Weekend Roundup

• UC Law SF, so-renamed after dropping the name of its founder, Serranus Hastings, who unleashed a massacre of California's Native Americans, announced that Benjamin Madley, a UCLA history professor and the author of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2017), will be a visiting member of its faculty this year and, among other things, "work with the Indigenous Law Center on a California legal history project."
  

• "Surviving members of the Little Rock Nine, a group of students who faced extreme harassment and threats of violence for integrating Little Rock Central High School in 1957, have spoken out against Arkansas education officials who decided last week not to recognize an Advanced Placement (AP) course on Black history" (Truthout).  Governor Sarah Sanders met with "members of the Arkansas Legislature, including leadership of the Legislative Black Caucus," to discuss the controversy  (TB&P).
  

• The University of Arkansas has noted the retirement of the constitutional historian Mark Kellenbeck after thirty-five years as a member of the faculty of its law school.  In May 2012, he delivered "A Prudent Regard to Our Own Good? The Commerce Clause, in Nation and States,” at the U.S. Supreme Court as part of the Leon Silverman Lecture Series of the Supreme Court Historical Society (U Ark News).

•  The Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law "invites entry-level and lateral applicants for a full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty position in the field of race and law." View the ad here. 
  

• 
  The Federal Judicial Center has posted a "user guide' to its website on the history of the federal judiciary. 
  

• Matthew Waxman, Columbia Law School, on Daniel Webster and the Guano Islands near-war (Lawfare).
  

• George W. Martin has died.  In addition to Madam Secretary, a biography of Frances Perkins, he published two significant works of legal history: Causes and Conflicts: The Centennial History of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and CCB, a biography of the New York City lawyer Charles C. Burlingham, for which he received the Erwin D. Griswold Prize by the Supreme Court Historical Society (NY City Bar).  H/t: JQB.
  

• Just out, open access, from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Beyond “Death Do Us Part”: Spousal Intestate Succession in Nineteenth-Century Hispanic America, by Carmen Diana Deere.
  

• A notice of this summer’s projects by undergraduates in the Digital Legal Research Lab under the mentorship of Katrina Jagodinsky and William Thomas at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
  

•  At noon on November 3, in the Claire Priest, Yale Law School, is to speak on “From Invasion to Formalization: The Peruvian Origins of the Property Titling Movement” at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo School of Law.  (Yesterday, Samantha Barbas present her book, Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan.)  More.
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society announces the world premiere of “Holmes” on October 30, 2023, at Arena Stage, Washington, DC.  “Veteran actor Kevin Reese will bring the Justice from Beacon Hill to life, showcasing his humor and wisdom."  One night only.
  

• In person and streamed on line: Texas Gulf Sulphur at 55, Friday, September 29, 2023, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. EST.  Sponsored by the SEC Historical Society and Quinnipiac School of Law.
  

• ICYMI: Ada Sipuel paves the way (El Dorado News-Times).  John Randolph's enslaved people (Knox Pages).
  

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

More Than a Contract II, Premo with J. Mansilla

In the last blog, we discussed how improvised legal deals made far from notarial offices helped the inhabitants of Lima get back on their feet again after a massive earthquake and tidal wave in 1687. But even in ordinary times, informal tratos were recognized as legally—and socially-- binding. (cont'd)

More Than a Contract Part I, Premo with J. Mansilla

As I’m joined by my colleague and fellow historian of Peru, Judith Mansilla, for the next two blog posts, we bring in another voice to harmonize with us: the contemporary Spanish musician Alejandro Sanz. In his ballad Hicimos un trato (We made a deal), he croons:

Hicimos un trato, no sé si te acuerdas …     We made a deal, I don’t know if you remember…  

…que un trato es un trato                             that a deal is a deal

Mucho más que un contrato                         Much more than a contract  (cont'd)

Copies and Originals, Premo

In a terrific book about notaries in colonial Cuzco, Peru, Kathryn Burns reminds us how frequently official writers distorted, left blank, and forged contracts and parts of court cases, leaving traces of their control over the order of the historical record.[1]  But, if official writers held the power to shape the archive, at the same time, ordinary Spanish colonial subjects—many of whom did not read or write themselves-- commandeered the form of legal protocols and served as legal agents outside of court. 

The notary-free contract was a part of daily life, and it crossed any simple divide between colonizer and colonized, enslaved and free, state and subject.  People picked up and reproduced, out loud, in rough orthography, on the backsides of printed text and scraps of paper, the formula for contracts that had been set in manuals for legal personnel. (cont'd)