Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop is an informal evening seminar, starting at 6.30 p.m., and conducted over zoom. Participants are graduate students and faculty in law and history from U of T, York, McMaster and other institutions, as well as lawyers, judges and law students. All law students with an interest in legal history are welcome. Law students may also take the workshop for credit – see Course List.

If you would like to be put on the mailing list and to receive the papers, please send an email to j.phillips@utoronto.ca.

FALL TERM

Wednesday, September 16 – Ian Kyer, Independent Scholar, ‘Wallace Nesbitt KC: An early advocate of Indigenous Rights’

Wednesday, September 30 – Allan Greer, McGill University, ‘Corporations and the Making of Canadian Space’

Monday, October 5 – Hamar Foster, University of Victoria, ‘The History of Aboriginal Title in British Columbia.’ NOTE that this is the annual R. Roy McMurtry Lecture in Canadian Legal History. It will be delivered at 5:30 p.m. in the Moot Court Room at the University of Toronto Law School. This is an addition to the schedule. Those who attend can have this credited towards their attendance requirement. Students can also write a comment on this lecture to be submitted within a week of the lecture.

Wednesday, October 14 - Laura Cameron, Stockwoods Barristers, ‘F. R. Scott and R v Brodie: Going to bat for Lady Chatte’

Wednesday, October 28 - Madalyn Manziuk, University of Alberta, and Taylor Starr, University of Toronto: “We are living in an epidemic of violence”: A Legal History of Advocacy at the Limits of Law in Twentieth-Century Northern Canada’

Wednesday, November 4 – No workshop scheduled. University of Toronto Law School and Osgoode Hall Law School Reading Weeks.

Tuesday, November 10 – Optional Session for students taking the workshop for credit. Melvyn Green, ‘The LeDain Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs.’ This talk will take place online starting at 5:30 p.m. Those who attend can have this credited towards their attendance requirement. Students can also write a comment on this lecture to be submitted within a week after the lecture.

Wednesday, November 11 – No workshop scheduled. American Society for Legal History Conference, Banff

Wednesday, November 18 – Lyndsay Campbell, University of Calgary, ‘Cherneskey v Armadale Publishing Co and the history of the fair comment defence in Canada’

Wednesday, December 2 – Maggie Ross, University of Toronto, ‘No G-String, No Service: The Canadian Association of Burlesque Entertainers, Anti-Nudity Law, and the Whorearchy, 1978-1983. (Optional for students at Osgoode Hall Law School because it is during the exam period)
WINTER TERM

Wednesday, January 13 - Robert Sharpe, Ontario Court of Appeal (retired), ‘Revolution by Consent or by Violence? Harold Laski’s Libel Trial’

Wednesday, January 27 – Dan Priel, Osgoode Hall Law School and City University of Hong Kong, ‘Action Against the Free Press: When Ghosts Visited the Supreme Court of Canada’

Wednesday, February 10 – TBA

Wednesday, February 24 – TBA

Wednesday, March 10 – Hamar Foster, University of Victoria, ‘Section 141 of the Indian Act in Action: Two Cases from British Columbia’

Wednesday, March 24 - Jim Phillips, University of Toronto Law School, ‘A History of Parliamentary Divorce in Canada’

Wednesday, March 31 or April 7 – Zoe Savitsky, Osgoode Hall Law School, ‘The Legal History of Corporate Personhood in Canada’

Cahn, Eichner and Ziegler on Parental Consent and Minor Rights

Naomi Cahn, University of Virginia School of Law, Maxine Eichner, University of North Carolina School of Law, and Mary E. Ziegler, University of California, Davis School of Law, have published “For Their Benefit": The Lost History of Parental Consent and Minors Rights, which is forthcoming in the California Law Review:

The principle of parental involvement in children’s lives has achieved surprising consensus across blue and red states. Meanwhile, the goal of children’s wellbeing has become a touchstone for legal reform efforts across a variety of domains. The apparent embrace of both the goal of children’s wellbeing and parents’ right to be involved conceal deeply contested questions about when, why, and how the law should require parental consent of minors’ decisions.

Drawing on archival material housed at six different universities, we make sense of present-day conflicts about parental approval by revisiting the long legal history of parental involvement, from early common-law cases to struggles of the civil rights era. We show that contrary to widespread assumptions, from the very beginning, strict requirements of parental involvement were compartmentalized to particular areas and inconsistently applied in others. Further, what is often portrayed as a relatively recent, evolving consensus in favor of using children’s wellbeing rather than parental involvement as the guiding principle in the regulation of children is instead a continuation of a longstanding tradition. At common law, we demonstrate, in determining whether a minor could bind themselves to an agreement without parental involvement, courts often asked whether an agreement was beneficial to the child’s interests (and therefore either voidable or binding, depending on the judge or jurisdiction) or prejudicial to the child’s interests and therefore void.

Building on a rich literature on child wellbeing, we then use lessons from this history to construct a framework for determining when legislators and judges today should require parental involvement and when minors should be allowed to make their own decisions. We begin with a presumption, drawn from the lessons of common law, that parental involvement should be required for most types of important decisions. Yet decision-makers should impose exceptions to the general rule of parental involvement when: (1) parental involvement requirements impede access to care or resources critical to minors’ wellbeing; or (2) the decision at issue is integral to minors’ autonomy over their bodies and their futures. We consider how this framework would address four current controversies relating to minors: (1) abortion and abortion-related travel; (2) gender-affirming medical care; (3) access to social media; and (4) mental-health treatment. Our framework, we hope, will be faithful to the basic principles that animated the common law and better able to illuminate when parental involvement is beneficial—and when it may have harmful consequences for the minors it is supposed to protect. 

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Legal historian Sarah Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania, has been appointed to the Evan C Thompson Chair for Excellence in Teaching (Almanac). 

• "William G. Ross, the Albert P. Brewer Professor of Law and Ethics at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, was honored with the Thomas W. Woolley Scholarly Achievement Award during the university's 185th Opening Convocation on Aug. 25."  More. 

• UVA's Sarah Milov was quoted in a recent New York Times article on "Social Media and the Myth of the Big Tobacco Moment."

• In "The Maritime Origins of Judicial Review," Thomas H. Lee, Fordham Law, reviews The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789-1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2025), by Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law (Lawfare).   

• Matthijs Wibier, an assistant professor of Classics at the University Of Cincinnati, has "edited and translated a Latin legal text [about taxes] he pieced together from fragments that surprisingly survived in the Egyptian sands for more than 1,600 years" (UC News).  

• Charles Plambeck, Adjunct Professor of Law, and Kathleen DuVal, Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History, will lecture on the 1776 North Carolina Constitution at UNC Law from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm on September 23.

• Karin Wulf interviews Anna O. Law about her new book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants  (Commonplace).

• The exhibit, "Pennsylvania’s Founding: How a City and a Colony Shaped America’s Civic DNA," a joint project of the National Constitution Center and Drexel University, will be on display at the NCC from September 30 through January 3.  In conjunction with the exhibit is the NCC town hall, "The Holy Experiment: Religious Liberty, Pennsylvania, and the Making of America" which will take place on September 29.  (Metro Philadelphia).   

• 
  The American Antiquarian Society will hold a book event on Peter Jaros's The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature (2026) on November 19, 2026, from 2 - 3pm (AAS).

• UConn Law's notice of new faculty and fellows includes Brianne Felsher, "a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at Berkeley" who "studies the legal history of queer families and marriages in the United States from the early 1800s through World War I." 

• "Do We Need a New Approach to Our Origin Stories?" Ned Blackhawk (Yale University) discusses this question and others in an interview for the Nation.

• A notice of Vox Mercatoria, a podcast growing out of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project, “Migrating commercial law and language: Rethinking lex mercatoria (11th-17th cent.),” which is directed by Stefania Gialdroni, University of Padua. 

• The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory Partner Group, “The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade,” will hold a discussion workshop on September 4, 2026, 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM (Local Time Germany) (More).

• ICYMI: The one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court of Ohio's "Women in the Law" exhibit (CNO).  Rachel Shelden writes that For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical (TPM).  Kelsey Dallas on Alcohol at the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUSblog).

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

CLH 14:1

Comparative Legal History 14:1 (2026) has been published. 

Editorial
David Schorr & Agustín Parise

Comparative law today – tomes, themes, trends
Ralf Michaels

This essay surveys recent themes and trends in comparative law scholarship, with a particular eye towards the connections between comparative law and legal history. The author observes a significant movement towards encyclopaedisation, marked by a proliferation of handbooks and encyclopaedias that attempt to systematise knowledge, though these works often struggle with comprehensiveness and persistent Eurocentrism. While traditional treatises continue to show fealty to established functionalist models, there is an observable shift away from the historical dominance of private law towards holistic, post-doctrinal, and interdisciplinary approaches. A primary concern raised is the ‘turn to method’, where the discipline has become increasingly self-absorbed with methodological pluralism and theory, sometimes resulting in ‘method without comparison’. Furthermore, the survey highlights the vital emergence of decolonial and postcolonial scholarship originating from the Global South, facilitating South-South comparison and challenging the field's colonial and Eurocentric foundations. Finally, the author examines the uneasy relationship between comparative law and legal history, questioning whether the discipline can move beyond viewing legal systems as separate entities towards a more integrated world law approach.

Early conflict-of-laws rules: Vietnam’s Lê Code (1483) in East Asian and global contexts
Thào Anh Hoàng

This article examines one of the earliest codified conflict-of-laws rules in East Asia and its overlooked reception in Vietnam. While systematic codifications of conflict rules in Europe developed much later, the Tang Code of China (652 CE) had already incorporated a provision regulating disputes involving foreigners within its territory. This rule was subsequently received in the legal systems of several Sino-sphere countries, including Vietnam. Vietnam’s Lê Code, in force from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, preserved this conflict rule even after its removal from later Chinese codes beginning in the thirteenth century. This renders the Lê Code the only known continuation of the Tang conflict-of-laws provision.

Long mistranslated as a criminal clause concerning ‘minority ethnic groups’, the relevant provision in the Lê Code is re-evaluated here as a conflict-of-laws rule applicable to both civil and criminal matters. This reinterpretation is situated within the context of East Asian legal culture with a functional equivalence approach. The study shows that Vietnamese law should not be viewed only as a marginal recipient of Chinese legal influence, but rather as a key site where an early conflict-of-laws rule was preserved, adapted, and given historical significance within the development of conflict-of-laws regulations across different jurisdictions. The paper also offers a comparative analysis with other legal traditions of the same period as Tang law, including those of early medieval Europe and the Islamic world.

Ius commune, Venetian governance, and Croatian Glagolitic culture: testaments from the countryside of Šibenik in the early modern period (1637–1713)
Henrik-Riko Held

In the article, I discuss the entanglement of ius commune and Croatian Glagolitic culture under the auspices of Venetian rule in the early modern period. I analyse 222 testaments written in the Croatian language and Glagolitic script between 1637 and 1713 by Glagolitic priests in the countryside of Šibenik, on the eastern Adriatic coast, then under Venetian rule. I address in particular the terminology employed, as well as the structure of the testaments. I compare them with models found elsewhere in Europe, as evidenced by relevant notarial formularies. Finally, I examine the issue of the validity of testaments composed by ostensibly unauthorised persons (parish priests).

The Polish Blackstone: an examination of nineteenth-century Polish scholars’ interpretations of Blackstone and his Commentaries
Lukasz Jan Korporowicz

The principal goal of this article is to address the reception of William Blackstone's legal thought and the awareness of his contributions within the context of nineteenth-century Polish legal scholarship. Despite the considerable differences between English and Polish legal traditions, the limited proficiency in the English language within Poland, and the relatively gradual evolution of Polish legal thought, Blackstone's works were acknowledged by academic circles in Poland in the nineteenth century. Over time, this awareness manifested in direct engagement with certain aspects of Blackstone's perspectives. Nonetheless, the temporal disparity between Blackstone's period of influence and the evolution of legal scholarship in partitioned Poland significantly limited the practical opportunities for the integration and application of Blackstonian jurisprudence.

Re-enacting the judicial philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Saunders v Vautier and Claflin v Claflin compared
Ann Mumford

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sat on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 1889, when, in the case of Claflin v Claflin, he joined the decision that a trust may not be modified if the intention of the testator would be undermined. Claflin rejected Lord Cottenham’s reasoning in Saunders v Vautier that, under certain circumstances, beneficiaries may compel the termination of the trust and transfer the property to them. Claflin v Claflin and Saunders v Vautier are perhaps the two most famous cases in Anglo-American Equity. Through a detailed examination of manuscripts, this article offers a comparative expansion of the US and English histories, and particularly considers the role played by Holmes. Re-enactment theory offers the possibility of creating, or reliving, the intellectual process that led to Claflin, thus revealing a significant moment in the history of US federalism.

--Dan Ernst.  Book Reviews after the jump.

Probert's "Double Trouble" and "Double Lives"

Rebecca Probert, University of Exeter, has published two companion volumes with Hart/Bloomsbury.  The first is Double Trouble: Bigamy and the Law in England and Wales, 1604-2024:

Between 1604 and 2024, around 30,000 individuals were prosecuted for bigamy in England and Wales. A few were able to establish a defence to the charge, but most were convicted. How they were punished varied hugely across the centuries – from execution, branding, whipping, transportation, and imprisonment through to fines and community service.

Double Trouble details the legal framework that underpinned such prosecutions. As a companion volume to Double Lives: Stories of Bigamy in England and Wales, 1604–2024, it sets the offence in the context of the changing laws on marriage and divorce, and examines the consequences of bigamy for those involved, including the remedies that were available to the often-deceived second spouse.

Drawing on a wide array of sources from the 17th century to the present day, including formal law reports, legal treatises, newspapers, censuses, parish registers, divorce petitions and Parliamentary debates, this book shows how bigamy should be taken seriously as an offence that all too often involved deception, abandonment and heartbreak.

The second is Double Lives: Stories of Bigamy in England and Wales, 1604-2024:

A woman remarries after hearing that her husband has drowned, only for him to turn up alive and well. Is she now a criminal? A deserted husband, unable to afford a divorce, finds happiness in a new union. How many did the same? A conman advertises for a wife and then disappears with her life savings; he has already done the same to many other women. How was he brought to justice?

These are just a few of the hundreds of bigamous remarriages put under the microscope in Double Lives. As a companion volume to Double Trouble: Bigamy and the Law in England and Wales, 1604–2024, this book goes behind the law reports to reconstruct the stories of those involved. Drawing on archival sources, pamphlets, newspapers, census data, parish registers, divorce petitions and family histories, it shows the different forms that bigamy might take – accidental, consensual, deceptive or exploitative – and how bigamists' stories in turn helped to shape the law.

Double Lives shows how bigamy should not be dismissed as a comical or victimless crime. Every case had its own complex mix of desire and deception, and, all too often, heartbreak for someone.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Sally Hadden, Western Michigan University, will speak on “The First Massachusetts Constitution and How Town Actions Derailed It,” online at noon today as the first in the Bidwell House Museum's series of history talks.  It is free for members of the museum and $15 for others.  Register here.

• A review symposium on Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law, with contributions from Albertina Antognini, Cary Franklin, Jessica Dixon Weaver, Deborah Dinner, Linda C. McClain, and Katie Eyer, with a response by Professor Mayeri (BU Law Review Online).  

• Marlene Trestman will be in conversation about her book, Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin, in person and online, with Senior Judge Beryl A. Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia at the Capital Jewish Museum in DC on June 4, from 6:30-7:30.  Register here.

• Bill Littlefield reviews Gautham Rao's White Power: Policing American Slavery (arts fuse).

• Jonathan Parry reviews H.S. Jones’s Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect (London Review of Books).

• Robert Tsai and others will discuss John Brown's provisional constitution on June 29. 

• Rodger Citron on that podcast with Samantha Barbas on her book on New York Times v. Sullivan (Verdict).   

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

do Vale Alves on Latin American Women's Rights and Family Law

Ayla do Vale Alves, Adelaide University, will speak on Women's Rights in Latin American Family Law in the Helsinki Legal History Series seminar on June 2:

The legal history of women’s rights in Latin American family law is deeply shaped by religious influence. Approaching this history from a human rights lens, the Catholic doctrine guided much of early constitutional law and civil codes regulating rights of the family in the region. These foundations helped entrench patriarchal family structures that limited women’s rights, particularly in relation to marriage, property ownership, parental authority, and reproductive autonomy. Over time, the Inter-American System of Human Rights has played a transformative role in challenging these conservative doctrines and elevating women’s rights. Now, there is return of extreme conservative religious views affecting women’s rights in the region and how the System will react to these evolving dynamics, and whether its decisions will retain influence over family protection in Latin America, remains an open question.

Time: 15:00-16:30, Tuesday 2.6.2026.  Location: Päärakennus, U4075, University Main Building (Fabiankatu 33).  Online [here].  

--Dan Ernst 

LSA James Willard Hurst Book Prize to Mayeri for "Marital Privilege"

The Law & Society Association has announced its 2026 awards, including the winner of the James Willard Hurst Book Prize ("awarded annually (biennially prior to 2002) for the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year").

This year's Hurst award went to Serena Mayeri (Penn Carey Law), for Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Oxford University Press, 2025). The citation:

Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege shows how, beginning in the 1960s, marriage was dislodged from its supreme position across a range of legal domains and replaced with a regime of “marital privilege.” With poignant, empathetic detail drawn from archives and legal documents, Mayeri brings to life both well-known and not-so-famous cases, revealing the theories and evolving strategies animating a wide range of challengers to the regime of marital supremacy—from litigants to advocacy organizations to legal academics. Yet, even as their victories advanced the values of nondiscrimination and individual autonomy, Mayeri shows how the assumptions of the new regime of “marital privilege” obscured and deepened inequalities of wealth, power, and privilege in American law and society. Combining sweeping ambition, doctrinal acumen, and a keen sense of historical contingency, Marital Privilege provides a magisterial account of a crucial transformation of American law. 

Congratulations to Professor Mayeri!

-- Karen Tani 

The Witte Backlist

John Witte, Jr.,  Emory University School of Law, an eminent historian of law and religion, has posted a number of his papers, most (but not all) of which are brief:  Church, State, and Marriage: Three Reformation Models; The Tradition of Traditional Marriage; Religious Liberty (Foundations); the preface to To Have and to Hold: Marrying and its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400-1600, edited by Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte, Jr. (2007); Protestant Law; Christianity and Law in the Enlightenment; Josef Bohatec: The First Historian of the Calvinist Reformation of Rights; the introduction to Christianity and Democracy in Global Context, edited by John Witte, Jr. (1993); and Johannes Althusius and the Universal Rule of Natural Laws and Rights.

--Dan Ernst 

Sunday Roundup

• NYU Law's notice of Ashraf Ahmed, Lev Menand, and Noah Rosenblum's article, "The Making of Presidential Administration,” upon its naming as winner of the annual Award for Scholarship in Administrative Law from the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. The notice also includes a Q&A with Rosenblum. 

• Historical research figured prominently in the decision of Judge Chad F. Kenney, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, turning aside a challenge to the qui tam provisions from the False Claims Act on unitary executive grounds (JDSupra). 

• A notice of UC Berkeley professor David Henkin's legal-history-laden course on love, sex and marriage. 

• In March, SWOP NSW will host walking tours of Sydney’s historic "red light district."  “With 8 speakers each evening, the tour will cover both the personal anecdotes of those involved in sex work and the legislation that has shaped their lives. Speakers will share their stories on various topics, including current, historical, and future laws that aim to protect sex workers, as well as the advocates who have been instrumental in achieving these legal advancements." 

• Vice President Mike Pence and former Deputy Assistant to the President Greg Jacob are teaching the course, The Character of the American Constitution, at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government.  The first class “walked students through the origins of the Declaration of Independence, exploring what the Declaration meant and where the writers got the ideas.”  (GMU).

--Dan Ernst 

Christensen-Nugues on Forced Marriages and the Apostolic Penitentiary

Charlotte Christensen-Nugues, Lund University, has published, open-access,  Consent and Coercion: Forced Marriages in Supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1484-92, in the Journal of Medieval History:

In the late Middle Ages, hundreds of Christians from all over Europe sent supplications to the Papal Curia to be freed from promises made under duress. This article analyses the supplications about forced marriages that were submitted to the Apostolic Penitentiary during the pontificate of Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92). The study is based on mainly unedited source material that has not been investigated before. The article examines who turned to the Penitentiary for annulment because of force (age, gender, and social status), who was designated as the compelling party, and, finally, what kind of coercion the petitioners had been subjected to. Particular focus is given to the narrative strategies of the petitioners and how their stories relate to legal theory and cultural norms in late medieval society.

--Dan Ernst 

Cahn, Eichner, and Ziegler on Parental Consent and Minors' Rights

Naomi Cahn, University of Virginia School of Law, Maxine Eichner, University of North Carolina School of Law, and Mary E. Ziegler, University of California, Davis School of Law, have posted "For Their Benefit": The Lost History of Parental Consent and Minors' Rights:

The principle of parental involvement in children’s lives has achieved surprising consensus across blue and red states. Meanwhile, the goal of children’s wellbeing has become a touchstone for legal reform efforts across a variety of domains. The apparent embrace of both the goal of children’s wellbeing and parents’ right to be involved conceal deeply contested questions about when, why, and how the law should require parental consent of minors’ decisions.

Drawing on archival material housed at six different universities, we make sense of present-day conflicts about parental approval by revisiting the long legal history of parental involvement, from early common-law cases to struggles of the civil rights era. We show that contrary to widespread assumptions, from the very beginning, strict requirements of parental involvement were compartmentalized to particular areas and inconsistently applied in others. Further, what is often portrayed as a relatively recent, evolving consensus in favor of using children’s wellbeing rather than parental involvement as the guiding principle in the regulation of children is instead a continuation of a longstanding tradition. At common law, we demonstrate, in determining whether a minor could bind themselves to an agreement without parental involvement, courts often asked whether an agreement was beneficial to the child’s interests (and therefore either voidable or binding, depending on the judge or jurisdiction) or prejudicial to the child’s interests and therefore void.

Building on a rich literature on child wellbeing, we then use lessons from this history to construct a framework for determining when legislators and judges today should require parental involvement and when minors should be allowed to make their own decisions. We begin with a presumption, drawn from the lessons of common law, that parental involvement should be required for most types of important decisions. Yet decision-makers should impose exceptions to the general rule of parental involvement when: (1) parental involvement requirements impede access to care or resources critical to minors’ wellbeing; or (2) the decision at issue is integral to minors’ autonomy over their bodies and their futures. We consider how this framework would address four current controversies relating to minors: (1) abortion and abortion-related travel; (2) gender-affirming medical care; (3) access to social media; and (4) mental-health treatment. Our framework, we hope, will be faithful to the basic principles that animated the common law and better able to illuminate when parental involvement is beneficial—and when it may have harmful consequences for the minors it is supposed to protect. 

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Elizabeth Brand Monroe (1947-2026), a legal and public historian who received the Supreme Court Historical Society's Gossett Award for her article on the Dartmouth College Case (IndyStar). 

• Over at the LPE Blog: Serena Mayeri (Penn Carey Law) on "writing a history of marital privilege in an age of retrenchment." 

• In the Brigham Young University Law Review: a symposium reflecting on the 20th anniversary of David Skeel's Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America.   

• Robert Post, Yale Law School, and Daniel Holt,  Historical Office of the U.S. Senate, discuss the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1925 in this recording of a lecture sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society. 

• The American Historical Association hosts a Congressional Briefing on the history of vaccines on Wednesday, February 11, at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2044.  Panelists Elena Conis (Univ. of California, Berkeley), David M. Oshinsky (New York Univ.), and Michael Willrich (Brandeis Univ.) will discuss the history of vaccines against diseases including smallpox, polio, and measles.

• Via H-Disability: a CFP for a workshop on "Disabilities and Women in Ancient Rome: Legal, social and cultural perspectives" (University of Helsinki, Finland, May 4, 2026). 

• The Federalist Society has announced the establishment the Meese Prize for Excellence in Originalist Scholarship.  The winner gets  $10,000.  H/t: Originalism Blog.    

• Madiba Dennie will discuss her book The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take it Back at UVA Law. 

• The latest Part of the Philip C. Jessup papers is open at the Library of Congress.  Here's Rachel McNellis's account.  (Unfolding History.)

• A notice of Scott Sandage's teaching on the Constitution in the Special Collections Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

• Now online from the National Constitution Center: "Lucas Morel and Melvin Rogers join to discuss how African American leaders and citizens, such as Prince Hall, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. have invoked the ideas and principles of the Declaration of Independence throughout American history to push for a more free and equal America." 

• Although the event for which it was produced was last year, the American Historical Association has just circulated this very useful handout on the history of the tariff. 

• ICYMI: A GWB-appointed judge blasts the removal of the mention of George Washington's slaves  from his Philadelphia home (ATL).  Relatedly, SHEAR has a tracker of this and similar purging of public history (Panorama).  Jack Rakove on Playing the Grinch at America’s 250th Birthday Party (Washington Monthly). George Liebmann provides Historical Perspective on the Unitary Executive (Law & Liberty).  Adolpho Birch, the first Black judge appointed in Nashville (Fox17). Noah Shusterman says there's still historical work to be done on the Second Amendment (DCFL).  The criminalizing of protest and dissent has a long history in America (Guardian).  Yearlong project restores lost videos of civil rights foot soldiers (Tuscaloosa News).

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

"Law and Justice in the 1950s" (in England and Wales)

Just out from University of London Press: Law and Justice in the 1950s: Case Studies From a Neglected Decade, edited by Fiona Cownie and Rosemary Auchmuty and published in association with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies:

The 1950s was a decade of considerable legal development in England and Wales, despite often being regarded as very conservative in contrast to the more radical 1960s and 1970s. This collection illustrates the breadth of those developments, providing a sociolegal perspective on a range of topics across criminal, property, family, commercial, environmental and public law, and legal education. It examines the social, political and economic context of the decade to reveal how legal developments in the 1950s have much greater significance than has generally been acknowledged to date. Drawing on case studies from the Great London Smog in 1952, the treatment of women in the Wolfenden Report and divorce law reform, to the takeover battle for the Savoy Hotel in 1953, law on the radio and more, the chapters throw new light on current debates about the relationship between law and issues of justice, inclusion and equality in different spheres of activity.

Written for historians and legal specialists alike, this book explores the stories behind the laws in this neglected decade. In revealing the historical context, arguments and controversies raised at the time and the different perspectives of the parties involved, it offers a greater understanding of why we have the law we have now and of these issues as they continue to be played out in the early twenty-first century.

Here is an endorsement that matters: 

This ground-breaking book provides an exciting new perspective on the role of law in England and Wales during the 1950s. New stories not already recorded in standard legal histories are carefully examined, including an eye-opening series on education, and the conjunction between women and the home. Wide-ranging and engaging, it is a fine achievement.  

—David Sugarman, Professor Emeritus, Law School, Lancaster University, UK

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump. 

Weekend Roundup

• A historian's' amicus brief, sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice, has been filed in United States v. Hemani, "a constitutional challenge to a federal statute prohibiting any individual who 'is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance' from possessing a firearm." The signatories are Holly Brewer, Saul Cornell, Brian DeLay, Randolph Roth, Simon Stern, Stephen Taylor, and William Treanor.  

• The life and legacy of John Hope Franklin, an episode of the radio program, Black America (KUT).

• A recording of that Federalist Society panel on originalism and birthright citizenship, including Kurt Lash, Amanda Frost, and Keith Whittington, is here.   

• The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, seeks a research associate to "undertake directed research and produce public-facing and scholarly work on histories and legacies of religions and freedom in the early Americas with an emphasis on the eighteenth century." 

• Jessica Lake will discuss her book, Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law at UVA Law on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, from 5-6 p.m.  

• The schedule has been announced for that symposium at Boston College on February 20 to honor the life and work of the late  Ken Kersch.   

• In memoriam: Daniel Walker Howe (UCLA).

• Lady Margaret Hall's notice of the ASLH and Cromwell Foundations award of its William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize to Grace Mallon.

• The January 2026 newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here. 

• 
  The Merced County [CA] Historical Society has released its book, Old Courthouse: 150 Years, 150 Stories (Merced Sun-Star). 

• "Talbot Publishing, an imprint of The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., is pleased to announce the publication of M.H. Hoeflich and John Moreland’s Little Law Books."

• Alex Wellerstein discusses his new book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (LGM Podcast). 

• The finalists for the African American Intellectual History Society's Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History (Black Perspectives).

• Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur on "Jan. 6 and the Long Shadow of Civil War- and Reconstruction-Era Political Violence" (Talking Points Memo).

• ICYMI: Jack Rakove on what’s wrong with The American Revolution by Ken Burns (Washington Monthly).  Anna O. Law on birthright citizenship, in an interview heralding her book (The Redoubt).  Max Skjönsberg on Maitland, Smith, and Laissez-Faire (Law and Liberty).  Ilya Somin on Chief Justice Roberts on the Declaration of Independence (Volokh Conspiracy). A Timeline of Divorce in America (History).

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

Weekend Roundup

• A one-day, virtual workshop on Historical Evidence for Policy Reform in Marital Breakdown, Domestic Abuse, and Child Welfare sponsored by Northumbria University on January 20, 2026.   

• Catherine Ceniza Choy, Cybelle Fox, Leti Volpp, and Hidetaka Hirota "discuss how the 1875 Page Act laid the foundation for the Chinese Exclusion Act and later immigration laws in the United States" (Berkeley Talks).

• "Remembering Mitsuye Endo and the Supreme Court Case That Helped End Incarceration" (Densho).

• 
  Applications for the Baldy Center Post-Doctoral, Mid-Career, and Senior Fellowships in Legal Studies 2026-27 at the University at Buffalo School of Law are now open!   

• Adam Feldman on the death of the norm of consensus on the U.S Supreme Court--and after (SCOTUSblog).

• The Brennan Center for Justice's "Playbook for Countering Originalism in Court."

• "Inside the Supreme Court of Canada: The Road to the Charter" (CPAC).  

•  Christopher Bryant, University of Cincinnati College of Law, on the temporary insanity defense of the bootlegger George Remis (UC Law). 

• ICYMI: A train wreck and Grand Central station (Smithsonian).  The History of the Kings County Supreme Court Library (NYLJ).  Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (NYT Magazine). The 1884 Cannibalism-at-Sea Case That Still Has Harvard Talking (Harvard Magazine).

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

CFP: Marital Breakdown in the Common Law World

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Broken Bonds: New Perspectives on Marital Breakdown in the English Common Law World, 1801-1969

20th April 2026, 9.30am - 5.30pm in The Great Hall of Northumbria University, Sutherland Building, Ellison Place, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Marital breakdown is not a modern phenomenon. Options available to separating spouses in the English Common Law World were, however, heavily restricted by gender and economic status, with wives occupying a significantly more vulnerable position. Before 1857, full divorce remained the preserve of wealthy men who could navigate the expensive Parliamentary divorce process. The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 transformed this landscape, establishing the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes and making divorce accessible beyond the elite. This legislation influenced divorce law in England and Wales and across the Common Law World well into the twentieth century.

[The deadline for submitting abstracts is Monday, February 2, 2026.  For more information, visit the conference website.]

ASLH Burbank Article Prize to Fei

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize. About this prize: 

The Jane Burbank Article Prize in global legal history will be awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history published in the previous calendar year. Submissions may address any topic or period, and may focus on case studies in which the analysis relates to broader processes or comparisons. Articles on methodological or theoretical contributions are also welcome.

The 2025 Burbank Prize winner was Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections,” Past and Present 266:1 (2025): 40-74. The citation:

In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a collection of letters and documents which includes a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved people she owned, conducted in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels: the case summary itself and its process, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use.

An Honorable Mention went to Rui Hua (Boston University), for “The Cheese, the Worm, and the Law: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian Borderland, 1906-1927,” Modern Asian Studies 58:4 (2024): 1201-1221.

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani 

 

ASLH Surrency Prize to Han & Xiangyi

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Surrency Prize. About this prize: 

The Surrency Prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the Society’s journal, the Law and History Review, in the previous year. The prize is named in honor of Erwin C. Surrency, a founding member and first president of the Society and for many years the editor of its former publication, the American Journal of Legal History. 

The 2025 Surrency Prize winners were Shumeng Han (University of California, San Diego) and Ren Xiangyi (University of Chicago) for their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Law and History Review 42:2 (2024): 319–42. The citation:

In their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Shumeng Han and Xiangyi Ren bring analytical clarity to a complex process of legal change. Through a sensitive and systematic reading of four decades of intergenerational property dispute cases in Jiangjin county, China, the authors illuminate a transformation of the fundamental Qing legal principle of filial piety. What began as a unified concept harmonizing individual filiality and morality with imperial loyalty and legitimacy, the authors explain, branched over time into multiple hybrid forms in Republican China. The article demonstrates how dual processes—changing legal rules and institutional nation-state building—coproduced forces within and without law that spun filial piety into different successor strands: individualist, nationalist, legal, and sentimental, each carrying forward a fragment of the original principle of filial piety. With precision, the article documents a Qing-Republican legal transition that is not a simple transplantation story of one order replacing another. Rather, as the authors conclude, “legal actors recreated and particularized the inherited conception [of filial piety] in their legal practice by drawing on sources from code, customs, and their specific historical context,” thus making and using diverse and even contradictory new strands. With this remarkable work of research and interpretation, “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality” shows how the meaning of legal concepts may be transformed amid wider societal and regime change—and how to study such transformation with nuance, rigor and imagination.

An Honorable Mention went to Kate Alba Reeve (Columbia University) for “Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations,” Law and History Review 42:3 (2024): 499–520.

Congratulations to all!

-- Karen Tani  

 

Weekend Roundup

• Caitlin Tully, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Princeton University, has published an essay in The Atlantic: "The Court has an Easy Answer on the Fed."  

• From Time's "Made by History": Douglas Boin (Saint Louis University) on "How Patriarchy Undermined the Roman Republic."   

• Malick W. Ghachem, MIT, discusses his book The Company and the Colony: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble with Gerald Horne on the “Freedom Now” program on KPFK radio.

• Jill Hasday, Minnesota Law, discussed her book We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality with Kate Shaw on the Strict Scrutiny podcast.

• Allen Boyer reviews Kathryn Schumaker's Tangled Fortunes (Mississippi Books Page).   

• We've spotted an advertisement for a predoc university assistantship with Prof. Dr. Lena Foljanty, Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna. 

• Lawbook Exchange's November 2025 catalogue on Scholarly Law and Legal History (Part 1; Part 2).

• ICYMI:  A Very Short History of Freedom of Speech by Oliver Bramley (Constitution Society). How Germany's Nuremberg trial for Nazi crimes transformed international law (rfi).

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