Legal History Blog

John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School , will deliver the 2026 McCorkle Lecture , “Power Not Rights: The Secret History of 20th-Century Constitut...

[We have the following announcement .  DRE] The Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop is an informal evening seminar, starting at 6.30 p.m...

New from the University of Chicago Press:  Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life , by Barbara Young Welke (Un...

Tracy Thomas , the Seiberling Chair of Constitutional Law, University of Akron School of Law , has published The First Woman Judge: The Life...

Jonathan Yovel, University of Haifa Faculty of Law,  has The Dreyfus Affair: A Law and Literature Account of a Law and Literature Affair , w...

Jack Rakove on "The Unitary Executive Theory in All of Its Historical Perversity" ( Washington Monthly ).  Meet Magdalene Zier , ...

Avi Koenig-Winter , a student at the Columbia Law School, has posted All Aboard! Regulating Locomotive Engineers : Academic treatment of loc...

My first guest post was a brief excerpt from my new book, White Power: Policing American Slavery . Now I want to tell you how it came to be....

Sasha Allison , an independent researcher who is also Barrister at Law in Hong Kong, has published The Lumbering Machinery of the Hong Kong ...

We have the following announcement, from Peking University School of Transnational Law: The Law & Humanities Seminar Series (LHSS) is pl...

Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford Law School , has posted Original Understandings of the U.S. Territories : Recently, judges and scholars alike hav...

[Via Balkinization , We have the following CFP.  DRE.]   The University of Illinois, the University of Bologna, and Johns Hopkins SAIS regul...

We have word that the Legal Humanities at QM Network will host a book launch symposium for Paul Mitchell ’s Gaskell and the Law in Room 313...

The Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium has released the schedule for its next convening, on October 17, 2026, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. CS...

[We have the following announcement of the latest in the Comparative Legal History Dialogues series.  DRE] Family feud or family reunion?  ...

Holly Brewer, University of Maryland , delivered the Constitution Day lecture at UNLV, entitled  The Absolutist Origins of Unitary Executive...

Brad Baranowski, SMU Dedman School of Law , has posted Remaking Rulemaking: Lessons from the History of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b...

Gerard N. Magliocca, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law , has posted T aming the 1960s: The Bayh Senate Subcommittee on Con...

Mark Graber, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, has posted A Constitutional Revolution? which is forthcoming in SCOT...

Sarah Marsh , Seton Hall University , has published Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race: A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in t...

Samantha Barbas, University of Iowa Law , has published Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma (University of C...

Julia R. Azari, Marquette University , has published Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History (P...

Out today from W.W. Norton & Co.:  Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People , by Nikolas Bowie and Daphne Rena...

The following is adapted from my book, White Power: Policing American Slavery  (Hodding Carter III Books/University of North Carolina Press,...

[We have the following announcement.  DRE] Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History 34 (2026) out now.  It is the journal of the Max Planck Institu...

The Library of Congress will observe Constitution Day with a program on William Howard Taft , featuring  Kevin J. Burns , assistant profess...

Jane Ohlmeyer, Trinity College, Dublin, Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois , and Philip Stern, Duke University, have posted Anglicizat...

Neil Duxbury, London School of Economics,  has posted The General Law Renaissance and the Common Law , which is forthcoming in the Notre Dam...

Ellen Murphy, Wake Forest University School of Law , has posted Farm Advocates: Unearthing an Access to Justice Success Story , which is for...

We have word of the launch of the newly established Research Centre for Legal History at the Maynooth University School of Law and Crimino...

[We have the following schedule for the Columbia Law School’s Legal History Workshop.  DRE.] Columbia Law School Legal History Workshop, 202...

[We have the following announcement .  DRE.] Reading the Past: Historians and Lawyers in Dialogue, Tuesday, September 29, 3–4 p.m. ET Origin...

[ Via H-Law , we have the following announcement for an Assistant Professor US Legal History in the Department of History in the College of ...

Naomi Cahn, University of Virginia School of Law, Maxine Eichner, University of North Carolina School of Law, and Mary E. Ziegler, Universi...