- An alarming opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel of the US Department of Justice advising White House Counsel that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. WaPo's story is here.
- Having written about two thirds of a history of a law school, word of a new contribution to the genre always intrigues me. Here's a notice of Legal Education at the University of Virginia: Tradition and Transformation (University of Virginia Press). DRE
- In the American Prospect: Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) writes about the Supreme Court's recent decision in Chiles v. Salazar (involving a Colorado ban on "conversion therapy"). The piece also quotes legal historian Marie-Amélie George (Wake Forest University Law School).
- Via Brian Rosenwald: "Made by History" has a new home. Going forward, it will partner with the Philadelphia Inquirer. New pitch email: madebyhistory@inquirer.com.
- On Friday, April 10, Alejandro de la Fuente, Harvard University, will deliver the sixteenth annual Presidential Lecture at Tufts University on Slavery, Freedom, Race, and the Law in the Americas. The lecture will be based on his and Ariela J. Gross’s book, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (THR).
- Over at Divided Argument, William Baude hosts a roundtable with Christian Burset, Jonathan Green, and Ryan Snyder on their recent articles, which Baude describes as some of the best contributions to a "recent round of scholarship on history and tradition in legal interpretation."
- And over at Modern American History, Sarah Seo hosts a roundtable of historians to discuss "the benefits of and challenges to translating historical scholarship for a legal audience." With Laura Edwards, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Samuel Erman, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Maggie Blackhawk and Ned Blackhawk.
- G. Edward White discovers who pranked the U.S. Supreme Court "by filing a phony cert petition challenging an absurd DC noise ordinance" (Oyez).
- That symposium over at Balkinization on Stephen Skowronek's Adaptability Paradox continues, with, among other contributions, Jeremy Kessler's Material Foundations of American Constitutional Development.
- The latest issue of the Journal of American History includes several articles of interest to legal historians, including One Person, One Vote? The Gap between Representative Equity and Mathematical Equality after Baker v. Carr, by Alma Steingart, which shows how "litigants, Supreme Court justices, judges, and mathematical experts struggled to align the theoretical concept of political representation with mathematical notions of equality" in the malapportionment cases of the 1960s.
- The NYT review of Mark Peterson's The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History (Princeton University Press) and a blog post by the author.
- The April 2026 newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here.
- More on Birthright Citizenship. John Yoo says that it has a long historical precedent (AEI). Kate Masur "Fact-Checks President Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order" (CBS Chicago). John Mikhail on Jurisdiction, Domicile, and the Ratio Decidendi of Wong Kim Ark (Balkinization). Yet another dispatch from the war between the law professors on the history of the citizenship clause. (Courthouse News Service). And has the distance between law professor Bluesky and NYT opinion page ever been shorter?
- ICYMI: A new book on Sarah Keys Evans, "The Black Veteran Who Desegregated Interstate Buses" (Mother Jones). Tom Lee on the Declaration of Independence at 250 (Fordham Law). A Century of Colonial Tariffs (LPE Project). High school students explore Münster’s legal history (Universität Münster).
Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.
