Weekend Roundup

• Now on YouTube: the National Constitution Center’s panel on “the history of the African American fight for freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods”  Edda Fields-Black and James Oakes were panelists.  Thomas Donnelly of the NCC moderated.
  

• The Union County Board of County Commissioners is hosting Gibbons v. Ogden: Its Continuing Importance 200 Years Later with Edward Hartnett, Seaton Hall, on Tuesday, March 4th from 12:30 p.m. until 1:30 p.m. "at the Courtroom of Honorable Lisa Miralles Walsh (A.J.S.C.) on the 1st Floor Tower of the Union County Courthouse, located at 2 Broad Street, Elizabeth." 
  

• Last semester, in the  course titled “Research Methods in Judicial History,” Yale students "had the opportunity to delve into the working papers of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ’37 LAW ’41 (Yale Daily News).

• Jake Kobrick, Associate Historian at the Federal Judicial Center, has a nice post on Eighth Amendment Prison Litigation on the FJC website. 
  

• A symposium on Robert Post's Holmes Devise history of the Taft Court is at Balkinization.  We've spotted contributions by Laura Kalman, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Brad Snyder.
  

• A note in the Harvard Law Review: Compulsory Voting’s American History. 
  

• From In Custodia Legis: The History of the U.S. Bar Exam, Part I and Part II. Also: "Philadelphia’s Gilded Age Medievalist: Henry Charles Lea."

• This season in the Institute for Justice's podcast series Bound by Justice is devoted to property cases, including "a tour of the house at issue in Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon" and three pods on the history of zoning."

• Over at JOTWELL, Richard Murphy has posted an admiring review of Andrea Scoseria Katz and Noah A. Rosenblum's, Becoming the Administrator-in-Chief: Myers and the Progressive Presidency, 123 Colum. L. Rev. 2135 (2023).

• ICYMI: "Of Course Presidents Are Officers of the United States," says Mark Graber (The Atlantic).  Mug commemorating real-life crime 1823 style flies to 10 times estimate (Antiques Trades Gazette).  John Q. Barrett on Cardozo's quip (SSRN). How a 1924 Immigration Act Laid the Groundwork for Japanese American Incarceration: An Interview with Mae Ngai (Smithsonian).

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

Masur and Penningroth on the Forgotten Years of the Civil Rights Movement

Online on at noon ET on Thursday, October 5, the National Constitution Center will host a session in its "America's Town hall" series, The Forgotten Years of the Civil Rights Movement:

Prize-winning historians Kate Masur, author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, and Dylan Penningroth, author of the new book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, explore the central role of African Americans in the struggle for justice and equality long before the social movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.

--Dan Ernst

Nicoletti Wins Richards Prize

Congratulations to Cynthia Nicoletti, Virginia Law, for winning the George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in the Journal of the Civil War Era in 2021. The article, “William Henry Trescott: Pardon Broker,” 

details the efforts of William Henry Trescot, “executive agent” for South Carolina, who secured pardons in order to facilitate the restoration of land the federal government had seized from lowcountry planters during the war.  She demonstrates how Trescot’s maneuvering in the Johnson White House and with Freedmen’s Bureau officials throughout 1865 and 1866 was integral in explaining the failure of Reconstruction-era land redistribution in the United States.

In the words of the prize committee, “Nicoletti offers an important new perspective on a familiar subject: the pardoning of ex-Confederates by U.S. president Andrew Johnson. Taking a novel methodological approach to this topic, her well-written article shows the critical role that the South Carolinian William Henry Trescot played in not only encouraging Johnson’s issuance of pardons but also facilitating the restoration of land to former slaveowners in the U.S. South. In doing so, “William Henry Trescot, Pardon Broker” makes a substantial contribution to the scholarship on the Reconstruction era and strengthens our understanding of its legacies. The denial of freedpeople’s demands for land redistribution as an essential foundation of self-determination and restorative justice was far from inevitable, as Nicoletti concludes. “Instead, the nation that emerged from the struggles of the Civil War was one that was actively made by men like William Henry Trescott."

Professor Nicoletti presented the paper at an annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History (and other legal history venues).

--Dan Ernst

Chin and Finkelman on Birthright Citizenship and the Slave Trade

Gabriel Jackson Chin, University of California, Davis School of Law, and Paul Finkelman, Gratz College, have posted Birthright Citizenship, Slave Trade Legislation, and the Origins of Federal Immigration Regulation, which is forthcoming in volume 54 of the UC Davis Law Review (2021):

In accord with the traditional restriction of citizenship of nonwhites, for decades some conservative lawmakers and scholars have urged Congress to deny citizenship to U.S.- born children of unauthorized migrants. For its part, the Trump Administration has promised to pursue birthright citizenship “reform.” The most prominent and compelling argument that Congress can deny citizenship by statute notwithstanding the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment comes from Citizenship Without Consent, a book authored by Yale Law Professor Peter Schuck and then-Yale Political Science Professor Rogers Smith. They argue that there was no federal exclusion or deportation in 1868 and thus the Fourteenth Amendment simply did not contemplate the citizenship of children of the then non-existent category of “illegal aliens.” Hundreds of law review articles, op-eds, white nationalist listservs, congressional hearings, and bills have embraced this argument, often citing Citizenship Without Consent.

This article is the first to examine the law regulating, suppressing, and banning the African slave trade to demonstrate, contrary to Citizenship Without Consent, that throughout the period leading up the Civil War and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States had both immigration laws and unauthorized migrants in the modern sense. First, the slave trade laws used immigration regulation techniques, including interdiction, detention, and deportation. Second, they were designed to exclude undesirable migrants and shape the nation’s population. Persons trafficked illegally could be and were deported, but, as Congress well knew, some were successfully smuggled in the country and remained here. Because the children of unauthorized migrants born in the United States were unquestionably made citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment, any modern statute denying citizenship to the children of undocumented migrants would be unconstitutional. In addition, scholars must consider the slave trade laws as part of the origins of federal immigration regulation.

–Dan Ernst

Minnesota Post-Doc Fellowship on Racial Justice/Settler Colonialism

 [We have the following from our friends at the University of Minnesota.  DRE]

Forret on Williams' gang

 Jeff Forret (Lamar University) published Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts with Cambridge University Press in 2020. From the publisher: 

William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades. Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.

Praise for the book: 

 "In Williams' Gang, Jeff Forret takes a journey through some of the dark and often convoluted paths traveled by domestic slave traders and their human merchandise. Taking time along the way to introduce readers to some of the elaborate financial and legal infrastructures that governed and facilitated the domestic slave trade, Forret tells a once infamous but largely forgotten story about the Washington, DC slave trader William H. Williams and the enslaved Virginia convicts he imported illegally to Louisiana. Built on an impressive mountain of archival research and relayed with vivid prose, it is a story Williams himself surely wished would never have been one to tell at all." - Joshua D. Rothman

'"An expert autopsy of crime and punishment in the Old South with striking relevance for today. Leading historian of Southern history Jeff Forret meticulously narrates the ordeals of twenty-seven Black Virginians, whose enslavement was compounded by convictions and whose transport to Louisiana at the hands of a Washington, DC slave trader led to a dozen years each in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Forret shows the guts of a horrific injustice that supports ongoing structural violence against African Americans." - Calvin Schermerhorn

"… meticulously researched and superbly crafted … This is a vivid and absorbing account of the exploitation of human beings whose suffering meant profit for others, all of which is part of our nation's history." - Roger Bishop

"… demonstrate(s) the riches awaiting us in narrating the hitherto untold and complex stories of slavery and emancipation in the United States." - Manisha Sinha

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi