Weekend Roundup

• ASLH President (and former Legal History Blog co-moderator) Mitra Sharafi discusses her new book, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia (Cornell University Press) over at the New Books Network.  

• Penn Carey Law announces the awarding of its first Certificate of Study in History and Historical Research Methods, which provides students with "a structured pathway to build expertise in legal history without the multi-year commitment of Penn Carey Law’s JD/PhD Program in American Legal History." 

• Over at JOTWELL: Ilya Somin (Scalia Law) spotlights Anna O. Law's Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (2026); Reuel Schiller (UC Law San Francisco) reviews Alma Steingart, One Person, One Vote? The Gap between Representative Equity and Mathematical Equality after Baker v. Carr, 112 J. Am. Hist. 702 (2026).

• Todd C. Peppers and Madison Mycoff  on how Chief Justice Warren Burger celebrated the Declaration of Independence in 1971 (SCHS).   

• From Nursing Clio's "undergraduate writing series": “Presumptive Testimony Only”: From Esther Davis to Patience Rousseau, Two Centuries of Criminalizing Pregnancy Loss, by Rachel Kuhn.

• "Cooley Law School Professor Joseline Jean-Louis Hardrick recently premiered, “If These Headlines Could Talk,” an original historical documentary musical that brings the landmark decisions of the Warren Court to life through storytelling, music, archival materials, and legal history" (Florida Bar News).

• Kali N. Murray, Marquette Law, on the haunting of American trademark law (by fugitive slave advertisements) (Marquette Today). 

• Over at Shugerblog, Jed Shugerman (Boston University School of Law) has been "fact-checking" the U.S. Supreme Court. The latest installment is here. 

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

Weekend Roundup

• An alarming opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel of the US Department of Justice advising White House Counsel that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional.  WaPo's story is here.

• 
  Having written about two thirds of a history of a law school, word of a new contribution to the genre always intrigues me.  Here's a notice of Legal Education at the University of Virginia: Tradition and Transformation (University of Virginia Press).  DRE

• In the American Prospect: Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) writes about the Supreme Court's recent decision in Chiles v. Salazar (involving a Colorado ban on "conversion therapy"). The piece also quotes legal historian Marie-Amélie George (Wake Forest University Law School). 

• Via Brian Rosenwald: "Made by History" has a new home. Going forward, it will partner with the Philadelphia Inquirer. New pitch email: madebyhistory@inquirer.com.  

• On Friday, April 10, Alejandro de la Fuente, Harvard University, will deliver the sixteenth annual Presidential Lecture at Tufts University on Slavery, Freedom, Race, and the Law in the Americas.  The lecture will be based on his and Ariela J. Gross’s book, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (THR).

• Over at Divided Argument, William Baude hosts a roundtable with Christian Burset, Jonathan Green, and Ryan Snyder on their recent articles, which Baude describes as some of the best contributions to a "recent round of scholarship on history and tradition in legal interpretation."    

• And over at Modern American History, Sarah Seo hosts a roundtable of historians to discuss  "the benefits of and challenges to translating historical scholarship for a legal audience."  With Laura Edwards, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Samuel Erman, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Maggie Blackhawk and Ned Blackhawk.

• G. Edward White discovers who pranked the U.S. Supreme Court "by filing a phony cert petition challenging an absurd DC noise ordinance" (Oyez).

• That symposium over at Balkinization on Stephen Skowronek's Adaptability Paradox continues, with, among other contributions, Jeremy Kessler's Material Foundations of American Constitutional Development. 

• The latest issue of the Journal of American History includes several articles of interest to legal historians, including One Person, One Vote? The Gap between Representative Equity and Mathematical Equality after Baker v. Carr, by Alma Steingart, which shows how "litigants, Supreme Court justices, judges, and mathematical experts struggled to align the theoretical concept of political representation with mathematical notions of equality" in the malapportionment cases of the 1960s. 

• The NYT review of Mark Peterson's The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History (Princeton University Press) and a blog post by the author.

• The April 2026 newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here. 

• More on Birthright Citizenship.  John Yoo says that it has a long historical precedent (AEI).   Kate Masur  "Fact-Checks President Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order" (CBS Chicago).  John Mikhail on Jurisdiction, Domicile, and the Ratio Decidendi of Wong Kim Ark (Balkinization).  Yet another dispatch from the war between the law professors on the history of the citizenship clause.  (Courthouse News Service).  And has the distance between law professor Bluesky and NYT opinion page ever been shorter? 

• ICYMI: A new book on Sarah Keys Evans, "The Black Veteran Who Desegregated Interstate Buses" (Mother Jones).  Tom Lee on the Declaration of Independence at 250 (Fordham Law). A Century of Colonial Tariffs (LPE Project).  High school students explore Münster’s legal history (Universität Münster).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Notre Dame Law’s notice of its two prize winners at the recent annual meeting of the Supreme Court Historical Society, Barry Cushman and Dennis Wieboldt.   

• Harvard Law's notice of Kenneth W. Mack's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Harvard Law Today).

• More historians' amicus briefs from the Brennan Center for Justice: a third one on birthright citizenship by Martha Jones and Kate Masur (New Hampshire Indonesian Community Support et al. v. Trump) and another on voting rights by Alexander Keyssar, Carol Anderson, Orville Vernon Burton, and J. Morgan Kousser (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe). 

• The U.S. Department of Justice, Then & Now: Barbara McQuade, Michigan Law and a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, in conversation with John Q. Barrett at the Robert H. Jackson Center. 

• W.E.B. Du Bois and His Impact on America: David Levering Lewis in conversation with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center, Thursday, June 19, at Noon ET. Register here to attend online. 

• Also at the National Constitution Center, in person and online: The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed, on Monday, June 23 at 6:30 p.m. ET.  Register here to attend online.

• If, like me, you teach the rise of the residential subdivision, you might want to check out this post by the Library of Congress's Geography and Maps Division.  DRE 

• ICYMI: "The Constitution—Not Trump—Demands Allegiance" says Christian Fritz (Albuquerque Journal) (link fixed). The Cato Institute says history teaches that fighting tyranny requires mobilizing the people as well as the courts (Cato).  A history of the Antiquities Act in 1906 (Wilderness Society).

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

Maltz on the Coming of the 15th Amendment

Earl Maltz, Rutgers Law School, has published The Coming of the Fifteenth Amendment: The Republican Party and the Right to Vote in the Early Reconstruction Era, in the Louisiana Law Review:

The year 2020 marked the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments that fundamentally transformed both the structure of the Constitution and the nature of American federalism. The Fifteenth Amendment differed from its predecessors in a number of important ways. First, it was the only one of the Reconstruction Amendments and remains the only part of the entire Constitution to focus explicitly on race. In addition, the amendment became the first provision of the Constitution to limit the power of the state governments to establish the qualifications for voters in elections for state office, providing that “[t]he right of citizens . . . to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”1 and vesting Congress with the authority to enforce this command by adopting “appropriate legislation.”2 Thus, among other things, the Fifteenth Amendment provided the most plausible source of congressional authority for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a statute which was and continues to be, by any standard, one of the most important civil rights measures that Congress ever adopted. Nonetheless, unlike the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, legal scholars have shown relatively little interest in exploring the background of the Fifteenth Amendment. This Article describes both the sequence of events that led to the passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and the forces that shaped the amendment itself.

--Dan Ernst

Monopoli on the 19th Amendment

Paula A. Monopoli, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, has posted Gender, Voting Rights, and the Nineteenth Amendment, which is forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy:

One hundred years after the woman suffrage amendment became part of the United States Constitution, a federal court has held—for the first time—that a plaintiff must establish intentional discrimination to prevail on a direct constitutional claim under the Nineteenth Amendment. In adopting that threshold standard, the court simply reasoned by strict textual analogy to the Fifteenth Amendment and asserted that 'there is no reason to read the Nineteenth Amendment differently from the Fifteenth Amendment'. This paper’s thesis is that, to the contrary, the Nineteenth Amendment is deserving of judicial analysis independent of the Fifteenth Amendment because it has a distinct constitutional history and meaning. The unique historical context preceding and following the Nineteenth’s ratification militates for courts to adopt a holistic interpretative approach when considering a Nineteenth Amendment claim. Such an approach has both expressive and doctrinal implications, providing support for courts to adopt disparate impact, rather than intentional discrimination or discriminatory purpose, as a threshold standard for such claims. Reasoning beyond the text—from legislative intent, purposes, structure, and institutional relationships—could restore the lost constitutional history around the Nineteenth Amendment, making it a more potent tool to address gendered voter suppression today, especially for women of color. This paper provides a framework for judges willing to move away from rigid textual analogy toward a more holistic constitutional interpretation when evaluating a constitutional claim under the amendment.

--Dan Ernst

SAPD 35:2

Studies in American Political Development 35:2 (October 2021) has been published:

From civil rights to social policy: the political development of family and medical leave policy
Kumar Ramanathan

Naturalizing affection, securing property: Family, slavery, and the courts in Antebellum South Carolina, 1830–1860
Gwendoline M. Alphonso

Select No Gestapo: J. Edgar Hoover's world-wide intelligence service and the limits of bureaucratic autonomy in the national security state
Harry Blain

The 1982 Voting Rights Act Extension as a “Critical Juncture”: Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and Republican Party-Building
Richard Johnson

When Think Tanks Refuse Thinking: Why American Pro-Market Conservatives Oppose Market Integration
Benedikt Springer 

--Dan Ernst

Torres-Spelliscy on "The Branding of Asian Immigrants in the Democratic and Republican Party Platforms and Supreme Court Opinions 1876-1924"

We recently noted Rabia Belt's contribution to the New York University Law Review's October 2021 symposium on "Voting and Representation: New Issues and Challenges." Another contribution of interest is "The Political Branding of Us and Them: The Branding of Asian Immigrants in the Democratic and Republican Party Platforms and Supreme Court Opinions 1876-1924," by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (Stetson Law). Here's the abstract:

In this piece, I examine the political branding of Asian immigrants by comparing the rhetoric used in the political platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties from 1876 to 1924 to the language deployed in U.S. Supreme Court opinions during the same time period. The negative verbiage repeated at national political conventions branded the Chinese as a threat to labor, immoral, unassimilable, diseased, and invaders. Interestingly, the Republican authors of their political platforms were multiracial, and yet they produced rhetoric as harshly anti-Asian as their Democratic counterparts, who included ex-Confederate soldiers and even KKK members. And disappointingly, the Supreme Court picked up this derogatory language found in both parties’ political platforms and continued to echo it in cases that diminished the rights of Chinese and other Asian immigrants. This history is then linked to the present day through the example of the negative impact of politicians’ calling the contemporary COVID-19 pandemic “Kung Flu.” 

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

Belt, "Mass Institutionalization and Civil Death"

The New York University Law Review has published "Mass Institutionalization and Civil Death," by Rabia Belt (Stanford Law School). The abstract:

Most scholars who study felon disenfranchisement trace its roots back to Reconstruction. Southern states drew up laws to disenfranchise people convicted of felonies as an ostensibly race-neutral way to diminish the political power of newly freed Black Americans. Viewed against this historical backdrop, the onset of mass incarceration in the current era expands the impact of a practice intended to be both racist and punitive from the start.

This account is true, but it is incomplete. Non-criminal mass institutionalization has also played—and continues to play—a role in systematic disenfranchisement. Marshaling a wealth of archival and historical evidence, from newspapers, legislative debates, congressional hearings, and court cases, I reveal that institutional disenfranchisement is not just about mass incarceration—a singular phenomenon sparked by the Civil War that happens solely within the carceral state and targeted only freed Black people. Institutional disenfranchisement began much earlier, included more spaces than the prison, and initially targeted white men. Indeed, the more familiar prison disenfranchisement had a shadowy twin within the welfare state. Civil death includes more ghosts than previously imagined.

Read on here. The article appears as part of a symposium on "Voting and Representation: New Issues and Challenges."

-- Karen Tani

Katz on Women's Legal Right to Hold Public Office

 Elizabeth D. Katz, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has posted Sex, Suffrage, and State Constitutional Law: Women's Legal Right to Hold Public Office, which is forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism:

On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was sworn in by Justice Sonia Sotomayor as the nation’s first woman Vice President. This occasion, with women of color holding two of the most crucial roles in our national government, would have been unthinkable for most of United States history. While the political efforts necessary to reach this moment have been studied in great depth, the legal challenges have been overlooked and even denied.

Relying on extensive historical research, this Article is the first to examine how women advocated for the legal right to hold public office in state-level litigation, constitutional amendments, legislative lobbying, and other venues for more than a century. From the 1840s through the 1940s, women in many states were excluded from holding even mundane public offices because of state constitutional language and judicial holdings. Opponents of women’s officeholding feared that permitting women to hold posts would deprive men of their rightful opportunities, radically alter gender norms, and fuel the flames of the women’s suffrage movement. The nation’s first women lawyers were particularly active in challenging these restrictions, with results varying by region and reflecting distinct legal, political, and social cultures. Women in the West obtained public offices relatively early, in part because they were the first to secure suffrage. Women in the Northeast and South faced the most difficult hurdles because conservative state judiciaries construed constitutional silences as implying women’s exclusion from office. The Midwest emerged as the contested middle ground; although women could not vote in Midwestern states for most of the studied period, many courts nevertheless held that they were entitled to hold both appointed and elected offices.

Recovering the history of women’s legal right to hold public office challenges three major conventional wisdoms. First, it undermines the commonplace claim in scholarship on women’s legal and political history that officeholding was not a meaningful part of women’s advocacy or experiences until after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. This account instead shows that proponents of women’s rights have long demanded women’s access to public posts, and women held positions more than a half century prior to the federal suffrage amendment. Second, this Article challenges prominent scholarship—mostly focused on interpreting the Reconstruction Amendments—that treats officeholding as an obvious or inevitable twin to suffrage. Foregrounding women’s history and state-level advocacy emphasizes the legal possibility and practical reality of severing these political rights. Third, and relatedly, the Article calls for more attention to state constitutional law and regional variation. The women’s officeholding story clearly demonstrates how focusing on one geographical area, providing a single national account, or limiting analysis to the federal level obscures essential developments in securing rights.

--Dan Ernst

The Nineteenth Amendment at 100: Essays by Siegel, Asanloo, Mayeri

The Yale Law Journal Forum recently published a collection of essays on The Nineteenth Amendment at 100. We've mentioned Reva Siegel's contribution, but missed two others. Arzoo Asanloo (University of Washington, Seattle) wrote about "Lessons from the Suffrage Movement in Iran":

The suffrage movement in Iran achieved its goal of formally enfranchising women in 1963, through a referendum in which women voted. This Essay explores the movement for Iranian women’s suffrage in three phases. First, it examines ’the mid-nineteenth-century pre-suffrage political climate that created the conditions for some to call for women’s enfranchisement and the founding of a women’s movement during a period of modernization in the mid-twentieth century alongside debates about Iranian women’s roles. Second, this Essay considers the success of the women’s suffrage movement as part of a broader package of reforms that transferred power from the aristocracy and clerical leaders to the monarchy, despite political resistance. Third, it explores the challenges to Iranian women’s rights after the 1979 revolution, which maintained women’s right to vote, but initially suspended other hard-fought rights in the domain of family law, as part of an effort by the new Islamic republic to redefine women’s roles as a technique of branding the new state.

The lessons from the Iranian women’s suffrage movement show that voting alone is not a cure for women’s equal enfranchisement in all sectors of society. Women’s entry into the political sphere, however, raises and maintains demands for women’s rights in society as a key legitimating factor for the state. The Iranian women’s movement was a multi-dimensional effort with different factions sometimes sparring over the goals of the mission. Debates about women’s rights in Iran and elsewhere reveal that women’s societal roles still serve as important cultural tropes whose meaning powerful actors fight to define and control.

Serena Mayeri (University of Pennsylvania) contributed a piece titled "After Suffrage: The Unfinished Business of Feminist Legal Advocacy":

This Essay considers post-suffrage women’s citizenship through the eyes of Pauli Murray, a key figure at the intersection of the twentieth-century movements for racial justice and feminism. Murray drew critical lessons from the woman suffrage movement and the Reconstruction-era disintegration of an abolitionist-feminist alliance to craft legal and constitutional strategies that continue to shape equality law and advocacy today. Murray placed African American women at the center of a vision of universal human rights that relied upon interracial and intergenerational alliances and anticipated what scholars later named intersectionality. As Murray foresaw, women of color formed a feminist vanguard in the second half of the twentieth century, pioneering social movements and legal claims that enjoyed significant success. But Murray’s hope that women’s solidarity could overcome ideological divides and the legacy of white supremacy went unfulfilled. As a result, the more expansive visions of racial, sexual, economic, and reproductive justice that intersectional advocacy produced remain the most pressing unfinished business of sex equality today, at the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial.

The whole collection is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Via our friends at Iowa Law, word of a faculty fellowship position, appointed at the rank of Visiting Assistant Professor of Law. The fellowship "prioritizes applicants who seek to conduct interdisciplinary research that connects with other fields of study at the University of Iowa." 

• As always, the Washington Post's "Made by History" section published a number of interesting op-eds this week, including "Utah women had the right to vote long before others — and then had it taken away," by Katherine Kitterman (Ph.D. candidate, American University); and "What’s behind Virginia’s latest move to fix lending laws and protect borrowers," by Anne Fleming (Georgetown University Law Center).

• To mark the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the first year in which the editors-in-chief of all of the nation’s top sixteen law reviews are women, those sixteen law reviews joined together to publish an issue on "Women & Law." Legal historians are well represented. For example, the Duke Law Journal's contribution comes from Dean Kerry Abrams and is titled "Family, Gender, and Leadership in the Legal Profession." The Stanford Law Review's contribution is by Maggie Blackhawk (University of Pennsylvania): "On Power and Indian Country." University of Virginia's Dean Risa Golobuff contributed a piece "On Firsts, Feminism, and the Future of the Legal Profession." 

• Burnita Shelton Matthews, National Woman’s Party, and Condemning Land for the Marble Palace.

• New from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Accounting for Colonial Legal Personhood: New Intersectional Histories from the British Empire, by Antoinette Burton.

• Just published, a second edition of Law and People in Colonial America (Johns Hopkins University Press), by Peter Charles Hoffer, University of Georgia.

•  The Woodrow Wilson Center seeks applications for the 2020 Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research.

• Dire financial exigency is forcing the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to sell some of its holdings, including "the Freedom Box" citizens of New York gave Andrew Hamilton after his defense of John Peter Zenger.

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

Siegel on the 19th Amendment and the Family

Reva Siegel, Yale Law School, has posted The Nineteenth Amendment and the Democratization of the Family, which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal Forum:

This Essay recovers debates over the family connecting the Reconstruction Amendments and the Nineteenth Amendment, and considers how this lost history can guide the Constitution’s interpretation, in courts and in politics.

A woman’s claim to vote contested a man’s prerogative to represent his wife and daughters, and so was a claim for democratization of the family. Suffragists raised other, more far-reaching challenges to the family. Suffragists advocated reforming the law to recognize women’s right to voluntary motherhood and to be remunerated equally with men for work outside and inside the household. They sought to create a world in which adult members of the household could be recognized and participate in democratic life as equals. And they debated how to realize these goals when women faced different and intersectional forms of discrimination.

Courts can interpret the Amendments synthetically and so, for example, integrate the history of suffrage struggle into the equal-protection framework of United States v. Virginia. I show how an historical and intersectional analysis could change the way that courts approach cases concerning of the regulation of pregnancy, contraception, sexual violence, and federalism. I close, looking beyond the courts, to persisting claims for democratization of the family in politics. How would we understand these claims if we recognized they began in the decades before the Civil War, and we recognized the disenfranchised Americans who voiced them among our Constitution’s esteemed Framers?

--Dan Ernst

CFP: The 15th and 19th Amendments

[We have the following announcement.]

Massachusetts Historical Society.  Call for Papers for the 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference.  “Shall Not Be Denied”: The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of their Ratifications, October 16-17, 2020.  Deadline: November 1, 2019.

The year 2020 marks the anniversaries of two critical amendments to the United States Constitution. Spaced fifty years apart, the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, ratified in 1870 and 1920, respectively, prohibited the use of race or sex to deny American citizens the franchise. However, the amendments did not prevent states from adopting other methods of discrimination. Viewed as the product of two different movements—abolitionism and the Civil War on the one hand and the Progressive campaigns and the First World War on the other—these two periods and amendments are not often considered together. This conference revisits the long journey to secure voting rights for African Americans and women in United States history. It considers the legal precedents and hurdles that each amendment faced, the meaning and uneven outcomes of each, the social context that allowed for ultimate ratification, the role of key individuals and groups in these respective contexts, and how each amendment has been remembered over time.

This conference invites scholars from various disciplines to discuss common themes and challenges surrounding the amendments and papers can cover any topic relating to them. We welcome submissions from all historical, political science, and legal fields.

A keynote panel and reception will take place on Friday, 16 October. The panel features Profs. Alison M. Parker (University of Delaware) and Lisa Tetrault (Carnegie Mellon University) and will be moderated by Prof. Alex Keyssar (Harvard). The full conference day will take place on Saturday, 17 October.

Interested parties are encouraged to submit either individual paper presentations or full panels (with or without commenters) by November 1, 2019. Application materials must include a paper description and CV for individual submissions. Full panel proposals must include paper descriptions and individual CVs along with a description of the panel itself. Paper proposals should not exceed one page and accompanying CVs should not exceed ten pages in length. Please submit applications materials and/or questions to research@masshist.org.

[--Dan Ernst.  H/t: LES]

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

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Sarah Barringer Gordon and Kevin Waite, both of the University of Pennsylvania, on their award of a $242,000 collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will support a project titled "The Long Road to Freedom: Biddy Mason (1818–1891) and the Making of Black Los Angeles."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Adam Malka (University of Oklahoma) on "Why law enforcement has a blind spot for white male violence"; Hidetaka Hirota (Waseda University) on "The danger of vilifying poor immigrants"; Salonee Bhaman (Ph.D. candidate, Yale University) on "How President Trump’s new immigration rule could erode the social safety net"; Margaret Marsh (Rutgers University) and Wanda Ronner (Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania) on "Why new anti-abortion laws may make it harder to conceive"; Katherine M. Marino (University of California, Los Angeles) on "How Mike Pompeo’s new commission on ‘unalienable rights’ butchers history"; Faith Hillis (University of Chicago) on "Why trying to distinguish between useful and dangerous immigrants always backfires"; and more.

• Writing for JOTWELLs Constitutional Law section, Ilya Somin has posted an admiring review of Maureen E. Brady's recent article on damagings clauses.

• Over at In Custodia Legis, an appreciation for equal rights crusader Maggie Kuhn; the long struggle for Swiss women's suffrage.   

• Harvard Law Today has a story on how students in Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s seminar, "Mind and Criminal Responsibility in the Anglo-American Tradition," use crime broadsides and other original sources in the Harvard Law School Library's Historical & Special Collections.

• Princeton Alumni Weekly has posted a podcast with Sarah Seo on her book Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.

• The Supreme Court Historical Society and production company Article III Films have announced the launch of the web documentary FDR and the Courtpacking Controversy.  “In late August the documentary will be sent to U.S. History teachers across the nation, accompanied by specially designed lesson plans to help students learn about the Courtpacking episode, which highlights important issues about separation of powers.”

• Now available on-line from the American Journal of Legal History: The Development of the ‘Modern’ Criminal Law of Evidence in English Law and in France, Germany and the Netherlands: 1750–1900, by R G Bloemberg.

• 1619: The 400th anniversary of the start of African American slavery in what is now the United States of America is the subject of the 1619 Project of the New York Times Magazine and this timeline in The Guardian.  But the History Channel says it started earlier.

• ICYMI: Immigration edition.  Erika Lee on the legal history of the new "public charge" regulation.  Also Kunal Parker, on NPR.  Mother Jones thinks Acting Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli’s ancestor might have been excluded under it.

• Have you checked out the Federal Judicial Center's Famous Federal Trials lately? 

• Margaret O'Mara, the Howard & Frances Keller Professor of History at the University of Washington, will be delivering the keynote at the Policy History Conference in June 2020.  The PHC is currently accepting submissions of panels and papers.

• Now out in paperback:Women's Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland (Hart), edited by Erika Rackley and Rosemary Auchmuty.

• Update: LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi's post for India's Independence Day (Aug.15) on how one law journal survived the partition of British India

• Update: Check out the Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. Lots of legal history here!

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

AALS CFP: Century of Woman Suffrage

[We have the following CFP.]

The AALS Section on Legal History is pleased to announce a call for papers for its section program, which will be held during the 2020 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. The program is entitled “A Century of Women’s Suffrage.”

2020 marks one hundred years since the 19th Amendment was ratified, ushering in the last century of women’s suffrage in the United States. This program will bring together scholars writing on the history of women’s suffrage, broadly construed. Submissions should relate to any aspect of women’s suffrage, including exploring the suffrage movement that culminated in the 19th Amendment, addressing how the 19th Amendment affected political parties or politics in the subsequent century, and comparing the women’s suffrage movement to analogous social movements.

Eligibility and Submission Requirements: This Call for Papers is open to all faculty members from AALS member schools. Submissions should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. You may submit a CV as well, but are not required to do so.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation as a panelist, please email a copy of your submission to Evan Zoldan at evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu by July 31, 2019. Participants will be selected by the Legal History section executive committee and will be notified by September 1, 2019.

Questions: If you have any questions about the panel, please contact Evan Zoldan at evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu.  A link to the CFP can be found on the AALS website, here.

---Dan Ernst

Maltz on the Fifteenth Amendment

Earl Maltz, Rutgers Law School, has posted The Coming of the Fifteenth Amendment: the Republican Party and the Right to Vote in the Early Reconstruction Era:

The year 2019 marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of one of the most significant moments in American constitutional history. On February, 25, 1869, more than two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives approved the proposed Fifteenth Amendment. The next day, the Senate followed suit, and the proposed amendment was sent to the state legislatures for ratification. After being ratified by the requisite number of states, the Fifteenth Amendment became the last of the three Reconstruction amendments that fundamentally transformed both the structure of the Constitution and the nature of American federalism.

The Fifteenth Amendment (LC)

The Fifteenth Amendment differed from its predecessors in a number of important ways. First, it was the only one of the Reconstruction amendments and remains the only part of the entire Constitution to focus explicitly on race. In addition, the amendment became the first provision of the Constitution to limit the power of the state governments to establish the qualifications for voters in elections for state office, providing that “[t]he right of citizens…to vote…shall not be denied or abridged…on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and also vesting Congress with the authority to enforce this command by adopting “appropriate legislation.” Thus, among other things, the Fifteenth Amendment provided the most plausible source of congressional authority for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a statute which was and continues to be, by any standard, one of the most important civil rights measures ever adopted by Congress.

Nonetheless, unlike the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, legal scholars have shown little or no interest in exploring the background of the Fifteenth Amendment. This article is the first to describe both the sequence of events that led to the passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and the forces that shaped the amendment itself.

Lichtman, "The Embattled Vote"

New from Harvard University Press: Allan J. Lichtman (American University), The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (September 2018). A description from the Press:

Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. Yet the world’s oldest continuously operating democracy guarantees no one, not even its citizens, the right to elect its leaders. 

For most of U.S. history, suffrage has been a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Economic qualifications were finally eliminated in the nineteenth century, but the ideal of a white man’s republic persisted long after that. Today, voter identification laws, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of American citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box. 

An award-winning historian who has testified in more than ninety voting rights cases, Allan Lichtman gives us the deep history behind today’s headlines and shows that calls of voter fraud, political gerrymandering and outrageous attempts at voter suppression are nothing new. The players and the tactics have changed—we don’t outright ban people from voting anymore—but the battle and the stakes remain just as high.

More information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• From the Los Angeles Times: an op-ed by Kristin Collins (Boston University Law), Serena Mayeri (Penn Law), and Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA Law). They bring a historical perspective to bear on current immigration policy and the family separations occurring at the U.S.-Mexico border.

• From History News Network, a roundup of commentary on Juneteenth.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Allison K. Lange (Wentworth Institute of Technology) on the Equal Rights Amendment - is it on "the verge of a comeback"?; Also Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Kennesaw State University) and Lina-Maria Murillo (University of Iowa) on "The Trump Administration's Assault on Contraception"; Christian Hosam (New America) on "The Supreme Court's long war against voting rights."

• From the New York Times: Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law) on a new exhibit at Monticello, in which "Sally Hemings Takes Center Stage."

•  Now available from the DC Public Libraries: over 600 images documenting the 1968 Poor People's Campaign.

• Aaron T. Knapp reviews former LHB Guest Blogger Gautham Rao’s National Duties in the latest issue of Law and Social Inquiry.

• From the newsletter of the SEC Historical Society: “Maybe you've heard of the Buttonwood Agreement, an effort to organize securities trading in 1792 and preceding the formation of the New York Stock and Exchange Board...but have you ever seen it?”

• Coming up: a workshop on "Cultural Expertise in Ancient and Modern History," convened by Livia Holden at Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, July 4-5, 2018. Participants will explore dispute resolution and cultural expertise in legal history, while also tracing the historical development of recent trends in cultural expertise. More here.

• And later this summer: a 900-year commemoration of the first Icelandic laws, the Hafliðaskrá, at the 17th International Saga Conference in Reykjavik and Reykhold (Aug.12-17, 2018). Otto Vervaart has a handy overview at his Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog.

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

Weekend Roundup

• From the University of Minnesota: "the first-ever effort to comprehensively map the use of racially restrictive covenants in a U.S. city."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Frederick Rowe Davis (Purdue University) on the history behind the EPA's pesticides restrictions (now being loosened); Noah Shusterman (China University of Hong Kong) on "what the Second Amendment really meant to the Founders"; Kathryn Schumaker (University of Oklahoma) on the high school activists of Parkland, Florida, and the historic free speech decisions that protect them; Ian Toller-Clark (University of Illinois) on "why the courts are unlikely to have the last word on gerrymandering."

• From the blog of the American Constitution Society: Sophia Z. Lee (University of Pennsylvania) on "Using History to See the Glass Part Full in Janus v. AFSCME."

• ChinaFile has posted an interview with recent guest blogger Taisu Zhang (Yale Law School), on his book The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England.  UPDATE: Here's one more, from the New Books Network.

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