texas Legal History, awarded annually for the best research proposal on some aspect of Texas legal history, is accepting applications through November 15, 2023.  More.
  

• The Center for Constitutional Design at Arizona State University and the National Constitution Center present the discussion, From FDR to Biden: The Creation of the Modern Presidency, with Sidney Milkis, Barbara Perry, and Stephen Knott, moderated by Jeffrey Rosen.
  

• Here is the October 2023 issue of the newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit.

• Barry Cushman, Notre Dame Law, lectured on the court-packing crisis of 1937 at Taylor University on September 20 (Echo).
  

• Akhil Reed Amar, Yale Law School, lectured on “The Founding Fathers and the Importance of Civil Discourse” as part of the Starr Federalist Papers Lecture Series at Baylor University.  More. 
  

• Lawbook Exchange’s October 2023 catalogue is here.
  

• ICYMI: Alexander Keyssar and Thomas Wolf on the Supreme Court's Originalism (Newsweek). Indianapolis has unveiled a historical marker describing the 1845 lynching of John Tucker (WFYI).  William Leuchtenburg is 101.

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