Walsh reviews Crowe, "Building the Federal Judiciary"

JOTWELL's Courts Law Section has posted a book review that may be of interest: Kevin C. Walsh (Richmond School of Law) covers Justin Crowe, Building the Judiciary: Law, Courts, and the Politics of Institutional Development (Princeton University Press, 2012). Here's the first paragraph of the review:

Scholars working within the field of “Federal Courts” have, from the beginning, been concerned about the past and future of the federal courts as instruments of government. But the beginning of Federal Courts as a field was in the early 1950s, several decades after the Judiciary Act of 1891 created the intermediate circuit courts of appeals and almost three decades after the Judiciary Act of 1925 reconfigured the relationship between the Supreme Court and all other courts in the United States deciding questions of federal law. And the trajectory that the federal judiciary has traveled since that time has been relatively consistent. To the extent that this may have resulted in a failure to appreciate the forces that had already made the federal courts so powerful by the time Federal Courts came into its own, Justin Crowe’s recent book Building the Judiciary offers a helpful corrective.

Read on here.

New Release: Probert, "The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation"

Yes, it's Valentine's Day, but that won't stop your dedicated bloggers from spotlighting a book about the punishment of illicit sex.  The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation: From Fornicators to Family, 1600–2010, by Rebecca Probert, was released this past fall by the Cambridge University Press. A description from the Press:

Rebecca Probert (credit)

This book has three key aims: first, to show how the legal treatment of cohabiting couples has changed over the past four centuries, from punishment as fornicators in the seventeenth century to eventual acceptance as family in the late twentieth; second, to chart how the language used to refer to cohabitation has changed over time and how different terms influenced policy debates and public perceptions; and, third, to estimate the extent of cohabitation in earlier centuries. To achieve this it draws on hundreds of reported and unreported cases as well as legislation, policy papers and debates in Parliament; thousands of newspaper reports and magazine articles; and innovative cohort studies that provide new and more reliable evidence as to the incidence (or rather the rarity) of cohabitation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. It concludes with a consideration of the relationship between legal regulation and social trends.

Here's a peak at the TOC:

1. Introduction
2. Fornicators: the punishment of illicit sex
3. No name: law, morality and precedent
4. Unmarried wives in war and peace
5. Living in sin: concerns and changes
6. 'Stable illicit unions': cohabitation and the reform of divorce law
7. Common-law wives: the 1970s and the creation of a myth
8. Live-in lovers: trying to get back to basics
9. Partners: New Labour and neutrality
10. Conclusion

Pamela: or, Copyright Rewarded?

James R. Alexander, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, has posted Richardson and Copyright, which appeared in Notes and Queries (2012) 59 (2): 219-224. Here is the abstract:

Image credit

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1741) was one of the earliest of the moralizing epistolary novels that became commercially popular with the new reading middle class. It was also subject to widespread literary piracy, published in unauthorized editions, serialized in newspapers and literary magazines, and beset by sequels, satires, and parodies. As such, it became a benchmark for how the new novel form would be treated under law and equity after passage of the Statute of Anne, England’s first copyright law. Tracing Richardson’s efforts to enjoin copyright infringement of Pamela is however not an easy task, as court records are elusive, but publication history and patterns of newspaper advertising allow his one recorded claim in Chancery court to be reconstructed, revealing many of the nuances of early copyright doctrine as it evolved in the mid-18th century.

FDR's Legacy: Executive Power and the Constitution in War and Peace

FDR in 1920. Credit Library of Congress

Via H-Law, we have news of a conference later this month sponsored by Christopher Newport University's Center for American Studies in Newport News, Virginia.  To be held February 27-28, the conference is "FDR's Legacy: Executive Power and the Constitution in War and Peace."  Speakers include

David M. Kennedy, Stanford University
Charles W. McCurdy, University of Virginia (on the “Ideological Origins of the Court-Packing Plan”)
Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School (on “Korematsu after September 11”)
James F. Simon, New York Law School (on his recent joint biography of FDR and Chief Justice Hughes)
Harvey Klehr, Emory University
Robert Higgs, The Independent Institute
Sidney Milkis, University of Virginia


Schedule and more information here.

Orbach on Antitrust History

Barak Orbach, University of Arizona College of Law, has posted How Antitrust Lost Its Goal, which is forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review 81 (2013).  Here is the abstract:

George Edmunds (Library of Congress)

During the first seven decades of the Sherman Act, competition was the uncontroversial goal of antitrust. The introduction of the consumer welfare standard led to the dissipation of “competition” as the goal of U.S. competition laws. This Article explores how antitrust lost the goal of competition, and argues that this goal should be restored. The Article reevaluates several influential antitrust propositions. First, while “consumer welfare” was offered as a remedy for reconciling contrasts and inconsistencies in antitrust, the adoption of the standard sparked an enduring controversy and “set sail on a sea of doubt.” The consumer welfare standard has been a source of confusion and doctrinal uncertainty. Second, the small-business interests hypothesis, which has been often used to explain the enactment of the Sherman Act, is inconsistent with the well-documented historical record. Third, the logic of Robert Bork’s consumer welfare thesis supposedly requires restoration of “competition” as the goal of antitrust. The Article concludes with a straightforward observation: “Consumer welfare” may continue serving as the stated goal of U.S. competition laws but, practically, antitrust has always been and will always be about the preservation of competition.

New Issue of Law and History Review

The first issue of Volume 31 of the Law & History Review is now out. Cambridge Journals is providing free access (until February 28, 2013) to the following three articles:

Alfred L. Brophy, "Introducing Applied Legal History"

Kristin A. Collins, "'Petitions Without Number': Widows' Petitions and the Early Nineteenth-Century Origins of Public Marriage-Based Entitlements"

Kimberley A. Reilly, "Wronged in Her Dearest Rights: Plaintiff Wives and the Transformation of Marital Consortium, 1870–1920"

Also in this issue:

Roman J. Hoyos, "The People's Privilege: The Franking Privilege, Constituent Correspondence, and Political Representation in Mid-Nineteenth Century America"

Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, "Building Toward Major Policy Change: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1941–1950"

Robert Tennyson, "From Unanimity to Proportionality: Assent Standards and the Parliamentary Enclosure Movement"

James Oldham and Su Jin Kim, "Arbitration in America: The Early History"

The issue also includes four book reviews, which we'll try to feature soon.

