Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History

We’ve received word of a new book series, Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History, edited by Aniceto Masferrer, University of Valencia, and Heikki Tapio Pihlajamäki, University of Helsinki:

This series covers the general area of comparative legal history, including contributions focusing on both 'internal' legal history, i.e., doctrinal and disciplinary developments in the law, and 'external' legal history, i.e., legal ideas and institutions in wider contexts. Considering the various legal traditions worldwide, the series also welcomes works dealing with other laws and customs from around the globe. Temporal or geographical in approach, the series will consider both legal and similar law-like normative traditions. Works encompassing views from different schools of thought and contributions from comparative and transnational historiography, including interdisciplinary approaches, are encouraged. With a focus on higher level research in the form of monographs and edited collections, proposals for supplementary reading and textbooks are also welcomed.

Members of the editorial board appear here.

–Dan Ernst

Getzler and Pitts Are New AJLH Editors-in-Chief

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The American Journal of Legal History and Oxford University Press are delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Yvonne Pitts and Prof. Joshua Getzler as Co-Editors-in-Chief, effective 1 January 2021.

Joshua Getzler is professor of law and legal history at the University of Oxford, and a fellow in law at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He trained in law and history in Australia, and then wrote a doctorate in legal and economic history at Oxford, resulting in his monograph A History of Water Rights at Common Law which was awarded the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2005.

Joshua works on the historical evolution of legal institutions of property, trust, fiduciaries, corporations, and charities, especially religious and welfare forms. He also studies the history of native title, and the jurisdiction and accountability of colonial, settler and imperial governments, principally in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Joshua has taught and researched at universities in Australia, USA and Israel. He serves on the council of the Selden Society for English legal history, the editorial boards of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Equity, and is co-editor of the OUP monograph series Oxford Legal History.

Yvonne Pitts is an associate professor of history at Purdue University - West Lafayette specializing in the legal histories of sexual regulation, disability, property, and legal culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. She is the author of Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth Century Kentucky, which was awarded the American Society of Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize in 2014. Her current research explores the U.S. military's system of licensing prostitutes and regulating sex work in Nashville, Tennessee during the American Civil War. She traces how regulatory practices around sexual danger, race relations, contagion, and the proper subjects of surveillance and legal discipline evolved in the context of a wartime military occupation. She is also working on a project examining the constitutional and legal understandings of the material texts and evidentiary practices in nineteenth century obscenity trials.

Joshua writes: "Under the vigorous editorial leadership of Alfred Brophy, Stefan Vogenauer, and Felice Batlan, the American Journal of Legal History stands out as a compelling publication, with every issue filled with erudition, originality, and thought-provoking discoveries. Stefan has described very well the growth of the journal to its current commanding form. The journal attracts great attention across North America, Britain, Europe, and the wider world. In a globalized society full of contention over justice and authority, livelihoods and identities, tradition and innovation, we need a vigorous and independent-minded legal history practice more than ever, to explore the shape of the past and its impact on the present. I am excited by the opportunity to carry forward and develop the mission of the AJLH, working closely with my co-editor Yvonne Pitts, the distinguished editorial board, the associate and review editors, and our OUP partners. We will strive to serve the legal-historical community by providing the best possible forum for scholarly work covering all periods and places."

Yvonne writes: "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to the field of legal history and work with diverse and international legal scholars as the co-editor of the American Journal of Legal History. The AJLH has a long tradition as a forum for highly respected, innovative legal historical scholarship across broad geographical, thematic, and temporal subfields. Under the able leadership of past editors Felice Batlan and Stephen Vogenauer, the AJLH has produced trenchant, influential research from early career and established scholars. I look forward to working with my co-editor Joshua Getzler to build on the AJLH's commitment to emerging questions and traditional themes in legal and constitutional history in local, national, and transnational contexts."

Oxford University Press would like to thank the outgoing editors, Prof. Stefan Vogenauer and Prof. Felice Batlan, for their skilled and dedicated work on AJLH. The AJLH was first published in 1957 and was the first English-language periodical in the field of legal history.

Comprehensive List of Legal History Journals

The Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History of the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University has posted the most complete list of legal history journals we’ve ever seen.  The list was compiled primarily by Ron Harris and Assaf Likhovski, who would like to know of any they may have missed.

--Dan Ernst

ASLH's Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors.  Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History. Deadline: June 30, 2019

The Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors sponsored by the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) is designed to provide advice and support to scholars working toward the publication of first books in legal history, broadly defined. In conversation with peers and with the advice of senior scholars, participants will learn about approaching and working with publishers, and will develop and revise a book proposal and one to two sample chapters.

Applications for Johnson Fellows are invited from early career, pre-tenure scholars, publishing in English, who have completed PhDs or JDs and are working on first books in legal history.

Scholars with expertise in all chronological periods and geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are scholars who may not (yet) identify as legal historians.

The program includes the following elements:

• Fall 2019 (Nov. 21, 2019): one-day, pre-conference workshop at the ASLH Annual Meeting (Boston, MA), introduction to book publishing and proposal writing;

• Spring 2020 (date TBD): remote meeting, feedback from program leader and peers on draft book proposal;

• Summer 2020 (last week of July): two-day workshop on draft chapters, University of Pennsylvania Law School; and

• Fall 2020 (Fall 2020): Wallace Johnson Fellows Roundtable at the ASLH Annual Meeting (Chicago, IL, Nov. 11-14, 2020).

The 2019-20 Johnson Program will be led by Professor Reuel Schiller, with the participation of other senior legal historians. Participants must commit to participation in all elements of the program.

Up to 5 Fellows will be selected. Each will receive substantial funding for travel and accommodation related to the program, with a small supplement to participants who have no institutional support for travel and research.

The application deadline is June 30, 2019. Applicants should submit items 1-3 as a single pdf document, Times New Roman, 12 point font, with your full name in a header on each page:

1.  Applicant Information Sheet (in lieu of cover letter):

• Personal Information: first name; last name; current mailing address; phone; email address; current institution; current position; institutional affiliation for 2020-2021;

• Education: month and year of graduate degree, institution, and field: Ph.D.; J. D.; Other

• Funding: We are committed to enabling fellows from a range of institutional positions to participate in the program. Your answer here will have no effect on your candidacy, but will enable us to provide small supplements to participants without institutional support. If selected for the Wallace Johnson program, would you have access to university or other institutional funds to help cover the costs of attending the program? Yes, No, Don’t Know. Comments or relevant details.

2.  Project Description (single spaced; not exceeding 1,000 words) organized with the following sections and addressing these questions. We are looking for candid self-reflection. You should think of this document as the first step in the revision, rethinking process.

• Author Bio. Tell us about yourself, including your position and commitments for the fellowship year (remember, we’ll have your cv);

• Dissertation. What was your dissertation about? What was its argument? What was its arc? What were its original contributions?

• Book. What changes are you imagining for the book in terms of conceptualization, structure, narrative, or arc? Are you planning additional research and/or new chapters? How are you imagining the book’s audience?

3.  Abridged Curriculum Vitae (limited to 2 pages);

4.  Two letters of recommendation submitted separately. Please ask two scholars who know your work well to write a letter of recommendation. We recommend that at least one letter come from a faculty member who was a major advisor of the dissertation. Letters should be sent by email directly to Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu) and received no later than June 30, 2019.

All materials should be submitted to Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu), Chair, University of Minnesota by June 30, 2019.

The 2018 Johnson Program for First Book Authors Committee
Barbara Young Welke, Chair, University of Minnesota welke004@umn.edu
Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University
Sam Erman, USC
Kurt Graham, NARA
Tim Lovelace, Indiana University
Intisar Rabb, Harvard University
Matthew Sommer, Stanford University

Applicants will be notified by August 15, 2019. Please direct any questions to Barbara Welke.

Thank you, Sam Erman!

It is time, dear readers, to bid fond farewell to our most recent guest blogger, Professor Sam Erman (USC). For reference, here is a compilation of all his posts:

• A better book (intro post)

• A better book: mentors

• A better book: the ASLH book series

• A better book: living descendants

• A better book: development editors

• A better book: the first book workshop

• A better book: the home institution

• A better book: trust oneself, then know oneself

• On op-eds and amicus briefs

• On USC's undergraduate major in law, history, and culture

Thank you, Sam Erman!

-- Karen Tani

A Better Book: The First Book Workshop

              Several years ago, LHB’s own Karen Tani and Mitra Sharafi wrote wonderful posts on their first book workshops (Karen’s is here; Mitra’s is here).  For those who missed them, a first book workshop is a manuscript workshop for a first-time author. Such sessios have grown increasingly common in legal history. Participants typically include a mix of home-school colleagues and outside commenters. Mine was incredibly valuable. This post uses that experience to build on Karen’s and Mitra’s insights. (If your experience as an author or participant was similar or to the contrary, please share it in the comments below.)

              An immediate benefit of staging a first book workshop is the deadline. Karen Tani declared it “a source of stress -- but also a source of motivation.” I would write “and” where she wrote “but.” The interim deadline improved my mood, productivity, and work product. It distracted me from the truly looming deadline: closure of my tenure file. I thus traded exhausting long-term stress for more energizing and motivating short-term stress. After all, getting a manuscript done sooner would mean more time to improve it later.

              The structure of the workshop can vary with the author’s goals. Mitra Sharafi described gathering 4-6 readers for an afternoon of conversation about the book. Karen Tani’s workshop had more than a dozen participants who presented on different parts of the book in panels across an entire day.  My workshop split the difference.  I gathered just shy of a dozen people for a single three-hour book conversation in the morning. There were opportunities to follow up and revisit matters during the lunch that followed and the dinner that I had with the out-of-town guests.

              My goal for the workshop was to come away with a plan for pulling the manuscript’s disjointed pieces together. I already had a clear vision of the characters, narrative, and argument of the book. I knew what I wanted to accomplish in each chapter and overall.  Plus, my tenure file would close in a year and a half, so I had to stay firmly in finish-the-book mode. Any deep exploration of new literatures or events would have to wait for follow-on projects. Instead, I hoped that my readers and I would put on the table competing visions for integrating what I already had. To keep the focus on the book as a whole, I decided against asking each reader to take primary responsibility for one or another chapter.

              Inevitably, I received conflicting advice and concerns. Here, it was crucial to have a trusted mentor present who could direct conversation toward achieving consensus on a concrete plan.  Ariela Gross served that role for me, and did a fantastic job.  Had she been unavailable, I’m confident that either of the ASLH series editors involved in the book – Sally Gordon and Reuel Schiller – could have stepped in.

              I would also recommend having someone in the room take notes. If (unlike me) you would listen to a recording later, consider following Karen Tani’s lead and asking participants’ permission to record the session. I also found it helpful to ask those who spoke to send me any notes they had afterward. I worried that asking people to pre-circulate notes as Karen Tani had might stifle free-flowing discussion.

              I aimed to be instrumental and substantive when inviting participants. My primary goal was to choose readers who would provide helpful feedback on the project. But the workshop was also an opportunity to secure buy-in and buzz for the book and to strengthen my relationships with others in the field. My ideal outside reader was someone who would value the project, become an interlocutor, and potentially write a tenure letter. I wanted inside readers to hear from outsiders why the project mattered and to be drawn more into the work. I also hoped that the discussion would cause all the participants to discuss the book with colleagues once the workshop ended.

              For my workshop, I chose equal numbers of external and internal readers.  Bob Gordon and Sophia Lee agreed to fly in for the event, as did Reuel Schiller in his capacity as the editor for the ASLH series that was publishing my book. Clyde Spillenger made the trek from UCLA, and my USC colleague from American Studies and Ethnicity, Nayan Shah, came as well.  At my home institution, the Gould School of Law, I invited senior colleagues in legal history and constitutional law.

All of this cost money. Mitra Sharafi and Karen Tani turned to grants to fund their workshops. I was fortunate to work at a law school willing to foot the bill. (Thanks, Dean!).

               In my case, the workshop was time and money and well spent. I came out of it with better key terms, a clearer sense of argument, and plans for streamlining the prose. I strengthened my relationships with scholars I admire and placed my book project on their radar.  Crucially, I also gained a renewed sense of the potential of the project.

              Though manuscript workshops are beneficial for junior scholars, they are not equally accessible. Certain educational trajectories and institutional homes make it easier to secure funds and participants – if one knows to seek them in the first place. It is that last barrier that made Mitra Sharafi’s post so valuable. It publicized the first book workshop when it was an emerging practice and possibility.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book: Development Editors

              Today’s post concerns the secret weapon of many an excellent (legal history) author, the development editor. I worked with two on my book, Almost Citizens. They were crucial to my learning curve. Without them, I would never have crafted a book that resembled the vision in my head.

              Before starting my book, I had never contemplated paying someone to help me improve my writing. Legal history is a specialized area, and I chose my words carefully to hew to what the sources supported. I worried that someone from outside the field would seek to simplify or expand my claims in ways that I would just end up reversing. The problem was that I also knew that I could benefit from fresh eyes on my writing. By the time I’d drafted a few chapters and signed with Cambridge University Press, I felt confident about my narrative structure and cast of characters. But I found it more difficult to do smaller-scale reorganizations and line edits. This was partly because I was so close to the manuscript. It was also because writing is a skill, and I had more to learn.

Despite having many generous readers, none seemed likely candidates to become writing mentors. Colleagues and reviewers grappled with my work and provided incisive comments. But that feedback almost always involved the substance of the argument rather than its tone and constituent sentences. Given the economic realities of book publishing, many publishers hardly do any editing of manuscripts in progress. I did have the good fortune to publish with American Society for Legal History’s book series (which I discuss here). Sally Gordon was my editor there, and she was a tireless and skilled reader. But she soon saw that the book and I could both gain from more editorial engagement than she could devote to a single book in her series. So she recommended that I consider a development editor.

              I had never heard the term. Perhaps because I live just down the road from Hollywood, my mind immediately went to the entertainment executives who tell show runners that their sitcoms need more dogs or a kooky sister to really draw in the millennials. But (spoiler alert!) that was not whom I was to encounter. The editors I would work with helped me produce the best possible version of my book. Sometimes, such work is called development editing. Sometimes it goes by different names.

              I sought someone who could help me make my prose sing (or at least hum occasionally) without sacrificing nuance and accuracy. Given my topic, that meant an editor who could engage legal and historical arguments, had a sense of the evidentiary norms in the field, and understood the potential audiences for the work. But finding such an editor is a bit like turning up a good contractor for a renovation; you ask around, check out samples of the person’s work, and ultimately take a leap of faith that the (intellectual) place that you lay your head will be transformed for the better.

              I had the good fortune to work with two excellent development editors. I learned of both through admired colleagues who sang the praises of having collaborated with them. The first was Grey Osterud, an accomplished academic historian. Rather than teach, she complements her research with editing colleagues’ work. I was thus confident from the outset that she knew and honored the standards of academic history. Once I had the manuscript drafted, I undertook a rewrite with Pamela Haag, an author of serious histories for broader audiences. Notably, she also has a contract with Yale University Press for a style guide for the scholar-writer that I look forward to adding to my shelf soon.

              As Grey and Pamela helped me improve the book’s prose, they were also teaching me to be a better writer. One set of lessons had to do with the difficulties of evaluating choices about organization when one is too close to the text. Because I was circulating individual chapters to colleagues for feedback, I tried to put enough at the front of each chapter to orient them. The result was bloated chapter introductions. My development editors saw the problem immediately. They worked with me to shorten the chapter introductions and have them serve more as bridges between chapters than as introductions to standalone essays. Similarly, my immersion in the particularities of the book’s events had led me to subdivide the book’s chronology into overly narrow chronological bands. As Grey and Pamela perceived, such fine distinctions muddied the broader argument rather than clarifying it. Thus, a chapter that I had written with six sections, one for each of three characters at each of two times (ABCABC), came to contain just three character-centered sections (ABC).

              Careful editing by others is a wonderful way to discover one’s own writing tics. I had been particularly blind to two. I wrote long, intricate sentences and was overly fond of metaphors. I had to learn to reduce clauses and interjections, break up sentences, and clarify which verbs and nouns went together in what ways. Similarly, I had to unmix metaphors and close them out before they ceased to clarify. The difficulty in both cases was less fixing the problems than perceiving them in the first place. Grey and Pamela sensitized me to my propensity to create these tangles, which was all I needed to start fixing them.

              Like many historians, I revel in the details and complexity of what I study. Seeing the danger, my dissertation committee co-chair Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof counseled that my job was to over-claim and that his job was to rein me in. But knowing that I should trim and sum up did not wholly cure me. My development editors urged me to go further. Curate evidence. Don’t cut one of five quotations; leave just one. Remove tangents. Lead with bold claims. Qualify them later. Or don’t. The result was much more accessible prose. Arguments rose to the surface, no longer drowned by my sea of evidence.

There is one big downside to a development editor: she costs money. How much varies by who you hire, for how long, and for what. But price tags in the thousands of dollars would be common. The best solution is to have someone else pay. My law school (USC’s Gould School of Law) is extremely generous in its support for junior scholars’ work. While schools and departments may vary substantially in what they are able to offer, it is always worth asking. Knowing that peer institutions have offered similar funding can sometimes help shake out extra funds.

Had I had to pay for my development editors entirely out of pocket, I might have balked at using them or using them so extensively. In my case, that would have been a mistake. Their services were worth far more than the cost. As an early-stage scholar, the benefits were quite large. I have many productive years left in which to benefit from what I have learned in terms of writing and argumentation. The book is stronger too. That matters because the book is my debut in legal history as a mature scholar. It was also the centerpiece of my file for tenure (which I just received--Yay!).

