Murphy on Lay Legal Advocates in the Farm Crisis

Ellen Murphy, Wake Forest University School of Law, has posted Farm Advocates: Unearthing an Access to Justice Success Story, which is forthcoming in the Nebraska Law Review: 

This is the untold story of a grassroots group of lay legal advocates who – in defiance of unauthorized practice of law restrictions – provided legal assistance to countless farmers and farm families during the 1980s Farm Crisis. The Farm Crisis followed a period of unprecedented prosperity in farm country. But when the boom ended, many farmers were saddled with unmanageable debt. Farm country and much of rural America faced catastrophic loss of people, community, and institutions. Pressured by class actions against government lending agencies, Congress (eventually) responded with statutory relief for the farmers. However, obtaining the relief was legally complex and, as remains true today, farm country faced a simultaneous crisis: access to justice. Farmers needed legal assistance, but lawyers were scarce, cost-prohibitive, and unfamiliar with agriculture’s legal complexities and cultural norms. The farm advocates stepped up to provide the legal services that farmers needed.

These self-organized groups of neighbors helping neighbors morphed into a sophisticated system of legal service providers who were trained and supported – but not supervised – by legal service agencies and nonprofits. Some states, like Minnesota, funded farm advocate programs. The advocates, operating in plain sight, counseled, advised, and assisted distressed farmers and farm families in exercising their legal rights. The farm advocates were not lawyers but nevertheless, they engaged in the practice of law. And they did so without evidence of harm and without drawing the ire of the bench and bar.

The farm advocates’ legal work saved countless farms and restored hope to rural communities. Analyzing hundreds of pages of training materials and oral histories, this article unearths their contribution to access to justice. The farm advocates were a small but mighty force in the history of access to justice. Their story challenges the foundational premise of lawyer regulation: that legal services can be competently provided only by lawyers and that law practice by unlicensed practitioners invariably harms the public. The farm advocates' story shows, to the contrary, that legal services can thrive outside of the lawyer monopoly, and that strict enforcement of unauthorized practice of law restrictions can deprive people of help that is essential to their lives and livelihoods.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Berkeley Law's notice of its new legal historian, Aaron Hall (UC Berkeley Law).  

• Daniel F. Gosling, Principal Legal Records Specialist at UK's National Archives, has announced the completion of his searchable database of 

• Legal Histories of Empire has posted a "save the date" for its fifth conference, 13-15 July 2028, at NLSIU Bengaluru.   

• The University of Kansas's notice of Raj Bhala's article on the rule of law in “Measure for Measure" (KU News).

• The Library of Congress has a new research guide on the Legal Tender Act of 1862.

• Kevin Kruse on The Rise, Fall, and Possible Rebirth of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division (Talking Feds with Harry Litman). 

• Julia Rose Kraut, Sam Lebovic and Ellen Schrecker's amicus brief in an ideological deportation case, AAUP v. Rubio (1st Cir.) (Brennan Center).   

• The legal historian Patti Minter has been appointed to Kentucky’s Board of Education (College Heights Herald). 

• 
  Noticed in the New York Almanack: Carol Kammen's Smut: An 1883 Obscenity Trial and Its Echoes Today (Paul Dry Books, 2026), on an 1883 trial for “selling and exhibiting obscene pictures.” 

• Rosemarie Zagarri on The Grievances of the Declaration of Independence: a National Constitution Center podcast.  

• Danielle Allen and Mary Bilder on the Declaration of Independence on Preet Bharara's podcast. 

• Robert P. George, Princeton University, and Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford University, on the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s “promissory note” (SLS Podcasts).

• Did the Constitution Lay the Groundwork for Abolition? A Federalist Society webinar with Timothy Sandefur and Kenneth Williams.  The recording of the National Constitution Center's book even for Mr. Sandefur's new book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence is here.  

• "Founding Friends, Founding Foes": Kurt Graham and Steve Light on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, at the Harry S. Truman Library on September 23.   

• A notice of Gautham Rao's course, HIST-196 America at 250: Revolution (AU Magazine).

• Check out Drafting the Past: "a new home to celebrate nonfiction history books." 

• ICYMI: Hangings in Jefferson County, PA (ExploreJefferson).  What the Framers Were Really Thinking (Harvard Gazette).  Ohio in the oleomargarine wars (CNO) .

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

Daniel on the Affinity of Lawyers and History

Josiah M. Daniel III has posted The Affinity of Lawyers and History: The Dallas Bar Association's Legal History Discussion Group as a Case in Point, which appears in the Journal of Texas Supreme Court History:

Legal history may be conceived as the story of the evolution of legal doctrines and rules or as the analysis of the effects of law on society and vice versa. In all events, the irreducible elements of the subject matter of the field of legal history are not only the law but also the lawyer and the judge. 

To begin, the lawyer is the quintessential element because what lawyers "do" is to invoke and apply the processes of the law, either in resolving disputes or in effectuating transactions, on behalf of a client. Lawyers are the ones who know or learn what the law is in order to be able to seek to accomplish—ideally with highest ethics, not merely as an agent—the objectives of a client. Such work is known as “lawyering.”

But not only have lawyers always been key actors within the activities and events that are comprehended within the ambit of legal history but today quite a number of them are researchers and authors—legal history scholars—knowledgeable of the literature and interested in learning and creating more in publications and oral presentations. As undergraduates, many attorneys and judges majored or minored in history, but even those who studied business administration or accounting in university are often found reading and discussing legal-historical books and articles. Some even write them. 

The scholarly discipline of history has been called "the art of reconstructing the past."  The endeavor to do so, known as the historical method, requires, first, finding the sources. Lawyers are experienced in fact finding and determining causation, and engaging in historical research is a natural extension.

This essay argues that the multiple affinities of lawyers and judges for history are demonstrated in the legal history activates of Dallas and Texas lawyers.

--Dan Ernst 

Todd and Thunder's "United States Attorneys for the District of Columbia"

K. Chris Todd and James M. Thunder have privately published, with the sponsorship of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, The United States Attorneys for the District of Columbia 1801-2024: A Compendium of Short Biographies (iUniverse):

Did you know that Francis Scott Key, author of the Star-Spangled Banner, was also the top federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia for eight years? Read a short biography of his life, his career, and his work as a prosecutor and lawyer in this fascinating compendium featuring all forty-nine United States Attorneys for the District of Columbia. Or read the shocking story of the 1859 murder in Lafayette Park of Key’s son, Barton Key, who was serving as the United States Attorney at the time he was shot dead. Congressman Daniel Sickles murdered Key after Sickles discovered Key was having an affair with Sickles’ wife. In recent history, read about Earl Silbert, who broke the case of the Watergate cover-up, along with the stories of such distinguished lawyers and judges as Thomas Flannery, Eric Holder, Chuck Ruff, and many others. The book recounts the history of one of the most important of the ninety-four judicial districts in the United States. Many landmark trials in our nation’s history occurred in the District of Columbia courts, either guided by or defended by one of these forty-nine men and women. They prosecuted the assassins of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield, and the men who attempted to assassinate Presidents Jackson, Truman, and Reagan. They also played pivotal roles in the trials concerning the Teapot Dome Scandal of 1923, the attacks on the Capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists in 1954, the 1971 May Day protest against the Vietnam War, and the Jan. 6th, 2021 violent attack on the Capitol. The book is sourced in great detail, richly illustrated with over 800 historic photos and other images contemporaneous with the events that defined the lives of each United States Attorney.

--Dan Ernst

Wells on the Origins of the Limited Liability Partnership

Harwell Wells, Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law, has posted The Unexpected Origins of the US Limited Liability Partnershi:

This paper tells the origins of the Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) in the United States. Its origins are seemingly well-known; the LLP was created as a response to staggering malpractice claims arising in the 1980s that pushed partners in large American law firms, almost all organised as general partnerships, to seek a shield from personal liability for their firms' or fellow partners' debts. But that account is incomplete. The LLP's origins lie at the end of a much longer story, that of American lawyers' stiff resistance to corporations practicing law. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the legal profession had labored to protect lawyers' self-image and fend off competition by (among other things) forbidding corporations from offering legal services; the LLP appeared when lawyers decided that, despite this longstanding opposition, they needed one of the advantages of incorporation: limited liability. The LLP was thus the product not only of economic demands, but of the peculiarities of the American legal profession and its conflicted relationship with the corporate form and the modern corporation. 

--Dan Ernst 

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 

Hamm's Biography of Arthur Garfield Hays

Richard F Hamm has published Confronting Racism: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Fight for Equality, 1925-1954 (SUNY Press):

Beginning in 1925 the corporate lawyer and civil libertarian Arthur Garfield Hays began battling segregation. This book details Hays's work on the Mayor's Commission that investigated the1935 Harlem riot; his role in a 1937 restrictive covenant case in Westchester, County; his representing a challenger to the segregated draft in World War II; his part in ending the exclusion of African Americans from the American Bar Association; and his opposition to strong fair employment legislation. Motivated by his conception of a good society that valued civil liberties, democracy, and individualism, Hays fought for African Americans' legal rights under the Constitution. His activism was limited by his conservative economic views and his fear of an active state that intervened in private matters. His career illuminates the potential and perils of interracial co-operation during the long civil rights movement. Because the issues he confronted continue today-police mistreatment of African Americans, housing discrimination, limits on African Americans in the professions, racial discrimination in the military, and how to build government structures to limit discrimination-this book speaks to our time as well as his.

 --Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Ely Samuel Parker, seated at left (LC)

  Ely Samuel Parker, "a member of the Senecans," was admitted to the New York State Bar, 176 years after being denied entry on account of his race  (NYT).  

• John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) has published an editorial in the New York Times: "The Idea That Once Held America Together Died in 2025." (The idea: procedural fairness/regularity.)

• Samuel Bray summarizes his and Drew Keane's book chapter, "Of Canon Law and Kings: The Legal Thought of James Ussher (1581-1656)" (Divided Argument).   

• "The American Historical Association (AHA), in collaboration with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), has filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard University’s lawsuit against the federal government over the university’s ability to host foreign scholars and students." Link. 

• Theda Skocpol in conversation with Edwin Amenta (Sociologica). 

• An impressive lineup of historical talks at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research. 

• Lawbook Exchange's  December 2025 (Part II) catalog of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: Damon Root on Mercy Otis Warren, "the Founding Mother Who Opposed the Constitution" (Reason).  Adam Serwer thinks "Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back" (The Atlantic).

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

Bartie on Collective Legal Biography

Susan Bartie, Australian National University, has published Understanding the world through legal Biography: Lessons from history, sociology and law open access in the International Journal of the Legal Profession 32 (2-25): 185-206:

This article draws on the historiography of biography, sociology and examples from law to consider the potential of group legal biography projects to generate knowledge and theories about law, society and politics. From the historiography of biography, it explains how debates between historians about whether histories of social orders are best treated as large-scale biography projects reject certain theories about humanity and how people construct society. They suggest that biographical approaches are about something more than form and that the size and depth of projects support some theories better than others. From sociology, it explains how sociologists have unwittingly taken positions in the historians’ debates, developing theories that encourage researchers to approach biographical data in different ways to generate certain theories about society. From law, it situates historical and sociological projects that draw on lawyers’ biographical data within the historical debates and the sociological theories. The point is to encourage more researchers to appreciate the range of possibilities and corresponding debates about the use and potential of biographical data in understanding law.

--Dan Ernst

Engstrom and the Legal Insurance Experiment

Nora Freeman Engstrom, Stanford Law School, has posted Legal Insurance and Its Limits, which is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review:

Courts are buckling under the weight of a staggering access-to-justice crisis. In three-quarters of cases, at least one side lacks a lawyer, default judgments are on the rise, and most Americans with valid claims never take legal action. The situation is dire, and it understandably has policymakers casting about for a fix. On the menu are a range of uncontroversial reform ideas, such as expanding legal aid, supporting system simplification, and promoting pro bono. But it is increasingly clear that those measures—even if accomplished—would not make a dent in the problem. Attention is thus turning to other reform ideas, such as relaxing unauthorized practice of law (UPL) rules and scrapping Model Rule 5.4(d), the provision that prevents nonlawyers from even partially owning entities that deliver legal services. Both reforms are promising. But both would dilute the longstanding lawyers’ monopoly. Perhaps not surprisingly, the bar is fighting these reforms tooth-and-nail.

Into this roiling landscape, some now have a new idea: legal insurance. They suggest that legal insurance is the way to expand access to justice for middle and working-class Americans. Reformers are also quick to point out that—unlike a relaxation of UPL restrictions or the abolition of Rule 5.4(d)—legal insurance stands to benefit lawyers.

We have seen this play before. In the 1970s, the bar seized on legal insurance as a solution to what was then seen as an urgent access-to-justice crisis afflicting the middle-class. The movement garnered enthusiastic support, not just from the bar, but also from unions, states, Congress, private insurers, and consumer groups. For a time, legal insurance even took off. By the mid-1970s, there were reportedly 5,000 distinct plans in operation, and experts predicted that, by the mid-1980s, half of practicing lawyers would be participating.  Of course, it didn’t come to pass—and remarkably, it seems the entire episode has been forgotten.

This Article recovers the lost history of the country’s first experiment with legal insurance. In so doing, it seeks to forestall another false start. In addition, by drawing on a range of disciplines—including insurance law (particularly insights concerning moral hazard and adverse selection), behavioral economics, legal ethics, and the legal profession—this Article explains why the legal insurance idea floundered, and seems destined to flounder, going forward.

It is undeniably seductive to think the access-to-justice crisis can be addressed in a way that benefits lawyers. It was seductive half-a-century ago. It is seductive now. But those who actually want to address the access-to-justice crisis need to look somewhere else. 

--Dan Ernst 

Atencio on the First Generation of Latina Attorneys

Dolores S. Atencio has published The Illustrious Impact of Luminarias on the Law: The Legal Handicraft of the First Latina Article III Judges, State Supreme Court Justices, and Public Interest Litigators (Carolina Academic Press):

The first generation of Latina attorneys, Luminarias, earned their law degrees over the 100-year period of 1880–1980. Lawyer and author Dolores Atencio uncovered their identities and legal careers through the Luminarias Study, which was conducted from 2016 to 2022 at 167 law schools in the country accredited by the American Bar Association.

This book features the legal work of the first Latina federal Article III judges, state supreme court justices, and select public interest litigators. Their story begins in the early 1970s when the first Luminaria public interest social justice activistas began advancing novel litigation theories seeking to expand voting rights, equal educational opportunities and funding, and the reproductive and work rights of women. Included are cases tried or supervised by Luminaria litigators and leaders—Vilma Martinez, Norma Cantú, Antonia Hernandez, Irma Herrera, and Deborah Escobedo—during their tenures at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Multicultural Education and Training Advocacy, Inc., Youth Law Center, Equal Rights Advocates, and the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights.

Beginning in the 1980s when Luminarias began ascending to the bench, significant decisions issued by the first eight Luminaria judges on courts of last resort are discussed, including those that codify theories tested by the Luminaria litigators. The juridical careers of the first seventeen Luminaria Article III judges are covered, from both the district trial courts and circuit courts of appeals. Obstacles faced during their confirmation processes are highlighted as is data construed and created expressly for the book, including a comparison of the number of days from dates of referral to dates of confirmation.

For each Luminaria featured in the book, biographical summaries of their early lives, education, and professional trajectory are included. The intersectionality of the careers of these thirty-five remarkable Latina lawyers blends together their individual histories with the country's during times of turmoil, reconciliation, and a return to a litigious past.

–Dan Ernst.  TOC here.

Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court

 Now out from Palgrave/MacMillan: Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities, edited by Emma Rhatigan and Jackie Watson:

This collection of essays presents recent research on the Inns of Court and their place in the literature and culture of the early modern world. The volume is structured in three sections. Section One looks at the institutional spaces of the Inns themselves. The chapters consider how the Innsmen’s identities and writings were shaped by their participation in the communal life of the legal Societies. Section Two looks at the Inns in the context of early modern London. The chapters attend to the intellectual and cultural traffic between the Inns and the city in which they were located by examining the role of Innsmen in the book trade, the circulation of manuscripts, playhouses, and musical culture. Finally, Section Three sets a wider international context. The chapters focus on the role of Innsmen in translation, nation-building, and early colonisation. Together these sections attend to the Innsmen not only as writing communities in themselves, but as participants in a complex of intersecting networks reaching out into London and beyond.

TOC here.  A book launch is scheduled at Middle Temple Library (and also online) at 6.15 pm on Tuesday, September 9.  For details, email MappingInns@gmail.com. 

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Adam Sitze (Amherst College) on "The Strange History of University Autonomy — and Why We Need It More Than Ever."

• "Miscarriage is a Crime Again": over at Nursing Clio, Lara Freidenfelds draws connections between the contemporary U.S. and early modern England.   

• A recording of Kim Lane Schepple's really terrific Robert H. Jackson Lecturer on the Supreme Court of the United States.at the Chautauqua Institution is here.  "Professor Scheppele’s lecture focused on Robert H. Jackson and constitutional separation of powers": Court-packing, destroyers for basis, North American Aviation, Nuremberg, Youngstown, and Trump v. United States.  With an introduction by John Q. Barrett.

• 
  MIT's notice of Malick Ghachem’s new book, The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble, which "examines the pre-revolutionary changes that set Haiti’s long-term economic structure in place." 

• Patrick S. O'Donnell on "The Haitian Revolution and Jacob Lawrence: Exemplifying Historical Narrative, Values and Purposes through Art."

• Check out A.B. Hart's Suggestions on the Study of History (1893).  H/t: MSB. 

• "The Supreme Court of Ohio is staying open late to the public on Sept. 9 with two evening tour offerings. ... See Ohio’s rich history on full display at the Thomas J. Moyer Ohio Judicial Center" (CNO).  

• "Three UMass Dartmouth School of Law 2L students, Patrick Wilson, Adyen Artica, and Nathan Gudas, helped North Shore government officials verify approximately 200 property deeds containing racist or discriminatory language, contributing to a broader effort to clean "dirty deeds" in southern Essex County, as part of their legal internships at the Essex Registry of Deeds" (UMass Law).

• "Patrick T. Conley has donated his 1,500-volume private collection on American legal and constitutional history to the Roger Williams University School of Law" (Warwick Beacon). 

• The Brennan Center Fellows Eric Ruben and Andrew Willinger's essay on the Supreme Court's reliance  on historical scholarship in Second Amendment case.  

• Patrick O'Donnell also has an essay on the criminal defense and cause lawyer Charles R. Garry (1909-1991).

• On September 21, 2025, 5:00 pm -6:00 pm, Jill Lepore will discuss her new book on the Constitution, We the People, at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC PoPVille). 

• "Tulane University School of Law invites applications from entry-level and lateral candidates for one or more tenure-track faculty positions.  We welcome applications from candidates with teaching and research interests in all topics, but we are particularly interested in candidates who focus on torts, business organizations, and commercial law."  More. 

• ICYMI:  Thomas Edsall on the Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump, with quotes from Terri Bimes, Matt Dallek, Bruce Miroff, Jack Rakove, Rogers Smith, Jeremi Suri, Sean Wilentz et al. (NYT).

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

Concepcion on the First American Law Libraries

Cattleya M. Concepcion, Georgetown University Law Library, has posted The First American Law Libraries, which is forthcoming in the Green Bag Almanac and Reader:

A brief history and bibliography of the first American law libraries, including lawyers’ personal law libraries, bar association or membership law libraries, county law libraries, state law libraries, court law libraries, federal law libraries, law school libraries, law firm libraries, and prison law libraries. 

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Like us, you might have heard something about limited access to the collections at the National Archives, College Park.  Here is the latest that we've found, courtesy of the American Historical Association.  

• A recording of The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed, a "Town Hall" sponsored by the National Constitution Center, is now online.

• We were very pleased to learn that the Law, Culture and the Humanities has given its James Boyd White Award to Robert W. Gordon.  H/t: SB

• "John A. Kirk, George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has been awarded the Susie Pryor Award for his article examining the case of Mary Dinwiddie, the only African American woman sentenced to death in Arkansas during the 20th century."  More.  

• A colloquy with Jill Hasday, University of Minnesota Law School, on her book, We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Minnesota Law).

• "Kim Lane Scheppele will give Chautauqua Institution’s 21st annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States, on Monday, August 11, 2025, at 3:30 p.m." (Jackson List.) 

• A report on a symposium on that Magna Carta at HLS (Harvard  Law Today).

• "Etta Haynie Maddox: First Woman Licensed to Practice Law in Maryland" (In Custodia Legis). 

• Also on In Custodia Legis, A History of Self-Representation and How H.H. Holmes Represented Himself in His Criminal Trial, posted by Emily Tejada, a former intern with the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress.

• In Time's "Made by History" series: The Lavender Scare and the Long History of LGBTQ Exclusion in America by Joel Zapata. 

• "Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State": Sam Moyn reviews Andrew Preston’s Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security (New Republic).   

• The eighth biennial conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History begins next week at the University of Szeged (ESCLH).

• Lawbook Exchange's June 2025 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History: Part 1 and Part 2.

•  ICYMI:  "What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About SCOTUS’s Trans Rights Ruling" [New Republic, quoting legal historian Kate Redburn (Columbia Law)]. The Constitution is not in crisis; it has already failed, says Jack Rakove (Washington Monthy).

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

Lange on Nazi Lawyers and the Invasion of Poland

Felix Lange, University of Cologne, has published, open access, Claiming Legality: German Lawyers under the Swastika and the Aggression against Poland, in Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht 85:1 (2025) 17-42:

The article studies how German lawyers under the swastika justified the German aggression against Poland in 1939 and questioned the support of the United States for Poland and its Allies. It distinguishes three lines of argument: First, they claimed that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was devoid of normative content and thus could not bind the German Reich. This argument was coupled with a political critique of the League of Nations Covenant and the Kellogg-Briand Pact as instruments for maintaining the territorial status quo. Second, they put forward that the German Reich was acting in self-defence and that it was Poland, France, and Great Britain who had violated the Covenant and the Pact. Third, they rejected efforts to reconceptualise the existing rules of neutrality in light of the Covenant and the Pact. Reliance on a more traditional understanding of neutrality was intended to raise legal obstacles to siding with Poland, France, and Great Britain for third states such as the United States.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t ESCLH.

A Conference for Charles Donahue

[Congratulations to Professor Donahue.  We wish we could be there!  DRE]

The Learned and Lived Law: A Celebration in Honor of Charles Donahue, May 19, 2025, Lewis 214, Harvard Law School.

Please join us for a celebration honoring Professor Charles Donahue and marking the publication of The Learned and Lived Law:  Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue.  We will have a day of presentations by chapter authors as well as a display of medieval manuscripts in the Harvard Law Library in the early afternoon.

Welcome
8:45 – 9:00 am
Interim Dean John C.P. Goldberg
Saskia Lettmaier and Elizabeth Papp Kamali

Panel 1: Roman Law
Chair: James Townshend
9:00 – 10:00 am

Charles Bartlett, Roman Property, Corporate Personhood, and the Politics of Natural Law in Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy: Venice, Baldus, and the res communes omnium

Wim Decock, “For the Sake of Mental Health and Mutual Peace”: The Transactio-Agreement in Early Modern Law and Theology

Panel 2: Medieval and Early Modern Law
Chair: Elizabeth Papp Kamali
10:15 – 12:15 pm

Samantha Kahn Herrick, Getting Ahead in a Twelfth-Century City: The Ambitious Monks of Saint-Clément, Metz

Ryan Rowberry, The Papal Constitution Execrabilis (1317) and Clerical Justices in the English Royal Courts

Elizabeth Mellyn, Suicide in Early Modern Italy

Carol Symes, The “Desire of Deeds”: On Cherishing Medieval English Charters

12:15 – 1:15 pm
Lunch available in Lewis 202

Medieval Manuscript Display
Harvard Law Library, 4th floor, Caspersen Room
1:15 – 2:15 pm
Arranged by Sarah Wharton, Historical & Special Collections
Co-Hosts: Carol Symes and Charles Bartlett

Panel 3: American Legal History
Chair: Ryan Rowberry
2:30 – 3:30 pm

Sally Hadden, Lawyers and Their Book Collections: Notes from the Eighteenth Century

Amalia Kessler, The American Importation of the Comparative Accusatorial/Inquisitorial Divide: Francis Lieber’s Failed Transplant and Its Early Twentieth-Century Resurgence

Panel 4: Literature and Legal Theory
Chair: Saskia Lettmaier
3:45-4:45 pm

Anton Chaevitch, Faust: Goethe’s Guide to Legal Progress

Bharath Palle, Wesley Hohfeld’s Modernist Imagination

Closing Reflection
Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas, De Magistro eruditissimo et beneficentissimo

Weekend Roundup

• From Time's "Made by History" section: Ajay Mehrotra (Northwestern/American Bar Foundation) and John Fabian Witt (Yale) on "Tax Season and the Making of the American Fiscal State"; Betsy Wood (Bard Early College), "Paying Your Taxes Used to Be Patriotic"; and more.
  

• "Historians Respond to Federal Actions" is a new resource page from the American Historical Association. Track federal actions affecting historians, get tips on writing an op-ed, and read AHA statements and action alerts.
  

• Over on Bluesky, former LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi posed an interesting question: "Can anyone recommend work by historians on the theme of secrets, especially: secrets the historian encounters intentionally or not, and what they decide to do with them in their scholarship? Any time or place." Check out the replies and add your own if you have thoughts! 
  

• Congratulations to this year's recipients of John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, including Kellen Funk, Mark Graber and Martha Jones! 

• A recording of that panel, "Lessons from History,"  at the symposium "Where Does Administrative Law Go from Here?" held at NYU Law last week is now up on YouTube.  In addition to me, Joanna Grisinger, Julian Davis Mortenson, and Nicholas Parrillo presented.  Noah Rosenblum moderated.  DRE. 
  

• Steven Vladeck reviews Alison L. LaCroix’s The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms on Jotwell.
  

•  Joseph W. Bellacosa reviews The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States, by Stuart Banner (Law.com).  And Professor Banner on Presidents and the Supreme Court (WaPo).

• The National Archives posted the first tranche of records relating to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy yesterday.  
  

• A notice of the memorial lecture Martha Jones recently delivered on her book, The Trouble of Color at North Carolina State University (Technician).
  

• My Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail has posted "Birthright Citizenship and DOJ’s Misuse of History in Its Appellate Briefs" (Just Security). 
  

• In honor of Law Day, the Multnomah Bar Association YLS Service to the Public Committee has organized a workshop at the University of Oregon's Portland campus on The Legal Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration on Monday, May 5, 2025, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.  (Portland).

• Joseph Ellis on "the key compromises over slavery at the Constitutional Convention" (NCC's YouTube Channel).
  

• BC Law's notice of a new faculty member the legal and constitutional historian Marco Basile (BC Law).

• ICYMI: Michele Chen on deporting activists under the McCarran-Walter Act (Progressive). Steven Hahn on deportations and the illiberal history of the United States (Guardian).   HUAC is Back (Lawfare).  Scott Reynolds Nelson on Radical Tariffs, an American Story (Perspectives on History).  1,900-year-old Roman papyrus details elaborate tax evasion scheme (CBC).

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

Fountaine on Lawyers and the Rule of Law in the Third Reich

Cynthia Fountaine, University of North Texas, has posted Complicity in the Perversion of Justice: The Role of Lawyers in Eroding the Rule of Law in the Third Reich, in St. Mary’s Journal on Legal Malpractice and Ethics:

A fundamental tenet of the legal profession is that lawyers and judges are uniquely responsible—individually and collectively—for protecting the Rule of Law. This Article considers the failings of the legal profession in living up to that responsibility during Germany’s Third Reich. The incremental steps used by the Nazis to gain control of the German legal system—beginning as early as 1920 when the Nazi Party adopted a party platform that included a plan for a new legal system—turned the legal system on its head and destroyed the Rule of Law. By failing to uphold the integrity and independence of the profession, lawyers and judges permitted and ultimately collaborated in the subversion of the basic lawyer–client relationship, the abrogation of the lawyer’s role as advocate, and the elimination of judicial independence. As a result, while there was an elaborate facade of laws, the fundamental features of the Rule of Law no longer existed and in their place had grown an arbitrary and chaotic system leaving people without any protection from a violent, totalitarian government.

--Dan Ernst

Goldsmith, Barco and Mack to Lecture at SCHS

The Supreme Court Historical Society has announced a three-part lecture series for Spring 2025:

Lecture One – Virtual
In Hoffa’s Shadow: Chuckie O’Brien, the Supreme Court, and a Son’s Search for the Truth
A Lecture by Professor Jack Goldsmith
March 19, 2025 | 12:00 PM ET | Via ZOOM

As a young man, Jack Goldsmith revered his stepfather, longtime Jimmy Hoffa associate Chuckie O’Brien. But as he grew older and pursued a career in law and government, he came to doubt and distance himself from the man long suspected by the FBI of perpetrating Hoffa’s disappearance on behalf of the mob. It was only years later, when Goldsmith was serving as assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, that he began to reconsider his stepfather and to understand Hoffa’s legacy.  

Professor Goldsmith wrote In Hoffa’s Shadow to share how he reunited with the stepfather he’d disowned and then set out to unravel one of the twentieth century’s most persistent mysteries and Chuckie’s role in it.

Lecture Two – Virtual
Denied but Not Defeated: Myra Bradwell and the Battle for Women in Law
A Lecture by Siobhan Barco
April 22, 2025 | 2:00 PM ET | Via ZOOM

Myra Colby Bradwell (February 12, 1831 – February 14, 1894) was a Chicago publisher and political activist. She attempted in 1869 to become the first woman to be admitted to the Illinois bar to practice law but was denied admission by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1870 because of her sex. She was denied again on appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873). What happened to Ms. Bradwell after her case was decided?

Lecture Three – In Person
The Vanishing of Lloyd Gaines: A Supreme Court Victory and a Civil Rights Mystery
A Lecture by Professor Kenneth W. Mack
May 21, 2025 | 6:00 PM ET | Supreme Court of the United States
Tickets: $50 | Reception to Follow | Advance Registration Required

Lloyd Gaines (1911 – disappeared March 19, 1939) was born in Mississippi and moved to Missouri with his mother and siblings.  He attended the Blacks-only Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.  He then applied to the University of Missouri Law School, which did not admit Black students. With the help of the NAACP, he was the petitioner in Gaines v. Canada. In 1938,  the Supreme Court held that states that provided a school for  White students had to allow Black students to attend or provide a separate school for them. Shortly after this victory though, Lloyd Gaines disappeared. He was never found.  What happened to Lloyd Gaines?

--Dan Ernst