Legal Theory and Legal History: A Neglected Dialogue?

We’ve previously noticed the upcoming conference of the United Kingdom Branch of the International Association of Legal and Social Philosophy (IVR), to be held on 12-13 April 2013 at Queen Mary School of Law, University of London.  The program is now available, and registration is now open, on-line.  The theme of the conference is "Legal Theory and Legal History: A Neglected Dialogue?"  Quentin Skinner delivers the keynote, “The Concept of the State in Legal History and Theory.”  Other participants include Michael Lobban, Christopher Tomlins, Joshua Getzler, James Hackney, Jonathan Rose, Roger Cotterrell, David Ibbetson and Philip Schofield.

Stanford Legal History Workshop: Spring 2013

Amalia Kessler has sent us the line-up for the Stanford Law School Legal History Workshop, which she co-teaches with Robert W. Gordon:

Sara McDougall (credit)

January 28: Karen Tani (University of California, Berkeley Law School): “Administering Citizenship: The ‘Indian Problem’ in the Age of the Federal Grant”

February 11: Sara McDougall (John Jay College History Department), “Reforming Adultery in Late Medieval France”

February 25: Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania Law School & History Department): “American Mortmain: Religion and Property after Disestablishment”

March 11: Denis Baranger (Université Panthéon-Assas, Faculté de droit): “Our Legislative Predicament: An Investigation into the History of Ideas”

Adler Reviews Livingston, "Arsenic and Clam Chowder"

Our friends at H-Law have published a new book review: Jeffrey S. Adler (University of Florida) reviews James D. Livingston, Arsenic and Clam Chowder: Murder in Gilded Age New York (State University of New York Press, 2010). Here's Adler's concise introduction to the text and its author:

On August 30, 1895, Evelina Livingston Bliss, a member of New York’s patrician Livingston family, ingested arsenic, and a day later she died, likely at the hands of her ne’er-do-well daughter, leading to one of the most sensational and salacious murder trials in late nineteenth-century New York City. Author James D. Livingston, a distant cousin of the victim and the killer, recounts the murder of Bliss and particularly the trial of her daughter, Mary Alice Livingston, who seemed destined to become the first woman executed in the state’s electric chair. A physicist by training and an amateur historian by avocation, the author provides a colorful, fast-paced narrative, written in the true-crime genre.

Adler praises Livingston for "tell[ing] a riveting story with energy and verve," but critiques the author's failure to "engag[e]or draw[] from, even implicitly, the historical scholarship on class, gender, sexuality, criminal justice, and science," all of which are relevant to this tale. The full review is available here, at H-Net.

Commerce, Corporations and the Law

The History Project has announced a Call for Papers for Commerce, Corporations and the Law, a conference to be held 27-28 September 2013 at Princeton University.  The Organizing Committee welcomes proposals for papers from advanced undergraduates, graduate students and recent PhD recipients.  The deadline for submissions of proposals is March 1, 2013.  The call states:

We welcome proposals for papers from graduate students and recent PhD recipients in different disciplines, including economics, economic history, the history of economic thought, legal history, political theory, and the history of science. The conference will be concerned with cross-cultural trade, firms, and legal systems around the world.

Proposals are to be submitted on-line.  Information on grants in aid of travel and accommodation costs, as well as “a small number of research grants" is here. 

About The History Project:

Economic history grew out of the interest of historians and economists in understanding the economic crises of the 1890s and 1930s. The 2010s are a moment of comparable anxiety, excitement, and opportunity. Since the launch of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, there has been increasing recognition that connections between economics and related disciplines -- and connections to history in particular -- are essential to understanding the social, political, and environmental changes now under way. It is this moment of opportunity that the History Project hopes to develop into lasting innovation. The future of economic history requires a reconstitution of the interest, within history departments, in economic change. This is so on even the narrowest definition of economic history as applied economics using historical data. Economists will continue to need well-informed historical scholarship, qualitative and quantitative, as a source of data, and of informed criticism of the data to be used. A new history of economic life, which engages both with economic history and with the history of economic thought, can also extend across and transcend the distinctions between different kinds of history -- transnational, social, business, political, cultural, legal or intellectual.

New Release: Dauber, "The Sympathetic State"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (2012). Readers may have caught glimpses of this project in Dauber's previous articles in the Law and History Review. For those unfamiliar with Dauber's work, here's the Press's description of the book:

Even as unemployment rates soared during the Great Depression, FDR’s relief and social security programs faced attacks in Congress and the courts on the legitimacy of federal aid to the growing population of poor. In response, New Dealers pointed to a long tradition—dating back to 1790 and now largely forgotten—of federal aid to victims of disaster. In The Sympathetic State, Michele Landis Dauber recovers this crucial aspect of American history, tracing the roots of the modern American welfare state beyond the New Deal and the Progressive Era back to the earliest days of the republic when relief was forthcoming for the victims of wars, fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes.

Drawing on a variety of materials, including newspapers, legal briefs, political speeches, the art and literature of the time, and letters from thousands of ordinary Americans, Dauber shows that while this long history of government disaster relief has faded from our memory today, it was extremely well known to advocates for an expanded role for the national government in the 1930s, including the Social Security Act. Making this connection required framing the Great Depression as a disaster afflicting citizens though no fault of their own. Dauber argues that the disaster paradigm, though successful in defending the New Deal, would ultimately come back to haunt advocates for social welfare. By not making a more radical case for relief, proponents of the New Deal helped create the weak, uniquely American welfare state we have today—one torn between the desire to come to the aid of those suffering and the deeply rooted suspicion that those in need are responsible for their own deprivation.

Contrary to conventional thought, the history of federal disaster relief is one of remarkable consistency, despite significant political and ideological change. Dauber’s pathbreaking and highly readable book uncovers the historical origins of the modern American welfare state.

Michele Landis Dauber (credit)

And a few blurbs:

“A marvelous, deeply researched history of the largely forgotten role of federal disaster relief in the historical development of the American welfare state. Michele Landis Dauber shows very creatively how the Great Depression came to be understood as a single, monolithic event—as a disaster—that justified new and expansive forms of relief. Political scientists and historians will have to contend with her central argument: that the New Deal was less the product of a ‘constitutional revolution’ than ordinary lawyering from long-settled precedents.” -- Michael Willrich (Brandeis University)

“The Sympathetic State is a revisionist history for our contested present. As Dauber masterfully shows, the more than two-hundred-year history of federal disaster relief indicates that national social policies fit comfortably with longstanding American constitutional traditions. You cannot fully understand current debates—or where they might yet go—until you read this book.” -- Jacob Hacker (Yale University)

Follow the link for more blurbs and the TOC. For reviews, check out Dauber's Stanford Law website, which provides links to coverage in the Washington Monthly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other publications. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the book has received lots of (well-deserved) attention.

Colley on the Unwritten Constitution Postponed

Professor Linda Colley's talk to the Washington History Seminar, "Britain - the Question of Written Constitutions and the World since 1776," previously announced here, has been postponed, due to the speaker's illness.

Wells on Holmes

Catherine Wells, Boston College Law, has posted her important series of articles on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  The first is Legal Innovation within the Wider Intellectual Tradition: The Pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., which appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review 82 (1988): 541-95

Library of Congress

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is one of the dominant figures in American jurisprudence. As a scholar, he wrote prolifically about legal theory and legal history. His book The Common Law is one of the most influential studies of the common law tradition; it has shaped the views of American legal scholars for several generations. In addition, Holmes spent nearly forty years as a judge-first as a justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and later as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. On the bench, Holmes was a formidable presence influencing the development of American law. His judicial opinions are both numerous and memorable. More than fifty years after his death, casebooks still include many of his opinions and legal periodicals frequently contain analyses of his judicial philosophy.' Indeed, Holmes is so central to the American legal tradition that understanding what Holmes thought about law is an important step in understanding one's own thoughts on legal theory

The second is Holmes on Legal Method: The Predictive Theory of Law as an Instance of Scientific Method, Southern Illinois Law Review 18 (1994): 329-345:

When it comes to legal method, Holmes is well known for two claims: first, that lawyers and legal scholars should employ an empirical rather than a deductive method and second, that the task of lawyers is to predict the actions of judges. These claims raise a number of questions. Three questions, in particular, seem to recur among thoughtful readers: (1) Why does Holmes, leader of the revolt against formalism, place so much emphasis on the role of logical analysis in law? (2) If legal method is empirical, what is law "empirical" about? What are the facts or the data upon which an empirical science of law should be based? and (3) Under the predictive theory of law, what is it that a judge is supposed to do when (s)he decides a case? Does the judge decide a case by predicting his or her own decision?

The third is Old Fashioned Postmodernism and the Legal Theories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Brooklyn Law Review 63 (1997):59-85:

Whether Holmes was the greatest American jurist is a question for debate. What needs no debate is the fact that Holmes is the most published, the most discussed, the most praised and the most criticized judge in American history. In view of this fact, one might well doubt the need for yet another paper on Holmes. The sheer number of studies, discussions, collections and biographies raises question as to whether we have not already said enough. Is there any point-besides the obvious pleasure of a good symposium-to more discussion of Holmes and his effect on American law? For a number of reasons, I think that the answer to this question is a surprising "yes." No one would dispute that Holmes is an important source of our understanding about the American legal tradition. It is not just that his writings are widely read; it is also that lawyers and scholars have treated him as a particularly important symbol of American law, who-depending on your viewpoint-should be praised for his virtues or condemned for his shortcomings. For example, some scholars think that Holmes deserves high praise for rescuing American law from the rigidity of formalism.' Others disagree: they suggest that Holmes was insufficiently principled; that he was self serving, insensitive and cynical; and that, in view of these shortcomings, he is an unworthy representative of American law.

Hunter To Speak at UNC on "African-American Marriage, Slavery and Freedom"

Tera W. Hunter (credit)

Readers in the North Carolina Triangle Area may be interested to learn that Tera W. Hunter (Princeton University) is scheduled to deliver the ninth annual African American history month lecture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her talk is entitled "'Bound As Fast In Wedlock As A Slave Can Be': African-American Marriage, Slavery, and Freedom." 

Additional details are available here. Thanks to Al Brophy at the Faculty Lounge for spreading the word.

War, Schools, and the Future: This Week in the Book Pages

This week in the New York Times, Michael Beschloss reviews Paul Kennedy's Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (Random House).  Beschloss writes that "like an engineer who pries open a pocket watch to reveal its inner mechanics, Kennedy tells how little-known men and women at lower-levels helped win the war."  In doing so,"Engineers of Victory achieves the difficult task of being a consistently original book about one of the most relentlessly examined episodes in human history."

Also in the New York Times, Andrew Bacevich reviews The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq (Pantheon), From George W. Bush to Barack Obama by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor.  It is, Bacevich writes an "instructive yet analytically shallow account of the Iraq war after the fall of Baghdad."  Read on here.  And, the New York Times has Michael Lind's review of Al Gore's The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (Random House).

In the Wall Street Journal Robert Merry reviews Coolidge by Amity Shlaes (Harper).  "The research is exhaustive, and the political and economic analysis sound," he writes.  You'll also find Isaac Chotiner's review of Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (Bloomsbury) by John Darwin.

In the Washington Post, you'll find a review of Michelle Rhee's Radical: Fighting to Put Students First (Harper), and a review of Richard Seymour's Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (Verso)

John in the NYT: "How the Post Office Made America"

In response to the U.S. Post Office's plans to end Saturday mail service, historian Richard R. John (Columbia University) has written an op-ed in the New York Times. John is the author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Harvard University Press, 1995). Here's a taste of the op-ed:

In 1899, Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith called the post office the “greatest business concern in the world.” He had it wrong. The post office is a public service with a civic mandate central to American business, society and civic culture — not a business. But if it is to survive, Congress must allow it to start acting like one. 

The rest is here.

Weekend Roundup

• Inside Higher Education published a brief interview with Robert Townsend about his book, History's Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise in the United States, 1880-1940 (University of Chicago Press).  Hat tip: Ross Davies.

• KALA, a public radio station associated with St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, has been nominated for a prize for its interview of Scott Gerber, Ohio Northern Law, on Jefferson and the Bill of Rights. The interview is here.

• Julius (Jay) Wachtel, a lecturer at California State University, Fullerton, has recently published Stalin's Witnesses, “a deeply researched, meticulously documented historical novel.” It “tells the story of the Soviet terror through the eyes of Vladimir Romm, a real-life Soviet intelligence officer who served as the USSR's inaugural correspondent to Washington. Based on foreign and domestic archives, interviews with descendants and a wealth of secondary sources, Stalin's Witnesses applies a light fictional touch to give voice to Romm and four fellow 'witnesses' who were forced to give false testimony at the 1937 Moscow Show Trial.”  More.

• From the new issue of Academe (the on-line publication of the American Association of University Professors): a discussion of "evaluating the humanities." 

• CFP: "The Study of Legal Documents: New Approaches to Arabic Papyrology and Diplomacy." (Hat tip: H-Law)

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

Jerusalem Legal History Workshop

The Jerusalem Legal History Workshop, moderated by Adam Hofri-Winogradow, has announced its very impressive line-up for the Spring semester.  It meets Tuesdays from 4:30-6:00 PM, in Room 119, Law Building, Mt. Scopus Campus.  For more information contact Professor Hofri-Winogradow at adam.hofri [at] mail.huji.ac.il

March 12, 2013: Shai Secunda, The Hebrew University: The Iranian Talmud: The Evolution of Rabbinic Law in  its Iranian Context

March 19, 2013: John Langbein, Yale Law School: Why Trial Vanished: The Diverging Paths of Criminal and Civil Justice

April 9, 2013: Anat Rosenberg, Interdisciplinary Center: Varieties Of Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Contract Between Law, Novels and History

April 23, 2013: Jim Jaffe, University of Wisconsin: The Imagined Panchayat during the Long Nineteenth Century

April 30, 2013: Efrayim Ya'acov, The Hebrew University: Yemenite Jews' Understanding of Islamic Law

May 7, 2013: Ajay Mehrotra, Indiana University, Maurer School of Law: The VAT Laggards:  A Comparative Fiscal History of U.S. and Japanese Resistance to the Value-added Tax

May 21, 2013: Guy Seidman, Interdisciplinary Center: The Regulation of Going Abroad during the First Decade of Israeli Independence

May 28, 2013: Rande Kostal, University of Western Ontario: 'The Destruction of Philosophies': Allied Planning for the De-Nazification of German Law, 1944-45

June 4, 2013: Ronni Weinstein, The Hebrew University: Rabbi Yosef Caro and Modern Law - the Beit Yosef and Shulkhan Arukh Project

June 11, 2013: Noga Morag-Levine, Michigan State University: Facts, Formalism, and the Brandeis Brief: The Origins of a Myth

June 18, 2013: Amalia Kessler, Stanford Law School: Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877

Novak's "Revisionist History of Regulatory Capture"

A prepublication of the book chapter, A Revisionist History of Regulatory Capture, by William J. Novak, Michigan Law, appears on the website of the Tobin Project.  The final version will appear in Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It, ed. Daniel Carpenter and David Moss (Cambridge University Press).

Among the other chapters in the work is David Moss and Jonathan Lackow’s Capturing History: The Case of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927.

Jones for the HuffPost: "Understanding Race"

Legal historian Martha S. Jones (University of Michigan) has contributed a short piece on "understanding race" to the Huffington Post blog. Here's a taste:

"Through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall." With this phrase, Barack Obama rewrote our national narrative of freedom and equality. That story, the president urged, runs from mid-nineteenth century struggles for the rights of women, into the modern civil rights campaign for racial justice and on through the 21st century battles for the rights of LGBTQ Americans. The president only hinted at the strong relationship between these movements. What President Obama termed our quest for "tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice" has always been shaped by intersecting interests and experiences.

Read on here.

Davies on Marvin Miller on the MLBPA

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law, has posted Baseball Players, Owners, Unions, and Trusts: The Roots and Rise of the Major League Baseball Players Association, which is forthcoming in the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy.  Here is the abstract:

On April 24, 2012, Marvin Miller delivered a speech at New York University in which he reflected at length on the history of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) and his role in the development of the labor union he led from 1966 to 1983. This article is an introduction in two parts to that speech and the panel discussion that followed it. Part I is a chronology of highlights of labor-management relations in major league baseball. Part II draws an inference or two about the MLBPA from events on that timeline. It is not the entire story of organized labor in major-league baseball, or even of Miller and the union he led. But it is enough, I hope, to put his recollections and the subsequent discussion in mature perspective.

"Disrobing the Law": A Graduate Student Conference

[The Princeton Program in American Studies announces the conference Disrobing the Law in American Culture: A Graduate Conference.  The call states that Laura Edwards (Duke University) and Sally Gordon (University of Pennsylvania) will be keynoters and explains:]

This conference, sponsored by the Program in American Studies at Princeton University, will focus on interdisciplinary questions of being beyond the law – of how people across time and space have managed to detach themselves from legal fabrics. It will examine how law accounts for specific bodies and behaviors, and how those bodies and behaviors can render themselves invisible to legal hermeneutics.  We want to bring together scholars from a variety of fields to explore the disjunction between law and social practice. This conference asks how much the law really matters. It questions its historical efficacy and, at the same time, notes just how far reaching the law can be.

We invite graduate students working in the fields of American Studies, History, English and literary study, Anthropology, Political Science, Performance Studies, Art History, Law, and related fields to submit papers on topics including but not limited to:

-- Piracy & digital media/culture
-- Political movements & resistance
-- The politics of everyday life
-- Anthropology and the law
-- Embodiment & personhood
-- Literary approaches to legal hermeneutics
-- Theories of extralegality
-- Performance and the law
-- Theories and histories of the legal archive

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, a short biographical description, and your contact information by Monday, March 11.

The conference will be held at Princeton University, on April 26th and 27th.  Proposals and/or questions should be sent to co-organizers Alix Lerner (allerner@princeton.edu) and Kameron Collins (kacollin@princeton.edu).

From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843

[We have the following announcement via H-Law.]

A new Yale Law Library exhibit celebrates Connecticut's role as the birthplace of vocational legal education in the United States.

The exhibit, "From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," is on display through May 2013 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. It was curated by Michael von der Linn, Manager of the Antiquarian Book Department at The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., with help from Michael Widener, Rare Book Librarian in the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Image credit

Although Virginia's College of William & Mary began offering law lectures in 1779, the Litchfield Law School in northwest Connecticut was the first school to provide a focused curriculum of legal training, beginning in 1782. The school's success inspired the establishment of a law school in New Haven in about 1800, which eventually evolved into today's Yale Law School. Two other law schools operated for several years in Hebron and Windham. In the early 19th century Connecticut had more law schools than any other state in the union.

On display are student notebooks, textbooks, letters and other documents of the schools and their instructors. Included are items on loan from the Litchfield Historical Society and from Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library.

The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily, February 5 - May 31, 2013 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. It will also go online via the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

For more information, contact Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, at (203) 432-4494 or .

Camacho reviews Shah, "Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West""

H-Borderlands has published a review of Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (2011). The book is part of the University of California Press American Crossroads Series.

Here's a taste of the review, by Julia Camacho (University of Texas, El Paso):

In his second deftly researched and compelling book, Nayan Shah shines light on stories long obscured. Through descriptive writing and sharp analysis, he tells a fascinating wider tale of migration, intimacy, and survival in the North American West. Focusing on South Asian male migrants and the myriad intimate ties they forged with others, the book draws on a rich body of legal material in the United States and Canada, as well as elsewhere. It critically analyzes state records, using them to show how migrants were both tied to and living outside the limits of the nation-state. Shah complicates the historiography on migration and sexuality by putting in conversation literature on interracial ties and same-sex relations, which have rarely converged in scholarly inquiries.

The full review is available here. (Hat tip: H-Law)

Colley to Lecture on Britain and "The Question of Written Constitutions"

Washington History Seminar announces the next in its series of sessions, Britain - the Question of Written Constitutions and the World since 1776, by Linda Colley, CBE, FBA, and Shelby M.C. Davis Professor of History at Princeton University:

After the American and French Revolutions, new-style written constitutions gradually came to be viewed as an essential symbol of a modern state. Britain, however, both fought against these two revolutions and has famously retained its un-codified constitution. Despite this, the impact of the new constitutions on ideas and politics in Britain was a profound one and has changed markedly over time; while Britain's own impact on the writing of other constitutions has been enormous. This seminar presentation explores these paradoxes.

The session will be on Monday February 11, 2013, at 4:00 p.m., in the Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom, Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop.  Reservations requested because of limited seating: HAPP@wilsoncenter.org or 202-691-4166
Photo ID required for admittance to the building.

Foley on Hayes, Tilden and Samuel Randall

Edward B. Foley, Ohio State University College of Law, has posted Virtue Over Party: Samuel Randall's Electoral Heroism and Its Continuing Importance.  Here is the abstract:

Samuel Randall (Library of Congress)

This keynote address for the symposium on “Foxes, Henhouses, and Commissions: Assessing the Nonpartisan Model in Election Administration, Redistricting, and Campaign Finance,” at UC Irvine on September 14, 2012 has three parts. First, it explains why institutional reform, while necessary, is not by itself sufficient to achieve impartial governance of the electoral process in the public interest. Instead, institutional reform must be supplemented by an adequate measure of nonpartisan political virtue, in pursuit of the public interest, on behalf of elected and appointed officials responsible for the governance of the electoral process. Second, to illustrate this kind of electoral virtue, the middle (and main) part of this essay tells the largely forgotten — but highly significant — story of Samuel Randall’s conduct as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1, 1877, at the crucial climactic moment of the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential election. As eyewitnesses understood, Randall’s resistance to hardliners within his own party averted the risk that the congressional counting of Electoral Votes would not be complete for the March 4 deadline for inaugurating the new president. Moreover, if March 4 had arrived with both Hayes and Tilden claiming the authority of Commander-in-Chief based on different interpretations of the constitutional consequences of an incomplete Electoral Count, the nation would have suffered a genuinely severe constitutional crisis. Therefore, Randall’s nonpartisan conduct to prevent the possibility of that constitutional crisis serves as an exemplary “profile in electoral courage,” to which contemporary and future politicians can aspire (if they, too, are put in a position where they must choose between partisanship and the public good when making a decision about the governance of the electoral process). The third (and final) part of the essay briefly explores how civics education, both in schools and in the culture more broadly, can invoke this and similar examples of electoral virtue, in an effort to cultivate an atmosphere in which other “profiles in electoral courage” are more likely to occur

Connecticut Legal History and Culture Speaker Series

Here’s the lineup for the current semester in the Connecticut Legal History and Culture Speaker Series:

February 6: Adriaan Lanni (Harvard), Law & Order in Classical Athens

March 4: Jed Shugerman (Harvard), The Decisions of 1870 and 1887: The Origins of America's Exceptional Mixed Executive

March 6: Mary Ziegler (St. Louis), The Making of a Woman's Right: Social Movements and the Popular Reinterpretation of Roe v. Wade, 1965-1980

Storrs Discusses "The Second Red Scare"

Karen has previously noted the publication of Landon Storrs's The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (2013).  Professor Storrs discusses the book, which provides an engrossing perspective on the federal loyalty security program, based on recently available sources, on Marshall Poe's New Books in History podcast.

Re-cap of AALS Panel on "The Concept of Peace in Law, Culture and Society"

Over at the War Time blog, Mary Dudziak (Emory Law) is posting "summaries and snippets" from an AALS roundtable in January on The Concept of Peace in Law, Culture and Society. The roundtable, which Dudziak moderated, included Petra Goedde (Temple University Department of History); John N. Moore (University of Virginia School of Law) (founder of the U.S. Institute of Peace); Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University); Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (University at Buffalo Law School); and Ruti G. Teitel (New York Law School).

Here's an excerpt from the first post, by historian Petra Goedde:

[D]espite the prevalence of a wartime sentiment in American society and culture, the rhetoric of peace was ubiquitous particularly in the 1950s and 60s. This rhetoric did not come only from those in opposition to the cold war arms build-up. It also pervaded much of the political discourse within the United States and the diplomatic exchanges between the principal cold war adversaries. Moreover, this rhetoric was not exclusively aspirational. Both sides maintained that war preparedness was an essential aspect of their peace policy. The concept of peace became an essential political tool in the conflict between East and West.

Read on here.

Walker wins Langum Prize in American Legal History/Biography

The Langum Charitable Trust has announced the 2012 winner of the Langum Prize in American Legal History/Biography:

The winner of the 2012 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History or Biography is Samuel Walker for his Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). This work is a tour de force that that discusses virtually every significant event, judicial decision, or government activity affecting civil liberties in America from 1913 (Wilson's inauguration) to 2009 (Obama's inauguration). Organized primarily by Presidential actions or reactions, the author analyzes each President by his civil rights record, and, finding them all to be lacking, concludes with the subtitle of the book, that on the whole they have been poor custodians of Americans' civil liberties.

This is no dry discussion of changing legal doctrine. As appropriate, Walker is careful to bring to the discussion how changes in the economy, public opinion, social conditions, wartime fears, and protests have been inextricably involved with the expansion and contraction of civil rights. He brings a generally liberal and civil-libertarian outlook to his work, and is candid to disclose that he has had thirty years of involvement with the ACLU. Nonetheless, he is scrupulously fair. Where Presidents generally thought of as conservative did something favorable to civil liberties he describes it and renders praise. An example of this is President Harding's pardon of Eugene Debs, a notable victim of Wilson's World War I suppression of free speech. Likewise where Presidents generally thought of as liberal did something unfavorable to civil liberties, he describes that too and criticizes. An example of this is President Truman's Loyalty Program and its use of guilt by association. He makes a clear case that disrespect for civil rights is nonpartisan.
General readers should not be discouraged by the footnotes being placed where they should be positioned for convenience of reference: at the foot of each page. Although many facts and much history are packed within this 510 page volume, Walker has written an extremely readable account. DJL, Sr.

Hat tip: H-Law

The Trust awarded Honorary Mention to R. Kent Newmyer for The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr: Law, Politics, and the Character Wars of the New Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Read the citation after the jump.

Harvard's Legal History Workshop

Here's the lineup for the spring semester in the Legal History Workshop at Harvard Law School, which meets from 5-7 on Thursdays and is directed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin and Kenneth Mack.

February 7:   Sabeel Rahman, Reginald Lewis Fellow, Harvard Law School (Griswold 110),  “Democracy, Markets, and Expertise: Financial Regulation in Historical Perspective”

February 28:   William Forbath, University of Texas School of Law (Griswold 110), “Jews, Law and Identity Politics”

March 7: Sophia Lee, University of Pennsylvania School of Law (WCC 2012), “’We Were Not Antagonistic to Collective Bargaining”: Forging a Liberal Workplace Constitution in the Courts”

April 4: Peter Pihos, Berger-Howe Legal History Fellow, Harvard Law School (Griswold 110), "Who Controls the Police? The Law and Politics of Police Brutality in Chicago"

April 11: Mary Bilder, Boston College School of Law (WCC B010), “Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention”

Davis reviews Pearson, "The Rights of the Defenseless"

H-SHGAPE has published a review of Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011). We mentioned the book not too long ago because it won the  2012 Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Reviewer Janet M. Davis describes the book as a "superb work of intellectual history," which "charts a clear genealogy for generations of social thought regarding children, animals, property, the family, and state formation." Here's a paragraph of the review that I found fascinating, dealing with Pearson's contribution to our understanding of the modern American state:

Pearson contends that nineteenth-century Americans may have clung to exceptionalist ideals of weak, limited government, but in practice, the Civil War marked a consolidation of federal authority that intensified during the Gilded Age. The activities of state and local governments reveal an even more dynamic landscape of "state interference" during this era, especially with respect to the shared movement to prevent cruelty to animals and children. Although animal and child protection organizations were private institutions, they helped transform the reach of the state through an ideological project that Pearson calls "sentimental liberalism." Vested with the powers of arrest in their state charters of incorporation, private SPCAs, SPCCs, and humane societies (which performed plural child and animal protection activities) fused the classical liberal language of rights with a sentimental conviction that "beasts and babes" had a right to protection because they could feel and suffer. According to Pearson, "Speaking the language of rights while amplifying the powers of the state, humane societies stood at the crossroads of what historians typically think of as two versions of liberalism--the one classical and minimalist, the other modern and interventionist" (p.16).

Read on here. (Hat tip: H-Law)

Weekend Roundup

• Texas lawyers can get up to 6.75 hours of CLE for a day-long meeting in Austin, The History of Texas Supreme Court Jurisprudence.  The bench and bar predominate as presenters, although SMU Law's William Dorsaneo contributes a paper on the court's role in developing rules of court.  (Hat tip: Josiah Daniel)

• One of the first stories on a website devoted to the history of the University of Michigan's is on The Warrior Scholar, Yale Kamisar. 

• Mike Widener, Rare Books Librarian and Lecturer in Legal Research at Yale Law School, has circulated an announcement about his upcoming Rare Book School course, "Law Books: History & Connoisseurship." (Hat tip: H-Law)

• Over at Books & Ideas, Alice Conklin reviews two books on "colonial science": Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Pierre Singaravélou, Professer l’Empire: Les “sciences coloniales” en France sous la IIIe République (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011).

• Seth Barrett Tillman, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, has sent us “a call for submissions from the Irish Law Journal, a hybrid peer-reviewed student-edited journal. If you have a paper that is exclusively tied to an American audience, then it will be of little interest to ILJ. But if you have an article touching on the permanent things, or comparative law, public or private international law, or any other topic (including legal history) that may interest an Irish, European, or transnational audience, then it will be actively considered.  Book reviews are also welcomed.”

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

CFP: The Historian as Expert Witness

Via H-Net, we have the following Call for Papers:

THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN invites proposals for articles to be published in a special issue of the journal that examines the historian as expert witness in the adjudication of natural resources in North America, including but not limited to issues surrounding property, water, and mineral rights. Proposals that discuss issues and problems of historical consulting and expert witness testimony across North America (Native American/First Nations, Canada, United States, Mexico) are especially encouraged. For example, a proposed essay might address the nature and scope of your work as a consultant and expert witness, contextualize your recruitment to particular cases, evaluate aspects of your work (deposition, trial testimony, research, and consultation), consider a body of work generated by particular litigation, examine judicial criteria for determining historical expertise on a given subject, identify and evaluate the tensions or challenges of presenting your expertise in litigation, or critically analyze the substance and effect of historical expert witness work on your discipline. Proposals for alternative formats, such as conversations among experts in one field or with attorneys or judges on the claims, composition, and effects of historical expertise on a particular case, will also be welcome. Proposals, which should be no longer than one double-spaced page, should be submitted to The Public Historian at scase@history.ucsb.edu. Deadline for submission is March 1, 2013. Selected authors will be notified by April 1, 2013. Articles will be due by August 1, 2013 and subject to peer review. Publication of the special issue of The Public Historian is expected in 2014 (Volume 36).

Pollack on The New EU Legal History

Mark A. Pollack, Temple University, has posted The New EU Legal History: What's New, What's Missing? which is forthcoming in American University International Law Review.  Here is the abstract:

For several decades, the history of the European Court of Justice has been studied primarily by legal scholars and political scientists, but not by historians, who focused primarily on the political and economic history of the European Union (EU). That anomaly is starting to be rectified, with the emergence of what I call the New EU Legal History. In this paper, I review the arguments and the findings of this new historical research, asking what is new, what value-added insights have emerged about the early Court vis-à-vis existing political science and legal scholarship, as well as what is still missing, namely what important questions remain to be addressed by EU legal historians.

The paper is organized in three parts. First, I provide a brief summary of some of the primary themes of recent political science scholarship on the ECJ, identifying four primary questions and debates from that literature: the nature and preferences of the Court, the independence of the Court vis-à-vis the member states, the Court’s relationship of the Court to national courts, and the “constitutionalization” of the treaties.

Second, I look to the New EU Legal History, asking what genuinely new insights, if any, it has generated with respect to each of these four questions. I argue that EU legal historians have indeed challenged some widely held assumptions in the political science literature, and also help to adjudicate among long-standing, and competing, theories of judicial politics and European integration. In terms of the nature of the Court and its preferences, historians have challenged the complacent assumptions about the unity and the pro-integration preferences of the Court, showing us instead an early Court that was divided in its views and whose judges were far from consistently “constitutional” in their preferences. With respect to the independence of the Court, the early Court was willing to rule against the expressed will of powerful member states, counter to the predictions of a simple intergovernmentalist model, yet these same judges were more cautious, and more acutely aware of the potential for backlash, than a strong “trusteeship” image might imply. In terms of the Court’s relations with national courts, historical studies have reinforced the findings of recent political science scholarship, which finds numerous examples of consistent, sustained national-court resistance to the ECJ, whose reception in the member states’ legal orders was and remains an uneven “patchwork.” Finally, all of these findings taken together yield a picture of an ECJ whose constitutionalization of the treaties was indeed an act of agency, but a more contingent, and more contested, act than the heroic accounts of this period have suggested until now.

The third and final section identifies a series of potentially interesting and important questions that remain underexplored by legal historians, and issue a plea for historians to engage these questions as well.

CFP: Social Science History Association

The deadline is approaching for proposals for the 2013 meeting of the Social Science History Association (Nov. 21-24, in Chicago). The Criminal Justice-Legal History Network has reached out to H-Net with the following announcement:

We welcome panels and individual papers on any topic of interest to scholars of Criminal Justice/Legal History, especially those broadly connected to the overall conference theme, ”Organizing Powers”. We also encourage proposals for panels organized around recently published books.

Themes of particular interest to our network include:

The carceral state
Policing resistance
Exporting US Constitutionalism
Crime and political protest around the world
Juvenile Crime, Then and Now

For more information on the meeting as well as the general call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website: www.ssha.org. The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2013.

Hale, "When Jim Crow Drank Coke"

Grace Elizabeth Hale (credit)

Yesterday's New York Times included a fascinating op-ed piece by historian Grace Elizabeth Hale (University of Virginia). Her starting point is the NAACP's response to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s restrictions on the size of sugary sodas. "This is more than a story of mutual back-scratching," Hale writes. "It is the latest episode in the long and often fractious history of soft drinks, prohibition laws and race." Read on here.

