Wiebolt on the Lawyer behind School Choice

Dennis J. Wieboldt, III, soon to be a VAP at Notre Dame Law, has posted William Bentley Ball and the "Century of Struggle" for School Choice:

The Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman profoundly shaped the development of federal constitutional law. For more than fifty years, Lemon served as the basis for invalidating countless government programs that sought to support private religious education, posing a formidable challenge to the late-twentieth-century school choice movement. In response, school-choice advocates spent decades incrementally dismantling the Court’s three-part test for determining when government programs seemingly supporting religion violate the Establishment Clause. Their efforts culminated in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022). There, the Court not only opened new doctrinal avenues for defending a wide range of school-choice programs, but also vindicated the litigators who unsuccessfully argued Lemon decades earlier.

To understand Lemon and the forces that led to its eventual undoing, this article turns to William Bentley Ball, a relatively little-known Catholic lawyer who argued Lemon before the Supreme Court in March 1971. As Ball himself remarked after oral argument, the “fight” for school choice in Lemon “was the windup of years of work – a century of struggle.” To be sure, Ball was not litigating for a century before Lemon, but the ideas that so decisively shaped his thinking about the constitutionality of public funding for private religious education indeed emerged one hundred years before he appeared at One First Street. By tracing Ball’s intellectual formation in the lead-up to Lemon, this article sheds new light on the history of the twentieth-century Supreme Court and one of the legal campaigns that continues to figure prominently in our national debates over the Religion Clauses.  

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• 
  ASLH President Mitra Sharafi discusses Fear of the False, "her new book about colonial South Asia's critical role in the development of forensic science" on Law in Action, the podcast of the University of Wisconsin Law School.   

• From the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History: John Fea (Messiah University) on "Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students." 

• Another memorial to the late Gordon Wood, via History News Network x Bunk History. 

• "The History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) has released 'The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,' the first comprehensive report documenting and analyzing the Trump administration’s sweeping, coordinated effort since January 2025 to reshape how the American past is recorded, preserved, and shared with the public" (OAH).

• Steven Hahn reviews Born Equal: The Remaking of America’s Constitution, 1840–1920
  by Akhil Reed Amar (The Nation). 

• Via H-Disability: a memorial to Richard K. Scotch, author of multiple landmark histories of disability law and policy. 

• A call for papers for a conference on the Legal History of Tamilnadu.  Deadline for abstracts: June 15.  

• The conference "Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution" will take place at UMass Amherst from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 12, 2026 (H-Law).

• "Students from Stanford Law School’s Center for Racial Justice recently helped bring Wong [Kim Ark]’s story to life through a Bay Area public-history project that joins law, art, and community memory" (Stanford Lawyer).  

• U.S. Representative French Hill has introduced a bill to require the Department of the Interior to study the preservation and incorporation into the National Park System of the home of Scipio Jones (QQ) 

• A recording of the webinar, Equality and Exclusion: Israel's Constitutional Order and Its Palestinian-Arab Minority (1948–2025), with Ofra Bloch, moderated by Jon D. Michaels (UCLA).

•  ICYMI: Eric Segall asks that we "Please Stop Calling the Roberts Court Justices Originalists" (Dorf of Law). Jamelle Bouie discusses the so-called "Colored Conventions" of the nineteenth century in arguing that "The Supreme Court Doesn’t Own the Constitution" (NYT).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Elizabeth Papp Kamali on "Charles Donahue: Man, Magister, Inimitable Scholar" (Harvard Law Bulletin).  

• The HLS Library has scanned "Harvard’s full collection of 140,000 documents comprising more than 700,000 pages" to produce "the first complete, keyword-searchable online collection of the Nuremberg Trials records" (Harvard Law Bulletin).

• BU Law's notice of legal historian Rephael Stern. 

• Congratulations to Alison LaCroix, upon her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences!  Also William Baude and Elizabeth Clemens (UChicago News).  Professor LaCroix will be the speaker at the University of Chicago's 2026 Commencement this June.

• A notice of Jill Lepore's HLS seminar, “The History of Evidence,” devoted to "two key questions: 'What counts as proof?' and 'How has that changed over time?'” (Harvard Law Today).  She discussed her book We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

• Mary Sarah Bilder and Sarah Isgur will "explore Virginia's central role shaping the nation's founding" as part of the 2026 Founding Debates Program of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and the Virginia Law Foundation on September 24, 2026, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.  (More.)

• ICYMI: Martin v Hunter’s Lessee (History is Now).  Michael D. Ramsey, Keith Whittington, Kurt Lash, and Lawrence Solum on birthright citizenship (Regulatory Review). The Forgotten History of the School Choice Movement (AEI).

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

Hamilton's "Nothing Less Than Equality"

Tikia K. Hamilton, Loyola University Chicago, has published Nothing Less Than Equality: The Battle over Segregated Education in the Nation’s Capital (University of Chicago Press):

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which barred racial segregation in American public schools, wasn’t the only path for Black parents, teachers, and activists who sought equality of educational opportunity. Some believed that the solution to inequality lay in pressing the federal government to live up to the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal” by providing more resources to Black schools. And for a time, this seemed true in Washington, DC, where Black activists leveraged their status as residents of the nation’s capital to advocate on behalf of Black education. However, disappointments with the “separate but equal” strategy and a sea change in activism led to an embrace of integration.
 
In Nothing Less Than Equality, Tikia K. Hamilton reveals the rich and complex history of educational activism in Washington prior to Brown v. Board of Education, illuminating complex dynamics that provide a counterpoint and backdrop to the landmark Supreme Court case. Hamilton thoroughly examines the multipronged strategies employed by parents, teachers, attorneys, and activists to democratize education, demonstrating that there was no linear path to Brown. 

--Dan Ernst 

Gonzales's "Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation"

David-James Gonzales, Brigham Young University, has published Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford University Press):

On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation.

Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals.

--Dan Ernst

Black on Education and State Constitutions in Reconstruction

Griffin Black has recently published Reconstruction State Constitutional Conventions and the Rebirth of American Schooling as a student note in the Yale Law Journal:

A rebirth of American education occurred in the state constitutional conventions of the Reconstruction South. At a moment of national constitutional reformation, biracial coalitions of delegates constitutionalized universal public-school systems, viewing them as a core component of remaking their states in the image of the U.S. Constitution. These delegates succeeded in keeping their constitutions free from the language of segregated schooling. This ill-understood history severely troubles the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the schoolhouse. This Note fills gaps in the ongoing conversation emanating from the Court about the relationship between our nation’s history and its current educational landscape.

--Dan Ernst 

Evolution on the Stand: Revisiting the Scopes Trial at 100

[From Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections, we have word of a new digital exhibit at the University of Minnesota Law Library.  DRE]

“Evolution on the Stand: Revisiting the Scopes Trial at 100” 

The new digital exhibit commemorates the centennial anniversary of one of America’s most storied courtroom dramas, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. The 1925 trial of John Scopes, accused of violating a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, became a national sensation and the focal point of a public debate over the roles of science and religion in public education. The digital exhibit highlights the Library’s preeminent collection of famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s letters, publications, photographs, and trial materials, preserving and building on a physical exhibit open in the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center throughout 2025. The new digital site adds to and expands the digital research sites and exhibits available as part of the Library's digital special collections. 

The Scopes Trial digital exhibit features a trove of material drawn from the Riesenfeld Center's collections, including letters, original trial documents, witness statements, inscribed books, speeches, and debates. The exhibit includes daily trial summaries and transcripts, and sets the trial within a longer history of evolutionary thought and debate on the roles of science and religion in American public education.

Weekend Roundup

• The Harvard Law Library’s rich collection on Magna Carta
 ""offers students an important link to the past and the present" (Harvard Law Bulletin).   

• In an online program at Noon on November 4, 2025, the Supreme Court Historical Society will host a conversation by the authors of two published this fall on Justice Robert H. Jackson: G. Edward White, author of Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment, and Gerard Magliocca, author of The Actual Art of Governing: Justice Robert H. Jackson’s Concurring Opinion in the Steel Seizure Case.  Register here.

• Scott Bomboy's explainer on the Posse Comitatus and Insurrection Acts (National Constitution Center).  

• Richard Re on Julian Mortenson's "The Executive Power Clause" and the history of presidential removals (Divided Argument).  

• In the October 16 session of the of the Berkeley Legal History Workshop, "Hendrik Hartog will reflect on the development of the field of legal history and discuss inter-disciplinary collaboration in the legal context" (UC Berkeley Law).

• Clark University's notice of Aziz Rana's Constitution Day lecture on American Constitutional History (ClarkNews).  

• We missed Temple Law's story on Craig Green and the contribution of history to legal education when it appeared this summer (Temple Law News). 

• We don't believe we realized that there is a biennial conference of the Children's History Society. 

• The University of Nevada, Las Vegas seeks an Assistant Professor specializing in the history of Indigenous North America. 

• Two of the three recipients in Berkeley’s JSP program recently named Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Graduate Fellows are studying legal history.  “Michael Banerjee is researching the legal history of American universities and academic freedom, and Margot Lipin is studying the nexus of legal history, policing, and fashion” (UC Berkeley Law).

• "The University of Northern Iowa's Center for Civic Education has received a $1.22 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education . . . . to strengthen civic education for students statewide. The program will include seminars on civic virtues and Iowa's constitutional history, reaching educators through various formats such as high school teacher seminars, intensive sessions for UNI teaching majors, and workshops for elementary teachers( KWWL). 

• The blog Public Law, Policy, and Public Administration blog conveniently gathers links to all the sites you need to keep up to speed with the Supreme Court during its present term.  Scroll down to the post dated October 7. 

• An essay on the presidents of the Florida State Bar Association from 1907 through 1949 (Florida Bar News). 

• Lawbook Exchange's October catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• Martti Koskenniemi delivered 2025 Leo Mechelin Keynote Lecture at the Rule of Law Day observance by the University of Helsinki’s Rule of Law Centre and the Leo Mechelin Foundation (ESCLH). 

• ICYMI: Twelve Failed Constitutional Amendments That Could Have Reshaped American History (Smithsonian). More Lepore (NPR; CSM; Big Think; Foreign Policy). Steven Calabresi (and Gordon Wood) on Akhil Reed Amar's Born Equal (Volokh Conspiracy). Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Origins of "Equal Justice under Law" (NYT). "The Pendle witch trials will haunt [Lancashire's] past forever" (LancsLive). Chattanooga lawyers mourned the death of Judge Charles Dickens Clark in 1908 (Chattanooga Times Free Press).

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

Palau-McDonald on Farrington v. Tokushige

MJ Palau-McDonald, University of Hawai’i at Manoa--William S. Richardson School of Law, has posted Farrington v. Tokushige: Language & Power in Hawai’i:

In Farrington v. Tokushige (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Fifth Amendment grounds a series of laws enacted by the Territory of Hawai'i to control and ultimately eradicate private Japanese language schools. Legal commentary on Tokushige is sparse. The case is often characterized as a straightforward application of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) and Meyer v. Nebraska (1923). Together, Tokushige, Pierce, and Meyer are often cast as the Court’s public education chapter of the Americanization period. However, viewing Tokushige as a simple extension of Meyer and Pierce alienates the case from its historical context of white elites’ attempts to maintain political and economic control in the Territory in the face of a growing population of Nisei (U.S.-born children of first-generation Japanese immigrants), who, unlike their parents, were U.S. citizens with the right to vote. In this way, the Territory’s anti-Japanese movement was distinct from concurrent Japanese exclusion initiatives in California and Washington, which revolved around attempts to prevent Japanese land ownership and economic ascension, though the fear of the “yellow peril” was the fulcrum around which these movements metastasized. Through an examination of the social and legal history behind Tokushige, this article reinserts the significant racial dynamics that undergirded the events, the cultural depictions, and the legal justifications for the Japanese school control legislation that was lost in the Court’s sterilized decision. It also resituates Tokushige within the context of U.S. colonization and the forces that justified control over Hawai’i’s politics, land, and culture. The case’s unique history is inextricably intertwined with the establishment and maintenance of U.S. hegemony in the Pacific. Recontextualized, Tokushige implicates core questions of power that are increasingly relevant today, including who has access to political and economic power and who creates the conditions for access to that power.

