Environmental Legal History Job at Texas A&M

[Via H-Law, we have the following job announcement.  But see this.  DRE]

The Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University invites applications for a full-time tenured Associate Professor of Environmental History, with an emphasis on questions of law, justice, or governance, to begin in the fall of 2026. We encourage applications from scholars whose work addresses any time period or place, but successful applicants will extend and expand department strengths in multiple research areas and be willing to engage in intellectual exchange connected to borderlands studies. For more on the department’s exceptional research, see our faculty listing. The successful candidate will maintain an ambitious, productive research agenda, teach two courses per semester, recruit and train outstanding students, and participate in university and professional affairs.

This position is part of a cluster hire made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation. Hired faculty are appointed, and undergo review and promotion, in their home departments. Hired faculty are also expected to contribute to the interdisciplinary environmental undergraduate program, which is advancing environmental humanities curriculum. Hired faculty will be affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences’ Environmental and Sustainability Initiative and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI). In addition to the title of Associate Professor with tenure, for their first three years hired faculty will be identified as “Mellon-RESI Scholar,” leveraging their expertise to engage with, and contribute to, the scope of the Mellon-funded LatinTX  environmental humanities initiative. This initiative seeks to build a collaborative community of scholars from across the humanities converging to advance transformative conversations toward better responses to everyday environmental issues in borderland communities in Texas and beyond. Additional resources are earmarked to support the cluster hire faculty both individually and in their collaborative efforts.

Texas A&M University is a Top 20 public research institution and among the largest universities in the United States. It is a land, sea, and space grant institution that holds the distinction of classification as an R1 Doctoral University (Highest Research Activity), and faculty benefit from the resources and support associated with this designation. Texas A&M is also federally designated as a Hispanic-serving Institution.

Our department is committed to broadening participation in higher education and has a policy of being responsive to the needs of dual-career couples. The department is interested in candidates who, through their research, teaching, and/or service, will contribute to the breadth and excellence of the academic community, as well as the educational needs of the population of Texas and the global community.

Located in College Station, the university is 90 miles from Houston, 100 miles from Austin, and 165 miles from Dallas. The Bryan-College Station metropolitan area has over 160,000 residents and is experiencing rapid job growth.

Qualifications.  The successful candidate must have a PhD in history or a related field.

Contact Information. For queries about the position please contact historydept@tamu.edu. All application materials must be submitted through or uploaded to Interfolio https://apply.interfolio.com/173967. To apply please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, personal statement to include philosophy and plans for research, teaching, and service, and names and contact information of three references. 

Review of applications will begin on October 31, 2025.  Closing Date: November 1, 2025.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Nursing Clio, Kylie Smith (Emory University) brings history to bear on "RFK’s ideas about 'wellness farms' for young people." 
  

• The next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop will take place on May 16 at 12 noon UTC.  Sara Limao Papa, a doctoral student at Goethe University Frankfurt, will present "The Pathways of the People: Access to Water in 18th-Century Maranhão and Bahia."  Tamar Herzog, Harvard University, will comment. (More and h/t: H-Law).

• 
   HLS's notice of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (Harvard Law Today).

• Throughout this week, we've mentioned legal-historical works that won prizes at the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Another legal history--Marie-Amélie George's Family Matters--won an Honorable Mention, for the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award.  For more on the book, check out the wonderful series of posts that Professor George wrote for the blog last fall. Congratulations, Professor George!
  

• Mary Ziegler, UC Davis, discusses her new book, Personhood, on the NPR show Here & Now.

• NYU Law's notice of its lateral hiring of Sarah Seo.  
  

• Linda Colley has received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
  

• The Organization of American Historians hails its new president, Annette Gordon-Reed.

• Gerard N. Magliocca on Vice Presidential Inaugural Addresses (Green Bag).
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman's reflections on civility and the debate over Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Review.

• ICYMI:  Chief Justice Roberts, a Buffalo native, will help celebrate 125th anniversary of the Western District of New York.  Robert H. Jackson and John Lord O'Brian would be pleased!  (WGRZ). Originalism in a gun-control case in the Fourth Circuit (Bloomberg Law).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Jonathan Gienapp continues his engagement with "original public meaning" originalists.  "[O]riginalists assume that historians’ primary contribution is that they know that something happened or that a word had a certain meaning in the past," he writes. "Historians, meanwhile, tend to believe that their principal skill is in knowing how to decode historical utterances in all their guises. The knowing that is thus built on the knowing how, or, better put, the knowhow" (Process).

• 

  Raulston,J., charges the Scopes Trial jury (NYPL).

  On March 20-21, the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania will host a hybrid event on "The Scopes Trial at 100: Secularism, Race, and Education." More information is available here. 
  

• Edward Larson will deliver the Palmer Hotz Endowed Lecture in the History of Science on the Scopes Trial at the University of Arkansas at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, March 6, in the Gearhart Auditorium.
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society lecture, "The Life and Times of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth," by William R. Casto will be held at 12:00 PM (EST) on February 24, 2025, via Zoom.  The Society will subsequently post a recording on its YouTube channel.  Register here.
  

• At the next meeting of the Helsinki Legal History Series seminar, on February 25 and conducted over Zoom, Susanne K. Paas of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, will speak on “Josef Esser: A German Jurist in Four Systems.”  More.

• At the next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop, Benjamin Richardson, University of Tasmania Faculty of Law, will present the previously circulated paper, “Conservation Covenants in Castlecrag, Sydney: Walter Burley and Marion Griffin’s Legal Innovation in the Interbellum.”  Carol Rose will comment.  The session will take place on March 27 at 9 pm UTC.  (Convert to your time zone, if necessary, here.)(H-Law).
  

• "Christian, Jewish, Islamic & Secular Law in American & International History," a Zoom panel, will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 3:30 EST. Panelists include Deina Abdelkader, David Novak, Peter N. Stearns, and R. Charles Weller.  Register here  (H-Law).
  

• Five top public law scholars have responded to the Barnett/Wurman NYT op-ed on birthright citizenship (Just Security).  And Jonathan Schaub, after reviewing the exchange, adds an argument based on expatriation (Lawfare).
  

• Mark Tushnet, Stephen Skowronek, and John A. Dearborn discuss “the destruction of the public service” on the Scholars’ Circle podcast.
  

• ICYMI, State Constitutional History Edition: The New Hampshire Department of Education has launched a series of digital resources on the New Hampshire Constitution (Discovery).  Also, "Iowa's unique civil rights history must be taught, not suppressed" (Des Moines Register).  The inalienable rights clause of the North Dakota Constitution figures in a reproductive rights brief files by the Constitutional Accountability Center (CRR).  Teaching Americanism in New York classrooms, 1919-1922 (New York Almanack).  
  

• Karin Wulf on "Abigail Kimball's law book...1785" in Princeton's Lapidus Collection (BlueSky).

• ICYMI: The Charter of the Forest of 1225, the Magna Carta of 1215, and the Forest Charter of 1217 are on display at Lincoln Castle until June 1, 2025 (Lincolnshire Today).  A new library at Adams State University will preserve "the water, land and cultural history of the Upper Rio Grande River Basin" (KRCC). Vittorio Bufacchi's short history of separation of powers (The Conversation).  The six sentences George Washington cut from his farewell address (Slate). 
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• LHB mourns the passing of Ken Kersch, a professor of political science at Boston College and an excellent historian of American conservatism, including its constitutional dimensions.  David Bernstein has posted his AHR review of Kersch's Constructing Civil Liberties on the Volokh Conspiracy.  H/t: DS.
  

• An essay by H.L.A. Hart, found in Ronald Dworkin's papers and responding to Dworkin's work, has now been published in the American Journal of Jurisprudence as Policies, Principles, and Adjudication: (c. 1977-82). 

• From Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians: Jennifer Thomson (Bucknell University) reflects on her June 2024 Journal of American History article on “The Environmental Protection Agency, Sewer Infrastructure, and the Racialized Geography of the United States.”

• Julian Ku ‘s review essay of Curtis Bradley’s Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: Constitutional Authority in Practice (Federalist Society). 
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the law librarians of Congress): news that the Senate Journal from Century of Lawmaking has been added to Congress.gov. Also: a remembrance of "Pablo Abeita: Judge and Isleta Governor."

• Keith Whittington, YLS, discusses his book, The Impeachment Power: The Law, Politics, and Purpose of an Extraordinary Constitutional Tool in the podcast series of the Princeton University Press.

• The final Helsinki Legal History Series seminar of the year is “Corporations and Jurisdictional Culture: Exploring the Political Identity of Early Modern Iberian Monarchies,” presented by Pedro Cardim, Nova University Lisbon. Tuesday, December 10th, 2024, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM (UTC+2) at University of Helsinki Main Building, Room U3039.  More.
  

• "The next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop will take place at 9 pm GMT on Thursday, January 16. We will discuss with Rebecca McLennan (UC Berkeley History Department) her "Litigating Extinction, Anticipating the Anthropocene: Law, Nature, and the ‘Fur Seal Trial’ of 1893", with comments by Angela Fernandez (U Toronto Law)" (H-Law).
  

• CFP: "The Bentham Project is hosting a two-day conference entitled ‘Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon penitentiary scheme, and “A Picture of the Treasury”’, which will take place at Bentham House, Faculty of Laws, University College London, on 23 and 24 July 2025"  (H-Law). 
  

• From LPE Blog: Eamon Coburn (Yale Law School) on the history of treating abusive labor practices as a form of unfair competition (drawing on this recent piece in the Yale Law Journal).
  

• Syllabi for our times, from the Stanford's Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. 
  

• ICYMI: The legal historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal got a shout out when his student entered the transfer portal (Press-Telegram).  As a former Fulbrighter to NZ, I feel for that country's humanists (RNZ) (DRE).  Five times martial law was declared (History).  The first blind woman licensed to practice law in California (UC Law SF). A virtual tour of Hawaii's King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center (KHON). Ned Blackhawk’s list of best recent books about Native America (New Yorker).
  

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

Online Workshop on Environment, Law, and History

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

While environmental history and legal history are well-developed fields with dedicated forums for discussion new scholarship, those of us interested in the intersection of these two fields have to date had a harder time meeting up with scholars with similar interests. After successful sessions at last year's conference of the European Society for Environmental History and this past summer's meeting of the World Congress of Environmental History, we will finally be kicking off an ongoing online workshop, in which we will discuss pre-circulated drafts with the authors from around the world. We plan to meet on Zoom a few times a year, for about an hour each time.
 
Our first workshop session will take place 15 November 2024 at 8 am GMT. We will discuss with David Wilson of the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde his paper, "Towards an Optimum Yield: Science, Technology, and Fisheries Development in Lake Malawi, 1930-1964". The following session, in January 2025, will feature Rebecca McLennan of the UC Berkeley History Department.
 
To receive a copy of David's paper and a Zoom link, or to ask to be put on the list for messages about future workshop sessions, please email one of us. 

Susan Bartie (susan.bartie[at]anu.edu.au)
David Schorr (dschorr[at]tauex.tau.ac.il)

CSCHS Review (Spring/Summer 2024)

[The Spring/Summer '24 issue of the California Supreme Court Historical Society Review is now available.  Here is the editor's description of its contents.  DRE]

The upcoming presidential election and ongoing debate over who is entitled to vote and how votes should  be counted make this an appropriate time to look back at how Californians expanded the franchise since the early days of statehood. In our lead story, the first of two parts, a team of UCLA researchers explores how California systematically discriminated during its first hundred years against different groups of prospective voters, employing some of the same tools used under the Jim Crow regime of the South. Part II, which will run in our Fall / Winter ’24 issue, will focus on the post-World War II decades when the pendulum began to swing the other way and state law evolved to make voting easier and broaden voting rights, while maintaining the integrity of voting systems.

Next, Mitchell Keiter looks back at the Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center litigation and whether private property owners — there, a shopping mall owner — could evict high school students who were peacefully gathering signatures for a petition opposing both a U.N. resolution against Zionism and Syria’s emigration restrictions. Keiter, an appellate attorney and member of the Society’s Board of Directors, analyzes the California and U.S. Supreme Courts’ decisions in this case against historical tradition and earlier litigation between speakers who wish to express ideas and property owners who wish not to host that expression. The question lies at the core of two cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the constitutionality of Florida and Texas laws requiring viewpoint-neutral access to privately owned social media platforms.

Elsewhere in this issue, Society Board member John Caragozian traces how litigation about California’s remote Mineral King Valley changed the U.S. environmental movement by opening the door to claims by citizen groups and individuals challenging proposed land use and development. Also, UC College of the Law, San Francisco Professor Mark Aaronson reviews Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness. The new book looks at the founding generation’s philosophical understanding of that phrase from the Declaration of Independence, which also appears in many state constitutions, including California’s. In his thoughtful essay, Aaronson sees helpful insights in Rosen’s book for thinking about a revitalized conception of happiness as a source of constitutional protections and aspirations going forward.

Transportation Library Travel Grant

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

We are pleased to share that applications are open for the 2024-2025 Transportation Library Travel Grant.

The Northwestern University Transportation Library holds one of the largest transportation research collections in the world, covering all modes of transportation including aviation, rail, highway, public transit, and pedestrian and bicycle transportation. In addition to our technical collections that support research on current transportation issues, the library maintains special and archival collections such as timetables, passenger ephemera, and rare books and journals. It also holds a substantial collection of mid-19th to early 21st century transportation annual reports, and one of the most complete U.S. Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) collections in existence.

This research grant was established in 2021 to facilitate and support research projects that significantly benefit from substantial onsite use of the Transportation Library’s unique technical, special, and archival collections.

Funding.  Each year we will award one or more grants, up to a total of $3,000.  Grants will be awarded to reimburse expenses for transportation, accommodations, and meals for one or more on-site visits to Northwestern University Libraries.

Eligibility.  Open to academic and independent researchers. We encourage applications by those working in traditional academic practice as well as those whose research is interdisciplinary, or oriented towards creative arts and practices.  There are no restrictions as to the applicant’s nationality or academic status.    Research may be in any field supported by the collections of the Transportation Library. At the discretion of the selection committee and Northwestern University Libraries, the grant may be awarded to an individual applicant, a team, or divided among multiple applicants and/or teams. Further, if a suitable recipient is not identified among the applications received, we reserve the right to withhold the grant for that particular year.  Applicants who are not awarded the grant in a specific year may resubmit proposals in following years without prejudice.  An applicant may receive only one award for any one project as determined by the selection committee and Northwestern Libraries. Researchers affiliated with Northwestern University will not be considered for this travel grant.

