ASLH Craig Joyce Medal to Bryen, Rao

For the past month, we have been posting notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at this fall's meeting of the American Society for Legal History. There is one more to cover, and it's a special one: the Craig Joyce Medal. About this award:

The Society depends on the volunteer labors of its members. It is fortunate in the number of its members who are willing to join in the business of the Society, which is to foster scholarship and teaching in the broad field of legal history. Each year well over a hundred names appear on this website on the lists of officers, directors, and committee members. Among that number, a few people contribute their time to the Society over many years in ways that are above and beyond the call of duty, even in an organization whose members have a strong sense of duty. The Craig Joyce Medal recognizes those individuals. It is awarded on an occasional basis to acknowledge and honor extraordinary and sustained volunteer service to the Society. The medal was first awarded, fittingly, to Craig Joyce, the Andrews Kurth Professor of Law at the University of Houston, in whose honor the ASLH Board of Directors created the award.

In 2025, there were two medal recipients: Ari Bryen (Vanderbilt University) and Gautham Rao (American University). Both recipients have long records of service to the Society. Most recently, Professor Bryen served a 4-year term as the ASLH's Secretary. Professor Rao has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ASLH-sponsored Law and History Review since 2017; in 2026, he will help transition the journal to new leadership.  

Congratulations to Professor Bryen and Professor Rao - and thank you to both of them for their extraordinary dedication to the Society and the field. 

-- Karen Tani  

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Ely Samuel Parker, seated at left (LC)

  Ely Samuel Parker, "a member of the Senecans," was admitted to the New York State Bar, 176 years after being denied entry on account of his race  (NYT).  

• John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) has published an editorial in the New York Times: "The Idea That Once Held America Together Died in 2025." (The idea: procedural fairness/regularity.)

• Samuel Bray summarizes his and Drew Keane's book chapter, "Of Canon Law and Kings: The Legal Thought of James Ussher (1581-1656)" (Divided Argument).   

• "The American Historical Association (AHA), in collaboration with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), has filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard University’s lawsuit against the federal government over the university’s ability to host foreign scholars and students." Link. 

• Theda Skocpol in conversation with Edwin Amenta (Sociologica). 

• An impressive lineup of historical talks at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research. 

• Lawbook Exchange's  December 2025 (Part II) catalog of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: Damon Root on Mercy Otis Warren, "the Founding Mother Who Opposed the Constitution" (Reason).  Adam Serwer thinks "Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back" (The Atlantic).

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

Baylin Duryea on Judicial Review of Wartime Price Control

Catherine Baylin Duryea, St. John's University School of Law, has published Emergency Oversight in the FIU Law Review.  It is an excellent study of an institution familiar to Federal Courts scholars but not enough others, the Emergency Court of Appeals, which heard challenges to the orders of the Office of Price Administration during World War II and to that extent ensured the the United States fought, not in a state of exception, but, as Charles Evans Hughes might have put it, under "a fighting constitution." Here is the abstract:

This Article examines one of the most pressing questions in administrative law: How much judicial oversight should administrative agencies face during an emergency? This issue was particularly salient during the COVID epidemic, but it is not new. The Second World War saw a significant expansion and consolidation of the power of administrative agencies as well as experimentation with the appropriate oversight role for courts. This Article analyzes one such experiment: judicial oversight of agencies implementing wartime anti-inflationary measures, i.e., price controls and rationing. During the war, Congress created a specialized court, the Emergency Court of Appeals (ECA), to hear disputes arising out of these domestic economic programs. The ECA took a minimalist approach to oversight of agency decisions; it intervened to protect individual rights only so far as it could do so without impairing the overall regulatory scheme. The court embraced the view that its responsibility was to protect constitutional rights and guard against wartime inflation. The Supreme Court fully endorsed the approach of the ECA. This vision of courts and agencies working in harmony during a crisis stands in stark contrast to their contemporary relationship.

This Article makes two significant contributions. The first is a descriptive analysis of the relationship between administrative agencies and courts with respect to price control and rationing during WWII. That relationship, described in detail here for the first time, provides a valuable historical comparison for the contemporary era, where the courts similarly found themselves navigating expansive economic regulation in the context of national emergencies. During COVID, the court took a far more interventionist, restrictive approach towards limiting agency action. That tees up the second contribution of the Article, which is to raise the normative question: Is it desirable for courts to strictly limit administrative responses to national emergencies? The historical comparison cannot provide an answer, but it highlights another, more collaborative model for balancing individual rights with effective and efficient governance.

--Dan Ernst 

Bartie on Collective Legal Biography

Susan Bartie, Australian National University, has published Understanding the world through legal Biography: Lessons from history, sociology and law open access in the International Journal of the Legal Profession 32 (2-25): 185-206:

This article draws on the historiography of biography, sociology and examples from law to consider the potential of group legal biography projects to generate knowledge and theories about law, society and politics. From the historiography of biography, it explains how debates between historians about whether histories of social orders are best treated as large-scale biography projects reject certain theories about humanity and how people construct society. They suggest that biographical approaches are about something more than form and that the size and depth of projects support some theories better than others. From sociology, it explains how sociologists have unwittingly taken positions in the historians’ debates, developing theories that encourage researchers to approach biographical data in different ways to generate certain theories about society. From law, it situates historical and sociological projects that draw on lawyers’ biographical data within the historical debates and the sociological theories. The point is to encourage more researchers to appreciate the range of possibilities and corresponding debates about the use and potential of biographical data in understanding law.

--Dan Ernst

Jeppeson on Attainder in Virginia and New South Wales

Jennie Jeppesen has published "Tried and Attainted": Comparisons of the Application and Reception of the Common Law of Attaint in Virginia and New South Wales in Law and History Review:

Common Law, the shining cornerstone of the English Justice system, becomes a muddy pool when trying to uncover the ways in which it arrived into the early Virginian, Maryland, and early Eastern Australian colonies. This is particularly true for the common law of felony attainder. Attaint—social and legal death without physical death—had lasting implications on the question of legal personhood for the convicts transported from England to these colonies between 1614 and 1840. This article revisits the work done by Bruce Kercher, adding new primary research from the American colonies to enrich and challenge Kercher’s arguments. Expanding the primary source material used in the analysis gives us a deeper and more nuanced understanding about how attainder was received and applied in the colonies—in particular, in the American colonies—and a deeper understanding of outside forces that influenced property rights beyond that of the question of attainder. This article provides nuance to how common law was understood and applied by those with and without formal legal training in early developing colonial societies.

--Dan Ernst

LHR 43:4

Law and History Review 43:4 (November 2025) is now published online.

