Boston University's Clark Legal History Series, Fall 2024

Via our friends at Boston University, we have the following announcement, of the Fall 2024 lineup for the Clark Legal History Series.

All workshops are Monday 10:40-12:40 in room 203, except for the first week's guest:

THURSDAY, Sept. 19, 4:20:

Jill Lepore, Harvard History/Law

We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (book excerpts) (forthcoming 2025)

Sept 23: Rory Van Loo, BU

“The New Consumer Law” (or: Digitally Intermediated Consumer Law)

Sept 30: Richard Re, U. of Virginia Law

“Legal Realignment” (forthcoming U. Chicago L. Rev)

Oct. 7: Martha Minow, Harvard Law

“The Unraveling: What Dobbs May Mean for Contraception, Liberty, and Constitutionalism”

Oct. 28: Jack Balkin, Yale Law (by Zoom)

Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation

Nov. 4: Stephen Sachs, Harvard Law

“The Twelfth Amendment and the ERA.”

Nov. 11: Emmanuel Arnaud, Cardozo Law School

On the development of the local criminal legal systems in Puerto Rico & American Samoa

Nov. 18: Shaun Ossei-Owusu, U. Penn. Law

The People’s Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press)

Or Renegade at Law: How Our Legal Industry Creates, Justifies, and Compounds Inequality

Website.  Readers are welcome to contact Jed Shugerman with questions, jshug@bu.edu. 

Weekend Roundup

• Virginia Law Weekly has published a report of “Originalism 101,” a conversation between Lawrence Solum and Charles Barzun on "the origins of originalism, its variations, its merits and flaws, and its impact on judicial decision-making."  
  

• The Harvard Crimson puts fifteen questions to former ASLH president Bruce Mann.

• Over at JOTWELL, Sara Mayeux (Vanderbilt Law) has posted an admiring review of Sean Vanatta's Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (2024).
  

• Deafness in the Divorce Court, a blog post from Northumbria University, is about the 1876 divorce case involving a "deaf and dumb" couple, the husband of which engaged in physical violence.
  

• Isabel Taylor, Head of Archival Core Functions at the University of Hamburg Archives, has a long post up on the blog of the UK Constitutional Law Association, entitled, Not So Arcane After All: Archives and the Battle for "Ancient Freedoms" in the Stuart Permanent State of Emergency.
  

• Harry F. Byrd's gift to America, Constitution Day, just keeps giving.  First up: Michael Waldman, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, will deliver The Supreme Court and American Democracy, the Constitution Day lecture in Room 101 of the Beverly Rogers Literature and Law Building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on September 17 from 4:30 pm to 6 pm.
  

• On September 17, the Lower Manhattan Historical Association, cultureNOW, and the United States District Court for the District of New York  will host an event in the Ceremonial Courtroom at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., with Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law; The Honorable Judge P. Kevin Castel, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York; Seth Kaller, Historical Documents & Legacy Collections; and James von Klemperer, FAIA, President Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.  RSVP here. 

• The Supreme Court Historical Society's Constitution Day lecture is a virtual event: At 12:00 PM (EST) on September 17, 2024, via Zoom, Judge Jon O. Newman and Professor Marin K. Levy speak on their new book, Written and Unwritten: The Rules, Internal Procedures and Customs of the United States Courts of Appeals.  You may register here.  A recording will be posted to YouTube after the event.
  

• Securities law gets in on the act on at Case Western Law when Adam C. Pritchard and Robert B. Thompson discuss their book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, on September 17 from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the School of Law’s Moot Courtroom (Room A59).
  
  
• Michael E. Woods, The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee, and Reeve Huston, Duke University, will discuss “The Election of 1824 and the History of Contested Presidential Elections,” as a Constitution Day commemoration at the Virginia Military Institute on Thursday, September 19, at 8 p.m. in Marshall Hall’s Gillis Theater (News-Gazette).
  

• 
   On October 9, the Supreme Court Historical Society will hold a virtual lecture Visiting the Supreme Court Building: A Discussion with the Court’s Curator, Matthew Hofstedt, and Deputy Curator, Nikki Peronace.  Before the discussion, Clare Cushman will introduce viewers to the Society’s newest publication, An Illustrated Guide to the Supreme Court.
  

• The Organization of American Historians is circulating the amicus brief it joined in United States v.  Skrmetti.  In the brief, "well-recognized scholarly historical organizations and academic scholars and historians whose many decades of study and research focus on the history of gender, sexuality, and medicine . . .  aim to provide the Court with accurate historical perspective as it considers the question of whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, prohibiting all medical treatments intended to allow 'a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex" or to treat 'purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.'” The amicus brief of William Eskridge, Jr., Steven Calabresi, Naomi Cahn, Alexander Volokh et al. is here; the "Yale philosopher’s" brief, here. 
  

• The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History, by Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls, was the sbject of an interview in the summer 2024 issue of The Historian, Issue 162 (Summer 2024),  In addition, former BBC Wales newsman Phil Parry interviewed Boyer about the Welsh aspects of the English law of treason (History Boys).
  

• A notice of Alison LaCroix's Interbellum Constitution  in the Cook Country Record.
  

• Penn's Omnia magazine has published a nice write-up on Sarah Gronningsater's The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom (2024).
  

•  Michael Hayes, a Kansas City lawyer with a Ph,D. in philosophy, reviews Aziz Rana's Constitutional Bind on Public Discourse, the blog of the John Witherspoon Institute. 
  

• ICYMI: Queer Justice: 50 Years of Lambda Legal and LGBTQ+ Rights, a traveling exhibit debuted in Dallas at the Resource Center on September 6 (Dallas Observer).  The Robert H. Jackson Center has its first program director, Elizabeth Hosier (Post-Journal).  The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation recognizes the Honorable Peter Fox Cohalan for his contributions to the Historical Society of the New York Courts’ online County Legal History Project (TBR Newsmedia).
  

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

Bray and Keane on Ussher

Samuel L. Bray, Notre Dame Law School, and D. N. Keane, Georgia Southern University, have posted James Ussher (1581-1656):

James Ussher (wiki)

In the seventeenth century, James Ussher was the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of the Church of Ireland. Now remembered for his risible dating of creation, in his lifetime he was widely regarded as one of the most learned persons in the British Isles if not in Europe. This chapter explores Archbishop Ussher's ideas that have significance for law. In particular, it considers his commitment to absolute monarchy, even as the tide was flowing toward a more assertive Parliament; his proposal for "reduced episcopacy," a form of conciliar ecclesiastical government; and his insistence that each national church have its own canon law. This chapter takes the measure of these contributions and also of their contributor. Ussher was a Janus-like figure of contradictions—staggering in how much he knew, and now remembered mostly for what he did not know; widely renowned in his time for his moderation, yet repressive to Irish Catholics; a royalist bishop who was deeply admired by both King Charles I and the rebels who beheaded him.

--Dan Ernst

Healy on Barbas on NYT v. Sullivan

Thomas Healy, Seton Hall Law School, has posted A Democracy Story: Reframing a Free Speech Landmark, his review of Samantha Barbas’s Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in N.Y. Times v. Sullivan:

What can we learn about the wisdom and legitimacy of current free speech doctrine by revisiting the story behind a landmark First Amendment decision? That’s the question I explore in this review essay of Samantha Barbas’s new book, Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in N.Y. Times v. Sullivan.

As her subtitle indicates, Barbas’s book attempts to reframe the story of Sullivan – to shift the focus from the issue of free speech to that of racial equality. Although there are real benefits to this approach, I argue that there are also risks. The primary one is that portraying Sullivan as a civil rights case will weaken its force as a free speech precedent, implying that the decision was the result of special circumstances and that the actual malice rule it adopted is therefore not generally applicable. Instead, I argue we should think about Sullivan primarily as a case about democracy and the rules necessary to sustain it. Doing so not only underscores the decision’s universal dimensions; it also helps to defend against the numerous critiques leveled at the Sullivan regime in recent years, most of which, I argue, are unfounded.

--Dan Ernst

Helsinki Legal History Series

 [We have the following announcement from our friends at the University at Helsinki.  DRE]

We are pleased to announce that the Helsinki Legal History Series will be taking place again this fall. The events are open to all and will be held at the University of Helsinki, organized by the Eurostorie and Cocolaw research units. We also plan to stream the sessions live, allowing participants from around the world to join.

The series this Fall is called Identities and Legal History, you can find more information here.  Here are the dates for the seminars:
 
Emily Prifogle (University of Michigan) 24.9, 3PM-4:30pm (UTC+3, Helsinki time)
“Making Rural America: A Legal History”

Anne Orford (University of Melbourne) 8.10, 3PM-4:30pm (UTC+3, Helsinki time)
 “The Promises and Perils of Interdisciplinary Encounters”

Luisa Brunori (CNRS) 5.11., 3PM-4:30pm (UTC+3, Helsinki time)
“The Identity of Partners and the Anonymity of Capital in Transatlantic Trade during the Early Modern Period”

Pedro Cardim (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) 10.12. 3PM-4:30pm (UTC+3, Helsinki time)
“Corporations and Jurisdictional Culture: Exploring the Political Identity of Early Modern Iberian Monarchies.”

Post Interviewed by Treanor on the Taft Court at the Library of Congress

Tomorrow, Wednesday, September 11, at 3:00 pm, the Library of Congress will livestream its Constitution Day lecture for 2024, an interview of Robert Post, the former dean of the Yale Law School, on his Holmes Devise volume, The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, by William M. Treanor, Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center.  The event is also open to the public.  For the link for the livestream and to register for the in-person event: this blog post.

--Dan Ernst

Penn Conference: Histories of Voting in America

We have word of a one-day conference, A More Perfect Union: Histories of Voting in America, to be held on October 18 at the University of Pennsylvania, organized by Hardeep Dhillon and William Sturkey of the Department of History.  Here is the schedule:

10:30am.  Breakfast

10:45am.  Opening Remarks
Dr. Hardeep Dhillon, Penn

11am.  The Promise and Limits of Electoral Democracy in the Early United States
Dr. Mark Boonshoft, Virginia Military Institute
Chair, Dr. Karen Tani, Penn

11:45am.  The Rise and Fall of Black & Woman Suffrage During Reconstruction
Dr. Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut
Chair, Dr. Mia Bay, Penn

1:15pm.  Disenfranchisement and the Fight for Chinese American Suffrage
Dr. Beth Lew-Williams, Princeton
Chair, Dr. Fariha Khan, Penn

2pm.  Purging the Electorate
Dr. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Cornell University
Chair, Dr. Chenoa Flippen, Penn

3pm.  Student Voices
Moderator, Dr. William Sturkey, Penn

RSVP here

--Dan Ernst

Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable

[From our friends at the Boston College Law School, we have the schedule for its Legal History Roundtable.  DRE]

This year, the Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable begins its 23rd successful year. BC Law's legal history group–Mary Sarah Bilder, Felipe Cole, Daniel Farbman, Aziz Rana, Adnan Zulfiqar, Daniel R. Coquillette, Frank R. Herrmann, S.J., and Laurel Davis–welcome anyone in the Boston area to join us. The Roundtable meets and discusses a pre-circulated paper in an informal, collegial atmosphere of informed discussion. We meet in the Boston College Law Library, Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room. More information can be found on the website or by contacting Chris Fitzgerald (fitzgefk@bc.edu).

Thursday, September 12, 5:00 PM
Professor Malick Ghachem, MIT

Thursday, December 05, 4:30 PM
Professor Idriss Fofana, Harvard Law School

Columbia Legal History Workshop

[From our friends at Columbia Law, we have the following schedule for the Columbia Legal History
Workshop.  DRE]

Please find below the Columbia Legal History Workshop’s 2024-2025 schedule. In the Fall, we will be meeting on Wednesdays from 6:00-7:30 PM in Fayerweather Hall, Room 411. Note that the first listed date is Erev Rosh Hashanah, so we are looking for an alternative date, most likely the following Wednesday, October 9. If you would like to be on the mailing list for the Workshop, please let us know by emailing Susanne Ridley (sridley@law.columbia.edu). Papers will be circulated and discussants announced at least one week in advance.

Amy Chazkel & Jeremy Kessler (with Kellen Funk, Maeve Glass, Adam Kosto, Christina Ponsa-Kraus, Stephanie McCurry, Kate Redburn, Sarah Seo, and Madeleine Zelin)

October 2. Jeremy Kessler (Columbia, Law)
“The Origins of ‘The Rule of Law’”

October 30. Naor Ben-Yehohada (Columbia, Anthropology)
“As If You Were Brothers: The Criminalization of Subjunctive Kinship” 

November 20. Mariana Silveira (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, History)
“International Law as History: John Bassett Moore and the Remaking of South American Borders”

December 4. Gautham Rao (American University, History)
“White Power: Policing American Slavery”

 January 29. Anders Walker (St. Louis University, Law)
“‘Every Man a Gun’: Andrew Jackson and the Origins of American Violence”

 February 19. Charles Bartlett (Miami, History)
“Universal Currency, Natural Law, and Just Society in the 16th Century: Gasparo Scaruffi on Commerce and Intrinsic Value”

March 26. Marissa Moorman (Wisconsin, History)
“Imperialism on Trial: Mercenaries, Sovereignty, and Internationalism in Angola’s 1976 People's Revolutionary Tribunal”

April 23. Keila Grinberg (Pittsburgh, History)
“The Fight for Racial Justice and Reparations

Weekend Roundup

• Video is available of the most recent Peking University School of Transnational Law Law and Humanities Series seminar: Dmitry Poldnikov (MGIMO University and Higher School of Economics discussed “Comparison of the World’s Legal Traditions on the Basis of the Role of Law.” 
  

• Over at the blog of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, a forum will appear in seven installments over the next several weeks on the history and legacy of Anthony Comstock. It will also appear in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as “The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws.”
  

• The University of Chicago Law School's notice of The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms by faculty member Alison LaCroix.
  

• The Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań announces that its law faculty member Piotr Alexandrowicz has received a European Research Council Starting Grant to study legal marginalia–or, in the words of the grant, “Petrification of ius commune through printed paratexts.”  He says, “By studying creative approaches to printed paratexts, we may better understand the extent to which they served in the application of the law, whether they were helpful in legal education, whether they served to consolidate leading interpretations of normative texts.”
  

• The shortlist for the 2024 Cundill History Prize has been announced.  It includes They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence, by Lauren Benton; Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, by Andrew C. McKevitt; and Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, by Dylan C. Penningroth.
  

• Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Yale University, will speak on Unsettlements: History of Land Reclamation in British Mandate of Palestine in the Eurasian Empires Workshop of the Stanford Humanities Center on Monday, October 28, 2024, 5:30 - 7pm.
  

• “The latest University of Nebraska–Lincoln digital humanities project, ‘Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West,’ is now online and invites users to explore how marginalized communities navigated the courts to seek justice.”  (Nebraska Today).
  

• The University of Arkansas School of Law welcomes Benjamin Brady to its faculty.  In addition to serving as counsel for policy and international affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office and working in law firms in New York City and Washington, D.C., and in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Professor Brady is the holder of a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, where his dissertation was Regulating the World: American Law and International Business (2016).
  

• The FDR Library has posted the video of a book event Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers' Project with Sara Rutkowski.
  

• The Lawbook Exchange’s September 2024 catalog of Scholarly Law & Legal History.
  

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

 

October ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

The ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium will convene this October. Virtual participation remains an option for those who want to attend. Register here: https://forms.gle/tk3fQ6ZuTdSFNbkt6.

October 19, 2024 | 10 AM - 3 PM (CST) 

Notre Dame Law School | Chicago, IL

Registration/Welcome 09:45 - 10:05 AM

Paper #1: Historicizing the Legal Profession 10:05 - 11:00 AM (CST)

“Attorney Image, Advertising, and Access to Justice in the 1970s”

Author: Kathryn Birks Harvey, Northwestern University

Respondent: Derek T. Muller, Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

Paper #2: Legal History of Urban Renewal 11:05 - 12:00 PM (CST)

“In Between Historic Preservation and Blight: Urban Renewal in Providence”

Author: Kawit Promrat, University of Virginia

Respondent: Nadav Shoked, Professor of Law, Northwestern University

Paper #3: Nineteenth-Century Government Accountability 01:05 - 2:00 PM (CST)

“Officers at Common Law”

Author: Nathaniel Donahue, New York University

Respondent: Farah Peterson, Professor of Law, University of Chicago

Paper #4: Prohibition & the Constitution 02:05 - 3:00 PM (CST)

“A Decade of Judicial Intemperance: The 18th Amendment’s Impact on 4th Amendment Searches & Seizures”

Author: Mitchell A. Szlabowicz, University of Virginia

Respondent: Darrell A. H. Miller, Professor of Law, University of Chicago

More information about the colloquium, from a May 2024 announcement:

With the financial support of the American Society for Legal History, Notre Dame Law School and the University of Notre Dame Graduate School will host the ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium during the 2024-2025 academic year.

Dennis Wieboldt, a joint J.D./Ph.D. student in history, is spearheading the forum. Associate Dean Randy Kozel and Professor Christian Burset have worked with Wieboldt to launch the colloquium at Notre Dame next year.

. . . The forum will provide budding legal scholars and practitioners with feedback on works-in-progress—an important step in fine-tuning research to a point where it can be submitted for publication. “As the federal judiciary increasingly turns its attention to ‘history and tradition,’” Wieboldt noted, “it is crucial for future leaders in the legal profession to develop the skills necessary to employ historical methodologies and make historically informed claims about the meaning of legal texts.”

“Notre Dame is an excellent place to think seriously about the role of history in contemporary legal practice,” Wieboldt added. “I am excited to welcome students and faculty from other institutions to engage in conversation with members of the Notre Dame community.”

. . . 

For further information about the Colloquium, please visit here.  If you have any questions, please contact Dennis Wieboldt at dwiebold@nd.edu.

-- Karen Tani

Vanderbilt Legal History Colloquium, 2024-25

 Via our friends at Vanderbilt University, we have the following Legal History Colloquium schedule:

Vanderbilt Legal History Colloquium, 2024-25

Fall 2024

September 30         Jessica Lowe (VU), Early Modern Germany

October 28             Jessica Power (Fisk), Latin America

November 14         Yanna Yannakakis (Emory), Colonial Mexico

Spring 2025

January 27            Nicholas Abbott (Old Dominion), Early Colonial India

February 17          Emily Prifogle (Michigan),  US Rural Farm Workers

March 17              Nora Barakat (Stanford), Late Ottoman Empire

April 14                 Karl Shoemaker (Wisconsin), Medieval Europe

-- Karen Tani

"Making Connections": An ASLH On-line Seminar

[The American Society for Legal History has announced the schedule for its on-line seminar, “Making Connections.”  The sessions are open to all, but an RSVP is required. DRE.]

Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series
Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History
 
All sessions will be on Zoom Wednesdays from 6:00-7:00 pm (Central).  We will send an email [to ASLH members] two weeks in advance of each event. [Non-ASLH members should request a link to RSVP from Emily Prifogle (prifogle [at] umich.edu) for Fall sessions and Siobhan Barco (sbarco [at] princeton.edu) for Spring sessions.]  You must RSVP to receive the zoom link.
 
September 18th  
Hendrik Hartog, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’  Brotherhood Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2024) with interlocutor Susanna Blumenthal
 
November 20th  
Giuliana Perrone, Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023)(Studies in Legal History) with interlocutor Cynthia Nicoletti
 
December 11th
Chloë Kennedy, Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2024) with interlocutor Catherine Evans
 
January 22nd  
Gender & History, Special Issue, Engendering Carcerality (July 2024).
Authors in Conversation:

Rachel Klein, “Surviving Domestic and State Violence: Women’s Prison Organizing and the Gendered Politics of Solidarity,”

Anne Gray Fischer, “Bad, Mad or Both: A Legal History of Battered Woman Syndrome"

April Haynes, “The Other Women’s Rights Movement: ‘Streetwalkers’, Habeas Corpus and Anti-Carceral Activism in New York City, 1830-1860”

February 26th  
Allison Powers, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford University Press 2024) with interlocutor Sam Erman
 
March 26th  
Joint event with the Immigration & Ethnic History Society

Brianna Nofil, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Migrant Incarceration (Princeton University Press, 2024) with interlocutor Lucy Salyer

April 16th
Joint event with the Business History Society.

Xaq Frohlich, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (University of California Press, 2023)

Sean Vanatta, Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale University Press, 2024)

Yale Legal History Forum

[Our friends at YLS have sent us the Fall 2024 schedule for the Yale Legal History Forum.  DRE]

September 17 — Professor Jill Lepore, Harvard Law School, If Anything Human Can So Long Endure: The U.S. Constitution and the Philosophy of Amendment (co-hosted by the Public Law Workshop). Sterling Law Building 121 from 12:10-1:30 PM

October 1 — Professor Karen Tani, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Curation, Narration, Erasure: Power and Possibility at the U.S. Supreme Court (co-hosted by the Public Law Workshop).  Sterling Law Building 121 from 12:10-1:30 PM

October 8 — Professor Rohit De & Professor Ornit Shani, Yale University and the University of Haifa, Title forthcoming.  Baker Hall, Room 116 from 12:10-1:30 PM

October 15 — Professor Noah Rosenblum, NYU School of Law, Title forthcoming (co-hosted by the Public Law Workshop).  Sterling Law Building 121 from 12:10-1:30 PM

October 22 — Professor Curtis Bradley, University of Chicago Law School, Excerpt from Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: Constitutional Authority in Practice (co-hosted by the Public Law Workshop).  Sterling Law Building 121 from 12:10-1:30 PM

November 19 — Professor Myisha Eatmon, Harvard University, From Jim Crow to ‘Civil Rights’: Challenging Jim Crow Policing and Vigilantism through Litigation and Discourse.  Baker Hall, Room 116 from 12:10-1:30 PM

ABF Legal History Workshop

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the American Bar Foundation.  For further information, please contact Sophie Kofman at skofman [at] abfn.org.  DRE]

The ABF Chicago-area Legal History Workshop will be held periodically on Wednesday evenings (see dates below) at 4:00 pm (except where otherwise noted) at the 4th Floor Woods Conference Room of the ABF Offices (420 E. Superior St.).

Wed. Sept. 4 (4:00pm start) – Joanna Grisinger (Northwestern University)

 “Challenging the Establishment at half fare”: The Civil Aeronautics Board and Youth Air Travel

Joanna Grisinger is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University. Her current research explores public interest participation in administrative decision making. Grisinger’s book manuscript examines airline regulation as a site for mobilization around issues of race and apartheid, disability, consumer rights, and the environment. 

Wed. Sept. 25 (4:00 pm start) – Anders Walker (St. Louis University)

Wed. Oct. 9 (4:30pm start) – Amy Stanley (University of Chicago)

Wed. Nov. 13 (4 pm start) – Brett Gadsden (Northwestern University)

Conley on Originalism and Comparative Law

Anna Conley, University of Montana Alexander Blewett III School of Law, has posted The Inevitability of Adaptability: Comparative Contributions to Understanding Originalism, which is forthcoming in the Emory International Law Review:

What can comparative law teach us about originalism as a constitutional interpretation method? After synthesizing existing comparative analyses, this article seeks to redefine comparative law’s role in understanding originalism. When defining originalism strictly to require adherence to fixed original meaning, originalism is not used by courts anywhere in the world. Instead, courts use history purposively to understand the intent behind constitutional text as one of many methods of interpretation. Comparative works suggest historical constitutional interpretation has a complex relationship with rights, politics and culture.

Comparative law can provide not only descriptive understandings of originalism but also interrogate its mandate that present-day judges adhere to fixed historical definitions of constitutional provisions. This article challenges originalism’s normative mandates by proposing principles about the movement of law between and within legal systems gleaned from comparative law. Two proposed principles are: (1) the “interpretive valve principle” that legal systems need mechanisms to adapt to societal changes, and that legal systems will generally work around artificial barriers to interpretive valves; and (2) the “legal transplant principle” that legal transplants always change from their origin system to the receiving system. Islamic law’s development throughout the Islamic diaspora, Europe’s reception of Roman law, and post-colonial common law systems’ integration of English law highlight these fundamental tenets.

This article applies these principles to equitable originalism, a strict originalist philosophy fixing the meaning of “equity” in Article III to English chancery courts’ equitable powers in the 1780s, and limiting federal judges’ equitable powers to that fixed meaning. Equitable originalism is an artificial barrier to equity, which is an interpretive valve in the U.S. legal system. This dispositive freezing of equity is seen in no other former British colony, and stymies development of equity’s inherent corrective function. Equitable originalism will likely face limited success as a sustainable constitutional interpretation method because it is anomalous to the way law moves and develops.

--Dan Ernst

Gienapp's "Against Constitutional Originalism"

Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford University, has published Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique, in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference 

Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory’s core tenet—that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning—has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the distant constitutional past. Yet originalist engagement with history is often deeply problematic. And now that a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court champion originalism, the task of scrutinizing originalists’ use and abuse of history has never been more urgent.
 
In this comprehensive and novel critique of originalism, Jonathan Gienapp targets originalists’ unspoken assumptions about the Constitution and its history. Originalists are committed to recovering the Constitution laid down at the American Founding, yet they often assume that the Constitution is fundamentally modern. Rather than recovering the original Constitution, they project their own understandings onto it, assuming that eighteenth-century constitutional thinking was no different than their own. They take for granted what it meant to write a constitution down, what law was, how it worked, and where it came from, and how a constitution’s meaning was fixed. In the process, they erase the Constitution that eighteenth-century Americans in fact created. By understanding how originalism fails, we can better understand the Constitution that we have.

--Dan Ernst

Penn Legal History Workshop: Fall 2024 Lineup

The Fall 2024 lineup for the University of Pennsylvania Legal History Workshop is below:

September 12th, 2024: Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford University), "The People of the United States: The Lost Constitution of National Popular Sovereignty"

September 26th, 2024: Ofra Bloch (Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law), “Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the Memory Wars”

October 10th, 2024: Beth Lew-Williams (Princeton University), “John Doe China Man: Race and Law in the American West”

October 17th, 2024: Sarah Seo (Columbia Law School), "The Necessity of the Circumstantial Case"

November 14th, 2024: Gautham Rao (American University), excerpts from White Power: Policing American Slavery (manuscript under contract) (introduction and chapter 5, "The Other Reconstruction: The Enslavers State After Emancipation”)

November 21st, 2024: Saul Cornell (Fordham University), "The Paradox of Heller’s Anti-Originalist Originalism: The Original Understanding of Rights. Regulation, and Firearms”

Do you have a legal history workshop series or event you'd like us to publicize? Feel free email us!

-- Karen Tani

Perrone, "Rehearsals for Reparations"

New from Giuliana Perrone (UC Santa Barbara): "Rehearsals for Reparations," RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10 (June 2024). The abstract:

This article considers a subset of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers’ bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them, that there was a general agreement between enslaved and enslaver about the form reparations should take, and that there was a similar understanding that reparations should be generational. The article further suggests the promise of additional inquiry into historical testamentary records. Such a novel archive would add to contemporary arguments in favor of reparations by identifying an unacknowledged effort to provide compensation to formerly enslaved people.

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

NYU Legal History Colloquium

[We have the following announcement of the Legal History Colloquium at NYU Law School.  DRE]

Legal History Colloquium (Fall 2024).  David Golove and Noah Rosenblum.  Alternate Wednesdays 4:45-6:45 p.m.  Vanderbilt Hall, Room 208

The colloquium will alternate between public and private sessions. In the public sessions, the colloquium will discuss works-in-progress by historians or legal scholars. In the private sessions, the moderators and students will discuss reading materials that provide context for the upcoming public papers. Students will submit response papers before each public session.

Fall 2024 Schedule of Presenters
 
September 11
“Against Constitutional Originalism”
Jonathan Gienapp, Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law, Stanford University

September 25
Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law

October 9
Sarah Seo, Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law, Columbia Law School & Visiting Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

October 23
Anna O. Law, Associate Professor of Political Science & Herbert Kurz Chair of Constitutional Rights, CUNY Brooklyn College

November 6
Stephen Holmes, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

November 20
Jane Manners, Assistant Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law

November 27
Caitlin B. Tully, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History, NYU School of Law