Ewing and Moretta on the Cold War and the UK Right to Strike

K.D. Ewing and Andrew Moretta have published Labour Law, the Cold War, and the Right to Strike: A Legal and Political History of Order 1305 (Hart/Bloomsbury):

Surprisingly, the prohibition on the right to strike was retained by the Attlee administration after the Second World War, and was transformed to become a weapon of government during the Cold War to deal with what were wrongly claimed by ministers to be Communist-inspired strikes engineered for subversive purposes.

In a deep analysis of Order 1305, the authors provide a reassessment of the role of the State in industrial relations. Challenging much contemporary learning in labour law, the book is informed by a very detailed engagement with Cabinet and ministerial papers, which highlight the contradictions on the part of government in simultaneously promoting and containing trade union power. These sources also highlight the extent to which trade unions both relied on and were co-opted by the State.

The main focus of the book, however, is the role of Order 1305 in the control of trade union activists, with the continuing presence of the criminal law and allegations of communist inspired strikes ensuring an important role for MI5 and Special Branch in post-war industrial relations. Material unearthed at the National Archives demonstrates unequivocally not only that trade unions were deeply penetrated, but also that trade union activists were the subject of extensive surveillance, as the authors fully reveal.

–Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

CFP: Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

"Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North."  Aberdeen Medieval and Early Modern North Conference, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

In 1336, a battle took place in the Wars of Scottish Independence in which Edward III of England burnt Aberdeen to the ground. In 1644, the Battle of Aberdeen saw the clash between Covenanter and Royalist forces in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, with the battle and its aftermath shaking Aberdeen and its denizens. While living memory of these events has faded away, their scars can still faintly be seen. Battles, plague, witch trials and legal cases of domestic abuse have all left their mark on Aberdeen and have shaped the way we view the past. 

Violence in the medieval and early modern world is central to our construction and understanding of the past. Although we have dates and locations, the details of violent enaction are often hazy. Violence, then as now, heavily colours the pages of history, with societal expectations often being enforced through threat of violence. Thus, we propose an exploration of violence for this year's conference, inspecting closely what is considered violence, what is determined as avoiding violence, and who decides the definitions of such things.

We encourage researchers to explore how violence was interpreted, enacted and avoided in the medieval and early modern north. How does the reality of the medieval and early modern world reflect how we view the past? How did Vikings, Knights and Musketeers handle the violence of their occupations? Do we still enact violence on the past as researchers? What were the aftereffects of violence, on the body, on architecture, and on society? From witch trials, war, bizarre medical practices, and natural phenomenon, this conference will investigate the violence of the past. 

We're seeking papers on the topic of violence and its intersections with:

• Memory and Trauma 
• Judicial and Legal Systems
• Literature and Artistic Representations
• Domestic and Public Spheres
• Gender, Race, Class, and Disability Studies
• Military and War Studies
• Religious and Ecclesiastical History
• Histories of Medicine and the Body
• Medievalism and Early Modern Reception
• History of Emotions (e.g. anger, humour etc.)
• Ecocriticism 
• Manuscript Studies and Material Culture 

While we invite papers on all parts of the north, we especially welcome papers on Aberdeen and northern Scotland. The conference will be held on 25-26 May 2026 at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.  Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to medievalandearlymodernaberdeen@gmail.com.  Deadline:15 January 2026 @ 23:59(GMT).

Del Mar's "Neil McCormick"

Maksymilian Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London, has published Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (Cambridge University Press):

Neil MacCormick (1941–2009) was one of the twentieth century's most important legal philosophers and one of Scotland's most influential public intellectuals. This book tells the story of his political and philosophical life, from his intensely political childhood as the son of 'King John', one of the founders of the Scottish National Party, through to his involvement in Scottish politics – especially as the author of SNP's constitutional policy – and his role as a Member of the European Parliament, helping to draft the European Constitution. With special attention to MacCormick's character, this book offers a reading of his entire oeuvre, covering his contributions to theories of legal and moral reasoning, institutional legal theory, nationalism, post-sovereignty, subsidiarity, and constitutional pluralism in Europe. This book reads MacCormick as a highly creative thinker who excelled in the art of constructing inclusive middles and thereby developed his own distinctive approach to politics and philosophy.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• To celebrate its 90th anniversary, the Stair Society held a legal history moot, according to Scottish law in 1851, a case involving wages for domestic service and an action of seduction (SLN).

• Claire Priest, YLS, will give a talk on Peruvian legal history in the Helsinki Legal History Series seminar on March 25. 
  

• Daniel Huslebosch, NYU Law, will deliver a virtual talk, “Confiscation in the American Revolution: Taking Property, Making the State,” before the Schenectady County Historical Society on April 2, at 7:00pm (News10).

• Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University, will deliver the Robert H. Jackson Lecture at Chautauqua this August.

• The American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians have issued a joint statement on "federal censorship of American History."
  

• The Madison minimizers still have their work cut out for them, judging from this essay for Voice of America.
  

• 
  Law professors and historians at Willamette University "addressed the authoritarian tendencies of President Donald Trump’s second administration and debated historical similarities with European fascism" (Salem Reporter).
  

• Members of the Women and the Law Division of Indiana State Bar have created All Rise, a coloring book on inspirational women in the state's history.
  

• University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign's notice of The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement, by Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith (NYU Press).

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

• In Time's "Made by History" series: Historians Call Trump a “Transformative President” (Justin Peck).  1860s Prussia Teaches Us About Constitutional Crises (Christine Adams).  The Long Fight against the Department of Education (Austin Steelman). The Dangers of Politicizing Civil Service (Yong Kwon).  The 1930s Case That Sparked a Deportation Debate (Rebecca Brenner Graham).  What the 1990s Tell Us About DOGE (Jacob Bruggeman & Casey Eilbert).
  

• ICYMI: A notice of the first six months of the honorary historian of the New York State Unified Court System, former Court of Appeals Judge Albert M. Rosenblatt (LAW360).  Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme, writes Lawrence B. Glickman (Boston Review).  Peter Neal says, No, Let's Not Bring Back Letters of Marque (Lawfare).  The Wisconsin Historical Society and the Barron County Historical Society are preparing a new historical marker on Ojibwe treaty rights and the “Walleye Wars” near Rice Lake (Barron News-Shield).

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

Bogle on Viscount Stair and Commercial Law

Stephen James Bogle, University of Glasgow School of Law, has posted James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, 1619-1695: a pioneer of law and commerce?

James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair (NYPL)

James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair (1619-1695), is rarely associated with commercial law, yet this connection is both justified and valuable. While he does not explicitly use the term 'commercial law' or structure his writings around commercial transactions, his Institutions of the Law of Scotland, drafted between 1659 and 1661 and first published in 1681, offers an innovative theory of law and commerce. This nuanced outlook merits closer examination. Arguably, this perspective on Stair has largely been overlooked, perhaps due to the way in which the Institutions is presented as a comprehensive account of Scots customary law. However, as argued in the conclusion, to neglect the commerciality of Stair is to the detriment of our historiography of commercial law. Recognizing Stair as not only a lawyer but also a thinker on commerce highlights the significance of legal treatises to broader historical narratives. Moreover, today, there are efforts to rebuild connections between the fields of political economy and law, seeking to understand how economics and politics shapes legal thinking, and vice versa. Such efforts, however, can be enriched, it is argued here, by considering, from a historical perspective, what might otherwise appear dogmatic works of commercial law scholarship. To do that, we first need to identify who might be worth examination.

As will be argued, Stair took the ideas he found in the natural jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius - and perhaps also, those relating to free trade on the high seas - and incorporated it into domestic legal writing about internal commercial activity. Stair’s transformation of Grotius's ideas on international law, trade, and human sociability into the domestic context has not always been appreciated. However, when framed in this manner Stair’s project represents an interesting contribution to the development of commercial law literature in the early modern period.  To adequately contextualise Grotius and Stair requires a deeper examination of seventeenth century natural jurisprudence, which continued to inform legal, economic, and political ideas well into the eighteenth century. Thus, for example, Istvan Hont has shown that natural jurisprudence, including the work of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, provided a key bridge between legal and economic ideas, and the eventual development of national state policy. Of course, much of this is beyond the compass of this present enquiry, but it does nonetheless underscore the importance of taking commercial law scholarship seriously. Our first task, however, is to establish Stair as a notable example of commercial law scholarship, explain why, and then suggest avenues for future study.

--Dan Ernst

MacQueen's "Law and Legal Consciousness in Medieval Scotland"

Hector L. MacQueen, Emeritus Professor of Private Law at Edinburgh Law School, has published Law and Legal Consciousness in Medieval Scotland in Brill’s series, Medieval Law and Its Practice:

This book explores the rise of a Scottish common law from the twelfth century on despite the absence until around 1500 of a secular legal profession. Key stimuli were the activity of church courts and canon lawyers in Scotland, coupled with the example provided by neighbouring England’s common law. The laity’s legal consciousness arose from exposure to law by way of constant participation in legal processes in court and daily transactions. This experience enabled some to become judges, pleaders in court and transactional lawyers and lay the foundations for an emergent professional group by the end of the medieval period.

–Dan Ernst

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, a two-volume work edited by Peter Cane, Christ's College, Cambridge, and Australian National University, and H. Kumarasingham, University of Edinburgh, has been published.  Here is a composite of the press’s descriptions of the two volumes:

Featuring contributions from leading scholars of history, law and politics, this path-breaking two-volume work traces the development of the United Kingdom's constitution from Anglo-Saxon times and explores its role in the creation, exercise and control of public power. Chapters in Volume One, entitled "Exploring the Constitution," approach the constitution and its history from various scholarly perspectives, and provide historically sensitive discussions of constitutional actors and institutions, and of political traditions and transformations of the constitution. Essays in Volume Two, entitled "The Changing Constitution," examine the development of the constitution from the departure of the Romans up to the present day and beyond. Together, the two volumes form the first, wide-ranging history of the constitution to be published for more than 50 years. By its cross-disciplinary approach, taking account of the latest legal, political and historical scholarship on the constitution, it fills a large gap in the literature of the constitution, and in political thought and British history.

The TOC for the first, thematic volume, is here; the one for the second, more chronologically organized volume, is here.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: DC

Derry on Woods and Pirie v Cumming Gordon in the Watson Seminar

Caroline Derry, a senior lecturer in law at the Open University, gives the Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History at the Edinburgh Law School on Monday, February 13, 2023, 17:00 - 19:00 (GMT).  Her topic: Networks of influence, gender, class and lesbianism in Woods and Pirie v Cumming Gordon (1810-12):

The Court of Session defamation case Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie v Dame Helen Cumming Gordon lasted several years and its records extend over many hundreds of pages. The alleged defamation was an allegation that the pursuers, two schoolmistresses, were in a sexual relationship. The main sources of the allegation were identified as a half-Scots, half-Indian teenage pupil and a ‘malign domestic’. It was through the pupil’s grandmother Dame Helen that the accusations spread among parents and guardians, resulting in the school’s closure within days. The court hearings were conducted behind closed doors, and its mainly female witnesses described aspects of their private worlds usually unspoken in public.

The case is therefore a rich source of for histories of law, gender, race, empire and class and has attracted scholarly attention particularly from historians of sexuality. This talk will focus upon a slightly different aspect: the networks which emerge through the evidence. They show much about women’s agency and the complex webs of influence in Edinburgh society based upon class, age and gender. After considering the social networks of higher-class women, servants and pupils revealed by the case, the talk will consider the ways in which lesbianism was understood by, and posed a threat to, those networks.

--Dan Ernst

Book Launch: Law, Lordship and Tenure

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

[On Thursday, October 6, 2022, from 17:30-19:30, the Centre for Legal History at the University of Edinburgh] presents a book event celebrating the publication of Law, Lordship and Tenure: The Fall of the Black Douglases by Prof Hector MacQueen and Alan Borthwick:

This book is a new interpretation of the fall of later medieval Scotland’s greatest noble family, the Black Douglases, in 1455. The discussion reaches back in time to over a century before, as the family began its rise to the pinnacle of Scottish society. The killing of William eighth earl of Douglas by King James II in 1452 receives particular attention, as also the way in which he, his brother James (his successor as earl), and their predecessors exercised their power and authority as earls and lords, and it is suggested that their identifiable failings in this provide the key to understanding the catastrophe that befell the family in 1455. The principal analytical tool is the law relevant to these events and the specific meaning and significance of the documents (which is often a legal question) that evidence them. It is argued that this form of analysis is at least as relevant as any more political approach and that ‘legal consciousness’ was a vital feature of Scottish noble society.

Book Launch: Sellar's Select Essays on Scottish Legal History

[We have word of the following book launch.  DRE]

On Friday, March 18, 2022, from 15:00-17:15, the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law presents an event to celebrate the launch of Continuity, Influences and Integration in Scottish Legal History: Select Essays of David Sellar, edited by Hector L. MacQueen. 

The speakers include Dick Helmholz (Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago); Caroline Humfress (Professor in Medieval History, University of St Andrews); Alice Taylor (Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London); Hector MacQueen (Emeritus Professor of Private Law, University of Edinburgh); Gwen Seabourne (Professor of Legal History, University of Bristol); Tom Green (Lecturer, University of Aberdeen); Alexandra Braun (Lord President Reid Professor of Law, University of Edinburgh); Stephanie Dropuljic (Lecturer, University of Exeter); Remco van Rhee (Professor of European Legal History and Comparative Civil Procedure, Maastricht University). 

Programme
1500 - Introduction - Hector MacQueen
1515 - Celtic law - Alice Taylor1530 - Canon law - Dick Helmholz
1545 - English law - Gwen Seabourne
1600 - Break
1615 - Roman law - Caroline Humfress
1630 - Marriage - Tom Green
1645 - Criminal law - Stephanie Dropuljic
1700 - Succession - Alexandra Braun
1715 - Concluding words - Remco van Rhee

The book is available on the Edinburgh University Press website.  This event is free and open to all but registration is required [here].

CFP: Gender and justice in Scotland

 [We share the following Call, via the Edinburgh Legal History Blog. Submissions are due by 19 March 2021.]

Gender and justice in Scotland: historical and legal perspectives 

‘Gender and Justice in Scotland: Historical and Legal Perspectives’ is a collaborative symposium between the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History and the School of Law. The historical struggle for gender equality has transformed women’s access to justice in Scotland today. Over the last two centuries, Scottish feminists and their supporters campaigned for women’s right to vote, to own property, to seek marital separation, to obtain custody of their children and to have bodily autonomy. Understanding women’s access to justice in the Scottish past can help legal practitioners and the courts make better-informed decisions when encountering similar problems today. The ways in which we make sense of women’s social agency needs to acknowledge the intersectional nature of ongoing discrimination throughout history. Even today, the struggle for gender equality is far from complete, and a glaring disparity between the achieved equality of women and their lived realities still remains. 

This is a call for papers which aims to explore issues affecting women’s access to justice in Scotland across time and space, and we welcome research on all Scottish courts, regions, jurisdictions, ethnicities, sexual and gendered identities, languages and religious and confessional identities. We also welcome papers that approach Scotland through a comparative or international perspective. Post-graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply. We welcome abstracts from a variety of disciplines, including (but not limited to): history, law, criminology and social science. We invite papers that address the following or related themes in a historical or legal perspective: • inheritance, succession and family law • cohabitants’ rights on separation and death • civil partnership, marriage, and divorce • civil remedies for domestic abuse and gender-based violence • reproductive health rights • parental rights and responsibilities, children and adoption. 

The symposium will be held online on 6 and 7 May 2021. Please send a 300-word abstract with a short biography to the organiser with ‘Gender and Justice’ in the subject line by 19 March 2021. 

Organiser: Dr Rebecca Mason, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Law Email: contact@womenmarriagelawscotland.org 

Co-organisers: Dr Maud Bracke and Dr Jackie Clarke (Centre for Gender History); Professor Jane Mair (School of Law).

--Mitra Sharafi

Loft on Litigation and the Anglo-Scottish Union

Philip Loft, University of Cambridge has published "Litigation, the Anglo-Scottish Union, and the House of Lords as the High Court, 1660-1875" in The Historical Journal 61:4 (2018), 943-67. The article won the Royal Historical Society's 2019 David Berry Prize for best essay on any aspect of Scottish history. Here's the abstract: 

This article examines the role of the House of Lords as the high court from the Restoration of 1660 to the passage of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act in 1876. Throughout this period, lay peers and bishops judged appeals on civil law from the central courts of England and Wales, Ireland (aside from between 1783 and 1800), and Scotland after the Union of 1707. It has long been known that the revolution of 1688–9 transformed the ability of parliament to pass legislation, but the increased length and predictability of parliamentary sessions was of equal significance to the judicial functions performed by peers. Unlike the English-dominated profile of eighteenth-century legislation, Scots constituted the largest proportion of appellants between 1740 and 1875. The lack of interaction between Westminster and Scotland is often seen as essential to ensuring the longevity of the Union, but through comparing the subject matter of appeals and mapping the distribution of cases within Scotland, this article demonstrates the extent of Scottish engagement. Echoing the tendency of Scottish interests to pursue local, private, and specific legislation in order to insulate Scottish institutions from English intervention, Scottish litigants primarily sought to maintain and challenge local privileges, legal particularisms, and the power of dominant landowners.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Cairns's Watson Lectures on Slavery and Scotland

The recordings of Slavery and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, the Alan Watson Memorial Lectures for 2019, delivered by Professor John W. Cairns at the Centre for Legal History at the University of Edinburgh, have been posted on the Centre’s website.  The lectures are "Enslaved and Enslavers in Scotland" (February 14, 2019); "Managing the Enslaved?" (February 21, 2019); and "Challenging Enslavement" (February 28, 2019).

Weekend Roundup

• “Two retired judges of the Supreme Court of Canada say 50 years is too long to seal internal court documents revealing the communications between judges on cases.”  More. 

• Last Wednesday, the Nelson Mandela University held a launch of The Land is Ours: South Africa’s First Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi

• Although we were aware that the Historical and Special Collections of the Harvard Law School Library had opened the papers of Stanley S. Surrey, we only recently realized that the manuscript memoir of this great tax scholar and policymaker, "Fifty Years [A Half-Century] with the Internal Revenue Code," is readable on-line. 

• UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy “is inviting proposals for innovative new research projects that have three defining qualities: (1) they bring historical analysis to bear on issues of contemporary political or social relevance; (2) they explicitly aim to contribute to solving an identifiable problem; and (3) they are collaborative in nature.”

• My Georgetown Law colleague Randy Barnett has tweeted a list of Books on the Constitution for Libertarians and Conservatives.  DRE

• And in Scottish legal history: new online resources by Rory MacLellan make more accessible the court and guild records of one Scottish town, the burgh of St. Andrews, 1550-1700.

• Update: Former LHB Guest Blogger Mary Ziegler, Florida State Law, to NPR on the history of Title X and the gag rule.

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

Rahmatian on Lord Kames

Rounding off our Commonwealth titles from 2015 is Lord Kames: Legal and Social Theorist by Andreas Rahmatian, University of Glasgow. The book re-establishes the importance of the ideas and legal philosophy of Scottish jurist and philosopher, Lord Kames. More from the publisher: 

The Scottish jurist, judge, legal historian and philosopher Henry Home (1696–1782) took the title Lord Kames when he was elevated to the bench of the Scottish Court of Session in 1752. In the 18th century, his books were influential and widely read; the educated classes and representatives of the Enlightenment in England, France and in the German states were all familiar with his aesthetic and philosophical writings. 

Andreas Rahmatian explains Kames’ conceptions of legal philosophy, including black-letter law, legal science, legal theory, legal sociology and anthropology in its early stages, setting them in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. He looks at how Kames came to be one of the forefathers of comparative law, sociology of law, legal psychology and ‘legal science’ in its proper meaning, as opposed to ‘law’.

Praise for the book:

"Andreas Rahmatian deploys multi- and inter-disciplinary skills worthy of the polymathic Kames himself, setting him in the context of eighteenth-century law and Enlightenment but also arguing that we should pay close attention to what his writings tell us today. The result is challenging new insight on the work of a remarkable jurist." -Hector L MacQueen

Further information is available here.