Gindis and Medema on the Origins of the Law and Economics Movement

David Gindis, University of Warwick Law School, and Steven G. Medema, Duke University, have posted Henry Manne, Pareto in the Pines, and the Origins of the Law and Economics Movement:

Law and economics—or the application of economic reasoning and methods to the study of law—was a niche topic of study at Chicago and Yale in 1950s and 1960s, before coming out of the wilderness in the early 1970s and becoming an institutionalized feature of American legal education by the late 1980s. Relying on archival material, the paper shows how this remarkable transformation was driven by an academic entrepreneur, Henry Manne, who in 1971 started a summer school in economics for law professors. This program prepared the ground for, and gave shape to, the intellectual and geographical spread of law and economics. But Manne's enterprise would not have succeeded had there not been a widespread demand for the inclusion of social science research in the law school curriculum, combined with the failure of the alternative law and society movement—which sought to apply sociological concepts and methodologies to the study of legal phenomena—to establish a real toehold in the law school world.

--Dan Ernst 

Widener on Greenleaf's Confessions and Corbin's Complaint

Mike Widener, formerly Rare Book Librarian in the Lillian Goldman Law Library at the Yale Law School, has made two recent articles available via Academia.  The first appeared in volume 29 of the Green Bag, 2d ser.: "Confessions of a Case Reporter."  “It describes and publishes a letter that Simon Greenleaf wrote in 1836, where Greenleaf discusses both the economics and the style of case reporting, and concludes that ‘it costs far more labor to make a neat & condensed report of a case, than to publish it, chaff & all, just as the materials come to the reporter’s hands.’”

The second appeared in volume 12 (2025) of the Journal of Law.  "Authoring: Reclaiming Credit Where Credit is Due” presents “an irate memorandum by Arthur Corbin, accusing the dean of the Yale Law School of trying to stiff him and a co-author over payment and credit for their work on Volume 22 of the Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure (1906).”  

--Dan Ernst 

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. 

Karl Llewellyn Archive at the Perelman Centre in Brussels

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE.  H/t: DS]

The Twining-Llewellyn Fund is a unique collection of several hundred documents and works collected by William Twining (1934-2025) over the course of his career. The collection is housed at the Perelman Centre in Brussels. A significant portion of these documents illuminate the life and work of Karl N. Llewellyn. The documents in the archive, sometimes original, often commented on by Twining, date from the 1910s to the 1960s. The collection contains the bulk of Llewellyn’s publications, the transcription of several dozen unpublished works and some of his lecture notes. Researchers will also be able to read many of his personal and professional letters, as well as dozens of documents related to his research and the development of the UCC. The archive is open to the public and can be consulted by researchers.  The full catalogue of the Llewellyn archive can be accessed here.

[The main body of Llewellyn's papers are at the University of Chicago, but this is an impressive collection, particularly for as a comprehensive bibliography of Llewellyn's writings, published and unpublished.]

Weekend Roundup

• Nathan Dorn, the Curator of Rare Books at the Law Library of Congress, on  Hippolytus de Marsiliis: The First Criminal Law Professor and His Books (In Custodia Legis).  

• Congratulations to legal historian Jennifer L. Mnookin upon her appointment as president of Columbia University! (Columbia News).

•  History, Tradition, and the Constitution (Claude's, that is) (Dorf on Law).  

•  "U.S. Territorial Expansion: The Constitutional Roles of Congress and the President," a Congressional Research Service Report.   

• Righting the Wrongful Conviction and Execution of Daniel Sampson in Halifax in 1935, an event at Dalhousie's Schulich Law School on February 5, 2026, at 07:00 PM.  The event will be recorded and posted to YouTube. 

• The Virginia Tourism Corporation has launched a new Virginia Civil Rights podcast (WRIC). 

• Lawbook Exchange's January 2026 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History is here. 

• A conversation with Jill Lepore on We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (W.W. Norton, 2025) (BC Law).

• ICYMI: Tal Fortgang on whether Traditionalism can be Originalist (SCOTUSblog).  Molly Brady, HLS, on debates from 19th-century state conventions that reveal why some constitutions allow takings for “private use" (State Court Report). Madiba K. Dennie on how originalist law professors get birthright citizenship wrong (Balls & Strikes).  An Ohio Supreme Court landmark: Rogers v. Toni Home Permanent Hair Co. (1958) (CNO). 

• Update: UVA Law's notice of G. Edward White's selection as Editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History. 

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

Query about the Early History of Bar Prep Courses

Carole Prietto, the archivist of Georgetown Law, recently asked me about the history of courses designed to prepare law graduates for the bar before the emergence of the modern bar preparation companies.  The card reproduced at right prompted her question.  I'm afraid she stumped me.  She would be grateful for any leads LHB readers might have for her.  Please contact her at cap166@georgetown.edu.

--Dan Ernst 

Schlegel to Lecture on Legal Education and the Postwar Middle Class

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Fall 2025 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture at the University at Buffalo School of Law

 Friday, November 14, 2025. Lecture at 2:30 p.m. Panel Discussion at  3:30 p.m. Reception at 4:30 p.m.  Charles B. Sears Law Library, John Lord O’Brian Hall, UB (North Campus)

“Reflections on Legal Education and the Post-War Middle Class,” by John Henry Schlegel

The history of American legal education, the one that “everybody knows,” begins with Christopher Columbus Langdell, the first Dean of the Harvard Law School, who discovered, not a continent, but case law, the large class, and the cold call and used them to wrestle legal education from practicing lawyers who apparently didn’t understand what they did every day. Thereafter, Legal Realism moved the focus of the classroom from what the case law was to what it should be, and their grandchildren attended to matters of ethnicity, race and gender. Matters of social class, while not verboten, are seldom adverted to in this story. Reflections on Legal Education and the Post-War Middle Class attempts to repair this historical absence by inserting aspects of class into the story both generally and more specifically in explaining behavior by contemporary law students that their professors complain about while they teach as if without students.

Join us as we celebrate Prof. Schlegel on his 50+ years of distinguished teaching and scholarship at a reception to follow the lecture.  Free and open to the public. Registration is required.  Prof. John Henry Schlegel is a UB Distinguished Professor and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He joined the UB Law faculty in 1973, teaching for more than five decades primarily in the areas of corporate and commercial law and regional economic development.

A legal historian, his scholarship has focused on the history of legal education and the evolution of American Legal Realism in the 1920s and 30s. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including, most recently, While Waiting for Rain: Community, Economy and Law in a Time of Change (University of Michigan Press, 2022).

Treanor and Uelman on Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, and DEI

William Michael Treanor and Amy Uelmen, Georgetown University Law Center, have posted Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, and DEI, which is forthcoming in a special issue of the Jesuit Educational Quarterly entitled "Legal Education and the Society of Jesus."

The ability of Jesuit educational institutions to pursue a central part of their mission that of fostering diverse, equitable and inclusive educational environments is under attack. This essay outlines several dimensions of their religiously-grounded mission and the reasons to strongly protect from government interference the rights of Jesuit universities to implement programs and practices that align with DEI values. First, for Jesuit universities, these programs and practices are rooted in a much deeper culture of the more than 2,000-year old Catholic intellectual tradition and the now 500-year old tradition of Jesuit spirituality. Second, drawing on the classic work of Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, this essay highlights the important role that Jesuit universities play in protecting liberty and democracy. Third, a Jesuit university's control of its curriculum and admissions practices are protected by well-established First Amendment principles, including freedom of religion. In addition, the First Amendment principle of religious freedom also protects Jesuit universities' ability to have race-conscious programs of student support that advance the Jesuit pedagogic mission. The final section of this essay describes some of the curricular and co-curricular innovations and programmatic offerings at Georgetown University Law Center to illustrate how a Jesuit Law School might advance the Jesuit mission of creating an inclusive environment that supports reflective practices and the free exchange of ideas across differences. 

--Dan Ernst 

Kroncke on American Legal Education and Chinese Law Reform

Jedidiah J. Kroncke, University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, has posted Model, System, or Node? Understanding Legal Education Reform in Twentieth-century China and Beyond:

This chapter examines the complex influence and impact of American legal education models in China's 20th-century legal reforms. It argues that while American legal ideas were widely discussed and promoted, their actual influence on China's legal education system was limited. A conceptual framework is introduced which distinguishes between a country's system of legal education, its ideal model of a law school, and episodic nodes for integrating elite domestic and international legal capital. The analysis reveals that American legal education, particularly the "Harvard model," was often presented as an ideal for reform in China. However, it primarily functioned as a model for elite, non-replicable nodes. Ultimately, this chapter challenges claims of significant American influence. It also highlights the importance of understanding the contested nature of legal education reform within China's specific historical and political context.

--Dan Ernst 

Lupu Remembers Steinem at the HLR Banquet

Ira C. Lupu, George Washington University Law School, has posted Gloria Steinem at the Harvard Law Review Banquet, which appeared in the Green Bag:

In the Spring of 1971, Gloria Steinem became the first woman to be the keynote speaker at the prestigious annual banquet of the Harvard Law Review. At that time, as an editor of the Review, I played an instigating part in the process that led to this controversial invitation. I attended the Banquet, and I paid close attention to the speech and its aftermath. In 1998, I decided to memorialize that experience in this essay, which frames the event in its cultural and political context – the rise of feminism, the Vietnam War, and American student radicalism, among other phenomena. In her book My Life on the Road (2015), Ms. Steinem draws explicitly from details in the essay in describing her experience at the Banquet.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Legal Education Prognosticators in Retrospect

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Journal of Legal Education is the official scholarly journal of the [Association of American Law Schools] and in that role it has and continues to play an important role in chronicling the development of legal education in the United States. For a special symposium issue dedicated to analyzing that role, the editors invite submissions of articles that reflect on one or more articles published in the journal which at the time of publication discussed the future of United States legal education and then assess how the events in the years following the publication exhibited the arguments put forward by the authors. For example, publication of the McCrate and Carnegie reports inspired articles on the what the future should hold in light of those studies. How prescient were the authors of those articles? Other articles have discussed and assessed what at the time were new developments in pedagogy, scholarship, and the profession in general. Have those developments simply continued, flourished, or withered away?

The goal is to publish in JLE work honoring its history by presenting thoughtful assessments of the plans and predictions put forward in the past with the goal of helping think more rigorously about our own future.  The entire run of JLE is available on HeinOnline and from the mid-1980s on Westlaw. Both platforms, of course, have search functions, and Hein provides a complete view of each issue.

Proposals for individual responses or collections of shorter responses all responding to the same article with an abstract of the work are due March 24, 2025 to the New York Law School editorial team at JLE-CFP@law.nyls.edu. Contributors will be notified promptly with the expectation that final drafts of articles will be due July 15, 2025.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at the Law & Political Economy Blog: Evan Bernick (Northern Illinois University College of Law) on "The Anti-Constitutional Attack on Birthright Citizenship."
  

• Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (Penn History) will discuss The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom (Penn Press, 2024) at two upcoming events in New York City: with Kimberly White (Penn History/Columbia Law) at the New York Society Library on February 10 and with Christoper Brown (Columbia University) at the New York Historical Society on February 13.

• There's still much of interest to legal historian at the ongoing conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society of The Library Company of Philadelphia.  We missed Gautham Rao on a panel on "The History of Early American Economy and Society, 1999-2024," but today Claire Priest is “Looking at Capitalism through the Lens of Property Law” (PEAS).
  

• The National Constitution Center and the Federal Judicial Center will convene historians, online and in person, for Reconstruction and the Constitution: A Historical Perspective on Monday, February 10, 9:45–11:45 a.m. ET. “Pamela Brandwein of the University of Michigan, Sherrilyn Ifill of Howard University School of Law, and Ilan Wurman of the University of Minnesota Law School will explore the 14th Amendment and the history of Reconstruction. Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University, Kate Masur of Northwestern University, and Dylan Penningroth of the University of California, Berkeley, will delve into the broader legal and social effects of Reconstruction beyond the amendments." Jeffrey Rosen moderates.

• A report of Jonathan Gienapp and Michael McConnell in conversation about Professor Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique at Stanford's Constitutional Law Center (Stanford Daily). 
  

• The King's Court "visually reconstructs the long lost court of King’s Bench, using immersive digital technology and recorded sound to enable visitors to see and hear how it functioned during the Georgian period, between the late 1780s and early 1800s."  You are there for the argument of King v. Stockdale (1789).
  

• Judge Richard Gergel of the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina recently discussed his book Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring at Georgetown Law.

• Having a hard time keeping up with the litigation against the Trump administration?  Try Just Security's Litigation Tracker.  Also: who's in charge at the National Archives, and for how long? (Current).  And we're following efforts to recover and restore recently memory-holed federal websites onto publicly accessible servers and will post the most comprehensive portals when they are up. 
• Update:  President Trump has just fired Colleen Joy Shogan, Archivist of the United States.

• Here are the currently scheduled late-breaking session at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in April.
  

• A dedication ceremony for a historical marker for the civil rights attorney James R. Walker Jr., will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, February 22 at New Ahoskie Missionary Baptist Church at 401 West Hayes Street, in Chapel Hill, NC (rrspin).
  

• The University of Colorado Law School reflects on its history of education Black students (Colorado Law).  
  

• Lawbook Exchange's February catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History.

• ICYMI: Amy Howe on the history of birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court (SCOTUSblog).  Amanda Frost on the same (PBS News).  Farrell Evans on how Dred Scott energized the anti‑slavery movement (History). Eric Segall on how the Roberts Court killed originalism (Dorf on Law).
  

• Update: A notice of Dennis Wieboldt, a JD-PhD candidate at Notre Dame (Notre Dame Law).
  

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

DLI Remembered and the Required Legal History Course

As an heir, through John Langbein when he taught at the University of Chicago, to the "Development of Legal Institutions" tradition in American Legal History, I was thrilled--really thrilled--by the publication of The Tradition of History at Harvard Law School, a note in the Harvard Law Review.  I may have some thoughts later, but I want to note its appearance now.  From the introduction:

This Note examines the available archival documents to recount the evolution of the DLI course and reflect on the issues that law schools would have to consider in adding a similar legal history requirement today. HLS’s experience with DLI demonstrates that schools may face two major challenges: unpopularity among students and difficulties in optimizing a required history class syllabus for law schools — especially if the goal of such a class is to help budding lawyers apply tests like Bruen’s. Furthermore, fundamental tensions between historical practice and a legal test like “history and tradition” would make it difficult for even a perfectly designed course to meet the goal of training students to apply the test.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The recording of that interview of Robert Post, on his Holmes Devise volume, The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, by William M. Treanor is here.   
  

• For the Stanford Legal podcast, Pam Karlan and Richard Thompson Ford interview Jonathan Gienapp on Challenging Originalism: Putting the Electoral College, Presidential Immunity, and Recent SCOTUS Decisions into Historical Context.
  

• On Tuesday, October 1, at 11:30 a.m., Esteban Llamosas (National University of Córdoba), will speak on Economía Política (y católica) en la enseñanza jurídica cordobesa: traducción del liberalismo en la Universidad de Córdoba (Argentina) en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, in the Legal History Colloquium of the law faculty of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.  It will take place in Seminar IV and may be viewed via Zoom.  (Meeting ID: 829 1079 8716 / Access Code: 609743).

• The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will hold a book launch for South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Towards a Historical Ontology of the Law, by Faisal Chaudhry, on Friday, October 04, 2024 at 12:00pm to 1:15pm in the Law School Moot Court Room.  The event will be bring together historians of South Asia (Tiraana Bains, Osama Siddiqui, and Sana Haroon) and Duncan Kennedy. Danya Reda, Wayne State Law, will moderate.  For Zoom access to the event, contact hfern@umassd.edu. 
  

• Also on Friday, October 4, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court Historical Society will commemorate the career of Sandra Day O’Connor with the panel Center Court: Justice Sandra day O’Connor and the Supreme Court.  It will take place in the Montpelier Room 101 in the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress from 4:30 with a panel starting at 5:00. The panelists are Neomi Rao, Julie Rose O’Sullivan, Joan Biskupic, and Theodore Olson.  Kimberly Atkins Stohr will moderate.  YouTube coverage is here.  Register to attend here.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has a new and very substantial post on the history of treaties in the federal courts.
  

• "Sylvia Mendez was just eight when she became part of a landmark school desegregation case that helped pave the way for the famous Brown v. Board ruling a decade later." The blog of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts tells the story of Mendez v. Westminster in a new Moments in History video.  
  

• Grace Mallon has been appointed to the Clive Holmes Fellowship in History at Lady Margaret Hall.  More.
  

• "The Historical Society of the New York Courts has named Allison M. Morey as its new Executive Director."  More. 
  

• "The FDR Presidential Library and Museum and the Gillespie Forum present a lecture and discussion with Jeffrey Urbin: Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt: Progressives in the New Deal on Tuesday, October 1, 2024 at 7:00 p.m."
  

• "In celebration of Constitution Day and the five-year anniversary of the Library of Congress website, the Constitution Annotated online, the Library of Congress is launching “Our Constitution,” a monthly podcast series that introduces listeners to the foundational legal document of the United States and how the nation’s charter has been interpreted over time."   More.
  

• Years ago, my then-colleagues Richard Chused and Wendy W. Williams taught a legendary seminar on Women's Legal History at Georgetown Law.  I had to smile, then, when I saw that Susan Damplo, one of their students in the 1987 offering of the seminar and now a New-York-City based lawyer, just posted the paper she wrote then to SSRN.  It is Federally Sponsored Childcare During World War II: An Idea Before Its Time.  DRE.

• 
  ICYMI: Rare Copy of U.S. Constitution, Found in a File Cabinet, Is Up for Auction (NYT).  ABA will bring lawyers to the UK to celebrate historic 1924 visit (ABAJ).  Linda Colley reviews The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom (NYRB). Cass Sunstein reviews Jonathan Gienapp's Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (WaPo). "Originalism Was Impossible," says Eric L. Muller (The Atlantic).

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

Tomlins's "Legal History/History of Law at Berkeley"

Christopher L. Tomlins, Berkeley Law, has written, as a digital "flipbook," Legal History/History of Law at Berkeley, 1870-2024.  Presently it resides here, although in time it might migrate to California Digital Library.  (For good measure, we're putting a QR code at right.)  

Here is Professor Tomlins's introduction:

As a field of study and practice in the modern university, history has always balanced, somewhat uneasily, between the humanities and the social sciences. The same is true of law. Is law art or science? Is it formed in the cloister of knowledge or the forensics of action?

Now put these two fields together. Legal history. Legal history purports to study the history of law – of legal discourse, and legal institutions, and legal cultures, and of the circumstances in and by which they are formed. Is this art studying art, or science studying science? Both?

At Berkeley, history and law have been entangled in one fashion or another virtually since the creation of the University of California in 1868, so this question – what is the connotation of “legal history”? – should always have been ripe for a response at the university, whether from among the academic lawyers of the law school or the scholarly historians of the history department. Instead, despite (or more likely because of) their original entanglement, each party mostly preferred to go its own way. 

But developments at the law school in the 1960s and 1970s made their encounter unavoidable. First came the creation of an interdisciplinary “Center for the Study of Law and Society” (CSLS); then a PhD  program called “Jurisprudence and Social Policy” (JSP), followed by an undergraduate “Legal Studies” program. Separately, but parallel to these developments, the law school became host to an extraordinary manuscript and rare book archive, the Robbins Collection, which made it a home (whether or not it wished to be) for ancient and medieval legal history, and the history of law and religion.

Legal History/History of Law at Berkeley, 1870-2024 is an account of the entanglement of history with law at Berkeley, both before and after the arrival of “law and society.” It describes how legal history at Berkeley was incubated in the law school. This came about despite the law school’s central institutional imperatives (its pedagogical and professional emphasis on training lawyers), but also partly in reputational tandem with those imperatives (the scholarly achievements of various high-profile faculty members, the development of its world-renowned rare book and manuscript archive). In substance, these roots meant that as it developed, legal history at Berkeley Law sprawled widely – beyond the history of the United States and beyond the practical context of “recent” history.

The creation of JSP in the mid-1970s did not mean any sudden new departure from these tendencies. Still, we will see that much would change in the fifty years following the program’s inception. JSP added a new and valuable center of orientation, with its own problems and possibilities to work out. Most important, it added graduate students. In the field of legal history it added emphasis on the United States where before there had been little, while simultaneously helping to ensure that Berkeley’s legal history would be deeply interdisciplinary – as one can tell from the dissertations written and from the careers pursued. This essential plurality of purpose would eventually become the character of legal history elsewhere on campus, in the History Department and beyond.

Over time, trends in legal scholarship, trends in historical scholarship, and the temptations and rewards of interdisciplinarity have slowly created a contemporary intellectual world at Berkeley in which legal history – the history of law and legal institutions, of legal discourse, and legal cultures, and legalities – has never been better served by a greater range of Berkeley scholars, campus-wide, than it is now. Legal History/History of Law at Berkeley, 1870-2024 tells the story of how this came to be.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Historical Perspectives on Lay Legal Education

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Learning about the law: Historical perspectives on public legal education for laypersons and underprivileged groups.  20-21 May 2025, University of Helsinki

This conference focuses on public legal education in a historical perspective. It aims to discuss the various ways in which legal information has been disseminated to groups of laypersons or underprivileged people in order to enhance their legal literacy. Such groups can include e.g. women and children, workers, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees.
 
In the wake of industrialisation and the growth of the working class, many countries implemented legislation regarding workers' protection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This in turn caused the need to educate workers on their rights. The early 20th century also witnessed the growth of women's rights regarding e.g. education, occupation, property and marriage - all of which women needed information on. Throughout history, there have been waves of immigration around the world for various reasons. Those leaving their homes and moving to another country have also needed knowledge on their rights and the laws they need to follow. Moreover, besides underprivileged groups, educating laypersons in general on legal matters has also been part of building liberal, democratic nation states in which citizens are aware of the legal system and know how to navigate it. This kind of public legal education can take various forms. Legal knowledge has been distributed e.g. through handbooks, magazine articles, popular lectures and courses.
 
The conference aims to bring together historical research on the topic from different countries or regions to form a comparative understanding on the reasons for such activities, the forms they take and the consequences these practices had for each group of people and even society as a whole.
 
Papers could discuss e.g.:

• the motives for distributing legal knowledge to laypersons and underprivileged groups
• the different actors involved (providers and recipients of public legal education)
• whether the activities are initiated from within the specific group or from the outside
• what kind of legal information was seen as relevant for each group
• the role of professional lawyers in these activities
• the role of various interest groups in promoting these activities (associations, political parties etc.)
• the role of the state in these activities
• the different media used to disseminate legal education (courses, lectures, handbooks, magazines, radio and tv programmes etc.)
• the role of publishers or media outlets
• public legal education as part of developing a civil society
• how has the increasing legal awareness impacted each group
• the topic from a broader comparative perspective
• a longue durée view on the phenomenon

Keynote presentations will be given by: Dr. Kate Bradley (University of Kent); Dr. Elsa Trolle Önnerfors (Lund University); and Prof. Felice Batlan (Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology).
 
Deadline for paper proposals with abstracts (max. 400 words) and a short description of the presenter is 30 November 2024.  For further information, as well as sending paper proposals, please contact Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen (marianne.vasara-aaltonen@helsinki.fi), University Lecturer in Legal History at the University of Helsinki.

AJLH: 63:4

The American Journal of Legal History 63:4 (December 2023) has now been published online.  Here's the TOC:

The Abolition of the Right to Trial by Jury in Civil Cases in England
Charles S Bullock

Brave New World? Care and Custody of Children at the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in Mid-Victorian England
Penelope Russell

Banking Law in Italian Legal Consulting between the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Centuries
Mario Conetti

In forma pauperis: Indentured Servitude, the Right to Counsel, and White Citizenship in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
Anna Suranyi

Justice Kennedy’s Jurisprudence of Dignity: From Sovereign Immunity to Gay Rights
Eric J Scarffe

Hoist by the Colonizer’s Own Device? Law Reporting in Mandatory Palestine
Yair Sagy and Eyal Katvan