British Imperial Constitutional Law and the Zionist Campaign against the Legislative Council in Mandatory Palestine
Maya Kreiner

The Twentieth-Century Origins of the Medieval Lex Mercatoria Thesis
Jake Dyble

General Will or Public Order? The Debate on Criminal Justice Policy in Early Colonial Himalaya, 1815–1816
Irit Ballas, Arik Moran

How Kantian is Kelsen’s Early Theory of International Law?
Wojciech Engelking

“The Problem Can Be Solved Only by Those Imbued with a Socialist Sense of Justice!”: Social Conflict and the Lower Courts in the German Democratic Republic
Ville Erkkilä, Luisa Gries

Legislating the Progressive Arab Society: State Authority and Social Rights in the 1964 Interim Constitutions of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria
Relli Shechter

The Collapse of the Civil Rights Coalition: Congress and the Politics of Antibusing Legislation, 1966–86
Jeffery A. Jenkins, Justin Peck

“The Rich Uncle from America”: Transnational Inheritance Transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia, 1840s–1980s
Jürgen Norbert Dinkel

Between Law and Politics: Islamic Judges in the South Indian Littoral, 1808–1885
Saumyashree Ghosh

Witnesses, Judges: A Revolution Untold
Orit Malka

Lucretia (and Lucia) and the Medieval Canonists: Guilt, Consent, and Chastity in the Early Canonistic Jurisprudence of Rape: Submission for Law and History Review
Atria A. Larson

Fines and the Common Bench, 1218–1226
Douglas R. Chapman

Conspiracy, Crime, and Conflict in the Court of Star Chamber
K.J. Kesselring

“To Each Their Grievance Is Bitter and Unbearable”: Petitions, Autocracy, and the Rule of Law in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Alison K. Smith

Taken Not Given: The End of Slavery in Britain
Simon P Newman

“Distressing the Distressed”: Rent Distraint in Early Republic New York
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan

Incapable of Managing His Estate: Habitual Drunkards and the Expansion of Guardianship in the Nineteenth-Century United States
David Korostyshevsky

Alien Acts in the Age of Emancipation: Mobility Control and Executive Power in the British Caribbean, 1820s–1830s
Jan C. Jansen

Ideas With(out) Consequences?: The Natural Law Institute and the Making of Conservative Constitutionalism During the Cold War, 1947–1951
Dennis J. Wieboldt

The Appeal of Religious Law: Jurisdictional Politics and Modern State Formation in the Gulf Sheikhdoms, ca. 1950–2000
Alexandre Caeiro

Review Essay

Past as Present: State-ifying the Laws of War
Yilin Wang

Book Reviews

Lauren Benton, They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. Pp. 304. £35 hardcover (ISBN 9780691248479)
Boyd van Dijk

Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls, The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 333. $180.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780367509934).
Matthew Steilen

Henry Ansgar Kelly, Criminal-Inquisitorial Trials in English Church Courts: From the Middle Ages to the Reformation Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp. x, 
R. H. Helmholz

Alex Thompson, British Law and Governance in Treaty Port China 1842–1927: Consuls, Courts and Colonial Subjects Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024. Pp. 180. €104.00 hardcover (ISBN 9789463720397). doi: 10.1515/9789048557097-004
Ivan Lee

Cuilan Liu. Buddhism in Court: Religion, Law, and Jurisdiction in China. Hardback. Published: 29 August 2024. 288 Pages. ISBN: 9780197663332.£78.00.
Paul R. Katz

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. Pp.360. Paperback 32$. ISBN: 9781503637740
Ilkay Yilmaz

Taisu Zhang, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 422, $120.00 hardcover (ISBN 9781108995955).
Meng Zhang

Nadeera Rupesinghe, Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka. Navigating Pluralities in a Colonial Society, Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2023. Pp. 316. € 66,00 paperback (ISBN 9789087283759).
Pouwel van Schooten

--Dan Ernst 

Frost and Eason on Birthright Citizenship and Congressional Qualifications

Amanda Frost, University of Virginia School of Law, and her UVA law student, Emily Eason, have posted The Dog That Didn't Bark: Eligibility To Serve In Congress And The Original Understanding Of The Citizenship Clause, which appeared in Georgetown Law Journal Online, and is the subject of a New York Times column by Adam Liptak.  Here is the abstract:

Jefferson Davis Contemplates Hiram Revels (LC)

President Donald J. Trump's 2025 Executive Order restricting birthright citizenship has prompted new interest in the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause. This Essay analyzes an overlooked source of the original understanding of that Clause: the meaning of "citizen" when determining whether members-elect are qualified to serve in Congress. The U.S. Constitution requires that every member of Congress be a U.S. citizen, and further provides that each House "shall be the judge" of members' qualifications. Anyone is permitted to challenge a member-elect's qualifications to serve, and hundreds of such challenges have been brought over U.S. history. Accordingly, challenges to members-elect's citizenship--as well as the absence of such challenges--shed light on the original understanding of the Citizenship Clause. 

Using a variety of archival sources, we have researched the ancestry of all 584 members of the Thirty-ninth (1865-67), Fortieth (1867-69), and Forty-first (1869-71) Congresses, and found more than a dozen whose citizenship would be suspect under President Trump's interpretation of the Citizenship Clause. Yet no one questioned these members' citizenship despite the contentious political environment that inspired frequent qualifications challenges on a variety of other grounds. This dog that didn't bark provides further evidence that the Trump administration's novel interpretation of the Citizenship Clause is inconsistent with the original understanding. 

We conclude with an observation based on long hours of tedious research: Determining the status of immigrants arriving in the early nineteenth century--an era with few immigration records and minimal enforcement of existing state-based restrictions on immigration--is often impossible, and always onerous. The difficulty of the task alone is evidence that no one at the time of ratification could have seriously thought that U.S. citizenship turned on such questions. 

--Dan Ernst 

Legal History Review 113:3-4

Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Revue d'histoire du droit/The Legal History Review 113: 3-4 (2025) has been published, Here, with a hat tip to ESCLH Blog, is the TOC:

The Hexabiblos: the Humanist quest for the text (Lorena Atzeri)

Since the publication of its editio princeps in 1540, the Hexabiblos of Constantinos Harmenopoulos attracted the attention of many legal humanists, including Cujas, Contius, Soarez de Ribeira, Falkenburg, and others. As was their practice, they wrote annotations, emendations and comments in the margins of their personal copies, often collating the printed text with other manuscripts they discovered in various libraries. Some of this precious evidence has been preserved in a set of seven copies now in the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. These copies were used in the 18th century by Otto Reitz, the scholar entrusted by Meerman with the preparation of a new edition of the Hexabiblos. The books were later sold at the auction of Meerman’s library in 1824. This late Byzantine source offers an illuminating example of the philological approach of the legal humanists, and of the process which, over the centuries, led from manuscript text to printed edition.

Frühklassische Testamentsauslegung im Spiegel von Phaedrus Fab. iv,5 (Andreas Herrmann)

In Phaedrus we find striking examples of law in literature. Not only does Phaedrus exhibit a propensity for juristic parlance, he shows a recurring interest in questions of law as well as an understanding of legal concepts. His Fab. iv,5 in particular reflects topics which will have occupied early classical Roman jurists in their attempts to interpret testamentary dispositions. Read with a view to law as literature, Phaedrus’s narration draws attention to a particular pattern in which arguments are presented in some texts composed by Roman jurists.

‘Quibus permissum est iura condere’ Some ideas on the origin of the Ius respondendi (W.J. Zwalve) 

It is contended in this article that there has never been a ‘ius respondendi’, a licence to respond, introduced by the emperor Augustus. Instead, Justinian, after having repealed the 426 Law of Citations, wanted to stress that the authority of Roman jurisprudence (ius) had always been dependent on imperial authority even before the Law of Citations, retroactively granting an imperial ‘licence to explain the law’ to all jurists mentioned in his Digest.

Publication and the validity of constitutions in the Late Roman Empire (A.J.B. Sirks) 

Contrary to the current view of Mommsen, Seeck and Schwind that imperial legislation required publication to gain validity, Bianchi Fossati Vanzetti and particularly Kreuzsaler maintained that imperial legislation gained validity directly by the issuing by the emperor (the datio). Purpose of publication was merely to make the law known. For legal acts performed in the period between datio and publication according to the old law generally restitution was granted. In a reaction Kaiser has submitted arguments against this position. The present article examines his and Kreuzsaler’s arguments and confirms the conclusion of Kreuzsaler.

Henricus Kinschotius (1541–1608) On practices of grace and debt relief before the Sovereign Council of Brabant (Nicolas Ruys)

This article is aimed at investigating the power to pardon insolvent debtors in the early modern Duchy of Brabant through the analysis of Henricus Kinschotius’ treatise De solutionum induciis, 4th part of his opus De rescriptis Gratiae, a supremo Brabantia senatu nomine Ducis concedi solitis. In his treatise, Kinschotius, a Brabantian lawyer of the second part of the xvith century, seeks to study the so-called letters of atterminatio and respite, which are ducal grace letters intended to grant payment suspension to insolvent bona fide debtors. As supreme jurisdiction of the duchy, the Sovereign Council of Brabant is the main institution empowered to issue these pardon letters on behalf of the Duke. But granting such debt deferral is likely to affect the creditors’ interests. As a matter of consequence, several legal requirements must be fulfilled to benefit from a letter of atterminatio: the requesting debtor must notably provide a sufficient guarantee and obtain the consent of the majority of his creditors. This paper will thus discuss the procedural aspects for acquiring those letters, the scope of application ratione personae and materiae (with a list of claims that cannot be subject to a debt deferral) as well as their legal conditions and effects. Finally, special attention will be paid to the common practices of abuse committed by fraudulent debtors and which solutions Kinschotius proposes to put an end to it. As it will be concluded, Kinschotius’ study of the practice of letters of atterminatio and respite by the Council of Brabant illustrates a strong and tenacious autonomy of a provincial institution in the context of the assertion of sovereignty and centralisation of power that characterised the modern Habsburg Low Countries.

Passer lectres et contraitz entre les parties consentens et eux soubmectans a ladicte jurisdicion volontaire De vrijwillige rechtspleging voor publieke notarissen, grafelijke leenmannen en lokale schepenbanken binnen laatmiddeleeuws Henegouwen (14de–15de eeuw) (Falco Van Der Schueren)

In late medieval Hainaut, notaries public, comital vassals, and local benches of aldermen alike were competent to authenticate deeds of various legal transactions. As they could all exercise voluntary or non-contentious jurisdiction, they competed with one another in a free legal market. From a legal-historical perspective, this contribution aims to assess their relative market share. Methodologically, it uses the concepts of ‘validity’ and ‘proof’ as objective analytical criteria in a contextual framework combining normative texts, a unique fifteenth-century formulary, and a substantial corpus of chirographs, sealed charters, and notarial instruments. In doing so, it examines how these three legal actors ensured the validity of the transactions they handled, and to what extent their deeds had any probative value.

Versions of War Slavery: Grotius, Hobbes and the reception of their ideas (Gustaaf van Nifterik)

This article discusses two approaches to war slavery, one by Hugo Grotius based on jus gentium with a moral appeal to treat one’s war slaves well, the other by Thomas Hobbes for whom jus gentium plays no role and who focuses on the difference between chained and unchained slaves. Next, we look at the works of Pufendorf, Huber, and Noodt. There we find elements of both Grotius and Hobbes, in various combinations and with different outcomes. We see Grotius’ moral appeal gradually becoming an integrated part of jus gentium, applying to both chained and unchained slaves.

Book reviews

Daphne Penna [and] Roos Meijering, A sourcebook on Byzantine law, Illustrating Byzantine law through the sources. [Medieval law and its practice, 34]. Brill, Leiden – Boston [2022]. xvii + 224 p. (Philipp Scheibelreiter)

Isabel Alfonso, José M. Andrade [and] André Evangelista Marques (eds.), Records and processes of dispute settlements in early medieval societies, Iberia and beyond. [Medieval law and its practise, 41]. Brill, Leiden – Boston 2024. xiv + 425 S. isbn 978-90-04-68295-5 (hardcopy), 978-90-04-68300-6 (e-book) (Steffen Schlinker)

Frisian Land Law, A critical edition and translation of the Freeska Landriucht, edited by H. Nijdam, J. Hallebeck [and] Hylkje de Jong. [Medieval law and its practice, 33]. Brill, Leiden – Boston [2023]. viii + 449 p. (Helle Vogt)

Srdan Šarkic, A history of Serbian mediaeval law. [Medieval law and its practice, 39]. Brill, Leiden – Boston [2023]. xiii + 616 p. (Tomislav Karlovic)

G. Mazzanti, Matrimoni post-tridentini, Un dibatto dottrinale fra continuità e cambiamento (secc. xvi–xviii). [Diritto cultura società, Storia e problemi della giustizia criminale, 14]. Bononia University Press, [Bologna 2020]. 235 p. (Ton Meijers)

Sir John Baker, Sources of English legal history, Public law to 1750. Oxford University Press, [Oxford] 2024. lii + 788 p. (Guillaume Leyte)

T. Pasquiet-Briand (dir.), Les conflits doctrinaux du xix e siècle, Une analyse des fondements politiques du droit. Éditions mare & martin, [Paris 2023]. 261 p. (Guillaume Grégoire)

A. Cordes, H.-P. Haferkamp, B. Kannowski, H. Lück, H. de Wall, D. Werkmüller† und C. Bertelsmeier-Kierst (Hrg.), Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte hrg , 2., völlig überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage, Redaktion: A.M. Auer, A.-M. Heil, R. Penssel, L. Samad-Tari, S. Schmidt, P.-M. Schmitt, O. Walther, Th. Wanninger und M. Wolter, Band iv: Nüchternheit, nüchtern – Richtsteig. Erich Schmidt Verlag, [Berlin 2024]. xvi S. + 2016 Sp. (Alain Wijffels)

P. Collin [and] A. Casagrande (eds.), Law and diversity: European and Latin American experiences from a legal historical perspective, vol. 1: Fundamental questions. [Global perspectives on legal history, 21]. Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie, Frankfurt am Main 2023. xii + 764 p. (Sandrine Brachotte)

--Dan Ernst 

CFP: ASLH 2026

[We have the Call for Papers for the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History to be held in Banff, Canada, November 12-14, 2026.  DRE]

The Program Committee of the American Society for Legal History invites proposals for the 2026 meeting to be held November 12-14 in Banff, Canada. Panels on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome. We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography. The online portal will open in early January 2026. The deadline for Pre-Conference Symposia proposals is Friday, February 27, 2026. The deadline for all other submissions is Tuesday, March 24, 2026.

Panel proposals should include the following: a CV with complete contact information for each person on the panel, including chairs and commentators; 300-word (maximum) abstracts of individual papers; and a 300-word (maximum) description of the panel. Only complete panel proposals will be considered. All conference panel slots will be 90 minutes long.

Scholars looking to build a panel may post their potential paper topics here. We encourage individuals to peruse this spreadsheet to identify other scholars with common interests, beyond their familiar networks. Senior scholars who are willing to chair and/or comment on a panel may register their interest and availability here. All program participants must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. Information on how to build a successful panel can be found here. The Program Committee especially encourages panels that include participants from groups historically underrepresented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

Besides traditional panels featuring presentations of work in progress, the Program Committee welcomes other forms of structured presentation, such as a skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters) or a roundtable format (chair, 3-5 presenters).

In addition to the above formats, the Program Committee accepts proposals for the following three types of panels: 

New Directions: The purpose of these panels will be to identify cutting-edge methodological and topical directions in legal history, to define new subfields, and/or generate dialogue among scholars whose recent books (published since 2023 or forthcoming) have tackled common historiographic questions. These panels may feature three to five authors of new books organized by theme, chronology, or methodology and may also include scholars writing review essays of a field, or others similarly positioned. For a panel featuring new books, the session abstract should include the author, title, publisher, and publication date for each proposed book. Please note that the Program Committee will devote only a very small number of sessions to this type of panel (likely 2-3) that are able to clearly develop broad analytical themes among the included monographs and that illuminate shifts in the “state of field” in a particular area rather than descriptions of the books themselves. The Program Committee will not accept proposals for “Author-Meets-Readers” panels for the 2026 meeting. Book authors are encouraged to apply for “Making Connections: New Works in Legal History.”

Poster Presentations: This year’s Annual Meeting will dedicate space during the conference for poster presentations on any aspect of legal history in the main conference common area. Participants in the poster presentations will also join in a “lightning round” panel session to introduce their projects. Individuals interested in participating in this session should submit a short description of their project (up to 300 words) as well as a CV. Accepted participants will be asked to submit a poster design to the organizers by early October. Posters will be printed onsite.

Graduate Lightning Round: In this session, 8-10 graduate students briefly introduce their projects and receive feedback and questions from the audience. Interested graduate students should submit their CV and an abstract of their paper. Note that given the large size of the panel, an individual presenter in this session has much less time to present their work than in a traditional panel with 3-4 presenters.

 

The Program Committee additionally seeks proposals for full-day or half-day pre-conference symposia crafted around related themes to augment traditional conference offerings. We especially encourage proposals for pre-conference events that will involve scholars in emerging fields or in fields previously underrepresented at ASLH conferences and/or that will promote early career scholarly development. We encourage those considering submitting a proposal for pre-conference symposia to be in touch with the program committee chairs. To submit a proposal, please email the program co-chairs directly to provide a short proposal (1-2 pages) including program title, the intended length of program, and a program description, as well as a CV and contact information for each presenter. The Program Committee is available to consult with organizers of such symposia as they develop their proposal, but pre-conference symposia must be largely self-funded. Limited funds will be available for pre-conference expenses like food and travel, and Program Committee co-chairs will solicit funding requests when they send out pre-conference acceptances. To be eligible for funding and included on the program, pre-conferences must be open to all conference attendees. Organizers are encouraged but not required to host their symposia at the conference hotel. Please note that the deadline for these submissions is earlier than the deadline for main conference submissions so that organizers whose symposia are not selected have an opportunity to submit their panels to the main conference.

As a general matter, we will not be able to accommodate special scheduling requests, nor will we be able to support hybrid or virtual presentations or panels. (For a fuller explanation of this policy, please see the ASLH Annual Meetings FAQ page.) Until a draft of the program is circulated, prospective presenters, chairs, and commentators at the main conference should plan to be available in person on Friday, November 13, and Saturday, November 14.

The ASLH has a strict one-appearance policy (excluding appearances at pre-conference symposia and Preyer Award panel commentators). Prospective participants may submit proposals for multiple sessions, with the understanding that the panel chair will be responsible for promptly finding an appropriate substitute member for any session from which a participant has to withdraw.

Limited financial assistance (covering air and ground transportation, conference hotel, and registration fees only) is available for conference presenters in need, with priority given to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, contingent faculty, and scholars from abroad. Program Committee co-chairs will solicit requests for funding when they send out program acceptances.

The members of the Program Committee are Samy Ayoub, Hayden Bellenoit, Ruth Ginio, Taja-Nia Henderson, Krista Kesselring, Ada Kuskowski, Mary X. Mitchell, Ángela Pérez-Villa, Felicity Turner, Mary Anne Vallianatos, and Mary Ziegler. The co-chairs of the Program Committee are Hidetaka Hirota (hhirota@berkeley.edu) and Jedidiah Kroncke (jkroncke@hku.hk).

Weekend Roundup

• A one-day, virtual workshop on Historical Evidence for Policy Reform in Marital Breakdown, Domestic Abuse, and Child Welfare sponsored by Northumbria University on January 20, 2026.   

• Catherine Ceniza Choy, Cybelle Fox, Leti Volpp, and Hidetaka Hirota "discuss how the 1875 Page Act laid the foundation for the Chinese Exclusion Act and later immigration laws in the United States" (Berkeley Talks).

• "Remembering Mitsuye Endo and the Supreme Court Case That Helped End Incarceration" (Densho).

• 
  Applications for the Baldy Center Post-Doctoral, Mid-Career, and Senior Fellowships in Legal Studies 2026-27 at the University at Buffalo School of Law are now open!   

• Adam Feldman on the death of the norm of consensus on the U.S Supreme Court--and after (SCOTUSblog).

• The Brennan Center for Justice's "Playbook for Countering Originalism in Court."

• "Inside the Supreme Court of Canada: The Road to the Charter" (CPAC).  

•  Christopher Bryant, University of Cincinnati College of Law, on the temporary insanity defense of the bootlegger George Remis (UC Law). 

• ICYMI: A train wreck and Grand Central station (Smithsonian).  The History of the Kings County Supreme Court Library (NYLJ).  Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (NYT Magazine). The 1884 Cannibalism-at-Sea Case That Still Has Harvard Talking (Harvard Magazine).

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

Kessler on the History of Viewpoint Discrimination

Jeremy Kessler, Columbia Law School, has posted The Short, Strange Career of Viewpoint Discrimination: From Teachers Unions to Social Media Platforms, which is forthcoming in Platform Regulation and Freedom of Expression in the US and Europe: Across the Great Divide, edited by Ronald J. Krotoszynski et al. (Oxford University Press):

In Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court treated the norm against viewpoint discrimination as intuitive and timeless. Yet the majority opinion's portrayal of social media platforms as the victims of viewpoint discrimination relied entirely on post-1970 caselaw. That is because what this Chapter calls “viewpoint discourse” was an invention of the 1970s legal elite. That elite was responding to a distinctive social problem: the growing power of public-sector unions and politically progressive nonprofits. These groups represented particularly assertive factions of the “new” or “information” class: the ever-expanding population of workers who earn a wage by manipulating information, whether stored on hard drives or in the human mind. Though far from a monolith, this class tends: to undermine traditional values; to interfere with the profit-maximizing strategies of the “old” class (those who own the bulk of monetary capital); and to trouble democratically elected authority with ceaseless, censorious infighting. 

Between 1983, when the Supreme Court finally adopted the language of “viewpoint discrimination” and “viewpoint neutrality,” and 1995, a striking decisional pattern emerged. With one, partial exception, whenever the Court vindicated a claim of viewpoint discrimination, it did so to protect speech that coded as politically conservative or for-profit from politically progressive, information-class curation. By contrast, whenever the Court found an absence of viewpoint discrimination, it did so to reassert the authority of public administrators beset by contending information-class factions.

The rise of “the platform economy" scrambled the logic of viewpoint discourse. The platform economy refers to a situation in which a highly skilled faction of the information class rejoins the old class. This union between old- and new-class factions not only operates but owns a set of assets (“the modern public square”) that produces profit primarily by expropriating the value of the information class as a whole. The ideological, political economic, and doctrinal tensions created by this development were exemplified in Moody, as both the states of Florida and Texas and the Supreme Court tried to honor the norm against viewpoint discrimination. The states sought to do so by protecting politically conservative viewpoints from politically progressive curation. The Moody Court sought to do so by protecting for-profit speakers and the federal executive branch from state governments captured by information-class factions deemed – if only for a moment – to be both economically and politically unproductive. The fact that social media platforms are privately owned was not dispositive of this result. To the contrary, history suggests that the ideological and political economic imperatives of viewpoint discourse have tended to drive the Court's demarcation of the boundary between public and private curation. 

--Dan Ernst 

Ellias and Lalafaryan on the Global Law of Debt

Jared A. Ellias, Harvard Law School, and Narine Lalafaryan, University of Cambridge, have posted The Global Law of Debt: 

Corporate debt financing and the restructuring of large corporations are now governed by what this Article calls the “global law of debt,” a transnational system shaped more by law firms, investment banks, and investors in New York and London than by national laws or court decisions. Large companies can now optimize governing law on a transaction-by-transaction basis, for example by borrowing in New York and then restructuring that debt in the United Kingdom, or by borrowing in London through English-law governed contracts with New York-law interpretation for select provisions.  This Article provides the first account of this development, tracing its origins to the 1960s, when New York and London debt professionals expanded into each other’s markets, creating an entangled system that fostered mutual learning and competition.  In 1978, Congress enacted a new bankruptcy law that gave American lawyers and investors corporate restructuring expertise that they later exported abroad.  In the post-pandemic era, London emerged as a global restructuring hub rivaling the United States.  These developments have produced a robust global debt market, but they have also unsettled long-standing assumptions about the rights of creditors as Chapter 11’s primacy fades and controversial American innovations that erode creditor protections proliferate globally.

--Dan Ernst 

Kaufman on the First Criminal Procedure Revolution

Emma Kaufman, New York University School of Law, has published The First Criminal Procedure Revolution in the Harvard Law Review:

Today, it seems obvious that criminal defendants can waive constitutional rights. Plea bargains make up the vast majority of criminal convictions, and defendants routinely trade their rights — to indictment, to remain silent, to an attorney, to a jury — in exchange for a faster trial or a lesser charge. The modern criminal legal system is a regime of negotiated justice. Rights used to have more force. In the nineteenth century, the rules we now call criminal procedure rights were hard limits on judicial power. Defendants could not forfeit rights, and constitutional violations deprived courts of jurisdiction. But then, in an underappreciated and radical shift, courts changed their mind. One by one, rights became individual options, alienable upon consent. The rest is history: Grand juries declined, plea bargains soared, prosecutors became power brokers, and the system of mass processing was born. This Article recovers a lost chapter of American criminal procedure. It mines a trove of overlooked sources and traverses multiple disciplines to advance a simple claim: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, courts transformed the rights of the accused. Long before the Warren Court revolutionized criminal procedure, there was a first revolution in constitutional criminal law. The story of that revolution reorients the field’s core assumptions, embarrasses modern doctrines, and expands the canon. It also advances our collective understanding of what it could mean to protect criminal procedure rights.

--Dan Ernst 

Snyder on Judicial Resort to "Practice" at the Founding

Ryan Snyder, University of Missouri School of Law, has posted Historical Practice at the Founding:

In recent years, the Supreme Court has increasingly relied on historical practice—actions other than judicial decisions that implement the law after its adoption. That creates tension with the Court’s professed adherence to originalism—the view that a law’s meaning is fixed at the time of its adoption. To resolve this tension, the Court and many scholars have embraced theories such as “liquidation,” which argue that the Founders themselves used practice to update or change the law’s meaning over time. But until now, no one has systematically examined whether the Founders accepted those theories.

This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of how Founding-era courts used practice to interpret legal texts. It concludes that courts did not rely on practice to revise the law’s meaning; rather, they used it to discover what the law originally meant.

Courts believed that practice helped reveal original meaning for three main reasons. First, they thought that contemporaneous interpreters were more likely to understand the law’s text and purpose, which gave them valuable insight into its original meaning. Second, they believed that contemporaneous practices revealed how those interpreters understood the law. And third, they believed that contemporaneous practice was even better evidence of original meaning when it had continued unchanged over time.

At the same time, courts recognized that practice was not perfect. To address that risk, they applied a rigorous screening test designed to exclude unreliable practices and give greater weight to reliable ones. This test looked at various factors—such as whether the practice started shortly after the law’s adoption and whether it reflected a good-faith effort to interpret the law—that further confirm that courts used practice only as a tool for discovering original meaning.

This history has important consequences for the Supreme Court’s use of practice. First, the history suggests that the Court should refuse to rely on practice as a way of updating or changing the law’s meaning. And second, it suggests that the Court should reshape its current use of practice to better reflect the Founders’ approach.

--Dan Ernst 

Katz on the Uruguayan Plebiscite of 1980

Andrea Scoseria Katz, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has posted No Higher Law: The Uruguayan Plebiscite of 1980 as a Failed Constituent Moment:

On November 30, 1980, the people of Uruguay were called on to vote on a new constitution whose objective was to legalize the military dictatorship that had ruled Uruguay since 1973. The proposed constitution would reestablish elections, political parties, and an independent judiciary, but all subject to overrule by the National Security Council (COSENA), the junta of military leaders that acted as the nation's de facto ruling body. Despite the highly repressive political environment in which the plebiscite was held, the citizenry rejected the draft in resounding fashion by a vote of 57% to 43%. Although the Plebiscite of 1980 was certainly a "failure" from the regime's point of view, it is considered a founding moment in Uruguayan history during which the dictatorship was delegitimized and the process of redemocratization triggered, culminating in a democratic transition in 1985. This case illustrates that constitutional failures can be successes in the long term when they launch deeper processes of democratization or constitutionalism.

--Dan Ernst

Ramdas et al. on the Diffusion of Constitutions

Tejas Ramdas, Cornell University; Patrick Chung-Chia Huang, National Taiwan University College of Law; Nuno Garoupa. George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School; Martin T. Wells, Cornell Law School, Yun-chien Chang, Cornell Law School, and Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago Law School, have posted The Genesis of Constitutions: A Natural Language Processing Approach:

The diffusion of constitutional ideas and models has been the subject of extensive scholarship. In this paper, we use natural language processing methods to examine the persistence of constitutional ideas and models, focusing on how 16 core and iconic constitutions influence 572 newer constitutions over a long period (1900-2020). Our findings indicate that "old" core constitutions (such as those of the U.S. of 1789, Spain of 1812, France of 1848, and to a lesser extent France of 1791) have maintained significant influence over those 121 years. Austria of 1920 and France of 1946 are the most influential among the 20th-century iconic constitutions. In line with previous research, these old "core" constitutions experienced a sustainable decline in their impact from the early 1900s to World War II. However, remarkably, their formal influence tended to stabilize after the 1950s. Notably, the influence of the U.S. Constitution of 1789 and the French Constitution of 1848 never fully disappeared. The persistent impact of these older constitutions indicates a certain institutional inertia that shapes legal orders to this day.

--Dan Ernst

Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize to Lilić, Quiroga-Villamarín

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective. About this award:

The Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in Global Perspective will honor exceptional dissertations on topics in European legal history in global perspective and presented for PhD or JSD degrees awarded in the previous calendar year. Topics may include European legal interactions with people or places outside Europe, legal processes spanning Europe and other world regions, and developments in legal theory closely related to imperial, transnational, or trans-regional trends. 

The 2025 award when to two scholars: Vladislav Lilić, for “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912.” (Vanderbilt University, 2024) and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, for “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919-1998),” (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2024).

The citation for Lilić’s "Empire of States":

Vladislav Lilić’s superb dissertation, “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912,” makes a strikingly original contribution to European and global legal history by supplanting familiar narratives of Balkan state formation. The dissertation traces how small Balkan states took shape not through the influence of surging nationalism but through conflicts conducted in the medium of imperial law. Lilić demonstrates that in Montenegro and Serbia varied sets of legal actors—from viziers and Ottoman officials to pastoralists and journeymen—engaged in legal disputes that gradually reset the coordinates of political belonging, property, and public order. As a result, provincial states emerged within the empire before featuring as states in the international order. The dissertation is elegantly structured and based on extensive research in multiple languages and archives, and it combines a deft narrative style with nuanced interventions in the literature on European sovereignty and legal pluralism in global perspective.

The citation for Quiroga-Villamarín's “‘Architects of the Better World’”:

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín’s outstanding dissertation, “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919–1998),” constitutes a seminal contribution to both the history of international law and global legal history. By tracing what he designates as the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s move to institutions in the short twentieth century (1919–1998), Quiroga-Villamarín reconstructs the formation of international parliaments from interwar Geneva to the conclusion of the Cold War. Attending to architectural and material templates originating in Europe and their subsequent translations across continents, the dissertation spatializes history and historicizes space, shifting the perspective from figurative “architectures” to tangible built environments. The conceptual framework proves particularly innovative, foregrounding how architecture simultaneously mirrored and enabled aspirations of global order. Drawing on extensive archival research in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, it situates its argument within a rigorous methodological apparatus and advances its findings in elegant and compelling prose.

Congratulations to both winners!

-- Karen Tani

A Symposium in Honor of Ken Kersch

[We have the following announcement from Boston College’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.  DRE]

Constructing the Constitutional Imagination: A Symposium in Honor of Ken I. Kersch

On February 20, 2026, the Clough Center will host a conference in honor of Ken I. Kersch, who passed away last November. In addition to directing the Clough Center from 2008 to 2012, Kersch served as a professor in BC's Political Science Department, where he taught classes on American conservatism, political thought, constitutional development, and civil liberties. A revered teacher and author of 5 books, Kersch was the recipient of, among other honors, the American Political Science Association's 2020 C. Herman Pritchett Award for the best book on law and courts. 

The Clough Center's conference will coincide with the publication of a special issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History that engages with Kersch's work in political science, history, and law. Speakers include Aziz Rana (Boston College), Sophia Lee (Penn), Mark Graber (Maryland), Justin Dyer (UT Austin), Mary Ziegler (UC Davis), Sanford Leinvson (UT Austin), Julie Novkov (SUNY Albany), Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford), Rogers Smith (Penn), Linda McClain (BU), James Fleming (BU), George Thomas (Claremont McKenna), Logan Sawyer (Georgia), Michael Dichio (Utah), Paul Herron (Providence), Sean Beienburg (Arizona State), Clement Fatovic (Florida International), Austin Steelman (Clemson), and Calvin TerBeek (Claremont McKenna). 

The Law School and Political Science departments are co-sponsoring this event. [Register here to attend.]

Update: The program is here. 

LHR 43:2

Law and History Review 43:2 (2025), a special issue, has now been published on-line.  Here is the TOC:

Archives of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones
Rosemary Byrne, Stephanie McCurry, Jane Ohlmeyer

Women and Sexual Violence in the “1641 Depositions”
Jane Ohlmeyer

Ku Klux Klan Violence and the Problem of Evidence
Stephanie McCurry

Collective Sexual Violence in Turkey, 1894–1924: What we know and how we know it
Benny Morris

Archives of Sexual Violence: Some Testimonies from the Partition of India
Sucheta Mahajan

Women on the Death Railway: A Microhistory of Victimization and Agency
W.L. Cheah

“Hints” of Sexual Violence: What the Akayesu Trial Archive at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Tells Us About Uncovering Sexual Violence Testimony in Conflict Archives
Rosemary Byrn

--Dan Ernst 

Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Borsk, Olmstead

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize, which is "awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference." 

The 2025 Cromwell Dissertation Prize went to two scholars: Michael Borsk, for “Measuring Ground: Surveyors and the Properties of States in the Great Lakes Region, 1783-1840.” (Queen’s University, 2024), and Shay R. Olmstead, “’Refuse to Run Away’: Transsexual Workers Fight for Civil Rights, 1969-1992.” (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2024). 

The citation for Borsk's "Measuring Ground": 

“Measuring Ground” is a comparative study of state formation through surveying techniques and paperwork in Upper Canada and Michigan Territory from the 1790s-1837. Borsk argues that the very processes of surveying and of building the archives asserted state power and authority. Surveying regulations structured the production of knowledge around boundaries, a process which depended upon indigenous participation and recognition for legitimacy. However, surveying also ultimately eroded indigenous claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty, as it converted surveyors into actors with legal authority. Turning their attention to surveyors’ papers, Borsk demonstrates how these documents and their associated archival processes produced knowledge, which in turn drove policy. The authority to determine boundaries and ownership migrated from surveyors’ offices to the courts, which applied their own standards of law and evidence.

This innovative study is based on deep archival research and makes provocative connections between the geographic and epistemological elements of the legal processes of colonization in the Upper Midwest. It expands and refines our understanding of how defining and securing individual property rights has related to state formation. Borsk also describes the way in which archival methods and processes interacted with legal rules and procedures to produce knowledge and authority, and ultimately to construct government. This work traces how indigenous knowledge and participation ironically played a key role in ultimately extinguishing indigenous claims to territory. This scholarship opens new lines of research and offers novel ways of conceptualizing the law itself.

The citation for Olmstead's "'Refuse to Run Away'" 

“'Refuse to Run Away'” is a history of thirty cases from the 1960s to the 1990s in which transsexuals (they use the contemporary term) challenged workplace
discrimination on the basis of sex or disability. Administrative agencies and courts rarely granted these plaintiffs favorable rulings. Even when they did, they did so by redefining “sex” under the law in ways that benefitted only normative, “respectable” claimants and ultimately harmed other sexual minorities. Moreover, variations in decisions among states and agencies led to the creation of multiple “cis states.” Victims of discrimination fared better when they brought claims under “disability,” because federal legislation was not written in a way that obviously excluded transsexuals from protection or defined “disability” in a way that was incompatible with transsexuality. However, in response to some scattered successful litigation, Republicans in Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude transsexuals, effectively closing that avenue for remedying discrimination.

Olmstead’s description of the shift from sex-based to disability-based discrimination claims is highly persuasive, and invites the reader to contemplate the liquidity of the category of “disability.” They present their analysis as evidence that legal campaigns alone are insufficient to bring about civil protections against discrimination in the workplace, and argue that political organizing must be part of the equation as well. Their discussion of rights protections is revelatory and potentially offers lessons for current campaigns to protect marginalized people.

Congratulations to both winners!

-- Karen Tani 

CFP: Queering Private Law

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

We invite submissions for the Queering Private Law Conference at UCL Faculty of Laws on 3-4 September, 2026. This will be the 2026 Bentham House Conference – the flagship conference for the UCL Faculty of Laws.   

Queer theory and private law rarely interact. While queer theory has been applied to other fields, private law remains largely an unexplored territory. Yet queer analysis offers a particularly valuable lens to explore, expose, and reimagine the heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions embedded within private law's foundational doctrines and concepts. 

We aim to publish the conference outputs in an edited collection in a leading international university press. The edited collection will provide a shared vocabulary, conceptual frameworks, and methodological tools that will define this emerging field.  

Scope and Themes.  We welcome submissions addressing any area of private law, broadly defined, including contracts, company law, corporate law, equity and trusts, family law, intellectual property, property, torts, and unjust enrichment.  Some illustrations for topics, questions, and methods include: 

• Foundational concepts: How do concepts, such as consent, capacity, vulnerability, reasonableness, good faith, unconscionability, and the public/private distinction, embed and perpetuate heteronormative assumptions in private law? 

• Comparative and transnational perspectives: Do different legal systems approach LGBTQI+ rights and lived experiences differently within the doctrinal confines of a particular private law field, or across private law fields? 

• Intersectional approaches: How does queer theory intersect with and other critical perspectives including race, disability, postcolonial critique, and economic justice, to illuminate private law doctrine and theory? 

• Pedagogical dimensions: How can we teach private law in ways that expose and challenge its normative assumptions? 

Submission Details.  Please submit a 500-word abstract by February 6, 2026 via this MS Forms.   
Note that, if accepted, a full draft of 5,000-8,000 words inclusive of footnotes must be submitted by June 30, 2026. 

The committee reviewing abstract submissions will generally prioritise authors who express their interest in contributing their paper to the edited volume. However, in the interest of broadening the range of topics, methods, and scholars, we accept submissions from those interested in presenting their papers without contributing them to the edited volume. 

Funding.  To further the conference’s goals and our underlying commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion, promoting under-represented and emerging voices, some funding is available to cover speakers costs in a manner that is attentive to needs, with preference given to early career scholars, under-represented voices, as well as proportionately of travel costs. Our funding is limited, so if you do require assistance, please let us know for which element (travel to/from, accommodation, or both) and estimated costs when submitting your abstract via the MS Form. 

About the Organisers.  This conference is co-led by Haim Abraham (UCL), Niamh Connolly (UCL) Philip Gavin (UCL), Andrew Gilden (Southwestern Law School), Michael Goodyear (New York Law School), and Eden Sarid (KCL) with funding from BA/Leverhulme Trust and UCL Faculty of Laws. 

For more information on the Queering Private Law Project, please visit [here].  For enquiries about abstract submissions and selections, please contact queering.law@kcl.ac.uk. 

CFP: Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

"Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North."  Aberdeen Medieval and Early Modern North Conference, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

In 1336, a battle took place in the Wars of Scottish Independence in which Edward III of England burnt Aberdeen to the ground. In 1644, the Battle of Aberdeen saw the clash between Covenanter and Royalist forces in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, with the battle and its aftermath shaking Aberdeen and its denizens. While living memory of these events has faded away, their scars can still faintly be seen. Battles, plague, witch trials and legal cases of domestic abuse have all left their mark on Aberdeen and have shaped the way we view the past. 

Violence in the medieval and early modern world is central to our construction and understanding of the past. Although we have dates and locations, the details of violent enaction are often hazy. Violence, then as now, heavily colours the pages of history, with societal expectations often being enforced through threat of violence. Thus, we propose an exploration of violence for this year's conference, inspecting closely what is considered violence, what is determined as avoiding violence, and who decides the definitions of such things.

We encourage researchers to explore how violence was interpreted, enacted and avoided in the medieval and early modern north. How does the reality of the medieval and early modern world reflect how we view the past? How did Vikings, Knights and Musketeers handle the violence of their occupations? Do we still enact violence on the past as researchers? What were the aftereffects of violence, on the body, on architecture, and on society? From witch trials, war, bizarre medical practices, and natural phenomenon, this conference will investigate the violence of the past. 

We're seeking papers on the topic of violence and its intersections with:

• Memory and Trauma 
• Judicial and Legal Systems
• Literature and Artistic Representations
• Domestic and Public Spheres
• Gender, Race, Class, and Disability Studies
• Military and War Studies
• Religious and Ecclesiastical History
• Histories of Medicine and the Body
• Medievalism and Early Modern Reception
• History of Emotions (e.g. anger, humour etc.)
• Ecocriticism 
• Manuscript Studies and Material Culture 

While we invite papers on all parts of the north, we especially welcome papers on Aberdeen and northern Scotland. The conference will be held on 25-26 May 2026 at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.  Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to medievalandearlymodernaberdeen@gmail.com.  Deadline:15 January 2026 @ 23:59(GMT).

ASLH Dudziak Prize to "Petitioning for Freedom"

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to one that is close to our hearts: the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize. About this prize: 

The Dudziak Prize, named in honor of Mary L. Dudziak, a leading scholar of twentieth century U.S. legal history and international relations as well as a digital history pioneer, is awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project. These projects may take the form of either traditionally published peer reviewed scholarship or born-digital projects of equivalent depth and scope.

The 2025 Dudziak Prize winner was “Petitioning for Freedom,” directed by Katrina Jagodinsky and the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. The citation:

“Petitioning for Freedom,” developed by Katrina Jagodinsky and her team at the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, offers a deeply researched and carefully curated online database of over 2,000 habeas petitions filed across the American West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The database inventory continues to be updated monthly with a diverse array of petitions from those challenging slavery, peonage, removal and deportation, state custody over Indigenous wards, and abusive husbands’ custody over their dependents. The database offers a regularized schema of records whose handwritten originals are often buried under the haphazard organization and inconsistent recording practices of their rendering courts, and alongside this, the project site provides numerous essays and stories drawn from the habeas proceedings to help researchers at all levels understand the records and make informed interpretations about the deployment of legal power against and on behalf of the less empowered peoples of the American West.

An Honorable Mention went to Stephen Robertson's Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Marital Breakdown in the Common Law World

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Broken Bonds: New Perspectives on Marital Breakdown in the English Common Law World, 1801-1969

20th April 2026, 9.30am - 5.30pm in The Great Hall of Northumbria University, Sutherland Building, Ellison Place, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Marital breakdown is not a modern phenomenon. Options available to separating spouses in the English Common Law World were, however, heavily restricted by gender and economic status, with wives occupying a significantly more vulnerable position. Before 1857, full divorce remained the preserve of wealthy men who could navigate the expensive Parliamentary divorce process. The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 transformed this landscape, establishing the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes and making divorce accessible beyond the elite. This legislation influenced divorce law in England and Wales and across the Common Law World well into the twentieth century.

[The deadline for submitting abstracts is Monday, February 2, 2026.  For more information, visit the conference website.]

William E. Nelson

William E. Nelson (NYU)

William E. Nelson, the Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law Emeritus at the New York University School of Law, has died.  His impact on the field of American legal history far exceeds the enormous influence of his publications, including the path-breaking Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Harvard University Press, 1975), through his direction of NYU's Legal History Colloquium and Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History.  Early tributes have called him "an absolutely remarkable force" and "a giant" in the field, as well as a great father, husband, and citizen.  Many recall his invitation to participate in the colloquium or some other act of scholarly generosity as a decisive moment in their careers, especially when it came when they were novices or otherwise uncertain of their status as legal historians.  He remained an active scholar after taking emeritus status.  The on-line, works-in-progress workshop over which he presided was ongoing at his death.  

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• A notice of Daniel Gervais's book chapter, “Trade Secret Law in the United States: Evolution, Framework, and Federalization" (Vanderbilt Law).

• The Brennan Center for Justice has published a resource on "Countering Originalism." The Center explains: "This guide offers lawyers strategies, arguments, and citations to address originalist claims they encounter in litigation."

• Trump v. Slaughter Roundup, Round 2: Jane Manners and Lev Menand on the original meaning of a term of years (Notice & Comment).  Originalism, what originialism? (Slate). Menand fact checks the oral argument (Notice & Comment).  Noah Rosenblum on Vox's Today Explained. Beau Baumann and Nathaniel Donahue discuss the oral arguments (PPT).

• 

  Credit: Highsmith (LC)

  Save Ben Shahn's "Meaning of Social Security"! (NR). 

• Paul Finkelman reviews Brad Snyder's You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads (LARB). 

• A new exhibit on foundational documents of Ohio constitutional history (CNO). 

• Time's "Made by History": The historians on Ken Burn's "American Revolution").    

• That National Constitution Center session on Robert H. Jackson with John Q. Barrett, Gerard Magliocca, and G. Edward White has now been posted to the NCC's YouTube channel.

• Robert Tsai discusses America’s Forgotten Constitutions (Democratic Constitution).

• ICYMI: Nick Salvatore (1943-2025) (Ithaca Voice).  More Lepore (Persuasion).  John Yoo on birthright citizenship (Fox). How the Immigration Act of 1924 Tried to Reshape America (History).

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

ASLH Burbank Article Prize to Fei

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize. About this prize: 

The Jane Burbank Article Prize in global legal history will be awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history published in the previous calendar year. Submissions may address any topic or period, and may focus on case studies in which the analysis relates to broader processes or comparisons. Articles on methodological or theoretical contributions are also welcome.

The 2025 Burbank Prize winner was Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections,” Past and Present 266:1 (2025): 40-74. The citation:

In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a collection of letters and documents which includes a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved people she owned, conducted in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels: the case summary itself and its process, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use.

An Honorable Mention went to Rui Hua (Boston University), for “The Cheese, the Worm, and the Law: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian Borderland, 1906-1927,” Modern Asian Studies 58:4 (2024): 1201-1221.

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani 

 

Petruccelli's History of the Origins of Interpol

David Petruccelli, Dartmouth College, has published A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe in the series Oxford Studies in International History:

As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity."

Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.

While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.

--Dan Ernst

Oldham's "Law and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court"

New from Hart/Bloomsbury: Law and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court 1970-75: "Rather Peculiar Things," by Peter Oldhan, K.C.:

 Constitutional and employment lawyers, and indeed anyone interested in the history of the times, will not want to be without this deeply researched yet entertaining work.

When the Heath Government came to power in 1970, it set up the National Industrial Relations Court to referee highly contentious disputes between unions and employers. Regarded with hostility by the labour movement from the start, the Court and its President, Sir John Donaldson, faced mounting suspicion, and were regularly front-page news. When Donaldson jailed five dockers in 1972 – the Pentonville Five – for defying the Court's orders, strikes erupted and the docks closed. With the country's food supplies dwindling, a state of emergency loomed. How had it come to this? Could a way through be found?

This is a revelatory account of the National Industrial Relations Court's defining crisis, set in the context of a wider, and frequently startling, exposition of how Donaldson went about his role as its President.

Peter Oldham KC combines decades of experience as a barrister with archival research to shine a bright new light on how and why the Court found itself doing – in Donaldson's own words – "rather peculiar things."

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.