Law and History Review: A Call for an Editor

[We have the following announcement from the Publications Committee of the American Society for Legal History.  DRE] 

After eight years of exceptional service, Gautham Rao is stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of the Law & History Review, which is sponsored by the American Society for Legal History and published by Cambridge University Press.  Founded in 1983 and published quarterly, LHR is the top journal in the field of legal history.

The ASLH Publications Committee invites applications for the position. Applicants should be members of the American Society for Legal History who are accomplished legal historians, have the intellectual range to work with manuscripts from different historical periods and geographic regions, are conversant with both law and history, and welcome the opportunity to identify and promote the best scholarship in the field.  They should be prepared to request release time and other departmental or institutional support.

The editor’s responsibilities include soliciting manuscripts in all fields of legal history, shepherding submitted manuscripts through the peer review and editorial processes, working with the journal’s print and electronic publisher Cambridge University Press, and maintaining collaborative relationships with the journal’s Associate Editors, its Editorial Board and the ASLH Board of Directors. Production management is the responsibility of Cambridge University Press. Appointment is for an initial five-year term.  

Interested scholars should send an electronic version of their current c.v. and a statement of what they would like to accomplish as editor of the journal by September 15, 2025, to the Chairs of the Publications Committee: Daniel Ernst (ernst@georgetown.edu) and Catherine Fisk (cfisk@berkeley.edu).  Inquiries about the position should be directed to the same email addresses or by phone to Daniel Ernst at 240.506.2220.

The Work-Life Balance & Other Myths

         It took far longer to get my first book to publication than I ever thought it would. It began as my dissertation, completed in 2005. The next year I began a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college with a 3:3 teaching load and fairly heavy service and advising expectations. The year after that, my oldest child was diagnosed with both a disability and a chronic illness.

    His conditions entailed regular visits to medical specialists and therapists, some up to two hundred miles away; when at home, he required direct supervision at all times. When time allowed, I worked on the major revisions the manuscript required. Extended or multiple visits to archives were simply not a possibility, as he needed specialized care and could not be left. I would have to make the most of the material I had (and fortunately, I had quite a bit). I lost one entire summer to recovery from emergency surgery.

    Finally, after six years, I had a fully revised draft ready to submit to a press who had expressed interest. They sent it to readers, who returned thorough reviews which, while supportive, recommended substantive revisions. These were entirely fair, and I probably could have completed them in a year, under normal circumstances. However, my son's illness had just progressed from chronic to acute, and I decided I needed to focus all my energies on helping him.

    That situation was so overwhelming for the next few years that I had no thoughts or energy to spare for the manuscript. I didn't even look at it, in fact. But as my son slowly started to recover, I began to think about giving it another try. I got back in touch with the press, and we agreed that it probably wouldn't work to proceed with them anymore. Nonetheless, I tackled revisions in a serious way and began thinking about where else a good fit for the manuscript might be. And thanks to an editor, readers, indexer, copyeditor, and countless others willing to work through the exigencies of pandemic publishing, the book is now in print. More importantly, my son is doing well.

    I share my story not for sympathy or because I think it's unique--but because I recognize that these sorts of experiences are becoming all too common in the age of Covid and Long Covid. So many academics, especially caregivers, are seeing their work goals recede into the distance as they try to be the safety net that our society and institutions fails to provide.

    Many, particularly contingent and untenured faculty, are feeling anxious about how their caregiving responsibilities have affected, and continue to affect, their scholarly productivity. And they don't feel they can acknowledge their situation--I certainly have not, before now. I would like to normalize talking about some of the challenges we are facing. I'd also like to encourage those of us with tenure to be more creative in thinking about how to extend greater flexibility and support to our colleagues.

N.B.: I've attached labels to this post such as "Publishing advice" and "Research tips," which are quite misleading. Nothing here should be construed as advice or tips, as I do not recommend this path if you can at all avoid it. But I did want to assure anyone else who might be sharing a common experience that you are not alone.

--Kristin A. Olbertson

Jokes and their Relationship to Class, Impostor Syndrome, and Belonging

I’ve been writing posts here as a guest this month, mostly about my writing life - my emotional responses to writing, managing that response through my writing process, and so on. In this post I get a little more afield from the doing of writing while keeping on the theme of the emotional life of writing, tied to my being a first generation academic.

At several points while writing these posts I have written jokes or parts of jokes, often self-deprecating ones. I believe I’d edited them all out. I’ve done so because they’re not particularly funny (my oldest daughter likes to tell me “‘dad jokes’ rhymes with ‘bad jokes’ for a reason”) and because they don’t really fit with what I am trying to accomplish in these posts. At best, they are something I needed to do as a writer. Part of the task of editing is to remove things that are in a draft just for the writer’s sake, so that as much as possible what remains in a text is only there for the sake of the final piece of writing and the connection with the reader. Doing this requires being able to approximate thinking as if one is a different person; few people can do that very well, which is one of many reasons why writers need editorial readers. But I digress.

Undergraduate Major in Law, History, and Culture

One of the great pleasures of being at USC is getting to work with undergraduates each year as the instructor of Law 101: Law and the U.S. Constitution in Global History. I have this opportunity as a result of USC’s large, innovative and growing Law, History, and Culture (LHC) major and because of USC’s openness to having law professors teach undergraduates. In this post, I describe the genesis and operation of the major, catalog its successes, and note some risks and shortfalls of the project.

The LHC major was originally the brainchild of my colleagues Ariela Gross, Hilary Schor, and Nomi Stolzenberg. It came into existence because of their determination and their ability to frame it as a solution to two inter-school challenges.

