New Republic launches book blog

The New Republic has launched a new web enterprise: The Book. TNR Executive Editor Isaac Chotiner writes:

Like every other magazine and newspaper, we have spent the past decade developing a website to complement and enrich the content that appears in the print magazine. Most of that web content has focused on politics and breaking news. The time has come to break out of that necessary but constraining box. To that end, we are launching The Book: An Online Review at The New Republic....

The first thing to know about The Book is that it is a supplement to our print content–an attempt to apply the new technology to the old and untarnished purposes. While our online book review will certainly be lively, it will not be significantly more relaxed than our magazine itself. We are not slumming here, or surrendering to the carnival of the web. Quite the contrary. We are hoping to offer an example of resistance to it....Here you will find criticism, not blogging; pieces, not posts. Four or five times a week we will publish a new review of a new book.

At the top of The Book today is a review of Churchill by Paul Johnson.

Hat tip.

CFP: Crime and Punishment in Modern Europe

[Here is a call for papers for the conference "Crime and Punishment in Modern Europe, 1870-1990," to be held in Washington DC on September 16-18, 2010:}

The German Historical Institutes in Washington and London are organizing an international conference on the history of criminal justice in modern Europe from 1870 to 1990. The conference will take place in Washington DC from September 16 to 18, 2010. The meeting is designed to take stock of recent and current research in this burgeoning field and to facilitate conversation between historians working on different countries in order to provide a comparative perspective on European developments. For this purpose, the conveners are soliciting proposals for papers presenting historical research on the legal, political, cultural, and social history of criminal justice, including but not limited to the following aspects:

- the social and cultural history of criminal justice
- the history of the criminal law and penal policy
- the history of the criminal trial
- the history of penal reform
- the role of gender in criminal justice
- the history of juvenile justice
- the history of prisons
- criminal justice and medicine/science
- criminal justice and the welfare state
- the relationship of criminal justice to political cultures, systems, and ideologies
- criminal justice and the history of the legal profession

Based on the proposals received, the conveners plan to assemble 4-6 panels, each featuring 3-4 papers on different countries addressing a common theme. Comparative papers are, of course, most welcome.

Please email a paper proposal (in English) of no more than 500 words and your curriculum vitae to the two conveners listed below. The deadline for submission is February 15, 2010. Applicants will be notified by the end of February. The conference, held in English, will focus on the discussion of pre-circulated papers, which should be ready for distribution by September 1. Expenses for travel and accommodation will be covered.

Conveners:

Dr. Richard F. Wetzell
German Historical Institute Washington
wetzell@ghi-dc.org

Dr. Kerstin Brückweh
German Historical Institute London
kbrueckweh@ghil.ac.uk

Hat tip: H-Law
Image credit: GHI Building, Washington, DC

Stone on Free Speech in the Twentieth Century

Over at the University of Chicago Law Faculty Blog, the veteran student blogger David Schraub has a summary of the presentation to Chicago's Works in Progress seminar by Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor and the author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (W.W. Norton, 2004). According to Mr. Schraub, in his presentation, entitled Free Speech in the Twenty-First Century: Ten Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Professor Stone argued:

At the start of the 20th century, there was virtually no free speech doctrine. The jurisprudence of the First Amendment developed through World War I, the red scares, McCarthyism, and Vietnam into what we have today: an imperfect, still developing, but cohesive model that remains the global standard (excepting a few high profile areas, like hate speech).

More.

The Seal: An International Conference

Here's a call for papers for the conference "Insculpta Imago: Seal Matrices and Seal Impressions in the Mediterranean," to be held at the Max-Planck-Institut, in Florence, 3-5 February, 3-5, 2011. Our description is from Research News in Late Antiquity:

The seal as an artifact in very small format displays a multiplicity of images and signs. With a 9000 year-old history the seal belongs to one of the oldest and most enduring forms of image reproduction, embracing numerous cultures.

A seal matrix, or cylinder seal, seal tongs or gems mounted in seal rings can produce a large quantity of impressions in clay, lead or wax. In comparison with other artifacts seals have an exponentially high and wide distribution, in diplomatic correspondence and in trade, and as objects of representation and collection as well. Both the seal matrix and the seal impression are three dimensional, that is, sculptural images - insculptae imagines : the recessed image of the die appears raised and relief-like on the impression. An enormous number of seals are preserved. They are objects of investigation in such disciplines as Egyptology, archaeology, Jewish, Byzantine and Islamic studies, medieval historical studies, and, increasingly in recent times, art history, albeit within the context of the single field of research. According to the traditions of the respective discipline emphasis is laid either on the seal die or on the seal impression.

The conference to be held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Max-Planck-Institut, in Florence will encompass seals from late antiquity to early modern times in the Mediterranean area as a region of contact and coexistence of different cultures. Considering the seal as a transcultural image and medium of reproduction, the conference aims to bring together the disciplines mentioned above.

More.

Image credit.

Balogh's Government out of Sight

Brian Balogh, Miller Center for Public Affairs and History Department, University of Virginia, will be discussing his new book A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. He’ll be discussing the book over the radio, on-line and via podcast during the week of January 16-21, 2010. More information is here; here’s a brief description of the book:

How big a role should the American government play? Should it be shelling out billions for public works and other projects? Is such government involvement unprecedented? Many historians assume the U.S. government of the 19th century to be hands-off; quintessentially laissez faire. Politicians and analysts who champion such a style of government even regard it as a sort of golden age.

In A Government Out of Sight, Brian Balogh destructs this view, demonstrating that in the 19th century, even those who argued for a small, nonintrusive central government demanded that the national government expand its authority to meet the nation's challenges. Balogh identifies government programs and subsidies from the 19th century that survive even today, revising our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout this period.

A Government Out of Sight fundamentally alters our perspective on American political development in the 20th century, shedding light on contemporary debates between progressives and conservatives about the proper size of government and government programs.

Update: Check out Gautham Rao's review, Out of Sight, But on the Horizon: The Secret Life of the American Nation-State, in Common-Place.

New on-line legal history journal

Traductions : Oliver W. Holmes Jr., "La passe étroite du droit" et "La Common Law" is featured in the November 2009 issue of Clio@Themis, a new on-line legal history journal. Here's the journal description:

Fondée à l’initiative de plusieurs chercheurs au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), associant des enseignants-chercheurs des Universités, cette nouvelle revue souhaite contribuer au développement des débats et échanges scientifiques sur l’histoire du droit. Sa création en France ne part pas d’un constat de crise ou d’isolement de cette discipline enseignée et organisée au sein des Facultés de Droit. Elle s’appuie, au contraire, sur l’élargissement et l’enrichissement des perspectives auxquels nous assistons depuis plusieurs années.

English presentation :
Founded at the initiative of several researchers from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), joined by a number of University Lecturers, this new journal aims to contribute to the development of debates and scientific exchanges with regard to the history of law. Its creation stems not from any crisis or sense that this subject, taught and coordinated by Law Faculties, is isolated. On the contrary, its basis is to enlarge and enrich those aspects with which we’ve assisted for several years already.

Hoosier Justice in Nuremberg

The Indiana Historical Society Press has published, in its Indiana Supreme Court Legal History Series, Hoosier Justice at Nuremberg, by Suzanne S. Bellamy. According to the Historical Society, the book

examines how Frank Richman of Columbus, Indiana, and Curtis Shake of Vincennes, Indiana, both served with distinction as members of the Indiana Supreme Court. By early 1947 both justices had stepped down from the court to begin new phases in their profession. Shake resumed his law practice in Vincennes, and Richman planned to teach law. World events intervened when both men were called to serve as civilian judges in tribunals convened in Nuremberg to try secondary Nazi war criminals. Shake and Richman sat on the bench in the trials of leading German industrialists for crimes against humanity, applying international law according to American concepts of fairness.

Despite lingering doubts about the legitimacy of American judges having jurisdiction over German nationals, Richman and Shake responded with grace, competence, and high ethical standards, along with a little controversy. The book highlights the role two leading citizens of Indiana played in events that, more than sixty years later, still resonate across the world.

More and hat tip.

Finkelman reviews Hoffer et al. and Powe on the Supreme Court

Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School, Government Law Center, has just posted The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and History. It appeared in the Texas Law Review (2009).

This article is a book review of The Supreme Court: An Essential History by Peter Hoffer, Natalie E. Hoffer, and Williamjames Hull Hoffer as well as The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008 by Lucas Powe. Here, Professor Finkelman briefly surveys the books. He contrasts the two books and discusses their general strengths and weaknesses. Further, Finkelman examines how the authors deal with the way slavery affected both the United States Constitution and Supreme Court.

Hat tip: Legal Theory Blog.

Chauncey and Cott testify in California Prop. 8 Trial

Yale historian George Chauncey, and Harvard's Nancy Cott testified this week in the California trial challenging that state's ban on same-sex marriage. The New York Times reports:

After viewing several television commercials produced by Proposition 8's sponsors, Chauncey said images and language suggesting the ballot initiative was needed to ''protect children'' were reminiscent of earlier efforts to ''demonize'' gays, ranging from police raids on gay bars during the 1950s to campaigns to rid public schools of gay teachers in the 1970s.

Nancy Cott's testimony

disputed a statement by a defense lawyer that states have a compelling interest to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples for the sake of procreation.

Cott said marriage also serves an economic purpose -- one that was especially pronounced when it was assumed that men and women performed different jobs in their partnership.

But as traditional gender roles and the purposes of marriage have changed, the reasons to bar same-sex couples from marrying have gone away, she said.

''It does seem to me that the direction of change leads consistently toward the appropriateness of allowing same-sex couples to marry,'' she said.

Read the rest here.

Update: Claire Potter has much more on this here.

Photos: Chauncey, Cott.

Polenberg on Brandeis, Cardozo and the Crisis of the 1930s

"Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo: Judaism and the Crisis of the 1930s," a fascinating talk by Richard Polenberg, Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History in the Department of History at Cornell University, is here.

Image credits: ldb; bnc

Call for Papers: Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development

The University of Pennsylvania Press, with support from The Mellon Foundation, announces the launch of our new journal, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.

In recent decades, the traditional contest of left and right has been displaced by a politics of humanity. In both domestic and international contexts, the languages of human rights and humanitarianism are often marshaled as moral claims that bolster diverse global enterprises of governance, intervention, and reform. And development—a Cold War project—has evolved beyond economic or institutional concerns. Now encompassing matters once targeted in human rights activism, it has also expanded to address the acute humanitarian crises once treated as episodic and temporary.

This convergence of the concepts of human rights, humanitarianism, and development within a larger politics of humanity is one of the signature phenomena of our time. The global politics of humanity legitimates itself not on the old foundation of settled international law but on new promises to generate new legal and political orders, to shape new social realities and relations, to forge new cultural connections and values. Human rights advocates find themselves involved in the rebuilding of political regimes, economic structures and the very social fabric of societies. Political advisers and academics of various persuasions engage in nation-building. Embedded anthropologists reengineer traditional social structures in the midst of military occupations. More than ever, politics aims at generating specific forms of life, and the celebrated decline of state sovereignty seems to coincide with the rise of biopower.

This new journal provides a single forum for the dispassionate, analytically focused examination of these trends. Humanity will explore the transformations in political understandings that have reshaped the terms of liberation and idealism as well as the practices of domination and control. While the global politics of humanity is emphatically a politics with an urge to mend, ameliorate, or even transform circumstances of disorder and atrocity, its very aspirational quality often immunizes it from critical inquiry. For a number of years now, scholars have been analyzing this convergence -- its formative history and future implications. Many powerful insights about these transformations have emerged from fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, literature, philosophy, and sociology. Too often, however, this work has remained cloistered from scholars in other fields (and the world of practice), even though much of it shares a common intellectual genealogy; and the centripetal force of the disciplines has tended to perpetuate the divide between the social sciences and the humanities, even though both have a common stake in the world. As it welds these diverse enterprises in one space, Humanity will not offer skepticism for its own sake about various projects on the terrain of human rights, humanitarianism, and development. It will, however, prize analytical distance from them.

Humanity welcomes contributions from all disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences but also seeks to publish visual interventions – notably photographic material – as well as occasional interviews shedding light on the contested politics of humanity.

Contributions (which are peer-reviewed) should generally run 8,000 to 11,000 words, including apparatus, but both shorter and longer pieces are potentially viable. Also invited are thematic essay reviews, combining at least two recent books, between 5,000 and 7,000 words. Anyone interested in pursuing publication in the journal can write to the editors at humanityjournal@gmail.com.

Samuel Moyn, Editor
Nehal Bhuta, Coeditor
Nils Gilman, Coeditor
Joseph R. Slaughter, Coeditor
Joseph R. Slaughter, Coeditor
Miriam Ticktin, Coeditor

In the first issue, look for…

Michel Agier on the politics of refugees, asylum, and camps
Isaie Dougnon on global humanitarianism and African child-trafficking
Lynn Festa on the distance, empathy, and the origins of "humanity"
Martti Koskenniemi on mainstreaming human rights
Andrew Lakoff on two regimes of global public health
And other texts, Nincluding a war photography dossier and an essay review

Phipps on Marriage & Redemption: Mormon Polygamy in the Congressional Imagination, 1862-1887

Marriage & Redemption: Mormon Polygamy in the Congressional Imagination, 1862-1887 is a recent article by Kelly Elizabeth Phipps in the Virginia Law Review (95 Va. L. Rev. 435 (2009)). Phipps is a federal judicial law clerk and a 2008 graduate of the University of Virginia Law School. This piece is her law review Note. Here's the abstract:

How did nineteenth-century federal legislators imagine Mormon polygamy as they debated and adopted harsh anti-polygamy enforcement laws? Republican anti-polygamists in the Reconstruction era called polygamy and slavery the “twin relics of barbarism,” analogizing polygamous husbands to Southern slaveholders. By the 1880s anti-polygamists in Congress rooted their arguments in Chinese Exclusionism and avoided divisive references to Southern slavery. They compared Mormon polygamy to “despotic” cultural practices popularly associated with Chinese immigrants, like concubinage, prostitution, and “coolieism.” White cultural nationalism mobilized support for the first effective anti-polygamy statutes in 1882 and 1887. These changing representations of polygamy illustrate how the Republican party came to terms with the South's legacy of slavery and rebellion by embracing a unified white cultural identity. Metaphorical comparisons to Southern slavery and “oriental paganism” not only vilified polygamy, they also justified federal intervention into local affairs. The these vivid metaphors arose from the Republican party's shifting ideology, not the lived experience of polygamy's perceived “victims”: the plural wives.

Law & Society Association opportunities & deadlines

Deadlines are coming up very soon for Law and Society Association workshops and awards. Full details are at the links:

WORKSHOPS

January 15, 2010

EARLY CAREER WORKSHOP, May 25-26, 2010

Renaissance Hotel, Chicago; for beginning faculty and postdoctoral research fellows.

January 29, 2010

GRADUATE STUDENT WORKSHOP, May 25-26, 2010

Renaissance Hotel, Chicago; for graduate and law students.

PRIZES (see PRIZE DESCRIPTIONS & NOMINATION PROCEDURES):

January 15, 2010

STAN WHEELER MENTORSHIP AWARD

February 1, 2010

LSA ARTICLE PRIZE

GRADUATE STUDENT PAPER AWARD

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT PAPER AWARD

NOMINATIONS COMMITTEE for 2010 LSA ELECTIONS

The Nominations Committee welcomes suggestions and nominations from LSA members of possible candidates to stand for election to LSA's Board of Officers and Trustees. Please contact the committee chair Lynn Mather, lmather@buffalo.edu by March 8, 2010.

AHA round-up

History News Network has good coverage of the American Historians Association meeting last weekend. Highlights include video from the panel Is Google Good for History? on day 1. From day 2, panels on What Has Obama Learned from History? A Roundtable on Politics, Economy, and Society, and Gay Marriage and Proposition 8: Reflections. Day 3 coverage focuses on the panel Whither History PhD Programs? The Education of Historians Report after Five Years. For Day 4, a panel on pedagogy: Reacting to the Past: Role Play, Persuasion, and Engagement in Undergraduate Teaching.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Coverage from bloggers is here. A video of a protest against the conference hotel is here (the owner was a contributor to the campaign to pass Proposition 8 in California, which bans same-sex marriage).

The Cliopatria Awards for history blogging were announced in conjunction with the meeting. Georgian London was honored as Best New Blog and Best Individual Blog. The rest are here.

Stern on Indexing English Legal Treatises

Simon Stern, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, has posted The Case and the Exceptions: Creating Instrumental Texts in Law and Literature, which appears in Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book: Writers and Publishers in England, ed. Pat Rogers and Laura Runge (University of Delaware Press, 2009), 95-116. Here’s the abstract:

In early 18th century England, the legal treatise was a young genre (some would say a nonexistent genre). Legal treatises are instrumental books, meant to be usable by the reader who consults a few pages rather than reading the whole book (and to be capable of steering the reader directly to those pages), and meant to be used as fodder for briefs and oral arguments. They are meant to produce more writing, and they are designed with that goal in mind. The changing format of 18th century legal treatises shows how they adapted themselves to these instrumental uses. Cross-referencing was already a familiar feature of law books, but the back-of-the book index underwent significant change during the 18th century. Changes in these books show how their creators came to understand the channeling function of indexes, which can help to frame the question for the reader, rather than serving only those readers who know in advance how the question must be framed. By the end of the eighteenth century, these books had begun to include multi-level indexes that allowed for orderly, visual, telegraphic presentation of doctrinal distinctions. Just as treatises, by rationalizing the basic principles and structure of an area of law, may have helped to facilitate further doctrinal clarity, thoroughness, and specificity, the increasingly effective channeling function of indexes may have played a small part in encouraging lawyers to expect that fine distinctions can be captured quickly and precisely.

These developments were occurring at the same time that the literary marketplace in England was beginning to include books designed for professional writers, such as rhyming dictionaries, thesauruses, and collections of quotations. A comparison between the indexes in law books, and those in books for writers, helps to identify the pragmatic needs of professionals in each area.

Tucker on Canadian Street Railway Strikes

Eric Tucker, Osgoode Hall Law School, has posted Who’s Running the Road? Street Railway Strikes and the Problem of Constructing a Liberal Capitalist Order in Canada, 1886, which is forthcoming in Law and Social Inquiry. Here is the abstract:

Street railway strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were frequently the occasion for large-scale collective violence in North American cities and challenged the capacity of local authorities to maintain civic order. However, this was only the most visible manifestation of the challenge that street railway workers’ collective action posed to the order of liberal capitalism, an order constructed on several intersecting dimensions. Using the example of Canadian street railway workers from 1886 to 1914, a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization, this article explores the ways the collective action by workers and their community sympathizers challenged the workplace, marketplace, and “streetplace” orders of liberal capitalism. It discusses how those challenges were met through political and legal processes of resistance and accommodation, taking into account the fragmentation of state power, hostile public opinion toward the street railways, and conflicting views over the legitimate scope for workers’ collective action.

Image credit.

The Watergate Trial: The Lawyers Speak!

The latest issue of the newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is out and, with it, news that a recording of a panel on “The Watergate Cover-up Trial” is now up on the Society’s website. Here’s the newsletter’s description:

Watch, listen, and witness history as a number of the leading participants in the 1974 Watergate Trial talk together for the first time. Listen to the fascinating exchanges between defense Counsel, Plato Cacheris, and Prosecutor, James F. Neal, and to the never-before heard commentary of John Dean and D. Todd Christofferson, former law clerk to Judge Sirica (right). Watch Moderator Carl Stern prod the panelists to talk candidly and expansively.

Image credit.

Weiner to Be Honored

Readers of the blog will recall the dispatches of Mark S. Weiner, Rutgers-Newark Law, from his Fulbright in Iceland. Now comes news that Rutgers is honoring him as a Distinguished Research Scholar:

Rutgers Law School-Newark Professor Mark S. Weiner (left) will be honored as 2009/2010 Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Scholar at Rutgers University, Newark, during a Feb. 23 reception and lecture. Steven J. Diner, chancellor of Rutgers-Newark, will present the award to Weiner, who will then give a talk titled “Clan, Culture, and the Concept of Law: Lessons from Iceland.” The ceremonies will begin at 4 p.m. in the Paul Robeson Campus Center, 350 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

The professor has just returned from the University of Akureyi, Iceland, 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle, where he spent the fall 2009 semester as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching an intensive course on U.S. constitutional law. He also conducted research for a new book about the legal and cultural significance of the clan, or extended kinship network, and its relation to the growth of the modern state. Among its topics, the book will consider how legal developments in the middle ages shed light on current efforts to develop the rule of law in weak states and regions of the world which nurture international terrorism. “I believe what happened in Iceland in the 13th century can help us understand what’s happening right now in Afghanistan and Somalia,” explains Weiner. His Feb. 23 talk will address those topics and provide an overview of his work in progress.

More.

Call for Papers: Law in Early America

[We have the following Call for papers from the organizers of "AB INITIO: Law in Early America," a conference to be held June 16 ­and 17, 2010:]

The Legal History Consortium and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, both of the University of Pennsylvania, together with the American Society for Legal History, the University of Michigan Law School, and the University of Minnesota Law School, will sponsor a conference focusing on the legal history and historiography of North America to 1820. The conference will take place at the McNeil Center in Philadelphia, and will feature work by new scholars, as well as commentary and new work by senior legal historians. Professor Bruce H. Mann of Harvard Law School will deliver the keynote address; other confirmed participants include Sarah Barringer Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania, William Novak and Martha Jones of the University of Michigan, Barbara Welke of the University of Minnesota, and Richard Ross of the University of Illinois. Paper proposals in any field of law related to the geographic and chronological focus of the conference should be submitted by February 15, 2010. Proposals must include a 300-word abstract and a cv. For those selected to present, final papers of no more than 9,000 words must be submitted by May 1, 2010. All papers will be pre-circulated to conference participants. Support for presenters' travel and lodging expenses will be available.

Please send proposals via email to: mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu, with “Legal History Conference” in the subject line.

Lindseth on Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State

Peter L. Lindseth, University of Connecticut School of Law, has posted Introduction: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State, an excerpt from his new book, RESISTANCE AND RECONCILIATION: EUROPEAN INTEGRATION, ADMINISTRATIVE GOVERNANCE, AND THE NATION-STATE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, Oxford University Press, 2010. (I am having trouble downloading this, but the download function will most likely be fixed soon.) Here's the abstract:

European governance is “administrative, not constitutional.” That is the basic thesis of my forthcoming book, RESISTANCE AND RECONCILIATION: EUROPEAN INTEGRATION, ADMINISTRATIVE GOVERNANCE, AND THE NATION-STATE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE (Oxford University Press, 2010). The Table of Contents and Introduction are now posted on SSRN for review and comment.

This book approaches the problem of European governance from the perspective of the legal development of the administrative state over the course of the twentieth century. It describes the convergence of European public law and institutional practice around the legitimating structures and normative principles of what this study calls “the postwar constitutional settlement of administrative governance.” The process of European integration has had, without doubt, profound constitutional implications for its constituent states. It has both disciplined certain negative externalities of national democracy and offered market actors a range of transnational rights and duties, all in order to construct a new market-polity transcending national borders. Nevertheless, this polity has had great difficulty being understood as “constitutional” in its own right. Most importantly, it has struggled to be seen as the embodiment or expression of a new political community (“Europe”) capable of self-rule through institutions historically “constituted” for that purpose. Rather, as with all forms of administrative governance, European integration has remained ultimately dependent, for its democratic and constitutional legitimacy, on the “constituted” bodies of “representative government” on the national level – legislative, executive, and judicial.

This historical synthesis challenges an idea widespread among legal scholars of integration: that European governance is built on a set of “institutions constitutionally separated from national legitimation processes.” To the contrary, the mechanisms examined in this book have developed historically to overcome the seeming disconnect at the heart of integration, between otherwise autonomous exercises of supranational regulatory power, on the one hand, and the national sources of democratic and constitutional legitimacy, on the other. Much less than reflecting the purportedly “sui generis” character of “multilevel” or “polyarchical” governance in Europe (three commonly deployed rubrics), these mechanisms have an identifiable historical pedigree. They are grounded in models of administrative legitimation that emerged in postwar Western Europe in response to the disastrous constitutional failings of the interwar years. For that reason, to understand integration, historical attention to the antecedent stabilization of administrative governance on the national level is essential.

By conforming to the normative demands of the postwar settlement (most importantly, "delegation" and “mediated legitimacy”), European public law has sought to reconcile the functional realities of integration with the continuing role of the nation-state as the primary locus of democratic and constitutional legitimacy in the European system. This reconciliation has tolerated a good deal of autonomous regulatory power in what has become an increasingly dense and complex sphere of “Europeanized” administrative governance. Nevertheless, this process of reconciliation has also included a significant amount of normative resistance to the autonomously “constitutional” pretenses of European supranationalism (as if the EU were somehow capable of self-government through institutions independently “constituted” for that purpose). By describing the interrelationship between resistance and reconciliation in the evolution of European public law, this book seeks to draw on history to develop a better understanding of the nature and legitimacy of European governance going forward.

Call for Papers: Women & International Criminal Law

Call for Papers: Women & International Criminal Law

Special Issue of the International Criminal Law Review

Dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald

The International Criminal Law Review invites submissions for its 2010 special issue entitled "Women and International Criminal Law," to be guest-edited by Diane Marie Amann, University of California, Davis, School of Law; Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Temple University Beasley School of Law; and Beth Van Schaack, University of Santa Clara School of Law. The Special Issue is dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald, a pathbreaker in international criminal law who has served as Chief Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a member of the Iraq Intelligence Commission, Co-Chair of the American Society of International Law Task Force on the International Criminal Court, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

This special issue is devoted to the topic of women and international criminal law. The majority of the articles have been solicited from prominent academics and practitioners in the field of international criminal law and feminist jurisprudence, such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Prof. Jenny Martinez, Dean Martha Minow, Prof. David Luban, Prof. Leila Nadya Sadat, Prof. Naomi Cahn, and Lucy Reed. The editors have also reserved several slots for submissions in response to this call to papers. Submissions should be inspired by this theme statement:

Special Issue Theme: Women & International Criminal Law

The law, it has been noted, "has not always served women well."[1] The critique extends readily to international law. Until very recently, women were absent from the processes of international law formation and enforcement, and invisible within substantive law reflective of the male experience. Mirroring the public/private divide running through much of law and society, the law, and those with the power to use it, tended to treat all forms of gender violence as opportunistic, peripheral, or private crimes reflecting personal motives and desires unconnected to issues of international importance. Thanks to the tireless work of committed advocates, jurists, and diplomats, international criminal law now treats many forms of gender violence as prosecutable offences against the physical and mental integrity of the victim. With the promulgation of the Statute of the International Criminal Court and the voluminous jurisprudence of the ad hoc criminal tribunals, the law now sanctions the prosecution of gender crimes as war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and the predicate acts of genocide.

Women have stood front and center to push these developments. Other international institutions often are dominated by men. Yet women have served in top posts in all of the modern tribunals, as Presidents (Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, Navanethem Pillay, and Renate Winter), Registrar (Dorothée de Sampayo Garrido-Nijgh), Chief Prosecutors (Louise Arbour and Carla Del Ponte), Deputy Prosecutors (Fatou Bensouda), Gender Advisors (Patricia Viseur Sellers and Catharine MacKinnon), and in many other judicial, prosecution, defense, and administrative capacities. The tribunals are approaching gender parity in staffing, although women remain concentrated in the lower professional grades. International criminal law is thus one area of international law in which women have made headway in terms of substantive law and institutional access; still, significant obstacles remain to ensure a robust system of gender justice in the face of continued violations.

The field of international criminal law nears a watershed moment, as ad hoc tribunals wind down and the International Criminal Court becomes fully operational. This opportune time invites reflection on whether international criminal law should be considered a feminist project. Accordingly, this volume offers sustained study of how international criminal law affects women and how women have affected international criminal law. We welcome submissions on the following topics:

. Can, and has, international criminal law improved the material conditions of women's lives and promoted the dignity of women?

. Is participation in international criminal justice liberating and transformative, or alienating and regressive?

. What legal reforms, procedural devices, advocacy strategies, and institutional arrangements can be employed to ensure that women experience the former and not the latter?

. Does fixation on criminal penalties constrain imagination and implementation of other ways to respond to the needs, demands, and aspirations of women in situations of armed conflict, mass violence, abuse, and repression?

. How have women - as activists, victims, lawyers, and perpetrators - changed the field?

. How has the gender jurisprudence advanced, or impeded, the development of international criminal law?

. Has international criminal law changed the way we think about violence against women?

This volume looks beyond sex crimes to consider multiple ways that women experience war and repression, as agents of change, as victims, and as perpetrators. The study adopts critical perspectives to challenge conceptual boundaries - between and within public international law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and international human rights - that tend to eclipse the intersectionalities of women's identities and to fragment women's experiences with violence, based upon whether violence occurs in a time of war or peace, whether it occurs at home or in a detention center, or whether the perpetrator is a state actor or a private person. Our hope is that the new perspectives presented in this collection will advance our thinking about gender and international law across a number of disciplines. We welcome your participation in this historic effort to examine the impact of international criminal law on women, and vice versa.

Special Issue Logistics

The volume will be published in spring 2011. Judge Wald and other contributors will present their works at a roundtable hosted at the American Society of International Law's Tillar House in Washington, D.C., on October 29, 2010 - days before the tenth anniversary of the first U.N. Security Council resolution on Women, Peace and Security.

To ensure anonymity in the selection phase, please submit a solid draft essay or article, in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 words, with all identifying information redacted, to Kathleen A. Doty, by way of an e-mail attachment in Word format (kadoty@ucdavis.edu), by April 15, 2010. Please note the paper's title (which should match exactly the title of the redacted paper) and your name and contact information in the body of the e-mail.

Once papers have been selected, they will be subject to a full edit and peer review in advance of the October roundtable. The final draft of the paper will be due no later than March 1, 2011, and should adhere to the International Criminal Law Review style sheet, which is available at http://www.brill.nl/AuthorsInstructions/ICLA.pdf.

About the Editors

Diane Marie Amann is Professor of Law and Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall, University of California, Davis, School of Law; a founding contributor to the IntLawGrrls blog, http://intlawgrrls.blogspot.com/; and a Vice President of the American Society of International Law. Her scholarship examines the interaction of national and international legal regimes in efforts to combat atrocity and cross-border crime.

Jaya Ramji-Nogales is Assistant Professor of Law at Temple University's Beasley School of Law; a regular contributor to IntLawGrrls blog; and a member of the Board of Legal Advisors to the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Her scholarship examines transitional justice mechanisms, and includes the volume Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence Before the Cambodian Courts (2005), co-edited with Beth Van Schaack.

Beth Van Schaack is Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law and Visiting Scholar (2009-2010) at the Center on Democracy, Development & The Rule of Law, Stanford University, as well as a regular contributor to IntLawGrrls blog. Prior to joining the law faculty, she was Acting Executive Director and Staff Attorney with The Center for Justice & Accountability, San Francisco, and a law clerk with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Her scholarship is in the area of international criminal law, and she is the co-author with Ron Slye of a leading casebook and hornbook on the topic.

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[1] Elizabeth Evatt, Foreword, in The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis ix (Hilary Charlesworth & Christine Chinkin eds., 2000).

Photo: Judge Patricia Wald.

What's the Matter with Kansas (Legal History)?

Michael H. Hoeflich's Kansas State Historical Society Presidential Address for 2003, "Why the History of Kansas Law Has Not Been Written," is here.

Image credit: "No, not that Kansas!"

Legal History for High Schoolers

[The Fayette (Georgia) Citizen reports, in Law History Class Offered for HS Students, on a local judge's offering of a constitutional and legal history course for high schoolers:]

High school students are being invited to apply for a free 11-week Saturday symposium on American Constitutional law and legal history taught by Fayette County Superior Court Judge Chris Edwards.

Each class will focus on a particular topic of Constitutional history. Students will be responsible for purchasing a $10 book for the class entitled “The Supremes’ Greatest Hits: The 34 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life” by Michael Trachtman.

Students considering a law career and those taking AP History are especially encouraged to apply for the class. The deadline to apply for the class is Friday, Jan. 15 and must be mailed to Judge Edwards at One Center Drive, Fayetteville, Ga. 30214.

Image credit.

"Grim Year" on the Job Market for History PhDs

Robert B. Townsend at AHA Perspectives reports on the troubling job market for history Ph.D.s:

The number of job openings in history plummeted last year, even as the number of new history PhDs soared. As a result, it appears the discipline is entering one of the most difficult academic job markets for historians in more than 15 years.

During 2008–09 job advertisements fell by 23.8 percent—from a record high of 1,053 openings in 2007–08 to 806 openings in the past year. This was the smallest number of positions advertised with the AHA in a decade (Figure 1).1 To make matters worse, a subsequent survey of advertisers indicates that about 15 percent of the openings were cancelled after the positions were advertised.

Townsend suggests that

While it is small comfort to candidates on the current job market, it is worth noting that the near perpetual sense of crisis in history employment over the past 20 years had very little to do with a diminishing number of jobs, or even the growing use of part-time and contingent faculty.

More than half of the full-time history faculty in U.S. colleges and universities have retired and been replaced over the past 20 years, while the number of full-time faculty employed in history has grown steadily.

Continue reading here.

UPDATE: Marc Bousquet criticizes Townsend's report at the Chronicle of Higher Ed blog Brainstorm. Hat tip to Ralph Luker. Bousquet argues that Townsend's analysis is

part of a "second wave" of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration. Thanks to the third wave of thought arising from graduate students and contingent faculty in the academic labor movement, you just don't hear so much of this sort of thing anymore. In most fields, it's pretty well understood that the real issue is an undersupply of tenure-track jobs, i.e., that the issue needs to be addressed from the "demand side." There's no real oversupply of folks holding the Ph.D. because what's happened is an aggressive, intentional restructuring of demand by administrators....

It's well understood by most folks doing serious work on academic labor that regardless of how one analyzes the problem, most "supply-side" solutions are doomed to fail so long as administrators have so much control over the contours of demand that they can put staff, permatemps, and students -- including undergraduates -- to work at activities that were formerly done by persons holding doctorates.

Read the rest here, where others, including historian Ellen Schrecker, weigh in in the comments.

Congressional Research Awards

[We have the following announcement courtesy of H-US 1918-45:]

The Dirksen Congressional Center invites applications for grants to fund research on congressional leadership and the U.S. Congress. A total of up to $35,000 will be available in 2010. Awards range from a few hundred dollars to $3,500.

The competition is open to individuals with a serious interest in studying Congress. Political scientists, historians, biographers, scholars of public administration or American studies, and journalists are among those eligible. The Center encourages graduate students who have successfully defended their dissertation prospectus to apply and awards a significant portion of the funds for dissertation research. Applicants must be U.S. citizens who reside in the United States.

The awards program does not fund undergraduate or pre-Ph.D. study. Organizations are not eligible. Research teams of two or more individuals are eligible. No institutional overhead or indirect costs may be claimed against a Congressional Research Award.

There is no standard application form. Applicants are responsible for showing the relationship between their work and the awards program guidelines. Applications are accepted at any time. Applications which exceed the page limit and incomplete applications will NOT be forwarded to the screening committee for consideration.

All application materials must be received on or before February 1, 2010. Awards will be announced in March 2010.

More information.

The Reid Book Prize

[Courtesy of H-Law, we have the following announcement for John Phillip Reid Book Award:]

Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best monograph that is not the author’s first book, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The award is given on the recommendation of the Society's John Philip Reid Award Committee.

Nomination Process for 2010:

For the 2010 award, the Committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book that bears a copyright date in 2009. Nominations for the prize should include a curriculum vitae of the author and should be submitted by May 28, 2010 to:

Professor Gerald Leonard
Chair, ASLH Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award
Boston University School of Law
765 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, MA 02215
gleonard@bu.edu

Copies of each nominated book should be mailed to the chair (above) and to each member of the committee:

Professor Michael Les Benedict
Ohio State University
106 Dulles
230 West 17th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210
benedict.3@osu.edu

Professor Susanna Blumenthal
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55455
blume047@umn.edu

Professor Philip Girard
Schulich School of Law
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
CANADA B3H 4H9
Philip.Girard@dal.ca

Professor Reva Siegel
Yale Law School
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520
reva.siegel@yale.edu

Tillman on Originalism and the Annals of Congress

Seth Barrett Tillman has posted Originalism, the Annals of Congress, and the Problem of Constitutional Memory. Here's the abstract:

The Constitution contains several clauses referring to government “offices” and “officers.” The precise phrasing used in the different clauses is similar but textually distinct. In several recent publications, I have that argued that these fine textual distinctions were purposely drafted by Gouverneur Morris (the Committee of Style’s primary draftsperson) and by the other members of the Federal Convention and that they were also meaningful to the Constitution’s intended audience, even if such distinctions usually pass without analysis or even notice by modern commentators. The purpose of this short Article is not to rehash that debate, or even to present a further substantial defense of the ideas already presented on several prior occasions. Instead, the purpose of this Article is to explain one reason why modern scholarship in this area failed to fully engage the Constitution’s text. My answer is a simple one. Modern scholars treats the Annals of Congress as an official record of contemporaneous congressional debate. That was and is a mistake. Nor is it a mistake limited to those scholars researching obscure constitutional word-choice relating to “office” and “officer.” It is a mistake made by the widest body of scholars, left or right or center, researching virtually each and every provision of the original Constitution of 1787 and its antebellum amendments. My topic here is a narrow one, but it has implications for constitutional scholarship generally.

Image credit.

Call for AALS and AHA Guest Posts

If you will be attending the Association of American Law Schools meeting in New Orleans this week or the American Historical Association meeting in San Diego, and you would like to contribute a guest post, please contact me. We had great posts about the American Society for Legal History meeting, and I know that readers would enjoy hearing about these conferences as well.

The Legal History Blog is now on Facebook

You can now get your daily dose of legal history news and scholarship by going to the Legal History Blog page on Facebook. Click here to see all Legal History Blog posts on Facebook. You can comment on a particular post, make a general comment on the Legal History Blog wall, or join a discussion in the discussion forum section of the page.

Visit the Legal History Blog on Facebook and become a fan!

Garrison on Internal Security Law, 1789-1800

Arthur H. Garrison, Garrison Consultants LLC, has posted The Internal Security Acts of 1798: The Founding Generation and the Judiciary During America's First National Security Crisis, which appeared in the Journal of Supreme Court History 34 (February 2009); 1-27. It is an illustrated study of the Alien and Sedition Act and the resulting trials between 1798 and 1800.

On the air in Illinois

Readers in Illinois and thereabouts can find me on the air on Tuesday morning, Jan. 5, at 11 am Central time on Illinois Public Radio's Focus 580 with David Inges (AM). The topic is my book Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey. I'm told that the signal reaches Chicago and Indianapolis as well as two-thirds of Illinois and half of Indiana. This is a live call-in show, so give me a call on the air!

O'Malley on Imagining Insurance: Risk, Thirft and Life Insurance in Britain

Imagining Insurance: Risk, Thrift and Life Insurance in Britain has just been posted by Pat O'Malley, University of Sydney - Faculty of Law. It appeared in EMBRACING RISK, T. Baker, J. Simon, eds. (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Here's the abstract:

The genealogy of risk is closely linked with the development of insurance, which in turn is linked to changes in the forms of political liberalism. This paper examines shifts in this triangular relationship from the early 19th century to the present, and argues that risk has changed its forms and functions in ways that reflect its movement to centre stage at the intersection of capital and political governance.

Adventures in Book Collecting: Who Owned Kerr's Hawkins?

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr reports on a recent acquisition, an edition of the first volume of Hawkins's Crown Pleas, and offers some speculations on its provenance.

Update: on the significance of Dublin editions for American lawyers, see Daniel J. Hulsebosch, "An Empire of Law: Chancellor Kent and the Revolution in Books in the Early Republic," Alabama Law Review 60 (2009): 337 ff., which also appears as an SSRN paper, here.

Lears on TR, Biskupic on Scalia, and more in the book reviews

"In Rebirth of a Nation, Jackson Lears treats as tragedy what Hofstadter viewed as farce," Christopher Benfey writes in a review of Lears' Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 in the January 14 New York Review of Books. Lears considers Theodore Roosevelt

a far more sinister figure than he appears in Hoftstadter's lenient and occasionally affectionate assessment. Lears explicitly attacks Hofstadter, among the most influential American interpreters of the post–Civil War decades, for "writing the history of winners." Lears, a professor of history at Rutgers and the editor of the journal Raritan, has written incisively about the period before. In his landmark study No Place of Grace (1981), he examined what he called "antimodern" traits during the Gilded Age: the tendency in such developments as the Arts and Crafts movement and Henry Adams's embrace of medieval France to adopt cultural values from an earlier and seemingly more "authentic" time and place....

His new book draws on kindred concerns, with a more indignant edge regarding the sufferings of ordinary people. In his view, what he calls the "Age of Roosevelt," with all its collective fantasies of regeneration and national greatness, was conspicuous for its losers: blacks, Indians, immigrants, workers, and victims of American military adventures abroad. If Hofstadter contrasted Roosevelt with Hitler and Mussolini, with some confidence that "it can't happen here," Lears has in mind a more immediate comparison with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and the ways in which the "war on terrorism" has "revived all the old, destructive fantasies—the belief in America's capacity to save the world; the faith in the revitalizing powers of combat; the cult of manly toughness in foreign policy."

Continue reading here (subscription required).

Jeffrey Rosen writes in the New York Times that "it’s hard to write a fair-minded biography of such a polarizing figure" as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, "but that’s what Joan Biskupic has done" with AMERICAN ORIGINAL: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

By letting Scalia describe himself in his own words, Biskupic offers a profile of a man who, at the age of 73, sometimes appears smug and self-satisfied — adjectives he has used to describe critics of using torture in the war on terror — but not especially self-aware. Scalia thinks of himself as a pleasant fellow, and Biskupic reports that he was dumbfounded when Jon Stewart, in response to a Daily Show guest who suggested that John Roberts was nicer than Scalia, replied, “Aren’t we all nicer than Scalia?”

Read the rest here.

Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew is "as complete and thorough as such a history may be and as engrossing as any spy novel," writes Tim Rutten in this week's Los Angeles Times.

CHURCHILL by Paul Johnson is "a slim but worshipful new biography," writes James Mann in the Washington Post. Also in the Post, Susie Linfield offers critical reviews of WORSE THAN WAR: Genocide, Eliminationism, And the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and STRIPPING BARE THE BODY: Politics Violence War by Mark Danner.

Finally, BEYOND VIETNAM The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990 By Robert Surbrug Jr. is reviewed in the Boston Globe.