Weekend Roundup

• The Richmond Free Press has reported the discovery of “144 moldy boxes filled with the decaying legal papers of one of Richmond’s legal giants, Roland J. 'Duke' Ealey,” a 1939 graduate of the Howard Law School.  Topics include “Poll tax litigations and campaign information; Richmond Crusade For Voters literature and training materials; Prince Hall Fraternal Order of Black Freemasonry documents; Massive Resistance and the Byrd Machine; Interstate Highway System family displacement records; [and] Brown v. Board of Education paperwork. 
  

• The Annual General Meeting of the Irish Legal History Society on Friday, December 1, 2023, includes, at 6.45 GMT, the Winter Discourse, “The Trials of Bad Bridge,” by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick.  It is open to non-members who register for the event.

• From In Custodia Legis: the legal history of the New York City rat.
  

• Richard W. Ireland, on delight in legal history, especially as engendered by "Characters, Not Caricatures: Sketches taken from life principally in Court on the Western Circuit" (Legal History Miscellany).
  

• From the American Historical Review, an interesting Call for Proposals: AHR Special Issue: “The Mistakes I Have Made." 
  

• 
  If you had read Joanne Freeman's Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, you couldn't help thinking of it upon encountering the reports of bad behavior in Congress this week.  Professor Freeman answers the call here and here.
  

• Over at the blog of the Supreme Court Historical Society, Todd C. Peppers and Tim Flanigan have posted Efficient and Humane: Chief Justice Warren Burger Reconsiders the Bar Admission and Reading Opinions from the Bench.
  

• Speaking of the Supreme Court Historical Society, the discussion it hosted on Cliff Sloan’s The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made is now on YouTube.
  

• Asheesh Kapur Siddique has published The Ideological Origins of “Written” Constitutionalism in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. "Building on recent scholarship on the coproduction of writing practices and state formation, it argues that the mode of constitution-making inaugurated in the aftermath of the American Revolution represented less a moment of origin than an ideological project of revising the relationship between document and statecraft characteristic of the early modern British Empire."
  

• Over at Credit Slips, my Georgetown Law colleague Adam Levitin is part of a discussion, arising from the briefing in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case before the Supreme Court, about the constitutional significance of unpublished English opinions.  See here and here.  DRE
  

• Brad Snyder discusses his book, Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment, with Jeffrey Rosen at the New-York Historical Society on Tuesday, December 12, 6:30 – 7:30 pm ET.  The charge for livestream access for nonmembers is $30.
  

• Over at the Law & Political Economy Blog: Karl Klare (Northeastern University School of Law) on the history of "non-reformist reforms" (in dialogue with Amna Akbar's recent article on this topic).
  

• ICYMI: “American LGBTQ+ Museum’s first traveling exhibition celebrates Lambda Legal’s history" (gay city news). "More Than 100 Years Later, Army Overturns Convictions of 110 Black Soldiers After 1917 Houston Riots" (Military.com).

• Update:  "Leviathan Production has entered development on a feature adaptation of Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battles Against Hate Speech, a historical work penned by Victoria Saker Woeste" (Deadline).
  

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