Back in the aughts, the proposal was met by resistance. Then, earlier this decade, USC grew receptive. One reason was that the law school and humanities departments faced financial pressures. Law school applications were down nationally. Growing numbers of undergraduates were choosing majors outside the humanities.  Another reason was that USC became invested in providing undergraduates inter-disciplinary and inter-school experiences. Ariela, Hilary, and Nomi knew both dynamics well. They were co-directors of USC’s Center for Law, History, and Culture, which drew together law and humanities scholars from around the university. Seeing their opportunity, they pitched the LHC major as an inter-disciplinary, inter-school way to grow law and humanities enrollments.

The LHC major piggybacked on the community and intellectual project that the Center for Law, History, and Culture had built. It aimed to draw new students to work with faculty in law and the humanities. After all, many students are interested in the humanities but believe (incorrectly in my view) that the humanities are impractical. Adding a legal component could provide an attractive path in.

The major is structured to combine a couple of courses taught by law professors with a much larger number of humanities (and social science) courses. The hope is that courses by law faculty will attract pre-law students and students who want to know a little law without having to go to law school. Once enrolled, the students will get hooked on what the courses illuminate and facilitate: exciting and generative work on the humanistic study of the law.

The LHC major is housed within the History Department and overseen by an interdisciplinary steering committee that I co-chair with my colleague in history, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal.  We have been lucky that those who teach in the major have been willing to serve on the steering committee, attend events, and speak to students.

In terms of attracting students and boosting law enrollment, the major has been a success. The major is large and growing. There are already more LHC majors than pure history majors. My Law 101 course has around three times as many students as all my other law courses combined. The other law course required for the major enrolls about half as many total students as matriculate into USC’s J.D. program each year.

I get great students who are eager, smart, and often from far from knowing that they want to do with their lives. As compared to teaching law students, I make a different kind of difference in their lives and get to lead more free-ranging discussions. Plus, I get to join pedagogical conversations with colleagues in history, religion, English, and other humanities fields.

The major can also advance research by drawing together like-minded professors from disparate departments and schools. I’m currently working with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal on a history of birthright citizenship. Recently, the major facilitated a connection between a law school and a history colleague who share an interest in the quantitative study of medieval legal history. Ability to teach in this thriving major can also be part of what makes a scholar attractive to departments and schools as a potential hire.

There remains work to be done. The promise that the LHC major would boost enrollments across the humanities remains partly aspirational. We hope that a new set of distribution requirements, which will soon be implemented for the major, will help to bring student demand and course supply into closer alignment.

Conversely, there are potential dangers in driving students towards courses in professional schools.  One justification for the LHC major was that it might coax students from the professional schools, sciences, and social sciences back to the humanities.  To the extent that the major is routing humanities students into law courses instead, we may be making the problem worse, not better.

Then there is the problem of expertise. Professional schools have deep experience in educating students who already have their bachelor’s degrees. The college houses the experts in undergraduate education. A resultant expertise and experience gap can result in poorly designed courses and even-worse-designed majors. If a professional school prioritizes graduate students, undergraduates may receive less desirable instructors. Competition for tuition dollars can also encourage reducing course requirements as a lure to students.

The LHC major itself avoids the potential professional-school trap. Tenured and clinical faculty teach the law courses that count toward the major. Those courses were designed in conversation with colleagues in the college and with an eye to serving a major that was neither designed nor housed within the law school. LHC is not a pre-professional major in law, which I don’t think would serve college students well. It instead identifies and takes as its raison d’etre a pre-existing space in which faculty are crossing disciplinary lines to collaborate and produce cutting-edge scholarship. It is thus an attempt to live up to USC’s ballyhooed commitment to interdisciplinarity rather than to pay it mere lip service.

The danger is that the LHC major is an opening wedge for other, more pre-professional law courses. My hope is that it is instead a model of a better approach to involving professional schools in undergraduate education.

--Sam Erman (with gratitude to Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and Hilary Schor for assisting with this post)

Op-eds and Amicus Briefs

In a prior post, I mentioned the benefits of having access to a good publicity team at one’s home institution.  Today, I want to talk about the relationship between legal historians and other consumers of the past.

Over the years, LHB has flagged many op-eds and amicus briefs and featured a number of commentaries on the issue. Last May, Christopher Schmidt ruminated that The Art of the Op-Ed was “problematic” because it required “compromise and simplification” and “anachronism and presentism.” Turning to amicus briefs, Greg Ablavsky’s Thoughts on Historians and Advocacy included the concern that “briefs rarely capture the complexity that good history depicts.” In “Say Something Historical!” Tomiko Brown-Nagin recounted how using the past in public advocacy or legal reasoning involves “ways of reasoning about history that often seem dubious to me in my capacity as a professional historian. ”

In a recently published entry in the Oxford Handbook of Legal History entitled “Historians' Amicus Briefs: Practice and Prospect,” Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and I relayed a similar concern.  Some historians who had helped the NAACP’s lawyers craft historical arguments in Brown v. Board of Education had come to have second thoughts. They worried that, “spurred on by their desire to reach a particular outcome, they had drawn conclusions that were not warranted by strict historical methods.”

Notably, Chris, Greg, Tomiko, Nathan, and I agreed that the benefits of engagement outweighed the risks. As Tomiko put it, “Historical arguments are quite attractive and will be made.” Better not to exclude those most qualified and committed “to tell the truest story possible, given the available evidence.”

I agree. But I also wonder if we legal historians should wring our hands a bit less before striding into the public square.

Relating the past to the present is inherent to the historical enterprise. While I value complexity and believe that the past is different from the present, it is living readers for whom I write. Modern concerns shape the topics I choose, the methods I deploy, and the arguments that I make. I experience history as a translation between then and now. I worry that the alternative would be sterile antiquarianism.

On this view, the question isn’t whether it’s appropriate to write op-eds, amicus briefs, and the like, but how.  Nathan and I took a stab at part of that question in our essay.  Where amicus briefs are concerned, the historian must often “speak in a language legible to courts on matters of concern to them, while respecting the court’s distinct areas of authority.” We identified several strategies for striking that balance:

1. Stop short of arguing that history can decide the final issue
2. Limit participation in the amicus briefs to experts on the specific topic at issue
3. Use intermediaries between law and history: lawyers familiar with history, legal historians, or historians willing to learn about law
4. Provide multiple points of entry into the argument; describe ways that history could support certain arguments; explain why history runs counter to other arguments
5. Show your work by making your methods explicit

If ever an audience knew more good strategies, it would be LHB readers. I hope you’ll take to the comments to share.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book: The Home Institution

              A choice I did not make that profoundly shaped Almost Citizens was that of USC Gould School of Law to hire me. Here, I lucked out. Writing the book I wanted required time, money, inspiration, guidance, autonomy, infrastructure, and publicity. Fortunately, my home institution was well stocked with all seven. (If your school takes a different approach to these questions or your recipe for success calls for different ingredients, please share in the comments.)

              Time was what I needed most. But it was easy to overinvest in teaching and service. I wanted to serve students and please senior colleagues, and there were so many new, interesting ways to contribute. Gould protected me against myself.  The dean assigned junior professors light service obligations and never asked them to develop new courses beyond their original three (we have a 2-1 load). Senior faculty protested any perceived erosion of the norm. And I got a semester-long sabbatical halfway through.

              I also found that my research, writing, and physical book all benefited from money.  Paid research assistants facilitated broader searches and more thorough reviews. Money for travel bought archival trips and conference presentations. It took funds to hire development editors and improve the book through subventions.  While I couldn’t spend my way to a good book, I could have been starved into a weaker one. Fortunately, I had a dean and institution that invested in scholarship. I never had a prepublication request denied. That support let me put my best foot forward, plan with confidence, and avoid the stress of committing personal funds to professional advancement.

              My book was also shaped by the scholarly cultures and institutionalized intellectuals spaces of the institutions where I researched and wrote. It was while taking part in Gould’s healthy culture of office, hallway, and faculty lounge chats that I had many important epiphanies. I gained key interlocutors and inspiration through my participation in USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and the multi-institution Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop that the center cosponsors. Gould also gave me the chance to present in an internal workshop each year. And every year the school’s senior faculty read and responded to all my works in progress.  As a result, I received an additional mountain of helpful tips and questions.

One of the  challenges of taking full advantage of opportunities for feedback at Gould was the knowledge that I was inviting criticism from the same people who would vote on my tenure case. Fortunately, engagement with my colleagues turned out to be a way to elevate my work while pleasing my electorate. Gould’s senior faculty stressed that I should ignore any advice that proved unhelpful.  The dean repeatedly insisted that it was the scholar’s job to bring critical judgment to the array of conflicting suggestions received. Never did I hear a complaint that I had ignored someone’s suggestion.

              Gould’s service-oriented library multiplied my research productivity. Its librarians acquired obscure sources, secured high-resolution scans of illustrations, undertook foreign-language correspondence with overseas repositories, and filed Freedom of Information Act requests. Whenever I asked them to compile reading lists, find statistics, create maps, or undertake targeted research, I could trust that it would be done and done well. In fact, Gould’s librarians were often better than me at finding sources and digging up facts. Having such skill on staff was the result of a decision to prioritize personnel above collection size. But Gould’s smaller collection never hampered me. Interlibrary loan, mass digitization, and the school’s willingness to buy otherwise inaccessible materials always did the trick. The end result was that I saved considerable time and mental energy. 

              When I was on the entry-level market, it never occurred to me to evaluate law schools in terms of their public-relations teams.  My mistake! After years of obscurity as a grad student, law clerk, and post-doc, my arrival as a professor brought ready access to the public sphere.  As I soon learned, I could give interviews, discuss topics on background, write op-eds and articles, post to blogs, secure press coverage and book reviews, do public events, send out promotional materials, and much more. (I invite those of you more media-savvy than me to take up the possibilities in the comments.)  I was enthusiastic to raise my profile and spread my ideas. But I worried about PR becoming a time sink, or worse, about making a fool of myself before a large audience.

Gould’s PR team helped me enter the public eye efficiently and on my own terms. They took care of logistics, safeguarded my time, and focused on how I could have an impact. They initially held my hand, practicing with me what I would say and helping me set expectations with reporters. As my confidence grew, my scholarship progressed, and world events unfolded, they had endless ideas about how to give me and my work a broader platform. With their help, I gravitated toward interviews and op-eds (a subject of an upcoming post). I eschewed forums that treated intellectual exchanges as battles, and sought out those favored conversational interactions. They even helped me be heard despite my general absence from most social media (LHB notably excepted!).

              --Sam Erman

A Better Book: The First Book Workshop

              Several years ago, LHB’s own Karen Tani and Mitra Sharafi wrote wonderful posts on their first book workshops (Karen’s is here; Mitra’s is here).  For those who missed them, a first book workshop is a manuscript workshop for a first-time author. Such sessios have grown increasingly common in legal history. Participants typically include a mix of home-school colleagues and outside commenters. Mine was incredibly valuable. This post uses that experience to build on Karen’s and Mitra’s insights. (If your experience as an author or participant was similar or to the contrary, please share it in the comments below.)

              An immediate benefit of staging a first book workshop is the deadline. Karen Tani declared it “a source of stress -- but also a source of motivation.” I would write “and” where she wrote “but.” The interim deadline improved my mood, productivity, and work product. It distracted me from the truly looming deadline: closure of my tenure file. I thus traded exhausting long-term stress for more energizing and motivating short-term stress. After all, getting a manuscript done sooner would mean more time to improve it later.

              The structure of the workshop can vary with the author’s goals. Mitra Sharafi described gathering 4-6 readers for an afternoon of conversation about the book. Karen Tani’s workshop had more than a dozen participants who presented on different parts of the book in panels across an entire day.  My workshop split the difference.  I gathered just shy of a dozen people for a single three-hour book conversation in the morning. There were opportunities to follow up and revisit matters during the lunch that followed and the dinner that I had with the out-of-town guests.

              My goal for the workshop was to come away with a plan for pulling the manuscript’s disjointed pieces together. I already had a clear vision of the characters, narrative, and argument of the book. I knew what I wanted to accomplish in each chapter and overall.  Plus, my tenure file would close in a year and a half, so I had to stay firmly in finish-the-book mode. Any deep exploration of new literatures or events would have to wait for follow-on projects. Instead, I hoped that my readers and I would put on the table competing visions for integrating what I already had. To keep the focus on the book as a whole, I decided against asking each reader to take primary responsibility for one or another chapter.

              Inevitably, I received conflicting advice and concerns. Here, it was crucial to have a trusted mentor present who could direct conversation toward achieving consensus on a concrete plan.  Ariela Gross served that role for me, and did a fantastic job.  Had she been unavailable, I’m confident that either of the ASLH series editors involved in the book – Sally Gordon and Reuel Schiller – could have stepped in.

              I would also recommend having someone in the room take notes. If (unlike me) you would listen to a recording later, consider following Karen Tani’s lead and asking participants’ permission to record the session. I also found it helpful to ask those who spoke to send me any notes they had afterward. I worried that asking people to pre-circulate notes as Karen Tani had might stifle free-flowing discussion.

              I aimed to be instrumental and substantive when inviting participants. My primary goal was to choose readers who would provide helpful feedback on the project. But the workshop was also an opportunity to secure buy-in and buzz for the book and to strengthen my relationships with others in the field. My ideal outside reader was someone who would value the project, become an interlocutor, and potentially write a tenure letter. I wanted inside readers to hear from outsiders why the project mattered and to be drawn more into the work. I also hoped that the discussion would cause all the participants to discuss the book with colleagues once the workshop ended.

              For my workshop, I chose equal numbers of external and internal readers.  Bob Gordon and Sophia Lee agreed to fly in for the event, as did Reuel Schiller in his capacity as the editor for the ASLH series that was publishing my book. Clyde Spillenger made the trek from UCLA, and my USC colleague from American Studies and Ethnicity, Nayan Shah, came as well.  At my home institution, the Gould School of Law, I invited senior colleagues in legal history and constitutional law.

All of this cost money. Mitra Sharafi and Karen Tani turned to grants to fund their workshops. I was fortunate to work at a law school willing to foot the bill. (Thanks, Dean!).

               In my case, the workshop was time and money and well spent. I came out of it with better key terms, a clearer sense of argument, and plans for streamlining the prose. I strengthened my relationships with scholars I admire and placed my book project on their radar.  Crucially, I also gained a renewed sense of the potential of the project.

              Though manuscript workshops are beneficial for junior scholars, they are not equally accessible. Certain educational trajectories and institutional homes make it easier to secure funds and participants – if one knows to seek them in the first place. It is that last barrier that made Mitra Sharafi’s post so valuable. It publicized the first book workshop when it was an emerging practice and possibility.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book: Development Editors

              Today’s post concerns the secret weapon of many an excellent (legal history) author, the development editor. I worked with two on my book, Almost Citizens. They were crucial to my learning curve. Without them, I would never have crafted a book that resembled the vision in my head.

              Before starting my book, I had never contemplated paying someone to help me improve my writing. Legal history is a specialized area, and I chose my words carefully to hew to what the sources supported. I worried that someone from outside the field would seek to simplify or expand my claims in ways that I would just end up reversing. The problem was that I also knew that I could benefit from fresh eyes on my writing. By the time I’d drafted a few chapters and signed with Cambridge University Press, I felt confident about my narrative structure and cast of characters. But I found it more difficult to do smaller-scale reorganizations and line edits. This was partly because I was so close to the manuscript. It was also because writing is a skill, and I had more to learn.

Despite having many generous readers, none seemed likely candidates to become writing mentors. Colleagues and reviewers grappled with my work and provided incisive comments. But that feedback almost always involved the substance of the argument rather than its tone and constituent sentences. Given the economic realities of book publishing, many publishers hardly do any editing of manuscripts in progress. I did have the good fortune to publish with American Society for Legal History’s book series (which I discuss here). Sally Gordon was my editor there, and she was a tireless and skilled reader. But she soon saw that the book and I could both gain from more editorial engagement than she could devote to a single book in her series. So she recommended that I consider a development editor.

