Weekend Roundup

• "Annette Gordon-Reed will present 'Thomas Jefferson and the Presidency," as the University of Northern Iowa’s 2026 Constitution Day address on Thursday, Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. in Bengtson Auditorium, Russell Hall," Cedar Falls, Iowa (Clear Lake Mirror Reporter). 

• Western New Mexico University Professor Andy Hernandez's presentation to a recent Children’s Law Institute conference set out "the historical continuum from early state-sponsored practices and the Indian Slave Trade to the residential boarding school era" (WNMU).

• 
  A prince narrates the audiobook of Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. 

• The new Postdoctoral Associates and Mid-Career Fellows at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo School of Law include the historians Aaron Jacobs, who studies vigilantism, Eva Vaillancourt, whose current project is the history of European road traffic rules, and University of Kentucky professor Nikki Brown, an expert on race, representation, and African American history.  More. 

• "The Law and Us," a new exhibit at the UK Supreme Court, includes a copy of Magna Carta (Scottish Legal News).   Update: For Women Scotland notes that its case is one of the seventy mentioned.

• A notice of Ava DuVernay's forthcoming documentary on the 14th Amendment.

• Fay Diploma winner Abigail Simon really liked her constitutional history course with Michael Klarman (Harvard Law Today). 

• From the Chronicle of Higher Ed [behind a paywall, unfortunately]: "Higher Ed’s Hidden Corporate Empire," by Michael Banerjee (UC Berkeley). 

• Over at In Custodia Legis: "Giulio Claro: Renaissance Italy’s Would Be Encyclopedist of the Law and his Criminal Law Book"; "150 Years After Her Death: George Sand and the Napoleonic Code of 1804."

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

Weekend Roundup

• Legal historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin has been appointed dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Stanford's notice is here.
   
• Over at JOTWELL: Bethany Berger (Iowa College of Law) spotlights Lila Teeters Knolle's Indians Now Taxed: Citizenship and Taxation in Settler-Colonial South Dakota, 44 J. Am. Ethnic History 44 (2025); Lisa Owens (UMass Dartmouth) flags K-Sue Park's Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, 133 Yale L.J. 1487 (2024). 

• From In Custodia Legis: "Murder, He Signed? The Unexpected Death of A Declaration of Independence Signer." 

• We have previously posted about Christina Kexel Chabot's "The Interstitial Executive: A View from the Founding," forthcoming in the BYU Law Review. She has now posted an updated version, which includes historical evidence that bears directly on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Trump v. Slaughter. 

• Nursing Clio is spotlighting undergraduate writing this summer. Here's a post on "Registration of Maternity Homes Act, 1934: Institutional inadequacy and indifference in Irish maternity homes," by Whitney Cowan (St. Olaf College). 

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

Weekend Roundup

• ASLH President Mitra Sharafi's alternative to assigning undergraduate research papers in an age of AI (South Asian Legal History Resources).

• The recording of the National Constitution Center's session on the Constitution and the Courts, held in conjunction with the Federal Judicial Center, is now available.  It consists of a panel on the Constitution in the Founding Era with Akhil Reed Amar, Christopher Bonner, and Gerald F. Leonard, moderated by Thomas Donnelly, and a discussion on the Constitution and the federal judiciary with Kevin Arlyck, moderated by Julie Silverbrook.  

• Alison L. LaCroix's speech to the University of Chicago's graduates is here.  H/t: JDM. 

• From In Custodia Legis: "A Deep Dive into Library Resources on Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp." -- Part 1 and Part 2.   

• Saul Cornell appears in "The American Experiment," a five-part documentary on the nation’s founding that starts streaming on Netflix on June 24 (Fordham Law).

• Margaret Burnham and Brenda E. Stevenson on opening the federal archives on Civil Rights Cold Cases (AHA Perspectives). 

• "The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law is pleased to announce the 2026–2027 recipients of the Steven M. Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History: Kate Andrias, Olatunde Johnson, William Novak, Alice O’Brien, and Julie Suk."   

