Weekend Roundup

• Penn Carey Law’s notice of Dean Sophia Lee's recent article on "the evolution of Fourth Amendment privacy from weak pre-Reconstruction protections through its development over the years, culminating in Boyd v. United States."
  

• A Q&A with Felicia Kornbluh and LHB Guest Blogger Jill Hasday on Professor Hasday’s new book We the Men in Ms. Magazine.  Her post on OUPblog is here.
  

• The League of Women Voters of Pullman and Whitman County will host the virtual event, “History of Disability Rights” on 7-8:30 p.m. March 31 over Zoom (Lewiston Tribune).
  

• James E Hurford reviews The Legal History of the Church of England: From the Reformation to the Present, by Norman Doe and Stephen Coleman (Law Society Gazette).

• Stephen B. Presser review Jonathan Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism for the Federalist Society.

• From In Custodia Legis: an announcement of a new collection release, "Pre-1901 Legal Documents of New Spain/Mexico." Also, a profile of "Bessie Margolin, Labor Lawyer."
  

• Zachary M. Schrag on the New Crisis in Urban History (AHA Perspectives).

• ICYMI: Black History, Birthright Citizenship & Civil Rights (New York Almanack).  Jim Crow Laws (Historian).  Confiscation in the American Revolution (New York Almanack). A pardon for Ruth Ellis?  (Legal Cheek).

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

ASLH Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize to "The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0"

Continuing our round-up of the prizes and award announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to a prize named for the LHB's founder. The Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize "is awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project."

This year's award went to The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0. The citation:

The Committee unanimously selected The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0, (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/). Project Directors Tim Hitchcock, Professor Emeritus of Digital History, University of Sussex, and Robert Shoemaker, Professor Emeritus of Eighteenth-Century British History, University of Sheffield, submitted this nomination on behalf of the project team, which also included Jamie McLaughlin (software engineer), Sharon Howard (data manager), and Nick Phipps (web designer). First launched in 2003, the site hosts hand-corrected transcript accounts of around 200,000 criminal trials conducted at London’s Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913. While the underlying records, known as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, had been consulted sporadically by social historians in the twentieth century, the digitization and search apparatus provided by the Old Bailey Online has become a definitive landmark in English legal history.

The Committee is awarding the Dudziak Prize to the newest iteration of this project, Version 9.0 This major upgrade, which was launched in 2023, is significant for three reasons. First, it makes the site more accessible and sustainable. Second, the site now allows for more user interaction and manipulation of data through Elasticsearch and in response to feedback from scholars making use of their dataset. These enhanced searching features include the presentation of results in a macroscope format as well as more categories to allow for more advanced statistical modeling. Third, the curators have added new background pages that address the historiographical developments since the site was originally created twenty years ago.

Congratulations to the entire team behind this important project!

-- Karen Tani

Smith and Vine, "Material and Digital Archives: The Case of Wills"

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society is providing open access to the newly published article "Material and Digital Archives: The Case of Wills," by Harry Smith (King's College London) and Emily Vine (University of Birmingham). The abstract:

The range of digital sources available to historians has expanded at an enormous rate over the last fifty years; this has enabled all kinds of innovative scholarship to flourish. However, this process has also shaped recent historical work in ways that have not been fully discussed or documented. This article considers how we might reconcile the digitisation of archival sources with their materiality, with a particular focus on the probate records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC). The article first considers the variety of digital sources available to historians of the United Kingdom, highlighting the particular influence of genealogical companies in shaping what material is available, how it has been digitised and how those sources are accessed. Secondly, we examine the PCC wills’ digitisation, what was gained and what was lost in that process, notably important material aspects of the wills. This article does not seek to champion archival research in opposition to digitally based scholarship; instead, we remind historians of the many ways in which the creation of sources shape their potential use, and call on historians to push for improvements in the United Kingdom’s digital infrastructure to avoid these problems in future.

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Balkinization is hosting a symposium on "Law and Historical Materialism" by Jeremy Kessler (Columbia Law). Samuel Moyn (Yale Law) kicked things off. Other participants include Yochai Benkler, Corinne Blalock, Matthew Dimick, Paul Gowder, Brian Leiter, Eva Nanopoulos, and Talha Syed.
  

• Via Time's "Made by History" section: Christine Adams (St. Mary’s College of Maryland), "The French Revolution Offers a Warning About Presidential Immunity"; Kali Nicole Gross (Emory University), "Why Kamala Harris’ Promises on Abortion Matter So Much to Black Women"; Marie-Amélie George (Wake Forest University School of Law), "The False Idea Behind Project 2025’s Plans for LGBTQ Rights."
  

• Jonathan Gienapp and Rachel Shelden discuss “early American political culture and political civility in the early American republic” (Ben Franklin’s World podcast).
  

• Rebecca Probert, University of Exeter, will address the Law and History Network Seminar, online via Zoom, on “Undoubtedly a principle of English criminal law”: The use of precedent in R v Tolson on October 9, from 5:00 to 6:00 PM
  

• A report of an interview of James Obergefell at the Marquette Law School on September 18, 2024 (Marquette Law Faculty Blog).
  

• "Milestones in Hispanic Legal History in California" (California Courts Newsroom).
  

• "Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch talked about civility at the Constitutional Convention" at the National Constitution Center (C-SPAN).

• "For the project 'The Rhine as Legal Entity? Exploring Multilevel Governance and Intercity Relations in the 16th-Century Wine Trades across the Rhine Region' Tilburg University is hiring a postdoctoral researcher with a passion for (legal) historical research." More.
  

• The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the Poughkeepsie Public Library District present the annual Paul M. Sparrow Lecture, “Foundations of a Movement: Black Americans, Civil Rights, and the Roosevelts,” a conversation with Basil Smikle on Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 4:00 p.m, in the Henry A. Wallace Center It will also be streamed live to the official FDR Presidential Library YouTube and Facebook accounts. Register here. 
  

• The Brennan Center for Justice in partnership with the Organization of American Historians, will host The Fight Against Originalism Continues, a live virtual event on Wednesday, October 2, 1pm ET.  Speakers are Jonathan Gienapp, Gautham Rao, Rachel Shelden, and Thomas Wolf.
  

• 
  Just concluded: the 44th Rechtshistorikertag biennial conference of German-speaking legal historians, devoted to “The Language of Sources," at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
  

• Aziz Rana will speak on The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them at the Clough Center at Boston College on Thursday, September 26, 2024, 5:00 - 7:00 PM.  Live stream link here.
  

• A table of Supreme Court decisions overruled by subsequent decisions (Constitution Annotated).
  

• ICYMI: Some Supreme Court justices left the bench for more interesting work (AP).  The framers of the Constitution didn’t want you to choose the president, says Michael Klarman (Harvard Law Today).
  

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

Morgan on "Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History"

Mudlark press has published The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History, by Kate Morgan (2024). A description from the press:

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.'

So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?

In this vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.

We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’.

Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.

An interview with Morgan is available here, at New Books Network. 

-- Karen Tani

PhD Fellowship on the Court of Chancery during the English Civil War

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

University College London and The National Archives are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from 1st October 2024, under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme.

The PhD project will investigate the records of the Court of Chancery during the English Civil War and Interregnum (c. 1640-1660). The key aims of this project are to better understand how the Court of Chancery was being used by litigants between 1640 and 1660, and to unlock the records of this court through original research and cataloguing. The project has intentionally broad research aims to allow the student to develop their own research questions and answers based on discoveries in these collections. Their initial investigation of these records will provide them with case studies, which can be approached in a variety of ways depending on the student’s interests.

The richness of the records, the high stakes of the litigation, and the political uncertainty of the period promise to make this project an insightful and important archival study which will serve as a benchmark for future studies.

The key research questions of the project are:

• How did the Court of Chancery function during this tumultuous period?
• How and for what reason did litigants use this court?

Applicants should ideally have or expect to receive a relevant Masters-level qualification or be able to demonstrate equivalent experience in a setting involving knowledge of and critical reflection on relevant topics, such as Legal History, Constitutional History, and Political History. Suitable disciplines are flexible but might include Law or History.

As a collaborative award, students will be expected to spend time at both the University and The National Archives.

Any questions should be directed to UCL’s Faculty of Laws PhD team at phd-law@ucl.ac.uk

Applications will be considered following the 24th June application deadline, initially to be short-listed for interview.  Interviews will take place online, via Zoom, in July 2024.

[Tuition fees up to the full-time home rate for PhD degrees. The UKRI Indicative Fee Level for 2024/25 is £4,786 for full-time home students, plus an annual maintenance stipend which will be £21,237 in academic year 2024/25.  Closing date: June 29, 2024.]

Larson, "The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial in America"

Carlton F. W. Larson (University of California, Davis) has posted "The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial in America." The article appears in Volume 57 of the UC Davis Law Review. The abstract:

This Article explains how defense counsel were introduced into American felony trials. Building on John Langbein’s work on England in The Origins of Adversarial Criminal Trial, it argues that American jurisdictions pioneered the use of defense counsel in felony cases, a practice that was not allowed in England until the 1730s (and then only in piecemeal fashion). Rejecting some earlier attempts that have sought to locate this right in the seventeenth century, it argues that the relevant time frame is the first decades of the eighteenth century, when American jurisdictions, either by statute or by judicial practice, extended the right of counsel to felony defendants. Pennsylvania, perhaps spurred by Parliament’s elimination of jury trials in piracy cases, took the lead in 1701. The American innovation of defense counsel for accused felons would eventually spread throughout the common law world. Famed American defense lawyers, such as the fictional Perry Mason, are not American copies of English originals, but a distinctive American creation.

The Article then turns to the most plausible explanation for this innovation: the parallel development of public prosecution by lawyer prosecutors. Every American jurisdiction that recognized felony defense counsel had previously introduced public prosecutors. But the connection was not necessarily automatic or immediate. Not every jurisdiction that introduced public prosecutors recognized a right to felony defense counsel, and those that did often delayed the introduction by several decades or more. At minimum, the process was far messier and less predictable than some accounts have suggested.

Finally, the Article turns to the possibility of American influences on England. It argues that the American introduction of felony defense counsel may have made it easier for English courts to do the same. English judges would have been more likely to adopt a procedural innovation if they knew that it had been adopted successfully elsewhere. The Article suggests that the English Inns of Court may have helped transmit transatlantic legal knowledge, and it identifies specific American members of the Inns who could have played a crucial role. Although direct evidence on this point will likely remain elusive, it is plausible that the American introduction of felony counsel contributed to the rise of such counsel in England. Unlike many other areas of common law, where American courts simply followed English practice, this aspect of English law may have deep American roots. 

The full article is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Grant, "Sir Edward Coke’s Infidel: Imperial Anxiety and the Origins of a ‘Strange Extrajudicial Opinion’”

The Journal of Modern History has published "Sir Edward Coke’s Infidel: Imperial Anxiety and the Origins of a 'Strange Extrajudicial Opinion,'" by Daragh Grant (University of Chicago). Here's the abstract:

In the middle of his report on the Case of the Post-nati, also known as Calvin’s Case (1608), Sir Edward Coke drew a distinction between the status of laws in conquered Christian and conquered infidel territories. Scholars have long interpreted this distinction as an expression of Coke’s interest in the Virginia Company, but the assumptions that underpin this colonial reading have recently been called into question. In this article, I revisit the influence of England’s early colonial ventures on Coke’s report. His remarks on infidels, I maintain, were intended to respond to a particular line of argument advanced before the Exchequer Chamber. Specifically, Coke aimed to foreclose the denization of Indigenous Americans in England as a result of colonial conquests, a possibility raised by counsel for both the plaintiff and the defense. Anxious about the potentially disordering implications of imperial expansion, Coke hoped to secure England’s legal order by excluding infidels from English subjecthood. But if this was what Coke intended by his remarks on infidels, what he did was furnish a new justification for colonial conquest that ran contrary to his own aims. In the conclusion of this article, I exploit this disconnect between Coke’s intentions and his actions to make a modest contribution to ongoing debates over the relationship between law and history.

Access to the full article appears to be behind a paywall.

-- Karen Tani

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, a two-volume work edited by Peter Cane, Christ's College, Cambridge, and Australian National University, and H. Kumarasingham, University of Edinburgh, has been published.  Here is a composite of the press’s descriptions of the two volumes:

Featuring contributions from leading scholars of history, law and politics, this path-breaking two-volume work traces the development of the United Kingdom's constitution from Anglo-Saxon times and explores its role in the creation, exercise and control of public power. Chapters in Volume One, entitled "Exploring the Constitution," approach the constitution and its history from various scholarly perspectives, and provide historically sensitive discussions of constitutional actors and institutions, and of political traditions and transformations of the constitution. Essays in Volume Two, entitled "The Changing Constitution," examine the development of the constitution from the departure of the Romans up to the present day and beyond. Together, the two volumes form the first, wide-ranging history of the constitution to be published for more than 50 years. By its cross-disciplinary approach, taking account of the latest legal, political and historical scholarship on the constitution, it fills a large gap in the literature of the constitution, and in political thought and British history.

The TOC for the first, thematic volume, is here; the one for the second, more chronologically organized volume, is here.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: DC

Gibbs's "Lordship, State Formation, and Authority"

Spike Gibbs, Universität Mannheim, has published Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press):

Providing a new narrative of how local authority and social structures adapted in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation, Spike Gibbs uses manorial officeholding – where officials were chosen from among tenants to help run the lord's manorial estate – as a prism through which to examine political and social change in the late medieval and early modern English village. Drawing on micro-studies of previously untapped archival records, the book spans the medieval/early modern divide to examine changes between 1300 and 1650. In doing so, Gibbs demonstrates the vitality of manorial structures across the medieval and early modern era, the active and willing participation of tenants in these frameworks, and the way this created inequalities within communities.

--Dan Ernst

Tate's "Power and Justice in Medieval England"

Joshua C. Tate,  SMU Dedman School of Law, has published Power and Justice in Medieval England: The Law of Patronage and the Royal Courts (Yale University Press) in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference:

Appointing a parson to the local church following a vacancy—an “advowson”—was one of the most important rights in medieval England. The king, the monasteries, and local landowners all wanted to control advowsons because they meant political, social, and economic influence. The question of law turned on who had the superior legal claim to the vacancy—which was a type of property—at the time the position needed to be filled.

In tracing how these conflicts were resolved, Joshua C. Tate takes a sharply different view from that of historians who focus only on questions of land ownership, and he shows that the English needed new legal contours to address the questions of ownership and possession that arose from these disputes. Tate argues that the innovations made necessary by advowson law helped give birth to modern common law and common law courts.

Here are some endorsements:

“A praiseworthy and original investigation of a subject that straddled the line between secular and spiritual: the early history of the English common law of advowsons.”—R.H. Helmholz, University of Chicago Law School
 
"Tate brings to this book just the qualities it needs: he asks the right questions and knows the common law and canon law materials which supply the answers. His study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of an important part of the early English Common Law."—Paul Brand, University of Oxford

“It has been a great pleasure to watch what began as a tentative, but intriguing, doctoral dissertation turn through a series of articles on seemingly small points into the small masterpiece that is this book.”—Charles Donahue Jr., Harvard Law School

–Dan Ernst

History Society Lecture: Law in a time of plague

 [We share the following announcement for an online event on 22 March 2021 at 5.30pm-7pm GMT. This zoom webinar is sponsored by the Inner Temple.]

History Society Lecture: 

Law in a time of plague--was the law a good doctor? 

• Professor Sir John Baker (Emeritus Downing Professor of the Laws of England 1998-2011 and Inner Temple Bencher)
• Professor John Wass (Professor of Endocrinology, University of Oxford and Inner Temple Bencher)

Further details and registration here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Job Alert: History of Slavery in the City of London

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Postdoctoral Researcher: History of Slavery in the City of London, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Nuffield College seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher to research the role of the City of London and its commercial institutions in the eco-system of the transatlantic slave trade and ownership. Co-funded by the global law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, and under the supervision of Professor Andrew Thompson (Professor of Imperial and Global History, Nuffield College), the researcher will contribute to the growing body of scholarly literature on British imperialism and its intersection with transatlantic slavery, exploring the past and bringing it into close dialogue with the present. 

H/t: American Historical Association

Arnold on heresy trials in medieval England

John H. Arnold (University of Cambridge) has published the following article: "Voicing Dissent: Heresy Trials in Later Medieval England," Past & Present 245:1 (Nov. 2019), 3-37. Here is the abstract:

Recent work on medieval heresy has emphasized the ‘constructedness’ of heresy by orthodox power, thus undermining the coherence of heretical sects and tending to suggest that those tried as heretics were essentially unwitting victims. This article examines the evidence from the entire range of surviving Lollard trials, and argues that we can see consciously ‘dissenting’ speech alongside the standard theological positions associated with (and perhaps imposed upon) Lollardy. In each area of dissent anticlerical, sceptical, disputational and rebellious a wider cultural context is explored, demonstrating that the language of dissent is not limited to ‘Lollardy’; at the same time however it is argued that it is precisely through the voicing and reception of such wider referents that a heretical movement comes to exist. The article traces trends in medieval speech through which specific opinions and beliefs are voiced as a challenge, and the linguistic and social contexts within which they give rise to wider meanings—including collective identifications. Thus, whilst we may wish to foreground the impositions of power and orthodoxy that ‘made’ heresy, we should not make ‘heretics’ disappear completely. Through the records of prosecution, we can still hear something of the voices of those who chose to voice dissent; and we can give recognition to that choice as a form of dissenting agency—dependent also however on the reception and interpretation of those voices by neighbours, witnesses and inquisitors.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Charles Evans Hughes and The Role of New York's Organized Bar at a Time of Crisis for the Rule of Law, the 55th Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture, delivered by Henry F. Greenberg, president-elect of the New York State Bar Association, is now available.

• New in Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: “Plant Yourselves on its Primal Granite”: Slavery, History and the Antebellum Roots of Originalism, by Aaron R. Hall; and Disqualified Witnesses between Tannaitic Halakha and Roman Law: The Archeology of a Legal Institution, by Orit Malka.

• Have you registered for ASLH Boston yet? 

• Eric Rauchway will speak on his book, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal, on Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 7:00 p.m., in the Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home.   I recently read Winter War and learned a great deal from it.  In particular, I was struck by its depiction of Hoover as a person who, incapable of taking no for an answer on November 8, 1932, at once started laying the foundation for what he was certain would be his inevitable vindication.  But even this was to be denied him: when conservatives finally looked for an early twentieth-century president to exalt, they rejected Hoover (the Reconstruction Finance Corporation looked too much like the Troubled Asset Relief Program) in favor of Coolidge.  DRE

•  ICYMI: John Mikhail on Hammer v. Dagenhart, United States v. Darby, and the Tenth Amendment over at Balkinization.   Also at Balkinization, Mark Tushnet on Justice Gorsuch getting his history of the Schechter case from Amity Shlaes.  Sam Erman on how Isabel Gonzalez shows us that the Constitution is what we make of it in The Hill.

• And finally: check out the online database, England's Immigrants 1330-1550: Resident Aliens in the Late Middle Ages. It has entries on over 64,000 peoples, along with themed posts (under Background: Individual Studies).

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

Helmholz on "The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers: An Historical Introduction, by R. H. Helmholz (University of Chicago). A description from the Press:

Historians of the English legal profession have written comparatively little about the lawyers who served in the courts of the Church. This volume fills a gap; it investigates the law by which they were governed and discusses their careers in legal practice. Using sources drawn from the Roman and canon laws and also from manuscripts found in local archives, R. H. Helmholz brings together previously published work and new evidence about the professional careers of these men. His book covers the careers of many lesser known ecclesiastical lawyers, dealing with their education in law, their reaction to the coming of the Reformation, and their relationship with English common lawyers on the eve of the Civil War. Making connections with the European ius commune, this volume will be of special interest to English and Continental legal historians, as well as to students of the relationship between law and religion.

A few blurbs:

‘This valuable book by one of our most eminent legal historians is the product of fifty years engagement with the history of the Church courts in England. It not only provides new insights into the careers of eighteen very different ecclesiastical lawyers over seven centuries but also (in the first half) prepares the way with an accessible and authoritative history of their profession.' -- John H. Baker 

‘The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers: An Historical Introduction is an important contribution to the literature on the history of the legal profession by the leading scholar of canon law. It combines a thorough and insightful analysis of the development, education, and regulation of a somewhat neglected segment of the English legal profession with a view of the profession through the activities of its practitioners.' -- Jonathan Rose

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

-- Karen Tani

ASLH Sutherland Prize to Lambert

Via the American Society for Legal History, we have the formal citation for this year's Sutherland Prize, which the Society awarded to Tom Lambert (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University): 

The Sutherland Prize, named in honor of the late Donald W. Sutherland, a distinguished historian of the law of medieval England and a mentor of many students, is awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Sutherland Prize Committee, to the person or persons who wrote the best article on English legal history published in the previous year. 

2018 recipient: Tom Lambert, “Jurisdiction as Property in England, 900-1100” in Legalism: Property and Ownership, edited by Georgy Kantor, Tom Lambert, and Hannah Skoda (Oxford University Press, 2017). 

Committee citation: The Sutherland Prize for 2017 is awarded for a piece addressing the issue of jurisdictional rights in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Such rights enabled their holders not merely to receive the revenues associated with a particular offence but also to hold courts and enforce the law in pursuance of such rights. Two separate views are identified within the current historiographical debate about the existence and extent of such rights. The first assumed that an entitlement to legal revenues brought with it an entitlement to perform legal functions as well. The second took the view that aristocratic legal privileges were fiscal rather than jurisdictional. Both, the author notes, are premised on certain assumptions about the chronology of feudalization. The author adopts an alternative approach, contending that ‘the absence of explicit evidence for aristocratic possession of jurisdictional rights before the Norman conquest … should be taken as a sign that jurisdictional rights did not exist as things to be possessed or transferred.’ This, he notes, moves the focus away from feudalization to the issue of when jurisdictional rights emerged as a form of property. The article goes on to discuss the absence of jurisdictional rights in the tenth century, arguing that this was because ‘the performance of functions relating to both judicial decision-making and law enforcement was theoretically open to all’ and given its demanding and sometimes dangerous nature was ‘understood to be more of a burden than a privilege.’ Matters changed in the eleventh century, it is suggested, because of economic incentives, with greater competition for legal revenues leading to the performance of the associated legal functions being perceived as a more desirable task. The result, as the author concludes, was that ‘[g]radually and unevenly – and perhaps initially not very legalistically – jurisdictional rights were probably emerging as a form of property in the decades before the Norman conquest.’

The members of this year's Sutherland Prize Committee were Rebecca Probert (University of Exeter) (chair); Paul Halliday (University of Virginia); Allyson May (University of Western Ontario); and  P.G. McHugh (University of Cambridge).

Congratulations to Dr. Lambert!

Weekend Roundup

• Okay, so we're not located in the middle of Williamsburg, but still: Why didn't we think of this?  William & Mary Law has a Legal History Society.

• ICYMI: Stanford Law's Greg Ablavsky, interviewed for Constitution Day.  HNN's questions and answers on Supreme Court nominations.  Also: well put.

• In the Los Angeles Times, Sam Erman (University of Southern California) has an op-ed on "devastation without representation in Puerto Rico."

• From the Washington Post's Made by History section, Mary C. Flannery (University of Oxford) on the Kavanaugh nomination and the "medieval roots of character testimony." Also Katherine Turk (University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill) and Anne M. Blacshke (College of the Holy Cross) on "what we have -- and haven't -- learned from Anita Hill."

• At the Recipes Project: a blogpost by Jessica P. Clark (Brock University) on safeguarding secrets in the Victorian beauty business.

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