How to apply.  To apply, please submit the following:

• A project proposal (1,200 words max) that describes the proposed research; explains the significance of the collection materials to the project; [and] proposes specific outcomes (e.g., dissertation, article, book, creative or artistic work) that will result from this research
• A curriculum vitae
• A detailed budget indicating the total amount requested with itemized list of projected expenses for transportation, accommodations and meals. For meals and incidentals, applicants should use the U.S. General Services Administration Per Diem Rates for Meals & Incidentals (M&IE) for Chicago. Applicants should indicate any other sources of funding that will be applied to the project, if applicable. For additional information on planning a budget, see allowable expenses and Out-of-Town Visitor Resources.

Applicants should arrange for one (1) letter of recommendation from someone qualified to judge the quality, feasibility, and significance of the proposal and the qualifications of the applicant to successfully complete the project to be sent in support of their proposed project. Those writing recommendations should submit their letters directly to librarygrants@northwestern.edu.

Applicants should submit the research description, curriculum vitae, and budget by e-mail attachment (PDF format) to librarygrants@northwestern.edu.

Please note: The selection committee is unable to provide feedback with regard to unsuccessful applications.

Expectations.  All grant awardees will be required to submit receipts for expenses incurred and will be reimbursed, in accordance with Northwestern University policies. For meals and incidentals, we require that recipients use the U.S. General Services Administration Per Diem Rates for Meals &Incidentals (M&IE) instead of itemized receipts. Reimbursement requests must be made within 30 days of last day of visit.

Grant awardees must conduct their research visit within the academic year following the grant being awarded (between September 1st and August 1st).

Upon completion of the research, grant awardees will be required to submit a brief report [1-2 pages] summarizing the use of the collection(s) and how the visit benefited their research to librarygrants@northwestern.edu.

Questions?  Contact librarygrants@northwestern.edu.

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Dorothea Heron (ILN)
  

  "The Law Society of Northern Ireland has unveiled a portrait of Dorothea Heron, who made legal history as the first woman to qualify as a solicitor anywhere on the island of Ireland" (Irish Legal News).  
  

• The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has opened a center on its history within the Pennsylvania Judicial Center, in the Capitol Complex (Penn Live).
  

• Noah Rosenblum, NYU Law, weighed in on the legal and historical issues in SEC v. Jarkesy, which was argued before the US Supreme Court this week, in "The Case That Could Destroy the Government" (The Atlantic).  "Many conservative judges don’t even bother to make substantial originalist arguments anymore," Professor Rosenblum writes.  "A lazy hand-waving suffices instead. They sprinkle in a few historical quotations, refuse to engage seriously with historians’ findings, and then declare that their right-wing policy preferences are dictated by the authority of history."  He and Ilan Wurman discussed the case and scholarship on the delegation of Congressional power and the Unitary Executive at the Founding in a National Constitution Center podcast moderated by Jeffrey Rosen.  

• The 43-minute documentary My Native Air: Charles Evans Hughes and the Adirondacks is now available on YouTube.  M/t: JQB. 
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Librarians of Congress): "Supernatural Ordeals and the Law of the Jungle in the Works of Friedrich Majer";
  

• “On December 9, at 1 p.m. Paul Ellis Graham will lecture on “Henry Lawrence Burnett: Prosecuting the Lincoln Conspirators” in the lower level of Monroe Town Hall (1465 Orange Turnpike, Monroe, [New York]) (The Chronicle).
  

• New online from in the American Journal of Legal History: Justice Kennedy’s Jurisprudence of Dignity: From Sovereign Immunity to Gay Rights, by Eric J Scarffe.
  

• The Program Committee of the Organization of American Historicans, whose co-chairs include Kate Masur, Northwestern University, has issued a call for proposals for its in-person Conference on American History to be held in Chicago, April 3-6, 2025.

• Over at Active History: Harrison Dressler on Thinking Historically About Disability at the Ontario School for the Blind, 1903-1917.
  

•  Lawbook Exchange has posted its latest catalogue.

• ICYMI: Mark Graber on  Donald Trump and the Jefferson Davis Problem (NYT).
  

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

CFP: Environmental History, Legal History, and Environmental Law – Two Transdisciplinary Conversations

Via H-Net, we have the following announcement:

Environmental History, Legal History, and Environmental Law – Two Transdisciplinary Conversations

David Schorr

Susan Bartie (ANU), Ben Pontin (Cardiff), and I are organizing a double session on environment, law, and history for the 4th World Congress of Environmental History, to be held (in hybrid format) in Oulu, Finland, 19-23 August 2024. This double session will showcase environmental-legal-historical research that demonstrates the opportunities as well as the challenges inherent in this meeting of disciplines, and discuss strategies, theories, and research methods that might help in overcoming these challenges. The sessions' abstract is below.

If you're interested in joining (in person or remotely, you need not decide now), please submit a proposal through this link by 18 September 2023. Please indicate in your submission whether you wish to propose a traditional research paper (the first session) or make a presentation as part of the roundtable (second session).