• 
  
  "Is the United States on the Road to a New Civil War?" David Blight's lecture to the American Academy in Berlin. 

• Edmarverson A. Santos on Doctrine of Discovery and Colonial Legal Order and Robert J. Miller on The International Law of Colonialism: The Doctrine of Discovery.

• ICYMI: More Gordon Wood tributes (LOA).  250 Years of State Constitutions (SCR). The NJ State Library's exhibit on the state's first constitution (tapinto).  Jesse Wegman discusses James Wilson (Fresh Air).  The University of Pennsylvania Almanac notes Serena Mayeri's receipt of the 2026 James Willard Hurst Book Prize From Law & Society Association.  The lessons of the Harry Raymond car bombing of 1938 for police accountability today (DJ).  When Robert E. Lee's daughter was arrested in a Jim Crow streetcar dispute (Alexandria Brief).

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

Ablavsky on State Criminal Jurisdiction in Indian Country

Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford Law School, has posted State Criminal Jurisdiction in Indian Country: A History, which is forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review:

In Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta (2022), the Supreme Court dismantled the long-standing black-letter principle that states lack criminal jurisdiction in Indian country absent congressional authorization by embracing a revisionist historical account emphasizing inherent state sovereignty. The consequences have been predictable: intense uncertainty and ongoing litigation. Oklahoma’s highest courts, for instance, have repeatedly endorsed inherent state jurisdiction over Native people within Indian country, employing Castro-Huerta to distinguish considerable contrary federal law and precedent.

The challenge, especially given the current history-minded judiciary, is that the claim that states have never asserted inherent criminal jurisdiction over Indian country is too simplistic and easily disproven, making it tempting to toss out the old rules. But the revisionist claim, advanced by some scholars and embraced by Justice Thomas, that states enjoyed expansive criminal jurisdiction, is also wrong. This Article attempts to offer a more rigorous legal history, moving beyond the handful of Supreme Court decisions to survey every identifiable state and federal case on inherent state criminal jurisdiction in Indian country. It depicts four distinct periods: an initial headlong assault on federal authority (1787–1834) ; an era of "great confusion" in which states pressed on the many uncertainties of federal Indian law (1835–1886) ; the jurisdictional chaos of the allotment era (1880s–1930s); and a period of relative statutory stability (1948–2022) that Castro-Huerta has now abruptly terminated. What this history shows above all is contestation—a cat-and-mouse game in which states seized on ambiguities to claim authority, only to be periodically rebuffed by the federal courts. But the mere existence of past conflict does not support broader state jurisdiction in Indian country. Rather, every conventional method of legal and constitutional interpretation undercuts the argument that such jurisdiction was ever meaningfully positive law. There are also strong normative reasons for skepticism, since state claims of authority were rarely motivated by public safety but were instead tools to facilitate Native dispossession and erode tribal self-governance. By recounting these complexities, the Article challenges the current legal instability that threatens the foundations of modern tribal sovereignty.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Via the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA): a recording is now available of the recent webinar on "Indigenous Legal Orders, Legal Pluralism, and the Coloniality of Method Across Comparative Law, International Law, IP, and Trade Governance."

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Library of Congress): "Introducing Chew Heong and Chinese Exclusion: A New Story Map from the Law Library"; "Supporting Art Through Hardships: The Federal Theatre Project." 

• ICYMI:  The lower house of the Rhode Island legislature has unanimously approved a bill to rescind the state's "approval–in May 1861–of a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have permanently protected slavery from federal interference" (Providence Journal).  The Supreme Court’s long history of racial profiling in immigration (SCOTUSblog). The "idea of changing the number of Supreme Court justices is hardly new" (NCC)--just ask Rachel Shelden, who says as much in Made by History (now behind a paywall at the Philadelphia Inquirer).

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

Byrne's "Law in the New Democracy" and Book Launch

On Thursday, July 2, from 6 PM - 7 PM at the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Camperdown, NSW, Paula Jane Byrne speaks about her new book Law in the New Democracy exploring development of a legal system in colonial New South Wales. It is published by ANU press and with the assistance of the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History.  Here is the press's description of the book:

In the 1850s, opposition to the Crown in New South Wales made for unsteady ground for the administration of criminal law. This study of skirmishes between magistrates, constables and the metropolis reveals just how far understandings of law could be stretched and warped by recalcitrant local populations. At Carcoar, the local population entirely controlled how law worked; on the South Coast, ‘the people’ influenced how law intervened in their lives; in the north west of the colony, publicans dominated; on the north coast, violence against First Nations/Aboriginal people was forcibly meshed into the day to day working of the courts. This study shows a ‘frontier’ centred on the coasts and in the minds of legal officials of the metropolis, but elsewhere, some recognition of the Aboriginal polity and an early understanding of Aboriginal rights.

And here is the description of the book launch:

Democracy in the 1850s was felt to be fragile and uncertain. At any moment, the rhetoric of the Legislative Council and Assembly tells us, the rights obtained by the citizenry might be thwarted by the cunning manoeuvres of the English crown.

Such rhetoric would shape how colonial New South Wales viewed criminal law. Across the colony, desultory clerks filled sheets of paper with the words of victims and witnesses, words that would be carried to the metropolis, to the offices of legal officials. Dragging behind these words were the chained prisoners of the colony, eager on their journey to obtain money for a barrister in court.

This discussion examines the traces of such events and the role of the historian of 2026 in interpreting them. It addresses right of reply by Aboriginal people to history making. It questions the idea of a move into lawlessness the further we travel from Sydney and the idea of the frontier.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Katrina Jagodinsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will be addressing the Department ofHistory and School of Law at the University of Oregon on May 19, from 3:30-5:00 on "Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924," based on her Mellon-funded, NSF supported digital initiative on U.S. Law and Race.

• We have two reports of Maggie Blackhawk's discussion at Dartmouth College on May 6 of "the centrality of American colonialism and Native American history to legal understandings of the United States Constitution (The Dartmouth; Dartmouth News).  

• Lucy Salyer, University of New Hampshire, explains Wong Kim Ark and birthright citizenship on NBC News' "Here's the Scoop" (YouTube).

• Rebecca Tushnet's 2025 Nies Lecture on Intellectual Property at Marquette Law School, entitled  “History and Tradition in First Amendment Intellectual Property Cases” is here.

• That symposium over at Balkinization on Stephen Skowronek's The Adaptability Paradox is now complete and is available here.

• More on the litigation over the executive order curtailing the Presidential Records Act: Jonathan Shaub scores the government lawyers who defended the executive order (Lawfare).  The American Historical Association explains a recent hearing in the dispute.  

• Michael C. Blumm, Lewis and Clark Law School, has posted the preface, table of contents, and first chapter of the second edition of his West Nutshell, A Brief American Legal History, which surveys "American legal history from the Colonial Era to the Trump administration, including an extensive chapter on the first six months of the second Trump administration." 

• John O. McGinnis reviews The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History by Mark Peterson (Law & Liberty). 

• ICYMI:  Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery (Salon)

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

Federal History 18

Federal History 18 (2026) has been published.  Here is the TOC:

Editor's Note 

Benjamin Guterman

Roger R. Trask Lecture

“Girl From the North Country”: Pursuing History and Finding Community in the Nation’s Capital
Kristin L. Ahlberg

Articles

Bind Together Whom? The Internal Improvements Debate and Native Dispossession in the Early Republic
James R. Stocker

1870s House Investigations of Bureau Commissioner Oliver O. Howard and the Retreat from Reconstruction
Peter A. Porsche

Woodrow Wilson, American Power, and International Order at the Paris Peace Conference, 1918–1919
Peter Jackson

A Troublesome Reckoning: The Rediscovery of the U.S. Postwar Cover-up of Unit 731 and the Ethical Threat to Democracy
Emily Matson

