Herz's "God and the Bueaucrat"

Zachary Herz, University of Colorado, Boulder, has published The God and the Bureaucrat
Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories (Cambridge University Press):

Why is Roman law so boring? In this book, Zachary Herz argues that the bureaucratic, positivistic world of Roman law is not a distraction from the violent autocracy of the Roman empire, but an imagined escape. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and even emperors used legal writing to think about worlds that were safer or fairer than the one in which they lived. This archive of political imagination slowly became a law-code, and now guides readers through a legal system about which its authors could only dream. From Augustus to Justinian, this book shows how law symbolized order in chaotic times, and how that symbol eventually took on a life of its own. From the enlightened judgements of Hadrian to the great jurists and child rulers of Severan Rome, Herz reveals what Romans were really talking about when they talked about law.  

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

Exploring the Foundations of Contract Law

Cause and Consideration: Exploring the Foundations of Contract Law, an anthology edited by Bruno Rodríguez-Rosado, Rocío Caro Gándara, and Antonio Legerén-Molina, has been published by Hart/Bloomsbury.  The publishers tell us that you may order it online here and use the code GLR BD8 to get 20 percent off.

This book provides a comprehensive study of two parallel notions of civil and common law: cause and consideration . . .  in three ways; with historical, comparative, and functional perspectives. Aspects of cause and consideration are hotly contested by contract lawyers and this book will bring clarity by looking at the English and Continental positions. Key areas of focus include: enforceability, questions of legality and morality, contractual justice, and the correction of unjustified property displacements.

Bringing together a team of experts, the book discusses (in some cases for the first time in English) complex questions of both academic and practical importance.

–Dan Ernst. TOC after the jump.

A Conference for Charles Donahue

[Congratulations to Professor Donahue.  We wish we could be there!  DRE]

The Learned and Lived Law: A Celebration in Honor of Charles Donahue, May 19, 2025, Lewis 214, Harvard Law School.

Please join us for a celebration honoring Professor Charles Donahue and marking the publication of The Learned and Lived Law:  Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue.  We will have a day of presentations by chapter authors as well as a display of medieval manuscripts in the Harvard Law Library in the early afternoon.

Welcome
8:45 – 9:00 am
Interim Dean John C.P. Goldberg
Saskia Lettmaier and Elizabeth Papp Kamali

Panel 1: Roman Law
Chair: James Townshend
9:00 – 10:00 am

Charles Bartlett, Roman Property, Corporate Personhood, and the Politics of Natural Law in Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy: Venice, Baldus, and the res communes omnium

Wim Decock, “For the Sake of Mental Health and Mutual Peace”: The Transactio-Agreement in Early Modern Law and Theology

Panel 2: Medieval and Early Modern Law
Chair: Elizabeth Papp Kamali
10:15 – 12:15 pm

Samantha Kahn Herrick, Getting Ahead in a Twelfth-Century City: The Ambitious Monks of Saint-Clément, Metz

Ryan Rowberry, The Papal Constitution Execrabilis (1317) and Clerical Justices in the English Royal Courts

Elizabeth Mellyn, Suicide in Early Modern Italy

Carol Symes, The “Desire of Deeds”: On Cherishing Medieval English Charters

12:15 – 1:15 pm
Lunch available in Lewis 202

Medieval Manuscript Display
Harvard Law Library, 4th floor, Caspersen Room
1:15 – 2:15 pm
Arranged by Sarah Wharton, Historical & Special Collections
Co-Hosts: Carol Symes and Charles Bartlett

Panel 3: American Legal History
Chair: Ryan Rowberry
2:30 – 3:30 pm

Sally Hadden, Lawyers and Their Book Collections: Notes from the Eighteenth Century

Amalia Kessler, The American Importation of the Comparative Accusatorial/Inquisitorial Divide: Francis Lieber’s Failed Transplant and Its Early Twentieth-Century Resurgence

Panel 4: Literature and Legal Theory
Chair: Saskia Lettmaier
3:45-4:45 pm

Anton Chaevitch, Faust: Goethe’s Guide to Legal Progress

Bharath Palle, Wesley Hohfeld’s Modernist Imagination

Closing Reflection
Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas, De Magistro eruditissimo et beneficentissimo

Furstenberg on Rabbinic Evidence for the Spread of Roman Legal Education

Yair Furstenberg has published open access in Law and History Review Rabbinic Evidence for the Spread of Roman Legal Education in the Provinces:

A long tradition of comparative scholarship has succeeded to establish the impact of Roman legal environment on rabbinic law making during the first two centuries CE, particularly in the field of family and status. Yet, the specific channels for acquiring this knowledge have hitherto remained a matter of conjecture. This paper argues that the rabbis were exposed to the contents of the current legal handbooks. Tractate Qiddushin (on betrothal) of the Mishnah includes two peculiar units: the first (1.1–5) regarding forms of acquisition and the second (3.12) on the status of newborns. Both units appear in key points in the tractate and exhibit striking structural and conceptual similarities to extended portions of the Roman school tradition regarding the laws of status, as handed down in Gaius’ Institutes and Pseudo-Ulpian's liber singularis regularum. It is therefore suggested that these units provide the earliest literary attestation already around the turn of the third century CE for the dissemination of Roman legal education among non-Roman provincials in the East, who sought to adjust their local practices into Roman-like legal structures.

--Dan Ernst

Uncertainty in Comparative Law and Legal History

Published last month: Uncertainty in Comparative Law and Legal History: Known Unknowns, edited by Andrew J. Bell and Joanna McCunn (Routledge, 2025):

Laws are imposed on facts. But what is the law to do when its rules for establishing facts do not—because they cannot—produce a satisfactory answer? Scenarios that raise this intractable uncertainty problem have been treated as isolated concerns, but are in fact endemic across legal systems. They can cross jurisdictional and doctrinal boundaries, have recurred throughout history, and demand creative thinking from those faced with them. This book explores the law’s understandings of and responses to such situations from a comparative historical perspective. It investigates how the law has framed these most difficult problems of uncertainty; dealt with uncertainty’s often unclear boundaries; and developed a broad range of different responses to solve or avoid it, across doctrine, time, and jurisdiction. The work examines a selection of key uncertainty problems across private law as elements of a singular uncertainty issue endemic in legal systems. This analysis will be of interest to historians and comparatists, but also to doctrinal, theoretical, and other scholars and practitioners. The analysis leaves us better informed and better equipped for dealing with future scenarios where uncertainty arises, including insights beyond national and doctrinal confines.

A book launch will take place on Thursday, February 13, 2025, 17:00-19:00 GMT in the Lady Hale Moot Court Room at the University of Bristol Law School and online.  Gwen Seabourne and Catharine Macmillan will participate.

–Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

A Festschrift for David Ibbetson

Essays in Law and History for David Ibbetson, edited by Joe Sampson and Stelios Tofaris is published today by Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury:

Over the last 40 years, David Ibbetson has paved the way in a remarkably broad range of fields.  In ancient law, his scholarship has spanned both the detailed doctrine of the Roman law of obligations and the cross-pollination of legal influences around the ancient Mediterranean. His work on English legal history has ranged from the earliest days of the common law through to the turn of the 20th century, combining forensic archival research with a sensitivity to how lawyers thought about their subject. In European legal history, he has shown the porousness of the civil law and the extent to which it has been shaped by other areas of intellectual life, from theology to rationalist philosophy.

The contributions to this volume in his honour mirror both the breadth and the depth of Ibbetson's scholarship. The book combines chapters from leading legal historians, close colleagues and over a dozen of Ibbetson's students. Some chapters build upon or respond to Ibbetson's ideas, others his areas of interest. The contributions are introduced by Ibbetson's valedictory lecture on the importance of legal history to modern practice and scholarship, and the work yet to be done.

–Dan Ernst.  Table of Contents after the jump.

Weekend Roundup

• The Irish Legal History Society will hold its annual general meeting on November 29.  Following the meeting John G. Gordon will lecture on “‘Where there’s a Will there’s a Contest’: The Will of the Very Rev Frank Henry PP: From Carrickfergus to Rome”  (Law Society Gazette).
  

• The Centre for Law and History Research (Law and History Network) at the University of Bristol will host a seminar by Graham Moore, an Eighteenth-Century Collections Researcher at The National Archives on Confederacy, treason, or robbery? Defining piracy in the seventeenth-century High Court of Admiralty.
  

• A notice of Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th Century England and Wales: For Wives Alone, on Section 21 of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which allowed deserted women to have their feme sole status. Professor Olive Anderson died in 2015 before completing the book. Northumbria University professor academic Dr. Jennifer Aston subsequently came across the manuscript and, with the support of Anderson's daughters, completed it.
  

• On November 8, David Wilkins, University of Richmond, delivered the address “Apart & Akin,” on “the shared histories and legal statuses of Native peoples and African Americans,” at  Appalachian State University (The Appalachian).
  

• The University of Chicago's notice of Samuel Fury Childs Daly's new book, Soldier's Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire. 
  

• Yale Law School's notice of Keith E. Whittington’s The Impeachment Power (Yale).
  

• Kate Masur discussed her graphic history Freedom Was In Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction the Washington D.C. Region at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (YouTube).
  

• Carl Rice, a visiting assistant professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College, lectured on “Roman Religion and the Citizens of Empire, 200-450 CE,” at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton University (Pipe Dream).
  

• Korematsu v. United States was re-argued on its 80th anniversary in an event sponsored by the Robert H. Jackson Center at George Washington University Law School (YouTube).
  

• Stephen Sachs summarizes his review of Jack Balkin's Memory and Authority (Volokh Conspiracy).
  

•  ICYMI: The 18th‑Century Origins of Recess Appointments (History).  Uncovering the Legal Records of France’s Once-Largest Jewish Community--an 18th-century pinkas, in Metz (Mosaic).

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

Smith on Emancipation in Roman Law

Lionel Smith, Cambridge University, has posted From Mancipatio to Emancipation in Roman Law, which appears in Revue du Notariat 124 (2024): 347-60:

This text was produced as a contribution to a series of seminars entitled Emancip(ense): penser l’émancipation en droit privé (‘Thinking about emancipation in private law’), which took place in 2021-23 and which was co-organized by the Groupe de réflexion en droit privé and the Groupe de recherche sur les humanités juridiques. In the modern civilian tradition, "emancipation" refers to the acquisition of some or all of the incidents of full legal capacity by a person who has not reached the age of majority. This short text traces the development of emancipation in Roman law through the adaptation of an institution of property law, exploring in the process the links between family law and property law in ancient Rome. It argues that in the Roman understanding of one of the most ancient written texts of law, found in the XII Tables, we can see a feature that is in common with modern law, both in the common law and the civil law: when a person acquires a legal power for an other-regarding purpose, they do not hold that power as patrimonial wealth, but on the contrary the power can be taken away if it is misused.

--Dan Ernst

LHR 42:2

Law and History Review 42:2 (May 2024) is now available online:

Legal Pluralism as a Category of Analysis
Jessica Marglin, Mark Letteney

Legal Pluralism's Other: Mythologizing Modern Law
Caroline Humfress

Legal Pluralism from History to Theory and Back: Otto von Gierke, Santi Romano, and Francesco Calasso on Medieval Institutions
Emanuele Conte

The Rise of the Indigenous Jurists
Clifford Ando

Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics
Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow

The Uses and Abuses of Legal Pluralism: A View from the Sideline
Tamar Herzog

Rethinking the Rethinking of Legal Pluralism: Toward a Manifesto for a Pluri-Legal Perspective
Ido Shahar, Karin Carmit Yefet

The Edicts of the Praetors: Law, Time, and Revolution in Ancient Rome
Lisa Pilar Eberle

The Carried-Off and the Constitution: How British Harboring of Fugitives from American Slavery Led to the Constitution of 1787
    Timothy Messer-Kruse

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South
Eric Eisner

Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949
Shumeng Han, Xiangyi Ren

Human Rights at the Edges of Late Imperial Britain: The Tyrer Case and Judicial Corporal Punishment from the Isle of Man to Montserrat, 1972–1990
Christopher Hilliard, Marco Duranti

An Instrument of Military Power: The Development and Evolution of Japanese Martial Law in Occupied Territories, 1894–1945
Kelly Maddox

“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law
Alan McPherson

--Dan Ernst

Alan Rodger Postgraduate Visiting Researcher at Glasgow

[Via H-Law, we have the following announcement.  DRE.]

The University of Glasgow School of Law invites applications from PhD students in Roman law/legal history for the post of Alan Rodger Postgraduate Visiting Researcher, to be held during the 2024/25 academic year. The selected candidate will spend a term in Glasgow and receive a £2,000 award for support. The deadline for applications is 28 June 2024. Full details are available from our website.

The post was established in memory of Lord Rodger of Earlsferry (1944-2011), Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and scholar of Roman law and legal history.

Contact Information: Ernest Metzger, Douglas Professor of Civil Law, The School of Law, Stair Building, 5 - 8 The Square, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ United Kingdom.

Book Event: di Robilant's "Making of Modern Property Law"

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Please Join us for a Book Symposium featuring Anna di Robilant to celebrate the publication of The Making of Modern Property: Reinventing Roman Law in Europe and its Peripheries 1789–1950 on Tuesday, March 26th, 2024.

In this original intellectual history, Anna di Robilant traces the history of one of the most influential legal, political, and intellectual projects of modernity: the appropriation of Roman property law by liberal nineteenth-century jurists to fit the purposes of modern Europe. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources, many of which have never been translated into English, di Robilant outlines how a broad network of European jurists reinvented the classical Roman concept of property to support the process of modernisation. By placing this intellectual project within its historical context, she shows how changing class relations, economic policies and developing ideologies converged to produce the basis of modern property law. Bringing these developments to the twentieth century, this book demonstrates how this largely fabricated version of Roman property law shaped and continues to shape debates concerning economic growth, sustainability, and democratic participation.

Panelists: Anna di Robilant, Boston University School of Law; K-Sue Park, UCLA School of Law; Lua Yuille, Northeastern University School of Law.  Moderated by Gary Lawson, Boston University School of Law.  Lunch available in Barristers Hall at 12:00pm.  Register here.

Learn more about The Making of Modern Property: Reinventing Roman Law in Europe and its Peripheries 1789–1950 with Anna di Robilant on BU Law’s The Record podcast.

Postdoc on Local Law under Rome

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The [European Research Council] project Local Law under Rome is offering a number of Postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem beginning October 2024, or as soon as possible thereafter. Scholars who have received their Ph.D. after October 1st 2019 or will submit their Ph.D. no later the beginning of the Postdoctoral period are eligible to apply.

The successful candidate will be a part of a unique interdisciplinary team which will be engaged in comparative study of local legal cultures within their Roman imperial context. Together we seek to enhance the understanding of provincial legalism in its multiple manifestations.  

We are seeking experts in one (or more) of the following legal traditions, who are committed to a contextual and historical analysis of legal materials: (1) Early rabbinic law (2) Legal papyrology (3) Roman law in the provinces, or (4) Greek law. We also welcome applications by scholars of (5) Anthropology of Law who are interested in these materials.

The appointed fellow is expected to work closely with other team members. S/he will participate in the project’s ongoing activities and is expected to contribute to its collaborative outputs, produce project-related publications and provide materials for the comparative database.    

The scholarship will be granted for a maximum of 3 years. (subject to review at the end of each year). The fellow will receive a monthly stipend of approximately 11,000 NIS. Additional funding for travel will be available following approval. The fellow will have an office at the Mount Scopus Campus in Jerusalem and is expected to be present there regularly. Knowledge of Hebrew is not required.

Please submit the following documents (in one PDF file) to the e-mail address below:

• Introduction
• Letter describing your academic experience and motivation for participating in the project (2-3 pages)
• Curriculum vitae
• Abstract of the PhD dissertation
• Writing Sample: dissertation chapter or a paper that has been published or accepted for publication (no more than 30 pages)

In addition, please arrange for two Reference Letters to be sent directly.

We encourage potential applicants to contact us for additional information on the project, the
application procedure, The Hebrew University and life in Jerusalem.  Applications will be Reviewed beginning March 15, 2024.

Prof. Yair Furstenberg, Talmud Department, Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.  yair.furstenberg@mail.huji.ac.il

van den Berge on Roman Dictatorship

Lukas van den Berge, Utrecht University Faculty of Law, has posted Roman Dictatorship: Emergency Government and the Limits of Legality, which is forthcoming in Law and Method:

Doctrinal approaches to Roman law are currently often supplemented by contextual legal-historical scholarship that aims to expose Roman law’s connections with its socio-political, religious and broader intellectual environment. This article draws attention to the relevance of such contextual research for modern legal problems. An analysis of the Roman dictatorship and its reception history in legal and constitutional scholarship serves as a case in point. Contrary to common belief, the far-reaching powers of the Roman dictator – acting to save the Roman Republic in times of great peril – were controlled by informal rather than formal legal restraints. A corrected understanding of the Roman dictatorship is arguably not only important for an appropriate assessment of the Roman constitution itself, but also for current debates on the limits of legality in times of emergency. 

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Legacies of the Roman Republic: Law, Text, and Spaces

[W e have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Call for papers: “Legacies of the Roman Republic: Law, text, and Spaces” conference, 18-19 January 2024, Helsinki.

Administrative professionalization has conventionally been the hallmark of a modern state. The conceptual separation of the office and its holder has long defined the European way of governance. The origin of this European tradition of the separation of public and private has often been seen in the Roman Republican political organization with its strict responsibilities, term limits and defined powers of its magistracies who operated in public spaces. Nonetheless, this view has been challenged by the recent research on the Roman Republic and its legacy. The conference aims to build a new interpretation of the Roman Republican governance: a comprehensive re-evaluation of the ancient Roman administrative tradition and its links with the European heritage through the lens of Republican and administrative space. The conference seeks to investigate this neglected issue through the spatial analysis of power relations and meanings. The significance of these issues extends much beyond this: the development of administrative space in the European context amounts to nothing less than the emergence of the concept of public.

The conference advances the idea of republicanism through changes that are addressed via developments in the political, economic and social context from the Roman Republic to the Empire and beyond. While much of the earlier research on Republican administration has been constitutional, focused on authority or the individual magistrates, the conference encourages a new interpretation through spatial and topographical analysis, using unconventional methodological tools to explore the social and cultural dimensions of legal and administrative space. At the center is the confrontation of ideas and their contexts from the Roman Republic to modern republicanism, building on the questions: How did the conflict between Republican ideals, political power, and administrative practices transform the spaces of administration? How did this conflict change the social topography of Rome and other cities and the public and private spheres of governance? How did Rome become the model for the Western administrative state?

Themes (suggested, but not limited to):
•    The idea of Republican space
•    Administration and space in practice
•    Republican, democratic, and authoritarian architecture?
•    Distinction of public and private in administration and the everyday
•    Development of institutional space from the Roman Republic to the modern era
•    New methodologies to study Republican administrative space
•    Gender, intersectionality and public space
•    Archaeology and topography of the Roman Republic and magistrates

Keynote speakers: Valentina Arena, Dunia Filippi, Greg Woolf and Aldo Schiavone.

The conference is organized by the ERC-funded project Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition (SpaceLaw), based at the University of Helsinki. There is no conference fee. The organizers are unfortunately unable to aid in either travel or accommodation arrangements or the cost of travel or accommodation.

Abstracts should be 300 words maximum, for 20-minute papers to be delivered in English.  Abstracts should be sent to lawgovernanceandspace@gmail.com. The extended deadline for abstracts is 1 October 2023.  Questions may be sent to samuli.simelius@helsinki.fi.

JDLH 1:1

Last summer we published the call for submissions for a new legal historical periodical, the Journal for Digital Legal History.  It has since published its first issue.  Here is the journal's self-description:

Legal history is traditional in its methods and techniques of research. This is not necessarily a problem, but researchers applying digital tools to legal sources need a place to go. The Journal for Digital Legal History ("DLH") wants to showcase both new methods and the application thereof, by including elaborate graphics, datasets, links, Jupyter Notebooks, metadata and tutorials. As such, the DLH does not limit itself to traditional formats and offers a platform for innovative research, to reach out to colleagues interested in novel approaches and methodologies.

And here is the TOC for the first issue:

Book reviews

Max Kemman, Trading Zones of Digital History
Femke Gordijn

Jennifer Guiliano, A primer for Teaching Digital History. Ten Design Principles (Duke 2022)
Christel Annemieke Romein

Short notices

To commemorate shared pasts. Legislation related to enslavement and multicultural relations in the Dutch West Indies colonies, c. 1670 – c. 1870
Marijcke Schillings and Henk-Jan van Dapperen

A Database of Early Modern Police Ordinances.
Karl Härter

Collateral Councils – Collaterale Raden - Conseils collatéraux of the Low Countries (1531-2031)
Hans Cools, Vincenzo De Meulenaere, Marie-Charlotte le Bailly, Christel Annemieke Romein, Nicolas Ruys, René Vermeir and Monique Weis

Roman Law MOOC
Jean-François Gerkens

--Dan Ernst

Robilant's "Making of Modern Property"

Anna di Robilant, Boston University, has published The Making of Modern Property: Reinventing Roman Law in Europe and its Peripheries 1789–1950 (Cambridge University Press):

In this original intellectual history, Anna di Robilant traces the history of one of the most influential legal, political, and intellectual projects of modernity: the appropriation of Roman property law by liberal nineteenth-century jurists to fit the purposes of modern Europe. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources, many of which have never been translated into English, di Robilant outlines how a broad network of European jurists reinvented the classical Roman concept of property to support the process of modernisation. By placing this intellectual project within its historical context, she shows how changing class relations, economic policies and developing ideologies converged to produce the basis of modern property law. Bringing these developments to the twentieth century, this book demonstrates how this largely fabricated version of Roman property law shaped and continues to shape debates concerning economic growth, sustainability, and democratic participation.

--Dan Ernst

Penna and Meijering's "Sourcebook on Byzantine Law"

Daphne Penna and and Roos Meijering have published A Sourcebook on Byzantine Law: Illustrating Byzantine Law through the Sources (Brill).  

This is the first book in English providing a wide range of Byzantine legal sources. In six chapters, this book explains and illustrates Byzantine law through a selection of fundamental Byzantine legal sources, beginning with the sources before the time of Justinian, and extending up to AD 1453.

For all sources English translations are provided next to the original Greek (and Latin) text. In some cases, tables or other features are included that help further elucidate the source and illustrate its nature. The volume offers a clear yet detailed primer to Byzantine law, its sources, and its significance.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at the Jus Commune podcast, Paul du Plessis, Edinburgh Law School, discusses litigation in the Roman Republic.
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology, has been awarded the North Carolina Society of Historians’ 2021 Award of Excellence for Outstanding Contribution to the Preservation and Perpetuation of North Carolina History and Heritage in connection with his two publications on Jacob Henry: "What Oath (if any) did Jacob Henry take in 1809?;Deconstructing the Historical Myths," American Journal of Legal History 61 (2021): 349-384; and "A Religious Test in America?: The 1809 Motion to Vacate Jacob Henry’s North Carolina State Legislative Seat—A Re-Evaluation of the Primary Sources," North Carolina Historical Review 98 (2021): 1-41.
  

• The transcript of Judith Heumann’s Jefferson Lecture, a conversation with Karen Tani introduced by Christopher Tomlins, on the long fight for disability rights has now been posted.

• Congratulations to Professor Tamika Nunley (Cornell University): The Journal of Southern History reports that her article "Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts" has won the (first ever!) Anne Braden Prize in southern women's history from the Southern Historical Association.
  

• For those on Twitter, you can find updates from the ongoing American Society for Legal History conference via the hashtag #ASLH2022.
  

• Congratulations to David B. Schorr (Tel Aviv University): the Israel Association for Law and History recently awarded its best article prize to his article "Horizontal and Vertical Influences in Colonial Legal Transplantation: Water By-Laws in British Palestine."
  

• From Dan Farber (Berkeley Law) at LegalPlanet: "The Supreme Court’s Earliest Pollution Cases." h/t Environment, Law and History
  

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

The Docket 5:3

The Docket, 5:3 is now available.  Here is the TOC:

Lisa Cowan, Review of Johnston’s Roman Law in Context (2nd Edition)

Bruce W. Dearstyne, Revisiting the “Brandeis Brief”

John Henry Schlegel, Meeting Willard Hurst in the Seminar Room: On the Humility in Historical Judgment

Symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy

Karen M. Tani, The Modern American State as a Democratic State: Questions Inspired by Novak’s New Democracy

Sophia Z. Lee, Evolution or Revolution in Novak’s New Democracy

Joanna Grisinger, Novak’s A New Democracy: By and For Whom?

Ajay K. Mehrotra, Continuity and Change from Novak’s People’s Welfare to New Democracy

--Dan Ernst

David Ibbetson's Valedictory Lecture

The Centre for English Legal History has announced “a valedictory lecture to mark the retirement of David Ibbetson FBA from the Regius Professorship of Civil Law at Cambridge. The lecture will be introduced by Mr Justice Foxton.” It will take place on November 25, 2022, at 5:15pm.  “All are welcome, though booking is essential. You can reserve your place [here]."

From the announcement:

David Ibbetson has been at the forefront of legal historical scholarship for four decades. He began his legal historical studies at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, reading Law as an undergraduate and staying on for a doctorate on the development of assumpsit under John Baker. He moved to Oxford to take up a Fellowship at Magdalen College in 1980, where he spent the next twenty years developing research interests spanning English legal history, European legal history, the law of ancient Rome and pre-Roman legal systems. He returned to Cambridge in 2000 to take up the Regius Professorship of Civil Law, and to Corpus where he took a particularly central role in the mentoring of the graduate community. His work in fostering graduate communities made him an ideal fit for Clare Hall, where he was President between 2013 and 2020.

Ibbetson's legal historical scholarship is marked by its breadth, with publications spanning topics as varied as medieval contracts, wrongdoing in Mesopotamian codes, early modern natural law and modern tort. His early career was characterised by work on the development of the English law of obligations, exemplified by his book A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations, which remains a central point of reference for any account of how the modern law of tort and contract have taken their present shapes. Roman Law, a subject Ibbetson taught since his days as a PhD student, developed into a second focal point for his research, with a series of articles on the Roman law of obligations applying the methods of English legal history to the ancient sources. His more recent work has increasingly taken on a multi-jurisdictional approach, and further explored the way in which legal concepts were understood at an intellectual level as well as in the courtrooms.

--Dan Ernst