Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington University Law Review Online: Michael Bannerjee (UC Berkeley) on "Land-Grant Universities."  

• 
  The Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology announces the establishment of its Research Centre for Legal History.

• Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, discusses the history of conceptions of federalism in the United States on the Stationary Bandit podcast. 

• "His Majesty The King has approved the appointment of Professor Wim Decock, of the Universities of Louvain and Liège, as the new Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford. He will take up the post on 1 October 2026 and succeeds Professor Wolfgang Ernst." [No relation.  DRE]  H/t: ESCLH Blog, which has the link to the press release.

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts is staging a historical reenactment of proceedings in the Amistad case on Monday, February 2, 2026, from 6:00 - 8:00 PM at the Appellate Division, First Department Courtroom in New York City.  

• Laurence H. Tribe reviews Jill Lepore's We the People (NYRB).

• ICYMI: Andrea Katz and John Guida ask, Has the Supreme Court Backed Itself into a Corner (on removal)?  Britt Tevis on Ben Shahn’s mural, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" at Syracuse University (Daily Orange).  Meet Edward Bennett Williams (Daily Record).  Return Jonathan Meigs, Jr., Ohio's First Chief Judge (CNO).  What Were the Palmer Raids and What Tactics Did They Use? (History).  Citywide general strikes in US history, including in Minneapolis (Jacobin). 

• Update: A review of Old Courthouse, that book on the Merced County court--where Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. was filed. 

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

The Docket 1.2

The second issue of The Docket is now live.  Here is Law & History Review editor Gautham Rao's introduction (which includes an invitation to contribute), and here is Felice Batlan's timely and impressive article, "Deja Vu and the Gendered Origins of the Practice of Immigration Law: The Immigrants' Protective League, 1907-1940."

Stanford Center for Law and History & Inaugural Graduate Student Paper Prize

[We have the following announcement.]

We are pleased to announce the creation of the new Stanford Center for Law and History (SCLH). SCLH brings together faculty, postdocs, and students from across Stanford University’s many schools and departments—and beyond—to participate in a broad range of conferences, workshops, and lectures devoted to examining the multifaceted interrelationships between law and history (without geographic, temporal, or other subject-area limitations).

On April 20, 2018, SCLH will host its inaugural one-day conference, titled “Legal Histories of Policing and Surveillance.” The event will include a keynote address by Professor Michael Willrich and three panels featuring a range of prominent legal historians entitled: “Broadening the State’s Criminal Oversight Power,” “Surveillance Technologies and Legal Culture,” and “Policing Intimate and Family Life.”

The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the inaugural winner of the SCLH Graduate Student Paper Prize. This student will be added to one of the three panels—alongside distinguished faculty working on related topics—based on the fit between the proposed paper and the three panel themes. Funding for travel and housing will be provided.

To apply, submit the following in a single PDF here. The deadline is Friday, December 1, 2017.

• CV
• 500 word paper abstract
• Briefly describe (75 words or less) which of the three panels is the best fit for your paper and why.

The organizers will inform the selected graduate student by early January 2018. The prize winner must circulate a fifteen to twenty page paper to the organizers by Monday, April 9, to share with other conference attendees.

For any questions, please email: akessler@law.stanford.edu and edkatz@stanford.edu

More on the Emoluments Clause

In a recent Weekend Roundup, we noted the New York Times op-ed on the Emoluments Clause by Joshua Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman (as well as John Mikhail’s paper on how dictionaries published between 1523 and 1806 defined "emoluments").  The legal historians Gautham Rao and Jed Handelsman Shugerman have now replied to Blackman and Tillman in Slate. 

Mehrotra Receives Intellectual History Book Award

Congratulations to former LHB Guest Blogger Ajay Mehrotra, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, for being named the recipient of the Society of U.S. Intellectual History’s book award for 2014 for Making the Modern American Fiscal State (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Here is the citation, from the Society’s website:

Mehrotra’s important and ambitious book chronicles the early 20th-century transformation in American tax policy and public finance. It analyzes the shift from the nineteenth-century “regime of indirect, hidden, partisan, and regressive taxes” to the “direct, transparent, professionally administered, and progressive tax system” we know today. A book on taxation may well seem a curious choice for an intellectual history prize, but we were struck by how successfully Mehrotra weaves together the intellectual, legal, administrative threads of his argument. Mehrotra takes ideas seriously. He traces legal and administrative change to a prior “conceptual revolution,” wrought primarily by a cohort of professionally trained intellectuals, including Henry Carter Adams, Richard Ely, and Edwin R.A. Seligman. And he shows how notions of economic justice, political obligation, ethical duty, and democratic reciprocity underwrote the new progressive conception of what Mehrotra aptly labels “fiscal citizenship.” He also shows what happened to those ideas as they traveled through a contested political process and were embodied in a complex administrative apparatus with paradoxical and often unintended consequences. Mehrotra’s book is thus a history of ideas in action. It makes a signal contribution to the field by demonstrating how even the most seemingly mundane features of our world have strikingly rich intellectual histories.

A Final Post on Tax Day

"The New Man on the Job" (LC)

Former Guest Blogger Ajay Mehrotra's op-ed: The Lost Promise of Progressive Taxes.

Cushman to Notre Dame

Barry Cushman

Barry Cushman, the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Virginia, is moving to Notre Dame Law School where he will be the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law.  Cushman needs no introduction to the Legal History Blog readership.  Among his most important works is his book Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1998).  The full announcement is here.  Congratulations to all!

Missing Cliopatria

Ralph Luker has posted the sad news on Cliopatria that after over eight years of keeping the history community up to date on scholarship and news in the field, this essential blog is closing up shop.  Especially in the early days of the Legal History Blog 5 1/2 years ago, Cliopatria was an essential source that I visited every morning.  Best wishes to Ralph and fellow bloggers.  It just won't be the same without you!

Cookie History

Thanks to Al Brophy for the tip that Bill Turnier, Univ. of North Carolina Law School, will be on the CBS evening news this evening talking about the 100th anniversary of the Oreo.

Historical Archives and Cultural Centers Suspending Operations

Although it has long been reported that archives and cultural centers across the U.S. are cutting staff and reducing or even eliminating their hours of operation due to the economic realities of the recession, I have recently experienced the affects directly. I was attempting to research the provision of legal aid during the turn-of-the century at New Jersey’s Whittier settlement house and learned that the collection manager of the New Jersey Historical Society is on permanent furlough. Even more disturbing, the Chicago Jewish Archives at the Spertus Institute closed its archive three years ago. As far as I know, it is the only archive that possesses significant documents relating to Minnie Low, often called the Jewish Jane Addams. For many years, Low supervised Chicago’s Bureau of Personal Service which provided both social work and legal aid to poor Chicago Jews. Not being able to access these documents is a tremendous setback in writing about the history of legal aid.  I have been informed that the Spertus Institute plans to reopen its Jewish archives, but there is no definite timeline.   For the time being, rich archival material will be left unseen and researchers will be forced to look elsewhere or make special arrangements to see the collections.  Aside from archives departments, important centers of social reform are also closing its doors.  The storied Jane Addams Hull House Association in Chicago, which relies heavily on state funding, recently closed down because of economic hardships. That Chicago will no longer have this extraordinary institution is shocking.  Aside from its important history, Hull House provided services that included programs for abused and neglected children who were wards of the Chicago courts. 

Cambridge UP Article Rental

It's the wrong time of year for an April fool's prank, so perhaps someone can weigh in on how the Cambridge University Press new article rental program will affect the Law and History Review. It's described on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's Wired Campus Blog:

Will researchers pay for short-term access to journal articles? Cambridge University Press is about to find out. The publisher has just announced a rental program for articles from the more than 280 peer-reviewed journals it publishes.

“For just £3.99, $5.99 or €4.49, users are now able to read single articles online for up to 24 hours, a saving of up to 86% compared with the cost of purchasing the article,” the press said in an announcement. “After registration and payment, the reader is e-mailed a link, through which they can access and read the article in PDF format as often as they wish during the subsequent 24 hours.”

Readers may not download, print, or copy and paste the articles. That’s similar to the conditions set by DeepDyve, which also offers 24-hour, no-download access to research articles, but on a monthly subscription basis.

Would you "rent" an article under these terms?

New ASLH President-elect, Board and NomComm Members

2011 election results were announced at the American Society for Legal History Conference.  Michael Grossberg, Department of History, Indiana University is the new president-elect. Bruce H. Mann, Harvard University, becomes the organization's new President.

Elected to the Board of Directors are:  R. B. Bernstein of New York Law School, Christian G. Fritz of the University of New Mexico, Dan Hamilton of the University of Illinois, Linda K. Kerber of the University of Iowa, and Amalia Kessler of Stanford University.

Lucy E. Salyer, University of New Hampshire, was elected to the Nominating Committee.

Continuing officers are here.  Congratulations to all!

Earthquake History

For all the east coast earthquake newbies out there, HNN is on top of the story.  NPR has more historical and geologic context.  My favorite headline, though, is in the LA Times.

For a minute there, I thought that my Duke colleagues were trying to be so welcoming that they threw me an earthquake!

Historicizing Carmageddon

photo credit

I am on the wrong coast this weekend, and missing the event of the year in LA:  the temporary closing of part of the 405 freeway, appropriately called 'Carmageddon.'  For locals, who would never take this freeway anyway, the closure is expected to jam our favorite surface streets, wreaking havoc citywide.  Or not.  Who knows?

"We prayed this day would never come," Stephen Colbert commented.  "Someone might have to walk someplace!"

To place the event in a historical context, the LA Times has posted this before and after photo from construction of the freeway in 1962.  What's wrong with the photo?  In the "after" image, the freeway is not jammed with traffic.

What was it like before the freeway?  For a Californian, this concept is hard to imagine. But Father Juan Crespi said in 1769:

We saw a very pleasant and spacious valley. We descended to it and stopped close to the watering place, which is a very large pool. Near it we found a large village of heathen, very friendly and docile; they offered us their seeds in baskets and other things made of rushes.

If LA without the 405 seems an alien concept, then you won't be surprised to hear that the Sepulveda Pass -- the area of this weekend's closure -- is "also an area noted for UFO sightings and mysterious helicopters, " according to the HermosaBeachPatch.

Actress Shirley MacLaine tells a story that she heard from comedian Lucille Ball about Ronald and Nancy Reagan arriving several hours late to a party and explaining they had an encounter with aliens along the Sepulveda Pass.

The story goes:

“Ronald Regan told Lucy that he and Nancy were driving on Mulholland Drive when a UFO landed near their vehicle. Although this story has been told before, a number of new details were added. For example, Shirley MacLaine says Lucille Ball told her that Reagan claimed a ladder appeared and an alien climbed out of the craft. The alien told him to quit his acting work and go into politics.”

And the rest, of course, is history.

Full coverage of the festivities is here.  More historic photos are here.  And more 405 trivia is here.

Law Blog Helpful Links

For those looking for law blog commentary related to today's news on the death of Osama Bin Laden, two places to go are Opinio Juris and Lawfare.

Manning Marable has died

Civil Rights historian Manning Marable, died today at the age of 60, the Los Angeles Times and other sources report.  His "long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," will be published on Monday."

Manning Marable by David Shankbone

I have benefited greatly from Marable's scholarship, and have often assigned chapters from his book Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990.

Tributes and more details appear at The Root and  NPR Blog.  From the New York Daily News:

"He would want to be remembered for being both a scholar and an activist and as someone who saw the two as not being separated," Manning's widow, Leith Mullings Marable, told The Root, an online magazine.

Fellow historian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad called the Marable's biography Malcolm X his "crowning achievement."

It is "the culmination of over 20 years of research and writing," he said.

Tani to Berkeley!

I'm very happy to report that Karen Tani, our Legal History Blog colleague, has accepted an entry-level offer at U.C. Berkeley Law School.  Congratulations to Karen and to Berkeley!

Tomlins, Freedom Bound; Foner, The Fiery Trial; and Dubow, Ourselves Unborn win Bancroft Prize

Christopher Tomlins, Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC-Irvine Law School, and Research Professor Emeritus at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, has been awarded the 2011 Bancroft Prize for his book, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America 1580-1865 (Cambridge University Press 2010).  Other winners are Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, and Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America.  The Bancroft Prize is awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University for a book of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography, and diplomacy.

Congratulations to all!

Losses

Many are mourning the death this week of William Stuntz, Harvard Law School, who touched so many through his compelling work and his extraordinary and reflective public engagement.  He died this week at the age of 52.

After the loss of Kay Mills, another unexpected and untimely death of a biographer.  Hazel Rowley died earlier this month at the age of 59.  Smart, witty, and full of life, she authored Richard Wright: The Life and Times; Franklin and Eleanor:  An Extraordinary Marriage, and other works.

Kay Mills has died

Kay Mills

Journalist and biographer Kay Mills, 69, died of a heart attack this week in Santa Monica, California.  Mills will be best known to LHB readers as the author of the first full-length biography of civil rights legend Fanny Lou Hamer. This Little Light of Mine:  The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer is a riveting account of Hamer's life as a sharecropper in Mississippi and the path that led her to capture the nation's attention during the 1964 Democratic National Convention.  The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the regular Mississippi delegation, since African Americans in the state were disenfranchised. "If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America," Hamer said in powerful, televised testimony. "Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily." As a compromise measure the Democratic Party leadership offered the MFDP delegation two seats, which they refused. Hamer said: "We didn't come for no two seats when all of us is tired."

Mills' book was awarded the 1993-94 Julia Spruill Book prize for the best book on Southern women's history from the Southern Associaiton of Women's Historians.  A pioneering journalist once denied a job when an editor asked "what would you do if someone you were covering ducked into the men's room?" Mills was also the author of Something Better for My Children: How Head Start Has Changed the Lives of Millions of Children and Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television and other works.  More about Mills and her work is here.

Kay Mills was also my neighbor for a number of years when I first moved to Santa Monica to teach at USC.  Meeting her was an immediate affirmation that intellectual life in Southern California is not a non-sequiter, and that vibrant writers and ideas are to be found outside the academy, and sometimes right down the street.  She will be missed.