A Better Book: The First Book Workshop

              Several years ago, LHB’s own Karen Tani and Mitra Sharafi wrote wonderful posts on their first book workshops (Karen’s is here; Mitra’s is here).  For those who missed them, a first book workshop is a manuscript workshop for a first-time author. Such sessios have grown increasingly common in legal history. Participants typically include a mix of home-school colleagues and outside commenters. Mine was incredibly valuable. This post uses that experience to build on Karen’s and Mitra’s insights. (If your experience as an author or participant was similar or to the contrary, please share it in the comments below.)

              An immediate benefit of staging a first book workshop is the deadline. Karen Tani declared it “a source of stress -- but also a source of motivation.” I would write “and” where she wrote “but.” The interim deadline improved my mood, productivity, and work product. It distracted me from the truly looming deadline: closure of my tenure file. I thus traded exhausting long-term stress for more energizing and motivating short-term stress. After all, getting a manuscript done sooner would mean more time to improve it later.

              The structure of the workshop can vary with the author’s goals. Mitra Sharafi described gathering 4-6 readers for an afternoon of conversation about the book. Karen Tani’s workshop had more than a dozen participants who presented on different parts of the book in panels across an entire day.  My workshop split the difference.  I gathered just shy of a dozen people for a single three-hour book conversation in the morning. There were opportunities to follow up and revisit matters during the lunch that followed and the dinner that I had with the out-of-town guests.

              My goal for the workshop was to come away with a plan for pulling the manuscript’s disjointed pieces together. I already had a clear vision of the characters, narrative, and argument of the book. I knew what I wanted to accomplish in each chapter and overall.  Plus, my tenure file would close in a year and a half, so I had to stay firmly in finish-the-book mode. Any deep exploration of new literatures or events would have to wait for follow-on projects. Instead, I hoped that my readers and I would put on the table competing visions for integrating what I already had. To keep the focus on the book as a whole, I decided against asking each reader to take primary responsibility for one or another chapter.

              Inevitably, I received conflicting advice and concerns. Here, it was crucial to have a trusted mentor present who could direct conversation toward achieving consensus on a concrete plan.  Ariela Gross served that role for me, and did a fantastic job.  Had she been unavailable, I’m confident that either of the ASLH series editors involved in the book – Sally Gordon and Reuel Schiller – could have stepped in.

              I would also recommend having someone in the room take notes. If (unlike me) you would listen to a recording later, consider following Karen Tani’s lead and asking participants’ permission to record the session. I also found it helpful to ask those who spoke to send me any notes they had afterward. I worried that asking people to pre-circulate notes as Karen Tani had might stifle free-flowing discussion.

              I aimed to be instrumental and substantive when inviting participants. My primary goal was to choose readers who would provide helpful feedback on the project. But the workshop was also an opportunity to secure buy-in and buzz for the book and to strengthen my relationships with others in the field. My ideal outside reader was someone who would value the project, become an interlocutor, and potentially write a tenure letter. I wanted inside readers to hear from outsiders why the project mattered and to be drawn more into the work. I also hoped that the discussion would cause all the participants to discuss the book with colleagues once the workshop ended.

              For my workshop, I chose equal numbers of external and internal readers.  Bob Gordon and Sophia Lee agreed to fly in for the event, as did Reuel Schiller in his capacity as the editor for the ASLH series that was publishing my book. Clyde Spillenger made the trek from UCLA, and my USC colleague from American Studies and Ethnicity, Nayan Shah, came as well.  At my home institution, the Gould School of Law, I invited senior colleagues in legal history and constitutional law.

All of this cost money. Mitra Sharafi and Karen Tani turned to grants to fund their workshops. I was fortunate to work at a law school willing to foot the bill. (Thanks, Dean!).

               In my case, the workshop was time and money and well spent. I came out of it with better key terms, a clearer sense of argument, and plans for streamlining the prose. I strengthened my relationships with scholars I admire and placed my book project on their radar.  Crucially, I also gained a renewed sense of the potential of the project.

              Though manuscript workshops are beneficial for junior scholars, they are not equally accessible. Certain educational trajectories and institutional homes make it easier to secure funds and participants – if one knows to seek them in the first place. It is that last barrier that made Mitra Sharafi’s post so valuable. It publicized the first book workshop when it was an emerging practice and possibility.

--Sam Erman

Independent Publisher Book Award to Newman for "Dark Inheritance"

Congratulations to Brooke N. Newman for receiving an Independent Publisher Book Award for A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press). The book "shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified hereditary African slavery and barred members of marginalized groups from claiming the inherited rights and liberties of British subjects." The Independent Book Publisher Awards "are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers."

OAH Barnouw Award to "The Chinese Exclusion Act"

One more bit of legal history news from the recent Organization of American Historians meeting. The film The Chinese Exclusion Act received the Erik Barnouw award for "outstanding programming on television, or in documentary film, concerned with American history, the study of American history, and/or the promotion of American history." The film is a co-production of Steeplechase Films and the Center for Asian American Media. It was directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu and produced and written by Ric Burns, Robin Espinola, and Li-Shin Yu. Executive Producers: Stephen Gong and Donald Young, Center for Asian American Media; Mark Samels, American Experience.

A Better Book: Development Editors

              Today’s post concerns the secret weapon of many an excellent (legal history) author, the development editor. I worked with two on my book, Almost Citizens. They were crucial to my learning curve. Without them, I would never have crafted a book that resembled the vision in my head.

              Before starting my book, I had never contemplated paying someone to help me improve my writing. Legal history is a specialized area, and I chose my words carefully to hew to what the sources supported. I worried that someone from outside the field would seek to simplify or expand my claims in ways that I would just end up reversing. The problem was that I also knew that I could benefit from fresh eyes on my writing. By the time I’d drafted a few chapters and signed with Cambridge University Press, I felt confident about my narrative structure and cast of characters. But I found it more difficult to do smaller-scale reorganizations and line edits. This was partly because I was so close to the manuscript. It was also because writing is a skill, and I had more to learn.

Despite having many generous readers, none seemed likely candidates to become writing mentors. Colleagues and reviewers grappled with my work and provided incisive comments. But that feedback almost always involved the substance of the argument rather than its tone and constituent sentences. Given the economic realities of book publishing, many publishers hardly do any editing of manuscripts in progress. I did have the good fortune to publish with American Society for Legal History’s book series (which I discuss here). Sally Gordon was my editor there, and she was a tireless and skilled reader. But she soon saw that the book and I could both gain from more editorial engagement than she could devote to a single book in her series. So she recommended that I consider a development editor.

              I had never heard the term. Perhaps because I live just down the road from Hollywood, my mind immediately went to the entertainment executives who tell show runners that their sitcoms need more dogs or a kooky sister to really draw in the millennials. But (spoiler alert!) that was not whom I was to encounter. The editors I would work with helped me produce the best possible version of my book. Sometimes, such work is called development editing. Sometimes it goes by different names.

              I sought someone who could help me make my prose sing (or at least hum occasionally) without sacrificing nuance and accuracy. Given my topic, that meant an editor who could engage legal and historical arguments, had a sense of the evidentiary norms in the field, and understood the potential audiences for the work. But finding such an editor is a bit like turning up a good contractor for a renovation; you ask around, check out samples of the person’s work, and ultimately take a leap of faith that the (intellectual) place that you lay your head will be transformed for the better.

              I had the good fortune to work with two excellent development editors. I learned of both through admired colleagues who sang the praises of having collaborated with them. The first was Grey Osterud, an accomplished academic historian. Rather than teach, she complements her research with editing colleagues’ work. I was thus confident from the outset that she knew and honored the standards of academic history. Once I had the manuscript drafted, I undertook a rewrite with Pamela Haag, an author of serious histories for broader audiences. Notably, she also has a contract with Yale University Press for a style guide for the scholar-writer that I look forward to adding to my shelf soon.

              As Grey and Pamela helped me improve the book’s prose, they were also teaching me to be a better writer. One set of lessons had to do with the difficulties of evaluating choices about organization when one is too close to the text. Because I was circulating individual chapters to colleagues for feedback, I tried to put enough at the front of each chapter to orient them. The result was bloated chapter introductions. My development editors saw the problem immediately. They worked with me to shorten the chapter introductions and have them serve more as bridges between chapters than as introductions to standalone essays. Similarly, my immersion in the particularities of the book’s events had led me to subdivide the book’s chronology into overly narrow chronological bands. As Grey and Pamela perceived, such fine distinctions muddied the broader argument rather than clarifying it. Thus, a chapter that I had written with six sections, one for each of three characters at each of two times (ABCABC), came to contain just three character-centered sections (ABC).

              Careful editing by others is a wonderful way to discover one’s own writing tics. I had been particularly blind to two. I wrote long, intricate sentences and was overly fond of metaphors. I had to learn to reduce clauses and interjections, break up sentences, and clarify which verbs and nouns went together in what ways. Similarly, I had to unmix metaphors and close them out before they ceased to clarify. The difficulty in both cases was less fixing the problems than perceiving them in the first place. Grey and Pamela sensitized me to my propensity to create these tangles, which was all I needed to start fixing them.

              Like many historians, I revel in the details and complexity of what I study. Seeing the danger, my dissertation committee co-chair Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof counseled that my job was to over-claim and that his job was to rein me in. But knowing that I should trim and sum up did not wholly cure me. My development editors urged me to go further. Curate evidence. Don’t cut one of five quotations; leave just one. Remove tangents. Lead with bold claims. Qualify them later. Or don’t. The result was much more accessible prose. Arguments rose to the surface, no longer drowned by my sea of evidence.

There is one big downside to a development editor: she costs money. How much varies by who you hire, for how long, and for what. But price tags in the thousands of dollars would be common. The best solution is to have someone else pay. My law school (USC’s Gould School of Law) is extremely generous in its support for junior scholars’ work. While schools and departments may vary substantially in what they are able to offer, it is always worth asking. Knowing that peer institutions have offered similar funding can sometimes help shake out extra funds.

Had I had to pay for my development editors entirely out of pocket, I might have balked at using them or using them so extensively. In my case, that would have been a mistake. Their services were worth far more than the cost. As an early-stage scholar, the benefits were quite large. I have many productive years left in which to benefit from what I have learned in terms of writing and argumentation. The book is stronger too. That matters because the book is my debut in legal history as a mature scholar. It was also the centerpiece of my file for tenure (which I just received--Yay!).

My biggest fear when I began working with development editors was that I would not recognize the final text of the book as my own prose. In fact, the opposite was true. By the time I began working with Grey, I largely knew what I wanted to argue, which historical actors and narratives I wanted to feature, and what evidence I wanted to rely upon. But I found it frustratingly hard to translate the book that I had in my head into words on the page. As Grey and then Pamela and I worked on the prose, the gap between it and my envisioned book narrowed considerably (albeit with some nice additions suggested by my development editors that I had not foreseen). Almost Citizens ended up being very much my book—even more so than I had at first hoped.

--Sam Erman

OAH John D'Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award to De Orio

At the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians, another major prize went to a legal historian: Scott De Orio (currently a post doctoral fellow at Northwestern University) received the John D'Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award for “Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights." De Orio completed his dissertation at the University of Michigan under the direction of advisers Matthew Lassiter [Chair], David Halperin, Gayle Rubin, and William Novak.

Congratulations to Dr. De Orio!

OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award to Jones for "Birthright Citizens"

At the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians last week, Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins University) received the Liberty Legacy Foundation award for Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press).

As the OAH website explains, the award was "inspired by OAH President Darlene Clark Hine’s call in her 2002 OAH presidential address for more research on the origins of the civil rights movement in the period before 1954." It is given annually "to the author of the best book by a historian on the civil rights struggle from the beginnings of the nation to the present."

Congratulations to Professor Jones!

Weekend Roundup

• Ohio University seeks an instructor of Law, Justice, and Culture. The deadline for applications is May 6.

• Congratulations to legal historians recently named John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow for 2019-20.  These include ASLH President-Elect Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University, for "Legalities of Small Wars in European Empires, 1400-1900"; Lena Salaymeh, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University for "Revolutionary Islamic Law"; and Brad Snyder, Georgetown Law, for "Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, Judicial Restraint, and the Creation of the Liberal Establishment." The complete list of recipients is here.

• Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins) has been elected to the Society of American Historians. Congratulations! 

• Samuel Moyn has been designated the Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at the Yale Law School.  Congratulations, as well!

• California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, an exhibit curated by Tyree Boyd-Pates and Taylor Bythewood-Porter, is at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles through April 28.

• I'm grateful to Virginia Law's Aditya Bamzai for posting his amicus brief in PDR Network et al. v. Carlton & Harris Chiropractic, Inc., early in the same week in which I got to the Office of Price Administration in my legal history course, even though its discussion of Yakus is not the only treatment at hand of how the US squared the need for speedy wartime price control with the dictates of Article III. [DRE]

• From Tocqueville 21, William Novak (University of Michigan Law School) on "Honneth, Dewey, and the Depths of Democracy." And from AHA Perspectives, Katherine Benton-Cohen (Georgetown University) on How Experts and Their Facts Created Immigration Restriction.

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

In Memoriam: Kenneth Karst

Via UCLA law, we have learned of the unfortunate death of Professor Kenneth Karst, "an influential constitutional law scholar, teacher and longtime faculty member who had a profound effect in shaping UCLA School of Law." Of particular note to legal historians, Karst was the author of Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution (Yale University Press, 1989), which received the James A. Rawley Prize from the American Organization of Historians. UCLA's remembrance continues here.

An Essay Collection on International Arbitration

Newly published by the Cambridge University Press is Experiments in International Adjudication: Historical Accounts, edited by Ignacio de la Rasilla, Wuhan University Institute of International Law, and Jorge E. Viñuales, Cambridge University:

The history of international adjudication is all too often presented as a triumphalist narrative of normative and institutional progress that casts aside its uncomfortable memories, its darker legacies and its historical failures. In this narrative, the bulk of 'trials' and 'errors' is left in the dark, confined to oblivion or left for erudition to recall as a curiosity. Written by an interdisciplinary group of lawyers, historians and social scientists, this volume relies on the rich and largely unexplored archive of institutional and legal experimentation since the late nineteenth century to shed new light on the history of international adjudication. It combines contextual accounts of failed, or aborted, as well as of 'successful' experiments to clarify our understanding of the past and present of international adjudication.

W. Wesley Pue Remembered

The American Society for Legal History has posted a memorial of Professor W. Wesley Pue on its website.

Golieb Fellowships to Katz, Khalil

Via New York University School of Law, we have word of the Samuel I. Golieb Fellows in Legal History for the 2019-20 academic year. They are Andrea Scoseria Katz and Mina E. Khalil.

Andrea Scoseria Katz holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. After graduation, she clerked for Judge András Sajó on the European Court of Human Rights and Judge Michael A. Ponsor on the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. Her dissertation is titled "The President and His Labyrinth: Checks and Balances in the New Pan-American Presidentialism." Other recent work will appear this spring in the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Mina E. Khalil is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a current Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. His research focuses on the modern legal, social, and political history of the Middle East and draws on intensive periods of work, study, and teaching in Egypt, among other countries. He is the author of "Early Modern Constitutionalism in Egypt and Iran," which appeared in the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law in 2016,

New Online Source on Austrialian Investigations of Japanese War Crimes

The National Archives of Australia has just launched Dr Narrelle Morris’ new archival guide to Australia’s war crimes records: Japanese War Crimes in the Pacific: Australia’s Investigations and Prosecutions (National Archives of Australia, 2019).

The guide of more than 150,000 words covers Commonwealth government records (principally holdings of the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial) on the World War II war crimes investigations of Sir William Flood Webb (1943-46), the United Nations War Crimes Commission (1943-48), the Australian Army’s Directorate of Prisoners of War & Internees, post-war investigations, the War Crimes Act 1945 (Cth) and preparation for trials, the 300 Australian Military Court war crimes trials (1945-51), the Australian War Criminals Compounds, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946-48), and the repatriation, parole and release of convicted war criminals. Each chapter begins with a substantial, footnoted discussion of the subject matter before listing relevant records in sections. Appendix B contains an alphabetical name index with more than 950 entries of all war criminals tried by Australia with details of their trial(s) and outcome(s). Appendix D contains a basic index to finding key documents within the (now archival files) of the 300 Australian trial proceedings.

The guide can be downloaded as a free e-book (pdf format) here (at the bottom of the page). Or it can be viewed online in HTML format, which links directly to the catalogue (thus straight to the digitised online records in many cases). The guide is under a Creative Commons license, so it can be freely shared and copied.

Narrelle is an editor of and contributor to Australia’s War Crimes Trials, 1945-51 (Brill, 2016) and the law reporter for the forthcoming law reports series on the Australian Military Courts war crimes trials of the Japanese. She can be contacted at narrelle.morris@curtin.edu.au.

Cromwell Dissertation Prize

[We have the following announcement.]

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference.

The author of the winning dissertation receives $5,000. Anyone who received a Ph.D. in 2018 will be eligible for this year’s prize, which is awarded after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

To be considered for this year’s prize, please EITHER send a hard copy of the dissertation and author curriculum vitae to all committee members listed below OR simply e-mail an electronic copy of the dissertation and author curriculum vitae to John Gordan (johngordan3@gmail.com) and H. Robert Baker (robertbaker@gsu.edu) with the subject heading: CROMWELL DISSERTATION PRIZE SUBMISSION no later than June 7, 2019.

LASA Article Prize to Chira

At its annual meeting this spring, the Latin American Studies Association awarded the prize for "best article" to Adriana Chira (Emory University), for "Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68," which appeared in Volume 36 of the Law and History Review (Winter 2018). Congratulations to Professor Chira!

Rackley, Auchmuty and friends on women's legal landmarks in the UK and Ireland

Erika Rackley, University of Kent and Rosemary Auchmuty, University of Reading have co-edited the volume, Women's Legal Landmarks celebrating the history of women and law in the UK and Ireland with Hart. From the press: 

Women's Legal Landmarks commemorates the centenary of women's admission in 1919 to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland by identifying key legal landmarks in women's legal history. Over 80 authors write about landmarks that represent a significant achievement or turning point in women's engagement with law and law reform. The landmarks cover a wide range of topics, including matrimonial property, the right to vote, prostitution, surrogacy and assisted reproduction, rape, domestic violence, FGM, equal pay, abortion, image-based sexual abuse, and the ordination of women bishops, as well as the life stories of women who were the first to undertake key legal roles and positions. Together the landmarks offer a scholarly intervention in the recovery of women's lost history and in the development of methodology of feminist legal history as well as a demonstration of women's agency and activism in the achievement of law reform and justice.

 Table of Contents after the jump:

de la Rasilla on Groatian Revivals in International law

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral, Wuhan University, Institute of International Law, has posted Grotian Revivals in the Theory and History of International Law, which is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius, edited by R. C. H. Lesaffer and J. Nijman (Cambridge University Press, 2019):

This chapter examines how the title of founder of the law of nations was bestowed upon Grotius and how the liberal internationalist interpretation of the existence of a Grotian tradition in international law came into being. It also reviews the extent to which both historical constructs have been challenged by new historical research and contemporary re-interpretations of Grotius’ works and figure. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part accompanies the reception of Grotius by international lawyers from the time of the discovery of his De Jure Praedae in 1864 to the establishment of the Grotius Society in England during the First World War. The second part examines the revivals of Grotius among international lawyers in the aftermaths of both world wars and considers a number of Grotius-related historiographical developments during the Cold War period. The third part examines how, in recent decades, on the one hand Grotius has become more mainstreamed and further institutionalised as a global symbol of international law while on the other hand his reputation has suffered from him being labelled a handmaiden of European colonialism and exploitation. The concluding section reflects on the lasting fame of the ‘miracle of Holland’ among international lawyers and suggests that the history of international law as a research field should now take a break from Hugo Grotius.

Two by Kadens on Custom, the Learned Law, and Early Modern Cheating

Emily Kadens, Northwestern University School of Law, has posted two writings.  The first is  Convergence and the Colonization of Custom in Pre-modern Europe, which appears in Comparative Legal History (2019), edited by Olivier Moreteau & Kjell Modeer.  It argues that “once men trained in the learned laws during the Middle Ages, they could no longer conceive of custom in the traditional manner, but rewrote the narrative of custom to fit into the framework of law established by the Roman law.”

The second is Cheating Pays and is forthcoming in volume 119 of the Columbia Law Review:

Common private-ordering theories predict that merchants have an incentive to act honestly because if they do not, they will get a bad reputation and their future businesses will suffer. In these theories, cheating is cheating whether the cheat is big or small. But while reputation-based private ordering may constrain the big cheat, it does not necessarily constrain the small cheat because of the difficulty in discovering certain types of low-level cheating and the consequent failure of the disciplining power of reputation. Yet the small cheat presents a significant challenge to modern contracting, both between businesses and in the contracts of adhesion imposed on consumers. To encourage private law scholars to address the unique governance challenges posed by low-level cheating, this Essay describes the conditions under which low-level cheating can flourish and become widespread. It demonstrates this so-called “Cheating Pays” scenario using a historical case study in which a seventeenth-century London grocer, trading under precisely those conditions that private-ordering theories predict will incentivize honesty, not only cheated extensively but also successfully remained in business after having been caught and publicly punished. Identifying the scenarios in which cheating pays has implications for how firms use contracts and how consumers might use the courts to try to reduce opportunistic behavior.

Salter to Stanford Center for Law & History; Katz to Wash U

Via the Stanford Center for Law and History, we have the following news:

The Stanford Center for Law and History is pleased to announce that Brent Salter will be its fellow for 2019-2021. Salter currently teaches at Yale College and is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where his dissertation and ongoing research examines the laws and practices of the performing arts in the United States. He received a LL.M. from Yale Law School, LL.B. from Macquarie University, and Arts and Commerce undergraduate degrees from the University of Sydney. He has authored and edited articles, chapters, and books on legal histories of creative communities, as well as the laws of the first colonial courts of Australia. His forthcoming book “Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre” is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Elizabeth Katz, the Center’s inaugural fellow, is joining the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. She holds a J.D. and M.A. from the University of Virginia and is receiving her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University this year. Prior to the fellowship, she clerked for the Honorable J. Frederick Motz on the United States District Court for the District of Maryland and worked as a litigation associate at Covington & Burling. She is a previous recipient of the ASLH's Kathryn T. Preyer award, as well as the author of several articles and book chapters, including a forthcoming article in the University of Chicago Law Review, a prize-winning Note in the Virginia Law Review, and an article in the William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law. Her research focuses on the regulation of American families through civil and criminal laws.

Do you have hiring/appointments/fellowship news to share? Please feel free to email us!

Executive Reorganization at the FDR Library

[We have the following announcement from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.]

On Sunday, April 28, 2019, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the Baruch College Newman Library of the City University of New York will commemorate the 80th anniversary of FDR's 1939 reorganization of the executive branch -- the elusive goal of Presidents since Teddy Roosevelt and a timely topic today. The symposium, "Making Democracy Work: FDR's Bitter Struggle to Modernize the Presidency" -- beginning at 2:00 p.m. in the Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home -- is based on Baruch College's historic collection of the papers of one of FDR's administrative geniuses, Luther Halsey Gulick, III. Click here to register.

Discussing the most momentous restructuring of the government since 1787 will be three leading scholars: Susan Dunn, Massachusetts Professor of Humanities at Williams College and author of several histories including Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party; David Woolner, Senior Fellow and Resident Historian of the Roosevelt Institute, Professor of History at Marist College, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, and author of The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace; and Kenneth Meier, Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University, and coauthor, Politics and Bureaucracy.  The discussion will be moderated by Ralph Blumenthal, Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College and a New York Times reporter from 1964 to 2009

A Better Book: Living Descendants

              Three and a half years ago, I had the good fortune to join Barbara Welke, Mitra Sharafi, and Daniel Sharfstein at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History for a roundtable on working with the living descendants of historical actors.  As we explained:

Online databases and communication technologies, the transnational turn, the study of memory and agency, and genealogy all lead legal historians to work with descendants of subjects. . . . Scholar-descendant exchanges shape and enrich legal history, making the past recoverable and vivid.  Joint projects that broaden arguments and audiences can result. . . . The scholar offers new strands in family or community histories.  Descendants’ experiences and understandings reveal impacts, limits, and reverberations of legal dynamics or push scholars to move beyond legal frames in productive and unfamiliar ways.

I joined the panel to discuss the topic of today’s post, my experience working with a descendant of a central character in Almost Citizens. The story began around eight years ago.

Just weeks after receiving final approval of my dissertation, which centered on a 1904 Supreme Court litigant names Isabel Gonzalez, I received an email from Belinda Torres-Mary.  She was also researching Isabel Gonzalez and had been for years.  I held my breath.  She was fascinated to learn new details about Gonzalez’s unsuccessful experience as the first Puerto Rican person to demandU.S. citizenship from the Supreme Court.  She was not an academic historian.  Gonzalez was her great-grandmother. Belinda was a passionate genealogist. Exhale.

Soon, Belinda and I were trading research leads.  She told me anecdotes.  Tacking back and forth, we discovered many more records. A long-passed woman I had spent years getting to know came to life once again, now in a new way.  As a result, the book’s account of Gonzalez is much richer than the dissertation’s.

As our collaboration deepened, we discussed how we each understood Isabel Gonzalez.  I saw her as a tragic hero of sorts. When she sought to migrate from San Juan to a better life in New York, Ellis Island inspectors discovered that she was an unmarried mother who was also pregnant and ordered her to be deported as an undesirable alien. Gonzalez filed a suit that eventually reached the Supreme Court. She argued that Puerto Ricans could not be deported because they had become U.S. citizens after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1899. The claim tapped into longstanding interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment as making citizens of all Americans other than American Indians. But the justices ruled more narrowly: Puerto Ricans were not aliens, hence not subject to deportation. Nothing needed to be said regarding citizenship. The tentativeness was typical of the early-twentieth-century Insular Cases, through which the Court contributed to a sea change in constitutional law alongside lawmakers, bureaucrats, presidents, and private actors. But the sum result was momentous, a turn away from the Reconstruction Amendments, rights, citizenship, and statehood and toward colonialism.

Belinda declared Gonzalez to be the Puerto Rican Rosa Parks. Initially, the comparison typified for me the difference between our projects.  Belinda saw her ancestor as a heroic figure in a long U.S. march toward inclusion and liberty.  If asked, I probably would have said that even Rosa Parks was no Rosa Parks.  Certainly, the professional historian in me felt compelled to emphasize differences between the women.  Gonzalez’s activism had not made her famous.  It had not arisen out of a commitment to a mass social movement or come to be supported by one.  She had engaged in legal maneuvers rather than direct action.  She did not prevail.  The unmarried and pregnant Gonzalez was not a model of respectability.  She was from a different community and drew on a heritage of Spanish rather than U.S. rule.  It was not clear that she had African ancestry; she seemingly never identified as of color.

              But the deeper I have delved, the more wisdom I have found in Belinda’s analogy.  However Gonzalez self-identified, racial prejudice lay behind the effort to deny her U.S. citizenship and behind the Court’s tepid response to her challenge.  Both controversies were profoundly shaped by being launched by women.  Law played crucial roles in both cases, in part because its future shape was uncertain.  Although neither dispute resulted in a constitutional ruling, both quickly came to be understood as signal events in processes of major constitutional change.  Both cases asked federal courts to reinvigorate legal legacies of Reconstruction.  Gonzalez and her allies deployed honor in ways that prefigured later uses of respectability.  They argued that Puerto Ricans’ honor made them worthy of equal treatment, and that denial of such treatment unjustly dishonored them.  In both cases, a modestly situated actor meaningfully influenced constitutional change.  Both disputes were key events in iterative processes of legal transformation involving a diverse array of officials.  And as recent events sharply remind us, the constitutional revolutions that resulted in both cases were incomplete and unstable.

              Working with Belinda also made my process of researching Almost Citizens feel similar to my experience of reading good fiction.  The book’s characters, themes, insights, and events kept overrunning the interpretive bounds within which I sought to contain them.  I found the world that emerged from the archives to be immersive and consuming.  I aimed to capture these novelistic sensations with a character-driven approach that attended to narrative and people as much as it did to analysis and argument.  Of course, I did not have the luxury of inventing plot turns and characters at will.  But I did have characters who were real and compelling.  Their struggles helped form the world we now inhabit.  For Belinda, that was doubly true.  Isabel Gonzalez’s decisions brought Belinda’s ancestors into existence.  Unsurprisingly, strongly felt familial ties linked great-granddaughter to great-grandmother.  Perceiving Belinda’s passion for Gonzalez’s story inspired me to deepen my depictions of Gonzalez, her choices, and their consequences – all to the book’s benefit.

That Belinda and I even met reflects a sea change in the practice of history.  Since I began graduate school, innumerable primary documents have become text-searchable online.  Books, census manuscripts, passenger manifests, judicial documents, legislative hearings, and newspaper articles that required research trips, microfilm readers, hours of painstaking review, and no small amount of luck now spit up information on a person or theme of concern with little more than an entry in a search box.  In many cases, the impetus behind this mass digitization and metadata creation has not been the needs of academic historians, but the demands of genealogists and the growing sophistication of character recognition software.  Increasingly, scholars seeking to learn about particular historical figures find themselves working in tandem or collaboration with genealogists investigating their roots.  One additional reason is that the digitization revolution has made scholars' output ever more accessible, as Belinda discovered when she began searching mentions of her great-grandmother.

              The rise of genealogy and new research technologies has transformed the ethics of researching and telling history. I am lucky not to have encountered the more acute conflicts that can arise. Belinda encouraged me to make my own decisions about what to include in the book and how. Here, it helped that Belinda had developed her own writerly voice.  She expressed aspirations soon after we met to write a young adult biography of Isabel Gonzalez.  I think it’s a great idea. With any luck, I’ll interest her in letting me assist while she takes her turn in the author’s chair.

Even in functional partnerships, working together involves give, take, and the question of whether each person is doing their share of both. Early on, I worried that I was more of a taker. Belinda offered up family history that I had no other way to access.  To my delight, I came to realize that the scarce commodity that I could contribute was undigitized archival material and historical methods with which to make better use of what was online. I was pulling my own weight because history had something unique to contribute.

If I stumbled, it was in over-skepticism. When Belinda recounted the family lore that Gonzalez had married a gentleman before migrating to New York, my first thought was that many more families claim ancestral earls than actually have them. Silly me. As our research continued, Belinda remembered that the story was told in Spanish. Gonzalez had married a “caballero.” Perhaps that was a last name, not an adjective? Some searches in digitized church and county records confirmed it. Gonzalez’s first husband, Juan Caballero, died of tuberculosis in his early 30s, shortly after Gonzalez became pregnant with his second child.

              Working with Belinda was also a reminder that Gonzalez has many other living descendants. Some knew her well. All share in her history. Few would accept every interpretive choice that I made. Yet I am obliged to them, especially Belinda. I hope they recognized Isabel Gonzalez in what I wrote, even as they also saw her in a new light.

--Sam Erman

Daly on Biafra

In 2018, Samuel F. Daly, Duke University published "The case against Victor Banjo: Legal process and the governance of Biafra," pp.95-112 in A. Dirk Moses and Lasse Heerte, eds., Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide, out with Routledge. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

In June of 1968, Chief Justice of the Biafran Court of Appeal Sir Louis Mbanefo confidently assured a British diplomat that "all Biafra not in enemy hands was committed without distinction to independence." In fact, the Biafran government feared that the situation in the new country was divided from within; there were many within Biafra who did not see themselves as "Biafrans." In the opening months of the war, Biafra’s leadership became increasingly paranoid about threats of subversion and espionage; Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu found internal enemies everywhere he looked, and no one was above suspicion. It was true that many Biafrans had reservations about the war, even though few were actually engaged in the kind of cloak-and-dagger espionage that Ojukwu feared went on behind every closed door. This fear shaped Biafra’s internal administration in important ways. Law occupied an important place in Biafra’s administration and its national imaginary, and the fact that the legal system continued to operate throughout the war suggests that the Biafran government was animated by the law to a greater extent than historians have appreciated, or at least that the secessionist government saw value in the performance of legal processes. The present chapter looks inward on Biafra through the lens of its legal system, which reveals dimensions of Biafra’s internal life not captured in its propaganda and other sources. Using a treason trial from early in the war it investigates how Biafra’s political culture came to be characterized by paranoia, and how the application of military justice shaped questions about the ethnic identity, political ideology and administration of the new state.

Kornbluh and Parker to be LAPA Fellows

The Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University has announced its fellows for 2019-20.  Among them are Felicia Kornbluh, Professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont, and Kunal Parker, Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law.

Ostdiek and Witt on the International Arbitration of Escaped Slaves in the Early Republic

Bennett Ostdiek, a student at the Yale Law School, and John Fabian Witt, a professor there, have posted The Czar and the Slaves: Two Puzzles in the History of International Arbitration, which appeared in the American Journal of International Law (2018):

In 1822, the Russian Czar Alexander decided an arbitration between the United Kingdom and the United States over the fate of 5,000 enslaved persons who fled to British lines at the end of the War of 1812. American observers have asserted for more than a century that the Czar’s decision, which has gone down in history as one of the canonical Anglo-American arbitrations of the Early Republic, favored the United States. But did the U.S. really win? Secretary of State John Quincy Adams complained at the time that the decision was not sufficiently clear. And new debate has broken out in the historical literature. This article resolves the question, relying in part on new evidence from diplomatic archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. We show that, as a formal matter, the Czar sided with the United States, though the arbitration proved useful to U.K. statesmen as well. The curious case of the Czar and the slaves also poses a second puzzle about the relationship between slavery and the emergence of modern international law. Even as the U.K. was beginning to use international law to oppose the slave trade, the United States aimed to turn some of international law’s institutions into powerful bastions of support for slavery.

A Better Book: The ASLH Book Series

              Perhaps the most important decisions of my transition from dissertation to book was mine to publish with the American Society of Legal History’s book series at Cambridge University Press and theirs to have me.  In a word, the reason was: editing.  In a person, it was: Sally Gordon.  More specifically, I gained a mentor, a booster, a reader, a quarterback, and a promoter.

              From the outset, Sally shared and shaped my vision for the project. I first reached out to her about the book on the suggestion and introduction of my mentor Dan Ernst, himself a former editor of the series.  To my amazement, she read my entire dissertation with her discerning and constructive eye. She saw the same promise in the dissertation that I did. It already had characters, a narrative, and evidence that constitutional change sometimes occurred outside of courts. The promising strands it had left dangling included the place of Reconstruction in U.S. empire, mechanics and details of who drove what legal change how, the relationship between Puerto Ricans and both American Indians and mainland women and minorities, and the shadow that U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines cast over everything.

              An unexpected (but not surprising) benefit of publishing with the ASLH series is that it brings instant credibility with society members. At the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Sally also introduced me as an up-and-coming scholar with plans to publish in the series.  Anyone who’s seen Sally in action knows that means meeting a lot of society members. I’ve always felt welcome at the annual meetings, but since then the meetings have been a sea of friendly faces.

               Joining the series also meant receiving a level of editing and mentorship that I associate with literary presses of yore, not the tight margins of modern academic publishing.  Almost Citizens was my first book, so I had no experiences identifying – much less making – many of the decisions that book writing  requires. Fortunately, as I wrote (and rewrote), Sally read (and re-read)–the book proposal, an annotated table of contents, individual chapters, and finally the full manuscript.  Every major element of the book bears her mark. Through emails, phone calls, and coffees, she pressed me to specify and “surface” my biggest claims and to open my geographic and temporal lenses wide enough to bring those claims fully into focus. We discussed what books I liked, how they were structured, what writerly voice the authors had employed, who read those volumes, and who might read mine.

Equally important, Sally was an enduring source of encouragement. She kept me optimistic and energized throughout the long and lonely endeavor that is book writing. Our conversations spanned years. During each she reminded me what I had accomplished, then identified the further progress now within reach.

As my draft chapters accumulated, Reuel Schiller joined Sally as a co-editor of the series, to its and my good fortune. Sally and Reuel were a crack pair of text massagers and arrangers. They also knew how to leverage their insights. When they saw room for improvement but lacked the time to provide detailed feedback (the series had other authors; they had day jobs–and lives), they recommended that I use development editors (a subject of an upcoming post).

Working with the series also meant that I had experienced editors in my corner as I navigated the unfamiliar, far-from-intuitive publishing process.  When I negotiated my contract, Sally knew which details mattered: commit to a number of images and ask for preapproval; ensure that the series can choose the copy editor and indexer; choose a publication deadline that can slip a month or two without endangering your tenure case.  Someone had to pay for editing, indexing, and the like. The series helped me ask my home institution for the funds by providing me evidence that peer institutions were already providing such funds to their junior faculty. When I became concerned with one or another of the press’s decisions, Sally and Reuel helped me sort out which items were worth raising in what ways. They were always willing to speak on my behalf to Cambridge, with whom they maintained a strong and cooperative relationship.

Mostly, the series steered me away from pitfalls. I never had to contemplate the disadvantages of a machine-made index because my contract let me hire the wonderful Derek Gottlieb. Where some authors tell horror stories of overseas copy editors who insert more typos than they correct, the series snagged for me the excellent Julie Hagen.

              With my book now out under the series imprint, I can add that I am happy being judged by the company I keep. Cambridge University Press’s august imprimatur makes it more likely that readers will pick up the book. The American Society for Legal History is my foremost academic home. It has also published many of the legal historians that I most admire, including the first books of several of the best up-and-coming scholars in the field.

--Sam Erman

Weekend Roundup

• A new issue (2:1) of The Docket–the online sidekick of Law and History Review–has gone live.  Check it out! 

• The American Council of Learned Societies has announced its fellows for 2019, among them Laura Edwards (for “Only the Clothes on Her Back: Textiles, Law, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century United States”); Amanda H. Frost (for “Unmaking Americans: A History of Citizenship Stripping in the United States”); Katherine Unterman (for "The Colonial Constitution: Law and Empire in the US Territories”); and Kimberly Welch (for “Lending and Borrowing Across the Color Line in the Antebellum American South”).

• YLS's John Fabian Witt's lecture, To Save the Country? National Emergencies from Lincoln to Trump, delivered at Columbia University’s Center for American Studies on March 28, is now up on YouTube.

• "Voices of the Movement" is a series of podcast interviews of "veterans of the civil rights movement" conducted by the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart. Available now is episode 1: "The day Martin Luther King Jr. died."

• If you’re in the mood for a review essay with a point-of-view, try, while it’s still open access, Nan Enstad's The “Sonorous Summons” of the New History of Capitalism, Or, What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Economy? from Modern American History 2:1.  H/t: JLG 

• The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the International Labour Organization will present the symposium Together, We Win: FDR, Frances Perkins and the ILO at the Library’s Henry Wallace Center on Monday, April 15, 2019.

• Here’s some timely and unfortunately apt comparative constitutionalism: Lénárd Sándor, Chief Counsel to the Constitutional Court of Hungary and, currently, a visiting foreign fellow at the Federal Judicial Center, in conversation with Jeffrey Rosen.

• And, in other news from the FJC, check out the most recent addition to the Center's unit to our Famous Federal Trials series, U.S. v. Guiteau, written by Winston Bowman.

• ICYMI: In WaPo, Petula Dvorak’s appreciation of an exhibit on consumer advocacy at the National Museum of American History.   A Look at Dover [NH]’s Legal History, Courts, and Jurists. Sean Wilentz on "why a merciful God invented second editions."

• Postdoc opportunity at McGill's Indian Ocean World Centre: details here. The deadline is May 15, 2019.

• Also for early career scholars: Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies has a Call out for a "Law in Context" Early Career Workshop. Those applications are due July 10, 2019.

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

In Memoriam: W. Wesley Pue (via Canadian LHB)

From our friends at the Canadian Legal History Blog, we have the following unfortunate notice:

In memoriam--W. Wesley Pue 

The Canadian legal history community has lost one of its leading lights. W. Wesley (Wes) Pue died on Wednesday April 3rd, after a long illness. Wes was one of Canada’s leading legal historians, and taught at Osgoode Hall, Carleton, Manitoba and the University of British Columbia. At the last-named he was the first Nemetz Professor of Legal History. Wes was best known for his work on the legal profession, some of which was published as chapters in Osgoode Society books, and much of which appeared in Lawyers Empire: Legal Professions and Cultural Authority, 1780-1850 (2016). Wes was also remarkable for the support and encouragement he gave to others, particularly students of legal history who went through UBC’s graduate programme in the area. He leaves behind a wonderful wife, Joanne, and two daughters, Heather and Colleen. A Memorial Service will be held on Thursday April 11th at 2:00 p.m. at St. David’s Anglican Church, 1115 - 51A Street, Delta, B.C., V4M 2Y2. All are welcome. Donations in support of Wes’ journey to Inspire Health or the B.C. Cancer Agency are much appreciated.

Strang on The Declaration and Constitutional Interpretation

Lee J. Strang, University of Toledo College of Law, has posted The Declaration of Independence: No Special Role In Constitutional Interpretation, which appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 42 (2018): 43-58:

The Declaration of Independence is a beautifully written document; it is a potent symbol of our nation’s birth and founding principles; but it does not and should not play a unique role in constitutional interpretation. Instead, the Declaration is one source, among many, of the Constitution’s original meaning. I make three arguments to support this thesis.

First and theoretically, I argue that mainline originalist theory has no analytical space within it for the Declaration to play a special role in constitutional interpretation. To illustrate this, I describe the most prominent conception of originalism—public meaning originalism. Then, I show that public meaning originalism’s process to ascertain the Constitution’s original meaning treats the Declaration as one source of original meaning, and that its importance as a source therefore depends on the empirical-historical question of whether the original meaning in fact did privilege it.

This leads me to my second main argument, based on history. I make three moves to show that the Declaration did not play a unique interpretive role. First, I describe how the Framers and Ratifiers did not use the Declaration as the unique interpretive key to constitutional interpretation. Second, I show that, because the Declaration was inconsistent with the Constitution’s text, it cannot be the interpretive key to the Constitution. Third, I explain that it was only after the Founding, during times of moral crisis, that Americans in various social movements turned to the Declaration to support their out-of-the-mainstream constitutional interpretations. This phenomenon shows that appeals to the Declaration are motived by a desire for political and social change extrinsic to the Constitution.

Third and jurisprudentially, I show that our current constitutional practice does not recognize the Declaration as playing a unique role in constitutional interpretation. I focus on the Constitution’s text, current legal practice, and Supreme Court practice.

H/t: Legal Theory Blog

A Symposium on "Law's Intellectual History"

64: 1, a symposium issue of the Buffalo Law Review entitled Opportunities for Law's Intellectual History, is now available.  Here’s the TOC:

Introduction: Opportunities for Law's Intellectual History
Mark Fenster and John Henry Schlegel

A Bridge Between: Law and the New Intellectual Histories of Capitalism
Ajay K. Mehrotra

Capitalism and Risk: Concepts, Consequences, and Ideologies
Edward A. Purcell Jr.

Organic Poise: Capitalism as Law
Christopher Tomlins

Causation, Legal History, and Legal Doctrine
Charles Barzun

Mr. Peabody's Improbable Legal Intellectual History
Mark Fenster

Writing the Social History of Legal Doctrine
Cynthia Nicoletti

On Absences as Material for Intellectual Historical Study
John Henry Schlegel

Humbug: Toward a Legal History
Susanna Blumenthal

Textiles: Popular Culture and the Law
Laura F. Edwards

Some Final Observations on Legal Intellectual History
Robert W. Gordon

A Better Book: Mentors

              High among the joys of being a legal historian, is entering into a community of generous and incisive scholars.  At every turn of my career, I have benefited from mentors who saw me and my work for the mighty oak trees we might (yet) become, not as the acorns (and later saplings) that we were. Some of the most important choices that I made with regards to my recently released book, Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, involved accepting the right guidance from the right people at the right time. Treasured aspects of the book frequently have roots stretching back to words from treasured senior colleagues. This is equally true of Almost Citizen's arguments, tone, and structure. In many cases, institutional affiliations lay the groundwork for these interactions. I hope to illustrate all this with some examples.

              Arguments. The book makes three arguments.  All owe part of their genesis to mentorship.

Citizenship, Agency, and Law. My acknowledgements open with this understatement about my dissertation co-chair at the University of Michigan: “Rebecca Scott made me a historian.” I owe to her much of my passion for the field and my training in it. In that way she suffuses the entire book. Of course, the arguments expanded and changed shape after I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan and settled into new institutions.  As one reader remarked upon learning that Rebecca was my dissertation co-chair, it was obvious once he knew it, but had not occurred to him beforehand.  I see Rebecca’s hand particularly strongly in two key commitments in the book.  First, the central argument in the dissertation and a central argument in the book is that modestly situated individuals experience law, muster and transform it, and sometimes become drivers of major legal upheavals.  Second, I focus on citizenship as a site of legal contest between powerful officials and those not traditionally thought of as legal actors. Both moves are classic Rebecca, and it was her model and feedback that helped me pursue them and bring them to fruition.

              Reconstruction and Empire. The book’s second major argument is that early-twentieth-century fights over the legacy of Reconstruction and the future of empire were often one and the same.  On the legal front, U.S. officials sought to promote empire by dismantling key aspects of the constitutional regime that emerged after the Civil War. Substantial evidence for this claim appeared in my dissertation. But I did not make the argument there, in part because I was not yet sure that it was right. At my defense, Martha Jones urged me to put this material at the heart of my book and to look for more such evidence. It was the shot of confidence that I needed to dive back into the archives and begin testing out bolder, more important claims.

              Legal Change Beyond Courts. The third argument involves the mechanics behind the early-twentieth-century shift away from constitutionally guaranteed citizenship, rights, and statehood. Nonjudicial officials throughout the federal government, especially agency bureaucrats, developed and implemented new doctrines long before they received judicial imprimatur. At the dissertation stage, I had envisioned these federal officials as foils for the legal activists I studied. But then Dan Ernst infected me with his fascination with agency lawyers. Soon, the attorney bureaucrats I encountered in the archives were becoming a second focus of my study. Sophia Lee and Reuel Schiller then gave me the language of administrative constitutionalism with which to describe my findings.

Grey on infanticide in 19th-c. England and Wales

Last year, Daniel J. R. Grey, University of Plymouth published " 'No Crime to Kill a Bastard-Child': Stereotypes of Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales" in B. Leonardi's edited volume, Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 41-66. From the introduction: 

Executions of English and Welsh women for infanticide during the 'long nineteenth century' (1789-1914) were very much an anomaly, not the rule, despite the fact that it remained a capital offence and indistinguishable from any other type of murder until 1922...Precisely because of the focus by many colonial critics during the nineteenth century on the supposed widespread danger of infanticide by indigenous peoples--especially targeting unwanted daughters--as a custom that only the so-called civilising mission and imperial rule could eradicate, any suggestions that there might be parallels between the killing of young children at home and similar homicides in the colonies were variously played down, ignored, or explicitly denied. Instead, English and Welsh women who committed the crime were routinely and emphatically emphasised to be 'normal,' frequently of excellent character, and cultural discourses stressed that such a defendant should often not be considered legally responsible for their crime, even if their circumstances did not actually fit with either legal or medical definitions of insanity. This chapter explores how and why a distressing crime which might theoretically have been singled out for particularly harsh treatment became, instead, stereotyped as a type of killing only ever committed by the 'normal' and 'respectable'--sometimes even the 'good'--in nineteenth-century England and Wales.

A short preview of the chapter is available here. 

Lotmar's "Roman Law of Error"

[Our friends at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History announce the publication of a new work in the book series Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte.]

Philipp Lotmar: Das römische Recht vom Error.  Edited and introduced by Iole Fargnoli.  Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte 314.  Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2019

Das römische Recht vom Error (The Roman law of Error) is the title of an impressive two-volume work that brings to light a major contribution to Romanistic studies written by Philipp Lotmar (1850-1922), Professor of Civil Law at the University of Bern since 1888. Known primarily as an innovative jurist of labor law, in the course of his career, Lotmar continuously concentrated on the Roman doctrine of errors in contract law, examining a wide range of sources, which resulted in a text of about a 2.000 pages written in Sütterlin. During his lifetime, this opus magnum, which was conceived as a criticism of Karl Friedrich von Savigny's influential position, remained unknown to the public. Thanks to the editorial efforts of Iole Fargnoli, Director of the Romanistic Institute at Bern University, those parts of the manuscript Lotmar himself had prepared for publication - on cases and concepts of error - are now made available to the scientific community, almost a century after his death.

Sawyer in BC Legal History Roundtable

[We have the following announcement from our friends at Boston College.]

We invite you to join us on Thursday, April 11, at 4:30 in the Rare Book Room for our third event of the spring semester of the BC Legal History Roundtable 2018-2019.   Our guest will be Logan Sawyer, Professor of Law, University of Georgia.   He will be presenting a paper, "Originalism from the Soft Southern Strategy to the New Right: The Constitutional Politics of Sam Ervin Jr."

The paper will be available soon on the Roundtable website.  (Instructions for accessing the paper are in the final paragraph of the website introduction.)

Between 1954 and 1974 there was no more prominent advocate of originalism in political life than North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin, yet he is invisible in accounts of the theory’s past. Ervin’s embrace of originalism, however, deserves more attention than this because it shows the theory is more than an academic response to the perceived excesses of the Warren Court and more than a tool to advance the constitutional concerns of the New Right. The Reagan Administration’s embrace of originalism in the 1980s undoubtedly propelled the theory to new heights, but Ervin shows how originalism helped create the New Right coalition.

As one of the primary architects of the segregationist ‘soft southern strategy,’ Ervin used originalism both to criticize the Warren Court and to justify opposition to civil rights legislation. He did not, however, find originalism an established theory of constitutional interpretation, ready-made for those purposes and he used the theory to do more than cloak white supremacy. During his first decade in the Senate, Ervin’s opposition to civil rights legislation led him to build an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation on a foundation of broadly admired American legal and political traditions, including some that were embraced by the Warren Court. He then used that theory to support a political ideology aimed to unite racial reactionaries, conservatives, and moderates from across North Carolina and the country into an anti-civil rights legislative coalition. He and his allies ultimately failed to stop the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, but the interpretive theory Ervin developed helped construct an emerging conservative coalition by legitimating a shift by Southern conservatives to a political ideology that emphasized individualism and property rights.

Logan Sawyer is an Associate Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He earned his JD and PhD from the University of Virginia and is visiting at Harvard Law School this Spring semester.

Refreshments are available beginning at 4:15 pm. outside the Library Conference Room.

Schneider on the Tanana Chiefs Conference

Out in 2018 with the University of Alaska Press (distributed by the University of Chicago Press) was The Tanana Chiefs: Native Rights and Western Law, edited by William Schneider. From the publisher:

At the turn of the twentieth century, life was changing drastically in Alaska. The gold rush brought an onslaught of white settlers to the area, railroad companies were pushing into the territory, and telegraph lines opened up new lines of communication. The Native groups who had hunted and fished on the land for more than a century realized that if they did not speak up now, they would lose their land forever. 

This is the story of a historic meeting between Native Athabascan leaders and government officials, held in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1915. It was one of the first times that Native voices were part of the official record. They sought education and medical assistance, and they wanted to know what they could expect from the federal government. They hoped for a balance between preserving their way of life with seeking new opportunities under the law. 

The Tanana Chiefs chronicles the efforts by Alaska Natives to gain recognition for rights under Western law and the struggles to negotiate government-to-government relationships with the federal government. It contains the first full transcript of the historic meeting as well as essays that connect that first gathering with the continued efforts of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, which continues to meet and fight for Native rights.

Praise for the book includes:

 “William Schneider, Alaska’s premier oral historian, whose dedication to the preservation of Alaska and Alaska Native culture is widely known and highly respected, makes a significant contribution with this volume on the Tanana Chiefs conference in Fairbanks in the summer of 1915.” -Alaska History

Further information is available here.

A Better Book

I want to thank LHB for having me as a guest blogger.  Thank you, Karen Tani, for the kind introduction. As Karen mentioned, the occasion of my turn on LHB is Cambridge University Press’s release of my book, Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire.  If you want to learn more about it, reviews are available at the New Republic and Jotwell.

A big surprise for me was that the book turned out much better than I had hoped, much less expected.  That’s not to say that the book is perfect – far from it. But as compared to what I thought possible when I began, the writing was stronger, the arguments clearer and more consequential, and the characters and narrative more vivid. In several posts this month, I aim to explain why. As a teaser, my next entry will concern mentorship.

In other posts, I will reflect on other aspects of being a legal historian. Part of the joy of my job is that it connects me to students, courts, the public sphere, and the institutions that sustain the study of law and history. I look forward to addressing all of these in the weeks ahead.

I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to share thoughts with a community from which I have gained so much. I hope to hear from you in the comments.

CFP: Maritime and Riverine History

[We have the following call for papers.]

Welcome, Sam Erman!

We are delighted to welcome Sam Erman to the blog as our April guest blogger. He is an associate professor at the USC Gould School of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and legal history. He also teaches a large-enrollment undergraduate legal history course in the college.

Credit: @USCLawLibrary (Twitter feed)

Prior to joining the faculty at USC, he held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard Law School. He also clerked for three federal judges: Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy and D.C. Circuit Judge Merrick B. Garland. He holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Michigan.

Professor Erman is the author of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire (November 2018), which is part of Cambridge University Press's Studies in Legal History series. The book has received well-deserved attention, including, most recently, in the book review pages of the New Republic. Articles related to the book project have appeared in the California Law Review and the Journal of American Ethnic History.

Professor Erman is currently at work with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal on a history of jus soli citizenship, jus sanguinis citizenship, and their predecessors. With Perl-Rosenthal, he has also written a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Legal History on Historian's Amicus Briefs. The chapter draws in part on his own experience organizing amicus briefs, as in the citizenship case Tuaua v. United States. Erman also writes op-eds related to his historical work (see, for example, this one, on "devastation without representation" in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria).

At USC, he serves on the steering committee for the Center for Law, History and Culture and co-chairs the steering committee for the major in law, history and culture. He is also currently on the Provost's Taskforce on University Nomenclature, which seeks to come up with guidelines for deciding when buildings and other parts of the university should be renamed.

Welcome, Sam Erman!