Abstract:

The triangle ‘environment–history–law’ suggests a wealth of opportunities for productive transdisciplinary scholarship: Historical analysis of environmental law, environmental histories of legal change, legal histories of the environment, etc. Yet such transdisciplinary projects have to date been tentative and largely tangential to the thriving fields of environmental history, legal history, and environmental law. Legal history, while having moved beyond its previously narrow focus on legal doctrine to embrace wider contexts of society, economy, and culture, has to date remained largely indifferent to environmental issues or to the environment as a category of analysis. The field of environmental law, so salient in pressing issues such as climate change and biodiversity conservation, tends to see itself as brand new, overlooking centuries of environmental laws. And while environmental histories frequently reference legal issues and institutions, from common property to rights of nature, they are often insensitive to the legal context in which these institutions operate.

The first session will showcase new environmental-legal-historical research that demonstrates both the opportunities and challenges inherent in this meeting of disciplines. The following, roundtable session will bring together scholars working across the boundaries of environment, history, and law, in order to discuss the challenges facing this intersection of disciplines, from institutional obstacles to the difficulty in meshing historical and normative analysis. With the participation of the audience, it will seek to identify strategies, theories, and methods that might help in overcoming these challenges. Panelists will be drawn from a variety of disciplines, regions, and methodological approaches.

Contact Email

- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• From Environment, Law, and History: the final installment of David Schorr's series on "Nature versus the Common Law."
  

• The Law and Political Economy blog is running a series on the "LPE of Rural America." The post by Emily Prifogle (University of Michigan) and Jessica Shoemaker (University of Nebraska) may be of particular interest: "Rural and Racialized: How Property Law Perpetuates Racial Disparities."
  

• Via History News Network: Erik Baker on "The History and Politics of the Right to Grieve."
  

• Writing for Slate, Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) explains "Why the Effort to Make the Texas Abortion Bans More Humane Is Doomed."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Michelle Bezark (Start Early/Northwestern University), "Addressing the child care crisis will take more than the CHIPS Act"; Michael Stewart Foley, "Farmers are mobilizing for action. It’s not the first time"; and more.
  

• Now online: The Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies at Georgetown University. “The Center supports rigorous new scholarship and innovation in disseminating knowledge about the history of enslavement and its past and current legacies.  The history of Georgetown, the Jesuits, and enslavement is one area of focus, as well as the history of slavery and its legacies in the Washington, D.C. area, and in Catholic America.”
  

• At Stanford Law, on May 5, Felicia Kornbluh will “offer an overview of  the main arguments of her recent book, A Woman’s Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove, 2023)," in a session entitled Win a War on Women: My Mother, Her Neighbor, and the Fate of Reproductive Rights and Justice.  Estelle Freedman, Stanford University, will chair.  The event is part of the conference Legal Histories of the Body and the State: Dobbs and the Legacies of Regulating Gender & Sex.

• ICYMI: Illinois law, 200 years ago: Inside the quest to digitize state's legal history (Pantagraph.

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

 

Federal History 14

Federal History 14 (2022), the journal of the Society for History in the Federal Government, has been published.  Here’s the TOC:

Editor’s Note
        — Benjamin Guterman

Roger R. Trask Lecture
        — Arnita Jones

Articles

A Clash of Principles: The First Federal Debate over Slavery and Race, 1790
        — Paul J. Polgar

From Conspiracy to Policy: James V. Martin, the “Air Trust” Narrative, and the 1926 Air Commerce Act
        — Sean Seyer

“Substantive Accomplishments”: Richard Nixon, High School Student Environmentalists, and the President’s Environmental Merit Awards Program
        — Neil Buffett

The Contribution of U.S. Military Advisors in the Dominican Republic to Operation Unified Response, Haiti Earthquake Relief, 2010
        — Bradley Lynn Coleman

Interview

An Interview with Kelly J. Shannon
        — Alexander Poster

Roundtable

From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy by Sarah B. Snyder
        – Introduction by Paul Adler
        – Review by Theresa Keeley
        – Review by Robert Rakove
        – Review by Matthew K. Shannon
        - Response by Sarah B. Snyder

   Recent Publications

        Human Rights–A Select List

Weekend Roundup

• Over at the Jus Commune podcast, Paul du Plessis, Edinburgh Law School, discusses litigation in the Roman Republic.
  

• Seth Barrett Tillman, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology, has been awarded the North Carolina Society of Historians’ 2021 Award of Excellence for Outstanding Contribution to the Preservation and Perpetuation of North Carolina History and Heritage in connection with his two publications on Jacob Henry: "What Oath (if any) did Jacob Henry take in 1809?;Deconstructing the Historical Myths," American Journal of Legal History 61 (2021): 349-384; and "A Religious Test in America?: The 1809 Motion to Vacate Jacob Henry’s North Carolina State Legislative Seat—A Re-Evaluation of the Primary Sources," North Carolina Historical Review 98 (2021): 1-41.
  

• The transcript of Judith Heumann’s Jefferson Lecture, a conversation with Karen Tani introduced by Christopher Tomlins, on the long fight for disability rights has now been posted.

• Congratulations to Professor Tamika Nunley (Cornell University): The Journal of Southern History reports that her article "Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts" has won the (first ever!) Anne Braden Prize in southern women's history from the Southern Historical Association.
  

• For those on Twitter, you can find updates from the ongoing American Society for Legal History conference via the hashtag #ASLH2022.
  

• Congratulations to David B. Schorr (Tel Aviv University): the Israel Association for Law and History recently awarded its best article prize to his article "Horizontal and Vertical Influences in Colonial Legal Transplantation: Water By-Laws in British Palestine."
  

• From Dan Farber (Berkeley Law) at LegalPlanet: "The Supreme Court’s Earliest Pollution Cases." h/t Environment, Law and History
  

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

Rector, "Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit"

We missed this April 2022 release from the University of North Carolina Press: Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit, by Josiah Rector (University of Houston). A description from the Press:

From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, environmentally unregulated industrial capitalism produced outsized environmental risks for poor and working-class Detroiters, made all the worse for African Americans by housing and job discrimination. Then as the auto industry abandoned Detroit, the banking and real estate industries turned those risks into disasters with predatory loans to African American homebuyers, and to an increasingly indebted city government. Following years of cuts in welfare assistance to poor families and a devastating subprime mortgage meltdown, the state of Michigan used municipal debt to justify suspending democracy in majority-Black cities. In Detroit and Flint, austerity policies imposed under emergency financial management deprived hundreds of thousands of people of clean water, with lethal consequences that most recently exacerbated the spread of COVID-19.

Toxic Debt is not only a book about racism, capitalism, and the making of these environmental disasters. It is also a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health in the city and involved radical auto workers, ecofeminists, and working-class women fighting for clean water. Linking the histories of urban political economy, the environment, and social movements, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.

A sample of the advance praise:

“Josiah Rector’s history of environmental justice in Detroit is breathtaking in its ambition and scope. Integrating environmental justice, urban history, and political economy, Rector lays out how environmental inequality came to be, as a confluence of white segregationists working with capitalists in industry, finance, and real estate at the expense of workers and communities. This dazzling debut is extensively researched, innovative, and a must-read for those interested in environmental justice, labor history, and contemporary problems that continue to land particularly hard on Black, Brown, and poor bodies and communities in Detroit and beyond.”—Julie Sze

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Rachel A. Shelden, Associate Professor of History and Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University, will discuss her current research topic, The Political Supreme Court: Justices, Partisanship, and Power in the Nineteenth Century, over lunch at the Fred W. Smith National Library at [George Washington’s] Mount Vernon on November 1, from 12-1.
  

• The latest issue of the Michigan Journal of Law and Society includes two book reviews of legal histories: James Kloppenberg reviews William Novak's New Democracy and Andrew Lanham reviews Linda Colley's  The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen.
  

• Glenn C. Altschuler, Cornell University, reviews Brad Snyder's Democratic Justice in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Charles S. Dameron reviews it in the WSJ.
  

• Judge M. Margaret McKeown discusses her new book, Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion in a podcast (ABAJ).
  

• Yale’s Beinecke Library “is delighted to announce that, as of February 2021, the Walter O. Evans Collection of Frederick Douglass and Douglass Family Papers has been processed and digitized and is now accessible online to scholars, students, and the public."  (More.)
  

• "Historical documents offer glimpses of the Underground Railroad in Chicago" (Sun Times).
  

• ICYMI: Kenneth Mack and Manisha Sinha are quoted in this story on the historians who advised President Biden (NPR).  Erwin Chemerinsky says that Even the Founders Didn’t Believe in Originalism (The Atlantic). Lauren Thompson says that the Supreme Court’s selective reading of US history ignored 19th-century women’s support for "voluntary motherhood" (The Conversation).
  

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

Whitely on Property in Wolves

Jack Whiteley, a Fellow and Supervisory Attorney in the Environmental Law & Justice Clinic at the Georgetown University Law Center, has posted Property in Wolves, which is forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review:

"A Wintry Scene" (NYPL)

From colonial times until the mid-twentieth century, governments paid bounties to kill wolves, mountain lions, and other wild animals. Clearing the wild was a sustained legislative project. Yet interest in these statutes has remained confined to scholarship on wildlife conservation, and important insights for legal theory have gone unobserved.

Based on new research, I argue that these bounty statutes have implications for the history and theory of property. The statutes were, in their intent and effect, land use regulations. For more than three centuries, they encouraged livestock. By removing wild animals, the statutes made livestock-raising a more cost-effective use of land than it otherwise would have been for landowners. And by removing wolves and other ecologically important species, they changed the character of land in ways that diminished the value of wilder uses. The statutes chose winners among land uses, and they operated over a much longer timeframe than conventional accounts, which date land use regulation’s origin to 1916, would suggest.

The statutes also had a deeper consequence. They encouraged private property in land. Predation on livestock is the kind of “large event” that, on a famous theory developed by Robert Ellickson, makes collectively-owned land valuable. By acting to remove the threat of wild animal predation on livestock in settlement communities, governments weighted the scale toward privately-owned, fee-simple land regimes. This discovery raises questions for a popular normative justification for private property in land.

The Article finally offers thoughts as to why animal eradication was such a pronounced public policy. The phenomenon suggests the influence of cultural preferences on property regimes.

–Dan Ernst

Cheney on law and environmental change in Qing China

 Wesley Cheney (Bates College) has published "Threats to Gong: Environmental Change and Social Transformation in Northwest China" in Late Imperial China 41:2 (Dec.2020), 45-94. Here is the abstract: 

This article examines legal cases centering on the management of communal resources along the Tao River watershed during the Qing dynasty. Local commons, or gong holdings, had lasted for generations, but frayed when faced with subsistence pressures, demographic changes, and market penetration. Lineages could not maintain pastures if members’ own shrinking holdings made it difficult to put food on the table. Villages could not enforce regulations if outsiders were not bound by communal norms. And groups could not set aside forests if commercialization displaced local cultural values for prices, communally-held woodlands for units of timber. Focusing on village-level practices, this article argues that gong regimes were, above all, a matter of social relationships. Beginning in the eighteenth century, these relationships became strained as material conflicts were inflected by increasingly violent articulations of intercommunal, and often ethnic, difference. Behind the ethnicized brutality of the 1860s lay these long-term conflicts between different modes of production.

Prof. Cheney was a Hurst Institute fellow in 2017. Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi 

Weekend Roundup

• The Viennese Legal History Society (Wiener Rechtsgeschichtliche Gesellschaft) holds its events online via Zoom during the pandemic and opens the talks now for the wider public.  On 19 January, at 18:50 Vienna, Professor Thomas Simon (Vienna) will give a talk in German with the title: "Christlich", "deutsch", "ständisch": Die sog. "Maiverfassung" 1934 und der "Autoritäre Ständestaat". Versuch einer verfassungsgeschichtlichen Einordnung.  Zoom link.

• Shannon McSheffrey, Concordia, on Disorder, Riot, and Governance in Early Tudor London: Evil May Day, 1517, in the Late Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, February 5, 2021, 5:30PM - 7:00PM.
  

• On Monday, March 8, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:00pm, former LHB Guest Blogger Thomas McSweeney, William and Mary Law School, will discuss his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2020) with Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard Law School.  Register and more here.

• The University of Nebraska, Lincoln is advertising a postdoctoral research associateship for “a project manager of a collaborative team collecting and processing habeas corpus petitions to design and populate a robust database that will allow researchers to demonstrate the many interpersonal and institutional relationships evident in these claims to freedom while also assessing their significance and value within the larger body of American jurisprudence.”  More.
  

• New Books in Law has an interview with Virginia Torrie on her book Reinventing Bankruptcy Law, which we've previously spotlighted.
  

• Jane Dailey, University of Chicago,  discusses her new book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History, and "what America’s history with lynch mobs can teach us about the attack on the Capitol" with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles on Legal Talk Network. 
  

• Nial Osborough, "Ireland’s greatest legal historian," is dead (Irish Times).
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has lesson plans for its video, "The Supreme Court and the 1876 Presidential Election."  
  

• The Organization of American Historians has issued a statement January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
  

• “The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is now accepting nominations for the 2020 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article in US intellectual history by an emerging scholar."
  

• Over at Environment, Law, and History, David Schorr notices Thomas Le Roux’s extended review of Chad Montrie's The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (U Cal Press, 2018).
  

• 
  Supervisory Curator Herman Eberhardt of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library explores “historic artifacts, documents, photographs, and film from the inaugural ceremonies of 1933, 1937, 1941, and 1945" on January 20 at 2PM.  More.
  

• Legal historical op-eds and other writings on self-pardons, the 25th Amendment, impeachment, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and related matters are legion.  Here is a smattering: The US Senate History office on the post-resignation impeachment of William Belknap. William Eskridge says self-pardoning isn't a thing (WaPo).  Mark Graber on the second impeachment (WBALTV).  How scholars interpret "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" (NatGeo).  John D. Feerick on our nation's history with presidential inability and succession (The Hill).  Eric Foner and Gerard N. Magliocca on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (WaPo).  Joanne Freeman ad Geoffrey Stone on sedition (NYT).  Gregory Ablavsky compares the assault on the Capitol with the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 (Stanford News).
  

• Also Phil Magness and the Pacific Legal Foundation on the 1619 Project (PLF).
  

• Update: Shirley Abrahamson's NYT obituary.
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• Barbara Allen Babcock, the first woman member of the Stanford Law School faculty, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita, the author of Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (2011, and a great promoter of the history of women in the legal profession has died. Here's Stanford's press release. 

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts concludes its Celebrate Diversity Month in Common Threads of Justice by joining with Supreme Court Historical Society in the program Ladies of Legend: The First Generation of American Women Attorneys.

• Here's a "sixty-second lecture"  on the legal history of epidemics in Modern America by Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. And by LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi: Pandemic or poison? How epidemics shaped Southasia's legal history

• Congratulations to Jennifer Mnookin, a historian of the law of evidence, Erika Lee, a historian of immigration law and policy, and my law dean William Treanor, a constitutional historian of the Founding, upon their induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  I was also very pleased to see my Georgetown colleague Michael Kazin among the inductees.  DRE

•  Have you noted the National Archives and Records Administration platform, History Hub?  It “connects agencies, researchers, and a bevy of citizen archivists within its online community to help the public through its research journeys.”  The latest episode announces Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series: A Match Made in History.

• Julian Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley’s attack on the originalist case for the nondelegation in American constitutional law has prompted two responses on SSRN by Ilan Wurman and Aaron Gordon. 

• ICYMI: Richard Lazarus’s Rule of Five, on Massachusetts v. EPA, in Harvard Law Today.The NYT obit of Richard Sobol, who went from Columbia Law to Arnold, Fortas & Porter to the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in 1965.

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

Craig's "Stringfellow Acid Pits"

We received word the other day of another addition to the shelf of book-length case studies on environmental law (ours includes Duncan Maysille’s Ducktown Smoke and William Buzbee’s Fighting Westway).  It is Stringfellow Acid Pits: The Toxic and Legal Legacy (University of Michigan Press, 2020) by Brian Craig, a lawyer in Logan, Utah and a full-time adjunct faculty member in the School of Legal Studies at Purdue University Global.

Stringfellow Acid Pits tells the story of one of the most toxic places in the United States, and of an epic legal battle waged to clean up the site and hold those responsible accountable. In 1955, California officials approached rock quarry owner James Stringfellow about using his land in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, as a hazardous dump site. Officials claimed it was a natural waste disposal site because of the impermeable rocks that underlay the surface. They were gravely mistaken. Over 33 million gallons of industrial chemicals from more than a dozen of the nation’s most prominent companies poured into the site’s unlined ponds. In the 1960s and 1970s, heavy rains forced surges of chemical-laden water into Pyrite Creek and the nearby town of Glen Avon. Children played in the froth, making fake beards with the chemical foam. The liquid waste contaminated the groundwater, threatening the drinking water for hundreds of thousands of California residents. Penny Newman, a special education teacher and mother, led a grassroots army of so-called “hysterical housewives” who demanded answers and fought to clean up the toxic dump.

The ensuing three-decade legal saga involved more than 1,000 lawyers, 4,000 plaintiffs, and nearly 200 defendants, and led to the longest civil trial in California history. The author unveils the environmental and legal history surrounding the Stringfellow Acid Pits through meticulous research based on personal interviews, court records, EPA documents, and other documents. The contamination at the Stringfellow site will linger for hundreds of years. The legal fight has had an equally indelible influence, shaping environmental law, toxic torts, appellate procedure, takings law, and insurance coverage, into the present day.

--Dan Ernst

McGarity, "Pollution, Politics, and Power: The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity"

New from Harvard University Press: Pollution, Politics, and Power: The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity, by Thomas O. McGarity (University of Texas School of Law). A description from the Press:

The electric power industry has been transformed over the past forty years, becoming more reliable and resilient while meeting environmental goals. A big question now is how to prevent backsliding.

Pollution, Politics, and Power tells the story of the remarkable transformation of the electric power industry over the last four decades. Electric power companies have morphed from highly polluting regulated monopolies into competitive, deregulated businesses that generate, transmit, and distribute cleaner electricity. Power companies are investing heavily in natural gas and utility-scale renewable resources and have stopped building new coal-fired plants. They facilitate end-use efficiency and purchase excess electricity produced by rooftop solar panels and backyard wind turbines, helping to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

But these beneficial changes have come with costs. The once-powerful coal industry is on the edge of ruin, with existing coal-fired plants closing and coal mines shutting down. As a result, communities throughout Appalachia suffer from high unemployment and reduced resources, which have exacerbated a spiraling opioid epidemic. The Trump administration’s efforts to revive the coal industry by scaling back environmental controls and reregulating electricity prices have had little effect on the coal industry’s decline.

Major advances therefore come with warning signs, which we must heed in charting the continuing course of sustainable electricity. In Pollution, Politics, and Power, Thomas O. McGarity examines the progress made, details lessons learned, and looks to the future with suggestions for building a more sustainable grid while easing the economic downsides of coal’s demise.

Advance praise:

“In revealing many encouraging emission reductions by the electric power industry, Thomas O. McGarity shows what citizen action, regulation, and competition can contribute to expanding energy efficiencies and renewables like solar and wind. This book is a well-documented, eye-opening antidote to the ‘doom and gloom’ enveloping so many concerned people.”—Ralph Nader

“Pollution, Politics, and Power is a tour de force, analyzing environmental regulation of the power industry over the last half-century. With unmatched mastery, McGarity illuminates the current policy debates by placing them in their historical context, with a bull’s-eye on coal.”—Richard Lazarus

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani