CFP: Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

"Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North."  Aberdeen Medieval and Early Modern North Conference, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

In 1336, a battle took place in the Wars of Scottish Independence in which Edward III of England burnt Aberdeen to the ground. In 1644, the Battle of Aberdeen saw the clash between Covenanter and Royalist forces in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, with the battle and its aftermath shaking Aberdeen and its denizens. While living memory of these events has faded away, their scars can still faintly be seen. Battles, plague, witch trials and legal cases of domestic abuse have all left their mark on Aberdeen and have shaped the way we view the past. 

Violence in the medieval and early modern world is central to our construction and understanding of the past. Although we have dates and locations, the details of violent enaction are often hazy. Violence, then as now, heavily colours the pages of history, with societal expectations often being enforced through threat of violence. Thus, we propose an exploration of violence for this year's conference, inspecting closely what is considered violence, what is determined as avoiding violence, and who decides the definitions of such things.

We encourage researchers to explore how violence was interpreted, enacted and avoided in the medieval and early modern north. How does the reality of the medieval and early modern world reflect how we view the past? How did Vikings, Knights and Musketeers handle the violence of their occupations? Do we still enact violence on the past as researchers? What were the aftereffects of violence, on the body, on architecture, and on society? From witch trials, war, bizarre medical practices, and natural phenomenon, this conference will investigate the violence of the past. 

We're seeking papers on the topic of violence and its intersections with:

• Memory and Trauma 
• Judicial and Legal Systems
• Literature and Artistic Representations
• Domestic and Public Spheres
• Gender, Race, Class, and Disability Studies
• Military and War Studies
• Religious and Ecclesiastical History
• Histories of Medicine and the Body
• Medievalism and Early Modern Reception
• History of Emotions (e.g. anger, humour etc.)
• Ecocriticism 
• Manuscript Studies and Material Culture 

While we invite papers on all parts of the north, we especially welcome papers on Aberdeen and northern Scotland. The conference will be held on 25-26 May 2026 at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.  Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to medievalandearlymodernaberdeen@gmail.com.  Deadline:15 January 2026 @ 23:59(GMT).

Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe

New from Oxford University Press: Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe, edited by Erika Graham-Goering, Jim van der Meulen, and Frederik Buylaert.

The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, transforming scattered power structures into centralised governments.

Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe rethinks state formation as a process of decentralisation, exploring how these governments willingly left power to lesser political players. It challenges the assumption that the rise of states made lordship obsolete, showing instead how distributing authority among local lords reinforced the development of new political systems.

The contributors tackle this fresh perspective on lordship and state formation from two complementary angles. Detailed snapshots of lordship in France and the Low Countries assess the political significance of different aspects of lordly power. Historiographical essays discuss frameworks for understanding relationships between lordship and the state in contexts across Europe. These comparative perspectives establish an innovative approach to a key question in political history.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

Christian Culture and Society in Later Catholic England

Christian Culture and Society in Later Catholic England: Studies in Memory of F. Donald Logan, edited by Travis Baker, has been published in Brill’s series,  Later Medieval Europe.  Contributors include the legal historians Paul Brand, Charles Donahue, and Richard Helmholz:

This book in memory of F. Donald Logan explores different aspects of Christian culture and society in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Although this period has traditionally been interpreted in terms of decline and decay, this excessively gloomy picture has slowly given way over the last eighty years or so to a more positive view of Christian civilization during these centuries. The twenty-two studies brought together here seek to build on this ongoing reassessment of Later Catholic England, especially in those areas in which Professor Logan himself had done so much to deepen our understanding of Christian English society.

 --Dan Ernst

CFP: The Medieval Academy's Centenary

[We have the following Call for Papers.  DRE]

The Medieval Academy at 100: The 2025 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America.  Harvard University, Cambridge MA,  20-22 March 2025.

The Centennial Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by Harvard University, Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Fitchburg State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stonehill College, Tufts University, and Wellesley College. While the conference will take place in person, the plenary lectures and some other events also will be live streamed. Plenary addresses will be delivered by Kristina Richardson (Professor of History and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia), Sara Lipton (Incoming President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of History, Stony Brook University), and Wendy Belcher (Professor of Comparative Literature and African American Studies, Princeton University). The Annual Meeting will be followed by the Sunday annual meeting of the Medieval Academy's Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA). [More.]

Weekend Roundup

• Slate's Amicus podcast (hosted by Dahlia Lithwick) is doing a series on originalism. The first episode in the series is here ("How Originalism Ate the Law: The Trick"). 

