Weekend Roundup

• Like us, you might have heard something about limited access to the collections at the National Archives, College Park.  Here is the latest that we've found, courtesy of the American Historical Association.  

• A recording of The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed, a "Town Hall" sponsored by the National Constitution Center, is now online.

• We were very pleased to learn that the Law, Culture and the Humanities has given its James Boyd White Award to Robert W. Gordon.  H/t: SB

• "John A. Kirk, George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has been awarded the Susie Pryor Award for his article examining the case of Mary Dinwiddie, the only African American woman sentenced to death in Arkansas during the 20th century."  More.  

• A colloquy with Jill Hasday, University of Minnesota Law School, on her book, We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Minnesota Law).

• "Kim Lane Scheppele will give Chautauqua Institution’s 21st annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States, on Monday, August 11, 2025, at 3:30 p.m." (Jackson List.) 

• A report on a symposium on that Magna Carta at HLS (Harvard  Law Today).

• "Etta Haynie Maddox: First Woman Licensed to Practice Law in Maryland" (In Custodia Legis). 

• Also on In Custodia Legis, A History of Self-Representation and How H.H. Holmes Represented Himself in His Criminal Trial, posted by Emily Tejada, a former intern with the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress.

• In Time's "Made by History" series: The Lavender Scare and the Long History of LGBTQ Exclusion in America by Joel Zapata. 

• "Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State": Sam Moyn reviews Andrew Preston’s Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security (New Republic).   

• The eighth biennial conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History begins next week at the University of Szeged (ESCLH).

• Lawbook Exchange's June 2025 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History: Part 1 and Part 2.

•  ICYMI:  "What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About SCOTUS’s Trans Rights Ruling" [New Republic, quoting legal historian Kate Redburn (Columbia Law)]. The constitution is not in crisis; it has already failed, says Jack Rakove (Washington Monthy).

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