--Dan Ernst 

Boes on Antivaccination and American Antistatism

Julia Bowes, University of Melbourne, has published “Another Human Sacrifice Thrown to the Pitiless Moloch of Police Power”: The Anti-Vaccination Movement, Parental Rights, and the Roots of American Anti-Statism, 1890–1917, in Law and History Review:

This article revisits the roots of anti-statism in the United States by analyzing opposition to the introduction of compulsory school vaccination and medical examinations at the local and state levels in the Progressive Era. It shows that the widespread use of compulsory schooling laws to promote vaccination in the late nineteenth century, which led to establishing compulsory school medical exams and school nurse programs in the early twentieth, precipitated intense conflicts over states’ police powers. Exploring the controversy over school vaccine requirements in Utah between 1899 and 1901, the article reveals that resistance to public health interventions in schools fused skepticism of science with a gendered defense of individual and parental rights to challenge states’ power over children. The article then traces how these conflicts filtered up to the federal level, framing arguments against a proposed federal department of health in the 1910s. Led by the National League for Medical Freedom, opponents directly linked the reach of the police powers via compulsory school health initiatives with the expansion of federal power, arguing they were connected in a plot to establish “state medicine” that imperiled the gendered freedom of the “individual”—i.e., the white male citizen—over the home.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• The University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative (SDRI) has put together an amazing resource on state constitutions, the 50 Constitutions project, which it continues to update. Of particular interest: the "Tracking Constitutional Change" feature. This feature "allow[s] users to see how [constitutions] have taken shape over time and to learn about important historical moments." Nine states so far "have full Tracking Constitutional Change capabilities," including the just-added Pennsylvania. SDRI reports that "[m]ore states will be added in the coming year."   

• Katrina Jagodinsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will present in the Monday Seminar of the Department of History of Johns Hopkins University on September 22, from 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm. 

• 

  Children Gathering Wildflowers above Trondhjem (LC)

  Elin Hofverberg on "110 Years of the Norwegian Castbergian Child Laws" (In Custodia Legis).
  

• Zachary S. Price, UC San Francisco Law, on “Trumpian Impoundments in Historical Perspective” (SLR).

• "Durham Cathedral has unveiled a new exhibition featuring three versions of Magna Carta, the historical charter that first established the Rule of Law"  (Palatinate). 

• The historian of administrative state Joy Milligan has moved from Virginia Law to UC Berkeley Law (UC Berkeley Law). 

• Justice Stephen Breyer, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, and Michael Klarman on taking the bar--or not (Harvard Law Today). 

• Thanks to Liz Sepper (UT-Austin), the talk of law professor Bluesky is the painting "Supreme Court Beach." Jay Willis at "Balls & Strikes" did a deep dive on the painting's history -- including which former Justice owns the original. [KMT] 

• The latest "SCOTUS Scoop" from the Supreme Court Historical Society is Still at Work: How the Justices Spend Their Summer Months.  But we thought they were at the beach!

• For over 30 years, Daytonites "have put on a play every July using the trial transcript" form the Scope Monkey Trial.  "Destiny in Dayton" explains "the complexities of the town captured by history" (Akron Legal News).  Also, the ABAJ looks "back at the Scopes trial 100 years later." 

• Upcoming book talks in the America's Town Hall series of the National Constitution Center include Akhil Reed Amar on Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 (September 16) and Eric Foner on Our Fragile Freedoms (September 24).  

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

Watkins on BYU's Moral Policing

Grace Watkins, a recent graduate from the Yale Law School and a DPhil student in History at Oxford University has published her note, Piety Police, in the Yale Law Journal.  She received the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Award of the American Society for Legal History for the paper.

Religiously affiliated universities are permitted to maintain their own private police under the rationale that these departments serve an educational, rather than religious, mission. This Note calls that rationale into question by uncovering the history of the Brigham Young University Police Department’s (BYUPD’s) morals policing, which blurred the lines between the enforcement of the law and the school’s religious Honor Code. Drawing on extensive archival research and previously unexamined legal materials, this history reveals how the BYUPD waged vice- and sexual-policing campaigns that extended far beyond campus borders.

The Note argues that BYU’s religious affiliation shaped the methods, priorities, and powers of its campus police. In the 1960s, the BYUPD enlisted students and professors to assist with undercover drug operations, resulting in haphazard investigative tactics that disrupted campus life. During the 1970s, university administrators encouraged the BYUPD to aggressively police sexual morality. In response, campus officers used undercover student agents to conduct surveillance and sting operations targeting gay men living in Provo. Then, following a significant expansion of the BYUPD’s statutory authority in 1979, local residents reported that officers were using their law-enforcement powers to conduct Honor Code investigations off campus. In the 2010s, similar concerns resurfaced when it was discovered that a BYUPD officer had shared confidential police reports with administrators to punish victims of sexual violence for Honor Code violations related to their assaults.

Despite repeated attempts to separate the BYUPD’s law-enforcement and student-discipline functions, misconduct continued. This cycle suggests that the BYUPD’s religious and police duties are inextricably entangled. These findings provide a cautionary tale as more religious universities—and, more recently, megachurches—establish their own law-enforcement agencies nationwide. The Note concludes by mapping the legal landscape of this growing category of private police and reflecting on the inherent risks posed by departments acting under the authority of both church and state.

--Dan Ernst

Bernstein on the Court, Education and the KKK

David E Bernstein, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, has published The Supreme Court, Education, and the KKK in the 1920s in Western Legal History 35 (2025): 97-107:

Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters present historians with a puzzle. The Court had refused previous opportunities to initiate a due process jurisprudence that expanded beyond freedom of contract and property rights. Why did the Court suddenly adopt a more aggressive understanding of the Due Process Clause in Meyer and Pierce?

As has been discussed elsewhere, there are several plausible and non-exclusive explanations. This article focuses on the Justices’ hostility to the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had been a leading force behind laws regulating or banning private education, and the Court’s decisions in Meyer and Pierce likely in part reflected a pushback against the Klan’s agenda.

Part I of this Article discusses the Klan’s resurgence in the early 1920s and its role in sponsoring legislation targeting private schools. This included the Oregon compulsory public education law invalidated by the Court in Pierce.

Part II discusses the Court’s hostility to the Klan. This section discusses a significant anti-Klan ruling that has received little scholarly attention, the 1928 case of Bryant v. Zimmerman. In Zimmerman, the Court upheld a New York law requiring certain membership organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, to register their membership lists with the state. The Court held that this requirement did not violate constitutional rights, particularly freedom of association or due process. Importantly, the Court’s holding was not based on a rejection of the notion that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the freedoms of private membership organizations. Rather, the Court focused on the malevolent nature of the Klan. 

--Dan Ernst 

Jia on Constitutional Education in China and the US

My Georgetown Law colleague Mark Jia has posted The Possibilities of Constitutional Education:

Constitutional scholarship has traditionally focused on formal constitutional actors: courts, legislatures, and executives. These actors are often regarded as primary sources of constitutional law, or in some cases, as final arbiters of constitutional meaning. More peripheral in this literature are actors thought to transmit what courts and high officials have established. These constitutional educators, including law professors, legal journalists, and civics planners, are often overlooked for defensible reasons: they lack the normative authorities of formal institutional actors, and they do not exercise power as it is often understood in public law.

This Article advances a general theory of constitutional education to show what is possible through centering the output of constitutional educators. In an age of global constitutional change and local constitutional upheaval, constitutional education can shed light on basic questions of constitutional order. The analytic value of constitutional education lies not in studying it in isolation, but from examining how primary constitutional research subjects—texts, ideas, methods, decisions, and reasons—are refracted through a distinct set of downstream epistemic actors. Focusing on two case studies, the United States and China, the Article shows how the study of constitutional education can illuminate the functions of authoritarian constitutions, the construction of constitutional culture, and the dynamics of constitutional change. In so arguing, the Article also suggests that certain constitutional patterns may transcend divisions between autocracy and democracy, constitutions and constitutionalism.

--Dan Ernst

Jenkins and Peck on Antibusing Legislation and the Civil Rights Coalition

 Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck’s The Collapse of the Civil Rights Coalition: Congress and the Politics of Antibusing Legislation, 1966-86 is now available online from Law and History Review:

The legislative coalition responsible for passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not set out to use busing as a means to end school segregation. When it came time to implement relevant portions of the law, however, busing became the primary method for reversing “separate but equal” education. In this paper, we provide a legislative policy history detailing the unanticipated, but nearly two-decade long, congressional battle over busing. Through a detailed examination of congressional hearings, floor debate, and roll-call votes, we shed light on the collapse of the pro-civil rights coalition responsible for the landmark achievements of the early 1960s. In its place emerged a new, bipartisan, and interregional bloc of lawmakers—led by southern Democrats and Republicans but joined by a pivotal group of (ostensibly liberal) northern Democrats—who were opposed to efforts by the Supreme Court and administrative state to end school segregation in the North as well as the South.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From Time's "Made by History" section" Anthony Lee Gregory, "Republicans’ Calls for ‘Law and Order’ Have Democratic Roots"; Alison Lefkovitz, "The Right Aims to Turn Back the Clock on American Divorce Law."
  

• Legal historian Danaya Wright is doing the Lord's work at the University of Florida (Alligator). 
  

• Legal historian Farah Peterson received the Pushcart Prize for her essay, “Alone with Kindred,” which first appeared in the Threepenny Review.  
  

• 
  We spotted two recent book reviews by Reuel Schiller, UC Law San Francisco.  First up is Schiller's Jotwell review of Margot Canaday's  Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America (2023)., entitled Liberation Without Law: Queer Workers and the Limits of Legal Liberalism.  Then there's From Binding Arbitration to Shareholder Activism: Labor History and the History of Modern Liberalism, his Reviews of American History essay on two books by masters of the history of American labor relations, Sanford M. Jacoby's Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank, and Ronald W. Schatz's The Labor Board Crew: Remaking Worker-Employer Relations from Pearl Harbor to the Reagan Era.
   
  

• Stephen Sedley reviews The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls in the London Review of Books.  

• Jessica Lowe, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted her review essay on Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell's The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s-1830s, which will appear in a symposium in Federal History.

• Over at Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog, Otto Vervaart on repetitiones, "a kind of special lectures by medieval professors on selected themes in Roman and canon law," in Early Modern editions of medieval legal treatises.
  

• Joan Howarth discusses the history of the bar exam in an episode of the ABA's The Modern Law Library devoted to her book, Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing.
  

• The National Constitution Center has posted a new podcast: Randy Barnett, Georgetown Law and the author of the memoir A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, “joins Jeffrey Rosen to discuss his role in the evolution of originalism from a philosophy of judicial restraint to one of constitutional conservatism dedicated to restoring ‘the lost Constitution.’”
  

• The Oklahoma State Department of Education has issued its “Standards Guidelines for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year,” which are to be “immediate[ly] and complete[ly] implemented.  “This memorandum and the included standards must be provided to every teacher as well as providing a physical copy of the Bible, the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Ten Commandments as resources in every classroom in the school district. These documents are mandatory for the holistic education of students in Oklahoma.”  More.
  

• ICYMI: Daniel Rodgers, Nell Irvin Painter, Aziz Rana, and Abram Van Engen on President Biden's withdrawal from the presidential campaign (WaPo).  Michael McConnell discusses Trump v. United States with Pam Karlin (SLS).  Jay Rubenstein says that although the decision might put presidents above the law, kings never were (The Conversation).
  

