Gems of Scholarship I Discovered along the Way

I have found that legal historians, especially, relish in the construction of hierarchies. There are the leading works, the leading scholars, the persons at ASLH conferences worthy of conversing with (but see Miss Peppercorn’s advice). Of course one needs such lists of what to read and who is at the top. But just as I am attracted in my scholarship to recovering the stories of those who haven’t previously “made the list,” I’m also attracted to underappreciated (in legal history, at least) gems of scholarship. Here are a few such gems I discovered along the way in researching secondary sources while writing Defining the Struggle: 

* I had not thought a great deal about the connections between literature and the civil rights movement. Then I read an impressively succinct article by Christopher Metress, using Hayden White’s concept of history as “emplotment” to criticize “an unwillingness to acknowledge the cognitive value of literary discourse in the production of social memory” (141). Metress juxtaposes a reading of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Why We Can’t Wait” speech against Anthony Groom’s 2001 novel Bombingham, which interweaves the story of the 1964 Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls in Alabama with a fictional character’s experiences during the Vietnam war in targeting innocents for slaughter. I can’t do justice to Metress’s conclusions in this short space, but do commend the essay to readers.

* Thus primed to think harder about literature as an historical artifact, I began researching the voices of African American middle-class women activists at the turn of the twentieth century. I became especially interested in the women who joined Du Bois’s Niagara Movement once it lifted its policy prohibiting women’s membership (yes, somewhat ironic for an organization devoted to citizenship equality). I noticed that many of these women were involved in literary pursuits, either in writing literature themselves, as did Barbara Pope, the plaintiff in the Niagara Movement’s only test case challenging Jim Crow train cars under the interstate commerce clause, or in promoting and studying it, as did Medora Gould, a teacher and activist (who, as history would have it, is the familial ancestor of law professor and former NLRB chair William Gould IV). In seeking to understand more about these women’s intellectual commitments and the connection between these commitments and their social activism, I stumbled upon Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, a lovely, deeply considered work of exploration that seemingly has very little to do with legal history but which really does have a lot to do with how early twentieth century African American women thought about and pursued their commitments to law-related social reform activism.

* Another interesting and helpful discovery: Kate Dossett’s Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935. Black nationalism is, obviously, a very important part of the civil rights history story. I had always thought about it as taking social reform work “out of the law”--about abandoning the commitment to law, general public institutions, and being part of one polity in favor of going into a separate space. And, I now realize, I had thought about Black nationalism as primarily masculine. This book helped me make sense of where my research had taken me to in trying to understand African American women’s early twentieth century activism, as a kind of “bridging” of the public/private, law/voluntarism, integration/separatism divides.

I’m sure we all have our favorites on the list of underappreciated gems of scholarship; I would welcome anyone sharing their lists with me.

Hovenkamp on Interests and Ideas in the Teaching of Legal History

Herbert J. Hovenkamp, University of Iowa College of Law, has posted Interest Groups in the Teaching of Legal History.  Here is the abstract:

One reason legal history is more interesting than it was several decades ago is the increased role of interest groups in our accounts of legal change. Diverse movements including law and society, critical legal theory, comparative law, and public choice theory have promoted this development, even among writers who are not predominantly historians. Nonetheless, in my own survey course in American legal history I often push back. Taken too far, interest group theorizing becomes an easy shortcut for assessing legal movements and developments without fully understanding the ideas behind them.

Intellectual history in the United States went into decline because its practitioners often wrote as if the history of ideas drove everything else, either disregarding or minimizing the role of interest groups. In the process it became viewed as inherently conservative because its source materials came almost exclusively from elite white males. On the other side, social and economic history have been driven by impulses originating from both the left and the right that sees policy as little more than the outcome of conflict among interest groups. Further, these preference are generally "naked" in the sense that they reveal little more than the desires of each individual for wealth, stability, social status, or other recognition. Articulated ideas are little more than rationalizations, and the public processes that make legal rules are largely a zero sum game.

I try to instill in my students the idea that legal history is a much more complex process in which ideas and preferences interact. In differing areas and at different times one may dominate over the other, but almost never permanently. Further, ideas lead to preferences just as much as the other way around.

Teaching legal history in this fashion is more challenging to both the instructor and the students because it requires that ideas be taken more seriously. One cannot simply pass a hand over an entire area such as business policy and proclaim it to be the result of Social Darwinism, populism, labor and the surge in immigration, or some other interest group movement. I certainly do not expect my students to become experts in Calvinism, the social contract, classical political economy, genetic determinism, Freud, or the many other areas that wander into and out of my legal history course. But I do expect them to learn enough to take them seriously, and to understand that these intellectual ideas were as powerful to those who encountered them as the ideas that we hold today.

Scarlett on the Origins of Shareholder's Derivative Litigation

Out recently in the (ungated) Buffalo Law Review, 61 (2013): 837-908, is Ann M. Scarlett’s Shareholder Derivative Litigation's Historical and Normative Foundations.  From the article:

[The] debate over corporate purpose is not new. It raged in the first half of the 20th century with the proliferation of public corporations, in which many investors could purchase shares in corporations on a public stock exchange but play no active role in the management of those corporations.  Before the early 1900s, most corporations were privately owned by a small group of shareholders who typically participated in managing the corporation.  But even then, courts struggled with the question of corporate purpose within these private companies as shareholders sought to challenge the actions of directors through litigation. The shareholder derivative lawsuit is an important part of the debate about corporate purpose because, through such lawsuits, shareholders seek to hold directors accountable for their decisions. Yet scholars in the modern debate over corporate purpose have ignored its historical origins as reflected in shareholder litigation prior to the 20th century. Almost all scholarship that even briefly mentions early shareholder derivative lawsuits in the United States relies solely upon a 15-page paper by Professor Bert Prunty published in 1957. This Article seeks to remedy this gap in the literature by more fully examining English and U.S. law on the shareholder derivative action to understand its true historical and normative foundations.

New Release: Harms, Freamon, & Blight, eds., "Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition"

New from Yale University Press: Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, edited by Robert Harms (Yale University), Bernard K. Freamon (Seton Hall Law School), and David W. Blight (Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University). According to the Press:

While the British were able to accomplish abolition in the trans-Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century, their efforts paradoxically caused a great increase in legal and illegal slave trading in the western Indian Ocean. Bringing together essays from leading authorities in the field of slavery studies, this comprehensive work offers an original and creative study of slavery and abolition in the Indian Ocean world during this period. Among the topics discussed are the relationship between British imperialism and slavery; Islamic law and slavery; and the bureaucracy of slave trading. 

A blurb:

“The focus on the abolition period marks the volume as unique. It is valuable for that purpose, besides vetting very fine scholarship. I would recommend it to anyone interested in slavery, the Indian Ocean, the Islamic world, and abolition.”—Paul Lovejoy

The Table of Contents hasn't been posted on the Press's website yet, but you can get a peek at it by using the "Look Inside" link on the book's Amazon page.

Cheer Up, Mr. Rothstein!

Edward Rothstein’s review, in today’s New York Times, of Records of Rights, the new exhibition at the National Archives, reveals yet again how central law is to Americans’ national identity.  Anchoring the exhibition, on permanent loan from the philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, is one of four surviving copies of Magna Carta.  From that medieval artifact, visitors turn to a history of rights in the United States.  They can then pass into our great national reliquary, the Rotunda of the National Archives, with its copies of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. 

Credit: National Archives

Mr. Rothstein expected that the exhibit would show that the United States was “one of the few nations to evolve out of concepts rather than a people or place.”  He hoped that it would show “how ideas of due process grew into ideas of rights and liberty, which, however haltingly or falteringly, made their way into the present.”  Instead, it shows “not how these ideas succeeded despite flaws, but how deeply throughout our history they have failed.”  Mr. Rothstein faults the exhibition for presenting “no context or perspective; only grim struggles and partially won liberties.”  He asks, “What are we left with, as we head up to the Rotunda to see the founding documents?”  The answer, he fears, is that “the United States has been uniquely hypocritical and surpassingly unjust.”

I’ll give myself the treat of viewing the exhibition once I finish grading my exams.  My impression from viewing the on-line version is that the creators of “Records of Rights” got it just about right.  If the exhibition never acknowledged Americans’ recognition of rights, I’d be just as critical as Mr. Rothstein is.  But the on-line version, at least, includes many examples of the constitutional, judicial, legislative and popular recognition of quite fundamental rights. I could detect nothing grudging about the curators’ decision to include, for example, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, Lawrence v. Texas, or the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Visitors might well enter the Rotunda with a sense that the recognition of rights in America has been imperfect and incomplete.  Can one really argue they shouldn't, especially when the lead story of the same issue of the Times reports on Judge Richard Leon’s ruling that the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records “infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment”?

Cheer up, Mr. Rothstein!  As they enter the Rotunda, visitors probably won't be ruminating on the "uniquely hypocritical” history of rights in the United States.  More likely, they'll be thinking that that history is not yet concluded and that they can still have a part in making it.

Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

The Legal History and Rare Books Section of the American Association of Law Libraries, in cooperation with Gale Cengage Learning, seeks submissions for the second annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition:

The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Cohen’s scholarly work is in the fields of legal research, rare books, and historical bibliography. The purpose of the competition is to encourage scholarship in the areas of legal history, rare law books, and legal archives, and to acquaint students with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and law librarianship.

Students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, or related fields are eligible to enter the competition. Both full- and part-time students are eligible. Membership in AALL is not required.

Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives.
The winner will receive a $500.00 prize from Gale Cengage Learning and up to $1,000 for expenses associated with attendance at the AALL Annual Meeting.The runner-up will have the opportunity to publish the second-place essay in LH&RB’s online scholarly journal Unbound: An Annual Review of Legal History and Rare Books.

The deadline is March 17, 2014. More information is available here.

A Fellowship in Regulatory Governance at Duke

[We have the following announcement for George C. Lamb, Jr. Visiting Fellows in Regulatory Governance at Duke University.]

Rethinking Regulation at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke, in collaboration with Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and the Fuqua School of Business, invites outstanding scholars of regulatory governance to apply for 1-2 residential George C. Lamb, Jr. Fellowships for the 2014-15 academic year.  The Rethinking Regulation program is built on a multi-disciplinary community comprised of faculty members and graduate/professional students from many academic departments and professional schools at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University.  The group’s members study and assess “regulation in action” —  the evolving politics, operations, and culture of regulatory institutions, their interactions with regulated businesses and other interest groups, normative frameworks for the evaluation of regulatory policy, and the outcomes of regulatory decision-making.  Participants share a strong commitment to collaborative research, innovative teaching, and dialogue with policy-makers and other participants in the policy process.

In addition to pursuing their own research, Lamb Fellows will be expected to participate in Rethinking Regulation seminars and workshops, and to help shape a significant collaborative research project along with other members of the Rethinking Regulation community.  As part of that collaboration, Fellows will undertake some teaching responsibilities in Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and/or Fuqua School of Business– most likely co-teaching an advanced research seminar focused on the subject matter of the collaborative research project, though other arrangements are possible.  Fellows can come from any relevant academic discipline, including political science, public policy/administration, history, economics, sociology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, business management, law, environmental studies, risk analysis, and engineering.

Thematic Preferences for 2014-15

We especially welcome proposals from scholars with expertise or a strong emerging interest in one of the following two areas:

• Competition policy – including antitrust/merger regulation, intellectual property regimes, and attempts to restructure markets to improve competitive conditions

• Adaptive regulation – strategies of regulatory governance that can appropriately cope with changing conditions and rapid processes of technological or organizational innovation, in contexts such as financial regulation, the oversight of advanced techniques of extracting fossil fuels (fracking, deep-sea drilling), nanotechnology,  etc.

Ms. Peppercorn Considers: The Ethical Implications of an Unusual Archival Find

--> We are pleased to bring you the next installment of our occasional advice column, "Ms. Peppercorn Considers":

Dear Ms. Peppercorn

I have an ethics issue on which I would appreciate your thoughts. In researching a rather scandalous divorce case from the 1860s (involving incest and adultery with the local rector), I ran into a private, hand-written copy of the entire court file in the case, including juicy affidavits, letters, and court petitions. The hand-written notebook is part of the family papers of an aristocratic family in the county of Piccallili that was made by the then Earl of Chutney (names changed to protect the innocent) in 1960 when the court records were unsealed. The then Earl of Tuppence subsequently donated his entire family library, including this note-book, to the Bodleian, but the library continues to be housed at the Chutney family estate, where I encountered it. But in making the donation to the Bodleian, the Earl of Chutney “sealed” the document for another 100 years, until the year 2060. This is indicated by a typed statement stuck to the notebook¹s cover stating “sealed until 2060.” This would be no challenge to the diligent historian (that’s me) since the notebook is merely a copy of a public file, now housed in Kew. But my efforts were foiled again when I discovered that when the divorce court records were transferred to the PRO at some point after the notebook was made, all of the affidavits and letters were destroyed in the name of saving space. Thus, this copy is the only complete record of the case I have been able to locate. What legal and ethical constraints am I under with regard to using this notebook that memorializes a public record? Is it, once a public record always a public record? Or is the fact that the Earl of Chutney sealed the copy for another 100 years an exercise of a valid property right? I requested from the now living Earl of Chutney (the grandson of the Earl who wrote the notebook) permission to use the notebook and, after consultation with his lawyers, my request was denied. I am stymied here in Florida. What advice do you and your esteemed readers have for the noble seeker of truth whose efforts are blocked by those seeking to cover up scandalous family secrets?

Sincerely, STYMIED

Ms. Peppercorn's sage response, after the jump.

Kolasky on George Rublee and the FTC

I recently discovered that an article by William J. Kolasky, a partner at the law firm of Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, on a founder of the Federal Trade Commission is available on line.  The article is George Rublee and the Origins of the Federal Trade Commission,” Antitrust 26 (Fall 2011): 106-12.

George Rublee (LC)

This article examines how Wilson was able to secure the enactment of two major pieces of legislation—the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act—to implement this two part program of antitrust reform. In particular, it focuses on the role played by George Rublee, a little-known lawyer who can be credited with the inclusion in the FTC Act of Section 5, which gives the FTC authority to define and prohibit “unfair methods of competition.”

CFP: Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas

[We have the following call for papers for the conference "Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas," which is to take place May 15-17, 2014, in Leiden.]

LUCAS (the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society) will host a three-day conference on the various ways in which literary and artistic texts have represented, interrogated or challenged juridical notions of ‘personhood’.  The guiding assumption behind our conference is that ‘personhood’ is not a (biologically) given, stable property of human beings (which precedes their interaction with the law), but that ‘personhood’ is assigned to selected (and historically varying) ‘bodies’ by discursive regimes, such as those of law, medicine, politics, religion, and education. During the conference we will study how literature, art and culture form domains in which the implications and scope of legal, political or medical conceptualizations of personhood can be dramatized and thought through, and in which alternative understandings of personhood can be proposed and disseminated.

The symposium broaches the question of personhood on three different levels: those of the body, the individual and the community. Questions to be addressed include (but are not limited to), firstly: From which discourses did notions of bodily integrity historically emerge? Which social, political and medical developments are currently challenging these notions? How do artistic, cultural and socio-political phenomena (such as bio-art, body horror, the right-to-die movement, etc.) invite us to rethink our notion of the human body?

           

Second, what literary and rhetorical figures made it possible to think of legal personhood in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern era? What is the legal status of ‘not-quite persons,’ such as children, illegal immigrants, the mentally disabled, the unborn and the undead? What could ‘animal personhood’ entail?

Finally: how do collective bodies acquire personhood? How did art and literature represent legal entities such as the medieval city, the seventeenth century trade company or the nineteenth century corporation? Or what is the legally defined status of sects, networks, conspiracies, and resistance movements?

The conference is organized in cooperation with NICA (the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis) and is made possible by LUCAS, the Leiden University Fund and NICA.

400-word proposals for 20-minute papers can be sent to Frans-Willem Korsten, Nanne Timmer and Yasco Horsman (LUCAS, Leiden) at legalbodies@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Deadline: 14 February 2014

Kens's Historical Perspective on Citizens United

Paul Kens, Texas State University-San Marcos, has posted Citizens United from a Historical Perspective: Corporate Person, Corporate Rights, and the Principle of Confiscation, a very timely essay, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of Hobby Lobby.  Here is the abstract:

The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is often criticized for having declared that corporations are persons with the same constitutional rights as human beings. Using standard theories of the nature of the corporation as a guide, this paper traces the concept of corporate personhood from its mythical birth in the 1886 Santa Clara case. This historical perspective reveals that the Court has never settled on one theory of the nature of the corporation. Even after Citizens United the concept of corporate person remains little more than a metaphor or legal fiction.

The real significance of Citizens United is that it ignored the traditional limitation on corporate constitutional rights. The idea of corporate constitutional rights springs from early Contract Clause doctrine holding that a state could not deprive a corporation of the essential object of its grant or confiscate corporate property. By ruling that the rights of corporations are not limited to issues that materially affect its business or property, the majority in Citizens United casually dismissed this principle of confiscation. It thus rejected both the most significant limitation on corporate constitutional rights and underlying rationale for giving corporations constitutional rights in the first place.

Berger on Indian Women and the Law

Bethany Berger, University of Connecticut School of Law, has posted an article from her backlist, After Pocahontas: Indian Women and the Law: 1830-1934, which appeared in the American Indian Law Review 21 (1997): 1-62.  Here is the abstract:

The story of Pocahontas, simultaneously celebrated and contained, presents the favored path for Native American women in the newer legal culture: absorption into the Euro-American race and ultimate disappearance of the non-European element. The alternative path was reserved for women whose assimilation did not reach this level of absorption and disappearance but retained their allegiance to both the Indian and white society. Federal and state legislatures and courts marginalized such women, denied them the treaty rights accorded their male companions, and denied them stable marriages, rights of descent, and the power within the family that they had had within Indian culture. As white people and white values encroached ever further into formerly untouched Indian communities, and as the standards for acceptable assimilation grew higher, this second category came to include virtually all Indian women.

With few exceptions, no one has studied the ways in which the role of Indian women - as property owners, as wives, as heads of families, as members of their communities - was defined by American law throughout (and even before) the history of the United States. This article attempts to begin to fill this gap. Starting from the federal and state case law of the century preceding the Indian New Deal of 1934, it examines the ways judges and legislators perceived and treated Indian women in the century preceding this watershed in federal Indian law. It concludes with the ways tribes themselves forced Indian women from tribal land or otherwise diminished their power, and the extent to which nontribal policies may have influenced those actions.

Gesell Speaks!

The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit has posted the audiorecording of its oral history interview of Judge Gerhard Gesell, who served on the US District Court for the District of Columbia from 1967 to 1993.  My own interest in Gesell is principally his work at the SEC during the New Deal.  His examination of the New York Stock Exchange's Richard Whitney revealed sensation defalcations by that presumed pillar of probity.  Also of interest is his comments on the great Washington law firm Covington & Burling.

The recording covers the following topics.

Gerhard Gesell, 1938 (LC)

Preparing a Speech for President Roosevelt
Yale College and Yale Law School
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and William O. Douglas
Yale Law School and SEC Reflections
Personalities
SEC Reflections
New Deal Washington
Covington and Burling
President's Committee for Equal Opportunities in the Armed Forces
Politics

Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop, 2nd Term - revised schedule

We've previously posted the line-up for this year's Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop. There have since been a few changes to the schedule. Via the Canadian Legal History Blog, here's the latest version:

Wednesday January 15 - Maynard Maidman, York University: "The Practice of Law in Ancient Mesopotamia: Two Cases from ca. 1400-1350 B.C."

Wednesday January 22 - Eric Adams, University of Alberta: “TBA”

Wednesday February 5 - Philip Girard, Osgoode Hall Law School: “A History of Canadian Law, Chapter 2: 1500-1701"

Wednesday February 12 - Bill Wicken, York University: “Residency on the Six Nations Reserve: Legal and Social issues, 1870-1920.”

Wednesday February 26 - Sally Hadden, Western Michigan University: “Friends, Colleagues, Competitors: Apprenticeship and Communities of Young Lawyers in Colonial America”

Wednesday March 12 - Tyler Wentzell, University of Toronto: “Not for King nor Country: Canada's Foreign Enlistment Act and the Spanish Civil War”

Wednesday March 26 - Don Fyson, Laval University: “TBA”

Wednesday April 9 - Bettina Bradbury, York University: “‘In the event of my said wife remaining in the colonies … all her interest in my will is to cease’: The widow Kearney contests her husband’s final wishes in colonial Victoria, Australia.”

Attending the Association for the Study of African American History and Life, Part Two of Two

The ASALH panel that most engaged me this year was a 50th year retrospective of August Meier’s classic book, Negro Thought in America. This panel was organized and chaired by Shawn Leigh Alexander. Mia Bay spoke insightfully about how important this book was to her in graduate school, because Meier was the only historian she could find who had catalogued and captured with nuance the many important African American thinkers of the late nineteenth century. I very much identified with her experience of finding and relishing Meier’s book. Fellow panelists Ernest Allen and Pero Dagbovie had more critical perspectives. The most startling comments came from commentator John Bracey, who had collaborated with Meier and knew him well personally. Bracey’s candid comments included the revelation that Meier was “a real misogynist” -- not just a sexist but a person who thought women should have no place in the academy. This comment caused me to almost fall off my chair, and led to a terrific audience discussion about problems of mentorship and inclusion/exclusion in the academy, to which all of us, in any discipline, still need to be paying close attention. Bracey also pointed out a fact apparently known to many but not me: Meier was gay and Elliott Rudwick was his long-time partner. Finally, Bracey defended Meier’s anti-Black-nationalist position in Negro Thought in America by explaining that Meier was a closet socialist, who used his work to explore these ideas without having to claim them directly and thus risk being discounted for politics too far left to be acceptable in the U.S. academy. I ruminated on the connections between being a closet socialist and a closet gay person in the 1950s and 1960s, like other important figures such as civil rights activist Bayard Ruskin. Bracey’s analysis of Meier made perfect sense to me and helped me understand my own attraction to Meier’s viewpoint, despite some infuriating aspects of his work, such as his insistence on utterly discounting the important role of African American women’s thought and activism. I now understand this as a byproduct of his sexist prejudices; like so many, Meier was brilliant and deeply flawed at the same time. I wonder how much of Meier's attitude subtly persists-- but that is another blog entry. . .

Capital and Commodities at UT's Institute for Historical Studies

[Via H-Law, we have the following call for proposals.]

The Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin announces its 2014-15 theme, "Capital and Commodities."

For the Institute’s 2014–15 program, we invite proposals for research into the history of capital and commodities.  The co-development of financial and ecological crises, the global proliferation of mass consumerism, and ongoing social and military conflicts over access to natural resources suggest the critical importance of historicizing the study of capital and commodities.  Indeed, over the last several decades, historians have compiled an impressive body of work on the history of commodities and their production, circulation, uses, and cultural significance. Research into commodity chains has forced historians to consider questions of social identity formation and has invigorated analysis of systems of communication and representation.  Historical studies have also revealed the impact of commodity production and consumption on natural landscapes and sociopolitical formations.  Recent globalized economic crises have further helped focus scholarly attention on how commodity exchange and capital creation involve the conjunctural dimensions of history:  credit booms and debt crises, cycles of inflation and deflation, economic growth (and its intellectual constructions) and limits to growth.   In this vein, the Institute encourages analytical approaches that underscore the sociocultural, political, environmental and intellectual underpinnings of the history of capital and commodities.  We especially welcome proposals that encompass broad timespans (including the medieval and early modern periods) and that reach across geographic areas and disciplinary boundaries. Read more [here.]

The IHS invites applications for resident fellows at all ranks. Deadline: January 15, 2014 (12:00 midnight CST). For more information about the institute's fellowship and application process, please visit [here].

 For further information on IHS, including events programming and applications for residential fellowships for 2013-14, please visit the IHS website.

Best Books of 2013

It's that time of year when "Best of 2013" lists are being compiled. Here's a few from across the web.

The New Republic has posted its Best Books of 2013. The list includes Gary Bass's The Blood Telegram (Knopf), George Packer's The Unwinding (FGS), Bill Minutaglio and Steven Davis's Dallas 1963 (Twelve).

NPR has posted, "Book Concierge: Our Guide to 2013's Great Reads." In the Biography & Memoir category are books such as A. Scott Berg's Wilson (Putnam) and Jill Lepore's Book of Ages (Knopf). Under Staff Picks are Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Doubleday) and Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). And, the For History Lovers section includes lots of novels, as well as Carla Kaplan's Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (Harper) and Neil Irwin's The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire (Penguin).

The Economist has put together a video on its six best of the year, including Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: the Authorized Biography (Knopf) and Peter Hart's The Great War (Oxford). The top 50 books compiled in article form are here and include Coolidge by Amity Shlaes (Harper); The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf) by Gary Bass; and The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism (Simon & Schuster) by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

The NYT also has a video accompanying its top ten list. On its non-fiction list is Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (Doubleday) by Peter Baker. On the NYT top-100 list are The American Way of Poverty (Nation) by Sasha Abramsky; Gary Bass's The Blood Telegram (Knopf); Jill Lepore's Book of Ages (Knopf); Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit (Simon & Schuster); and Packer's The Unwinding (FSG).





Jonathan Yardley, whose reviews are often included in the weekly Book Roundup, has issued his favorite books of 2013 in the Washington Post.

Three critics have also posted their favorites in the New York Times: Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner, and Janet Maslin.

And be sure to check out the fun list over at The Atlantic where staff writers share favorite books they have read this year, regardless of publication date. This list ranges from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power.


UPDATE: Salon has also posted a top book list for the year, here, and a "What to Read" list, here.


There's lots of good legal history missing from these lists... What are your top reads of 2013?

Sunday Book Roundup

There's plenty of book reviews to read this weekend.

The Los Angeles Review of Books have added a handful of interesting reviews this week, including reviews of Adam Smith's Pluralism: Rationality, Education and the Moral Sentiments (Yale) by Jack Russell Weinstein (here) and Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience (Univ. Chicago Press) by Neil Harris (here). Additionally, both George Packer's The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (FSG) and Sasha Abramsky's The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (Nation) are reviewed together in a pieced titled "Ill Fares the Invisible Hand."

"This is the other story, one that is complementary to Abramsky’s. And it is the one told, with lucidity and narrative acumen, by George Packer in The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. If Abramsky’s book is in the tradition of Michael Harrington and Jacob Riis, Packer’s is self-consciously indebted to that of John Dos Passos, and to a lesser extent, James Agee. Indeed, The Unwinding is a kind of nonfiction homage to Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy: voluminous, generous, messy with life. For Packer, “the unwinding” describes the marked deterioration of the social, political, and economic structures that provided stability in American life for half a century."

Two thoughtful reviews have been posted on H-Net. One is a review of Teresa Anne Murphy's Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press).

"The greatest strength of this book is that Murphy does not merely trace and juxtapose these competing arguments: she truly connects them, and establishes that these debates were literally and overtly an ongoing dialogue between the various thinkers. Child had read Alexander and reviewed Fuller. Child’s own work on women’s history was in circulation in libraries from England to the Deep South, and is echoed in the notebooks of female academy students and in the rhetoric of labor reformers in New England. Child and Fuller appeared in Hale’s history as cautionary tales--as women who had strayed from their domestic responsibilities. Murphy suggests in her conclusion that all of these women set the stage for Mary Beard, Betty Freidan, and Eleanor Flexner. “Without reading the past clearly, it is impossible to go to the root of present evils,” Caroline Dall had proclaimed in a February 1855 edition of The Una. Try as they might, the forces of tradition could not mute this clarion call."

Weekend Roundup

• Via History News Network: What Have We Learned from Pauline Maier? Have college textbooks "contextualized their treatments of Samuel Adams, the Declaration of Independence, or ratification of the Constitution to reflect Maier’s findings"?

• Why Were Tariffs Politically Important in Late 19th-Century America? The Historical Society has the answer.

•  The National Archives has opened a new exhibit: Records of Rights. It is on permanent display in the new David M. Rubenstein Gallery at NARA I (D.C. location).

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

Chetail on the American Reception of Vattel

Credit: Wikipedia

Vincent Chetail, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), has Vattel and the American Dream: An Inquiry into the Reception of the Law of Nations in the United States, which appears in The Roots of International Law: Liber Amicorum Peter Haggenmacher, ed. V. Chetail and P.-M. Dupuy (Martinus Nijhoff, 2013), 251-300. Here is the abstract:    
posted

No other book on international law has been more widely read and cited than The Law of Nations by Vattel. The present article identifies and analyses the various reasons that explain Vattel’s authority in the United States. It first retraces his influence on the Founding Fathers, on the subsequent diplomatic and judicial practice, and on the legal doctrine in the United States. The article then examines his conception of national sovereignty as the most decisive reason explaining Vattel’s influence in the United States and the overall impact of his work.

Wang and Mizner, "The Rise of the Security State"

Yuhua Wang (University of Pennsylvania) and Carl F. Minzner (Fordham University - School of Law) have posted "The Rise of the Security State." Here's the abstract:

Over the past two decades, the Chinese domestic security apparatus has expanded dramatically. “Stability maintenance” operations have become a priority for local Chinese authorities. We argue that the birth of these trends dates to the early 1990s, when central Party authorities adopted new governance models that differed dramatically from those that of the 1980s. They increased the bureaucratic rank of public security chiefs within the Party apparatus, expanded the reach of the Party political-legal apparatus into a broader range of governance issues, and altered cadre evaluation standards to increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social protest. We show that the origin of these changes lies in a policy response to the developments of 1989-1991, namely the Tiananmen democracy movement and the collapse of Communist political systems in Eastern Europe. Over the past twenty years, these practices have flowered into an extensive stability maintenance apparatus, where local governance is increasingly oriented around the need to respond to social protest, whether through concession or repression. Chinese authorities now appear to be rethinking these developments, but the direction of reform remains unclear.

The full paper is available here, at SSRN.

Hat tip: Legal Theory Blog