Amestoy's "Slavish Shore"

Although we’ve noted some reviews, we’ve never actually posted on Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr., by Jeffrey L. Amestoy, formerly Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and currently a Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School.  From the Harvard University Press’s website:

In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. sailed to California as a common seaman. His account of the voyage, Two Years Before the Mast, quickly became an American classic. But literary acclaim could not erase the young lawyer’s memory of the brutal floggings he had witnessed aboard ship or undermine the vow he had made to combat injustice. In Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s unflagging determination to keep that vow in the face of nineteenth-century America’s most exclusive establishment: the Boston society in which he had been born and bred.

The drama of Dana’s life arises from the unresolved tension between the Brahmin he was expected to be on shore and the man he had become at sea. Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves, and his extraordinary advocacy put him at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court, and prosecuting Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason. Yet Dana’s own promising political career remained unfulfilled as he struggled to reconcile his rigorous conscience with his restless spirit in public controversy and private life.

The first full-length biography of Dana in more than half a century, Slavish Shore reintroduces readers to one of America’s most zealous defenders of freedom and human dignity.

Studying Roman Law: Juno, It’s More Useful than You’d Think

That's not our pun; blame the Guardian's headline writer.  The story includes the following quote from a former Latham & Watkins partner: “As a lawyer who practised in international, multi-jurisdictional litigation, I have seen first-hand how Roman law concepts are woven like a thread into fundamental aspects of cases I have been involved in, both as a matter of the private and public international law.”  Something for law-school based legal historians to keep in mind as our institutions implement the ABA's new, assessment-based accreditation standards.

Coates and Gerstle Win OAH Prizes

We'd like to note particularly two winners of prizes announced at last week's annual meeting of the Organization of American history.  Former LHB guest blogger Benjamin Coates, Wake Forest University, won the Binkley-Stephenson Award for best article appearing in the Journal of American History during the preceding calendar year, for his article “Securing Hegemony through Law: Venezuela, the U.S. Asphalt Trust, and the Uses of International Law, 1904–1909.”  Gary Gerstle, University of Cambridge, won the Ellis W. Hawley Prize for the best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present, for Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton University Press).  All of the prize winners are announced here.

2016 Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholars Workshop

Congratulations to the scholars whose papers were selected for the 2016 Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholars Workshop!

Flight, Fright, and Freedom: The Criminalization of Black Boys at the Illinois Training School for boys at St. Charles, 1920-1950
Tera Eva Agyepong, Assistant Professor of History, DePaul University

Rethinking Fictional Characters in the Eighteenth Century Literary Commons
Matthew H. Birkhold, Ph.D. Candidate in German, Princeton University

Who Speaks the Culture of the Corporation?  Dissent in the Close Corporation After Citizens United and Hobby Lobby
Gwendolyn Gordon, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Vagrancy Law, Police Reform, and the Poetics of Surplus Population
Sarah Nicolazzo, Assistant Professor of Literature, University of California, San Diego

How Meat Changed Sex: The Law of Interspecies Intimacy After Industrial Reproduction
Gabriel Rosenberg, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, Duke University

The Josiah Phillips Attainder and the Institutional Structure of the American Revolution
Matthew Steilen, Associate Professor of Law, State University of New York at Buffalo

Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law:  On New Ways of Not Being a State
Natasha Wheatley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International History, University of Sydney

Alternates:
Arresting Stories:  The Austrian Imperial Code and the Beginning of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (1811-1820)
Ofer Dynes, Ph.D. Candidate in Near Eastern Literatures and Civilization, Harvard University

Jim Crow Pragmatism:  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Legal Logic of Race
Hannah Wells, Assistant Professor of English, Drew University

Sunday Book Roundup

There's two new reviews of Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf's Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright): one in the Chicago Tribune, here, and one in The New York Times, here. From the Times:

"At the heart of their study of Jefferson’s life are the questions of freedom and slavery. Jefferson’s earliest memory was being handed up to a slave on a pillow, and the last person who understood his words on his death bed was a slave who at his request adjusted his pillow before he slipped away. “Slavery,” Gordon-Reed and Onuf thus note, “bounded his life from cradle to grave.” For all his travels, “he remained very much a product of Virginia’s plantation society — the society that formed him and the place where he discovered what role he wanted to play in the world.”"

The latest from The Federal Lawyer has a review of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Temple University Press).

H-Net adds two reviews on civil rights. The first is a review of Stephen A. Berrey's The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi (UNC Press). The second is a review of Stars for Freedom: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement by Emilie Raymond (University of Washington Press).

The sixth edition of Tulsa Law Review's annual book review issue has many reviews worth checking out. One is Kunal M. Parker's multi-book review, "Modernist Forms of Thinking and Their Critics in Mid-Twentieth Century America," reviewing Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books); Adam Laats, The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard University Press); and Reuel Schiller, Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (Cambridge University Press).

"In situating Kruse, Laats, and Schiller in terms of a longer intellectual history, I have sought to show how mid-twentieth century law, politics, religion, and education were all, in distinct but also related ways, tied up with the broad attack on foundational thinking, on the one hand, and with the various responses to it, on the other. Notions of tradition, religion, and law were all invoked to counteract modernist developments in the realms of education and politics. But in challenging these modernist developments, there would be no easy or uncomplicated return to the world before modernism. Law, religion, and perhaps tradition would endure a “thinning out” of sorts in their attempt to win back a role for themselves."

Another review from the issue is Adam Mossoff's review, "Patents as Commercial Assets in Political, Legal, and Social Context," reviewing Christopher Beachamp’s Invented by Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent that Changed the World (Harvard University Press).

And, over at The Junto there is a review of Abby Chandler's Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England (Ashgate).

"By examining three jurisdictions not previously studied by historians of law and sexuality, Chandler complicates standard narratives of the extent to which New Englanders adhered to English law. She also engagingly reconstructs the familial and neighborhood conflicts that shaped individual cases."

Conference Reports and Comments Welcomed!

Smita Ghosh’s recent post on a one-off conference at Columbia University and Karen’s recent tweet inviting posts on legal history panels at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians prompt me to second Karen and also to invite submissions of comments delivered on such occasions, revised so that non-attendees can catch your drift.  Of course, many comments really should not escape the airless confines of a conference room because they were delivered in a disciplinary setting to help colleagues improve not-ready-for-prime-time works in progress.  Some comments, though, include quick reviews or characterizations of the field that can help new entrants acquire a sense of the lay of the land.  I’m thinking especially of a few of the comments delivered on Thursday and Friday at a small, state-of-the-field conference on the history of the federal judiciary at the Federal Judicial Center, where Clara Altman (formerly an LHB blogger!) directs the History Office.

Having issued the invitation, though, I should also acknowledge that some comments ought to be worked up not as blog posts but full-blown review essays.  I wouldn’t want LHB, by providing a tempting way to publish the good, to become the enemy of publishing the best somewhere else.  Still, if, when attending, say, the upcoming Policy History Conference or annual meeting of the Law and Society Association (with its Law and History Collaborative Research Network), you see (or say) something of general interest to legal historians, feel free to see whether we would like you to say something about it on LHB.

Weekend Roundup

• Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard Law School, “spoke about her experiences combining legal analysis and historical research at a March 9 event hosted by the Class Marshals as part of” a series that “invites HLS professors to give a lecture as if addressing the graduating class for the last time.”  Watch it here. 

David M. Rabban (credit)

• Congratulations to David M. Rabban, Texas Law, for being named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow for 2016

• Wait, you mean it wasn't an April Fool's joke?  It's for reals?  After this, we're still not entirely convinced.

• From Notches: Alison Lefkovits (New Jersey Institute of Technology) draws on her expertise on the history of divorce law to explore "The Clinton Sex Scandal as Queer History."

• The Future of the African American Past: a conference in Washington DC, May 19-21, 2016.  Sessions include the opening roundtable, “The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom.”

• Lawrence Solum, Georgetown Law, has updated the entry on Originalism in his Legal Theory Lexicon.  

• The latest issue of Ronald K. L. Collins’s First Amendment News (FAN 103) is up on Concurring Opinions.  It features a notice of Stephen Solomon’s forthcoming Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech (St. Martin’s Press).

• “The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the Mid-Hudson Antislavery History Project will present 'Slavery and the Church in New York' with Reverend Charles Kramer on Sunday, April 10, 2016. The program will begin at 2:00 p.m. in the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center. This event is free and open to the public.”  More.

• "Conflict Resolution in Historical Perspectives," at Cardiff University, September 14, 2016.  More, via H-Law.

• We're very sorry to have missed noting the conference Theodore Roosevelt and the Law in a timely fashion.  Better late than never, we hope. 

• From Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog: a post on "An age of lawyers and literature" (drawing in part on the "Age of Lawyers" exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library).

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

CFP: Junior Scholars Conference at Tel Aviv

[We have the following CFP.]

The 4th Annual TAU Workshop for Junior Scholars in Law: Law in a Changing Society, November 21-23, 2016, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Tel Aviv, Israel

The Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law is pleased to invite submissions to its fourth annual workshop for junior scholars in law. The workshop provides junior scholars with the opportunity to present and discuss their work, receive meaningful feedback from faculty members and peers and aims to invigorate the scholars’ active participation in the community of international junior scholars in law.

Human society is constantly changing, and in recent decades the change seems all the more rapid. The transformation of social, political and economic structures, institutions and perceptions poses significant challenges for law. The workshop will explore the interface between legal change and social change: the ways in which law adapts itself to a changing society and the ways in which law changes society - how it reacts to technological and scientific advancements, how it supports and facilitates new institutions, and when and why it fails to do so.

Relevant papers may discuss a variety of legal fields such as criminal law, corporate law, environmental law, international & human rights law, intellectual property law, family law, etc. For example, papers could discuss the effects of the global financial crisis on corporate and financial regulation; changes in perceptions of borders and obligations to ‘others’ in the international realm; the effect of states' growing need for protection against cyber-crime on human rights law; the response of environmental law to global warming; the effect of information-sharing platforms and social media networks on intellectual property law; or the adaptation of family law to the demise of the traditional family and the development of advanced fertility technologies. Papers could also discuss legal history: historical instances of legal responses to social change or instances in which a change in law resulted in changes in society. We also welcome papers examining more theoretical questions, for example, whether law only reacts to social change or actively precipitates it (e.g., is sexual harassment law a result of change in social perceptions or did the development of such law lead to social change)? How do or should scientific research and technological advancement affect our interpretation of traditional legal concepts (e.g., mens rea, consent, causality, privacy, property)?

We welcome junior scholars (doctoral candidates, VAPs, writing fellows and recent graduates of doctoral programs) from universities and research institutions throughout the world to submit abstracts engaging with the general theme of the workshop.  Limited travel grants and accommodation will be available for participants with no institutional funding.

Submissions: Abstracts of up to 700 words of the proposed presentation (with a short bio and your current institutional affiliation(s)) should be submitted by email to TAU.junior.scholars@gmail.com by May 16, 2016. Applicants requesting travel grants and/or accommodation should indicate so in their submission, along with the city they expect to depart from and an estimate of the funds requested.  Applicants will be informed of acceptance or rejection by June 16, 2016.  Selected presenters must submit their papers up to 10,000 words in length by October 25, 2016.  For further inquiries contact us at TAU.junior.scholars@gmail.com.

Guest Post: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Incarceration

[We are very grateful to Smita Ghosh, JD, Class of 2014, and PhD Candidate, American Legal History, at the University of Pennsylvania, for this report!]

Last week I went up to Columbia University’s Heyman Center for an interdisciplinary conference on incarceration in America.  I thought the focus on “confinement” would gel with my interest in immigration detention (and if confinement’s not your bag, the conference focused on “mobility” as well).  I I’m certainly glad I went.   The gathering was organized by Hidetaka Hirota, who presented his work on immigration enforcement in the early 1900s at the Annual Meeting of ASLH last year.  I wanted to share some impressions on the conference to those LHB readers who are interested in the topic but for whatever reason couldn’t be confined there.
 

The first panel on Imprisonment and Poverty, chaired by Samuel Roberts (who presented his work on heroin treatment in New York at Penn last week).  Julily Kohler-Hausmann oriented historians of the ‘70s to the growth of the criminal justice provisions within the welfare state, tracking the growth of fraud penalties in state-level welfare laws.  Reuben J. Miller presented a study of the barriers that impede former prisoners as they “re-enter” society, and argued that reentry programs require conformity to the role of willing and repentant participant in order to access services.  Kristin Turney’s presentation suggested that parents and children experience extreme emotional and financial strain after mothers are incarcerated, and that this impact is especially high among children whose parents lived together before the mother’s incarceration.

The second panel on arresting and detaining migrants had two speakers--unfortunately Kelly Lytle Hernandez, who is working on a study of settler colonialism and incarceration in LA, was unable to make it.  Emily Ryo presented a study of legal attitudes among immigrant detainees (drawn from the Immigrant Detention Study she is doing with Caitlin Patler).   She revealed that migrant detainees find legal rules to be arbitrary, punitive and inscrutable by design.  Juliet Stumpf used family detention to show how developments in other forms of law can migrate  to immigration law.  One example: advocates have tried to use state childcare licensing laws to improve--or end--family detention in Texas.

In the third panel, “The War on Drugs, The War on Terror,” two historians--Donna Murch and Elizabeth Hinton--presented research on the mobilization and expansion of local law enforcement via federal subsidies in the 1960s and ’70s.  Their work, which drew from Murch’s forthcoming study of Los Angeles and Hinton’s new book, would be of interest to those who attended “Crime, Punishment, and Federalism: The Curious Case of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration” at the ALSH annual meeting last year, which featured commentary from Hinton as well).  Finally, the conference ended with Michel Welch’s assessment of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Journal.  The document, he argues, presents a glimpse of American culture at its most perverse.

Desan on the Political Economy of Chisolm v. Georgia

Christine A. Desan, Harvard Law School, has posted Contesting the Character of the Political Economy in the Early Republic, which appeared in The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon (2002), 178-232:

The U.S. Constitution left it notoriously ambiguous whether individuals could sue sovereign states for breach of contract in federal court. Within a few years, the issue had produced a constitutional crisis, famously acted out in the Supreme Court’s determination that states were subject to suit, Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. 419 (1793), and the political reversal of that permission, the Eleventh Amendment. The essay reconstructs the context that gave rise to the suit, its determination, and its political reversal. Colonial Americans had created a constitutional order that located legislative authority over the economy as the essential channel to self-determination, popular sovereignty, and calibrated justice over shared resources. But both political economic practices and conceptions about sovereignty were changing. The Supreme Court’s jurisdictional assertion was part of the movement towards an order that elevated judicial authority, locating it as the critical instrumentality in a liberal state where rights were supposed to exist independent of social and economic circumstance. The strategies adopted by the Chisholm claimant to define the obligations of contract and obtain a remedy showcase that transition. From Robert Farquhar’s 1784 death at sea on his way to obtain relief to the state of Georgia’s 1889 claim to reimbursement from the United States in the U.S. Court of Claims, the effort spanned more than a century. It took both individual and state claimants from executive officials and legislative committees to the increasingly ascendant courts.

Call for Applications: Law in Context Early Career Workshop

We have the following announcement [note the fast-approaching April 18 deadline]:

The International Journal of Law in Context and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford jointly invite early career scholars to participate in a workshop to be held in Oxford, June 20–21, 2016. 

The purpose of this international workshop is to bring together scholars at a relatively early stage in their careers to support them in developing research projects and preparing publications to submit to scholarly journals in the field of socio-legal studies. During the workshop scholars will make a presentation, take part in discussion, and receive feedback on their work from senior research staff at the Centre and the editorial team of the Journal. The best papers presented at the workshop will be considered for publication in the International Journal of Law in Context.

To be eligible to apply, you must be either a PhD student in socio-legal studies whose doctoral submission is expected in 2016, or a post-doctoral researcher who has completed a thesis within the last three years. Applications from inside and outside the UK are welcome. The ten best submissions will be selected and applicants will be invited to the workshop.

To make an application you should send a 1500-word extended abstract together with a cover letter with your name and contact information, details about your place of study or work, and the date of your expected or past doctoral submission. Abstracts may be on any contextual work dealing with law and its relationship with other social science disciplines. The deadline for applications is April 18, 2016. Please send applications to Katie Hayward, admin@csls.ox.ac.uk.

Now available to watch: Brown-Nagin on Judge Constance Baker Motley and Social Activism in the American Century

Now available on YouTube: Tomiko Brown-Nagin's inaugural lecture as Harvard Law School's Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law. The lecture is titled "On Being First: Judge Constance Baker Motley and Social Activism in the American Century."

(Hat tip: Samuel Moyn)

Eighth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

[We've previously posted an announcement for the Morris Cohen Prize, but because the deadline for submissions is approaching, we are posting this additional one.]

Morris L. Cohen (credit)

Are you a graduate student interested in legal history? It's not too late to enter the Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition! Deadline is Monday, April 18, 2016.

The Legal History and Rare Books (LH&RB) Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), in cooperation with Cengage Learning, announces the Eighth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition. The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, late Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.  The competition is designed to encourage scholarship and to acquaint students with the AALL and law librarianship, and is open to students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, and related fields. Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives. The winner will receive a $500.00 prize from Cengage Learning and up to $1,000 for expenses to attend the AALL Annual Meeting.

The entry form and instructions are available at the LH&RB website.  Entries must be submitted by 11:59 p.m., April 18, 2016 (EST).
Fred Dingledy
Co-Chair, Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition Committee

Metzmeier on Legislative History and the "Master of the Senate"

Kurt X. Metzmeier, University of Louisville, Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, has posed Fraternal Twins: Legislative History and the History of Legislation, which appeared in the Louisville Bar Briefs, July 2012, 8-9:

LBJ as Senate Majority Leader (LC)

The "legislative history" that lawyers research to help them interpret the language of statutes, bears very little resemblance to the actual history of how that law was passed. In his The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate historian Robert A. Caro showed LBJ's gritty, convoluted and intensely personality driven battle to pass a civil rights act. The texts of the laws passed in these years reflected compromises, political decisions, and intentions only dimly reflected in the bills, amendments, House and Senate reports, and debates that one would examine using the traditional implements of legislative history. Moreover, sometimes the tools that historians use—papers, accounts of journalists, memoirs—are available to lawyers soon enough to use along with the legislative history toolkit to interpret federal legislation. This short article discusses a few of these resources and offers examples of good histories and journalistic treatments of lawmaking.

Lebovic to Speak on "Free Speech and Unfree News"

On Monday, April 11, 2016, from 4:00 to 5:30pm, Sam Lebovic, George Mason University, will appear in the Washington History Seminar, to be held at the Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom.  He will be presenting his new book Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America (Harvard University Press):

Does America have a free press? Many who answer yes appeal to First Amendment protections that shield the press from government censorship.  But Sam Lebovic’s history of modern press freedom shows that the right to free speech has been insufficient to guarantee a free press in an age of rising state secrecy and corporate newspaper consolidation.  The origins of our contemporary newspaper crises, he suggests, can be traced to failed twentieth-century efforts to guarantee a public right to the news.

Sam Lebovic is Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University.  He received a PhD from the University of Chicago and has published articles on the role of the media in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the history of the Fulbright program, and on the history of popular culture during World War II.  His work on the history of press freedom was awarded the American Society for Legal History’s Paul Murphy Prize in the History of Civil Liberties in 2012, and has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, The Center for the Cold War and the U.S. at New York University, and the Truman Library Institute.

RSVP here.

Barbas on the Confidential Trial

Samantha Barbas, SUNY Buffalo Law School, has posted The Most Loved, Most Hated Magazine in America: The Rise and Demise of Confidential Magazine, which is forthcoming in the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal (2016):

Credit: Douglas Linder

Before Gawker, the National Enquirer, and People, there was Confidential magazine. In the 1950s, Confidential was the founder of tabloid, celebrity journalism in the United States. With screaming headlines and bold, scandalous accusations of illicit sex, crime, and other misdeeds, Confidential destroyed celebrities’ reputations, relationships, and careers. Not a single major star of the time was spared the “Confidential treatment”: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Liberace, and Marlon Brando, among others, were exposed in the pages of the magazine. Using hidden tape recorders, zoom lenses, and private investigators and prostitutes as “informants”, publisher Robert Harrison set out to destroy stars’ carefully-constructed media images, and in so doing, built a media empire. Between 1955 and 1957, Confidential was the most popular, bestselling magazine in the nation.

Confidential, published between 1952 and 1958, was a watershed in the history of American media and celebrity culture. Confidential also played an important, little-known role in legal history and the history of freedom of the press. The provocative, highly-sexualized magazine became the subject of a nationwide campaign to eradicate it from newsstands. These efforts culminated in obscenity, criminal libel, and conspiracy charges brought by the state of California, and a “star-studded” 1957 Los Angeles trial, described as the “O.J. Simpson trial” of its time. The extensive litigation against Confidential killed the magazine, and Robert Harrison ceased publishing it in 1958. Only sixty years ago, at a time when First Amendment protections for speech were fairly well-developed, the most popular magazine in the country was effectively run out of business by the law.

Confidential magazine has been written about extensively in the context of celebrity history and film history, but its legal history has yet to be documented. Drawing on unpublished legal and archival sources, this article tells the story of rise and fall of Confidential, and in so doing, illuminates a significant episode in the history of freedom of the press.

The Color of Surveillance: A Conference at Georgetown Law

The Color of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of the African American Community, a conference on “the role of law enforcement and national security surveillance in the relationship between African Americans and their government – beginning with the colonial era and continuing to the present day,” will take place on April 8 at the Georgetown University Law Center.  Speakers include David Garrow and David Levering Lewis.  It is hosted by my Georgetown Law colleague Paul Butler.

Hess on Female Appointees to the Federal Bench, 1970-2014

I believe we missed, when it was first posted, The Collapse of the House that Ruth Built: The Impact of the Feeder System on Female Judges and the Federal Judiciary, 1970-2014 by Alexandra G. Hess, a Yale Llaw student whi is now an associate at Paul Weiss.  It recently appeared in the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 24 (2015): 61-106:

This paper examines the evolving role of feeder judges in Supreme Court clerkships from 1970 to 2014. Using extensive empirical analyses, this paper reveals how an increasingly small number of ‘super feeders’ determine access to the vast majority of Supreme Court clerk positions, a system that excludes female judges. This increasingly narrow pool of feeder judges is the result of a confluence of factors, including: high levels of feeding along political party lines, an increasing applicant pool, and the attachment of career-long benefits to a Supreme Court clerkship.

Clune's "Executing the Rosenbergs"

Just out from Oxford University Press is Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War World, by Lori Clune, an  Associate Professor of History at California State University, Fresno.

In 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, an affair FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the "crime of the century." Their case became an international sensation, inspiring petitions, letters of support, newspaper editorials, and protests in countries around the world. Nevertheless, the Rosenbergs were executed after years of appeals, making them the only civilians ever put to death for conspiracy-related activities. Yet even after their executions, protests continued. The Rosenberg case quickly transformed into legend, while the media spotlight shifted to their two orphaned sons.

In Executing the Rosenbergs, Lori Clune demonstrates that the Rosenberg case played a pivotal role in the world's perception of the United States. Based on newly discovered documents from the State Department, Clune narrates the widespread dissent against the Rosenberg decision in 80 cities and 48 countries. Even as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations attempted to turn the case into pro-democracy propaganda, U.S. allies and potential allies questioned whether the United States had the moral authority to win the Cold War. Meanwhile, the death of Stalin in 1953 also raised the stakes of the executions; without a clear hero and villain, the struggle between democracy and communism shifted into morally ambiguous terrain.

Transcending questions of guilt or innocence, Clune weaves the case -and its aftermath -into the fabric of the Cold War, revealing its far-reaching global effects. An original approach to one of the most fascinating episodes in Cold War history, Executing the Rosenbergs broadens a quintessentially American story into a global one.

Endorsements after the jump.

Kessler on the Early Years of First Amendment Lochnerism

Jeremy K. Kessler, Columbia Law School, has posted The Early Years of First Amendment Lochnerism, which is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review:

From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, civil libertarian challenges to the regulation of economic activity are increasingly prevalent. Critics of this trend invoke the specter of Lochner v. New York. They suggest that the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other legislative “conscience clauses” are being used to resurrect the economically libertarian substantive due process jurisprudence of the early twentieth century. Yet the worry that aggressive judicial enforcement of the First Amendment might erode democratic regulation of the economy and enhance the economic power of private actors has a long history. As this Article demonstrates, anxieties about such “First Amendment Lochnerism” date back to the federal judiciary’s initial turn to robust protection of free exercise and free expression in the 1930s and 1940s.

Robert H. Jackson, J. (LC)

Then, it was those members of the Supreme Court perceived as most liberal who struck down economic regulations on First Amendment grounds. They did so in a series of contentious cases involving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who challenged local peddling taxes as burdening a central aspect of their missionary faith – the mass sale and distribution of religious literature. In dissent, Justice Robert Jackson warned that the new “liberal” majority’s expansive conception of First Amendment enforcement repeated the mistakes of the “liberty of contract” jurisprudence of the Lochner era, undermined democratic regulation of the economy, and imposed the beliefs of some on “the rights of others.”

Jackson’s warnings sound strikingly similar to contemporary critiques of First Amendment Lochnerism. Yet today’s critics treat recent case law as a novel, economically libertarian cooption of an otherwise progressive project: the judicial enforcement of civil liberties. In contrast, the Justices and scholars who objected to the 1940s peddling tax decisions perceived an inextricable relationship between judicial civil libertarianism and judicial interference with economic regulation. By recovering the origins and sketching the aftermath of the peddling tax debate, this Article argues that contemporary critics of First Amendment Lochnerism tend to overstate the phenomenon’s novelty and underestimate the difficulty of curing judicial civil libertarianism of its “Lochnerian” tendencies. This argument, in turn, counsels a reorientation of contemporary advocacy. Rather than defending an illusory tradition of economically neutral First Amendment enforcement, critics of today’s First Amendment Lochnerism might more accurately and persuasively position themselves as reformers. They could then set to work breaking with a legal tradition long insensitive to the deleterious effects of judicial civil libertarianism on political regulation of the economy.

Two by Hickford on New Zealand Legal History

Mark Hickford, Victoria University of Wellington, has posted two articles on the legal and constitutional history of New Zealand.  The first is Strands from the Afterlife of Confiscation: Property Rights, Constitutional Histories and the Political Incorporation of Māori, 1910s-1940s, from Raupatu: The Confiscation of Maori Land, ed. Richard Hill and Richard Boast (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2009):

This essay seeks to reveal the internal conversations in which the New Zealand Crown messily, and often inconclusively mulled over its own conduct and concept of sovereignty spanning the mid 19th to early 20th centuries, and the effect these diverging internal perspectives had on the varied internal and external histories of the crowns patterns of engagement with Māori. Providing a start toward reconsidering the competitive autonomy approach, the author proposes giving an internal history of the Crown, attempting to destabilise the mono-willed constitutional façade, and reveal the complex conduct concerned with crafting Crown legitimacy, sovereignty and autonomy.

The second is  Looking Back in Anxiety: Reflecting on Colonial New Zealand's Historical-Political Constitution and Laws’ Histories in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, New Zealand Journal of History 48 (2014): 1-29, 2014:

This essay addresses a concept of political as opposed to legal constitutionalism in New Zealand, including how such a concept might assist legal-historical analysis. It does so with reference to what the author has characterized as historical-political constitutionalism, focused upon expanding and diversifying areas of contestability and dissent in and through politics as opposed to relying on case- by-case legalism. In examining constitutionalism in this manner, this article foregrounds the ongoing political contestation that shaped and defined governmental power across various layers and interconnections of activity and thought, not only local or provincial but also trans-oceanic.

In the Nation's Service? Woodrow Wilson Revisted

A very interesting and important example of public history–the “public” being a university community–opens today in the Marver and Sheva Bernstein Gallery of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.  As you might recall, last fall, President Christopher Eisgruber appointed a trustee committee to examine how Princeton should recognize the legacy of its (and the nation’s) former president, Woodrow Wilson.  The committee’s report, approved by the Board of Trustees, was released today.  It calls for “a renewed and expanded commitment to diversity and inclusion at Princeton,” the creation of a new “pipeline program” to identify “highly qualified undergraduates from a broad range of colleges and universities and encourage and prepare them to pursue doctoral degrees,” and the alteration of the university’s informal motto to “Princeton in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity,“ a change that would take up a suggestion by Justice Sotomayer.  It also recommends that the Wilson School and the Wilson residential college continue to bear Wilson’s name, and stresses that Princeton must be “honest and forthcoming about its history” and acknowledge “Wilson's failings and shortcomings as well as the visions and achievements that led to the naming of the school and the college in the first place.” 

As a first step in that last task, the exhibit In the Nation’s Service? Woodrow Wilson Revisited opens today in the Bernstein Gallery, where it will run through October 26.  It draws on contemporary scholarship and the extensive holdings of Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library.  A panel discussion of Wilson’s legacy will be held in the Wilson School’s Dodds Auditorium at 4:30 on April 8.  We will post the link to the on-line exhibit when it becomes available.  Early press reports are here, here, here, and here.

Update: Here's the link to the on-line version of the exhibit.  It includes a very good bibliography.

To Michael B. Katz, In Memoriam (Tani, States of Dependency, Post 1)

Back in 2010, when I was a lowly graduate student trying to figure out what I had to contribute, I closed my guest blogging stint here at LHB with a post on gratitude. As I begin a series of posts on my just-published book, I’d like to begin the same way. I have by now accumulated many debts – so many that my formal Acknowledgments section is surely inadequate and under-inclusive.

Michael B. Katz (credit)

But I will always remember this big one: the debt I owe to one of dissertation advisors, Michael B. Katz. He succumbed to cancer in August, 2014, after a long career at the University of Pennsylvania. By then he had taught hundreds of students and written dozens of important books and articles, ranging from landmark overviews of the American welfare state to moving meditations on urban transformation and place-based inequality. (Here he is talking about One Nation Divisible; here's a link to a must-read short piece, "The Death of 'Shorty.'") My highest aspiration for my book is that it would have made him proud. So, before I post anything more about that, I want you to know about Michael Katz, to whom the book is dedicated.

Sunday Book Roundup

Having taken last week off, there's a long list of book reviews to cover this week.

From H-Net, we've already noted Sara Mayeux's review of Felice Batlan's Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945 (Cambridge University Press).

Also up on H-Net is a review of the volume, The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes, edited by Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband, and Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press).

Jennifer Thigpen's Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai'i's Pacific World (UNC Press) is reviewed here.

And, Vincent J. Intondi's African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press), is also reviewed.

From Salon comes an excerpt of Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law by David Cole (Basic). A review of the book is in The Washington Post, too. From the excerpt:

"There  is no precise way to measure the effects of these wide-ranging efforts. But nearly all of the advocates, lawyers, and activists with whom I spoke agreed that each of the developments summarized here provided an important foundation for the marriage equality campaign. They helped make it possible for Evan Wolfson to write his law school paper, and for the many initiatives that would be necessary, inside and outside of courts, before the right to marriage equality that Wolfson envisioned could be realized."

Also from Salon is a review of Adam Cohen's Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin). There's also a review of Cohen's book in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A third contribution from Salon is an excerpt from Adultery: Infidelity and the Law by Deborah Rhode (Harvard University Press).

"This is in keeping with public attitudes. Only a third of Americans believe that adultery should be a crime. Given these views, it is somewhat surprising that so many statutes remain on the books and that several have survived recent attempts at repeal. No one thinks the fight to preserve these statutes has much practical significance: the issue is symbolic. As Thurman W. Arnold observed three-quarters of a century ago, “Most unenforced criminal laws survive in order to satisfy moral objections to our established modes of conduct. They are unenforced because we want to continue our conduct, and unrepealed because we want to preserve our morals.”"

Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders by Brady Carlson (Norton & Co.) is reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

HNN has a review of Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic).

"The 2016 annual meeting for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) will feature a session focusing upon the provocative book One Nation Under God by Princeton history professor Keven M. Kruse. In One Nation Under God, Kruse argues that the idea of the United States as a Christian nation does not find its origins with the founding of the United States or the writing of the Constitution. Rather, the notion of America as specifically consecrated by God to be a beacon for liberty was the work of corporate and religious figures opposed to New Deal statism and interference with free enterprise."

Larry Cuban's Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools (Harvard Education Press) is also reviewed on HNN.

The New Books Network has posted two interviews since the last roundup: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal discusses Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press), and Daniel K. Williams discusses Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press).

The New York Times has a review of The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise by David K. Randall (Norton & Co.).

Last but not least, the latest issue of The Federal Lawyer is out, with reviews of Roger Lowenstein's America's Bank: The Epic Struggle To Create the Federal Reserve (Penguin), Jeffrey Amestoy's Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Harvard University Press), and Dina Gold's Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice as Krausenstrasse 17/18 Berlin (ABA Publishing). All reviews can be found here.

Weekend Roundup

• Tocqueville's Nightmare–now out in paper.

• Judging for the People, a day-long conference celebrating the 175th anniversary of Victoria’s Supreme Court, will take place at Victoria University’s Queen Street Campus on 9 April.  H/t: Lawyer’s Weekly

• In the New Republic, Stephanie Coontz (Evergreen State College) writes about the myth of "traditional family values." 

• In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern on Justice Alito's use of history in Sixth Amendment decisions

• It's the week for newsletters: Law and LAPA (the newsletter of Princeton's Law and Public Affairs Program), the National History Center; the Tobin Project; and the Miller Center for Public Affairs

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

Call for Applications: ASLH Student Research Colloquium

We have the following announcement: 

The American Society for Legal History will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, October 26, and Thursday, October 27, 2016, immediately preceding the ASLH’s annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. The SRC offers a small group of graduate and law students an opportunity to work on their in-progress dissertations and law review articles with distinguished ASLH-affiliated scholars.

The SRC’s target audience includes early post-coursework graduate students and law students interested in legal history. The SRC seeks to introduce such students to the ASLH and to legal history communities more generally. Students working in all chronological and geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are students whose projects engage legal-historical themes but who have not received any formal training in legal history. Applicants who have not had an opportunity to present their work at ASLH annual meetings or who have otherwise not had an opportunity to discuss their work with legal historians are particularly encouraged to apply. A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced paper to the entire group. These papers will provide the foundation for discussion at the colloquium. The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, complete reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference registration costs.

To apply to the ASLH’s Student Research Colloquium, please submit:

· a cover letter;

· a CV;

· a letter of recommendation from a faculty mentor/advisor;

· a two-page, single-spaced “research statement,” describing an in-progress dissertation or law review article.

The application deadline is July 15, 2016. Organizers will notify all applicants of their decisions by August 15, 2016. Please direct questions and applications to John Wertheimer at the following e-mail address: srcproposals@aslh.net.

Life & Law Panel Recap: "Rural Labor and Immigration"

[We’re grateful to Jillian Jacklin, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for this detailed recap of a panel at the Life & Law in Rural America Conference.]

An interdisciplinary dream, the Princeton University conference on rural America this past weekend was one of my most memorable moments as an academic to date.  An array of fledgling scholars discussed their own research, compassionately and judiciously commented on each other’s work, and grappled with divergent and competing meanings of “rurality.” Gracing all of us with her wisdom on the subject and personal experience growing up in the Arkansas Ozarks, UC-Davis “ruralist” and Professor of Law, Lisa Pruitt, provided a compelling case for producing scholarship on the intersection between law and rural life.  Arguably more importantly for a group of graduate students in the humanities, her talk urged us all to care about rural people; and she demonstrated a need for social justice beyond the borders of U.S. cities.  Overall, our projects contributed to a lively symposium that the American Studies Program hosted, and my time at Princeton was insightful and inspiring.

Although not all of the participants would have referred to themselves as legal scholars upon initially attending, the conference certainly revealed the importance of law in U.S. history.  One panel that I absolutely appreciated, titled “Rural Labor and Immigration,” focused on the juncture between rural work and matters of legality (and in interesting ways, law enforcement or lack their of) in the history of rural America.  As conference co-organizer, Emily Prifogle similarly expressed in her post, I apologize if I have misrepresented in any way, the intentions of each of the contributors: Smita Ghosh, Tyler Gray Greene, Vanessa Guzman, and Daniel Platt.  Postdoctoral Research Associate in African American Studies at Princeton, Jarvis McInnis, provided generous and critical commentary on the overall theme, as well as each individual paper.

Vanessa Guzman, graduate student in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, began with an important examination of the power of organizing and resistance on the part of a community of Latina/o laborers and their families in a migrant camp in the rural midwestern countryside.  Using intimate oral histories that she conducted, Guzman narrated stories of struggle, emphasizing “the deplorable living conditions” of seasonal employees who worked for Lakeside Foods during the turn of the twenty-first century.  Her historical subjects migrated from Mission, Texas by way of their established communal networks for employment, only to find themselves residing in abandoned prisoner of war detention centers in the rural-South of Minnesota.

Rather than focusing specifically on “shop floor” corporate injustices, Guzman discussed the cooperative efforts of parents who needed childcare and desired better homes for their kids.  Initially successful in their endeavors, at least comparably to their former situation, these Latina/o workers won a designated childcare facility and remodeled bathrooms (if still unacceptable, they represented an improvement).  Her research contributes a body of scholarship dedicated to connections between labor law reform and enforcement, migrant worker activism, and family studies.  In response to the challenge to take rural livelihoods seriously, posed by keynote speaker Lisa Pruitt, Guzman persuasively argued in support of also studying the experiences of marginalized communities within the rural world.

Meyler on the Politics of the Declaration before the Civil War

Bernadette A. Meyler, Stanford Law School, has posted Between the States and the Signers: The Politics of the Declaration of Independence Before the Civil War, which is forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review:

It is almost impossible to conjure the thought of the Declaration of Independence today without also raising the specters of the signers. Commonplace invocations of “John Hancock” stand in for the prototypical signature, and elementary school children throughout the country learn details about the lives of the signers. The signers did not, however, authorize the Declaration solely for themselves, but rather on behalf of the “People.”

At the same time as autograph collectors began accumulating the signatures of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in the early nineteenth century, the political contest over the “People” of the United States drew the Declaration into its arguments. Controversy focused, in particular, on whether this people could be considered united from the Declaration onwards or consisted in the people of the several states. Drawing on two periods when discussions of the Declaration came to the fore, this Symposium Article contends that the figure of the signers — and their signatures — became a crucial weapon in a battle over which people had authorized not only the Declaration but also the U.S. Constitution.

Mayeux on Batlan's "Women and Justice for the Poor"

H-Law has published a review of Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945 (Cambridge University Press), by former guest blogger Felice Batlan (IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law). The review is by Sara Mayeux (University of Pennsylvania). Here are the first two paragraphs:

In this bold work of both legal history and professional critique, Felice Batlan sets out to recover “the ‘real’ history of legal aid, a story that the predominantly male leaders in the field of legal aid intentionally masked” (p. 3). For decades, chroniclers of organized legal assistance to the poor have begun the tale in 1876, when the entity now known as the Legal Aid Society of New York was established to serve German immigrants. Even today, the Legal Aid Society touts itself as the nation’s “oldest” organization of its kind.[1] Not so, according to Batlan, who writes instead: “Organized legal aid began with the founding of the Working Women’s Protective Union in New York City in 1863” (p. 17).

Batlan reveals that women “lay lawyers” began serving the poor years before the organized legal profession got involved. Moreover, women continued to play a dominant role in legal aid efforts through the 1940s, whether as lawyers, “lay lawyers,” or social workers. But reform-minded bar leaders like the Boston lawyer Reginald Heber Smith—the Progressive Era legal aid movement’s most prominent evangelist—worried that the perception of legal aid as feminized charity work might undermine their campaign to secure the bar’s support. And so, in their conference proceedings, law review articles, and policy reports, they erased the history of women’s involvement, falsely enshrining the Legal Aid Society as the movement’s vanguard.

Read on here.

Rao's "National Duties"

Just out from the University of Chicago Press is National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State, by Gautham Rao, American University:

In the wake of the American Revolution, if you had asked a citizen whether his fledgling state would survive more than two centuries, the answer would have been far from confident. The problem, as is so often the case, was money. Left millions of dollars of debt by the war, the nascent federal government created a system of taxes on imported goods and installed custom houses at the nation’s ports, which were charged with collecting these fees. Gradually, the houses amassed enough revenue from import merchants to stabilize the new government. But, as the fragile United States was dependent on this same revenue, the merchants at the same time gained outsized influence over the daily affairs of the custom houses. As the United States tried to police this commerce in the early nineteenth century, the merchants’ stranglehold on custom house governance proved to be formidable.

In National Duties, Gautham Rao makes the case that the origins of the federal government and the modern American state lie in these conflicts at government custom houses between the American Revolution and the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He argues that the contours of the government emerged from the push-and-pull between these groups, with commercial interests gradually losing power to the administrative state, which only continued to grow and lives on today.

Here are two endorsements:

Brian Balogh, University of Virginia
“Brilliantly researched and smartly argued, National Duties deploys prodigious research to construct a social history of governance in the early Republic. Rao gives us a methodological monument that will not be replicated for some time, connecting high fiscal policy to its implementation on the ground, and placing that contingent relationship in the broader social context of mob action and the cultural context of the British fiscal-military state on the one hand, and republican ideology on the other. Besides providing a methodological template for historians interested in governance and the law, regardless of site or time period, Rao’s approach yields a major substantive payoff. He argues persuasively that the great centralizer, Alexander Hamilton, was in fact instrumental in replicating a decentralized financial regime and it was Jefferson and Madison, so often portrayed as the protectors of state’s rights who shored up the plenary power of the national government.”

Steven Pincus, Yale University
“Rao’s elegantly written and deeply researched National Duties tells a remarkably important and unknown story: the central role that the custom house played in the creation of a strong American state. Using reams of little known material from the customs records in the National Archives, Rao shows how the early republic depended overwhelmingly on customs revenue to pay its debts, fund its wars, and finance governance. This dependence on overseas trade gave the merchants who plied that trade inordinate influence in shaping the contours of the American state. Rao demonstrates that in the wake of the Napoleonic wars James Monroe began to dismantle the old custom house system, which had continued many of the traditions of the British Empire. In so doing, Monroe did a great deal to create a truly national American state. Rao’s book both demonstrates the strength of the early American state and tells an important story about how the relationship between the state and merchant capital was transformed in the early Republic.”

TOC after the jump.