Patients-in-Chief: The Public History of the President’s Physical Exam
Jacob M. Appel

Interview

An Interview with Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani
Sean T. Byrnes

Law & Constitution Roundtable

The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, by Alison L. LaCroix
Introduction: Gerald Leonard, Boston University
Review: Austin Allen, University of Houston–Downtown
Review: James A. Gardner, University at Buffalo School of Law
Review: Grace Mallon, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford
Review: Gautham Rao, American University
Author’s Response: Alison L. LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School

Reviews in Legal History

Richard Primus, “Sins and Omissions: Slavery and the Bill of Rights”
Terri Diane Halperin

Roger A. Bailey, “‘Intercourse . . . of the Most Friendly Nature’: The U.S. Navy, State Power, and William Walker’s Invasion of Mexico,     1853–1854”
Stephen J. Rockwell

Anna O. Law, “The Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments’ Effects on Citizenship and Migration”
Kelly Marino

Andrea Scoseria Katz, “A Regime of Statutes: Building the Modern President in Gilded Age America (1873–1921)”
Benjamin Guterman    

Benjamin Wetzel, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Unionist Memory of the Civil War: Experience, History, and Politics, 1861–1918”
Evan C. Rothera

Hardeep Dhillon. “The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law”
Amelia Flood

Kathryn E. Kovacs. “From Presidential Administration to Bureaucratic Dictatorship” 
Lisa K. Parshall

--Dan Ernst

Allread, "Indigenous Constitutionalism"

The Harvard Law Review has published "Indigenous Constitutionalism," by Tanner Allread (University of California, Los Angeles). The abstract:

By standard accounts, there are fifty-four constitutions across the federal, state, and territorial governments of the United States. But in fact, there are 230 other governmental constitutions that currently govern peoples and territories within the United States. These constitutions not only flow from a sovereignty that existed prior to the United States but also came out of a legal movement that asserted its independence from both the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions.

This Article tells the story of these constitutions — the constitutions of Native nations. Having existed for over two centuries with an archive of thousands of constitutional documents and amendments, tribal constitutions have been left out of the narratives of American constitutional history while being obscured within the fields of American constitutional law and federal Indian law. This Article corrects these oversights and calls for the recognition of a tradition of “Indigenous constitutionalism” in the United States.

This Article’s aims are both theoretical and historical. On one hand, it conceptualizes Indigenous constitutionalism as a distinct and shared constitutional practice through which Native nations claim and exercise self-governance while embedded in the wider constitutional — and colonial — landscape of the United States. On the other hand, this Article draws Indigenous constitutionalism’s features from the two-hundred-year history of tribal constitutions. It explores, for the first time, three major eras of tribal constitutional development: the first constitutions during the early nineteenth-century period of Indian Removal, the explosion of constitutions under the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, and the movement for tribal constitutional reform that has stretched from the late twentieth century to today.

But this Article also brings theory and history together to rethink the prevalent narratives surrounding tribal law, federal Indian law, and American constitutionalism. Indigenous constitutionalism reveals the fundamental and persistent questions around which a tribal constitutional law framework can be constructed. It also revises the origin stories of federal Indian law, demonstrating that the field did not coalesce in isolation from tribal law but was actually cocreated with tribal constitutions. Finally, by placing tribal constitutions into conversation with other American charters, Indigenous constitutionalism disrupts and expands the category of constitutionalism itself. This Article demonstrates that tribal constitutions — unique among American constitutions — showcase how these documents can appear in many forms, function as external-facing declarations of sovereignty, and exist alongside other forms of fundamental law. 

Read on here (or at SSRN). 

-- Karen Tani 

 

New Resource: The Supreme Court Indian Law Database

[The following is an invited guest post by Keith Richotte, Jr. (Director, Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program, and Professor of Law, University of Arizona), introducing The Supreme Court Indian Law Database.]

A critical new resource for scholars of the Supreme Court and Native America is now available: The Supreme Court Indian Law Database. Recently launched, this website offers a number of important features.

• It identifies every Indian law case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court (680 and counting). Listed chronologically, the list has a search function to allow a researcher to find a particular cases or cases easily 

• It places each case in one or more categories for identification and comparison. The site has forty-three categories, including plenary power, criminal jurisdiction, treaties, and many others 

•  It lists every justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and their participation in the cases on the list. It also identifies how the justice voted and if they wrote in a particular case 

•  The pages for each individual case identifies the other cases on the list that it cites and the cases where it has been cited. For example, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia cites three cases and has been cited forty-eight times 

In the future additional search functions will be added to the site. Once running a researcher will be able to easily identify cases decided between a certain date range, or cases that fall under the same four categories, or find out which three justices participated in the same cases or any combination of all three of these things and more.

 

In addition, there is room for debate for what counts as an Indian law case or for which category a particular case belongs. While acknowledging this certain subjectivity, quite a bit of thought and care went into curating the list. If you have questions about the list or would like to know how it was crafted please visit the methodology page.

 

Finally, while a lot of thought and care has been put into the list and the website, it is still very new and there is always room for improvement. To that end, if you have any constructive feedback you would like to share please send it to Keith Richotte, the curator of the site and Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. His email address is at the bottom of the main page.

 

The hope is that this website will be a valuable resource for practitioners, scholars, students, tribal nations and peoples, and anyone else with an interest in Native America and a desire to see Indigenous peoples thrive. Thank you and happy searching on SCILDB.com!

Kohtz on a Successful Challenge to an Indian Boarding School

Rong Kohtz, a historically minded attorney-at-law, has posted In re Lelah-Puc-Ka-Chee: A Case Study on the Americanization of Law in the Heartland, 1898-1908:

Lelah Puc-Ka-Chee (SHSI via Wiki)

From 1899 to 1908 in Iowa, the Meskwaki people and their local allies repeatedly defeated forcible removal of their children to a federal Indian boarding school in a series of legal actions during the zenith of hostile assimilation.  The case of Lelah-Puc-Ka-Chee was the first one of these cases.  The Meskwaki’s legal victory unsettles the prevailing historical account that casts Indigenous peoples as passive and reactionary to the U.S.’s assimilationist Indian policies and calls for re-examination of Indigenous Americans’ role in the evolution of American law.  By examining the power dynamics in the cases regarding Lelah-Puc-Ka-Chee, this essay investigates how far was the reach of the colonial administrative and judicial powers in the lives of Indigenous families and individuals, and what forces accelerated, slowed, or redirected the colonial powers in the domestic sphere at the local level.  In this exploration, the essay finds powerful Indigenous forces in the Americanization of law, and Indigenous Americans role as progenitors of a pluralistic American polity. 

--Dan Ernst

Law's "Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship"

The official date is still about a week hence, but because the book is already getting noticed in social media, we’ll note now the imminent publication of Anna O. Law’s Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press):

Since the late nineteenth century, the US federal government has enjoyed exclusive authority to decide whether someone has the ability to enter and stay in US territory. But freedom of movement was not guaranteed in the British colonies or early US. By contrast, voluntary migrants were met with strict laws and policies created by colonies and states, which denied free mobility and settlement in their territories to unwanted populations.

Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship presents a story of constitutional development that traces the confluence of the logics of slavery and settler colonialism in early legal rulings and public policy about migration and citizenship. The book examines the division of labor between the national and state governments that endured for over a century, reasons why that arrangement changed in the late nineteenth century, and what the transformation meant for people subject to those regimes of control. Drawing into one study the migration policy histories of groups of people that are usually studied separately, and combining the methodologies of political science, history, and law, Anna O. Law reveals the unmistakable effects of slavery and Native American dispossession in modern US immigration policy.

--Dan Ernst 

Karl Llewellyn Archive at the Perelman Centre in Brussels

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE.  H/t: DS]

The Twining-Llewellyn Fund is a unique collection of several hundred documents and works collected by William Twining (1934-2025) over the course of his career. The collection is housed at the Perelman Centre in Brussels. A significant portion of these documents illuminate the life and work of Karl N. Llewellyn. The documents in the archive, sometimes original, often commented on by Twining, date from the 1910s to the 1960s. The collection contains the bulk of Llewellyn’s publications, the transcription of several dozen unpublished works and some of his lecture notes. Researchers will also be able to read many of his personal and professional letters, as well as dozens of documents related to his research and the development of the UCC. The archive is open to the public and can be consulted by researchers.  The full catalogue of the Llewellyn archive can be accessed here.

[The main body of Llewellyn's papers are at the University of Chicago, but this is an impressive collection, particularly for as a comprehensive bibliography of Llewellyn's writings, published and unpublished.]

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Ely Samuel Parker, seated at left (LC)

  Ely Samuel Parker, "a member of the Senecans," was admitted to the New York State Bar, 176 years after being denied entry on account of his race  (NYT).  

• John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) has published an editorial in the New York Times: "The Idea That Once Held America Together Died in 2025." (The idea: procedural fairness/regularity.)

• Samuel Bray summarizes his and Drew Keane's book chapter, "Of Canon Law and Kings: The Legal Thought of James Ussher (1581-1656)" (Divided Argument).   

• "The American Historical Association (AHA), in collaboration with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), has filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard University’s lawsuit against the federal government over the university’s ability to host foreign scholars and students." Link. 

• Theda Skocpol in conversation with Edwin Amenta (Sociologica). 

• An impressive lineup of historical talks at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research. 

• Lawbook Exchange's  December 2025 (Part II) catalog of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: Damon Root on Mercy Otis Warren, "the Founding Mother Who Opposed the Constitution" (Reason).  Adam Serwer thinks "Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back" (The Atlantic).

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

Connolly's "Vested Interests"

Emilie Connolly, Brandeis University, has published Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States (Princeton University Press):

From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. In Vested Interests, Emilie Connolly describes how a system of “fiduciary colonialism” seized a continent from its original inhabitants—and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations.

Connolly documents two centuries of dispossession in the guise of fiduciary benevolence. Acting as both dispossessor and trustee, the federal government invested Native wealth in state bonds that financed banks, canals, and other infrastructural projects that enabled the country to expand further westward. Meanwhile, Native peoples protected the money they did receive for future generations, investing it in their own institutions and mounting legal challenges to hold their trustees accountable. Still, federal trusteeship placed tight constraints on Native economies with the aim of containing Native power, forcing nations to endure through sheer resilience and ingenuity. By chronicling the long history of Native land dispossession through financial paternalism, Vested Interests reveals the unequal dividends of colonialism in the United States.

--Dan Ernst 

Saunders on a 1941 Decision of the Treaty of Waitangi

Katherine Sanders, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, has posted “The King in all his cabinets”: Crown and Empire in Te Heuheu Tukino v Aotea District Maori Land Board:

The report of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Te Heuheu Tukino v Aotea District Maori Land Board [1941] NZLR 590 is today well-known for the finding that rights under the Treaty of Waitangi have no effect in New Zealand law, save where they are incorporated by legislation. This article asks what Te Heuheu and his supporters hoped to achieve in the litigation, and considers ideas of Crown and empire underpinning that strategy. It argues that debates about the legal and constitutional status of the Treaty were framed by the politics of the 1940 centennial of its signing. The article concludes by characterising “The Memorial of the Maori People of New Zealand to the Privy Council”, He Pukapuka Whakamaharatanga, as a means of marking the history of the Treaty and its breach at the Centennial. It argues that the Memorial served both to highlight injustice, and to reassert a vision of a political order in which the promises of the Treaty would be fulfilled.

--Dan Ernst 

Smith and McLay on Indigenous Law in NZ Courts

Antonia Smith and Geoff McLay, Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka Faculty of Law, have posted Hiding in Plain Sight: The Lost Tikanga Authorities, which appears in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review (2025)

The role of tikanga Maori within the law of Aotearoa New Zealand is the central issue facing the contemporary legal system. However, there are few historical authorities on the interaction between common law and tikanga currently in circulation. The aim of this article is to report the existence of a large body of historical cases in which tikanga-based arguments were pleaded before the courts. In many of these cases, tikanga was rejected. In some, the very existence of Maori law was denied. However, in a multitude of cases, over a wide array of legal areas, "native custom" was accepted as relevant and integrated in various ways into judgments and rulings. This article considers Reynolds v Tuangau, recently discussed in a Supreme Court judgment, as well as three other examples of such cases, picked from a pool collected as part of wider historical study. None of the cases discussed, nor any others found so far, provide an easy answer to the tikanga project. Instead, together they present New Zealand's early legal system as complex and shifting, featuring a variety of approaches to tikanga. The large majority of these cases, some of which were included in official law reports, have gone unnoticed since their adjudication. In this way they have been "hiding in plain sight". Uncovering and studying these historical authorities is an important task in terms both the history and law of Aotearoa New Zealand. 

--Dan Ernst

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

September 27, 2025  | 10 AM - 3 PM (CST)
Notre Dame Law School | Chicago, IL

Registration/Welcome, 09:45 - 10:05 AM
Coffee & Morning Refreshments

Paper #1: Property Law and Indian Removal, 10:05 - 11:00 AM

"Indigenous Incendiaries: Forest Fires, Arson Law, and Ute Removal in 1870s Colorado"

Author:     Jacquelyn M. Davila, Yale University 
Respondent:    M. Todd Henderson, University of Chicago Law School

Paper #2: Colonization and Property Law, 11:05 - 12:00 PM

"Property Law as Colonial Forerunner"

Author:     Nathan Lee, New York University 
Respondent:    Nadav Shoked, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Afternoon Break (Lunch), 12:05 - 1:00 PM

Paper #3: International Taxation, 01:05 - 2:00 PM

"Southern African Mining and the Modern Formation of Offshore Finance, 1860 - 1925"

Author:     Simon Rakei, University of Michigan
Respondent:    Ajay K. Mehrotra, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Paper #4: The Common Law and the Fourth Amendment, 02:05 - 3:00 PM

"What is a House? Investigating the Meaning of Curtilage at Common Law" 

Author:     Mitchell Del Bianco, University of Virginia 
Respondent:    R. H. Helmholz, University of Chicago Law School

Native Peoples, American Colonialism, and the US Constitution

[We have the following announcement from the Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History at the New York Historical, which is not to be confused with the  Institute for Constitutional Studies at the George Washington University Law School.  DRE.]

The Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is pleased to announce its fall 2025 seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty, Native Peoples, American Colonialism, and the US Constitution. 

Description.  As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this seminar invites a critical examination of a central paradox in American constitutional history: how can a nation celebrate a founding document and constitutional tradition built, in part, on the dispossession of Indigenous homelands? 

From the Founders’ long-standing relationships with Native nations to the grievances lodged regarding ‘merciless Indian savages’ into the Declaration, Indian affairs and westward expansion were foundational to the creation and evolution of the US Constitution.  The Northwest Ordinance laid the “blueprint for empire” for federal imperial expansion from thirteen states clinging to the Eastern seaboard to a nation that stretched “from sea to shining sea,” while the United States Constitution excluded “Indians not taxed” from American polity—in so doing, also codifying the specific subordination of a people by name within constitutional text. 

Despite this deep entanglement, Native history remains marginalized within the fields of constitutional history and mainstream constitutional scholarship.  This seminar explores emerging historical and legal literature that re-centers Native peoples and American colonialism in the narrative of US constitutional development.  Topics include the role of Native peoples and “Indian affairs” in the Constitution’s initial drafting and ratification and the legal architecture of colonial expansion.  The seminar will also explore how centering Native peoples allows for a rethinking of United States constitutional history and American public law more broadly.

Logistics.  The seminar meets at the New York Historical, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024, and via Zoom,* on the following dates:

    Friday, November 7, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET
    Friday, November 21, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET
    Friday, December 5, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET
    Friday, December 12, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET

*Although we encourage students to attend the class in person, livestream participation will be offered to admitted students who do not live in the New York Metropolitan Area or who are unable to attend a class in person. If you are interested in attending some or all of the class sessions virtually, please indicate this in your application statement.

Accepted students will receive further instructions and the classroom location within The New York Historical.  There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own.

Instructors.  Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is a professor of law at NYU whose work explores the relationship between law and power, with a focus on how subordinated peoples leverage legal tools—often beyond rights and courts—to shift power to their communities.  Her scholarship appears in leading journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Supreme Court Review, American Historical Review, Journal of Politics, among others.  Her recent projects, including the Foreword The Constitution of American Colonialism, investigate how the American colonial project, including the resistance and advocacy of Native and other colonized peoples, shaped U.S. constitutional law and history.  She is currently at work on two book projects that examine American colonialism, the field of “colonial administration,” and its boomerang effects.

Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Band of Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History at Yale University.  He is a historian of Native America and federal Indian law, as well as a scholar of violence and state formation, particularly in the American West.  He is the author of several books and/or co-edited works, including the recent Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, which took home the National Book Award, among numerous other prizes.  His recent writings can be found in The Boston Globe and The Atlantic (forthcoming), and draw upon his current research on the American Revolution and the many challenges that it brought to Native American communities in the 18th-century world.

Application Process.  The seminar is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. All participants will be expected to complete the assigned readings and participate in seminar discussions. Although the Institute cannot offer academic credit directly for the seminar, students may be able to earn graduate credit through their home departments by completing an independent research project in conjunction with the seminar. Please consult with your advisor and/or director of graduate studies about these possibilities.

Space is limited. To apply, please submit the following material to ich@nyhistory.org by October 10, 2025: (1) Your C.V.; and (2) a short statement on how this seminar will be useful to you in your research, teaching, or professional development.

Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter. For further information, please email Andrew Fletcher at ich@nyhistory.org.

Weekend Roundup

• On the Amicus podcast: Who Gets Left Out of Originalism? with Mark Joseph Stern, Maggie Blackhawk, and Greg Ablavksy.  A machine-generated, unedited transcript is here.  

• Carl Wilén, Lund University, will deliver The Haitian Revolution and the Concept of the Legal Form: Capitalism, Slavery and the Universality Paradigm in the Distinguished Speaker series of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo Law School on October 3 from 12:30 to 2p.m with a noon reception.  Zoom registration here.

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  The Georgia Historical Society has announced its program for the 250 anniversary of the founding, Restoring Trust in American Institutions: History and the Foundations of American Democracy (Saporta Report).   
  

• First 125 Years of AALS: a "coffee table book" on the Association of American Law Schools (ABA Journal).

• Adam Cox, NYU Law, "contests the origins of 'immigration exceptionalism,' the doctrine holding that the political branches of government exercise extraordinary discretion over immigration policy, subject only to limited oversight from the courts" (Regulatory Review).

•  In United States ex rel Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates, LLC, James Pfander, Diego Zambrano, and Jared Lucky submitted an amicus brief “to correct the district court’s misstatement of the historical record and mischaracterization of their work" on qui tam proceedings at the Founding (JD Supra).   

• "The American Constitution Society’s Chicago Lawyer Chapter has named Geoffrey R. Stone, '71, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, as the inaugural recipient of the Geoffrey R. Stone Award, established in his honor" (Chicago Law). 

• Leah Litman speaks with Richard Primus about his book, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Strict Scrutiny). 

• Balkinization Symposiums--A Continuing List 

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  ICYMI: Jamelle Bouie asks, What if Dred Scott Had Been Decided Correctly? (NYT). LHB Founder Mary Dudziak on the Trump Administration's takeover of the DC National Guard and police (CSM).  A review of Jere Nash's Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877 (Clarion Ledger). 

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