• Update: Join Their "Quest for the Truth"?  The Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida is hiring. 
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization: Reva Siegel (Yale Law School) and Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) on "Moyle and Abortion’s New Criminalization—A History-And-Tradition Right to Healthcare Access After Dobbs" (recapping findings from a recently posted paper on this topic). 

• Also at Balkinization: an ongoing symposium on Mark Graber's Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform after the Civil War (University Press of Kansas, 2023). So far, you'll see posts by Evan Bernick (Northern Illinois University College of Law), Rebecca Zietlow (University of Toledo College of Law), Alexander Tsesis (Florida State University College of Law), Travis Crum (Washington University in St. Louis Law), Stephen Griffin (Tulane  Law), and Rogers Smith (University of Pennsylvania).
  

• The Brennan Center reviews its Historians' Briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court in the October 2023 term.
  

• 
  The July Newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here.  It features the 1859 trial of Daniel Sickles.

• The American Historical Association is presenting a Congressional Briefing to provide historical perspectives on the role of the federal government on issues of academic freedom in higher education. The briefing will take place on Thursday, July 11 at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075.  David A. Bell (Princeton Univ.), Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (New School), and David M. Rabban (Univ. of Texas School of Law) will present.  James Grossman (American Historical Association) will moderate.

• This panel on Loper-Bright, convened by Neysun Mahboubi and including Cary Coglianese, Emily Bremer, Bridget Dooling, Michael Herz, and Kristin Hickman, sounds in administrative law,  but I found it extremely helpful and thought-provoking about the history of the subject.  DRE 
  

• ICYMI: Holly Brewer says The Supreme Court Turns the President Into a King  (New Republic).  The Court Went Too Far on Presidential Immunity (Cato Institute). The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling has a chilling parallel to the Jim Crow era (MSNBC). The Dred Scott of Our Time, says Sean Wilentz (NYRB). Alison LaCroix interviewed on a podcast on The Exoneration of Richard Nixon (Landslide).  Heather Cox Richardson weighs in (PBS Newshour).  Georgia in the house at the Founding (Atlanta History Center).  Steven K. Green, Willamette University, How Jefferson and Madison's partnership shaped America's separation of church and state (Akron Legal News).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Maximilian Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London, will present "Beyond Belief and Deeper than Argument: Character and Intellectual Historiography" in the Helsinki Legal History Series on Monday on April 29.  More.
  

• Holly Brewer, University of Maryland, on that historians' brief in the Trump immunity case (Maryland Today).
  

• The American Historical Association will conduct a Congressional Briefing “offering historical perspectives on federal safety regulations in transportation” on Thursday, May 9 at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075.  More.
  

• Carol Anderson, Emory University; Orville Vernon Burton, Clemson University; Alexander Keyssar, Harvard University; and J. Morgan Kousser, Emeritus, California Institute of Technology, have signed a Historians’ Amicus Brief in Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., et al., v. Secretary of State of Georgia (Brennan Center). 
  

• 
  Rodger Citron reviews Gary Stein's in Justice for Sale: Graft, Greed, and a Crooked Federal Judge in 1930s Gotham (Verdict).
  

• "The Joseph Smith Papers Project has unveiled its latest historical study aid, Legal Records: Case Introductions. This compilation contextualizes Joseph Smith’s multifaceted interactions with the law, casting light on his roles as a plaintiff, defendant, witness, or judge in approximately 200 cases spanning the years 1819 to 1844" (Church News).
  

• Paul Finkelman makes the case for the landmark status of the  home of Alexander Clark, who brought Clark v. Muscatine (1868) to racially integrate the schools of Muscatine, Iowa (Bleeding Heartland).
  

• “Hardeep Dhillon says that a grossly racialised legal structure was put in place by the British government to compensate Europeans affected in the [Jallianwala Bagh] massacre while undervaluing the claims made by families of Indians killed or injured in the incident” (Indian Express).
  

