The Lincoln Record Society's Magna Carta Conference

[Here is the provisional program for the Lincoln Record Society's Magna Carta Conference, to be held April 7-9, 2015, at the University of Lincoln.]

Tuesday, 7 April (afternoon)
Early career researchers sessions

• Sophie Ambler (University of East Anglia), ‘Who Witnessed Magna Carta?’

• Will Eves (University of St. Andrews), ‘Royal Justice in the Years Preceding Magna Carta: Actions of Mort D'Ancestor before King John, 1199-1216’

• Katherine Har (University of Oxford), ‘Navigating the royal administration of justice in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England’

• Joshua Hey (University of St. Andrews), ‘A Comparison of the Oaths in Magna Carta’

• Felicity Hill (University of East Anglia), ‘Magna Carta and Pastoral Care’

• James Richardson (University of York), ‘Ecclesiastical liberty and church reform: bishops and their dioceses in the reign of Edward I’

Wednesday, 8 April (all day).
A keynote address by David Carpenter and the following speakers:

• Dauvit Broun (University of Glasgow), ‘Scotland’s Magna Carta?’

• David Crook (University of Nottingham / Lincoln Record Society), ‘Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, 1215-17’

• Philippa Hoskin (University of Lincoln), ‘Magna Carta, episcopal rights and the 1250s ‘

• Helen Lacey (University of Oxford), ‘Invocations of Magna Carta in the Later Middle Ages’

• Frédérique Lachaud (Universite de Lorrainé, Metz), ‘Limiting the king’s powers by law and counsel: Magna Carta in the context of political theory (c. 1150-c. 1215)’

• Jessica Nelson (The National Archives), ‘Anglo-Scots relations in the Age of Magna Carta’

• Louise Wilkinson (Christ Church University, Canterbury), ‘Lincolnshire Women in the Age of Magna Carta’

Evening: Evensong with lecture in Langton by Wragby church, birthplace of Archbishop Stephen Langton, one of the chief architects of Magna Carta.  Formal dinner in Lincoln Cathedral (lecture by Lord Patrick Cormack, Chairman of the Historic Lincoln Trust, and medieval music from Lincoln Waits)

Thursday, 8 April (morning)
Events TBC but will include a visit to Lincoln Cathedral Library, a visit to Lincoln Castle to view Lincoln’s copy of Magna Carta, and a walking tour of uphill Lincoln.

Gudridge on Young, "How Do You Measure a Constitutional Moment?"

Over at JOTWELL, Pat Gudridge (University of Miami School of Law) has shined a spotlight on a student Note by Daniel Taylor Young, titled, "How Do You Measure a Constitutional Moment? Using Algorithmic Topic Modeling To Evaluate Bruce Ackerman’s Theory of Constitutional Change," which appeared in Volume 122 of the Yale Law Journal (2013). Here's the abstract:

Bruce Ackerman argues that major shifts in constitutional law can occur outside the Article V amendment process when there are unusually high levels of sustained popular attention to questions of constitutional significance.  This Note develops a new empirical strategy to evaluate this claim using the debate over ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as its test case.  The Note applies a statistical process known as unsupervised topic modeling to a dataset containing over 19,000 pages of text from U.S. newspapers published between 1866 and 1884.  This innovative methodological technique illuminates the structure of constitutional discourse during this period. The Note finds empirical support for the notion that the salience of constitutional issues was high throughout the ratification debate and then gradually declined as the country returned to a period of normal politics. These findings buttress Ackerman’s cyclic theory of constitutional change at one of its more vulnerable points.

And here's a snippet of Gudridge's essay:

“[F]or all the millions of words and thousands of newspaper articles this Note analyzes,” Mr. Young concedes, “this is a rather modest conclusion.” “[T]here is nothing surprising about the fact that the media was paying attention to the passage of major constitutional amendments in the aftermath of a devastating civil war.” (P. 2053.) It’s not Young’s bottom line, however, that marks his effort as important. “[M]illions of words and thousands of newspaper articles”—no law student reads this much! How did he do that?

“Algorithmic topic modeling,” his Note’s title tersely declares. Forty pages plus (out of 54 total) admirably explain what this involves. There is also an elegant technical appendix. Each newspaper front page from the period (all accessible on line) is treated as a separate document and run through optical character recognition software to identify words as words. The documents are computer-converted to brute lists stripped of all original interior organization, so-called common words deleted; the remaining identified words are counted in cases of repetition within each of the documents. The quantified word lists are statistically analyzed (more software) as word distributions, compared with each other, and the most common clusters of words across the full set of documents extracted. These clusters provide the ultimate working material for purposes of Young’s discussion. Texts become data.

I'm curious as to what historians think about this kind of analysis. Thoughts from readers?

New Release: Moore on The Court of Appeal for Ontario

New from the University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society: The Court of Appeal for Ontario: Defining the Right of Appeal in Canada, 1792-2013 (2014), by Christopher Moore. A description from the Press:

In Christopher Moore’s lively and engaging history of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, he traces the evolution of one of Canada’s most influential courts from its origins as a branch of the lieutenant governor’s executive council to the post-Charter years of cutting-edge jurisprudence and national influence.

Discussing the issues, personalities, and politics which have shaped Ontario’s highest court, The Court of Appeal for Ontario offers appreciations of key figures in Canada’s legal and political history – including John Beverly Robinson, Oliver Mowat, Bora Laskin, and Bertha Wilson – and a serious examination of what the right of appeal means and how it has been interpreted by Canadians over the last two hundred years. The first comprehensive history of the Ontario Court of Appeal, Moore’s book is the definitive and eminently readable account of the court that has been called everything from a bulwark against tyranny to murderer’s row.

Reviewers say:

“[Christopher Moore] has written a work that captures not just the facts and chronology, but also the character and personality of this marvellous, beloved institution.”
-- The Honourable Warren K. Winkler, QC, Former Chief Justice of Ontario

“Christopher Moore’s book is lively and engaging. It is a worthy and significant scholarly contribution to Canadian (and, of course, Ontario) legal history.”
-- Lorne Sossin, Dean, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Hat tip: Canadian Legal History Blog

Sunday Book Roundup

Nell Irving Painter has a review in The New York Times of William Wells Brown: An African American Life by Ezra Greenspan (Norton & Co.). 

"Greenspan, an English professor at Southern Methodist University, has written a highly sophisticated biography that appreciates Brown’s many and varied forms of self-expression. This deep and wide depiction of Brown within his several contexts rests upon a patchwork of sources, American and European — for Brown, despite his many books, left no archive. 

The child who would be William Wells Brown was born enslaved in Kentucky, in about 1814, the son of his owner’s cousin. In St. Louis, given the job of tending a young charge also called William, his name was changed to Sandford with the carelessness characteristic of slave naming. As Sandford he worked in his owner’s medical office and on the Mississippi River’s ships and docks. After several unsuccessful attempts at escape, one with his mother, he finally fled St. Louis at about age 19. He retook his own name William and added Wells Brown in honor of the Quaker who had rescued him from starving and freezing in Ohio."

This week Nicholas R. Parrillo's Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940 (Yale University Press) is reviewed alongside Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession (Doubleday) and Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Force (PublicAffairs).

You can read about Michael A. Ross's latest, Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Oxford University Press) in The New York Times, in a double book review with Gary Krist's Empire of Sin (Crown) in The Wall Street Journal, and there's even a short YouTube piece from Oxford University Press about Ross's book. From the NY Times,

"The police chief put his top black detective, John Baptiste Jourdain, on the case. Jourdain, the son of a white Creole father and free black mother, had already left a historical footprint. In 1864 he was among some 1,000 Afro-Creoles who signed a petition asking Lincoln to extend the vote to the free blacks of Louisiana. In 1867 he testified before a Congressional committee about bloody riots of the previous year, when officers from New Orleans’s police force, then still all-white, helped a mob attack a biracial state convention.

Jourdain, Mr. Ross writes, had studied investigative techniques originating in France, including deductive reasoning and the use of disguises, which he adopted during the Digby investigation. He interacted easily with whites involved in the case, including Thomas Digby, Mollie’s father, who repeatedly welcomed him into the family home, Mr. Ross relates. “We think of the Irish and African-Americans as being at one another’s throats, and yet here the interactions were all quite respectful,” the historian said."

The Nation asks "How did 'one person, one vote' become the rule for statehouses across the country?" in a review of J. Douglas Smith's On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The Nation also has a recent review of several new works on capitalism and slavery including Sven Beckert's The Monied Metropolis (Cambridge), Christine Desan's Making Money (Oxford), Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic), Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton (Knopf), Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams (Harvard), and the edited volume, The Cambridge History of Capitalism.

And, lastly, H-Net has added a couple reviews of note, including a review of Cheryl Janifer LaRoche's Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Univ. of Ill. Press) and a review of Glenn Tatsuya Mitoma's Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power (Univ. of Penn. Press).

Weekend Roundup

• Canadian legal historians are justifiably proud of Philip Girard for his beautifully crafted and insightful plenary address at last week's meeting of the ASLH. 

Philip Girard (credit)

• Writing for JOTWELL's Administrative Law Section, Linda Jellum has posted an appreciative review of Nicholas Parrillo's Against the Profit Motive. 

• From Slate's The Vault: Edgar Allen Poe's 1842 bankruptcy petition.

• The Library of Congress's "Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor" exhibition is now open.  Another report, featuring the Law Library of Congress's extraordinary curator of rare books, Nathan Dorn.  And also Princess Anne.

• The Junto's Jessica Parr on creating a public history program. 

• The online edition of the Savannah Morning News has recently carried an interview of Jonathan Bryant, Georgia Southern University, about his forthcoming book Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope, to be published next summer by W.W. Norton & Company.  Professor Bryant is to deliver the Harvest Lecture at Savannah's Davenport House Museum on Monday, November 17.

• Over at Inside Higher Ed, Ph.D. candidate Emily VanBuren (Northwestern University) has posted some tips for making archival research more efficient.

• In the wake of the disclosure that the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, had as many as 40 wives, the New York Times asked LHB guest blogger Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania) to weigh in on the Church's efforts at transparency. (Hat tip: @PennHistory)

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: How to finish a humanities dissertation in six years or less.

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

ASLH's Sutherland Prize to Walker

[Via H-Law, we have the following news of the ASLH’s Sutherland Prize, announced last week at the Society’s annual meeting.]

The Sutherland Prize, named in honor of the late Donald W. Sutherland, a distinguished historian of the law of medieval England and a mentor of many students, is awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Sutherland Prize Committee, to the person or persons who wrote the best article on English legal history published in the previous year. This year's committee, which was composed of Dan Klerman, James Oldham, and Joshua Tate, unanimously chose as the winner, Garthine Walker, "Rape, Acquittal and Culpability in Popular Crime Reports in England, c. 1670-c1750," Past & Present, 220:115-142.

Garthine Walker's article explores rape prosecutions in early modern England through reports in the popular press.  The article's findings upend much of the conventional wisdom about the relationship between law and society in the context of rape prosecutions.  Accounts in newspapers and similar sources do not generally doubt the veracity of the victim's account.  They do not blame the victim for provoking the crime, nor do they suggest that she "asked for it" or enjoyed it.  Low conviction rates, therefore, cannot be explained as reflecting misogynistic attitudes towards women or societal refusal to believe women's testimony.  This article thus encourages legal historians to rethink rape law so as to understand why legal standards and popular attitudes diverged.

Cromwell Article Prize and Research Awards

Via H-Law, we have news of two other awards given by the Cromwell Foundation, after consultation with the American Society for Legal History, at last week’s annual meeting of the ASLH. The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation was established in 1930 to promote and encourage scholarship in legal history, particularly in the colonial and early national periods of the United States

The 2014 Cromwell Article Prize went to Nicholas Parrillo, Leviathan and Interpretive Revolution: The Administrative State, the Judiciary, and the Rise of Legislative History, 1890-1950, which appeared in volume 123 of the Yale Law Journal, pages 266-411. 

The Cromwell Foundation also awards Research Fellowships.  The number of awards to be made, and their amounts, is at the discretion of the Foundation. In the past several years, the trustees of the Foundation have made from three to eight awards, in amounts up to $5,000. Preference is given to scholars at the early stages of their careers. The Committee for Research Fellowships and Awards of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) reviews the applications and makes recommendations to the Foundation.

The 2014 recipients (and research topics) are:

John M. Collins, "The Ghost of Thomas of Lancaster: Wartime in the American Revolution"

Scott De Orio, "Deviant Subjects: Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Citizenship in Modern America"

Helen Dewar, "Contested Delegations: Subjects, Sovereignty and Law in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663"

Nancy O. Gallman, "American Constitutions: Life, Liberty, and Property in Colonial East Florida"

Jane C. Manners, "'Infinitely Dangerous to the Revenue of the United States': The Great New York Fire of 1835 and the Ethics of Disaster Relief in Jacksonian America"

Emily Margolis, "'Punishment They So Richly Deserved': Women, Property, and Patriarchy in the Early Antebellum South"

Samanthis Q. Smalls, "Slaves, Jails, and the Question of Ownership"

Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Minoff

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awarded this year's Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Elisa Martia Alvarez Minoff (University of South Florida, St. Petersburg) for “Free to Move? The Law and Politics of Internal Migration in Twentieth-Century America.” Professor Minoff completed her dissertation at Harvard University, under the direction of Lizabeth Cohen.

Via H-Law, here's the official citation:

Elisa Martia Alvarez Minoff’s “Free to Move? The Law and Politics of Internal Migration in Twentieth-Century America” reframes our understanding of the rise of the American social welfare state.  Mining a stunning array of archival sources, Minoff makes a compelling case that a critical, yet underappreciated factor in the development of the New Deal state was the effort to deal with the movement of people across jurisdictional boundaries within the United States. Through exhaustive, creative research and elegant prose, she shows how social welfare advocates from the 1930s to the 1970s called upon federal political and legal institutions to take increased responsibility for protecting the rights of American migrants. Minoff presents compelling, fine-grained portraits of the reformers who led the struggle to protect migrants as well as many of the migrants themselves, demonstrating that the expansion of federal authority in the middle decades of the twentieth century was much more than an abstract solution to the limitations of local and state-level institutions. That federal expansion was also a response to millions of people who left home in search of new opportunities. The resulting policy and doctrinal changes, although never matching the most ambitious visions of these reform advocates, constitute a key component of the contemporary welfare state and the basis for a new, national conception of citizenship.

The dissertation is available online, here.

The members of this year's Cromwell Dissertation Prize Committee were:

John D. Gordan, III, Chair
Christian G. Fritz (University of New Mexico School of Law), Chair
Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago Law School)
Catharine MacMillan (University of Reading)
Christopher W. Schmidt (Chicago-Kent College of Law)

 Congratulations to Professor Minoff!

Sawyer on English Law in Colonial Maryland

Jeffrey K. Sawyer, University of Baltimore School of Law, has posted, in two parts “The Rhetoric and Reality of English Law in Colonial Maryland.”  Part 1 - 1632-1689, appears in the Maryland Historical Magazine 108 (Winter 2013): 392-409:

The rule of English law in the English-speaking colonial world is at once obvious and puzzling. Along with language, the law anchored the Englishness of life in colonial America, At the same time, warring states and rival investors used law and diplomacy as weapons in their arsenals of global competition, and so the law of nations provided an unstable and frequently contested framework for exploration and settlement. The governance of struggling Atlantic settlements (especially before 1660) rose, fell, and was reconstructed with the various fortunes of each. In these early settlements there was much law-making, but law was perhaps negotiated as often as it was applied; local officials frequently adjusted English rules to local circumstances. The more historians investigate this world, the harder it is to be sure, exactly, how colonial law worked.

This article examines why a perennial contest over the precise authority of English law was so central to the rule of law in early Maryland. Two new perspectives will help further this inquiry, which has long interested colonial historians generally and historians of Maryland in particular. The first is a heightened appreciation of the fact that early American legal history unfolded in distinct phases. The second is a recognition that the contest over English law in the colonies developed along different but overlapping dimensions, a political or rhetorical dimension and an operational dimension. This latter world of law was the reality of lawsuits, debt collection, inheritance, criminal prosecutions, judgments, and so on.

Part 2, 1689-1732, appears in the Maryland Historical Magazine 109 (Spring 2014): 81-95:

The first half of this essay, published in MdHM, 108 (2013): 393-409, explored the status of English law in colonial Maryland from the colony's beginnings to 1689. Despite heated rhetoric to the contrary, the central issue of contention for Marylanders was not the extension of specific rules of English law, but whether the proprietor and his judicial appointees should have the last word on the subject. Political flare-ups in the legislature notwithstanding, a stable legal reality developed in practice. Maryland law ruled in all legal proceedings. English law remained available in reserve for use as appropriate where Maryland law was silent. This practical solution prevailed against the impractical alternative sometimes advocated by the Lower House of the legislature, namely, requiring judges, by their oath of office, to apply English rules in any case where Maryland law was silent. The issue remained a highly emotional one, however, as English law continued to symbolize liberty as strongly as it had before, and any abridgment of it came even more strongly to epitomize tyranny during Maryland's years as a royal colony and during the restored proprietorship of Charles Calvert, the Fifth Baron of Baltimore. The resolution of the conflict was a subtle compromise that accommodated political realities as well as the intricacies of early Maryland law.

Grisinger Reviews "Teaching Legal History"

Over at Jotwell, Joanna Grisinger, Northwestern, has posted Bringing History into the Law School Classroom, a review of Teaching Legal History: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Robert M. Jarvis (Wildy & Sons, 2014), to which I contributed.

The Schiller Backlist

Reuel Schiller

Reuel Schiller, Hastings Law, has posted some of his backlist on SSRN.  If you haven’t been reading Professor Schiller, here’s a chance to catch up.

An Unexpected Antagonist: Courts, Deregulation, and Conservative Judicial Ideology, 1980-94, in Making Legal History Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson, edited by Daniel J. Hulsebosch and R.B. Bernstein (New York University Press, 2013), 264-92

Group Rights to Individual Liberties: Post-War Labor Law, Liberalism, and the Waning Of Union Strength, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 20 (1999): 1-73

The Strawhorsemen of the Apocalypse: Relativism and the Historian as Expert Witness, Hastings Law Journal 49 (1998): 1169-77

Reining in the Administrative State: World War II and the Decline of Expert Administration, in Total War and the Law: The American Home Front in World War II, edited by Daniel R. Ernst & Victor Jew (Praeger, 2002), 185-206  Not available for download, but here's the abstract:

This article argues that World War II had a profound effect on the relationship between courts and the administrative state in the United States. Between 1940 and 1950, administrative law changed dramatically. During the 1930s, it allowed administrative agencies to function with a great deal of autonomy. By 1950, the judiciary had asserted considerably more control over the administrative state. There is a direct link between the United States’ involvement in World War II and this change. In particular, three aspects of the wartime experience caused changes in American political culture that, in turn, contributed to this transformation. First, America’s encounter with totalitarianism – both abroad and on the home front – diminished people’s trust in the administrative state, which they began to associate with the unchecked power of fascism. Second, the track record of the wartime agencies – particularly the War Production Board and the Office of Price Administration – did little to assure Americans that administrative power could be used in a manner that was both efficient and consistent with democratic principles. Finally, the prosperity the War created caused one-time advocates of the administrative state to question the value of economic planning and to refocus their attention on curing economic maladjustments through Keynesian fiscal policy rather than through administrative control of economic actors. Thus, by the end of the War there were few advocates of extreme administrative autonomy left. Ideological, political, and economic changes dictated that the judiciary be put firmly in control of the administrative state.

Singing the 'Right-to-Work Blues': The Politics of Race in the Campaign for 'Voluntary Unionism' in Post-War California, in The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein & Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (University of Pennsylvania Press 2012)

This article tells the story of the failed attempt to pass a right-to-work proposition in California in 1958. In particular, it shows how right-to-work activists attempted to persuade African Americans to vote in favor of the proposition by portraying it as a fair employment practices measure. Because many California labor unions engaged in discriminatory practices, anti-union forces within the state thought they could tap into the hostility that many African Americans felt towards the labor movement. This strategy was unsuccessful. African Americans voted against the right-to-work proposition in overwhelming numbers. Nevertheless, the campaign exacerbated tensions in the tenuous political alliance between labor and the African American community. In the years that followed the proposition’s defeat, these tensions would undermine the political power of the labor movement, the African American community, and the Democratic Party.

ASLH's New Honorary Fellows: António Manuel Hespanha

[Here, via H-Law, is the citation for the Professor António Manuel Hespanha, whose selection as an Honorary Fellow was announced at the recent ASLH meeting.]

António Manuel Hespanha (credit)

Professor António Manuel Hespanha is generally regarded as the leading Portuguese historian of his generation and as a scholar whose work has radically revised the legal, political and cultural history of early modern Europe and of the Portuguese empire in Brazil and China.

António Manuel Hespanha was born in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1945.   He earned a law degree from the University of Coimbra in 1967 and a Ph.D. in political, legal and constitutional history from the New University of Lisbon in 1987.  He recently retired from the New University of Lisbon Law School as Professor, Chairman of the Scientific Board, President of the Academic Assembly, and Director of the Center for Studies on Law in Society. He is also Honorary Research Fellow of the Institute for Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. In the course of his academic career, Hespanha has held several different positions in Portuguese academia: he first taught at the Coimbra University Law School, the University of Lisbon Law School, and – unusually for a European academic—was also a faculty member in the History Department of the New University of Lisbon. He has served as a visiting professor in the history of law at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Yale University, and the University of Macao, among other places.

ASLH's New Honorary Fellows: Mary Frances Berry

Mary Frances Berry (credit)

[Here, via H-Law, is the citation for the Professor Mary Frances Berry, whose selection as an Honorary Fellow was announced at the recent ASLH meeting.  Penn's press releases are here and here.]

Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, is a leading historian of race, gender and the Constitution in the United States.  She is also a public intellectual known both for her archival finds and her ability to marshal them on behalf of public policy. Professor Berry is the author of ten books, with an eleventh in press.  Even her earliest work has proven unusually influential.
  Mary Frances received her B.A. and M.A. from Howard and her Ph.D. and J.D. from Michigan. Her career has included sojourns in history departments and law schools; academic administration, including a stint as Chancellor of the University of Colorado, Boulder; and public service. She was Assistant Secretary for Education at HEW during the Carter Administration.  During the Clinton and Bush II Administrations, she chaired the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, of which she was a member for a quarter-century.  She has been President of the Organization of American Historians and Vice President of the American Historical Association.  She is the recipient of 34 honorary doctoral degrees from colleges and universities.

We could go on about her scholarship, but we limit ourselves here to saying that the committee was especially taken by her My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (2005), which the Journal of American History likened to a “a paradigm shaping archaeological discovery,” and one which was “destined to become a seminal work in African American history.”  Like the rest of her scholarship, writes one reviewer, it “is beautifully written, almost novelistic, and conveys the emotional dimensions of the tragedy of the ex-slaves’ fate.”  The book uncovers the role of Callie House, founder of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association.  Through grass roots organizing, and despite constant harassment from the federal government, which imprisoned her, and resistance from black elites, which wanted no part of her crusade, House created the reparations movement. She was erased from history until Mary Frances found her.  Even then, Mary Frances could find “no one who admitted to being related to her,” and in the book’s final chapter, she writes movingly of repeatedly tramping the grounds of Mt. Ararat Cemetery in Nashville with her nephew, “vainly seeking a marker for Callie House.”

Mary Frances’s scholarship and activism is powerfully and cheerfully courageous. “When conservative commentators criticized me for complaining when presidents and other officials refused to enforce civil rights law,” she recounted in her history of the Civil Rights Commission, “I recalled what my best friend, Minerva Hawkins, always said, ‘Remember, Mary Frances, when you’re in the limelight you make a good target.’”  After her 1984 arrest in front of the South African Embassy for protesting apartheid, reporters asked Mary Frances why she had braved the conservative mood of the American people. She told them “if Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down on the bus in Montgomery, she’d still be standing up.  But she didn’t take a poll.  She knew what was necessary to be done, and she did it.  So, I didn’t take any polls either.”  We salute this remarkable historian, writer and activist.

ASLH's New Honorary Fellows: Charles Donahue

[Here, via H-Law, is the citation for the Professor Charles Donahue, whose selection as an Honorary Fellow was announced at the recent ASLH meeting.]

The American Society for Legal History is pleased to elect Professor Charles Donahue, Jr., as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Charles Donahue (Credit: Harvard Magazine)

Professor Donahue is the Paul A. Freund Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  He received an A.B. in Classics and English from Harvard University in 1962 and the LL.B. from Yale University in 1965.  Prior to joining the Harvard Law School faculty, he was a member of the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School.  He is a member of the American Law Institute, former Literary Director and Vice-President of the Ames Foundation, former Vice-President and Honorary Treasurer for the U.S.A. of the Selden Society, and, of course, former President of the American Society for Legal History.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Medieval Academy of America.  In 2011 the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his scholarship.

Professor Donahue is one of the leading medieval legal historians working today.  He is widely admired and respected for the range of his scholarship, the depth of his knowledge, and his generosity toward other scholars both young and established.

His scholarship ranges widely across medieval law and history.  He has examined the place of human rights in Roman law and the roles of women in medieval litigation, as well as fundamental questions of English common law and more.  With his prodigious breadth of knowledge, he has made pioneering contributions in every area he has addressed.  But throughout his scholarly travels, he has always returned to his abiding interest, medieval canon law.

Professor Donahue has devoted much of his career to exploring the question, “What Causes Fundamental Legal Ideas?"–a question he first posed in the title of an article on marital property in England and France in the thirteenth century in the Michigan Law Review in 1979.  He has led the way in extending Roman and canon law scholarship to include the impact of Roman and canon law in real world settings.  In his most sustained exploration of the question, he asked whether the canon law of marriage and marital property was monolithic or whether it was shaped by local needs and assumptions.  To answer, he dug deeply into the records of ecclesiastical courts in England and across western Europe.  His investigations culminated in what truly and literally can be described as his magnum opus–Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages:  Arguments About Marriage in Five Courts, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

The book is a tour de force of comparative legal history.  Professor Donahue moves beyond the canonical rules governing the formation and dissolution of marriage and studies how the rules were applied.  With his profound knowledge of canon law and ecclesiastical court practices, he demonstrates that within the common application of the general canon law of marriage, there were significant differences among courts in the types of cases heard and their outcomes.  He discerns differences in practice with such a fine eye that, as one reviewer remarked, he “enables us to grasp the world views or mentalités of the men and women who brought proceedings” before the courts.  In other words, he sees the people in the records.

That Professor Donahue could see the people in the records so clearly is in no small measure due to his intimate familiarity with archival court records that he himself translated, edited, and published.  Translating and editing court records, law reports, legal treatises, and the like, has been a staple of scholarship in medieval legal history to a degree unmatched by legal historians of any other period.  Professor Donahue is the preeminent modern exemplar of this tradition.

His contributions in this area have been many, significant, and selfless.  He has edited or co-edited major volumes for both the Selden Society and the Ames Foundation.  Indeed, whether or not he was editor, every volume published by the Ames Foundation in the last twenty-five benefitted from his advice, counsel, and often direct supervision as Literary Director of the Foundation.  He has had a hand–often both hands–in making available to fellow students of the field a large swath of the sources on which their own scholarship rests.

In sum, Professor Donahue has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.  As a scholar we admire, whose work we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand, we are pleased and honored to welcome him as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Hoeflich on Judge Lecompte's Court

M. H. Hoeflich, Kansas Law, has published In Judge Lecompte’s Court, University of Kansas Law Review 62 (2014): 1169-1225.  It commences:

Today, few remember Judge Samuel Dexter Lecompte except as a committed partisan of the proslavery party in territorial Kansas who used his office to further his party’s political goals.  But, in fact, Judge Lecompte, the first chief justice of the Kansas Territorial Supreme Court was a sophisticated jurist instrumental in creating the Kansas legal system.  His court was the first outpost of justice in a frontier settlement beset by sectarian strife. The time has clearly come for a reconsideration of the man and the legal structures he helped create.

Cromwell Book Prize to Pitts

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards annually a $5,000 book prize for excellence in scholarship in the field of American Legal History by a junior scholar.  The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty not yet tenured.  The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference.  The prize is limited to a first book, wholly or primarily written while the author was untenured.  The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

At the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, the 2014 Cromwell Book Prize was awarded to Yvonne Pitts, Purdue University, for Family, Law, and Inheritance in America:  A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky (Cambridge University Press).  Here, courtesy of H-Law, is the citation:

Yvonne Pitts' Family, Law, and Inheritance in America:  A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky uses inheritance law to reveal patterns in law and society, legal history, and women's and gender history.  By combining intensive research in local wills and appellate cases from Kentucky over the course of a century, Pitts combines a close reading of black-letter law with a subtle appreciation of the changing cultural contexts of inheritance in a febrile era of emancipation, rapid economic change, and the expansion of women's roles in politics and society.  By focusing on inheritance cases that center on personal problems and family disputes, Pitts links them to structural changes in law and society.  Her deep research into wills tracks how plain people understood the process of acquiring wealth and the even more problematic process of distributing it, and demonstrates how legal actors (lawyers, judges, courts and legal rules) both channeled individuals' interactions with the law and were in turn changed by those people. In particular, Pitts' focus on the issues of testamentary capacity and free will of individuals reveal the depth and continuity of gender equality in the legal culture, even after rights were granted to women.

ASLH Panel Report: Ask Me Anything (about the Job Market)

[Many, many thanks to Jeff Perry, PhD Candidate and Bilsland Fellow in Purdue University’s Department of History, for this report on the “Ask Me Anything: The Job Market” panel at the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.]

Last Friday afternoon a decent-sized contingent of law and history graduate students, recent Ph.Ds/JDs, and other job-seekers gathered for advice on succeeding in the always competitive academic job market.  The informal panel featured professors with a variety of job experiences.  Professors Sarah Barringer Gordon and Hendrik Hartog provided valuable insight to both sides of the job-hunt, while Assistant Professor Tom McSweeney, and Visiting Assistant Professor Clara Altman brought their recent job-hunting experiences to the table.  The panelists, along with comments and questions from the audience, touched on a variety of issues during the hour-long session.  In the end, those in attendance not only acquired some guidance for their job-hunting ventures, but a greater awareness that their trek is not a solitary one.

A common theme among the panelists' opening remarks was their insistence that job candidates be themselves throughout the application process.  Sarah Gordon claimed that, rather than padding their teaching fields with a variety of classes, candidates must interrogate themselves in order to determine what they really want to teach.  You may just find yourself assigned the course you proposed, so make sure you are both qualified and truly willing to devote time to the topic. Hendrik Hartog encouraged job-seekers to find "sound bites" highlighting their research and teaching credentials in order to better sell themselves.   Tom McSweeney noted, too, that one should always be aware of their audience.  What kind of job are you applying for?  Most likely you will be talking or writing to a group of non-specialists, so simplification in job talks and cover letters is a must.  All agreed that the job talk is extremely important.  Not only should the talk be something that can sustain interest, it can be constructed and delivered in such a way so as to draw out particular responses and questions.  Do not summarize your dissertation. Think of it instead as a demonstration of your teaching ability.

Clara Altman discussed the benefits and drawbacks of being a Visiting Assistant Professor, and addressed the difficulties legal historians face on the history market.  Although most of us seek tenure-track appointments, Altman reminded the audience that a VAP assignment can allow you to develop a larger teaching portfolio and secure a book contract before facing the pressures of the tenure clock.  VAP positions are not for everyone. Any number of personal and professional particularities shapes one's suitability for a temporary position. Moreover, the experience largely depends on the institution, as VAPs' departmental responsibilities, teaching loads, salaries, and medical benefits vary across the board.  Altman also noted some common difficulties for legal historians seeking appointments in history departments.  Especially for JDs, it can be hard to convince the search committee that their institution in fact needs a legal historian, that the field has a much broader scope than the technicalities of law, and that one's research can interest undergraduates.  The only real answer for these obstacles is to sell yourself.  If you research slave law in the Old South, for instance, assure the committee that you can teach a broader course on African Americans and slavery in early America.   

The panel also fielded questions over the importance of publications (critical, especially peer-reviewed for history departments), transcripts (depends on the job and search committee), teaching experience (get more of it), and the importance of having a plan B.  Whether you fall back on a job at a law firm, secure a post-doc, or wait tables, it is important to identify what you need to make progress on the first book.  A law-firm gig is not going to provide much time for research and writing-and neither would waiting tables-so you must be willing to make adjustments.  Moreover, Hartog encouraged us to think about ways to pursue a scholarly career outside of the traditional tenure-track route.  All agreed that adjunct positions should be avoided when possible.

And although Hartog began on an unfortunately realistic sour note, claiming that the market is at best chaotic but "mostly terrible," he and the other panelists concluded that things-especially in the history field-may be turning for the better.   They also stressed that job-hunting is a process, one that often entails more than one year on the market.  Gordon reassured anxious law students that most law schools, like history departments, will not punish you for previous forays into the market.  Get yourself out there and test the waters.  Hartog also offered that an on-campus interview, no matter the outcome, should be viewed as a victory.  A search committee read your work, and chose you out of however many stacks of relevant candidates.  The final appointment is often politics all the way down. Good luck. 

Call for Nominations: ASLH Honorary Fellows

[We have the following announcement.]

The ASLH Honors Committee invites members of the Society to submit the names of persons appropriate for election as Honorary Fellows.  Eligible nominees include all those who should be celebrated for their scholarship in legal history and contribution to the field, whatever their affiliation and wherever in the world they are situated.    In the words of the Society's website, “[e]lection as an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History is the highest honor the Society can confer.  It recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.  Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand.”

Names should be accompanied by brief (c. 200 word) statements of support.  Nominations by members should be submitted confidentially to the Chair of the Honors Committee, Laura Kalman,kalman@history.ucsb.edu, no later than December 15.

The Honors Committee will consider all member nominations, along with those made by committee members.  After deliberating, the committee will prepare and submit up to three fully documented recommendations for approval by the Board of Directors during the summer months.  Elected fellows will be inducted at the Society's annual meeting.

Constance Backhouse
Robert Gordon
Kenneth Ledford
Bruce Mann
Laura Kalman, Chair

Surrency Prize to Fraser & Caestecker, "Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust"

Continuing our announcements of the winners of the ASLH's annual prizes and awards, this year's Surrency Prize went to David Fraser (University of Knottingham) and Frank Caestecker (Ghent University) for “Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust,” which appeared in Volume 31 of the Law and History Review (2013).

About the award:

The Surrency Prize, named in honor of Erwin C. Surrency, a founding member and first president of the Society and for many years the editor of its former publication, the American Journal of Legal History, is awarded annually for the best article published in the Society’s journal, the Law and History Review, in the previous year.

Via H-Law, we have the official citation: 

Drawing upon archives in Belgium, Britain, France, and Germany, the authors unite legal and policy analysis focused on the continuing problem of statelessness with an emergent and vital historiography that examines how Jews, especially German Jews, rebuilt their lives in Europe after 1945 to explore the conundrum first noted by Hannah Arendt, that statelessness can be “strangely empowering.”  Occupation forces in Germany and the restored government in liberated Belgium grappled with conundrums such as legal frameworks that rendered German Jews, who had been deprived of German citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and fled to Belgium nonetheless “enemy nationals” as German citizens after National Socialist laws had been revoked as “contrary to law,” (Unrecht).  Fraser and Caestecker’s essay skillfully navigates the rapids of national and international regular and exceptional regulation of citizenship to call into question the consensus that roots citizenship, and thus rights, in a national system of belonging to note the ways that the plight of German Jews “provoked transient concessions from nation-states to human rights” (422) in the name of equity and justice.  Some lawyers proffered emergent international humanitarian law to assume the vocation of assuring that statelessness ceased to be equated with deprivation of individual rights, but the national and international solutions to the conundrum of statelessness after 1945 remained ambivalent, as they remain ambivalent and refractory today.  Fraser and Caestecker illustrate in an exemplary way how legal history speaks to the most contemporary of concerns.

The members of this year's Surrency Prize Committee were:

Kenneth F. Ledford (Case Western University), Co-chair
David Abraham (University of Miami), Co-chair
Maribel Morey (Clemson University)
Elizabeth Kolsky (Villanova University) 

Matthew P. Harrington (University of Montreal)

Congratulations to Professors Fraser and Caestecker!

Old and New Worlds: The Global Challenges of Rural History

[We have the following announcement for the conference "Old and New Worlds: The Global Challenges of Rural History,” to be held in Lisbon, 28-30 January 2016.]

Over the last 500 years, the inter-relations between civilisations and cultures across the globe have had multiple effects on agriculture, property, natural resources and rural societies. They brought about the circulation of people, plants, animals and diseases; transfers of techniques, knowledge, institutions and legal norms; changes in diet habits, land uses and landscapes; extensive appropriation and expropriation of property rights; and changes in produce and factor markets (land, capital, labour) at a global scale.

Research on these topics has been attracting scholars with a variety of backgrounds, from environmental to cultural history, from social to legal history, from economic history to the history of science, among others.

The concern to open up and globalise the research in rural history, both historically and historiographically, draws the guideline for this international conference. It is intended to be a forum where to present new findings and new perspectives on any aspect of those global dynamics, and where to discuss the major theoretical, methodological and historiographical challenges now facing rural history.

This call for panels (open to scholars of all nationalities, disciplinary areas and historical periods) has been extended until 25 November 2014.  See the full CFP and more info on the conference website.  The conference email is lisbon2016rh@gmail.com.

Reid Book Award to Dauber, "The Sympathetic State"

More prize and award news from last week's meeting of the American Society for Legal History: This year's John Phillip Reid Book Award went to Michele Landis Dauber (Stanford Law School) for The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University of Chicago Press).

Michele Landis Dauber (credit)

About the 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 by a mid-career or senior scholar, 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 Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award.

Via H-Law, we have the official citation:

Dauber's book dramatically revises the history of the American welfare state by tracing the practice of federal disaster relief to the founding era and showing how this practice provided the constitutional basis for the Social Security Act of 1935. The book makes a striking intervention in well-worn debates about the New Deal’s novelty by revealing that its legal architects sought not a constitutional revolution, but to incrementally extend the well-established constitutional precedent of disaster relief. Because this precedent was established primarily in Congress, Dauber’s book is also a major case study of legislative constitutionalism in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The Sympathetic State impressively alters – indeed reverses – the conventional account of what is today called “cooperative federalism” by demonstrating that, prior to 1937, there was a stronger consensus for the constitutionality of purely national spending programs than for cooperative federal-state spending programs. Revising how historians write about the Great Depression, Dauber observes that Americans first experienced the financial collapse as numerous local crises. She beautifully reconstructs how New Dealers used nascent social science, visual media, and journalism to knit these into a singular disastrous event, what we now term the Great Depression. Deeply and creatively researched, The Sympathetic State will reframe debate over the American welfare state among advocates and academics alike.

The members of the John Phillip Reid Book Award Committee were:

Sophia Lee, Chair (University of Pennsylvania Law School)
Richard J. Ross (University of Illinois College of Law)
Laura Weinrib (University of Chicago Law School)
Steven Wilf (University of Connecticut Law School)
Nicholas Parrillo (Yale Law School)

For my own admiring thoughts on this book, follow the link.

Congratulations to Professor Dauber!

The Supreme Court of Victoria: A Call for "Input"

And, in keeping with the emerging theme of Antipodean legal history in today's posts, we note a recent call for contributors to "a comprehensive history of the Supreme Court of Victoria [which] is to be published to help celebrate its 175th anniversary on 12 April 2016.  The project team is seeking input from the legal profession and wider community to help make the historic publication as detailed and engaging as possible.  The book will recognise the contribution of the Court to the rule of law and the development of Victoria, and examine the Court in a social, legal and historical context.”

Online Sources on Australasian Legal History

A press release from the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland reports that a grant from the Australian Research Council to the Australasian Legal Information Institute will make possible “a massive expansion of free access online to Australasian legal history through digitisation and data aggregation. The Legal History Libraries on AustLII will become a comprehensive trans-Tasman collection from 1788-1999, including all reported case series and those from colonial newspaper reports, and all Acts enacted, plus key collections of historical Bills, Gazettes, legal commentaries, and Parliamentary reports.”

AustLII‘s press release announcing the ARC's grant is here.

Morris's "Prendergast: Legal Villain?"

Grant Morris, Senior Lecturer in Law, Victoria University of Wellington, has published the judicial biography Prendergast: Legal Villain? with New Zealand’s Victoria University Press:

James Prendergast is the most infamous figure in New Zealand’s legal history, known mainly for his condemnation of the Treaty of Waitangi as “a simple nullity” in 1877. But during his lifetime Prendergast was a highly respected lawyer and judge. He was arguably New Zealand’s dominant legal professional from 1865 to 1899, and his good reputation remained intact until the 1980s, when the Treaty of Waitangi finally returned to the centre of New Zealand political life. The more the Treaty has been celebrated, the more Prendergast has been condemned. Who was this legal villain? Was he really a villain at all?

This comprehensive biography charts Prendergast’s life from his upbringing in the heart of London’s legal world through to his long and eventful reign as New Zealand’s third Chief Justice. On the way it details his ill-fated adventures in colonial Victoria and his rise to prominence in gold-rush Dunedin. It also analyses Prendergast’s pivotal role as Attorney-General during the New Zealand Wars and his controversial part in authorising the invasion of Parihaka. Prendergast explores the man, the lawyer, and the judge. It provides fascinating insights into different parts of the nineteenth-century British Empire and, in particular, colonial Wellington, featuring bitter feuds, ground-breaking judgments, and personal tragedy. This book finally provides the full story behind the name that every New Zealand law student knows.

News of the book launch is here.

Benjamin Hooks National Book Award

The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis is soliciting nominations for its annual National Book Award. A panel of judges representing various disciplines and academic institutions in Memphis awards the annual prize for the book that best furthers understanding of the American Civil Rights Movement and its legacy. An award of $1,000 will be made to the author(s). The recipient(s) of the award will receive an invitation to deliver an address in the Hooks Institute Lecture Series during the 2015-2016 academic year at the University of Memphis. Books must be published in calendar year 2014 to be eligible for the award. The deadline is December 31, 2014. More information, including a list of past winners, is available here.

ASLH Panel Report: Rethinking Southern Legal Orders

[Here is the second panel report from Victoria Saker Woeste, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation.  The first one is here.  Thanks, Professor Woeste!]

The session “Rethinking Southern Legal Orders Before, During and After the Civil War: Controlling Slave Economies, Practicing Confederate Constitutionalism, and Reconstructing Southern Law after Emancipation,” was chaired by Ariela Gross, University of Southern California.  It consisted of three papers and a comment by Cynthia Nicoletti of the University of Virginia.

Justene G. Hill, Princeton University.  Hill's paper was "'A Monstrous Nuisance': Legislative Responses to Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1850-1860" (the paper was read by Ariela Gross in Hill's stead).  Hill's research looks at slaves as actors in the market, particularly as they engaged in illicit trade with whites and hired themselves out, and the fear these practices precipitated among slave owners.  Legislation was proposed to punish whites for their participation in this trade, but the South Carolina legislature could not bring itself to approve corporal punishment for free whites, even to preserve the public safety.  This result suggests that economic imperatives superseded racial castes in importance, inasmuch as lawmakers chose to maintain the status quo despite the "nuisance" these activities caused.

Aaron Hall, UC Berkeley, presented "Not Their Fathers' Constitution: The Centrality of Slavery and the Centralized State in the Confederate Constitutional Order."  This paper examined the Confederate South's relationship to the Union by offering a new understanding of confederate constitutionalism in text and practice.  This new constitutionalism wedded statehood to slavery in an odd kind of "textual kinship." The Confederate framers retained old texts but imbued them with different meanings than the original, to preserve racial control and cotton hegemony.  But much of this meaning was ambiguous and meant that new constitutional questions would unavoidably arise.  "Before the 'rupture' of the Civil War amendments," Hall said, "a new constitutional conflict had already possessed the south":  a government designed to maintain slavery and little else required that its powers be strictly limited and that the governing class be insulated from future populist threats.  He gave as examples the confederate bills of attainder clause, which included protecting property in the form of negro slaves (as did the CSA privileges and immunities clause); severe limits on the CSA Congress's taxing and commerce powers, to keep the single crop economy and the slavery-based agriculture necessary for that economy intact.  The only area where the CSA government had greater powers than the Union was war powers.  Hall argued that this was not a states-rights constitution but a compact for a permanent (and limited) federal government.  Here I wrote to myself:  "really cool insight."  The confederate framers expected their constitution to empower confederate independence from the Union and were confident it would do so; if state courts strayed from this power structure they were marginalized by confederate central government and courts.  The CSA took constitutionalism seriously, reflecting the "urgent constitutional logic" of the need to fight war while protecting slavery and its attendant imperatives "to the bitter end" (even rejecting the idea of emancipating blacks who fought for the CSA).
   
Giuliana Perrone, of the University of California at Berkeley, presented  "Reconstructing Law After Emancipation: A Study of State Courts in the Post Civil War South."  The paper began with a description of three cases testing the legal meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation, decided in 1868.  In one, the Texas Supreme Court decided that Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in the state.  Thus it was a state supreme court that had to determine when emancipation happened and what it meant.  The destruction of slavery also destroyed the legal system of the south, at least for a time.  Emancipation, likened to death by Southerners, transfigured slaves, but southern state supreme courts did not immediately know how to recognize them in their new form.  Her research draws on the huge caseload of post-emancipation slave cases that arose, enabling state judges to perform this task.  Her point is that slavery as social practice remained before the courts long after the war ended.  (Again, a very cool idea.)  In other words, courts had to determine the future legal order of former confederate states during Reconstruction.  41% of these cases involved contracts for hire and service of slaves during the war; the rest were marriage, apprenticeship, and estate cases.  Were these labor contracts valid in the post-Civil War era?  How did these courts construe emancipation and work status of former slaves?  They struggled to define what it meant given their past and their understanding of the law.

Some states such as Louisiana barred enforcement of these contracts altogether, but most southern states did not.  The US Supreme Court would declare these agreements unconstitutional in 1871.  Perrone then used the emancipation-as-death metaphor in an extended analysis of these judicial decisions:

1.    Legal rhetoric allowed courts to excise the property character from ex-slaves so as to leave the legal person intact (as bizarre as this seems to us, it was even more so to them).  A new legal personhood for free people was to begin:  former slaves got freedom and personhood both.

2.    Judges adapted rules from the pre-Civil War period to the post war period in order to treat contract cases as if they were antebellum cases in which the slave had actually died; this shift enabled them to use same legal tools as before, leaving slave contracts intact and 19th-century jurisprudence in place.

3.    This practice offered litigants terms they could understand, even if it papered over the breach that emancipation actually created.  Regardless of wealth, all owners understood they lost value when their slaves died.  This is just a matter of imagining that all slaves died simultaneously.  Perrone then discussed several cases in depth.  For the most part, labor contracts survived emancipation, even if slavery itself did not.  She finished by extending that logic to its conclusion: slaves in achieving freedom became the legally "undead," or, in modern parlance, zombies.  Ironically, ex-slaves saw emancipation as their rebirth.  The concept of legal death in post-emancipation cases led to inquiries into new relations between blacks and whites, but judges were not concerned with much beyond immediate issue of status of former slaves.

The commentator, Cynthia Nicoletti, knitted all three papers together by noting they all focused on slaveholders' experience, provided an analysis of class tensions among southern whites, and highlighted how issues of race and class illuminate each other.  She praised each as thoughtful, well-written, and original (particularly rare to find in this crowded field).  A robust question and answer session ensued.

Legal History at the Southern

A big tip of the hat to Michael Ross, University of Maryland History, for making sure we knew of “the great legal history panels at this Southern Historical Association’s upcoming meeting this weekend in Atlanta.”  The full program is here.  Professor Ross especially notes:
 
Friday Nov. 14, 9:30-11:30: SLAVERY, LAW, AND THE AMERICAN STATE IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA
PRESIDING: Manisha Sinha, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Slave Manifests and Federal Regulation of Slave Status in Antebellum America
Gautham Rao, American University

Dred Scott and Washington’s Legal Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Rachel Shelden, University of Oklahoma

The Disputed Constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation
Cynthia Nicoletti, University of Virginia

COMMENTS: Manisha Sinha; Gregory Downs, City University of New York

Friday, November 14 11:45-1:50: A CONVERSATION WITH JUANITA JONES (MRS. RALPH DAVID) ABERNATHY

“Remembering a Career in Civil Rights”
Juanita Jones Abernathy, Atlanta, Ga.

A leading force throughout the civil rights movement, Juanita Odessa Jones Abernathy will engage the members of the SHA in a conversation about her experiences advocating social change. The widow of the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy who, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helped lead the struggle through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Mrs. Abernathy participated in every event from the Montgomery Bus Boycott through Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, the Poor People’s Campaign and the Charleston Strike of 1968, not stepping out of the civil rights spotlight until her husband left the SCLC in 1976.

Sponsored by the SHA Committee on Minorities, the Georgia Humanities Council and the Georgia State University, Department of African American Studies.  The presider is Glenn T. Eskew, Georgia State University; introductory comments by Brenda Tindal, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Friday, November 14: 4:45 P.M.-6:30 P.M.: SOUTHERN ASSOCIATION FOR WOMEN HISTORIANS ANNUAL ADDRESS
PRESIDING: Emily Clark, Tulane University

“Partus Sequitur Ventrum”: Colonial Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery
Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University

Saturday, November 15: 2:30-4:30 P.M.: POLICING RACE, MEDIATING CONFLICT, AND ENFORCING MORAL, LEGAL, AND SOCIAL NORMS IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH
PRESIDING: Heather Andrea Williams, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

African Americans and the Enticements of Market Revolution in the Courts of Newly-
Americanized St. Louis, 1804-1836. Mark Carroll, University of Missouri

Interracial Violence and Corporal Punishment in the Carolinas: The Unique Dynamic of Community-Centered Local Legal Debates, 1800-1840
Meggan Farish, Duke University

Slavery in Virginia’s Antebellum Jails
Taja-Nia Henderson, Rutgers School of Law, Newark

COMMENTS: Robert Cottrol, George Washington University Law School

Sunday, November 16: 9:00-11:00 A.M.: SLAVERY, LIBERTY AND THE LAW
PRESIDING: Kevin Dawson, University of California, Merced

Law at the Water’s Edge: Vice-Admiralty Courts in Colonial South Carolina and the British Atlantic World
Lee Wilson Bowden, University of Virginia

Stolen Lives and Stolen Labor: An Investigation into the Forgotten Phenomenon of Slave Stealing in the American South
Laura Sandy, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Restored to a British Liberty: The Freedom Plea of a Bermudian Enslaved in Louisiana
Neil Kennedy, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada

COMMENTS: Kevin Dawson; Kenneth Aslakson, Union College

ASLH Panel Report: Roundtable on Public Policy and Public History

[We are grateful to Victoria Saker Woeste, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation, for two marvelously complete reports of panels at the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.  Here is her first.]

Roundtable on Legal Histories and Public Audiences:  Linking Legal History, Public Policy, and Public History. 

This roundtable met at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning and featured John E. Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund; Patricia Nelson  Limerick, University of Colorado-Boulder/ Center of  the American West; Katrina Jagodinsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation, who also served as moderator.

John Echohawk led off with a discussion of his work on Native American Rights Fund litigation, which he founded in 1970 and of which he became executive director in 1978.  The legal history of indigenous people is long but largely unknown.  Serious study of Native American history and Indian law began in the 1960s, when the federal government offered law school scholarships at the University of New Mexico, where federal Indian law was taught, probably for the first time in the country.  John was one of the scholarship recipients.  Native tribes were sovereign, a fact recognized in the Constitution, and entered into treaties with the U.S., which proceeded to break provisions without consequence in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Federal policy, John declared, was to break treaties, send Indians to cities, and make them invisible. 

In the 1960s, Native Americans began to demand enforcement of these treaties and equal treatment under the law.  The Indian community recognized that knowledge of the legal system was essential to understanding and securing rights.  Following the model of the NAACP and ACLU, which had specific legal entities to fight their battles, the Native American Rights Fund obtained Ford Foundation money to hire lawyers that were made available to all tribes having treaty issues.  The NALF began winning in the courts as judges began to recognize the validity of treaty provisions and rights. These decisions recognized that tribes relate directly to the fed government and that states have no jurisdiction on tribal lands.  Naturally, the states began to object to the loss of authority over tribes, particularly in the area of water rights, in which Indian rights antedate state rights. 

John then asked:  what does this legal history mean?  Indians are no longer the vanishing Americans, but it is difficult to overcome that long history.  Often he gets this reaction:  "I thought all you people were dead."  Knowing tribal history helps people realize that Indians are alive and kicking, that they are an important part of the American system of government.  But it is essential to talk to the public, educate people about Indian legal history.  He is constantly engaged in educating everyone else about Indians' legal rights.

This is particularly important because people think that casinos make Indians rich!  This perception (which is inaccurate) makes his job a lot tougher  because it is now harder to raise money.  The truth is that casinos don't make most tribes rich.  Only about a dozen are doing well, out of 566 tribes nationwide.  It's also hard for federal agencies to work on Indian issues because gaming has hijacked the discussion, coloring every issue they deal with.

A more serious problem facing Indians seeking validation of their rights is the Supreme Court.  For a long time after President Nixon changed policy to give federal recognition to Indian self-determination, the Supreme Court was generally receptive to tribal claims.  That has changed with the rise of conservative justices  on the court (he didn't name names), whose open hostility has led the NALF to change strategy and avoid the Court as much as possible.  Indians need public support more than ever to keep their treaty-based sovereignty.

New Release: Cliche on Violence toward Children in Quebec Families, 1850-1969

New from Wilfred Laurier University Press: Abuse or Punishment? Violence toward Children in Quebec Families, 1850-1969, by Marie-Aimée Cliche, translated by W. Donald Wilson. The book is part of the Press's Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada Series. Here's a description:

At one time, the use of corporal punishment by parents in child-rearing was considered normal, but in the second half of the nineteenth century this begin to change, in Quebec as well as the rest of the Western world. It was during this period that the extent of ill-treatment inflicted on children—treatment once excused as good child-rearing practice—was discovered.

This book analyzes both the advice provided to parents and the different forms of child abuse within families. Cliche derives her information from family magazines, reports and advice columns in newspapers, people’s life stories, the records of the Montreal Juvenile Court, and even comic strips. Two dates are given particular focus: 1920, with the trial of the parents of Aurore Gagnon, which sensitized the public to the phenomenon of “child martyrs;” and 1940, with the advent of the New Education movement, which was based on psychology rather than strict discipline and religious doctrine.

There has always been child abuse. What has changed is society’s sensitivity to it. That is why defenders of children’s rights call for the repeal of Section 43 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which authorizes “reasonable” corporal punishment. Abuse or Punishment? considers not only the history of violence toward children in Quebec but the history of public perception of this violence and what it means for the rest of Canada.

More information is available here.

#ASLH2014

For those of you who couldn't attend this year's meeting of the American Society for Legal History, or who simply want to relive the highlights, head over to Twitter, where many attendees used the hashtag #ASLH2014 to post updates and notes of appreciation. And by all means, let's keep the conversation going until #ASLH2015!

Lowe on American Legal History since 1998

Jessica Lowe, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted Radicalism's Legacy: American Legal History Since 1998, which is forthcoming in Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte.  Here is the abstract:

This short essay, commissioned by the German legal history journal Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte, examines developments in American legal history since 1998. Framed around the legacy of Robert Gordon's "Critical Legal Histories," it argues that developments in the field have primarily clustered around five types of inquiry -- legal pluralism, rights consciousness, racial identity, citizenship, and the state -- and that theoretical ideas developed by Gordon and his generation have continued to shape the field. It then examines the unintended pitfalls of the critical agenda, and speculates about new possibilities for the discipline -- and what its relevance might be to the next generation of American law students and law schools.