Reinstein on the Haitian Revolution and American Constitutionalism

Robert Reinstein, Temple Law, has posted Slavery, Executive Power and International Law: The Haitian Revolution and American Constitutionalism.  Here is the abstract:   

The Haitian Revolution and its aftershocks had a profound impact on American constitutionalism. The six administrations from George Washington through John Quincy Adams responded to the slave revolt and establishment of Haitian independence in ways that greatly expanded executive power and changed the nation’s approach towards the law of nations. The Executive took effective control over the nation’s most important dimensions of foreign policy, creating and employing instruments of power that are used to this day. For the first time, presidents unilaterally provided funds and military equipment to a foreign belligerent, intervened in a foreign civil war, negotiated secret commercial, diplomatic and military agreements with a foreign nation and the leader of a rebellion, used military force abroad, expanded the treaty and recognition powers and, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, violated accepted doctrines of the law of nations. These actions formed a blueprint for executive dominance over foreign policy, war and international law.

This forgotten history is essential for a contemporary understanding of the foundations of modern presidential power over foreign affairs and war. Many of the most controversial questions presidents face in the modern era — whether to support regime change, use military force to protect American interests abroad, intervene in civil wars, arm foreign rebellions, form secret agreements with governments or belligerents, adhere to the requirements of international law — were first faced in the American reactions to the Haitian Revolution. Those decisions set precedents for the expansion of executive power whose legacies still exert a deep if unrecognized influence today.

This article also illuminates the relationship of slavery to American foreign policy in the early Republic. The near-universal abhorrence and fear of a slave revolt was a powerful force in executive foreign policy decisions. But two other factors also influenced presidents in dealing with the Haitian Revolution — trade and geopolitics. When these other forces overcame domestic pro-slavery demands, presidents supported blacks fighting for their freedom and helped to create independence from the crucible of a slave revolt. However, when these forces were aligned with, or at least did not conflict with, the existential threat of a permanently successful slave revolt, the determination to isolate or crush the Haitian Revolution prevailed. As Haiti lost its strategic and economic importance to the United States, a consensus developed in the executive, legislative and judicial branches that, in the legal contemplation of the American government, the nation of Haiti did not exist.

Scott and Hébrard to speak at Columbia today

Readers in the New York area may be interested in the following H-Net announcement:

Wednesday, January 30, 6-7:30 p.m.
East Gallery, Buell Hall
Columbia University: Main entrance at Broadway and 116th st
 
Historians Rebecca Scott (University of Michigan) and Jean Hébrard (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) discuss their new book, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012) in conversation with professors Christopher L. Brown (History, Columbia), Madeleine Dobie (French and Comparative Literature, Columbia), Eric Foner (History, Columbia) and Pierre Force (French and History, Columbia). Moderated by Emmanuelle Saada (French and History, Columbia).

A historical tour de force combining micro-history and global history, Freedom Papers opens with the enslavement of Rosalie, a woman from Senegambia, and then traces her family’s quest, across five generations and two continents, for lives of dignity and equality. The story of Rosalie and her descendants unfolds against the background of three great antiracist struggles: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the U.S. Civil War.

Mack on Obama, Pauli Murray and the 50th Anniversary of 1963

Kenneth Mack, Harvard Law School, has published Remembering Civil Rights in 1963, 50 Years On, on Huffington Post.  It commences:

President Obama's unprecedented endorsement of gay rights in his inauguration address last week–delivered on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday -- marks the beginning of a year when Americans will celebrate the 50th anniversary of so many groundbreaking events of 1963. . . . As the nation remembers these important milestones, it is important not to forget the work of a long-forgotten activist who emerged publicly that year to link civil rights to women's rights, and ultimately to her own closeted sexual identity. In doing so, an African American woman lawyer named Pauli Murray strongly criticized the leadership of the civil rights movement for excluding women as it was planning for the march that would bring 250,000 protesters to Washington that fall. More than any other individual, it is Murray who deserves credit for expanding the language of civil rights beyond the African American struggle for equality to women's rights, and ultimately to what she later called "human rights"– and for paving the way for a President of the United States to claim that it included gays and lesbians as well.

More.

Skocpol on the Usefulness of History

In all of the law school courses I teach, I take at least a few minutes to sell the law students on the usefulness of history. One of my points is about the explanatory power of history: it helps us understand our current mix of statutes, common law doctrines, constitutional provisions, and so on. Here I make a comparison to economics, which pretty much all of them have had a taste of in their other classes. To put it very modestly, history belongs in their tool-kit, too; it may help solve puzzles that other tools can't. The other point, which I stole from a wonderful set of legal history lecture notes that Christopher Beauchamp (Brooklyn Law School) shared with me, is about history as a "road map for change." This is a pitch to any law student with hopes of making the law better, however he or she defines that term. By looking carefully at the successes and failures of would-be law reformers from the past, we may extract lessons about how to proceed in the future.

I thought about this today when I came upon this Washington Post interview with Theda Skocpol (Harvard University). The occasion for the interview was the release of "Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming," a major report that Skocpol prepared for a symposium on "The Politics of America's Fight Against Global Warming." Here's the piece of the interview (by Brad Plumer) that caught my eye:

One of Skocpol’s key insights is that health care reformers spent much of their time in the run-up to Obama’s election studying past legislative failures and seeing what they could learn from them. Environmentalists, meanwhile, assumed they could build on previous successes and continue attracting Republican support. As a result, the climate movement was utterly unprepared for the GOP’s sharp turn against cap-and-trade in 2008.

The rest of the interview is here. (Hat tip: bookforum)

Parenthetically, the report is part of a larger initiative called the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), which, according to the SSN mission statement, "brings together many of America's leading scholars to address pressing public challenges at the national, state, and local levels." (Skocpol is at the helm, along with Suzanne Mettler, Jacob Hacker, and others.) I have heard Skocpol speak about SSN, and although the current roster of scholars draws heavily from political science, sociology, and public policy, she encouraged historians to get involved, too.