Grisinger reviews Cuellar, "Administrative War"

Writing for JOTWELL's legal history section, Joanna Grisinger (Northwestern University) has posted an admiring review of "Administrative War," by the honorable Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (California Supreme Court/Stanford Law School). The article appeared in volume 82 of the George Washington Law Review (2014). Here's a taste of Grisinger's review:

Cuéllar describes how pre-World War II agencies were hamstrung by limited powers and limited resources, limits which soon became impractical. World War II changed the political and economic context in which agencies operated, opening the door to legal changes that strengthened the agencies. Mobilization for war required greater administrative capacity, which in turn required more money to pay for agency operations. In response, federal courts expanded agencies’ subpoena powers, which markedly improved agencies’ ability to investigate. Courts also moved from a formalist understanding of the non-delegation doctrine (Schechter) to a functionalist one (Yakus) that legitimated broad congressional delegations of authority to agencies. And Congress enabled mass taxation to pay for expanded administration. (Funding is key to any discussion of administrative capacity; a chart in Cuéllar’s appendix showing the increase in federal employees during the war make this clear.) By giving agencies the tools they needed to endure, Cuéllar argues, wartime actors embedded administrative governance in American political life.

Also recently spotlighted in JOTWELL: Nicholas Bagley's "Medicine as a Public Calling," which encourages lawyers and policymakers to consider historical paths and precedents as they make sense of the world that the Affordable Care Act has wrought. 

Marcus to Serve as General Editor of Holmes Devise

Maeva Marcus (GW)

As was heralded at the annual luncheon of the American Society for Legal History, Maeva Marcus has agreed to serve as general editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the United States Supreme Court.  From the Library of Congress’s press release:

The Library of Congress and the Permanent Committee of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise announce the appointment of Maeva Marcus as the general editor of the "Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States." Marcus, a constitutional scholar with special expertise in the history of the United States Supreme Court, is the third person to serve as editor in the publication’s 60-year history.

More.

Sunday Book Roundup

This week The New Rambler has a review of Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

"In his new book, Give Us the Ballot, journalist Ari Berman tells the story of these stirring moments, and tells it well. But unlike many civil rights chronicles, his account begins rather than ends in the 1960s. Via a series of vivid anecdotes, he describes the tumultuous history of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) from its enactment all the way to the present day. It’s an important and absorbing tale—though one that could have been narrated with a bit less certainty and a bit more nuance."

There's lots on H-Net, including a review of Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence by Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay (UNC Press).

There's also a review of Origins of the National Security State and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman edited by Mary Ann Heiss and Michael J. Hogan (Truman State University).

Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition edited by Robert Harms, Bernard K. Freeman, and David W. Blight (Yale University Press) is reviewed on H-Net too.

The New Republic has a review of The Con Men: Hustling in New York City by Terry Williams and Trevor B. Milton (Columbia University Press).

"Terry Williams and Trevor B. Milton don’t bother to pretend not to be enchanted by their subjects. Con Men is a present-day investigation into some people who make a living against or around the law. It’s a PG-13 version that excludes crimes of violence, which are against the code, and only touches briefly on sex work. What’s left are hustles: Selling fake or stolen goods, dice and numbers games, quick confidence tricks, hawking water bottles and candy. Most of these play on the mark or customer’s combination of greed and their desire to be entertained. Unlike a mugging, they require some participation."

And, New Books has a couple new interviews too. There is an interview with Michael L. Berg discussing his Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (Oxford University Press). Mario T. Garcia is also interviewed about his book, The Chicano Generation: Testimonies of the Movement (University of California Press).

Weekend Roundup

• The American Society for Legal History's illustrated report of its annual meeting is now up on the ASLH website.  

• Via Duke Today, a report on “the three-day symposium ‘Global Slaveries/Impossible Freedoms,’ celebrating the legacies of John Hope Franklin.”

• We’re afraid there’s no ungated draft of the actual paper, but we note anyway that former guest blogger Mitra J. Sharafi, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted the abstract for her essay South Asian Legal History, which appears in Annual Review of Law and Social Science 11 (2015): 309-36.

• Campbell Law School dedicated the exhibit First Ladies of the North Carolina Judiciary, which contains rare archival and photographic exhibits, and chronicles the first N.C. women to break a number of judicial barriers, starting with Chief Justice Susie Sharp’s 1949 appointment as a superior court judge.” At right, former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Sarah Parker (and Micah 6:8). 

• More on that Women Attorney Trailblazers in New York State exhibit at the SUNY at Buffalo Law Library.

• Via H-Law: “The New Jersey Historical Commission cordially invites you to its 2015 annual conference, Fighting for Justice: 20th-Century Activism in New Jersey, at the Paul Robeson Campus Center at Rutgers-Newark on Saturday, November 21st.”

• Robb Haberman on John Jay: Forgotten Founder over at "Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History").

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

Primus on Bilder on "Madison's Hand"

Richard Primus has now added to Heather Gerken's comment on Mary Bilder's Madison's Hand. over at Balkinization on the impact or lack thereof her findings for originalists.

A Bentham MS at GULC Special Collections

[We reproduce the following from News and Reports of the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library at the Georgetown University Law Center for November 2015.]

Special Collections has acquired a unique manuscript glimpse into the mental world of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarian political thought and Anglo-American codification efforts. 

When Bentham first proposed his universal legal code, which he termed the Pannomiom, his goal was a simplified legal code that could be readily understood by everyone without the need to consult a lawyer. Such simplification apparently eluded even Bentham's talents and the Pannomiom was never completed. All that remains are several thousand manuscript leaves outlining various subjects and chapters, most of which are held by University College London which is crowdsourcing transcriptions. Special Collections' Pannomial fragment was apparently a presentation copy given to an unknown person at the opening of UCL in 1836. It is an outline in Bentham's hand for "Ch. 7. States of the mind with respect to delinquency," and includes his thoughts on distinguishing intellectual faculty from volitional faculty for purposes of determining criminal liability. 

This intriguing document is available online through Digital Georgetown. For access to the actual document, please contact Erin Kidwell, Curator of Legal History Collections (202-662-9149) or Hannah Miller-Kim, Special Collections Librarian (202-661-6602); or email us at specl@law.georgetown.edu.

CFP: Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship

[We have the following announcement.]

Call for Papers - DEADLINE EXTENDED TO DECEMBER 1, 2015
Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship, Thirteenth Annual Conference in Citizenship Studies, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA, March 31 - April 2, 2016

Conference Keynote: Margot Canaday, Princeton University, author of The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America

Plenary Address: John Corvino, Wayne State University, author of What's Wrong with Homosexuality?
Issues of gender and sexuality have long been realized as central to citizenship. We need only recall the patrilineal citizenship of ancient Greece or women's suffrage to recognize some of the ways gender and sexuality have been bound to citizenship. Today, gender and sexuality remain at the center of a number of key issues in citizenship, including derivative citizenship, family reunification, and who can sponsor new immigrants as well as marriage and social citizenship rights including adoption, healthcare, end of life care, etc.

Whether we are male or female or transgender, whether we are straight, gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual or transsexual, our identities can facilitate or limit access to full citizenship. How are rights, obligations, and privileges shaped by gender and sexuality?  Because we all bear the imprint of both gender and race, how do those traits interact to shape our experiences of freedom and public power?   How do gender and sexuality shape not only citizens' relationship to public power but also the way society constitutes and conceives of the state itself? 

The Center for the Study of Citizenship invites proposals for its 13th Annual Conference in Citizenship Studies.  We welcome proposals that examine such topics as:

• Historical (or present, or possible future) changes in the socio-political roles of men and women; 

• Matters related to sex- or gender-based  inclusion and exclusion in public life, past and present;

• Social and political constructions of ascriptions such as masculinity, femininity, or queerness as they have affected citizenship;

• Theories of citizenship that rely on interactions between sexuality/gender and other identities (e.g., race or class);

• Relationships between these identities and leadership, authority, power, or responsibility;

• Subjects' or citizens' perceptions of the ways in which their identities aid or impede access to (or experiences of) work, health care, religious freedom, child rearing, marriage and relationships, media depictions, law enforcement, incarceration, and other, similarly public topics.

Although the program committee will give preference to proposals directly relevant to the theme, proposals evaluating all aspects of the study of citizenship are welcome. We invite panel proposals, individual submissions, and suggestions for book sessions focused on exciting, new scholarship in the field of citizenship studies.  

To apply, please email Amanda Hanlin at citizenship@wayne.edu with three attachments: an abstract of   500 words or less, your C.V., and a 50-word bio. Please be sure that your full name, the name of your institution and your email address are included on each page submitted. If you have a Twitter handle, we appreciate you sharing it with us in the body of your email.  Please email us your materials no later than 5:00pm EST on Tuesday, December 1, 2015.

We provide a limited number of scholarships for international scholars. These funds will be distributed on a competitive basis. If you wish to be considered for a scholarship, please indicate so in your email.

We will notify applicants of their acceptance to present work at the conference by December 15, 2015. We will invite presenters to submit full papers for further review by our advisory board. Invited papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed volume in the Wayne State University Press book series, "Citizenship Studies," edited by the Center's director, Marc Kruman and Research Fellow, Richard Marback.

"House Arrest": Call for contributions to edited collection

Via H-Law, we have the following call for contributions:

CfA: “House Arrest” – Historical Perspectives on a Criminal Sanction and Oppressive Measure (working title)

In July, AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd was sentenced to eight months of house detention by a court in New Zealand. Recently the Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius was released from prison and placed under house arrest. In Iran opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mousavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavard have been under house arrest since February 2011 – without ever being tried in court.

Whether as an element of a legally sanctioned penal system or as a means of political intimidation and suppression: “House arrest” is a global phenomenon and, as such, has a long history. We can already trace this concept as liberia custodia in the times of the Roman Empire where persons of rank were put under surveillance and guard in the house of a senator while waiting for their trial. The Austrian Criminal Law of 1852 also consisted of – beside first- and second-degree arrest – house arrest; and during the 18th century the Free State of Bern used this form of imprisonment as well. Since the 1980s several countries have tested and introduced electronically monitored house arrest as an ambulant sanction and enforcement of sentences – often due to overcrowded detention facilities and leading to controversies.

In dictatorial and authoritarian regimes, during wartime and political crisis dissenters have seen themselves being imprisoned in their own houses and continually surveilled. Galilei Galileo had been punished for his heretical heliocentric ideas, being placed under house arrest for nine years, up to his death in 1642. In dynastical structures house arrest was deployed against monarchs deprived of their power. After the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910 the last sovereign of the Korean Empire Sunjong was confined to house arrest where he died sixteen years later. Robert Havemann, an outspoken critic of the GDR regime, was confined to his home from 1976 to 1979. Very often it was women, for example in former European and Asian courts that were subjected to this form of imprisonment. A more recent case was the one of Aung San Suu Kyi who had been placed under house arrest by Myanmar’s military government on numerous occasions.

The list of persons having been kept under house arrest in different historical and political contexts is long. However, little is to be found as to the history and precise shape of the overall phenomenon “house arrest.” Against this background, the edited volume aims to assemble the different perspectives of historical research on house arrest as a punitive measure imposed on individuals by ruling systems or state authorities – in terms of either a criminal penalty or a suppressive measure against political opponents.

The editors are interested in a wide range of topics on the global phenomenon “house arrest” spanning from the micro level of individual experience to the macro level of political and social structure. For example, contributions might explore the discourse on house detention or look at target groups of house arrest in different historical contexts. From a legal point of view, it is of interest how and to which consequences former legal systems interpreted house detention with regard to the corresponding system of criminal-law sanctions: as enforcing a sentence or as a way of pre-trial custody. Attention should be also paid to the formal ‘legal’ basis of house arrests against political opponents. Another focus will be set on those ‘subsystems’ guaranteeing the actual enforcement of house arrest which ever since the 1990s also includes private contractors of electronic monitoring systems.

The goal of the edited volume is to bring together historical analysis with different perspectives and approaches. We are seeking for contributions by historians and those working in related disciplines, e.g. the Social or Legal Sciences. Diachronic perspectives as to the development in particular countries or legal systems will be welcomed as will be synchronic, comparing analysis, overviews as well as case studies.

A Visiting Research Post in Roman Law at Glasgow

[Via H-Law we have the following announcement of the Alan Rodger Postgraduate Visiting Researcher in Roman law or legal history at the University of Glasgow.]

The University of Glasgow School of Law invites applications from PhD students in Roman law or legal history for the post of Postgraduate Visiting Researcher, to be held during the 2016/17 academic year. The selected candidate will spend a term in Glasgow and receive a £2,000 award for support. The deadline for applications is 15 January 2016. Full details are available from our website.   The post was established in memory of Lord Rodger of Earlsferry (1944-2011), Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and scholar of Roman law and legal history.


[More on legal history at the University of Glasgow.]

Brophy on a Confederate History in the YLJ

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, has posted A Confederate History in the Yale Law Journal.

This essay revisits Yale history professor Allen Johnson’s article “The Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Acts,” which appeared in the Yale Law Journal in December 1921. Johnson wrote about a law that had been nullified by the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment nearly 70 years before. His article was part of the scholarly reconsideration of the origins of Civil War designed to reconcile North and South. Northerners, especially Northern scholars, blamed the Civil War on fanatics on both sides and in some ways exculpated Southerners for their role in the War.

While scholars of memory have explored the rewriting of history in the early twentieth century, no one has noticed how it stretched outside of history books and into the pages of the distinguished Yale Law Journal. The efforts to re-write constitutional history and to defend the south’s case for one of the most reviled acts in American history reached into territory and to scholars we had not previously known. This essay thus implicates a wider stretch of legal and historical writing than we had known in the efforts to defend the proslavery south. 

Ross on English Protestants and Spanish Thomists on Law and the Soul

Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois College of Law, has posted a pre-publication draft of Binding in Conscience: Early Modern English Protestants and Spanish Thomists on Law and the Fate of the Soul, which appeared in the Law and History Review 33 (November 2015): 803-37:    

Romans 13:5 said that Christians should obey law not only for fear of punishment but “also for conscience sake.” What could this mean in practice? Early modern Protestants and Catholics agreed that violations of laws that bound conscience, if unrepented, threatened damnation. But which types of law bound? Natural and divine moral law did. Human laws presented a complicated case. Disobedience to only certain classes of human laws — but not all — imperiled the soul. Catholics and Protestants debated how to distinguish ordinances that obligated conscience from those that did not.

The stakes were considerable. Romans 13:5 multiplied the potency of rulers, who treasured the suggestion that God’s ultimate penalty of damnation reinforced their authority. But a world in which violation of any ordinance brought damnation would be unlivable for subjects. And it would preclude the bargaining about law at the heart of early modern politics. The application of Romans 13:5 necessarily became a dialectical endeavor. Theorists generated arguments to bind conscience and release it.

This essay explores the ways in which early modern Spanish Thomists and English Protestants linked human law to the fate of the soul and challenged that connection. They relied heavily on juridical concepts for assessing the validity and meaning of law in order to know which human ordinances obligated conscience under what circumstances. Manipulating borrowed jurists’ categories, they turned Romans 13:5 into a vital system for regulating conduct, with crucial effects in politics and daily life. Seeing Romans 13:5 from this perspective directs attention to the deep and changing intersections of legal and religious thought over a century and a half.

Sellars, ed., Trials for International Crimes in Asia

New from Cambridge University Press: Trials for International Crimes in Asia, edited by Kirsten Sellars (the Chinese University of Hong Kong). Here's a description from the Press:

The issue of international crimes is highly topical in Asia, with still-resonant claims against the Japanese for war crimes, and deep schisms resulting from crimes in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor. Over the years, the region has hosted a succession of tribunals, from those held in Manila, Singapore and Tokyo after the Asia-Pacific War to those currently running in Dhaka and Phnom Penh. This book draws on extensive new research and offers the first comprehensive legal appraisal of the Asian trials. As well as the famous tribunals, it also considers lesser-known examples, such as the Dutch and Soviet trials of the Japanese, the Cambodian trial of the Khmer Rouge, and the Indonesian trials of their own military personnel. It focuses on their approach to the elements of international crimes, and their contribution to general theories of liability. In the process, this book challenges some orthodoxies about the development of international criminal law.

And the TOC:

Law and Ideology in the National Security State: A Roundtable

Over at Balkinization, Mary L. Dudziak is presiding over a roundtable whose contributers presented at the ASLH panel at its recent annual meeting.  As Professor Dudziak explains:

At the American Society for Legal History annual meeting recently, I had the pleasure of chairing a panel on Law and Ideology in the National Security State. All of the panelists presented work that intersects with past discussions on this blog, so I've organized a roundtable to bring the panel to Balkinization.

Over the next few days, I will post contributions by Aziz Rana, Cornell Law School; Jeremy Kessler, Columbia Law School; Anne Kornhauser, Department of History, CUNY; and the panel commentator Christopher Capozzola, Department of History, MIT.

These scholars all see American constitutionalism as deeply affected by the United States role in the world. They differ in the ways they periodize global influence, and in the kinds of outside influences that matter. And though national security is the conceptual frame for the panel, these contributions -- explicitly or implicitly -- work with different ideas about what national security was thought to  require, and even what it is that American constitutionalism was securing. Together, however, they make clear that scholars examining the path of American constitutional history must set the story in the context of the U.S. role in the world.

We’ll update with links to the contributions.

Jeremy Kessler on The Myth of the Strong American State
Aziz Rana on Empire and the Creedal Constitution in the Philippines
Anne Kornhauser on German Émigré Intellectuals and the Struggle Over the Emerging National Security State

ASLH Panel Recap: Sharafi's "Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia"

[We are very grateful to Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, for this very full report on a panel at the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.]

On Friday October 30th 2015, the ASLH convened the Author-Meets-Reader panel featuring Mitra Sharafi’s (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. The chair and moderator was Thomas Green (University of Michigan Law School and Oberlin College), while the Readers were Rohit De (Yale University) and Bhavani Raman (University of Toronto). Binyamin Blum (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) provided a comprehensive summary of the book by way of introduction to the panel.

Maltz on the Lessons of 1968 for 2016

Earl M. Maltz, Rutgers-Camden School of Law, has posted The 2016 Election and the Future of Constitutional Law: The Lessons of 1968, which is forthcoming in the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.

Hubert H. Humphrey (LC)

The upcoming presidential election of 2016 may very well become a pivotal moment in the evolution of American constitutional doctrine. Given the ages of a number of the sitting justices, the next President could easily have the opportunity to choose several new members of the Court. Moreover, because the Court is currently divided almost equally along ideological lines, even a single appointment could have the effect of turning the overall orientation of the Court’s decisions sharply to either the right or the left.

To illustrate the effect that a single election can have on the development of constitutional law, this article will focus on the impact of the presidential election of 1968. The article will argue that the victory of Richard M. Nixon over Hubert H. Humphrey led directly to the rejection of a variety of progressive constitutional arguments, and that if Humphrey had triumphed, the political orientation of constitutional doctrine would be far different today. The article will conclude by discussing the implications of this insight for our understanding of constitutional theory generally.

Charles W. McCurdy and the Community of Scholars

Charles W. McCurdy (UVA Law)

On November 1-2, I attended “The Legacy of Charles W. McCurdy,” a conference held in honor of Professor McCurdy occasioned by his retirement from the University of Virginia, where he taught in the Corcoran Department of History and the School of Law.  The schedule is here.  The conference also marked the inauguration of UVA’s Charles W. McCurdy Fellowship in Legal History.  It followed “The Ages of American Legal History: A Roundtable in Honor of Professor Charles W. McCurdy,” held at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Washington, DC, on October 31.

ASLH Panel Recap: "Crime, Punishment, and Federalism"

[This ASLH panel recap comes from Sara Mayeux, a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University]

Crime, Punishment, and Federalism: The Curious Case of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration

If some conference panels generate synergy by bringing together papers asking similar questions across disparate times and places, this panel took the opposite tack and brought together three papers investigating one short-lived federal agency: the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Established by the Safe Streets Act of 1968, LEAA required states to develop “comprehensive plans” for criminal justice policy and awarded grants to supplement the budgets of local courts, corrections agencies, and police departments. LEAA was phased out in 1982, although it has various successor entities within the Department of Justice. 

LEAA is typically remembered as a flag-bearer of the punitive, “law-and-order” turn in American social policy, and in particular, as an early harbinger of police militarization. As panel chair and commentator Elizabeth Hinton has chronicled in a recent article (and in her forthcoming book), states used LEAA grants “to increase surveillance and patrols in already-targeted black urban neighborhoods,” to acquire “military-grade weapons” for police, and to cultivate “a climate of surveillance and intimidation” in inner cities that frequently erupted into “street warfare between police and residents.” However, LEAA funded far more than paramilitary gear (especially in its later years, and especially through the component of the program that made block grants available to states to use as they saw fit), pouring federal dollars into a dizzying variety of projects related to courts, jails, and prisons. As this panel demonstrated, taking a close look some of these projects may complicate our understanding of the agency’s legacy in some ways. Overall, though, the panel confirmed LEAA’s importance in laying down political, intellectual, and material foundations for the metastasizing “carceral state.” Further study of this somewhat opaque agency promises to generate new insights not only about criminal justice policy but also about the postwar American state and the dynamics of “cooperative federalism” more generally.

Sunday Book Roundup

We're back with a full book roundup this weekend. Here's the run-down of legal history related book reviews:

The New York Review of Books has a review by Jed Rakoff about John C. Coffee Jr.'s Entrepreneurial Litigation: Its Rise, Fall, and Future (Harvard University Press).

"Rather, it covers the full spectrum of class actions, including mass tort class actions, employment discrimination class actions, antitrust class actions, consumer class actions, merger and acquisition class actions, and much more. Not only is the book more comprehensive than prior studies of class actions, it also probes more deeply, placing today’s class actions firmly within the setting of the modern trend toward turning the practice of law ever more into a business. Perhaps most impressively, Coffee’s book offers specific prescriptions (the most original of which is discussed below) for reducing the weaknesses of modern class action litigation while enhancing its strengths."

In the LA Times is a review of Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

A complementary review in The New Rambler is that of Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy by Gary May (Basic).

Slate has a lengthy review of Glenda Gilmore and Thomas Sugrue's new These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present (Norton).

"In their timely, remarkable new survey of America since 1890, These United States, they argue that in many ways we are back to where we started. They begin in the 1890s, when Gilded Age tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller controlled much of the nation’s wealth and an enfeebled federal government seemed incapable if not unwilling to stop them. And despite the tremendous strides made during the New Deal and Great Society era, in many ways we find the U.S. facing those exact same problems. Provocatively, Gilmore and Sugrue ask whether the greater equalities of the immediate postwar years, when seen in light of the “long” 20th century, seems less like an inevitability and more like an “historical accident.” That they make a compelling case that they do makes this book required reading."

Tom Lewis's Washington: A History of Our National City (Basic) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead Books) is reviewed in several places. The review in the New Republic is here, and the review from the Washington Independent Review of Books can be found here. NPR says:

"Be careful about calling Sarah Vowell's latest a history book. The term fits in the broadest sense, sure — but for many, that phrase may also drum up visions of appendices and ponderous chapter titles, obscure maps and pop quizzes. Knee-deep as it may be in the history of the American Revolution, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States doesn't look or act much like its textbook brethren. 

Gilded with snark, buoyant on charm, Vowell's brand of history categorically refuses to take itself — or any of its subjects — too seriously."

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a review of Melvin Urofsky's Dissent and the Supreme Court (Pantheon).

An excerpt from Nut Country: Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (University of Chicago Press) by Edward Miller can be found on Salon.

From the New Statesman comes a two-book review of Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: the Authorized Biography, Volume Two--Everything She Wants (Allen Lane) and Kwasi Kwarteng's Thatcher's Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader (Bloomsbury).

Martha Minow reviews Michal Schudson's The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975 (Harvard University Press) for The New Rambler.

"Neither the founders of the nation nor their lawmaker heirs called for a citizens’ right to information during the 19th century or the first half of the 20th. Sociologist Michael Schudson whets the reader’s appetite with this arresting observation, and then offers satisfying case studies with explanations for changes since the 1950s. The book portrays political and social contexts that helped establish unprecedented demands for, and practices of, transparency in government processes and in the lives of public officials, as well as transparency about risks to health, safety, and the environment from economic developments."

H-Net, of course, has added several reviews in the two weeks since our last round-up. A review of Jori Diez's The Politics of Gay Marriage in Latin America: Argentina Chile, and Mexico (Cambridge University Press) is now available.

So too is a review of Louis Masur's Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion (Oxford University Press).

More Civil War history is found in the review of collected volume The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War (University of Georgia Press), edited by Brian Allen Drake.

Also on H-Net is a review of A Few Lawless Vagabonds: Ethan Allen, the Republic of Vermont, and the American Revolution (Casemate) by David Bennett.

Continuing to move back in time, H-Net has a review of Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World (University of California Press) by Kevin McDonald.

If that's too much reading for you, you can listen to an interview with Azizah al-Hibri, in which she discusses her new book The Islamic Worldview: Islamic Jurisprudence--An American Muslim Perspective, Volume One (ABA Books).

New Books in American Studies also offers an interview with Daniel Schlozman, who discusses his work in When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton University Press).

Daniel Geary discusses with New Books his work, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press).

And a last interview from New Books is one with Sam Mitrani, whose most recent book is The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 (University of Illinois Press).

Finally, I heard talk at ASLH of projects in the works for legal history writing for children and youth. So, here is an interesting multi-book review of children's history books in the New York Times, that includes a review of Aaron and Alexander by Don Brown (Roaring Brook Press). Also in this issue of NYT is a review of Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War by Steve Sheinkin (Roaring Brook Press), also for young readers.

Weekend Roundup

• Via H-Law we have a call for submissions for an edited volume on House Arrest: Historical Perspectives on a Criminal Sanction and Oppressive Measure.

• The National History Center’s congressional briefing on the history of mass incarceration airs on C-SPAN American History TV on November 8 at 6:45 pm and 10:45 pm EST.

• On November 3, Kunal Parker, University of Miami School of Law, presented Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America in the Legal History Workshop at the University of Michigan Law School.

• David Kopel replies to criticism of the treatment of English legal history and the right to carry arms in an amicus brief in Wrenn v. District of Columbia.

• A new Oxford Bibliography on Nuremberg Trials, by Kevin Jon Heller and Catherine E. Gascoigne.  H/t: John Q. Barrett and his Jackson List.

• Via H-Law, a call for papers for Constitutionalism Under Extreme Conditions, a day-long, international symposium to be held at the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa, on Monday, July 18,  2016, under the auspices of the Israeli Association of Public Law.

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

Hovenkamp's Note on Patent Exhaustion and Federalism

Herbert J. Hovenkamp, University of Iowa College of Law, has posted Patent Exhaustion and Federalism: A Historical Note, on Virginia Law Review Online 2015.

This essay, written as a response to John F. Duffy and Richard Hynes, Statutory Domain and the Commercial Law of Intellectual Property, ___ VA. L. REV. ___ (2015), argues that the patent exhaustion (first sale) doctrine developed as a creature of federalism, intended to divide the line between the law of patents, which by that time had become exclusively federal, and the law of patented things, which were governed by the states. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century courts were explicit on the point, in decisions stretching from the 1850s well into the twentieth century.

By the second half of the nineteenth century it was clear that federal supremacy controlled patent law, including patent infringement suits. The problem with the post-sale licensing restrictions that the patent exhaustion doctrine precluded is that enforcement of such restrictions via patent infringement suits would have applied federal supremacy so as to protect a set of practices (resale price maintenance, tying, and exclusive dealing) that state antitrust laws were just beginning to engage and often condemn. For example, if a tying or RPM restriction could be enforced via a patent infringement suit, the result would have been to preempt inconsistent state law declaring such practices anticompetitive. That was precisely the outcome that the Supreme Court reached in its Henry v. A.B. Dick decision in 1912, and that provoked Congress’ almost immediate reaction in passage of the Clayton Act.

Sutherland Prize to Gómez-Arostegui

[Via H-Law, we have the following report of another prize awarded at the recently concluded annual meeting of the ASLH.]

This year’s Sutherland Prize is awarded to a scholar whose prodigious research sheds new light on an important controversy in the history of copyright law.  The author carefully examines dozens of newspaper accounts as well as official and unofficial reports relating to the House of Lords proceedings in Donaldson v Becket (1774).  His task was complicated by the fact that the House of Lords at that time forbade notetaking and published only very brief summaries of its decisions.  Nevertheless, through exhaustive research, careful attention to the procedures and practices of the House of Lords, and patient inquiry into contemporary conventions relating to the interpretation of House of Lords decisions, the author elucidates the relationship between Donaldson v Becket and common law copyright.  The conventional understanding of the case is that it endorsed the existence of common law copyright, either directly or in combination with Millar v Taylor (KB 1769), while a revisionist account interprets the case as denying the existence of common law copyright.  This year’s prize-winning article is admirably sensitive to the limits of the evidence and eschews certainty where certainty is impossible.  While counsel, judges, law Lords, and lay Lords made arguments for and against the existence of common law copyright, the House of Lords decision in Donaldson v Becket did not definitely resolve the controversy one way or another.   Nevertheless, the author argues that most late eighteenth-century English judges viewed copyright as having a pre-statutory basis in the common law.  While common law copyright was given statutory form in 1710, most judges thought authors’ rights predated the statute and recognized the possibility that some common law rights might remain valid and important even after the passage of the statute.  More broadly, the article contributes to our understanding of the House of Lords as a judicial body in the late eighteenth century and thus to the proper interpretation of decisions from that formative period.  In doing so, it highlights the need for historians of substantive law to master the procedure used during the periods they study.  For these insights, the committee awards the 2015 Sutherland Prize to H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui for his article, “Copyright at Common Law in 1774,” 47 Connecticut Law Review, 1-57 (2014).

Surrency Prize to Bishara

[Via H-Law, we have the following report of another prize awarded at the recently concluded annual meeting of the ASLH.]

The 2015 Surrency Prize for the best article published in Volume 32 of the Law and History Review, calendar year 2014, goes to Fahad Ahmad Bishara for his essay “Paper Routes: Inscribing Islamic Law Across the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean,” Law and History Review 32 (2014): 797-820 (Number 4, November 2014).

This powerful, subtle, and elegant essay postulates that law, Islamic law, bound together a region from Muscat to Mombasa, from Oman to Kenya, “furnished Indian Ocean merchants, planters, and other commercial actors with a lexicon for economic life,” and “provided a legal grammar for a world of commercial contracting that moved along an axis that was largely independent of broader processes of imperial of political action” (801).  Independent of empire or kingdom, private law actors including Omani date plantation owners, Arab ivory and clove traders in Zanzibar, Indian merchants everywhere, local scribes, and Islamic law jurisconsults created during the nineteenth century credit and other legal instruments, founded on “confidence” that the actors worked inside the same system, which financed the entry of all of these actors into a premodern capitalist system of exchange while remaining within the structures of Islamic law.  Through the use of legal instruments called waraqas, a kind of deed or power-of-attorney, and a redeemable sale of real property called a khiyar sale, which resembled a pledge or pawn, merchants, planters, and scribes, all Muslim, injected liquidity into the commercial system within the strictures against usury.  The result is a highly revealing, ground-level view of “Islamic law” in action, free of abstraction and generalization.

Bishara encompasses the newest literature on law and empire as well as recent scholarship on the Indian Ocean as a system to think the Indian Ocean as a legal regime dependent on commerce and shared practices of private actors, rather than on political expansion or overarching imperial legal frameworks and policies.  Richly rooted in archival sources in Zanzibar and in the pronouncements of leading Omani jurists, Bishara’s bottom up approach renders all the more persuasive his ambitious argument that law not only structured commerce in the western Indian Ocean, but also constituted the Indian Ocean world -- as much as the monsoon winds and transregional communities that populated its port cities.  For its persuasive and powerful showing that law in the hands of private actors, even more than public institutions, structures commerce and thought, “Paper Routes” stakes a definitive claim for the analytical power of legal history and amply deserves the 2015 Surrency Prize.

ASLH Panel Recap: "Contesting Fatherhood"

[Here is Sarah Barringer (Sally) Gordon's recap of another panel at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Contesting Fatherhood:  Mediating Institutions and the Legal Regulation of Paternity from the Romantic Period to the Clinton Era.]

Panelists: Danaya Wright, Clarence J. TeSelle Endowed Professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law; Deborah Dinner, Associate Professor at Emory Law School; Kara Swanson, Professor of Law at Northeastern School of Law.  Chair and comment, Holly Brewer, Burke Chair of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland

Danaya Wright’s “Romanticism and Revolution:  Percy Shelley’s Children and the Origins of Parens Patriae” focused on Shelley’s loss in 1817 of custody of his children from a first marriage.  The father of Shelley’s dead wife sued, claiming that Shelley was an atheist, blasphemer, and adulterer (he deserted this first wife before she died, and took up with another woman).  Lord Eldon, the chancellor who decided the suit and was known to oppose all manner of liberal reforms, extended the traditional concept of parens patriae beyond its grounding in a royal prerogative to those with “reform views” and “vicious” opinions.  In the process, Eldon inaugurated a new pattern of removing children from fathers who might be financially sound but transgressed in other ways – they were homosexual, atheist, sexually promiscuous, or otherwise morally suspect.  In this way, the court expanded parens patriae to normative elements of the household.  This judicial oversight of the domestic sphere was deployed to give the state a mandate to interfere with parental rights, a mandate exercised primarily against fathers.

Deborah Dinner’s “Working Fathers: The Origins and Consequences of Sex Neutral Caregiving Entitlements” examined claims by working fathers in the 1970s that they, too, deserved parental leave.  These “male liberationists,” while never a cohesive group, nonetheless highlighted the tension within feminists’ claims parity.  Traditional maternalist laws “protected” women, reinforcing stereotypes but also providing important limits on what employers could demand of female workers.  Labor feminists argued that such protections should be expanded beyond mothers, to limit work hours and provide over time for all employees.  Other feminists argued instead in favor of formal, legal equality over mandatory protection.  This latter group championed provision of unpaid leave for all parents, and in the process they privileged those who could afford to take time off from work, an “upper class equality.”  And as Americans began to work longer hours with less job security in the mid and late 1970s, responsibility for child rearing shifted firmly inward to the family and away from state protective legislation, a new cultural and psychological.

Kara Swanson’s “Making Fathers in the Clinic: Donor Insemination and Legal Paternity” probed the simple process of insemination and the complex legal world that evolved to “make” fathers of the husbands whose wives were inseminated with a donor’s sperm from the 1940s through the 1970s.  The entire medical process was shrouded in secrecy, but its goal was the production of a legal fatherhood, and decidedly not “adultery by doctor.”  At first doctors described the process as “semi-adoption,” a legal fiction that collapsed under scrutiny by courts.  And one estranged husband in Illinois actually asked that his wife be charged with adultery.  Finally, a model Uniform Parentage Act smoothed the way for husbands of inseminated women.  Nonetheless, the ease of the procedure meant that it traveled outside the strict bounds of heterosexual marriage that mid-century doctors assumed would be eligible.  Especially among same sex couples and in clinics where secrecy and privacy eroded, some sperm donors have been held to paternal obligations.  And in the 21^st century, lawyers are now reaching back to the older concept of adoption, as both parents are now “made” in fertility clinics.

Holly Brewer’s comments noted that Shelley was himself a minor peer, and thus a high ranking figure.  The extension of such state power to such a man was itself surprising in the early nineteenth century.  In addition, she urged Dinner to take account of the physical fact of motherhood as she works on the complex debates among feminists and “male liberationists” over equality and parity.  Finally, she noted that physical fathers were “separated” from legal fatherhood in Swanson's clinics, a point that was picked up in questions.  Sophia Lee noted that one might speak as much of “termination” of fatherhood in the clinic (the fatherhood of the donor) as of the “creation” of fathers.  Barbara Welke asked about interracial couples, especially in light of the work of the late Peggy Pascoe.  Other questions asked about whether the contrast in Dinner’s work between cultural change and structural protection might benefit from some investigation of the overlap between the two.  In closing, it is worth noting that Percy Shelley, the subject of Wright’s paper, challenged his own father's authority when he surrendered his claim on the family estate in return for a cash payment after his father criticized the son's public and controversial defense of atheism.

Reid Book Award to Edling, "A Hercules in the Cradle"

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 Max M. Edling (King's College, London), for A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

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:

Edling’s marvelously insightful book explains the legal, political, and economic foundations of the early republic’s ability to tax, borrow money, wage war, and increase its territory.  Edling shows that debt following independence and the pressing need to raise money in a more effective manner than possible under the Articles of Confederation shaped constitutional design and, specifically, the tax power.  His contributions go well beyond legal history per se.  Historians of Europe and historical sociologists have long argued that “war made the state.”  Edling expertly applies this research tradition to the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War as the new nation developed a more robust state.  He explains that the United States by virtue of its geographic advantages faced lower security costs than the European powers, so it did not need to remain constantly on a war footing.  Yet, crucially, it constructed in 1787-91 a tax-collecting and borrowing capacity similar in operations and legitimacy to that of Britain.  This combination helps explain how the United States could repeatedly expand its territory and wage the Civil War to a successful conclusion.  Edling makes very good use of comparative history.  He contrasts the financial burdens, resources, and trend lines in the United States with those of Great Britain, Continental European powers, and Mexico.  As he does so, he is attentive to the particularities of the United States’ situation: for instance, state’s rights ideology, which acted as an ideological and institutional constraint on federal fiscal authority.  Deeply researched, marrying quantitative analysis with institutional history, alert to micro-level political strategizing, Edling’s work will be required reading not only in legal history, but in a number of other fields: foreign relations, comparative state-building, and the histories of taxation, military affairs, imperialism, and westward expansion.

The members of the this year's Reid Book Award committee were Richard J. Ross (University of Illinois) [chair], Deborah Dinner (Emory University), Catherine Fisk (University of California, Irvine), Nicholas Parrillo (Yale), and Brad Snyder (University of Wisconsin).

Liebowitz on Payments to British Authors by American Publishers

Stan J. Liebowitz, University of Texas at Dallas School of Management, has posted Paradise Lost? The Payment of British Authors in 19th-Century America’s Copyright Wilderness:

The payment to British authors by American publishers during the mid‑19th century, when the works of British authors did not have any American copyright protection, is sometimes presented as evidence that authors can be well rewarded without the need of copyright protection. The introduction of this evidence to economists came largely from Arnold Plant=s 1934 critique of copyright, which relied on a UK Royal Commission Report published in 1878. In this paper I examine the evidence put forward in the Royal Commission Report as well as data on payments to British Authors from a leading American publisher during the mid‑1800s. The conclusion I reach is that most British authors were not paid by American publishers and the majority of those who were paid received considerably less than they would have received under copyright. Further, a cartel‑like agreement among leading American publishers enhanced the payments to British authors beyond what they would have received in a market with modern antitrust laws, thus overstating author payments without copyright.

Kamali in Yale Legal History Forum

Back in August, we posted the schedule for 2015-16 of the Yale Legal History Forum.  Here’s an updated version, which includes word that on Tuesday, November 17, 2015, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard Law School, will speak on “Anger's Place in the Medieval English Law of Felony.” in YLS Room 129.  A reception begins at 4:00.  The Forum is from 4:15 PM to 5:45 PM.

Cromwell Book, Dissertation and Article Prizes Announced

Via H-Law, we have the following report of the prizes awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, in consultation with a committee of the American Society for Legal History and announced at the recently concluded annual meeting of the ASLH.

ASLH Honorary Fellows Announced

H-Law has circulated the names of the American Society for Legal History’s three new Honorary Fellows and the text of the citations for each, read at the annual meeting on Saturday.  The three new Honorary Fellows are Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University; Diane Kirkby, La Trobe University; and John McLaren, an emeritus professor at the University of Victoria.  Their citations follow after the jump.

ASLH Panel Recap: The Administrative State at the Grassroots

[Smita Ghosh, JD, Class of 2014, and PhD Candidate, American Legal History, at the University of Pennsylvania, has provided us with a recap of a second ASLH panel, "The Administrative State at the Grassroots."  The panelists were (1) Eric L. Muller, the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina School of Law; (2) Sarah Milov, an assistant professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia; and (3) Joanna Grisinger, Associate Professor of Instruction and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University.  I chaired and commented.  Here is Ms. Ghosh’s report.  The text of my comment and an addendum follow after the jump.]

Eric Muller’s “Looking at Japanese American Imprisonment through a Law Office Window” is a microhistory of legal contests at a Japanese internment site in Wyoming.  Project Attorneys for the War Relocation Agency (WRA), who acted as all-purpose lawyers in Japanese internment camps.  They served as representatives for camp directors and internee organizations, and also gave legal aid to particular detainees in low-level disputes.  While historians have seen these officers as embodiments of the government’s exclusionary impulse--”assimilationists” at best, abusive racists at worst--this paper found more nuanced story.  Project Attorneys often ignored explicit directives from Washington in order to accommodate the desires of detainees.  At one point, a cuckolded man assaulted another detainee who had been sleeping with his wife.  Officials in Washington, who monitored the attorneys in weekly correspondence, urged the Project Attorney to contact state officials to press charges.  But the attorney pushed back, convinced by the perception among the detainee “community” that the assault was justified.  In the end, the lawyer handled the case in house,  suggesting the negotiability of legal practices on the ground. 

In Sarah Milov’s paper, “Clearing the Air: Shimp v. New Jersey Bell and the Strange Politics of Workplace Smoking,” the original sin is not imprisonment but a little secondhand smoke.  The protagonist is an aggrieved plaintiff, rather than a government lawyer, but processes are similarly negotiable (we are, after all, in the grassroots).  The paper focuses on Donna Shimp, an employee of Bell Telephone who developed serious health problems after working in a smoke-filled office in the early 1970s. When Bell was unresponsive to her complaints--instead putting her on unpaid leave--Shemp became an anti-smoking activist.  She drew from a set of newly available resources to develop her complaints: agencies like the EPA and OSHA and their state counterparts, as well as newly formed anti-smoking advocacy groups.  Eventually, she sued the company in state court with the help of a Rutgers Law professor and his employment law clinic.  The suit pitted Shimp against her union, which had only ten years before earned its members the right to smoke at work.  After winning an injunction against Bell, Shimp developed a non-profit consulting company to help non-smokers advocate for similar changes on the job.  Despite the success of the suit, Shimp’s work focused on the bottom-line (and, as someone mentioned in Q&A, a gendered language about protection).  Employers of tobacco-toting TAs should take note: Smokers waste 2-10% of the workday on cigarette breaks. 

Joanna Grisinger’s paper, “‘The self-containment of the bureaucracy’: The Civil Aeronautics Board and the Right to Participate,” offered a grassroots-level view of public participation in agency processes.  The agency in question is the Civil Aeronautics Board, which was empowered to both regulate and promote the American airline industry.  This dual mandate made the liberal public participation provisions of the CAB’s statutory mandate fairly hollow. The agency rarely took the public’s input very seriously.  Instead, it was overwhelmed by public complaints, captured by greedy airlines and distracted by their orders to boost the industry.  But activists were still moved by the power of participation.  Activists interested in civil rights, environmentalism and dismantling Apartheid all complained to the Board in one way or another.  In this way, as Dan Ernst noted in his comments, Grisinger showed the optimistic tone of the early participation movement.

In his comments, Ernst reflected on his own work on the NRA in the 1930s and ’40s.  From this vantage point, he was able to assess the changing nature of administration  over the years.  In Ernst’s era, it was agencies that made the more “adventurous” legal arguments towards hostile and conservative courts. But by the 1970s things were different: Courts--like the NJ Superior Court in Shimp--were at the forefront of legal change, while agencies were slow to act, perhaps desiring political cover.  It was an apt time for Ernst's New Deal era film reference: We weren't in Kansas anymore.

[My comment and an addendum prompted by the Q&A appear after the jump.]

Rivlin on the Right to a Fair Trial on OUPblog

Over at the OUPblog is the first of a series of posts on The Right to a Fair Trial, by His Honour Geoffrey Rivlin QC, a Senior Circuit Judge and the Honorary Recorder of Westminster and the author of First Steps in the Law (OUP, 2015).

McKay on the History of Australian Water Law

Jennifer Margaret McKay, University of South Australia School of Law, has posted Australian Water Law History: The Move from Introspective State Sovereignty to a National Interest Approach and the Influence of International Law, which appears in Sovereignty and International Water Law in the History of Water, series III, volume 2, 2015

There are two types of water sovereignty in Australia. The first concerns state based sovereignty, and the socio‑legal history of this will be outlined. The second is national sovereignty, and this has two aspects: the first includes the national accreditation of state‑based water use regimes under the 2007 Water Act and the legislative instrument of the Murray Darling Basin Plan, which impacts on domestic freshwater use matters; the second aspect of national sovereignty concerns the regulation of foreign ownership of freshwater which is a national competency under the Foreign Investment and Takeover Act 1975. This chapter will discuss these types of sovereignty.

Strum to Lecture on Whitney v. California

Philippa Strum, Professor Emerita of the City University of New York and a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center will be speaking on Speaking Freely: Whitney v. California and American Speech Law at the Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room, Monday, November 9, 2015, 4:00-5:30pm:

The United States has the world's most permissive speech laws. That wasn't always true, however, and leading constitutional scholar Philippa Strum explains how and why it happened. The story involves both a radical descendent of Mayflower Pilgrims named Anita Whitney and Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis. Strum also explores the question of whether such a liberal approach to speech is the right policy in today's world, given cyberbullying, terrorist recruitment on the Internet, sexting, and the absence of gatekeepers in the world of the Web.

Kinder Institute Endowed Professor of Constitutional Democracy

[Via H-Law, we have word of the following job posting.]

University of Missouri-Columbia, Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy

Kinder Institute Endowed Professor of Constitutional Democracy (History)

The Department of History at the University of Missouri invites applications for an endowed Kinder Institute Professor of Constitutional Democracy, to be jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Institute at the rank of associate or full professor. Started in 2014 and supported by a generous grant from the Kinder Foundation of Houston, the Kinder Institute is an interdisciplinary academic center on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, jointly operated by members of the History and Political Science Departments. The Institute is dedicated to promoting excellence in teaching and scholarship on American political thought and history, understood broadly to include both the origins of America’s constitutional and democratic traditions, and their applications and reinterpretations in later periods and around the world.

The successful candidate will be expected to teach four classes per year, consisting of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that contribute to the program’s minor in American Constitutional Democracy and the history department’s broader curriculum. In addition, he or she will be expected to participate in the intellectual community of the Institute, maintain an active research and publishing agenda, and engage in professional service activity, including supervising undergraduate honors thesis projects and serving on doctoral committees.

Applicants must demonstrate a track record of distinguished scholarship, committed teaching, and intellectual curiosity based in a subject area that advances the Kinder Institute’s core missions While the particular sub-field and time period is open, we are most interested in an innovative scholar with broad interests in the political history of the Atlantic World (including culture, thought, and institutions) in the 18th and/or 19th century.  Applicants with expertise in the American Civil War era will be particularly welcome, especially if they can work and think in a long chronological scope and/or a transnational frame of reference that meaningfully connects them to the broader work of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy and its affiliated scholars.

To apply, please submit the a letter of application, current C.V., statement of teaching philosophy, an outline of your current research agenda, an article-length writing sample, and the contact information for three professional references online by January 15, 2016 [here].

Merge your CV with a brief cover letter and upload the document in the Resume/CV section of the application. Upload the teaching statement, research agenda, an article-length writing sample, and the names and contact information for three references in the “attachments” portion of the online application system.

For more information about the Institute, including descriptions of all faculty, graduate and undergraduate programs, please visit [here]. Questions about this position may be directed to Prof. Jeffrey L. Pasley, associate director of the Kinder Institute, at PasleyJ@missouri.edu. Please contact Human Resource Servicesmuhrs@missouri.edu for questions about the application process.

ASLH Election Results

Via H-Law, we have a list of the election results announced at Saturday’s annual luncheon of the American Society for Legal History.  The new president-elect is Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania Law School.  The new members of the Board of Directors are Gautham Rao, American University; Sophia Lee, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Sara McDougall, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Philip Girard, Osgoode Hall Law School; and Malick Ghachem, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The new members of the Nominating Committee are Amalia Kessler, Stanford Law School, and James Q. Whitman, Yale Law School.

Legal History, Foreign Relations History, and Our Founder!

Mary L Dudziak (credit)

We are very pleased to announce that LHB Founder Mary Dudziak, the Asa Griggs Candler Emory University School of Law and, this year, the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, has been elected Vice President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.  That would in itself be notable, but consider that in SHAFR whoever prevails in the competitive election for the vice presidency runs unopposed for the presidency the following year.  That means before very long, a leading legal historian will head the leading learned society on the history of foreign relations.  Legal historians should note another sign of the growing influence of their field–and this unusual opportunity for collaboration between historians of law and historians of foreign relations.

We may have, in effect, a preview in the lecture Professor Dudziak will deliver as Kluge Chair,  A Bullet in the Chamber: The Politics of Catastrophe and the Declaration of World War I, on December 10, 4:00 pm, in Room 119 of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress:

As members of Congress gathered in April 1917 to decide whether to declare war on Germany, some legislators arrived with battle scars. For Civil War veterans, the memory of that catastrophic war would inform their understanding of a new conflict. But their experience of war was overtaken as 20th century American wars moved offshore. Distance made war a matter of choice in 1917. This lecture will reveal what it would take to generate sufficient support to enter a faraway war: a politics of catastrophe. Dramatic stories of the deaths of small numbers of Americans who chose to cross an ocean war zone ultimately drove the country to commit soldiers to fight in European trenches. Over one hundred thousand American soldiers died. In World War I and after, dramatic events like torpedoed ocean liners were not a president’s sole reason for entering a war. But broad political mobilization and congressional authorization for distant war, in World War I and after, required a politics of catastrophe.