The Hinckley Trial: A Reenactment and Discussion

The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit announces the next in its Judge Patricia M. Wald Programs on Life and Law in the Courts of the D.C. Circuit: “The Road to the Release of John Hinckley: Attempted Presidential Assassination, Insanity, Commitment, and the Courts” on Wednesday, June 27, 2024, from 4:30pm to 6pm, in the Ceremonial Courtroom on the 6th floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse.  It will feature a reenactment of pivotal portions of the oral arguments held after John Hickley's insanity acquittal, followed by a panel discussion among experts on the unique challenges presented by this case for the courts, the advocates, the experts and the media and, thereafter, a reception.  Please direct questions to: info@dcchs.org.  Register here.

--Dan Ernst

Zier on In re Strittmater’s Estate

Magdalene Zier, a J.D. candidate at the Stanford Law School and a doctoral candidate in Stanford’s Department of History, has published “Champion Man-Hater of All Time”: Feminism, Insanity, and Property Rights in 1940s America, Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 28 (2021): 75-118:

Legions of law students in property or trusts and estates courses have studied the will dispute, In re Strittmater’s Estate. The cases, casebooks, and treatises that cite Strittmater present the 1947 decision from New Jersey s highest court as a model of the “insane delusion” doctrine. Readers learn that snubbed relatives successfully invalidated Louisa Strittmater’s will, which left her estate to the Equal Rights Amendment campaign, by convincing the court that her radical views on gender equality amounted to insanity and, thus, testamentary incapacity. By failing to provide any commentary or context on this overt sexism, these sources affirm the court’s portrait of Louisa Strittmater as an eccentric landlady and fanatical feminist.

This is troubling. Strittmater should be a well-known case, but not for the proposition that feminism is an insane delusion. Despite the decision’s popularity on law school syllabi, no scholar has interrogated the case’s broader historical background.  Through original archival research, this Article centers Strittmater as a case study in how social views on gender, psychology, and the law shaped one another in the immediate aftermath of World War , hampering women’s property rights and efforts to achieve constitutional equality. More than just a problematic precedent, the case exposes a world in which the “Champion Man-Hater of All Time”--newspapers’ epithet for Strittmater--was not only a humorous headline but also a credible threat to the postwar order that courts were helping to erect.  The Article thus challenges the textbook understanding of “insane delusion” and shows that postwar culture was conducive to a strengthening of the longstanding suspicion that feminist critiques of gender inequality were, simply put, crazy.

--Dan Ernst

Evans on empire and madness

Catherine Evans (University of Toronto) has published Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law with Yale University Press. The publisher calls this a "study of the internal tensions of British imperial rule told through murder and insanity trials." More from the press:  

Unsound Empire is a history of criminal responsibility in the nineteenth‑century British Empire told through detailed accounts of homicide cases across three continents. If a defendant in a murder trial was going to hang, he or she had to deserve it. Establishing the mental element of guilt—criminal responsibility—transformed state violence into law. And yet, to the consternation of officials in Britain and beyond, experts in new scientific fields posited that insanity was widespread and growing, and evolutionary theories suggested that wide swaths of humanity lacked the self‑control and understanding that common law demanded. Could it be fair to punish mentally ill or allegedly “uncivilized” people? Could British civilization survive if killers avoided the noose?

Praise for the book: 

 “Unsound Empire reconnoitres with late-Victorian jurists and medical men struggling with prisoners too dangerous to release and too mad to hang.  Catherine Evans’s micro-histories are strewn with eccentric characters and thick with tales that sparkle with stunning prose.” -Constance Backhouse

“This original, bold and beautifully crafted book brings legal history, the history of medicine and imperial history into dialogue. A must-read for anyone interested in a critical history of the British Empire.” -Renaud Morieux

 “Deeply researched and grippingly written, Unsound Empire demonstrates the centrality of imperial rule to the making of the common law and of legal competence to the emergence of political subjecthood, fundamentally transforming histories of law, medicine, and empire.” -Rohit De

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi