Curran on the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man

 Vivian Grosswald Curran, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has posted Disentangling the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which is forthcoming in the Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law:

Le Barbier's Declaration (wiki)

The American Declaration of Independence and Revolution are linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and its Revolution through the mutual, strong influences of the Enlightenment philosophes whom both the American Founding Fathers and the French revolutionaries read. They also were linked through acquaintance and ongoing communication, with the American Declaration serving as a model for the first, but not final, draft of the French one. Both Declarations and Revolutions were to follow divergent paths through time, however, a cause for great concern in nineteenth-century France when intellectuals such as Laboulaye, Tocqueville and Taine, fearful for France’s future in yet another new régime, looked to America’s foundational documents and governmental system to uncover the secrets of America’s stability and of France’s failure to safeguard the principles of 1789. This article proposes that the answers were far less to be found in the U.S. documents or bicameral legislative structure than in a comparative, contextual examination of the two societies, their populations and their political histories. Those were the differences which led France to sink into a Reign of Terror within a few years of its Revolution and to proceed to seesaw among various forms of government thereafter, while the United States was able to enjoy a single Constitution and general political stability.  The aims of each Revolution differed, as did the consequences of those differences, including how each nation perceived and dealt with freedom of religion, the abolition of slavery and the struggle for women’s equality. In France, the Revolution was intended to achieve a total rupture with the past, but France unwittingly fell prey to its past, as the absolutist tradition of the monarchy permeated its ranks in new ways, transforming egalitarianism into repression. In America, the colonists’ chief complaint had been their lack of representation in the British Parliament, not a wish to change a constitutional form of government which allowed for freedom of representation and had a king who bowed to the will of Parliament. After the American Revolution, the French looked to the new country overseas, often both idealizing and distorting it, with a view to how it could be a model for a new France.  The two nations had a common point of departure in the literature of the philosophes which had deeply inspired and captured the imagination of the American Founding Fathers and the French revolutionary thinkers alike. Even a written text, however, is interpretive, such that the texts themselves were a function of what they meant to their readers. Some have thought that the Founding Fathers understood Montesquieu’s intentions better than the French. This article hopes to illuminate twists and turns from a shared point of departure, and to address ongoing debates concerning their nature.  

--Dan Ernst 

Dardini on the 14th Amendment, Human Rights, and American Samoa

Ross Dardani, Muhlenberg College, has published, open access, The Influence of Fourteenth Amendment Jurisprudence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the U.S. Empire, in Law and History Review:

This article analyzes the influence of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence and the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) during congressional debates in 1949 that focused on establishing a territorial government for American Samoa. In these hearings, naval leaders argued that Supreme Court decisions that had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment as demanding colorblindness and others that established property ownership as a fundamental right, along with the creation of the UDHR, meant that Samoans might not be able to protect their land from further white-settler colonialism if Congress passed legislation establishing a civilian government in American Samoa. U.S. military leaders believed that the Court’s decisions in Buchanan versus Warley (1917) and Shelley versus Kraemer (1948), and the UDHR, could prohibit American Samoa from enforcing race-based land ownership restrictions if lawmakers extended citizenship, equal protection, or due process to American Samoa. Members of Congress, however, believed that the Court’s past rulings in the Insular Cases, models set in other unincorporated territories (e.g., the Philippines and Hawaii), and Federal Indian law established legal precedents that meant Samoans would be able to continue restricting land ownership on the basis of race if they became U.S. citizens and were governed by equal protection and due process. Samoan leaders demonstrated the unsettled nature of constitutional law in American politics by emphasizing that any congressional act that extended citizenship, equal protection, or due process to American Samoa would ultimately be reviewed and interpreted by the Court. For these Samoans, even if members of Congress were interpreting past Court precedents correctly, a future majority of justices could adopt a different understanding of what the extension of U.S. citizenship, equal protection, or due process meant for American Samoa by ruling that non-Samoans had fundamental constitutional rights to land ownership in American Samoa. This article thus helps explain how and why Samoan and naval leaders influenced U.S. lawmakers when Congress was considering legislation that would extend citizenship, equal protection, and due process protections to American Samoa in 1949. This legal history demonstrates how different interpretations of the Constitution, the UDHR, and fundamental rights influenced various actors within the context of the U.S. empire, illuminating the ambiguous nature of constitutional law in the U.S. unincorporated territories.

--Dan Ernst 

Witte and Pin's "Legal Foundations of Religious Freedom"

John Witte, Jr., Emory University, and Andrea Pin, University of Padua, have published The Legal Foundations of Religious Freedom: Human Rights in the United States and Europe (Notre Dame Press):

In The Legal Foundations of Religious Freedom, authors John Witte Jr. and Andrea Pin explore the Christian and secular origins of rights in the Western legal tradition and the complex interplay between human rights and religious freedom norms in modern law, religion, and culture. They analyze historical documents and recent cases from the United States Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Court of Justice of the European Union to articulate the historical, theoretical, and legal tension of human rights and religious freedom on both sides of the Atlantic. The authors contrast the serious threats to new religious minorities and traditional religious accommodations with firm new protections of religious freedoms in both Europe and America.

Ultimately calling for robust protection of the fundamental rights and liberties of all people and faiths, Witte and Pin caution that religious freedom and other human rights claims can only do so much to bridge the widening cultural divides over law and religion in modern Western societies. It is our responsibility to embrace the fundamental goods of dignity, fraternity, and justice.

--Dan Ernst 

Bauer to Lecture on Reparations for Victims of Brazil's Dictatorship

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Nos complace informaros de la celebración del próximo Coloquio de Historia del Derecho de la UAM. En esta ocasión contaremos con la presencia de la profesora Caroline Silveira Bauer, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, que nos hablará de “Las posibilidades de reparación de crímenes cometidos por empresas y particulares durante la dictadura de 1964 en Brasil.”  [“The possibilities of reparation for crimes committed by companies and individuals during the 1964 dictatorship in Brazil.”]  Adjunto a este correo se puede encontrar un resumen de su propuesta, junto con la programación prevista para este ciclo de Coloquios.

El encuentro se celebrará el próximo viernes 13 de marzo, a las 11:30 h, en el seminario VI de la cuarta planta de la Facultad de Derecho. Asimismo, también se podrá seguir a través del siguiente enlace: Coloquios HD | UAM | Reunión-Unirse | Microsoft Teams.  

CFP: Narrating Justice: Postwar Trials in Memory and Culture

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

On behalf of the organizers, the Polish Academy of Sciences – Scientific Centre in Vienna, the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw, and the Museum of the Second World War, we invite you to participate in the conference "Narrating Justice: Postwar Trials in Memory and Culture”, which will take place on June 11-12, 2026, in Vienna. 

The discussion on post-war reckoning provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary responses to violence and human rights violations, as well as on the role of scholarly research in the face of current conflicts and growing political tensions in Europe and around the world. The conference seeks to examine post-war trials as a long-term historical, legal, social, and cultural phenomenon. Drawing on approaches from different fields of scholarship, it will address the immediate post-1945 tribunals and their aftermath, as well as later trials and broader processes of post-conflict justice in diverse contexts. Attention will be given to the historical, social, and media contexts of these trials, their forms of documentation and reception, as well as their representation in literature, film, theatre, music, and the visual arts. We also invite contributions focusing on non- European contexts, perspectives, and historical settings.

We invite abstracts covering topics that include, but are not limited to:

Historical and Legal Contexts: The Nuremberg Trials and their impact on the development of international criminal law; Trials in Germany, Austria, Poland, and other countries; Shifts in legal categories: from war crimes to crimes against humanity

Social and Political Dimensions: Reception of post-war trials in European societies; Public debates on guilt, responsibility, and retribution; The role of victims’ and witnesses’ testimonies

Trials in the Media: Press, radio, television, and digital coverage of trials, Documentary recordings as historical sources, Visual and rhetorical strategies in depicting perpetrators and victims

Cultural and Artistic Representations: Trials as motifs in literature, theatre, film, and the visual arts; Artistic reconstructions, reinterpretations, and revisitations; Documentary literature and nonfiction in the context of legal history

Memory Studies and Politics of Memory: Post-war trials in European cultural memory; Transnational and comparative perspectives; Institutionalization of the memory of trials
(museums, archives, education)

Contemporary Relevance: Continuities between post-war tribunals and modern international courts; Narratives of responsibility in the context of contemporary conflicts; Challenges for law, memory, and justice in the twenty-first century.

Timeline and Submissions:  Proposals must include, in a single PDF file: (1) paper abstract (max. 1,000 words); and 2) brief biography of the author(s).  All conference submissions must be in English, and all accepted works are to be presented in English.  Proposals for the conference should be submitted to office@vienna.pan.pl by March 22, 2026.

Accommodation and Travel.  The conference will take place over two days, on 11–12 June 2026, at the Polish Academy of Sciences – Scientific Centre in Vienna (Boerhaavegasse 25, 1030 Vienna).  The organisers encourage in-person participation by all speakers. However, depending on the circumstances, some presentations could be delivered online. Please note that invited speakers will be responsible for their transport to and from Vienna.

Participation in the conference is free of charge, and participants will be offered lunch and coffee during the breaks. Participants without institutional support may receive reimbursement of travel expenses up to €150 per person, as well as modest complimentary accommodation at the PAS Scientific Centre in Vienna. For those requesting support, a brief statement of purpose (500–650 words) should be submitted with the abstract and biography.

Inquiries can be made by e-mail to monika.gromala@vienna.pan.pl, milena.blahuta@vienna.pan.pl

Sunday Roundup

• Now available on-line, a recording of that National Constitution Center town hall, The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed. 

• Also newly available online: Michael McConnell and Noah Rosenblum's debate on originalism at NYU Law on November 19, 2025. 

• William M. Treanor, the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Constitutional Law and Constitutional History and Dean Emeritus of Georgetown Law, will deliver the 2025 Gouverneur Morris Endowed Lecture of the Bronx County Historical Society at Fordham Law, which is co-sponsoring the event, on Wednesday, January 28, 2025 at 6:30 pm.  Dean Treanor’s topic: “The Constitution’s Penman, Gouverneur Morris" (New York Almanack).  

• Jeremy Kessler on the law and history of bans on history of viewpoint discrimination at a Columbia Law School alumni luncheon.  (The event is called the "Stone Circle" Luncheon, and I'm embarrassed to say I was slow to get the reference.)  (Columbia Law School). 

• 
  Heidi Kitrosser reviews Patrick G. Eddington, The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley to Eisenhower (Georgetown University Press, 2025) (Lawfare).

• ICYMI: The 1924 Immigration Act is back, unfortunately (The Guardian).  The Rise of Scholars' Amicus Briefs.  "Gun carry regulation was always the norm" (The Hill).  "A (very) short history of Crimes Against Humanity" (EJIL Talk!).  "Historic Dispute Over ‘Unitary Executive’ Advances in Trump Era"--a very full and thoughtful explainer (CT Examiner).  

--Dan Ernst 

Van Schaack's Annotated Bibliography on Crimes against Humanity

Beth Van Schaack, the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, has posted Crimes Against Humanity: An Annotated Bibliography:

This is an annotated bibliography of scholarship and jurisprudence involving crimes against humanity, an important element of the international criminal law canon. It elucidates the history of this offense (which traces its roots to the World War I period), elements of this offense, lingering areas of doctrinal indeterminacy, efforts at universal codification, and the most innovative scholarship grappling with the reach of this international offense. 

--Dan Ernst 

Duke Human Rights Archive

We've been told that the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University is offering research travel grants to work with the Human Rights Legal Collections of the Duke Human Rights Archive.   The DHRA director explains that the archive "has strong collections on legal history related to immigration law, international human rights law, Guantanamo, Attica, and the death penalty," detailed here.  For example, it has the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney's files on its pro bono representation of Bahraini detainees at Guantánamo Bay and the papers of Juan E. Méndez, who served as the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture and the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide. 

--Dan Ernst  H/t: AZB

Sugarman on the "Hidden Histories" of the Pinochet Case

David Sugarman, Lancaster University Law School, has published “The Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case” open access in the Journal of Law and Society   51: 4 (2024): 459–490:

Credit: LC

The world’s imagination was caught by the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet on charges of egregious human rights crimes and the 16-month battle to extradite him to Madrid. For the first time, a former head of state had, while travelling abroad, been arrested on such charges, with his claim to immunity being rejected by a national court. The case’s notoriety increased when Lord Hoffmann, a judge when it first came before the Law Lords, did not publicly disclose his links with Amnesty International, an intervenor in the proceedings. Pinochet’s release on health grounds compounded the controversy. This article reveals hidden histories behind the Pinochet case, advancing our understanding of its progression and wider significance. It illuminates the relationship between law and politics, the role of personal views and judicial creativity in the UK’s top court, the ways in which law operates in practice, and its promise and limitations.

