Cummings on Lawyers and the Struggle for LA

Scott L. Cummings, UCLA Law, has published An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles (Oxford University Press, 2020):

An Equal Place is a monumental study of the role of lawyers in the movement to challenge economic inequality in one of America's most unequal cities: Los Angeles. Breaking with the traditional focus on national civil rights history, the book turns to the stories of contemporary lawyers, on the front lines and behind the scenes, who use law to reshape the meaning of low-wage work in the local economy.

Covering a transformative period of L.A. history, from the 1992 riots to the 2008 recession, Scott Cummings presents an unflinching account of five pivotal campaigns in which lawyers ally with local movements to challenge the abuses of garment sweatshops, the criminalization of day labor, the gentrification of downtown retail, the incursion of Wal-Mart groceries, and the misclassification of port truck drivers.

Through these campaigns, lawyers and activists define the city as a space for redefining work in vital industries transformed by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and immigration. Organizing arises outside of traditional labor law, powered by community-labor and racial justice groups using levers of local government to ultimately change the nature of labor law itself. 

Cummings shows that sophisticated legal strategy — engaging yet extending beyond courts, in which lawyers are equal partners in social movements — is an indispensable part of the effort to make L.A. a more equal place. Challenging accounts of lawyers' negative impact on movements, Cummings argues that the L.A. campaigns have achieved meaningful reform, while strengthening the position of workers in local politics, through legal innovation. Dissecting the reasons for failure alongside the conditions for success, this groundbreaking book illuminates the crucial role of lawyers in forging a new model of city-building for the twenty-first century.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The Wall Street Journal interviewed Laura Phillips Sawyer (University of Georgia School of Law) for this piece on the Justice Department's pursuit of Google over its allegedly anti-competitive conduct. 

• Anders Walker reviews Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (2020) on Jotwell. 
  

• Ellen DuBois speaks on her book on Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote in the Washington History Seminar on Monday, October 26 at 4:00 pm ET.  Register for the webinar here or watch on live our Facebook Page.
  

• Ronit Stahl, Berkeley, delivers Lessons from RBG: Jews & Religious Freedom in the United States (The Paul & Dorothy Grob Memorial Lecture at the University of Virginia) on Thursday, October 29, from 7-8PM EST. 

• Nurfadzilah Yahaya, National University of Singapore, did online events recently at NUS, the University of Hong Kong, and elsewhere on her book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia. Here's a recorded one hosted by the HLS Program in Islamic Law last month.
  

• Just published: Holmes Reads Holmes: Reflections on the Real-Life Links Between the Jurist and the Detective, ed. Ross E. Davies and M. H. Hoeflich (Lawbook Exchange, 2020).
  

• ICYMI: Alexander Zhang, a J.D./Ph.D. student in law and history at Yale, on "The Forgotten Third Amendment [that] Could Give Pandemic-Struck America a Way Forward" (The Atlantic).  50 historic moments in the U.S. Supreme Court (Stacker via the Buffalo News).  Jerold Auerbach recalls--not happily--his Development of Legal Institutions class at Columbia Law School.  For more on Julius Goebel, this.
  

• Update: ConSource digital library to the Quill Project in Oxford (Real Clear Education).
  

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

Blickle on the Spanish Flu and German Cities

Kristian Blickle, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has posted FRBNY Staff Report No. 921, Pandemics Change Cities: Municipal Spending and Voter Extremism in Germany, 1918-1933:

We merge several historical data sets from Germany to show that influenza mortality in 1918-1920 is correlated with societal changes, as measured by municipal spending and city-level extremist voting, in the subsequent decade. First, influenza deaths are associated with lower per capita spending, especially on services consumed by the young. Second, influenza deaths are correlated with the share of votes received by extremist parties in 1932 and 1933. Our election results are robust to controlling for city spending, demographics, war-related population changes, city-level wages, and regional unemployment, and to instrumenting influenza mortality. We conjecture that our findings may be the consequence of long-term societal changes brought about by a pandemic.

--Dan Ernst

Robichaud, "Animal City"

Fans of Hendrik Hartog's classic "Pigs and Positivism" might be intrigued by this new release from Harvard University Press: Animal City: The Domestication of America, by Andrew A. Robichaud (Boston University). A description from the Press:

Americans once lived alongside animals. They raised them, worked them, ate them, and lived off their products. This was true not just in rural areas but also in cities, which were crowded with livestock and beasts of burden. But as urban areas grew in the nineteenth century, these relationships changed. Slaughterhouses, dairies, and hog ranches receded into suburbs and hinterlands. Milk and meat increasingly came from stores, while the family cow and pig gave way to the household pet. This great shift, Andrew Robichaud reveals, transformed people’s relationships with animals and nature and radically altered ideas about what it means to be human.

As Animal City illustrates, these transformations in human and animal lives were not inevitable results of population growth but rather followed decades of social and political struggles. City officials sought to control urban animal populations and developed sweeping regulatory powers that ushered in new forms of urban life. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals worked to enhance certain animals’ moral standing in law and culture, in turn inspiring new child welfare laws and spurring other wide-ranging reforms.

The animal city is still with us today. The urban landscapes we inhabit are products of the transformations of the nineteenth century. From urban development to environmental inequality, our cities still bear the scars of the domestication of urban America.

Advance praise:

“Based on exhaustive research, Animal City provides a rich description of nineteenth-century human and animal lives, including the landscapes, laws, economies, and institutions that shaped them. Robichaud has made a landmark contribution to how we understand this formative period in American urban and animal history.”—Peter Alagona 

“In ways that can seem unimaginable today, urban animals played a major role in shaping how nineteenth-century Americans debated laws, considered the boundaries of brutality, transformed economies and environments, and ultimately understood themselves. Through masterful storytelling and deep historical research, Andrew Robichaud paints this ecologically diverse urban world in vivid colors, showing readers that we cannot understand modern cities without acknowledging their controversial and often invisible animal past.”—Catherine McNeur

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Forbath on Radical Lawyering and Constitutional Imagination on the Lower East Side

William E. Forbath, University of Texas at Austin School of Law, has posted Class Struggle, Group Rights and Socialist Pluralism on the Lower East Side–Radical Lawyering and Constitutional Imagination in the Early Twentieth Century:

This paper is a rough draft of two chapters in a book-in-progress. It explores the advocacy, institution-building and constitutional imaginary of a handful of socialist lawyers, as they helped build the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in early twentieth century New York. These lawyer-leaders along with union chiefs, thousands of rank and file leaders and activists, and hundreds of thousands of new immigrant workers waged massive general strikes and forged industry-wide agreements and collective bargaining, while they also clashed over just how democratic and pluralist their socialist union would be.

These struggles were a site of constant legal invention. They drew new immigrant workers into a deeply contentious experiment in reconstructing labor-capital relations on the basis of group rights with no footing in the official legal order: to organize, strike, and bargain on an industry-wide basis, to be dealt with by employers not as individual workers but as one big corporate body. The official order did more than refuse to recognize these rights; it condemned workers’ efforts to exercise them. Yet, despite the courts’ best efforts, this dramatic experiment largely succeeded; and the union membership ending up rallying behind the lawyer-leaders and activists committed to a deeply democratic, federated, socialist and multi-cultural vision of “group rights” and union organization.

Jewish Workers in N.Y. Needle Trades (NYPL)

In the process, they forged a new rights consciousness - a consciousness of both peoplehood and class, mixing ethno-racial and class based conceptions of group rights. Not simply a brand of rights talk, it was a social and constitutional imaginary. Such an imaginary dwells at the intersection of ideas and social action. It is an assembly of analytic, normative and narrative pieces, along with what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling.” An imaginary gains traction in virtue of its capacity to express ideas, aspirations and normative principles about social structures and social relations, at the same time as it explains and helps reproduce – or, in the case of a counter-hegemonic imaginary like this one, helps efforts to remake – those structures and relations. The Jewish socialist constitutional imaginary whose adventures the paper follows did all three: expressed, explained and helped remake.

In addition to testing out the notion of a constitutional imaginary, this paper about the past has a present political point. Today, corporate and group rights are found mostly in the normative and conceptual toolkits of various kinds of conservative thinkers. Liberals and progressives see them as fraught with dangers for individual freedom. If liberal democracy is imperiled, the response should be shoring up the individual civil rights and civil liberties of post-New Deal liberalism, enshrined by the Warren and Burger Courts.

A century ago, things looked different. When left-leaning liberals, “advanced Progressives” and socialists imagined what might come next, after the overthrow of constitutional laissez-faire, it was not only Jews like the ones in this paper but many others who hoped that group rights would be part of the new constitutional firmament. Like left-leaning legal, political and social thinkers in many parts of the globe, they thought that modern liberalism could not make good on its promises of individual freedom and equality unless it took on board key precepts from its rivals and interlocutors: pluralism and socialism. They saw corporate and group rights as building blocks of a social-democratic and pluralist liberalism – or of a liberal and pluralist socialism. Individual rights alone could not secure a broad distribution of power on behalf of members of subordinate economic and ethno-racial groups. That kind of distributional work also required group rights.

When the dust settled, of course, there were no such group rights in the post-New Deal firmament. There were some individual rights doing certain kinds of functionally similar work. But in the politico-constitutional milieu of the Cold War, even these were pressed into an older liberal legal mold. So, one of the ambitions of this work-in-progress is to acquaint liberal and progressive readers with an alternate brand of American constitutionalism in action, more pluralist and socialist than the one we got.

During the Cold War, the socialist pluralist outlook of the lawyer-leaders in this story was repressed and forgotten. It had features worth remembering. It refused to choose between ethno-racial particularity and class universalism. It fashioned institutions, forms of advocacy and a legal and constitutional discourse that took up the competing claims of socialism, pluralism and liberalism, and individual and group rights, mediating the inescapable tensions among them and subjecting them all to stubbornly democratic principles. It rejected the notion of putting off the empowerment of ordinary workers for the indefinite socialist future, instead striving to implement it in the capitalist present, with the legal and institutional tools at hand. Its practitioners explained their ethics and style of advocacy in terms of the moral and political logic of a social movement that strives to prefigure the kind of world it hopes to create. It also rejected prevailing romantic, racialist conceptions of ethno-racial group identities, in favor of a pragmatic, open-ended view that emphasized democratic agency, change and self-invention. As we revisit the socialist tradition, this chapter in socialist history and legal history offers food for thought.

--Dan Ernst

Gardner on "Immigrant Sanctuary as the 'Old Normal': A Brief History of Police Federalism"

The Columbia Law Review has published "Immigrant Sanctuary as the 'Old Normal': A Brief History of Police Federalism," by Trevor George Gardner (Washington University School of Law). The abstract:

Three successive presidential administrations have opposed immi­grant-sanctuary policy, at various intervals characterizing state and local government restrictions on police participation in federal immigra­tion enforcement as reckless, aberrant, and unpatriotic. This Article finds these claims to be ahistorical in light of the long and singular his­tory of a field this Article identifies as “police federalism.” For nearly all of U.S. history, Americans within and outside of the political and juridi­cal fields flatly rejected federal policies that would make state and local police subordinate to the federal executive. Drawing from Bourdieusian social theory, this Article conceptualizes the sentiment driv­ing this longstanding opposition as the orthodoxy of police auton­omy. It explains how the orthodoxy guided the field of police federalism for more than two centuries, surviving the War on Alcohol, the War on Crime, and even the opening stages of the War on Terror. In construct­ing a cultural and legal history of police federalism, this Article pro­vides analytical leverage by which to assess the merits of immigrant-sanctu­ary policy as well as the growing body of prescriptive legal scholar­ship tending to normalize the federal government’s contemporary use of state and local police as federal proxies. More abstractly, police feder­alism serves as an original theoretical framework clarifying the struc­ture of police governance within the federalist system.

Read on here.

Weekend Roundup

• The University of Chicago Law School has posted the video of Why Madison Matters: Rethinking Democracy in America,”  this year’s Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lectureship in Legal History, delivered by James T. Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.   As the Law School’s website reports, “Drawing from Madison's writings along with those of other founding fathers, including James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, Kloppenberg suggested that they aimed not merely to balance competing interests but to pursue what Madison called ‘justice and the general good.’”  

• Congratulations to recent Guest Blogger Sarah Seo for the inclusion of Policing the Open Road in the New Yorker’s What We’re Reading This Summer!

• Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote, an exhibit at the Library of Congress, runs through September 2020

• The Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin invites graduate student submissions for the sixth annual Graduate Conference in Public Law, to be held October 24-25, 2019.  Among the contemplated submissions are papers on "Constitutional or Political Development."  Julie Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY, who writes at the intersection of law, history, US Political Development, and subordinated identities, will deliver the keynote.

• Call for Papers: Law and Governance of a Global City: 17th-Century Amsterdam," June 2020.  "Four hundred years ago, like today, globalisation and urbanisation impacted the world’s cities. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the afflux of trade and migrants prompted rapid economic and demographic growth, resulting in dynamic multicultural urban life and leading to complex questions of governance."  H/t: JG.