My biggest fear when I began working with development editors was that I would not recognize the final text of the book as my own prose. In fact, the opposite was true. By the time I began working with Grey, I largely knew what I wanted to argue, which historical actors and narratives I wanted to feature, and what evidence I wanted to rely upon. But I found it frustratingly hard to translate the book that I had in my head into words on the page. As Grey and then Pamela and I worked on the prose, the gap between it and my envisioned book narrowed considerably (albeit with some nice additions suggested by my development editors that I had not foreseen). Almost Citizens ended up being very much my book—even more so than I had at first hoped.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book: The ASLH Book Series

              Perhaps the most important decisions of my transition from dissertation to book was mine to publish with the American Society of Legal History’s book series at Cambridge University Press and theirs to have me.  In a word, the reason was: editing.  In a person, it was: Sally Gordon.  More specifically, I gained a mentor, a booster, a reader, a quarterback, and a promoter.

              From the outset, Sally shared and shaped my vision for the project. I first reached out to her about the book on the suggestion and introduction of my mentor Dan Ernst, himself a former editor of the series.  To my amazement, she read my entire dissertation with her discerning and constructive eye. She saw the same promise in the dissertation that I did. It already had characters, a narrative, and evidence that constitutional change sometimes occurred outside of courts. The promising strands it had left dangling included the place of Reconstruction in U.S. empire, mechanics and details of who drove what legal change how, the relationship between Puerto Ricans and both American Indians and mainland women and minorities, and the shadow that U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines cast over everything.

              An unexpected (but not surprising) benefit of publishing with the ASLH series is that it brings instant credibility with society members. At the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Sally also introduced me as an up-and-coming scholar with plans to publish in the series.  Anyone who’s seen Sally in action knows that means meeting a lot of society members. I’ve always felt welcome at the annual meetings, but since then the meetings have been a sea of friendly faces.

               Joining the series also meant receiving a level of editing and mentorship that I associate with literary presses of yore, not the tight margins of modern academic publishing.  Almost Citizens was my first book, so I had no experiences identifying – much less making – many of the decisions that book writing  requires. Fortunately, as I wrote (and rewrote), Sally read (and re-read)–the book proposal, an annotated table of contents, individual chapters, and finally the full manuscript.  Every major element of the book bears her mark. Through emails, phone calls, and coffees, she pressed me to specify and “surface” my biggest claims and to open my geographic and temporal lenses wide enough to bring those claims fully into focus. We discussed what books I liked, how they were structured, what writerly voice the authors had employed, who read those volumes, and who might read mine.

Equally important, Sally was an enduring source of encouragement. She kept me optimistic and energized throughout the long and lonely endeavor that is book writing. Our conversations spanned years. During each she reminded me what I had accomplished, then identified the further progress now within reach.

As my draft chapters accumulated, Reuel Schiller joined Sally as a co-editor of the series, to its and my good fortune. Sally and Reuel were a crack pair of text massagers and arrangers. They also knew how to leverage their insights. When they saw room for improvement but lacked the time to provide detailed feedback (the series had other authors; they had day jobs–and lives), they recommended that I use development editors (a subject of an upcoming post).

Working with the series also meant that I had experienced editors in my corner as I navigated the unfamiliar, far-from-intuitive publishing process.  When I negotiated my contract, Sally knew which details mattered: commit to a number of images and ask for preapproval; ensure that the series can choose the copy editor and indexer; choose a publication deadline that can slip a month or two without endangering your tenure case.  Someone had to pay for editing, indexing, and the like. The series helped me ask my home institution for the funds by providing me evidence that peer institutions were already providing such funds to their junior faculty. When I became concerned with one or another of the press’s decisions, Sally and Reuel helped me sort out which items were worth raising in what ways. They were always willing to speak on my behalf to Cambridge, with whom they maintained a strong and cooperative relationship.

Mostly, the series steered me away from pitfalls. I never had to contemplate the disadvantages of a machine-made index because my contract let me hire the wonderful Derek Gottlieb. Where some authors tell horror stories of overseas copy editors who insert more typos than they correct, the series snagged for me the excellent Julie Hagen.

              With my book now out under the series imprint, I can add that I am happy being judged by the company I keep. Cambridge University Press’s august imprimatur makes it more likely that readers will pick up the book. The American Society for Legal History is my foremost academic home. It has also published many of the legal historians that I most admire, including the first books of several of the best up-and-coming scholars in the field.

--Sam Erman

Advice on group publications

We recently featured a three-part series of posts sharing advice from legal historians on the question, should I do an edited collection? This applies to edited volumes (books) as much as special issues of journals. For your convenience, we're listing the links here:

• Should I do an edited collection? Advice to Authors
• Should I do an edited collection? Advice to Collection Editors
• Should I do an edited collection? Advice from Journal Editors

Good luck! 

Should I do an edited collection? Advice from Journal Editors

Group publications can be challenging in many ways. We asked legal historians for their

Credit: British Library Flickr

advice on doing edited volumes or special issues (h/t: LSA Law and History CRN). Our questions:

• What works and what doesn’t?
• What did you learn the hard way or wish you had known from the start?
• Was it worth it in the end?
• Were there any unexpected benefits?

We received a ton of responses. In the first post of this series, we covered advice on contributing a chapter as an author. The second post was about putting together such collections as an editor of the volume or special issue. In this third and final post, we share advice from scholars who have been editors of journals that produce special issues.

Our title borrows from Karen Kelsky’s post on the same topic (h/t: The Professor is in).

Gautham Rao: 

“Law and History Review is a leading journal of legal history published by Cambridge University Press for the American Society for Legal History.  Over the years, we have had several special issues and since I have taken over as Editor, our editorial team has approved another.  We have also been in discussions to carry a few more special issues, including one on our new digital imprint, The Docket.  We are chiefly interested in proposals that highlight new approaches to familiar questions; new fields or subfields; and, especially for our digital publication, historical inquiries into contemporary problems.  In my brief time at the helm of LHR, we've taken the initiative to put out a call for papers for a special issue on judicial originalism.  We were extremely fortunate to receive numerous proposals that used original research to frame new arguments about originalism.  The most successful ones had a few characteristics in common: they were clear as to the potential argument and they seemed feasible to complete in an article-length manuscript.  The necessity of a clear argument will surprise few of your readers.  But it bears emphasizing that several proposals, although smart and provocative, seemed extremely unrealistic.  For a small editorial team facing a relatively tight publication schedule, these proposals in particular seemed like they would require a great deal more time to get through peer review and editing.  So while it may seem like authors must propose papers that are groundbreaking, it is perhaps even more important to make sure that the proposal is something a group of editors can envision jumping through the hoops of the editorial process.”

From another scholar who has overseen special issues as a journal editor: 

“Here are some thoughts, they are not arranged in order of significance or any particular logic.  A couple brief notes before the list: while the list seems mostly negative, I actually was pleased with/proud of the symposia we published while I edited [journal X]. I like symposia as a way of compelling, for lack of a better word, readers to engage a topic outside their intellectual wheelhouses. I’m not sure that the “typical X reader”…would pay attention to an article on…Southeast or South Asia, or care whether digital humanities might contribute…but when all or most of a volume covers one of those topics, then it is something that flashes across their radar screens and perhaps encourages engagement.  And I also like the breadth of engagement with a topic that a good symposium provides. 

For some background, as I recall, while at [X] I published two symposia that were proposed to me, one that I organized, and one (two?) that were organic, in the sense that I had some related articles to hand and thought that tying them together in an issue would be useful. So I did published symposia a fair amount. I also helped organize another symposium when I was on the editorial board of another journal. My comments mostly apply to the one I organized the call for papers on, and the two that were proposed to me, though the first applies to all categories. 

Issues/concerns: 

1. Eating space: a symposium, even if it is not the whole issue, takes pages from other people’s articles. For some journals that might not be a problem. For [X], it was a significant issue. Every symposium I printed created a backlog of articles and while most authors didn’t complain much, it understandably mattered to some (the tenure folks) more than others.  At the very least, editors need to think about the impact on the other articles in their pipeline and be aware of authors who legitimately need to be published within certain timeframes.
2. Uneven product: Every symposium has some strong articles and some not so strong articles. The question is what to do about that. Referees can usually bring weaker articles up to an acceptable standard (and I always insisted on the right to refuse to publish any article that the referees panned in the first round of reviews, fortunately that never happened). But that can take time, and editors have to decide whether they need to stick to a particular timeline (this will come out in issue 3 this year) or insist on delaying publication to fix a problem article or two. I tended to insist on the timeline, because delaying an issue (or shifting a symposium scheduled for issue 3 to issue 4) would lead to a chain reaction of delays and article juggling. But that meant that some less than perfect articles got by.
3. Editing: there’s another problem that relates to point 2—who gets to decide what referee reports the author should engage and how? I insisted that since I upheld [X’s] standards, I had to make that decision, so would not allow symposium organizers to become guest editors. Instead, I picked referees (sometimes in consultation) and then I wrote the editor’s letter to the author regarding the referee reports, but I cc’d the symposium organizers. This let them into the conversation about revisions, and allowed us all to work together to make sure the symposium maintained its ‘voice,’ while at the same time respecting [X] process. It also let the symposium organizer help with revisions. That worked the times I tried it, but that doesn’t mean it always would.
4. The co-author that ate the world: The downside of the technique I described in point 3 was that it created a risk that the symposium organizer might help so much that he/she would become co-author of several parts of the symposium. And then, the journal no longer seems to be publishing a collection of related essays by different people, as much as giving one person the chance to publish several articles at once. I’m not sure what to do about that situation, it did happen in one symposium and I got some comments about it from readers (not complaints, exactly, but some eyebrow raising). Unfortunately, when that happens, it’s as much as sign of a weak collection of articles as it is a sign of a symposium organizer whose ego has run wild. And probably the answer to that is to pull the symposium. But by that point, a lot of work has gone into the product (and publication schedules have been set), so pulling it is easier said than done. This may be the biggest problem with publishing a symposium in a journal. In the end, the journal editor has to cross his/her fingers and hope it works, because if it doesn’t, usually the journal is stuck with the symposium in a way that the editorial office of a publisher is not. The publisher can refuse to publish a book. But once a journal has made a space for a symposium it is almost impossible to refuse to publish it, even if you have a backlog of articles in the pipeline.
5. Saying no: I actually turned down a couple of proposals, including one with a bunch of big name authors. In one case, I turned the idea down because I thought the proposal was [not as interesting as I had hoped]. In another, I was worried that the timeframe the organizer was proposing was too optimistic and that I was not going to get well-thought out pieces. It’s very easy for conference panels to think that they should become a symposium. Most of the time that is not the case.

Again, I’m generally happy with the symposia I published while editing [X], but I’m happier with some than with others. Which is not a big deal, but is worth thinking about. I think my experience was mixed enough that I would not have published any other symposia if I stayed on as editor. I do think there is a space for them, but I think perhaps this is a place where an e-journal or a blog might have worked better for most of the proposals I saw.”

A very big thank you to contributors!

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."

Should I do an edited collection? Advice to Collection Editors

Credit: British Library Flickr

Group publications can be challenging in many ways. We asked legal historians for their advice on doing edited volumes or special issues (h/t: LSA Law and History CRN). Our questions: 

• What works and what doesn’t? 
• What did you learn the hard way or wish you had known from the start? 
• Was it worth it in the end?
• Were there any unexpected benefits?

We received a ton of responses. In the first post of this series, we shared advice on contributing a chapter as an author. This second post is about putting together such collections as an editor of the volume or special issue. The third will cover advice from scholars who have been editors of journals that produce special issues. 

Our title borrows from Karen Kelsky’s post on the same topic (h/t: The Professor is in).

• From Sally Hadden, on work done with co-editors Al Brophy and Patti Minter:
• “A strong vision before you begin inviting people is essential. Put it on paper, give it clarity and depth.
• Imagine the ‘dream team’ of contributors you want and ask them first, but be prepared with other names to make sure your original strong vision doesn't go by the wayside if A or B is unavailable.
• Shoot for a mix of established and brand-new scholars, so that your table of contents shows contributions from more than one generation [this may help sell to more than one generation too!]
• Set clear deadlines up front.
• If you have brand-new scholars contributing, stick to those deadlines. Their tenure may depend on it.
• Provide regular feedback to your contributors. Don't leave them guessing. ("Thanks for your essays. We will be using this timetable to turn them around." "We've submitted the manuscript to the press." "We've had positive readers' reports." "We're sending out essays with editorial feedback for your review and revision." "Thanks for being so prompt in returning this revised essay." "The press tells us that we are in the fall catalog")
• Ask your contributors to assist with the index by giving you the index terms they want to see covered, at a minimum.
• Ask your contributors for suggestions about where the volume should be reviewed.
• I was really lucky. I worked with two excellent co-editors, we moved the two volumes through the process promptly, we worked with presses whose editors kept their word about when things would happen. The vast majority of our contributors delivered when they said they would.”

