The University of Virginia School of Law has just posted a new episode in its “Common Law” podcast, a series in which Dean Risa Goluboff discusses recent scholarship with its authors on the UVA faculty. It is entitled Digging into Our Forgotten Legal History.
In the season’s fifth episode, released Tuesday, Professors Cynthia Nicoletti and Joy Milligan talk with host Dean Risa Goluboff, who is also a legal historian, about two of their articles that share something in common: both show instances of people and institutions using the law to preserve the status quo against movements that were trying to improve conditions for Black Americans.
Yet the professors took distinctly different paths during the process of researching and writing about legal history. The trio discuss their decisions to focus on institutions versus people, “historical forgetting,” how the present affects our ideas of the past and the pitfalls of bringing historical work to bear on today’s concerns.
Nicoletti, the Paul G. Mahoney Research Professor of Law and a professor of history at UVA, discusses her paper “William Henry Trescot: Pardon Broker,” which was published in The Journal of the Civil War Era. The paper won the 2021 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in the journal that year. Trescot, a lawyer and lobbyist for the South Carolina Lowcountry elite whites, helped his clients obtain pardons after the Civil War to avoid having their land redistributed to formerly enslaved people.
Milligan, the Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law, discusses her paper “Subsidizing Segregation,” published in the Virginia Law Review. The article exposes how the federal government played a role in extending racial segregation and discrimination by funding segregated schools up to 10 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed “separate but equal” education.
--Dan Ernst