• ICYMI: Will Baude on originalism in the Volokh Conspiracy.  

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

Taylor, "Race for Profit"

Out later this year from the University of North Carolina Press (but available for pre-order now): Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Princeton University). A description from the Press:

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offers a damning chronicle of the twilight of redlining and the introduction of conventional real estate practices into the Black urban market, uncovering a transition from racist exclusion to predatory inclusion. Widespread access to mortgages across the United States after World War II cemented homeownership as fundamental to conceptions of citizenship and belonging. African Americans had long faced racist obstacles to homeownership, but the social upheaval of the 1960s forced federal government reforms. In the 1970s, new housing policies encouraged African Americans to become homeowners, and these programs generated unprecedented real estate sales in Black urban communities. However, inclusion in the world of urban real estate was fraught with new problems. As new housing policies came into effect, the real estate industry abandoned its aversion to African Americans, especially Black women, precisely because they were more likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure. 

Taylor narrates this dramatic transformation in housing policy, its financial ramifications, and its influence on African Americans. She reveals that federal policy transformed the urban core into a new frontier of cynical extraction disguised as investment.

A few blurbs:

"This is an incredibly important history. Well-written, persuasive, and brimming with insightful analysis, Race for Profit is a book that people have been waiting for."--Beryl Satter 

"Taylor offers a strong account of major transformations in U.S. affordable housing policy and its impact on African American communities. This is an extraordinary book, measured and incisive, with a rich and compelling narrative."--Joseph Heathcott

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Lehavi on Commons and Anti-Commons in Israel

Amnon Lehavi, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliyah , Radzyner School of Law, has posted Re-Romanticizing Commons and Community in Israeli Discourse: Social, Economic, and Political Motives, which is forthcoming in Theoretical Inquiries in Law:

Public discourse in Israel is taking a somewhat surprising turn in its vacillation between individualism and collectivism. While mainstream public opinion in the 1980s and 1990s pointed to the failures of common- and public-property regimes, elected officials, entrepreneurs, and consumers are nowadays singing the praises of commons and communities. The re-romanticizing of commons and community is driven by a number of explicit and implicit motives, which also underscore, however, the limits of a full-fledged return to common property regimes. This article highlights three instances of the reemergence of the commons- and community-discourse across the Israeli landscape.

First, while the old-style “cooperative kibbutz” suffered a substantial decline in past decades, the evolution of a new type of midlevel communitarianism in the “renewing kibbutz” has led to a growing demand to join the ranks of such kibbutzim.

Second is the development of urban shared office-space compounds such as WeWork, and the next phase of urban commons: co-living buildings.

Third, the emergence of “community villages” on state-owned lands, located mostly in Israel’s peripheral areas, has been praised by governmental agencies and residents alike as restoring a key role for community for middle-class families. But this advocacy may also be driven by exclusionary social and political motives, as applicants may be turned down based on open-ended criteria, such as “incompatibility with social life in the community” or incongruity with its “social-cultural texture.”

These case studies serve as a basis for offering new theoretical tools for thinking about the commons, fifty years after The Tragedy of the Commons presented their apparent failures. A fresh theory of commons and community could highlight how the revived discourse attests to the need to design a new set of balances between the perils of commons and anticommons, between values of anonymity and familiarity, and between governance by hierarchy and egalitarian rules.

Walker's "Most of 14th Street Is Gone"

Just out from OUP is Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968, by J. Samuel Walker:

“Left behind were hundreds of burned-out buildings, whole blocks that looked as though they had been bombed into oblivion.” These words, written by the Washington Post's Leonard Downie Jr., do not describe a war zone but rather the nation's capital reeling in the wake of the riots of April 1968. In the devastating aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination, a community already plagued by poor living conditions, unfair policing, and segregation broke into chaos.

These riots brought well-documented tragedy and heartbreak--not only among the families of those who lost their lives but also among those who lost their homes, possessions, jobs, and businesses. There was anger, fear, and anxiety throughout the city of Washington, DC, from the White House to the residential neighborhoods of the capital. There was an excruciating dilemma for President Lyndon Johnson. He was outraged by the violence in the streets, but he also keenly aware that African American citizens who joined the riots had legitimate grievances that his civil rights initiatives did little to address.

J. Samuel Walker's Most of 14th Street is Gone takes an in-depth look at the causes and consequences of the Washington, DC riots of 1968. It shows the conditions that existed in Washington, DC's low-income neighborhoods, setting the stage for the disorders that began after King's murder. It also traces the growing fears produced by the outbreaks of serious riots in many cities during the mid-1960s. The centerpiece of the book is a detailed account of the riots that raged in Washington, DC from the perspectives of rioters, victims, law enforcement officials, soldiers, and government leaders. The destruction was so extensive that parts of the city were described as “smoldering ruins block after block.” Walker analyzes the reasons for the riots and the lessons that authorities drew from them. He also provides an overview of the struggle that the city of Washington, DC faced in recovering from the effects of the 1968 disorders. Finally, he considers why serious riots have been so rare in Washington, DC and other cities since 1968. Walker’s timely and sensitive examination of a community, a city, and a country rocked by racial tension, violence, and frustration speaks not only to this nation’s past but to its present.

Weekend Roundup

• “The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum will present an African American History Month conversation and book signing with David Lucander, the author of Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 on Wednesday, February 28, 2018. The program will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home"  More. 

• The Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies will host a panel discussion of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, with the author, Kim Phillips-Fein, from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM on Friday, February 23, 2018 in Room C204, 640 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001.  More.

• We were looking for something else when we stumbled upon Harvard Law Record podcasts with HLS legal historians Tomiko Brown-Nagin (All Rise! Episode 5) and Michael Klarman (All Rise! Episode 6).

(Credit: #dc1968)

• Detroit's engagement with the 50th anniversary of the 1967 rebellion has been fascinating to observe.  Here's the latest, from The Intelligencer, on DC's engagement with 1968, fifty years on: "In honor of the 50th anniversary of the events of 1968, DC Public Library has compiled a Library Resource Guide to help you navigate the many collections and events the Library has to offer in commemoration of that momentous year. The guide includes Evolutions and Legacies: Martin Luther King, Jr. and D.C., 1957-1972, an online exhibit curated by Special Collections Archivist Derek Gray and #dc1968 project curator, Dr. Marya A. McQuirter."

• ICYMI: Andrew Porwancher, Oklahoma Law, on The Jewish Founding Father: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden Life.  Ralph Nader urged Harvard law students to “Take a course or two in legal history, or jurisprudence to absorb the big picture of the law over time.”   "May Donoghue of Donoghue v Stevenson fame is finally getting the recognition she undoubtedly deserves."

• UPDATE: From Muster, the blog of the Journal of the Civil War Era, Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins) on "Legal History's Debt to Frederick Douglass." "[A]cross his lifetime, Douglass never forget how [Justice] Taney had used the high court to demean African Americans. From the podium and the pen, Douglass made a record that has endured and thus ensured Dred Scott will be long remembered as the lowest point in the history of race and law."

• Yet another UPDATE: 10 Trailblazing Female Lawyers Who Shaped American History, in the National Law Review.

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

Silber on "The Poor Pay More"

Norman I. Silber, Hofstra University School of Law, has posted Discovering that the Poor Pay More: Race Riots, Poverty, and the Rise of Consumer Law, which appears in the Fordham Urban Law Journal 44 (2017): 1319-1328, and was a contribution to a symposium issue.

David Caplovitz is remembered primarily for his book The Poor Pay More and his writing about poor consumers. This article addresses why this work propelled the reconstruction of consumer financial protection law, by placing it within the context of widespread urban rioting and the civil rights movements of the 1960s. It argues that Capolvoitz presented the American political center with a clinical, denatured sociological explanation for urban rioting, which involved a more palatable and less threatening suggested response to unrest than explanations premised on intrinsic white racism or class oppression. According to Caplovitz, the riots more than anything else reflected a political and social failure to appreciate the importance of consumer finance. He recommended addressing racism and deeper social grievances through major revisions to commercial and consumer law. Sidestepping other “root causes,” Caplovitz helped courts, law-makers, and many middle-class Americans revalue consumer law and its connection to domestic peace, poverty and economic justice.

Schrader Reviews Harring's "Policing a Class Society"

Stuart Schrader, a Fellow in Crime and Punishment at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, has published a three-part review of Sidney L. Harring's Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017) , in Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law.  The posts are here, here, and here.  H/t: Patrick O'Donnell.

Fleming's "City of Debtors"

My Georgetown Law colleague Anne Fleming has just published City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance with the Harvard University Press:

Since the rise of the small-sum lending industry in the 1890s, people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in the United States have been asked to pay the greatest price for credit. Again and again, Americans have asked why the most fragile borrowers face the highest costs for access to the smallest loans. To protect low-wage workers in need of credit, reformers have repeatedly turned to law, only to face the vexing question of where to draw the line between necessary protection and overreaching paternalism.

City of Debtors shows how each generation of Americans has tackled the problem of fringe finance, using law to redefine the meaning of justice within capitalism for those on the economic margins. Anne Fleming tells the story of the small-sum lending industry’s growth and regulation from the ground up, following the people who navigated the market for small loans and those who shaped its development at the state and local level. Fleming’s focus on the city and state of New York, which served as incubators for numerous lending reforms that later spread throughout the nation, differentiates her approach from work that has centered on federal regulation. It also reveals the overlooked challenges of governing a modern financial industry within a federalist framework.

Fleming’s detailed work contributes to the broader and ongoing debate about the meaning of justice within capitalistic societies, by exploring the fault line in the landscape of capitalism where poverty, the welfare state, and consumer credit converge.

Here are some endorsements:

“Fleming’s fascinating, carefully researched study reveals the pivotal role New York played in the development of consumer-credit regulation. New York might be an outlier in the twenty-first century, but at the turn of the twentieth century, when small-sum loans originated, every major thread was connected to the events and personalities of New York.”—Ronald J. Mann, author of Bankruptcy and the U.S. Supreme Court

“Anne Fleming’s pathbreaking narrative of small-sum lending in New York City brings alive loan sharks, lenders seeking respectability, reformers, crusading lawyers, and the debtors themselves, all while focusing on a problem that plagues us to this day: the poor need money desperately, have little credit to obtain it, and thus are easy marks for exploitation.”—Robert W. Gordon, author of Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law

“Loan sharks and banks reside on a single lending continuum. Fleming takes us to the only space on that continuum where marginal wage-earners could legally, albeit expensively, borrow money. City of Debtors is essential reading for anyone who would understand that world and its consequences, then and now.”—Bruce H. Mann, author of Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence

“It would be easy to get lost in the thicket of loopholes, appeals, FTC rules, ‘wage assignments,’ ‘waiver of defense clauses,’ and similar arcana, but Fleming is a surefooted guide. The reader comes out with a much deeper understanding of the shadowy, constantly changing landscape at the edges of standard finance and economic daily life.”—Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

Professor Fleming’s “Made by History” op-ed on the book is here.  She’ll be presenting it to the Washington History Seminar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on March 19.

Woodring on Shakespeare and Sanctuary Cities

Benjamin Woodring, who holds a PhD from Harvard and a JD from Yale and is currently clerking for a federal judge, has posted Liberty to Misread: Sanctuary and Possibility in The Comedy of Errors, which appears in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 28 (2016): 319 et seq.:

Today’s hotly contested debates about “sanctuary cities” would feel very familiar to someone living in Shakespeare’s London. In this piece, which is part of a larger forthcoming book project titled Shakespeare’s Sanctuary Cities, I argue that Shakespeare is fascinated by the dramatic possibilities inherent in an asylum space situated on the fault line of a jurisdictional battle. A refuge site sits between life and death. At the same time, Elizabethan sanctuary was a contradictory swirl of concepts: something both holy and debauched, something at the same time archaic and unpredictably present. Shakespeare’s use of a sanctuary in The Comedy of Errors is not a simple endorsement of Christian mercy. It is rather a deeper reflection on genre and possibility: comedy is predicated on some escape valve from accumulating conflicts and obligations, while tragedy is ultimately insulated from such releases. Shakespeare creates an asylum episode in this play different from anything in Plautus or Gower, his main sources. The abbey, which jealously defends its sanctuary rights, is a space allowing for recognition and reintegration after long sequences of confusion and chaos. But it is also, I argue, a site for further potential misreadings. The sanctuary in Shakespeare’s play does not provide perfect resolutions. The sanctuary’s Abbess arguably bungles the play’s moral. But in the end, this imperfection is not only vastly preferable to tragedy’s irreversible misunderstandings, it is also a sign of Shakespeare’s nuanced unpacking of a generative social and spatial concept still lingering in the streets of London.

Farbman, "Reconstructing Local Government"

Just out in the Vanderbilt Law Review: "Reconstructing Local Government," by Daniel Farbman (Climenko Fellow, Harvard Law School). Here's the abstract:

After the Civil War, the South faced a problem that was almost entirely new in the United States: a racially diverse and geographically integrated citizenry. In one fell swoop with emancipation, millions of former slaves were now citizens. The old system of plantation localism, built largely on the feudal control of the black population by wealthy white planters, was no longer viable. The urgent question facing both those who sought to reform and those who sought to preserve the “Old South” was: What should local government look like after emancipation? This Article tells the story of the struggle over the answer to that question. At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, idealistic Yankee reformers went south with the explicit aim of remaking the “fabric of southern culture” by rebuilding the South in the image of their northern homes. Specifically, in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, these reformers rewrote state constitutions to replace the plantation and county court with townships modeled on the New England town. Southern conservatives resisted the new townships, understanding them as foreign impositions targeted to destroy their old way of life. Within a decade they had dismantled the new townships and built the foundations of a new Jim Crow local order rooted in the county and approximating a return to the plantation. By telling this new history, this Article contributes to present scholarship in at least two ways. First, the story highlights a binary struggle between “communitarian” localism embodied in the civic participation of the New England town and “proprietary” localism embodied in the private power of the plantation owner. This struggle was framed with crystal clarity during Reconstruction, but it remains a powerful analytic tool for understanding today’s debates and struggles over local government. Second and relatedly, this history reveals the extent to which racial anxiety shaped and continues to shape local institutions. The communitarian township experiment was fueled by a vision of racial equality—and the white supremacist response to it was fueled by resentment and resistance to that vision. When we think about localism and racial inequality, we tend to think about the responses to school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century when racial resentment and fear during the “Second Reconstruction” drove white flight and contributed to resegregation through suburbanization. This Article shows that we may be looking at the wrong Reconstruction. In fact, the pathologies of local government, racial segregation, democracy, and protection of property were framed after the Civil War, in the crucible of a direct conflict between utopian racial egalitarianism and white supremacy.

Full text is available here.

Legal History at the AASLH

[We have the following announcement.]

The Legal History Affinity Group of the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) will convene during an annual meeting in Detroit, Sept. 14-17. Registration is now open (early bird deadline: July 29). Sessions sponsored by the Legal History group will be held on Sept. 16; more information is available in the conference program (see pages 11, 15, 31, and 33).

The Legal History Affinity Group serves those who preserve and promote legal history in organizations of all types and sizes. Its members include state and federal court historians and educators, directors and board members of court historical societies, museum curators, law librarians and archivists, researchers, and university faculty. For more information about the group, visit the Legal History page on the AASLH website.

[Two events are particularly interesting for legal historians.]

History on Trial: Mock Trials and Reenactments in Historical Programming
Friday, September 16, from 8:30 to 9:45
Chair: Matthew Hofstedt, Associate Curator, Supreme Court of the United States

Trial reenactments and mock trials can be an exciting way to engage with visitors by exposing them to historical narratives through legal controversy. Come hear about two successful trial-based historical programs and participate in a short trial reenactment to learn about
the possibilities of presenting history through trials.

Legal History Roundtable at The Million-Dollar Courtroom
Friday, September 16, from 2:15 to 4:15 pm
Chair: Rachael L. Drenovsky, Learning Center Coordinator, Michigan Supreme Court Learning Center

Walk from the Cobo Center to the Theodore S. Levin U.S. Courthouse (1934), featuring a court museum and the “million-dollar courtroom”—a gem of marble and mahogany preserved from
the 1890s federal building replaced by the current courthouse. A roundtable discussion with the Legal History Affinity Group concludes the session. (Picture ID required; no cell phones/
wireless devices due to security regulations.)

[And, Property teachers, the Woodward Avenue tour (pp. 16-17) takes you within a block of the house at issue in Sanborn v. McLean!]

PhD Positions at the ASSER Institute

The ASSER Institute for European and International Law in The Hague is recruiting two PhDs with a focus on legal history in the framework of a research project on "The Global City: Challenges, Trust and the Role of Law."  The two PhD researchers will explore seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s intellectual history, that is, the early modern Portuguese Jewish body of social-political and legal thought on diversity, identity, and global trade relations as found in the holdings of Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos.

For more information please visit our website.  Deadline: 5 June 2016.

Life & Law Panel Recap: "Space Along the Rural-Urban Spectrum"

I’m delighted to report that the Life & Law in Rural America conference had an abundance of strong papers, and amidst a very interdisciplinary crowd there were many legal historians. We’re happy to have three of those legal historians provide us with panel recaps this week: Brooke Depenbusch, Smita Ghosh, and Jillian Jacklin will all contribute. More about the conference can be found, here.

Today, I want to provide a short recap of the panel that struck me the most, “Space Along the Rural-Urban Spectrum.” Elsa Devienne, a Princeton Mellon Fellow, acted as commentator for Alyse Bertenthal, Sean Fraga, Jessica Cooper, and Villiam Voinot-Baron. My apologies in advance for any mischaracterization of any of the panelists’ arguments.

Alyse Bertenthal, Ph.D. Candidate in Criminology, Law & Society at University of California, Irvine, started the panel with an insightful analysis of a publicity pamphlet from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Using the part-advertisement, part-travelogue, “Little Journeys into Water and Power Land,” her concise presentation pushed us to consider the rural as much of an ideology as place. Her analysis of the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s publicity campaign suggests that with regard to the Owen Valley Aqueduct, the rural as an ideology was constructed by urban public officials for the purposes of gaining support for the publicly owned utility and the building of the aqueduct in the early twentieth century. More than that, her narrative is one in which the “public good” was grounded in an urban area rather than those who lived in rural Owen County. Thus, attitudes toward the rural landscape and those who lived there were formed by the Department of Water and Power to achieve specific urban ends, despite the damaging long-term consequences for those in rural communities around the Owen Valley.

Sunday Book Roundup

If you're lucky enough to be snowed in this weekend, there's plenty of book reviews to read:

From The New Rambler is a review of Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary by Richard Posner (Harvard University Press).

There's also a review of Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash's Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive (Yale University Press).

"The ghost of George Washington haunts almost every page of Saikrishna Prakash’s new book, Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive.  It is a man, not a text, that dominates Prakash’s investigation of the creation of the American Presidency.  From the Philadelphia Convention where Washington presided over (and likely influenced) the drafting of Article II, to the military quashing of the Whiskey Rebellion with Washington riding at the head of the new federal army--it is the “imperial” presence and practices of General Washington that Prakash believes generally represent the original understanding of Executive Power."

H-Net adds a review of Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy by Aishwarya Kumar (Stanford University Press).

 The Los Angeles Review of Books features a review of Mark Mulder's Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure (Rutgers University Press).

The New Republic reviews Richard Tuck's The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge University Press).

"... it is so refreshing to read Richard Tuck’s The Sleeping Sovereign. Tuck, a political theorist and historian of ideas, argues that the point of an eighteenth-century constitution (like ours) was not to limit democracy, but to empower it, even to rescue it from the dustbin of history. This is surprising because the counter-majoritarian difficulty has shaped so much of the American experience of constitutionalism in the last century."

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era by Thomas C. Leonard (Princeton University Press) has also been reviewed in the New Republic.

The New York Times reviews Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary by Geoffrey Cowan (Norton & Co.).

David E. Bernstein, George Mason Law, has reviewed The Workplace Constitution: From the New Deal to the New Right, by former guest blogger Sophia Z. Lee, (Cambridge University Press), on reason.com and as an SSRN paper:

"Sophia Lee's The Workplace Constitution brings more fresh air to this stale field. Lee, a law professor and historian at the University of Pennsylvania, doesn't so much challenge the dominant paradigms of labor history as ignore them. And by ignoring them, she is able to address matters that labor historians have neglected."

David Greenberg's Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (Norton & Co.) is also reviewed in the NYT.

So too is a review, by Ira Katznelson, of Karl Rove's book, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters (Simon & Schuster)

Melvin Urofsky's Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue (Pantheon) is reviewed in The Nation.

"His book is a fascinating—­if at times dry and encyclopedic—­tour through the Court’s dissenting history. It dissects the many purposes of a dissent, some of them on display in Obergefell: to facilitate a future change in the law, to invite action from Congress, to provoke public scrutiny of the Court, to nitpick, to limit the scope of a majority decision. Dissent and the Supreme Court also illustrates a paradox: While a robust dissenting tradition encourages the free exchange of ideas, the Supreme Court unquestionably speaks most forcefully when it uses a single, unanimous voice."

The Texas Law Review has a review of Robert Tsai's America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Harvard University Press) by Aziz Rana, as well as Tsai's response.