Weekend Roundup

• 

  William Howard Taft (LC)

  Andrea Scoseria Katz on "Taft at the Beach: What the Supreme Court Misses About a Key Unitary Executive Precedent" (Can We Still Govern?) 

• Michael Dreeben looks back at Humphrey's Executor (Just Security). 

• Martha Jones's illustrated story in the New York Times Magazine on Elizabeth Freeman, who sued for her own freedom, is here. 

• That Modern Criminal Law Review workshop, "Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective," may be viewed here and just heard here.  

• A notice of the "Slavery and the Judiciary Collection" of the Law Library of Congress, which "provides digital access to more than one hundred books and manuscripts documenting issues related to slavery and the courts from 1740 to 1860." Also from the hardworking law librarians of Congress: "Code and Policy in Action: Shared Legislative Targets Between the Yurok and Other Sovereign Entities," and Nathan Dorn, Rare Books Curator, continues his series of posts on Anglo-American natural law theorists with "A Textbook for the Laws of Nature’s God: Thomas Rutherforth’s Institutes."

• On July 16, 2026 at 2:00 PM ET, the Foreign and Comparative Law Webinar Series of the Law Librart of Congress will host the webinar Colonialisation, i, and an Unwritten Constitution: Understanding Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Legal System, presented by visiting scholar, librarian, and American Association of Law Libraries Schaffer Grant recipient, Theresa Buller, who is the subject librarian for law and criminal justice at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.

• A notice of "Myths and Misunderstandings in Modern Irish History," by Patrick Geoghegan, the 2026 Hardiman lecture at the Supreme Court (Law Society Gazette). 

• A Q&A with Hadar Aviram's Behind Ancient Bars: Narratives of Incarceration in the Hebrew Bible (University of California Press) (UC SF Law). 

• Michael Dorf asks What Weight, If Any, Should Be Given Racist Laws In A History-and-Tradition Test? (Dorf on Law.)

• Nineteenth-Century NY Law and Birthright Citizenship: New York v. Miln (1837) (New York Almanack).  

• A notice of Stacey Patton's Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press, 2026) (New York Almanack).

• "Reflecting on America’s 250th anniversary: Revolution, the Constitution, and the founders" in the Princeton University Press's list (PUP).  And, while we're at it, Princeton University and the Revolution.  

• Lawbook Exchange's June 2026 list in Scholarly Law and Legal History.   

• State Constitution Roundup: What made Pennsylvania's first ever constitution so radical that it only lasted 14 years?  (WHYY).  1776 NC Constitution exhibit [is] part of ‘Capitol 250’ July 4 fest (Coastal Review).  Bayard v. Singleton: Judicial review’s NC origins (Carolina Journal).  The Hawaii Constitution (State Court Report). 

• ICYMI: HIAS's illustrated history of US immigration (HIAS).  Eugene V. Debs, Constitutional Voice (NCC).  An appreciation of Raphael Lemkin, "the author of the concept of genocide" (UJE).  Benjamin Perry and the fight against secession (Greenville Journal). 

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

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

Weekend Roundup

• "From Red Lights to Legal Rights": a notice of a book on the recent history of sex work in New Zealand by  Cheryl Ware (University of Auckland). 

• The New York Historical's lecture series in Bryant Park include talks by Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Martha C. Jones, Marcus Rediker, and Victor Luckerson (on the Tulsa Race Massacre).  

• The American Historical Association will hold a Congressional briefing offering on the United States Senate on Thursday July 24, at 10:00 a.m. ET in Dirksen Senate Office Building Room G-11 with Joseph Crespino, Joanne Freeman, and Daniel Holt.  
   
• An issue of the AHA Perspectives takes up history in the US national parks, including the censorship of LGBTQ+ History and what the Scopes trial tells us about "school opt-outs" tday.  

• "There is No Original Public Meaning of Imprecise Constitutional Text": Eric Segall's tribute to the late Richard H. Fallon, Jr. (Dorf on Law). 

• 

  Robert M. La Follette (LC)

  Time's Made by History:  Anna O. Law on Birthright Citizenship. Nancy Unger on Fighting Bob La Follette's progressivism.  Antonio Ramirez on investigating Florida's convict labor in the 1920s.    

• ICYMI:  Daniel Tichenor on the long shadow of the McCarran-Walter Act (Conversation).  Bruce Dearstyne on John Jay’s Early Leadership in the Revolutionary Era (New York Almanack). Sharon L. Kennedy, Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, on the Northwest Ordinance and Its Legacy (Court News Ohio).

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

Keyes on the Evolution of Legislative Drafting

John Mark Keyes, University of Ottawa, has posted Evolution of Legislative Drafting Style in English:

This paper reviews the evolution of legislative drafting style in English beginning in the Middle Ages in England through to modern reforms adopted by the national drafting offices of Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It concludes there is remarkable similarity in the styles adopted by these offices with the exception of some of the more debatable techniques proposed to enhance the readability of legislation.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Ajay K. Mehrotra reviews Dylan C. Penningroth's Before the Movement in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• A notice of the Legal History Consortium at Penn, led by LHB Blogger Karen Tani, with due credit given to Past ASLH President Susan Barringer Gordon, who was Professor Tani's predecessor as director of the consortium.  Also Professor Tani is among those faculty quoted by the Daily Pennsylvanian on teaching during Trump 2.0.  DRE 
  

• The Reed Gallery of the Dunedin Public Library has mounted an online exhibition of its Mary Downie Stewart Collection, a collection of portraits and autographed specimens of New Zealand judges, some of whom I discussed in this.  H/t: MW.  DRE

• A recording of that Tenement Museum-sponsored conversation, Receiving The Irish: The Origins of American Immigration Policy, with Hidetaka Hirota and Kevin Kenny. 
  

• The April 2025 issue of the Newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is now available here.  It includes a summary of the recently opened oral history of Judith Areen.

• Brian Leiter reports on the Oxford University Press's current policy on review copies (Leiter Reports).
  

• 
  We've heard that the movie option for Victoria Saker Woeste's Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech has been picked up and look forward to seeing it on the big screen.

• Lawbook Exchange's April catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History.

• Made by History, via Time Magazine: Michelle Bezark on What the Children’s Bureau Teaches us About Promoting Federal Programs.  Brendan A. Shanahan says that A Century-Long Battle Over the Census is Brewing.  Jeanne Theoharis on How Newspapers Struggled to Cover Martin Luther King Jr. and Segregation in the North.  Hidetaka Hirota on The Long American Tradition of Categorizing Immigrants as Either Good or Bad.

• ICYMI: Lorianne Updike Schulzke makes an originalist case against overturning Humphrey's Executor (Volokh Conspiracy).  Mark Tushnet on why he signed the HLS faculty's letter to their students (Balkinization).  Andrew Wender Cohen on the history of tariffs (PBS). The lesson of Loving for the Roberts Court (Minnesota Star Tribune). A Short Course in Justice: the Freedmen’s Bureau Courts (JSTOR Daily).  Ellen Schrecker says that the current assault on the university is worse than McCarthyism (The Nation).

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

Sanders on NZ Judges' Extrajudicial Activity

Katherine Sanders, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, has posted Away from the Familiar: Judges in Public Debate and as Commissioners, which appeared in Challenge and Change: Judging in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by John Burrows and Jeremy Finn:

This chapter aims to act as a starting point for discussion of the New Zealand judiciary acting "away from the familiar" by introducing some historical examples of judges "speaking out" off the bench and serving as commissioners. Given the breadth of this topic, the chapter makes no claim to be a comprehensive survey of judicial engagement in public debate, or of judicial service on commissions of inquiry. Rather, it asks how the judiciary has negotiated the challenges of acting away from the familiar, and examines how norms regarding judicial conduct relate to constitutional values and social change. The examples explored have been chosen because they enable inquiry into these questions.

--Dan Ernst

Stanley-Ryan on Maori History and International Law

Ash Stanley-Ryan has posted Ka mua, ka Muri: He Whakaputanga, Concealed Indigenous Histories, and the Making of International Law, which is forthcoming in Law&History, the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Legal History Society:

He Whakaputanga

This article examines how our understanding of international law is harmed by the systematic erasure of indigenous experiences and histories. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatira o Nu Tireni is used as a case study. The article first considers several methodological considerations for legal historians. A theoretical approach is constructed which centres Maori voices and Te Reo Maori, and accepts that history is both political and contingent. In the next section, two parallel histories are detailed: pakeha stories of he whakaputanga as act to secure Imperial interests; and Maori recollections of he whakaputanga as an affirmation of independence, in response to an ever-more-intrusive world. The two histories are then considered through the lenses of jurisdictional encounter and international legal reproduction. These lenses show how history and law have undertaken a demarcating exercise, concealing Maori histories and removing he whakaputanga from legal relevance. This process has harmed international law, because it legitimises imperialism and hides law’s contingent nature. The article closes by recalling Moana Jackson’s call for ‘honesty about the misremembered stories and the foresight to see where different stories might lead’.

--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.

Studies in the History of Tax Law

New from Hart Publishing: Studies in the History of Tax Law, Volume 11, edited by Peter Harris and Dominic de Cogan:

This book is a continuation of the prestigious series which is drawn from the papers of the biennial Cambridge Tax Law History Conference. The authors are a mix of academics and senior tax professionals from the judiciary and practice with representatives from 9 countries. The series continues to investigate current tax policy debates in an historical context. The papers fall within three basic categories:

1.  UK and Irish tax, looking at a variety of topics such as tax administration, cases and judges (Whitney, Singer, Viscount Radcliffe), the taxation of royal forests, the taxation of spirits, and income tax transition in the Irish Free State; 

2.  International taxation, with chapters on the role of international organisations (OECD, League of Nations) and on South Africa's early attempts to address double taxation (tax treaties); and 

3.  Non-UK tax systems, including chapters on the legacy of colonial influence (Dutch East Indies), early developments in China, New Zealand, and the USA, an influential Canadian report (Carter Commission), development of the GAAR in Scandanavia, and the receipt of Roman tax law in Europe.

--Dan Ernst.  Table of Contents after the jump.

Essays on Nationality, Law and Belonging in Australia and New Zealand

We have word of the publication of Subjects and Aliens: Histories of Nationality, Law and Belonging in Australia and New Zealand, edited by Kate Bagnall and Peter Prince  (ANU Press 2023):

Subjects and Aliens confronts the problematic history of belonging in Australia and New Zealand. In both countries, race has often been more important than the law in determining who is considered ‘one of us’.

Each chapter in the collection highlights the lived experiences of people who negotiated laws and policies relating to nationality and citizenship rights in twentieth-century Australasia, including Chinese Australians enlisting during the First World War, Dalmatian gum-diggers turned farmers in New Zealand, Indians in 1920s Australia arguing for their citizenship rights, and Australian women who lost their nationality after marrying non-British subjects.

The book also considers how the legal belonging—and accompanying rights and protections—of First Nations people has been denied, despite the High Court of Australia’s recent assertion (in the landmark Love & Thoms case of 2020) that Aboriginal people have never been considered ‘aliens’ or ‘foreigners’ since 1788. The experiences of world-famous artist Albert Namatjira, and of those made to apply for ‘certificates of citizenship’ under Western Australian law, suggest otherwise.

Subjects and Aliens demonstrates how people who legally belonged were denied rights and protections as citizens through the actions of those who created, administered and interpreted the law across the twentieth century, and how the legal ramifications of those actions can still be felt today.

TOC after the jump.

–Dan Ernst

CFP: ANZLHS Conference

[The website for the 42nd Annual Conference of the ANZLHS is now online.  Here's the CFP.  DRE]

The Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society invites abstract submissions for its 42nd Annual Conference. Personal attendance is warmly encouraged, but an online component will be available.  The theme for 2023 is Intersectionality and Legal Identities.  Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be accompanied by a brief statement of the author's academic affiliation and/or CV. Please submit abstracts via email: anzlhs2023@usq.edu.au

Abstracts should be submitted by 15 August 2023, and notification of acceptance will be sent in late September.  A PDF of the Call for Papers is available for download and circulation here. Conference registration details will be available via the 2023 ANZLHS Annual Conference website in the coming months.

Littlewood on Public Nuisance, Tax Avoidance, and George Grey in 19th-C New Zealand

Michael Littlewood, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, has posted three papers on nineteenth-century New Zealand.  The first is a short paper, Public Nuisance in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1849.  It “examines the Constabulary Force Ordinance enacted by the legislature of the New Zealand Province of New Munster in 1849" for its revelations into the everyday life of the time.  A second paper, Nothing New under the Sun: Tax Avoidance in Otago in 1856, reports on a tax on river crossings.  The third Sir George Grey’s Machiavellian Constitutional and Fiscal Reforms in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1845–1876:

Sir George Grey (wiki)

This paper examines the evolution of the New Zealand tax system from 1845 to 1876. The key to this period is the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 (UK), which was devised by the Governor, Sir George Grey, and which divided the Colony into six provinces. There were hardly any roads, so allowing isolated settler communities a degree of autonomy made obvious sense. Grey’s more sinister aim, however, was to retain control of the purse-strings and thus dictate policy generally. In this he was markedly successful: the Act gave the Governor tight control over the Colony’s two main sources of revenue (land sales and customs duties) and also over the military (which he used to confiscate Maori land). The provinces were free to build and operate roads, wharves, railways, schools, hospitals and so on — but they had to either persuade the Governor to supply funding or pay for them themselves.

Twenty years later the difficulties of communication had been largely solved and the Colonial Government, spectacularly insolvent prior to Grey’s arrival, was financially secure. The provinces had served their purpose and in 1876 they were abolished. Since then, New Zealand has had one of the most centralised systems of government and taxation in the world, and the Maori people are still suffering from the catastrophic loss of their land.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Saul Cornell, Fordham Law, has a substantial post, Originalism's Historical Problems: The Supreme Court's Embrace of a Controversial Theory, over at Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.  He also appears on the Supreme Myths podcast to discuss "the history of the Second Amendment, Originalism in general, and the Court’s creation of an anti-Constitution."
  

• Who Owns A Photo of Your Face? The Right to Privacy & The Courts, a session in the New York State Archives Partnership Trust’s Speaker Series, by Bruce W. Dearstyne and Henry M. Greenberg is now available online.  “This session explores the 1902 landmark decision Roberson v. Rochester Folding-Box Company[, in which] 17-year-old Abigail Roberson went to court to stop a company from using her face in ads for its flour." 
  

• "Cleveland State University’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously Thursday to change the longtime name of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in light of increased scrutiny of the college’s namesake, former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who owned slaves."  More. 
  

• 
  Congratulations to this year’s participants in the Student Research Colloquium and Wallace Johnson First Book Program, who gathered at last week’s annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History and are listed here!
  

• New discoveries in the search for Joseph Smith’s legal cases (Church News).
  

• Stuart Kells, an adjunct professor at La Trobe University’s College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce in Australia, has written Ashurst: The Story of a Progressive Global Law Firm (Legal Cheek).
  

• Darren Ranco, chair of Native American Programs at the University of Maine, and Rebecca Tsosie, University of Arizona School of Law, gave the virtual Indian Law and History Lecture, co-hosted by the University of Maine School of Law and Maine Conservation Voters yesterday.  The lecture treated “the Doctrine of Discovery, a millennia-old legal principle that formed the foundation for Western property law and was used to justify the Christian Crusades and colonization of the America” (University of Maine). 
  

• Clio Visualizing History has a new homepage. (The announcement is here.)  H/t: LK
  

• Hugh Rennie has published Chathams Resurgent: How the Islanders overcame 150 years of misrule (Fraser Books).  In case you really want to get away (Stuff)
  

• ICYMI: Allan J. Lichtman against the ISL doctrine (NY Daily News).  Steven Lubet on the Supreme Court's "bad history” in Bruen (The Hill).  Paul J. Welch Behringer on Harry S Truman and the Federal Records Act (WaPo).
  

• Updates:  A report on a panel on the history of reproductive health at Case Western Reserve University (The Observer).  And today's NYT includes a story on an alleged leak of the result and authorship of Hobby Lobby in 2014.  The Times story incidentally reports that anti-abortion activists contributed to the Supreme Court Historical Society at least in part to "mingle with justices at its functions."  The long-serving Executive Director of the SCHS mentioned in the story retired in February 2021.  A related Politico story from last summer is here.
  

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

McLay on the Removal of NZ Justice Edwards

Geoff McLay, Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka, has posted The Removal of Justice Edwards and the Struggle between the 'Legal' and the 'Constitutional' in Late Nineteenth-Century New Zealand, which appears in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review:

This article examines an extraordinary episode in New Zealand's constitutional history: the 1892 removal of Justice Worley Bassett Edwards as a Supreme Court judge after having been invalidly appointed by the previous government. Edwards' case is important as the only time a New Zealand government has formally sought to remove a sitting judge of the Supreme or (as it is now) High Court. But the article argues that the Edwards controversy is also an example of how New Zealand politicians and lawyers thought about judges within the developing New Zealand state, and even more profoundly about what was constitutional, as opposed to just legal, within that state. 

--Dan Ernst

Gillespie and Breen's New Legal and Social History of New Zealand

Alexander Gillespie and Claire Breen, University of Waikato, have published People, Power, and Law: A New Zealand History with Hart Publishing:

This book offers a unique insight into the key legal and social issues at play in New Zealand today. Tackling the most pressing issues, it tracks the evolution of these societal problems from 1840 to the present day.  Issues explored include: racism; the position of women; the position of Maori, free speech, and censorship. Through these issues, the authors track New Zealand’s evolution to one of the most famously liberal and tolerant societies in the world.

For 20 percent off, use the code GLR A6AUK for UK orders and GLR A6AUS for US orders.

--Dan Ernst

Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law: Papers from the 24th BLHC

Just published by Cambridge University Press: Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law: Essays in Comparative Legal History from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. William Eves, University of St Andrews, John Hudson, University of St Andrews, Ingrid Ivarsen, University of Cambridge, and Sarah B. White, University of St Andrews.

Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law builds upon the legal historian F.W. Maitland's famous observation that history involves comparison, and that those who ignore every system but their own 'hardly came in sight of the idea of legal history'. The extensive introduction addresses the intellectual challenges posed by comparative approaches to legal history. This is followed by twelve essays derived from papers delivered at the 24th British Legal History Conference. These essays explore patterns in legal norms, processes, and practice across an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range. Carefully selected to provide a network of inter-connections, they contribute to our better understanding of legal history by combining depth of analysis with historical contextualization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

TOC after the jump.

ANZLS Program Now Available

Courtoom Scene, Sydney, 1817 (wiki)

The program for the 39th Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society, “an intensive 1 day world-wide gathering devoted to law in history” on December 9, is now available here.  The keynote plenary sessions are Joshua Getzler, Oxford University, on “Six Nations of the Grand River, military feudalism, and the roots of ‘honour of the Crown’”; Miranda Johnson, Otago University, on “Reckoning with a Pacific empire state: Race, nation, citizenship and the idea of New Zealand”; and a closing address by Dame Sian Elias, former Chief Justice of New Zealand.

--Dan Ernst

ANZLHS 2020

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

39th Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society

Join us for an intensive 1 day world-wide gathering devoted to law in history on 9 December 2020, hosted by Event Services at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Keynote plenary sessions will feature:

Joshua Getzler, Oxford University, on "Six Nations of the Grand River, military feudalism, and the roots of 'honour of the Crown'"

Miranda Johnson, Otago University, on "Reckoning with a Pacific empire state: Race, nation, citizenship and the idea of New Zealand"

A Closing Address by Dame Sian Elias, former Chief Justice of New Zealand

The organisers have accepted 39 individual papers and 7 panel presentations. They will be run in four concurrent parallel sessions throughout the day. The programme will be uploaded to the ANZLHS website page shortly.

The timings will be specified according to the NZDT time zone - which is UTC+13. We have attempted to time presentations so that are as reasonable as possible for the presenters (but will be difficult for some). The conference will begin at 9.00am and conclude at 7.00pm NZDT.

To cover Event Services charges, and to ensure a high quality of digital platform delivery utilising Zoom, Vimeo and Twilio, we are asking all attendees to pay a modest registration fee. In addition, the rules of the ANZLHS require all presenters to pay the Society's 2020 annual subscription. So 'full member registration' applies to presenters who have paid the 2020 Society subscription in advance; 'full non-member registration' applies to presenters (some of whom will have been members in the past) who have not yet paid the 2020 Society subscription. We are waiving registration fees for postgraduate student presenters. The portal for registrations will be launched shortly through the website page. The cost for registration is as follows in $NZ:

Full member registration: $130; Full non-member registration: $ 215; Full-time post graduate presenters: Fee waiver; Attendance only registration: $130

Graduate students are invited to apply for Kercher Scholarships. Five scholarship awards will be made that may adorn your cv even though there is no monetary element to the scholarship this year. Please apply to Katherine Sanders: k.sanders@auckland.ac.nz by 20 November if you have not already applied. Graduate attendees may also wish to enter their paper for the Forbes Society Prize. The Society's peer-reviewed journal law&history will consider submissions from those who present papers at the conference. In the meantime further information about the conference may be gleaned from David Williams: dv.williams@auckland.ac.nz

Geiringer on Representation-Reenforcement and the NZ Bill of Rights

Claudia Geiringer, Victoria University of Wellington School of Law, has posted When Constitutional Theories Migrate: A Case Study, which is forthcoming in the American Journal of Comparative Law:

The last decade or so has witnessed a burgeoning of literature on the role of cross-jurisdictional influences in the design (as well as subsequent interpretation) of national constitutions. The consensus emerging from that literature is that transnational borrowing in the course of constitutional making is both inevitable and impossible. In a globalized world, those involved in the design of a new constitution naturally look beyond their borders for inspiration. Borrowing is thus endemic. But borrowing, in any true sense, is also impossible because in the process of migration, constitutional ideas must be de- and then re-contextualized in order to fit them for the new legal system.

What, though, if the object of transnational influence is not a constitutional text or an institutional mechanism but, rather, a scholarly theory? That is the question addressed by this article. Specifically, the article examines the intriguing (and little known) story of how John Hart Ely’s representation-reinforcing theory of (American) constitutional interpretation was transformed into a blueprint for the design of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It suggests that Ely’s journey to the South Pacific has the potential to illuminate both the study of constitutional migration generally and, more specifically, the linkages between comparative law and constitutional theory.

–Dan Ernst.  H/t: Legal Theory Blog