Weekend Roundup

• 
  "The Selden Society regularly funds a Milsom Studentship for a person undertaking research in English legal history leading to the degree of PhD (or equivalent) at a university in the United Kingdom." 

• A review of Geoffrey Samuel's Principia Iuris: A Historical and Comparative Introduction to the English Law (Edward Elgar Publishing) (Law Society Gazette). 

• A review of James Hart's The U.S. Supreme Court in American Society: Historical Perspectives (Edward Elgar Publishing) (Law Society Gazette).

• Washington University-St. Louis Law invited UCLA's Stuart Banner back to lecture on his history of the US Supreme Court (Student Life).   

• On Tuesday, April 28, from  6:00 - 8:00 PM, the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, First Department with support from the Historical Society of the New York Courts, will sponsor a talk on The Constitution’s Framers: What They Teach us about Making America Better, by John D. Feerick, Norris Professor of Law, Fordham Law School Dean Emeritus, and a panel discussion with William M. Treanor, Dean Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center and Fordham Law School and John Rogan, Senior Fellow, Fordham Law School.  Register here. 

• Jill Hasday, Minnesota Law, discusses We the Men on the Infinite Women podcast. 

• A fully funded four-year Collaborative Doctoral Studentship at the University of Leeds on The Making of the National Archive: The First Century of the Public Record Office.  

• Over at Balkinization, a symposium is underway of Stephen Skowronek's The Adaptability Paradox.   Several legal historians are slate to contribute.

• The National Constitution Center has posted the recording of its Town Hall on Women and the American Revolution with Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita of American History at Cornell University, and Rosemarie Zagarri, distinguished university professor of history at George Mason University. 

• ICYMI: Back to the archives to defend reproductive rights (Ms. Magazine).  A dispatch from the new "civic education" (University of Colorado-Boulder).  New York's woman lawyers (NYSBA).  Michael R. Dreeben revisits Robert Jackson’s "The Federal Prosecutor" (HLR). 

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

Siegel on the Originalist Case for Prenatal Personhood

Reva Siegel, Yale Law School, has posted It's Alive! When the Original Meaning of "Person" Protected by the Fourteenth Amendment Is Not a Fixed, But Living Word:

This Article examines an originalist argument for prenatal personhood—that life from conception is included within the original public meaning of the “person” the Fourteenth Amendment protects—advanced by Josh Craddock, the most prominent proponent of the originalist-personhood claim in the years before and after Dobbs. Under the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, Craddock claims, the “preborn” are persons entitled to due process and equal protection of the laws so that homicide statutes should apply to “preborn” as well as born persons.

The Article begins by evaluating Craddock’s argument for the original public meaning of person on its own terms, and identifies fundamental flaws in the way Craddock uses dictionary evidence and addresses the textual and historical context in which the Fourteenth Amendment employs the term “person.”  It then shows that Craddock is reasoning about abortion inside contemporary frameworks and not as nineteenth-century Americans did. (Craddock’s argument employs a language of personhood that opponents of abortion only began using as they entered into struggles over the Constitution in the era of Roe; Craddock draws on “substantive” originalist methods and advances equal-protection arguments about homicide law that opponents of abortion did not advocate until the twenty-first century, in the era of Dobbs

In concluding, the Article situates Craddock among abortion “abolitionists” who support legislation that provides equal protection to unborn persons by applying homicide law to women who obtain abortions and those who assist them. Abolitionists defend their carceral equal-protection arguments by appeal to constitutional memory (e.g. “person,” Lincoln; Frederick Douglass’s North Star) and in openly religious terms.

--Dan Ernst 

Symposium on Sharafi's "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947"

A symposium in Modern Asian Studies is devoted to an article by Mitra Sharafi, Wisconsin Law, who is the new President of the American Society for Legal History.  Professor Sharafi's  article was "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947: A medico-legal history," published in Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021): 371–428.  The just-published symposium includes comments by Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University; Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University; and Philippa Levine, Emerita, University of Texas; with a response by Professor Sharafi.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

•  A Q&A with Jane Manners, who joined Fordham's law faculty this fall (Fordham Law News).

• The death of former Vice President Dick Cheney has prompted reflections on his significance for U.S. legal history, including this one at the Conversation and this one at the New York Times. 

• Marlene Trestman has updated her database of 817 women who have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court (through May 15, 2025).  It is now live on the Supreme Court Historical Society's website.

• The Law & Economics Center at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School will host the symposium, The Un-Forgotten Founder: A Celebration of George Mason's Legacy on the Occasion of His 300th Birthday, on December 8, 2025.  The panelists include Akhil Reed Amar, Yale Law School; Michael S. Greve, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School; The Honorable Edith Hollan Jones, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; and The Honorable William C. Mims, Senior Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia.

• Mitchell Del Bianco, who graduated this year from UVA Law's famed JD-MA program, has won the Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition for his paper, “What Is a House? An Exhibit Investigating Common Law Origins of the Open Fields Doctrine.” He wrote it for Professor Paul Halliday’s legal history class. (UVA Law).    

• Speaking of UVA Law, new courses taught in the January term and Spring 2026 semester include "Citizenship: The Law, History and Politics of U.S. Citizenship," co-taught by Karsh fellow Anja Bossow and Professor Amanda Frost; "Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence," co-taught by Charles Barzun and David Plunkett, visiting from Dartmouth's philosophy department; and "Roman Law of Family, Property and Succession," taught by Michael Doran.

• Cultural Critique Online has published a roundtable on The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America's Universities (Duke University Press, 2023), by Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (Whitman College). It features responses by Joshua Barkan (Georgia), Michael Banerjee (UC Berkeley), and Adam Sitze (Amherst), along with a reply by Kaufman-Osborn.  

• Julian Zelizer interviews John Fabian Witt on his book The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.

• 
  Miloš Vec, University of Vienna, will deliver the lecture After 1919 and after 1945: How Two World Wars Shaped German Thinking on International Law, at Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana on November 14, 2025, at 3:00 pm.  More.  

• If you don't know who Sam Thorne was, consult this, which, for reasons known only to the algorithm, found its way to us this week.

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

• ICYMI: More Lepore (Harvard Crimson). Kenya's new judiciary museum (Eastleigh Voice).  An essay on Abortion, the 1966 book by the journalist Larry Nadler and the birth of the reproductive rights movement (Public Books).  The history of China's legal exam (World of Chinese).

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

Bracke's "Reproductive Rights in Modern France"

Maud Anne Bracke, University of Glasgow, has published Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford University Press):

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms.

This book breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors - including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments - Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Adam Sitze (Amherst College) on "The Strange History of University Autonomy — and Why We Need It More Than Ever."

• "Miscarriage is a Crime Again": over at Nursing Clio, Lara Freidenfelds draws connections between the contemporary U.S. and early modern England.   

• A recording of Kim Lane Schepple's really terrific Robert H. Jackson Lecturer on the Supreme Court of the United States.at the Chautauqua Institution is here.  "Professor Scheppele’s lecture focused on Robert H. Jackson and constitutional separation of powers": Court-packing, destroyers for basis, North American Aviation, Nuremberg, Youngstown, and Trump v. United States.  With an introduction by John Q. Barrett.

• 
  MIT's notice of Malick Ghachem’s new book, The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble, which "examines the pre-revolutionary changes that set Haiti’s long-term economic structure in place." 

• Patrick S. O'Donnell on "The Haitian Revolution and Jacob Lawrence: Exemplifying Historical Narrative, Values and Purposes through Art."

• Check out A.B. Hart's Suggestions on the Study of History (1893).  H/t: MSB. 

• "The Supreme Court of Ohio is staying open late to the public on Sept. 9 with two evening tour offerings. ... See Ohio’s rich history on full display at the Thomas J. Moyer Ohio Judicial Center" (CNO).  

• "Three UMass Dartmouth School of Law 2L students, Patrick Wilson, Adyen Artica, and Nathan Gudas, helped North Shore government officials verify approximately 200 property deeds containing racist or discriminatory language, contributing to a broader effort to clean "dirty deeds" in southern Essex County, as part of their legal internships at the Essex Registry of Deeds" (UMass Law).

• "Patrick T. Conley has donated his 1,500-volume private collection on American legal and constitutional history to the Roger Williams University School of Law" (Warwick Beacon). 

• The Brennan Center Fellows Eric Ruben and Andrew Willinger's essay on the Supreme Court's reliance  on historical scholarship in Second Amendment case.  

• Patrick O'Donnell also has an essay on the criminal defense and cause lawyer Charles R. Garry (1909-1991).

• On September 21, 2025, 5:00 pm -6:00 pm, Jill Lepore will discuss her new book on the Constitution, We the People, at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC PoPVille). 

• "Tulane University School of Law invites applications from entry-level and lateral candidates for one or more tenure-track faculty positions.  We welcome applications from candidates with teaching and research interests in all topics, but we are particularly interested in candidates who focus on torts, business organizations, and commercial law."  More. 

• ICYMI:  Thomas Edsall on the Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump, with quotes from Terri Bimes, Matt Dallek, Bruce Miroff, Jack Rakove, Rogers Smith, Jeremi Suri, Sean Wilentz et al. (NYT).

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

Bracke's "Reproductive Rights in Modern France"

Maud Anne Bracke has published Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950–1980 (Oxford University Press):

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms.

This book breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors--including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments--Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• "History in Action: A Conversation with Professor Felicia Kornbluh"(UVM). 

• Richard Epstein on his career as a legal scholar (and other topics) in the "Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century" podcast series of the Hoover Institution (Hoover).  

• Lindsay Chervinsky joins Saikrishna Prakash, Virginia Law, online to discuss her book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic, and “how the Constitution and the presidency were shaped by the demands of the times and how both continue to evolve.”  Thursday, September 4, 2025, 11 a.m.-12 p.m.  Sponsored by the UVA Miller Center (UVA Law).

• The University of Chicago Law School's notice of Alison LaCroix's receipt of that SHEAR book prize for The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms.

• Mary Ziegler, UC Davis School of Law, and Stephen Gilles, Quinnipiac University School of Law discuss Professor Ziegler’s book Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction in a National Constitution Center podcast.   

• 
  "Gerard Magliocca is the winner of the Erwin N. Griswold Prize [of the Supreme Court Historical Society] for his book Washington’s Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington (Oxford University Press, 2022). The Griswold Prize is awarded on an occasional basis when a book about the history of the Supreme Court" (SCHS).

• Jonathan Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism has been longlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.  

• This year, University of New Mexico School of Law is looking to hire in the fields criminal law, civil procedure, Law and Indigenous People, clinic and legal research and writing 

• ICYMI: Joyce Vance on Judge Frank Johnson on the Right to Protest (Substack).  Charles Apple on the history of the US Census (Spokane Spokesman-Review).  An interview with William Treanor (HIL Podcast)

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

Grossman and Friedman on History, Tradition and Abortion

The second of today’s HAT posts is Joanna L. Grossman, SMU-Dedman School of Law, and Lawrence M. Friedman, Stanford Law School, The Quick and the Dead: The Uses and Misuses of History in Abortion Jurisprudence, which appears in the Women’s Rights Law Reporter:

On June 24, 2022, a solid conservative majority of justices on the United States Supreme Court decided that the time had come to overrule Roe v. Wade, and it did so in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The opinion in Roe, according to the majority in Dobbs, “was egregiously wrong from the start.” And the time had come to get rid of it once and for all. There was no constitutional right to an abortion, according to the majority. In the Court’s words, “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”  

Dobbs is and will remain controversial. Abortion is clearly a major issue, politically speaking, with strong passions on both sides. Roe v. Wade itself was also controversial from the very beginning. Abortion had been a contested matter before that decision; and Roe itself was never accepted by a large minority of Americans, particularly in the South. Both sides in the abortion controversy have appealed to the historical record. The Dobbs majority opinion relies on the criminalization of abortion in the second half of the nineteenth century to conclude that abortion cannot be recognized as a fundamental right under the Fourteenth Amendment. In this article, we want to re-examine that history. 

It would be naïve to think that historical considerations made a crucial difference in the Dobbs decision (despite what the opinion claims); or that it will be decisive in a related dispute over the Comstock Act and the legality of abortion pills. But historical rhetoric has been a prominent tool in the abortion dispute; and this makes it worthwhile to pick apart the historical arguments. Yet this is not only, or primarily, a study in legal history. It is a study of the shape and meaning of the abortion controversy over time. It is a study of how the social context molded that controversy, in the past, and in the present. The goal is to broaden our understanding, first, of the abortion issue, and beyond that, how politics, religion, ideology, and other factors bear on the question of unborn life. 

The aim is objectivity—if that is possible. We will first consider the particular ways in which history was deemed relevant to the majority’s ruling in Dobbs and note the historical claims that are contested or even obviously wrong. Then, we will get to the heart of the article, in which we examine the history of abortion law and policy in social context. This analysis lays bare the absurdity of grounding constitutional rights in “history,” when laws and policies are plucked from their social context and dropped into a world that would have been unrecognizable to those who lived at the relevant time in history.

Abortion is, as before, a controversial issue. History, as we said, cannot convince either side that their view is right and the other view wrong. What it can do is shine the light of scholarship on the history of this controversy, with as much rigor as the subject allows. When we do this, the historical arguments in the Dobbs opinion seem more and more irrelevant. Those arguments, we have argued, were based on a profound misreading of the social context in which the abortion issue in Victorian times played out. Today, we live in a very different world. The terms of the debate in the nineteenth century are not the terms of today. They are in fact, as we tried to show in this article, essentially obsolete. 

--Dan Ernst 

Masur Delivers Fulton Lecture on Abortion in New England

On April 28, Kate Masur, the John D. MacArthur Chair and Professor of History at Northwestern University, delivered the 2025 Fulton Lecture in Legal History at the University of Chicago Law School, “Of History and Traditions: Abortion, Patriarchy, and Law in Small Town New England ca. 1860.”  A full notice of Professor Masur's lecture is here.  We will update with the video when it becomes available.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Nursing Clio, Kylie Smith (Emory University) brings history to bear on "RFK’s ideas about 'wellness farms' for young people." 
  

• The next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop will take place on May 16 at 12 noon UTC.  Sara Limao Papa, a doctoral student at Goethe University Frankfurt, will present "The Pathways of the People: Access to Water in 18th-Century Maranhão and Bahia."  Tamar Herzog, Harvard University, will comment. (More and h/t: H-Law).

• 
   HLS's notice of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (Harvard Law Today).

• Throughout this week, we've mentioned legal-historical works that won prizes at the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Another legal history--Marie-Amélie George's Family Matters--won an Honorable Mention, for the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award.  For more on the book, check out the wonderful series of posts that Professor George wrote for the blog last fall. Congratulations, Professor George!
  

• Mary Ziegler, UC Davis, discusses her new book, Personhood, on the NPR show Here & Now.

• NYU Law's notice of its lateral hiring of Sarah Seo.  
  

• Linda Colley has received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
  

• The Organization of American Historians hails its new president, Annette Gordon-Reed.

• Gerard N. Magliocca on Vice Presidential Inaugural Addresses (Green Bag).
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman's reflections on civility and the debate over Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Review.

• ICYMI:  Chief Justice Roberts, a Buffalo native, will help celebrate 125th anniversary of the Western District of New York.  Robert H. Jackson and John Lord O'Brian would be pleased!  (WGRZ). Originalism in a gun-control case in the Fourth Circuit (Bloomberg Law).

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

Fox and Ziegler on the History of IVF and Abortion

Dov Fox, University of San Diego School of Law, and Mary Ziegler, University of California, Davis School of Law, have posted The New Abortion, which is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review:

In vitro fertilization presents a neglected puzzle. IVF is used to create one in fifty babies born in the U.S. each year. Yet it remains deeply underregulated and has rarely been subject to political wrangling. Courts and commentators assume the regulatory vacuum around assisted reproduction owes to the singular polarization of abortion in the United States. But for half a century, the fate of these practices could not have been more different: contrast the state’s hands-off approach to IVF with vast constraints on abortion, marked by explosive partisan battles. Only since Roe’s fall has IVF become a culture war flashpoint—in roiling controversies over state restrictions, the Right to IVF Act in Congress, and the 2024 Alabama Supreme Court case treating embryos as persons. IVF’s sudden emergence as a site of intense contestation and social-movement struggle is what we call the new abortion.

This Article resolves the enduring mystery of IVF’s longstanding retreat from public discourse and its abrupt appearance on the national scene. It presents the first-ever legal history of the relationship between IVF and abortion. We chronicle and synthesize the political and regulatory dynamics they pose for family, faith, race, sex, gender, science, medicine, and technology, drawing on original archival research in three privately held collections, two historical societies, four universities, and the Library of Congress. This untold story reveals how IVF’s regulatory impasse collapsed in the aftermath of Roe’s reversal, exposing crumbling barriers to compromise and surprising patches of common ground in the wake of escalating conflicts around abortion. Our history also uncovers a historically informed path to meaningfully regulate IVF’s legality, access, licensing of clinics, and transparency about mishaps.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• New online from Law and History Review: Sara M. Butler's Context Matters: Understanding Why Medieval Legislators Chose to Regulate Women's Pregnant Bodies.  "The article was inspired by Justice Alito's selective and often misleading use of the medieval history of abortion law to justify the overturning of Roe v. Wade."
  

• Kate Masur's delivery of the Brian Simpson Lecture in Legal History at the University of Michigan made the list of most memorable stories at Michigan Law in 2024
  

• CFP: Corruption and Scandal in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London, June 5-6, 2025 (H-Law).
  

• Neil Eggleston, White House Counsel to President Obama, on The History and Impact of Recess Appointments on the ABA's National Security Law Today Podcast.
  

• ICYMI: Canon Law in North Carolina (Carolina Journal). 
  

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

Sreenivas on Legalizing Abortion in India

Mytheli Sreenivas, Ohio State University, has published Population, Eugenics and Reproductive Rights: Legalising Abortion in India, 1966–71 open access in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies:

This article analyses the 1971 passage of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, which created a framework for legal abortion in India. Examining the policy and legislative discourses that led to abortion reform, it demonstrates that the history of the MTP Act is not a simple trajectory of advancing the reproductive rights of pregnant persons. Rather, a connection to regimes of population control marked the MTP Act in enduring ways, notably by linking abortion to family planning, and by justifying the procedure as a eugenic response to disability. This history suggests why a rights-based approach to abortion has been so elusive, with enduring impact on access to abortion care.

--Dan Ernst

Kreis on Regulating Reproduction in Redeemer Georgia

Anthony Michael Kreis, Georgia State University College of Law, has posted Sex and Control in Redeemer Georgia, which is forthcoming in the Georgia State University Law Review:

This essay explores the interplay of history, law, and morality behind the first abortion law in Georgia. Examining the philosophical underpinnings of liberty and equality as articulated in Georgia's constitutional history through time, the essay highlights the moral contradictions inherent in the legal frameworks of Reconstruction Georgia. The origin of Georgia's 1876 abortion law contains multitudes-rooted in race-based contestations for political power, the sociological evolution of medical practice, and evolving attitudes on individual rights. At times, white elites used abortion to attack Yankee culture and stir up racist fears about moral contagion associated with Radical Republicans. To this end, when read against political time, the campaign to regulate motherhood and criminalize reproductive choice was not simply grounded in morality claims about protecting fetal life-a significant theme in the mid-nineteenth century campaign against abortion nationally-but also about enforcing other race and sex crimes and controlling the freedperson labor force in an era of political uncertainty and constitutional upheaval. Abortion surfaced as a political issue in Georgia at a time and in a manner that makes it inextricably linked to the politics of Reconstruction and Redemption.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 

  David S. Tanenhaus (UNLV)
  

  Heartfelt congratulations to David S. Tanenhaus on his receipt of the American Society for Legal History's Craig Joyce Medal, awarded to recognized extraordinary and sustained service to ASLH (UNLV Boyd School of Law).
  

• In Time Magazine's Made By History series: Ajay Mehrotra on The Tariff History Donald Trump Is Overlooking.
  

• Garrett Epps reviews Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World, "a fresh and readable one-volume history of the Court [that] explains how we got from Marbury to Dobbs" (Washington Monthly).

• On Saturday, November 9, from 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Alison L. LaCroix will discuss The Interbellum Constitution as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637.  The event is open to the public.

• The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has launched We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence, a "multi-year oral history and education project" commencing with the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

• On Monday, November 4, at Noon ET at the National Constitution Center, Keith Richotte, Jr., and Matthew L.M. Fletcher (University of Michigan) will discuss "Native American history and law through the stories of landmark Supreme Court cases."

• Christine Kexel Chabot, Marquette University Law School, is again making available the syllabus for her course Litigating the Lessons of History, in response to the revived debate making legal history part of the law-school curriculum.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Librarians of Congress): "Witchcraft and a Haunted Case of Torture in Joost de Damhouder’s Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1555)"; How a House Becomes Legally Haunted: Stambovsky v. Ackley, The “Ghostbuster” Ruling."

• Literary Hub's Ten Best Books on Reproductive Rights includes ones by Michele Goodwin, Leslie Reagan, and Mary Ziegler.  
  

• A notice of Molly Brady's  Brandeis Chair lecture at HLS, much of which she devoted to the legal history of single-family dwellings in the United States (Harvard Law Today).
  

• The University of Helsinki Faculty of Law "invites applications for a fixed term employment as a doctoral researcher or a postdoctoral researcher" with the project Comparing Early Modern Colonial Laws, led by Academy Professor Heikki Pihlajamäki.   More.

• 
  
  New online in Law & History Review: Weber in Jerusalem: The Rabbinical Debate over the Establishment of the Rabbinical Court of Appeals, 1918–1921, by Chagai Schlesinger.
  

• The Stanford Law School has announced its latest round of Sallyanne Payton Fellows.  I mentioned this here not simply because two legal historians, Greg Ablavsky and Bernadette Meyler, are their mentors, but because I gained lasting insights into the mindset of the first, postwar generation of Washington lawyers when then-Professor Payton shared her recollections of Charles Horsky when I presented at Michigan Law, some years ago.  DRE
  

• ICYMI:  Kristina M. Lee, University of South Dakota, on "What the history of blasphemy laws in the US and the fight for religious freedom can teach us today" (Akron Legal News).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization: Reva Siegel (Yale Law School) and Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) on "Moyle and Abortion’s New Criminalization—A History-And-Tradition Right to Healthcare Access After Dobbs" (recapping findings from a recently posted paper on this topic). 

• Also at Balkinization: an ongoing symposium on Mark Graber's Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform after the Civil War (University Press of Kansas, 2023). So far, you'll see posts by Evan Bernick (Northern Illinois University College of Law), Rebecca Zietlow (University of Toledo College of Law), Alexander Tsesis (Florida State University College of Law), Travis Crum (Washington University in St. Louis Law), Stephen Griffin (Tulane  Law), and Rogers Smith (University of Pennsylvania).
  

• The Brennan Center reviews its Historians' Briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court in the October 2023 term.
  

• 
  The July Newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here.  It features the 1859 trial of Daniel Sickles.

• The American Historical Association is presenting a Congressional Briefing to provide historical perspectives on the role of the federal government on issues of academic freedom in higher education. The briefing will take place on Thursday, July 11 at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075.  David A. Bell (Princeton Univ.), Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (New School), and David M. Rabban (Univ. of Texas School of Law) will present.  James Grossman (American Historical Association) will moderate.

• This panel on Loper-Bright, convened by Neysun Mahboubi and including Cary Coglianese, Emily Bremer, Bridget Dooling, Michael Herz, and Kristin Hickman, sounds in administrative law,  but I found it extremely helpful and thought-provoking about the history of the subject.  DRE 
  

• ICYMI: Holly Brewer says The Supreme Court Turns the President Into a King  (New Republic).  The Court Went Too Far on Presidential Immunity (Cato Institute). The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling has a chilling parallel to the Jim Crow era (MSNBC). The Dred Scott of Our Time, says Sean Wilentz (NYRB). Alison LaCroix interviewed on a podcast on The Exoneration of Richard Nixon (Landslide).  Heather Cox Richardson weighs in (PBS Newshour).  Georgia in the house at the Founding (Atlanta History Center).  Steven K. Green, Willamette University, How Jefferson and Madison's partnership shaped America's separation of church and state (Akron Legal News).
  

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

Siegel and Ziegler on "Abortion's New Criminalization—A History-And-Tradition Right to Healthcare Access After Dobbs and the 2023 Term"

Reva Siegel (Yale Law School) and Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) have posted "Abortion's New Criminalization—A History-And-Tradition Right to Healthcare Access After Dobbs and the 2023 Term." The abstract:

Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reversed Roe v. Wade as contrary to the nation's history and traditions, efforts to ban abortion appear as calls for a return to tradition. But criminalization after Dobbs is not a return to the past; it is a new regime, in certain respects less restrictive, and in others far more so. Today, states criminalize access to urgently needed health care for pregnant patients in ways they never have before. Cases in the Court's 2023 Term, Moyle v. United States and Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, demonstrate these trends. Under Dobbs, do abortion bans that break with history and tradition in obstructing access to urgently needed health care violate liberty guarantees of state or federal constitutions?

We present evidence that the nation has long had a tradition of exempting health care from criminalization that extended to abortion law and was expressed in the many state laws cited in Dobbs’s appendices, as well as in the text and case law of the Comstock Act. This tradition demarcated quite self-conscious limits on state action that were reiterated across jurisdictions and over time. We demonstrate that under Dobbs and Washington v. Glucksberg, such a tradition can guide interpretation of the Constitution’s liberty guarantees, even if access was not historically understood as a right. We show that courts in states with abortion bans view history-and-tradition analysis of this kind as faithful to Dobbs and have begun to employ it under their own state constitutions.

Finally, we defend this account of our law against an originalist reading of Dobbs advanced by Professor Stephen Sachs asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment only protects rights historically recognized as such at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification. We argue that Sachs’s reading conflicts with important aspects of Glucksberg and Dobbs, misconstrues Dobbs’s reasons for turning to history and tradition, and, in the process, imposes constitutionally offensive status inequalities on the Constitution’s liberty guarantees.

Addressing these questions, we suggest, contributes to the broader debate about how history and tradition can guide constitutional inquiry. Posing concrete questions of Dobbs illustrates how much of Dobbs has yet to be written, showing the many senses in which, as Justice Barrett writes in Vidal v. Elster, “a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test.”

The full paper is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Monday Roundup

• The political columnist Mark Z. Barabak has profiled Mary Ziegler, UC Davis, in the Los Angeles Times.
  

• Holly Brewer, University of Maryland, and Laura Edwards, Princeton University, on Rahimi (Washington Monthly).
  

• Jill Lepore, Harvard University, on the history of the U.S. Constitution (NPR). 
  

• John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School, review Aziz Rana's Constitutional Bind (New Republic).
  

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization, an interesting symposium on David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024) has wrapped up. This response by Pozen (Columbia Law) links to the various contributions, including by legal historian Shaun Ossei-Owusu (Penn Law).

• Also at Balkinization: Reva Siegel (Yale Law) and Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) on "Access to Life- and Health-Preserving Care - A History and Tradition."
  

• Edward A. Purcell, New York Law School, looks back to Charles Evans Hughes's Supreme Court of the United States for inspiration on how Chief Justices can induce the resignations of Associate Justices  (The Hill).

• Barbara Lauriat, Texas Tech University School of Law, has published Robinson & Roberts v. Wheble (1771): A New “First” Trademark Case at Common Law in The Docket.
  

• You may still register for the virtual event of the Supreme Court Historical Society, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, with Alison LaCroix, to be held at 12:00 PM (EST) on May 28, 2024, via Zoom.  It will be posted to YouTube following the event.
  

• 
  Jus Gentium is out with a special issue (9:2), The Historicization of International Law and its Limits, organized by Jean d’Aspremont and Thomas Kleinlein.  It includes the article “Lather, Rinse, Repeat: The Historical Returns of International Law,” by Carl Landauer.

• “On May 16, in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, the National Archives in Washington, DC, hosted a panel discussion on the lasting impact of the historic legal decision.”  The panel included Sheryll D. Cashin, Georgetown Law; Randall L. Kennedy, of Harvard Law School; and Michael K. Powell, who moderated.  More.
  

• Also, “Meet all the families behind the 5 school cases that swayed the Supreme Court” (LA School Report).
  

• “Dr. John Kirk, George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at UA Little Rock, and the students in his fall 2023 Seminar in Public History class, a capstone course that focuses on collaborative research for students who are earning a Master of Arts in public history, have received the Lucille Westbrook Award from the Arkansas Historical Association” for the paper “Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection: The Arkansas Cases of the Bone Brothers, 1938-1940.”  More.
  

• The ABA's Silver Gavel Awards have been announced.  The Book Prize went to Joanna Schwartz for Shielded: How The Police Became Untouchable."  Honorable Mention went to Cliff Sloan for The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made.
  

• The program for the 2024 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association is now online.
  

• ICYMI: Hardeep Dhillon on The Immigration Act of 1924 (Penn Today). "The 'Originalist' Justices Keep Getting History Spectacularly Wrong" (Balls & Strikes).  That "Appeal to Heaven" flag (AP; MSNBC).
  

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