Brodin on the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights

Mark S. Brodin, Boston College Law School, has posted The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice Turns Fifty—A Retrospective, which is forthcoming in the Massachusetts Law Review:

The year 1968 was one of the most tumultuous, and consequential, in the history of our Republic. Auspiciously, 1968 also witnessed the launch in Boston of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Months before his assassination, in June 1963, President John F. Kennedy convened a meeting at the White House of two-hundred and forty-four of the nation’s leading lawyers to urge them to become involved in what had emerged as a moral and legal civil rights crisis—defiant southern governors blocking the entry of black students to state universities, sheriffs brutally putting down non-violent protests with howling police dogs and firehoses, bombings of black churches, and pitiless beatings of Freedom Riders. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was formed in response, with the design of activating the pro bono resources of the private bar in the struggle for racial equality and justice.

--Dan Ernst

Gordon on Lawyers and Access to Justice in the United States

The Winter 2019 issue of Dædalus is devoted to Access to Justice.  One of its (open access) contributions is Lawyers, the Legal Profession & Access to Justice in the United States: A Brief History, by Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School:

Ideally, justice is a universal good: the law protects equally the rights of the rich and powerful, the poor and marginal. In reality, the major share of legal services goes to business entities and wealthy people and the prestige and prosperity to the lawyers who serve them. This essay deals with the history of access to justice – chiefly civil justice – and with the role of lawyers and organized legal professions in promoting and restricting that access. In the last century, legal professionals and others have taken small steps to provide access to legal processes and legal advice to people who could not otherwise afford them. By doing so, they have inched closer to the ideals of universal justice. Though the organized bar has repeatedly served its own interests before those of the public, and has restricted access to justice for the poor, it has been a relatively constructive force.

H/t: Harvard Law Today

ASLH @ AHA 2019

As an affiliated association, the American Society of Legal History may lay claim to two slots on the program of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.  For the AHA meeting in January 2019, the ASLH finally has, with panels intended to showcase more junior legal historians.  I'm pleased to be, with Serena Mayeri, one of two chair/commentators for the panels.  Credit for organizing the panels goes to Malick Ghachem, MIT.

New Directions in American Legal History, Part 1
Saturday, January 5, 2019: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Hilton Chicago, Stevens C-2

Chair: Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania

Papers:
Emancipation with neither Courts nor Constitution: The Remarkable Case of Revolutionary Massachusetts
Gloria Whiting, University of Wisconsin–Madison

The Making of Modern Law: Digital Computation and Anglo-American Legal History
Kellen Funk, Columbia University

Storehouse of the Industry of the Nation: Fire and Federalism in the Age of Jackson
Jane Manners, New-York Historical Society

Comment: Daniel Ernst, Georgetown University

New Directions in American Legal History, Part 2
Saturday, January 5, 2019: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Hilton Chicago, Stevens C-2

Chair: Daniel Ernst, Georgetown University

Papers:
Racial Discounting and Self-Help: Blacks, Americanization, and the Early 20th-Century Legal Aid Movement
Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Columbia University

Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights
Scott De Orio, Northwestern University

Arrestable Women: Sexual Policing and the Making of Law and Order America
Anne Gray Fischer, Indiana University

Comment: Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania

Sunday Book Roundup

Having taken last week off, there's a long list of book reviews to cover this week.

From H-Net, we've already noted Sara Mayeux's review of Felice Batlan's Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945 (Cambridge University Press).

Also up on H-Net is a review of the volume, The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes, edited by Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband, and Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press).

Jennifer Thigpen's Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai'i's Pacific World (UNC Press) is reviewed here.

And, Vincent J. Intondi's African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press), is also reviewed.

From Salon comes an excerpt of Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law by David Cole (Basic). A review of the book is in The Washington Post, too. From the excerpt:

"There  is no precise way to measure the effects of these wide-ranging efforts. But nearly all of the advocates, lawyers, and activists with whom I spoke agreed that each of the developments summarized here provided an important foundation for the marriage equality campaign. They helped make it possible for Evan Wolfson to write his law school paper, and for the many initiatives that would be necessary, inside and outside of courts, before the right to marriage equality that Wolfson envisioned could be realized."

Also from Salon is a review of Adam Cohen's Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin). There's also a review of Cohen's book in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A third contribution from Salon is an excerpt from Adultery: Infidelity and the Law by Deborah Rhode (Harvard University Press).

"This is in keeping with public attitudes. Only a third of Americans believe that adultery should be a crime. Given these views, it is somewhat surprising that so many statutes remain on the books and that several have survived recent attempts at repeal. No one thinks the fight to preserve these statutes has much practical significance: the issue is symbolic. As Thurman W. Arnold observed three-quarters of a century ago, “Most unenforced criminal laws survive in order to satisfy moral objections to our established modes of conduct. They are unenforced because we want to continue our conduct, and unrepealed because we want to preserve our morals.”"

Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders by Brady Carlson (Norton & Co.) is reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

HNN has a review of Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic).

"The 2016 annual meeting for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) will feature a session focusing upon the provocative book One Nation Under God by Princeton history professor Keven M. Kruse. In One Nation Under God, Kruse argues that the idea of the United States as a Christian nation does not find its origins with the founding of the United States or the writing of the Constitution. Rather, the notion of America as specifically consecrated by God to be a beacon for liberty was the work of corporate and religious figures opposed to New Deal statism and interference with free enterprise."

Larry Cuban's Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools (Harvard Education Press) is also reviewed on HNN.

The New Books Network has posted two interviews since the last roundup: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal discusses Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press), and Daniel K. Williams discusses Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press).

The New York Times has a review of The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise by David K. Randall (Norton & Co.).

Last but not least, the latest issue of The Federal Lawyer is out, with reviews of Roger Lowenstein's America's Bank: The Epic Struggle To Create the Federal Reserve (Penguin), Jeffrey Amestoy's Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Harvard University Press), and Dina Gold's Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice as Krausenstrasse 17/18 Berlin (ABA Publishing). All reviews can be found here.