• The Death Panel podcast has released a conversation with Karen Tani (University of Pennsylvania) and Katie Eyer (Rutgers Law) on their article "Disability and the Ongoing Federalism Revolution," Yale Law Journal (2024). The episode is currently available to patrons only, but will eventually be "unlocked."

• Welcome to the blogosphere to Legal History Insights, moderated by Thomas Duve, on th doings of the department on Historical Regimes of Normativity at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory!
  

• Boston College Law School has launched the website Black History at BC Law “to honor, document, and celebrate the rich history of contributions from Black BC Law community members as student leaders, educators, academics, judges, activists, litigators, transactional attorneys, and visionaries."  More.

• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies has announced its 2024-2025 Fellows.  They include Myisha S. Eatmon for “to complete a book on black Americans’ use of tort law to seek justice during the Jim Crow era, and to begin a second project on the legal relationship between black Americans and American Jews during Jim Crow and the Holocaust"; Daphna Renan and Nikolas Bowie, for a book “that contests judicial supremacy ...  and recovers a tradition rooted in abolitionism that allows the American people to define the Constitution democratically”; and Laura Weinrib, for “a book on labor unions, corporations, and money’s role in politics in the United States.”
  

• Claire Potter interviews Paul Sabin, Yale University, about his book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Political Junkie).
  

• "More than 200 people attended a special community celebration on Saturday, April 27, commemorating the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the construction of Aliʻiōlani Hale, home of the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court." More. H/t Michael Banerjee 
  

• 
  The U.S. Capitol Historical Society will host a Native American Suffrage Symposium on Thursday, May 23, "to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.”
  

• Legal historians were among the political historians and political scientists at the conference, How the New Deal Was Run, held last weekend at Vanderbilt University.  Kevin Kruse's brief notice of the conference is here. 
  

• New online in the AJLH:  Letter Writing and Legal Consciousness during World War I, by Elizabeth A. Hoffmann.  It "explores how ordinary Americans thought about law during World War I by examining 119 letters to Congress regarding charges under the Espionage Act.”

• New journal alert: "Early Medieval England and its Neighbours is an open access, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to new research on England, its closest geographic and intellectual neighbours, and their wider cultural contacts from the 5th to the 11th century." 
  

• Lawbook Exchange’s May 2024 catalogue.

• ICYMI: Yesterday the Supreme Court of Tasmania turned 200.  Ralph Richard Banks, Standford Law, asks, Brown v. Board: Success or Failure?  Should tikanga Māori be taught in New Zealand's law schools? (Re:). Patrick O'Donnell on Law and Psychoanalysis.
  

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

Papp Kamali's Chair Lecture on Veronica and the Jury

Saints Peter, Paul and Veronica (NYPL)

[Here’s a full report of Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s chair lecture at HLS.  DRE]

What do an iconic first century Christian saint, a 13th century medieval pope, and the twelve women and men currently sitting in judgment of the former United States president in a New York courtroom have in common?

While most observers would surely assume the answer is ‘not much,’ Harvard Law School’s Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 might beg to differ. An expert in medieval English law, Kamali argued during a recent lecture that while the origins of the modern jury trial can be traced to a momentous judicial reform enacted by a church council in 1215, England’s broader approach to fact-finding might be better understood by exploring Pope Innocent III’s personal devotion to the saga of Saint Veronica.

Kamali’s comments came during a Harvard Law School event on April 9 celebrating her appointment as the Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law. The author, among other works, of the award-winning book, “Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England,” Kamali teaches criminal law and English legal history.  More.

Boyer and Nicholls's "Rise and Fall of Treason in English History"

Allen Boyer, formerly senior appellate counsel at the New York Stock Exchange Enforcement Division and the author of Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age (Stanford University Press) and Mark Nicholls, a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, have published The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History (Routledge):

This book explores the development and application of the law of treason in England across more than a thousand years, placing this legal history within a broader historical context.

Describing many high-profile prosecutions and trials, the book focuses on the statutes, ordinances and customs that have at various times governed, limited and shaped this worst of crimes. It explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book. This book also considers why treason as both a word and a concept remains so potent in wider modern culture, investigating prevalent current misconceptions about what is and what is not treason. It concludes by suggesting that the abolition or 'death' of treason in the near future, while a logical next step, is by no means a foregone conclusion.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History is a thorough academic introduction for scholars and history students, as well as general readers with an interest in British political and legal history.