              I had never heard the term. Perhaps because I live just down the road from Hollywood, my mind immediately went to the entertainment executives who tell show runners that their sitcoms need more dogs or a kooky sister to really draw in the millennials. But (spoiler alert!) that was not whom I was to encounter. The editors I would work with helped me produce the best possible version of my book. Sometimes, such work is called development editing. Sometimes it goes by different names.

              I sought someone who could help me make my prose sing (or at least hum occasionally) without sacrificing nuance and accuracy. Given my topic, that meant an editor who could engage legal and historical arguments, had a sense of the evidentiary norms in the field, and understood the potential audiences for the work. But finding such an editor is a bit like turning up a good contractor for a renovation; you ask around, check out samples of the person’s work, and ultimately take a leap of faith that the (intellectual) place that you lay your head will be transformed for the better.

              I had the good fortune to work with two excellent development editors. I learned of both through admired colleagues who sang the praises of having collaborated with them. The first was Grey Osterud, an accomplished academic historian. Rather than teach, she complements her research with editing colleagues’ work. I was thus confident from the outset that she knew and honored the standards of academic history. Once I had the manuscript drafted, I undertook a rewrite with Pamela Haag, an author of serious histories for broader audiences. Notably, she also has a contract with Yale University Press for a style guide for the scholar-writer that I look forward to adding to my shelf soon.

              As Grey and Pamela helped me improve the book’s prose, they were also teaching me to be a better writer. One set of lessons had to do with the difficulties of evaluating choices about organization when one is too close to the text. Because I was circulating individual chapters to colleagues for feedback, I tried to put enough at the front of each chapter to orient them. The result was bloated chapter introductions. My development editors saw the problem immediately. They worked with me to shorten the chapter introductions and have them serve more as bridges between chapters than as introductions to standalone essays. Similarly, my immersion in the particularities of the book’s events had led me to subdivide the book’s chronology into overly narrow chronological bands. As Grey and Pamela perceived, such fine distinctions muddied the broader argument rather than clarifying it. Thus, a chapter that I had written with six sections, one for each of three characters at each of two times (ABCABC), came to contain just three character-centered sections (ABC).

              Careful editing by others is a wonderful way to discover one’s own writing tics. I had been particularly blind to two. I wrote long, intricate sentences and was overly fond of metaphors. I had to learn to reduce clauses and interjections, break up sentences, and clarify which verbs and nouns went together in what ways. Similarly, I had to unmix metaphors and close them out before they ceased to clarify. The difficulty in both cases was less fixing the problems than perceiving them in the first place. Grey and Pamela sensitized me to my propensity to create these tangles, which was all I needed to start fixing them.

              Like many historians, I revel in the details and complexity of what I study. Seeing the danger, my dissertation committee co-chair Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof counseled that my job was to over-claim and that his job was to rein me in. But knowing that I should trim and sum up did not wholly cure me. My development editors urged me to go further. Curate evidence. Don’t cut one of five quotations; leave just one. Remove tangents. Lead with bold claims. Qualify them later. Or don’t. The result was much more accessible prose. Arguments rose to the surface, no longer drowned by my sea of evidence.

There is one big downside to a development editor: she costs money. How much varies by who you hire, for how long, and for what. But price tags in the thousands of dollars would be common. The best solution is to have someone else pay. My law school (USC’s Gould School of Law) is extremely generous in its support for junior scholars’ work. While schools and departments may vary substantially in what they are able to offer, it is always worth asking. Knowing that peer institutions have offered similar funding can sometimes help shake out extra funds.

Had I had to pay for my development editors entirely out of pocket, I might have balked at using them or using them so extensively. In my case, that would have been a mistake. Their services were worth far more than the cost. As an early-stage scholar, the benefits were quite large. I have many productive years left in which to benefit from what I have learned in terms of writing and argumentation. The book is stronger too. That matters because the book is my debut in legal history as a mature scholar. It was also the centerpiece of my file for tenure (which I just received--Yay!).

My biggest fear when I began working with development editors was that I would not recognize the final text of the book as my own prose. In fact, the opposite was true. By the time I began working with Grey, I largely knew what I wanted to argue, which historical actors and narratives I wanted to feature, and what evidence I wanted to rely upon. But I found it frustratingly hard to translate the book that I had in my head into words on the page. As Grey and then Pamela and I worked on the prose, the gap between it and my envisioned book narrowed considerably (albeit with some nice additions suggested by my development editors that I had not foreseen). Almost Citizens ended up being very much my book—even more so than I had at first hoped.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book: Living Descendants

              Three and a half years ago, I had the good fortune to join Barbara Welke, Mitra Sharafi, and Daniel Sharfstein at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History for a roundtable on working with the living descendants of historical actors.  As we explained:

Online databases and communication technologies, the transnational turn, the study of memory and agency, and genealogy all lead legal historians to work with descendants of subjects. . . . Scholar-descendant exchanges shape and enrich legal history, making the past recoverable and vivid.  Joint projects that broaden arguments and audiences can result. . . . The scholar offers new strands in family or community histories.  Descendants’ experiences and understandings reveal impacts, limits, and reverberations of legal dynamics or push scholars to move beyond legal frames in productive and unfamiliar ways.

I joined the panel to discuss the topic of today’s post, my experience working with a descendant of a central character in Almost Citizens. The story began around eight years ago.

Just weeks after receiving final approval of my dissertation, which centered on a 1904 Supreme Court litigant names Isabel Gonzalez, I received an email from Belinda Torres-Mary.  She was also researching Isabel Gonzalez and had been for years.  I held my breath.  She was fascinated to learn new details about Gonzalez’s unsuccessful experience as the first Puerto Rican person to demandU.S. citizenship from the Supreme Court.  She was not an academic historian.  Gonzalez was her great-grandmother. Belinda was a passionate genealogist. Exhale.

Soon, Belinda and I were trading research leads.  She told me anecdotes.  Tacking back and forth, we discovered many more records. A long-passed woman I had spent years getting to know came to life once again, now in a new way.  As a result, the book’s account of Gonzalez is much richer than the dissertation’s.

As our collaboration deepened, we discussed how we each understood Isabel Gonzalez.  I saw her as a tragic hero of sorts. When she sought to migrate from San Juan to a better life in New York, Ellis Island inspectors discovered that she was an unmarried mother who was also pregnant and ordered her to be deported as an undesirable alien. Gonzalez filed a suit that eventually reached the Supreme Court. She argued that Puerto Ricans could not be deported because they had become U.S. citizens after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1899. The claim tapped into longstanding interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment as making citizens of all Americans other than American Indians. But the justices ruled more narrowly: Puerto Ricans were not aliens, hence not subject to deportation. Nothing needed to be said regarding citizenship. The tentativeness was typical of the early-twentieth-century Insular Cases, through which the Court contributed to a sea change in constitutional law alongside lawmakers, bureaucrats, presidents, and private actors. But the sum result was momentous, a turn away from the Reconstruction Amendments, rights, citizenship, and statehood and toward colonialism.

Belinda declared Gonzalez to be the Puerto Rican Rosa Parks. Initially, the comparison typified for me the difference between our projects.  Belinda saw her ancestor as a heroic figure in a long U.S. march toward inclusion and liberty.  If asked, I probably would have said that even Rosa Parks was no Rosa Parks.  Certainly, the professional historian in me felt compelled to emphasize differences between the women.  Gonzalez’s activism had not made her famous.  It had not arisen out of a commitment to a mass social movement or come to be supported by one.  She had engaged in legal maneuvers rather than direct action.  She did not prevail.  The unmarried and pregnant Gonzalez was not a model of respectability.  She was from a different community and drew on a heritage of Spanish rather than U.S. rule.  It was not clear that she had African ancestry; she seemingly never identified as of color.

              But the deeper I have delved, the more wisdom I have found in Belinda’s analogy.  However Gonzalez self-identified, racial prejudice lay behind the effort to deny her U.S. citizenship and behind the Court’s tepid response to her challenge.  Both controversies were profoundly shaped by being launched by women.  Law played crucial roles in both cases, in part because its future shape was uncertain.  Although neither dispute resulted in a constitutional ruling, both quickly came to be understood as signal events in processes of major constitutional change.  Both cases asked federal courts to reinvigorate legal legacies of Reconstruction.  Gonzalez and her allies deployed honor in ways that prefigured later uses of respectability.  They argued that Puerto Ricans’ honor made them worthy of equal treatment, and that denial of such treatment unjustly dishonored them.  In both cases, a modestly situated actor meaningfully influenced constitutional change.  Both disputes were key events in iterative processes of legal transformation involving a diverse array of officials.  And as recent events sharply remind us, the constitutional revolutions that resulted in both cases were incomplete and unstable.

              Working with Belinda also made my process of researching Almost Citizens feel similar to my experience of reading good fiction.  The book’s characters, themes, insights, and events kept overrunning the interpretive bounds within which I sought to contain them.  I found the world that emerged from the archives to be immersive and consuming.  I aimed to capture these novelistic sensations with a character-driven approach that attended to narrative and people as much as it did to analysis and argument.  Of course, I did not have the luxury of inventing plot turns and characters at will.  But I did have characters who were real and compelling.  Their struggles helped form the world we now inhabit.  For Belinda, that was doubly true.  Isabel Gonzalez’s decisions brought Belinda’s ancestors into existence.  Unsurprisingly, strongly felt familial ties linked great-granddaughter to great-grandmother.  Perceiving Belinda’s passion for Gonzalez’s story inspired me to deepen my depictions of Gonzalez, her choices, and their consequences – all to the book’s benefit.

That Belinda and I even met reflects a sea change in the practice of history.  Since I began graduate school, innumerable primary documents have become text-searchable online.  Books, census manuscripts, passenger manifests, judicial documents, legislative hearings, and newspaper articles that required research trips, microfilm readers, hours of painstaking review, and no small amount of luck now spit up information on a person or theme of concern with little more than an entry in a search box.  In many cases, the impetus behind this mass digitization and metadata creation has not been the needs of academic historians, but the demands of genealogists and the growing sophistication of character recognition software.  Increasingly, scholars seeking to learn about particular historical figures find themselves working in tandem or collaboration with genealogists investigating their roots.  One additional reason is that the digitization revolution has made scholars' output ever more accessible, as Belinda discovered when she began searching mentions of her great-grandmother.

              The rise of genealogy and new research technologies has transformed the ethics of researching and telling history. I am lucky not to have encountered the more acute conflicts that can arise. Belinda encouraged me to make my own decisions about what to include in the book and how. Here, it helped that Belinda had developed her own writerly voice.  She expressed aspirations soon after we met to write a young adult biography of Isabel Gonzalez.  I think it’s a great idea. With any luck, I’ll interest her in letting me assist while she takes her turn in the author’s chair.

Even in functional partnerships, working together involves give, take, and the question of whether each person is doing their share of both. Early on, I worried that I was more of a taker. Belinda offered up family history that I had no other way to access.  To my delight, I came to realize that the scarce commodity that I could contribute was undigitized archival material and historical methods with which to make better use of what was online. I was pulling my own weight because history had something unique to contribute.

If I stumbled, it was in over-skepticism. When Belinda recounted the family lore that Gonzalez had married a gentleman before migrating to New York, my first thought was that many more families claim ancestral earls than actually have them. Silly me. As our research continued, Belinda remembered that the story was told in Spanish. Gonzalez had married a “caballero.” Perhaps that was a last name, not an adjective? Some searches in digitized church and county records confirmed it. Gonzalez’s first husband, Juan Caballero, died of tuberculosis in his early 30s, shortly after Gonzalez became pregnant with his second child.

              Working with Belinda was also a reminder that Gonzalez has many other living descendants. Some knew her well. All share in her history. Few would accept every interpretive choice that I made. Yet I am obliged to them, especially Belinda. I hope they recognized Isabel Gonzalez in what I wrote, even as they also saw her in a new light.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book: The ASLH Book Series

              Perhaps the most important decisions of my transition from dissertation to book was mine to publish with the American Society of Legal History’s book series at Cambridge University Press and theirs to have me.  In a word, the reason was: editing.  In a person, it was: Sally Gordon.  More specifically, I gained a mentor, a booster, a reader, a quarterback, and a promoter.

              From the outset, Sally shared and shaped my vision for the project. I first reached out to her about the book on the suggestion and introduction of my mentor Dan Ernst, himself a former editor of the series.  To my amazement, she read my entire dissertation with her discerning and constructive eye. She saw the same promise in the dissertation that I did. It already had characters, a narrative, and evidence that constitutional change sometimes occurred outside of courts. The promising strands it had left dangling included the place of Reconstruction in U.S. empire, mechanics and details of who drove what legal change how, the relationship between Puerto Ricans and both American Indians and mainland women and minorities, and the shadow that U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines cast over everything.

              An unexpected (but not surprising) benefit of publishing with the ASLH series is that it brings instant credibility with society members. At the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Sally also introduced me as an up-and-coming scholar with plans to publish in the series.  Anyone who’s seen Sally in action knows that means meeting a lot of society members. I’ve always felt welcome at the annual meetings, but since then the meetings have been a sea of friendly faces.

               Joining the series also meant receiving a level of editing and mentorship that I associate with literary presses of yore, not the tight margins of modern academic publishing.  Almost Citizens was my first book, so I had no experiences identifying – much less making – many of the decisions that book writing  requires. Fortunately, as I wrote (and rewrote), Sally read (and re-read)–the book proposal, an annotated table of contents, individual chapters, and finally the full manuscript.  Every major element of the book bears her mark. Through emails, phone calls, and coffees, she pressed me to specify and “surface” my biggest claims and to open my geographic and temporal lenses wide enough to bring those claims fully into focus. We discussed what books I liked, how they were structured, what writerly voice the authors had employed, who read those volumes, and who might read mine.

Equally important, Sally was an enduring source of encouragement. She kept me optimistic and energized throughout the long and lonely endeavor that is book writing. Our conversations spanned years. During each she reminded me what I had accomplished, then identified the further progress now within reach.

As my draft chapters accumulated, Reuel Schiller joined Sally as a co-editor of the series, to its and my good fortune. Sally and Reuel were a crack pair of text massagers and arrangers. They also knew how to leverage their insights. When they saw room for improvement but lacked the time to provide detailed feedback (the series had other authors; they had day jobs–and lives), they recommended that I use development editors (a subject of an upcoming post).

Working with the series also meant that I had experienced editors in my corner as I navigated the unfamiliar, far-from-intuitive publishing process.  When I negotiated my contract, Sally knew which details mattered: commit to a number of images and ask for preapproval; ensure that the series can choose the copy editor and indexer; choose a publication deadline that can slip a month or two without endangering your tenure case.  Someone had to pay for editing, indexing, and the like. The series helped me ask my home institution for the funds by providing me evidence that peer institutions were already providing such funds to their junior faculty. When I became concerned with one or another of the press’s decisions, Sally and Reuel helped me sort out which items were worth raising in what ways. They were always willing to speak on my behalf to Cambridge, with whom they maintained a strong and cooperative relationship.

Mostly, the series steered me away from pitfalls. I never had to contemplate the disadvantages of a machine-made index because my contract let me hire the wonderful Derek Gottlieb. Where some authors tell horror stories of overseas copy editors who insert more typos than they correct, the series snagged for me the excellent Julie Hagen.

              With my book now out under the series imprint, I can add that I am happy being judged by the company I keep. Cambridge University Press’s august imprimatur makes it more likely that readers will pick up the book. The American Society for Legal History is my foremost academic home. It has also published many of the legal historians that I most admire, including the first books of several of the best up-and-coming scholars in the field.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book

I want to thank LHB for having me as a guest blogger.  Thank you, Karen Tani, for the kind introduction. As Karen mentioned, the occasion of my turn on LHB is Cambridge University Press’s release of my book, Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire.  If you want to learn more about it, reviews are available at the New Republic and Jotwell.

A big surprise for me was that the book turned out much better than I had hoped, much less expected.  That’s not to say that the book is perfect – far from it. But as compared to what I thought possible when I began, the writing was stronger, the arguments clearer and more consequential, and the characters and narrative more vivid. In several posts this month, I aim to explain why. As a teaser, my next entry will concern mentorship.

In other posts, I will reflect on other aspects of being a legal historian. Part of the joy of my job is that it connects me to students, courts, the public sphere, and the institutions that sustain the study of law and history. I look forward to addressing all of these in the weeks ahead.

I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to share thoughts with a community from which I have gained so much. I hope to hear from you in the comments.

Exhibit: HLS and the Bauhaus

[We have word a new exhibit at the Harvard Law Library: Creating Community: Harvard Law School and the Bauhaus.]

2019 marks the centennial of the Bauhaus, and Harvard is celebrating! The Bauhaus, considered the twentieth century's most influential school of art and design, has deep connections to Harvard, including the Law School. Did you know that Harvard's first example of modern architecture is on the HLS campus and was designed by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus? Or that Gropius commissioned Bauhaus pioneers to create site-specific artwork for the buildings?

If you are in the Boston area, come explore HLS's connection to the Bauhaus and its role in shaping campus life. The exhibit, curated by Karen Beck and Lesley Schoenfeld, is on view daily 9 to 5 through 31 July 2019 in the Caspersen Room, Langdell Hall. A sampling of the exhibit is online. If you are a Bauhaus fan, be sure to visit all of Harvard's Bauhaus-related exhibits, tours, and events happening in 2019.

On Scholarship and Productivity – a Farewell to the Legal History Blog and a Confession

Back in June 2018, when Mitra Sharafi invited me to be a guest blogger for a month, she mentioned, among other things, that she would love a post with tips on research productivity. I did not want to end this blogging experience without complying with her wish.  

Twenty-five years after I defended my dissertation and with some twenty-or-less years before I retire, what have I learned about research and writing? 

The first thing is that, although intuitively we tend to think that focusing on smaller things and a shorter time span would enable a greater efficiency, this is usually untrue. In my own experience, the larger and wider you look, the quicker you understand what you see. This was a lesson my driving teacher taught me when I was sixteen years old. She explained that if I looked right in front of the wheels (which was what I naturally wanted to do) I would see nothing; but that if I looked to the horizon I would see everything. I am sure she did not mean to give me a life-long advice, but her wisdom guides me (also) as I imagine, plan, or execute, new projects. 

Looking to the horizon requires, among other things, to ignore the most obvious and the most travelled route. I know Robert Frost warned us that the routes we take may not make as huge a difference as we would like to believe, but not being certain where I was going paradoxically allowed me to better listen to the archives. I listened not to what they told me about the past, but also to what they said about my research question. Was it a valid question? Should it be asked differently? How can it be divided into pieces and what should be included? At least twice the archives told me to abandon the search altogether or they suggested that the project I was pursing was of little interest. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I ended up obeying. 

Knowing when to stop was a fundamental issue. Many years ago, as an MA student, my then mentor gave me the advice that when nothing surprises me any longer, it is time to leave. I follow his recommendation religiously, even as I tremble at the thought that an amazing discovery may be waiting for me in the next bunch of papers, which I will never read. 

Efficiency at the archives is one thing; another is to overcome the first blank page of a new project. There are days in which I can write, and days that are useless. I try to come to terms with these fluctuations, knowing that there is little I can do to change them. When I get really stuck I go swimming. Swimming allows me a concentration, which I cannot otherwise obtain. 

Over the years, I learned to avoid peer review. I realize this may be an unnecessary confession, but there is nothing that I like or find useful about peer review. Peer reviewers sometimes know more than you, or as much as you do, but often they do not. Some are generous and engage with your argument, but others want to impose their ideas. I know peer review is supposed to ensure a certain quality across the board and maybe sometimes it does, but in my own experience it mostly produces leveling.  While it guarantees serious and responsible scholarship, it disrupts attempts at doing things differently. Perhaps because I was educated in Paris, as I matured in the American academic system I kept asking myself whether revered French academics such as Foucault, Derrida, or Braudel, would have ever passed a proper peer review. I am convinced they would not. Nonetheless, our scholarly world is better because of what they proposed. Their insights were transformative even if their method was too new, their facts too shaky, and their tendency to generalize too extreme. 

I also believe it is important to remember that there are many ways to think about productivity. The most obvious is to measure it by the number of books and articles. Another is by evaluating the divergence between them, and the degree by which they respond to different questions, methodologies, areas, or subjects of expertise. What kinds of linguistic and archival competence is required is another important point, as well as whether sources are available online or demand dislocation, where to, and how user-friendly are the deposits. 

Beyond all these considerations, the greatest lesson I learned is that, although we tend to think about productivity as a personal achievement, in earnest, it often depends on the individuals and institutions around us. Teaching in universities with excellent students, interesting colleagues, great libraries, and comfortable office space, facilitates things tremendously. So does having many sabbaticals, preferably, many more than the term usually implies. A supportive domestic and social environment is crucial. We often give thanks to our families and friends because of what they had endured while we did research and writing. I am thankful to them on this account, but I am mostly grateful for the conversations they facilitated. I found dialogues with my twin boys surprisingly illuminating. When they were younger, I needed to explain things simply; when older, my aim was to make them more complex. But, as I dragged them across countries and continents, I learned a new art of explaining and discovered new ways to think about what I believed I already knew. 

There is a famous saying that behind every successful man there is a great woman. Fortunately, I belong to a generation that can also affirm the contrary. I am certainly privileged to be backed by a great man. It is to him, that great man who listens, shares, discusses, assists, reads, and advises, that I dedicate this last piece.