• From another scholar: “Some thoughts on editing volumes.  Without meaning to, I have CO-edited three volumes and single-edited one volume of an author’s papers (working now on another’s).  I emphasize the co-edited part because that has been key to those volumes, but in different ways. [One] volume came about through the same editor that solicited my [own monograph]. I thought it would be selfish and unhelpful for me to be the lead person on both. So, I asked [X] to take the lead on that volume. The point here is that sometimes edited volumes can be about building a field and investment in a field. At that time, [X] was not centered in [the main theme of the edited volume]. His editorial work on that volume brought him squarely into a small field and, as a result, made our field much better because of his subsequent publications.  Around [year], a sometime teacher of mine, [Y], contacted me about contributing to a volume for our mutual teacher.... When I agreed, he then asked whether I knew other [similar scholars] who might contribute and suddenly I was co-editor. He never said this to me, but I have a feeling that the volume has stalled at some point...I give this history…because sometimes editing a volume is about getting worthy things started again.  One might start with 20 contributors in mind and only 8 end up doing anything. A secondary infusion of editorial help, in this case, pushed the whole thing in a way that I think fulfilled the purpose of the original idea.  For what it’s worth, the [non-US] publisher of that volume has repeatedly told me that this was his breakthrough into the US academic scene. [That publisher] has now become an important publisher of…monographs and edited volumes [on the theme of our volume]. I don’t really believe that our volume had much to do with it, but maybe a little. Finally, this new volume was a fun project for me because I got to work with my old mentor... I’m proud of the volume and its contributors, but the publication process with [publisher] was frustrating. It’s all style and format, but there are inconsistencies that the publisher introduced that we are now responsible for.  Substantively, the volume attempts a new state-of-the-field description/assessment, drawing on the expertise of many…In terms of takeaway, any edited volume should have a clear purpose. We intended to make [name’s] lifetime work more accessible. He covered all aspects of [theme] and so do we. That means the world looks different than if we started with [more standard] categories. We’re fine with that. Readers should adjust, because it’s worth it. I think it’s too early to say if we succeeded but I will always be happy with the goals.  So, as you can see, my experience suggests that various good reasons exist for editing volumes.  Cooperation was essential to those I’ve worked on and I recommend co-editing, if the work can be divided cleanly (as it was in each case for me).  In the case of single-editor volumes, it’s about why. So, general advice? Make sure you’re advancing a field and have a clear, unitary purpose behind a volume.”

• Dan Ernst: “Having done one, I'm with the Karen [Kelsky] of the blogpost.” DE would be surprised if many editors of a volume would want to edit another one. “Law review symposia issues might be a different matter, because so much of the most awful part is shifted to the students, and there's a drop dead deadline.” “My general position is a strong presumption that the costs of such volumes usually outweigh the benefits. The whole should be decisively more than the sum of its parts. This usually happens only with a great deal of ex ante planning by an editor, who envisions a large, multifaceted problem or question, assigns pieces of it to the proper people, give them enough time and incentives, and rides herd and polices deadlines right up to final submission. Usually, the best efforts by editors to find order in essays culled from the on-going projects of even historians working within hailing distance of each other falls short of the mark.”

• Jim Jaffe: “About editing:

1. Make extra double sure that any co-editor is willing and able to do their share of the work. Editing a volume is a tedious and frustrating endeavor. There are a lot of slackers out there so avoid any free riders.
2. Beware of contributors who may steal your idea. This happened to me after I gave up editing a volume of essays and then one of my contributors went on to edit and publish the exact same thing. Not all that unusual, I’ve been told.
3. Make sure your publisher thoroughly understands the scope and audience for your project….The chief editor at [publisher] desperately wanted [a volume I was putting together] until he actually saw its contents. After putting in the work to prepare the table of contents, draft an introduction, etc., he decided it wouldn’t fit into their catalog after all. He didn’t seem to understand at the outset that the volume was to be historical and not contemporary.”

• Sally Gordon:”I have been the editor of exactly NO edited volumes but have participated in several and written intros for a couple.  I also am on a faculty editorial board of a scholarly press and have seen how unmanageable many such projects are.  Honestly, keeping all the authors on point and within word limits is very difficult.  So now I understand better the urgency of the mandate to craft a piece to suit the main focus of a volume.  Without a really strong and careful editor, the authors kind of swim off in different directions, and such a volume without a clear focus can easily lose its way.”
• Kelly Kennington: “I have not yet participated in an edited volume as either an author or an editor, largely because my university does not count such publications or work toward tenure and promotion unless it is peer reviewed.  I am currently working on a forum for a journal that will be peer reviewed, and I am one of the two organizers as well as a contributing author.  At the moment, we have only solicited the articles and discussed the time table, though, so I don't have much advice on how to do it.  We did find that the Journal was more open to doing a shorter forum than a special issue.”
• Dan Klerman, speaking as a contributor, but with advice to editors of collections: “The only sticking point is that the slowest contributor (or editor) determines the publication date.  So for one of these books, I think the delay between submitting my final draft and publication was about 4 years.  So my main suggestion is pick people who can stick to a deadline and keep people moving.”
• From a scholar who co-edited two volumes, and who has also done a symposium issue of a journal: “It isn't easy to get an edited volume accepted any more, and the first one I did (which was not on law) was hell on wheels.  The second one [with a co-editor] was idyllic.  The third one [co-edited, happening currently] has been slower than I would have liked, but that is because the contributors have been slow.  I know presses never to touch.”
• Julie Novkov: “As an editor
• the best volumes I’ve done have been worked on through conferences, where we have put together multiple panels with volume contributors presenting chapters and discussing others’ chapters. This really helps to get the main themes more integrated, and helps authors refer to each other in a less forced way
• identify key themes early on and communicate them to authors
• be willing to read and comment on even very early and preliminary drafts! Some of the best chapters start just as think pieces that the author then shapes as the volume develops
• try to collect chapters from people at a variety of career stages and do what you can to get the people in the volume to know each other in real life. A volume project can also be a wonderful exercise in community building.

Every volume I’ve ever worked on, as a chapter author or as an editor, has been worth it!”

• Wes Pue: “I’ve edited a number of journal special issues and some book collections. Here are some random thoughts: 

1. The most frustrating are projects which cannot proceed without solid contributions from each of a number of contributors. All become hostage to the last to submit.  There are good and bad reasons for delayed delivery but the consequences are the same.
2. Thematic unity is important but a prior determination that some topic(s) MUST be included invites hazard if the work is not in hand when it is needed. 
3. A well-chosen co-editor can make a project fun, widen the intellectual scope, share the work, and expand the net of contributors.  I’ve benefited immensely from such arrangements. Sometimes, however, there is a ‘cost’ of losing decisions regarding items to include or reject. Having to reject something you wish to include makes for an unhappy moment. 
4. I’ve liked working on projects emerging from working groups of loosely allied scholars, each exploring a topic or interdisciplinary enquiry from their own perspective.  This can push scholarship in new and innovative directions. 
5. Getting edited books into print can be difficult compared with taking on guest editorship of a journal. Occasionally publishers encourage a volume but lose interest (possibly because of change of staff) before the work emerges. 
6. Folks need to beware [of the] time commitment. Edited collections can take a ton of time (they don’t always). This can be costly to scholarly careers, especially for those stepping onto tenure track or wishing to do so.  Pick solid, reliable contributors, any one of whom can be left out if not ready to proceed by publication date.  It can be helpful to hire a good copy editor to assist (a task to be avoided by academics) if you can. Be prepared to reject submissions by friendly colleagues (ouch).”

• Intisar Rabb: “I’ve largely had good experiences as an editor… Here are a few thoughts:
• I loved the experience of a helping to compile recent co-edited volume. My co-editor and I convened a conference which then turned into a volume…in honor or a retiring colleague, who hated Festschrift compilations that were random selections of student and collegial writings, and preferred something thematic. Luckily, we were able to settle on [a] theme that started his academic career, was of close [interest] to us as editors, and where many of his students and colleagues had something to say. To be as inclusive as possible, we also opened up the conference through a call for papers, the best of which would be published in the volume, and we also asked other colleagues of the professor honored who could not attend the conference if they had something to contribute on the theme. For good measure, and to make it a scholarly publication worthy of the field, we published through an academic press, which included peer review. Because of the good will for the honoree (and draconian, threatening emails about being timely from the organizers and editors – which we knew we had to back up by being timely ourselves in the editing to make it before the honoree’s actual retirement), the conference was enlightening and jovial, and contributors were timely with their submissions. After the conference, we submitted the volume after 12 months, and it was published in 18 months – which is pretty fast!
• Some benefits were getting to work closely with a friend and colleague on editorial decisions, and getting to know some of the work of colleagues in the field on a subject of close interest to me (I didn’t know that some were also moving in that direction) – so I found it well worth doing, and we even talked about keeping in touch to perhaps do further work together or at least read each others’ manuscripts in the future.”

• Mitra Sharafi: “Good advice from a wise colleague: don’t think of being an editor of a group publication as research. It is service.”

A very big thank you to contributors!

Should I do an edited collection? Advice to Authors

Credit: British Library Flickr

Group publications can be challenging in many ways. We asked legal historians for their advice on doing edited volumes or special issues (h/t: LSA Law and History CRN). Our questions:

• What works and what doesn’t?
• What did you learn the hard way or wish you had known from the start?
• Was it worth it in the end?
• Were there any unexpected benefits?

We received a ton of responses. In the first post of this series, we share advice on contributing a chapter as an author. The second post will be about putting together such collections as an editor of the volume or special issue. The third will cover advice from scholars who have been editors of journals that produce special issues.

Our title borrows from Karen Kelsky’s post on the same topic (h/t: The Professor is in).

On the problem of delay:

• “It's fun to work with/get feedback from people you know and trust, and I've had good experiences. In my experience, they are held hostage by the slowest author, so they tend to come out a few years later than initial (pessimistic) estimates. (I assume this blog post will be full of synonyms for ‘herding cats.’) I've been relatively fortunate that I haven't needed things to come out by a certain deadline for tenure/promotion, but I'd definitely warn junior scholars away from them if that was a concern.”

• “My thoughts on contributing, particularly for untenured folks, is to be very careful about committing to something highly specialized or getting too much ‘in the weeds’ on a project, because a publisher can and will pull the plug, even on a finished volume. If you can't easily repurpose the chapter for another project, this can really impair your publishing agenda.”

• “Here is my edited volume horror story: Workshop in 2011, I committed to publish piece (pre-tenure), book still languishing with [the publisher], although I corrected proofs about 2 (maybe 3) years ago (after tenure decision made without publication). AND I signed publication agreement that embargoes piece for 5 years after publication, which means that every year not published extends that embargo. AND I am now deeply embarrassed for the piece to appear with a current…date, when I wrote it using the literature of 2011. I will look like I completely ignored years of relevant work. No idea what is going on, but makes my last experience with an edited volume (5 years from conference to book) look speedy.”

• “I had a mixed experience with an edited volume…I was very flattered to be asked and spent a decent chunk of my pre-tenure time writing an original contribution. But then years passed in which nothing happened, publication-wise, and I worried about the chapter getting stale. During that time, I received zero credit for this piece of scholarship within my own institution. The piece did not make it into my tenure file. But there were positives, too. I learned some valuable things from writing the chapter, and participating in the volume put me in scholarly and real-life conversation with some people I really admire.”

• “One bandaid remedy to the staleness problem is to say in footnote 1: ‘This article was written in 2013.’ Obviously it’s still not great if your piece doesn’t come out until 5+ years after you wrote it (I’m in this situation with an article right now), but at least this tells the reader: ‘here is why you’re not seeing post-2013 literature in this piece, even though it has a 2019 publication date.’ I don’t usually post drafts on SSRN, academia.edu, or elsewhere, because I try to have only one version out there—the final one. But with the chapter I wrote several years ago whose edited volume shows no signs of coming out soon, I have asked the editors if I may post a draft of my chapter online, just to get it out there in some form.”

• Jim Jaffe: “As a contributor, I’ve been fortunate enough to have excellent editors, but the entire process is a long one and can take much longer than publishing an article in a journal. Of course, some or most edited volumes are not peer reviewed, so the quality of the finished product varies. One might want to be aware of these things.”

• Dan Klerman: “I have contributed chapters to several edited volumes and special issues recently. I have found the process to be very easy.  The editors had a very light touch, and everything went smoothly.  The only sticking point is that the slowest contributor (or editor) determines the publication date.  So for one of these books, I think the delay between submitting my final draft and publication was about 4 years.”

• Intisar Rabb reports some good experiences as an author. However, as an author, “my main complaint is the time it takes to go from submission to publication, and the lack of communication from the editors sometimes in that process. I have often submitted materials, and 5 years later have waited on news of review or publication. I wish editors would be more timely and follow a schedule of publication that is reasonable (2 years is fine; 5 years is excessive). My other main complaint is the time it takes to go from solicitation [by the editors] to submission [by me], and the lack of communication from me sometimes in that process!”

• Julie Novkov: “Meet your deadlines, for the love of whatever deity you worship!”

On the tenure & promotions process:

• “It is important to ask yourself: how does this count for tenure or promotion? My view is that if you are counting on an edited volume to get you tenured or promoted you either shouldn’t do it or should not be promoted. I think it is important for individuals to have their own, independent pedigree and to use edited volumes as a way to advance an argument or to build something good for a field. Otherwise, do something else.”

• Kelly Kennington: “I have not yet participated in an edited volume as either an author or an editor, largely because my university does not count such publications or work toward tenure and promotion unless it is peer reviewed.  Even if it is peer reviewed, edited collections count less than journal articles or, of course, monographs.  I was asked to be an author in a couple of edited collections and said no both times to focus on my book and articles that will count toward my promotion file.  I wish that the administration valued edited volume contributions, but until they do, I don't think I will get involved in one.  My time for research and writing is so limited…that I have to be careful with how I choose to spend it.”

On the coherence of the collection:

• “As an author, I have contributed to several…volumes. The stinkers are those that just throw stuff together. For me, the process is often indicative of the result. I have twice been asked last-minute to contribute to something in order to ‘round out’ a volume. In both cases, the urgency was mere pretense (the volumes only appeared years later) and the resulting volumes were [a hodge-podge]. I regret doing those, but was trying to help someone in both cases. The best volumes as an author, for me, have been those that resulted from a coherent project (often including a preceding meeting/conference) in which contributors get a good sense of what the larger aim is…Moral? Don’t contribute to volumes where the point/purpose is not clear. Edited volumes, like everything, should have an argument, say something new. If they don’t, skip. If they do, and you like the direction, embrace the goal and make your contribution an integral part of the overarching effort."

• Sally Gordon: “In terms of being an author, the difficulty that I have found is figuring out how best to craft my piece given [the parameters of the group publication].”

• Julie Novkov: “As an author, it’s great if you can read the other chapters as they are in progress, or at least the ones in the same section of the volume as yours. If you can get either the introduction or a sense of the broad themes the editors are emphasizing, that really helps too.”

• Jim Pfander: “I just published a chapter in a historical collection…It was on balance a worthwhile experience although the volume took a very long time to appear. The editors did a lovely job writing intros and other narrative material to stitch the various chapters together. Whether the end result has a genuine coherence and whether the chapters add to one another I cannot really say. But there’s more coherence than in some collections, partly because the editors encouraged the contributors to think in terms of historical periods.”

On edited collections that start with a conference:

• Laura Edwards: “it seems like my best experiences with edited collections have come as a contributor, when the volume was connected to a conference, organized around the theme of the volume, where we presented papers and discussed them before revising.  I suspect there are a lot of reasons why that seemed to work so well.  For one, we all had an initial deadline for the conference, where we were all presenting.  Then the discussion of the papers was really helpful in thinking through revisions and also making a cohesive volume."

On the importance of edited volumes in certain sub-fields:

• “In some sub-fields, people do book chapters, not law review articles (in part because it's hard to get published in a top law review coming from this sub-field). I wonder if people who do comparative legal history feel similarly? [A friend] felt that there was just no way to get around these volumes [in her field]. And she perceived a big risk in saying ‘no’ to participating in a volume that included big names in her field.”

On accessibility:

• John Wertheimer: “As an author, a down side can be that sometimes scholarly indexes don’t include book chapters as they do journal articles and book titles. Consequently, the edited collection chapter can sort of fall off the edge of the earth, not to be heard from again. Folks working in your field might not ever find your piece if you publish it in an edited collection. It’s a line on your CV, but might not move the needle in the scholarly conversation.”

• Sally Gordon: “[One] difficulty with such projects is that so few of them are available digitally, and I have generally advised early career scholars that participating in a symposium issue of a journal is likely to yield more readership than a traditional edited volume."

• Dan Klerman: “Another issue is that book chapters seem to be hard for researchers to find.  Anything you can do to increase visibility and citations (e.g. get the chapters indexed in the standard services, into Google Scholar, or somehow into Westlaw or Lexis) would be really helpful. Sometimes I feel like these chapters seldom get read (or cited).”

When it is worth it:

• Julie Novkov: “Every volume I’ve ever worked on, as a chapter author or as an editor, has been worth it!”

• Sally Gordon: “there are occasions where a new field emerges that can be productively defined and explained in an edited volume as nowhere else, because it includes multiple perspectives and examples of scholarship.”

• "There is apparently a new phenomenon called ‘pop up’ books. The idea is to do a volume on a super-expedited basis. Since everyone knows that's the deal in advance, I guess it solves some of the ‘herding cats’ issues that tend to arise later in the process.”

A very big thank you to contributors!