- From In Custodia Legis: a guest post by historian Ryan Reft on "Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Black Book."
A side note to the forgoing: At the start of his post, Dr. Reft reproduces a letter from Edward Holmes, the justice's nephew and executor, to Tom Corcoran, the justice's favorite legal secretary, in which the executor refers to "a question that intervenes between us." Perhaps the question was the disposition of the Black Book. In his often reliable memoir, Corcoran claimed that on the night the justice died, Edward Holmes said that the Black Book was "too personal" and should be destroyed, but that when the nephew's back was turned he "slipped it behind some other volumes on a shelf. A little later I smuggled it out of the house under my shirt and sent it by courier the next day to the Harvard Law School." Thomas G. Corcoran with Philip Kopper, “Rendezvous with Democracy: The Memoirs of ‘Tommy the Cork,’” Holmes, pp. 39-40, box 586, Corcoran MSS, Library of Congress. I've never looked for corroborating evidence in the Edward J. Holmes Collection or other HLS records. DRE.
Thomas G. Corcoran, 1935 (LC)
- From Time's "Made by History" section: Janet Golden, "America Has Been Having the Same Debate About Child Labor for 100 Years"; Ray Brescia, "The 19th Century Case That Transformed the Legal System—And Holds a Lesson for the Trump Trials"; Aaron Coy Moulton, "The Long, Sordid History of Foreign Governments Courting Members of Congress."
- The
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has issued a call for applications for its Fellowship Program. The library "welcome[s] applications from scholars and
graduate students locally and globally who utilize traditional methods
of archival and bibliographic research as well as from individuals who
wish to pursue creative, interdisciplinary, and non-traditional
approaches to conducting research in the collections."
- The New-York Historical Society has announced substantial postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships in Women's History. Due date: June 30.
- Alison LaCroix’s presentation of her just published book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, is now up on the Supreme Court Historical Society’s YouTube Channel.
- New on the Digging a Hole podcast: David C. Schleicher and Samuel Moyn interview Dylan C. Penningroth on his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. And congratulations to Professor Penningroth for winning the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize of the Law and Society Association for Before the Movement! Berkeley Law's notice of the awards the book has garnered is here.
- On the New Books in Intellectual History podcast, Kunal M. Parker discusses The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970.
- On the New Books in African American Studies podcast, Robert K. D. Colby discusses An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South.
- There's some legal history in the latest issue of Law and Humanities, including Thomas Giddens's A Roman face on an English body: the typography of Plowden’s Commentaries.
- A CFP has just issued for a Law and Rurality Workshop to be held at the University of Iowa Law School in November 2024. H/t: ER.
- ICYMI: Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law, on the Trump Conviction and the History of Presidential Crimes (SLS Blogs). The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act (Smithsonian; History Today). Policy approaches to addressing a history of racial discrimination (Stanford IEPR). Delaware marks 70th anniversary of its role in landmark Brown v. Board decision (WHYY).
- Update: We were pleased to learn that the University of Connecticut School of Law has established The Distinguished Alumni Professor Kent Newmyer Award in American Legal History "in honor of Kent Newmyer to recognize a student who demonstrates excellence in the study of American legal history."