International Legacies of a Century and a Half of the Case Method
Han-Ru Zhou

--Dan Ernst

Clark on the Sale of Puget Sound's Law School to Seattle University

Annette E. Clark has published “What’s Past Is Prologue”: The Story of the Sale of the University of Puget Sound School of Law to Seattle University, in the Seattle University Law Review:

When the Seattle University Law Review editorial staff invited me to write an updated history of the Seattle University School of Law in honor of our 50th anniversary, I planned to start the narrative with the year 1989, which was where the prior written history (authored by former Law Library Director Anita Steele and published by the Law Review) had left off. It also happens to be the year when I graduated from this law school and joined the tenure-track faculty, so 1989 seemed like a propitious place to begin. However, as I began to do the research necessary to cover the ensuing 33 years of the school’s history, I was drawn over and over again to one particular part of our story: the announcement in 1993 that the University of Puget Sound had sold its law school to Seattle University. In conducting my research, I came to realize that as others from the law school have moved on, retired, or passed away, I am the lone remaining faculty member who was here for that remarkable period in our history. Thus, in commemoration of the law school’s half-century mark of existence, I have chosen to travel back in time to the defining moment on November 8, 1993, when everything changed. While 1972 marked the law school’s founding, the announcement of the sale in 1993 was the critical inflection point that started us on a difficult but fascinating journey to where we are in this, our 50th year: a vibrant, urban, Jesuit, justice-focused law school, located in the heart of Seattle and at the heart of Seattle University.

--Dan Ernst

Epps and Green on Affirmative Action at YLS

JoAnne Epps and Craig Green, Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law, have posted Black Lawyers Matter: An Oral History of Race-Inclusive Admissions at Yale:

Almost no one knows that Yale had the first affirmative action program of any elite law school in the country. In 1968, Dean Louis Pollak endured fierce criticism from alumni and faculty for deciding to admit twelve Black students, larger than any prior group in the law school’s history. All of those students would eventually become judges, professors, civil rights lawyers, government leaders, in-house counsel, or successful private attorneys.

We sought to speak with every Black Yale law student from the entering classes of 1963 to 1978. Using techniques of oral history, we interviewed forty-seven people across twelve states, including at least one person from each class year. This Article merges that specific evidence with new interpretations of the “Affirmative Action Era” across the United States to highlight Black actors who are intrinsically important to the history of legal education, the legal profession, and society at large. Any accurate account of U.S. legal history must include Black voices and experiences.

This Article also applies historical materials and interpretations to current legal debates, undermining stereotypes and generalizations about affirmative action that have been endorsed by Justice Clarence Thomas and other critics. Particular histories of Yale students illustrate the nationwide risks of colorblind constitutionalism, and this Article uses the long national history of affirmative action to develop doctrinal solutions for the future.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From the LPEblog: Talia Rothstein on "What Law Clinics Left Behind." "[T]he rise of clinics did not represent a simple victory for student protestors. Instead, it left them with a host of unmet demands—many of which remain unfulfilled today."
  

• The U.S. Law and Race Initiative at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln seeks to hire a Research Assistant Professor. It is also plans to host "four history or social science graduate students" for a "three-week summer residential fellowship." More information is available here.
  

• Congratulations to Kimberly Welch (Vanderbilt University), who won the Anne Braden Prize from the Southern Historical Association for her article “The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans,” Journal of the Civil War Era 12 (December 2022): 473-502. The prize recognizes the best article on a topic in Southern women’s history.

• "Made by History" (formerly in partnership with the Washington Post) is back! It's now in partnership with TIME. 
  

• Berkeley Law’s notice of Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.
  

• The Library of Congress has recently posted a webpage on its collection, Historic Sources of Brazilian Law.
  

• Roxana Banu joins Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, as  Fellow and Tutor in Law.  “Her current research projects include an exploration of the history of private international law in the colonial context and the social history of interwar cross-border family maintenance conventions.”  More.
  

• Phillip W. Magness on "The Problem of the Tariff in American Economic History, 1787–1934"(Cato).
  

• ICYMI: The Illinois Supreme Court has opened its “new interactive learning center.”  (State Journal-Register; Pantagraph). Miranda: The Movie (Patch). Salem Witch Trials: What Caused the Hysteria? (History).
  

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