Remembering Willowbrook

[We have the following announcement from the Historical Society of the New York Courts.  DRE.]

Remembering Willowbrook: Ensuring Justice, Dignity and Inclusion for Individuals with Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities

Monday, October 27, 2025 • 6:00-7:30 PM

A panel of experts discuss the legacy of Willowbrook State School and its closure as well as its impact on people with developmental disabilities:

Henry Kennedy, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, Ret. Managing Attorney, Moderator
Marco Damiani, Chief Executive Officer, AHRC, New York City
Beth Haroules, Director of Disability Justice Litigation, New York Civil Liberties Union
Jose J. Rivera, Jr., Director of Quality Assurance, Compliance Officer, Cerebral Palsy Association of Nassau County, Inc.: Gouverneur Parents Association, Inc. Advocate
Joshua Schneps, CEO and Co-Publisher, Schneps Media
Victoria Schneps, Founder, President and Co-Publisher, Schneps Media; Founder, Life’s WORC
Leonard Simmons, Principal Attorney, Mental Hygiene Legal Service, Appellate Division, First Judicial Department

Free and Open to the Public • In-Person Only • At Appellate Division, First Department Courtroom (27 Madison Ave. New York, NY 10010).  Presented by the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, First Department and the Historical Society of the New York Courts.  Free CLE Credit.  Reception to Follow.

Weekend Roundup

• We were pleased to learn that Alastair McClure, University of Hong Kong, an expert on Asian legal history, is the new Associate Editor at Law and History Review.

• Natasha Wheatley, Princeton University, discusses her book, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton, 2023) on the Talking Legal History podcast with Siobhan M. M. Barco.
  

• Over at Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog: Petitions in Early Modern Britain: Asking for justice, questioning the law.

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  LHB Co-Blogger Karen Tani was part of a stellar lineup at a plenary session of this weekend's American Political History Conference, entitled "The Courts and American Democracy." The other panelists were Julian Mortenson, and Gautham Rao.  Rachel Shelden moderated.  DRE
  

• Another book event for Alison LaCroix's Interbellum Constitution: On June 17, Professor LaCroix is on the program of a Town Hall of the National Constitution Center with William B. Allen, a political theorist who was edited and translated Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws.  Register here.  
  

• A discussion of Jennifer Black's Branding Trust. Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America with the author is now up on the YouTube channel of the Business History Conference.

• Dylan C. Penningroth will discuss Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights on Tuesday, June 18, 2024, at 6 p.m. at the City of West Hollywood’s Council Chambers/Public Meeting Room located at 625 N. San Vicente Boulevard. The event is free and open to the public. Reservations are requested, here.
  

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts and the Supreme Court, New York County Civil Branch, are sponsoring a hybrid event, NY County Courthouse WPA Murals: Who Created Them and What Do They Represent? at the New York County Courthouse Rotunda at 60 Centre Street, NYC, Tuesday, June 25, 2024, from 1:00 - 2:30 PM.  The speakers are Greta Berman, emerita The Julliard School, and Helen A. Harrison, the former director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Stony Brook Foundation.  Jon Ritter, Clinical Professor of Art History, New York University, will moderate.
  

• Dueling books on American constitutionalism at the NCC's next Town Hall, on June 12, btw: Center: Yuval Levin’s American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again and Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them.  Jeffrey Rosen moderates.  Register here.
  

• The Organization of American Historians has announced  two new awards: the Award for Contributions to Public Policy, and the Joseph L. Peyser Prize for New France History.  "The Award for Contributions to Public Policy will annually recognize a scholar of any discipline who has made a significant contribution to U.S. public policy through historical research. The award is made possible through the generosity of J. Morgan Kousser, Professor of History and Social Science Emeritus at California Institute of Technology." 
  

• Registration is still open for The Road to the Release of John Hinckley: Attempted Presidential Assassination, Insanity, Commitment, and the Courts, an event sponsored by the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit to be held on June 27.

• The intellectual historian and author of a great book on the history of social science, Dorothy Ross, has died.  Here is Johns Hopkins's notice. 
  

• Allen D. Boyer, the author, with Mark Nicholls, of The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History (Routledge, 2024), has posted “Terrible as an Army with Banners”: Banners, Treason, and January Sixth. 
  

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  New online in the American Journal of Legal History: A Turbid River of History and Law: The Procurement of Women in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea, by Marie Seong-Hak Kim
  

• Carl Landauer has published C.H. Alexandrowicz's India and the Kautilyan Moment in the Asian Journal of International Law.
  

• On the ABAJ's Modern Law Library podcast: Madiba K. Dennie discusses her book, The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back.
  

• ICYMI:  Why Americans Have a Right to Trial by Jury (History).  A historical marker for Sully Jaymes, the first Black lawyer in Springfield, Ohio (Springfield News-Sun).
  

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

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