--Dan Ernst

Levin Center on Congressional Oversight of the War on Terror

[We have the following announcement from the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy of the Wayne State University Law School.  DRE.]

Today, the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, with the support of the U.S. Capitol Historical

Society, is releasing a new Portrait in Oversight describing two in-depth Senate investigations into the torture and mistreatment of individuals in U.S. custody during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both oversight investigations – the first by the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2004 to 2009, and the second by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2007 to 2014 -- collected evidence exposing the role of senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials in devising, approving, and directing the use of brutal interrogation methods on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay detainees. Both Senate investigations also led to enactment of new laws to prohibit the future abuse of individuals in U.S. custody.

“The explosive release of 2004 photos showing prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq shocked the American public and led to worldwide condemnation of U.S. brutality,” said Jim Townsend, director of the Levin Center. “This new Portrait in Oversight demonstrates how Congress exposed government misconduct, held U.S. military and intelligence officials accountable for what they did, and paved the way for laws to prevent this shameful history from repeating itself.”

“Checks and balances are the foundation of the American governmental system," said Jane L. Campbell, President & CEO of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.  "It's therefore vital to the health of our democracy that Congress continues to exert its power of oversight on our co-equal branches of government. The U.S. Capitol Historical Society thus commends the work of the Levin Center to inform Americans of the history of this vital process, including the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

The portrait is being released today in observance of the 16th anniversary of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s action on November 20, 2008, approving a 265-page report detailing how senior U.S. Department of Defense officials ordered abusive interrogation methods to be used on U.S. detainees. Six years later, on December 9, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released to the public a 700-page executive summary of its still classified report on the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the misconduct.

Barrett on the “Nuremberg Trials”

John Q. Barrett, St. John's University School of Law, has posted The Nuremberg Trials: A Summary Introduction:

This lecture was delivered on May 4, 2016, at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, at “The Nuremberg Symposium: The Nuremberg Laws & the Nuremberg Trials,” sponsored by the International March of the Living, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and Jagiellonian University.  The lecture explains that following World War II, there were thirteen “Nuremberg trials” of Nazi war criminals and introduces those proceedings by discussing:   

(1)   The predicate human behavior: making war;
(2)   International law's progress in addressing that behavior before World War II;
(3)   Nazism as human and national regression;
(4)   World War II;
(5)   Legal analysis and war condemnation during World War II;
(6)   The Allied nations' military defeat of Nazi Germany;
(7)   The Allies' international Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946;
(8)   The twelve subsequent American trials in Nuremberg;
(9)   The legal legacy of the Nuremberg trials; and
(10) The human rights legacy, including the Holocaust knowledge legacy, of the Nuremberg  trials.

This lecture appears in a symposium issue that also includes lectures and remarks by Wojciech Nowak, Richard Heideman, Shmuel Rosenman, Irwin Cotler, Alan Dershowitz, Samantha Power, Justin Trudeau, Robert Badinter, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Ayelet Shaked, Zdzislaw Mach, Michael Berenbaum, Edward Mosberg, John Dyson, Dorit Beinish, Sam Rugege, Rosalie Silberman Abella, Marie Thérèse Mukamulisa, Malcolm Hoenlein, Ron Prosor, Elizabeth Buettner, Brooke Goldstein, Stuart Eizenstat, Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, David Machlis, Gregory Peterson, and Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Penn Law Dean Sophia Lee discusses "her work as a legal scholar and historian of administrative law" (Regulatory Review).  And outgoing UVA Law Dean Risa Goluboff reflects on her tenure (UVA Today).
  

• Congratulations to Bethany Berger upon her receipt of the Perry Zirkel ’76 Distinguished Teaching Award at UConn Law (UConn Today).
  

• Christine Lamberson, Director, Federal Judicial History Office, has a post on Chy Lung v. Freeman: Anti-Chinese Sentiment and the Supremacy of Federal Immigration Law on the FJC website.
  

• Jacob Coffelt  University of Padova, on Codifying IHL before Lieber and Dunant: the 1820 treaty for the regularization of war (Humanitarian Law & Policy).
  

• Joy Milligan and Bertrall Ross, UVA Law, “discuss how we should interpret a Constitution that was not written for or drafted by ‘We the People,” on the Sidebar podcast.

