Legal History Blog

We are so grateful to Professor Mitra Sharafi  (University of Wisconsin, Madison) for coming back to the blog this past month and posting a ...

Caleb Nelson, University of Virginia School of Law , has posted Against the Dictatorial Presidency : George Washington ( NYPL ) Article II o...

Lance Walker , an oil-and-gas attorney in Oklahoma City, has posted "Not a Particle of Choctaw Blood": Samuel Caldwell's Four ...

Legal historian Sarah Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania , has been appointed to the Evan C Thompson Chair for Excellence in Teaching...

  A question hovered over my head as I worked on Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia : how shou...

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law , has posted Henry Fielding on Crime and Punishment : Henry Fielding ( NYPL ) In his own r...

Emily S. Bremer, Notre Dame Law School , has posted Making Our Ministry of Justice , which is to appear in Notre Dame Law Review Reflection ...

[ Via H-Law , we have the following CFP.  DRE] Rethinking Pakistan through Legal History.  Pakistan Legal History Workshop, December 18-19, ...

Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl, William & Mary Law School , has posted The Forgotten History of Legislative Interpretive Directives , which is fo...

 Vivian Grosswald Curran, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has posted Disentangling the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Fren...

John M. Breen, Loyola University Chicago School of Law , and Lee J. Strang, Ohio State University, have posted Jesuit Identity in American ...

Sandeep Dhaliwal, St. John's University School of Law, has posted The Legal Realism of W.E.B. Du Bois : W.E.B. Du Bois, 1907 ( wiki ) Th...

Heart Mountain High School Campus Scene, 1943 ( LC ) We have the following announcement .  DRE.] Federalism in Action: Teaching Japanese Ame...

" Annette Gordon-Reed will present 'Thomas Jefferson and the Presidency," as the University of Northern Iowa’s 2026 Constitut...

John Croucher, Macquarie University , has posted The Murder at Agnes Banks: Unravelling Truth, Lies, and 19th Century Justice : The setting ...

Stephen E. Henderson, University of Oklahoma College of Law , has published An Honest Verdict : In America, we’ve now had 250 years of crimi...

Samuel L. Bray, University of Chicago Law School , and Christian R. Burset, University of Pennsylvania Law School , have posted Why General ...

When I started working on my second book, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia , I created a cour...

The draft program for the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History to be held November 12-14, 2026, at the Banff Centre fo...

Wanling Su, Indiana University, Bloomington , has posted her amicus brief in Kian v. Florida (25-6623): (DRE/DPE Collection) Williams v. Fl...

[We have the following Call for Proposals.  DRE] The American Journal of Legal History is a well-established, quarterly publication coveri...

The Summer 2026 issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History is now online : Recovering the Lost Pragmatist Promise of Legal Pro...

[We have the following announcement from the ASLH.  DRE] Virtual Working Group 2026-2027: “Histories of Law and Technology” We are delighted...

Tomas Gomez-Arostegui, Lewis & Clark Law School , has posted Patent-infringement Actions in the Eighteenth Century and the Right to a Ju...

Andrew T. Fede has published An Antebellum Protest against Segregation and the Criminal Law Response: A Preview of Jim Crow Law and the Str...

Berkeley Law 's notice of its new legal historian, Aaron Hall ( UC Berkeley Law ).   Daniel F. Gosling , Principal Legal Records Specia...

During the 12+ years I spent working on Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia , I came across some...

Nga Bellis-Phan  has posted A Legal Remedy Against Rent Arrears: Landlords’ Privilege on Furniture in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Fra...

[ Via H-Law , we have word of the publication of a special issue ( 53:2 ) of  istorical Reflections/Réflexions  Historiques  devoted to Repa...

Samuel Moyn, Yale Law School , has posted A Letter to Hans Kelsen on the Use of Force : In the last days of 1966, John Fried wrote a letter ...

Joshua E. Kastenberg, University of New Mexico School of Law , has published “Ford is an Anarchist” and “History is Bunk”: William Archibald...

Andrew Wender Cohen, Syracuse University , has published  Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge Uni...

Aderson Francois, Georgetown University Law Center , and Helen Hershkoff, New York University School of Law , have posted Pennoyer , Due Pro...

[Via H-Law , we have the following from the ASLH.  DRE] The American Society for Legal History welcomes proposals for the funding of new in...