CFP: "Legacies of Slavery | Landscapes of Segregation"

We have the following Call for Papers/Panels:

Legacies of Slavery | Landscapes of Segregation
Universities Studying Slavery Fall 2022 Conference
September 28-October 1, 2022
Charlottesville, Virginia

In Fall 2022, the University of Virginia and its President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation (PCUAS) will host the USS conference: Legacies of Slavery | Landscapes of Segregation, highlighting slavery’s many enduring legacies after emancipation and also confront the American academy’s history of both benefiting from and perpetuating those legacies. We seek to examine a wide variety of topics: reconstruction, disfranchisement, redlining, racially restrictive zoning, racial terrorism, policing and incarceration, racist science’s impacts on public policy, and resulting inequalities in health, industry, housing, and education. Although the central theme focuses on the post-emancipation world, the conference will address a wide array of topics related to slavery, slavery’s afterlives, and universities.

We encourage submissions for both single papers and full panel proposals (max. 4 presenters and moderator/chair) that address any aspects of the theme as well as those that consider the history, public history, preservation, or memorialization of sites of enslavement or segregation. Faculty, graduate students, public historians, preservationists, university administrators, and independent scholars are welcome to submit individual papers or full panels. We also invite undergraduate student posters on research, activism, and student organizational work, among other topics.

Panel proposal submissions must include a 125-word maximum panel description that includes a proposed title as well as individual 250-word maximum paper proposals and brief bios (100 words max) for each participant.

Individual paper and poster proposal submissions should provide 250-word proposal and 100-word maximum brief bio.

Proposals are due by July 1, 2022

Please submit proposals at USS Conference Fall 2022.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• After the story broke about NPR's failure to cite historian Sarah Milov in a segment on her work, journalist Caroline Kitchener at The Lily followed up: "It’s not just Sarah Milov. Female academics aren’t credited in media ‘all the time.’" The follow-up article includes quotes from Women Also Know History co-founder Emily Prifogle (University of Michigan) and others.

• Robin Lindley’s HNN interview of Robin Chapman Stacey, University of Washington, the author, most recently, of Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales, is here.

• From our friends at the Max Planck Institute for European History, a post on the British Legal History Conference 2019.

• David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, has posted a draft chapter from his forthcoming intellectual biography, John Rawls: Envisioning Democracy.  It covers "Rawls's years at Cornell University from 1953-1958 and the gestation of the first (quite incomplete and underdeveloped) expression of justice as fairness in 1958."

• A recent Economist article took a swipe at historians, claiming that they "remain isolated in their professional cocoons, spending more time fiddling with their footnotes than bringing the past to light for a broader audience." Historians beg to differ here.

• And speaking of broader audiences: read or listen to this interview with Kalyani Ramnath, Harvard in The Polis Project's Suddenly Stateless series, exploring India's controversial National Register of Citizens and the people fighting to be recognized by it. 

• Just out online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core is Secularizing Islam: The Colonial Encounter and the Making of a British Islamic Criminal Law in Northern Nigeria, 1903-58, by Rabiat Akande, an SJD candidate at the Harvard Law School.

• From an email to John Q. Barrett 's listserv, we learn that Attorney General William Barr has reclaimed the official Department of Justice portrait of Robert H. Jackson.  Not the most outrageous association with a historical figure we can think of.  DRE

• ICYMI: Farah Peterson, University of Virginia Law, on Black Lives and the Boston Massacre in The American Scholar.  Also, Flos Greig, Australia’s first female lawyer.

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

Op-eds and Amicus Briefs

In a prior post, I mentioned the benefits of having access to a good publicity team at one’s home institution.  Today, I want to talk about the relationship between legal historians and other consumers of the past.

Over the years, LHB has flagged many op-eds and amicus briefs and featured a number of commentaries on the issue. Last May, Christopher Schmidt ruminated that The Art of the Op-Ed was “problematic” because it required “compromise and simplification” and “anachronism and presentism.” Turning to amicus briefs, Greg Ablavsky’s Thoughts on Historians and Advocacy included the concern that “briefs rarely capture the complexity that good history depicts.” In “Say Something Historical!” Tomiko Brown-Nagin recounted how using the past in public advocacy or legal reasoning involves “ways of reasoning about history that often seem dubious to me in my capacity as a professional historian. ”

In a recently published entry in the Oxford Handbook of Legal History entitled “Historians' Amicus Briefs: Practice and Prospect,” Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and I relayed a similar concern.  Some historians who had helped the NAACP’s lawyers craft historical arguments in Brown v. Board of Education had come to have second thoughts. They worried that, “spurred on by their desire to reach a particular outcome, they had drawn conclusions that were not warranted by strict historical methods.”

Notably, Chris, Greg, Tomiko, Nathan, and I agreed that the benefits of engagement outweighed the risks. As Tomiko put it, “Historical arguments are quite attractive and will be made.” Better not to exclude those most qualified and committed “to tell the truest story possible, given the available evidence.”

I agree. But I also wonder if we legal historians should wring our hands a bit less before striding into the public square.

Relating the past to the present is inherent to the historical enterprise. While I value complexity and believe that the past is different from the present, it is living readers for whom I write. Modern concerns shape the topics I choose, the methods I deploy, and the arguments that I make. I experience history as a translation between then and now. I worry that the alternative would be sterile antiquarianism.

On this view, the question isn’t whether it’s appropriate to write op-eds, amicus briefs, and the like, but how.  Nathan and I took a stab at part of that question in our essay.  Where amicus briefs are concerned, the historian must often “speak in a language legible to courts on matters of concern to them, while respecting the court’s distinct areas of authority.” We identified several strategies for striking that balance:

1. Stop short of arguing that history can decide the final issue
2. Limit participation in the amicus briefs to experts on the specific topic at issue
3. Use intermediaries between law and history: lawyers familiar with history, legal historians, or historians willing to learn about law
4. Provide multiple points of entry into the argument; describe ways that history could support certain arguments; explain why history runs counter to other arguments
5. Show your work by making your methods explicit

If ever an audience knew more good strategies, it would be LHB readers. I hope you’ll take to the comments to share.

--Sam Erman

Douglas on museums and memory

Stacy Douglas, Carleton University published Curating Community: Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political with the University of Michigan Press in 2017. From the publisher: 

In Curating Community: Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political, Stacy Douglas challenges the centrality of sovereignty in our political and juridical imaginations. Creatively bringing together constitutional, political, and aesthetic theory, Douglas argues that museums and constitutions invite visitors to identify with a prescribed set of political constituencies based on national, ethnic, or anthropocentric premises. In both cases, these stable categories gloss over the radical messiness of the world and ask us to conflate representation with democracy. Yet the museum, when paired with the constitution, can also serve as a resource in the production of alternative imaginations of community. Consequently, Douglas’s key contribution is the articulation of a theory of counter-monumental constitutionalism, using the museum, that seeks to move beyond individual and collective forms of sovereignty that have dominated postcolonial and postapartheid theories of law and commemoration. She insists on the need to reconsider deep questions about how we conceptualize the limits of ourselves, as well as our political communities, in order to attend to everyday questions of justice in the courtroom, the museum, and beyond.

Praise for the book: 

 “Curating Community makes a really significant and exciting contribution to existing literatures. Douglas is at her best when engaging in critiques of other thinkers such as Christodoulidis and Cornell. The unexpected link that Douglas makes between constitutions and museums is critically important because it directly links law and culture in ways that are not usually noted or thought about, but which have vital effects on our political and aesthetic lives.” -James Martel

“Reading museums alongside and against constitutional thinking, Douglas brilliantly exposes the problem of political sovereignty and the possibilities for rethinking political community. A thoughtful and inspired work.” -Davina Cooper

“Douglas has put forward an interesting and compelling argument drawing on various theorists and perspectives. Given the current social and political climate worldwide, her insistence on the disruption of the idea of community and thinking of justice as the exposure of the truth of infinite sharing is timeous and crucial, a call that should be heeded.” -Karin van Marle,

Further information is available here.