• Prairie View A&M history professor Ronald Goodwin discussed the early Republic and how Americans tried to define equality and interpret the Constitution in the first decades of the United States. (C-SPAN)
  

• Jedidiah Kroncke reviews Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (Jotwell).
  

• We recently discovered The Aotearoa History Show, a podcast of Radio New Zealand devoted to "the story of New Zealand and its people from its geological origins to modern day."  Episode 2:6 is on the Native Land Court.  Episode 2:12 is on Woman Suffrage. 
  

• George Fisher, Stanford Law School , discusses his latest book, Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of Today’s War on Drugs, a history of criminal law and criminal institutions, including the regulation of alcohol and drugs (Legal Aggregate).
  

• The April 2024 issue of the Newsletter of the Historical Society of the DC Circuit is now available. 
  

• ICYMI:  Judge John Bush of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said the originalist approach to interpreting text “is consistent with, and indeed will thrive” with advancements in AI (Bloomberg).  Mississippi’s Jim Crow Laws Still Haunt Black Voters Today  (Marshall Project). Sponsors of removed historical marker dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn ask judge to reconsider (Concord Monitor).
  

• ICYMI, April Fools Edition: Dueling, the Second Amendment, and the Fifth Circuit (Dorf on Law). 
  

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

Sugarman on "The Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case"

David Sugarman, Professor of Law Emeritus at the Law School of Lancaster University, is lecturing on The Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case in the "Director's Seminar" at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.  The event will occur in the IALS Council Chamber, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR on February 6, 2024, 5:00PM - 6:30PM.  You may register here.

Autumn 2023 marked the 25th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London, and the subsequent decisions of Britain’s top court denying Pinochet’s claim as a former head of state to immunity. It was the first time that a former head of state had, while travelling abroad, been arrested on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, and where that former leader’s claims to immunity were rejected by a domestic court. Hugely controversial, Pinochet’s arrest and the “Pinochet precedent” changed the meaning of international justice, giving a massive fillip to human-rights movements, galvanising victims and their loved ones, activists and lawyers.   

This lecture brings into the open the hidden histories of the Pinochet case. It reveals what went on behind the scenes, in law and in politics. Drawing on a unique set of 250 interviews with victims, NGO’s, activists, judges, lawyers, politicians, government officials and journalists during or shortly after the case, and exhaustive archival research, it casts new light on:

• Pinochet’s arrest.
• The mobilisation of a human rights coalition determined to indict Pinochet.
• The turbulent legal proceedings in London, including the decision to rehear the case as Lord Hoffmann lacked the appearance of judicial independence.
• The vital roles played by victims, their representatives, the superjuez, lawyers, journalists and media outlets (notably, El País) in sustaining the case against Pinochet versus the powerful forces seeking to resist it.
• Pinochet’s release on health grounds.

Under huge pressure many people produced high quality work, but there were structural and personal shortcomings. The lecture lays bare the collaborations that arose, and the professional and personal fissures that ensued.

The struggle to bring Pinochet to justice in London and Madrid was a remarkable endeavour. It has special saliency in an era when autocracy, impunity and denialism of human rights crimes are on the rise, and the notion of international justice is being challenged.
The lecture is situated at the intersection of law, politics, activism, the humanities and the social sciences. It will appeal to the IALS community and beyond.

Speaker: David Sugarman is Professor of Law Emeritus at the Law School of Lancaster University; Senior Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London; Senior Associate, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. He has authored, co-authored and edited 24 books and special issues of journals, and has published over 100 articles and book chapters. He has written widely on the Pinochet case including in the Modern Law Review, Journal of Law and Society, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Amicus Curiae, The Guardian, The Times, The Santiago Times, Open Democracy and El Mostrador. He has contributed to TV and radio on the subject, and has delivered keynote lectures on the case in Australia, Austria, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the USA.  

Chair: Professor Carl Stychin, IALS Director.

 --Dan Ernst

Fleming on "Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice"

Cambridge University Press has published In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice (2022), by Michael Fleming (Polish University Abroad, London). A description from the Press:

In the midst of the Second World War, the Allies acknowledged Germany's ongoing programme of extermination. In the Shadow of the Holocaust examines the struggle to attain post-war justice and prosecution. Focusing on Poland's engagement with the United Nations War Crimes Commission, it analyses the different ways that the Polish Government in Exile (based in London from 1940) agitated for an Allied response to German atrocities. Michael Fleming shows that jurists associated with the Government in Exile made significant contributions to legal debates on war crimes and, along with others, paid attention to German crimes against Jews. By exploring the relationship between the UNWCC and the Polish War Crimes Office under the authority of the Polish Government in Exile and later, from the summer of 1945, the Polish Government in Warsaw, Fleming provides a new lens through which to examine the early stages of the Cold War.

A sample of advance praise:

"This pathbreaking book sheds important new light on post-war attempts to prosecute Nazi war criminals and collaborators through an analysis of the participation in the United Nations’ War Crimes Commission of representatives of the Polish government, first that established in the west after the Polish defeat and then by the pro-communist government established by the Soviets. It is essential reading for all those interested in the problem of how to prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity." -- Antony Polonsky

 More information is available here. (h/t New Books Network)

-- Karen Tani

Federal History 14

Federal History 14 (2022), the journal of the Society for History in the Federal Government, has been published.  Here’s the TOC:

Editor’s Note
        — Benjamin Guterman

Roger R. Trask Lecture
        — Arnita Jones

Articles

A Clash of Principles: The First Federal Debate over Slavery and Race, 1790
        — Paul J. Polgar

From Conspiracy to Policy: James V. Martin, the “Air Trust” Narrative, and the 1926 Air Commerce Act
        — Sean Seyer

“Substantive Accomplishments”: Richard Nixon, High School Student Environmentalists, and the President’s Environmental Merit Awards Program
        — Neil Buffett

The Contribution of U.S. Military Advisors in the Dominican Republic to Operation Unified Response, Haiti Earthquake Relief, 2010
        — Bradley Lynn Coleman

Interview

An Interview with Kelly J. Shannon
        — Alexander Poster

Roundtable

From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy by Sarah B. Snyder
        – Introduction by Paul Adler
        – Review by Theresa Keeley
        – Review by Robert Rakove
        – Review by Matthew K. Shannon
        - Response by Sarah B. Snyder

   Recent Publications

        Human Rights–A Select List

Bessler's "Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights"

The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionist Norm, by John Bessler, University of Baltimore, is due out next month from Cambridge University Press, in its series, ASIL Studies in International Legal Theory:

The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights details how capital punishment violates universal human rights-to life; to be free from torture and other forms of cruelty; to be treated in a non-arbitrary, non-discriminatory manner; and to dignity. In tracing the evolution of the world's understanding of torture, which now absolutely prohibits physical and psychological torture, the book argues that an immutable characteristic of capital punishment-already outlawed in many countries and American states-is that it makes use of death threats. Mock executions and other credible death threats, in fact, have long been treated as torturous acts. When crime victims are threatened with death and are helpless to prevent their deaths, for example, courts routinely find such threats inflict psychological torture. With simulated executions and non-lethal corporal punishments already prohibited as torturous acts, death sentences and real executions, the book contends, must be classified as torturous acts, too.

Here is a post on the book in which Professor Bessler explains how Cesare Beccaria and other Enlightenment thinkers understood torture differently than we do today.  And here is an appearance by Professor Bessler on German TV during the recently concluded 8th World Congress Against the Death Penalty.  Finally, here is the book’s TOC:

Introduction
1. The death penalty: from draconian legal codes to the enlightenment
2. The abolitionist movement: state practice, international law, and global progress
3. Death threats and the law of torture: the death penalty's inherently cruel and torturous characteristics
4. Human dignity and the law's evolution: prohibiting capital punishment through a jus cogens norm
Conclusion

 

--Dan Ernst

The Search for Humanity after Atrocity

[We have the following announcement of a conference.  DRE]

The Search for Humanity After Atrocity.  October 16-17, 2022. In-person at Kean University, Union, NJ

Keynote Speaker: Loung Ung - Khmer Rouge Genocide Survivor, Activist, Author
Plenary Speakers: Eduardo Gonzalez and Ines Hernandes-Avila

Please click here to visit our website to register and for more information. Registration is open now. Discounted rate for students.

Recognizing that the search for humanity after atrocity is as imperative as it is elusive, this two-day conference will interrogate recent strides that are renewing scholarly and popular interest and debate. The conference, based on an NEH-funded seminar held at Kean University in June, 2021, will assemble engaged scholars and informed practitioners who honor the reciprocity of scholarship and activism for energizing a network in common search for humanity after atrocity. The conference's premise is the belief that post-atrocity renewal possesses the most promise if it is propelled by those who were and are vulnerable and victimized. *The intention is to have an in-person conference with the understanding that the need may arise to shift to a virtual format depending on the status of the pandemic this fall.

Contact Stephanie Reese at reeseste@kean.edu for details or to inquire about co-sponsorship opportunities.

Weekend Roundup

• Just announced: On "Thursday, November 4, immediately before the main conference begins, the American Society for Legal History is hosting an in-person preconference event on Regulation and Administration in American Life: Legal Historical Perspectives."

• ASLH members: last call for submissions to the Projects and Proposals Committee.
  

• Over at Talking Legal History, Siobhan M. M. Barco talks with former LHB Guest Blogger Samuel Fury Childs Daly “about his J. Willard Hurst Prize winning book A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Daly is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at Duke University."

• 
  John Fabian Witt reviews Samuel Moyn's Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War over at Just Security and discusses it with Professor Moyn on the Digging a Hole podcast.
  

• Law schools on their recent hires of legal historians: NYU on Maggie Blackhawk and Noah Rosenblum. Iowa on Andrew Lanham.   
  

• Over at JOTWELL: Christopher Walker (Ohio State University Moritz College of Law) on Emily Bremer's "The Rediscovered Stages of Agency Adjudication"; Erin F. Delaney (Northwestern Pritzker School of Law) on Paul F. Scott, "The Privy Council and the constitutional legacies of Empire,"

• The Bristol Centre for Law and History Research welcomes Dr Andrew J. Bell, a lecturer at the University of Bristol Law School.  "His research focuses on the law of obligations, comparative law and – excitingly for us! – comparative legal history.”  More.
  

• In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress, continues to offer interesting glimpses of its Herencia collection: "The Royal Order of October 1749 and the Historic Consequences of the Great Roma Round-up"; "Limpieza de Sangre: Legal Applications of the Spanish Doctrine of 'Blood Purity.'"
  

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Maia Silber (Princeton University), "The Supreme Court ended the eviction ban but not the fight against evictions"; Warren E. Milteer Jr. (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), "Voters elect representatives. But often it is politicians who pick their voters"; and more.
  

• Over at the LPEBlog, the symposium on Destin Jenkins' Bonds of Inequality continues.

• The Lilian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School has announced a new exhibit: “Fresher, More Recent Tragedies”: Media and the Memory of the Attica Prison Uprising.

• ICYMI: Relocating the grave of a leading Tennessee lawyer (Tennessean).  “A rock star of local theater will help tell the stories of enslaved people in Prince George’s County, Maryland, who successfully filed lawsuits in the 1700s that led to their freedom” (WTOP).
  

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

Venzke & Heller, eds., "Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories"

New from Oxford University Press: Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories, edited by Ingo Venzke (University of Amsterdam) and Kevin Jon Heller (University of Copenhagen). A description from the Press:

This book poses a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: could international law have been otherwise? Today, there is hardly a serious account left that would consider the path of international law to be necessary, and that would refute the possibility of a different law altogether. But behind every possibility of the past stands a reason why the law developed as it did. Only with a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did is it possible to argue about how the law could plausibly have turned out differently.

The search for contingency in international law is often motivated, as it is in this volume, by a refusal to resign to the present state of affairs. By recovering past possibilities, this volume aims to inform projects of transformative legal change for the future. The book situates that search for contingency theoretically and carries it into practice across many fields, with chapters discussing human rights and armed conflict, migrants and refugees, the sea and natural resources, foreign investments and trade. In doing so, it shows how politically charged questions about contingency have always been.

The Table of Contents:

Bassiouni's life in international law

The memoirs of M. Cherif Bassiouni (formerly of DePaul College of Law and the International Criminal Court), A Man of Many Flags: Memoirs of a War Crimes Investigator are out with Hart Publishing. From the press:

M Cherif Bassiouni was a towering figure in international law. He was personally connected to some of the most historically relevant moments of the past century: the Suez War; the Camp David Accords; the fall of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and the establishment of the International Criminal Court. A true global citizen – raised in Egypt, educated in Europe and emigrated to the United States – his life cut across cultures and religions. This fascinating memoir gives an immediate and personal eye-witness account of the operation of international events during a tumultuous period.

Table of Contents after the jump: