Rg 34 (2026)

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History 34 (2026) out now.  It is the journal of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory

Last year saw the publication of two significant new books on Rudolf von Jhering, one of the most original legal scholars of the 19th century. In the Research section of this year's issue of our Institute journal, the books' authors present their findings for discussion. While Michael Kunze traces Jhering's life-long quest for a secular foundation of law as an invisible normative order, Mathias Reimann finds both brilliant insights and chaotic tendencies in Jhering's writings.

Dave De ruysscher's article on the history of bills of exchange in Western Europe argues that their regulatory framework remained relatively indeterminate between c. 1450 and 1680. Only gradually did a synthesis of Genoese and Dutch methodologies establish itself as the dominant approach. Beate Althammer explores the history of pardoning practices as a part of 19th-century criminal justice reforms. Her analysis of petitions for royal mercy in England and Prussia leads her to question the narrative of a linear change of legal order and pardoning practices. Triin Tark offers a Baltic perspective on the translation of legal texts during the interwar period. She demonstrates how the consistent terminology for ethnic minorities used in the Estonian Law on Cultural Autonomy (1925) was replaced with an eclectic mix of vocabulary by the League of Nations' translators.

The Research section is completed by Erk Volkmar Heyen taking a closer look at the iconography of the courtroom table from the joint perspective of art and legal history. His analysis of 19th-century French and Belgian satirical images of the judiciary focuses on the relationship between religion and the state. 

Art and creativity are also the subjects of this year's Forum section. Its 15 short contributions explore the possibilities opened up by creative methods in legal history from a global perspective - with examples from the Americas, Africa and India.

This issue's Critique section offers 33 reviews of recent publications relevant to the study of legal history from late antiquity to the 21st century. Under Comptes rendus, we briefly present some key publications by researchers at our Institute.

Thorsten Keiser's Marginalia contribution deals with a key characteristic of the Venetian Republic's constitution from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century: the anonymous denunciation (denuncia segreta). The print issue's series of images is also devoted to Venice; the various selected views of the lagoon city all stem from the extensive collections of Frankfurt's Städel Museum.

Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History 34 is now available in print from the publishers Vittorio Klostermann and online in Open Access via the journal's website.

Weekend Roundup

• Legal historian Sarah Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania, has been appointed to the Evan C Thompson Chair for Excellence in Teaching (Almanac). 

• "William G. Ross, the Albert P. Brewer Professor of Law and Ethics at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, was honored with the Thomas W. Woolley Scholarly Achievement Award during the university's 185th Opening Convocation on Aug. 25."  More. 

• UVA's Sarah Milov was quoted in a recent New York Times article on "Social Media and the Myth of the Big Tobacco Moment."

• In "The Maritime Origins of Judicial Review," Thomas H. Lee, Fordham Law, reviews The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789-1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2025), by Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law (Lawfare).   

• Matthijs Wibier, an assistant professor of Classics at the University Of Cincinnati, has "edited and translated a Latin legal text [about taxes] he pieced together from fragments that surprisingly survived in the Egyptian sands for more than 1,600 years" (UC News).  

• Charles Plambeck, Adjunct Professor of Law, and Kathleen DuVal, Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History, will lecture on the 1776 North Carolina Constitution at UNC Law from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm on September 23.

• Karin Wulf interviews Anna O. Law about her new book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants  (Commonplace).

• The exhibit, "Pennsylvania’s Founding: How a City and a Colony Shaped America’s Civic DNA," a joint project of the National Constitution Center and Drexel University, will be on display at the NCC from September 30 through January 3.  In conjunction with the exhibit is the NCC town hall, "The Holy Experiment: Religious Liberty, Pennsylvania, and the Making of America" which will take place on September 29.  (Metro Philadelphia).   

• 
  The American Antiquarian Society will hold a book event on Peter Jaros's The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature (2026) on November 19, 2026, from 2 - 3pm (AAS).

• UConn Law's notice of new faculty and fellows includes Brianne Felsher, "a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at Berkeley" who "studies the legal history of queer families and marriages in the United States from the early 1800s through World War I." 

• "Do We Need a New Approach to Our Origin Stories?" Ned Blackhawk (Yale University) discusses this question and others in an interview for the Nation.

• A notice of Vox Mercatoria, a podcast growing out of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project, “Migrating commercial law and language: Rethinking lex mercatoria (11th-17th cent.),” which is directed by Stefania Gialdroni, University of Padua. 

• The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory Partner Group, “The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade,” will hold a discussion workshop on September 4, 2026, 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM (Local Time Germany) (More).

• ICYMI: The one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court of Ohio's "Women in the Law" exhibit (CNO).  Rachel Shelden writes that For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical (TPM).  Kelsey Dallas on Alcohol at the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUSblog).

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

Smith and Chang on Stravinsky's "Star-Spangled Banner" and the Law

Michael L. Smith, University of Oklahoma College of Law, and Yoo Jung Chang, a cellist, have posted Stravinsky's National Anthem:

Igor Stravinsky (LC)

In January 1944, famed composer Igor Stravinsky was scheduled to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in performing his controversial arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Before the performance took place, the police arrived in Stravinsky’s dressing room and informed him that his arrangement violated a Massachusetts law against altering the national anthem. Faced with the prospect of a criminal violation, and with the police already removing the offending arrangement from the music stands, Stravinsky opted to conduct the traditional version of the anthem.

This Article takes a deep dive into Stravinsky’s distinctive anthem arrangement, surveying its development, performance, and reception. Along the way, we dig into Massachusetts’s anthem restriction—a 1917 law that remains on the books to this day. In doing so, we address the parallels between the law’s wartime development and its wartime enforcement against Stravinsky. We argue that Stravinsky’s run-in with the police was unwarranted, both because Stravinsky’s arrangement did not violate the statute, and because the statute itself ran afoul of the First Amendment. Our historical investigation and analysis shed light on modern issues, including the phenomenon of patriotic outrage, the role of moral panic in the development and enforcement of the law, and the dangers of leaving unconstitutional zombie laws on the books.

--Dan Ernst 

Shanks-Dumont on Godzilla and the Imaginal Legal History of Ecocide

Daimeon Shanks-Dumont, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the 
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, has published Godzilla Cinema and the Imaginal Legal History of Ecocide in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities:

This Article develops a theory of imaginal legal history in the service of recovering aspects of social phenomena that are habitually suppressed in contemporary modes of legal history. It offers a retrospective account of the emerging international crime of ecocide through the use of unlikely source material: Godzilla cinema. Through the use of moving images, this history surfaces latent meaning within the concept of ecocide that has been concealed in traditional narratives, namely an anthropocentric grounding that is at odds with its self-professed environmentalism.

The Article is divided into two main Parts. The first lays out a speculative theory of imaginal history. It begins by critiquing the dominate modality of professional historiography, contextualism, and the reduction of narrative that is a result of the hegemony of the written word. It then considers how images operate in and through legal practices and materials as a general matter of symbolic ordering, before moving on to discuss what the concept of the imaginal offers legal-historical study. It then outlines a novel methodological paradigm—imaginal legal history—that promises a way out of the obsession with radical contingency that has arrested legal history since its encounter with Critical Legal Studies in the 1980s.

The second Part is an attempt to operationalize imaginal legal history with film—to create what Walter Benjamin called a “critical constellation”—to better appreciate current efforts to leverage international law to address the climate crisis. It begins by explaining why Godzilla cinema is an apt repository of moving images with which to engage the histories of international law, arguing that the genre’s global scope, international scale, and deep inventories of symbolic imagery and fantasy recommend it as a tool of imaginal legal history. It then analyzes a foundational moment of international environmental law’s history in the 1960s and 1970s—the invention of the concept of ecocide, the beginning of the modern environmental movement, and the articulation of environmental consciousness in American jurisprudence. Finally, the Article “reads” the 1971 film, Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and what its imagery, symbolism, and structure reveals of contemporaneous and current environmental and legal consciousness.

The dénouement comes in the Conclusion, which takes the montage of images brought forward in the Article, dissolved of their contexts, and through a critical interpretation integrates them in ecocide’s horizons of meaning. A short Coda to the text follows, meditating on a materialist reading of Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and the traces of the Real that survive in the interstices of the film.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Via the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA): a recording is now available of the recent webinar on "Indigenous Legal Orders, Legal Pluralism, and the Coloniality of Method Across Comparative Law, International Law, IP, and Trade Governance."

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Library of Congress): "Introducing Chew Heong and Chinese Exclusion: A New Story Map from the Law Library"; "Supporting Art Through Hardships: The Federal Theatre Project." 

• ICYMI:  The lower house of the Rhode Island legislature has unanimously approved a bill to rescind the state's "approval–in May 1861–of a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have permanently protected slavery from federal interference" (Providence Journal).  The Supreme Court’s long history of racial profiling in immigration (SCOTUSblog). The "idea of changing the number of Supreme Court justices is hardly new" (NCC)--just ask Rachel Shelden, who says as much in Made by History (now behind a paywall at the Philadelphia Inquirer).

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

The Fine Script: Legal Marginalia, 1100-1700

We have word of The Fine Script, a conference exploring comparative approaches to legal marginalia circulating in Europe and the Middle East between 1100 and 1700, will be held on Monday, August 31 and Tuesday, September 1, from 10 AM-3:30 PM.  The conference will" connect the present with the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period—placing Ireland within Europe, and Europe in its relationship with the Middle East and the Byzantine Sphere."  It can be attended in-person in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais or online (the zoom link will be circulated via email prior to the event).

--Dan Ernst.  Schedule after the jump. 

Weekend Roundup

• "On the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, Harvard Law historian and legal scholar Bruce H. Mann argues that colonists were fighting to uphold English common law rights and traditions" (Harvard Law Bulletin). 

• The Penn Carey Law School welcomes Christian Burset to its faculty. 

• An appreciation of the late John R Wunder (AHA Perspectives) .

• After appearing in "The Last Minute" segment of CBS's "60 Minutes," Jill Lepore wins the Pulitzer Prize in History for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. The National Review is not wholly persuaded.  

• A notice of Stanford’s “America at 250,” one-unit course, cross-listed in the History and American Studies departments and the Law School.  It is “an exploration of where America has been, and based on that, where it might be going or might need to go,” according to Jonathan Gienepp, who is one of its instructors, with Pamela Karlan (Stanford Daily).

• A Q&A with Len Niehoff about his new book, Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law (American Bar Association, 2026) (Michigan Law). 

• On Thursday, May 7, Christine Chabot, Jane Manners and Lev Menand presented papers on removal, with a comment Nick Parrillo, in one of the Academic Paper Workshops at the Spring conference of the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section of the American Bar Association."  

• "Alex Votta recently received Michigan Law’s Dimond Prize for his paper “The Great Rampart in Protecting Human Liberty: The Right to Education in Antebellum and Reconstruction Black Constitutional Consciousness.”  He credits Sam Erman, Rebecca Scott et al. (Michigan Law).

• The subsequent lives of the subjects of Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs (National Gallery of Art).  

• From the New York Times: "A Look Inside the Case That Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires" (Buckley v. Valeo).  

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

Basile on the 19th-Century Turn to Textualism

Marco Basile, Boston College Law School, has posted Old Textualism, New Juristocracy, which is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review:

This Article traces the emergence of text-centric theories of legal interpretation in the early nineteenth century amid an increasingly writing-based legal culture. While many scholars and judges associate textualism with the Founding period’s enactment of written constitutions and innovation in the separation of powers, this Article argues that the first “textualist” turn in legal interpretation crystallized after the Founding and reflected transnational developments. Not until the 1830s through 1850s did certain jurists on both sides of the Atlantic elaborate interpretive theories predicated on understanding a written law as an ordinary linguistic communication, as opposed to being in part declaratory of unwritten principles. This new emphasis on the enacted text reflected the increasingly writing-based legal culture of the early nineteenth century enabled by the industrial revolution in print and communication technologies. Amid this technological change, old textualists believed they were bringing the equivalent of modern steam power to legal interpretation.

Indeed, it was their work from the 1830s through 1850s, not the Founding, that Justice Scalia cited as muses for his project to revive a text-centric “science” of legal interpretation. Scalia’s new textualism, however, differed from old textualism. New textualism emphasizes the public legibility of the enacted text and how that public legibility operates to constrain judicial discretion. Old textualism, by contrast, understood law as a largely technical language and instead promoted a vision of legal interpretation that advanced public ends through non-public means. Old textualists ultimately sought to claim interpretation as the expertise of judges and to reassure skeptics that judges could exercise this expertise objectively—laying groundwork for the rise of judicial supremacy that would follow. 

--Dan Ernst 

Ritger's "Houses of Correction"

Matthew Ritger, Dartmouth College, has published Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press):

More than 250 years before the rise of the modern penitentiary, houses of correction pioneered the use of forced labor and individualized sentences within institutions of confinement, promoting reform and the “hope of amendment” for every individual. Yet these earlier carceral institutions faced many of the problems that remain familiar today: corruption scandals, recidivism, and abuses of power.

In Houses of Correction, Matthew Ritger turns to the archives of England’s first house of correction, Bridewell, to show how humanist reformers provided ideas, justifications, and administration for what came to be called bridewells, workhouses, and “Literary worke-houses,” even as repeated scandals made it clear that these coercive institutions would forever be at odds with the ideals of humanist culture. Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism’s entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe’s most influential carceral institutions. 

--Dan Ernst 

Newman's "Law and Justice in Song"

Daniel Newman, Cardiff University, has published Law and Justice in Song Murder Ballads and Popular Music (Routledge):

This book examines the murder ballad form, songs about death and killing, from a legal history perspective. It is held that taking on the long history of the murder ballad is a way that we can understand how death and killing in song has a function in dealing with the world around us. The book integrates law and humanities scholarship with diverse musical case studies to construct a typology of murder ballads and thus conceptualise the central messages of how murder ballads have treated death and killing. Drawing on a cultural form in which assessment and consideration of death and killing are so vigorously and richly enacted gives lawyers a guide to how those who do not see these matters through a primarily legal lens might understand this part of their world. The study will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Criminal Law, Legal History, Socio-Legal Studies, Criminology, and Musicology.

Professor Newman discuisses his book on JLS Blog. 

--Dan Ernst

"Performing Law"

Performing Law: Actors, Affects, Spaces, edited by Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law, Anna Jayne Kimmel, George Washington University, and Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School (Cambridge University Press), is now available open access on Cambridge Core:

The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from performance studies, theatre history, aesthetics, dance, film, history, and law provide critical analyses of the sites, dramas and stage directions to be found in the orchestration of the tragedies and comedies acted out in multiple forums of contemporary legality.

--Dan Ernst

The Julien Mezey Dissertation Award

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities is excited to announce that we are accepting submissions for the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.

The Association seeks the submission of outstanding work from a wide variety of perspectives, including but not limited to law and cultural studies, law and critical race studies, law and gender and sexuality, legal theory and environmentalism, law and literature, law and psychoanalysis, law and visual studies, legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence. Scholars completing humanities-oriented dissertations in SJD and related programs, as well as those earning PhDs, are encouraged to submit their work. Applicants eligible for the 2026 award must have defended their dissertations successfully between March 2025 and March 2026.

The Association will cover the Mezey Prize winner’s travel and lodging costs to our annual meeting at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, Illinois.  Nominations for the 2026 award must be received on or before March 15, 2026.  For submission instructions, please see our website.

Mitchell's "Gaskell and the Law"

Paul Mitchell, University College London, has published Gaskell and the Law (Hart/Bloomsbury):

Elizabeth Gaskell is best known today as a novelist of social realism. Until now, however, her use of law, which is crucial to her portrait of society, has never been systematically explored. This book shows that Gaskell's fiction is rich with insights into the law of her time, and that reading her work with a lawyer's eye deepens and enriches the reading experience.

The book explores Gaskell's work as a whole. It gives careful attention to her most famous novels, but also engages with the lesser-known novels and the shorter fiction, showing that these often overlooked works contain a wealth of original ideas and legal interest. Gaskell's fiction is shown consistently demonstrating a skilled, accurate and critical handling of legal rules and a sensitivity to law's personal and social effects. She does not limit herself to mid-nineteenth century issues, but enters into such fundamental questions as the individual's obligation to obey the law, and the relation between law and fiction. The book shows that a hitherto unappreciated aspect of Gaskell's genius as writer is that she integrates this sophisticated engagement with law seamlessly, so that it contributes to the cumulative artistic effect of her work.

As a leading scholar of Victorian legal history, Paul Mitchell brings an in-depth knowledge of the law to his close readings of Gaskell. He brings out the richness and sophistication of Gaskell's engagement with the law, and proposes both new readings and new valuations of this important novelist's work.

--Dan Ernst 

CFP: Four Nations Law and the Humanities

[We have the following CFP for The Four Nations Law and the Humanities Forums.  DRE]

We are excited to announce the calls for papers for Four Nations Law and the Humanities Forums 2026!

Located around the country during 2026, the forums will provide an important space to develop research excellence at the intersections of law and the humanities, and foster intellectual community, supporting early-career scholars. Hosted at the University of Glasgow, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Warwick, and Cardiff University, these workshops are a series held across the four UK nations, in collaboration with the Law and the Humanities Hub (LHub) at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

The forums will workshop ECRs’ work in progress and offer a rigorous context addressing the nature of interdisciplinary research in law and the humanities and its paths of development.

Criteria for Selection.  Contributions developed by early-career scholars will be selected based on their demonstration of excellence in scholarship and practice. Proposed participation may be written papers or creative work (in visual, sonic, film, etc. form), at any intersection within Law and the Humanities, including research that connects law with history, philosophy, literature, art, performance, linguistics, cultural and media studies, creative practice, and other humanistically-informed fields and methods.
     
Eligibility: The forums are open to individuals currently pursuing a PhD or DPhil, or who are within seven years of having completed their PhD, with due accommodation for career breaks, who are actively carrying out research in Law and the Humanities.

Forums Dates.  The dates of the workshops are as follows:

21st May - University of Glasgow
25th June - Queen’s University Belfast
2nd  July - Cardiff University
17th July - University of Warwick 

The workshops will bring law and humanities scholarship to wider audiences through the engagement of legal scholars as well as humanities scholars, ensuring that the research is not confined to law or the humanities.

Forums Format.  A limited number of works in progress will be selected for each forum. Each forum will be based on pre-reading of all papers and works by all attendees, and will include:

A friendly opening session;

Workshop sessions of 45 minutes dedicated to the submitted papers/works. Each session will include an invited senior commentator and an open discussion addressing subject matter, method, interdisciplinarity, and creativity. The authors/creators will not be expected to present.  The discussion will include all participants in conversational style (not as a Q&A).

The scholarship, creative practice, and networking will be fostered and supported through the participating institutions and LHub, via the Four Nations website, a concluding online plenary, and associated networks such as Legal Humanities Association and the Art/Law Network.

Submissions.  Please submit a CV; statement of interest in the forum, including an explanation of your eligibility (up to 250 words); and a 500-1,200-word proposal for a paper, or in the case of an artwork submission, the work and a 300-word description. Please also indicate which location you wish to attend.  

If accepted, submission of the completed paper will be expected a month prior to the chosen workshop, and should be up to 6000 words, or the completed artwork if non-text. 

Proposal Submission Deadlines.  Dates for the submission are as below.  

28th February - University of Glasgow
31st March - Queen’s University Belfast
30th April - Cardiff University and University of Warwick

NB: Location preferences may not always be possible.  Please send the above to Lucy.FinchettMaddock@gold.ac.uk and Lhub@sas.ac.uk. 

Completed Works Deadlines for Accepted Proposals:

21st May - University of Glasgow
25th May - Queen’s University Belfast
2nd June - Cardiff University
17th June - University of Warwick

For further information, please do contact Lucy.FinchettMaddock@gold.ac.uk and LHub@sas.ac.uk.

With thanks to funding from IALS LHub, Learned Society Wales, and University of Dundee, for their additional funding and support.

CFP: Narrating Justice: Postwar Trials in Memory and Culture

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

On behalf of the organizers, the Polish Academy of Sciences – Scientific Centre in Vienna, the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw, and the Museum of the Second World War, we invite you to participate in the conference "Narrating Justice: Postwar Trials in Memory and Culture”, which will take place on June 11-12, 2026, in Vienna. 

The discussion on post-war reckoning provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary responses to violence and human rights violations, as well as on the role of scholarly research in the face of current conflicts and growing political tensions in Europe and around the world. The conference seeks to examine post-war trials as a long-term historical, legal, social, and cultural phenomenon. Drawing on approaches from different fields of scholarship, it will address the immediate post-1945 tribunals and their aftermath, as well as later trials and broader processes of post-conflict justice in diverse contexts. Attention will be given to the historical, social, and media contexts of these trials, their forms of documentation and reception, as well as their representation in literature, film, theatre, music, and the visual arts. We also invite contributions focusing on non- European contexts, perspectives, and historical settings.

We invite abstracts covering topics that include, but are not limited to:

Historical and Legal Contexts: The Nuremberg Trials and their impact on the development of international criminal law; Trials in Germany, Austria, Poland, and other countries; Shifts in legal categories: from war crimes to crimes against humanity

Social and Political Dimensions: Reception of post-war trials in European societies; Public debates on guilt, responsibility, and retribution; The role of victims’ and witnesses’ testimonies

Trials in the Media: Press, radio, television, and digital coverage of trials, Documentary recordings as historical sources, Visual and rhetorical strategies in depicting perpetrators and victims

Cultural and Artistic Representations: Trials as motifs in literature, theatre, film, and the visual arts; Artistic reconstructions, reinterpretations, and revisitations; Documentary literature and nonfiction in the context of legal history

Memory Studies and Politics of Memory: Post-war trials in European cultural memory; Transnational and comparative perspectives; Institutionalization of the memory of trials
(museums, archives, education)

Contemporary Relevance: Continuities between post-war tribunals and modern international courts; Narratives of responsibility in the context of contemporary conflicts; Challenges for law, memory, and justice in the twenty-first century.

Timeline and Submissions:  Proposals must include, in a single PDF file: (1) paper abstract (max. 1,000 words); and 2) brief biography of the author(s).  All conference submissions must be in English, and all accepted works are to be presented in English.  Proposals for the conference should be submitted to office@vienna.pan.pl by March 22, 2026.

Accommodation and Travel.  The conference will take place over two days, on 11–12 June 2026, at the Polish Academy of Sciences – Scientific Centre in Vienna (Boerhaavegasse 25, 1030 Vienna).  The organisers encourage in-person participation by all speakers. However, depending on the circumstances, some presentations could be delivered online. Please note that invited speakers will be responsible for their transport to and from Vienna.

Participation in the conference is free of charge, and participants will be offered lunch and coffee during the breaks. Participants without institutional support may receive reimbursement of travel expenses up to €150 per person, as well as modest complimentary accommodation at the PAS Scientific Centre in Vienna. For those requesting support, a brief statement of purpose (500–650 words) should be submitted with the abstract and biography.

Inquiries can be made by e-mail to monika.gromala@vienna.pan.pl, milena.blahuta@vienna.pan.pl

Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars

[We have the following Call for Participation for the 2026 Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars.  DRE]

Georgetown University Law Center, Stanford Law School, UCLA School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California Center for Law, History, and Culture invite submissions for the 24th meeting of the Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School on June 8-9, 2026. 

About the Workshop.  The workshop is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and independent scholars working in law and the humanities. In addition to drawing from numerous humanistic fields, including Black and Indigenous studies, history, literature, political theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and philosophy, we welcome critical, qualitative work in the social sciences, including anthropology and sociology. While the scope of the Workshop is broad, we cannot consider proposals that are focused solely on quantitative social science research or that are limited to doctrinal legal research. We are especially interested in submissions touching on themes of inequality, anti-racism and anti-subordination. We welcome submissions from those working at regional and teaching-intensive institutions.

Based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, between six and eight papers will be chosen for presentation at the Workshop, where two senior scholars will comment on each paper. Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to subject and methodology. The selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation among all the participants that may include themes connecting all of the projects, as well as discussion of the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in interdisciplinary scholarship.

The selected papers may appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network at SSRN; there is no other publication commitment. (We will accommodate the wishes of chosen authors who prefer not to have their paper posted publicly with us because of publication commitments to other journals.) However, we will only accept Workshop participants whose papers are true works in progress; articles or chapters that are already in page proofs or are otherwise unable to be revised by the time of the Workshop are ineligible.

The Workshop will pay the domestic travel and hotel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation. For authors requiring airline travel from outside the United States, the Workshop will cover such travel expenses up to a maximum of $1250.
Submission Instructions.  Applications should be submitted through the submissions portal on the Law and Humanities Workshop website [here].  Your application should consist of a single Microsoft Word document (not PDF) containing:

• a 1500-2000 word summary of your paper (word count includes footnotes or endnotes);
• a 1-2 page bibliography; and,
• if your paper is a chapter in a book or dissertation, an optional 1-page chapter outline of the larger project.

Applications are due on Monday, December 1, 2025.

If your application advances to the final stage of consideration, you will be asked to submit the full paper by January 15, 2026. Please do not apply if you will not have a full paper on January 15. Your application should be a summary of existing, ongoing work rather than a proposal for new or planned work.
The full paper must be a work-in-progress that does not exceed 10,000 words in length (including footnotes/ endnotes). A dissertation chapter may be submitted, but we strongly suggest that it be edited so as to stand alone as a piece of work with its own integrity. A paper that has been submitted for publication is eligible for selection so long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time of the Workshop; it is important that authors still be in a position at the time of the Workshop to consider comments they receive there and to incorporate them as they think appropriate in their revisions.

We ask that those submitting applications be careful to omit or redact any information in the paper summary, bibliography, or chapter outline that might serve to identify them, as we adhere to an anonymous or “blind” selection process.

For more information, please send an email inquiry to Lawandhumanitiesworkshop@gmail.com or visit [here].

Program Committee, 2026 Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars

Riaz Tejani, Chapman University, Law, Chair
LaToya Baldwin Clark, University of California Los Angeles, Law
Danielle Boaz, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Africana Studies
David Eng, University of Pennsylvania, English & Asian American Studies
Melynda Price, University of Michigan, Women and Gender Studies
Clyde Spillenger, University of California Los Angeles, Law

The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars is committed to anti-racism both inside and outside the academy.

du Plessis's "Henry Maine’s Ancient Law as an Expression of Victorian Humanism"

Paul J. du Plessis, University of Edinburgh, has published Henry Maine’s Ancient Law as an Expression of Victorian Humanism (University of Edinburgh Press):

This monograph offers a comprehensive contextual analysis of Maine’s Ancient Law, emphasising the author’s use of various sources to construct the book's key themes. Ancient Law was written as a sophisticated piece of rhetorical prose grounded in Maine’s education in the classics. Central to this analysis is the significant role of Roman law in shaping the narrative, particularly its influence on Maine’s arguments and conclusions.

The monograph also positions Maine’s work within the broader intellectual debates of the nineteenth century, especially concerning the teaching of English law and Britain’s colonial presence in India. By situating Maine’s Ancient Law within this larger context, the study enhances our understanding of the text, revealing the historical legal framework that resonates in modern legal discourse and thought. This connection enriches our knowledge of Maine’s contributions and highlights the enduring relevance of his ideas.

–Dan Ernst

Goh on "Potential Legal History" in Art

New online from Law and History Review: Potential Legal History in the Art of Sonny Liew by Benjamin Goh, National University of Singapore:

Photographs, much less comic books, are not often seen to be focal sources of legal-historical research. This is so despite the growing momentum in the humanities and social sciences to take the visuality of culture, history, and law seriously. Notwithstanding the “visual turn” in law and humanities and socio-legal studies, it remains quite rare for legal history journals to carry images for the close reading of their pertinent implications. For the most part, legal scholarship has continued to exclude much of the optical media that arrange and compose the history of law, including the textual documents whose visuality produces, even contests, foundational legal concepts. This omission calls for intervention, not because legal history has failed to engage critically with dominant histories and the legal orders that they sustain, but rather because archived photographs and their (re)entry into visual modes of storytelling expand the range of historical sources that facilitate such critical projects. More fundamentally, the remediated photograph discloses the technological and theoretical assumptions of history-writing, prompting reflection on how far legal history should evolve to accommodate insights from its neighboring fields.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• The University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative (SDRI) has put together an amazing resource on state constitutions, the 50 Constitutions project, which it continues to update. Of particular interest: the "Tracking Constitutional Change" feature. This feature "allow[s] users to see how [constitutions] have taken shape over time and to learn about important historical moments." Nine states so far "have full Tracking Constitutional Change capabilities," including the just-added Pennsylvania. SDRI reports that "[m]ore states will be added in the coming year."   

• Katrina Jagodinsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will present in the Monday Seminar of the Department of History of Johns Hopkins University on September 22, from 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm. 

• 

  Children Gathering Wildflowers above Trondhjem (LC)

  Elin Hofverberg on "110 Years of the Norwegian Castbergian Child Laws" (In Custodia Legis).
  

• Zachary S. Price, UC San Francisco Law, on “Trumpian Impoundments in Historical Perspective” (SLR).

• "Durham Cathedral has unveiled a new exhibition featuring three versions of Magna Carta, the historical charter that first established the Rule of Law"  (Palatinate). 

• The historian of administrative state Joy Milligan has moved from Virginia Law to UC Berkeley Law (UC Berkeley Law). 

• Justice Stephen Breyer, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, and Michael Klarman on taking the bar--or not (Harvard Law Today). 

• Thanks to Liz Sepper (UT-Austin), the talk of law professor Bluesky is the painting "Supreme Court Beach." Jay Willis at "Balls & Strikes" did a deep dive on the painting's history -- including which former Justice owns the original. [KMT] 

• The latest "SCOTUS Scoop" from the Supreme Court Historical Society is Still at Work: How the Justices Spend Their Summer Months.  But we thought they were at the beach!

• For over 30 years, Daytonites "have put on a play every July using the trial transcript" form the Scope Monkey Trial.  "Destiny in Dayton" explains "the complexities of the town captured by history" (Akron Legal News).  Also, the ABAJ looks "back at the Scopes trial 100 years later." 

• Upcoming book talks in the America's Town Hall series of the National Constitution Center include Akhil Reed Amar on Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 (September 16) and Eric Foner on Our Fragile Freedoms (September 24).  

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

Poldnikov on Dialogical Narrative in Comparative Legal History

Dmitry Poldnikov, MGIMO University, Moscow, has posted Dialogical Narrative in Comparative Legal History:

As a well-established academic discipline, legal history offers a wide range of methodological tools. Many among them are rooted in the classical paradigm and face the challenge of the "postclassical turn" in humanities. This paper advocates a dialogical approach for legal history, asserting that profound understanding arises from an active "communication" with past legal systems through historians posing meaningful questions to historical documents, a concept drawing from comparative law. It first examines legal history's "vocation," touching upon Savigny's "Volksgeist" and the historicism-universalism debate, before critiquing the limitations of isolated traditional approaches like legal positivism, natural law theory, and sociological jurisprudence, which risk oversimplification or anachronism. As a constructive alternative, the paper advocates for a communicative, narrative-based approach, viewing legal history as a historian-constructed narrative in line with post-classical legal thought. A methodological framework for this dialogical and comparative legal history-encompassing descriptive reconstruction, causal explanation, and critical evaluation-is proposed. This framework is then vividly applied to a detailed comparative analysis of a single casus: the collision of carts from the Digest (D. 9.2.52.2). The paper examines how Roman law, English common law, Romano-canonical ius commune, Sharia (Fiqh), and Imperial Chinese law might have uniquely approached this problem. This micro-historical comparison reveals that the distinct style and substance of these legal traditions are fundamentally shaped by the specific questions they pose and the methods they employ for resolution. The paper concludes by affirming that such a sustained, questioning dialogue with historical legal sources is indispensable for constructing meaningful narratives that illuminate both the particularity of past legal systems and their enduring relevance to contemporary legal understanding. 

--Dan Ernst