Legal History Blog

Do you know about Founders Online , maintained by the National Archives?  H/t: Matt Steilen. Here 's a useful thread on dissertation pri...

[We have word that Fall 2022 seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty, sponsored by the Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate I...

Okay, we don't know how we missed this book, and the series in which it appears, until we just now saw William Eves's review in the...

 [Like us, you may not have been aware that some years back the newsletter of the California Supreme Court Historical Society was reestabli...

Congratulations to Cynthia Nicoletti, Virginia Law , for winning the George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in the Jo...

Via Professor Raphael Peixoto (Ufersa Law School and IDP-DF) and Professor Cristiano Paixão (University of Brasília) we have the following C...

We are very pleased to have had Kristin A. Olbertson, Alma College , as our guest blogger this month.  Here are her posts, collected for you...

     When white Americans and European immigrants began to settle on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, they were so unnerved by th...

From In Custodia Legis: " Land Claims Cases of Indigenous Nations in New York ." The journal Federal History seeks “an assistant ...

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University-Antonin Scalia Law School, has posted Impeachment by Any Other Name , which appears in the Univers...

Back in March, we noted the publication of William Novak 's New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State (Harvard Universi...

We hear that the third "Legal Histories of Empire" conference , held this year in Maynooth, Ireland, was terrific.  For those who ...

Hohfeld devotees rejoice: Wesley Hohfeld: A Century Later: Edited Work, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries , edited by Shyamk...

Congratulations to Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford Law School , for winning the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize of the Law and Society Association “...

      Writing is always a fraught process. It can be especially so during a pandemic. In 2020 and early 2021, when I was completing revision...

 AHA Perspectives on History has a brief interview with Linda Kerber about her essay, Frightened . Annette Gordon-Reed spoke on “The Fut...

Linda Ross Meyer, Quinnipiac University School of Law , has posted Connecticut's Anti-Originalist Constitutions and its Independent Cour...

Frederik Dhondt, Legal History Institute/Gustave Rolin Jaequemyns Institute of International Law , has posted John Gilissen and the Teaching...

Felix Schorling, University of Munster , has posted A Deeper History of German Law : Most textbooks introducing German law devote special at...

David E. Bernstein, George Mason Law , has published Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America (Simon & Schuster...

Susan Watson , who is Dean of the Business School and holds joint chairs in the Faculty of Law and Faculty of Business and Economics, at the...

      Having spent many years researching and writing a book about the historical criminalization of speech, I was quite chuffed to learn of...

The OAH is sponsoring the webinar Rethinking Our Historical Narrative: Native American and Indigenous History.  “We invite you to join us on...

William Novak, University of Michigan Law School , has published Willard Hurst, Technological Change, and the Transformation of American Pub...

K. Crosby , Senior Lecturer in Law, Newcastle Law School , has posted several articles on the jury in the United Kingdom England and the Uni...

Last year, the American Society for Legal History inaugurated an “ In Memoriam ” page with memorials of Willard Hurst (by Robert W. Gordon...

          It took far longer to get my first book to publication than I ever thought it would. It began as my dissertation, completed in 200...

In Frightened: A Legal Historian's View from 2022 , ASLH Honorary Fellow Linda K. Kerber comments on Dobbs in AHA Perspectives .  Here...

Here is the TOC for American Journal of Legal History 62:2 (June 2022): British Policy towards the Incorporation of the Baltic States into...

Harvard University continues to make great hires in legal history. Earlier this year, we noted Myisha Eatmon 's move. This week, we lear...

Earl Maltz, Rutgers Law School , has published The Coming of the Fifteenth Amendment: The Republican Party and the Right to Vote in the Earl...

Paula A. Monopoli, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law , has posted Gender, Voting Rights, and the Nineteenth Amendment ...

         In my first blog post discussing my recent publication, The Dreadful Word , I described how the criminal law in eighteenth-century ...