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

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

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

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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