Scooter Libby Trial at DCCHS

The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is hosting a series of reenactments relating to the Scooter Libby trial.  Hree is the Society's announcement:

What is it like to prosecute or defend a high-profile false statements / perjury case in the D.C. Circuit? 

Join us on June 10, 2026 (4:30 pm – 6:00 pm) in the Ceremonial Courtroom for an inside look at one of the most prominent false statement cases in our court in the past twenty-five years – the “Scooter” Libby Trial.  

The  year was 2003.  The Iraq War had just begun – with great controversy.  President Bush in his State of the Union speech said that Iraq had recently engaged in an effort to obtain uranium from Africa.  In June, reports began to surface that a former Ambassador had been dispatched to Africa in 2002 but found nothing to support the rumors.  Shortly thereafter, press reports named his wife, Valerie Plame, as having been involved in sending him to Africa, and “outing” her as an employee of the CIA.  An investigation of the leak began, and ultimately led to an indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, for making false statements to the FBI and Grand Jury during the investigation.  In early 2007, an all-star prosecution team faced off with an all-star defense team in a 7-week trial before Judge Reggie B. Walton.  After 8 days of deliberations, the jury found Libby guilty on 4 of 5 counts.  This program will explore in detail the challenges that lawyers and judges face in high profile false statement cases, including simulated dramatizations of the initial FBI interviews, a prosecution team meeting on whether to indict, a defense meeting on strategy, the Judge’s thoughts about difficult trial issues ahead, and jury deliberations.  Several original members of the trial teams, and Judge Walton, along with others will participate in the dramatizations. 

We hope you can join us.  Please register here.

--Dan Ernst 

Surrency Article Prize to Evans

Continuing our series of posts on the prizes and honors announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we are delighted to announce the winner of the Surrency Article Prize, "for the best article published in the Society’s journal, the Law and History Review." This year's winner is Catherine L. Evans (University of Toronto) for her article “Heart of Ice: Indigenous Defendants and Colonial Law in the Canadian North-West.” The article appeared in Volume 36, no. 2 (May 2018).

The citation from the committee:

Catherine L. Evans’ essay offers a compelling account of a deeply eerie incident in the late nineteenth-century Canadian Northwest Territory, the killing of an older woman believed to be a wendigo (malevolent spirit) by three Cree men who were acting in accordance with Cree law, their subsequent criminal trial, and the balance struck between Cree and colonial law by colonial officials in mitigation. The article offers an extremely subtle assessment of legal pluralism on a colonial frontier by arguing that the trial of the wendigo killers must be incorporated with the better-known corpus of trials held in the aftermath of Louis Riel’s contemporaneous territorial “rebellion,” which displayed a completely different face of the colonial state. This memorable essay avoids easy answers without dismissing prior scholarship, exhibits excellent research, and demands that the reader consider deeply both the brutalities and the cracks in colonial law.

The members of this year's Surrency Article Prize Committee were Cornelia Dayton (Chair)
(University of Connecticut); Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago); Kunal Parker (University of Miami); Christopher Tomlins (University of California, Berkeley); and Laurie Wood (Florida State University). We thank them for their service and offer our congratulations to Catherine Evans!

-- Karen Tani

Pearson on Forensic Medicine in Siam

Quentin (Trais) Pearson, Boston College has published "Morbid Subjects: Forensic Medicine and Sovereignty in Siam" in Modern Asian Studies (10 Nov. 2017), 1-27. Here's the abstract:

This article examines the question of Siamese sovereignty in the era of high imperialism through the lens of medical jurisprudence. Although Siam (Thailand) was never formally colonized, it was subject to unequal trade treaties that established extraterritorial legal rights for foreign residents. In cases where a foreign resident was suspected of having harmed a Siamese subject, the Siamese state had to appeal to foreign consular officials to file charges against the suspect. Standards of forensic evidence were crucial in such cases. While medical jurisprudence helped to bolster racial privilege in other colonial legal jurisdictions, this article argues that these disputes rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents and their political representatives. The dead bodies of Siamese subjects became grounds for challenging foreign courts and asserting Siamese sovereignty.

Further information is available here.