--Dan Ernst

Michaelmas Term at the Centre for English Legal History

Centre for English Legal History at Cambridge University announces its Michaelmas 2023 term card on seminars and a lecture.

--Dan Ernst

 

Papp Kamali on "Judging Mind" in Medieval England

Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard Law School, has published The Audacity of Judging Mind in Medieval England, in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2023) 53 (3): 493–518:

In medieval English texts, a common refrain, drawn from scripture, urged that only God could search the mind and heart of a sinner, and that those who judge others might face their own grave judgment on the last day. This sits uneasily with the task of issuing a felony verdict, a burden placed squarely upon the shoulders of lay jurors after the Fourth Lateran Council's effective abolition of trial by ordeal in 1215. Nevertheless, jurors did sit in judgment upon their neighbors, and evidence suggests that they were not merely assessing outward conduct but also the state of a defendant's heart and mind which, like the hand of a proband in the era of trial by ordeal, might be declared fair or foul. This essay explores how techniques for unearthing intentionality through circumstantial inquiry—techniques developed in the context of classical rhetoric and adapted for priests hearing confessions—were put to use by coroners and others tasked with investigating crimes. This, in turn, aided jurors in the perilous, even audacious, task of judging alleged felons, ultimately determining who should be acquitted and who should face the gallows.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

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

Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.  Universität Bern, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Aug 29–30, 2024.  Deadline: Nov 1, 2023.  Corinne Mühlemann und Fatima Quraishi

Materials and texts function in a variety of ways in legal contexts, they forge diplomatic ties, grant gifts of land, levy taxes, regulate markets, etc. In the medieval and early modern worlds, these objects took on many different guises. Some were highly ornate objects, such as Fatimid marriage contracts where text was embroidered on woven silk, or tablets of authority produced in gold, silver or wood which allowed travelers to cross the Mongol Empire without difficulty, or wax seals imprinted with imperial images protected in textile bags. Other objects facilitated the execution of law in everyday life; glass weights, stamps for marking loaves of bread, length standards embedded in architecture, volume standards. The connection between the materiality of these artefacts and the law are multiple, their very nature conveyed information, performed authority, and communicated authenticity.

Although legal objects fall between disciplinary categories, their texts have been the main subject of scholarship. The conference, Objects of Law, proposes thinking more deeply about the artistic practices that shaped the materiality, iconography, and texts of legal objects in the medieval and early modern period. What forms did these objects take? How did their form confer authenticity and legal authority? What training or knowledge are evident in the objects? Objects of Law seeks dialogue between scholars working in art history, history, archaeology, legal history, and related disciplines that deal with legal objects. We welcome contributions from all geographical regions that relate to the medieval and early modern period. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- The role of objects in legal practices
- The aesthetics of objects of law
- The artistic practices of crafting legal objects

Proposals should consist of an abstract in English for 30-minute papers (max 2000 characters incl. spaces) and a brief biography (max 1500 characters incl. spaces) in a single document (pdf or word). They should be submitted to: Corinne Mühlemann (corinne.muehlemann@unibe.ch) and Fatima Quraishi (fatimaq@ucr.edu) by November 1, 2023. Graduate students are highly encouraged to apply. Conference participants will be provided with accommodation in Bern for 3 nights and some travel expenses will be covered.

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, a two-volume work edited by Peter Cane, Christ's College, Cambridge, and Australian National University, and H. Kumarasingham, University of Edinburgh, has been published.  Here is a composite of the press’s descriptions of the two volumes:

Featuring contributions from leading scholars of history, law and politics, this path-breaking two-volume work traces the development of the United Kingdom's constitution from Anglo-Saxon times and explores its role in the creation, exercise and control of public power. Chapters in Volume One, entitled "Exploring the Constitution," approach the constitution and its history from various scholarly perspectives, and provide historically sensitive discussions of constitutional actors and institutions, and of political traditions and transformations of the constitution. Essays in Volume Two, entitled "The Changing Constitution," examine the development of the constitution from the departure of the Romans up to the present day and beyond. Together, the two volumes form the first, wide-ranging history of the constitution to be published for more than 50 years. By its cross-disciplinary approach, taking account of the latest legal, political and historical scholarship on the constitution, it fills a large gap in the literature of the constitution, and in political thought and British history.

The TOC for the first, thematic volume, is here; the one for the second, more chronologically organized volume, is here.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: DC

Eldridge's "Law and the Medieval Village Community"

Lorren Eldridge, an Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, has published Law and the Medieval Village Community Reinvigorating Historical Jurisprudence (Routledge):

This book expands on established doctrine in legal history and sets out a challenge for legal philosophers. The English medieval village community offers a historical and philosophical lens on the concept of custom, which challenges accepted notions of what law is. The book traces the study of the medieval village community from early historical works in the nineteenth century through to current research. It demonstrates that some law-making can and has been ‘bottom-up’ in English law, with community-led decision-making having a particularly important role in the early common law. The detailed consideration of law in the English village community reveals alternative ways of making and conceiving of law which are not dependent on state authority, particularly in relation to customary and communal property rights. Acknowledging this poses challenges for legal theory: the legal positivism that dominates Western legal philosophy tends to reject custom as a source of law. However, this book argues that medieval customary law ought to be considered ‘law’ if we are ever going to fully understand law - both then and now. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics working in the areas of Legal History, Legal Theory, and Jurisprudence.

--Dan Ernst

Eldridge on Law and the Medieval Village Community

On Monday, April 24, 17:00 - 18:30 (GMT), Lorren Eldridge, an Early Career Fellow in Legal History at the University of Edinburgh, will present, via Zoom, some of the findings from her forthcoming book, Law and the Medieval Village Community: Reinvigorating Historical Jurisprudence (Routledge 2023).  Register here.

Historical jurisprudence was initially developed into a methodology by late Victorian scholars who were particularly interested in medieval English law. This paper will consider some of the ways they used historical jurisprudence, in which they combined influences from the German Historical School, the Scottish Enlightenment, and English political preoccupations. The approach to the village community in the work of Sir Henry Maine, Frederick W Maitland, and Sir Paul Vinogradoff used this novel method to generate new questions in medieval English law, and in the theoretical understanding of legal personality, individualism, and communalism. This paper will explore some of the research questions they pursued which have enduring interest in modern scholarship. 

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Two law schools have recently noted publications by legal historians: NYU Law has a notice of Noah Rosenblum’s Columbia Law Review article, “The Antifascist Roots of Presidential Administration,” and Georgetown Law notes Brad Snyder’s Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment." 
  

• On Wednesday, January 18, at 6 p.m., the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and the John Marshall Center for Constitutional History and Civics will host three former Solicitors General (Clement, Verrilli, and Francisco) in conversation “on the U.S. Supreme Court’s history and founding under the leadership of the country’s first Chief Justice, John Marshall, as well as drawing comparisons between then and now” (More.)
  

• The National Constitution Center has posted The History of the Speaker of the House, a discussion, moderated by Jeffrey Rosen, by Matthew Green and Josh Chafetz.  They discuss “the role and the history of this powerful constitutional office” and “some of the most notable Speakers throughout history, from Henry Clay to Joe Cannon to Nancy Pelosi,
  

• Until January 31, the most-read essays of 2022 from Labor, the journal of the Labor and Working-Class history Association, are available open access.  Most are from a symposium on sexual harassment.

• The Supreme Court Historical Society just posted to YouTube a recording of Scott Gerber’s lecture, Historical Origins of an Independent Federal Judiciary. 
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society is hosting a virtual conversation with the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown about her book, Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas, at 7:00 p.m. (ET) on January 25, 2023
  

• ICYMI: be sure to check out The Steelyard, Hansard Merchants, and a “Misliving” Singlewoman in Late Medieval London, by Sara M. Butler, over at Legal History Miscellany.
  

• We were very impressed by and grateful for the career of Elizabeth Pugh, who, after a 44-year career in government service, has recently retired as general counsel of the Library of Congress (LAW360 Pulse).
  

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

Paul R. Hyams (1940-2022)

We are very sorry to report the passing of Paul R. Hyams, professor emeritus of history at Cornell University on December 4 at the age of 82.  In Cornell’s excellent notice, students and colleagues recall him as a generous mentor.  “He could spend hours dissecting a historical problem, or asking questions about a new project, or debating the details of your work,” Nicole Marafioti said. “Conversations with Paul lasted for years and were never really finished; we could always pick up where we left off, with a new idea or fresh insight.”   Ada Kuskowski said that he “enjoyed being somewhat of a gadfly, in the Socratic sense, at scholarly gatherings, challenging established scholars and making everyone rethink what they thought they knew,” while also acting as “the absolute champion of graduate students and junior scholars.” A special issue of Reading Medieval Studies, “Law’s Dominion in the Middle Ages: Essays for Paul Hyams,” was devoted to him.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Available online from AJLH and Oxford University Press: Those Things Which Are Written in Romance: Language and Law Teaching in Thirteenth-Century England, by Thomas J McSweeney, William & Mary Law.

• 
  "Immigration Restriction Then and Now: Re-Examining the Impact and Legacy of the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts," "an OAH Future of the Past conversation of the contributors to the Journal of American History special issue on immigration (September 2022), is now available on YouTube.  The Hosts are the Co-editors Maddalena Marinari, Gustavus Adolphus College, and Erika Lee, University of Minnesota.  The guests are Ashley Johnson Bavery, Eastern Michigan University; Kevin Kenny, New York University; Carl D. Lindskoog, Raritan Valley Community College; Mireya Loza, Georgetown University; and Yael Schacher, Refugees International.

• Over at Governing: Emma Newcombe on How States Used Land Laws to Exclude and Displace Asian Americans.
  

• An Obituary for Originalism: Stephen Rohde reviews Erwin Chemerinsky’s Worse Than Nothing in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  

• ICYMI: Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh "nullifies 22 old legal opinions that once helped state agencies uphold segregation and bans on interracial marriage" (WaPo).  Another report of the new findings on Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne (History Today).
  

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

Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 30

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History issue 30 published

Now in its 20th year of publication, the latest issue of Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History (Journal of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) once again brings together outstanding research contributions on legal historical topics as well as a considerable number of wide-ranging reviews.

This year’s Research section begins with Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s study on the consequences of the excessive consumption of alcohol in medieval English criminal law. Jan Schröder offers a close analysis of the sources to investigate the meaning of words in early modern legal and linguistic theories. The editors of the four-volume Handbuch zur Geschichte der Konfliktlösung in Europa – Handbook on the History of Conflict Resolution in Europe (Peter Collin, Wim Decock, Nadine Grotkamp,David von Mayenburg, Anna Seelentag) explain the conceptualisation underlying this standard reference work (published in 2021), and provide a brief overview of some of the overall patterns and findings emerging from this major project.

The Focus sections cover two fields of modern legal history from an international perspective. Karl Härter and Valeria Vegh Weis provide a substantial introduction to the topics discussed in the Focus on Transnational Criminal Law in Transatlantic Perspective (1870–1945), which comprises contributions by three authors (Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Nicolás Duffau, Paul Knepper) who particularly explore Latin American dimensions. The second Focus is dedicated to the complex field of labour law history and includes studies from both German and British researchers (Gerd Bender, Rebecca Zahn, Thorsten Keiser, Martin Otto, Johanna Wolf, Tim-Niklas Vesper, Benjamin Spendrin, Matthias Ebbertz).

As always, the reviews in this edition cover a broad spectrum of regions and epochs, ranging from the cuneiform transmission of the Codex Hammurabi to a three-volume history of Chinese legal culture and the European banking union – and for the first time also includes reviews of digital source editions. Finally, two Marginalia on the visualisation of law conclude this volume – and they could not be more different: Erk Volkmar Heyen’s contribution investigates the figuration of iustitia in the context of the political aspects of Marian devotion in the early 16th century. Daniel Damler, on the other hand, takes the reader into the dark canyons of Batman’s hometown Gotham City. This last contribution also inspired this year’s atmospheric picture series of black-and-white photographs of New York City by Otto Danwerth.

Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 30 is now available in print from the publisher Vittorio Klostermann and online in Open Access via the journal's website.

Book Launch: Law, Lordship and Tenure

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

[On Thursday, October 6, 2022, from 17:30-19:30, the Centre for Legal History at the University of Edinburgh] presents a book event celebrating the publication of Law, Lordship and Tenure: The Fall of the Black Douglases by Prof Hector MacQueen and Alan Borthwick:

This book is a new interpretation of the fall of later medieval Scotland’s greatest noble family, the Black Douglases, in 1455. The discussion reaches back in time to over a century before, as the family began its rise to the pinnacle of Scottish society. The killing of William eighth earl of Douglas by King James II in 1452 receives particular attention, as also the way in which he, his brother James (his successor as earl), and their predecessors exercised their power and authority as earls and lords, and it is suggested that their identifiable failings in this provide the key to understanding the catastrophe that befell the family in 1455. The principal analytical tool is the law relevant to these events and the specific meaning and significance of the documents (which is often a legal question) that evidence them. It is argued that this form of analysis is at least as relevant as any more political approach and that ‘legal consciousness’ was a vital feature of Scottish noble society.

Weekend Roundup

• “Abortion, Choice, and the Supreme Court: History Behind the Headlines,” an online event sponsored by the American Historical Association, will take place on Wednesday, July 6, at 3 PM ET.  The panelists are Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Research Professor of American History, Harvard University; Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network, New York University School of Law; and Aaron Tang, Professor of Law, University of California, Davis School of Law.  Leslie J. Reagan, Professor of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will moderate.  Register here, and look for the posting of the recording to the AHA's YouTube channel.
  

• "Rachel Shelden, director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a project titled 'The Political Supreme Court: Justices, Partisanship, & Power, 1830–1900'”  (PSU). 
  

• Hannah Boston, a Lecturer in Medieval History at Magdalen College, Oxford, will, as an Early Career Fellowship of the Leverhulme Trust at the University of Lincoln, a Lecturer in Medieval History at Magdalen College, Oxford, will “complete a study titled ‘Private charters and the transmission of ideas in English society, 1000-1307.’  The research will examine how ideas and practices around loyalty, property and authority developed, were transmitted and experienced across regional society outside the court-attending elite.”  More.
  

• John Q. Barrett, St. John's University,  is now a trustee of The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

• Last week, we noted a published student paper that drew upon the methods of corpus linguistics to address the early American history of abortion.  We, among others, expressed skepticism.  Here is a reply.
  

• There's much legal issue in the recent special issue of the Journal of Global History devoted to the history of international organizations and decolonization.  
  

• New online from the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic: Amnesty and the Limits of Transitional Justice in Brazil: The Case of Expelled Low-Ranking Soldiers, 1964–2014, by Marilia Corrêa.
  

• 
  The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., has circulated its latest catalogue, Scholarly Law & Legal History.
  

•  In the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Kimberly A. Hamlin, Miami University (Ohio), "After Dobbs, married women keeping their surnames regains political meaning.” Katherine Parkin, Monmouth University, “In 1970, a woman went to jail for an abortion. Now, it could happen again.”
  

• ICYMI on Bruen and Dobbs: Saul Cornell on Cherry-picked history and ideology-driven outcomes in Bruen (SCOTUSblog). David Cole on originalism in Bruen and Dobbs (WaPo).  Akhil Reed Amar on Why Liberal Justices Need to Start Thinking Like Conservatives (Time)."Say what you will about Roe, Justice Alito, but leave Lochner out of it," Damon Root--in effect--says of the justice's "junk history" in Dobbs (Reason).  Mary Ziegler says Justice Thomas isn't joking (Harvard Gazette).
  

•  ICYMI: An oral history project for North Carolina’s court reporterr. An unserved warrant for the murder of Emmet Till has been found (WJTV).  Jewish representation on SCOTUS (Forward).
  

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

Tate's "Power and Justice in Medieval England"

Joshua C. Tate,  SMU Dedman School of Law, has published Power and Justice in Medieval England: The Law of Patronage and the Royal Courts (Yale University Press) in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference:

Appointing a parson to the local church following a vacancy—an “advowson”—was one of the most important rights in medieval England. The king, the monasteries, and local landowners all wanted to control advowsons because they meant political, social, and economic influence. The question of law turned on who had the superior legal claim to the vacancy—which was a type of property—at the time the position needed to be filled.

In tracing how these conflicts were resolved, Joshua C. Tate takes a sharply different view from that of historians who focus only on questions of land ownership, and he shows that the English needed new legal contours to address the questions of ownership and possession that arose from these disputes. Tate argues that the innovations made necessary by advowson law helped give birth to modern common law and common law courts.

Here are some endorsements:

“A praiseworthy and original investigation of a subject that straddled the line between secular and spiritual: the early history of the English common law of advowsons.”—R.H. Helmholz, University of Chicago Law School
 
"Tate brings to this book just the qualities it needs: he asks the right questions and knows the common law and canon law materials which supply the answers. His study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of an important part of the early English Common Law."—Paul Brand, University of Oxford

“It has been a great pleasure to watch what began as a tentative, but intriguing, doctoral dissertation turn through a series of articles on seemingly small points into the small masterpiece that is this book.”—Charles Donahue Jr., Harvard Law School

–Dan Ernst