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

Podcast: Goluboff Interviews Nicoletti and Milligan

The University of Virginia School of Law has just posted a new episode in its “Common Law” podcast, a series in which Dean Risa Goluboff discusses recent scholarship with its authors on the UVA faculty.  It is entitled Digging into Our Forgotten Legal History.

In the season’s fifth episode, released Tuesday, Professors Cynthia Nicoletti and Joy Milligan talk with host Dean Risa Goluboff, who is also a legal historian, about two of their articles that share something in common: both show instances of people and institutions using the law to preserve the status quo against movements that were trying to improve conditions for Black Americans.

Yet the professors took distinctly different paths during the process of researching and writing about legal history. The trio discuss their decisions to focus on institutions versus people, “historical forgetting,” how the present affects our ideas of the past and the pitfalls of bringing historical work to bear on today’s concerns.

Nicoletti, the Paul G. Mahoney Research Professor of Law and a professor of history at UVA, discusses her paper “William Henry Trescot: Pardon Broker,” which was published in The Journal of the Civil War Era. The paper won the 2021 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in the journal that year. Trescot, a lawyer and lobbyist for the South Carolina Lowcountry elite whites, helped his clients obtain pardons after the Civil War to avoid having their land redistributed to formerly enslaved people.

Milligan, the Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law, discusses her paper “Subsidizing Segregation,” published in the Virginia Law Review. The article exposes how the federal government played a role in extending racial segregation and discrimination by funding segregated schools up to 10 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed “separate but equal” education.

--Dan Ernst

JAH 110:4

[Journal of American History 110:4 (March 2024) is of unusual interest for legal historians.  (I expect to assign the first article when I teach Johnson v. McIntosh in my first-year Property course next spring.)  Below I reproduce summaries of the principal articles from an email to subscribers from the JAH's publisher, the Organization of American Historians.  DRE.]

Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building

The 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh drew from a 1775 negotiation between land speculators and Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw people) to subjugate Indigenous sovereignty to the powers of Congress. This negotiation is usually framed as a “purchase,” but Joshua A. McGonagle Althoff makes clear that Peeyankihšia people intended to negotiate the right to live within, rather than own, their homelands. Moving away from the idea of a “purchase” reveals how Peeyankihšiaki were preparing for prosperity, not declension.

The “Profane Margins” of the State: Florida Sheriff Walter R. Clark and the Local History of Crime, Policing, and Incarceration

Sheriff Walter R. Clark of Broward County, Florida, used his office to enforce white supremacy, procure labor for local businesses, bolster the illegal gambling industry, and line his own pockets for nearly two decades in the twentieth century. Like other sheriffs, he was also central to the local workings of the state: policing the county, administering the courthouse, and more. Considering Clark in a long historical context from the Jacksonian Era to the present, Cindy Hahamovitch makes the case for the importance of sheriffs and local government in American life.

The Origins of the Student Loan Industry in the United States: Richard Cornuelle, United Student Aid Funds, and the Creation of the Guaranteed Student Loan Program

Britain Hopkins contributes to understandings of the origins of the student loan industry and student loan indebtedness in the United States. The article highlights how private organizations and actors worked with the Johnson and Nixon administrations to establish student loans as a primary means of funding higher education. These private-federal partnerships increasingly sought to commodify student loans on financial markets, thereby tethering access to higher education to previously excluded groups to market incorporation.

Exposing the Masculinist Narrative in Federal Antislavery Law: A History of U.S. v. Tony Booker (1980)

American antislavery law long denied the problem of sexual assault in slavery. Karin Zipf extends the historiography of American slavery in an analysis of late twentieth-century farm worker slavery cases. Zipf examines the testimonies of male and female farm workers to expose the masculinist narrative in federal antislavery law. Zipf demonstrates the law’s gendered limitations in its masculinist meanings of migrant slavery violence, insensitivity to women’s fieldwork experiences, and subliminal endorsement of racist stereotypes of Black women.