Holdren’s First Post -- My book and my plans for future posts

I want to thank the editors of the Legal History Blog for having me as a guest blogger. It’s an honor and I’m delighted to have my words on here. As Professor Tani mentioned in her introduction, I recently published a book and I want to tell you about it.

My book is called Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. It's my first book and is based on my dissertation. I think of the book as a study in the intellectual life of governance - how power relationships are conceptualized, mostly by powerful people, and what concepts are implied within power relationships, whether or not anyone actually thought them explicitly. In my view, inquiry is enriched by emphasis on both of these facets, the actual thoughts of people and the implicit logics enacted within institutional practices. I’m aware that this all sounds pretty abstract. In addition to talking about abstract matters, I also tried to foreground the real human beings who died, suffered, and lived despite all the harms to which working-class people are subjected. In my view, that dying and suffering was (and still is) largely organized by the kinds of abstractions I talk about in the book.

Weekend Roundup

• In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Ian Ayres (Yale Law School) and John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) offer Democrats a "Plan B" for the Supreme Court. "'Court packing' is one of the most controversial threads in the history of American politics," but what about "court balancing"?

• More praise for the legal historical scholarship on emoluments by Georgetown law professor John Mikhail.  H/t: David Edmon.  Also Seth Barrett Tillman and Josh Blackmon respond to Judge Messitte’s opinion in that Emoluments Clause decision on the Volokh Conspiracy.

• At the intersection of legal and medical history, Atlas Obscura has this piece on the grim profession of  the "railway surgeon" in the 19th-early 20th century.  

• JSTOR has updated its list of nine books from the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History now available on the platform.

• Bennett Liebman, Albany Law School, has posted Union College, Schenectady and the New York State Lottery in the 19th Century, a paper that especially treats how the lottery “affected the operations of Union College in Schenectady, New York" before the Civil War.

• Robert J. Miller, Arizona State University, will speak on “Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny and Oregon” at the Coos History Museum, Coos Bay, Oregon, on August 7.  More.

• ICYMI: In The Smithsonian: The Massacre of Black Sharecroppers That Led the Supreme Court to Curb the Racial Disparities of the Justice System.  Watch the home movies of FDR's secretary, Missy LeHand.  A visit to the Museum of Tort Law.  Also: an unpardonable offense.

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

Blom-Cooper on UK Public Inquiries

Louis Blom-Cooper QC has published Public Inquiries: Wrong Route on Bloody Sunday with  Hart Publishing. From the press:

Throughout the twentieth century, administrations have wrestled with allaying public concern over national disasters and social scandals. This book seeks to describe historically the use of public inquiries, and demonstrates why their methods continued to deploy until 1998 the ingrained habits of lawyers, particularly by issuing warning letters in order to safeguard witnesses who might be to blame. Under the influence of Lord Justice Salmon, the vital concern about systems and services allotted to social problems was relegated to the identification of individual blameworthiness. The book explains why the last inquiry under that system, into the events of 'Bloody Sunday' under Lord Saville's chairmanship, cost £200 million and took twelve and a half years (instead of two years). 'Never again', was the Government's muted cry as the method of investigating the public concern was eventually replaced by the Inquiries Act 2005, by common consent a good piece of legislation. The overriding principle of fairness to witnesses was confirmed by Parliament to those who are 'core participants' to the event, but with limited rights to participate. The public inquiry, the author asserts, is now publicly administered as a Commission of Inquiry, and is correctly regarded as a branch of public administration that focuses on the systemic question of what went wrong, as opposed to which individuals were to blame.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

Part I: Public Inquiries: Introduction

1. Concern for Scandals and Disasters

2. Early Beginnings: Corruption and Maladministration

Part II: The Principles of Public Inquiries

3. The Royal Commission on Tribunals of Inquiry 1966 (the Salmon Commission)

4. The Jurisprudence of Public Inquiries

Part III: Bloody Sunday; Second Time Around 1998–2010

5. The Wrong Turn in 1998: A Final Dose of Inappropriate Legalism

6. The Lapse of Time: Assessment of Evidence

7. The Unexplained Circumstances

Part IV: The Inquiries Act 2005

8. An Analysis of the Act of 2005: An Aspect of Public Administration

9. The Chairing of Commissions: Horses for Courses

10. Counsel to the Inquiry, Statutory and Non-statutory

11. Safeguards for Witnesses

12. Chilcot-Maxwellisation-Saville: The Problem of Delay

13. Model Inquiries: Hillsborough (1989) and Litvinenko (2015)

Part V: Final Thoughts

14. Conclusion

15. Postscript-Lessons Learned, or Another Wrong Turn?

You can read more about the book here.