Sawyer on Originalism, the South, and the New Right

We recently noted Calvin Terbeek’s article on the racial politics of originalism and now note another work on the same topic, Originalism from the Soft Southern Strategy to the New Right: The Constitutional Politics of Sam Ervin Jr, by Logan Sawyer, III, University of Georgia School of Law, in the Journal of Policy History 33:1 (January 2021): 32-59 :

Sam Ervin (LC)

Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other conservative southerners explain to outsiders and to themselves why they shifted from support for an interventionist state powerful enough to enforce segregation to an ideology founded on individual rights and liberty. It thus eased the South’s integration with the emerging New Right.

--Dan Ernst

Tippet on Enslaved Agents

Elizabeth Chika Tippett, University of Oregon School of Law, has posted Enslaved Agents: Business Transactions Negotiated by Slaves in the Antebellum South:

This article explores the law of agency as applied to enslaved workers in the antebellum South between 1798 and 1863. In particular, I examine legal disputes involving the delegation of agency power to enslaved workers. Southern courts generally accepted that an enslaved worker could serve as business agent for his or her slaveholder, which often meant binding a third party to a transaction negotiated or performed by an enslaved person.

These cases provide a window into business practices in slave states, where enslaved workers conducted business on behalf of slaveholders in a variety of contexts. While agency law served the economic interests of individual slaveholders – who could then avoid hiring paid labor for the same work – it also at times conflicted with the ideology of white supremacy and the associated southern laws meant to enforce racial dominance. Agency law bestowed the slaveholder’s power on an enslaved worker in transactions with third parties, often white businessmen who later sought to unwind the deal. The law of agency also conflicted at times with state laws that prohibited sales and business dealings with slaves. Nevertheless, southern courts frequently sided with slaveholders, who insisted that their powers could be delegated to enslaved workers.

--Dan Ernst

Pardo on Bankruptcy and Slavery in New Orleans

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted On Bankruptcy’s Promethean Gap: Building Enslaving Capacity into the Antebellum Administrative State, which is forthcoming in the Fordham Urban Law Journal:

As the United States contends with the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal bankruptcy law is one tool that can be used to resolve the financial distress suffered by individuals and businesses. When implementing this remedy, the question arises whether the law’s application should be viewed as limited to addressing private debt matters, without regard for the public interest. This Article answers the question by looking to modern U.S. bankruptcy law’s first forebear, the 1841 Bankruptcy Act, which Congress enacted in response to the depressed economic conditions following the Panic of 1837. That legislation created a judicially administered system that nationalized bankrupts’ assets, some of which featured prominently in the business of slavery. This Article focuses on a specific episode from New Orleans, which at the time was the nation’s third-most-populous city, had the nation’s largest slave market, and had one of the nation’s largest money markets. One of the bankruptcy cases commenced in that city involved the administration and sale of Banks Arcade, which was a premier commercial exchange for auctioning enslaved Black Americans. This history about how the federal administrative state restructured one component of the U.S. slavery complex should prompt critical reflection on how present-day bankruptcy law manages the fallout from a financial crisis. This Article concludes that courts have the authority to permit the public to advocate for its interests in distressed assets redeployed through the federal bankruptcy system.

–Dan Ernst

Mirow on Spanish Justice for British Residents in Colonial Florida

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has posted Judges for British Subjects in Spanish East Florida, which is forthcoming in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy:

Great Britain transferred East Florida with its capital St. Augustine to Spain in 1783. From the early months of 1783 until November 1785, the province experienced overlapping assertions of jurisdiction during a protracted transitional period. Arriving in mid-1784, Spanish Governor Zéspedes encountered a massive British population that did not leave as quickly as imperial authorities or treaty drafters anticipated. Lacking a legal adviser and instructions from Spanish authorities, Zéspedes asserted Spanish sovereignty through various ad hoc legal innovations. This article addresses his creation of “Judges over His Britannic Majesty’s Subjects” resident in Spanish East Florida. The judges appointed were not trained in English law; British subjects resisted their assertions of jurisdiction, the procedures they employed, and their attempts to provide Spanish justice for their British guests. This episode exposes jurisdictional battles tied to sovereignty in a legally plural, imperially liminal place and moment. It reveals gaps in legal understanding between imperial actors and established prejudices between British common law and Spanish colonial law (derecho indiano) in criminal civil, and procedural matters. This distance was exacerbated by a lack of informed legal experts. British residents yearned for a stable place and stable law as they settled their affairs and departed East Florida. The Spanish leadership responded to these desires with assertions of absolute sovereignty and instances of legal ingenuity such as Judges for British Subjects.

–Dan Ernst

Cornett and Bosau on Country Lawyers

Judy M. Cornett, University of Tennessee College of Law, and Heather H. Bosau, a 2020 graduate of Tennessee Law, have published The Myth of the Country Lawyer in the Albany Law Review 83 (2020): 185-167:

Everyone knows what a “country lawyer” looks like. He (it’s always a “he”) is middle-aged or older, an avuncular mix of wisdom and good humor. He is a generalist, in a small town, deeply connected to his community. He is trusted and respected. The person who is called upon when trouble threatens. Figures as diverse as Sam Ervin Jr. and Gerry Spence have called themselves “country lawyers,” and many lawyer obituaries claim that their subjects were “simple” country lawyers. The familiarity of the country lawyer qualifies it as an archetype in American culture.1 But, surprisingly, as familiar as the country lawyer archetype is, there has been little analysis of the history, characteristics, or role of the country lawyer in American culture. This Article will examine how the country lawyer came to be a familiar figure in American culture, tracing the archetype through its fictional and non-fictional manifestations. The Article will also analyze how the country lawyer archetype has affected the public perception of the American legal profession.

–Dan Ernst

Kennington to Speak on St. Louis Freedom Suits

The Field House Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, continues its “online programming with a Speaker Series event on August 19 at 7 p.m.   Dr.
Kelly Kennington, author and associate professor at Auburn University, will be joining us [for a "live-stream author talk"] on her book In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America.  Drawing on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the legal arena of St. Louis, she explores new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits.”  More.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• ASLH Secretary Anne Twitty on her recent discovery concerning  Old Miss’s Monument to White Supremacy, in The Atlantic. 

• The New York Times observed Juneteenth with this piece by Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins): "Ida, Maya, Rosa, Harriet: The Power in Our Names."

• Members of the Organization of American Historians can view online presentations of the papers and panels scheduled for its canceled annual meeting, including Brent Cebul, University of Pennsylvania, on the business appropriation of the language of community development (in the panel Leveraging Poverty: New Cities, New Partnerships, and the Progressive Abandonment of Urban Poverty in the 1980s and 1990s) and Unjust and Unequal: Death Investigations into Homicides in St. Louis, Missouri, 1875 to 1885, by Sarah Lirley McCune, Columbia College.

• The National History Center hosts a virtual congressional briefing on the history of vaccination usage and policy on Monday, June 22 at 11 a.m.  More.

• Searching for the real Nat Turner, but finding his ghost: a review of Christopher Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  

  Eleanor of Brittany (wiki)

• Gwen Seabourne, University of Bristol Law School, has posted Eleanor of Brittany and her Treatment by King John and Henry III, which she describes simply as a “study of the treatment of Eleanor of Brittany by successive kings of England.”  It will appear in Nottingham Medieval Studies.

• Is it just me, or does anyone else think more reporters should be referencing Al Brophy's Reconstructing the Dreamland?  DRE

• ICYMI: Annette Gordon-Reed on Growing Up with Juneteenth (New Yorker) and on the removal of Confederate statues (Harvard Gazette).  What Thurgood Marshall taught Cass Sunstein about police accountability (Star Tribune). Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? (BBC History).

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

Stella Akin (1897-1972)

[My annual exam in American Legal History also includes a biographical essay.  Last year’s was on the father-daughter duo Gaius and Jane Bolin; otherwise, I just have my students consider a single person (as here and here).  With the help of Hannah Kim-Miller, Special Collections Librarian at the Georgetown University Law Library, I did pretty well on this year’s subject--an unsung member of "Portia's Deal"--but, as you’ll see, holes remain that require presently inaccessible sources to fill.  DRE]

Stella Akin (1897-1972) was the first of four daughters born to a businessman and his wife (both white) in Savannah, Georgia, a coastal city located across the Savannah River from South Carolina.  She attended public schools and attended a local business college for a year to learn stenography.  In 1914, at age 17, Akin took a job in the law office of D.H. Clark, whom she recalled as “a nice old codger.”  When Clark learned she intended to prepare for the bar by reading law in his office after hours, he voiced his disapproval “with amazing strength and frequency.” In time, however, he came around.  First, he told her she was reading the wrong books and pointed out the right ones.  Next, he started quizzing her on her reading.  At last, he mapped out a complete course of study for her. 

The law was far from an obvious career choice for a female Georgia teenager in 1914.  In 1911, Atlanta newspapers that local courts had refused the admission of a female graduate of the local law school.  In the same year, an attempt to overturn the ban in the state legislature failed.  When, in 1912, the Georgia State Bar Association put the issue on the agenda for its annual meeting, the result was a vote in the negative.  One lawyer opined:

We must rally, men of the Bar of Georgia.  In this State at least, we have kept our profession as a refuge....  In it, we daily strive in forensic combat to settle causes by reason and precedent.  Shall it come to pass that they shall be won by curves and complexions, and lost by our lack of pulchritude?  Jury trials now have their grave faults, yet [they] cannot approach in fundamental catastrophe the grievous hour when languorous eye and scarlet lip shall deprive of liberty and property, or open-work stockings interpret the Constitution.

Not until August 1916, well after Akin commenced her studies, was a bill allowing women to be lawyers enacted.  Georgia women would not get the vote until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.  They would not serve as jurors until 1954.  Still, in December 1917, the day before her twentieth birthday, Akin was admitted to the Georgia bar, the first woman to do so in Savannah.

Mirow on Scots Traders and Spanish Law in East Florida

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has posted Scots Traders and Spanish Law in East Florida, which is forthcoming in Colonial Adventures: The Making of Commercial Law and Practice, ed. Serge Dauchy, Albrecht Cordes, Dave De ruysscher & Heikki Pihlajamäki (Brill):

This chapter describes commercial litigation in 1802 threatening Panton Leslie’s trading post at Picolata, East Florida, and the firm’s very existence in the province. It explores and reveals the legal sophistication and institutional limits of local actors in a small northern outpost of the Spanish empire. The parties considered and argued about the proper interpretation of royal orders, governors’ edicts, official correspondence, and other documents that shaped the dispute. Concerning commercial legal culture, the issues debated in the pleadings centered on Panton Leslie’s compliance with its unique trade status as delineated in a series of royal orders and agreements. Despite their remoteness from imperial economic and commercial centers, the parties did not play fast and loose with the legal sources or arguments. The dispute reveals that the nature of commercial enterprise within empires was not simply one of economic benefit. Trading companies were woven into the political fabric of imperial administration. In this context, Sánchez argued that for Spain to coexists with native populations and eventually to have Indian populations join its polity, the foreign, English, trading house of Panton Leslie had to be removed as an intermediary between them. This extensive legal battle also has some explanatory benefit on the shift of Panton Leslie away from trade to debt collection and property management in the early years of the nineteenth century. William Panton died in 1801 and Bowles’s attacks against Panton Leslie had significantly disrupted its ability to trade profitably. This suit must be added to these causes of the firm’s shift from Indian trade to debt collection and land management. The case surely absorbed time and resources. It also created an atmosphere of uncertainty under which the firm would have to operate. Every shipment and every transaction after the case would be subject to the greatest and most jealous scrutiny by at least a portion of Saint Augustine’s population. Panton Leslie’s success was a hollow victory.

--Dan Ernst

Tomlins on In the Matter of Nat Turner

Over at  writenowcoach.com, Christopher L. Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, is interviewed about his recent book In the Matter of Nat Turner.  Perhaps because the site appears to have a readership more of nonfiction writers than scholars, the interview is quite lively, touching upon not just the theoretical underpinnings of the book but what Tomlins is reading now and life while sheltering in place.  We'd rather attend a book talk irl, but in these times we'll take what we can get.

--Dan Ernst

Tsesis on Confederate Monuments and the 13th Amendment

Statute, Florence, AL (LC)

Alexander Tsesis, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, has posted Confederate Monuments as Badges of Slavery, which is forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal:

This Essay develops a Thirteenth Amendment theory supporting the removal of Confederate symbols from government properties. It argues that such monuments to the Lost Cause are badges of slavery that should have no place in public squares.

The Essay discusses how white supremacist groups, such as those who participated in the 2017 Unite the Right March in Charlottesville, affectively draw together around monuments honoring leaders and soldiers who fought for the cause of slavery. Relying on the Thirteenth Amendment’s principles of freedom, states and municipalities can and should eliminate those monuments from their properties. Such policy initiatives communicate government’s disapproval of secession’s racist premises and advance the nation’s commitment to equal liberty untainted by the Confederacy’s peculiar institution.

--Dan Ernst

Lives and Careers of Two Alabama Booksellers and Publishers

The University of Alabama’s Bounds Law Library announces the latest book in its “Occasional Publications" series:

The Bounds Law Library has published its ninth Occasional Publication, titled Law and Miscellaneous Works: The Lives and Careers of Joel White and Amand Pfister, Booksellers and Publishers. The book features biographical essays by David I. Durham and Paul M. Pruitt, Jr. and an essay by Michael H. Hoeflich analyzing Pfister and White’s printed catalogs. In addition, the book contains facsimile images of White and Pfister’s catalogs and other documents, including White’s correspondence with publishers. Emigrants to antebellum Tuscaloosa, White and Pfister separately operated bookshops, built up clienteles, and began to publish books. When the state capital moved to Montgomery in 1846 they moved with it and soon established a partnership. Following Pfister’s death in 1857, White continued in the business of bookselling and publishing; his most notable author was Tuscaloosa lawyer and politician William R. Smith, author of The History and Debates of the Convention of the People of Alabama (1861). After secession White undertook a clandestine mission to acquire large quantities of high-grade paper for the Confederate government. Following his own personal Reconstruction, White served as publisher of the Alabama Reports (vols. 50-83), working with the clerks, lawyers, and reporters attached to that institution. All the while he continued to operate his bookstore until shortly before his death in 1896. Law and Miscellaneous Works reveals a little-known world of nineteenth-century southern booksellers and small-scale publishers and places it in the context of regional and national affairs. Law and Miscellaneous Works is free upon request. Contact Paul Pruitt (ppruitt@law.ua.edu). 

--Dan Ernst

Tomlins's "In the Matter of Nat Turner"

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, has published  In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton University Press):

In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution.

Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner’s notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Christopher Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner’s intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots.

A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's Retropolis section, a profile of Mitsuye Endo, the under-appreciated Japanese-American citizen whose legal challenge to the Japanese American internment "forced the government to close the camps and allowed thousands of Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast."  

• Speaking of unlawful confinement, the History Office of the Federal Judicial Center has posted this introduction to federal habeas corpus jurisdiction. To its bibliography we would add Amanda Tyler's Habeas Corpus in Wartime (2017) and Eric Freedman's Making Habeas Work (2018).

• In individual posts we have mentioned several of the articles in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review's May 2019 symposium on administrative constitutionalism. The full symposium is now available here. It includes contributions by Karen M. Tani (University of California, Berkeley), Gregory Ablavsky (Stanford University), Joanna L. Grisinger (Northwestern University), Sophia Z. Lee (University of Pennsylvania), Jeremy K. Kessler (Columbia University), Bertral L. Ross II (University of California, Berkeley), William J. Novak (University of Michigan), Cary Coglianese (University of Pennsylvania), and William N. Eskridge, Jr. (Yale Law School). 

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Karin Wulf (Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture/William & Mary) on how "keeping historical records public and easily accessible" enables us to think for ourselves about impeachment.    

• Writing for JOTWELL's Contracts section, Daniel Barnhizer (Michigan State University) has posted an admiring review of "Cheating Pays," by legal historian Emily Kadens (Northwestern Pritzker School of Law). The article, which was based on a historical case study, appeared in Volume 119 of the Columbia Law Review.

• Available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia, by Priyasha Saksena.

• The blog of the Cato Institute has Roger Pilon’s notice of David N. Mayer, who died last month.  Mayer, professor emeritus of law and history at the Capital Law School, was the author of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 1994).

• ICYMI: Ryan Husey, The Carceral State and Prison Activism, an H-Net Book Channel Essay.

• In the op-ed section of the New York Times: Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Georgia State University) reminds readers that "Women Have Always Had Abortions."  

• Via History News Network: "Over 1500 Historians and Scholars Sign Letter Urging Impeachment." Also, Robert Hardaway (University of Denver Sturm College of Law) on "Impeachment and the Electoral College."

• Over at New Books in Law (part of the New Books Network): an interview with G. Edward White (University of Virginia) about Volume III of Law in American History (Oxford University Press, 2019). Also, Talitha LeFlouria (Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia) talks about her book Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

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

Brodin on the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights

Mark S. Brodin, Boston College Law School, has posted The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice Turns Fifty—A Retrospective, which is forthcoming in the Massachusetts Law Review:

The year 1968 was one of the most tumultuous, and consequential, in the history of our Republic. Auspiciously, 1968 also witnessed the launch in Boston of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Months before his assassination, in June 1963, President John F. Kennedy convened a meeting at the White House of two-hundred and forty-four of the nation’s leading lawyers to urge them to become involved in what had emerged as a moral and legal civil rights crisis—defiant southern governors blocking the entry of black students to state universities, sheriffs brutally putting down non-violent protests with howling police dogs and firehoses, bombings of black churches, and pitiless beatings of Freedom Riders. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was formed in response, with the design of activating the pro bono resources of the private bar in the struggle for racial equality and justice.

--Dan Ernst

Faulkenbury, "Poll Power: The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South"

Recently released by the University of North Carolina Press: Poll Power: The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South (April 2019), by Evan Faulkenbury (State University of New York, Cortland). A description from the Press:

The civil rights movement required money. In the early 1960s, after years of grassroots organizing, civil rights activists convinced nonprofit foundations to donate in support of voter education and registration efforts. One result was the Voter Education Project (VEP), which, starting in 1962, showed far-reaching results almost immediately and organized the groundwork that eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In African American communities across the South, the VEP catalyzed existing campaigns; it paid for fuel, booked rallies, bought food for volunteers, and paid people to canvass neighborhoods. Despite this progress, powerful conservatives in Congress weaponized the federal tax code to undercut the important work of the VEP.

Though local power had long existed in the hundreds of southern towns and cities that saw organized civil rights action, the VEP was vital to converting that power into political motion. Evan Faulkenbury offers a much-needed explanation of how philanthropic foundations, outside funding, and tax policy shaped the southern black freedom movement.

A few blurbs:

"In this innovative study, Faulkenbury goes behind the scenes to elucidate the relationship between the civil rights movement and philanthropic foundations. An organizational history of the Voter Education Project and its funders, Poll Power demonstrates that as civil rights activists in countless communities across the South began to institutionalize their hard-won access to the ballot, their opponents answered with federal legislation that severely curtailed the chances of their success. This work is essential for understanding the intricacies of voter suppression efforts, both past and present."--Katherine Mellen Charron 

"This important contribution focuses on a neglected yet critical episode in the civil rights movement, explaining well how an unexpected alliance of politicians, philanthropists, and civil rights activists launched voter registration projects and achieved important victories despite segregationists in Congress and state and local governments."--Olivier Zunz

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Adler on Racial Dispartities in Criminal Punishment in New Orleans, 1920-1945

Just out online from the American Journal of Legal History: “‘To Stay the Murderer's Hand and the Rapist's Passions, and for the Safety and Security of Civil Society’: The Emergence of Racial Disparities in Capital Punishment in Jim Crow New Orleans,” by Jeffrey S Adler, University of Florida:

This essay examines capital punishment in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945. Building on a quantitative analysis of case-level data culled from police, court, and prison records, it explores the emergence of racial disparities in death-penalty sentencing and charts the increasing use of capital punishment as a mechanism of racial control. The paper focuses on four surprising and counter-intuitive patterns in the application of the death penalty. First, shifts in the use of capital punishment during this era bore no connection to patterns of violent crime. Second, changes in death-penalty sentencing were only loosely related to overall trends in homicide conviction. Third, and most surprising, Orleans Parish jurors, particularly during the 1920s, sent white killers to the gallows at a higher rate than African American killers. And fourth, the analysis of case-level records reveals dramatic shifts in death-penalty sentencing during the 1930s, particularly the development of a pronounced racial disparity in the application of capital punishment. Prosecutors also exploited the threat of capital charges to secure guilty pleas from African American suspects, and thus changes in death-penalty sentencing contributed to racial disparities in incarceration. In short, this micro-analysis helps to explain when and why the death penalty became a core component of Jim Crow criminal justice.

--Dan Ernst

Journal of Southern Legal History, Vol. 26

Here’s the TOC for volume 26 (2018) of the Journal of Southern Legal History:

Oral History of Manley F. Brown (2016).  Introduction and interview by Patrick Emery Longan

Clyde Ray, “John Marshall, the Native American Cases, and the Idea of Constitutional Nationalism”

Nathaniel J. Berry, “Justice of the Peace Manuals in Virginia before 1800”

Weekend Roundup

• Over at New Books in Law, Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford University) discusses his book The Second Creation; former guest blogger Kimberly Welch (Vanderbilt University) discusses Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South.

• From the New Legal Realism blog: Malcolm Feeley (University of California, Berkeley) on Frank Remington, Wisconsin, and the influential American Bar Foundation project on the administration of criminal justice in the U.S. (The project was a collaboration with the Ford Foundation, the ABA, and others.) Willard Hurst makes a few cameo appearances.

• Are you up to speed on the due dates for the awards and prizes of the Organization of American Historians?  We ask, because we’re jurying one of them.  DRE 

• The HistPhil forum on the Dartmouth College v. Woodward case continues. Here's a contribution from Evelyn Atkinson (American Bar Foundation doctoral fellow/Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago).

•  From the Washington Post's Made by History section: Ariela Gross (USC) and Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard University) on the history of racialized understandings of citizenship; Smita Ghosh (Georgetown University) on migrant detention; Carly Goodman (co-editor, Made by History), S. Deborah Kang (California State University San Marcos), and Yael Schacher (Refugees International) on the power of immigrant rights advocates to protect and enforce the right to asylum; Rebecca Spang (Indiana University) on what the French Revolution teaches us about the dangers of gerrymandering; and more.

• Call for Papers: “Law and Political Economy: Democracy After Neoliberalism,” the inaugural Law and Political Economy Project conference. 

• For a limited time, The Czar and the Slaves: Two Puzzles in the History of International Arbitration, by Bennett Ostdiek and John Fabian Witt is open access in the American Journal of International Law.

• Newly published online in Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Method and Dialogue in History and Originalism by Logan Everett Sawyer, and “Amongst the Most Desirable Reading”: Advertising and the Fetters of the Newspaper Press in Britain, c. 1848–1914, by Anat Rosenberg.

• ICYMI: Manisha Sinha on The New Fugitive Slave Laws in NYRB.  As previously mentioned (but now the subject of an official HLS announcement), Property law scholar [and Legal Historian] Molly Brady joins the Harvard Law faculty.  A play on McNaughton's Case at the Edinburgh Fringe, via The Scotsman.

• Update: Listen to Sarah Milov discuss the controversy over an NPR segment that used her work without attribution here. Background here. H/t: Emily Prifogle and @womenalsoknowhistory

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

Longan on Judge Bootle and the Integration of the University of Georgia

I was pleased to note the recent publication by my law school classmate Patrick Emery Longan, Mercer University School of Law, of  “You Can’t Afford to Flinch in the Face of Duty”: Judge William Augustus Bootle and the Desegregation of the University of Georgia," Stetson Law Review 48 (23019): 379-425.  From the introduction:

On January 6, 1961, United States District Judge William Augustus Bootle granted a permanent injunction that required the University of Georgia to admit its first two black students, Hamilton E. Holmes and Charlayne A. Hunter. The backlash began immediately. Newspaper editorials condemned the decision. The Governor of Georgia threatened to close the University. Students rioted. A man escaped from an insane asylum, armed himself and went looking for Charlayne Hunter at her dormitory. Judge Bootle received numerous critical letters, including some that were threatening. Yet Judge Bootle’s attitude was that he did no more than what his position as a judge required him to do. Late in his life, he sat for an interview as part of the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies at the University of Georgia. He summed up his actions and motivations by saying: “You can’t afford to flinch in the face of duty. . . . [I]t just happened to happen on my watch.  I don’t deserve any credit. Don’t seek any. I did what any self-respecting, honest judge would have done.”

--Dan Ernst