Tani's "States of Dependency"

I’m delighted to announce that States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972, by my fellow LHB Blogger Karen M. Tani, University of California, Berkeley, Law, is out this month from the Cambridge University Press.  In appears in the book series Studies in Legal History, sponsored by the American Society for Legal History.

[UPDATE: The Introduction is now available for download here.]

Who bears responsibility for the poor, and who may exercise the power that comes with that responsibility? Amid the Great Depression, American reformers answered this question in new ways, with profound effects on long-standing practices of governance and entrenched understandings of citizenship. States of Dependency traces New Deal welfare programs over the span of four decades, asking what happened as money, expertise and ideas travelled from a federal administrative epicenter in Washington, DC, through state and local bureaucracies, and into diverse and divided communities. Drawing on a wealth of previously un-mined legal and archival sources, Karen Tani reveals how reformers attempted to build a more bureaucratic, centralized and uniform public welfare system; how traditions of localism, federalism and hostility toward the 'undeserving poor' affected their efforts; and how, along the way, more and more Americans came to speak of public income support in the powerful but limiting language of law and rights. The resulting account moves beyond attacking or defending Americans' reliance on the welfare state to explore the complex network of dependencies undergirding modern American governance.

Here are some endorsements:

“States of Dependency inverts the story of New Deal social benefits to provide a fresh perspective on the story of state-building. Tani explains how federal authorities relied on the language of rights to legitimize new programs, only to run afoul of local communities. This powerful book suggests how providing relief led to a stronger central government with the authority to scrutinize individual lives. I’m persuaded!”
— Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America.

“The publication of Karen Tani’s States of Dependency marks a new beginning in the history of the American welfare state. Deftly weaving together the techniques of social welfare history, legal history, the history of the state, and the history of administration, Tani offers an entirely new perspective on the persistence of poverty and the progress of social reform from the New Deal to the 1970s, from social security to the welfare rights movement. She tells the grand story of the rise (and fall?) of the American welfare state with expert attention both to complex matters of law and administration as well as to the everyday social struggles over issues of localism, needs, rights, race, gender, and inequality that basically define this important field of inquiry. This is bold and revisionist history in the traditions of Willard Hurst, Theda Skocpol, Michael Katz, and Jerry Mashaw.”
—William Novak, University of Michigan

“In this brilliant administrative history, Karen Tani traces the remaking of poor relief from the passage of the Social Security Act to the failure of a federally guaranteed minimum income. Centering our attention on the assumptions, commitments, and everyday actions of what might be thought of as the worker bees of the modern administrative state (the midlevel interpreters of statutes – here, lawyers, social workers, and other professionals who staffed the Social Security Administration and state and local level welfare offices) and the fulcrum of modern state power (federal matching grants which bound national, state, and local governments together in an uneasy embrace, a new fiscally-driven federalism), States of Dependency beautifully and powerfully captures the intricate web of dependencies, the mode of governance at the heart of the modern American state in the ‘age of statutes.’”
—Barbara Young Welke, University of Minnesota

TOC after the jump

Sunday Book Roundup

n+1 has a review of Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin).

"Against these odds, Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, a narrative history of America’s “forgotten age of revolutionary violence” released last April, is worth reading. For one thing, it draws on a large number of interviews with veteran radicals and the law enforcement agents who tracked them, most of whom have never spoken on record before. New information is a good reason to write a book, especially when the topic is criminal activity recent enough that it remains shrouded in alibis."

From H-Net is a review of The Life and Death of Gus Reed: A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Thomas Bahde (Ohio University Press).

And Public Books has a multi-book review, "Waste, Value, and Environmental Racism in the Southwest," that includes Traci Brynne Voyles's Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (University of Minnesota Press) and Andrew Needham's Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press).

"In her recent book on the uranium economy in the Navajo Nation, Traci Brynne Voyles brings into focus the flip side of value-making, what she calls “wastelanding.” Wastelanding refers to patterns of words and actions that, as Voyles states it, “render certain bodies and landscapes pollutable.” This happens in two stages. First comes “the assumption that nonwhite lands are valueless, or valuable only for what can be mined from beneath them,” then comes “the subsequent devastation of these very environs by polluting industries.”"

Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America by Sean P. Holmes (University of Illinois Press) is reviewed on H-Net.

The New York Review of Books has a multi-book review, "The Cops and Race and Gangs--and Murder," including Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City by Ray Kelly
(Hachette); Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick
(Simon and Schuster), Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Levy (Spiegel and Grau).

From The Washington Post comes a review of Douglas Brinkley's Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (Harper).

"Brinkley styles “Rightful Heritage” as a sequel to “The Wilderness Warrior,” his account of Theodore Roosevelt’s equally stellar environmental record. In the new book, Brinkley can be superficial when it comes to legal issues — it’s not always clear what authority FDR is drawing on when he takes a pro-environmental stance. And it’s misleading to say, as Brinkley does, that Missouri was “a Confederate state during the Civil War.” Missouri had its share of Confederate sympathizers, but the state never seceded from the Union."

Also from The Washington Post is a review by Michelle Alexander of Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World by Baz Dreisinger (Other).

And, from The New York Times comes another double review, including Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen (Penguin), and Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era by Thomas C. Leonard (Princeton University Press).

Weekend Roundup

• The Boston Globe has profiled Daniel Coquillette, "the the coauthor who shined a light on the Harvard Law crest controversy."  And, ICYMI: Harvard Corporation agrees to retire HLS shield.

• Via H-Law: "The Dirksen Congressional Center invites applications for grants to fund research on congressional leadership and the U.S. Congress."

• The OAH Distinguished Lectureship Series has a special page devoted to “Great Speakers for Legal Audiences," including many card-carrying legal historians.

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

Coulson on a 14th-Century Mock Trial

Doug Coulson, Carnegie Mellon University, has posted The Devil's Advocate and Legal Oratory in the Processus Sathanae, which appeared in Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 33.4 (2015): 409-30:

Modern readers have been baffled by the combination of legal, dramatic, and theological elements in the 14th century Processus Sathanae, a mock trial drama in which the devil’s advocate and the Virgin Mary employ various Roman law concepts in a courtroom debate regarding the devil’s claim that he was wrongfully dispossessed of humanity. This article examines the Processus Sathanae along with an early source of the drama in a Marcionite creation dialogue and argues that by foregrounding equitable and emotional appeals the drama taught late medieval law students important lessons regarding legal oratory during a crucial period in the development of European jurisprudence.

Kim, ed., "The Spirit of Korean Law: Korean Legal History in Context"

New from Brill Nijhoff: The Spirit of Korean Law: Korean Legal History in Context, edited by Marie Seong-Hak Kim (St. Cloud State University). A description from the Press:

This is the first book on Korean legal history in English written by a group of leading scholars from around the world. The chapters set forth the developments of Korean law from the Chosŏn to colonial and modern periods through the examination of codified laws, legal theories and practices, and jurisprudence. The contributors’ shared premise is that the evolution of Korean law can be best understood when viewed in terms of its interactions with outside laws. Each chapter integrates literature in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Western languages into comprehensive analyses to make up-to-date research available to readers both inside and outside Korea. This volume provides a solid framework from which to approach Korean legal history in the perspective of comparative legal traditions.

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

Hat tip: LSA Law & History CRN

Max Planck Summer Academy for Legal History: Call for Applications

Via H-Law, we have the following announcement. The deadline is March 31, 2016.

The Max Planck Summer Academy for Legal History provides a selected group of highly motivated early-stage graduates, usually PhD candidates, an in-depth introduction to methods and principles of research in legal history. 

The academy consists of two parts. The first part provides an introduction to the study of sources, methodological principles, as well as theoretical models and controversial research debates on basic research fields of legal history. In the second part the participants discuss a special research theme and develop their own approach to the theme.

The course will take place at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. 

Special theme 2016: Multinormativity

The fundamental question when addressing the topic of “law” concerns the relationship between what we call “law” and other rules, which serve behavioural control and the stabilization of expectations, but are not treated as “law”, such as moral and religious codes, but also technology and pragmatics.

Research on "multinormativity" looks at the coexistence of juridical and non-juridical variants of normativity including the related dimension of norm implementation, conflicts and synergies in the ensemble of normative layers and the relevance of multi-normative constellations for the structuring of law over the course of history and contributes to an outstanding challenge to the diverse and complex societies of today. 

Eligibility Requirements 

Early-stage graduates, usually PhD candidates 

Working knowledge of English is required, German is not a prerequisite 

Application

Required documents for the application are a CV, a project summary (approx. 10 pages) and a letter of motivation. 

Fees

There is no participation fee. Accommodation will be provided by the organizers.

Participants, however, will be responsible for covering their travel expenses. There will be a limited number of scholarships available. 

Contact Info:

Nicole Pasakarnis
Dr. Stefanie Rüther
Contact Email: summeracademy@rg.mpg.de
URL: http://www.rg.mpg.de/en/info/summeracademy

Bilder, Rosen and Lipman Share Bancroft Prize!

The New York Times has announced a three-way tie for this year's Bancroft Prize: Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, won for Madison’s Hand: Revisiting the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press); Deborah A. Rosen, Lafayette College, won for Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood (Harvard University Press), and Andrew Lipman, Barnard College, won for The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press).  H/t: Brad Snyder.

Weinrib on Civil Liberties Lawyering between the World Wars

Laura M. Weinrib, University of Chicago Law School, has posted From Left to Rights: Civil Liberties Lawyering between the World Wars, which is forthcoming in Law, Culture, and the Humanities 

In the formative years of the modern First Amendment, civil liberties lawyers struggled to justify their participation in a legal system they perceived as biased and broken. For decades, they charged, the courts had fiercely protected property rights even while they tolerated broad-based suppression of the “personal rights,” such as expressive freedom, through which peaceful challenges to industrial interests might have proceeded. This article focuses on three phases in the relationship between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the courts in the period between the world wars: first, the ACLU’s attempt to promote worker mobilization by highlighting judicial hypocrisy; second, its effort to induce incremental legal reform by reshaping social values; and third, its now familiar reliance on the judiciary to insulate minority views against state intrusion and majoritarian abuses. By reconstructing these competing approaches, the article explores the trade-offs — some anticipated and some unintended — entailed by the ACLU’s mature approach.

Gelber, "Courtrooms and Classrooms: A Legal History of College Access, 1860−1960"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: Courtrooms and Classrooms: A Legal History of College Access, 1860−1960, by Scott M. Gelber (Wheaton College). A description from the Press:

Conventional wisdom holds that American courts historically deferred to institutions of higher learning in most matters involving student conduct and access. Historian Scott M. Gelber upends this theory, arguing that colleges and universities never really enjoyed an overriding judicial privilege.

Focusing on admissions, expulsion, and tuition litigation, Courtrooms and Classrooms reveals that judicial scrutiny of college access was especially robust during the nineteenth century, when colleges struggled to differentiate themselves from common schools that were expected to educate virtually all students. During the early twentieth century, judges deferred more consistently to academia as college enrollment surged, faculty engaged more closely with the state, and legal scholars promoted widespread respect for administrative expertise. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights activism encouraged courts to examine college access policies with renewed vigor.

Gelber explores how external phenomena—especially institutional status and political movements—influenced the shifting jurisprudence of higher education over time. He also chronicles the impact of litigation on college access policies, including the rise of selectivity and institutional differentiation, the decline of de jure segregation, the spread of contractual understandings of enrollment, and the triumph of vocational emphases.

A few blurbs:

"A stunningly original book. Nothing like this has been written in the history of higher education. Succinct and lucid, Courtrooms and Classrooms combines legal literature and arguments with materials that bring to life the historical contexts of legal cases."— Roger L. Geiger

"Scott Gelber’s new book provides a fresh analysis to confirm that history does matter when it comes to understanding higher education. Nowhere is this more so than in the complex story of classrooms and courtrooms. The issues and arguments—and decisions—on college access in the century from 1860 to 1960 have some surprising roots and remain central to the drama of who goes to college—and where—in American history. Here is yet another excellent scholarly work from an outstanding historian of higher education." — John R. Thelin

More information is available here.

Hat tip: Law & History CRN

The John Phillip Reid Book Award

[We have the following announcement of the John Phillip Reid Book Award of the American Society for Legal History.]

Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history.  The award is given on the recommendation of the Society’s Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award.  [First books, written wholly or primarily while the author was untenured, should be sent to the Cromwell Book Prize committee of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation.  The Reid Award and the Cromwell Book Prize are mutually exclusive.]

For the 2016 prize, the Reid Award Committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book that bears a copyright date in 2015. Nominations for the Reid Award should be submitted by June 15, 2016, by sending a curriculum vitae of the author and one copy of the book to each member of the committee:

More on That Second Hoover Commission Program

We've previously announced tomorrow's program on the Second Hoover Commission and the historical trajectory of regulatory reform.  It will be "livestreamed" here

Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs

[We’re abetting a campaign by the Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) to publicize its work.]

The Consortium, formed in 2003, is an organization for colleges and universities that have interdisciplinary programs geared toward undergraduate education about law and justice in the United States and internationally. The CULJP supports and promotes Legal Studies programs, Law and Society programs, Criminal Justice and Criminology programs, programs in Law and Justice Studies, and other relevant programs. We are a clearinghouse for information about teaching in and administering these programs. More information about the Consortium is available here; information about institutional membership can be found here.

The Consortium website maintains a list of undergraduate socio-legal programs (all such programs, not just member programs); if you are at such a program, or know of a program that should be included, please email [culjp.admnstrtr@gmail.com]. We also have lots of other great teaching and advising resources here, including syllabi, primary source links, undergraduate fellowships, etc.

[We also want] to spread the word about the following Consortium awards: the Teaching Innovation Award and the Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. The deadline for both is March 28, 2016.  Details [after the jump]; application information is available here.

Fox, "The Origins of Immigrant Status Restrictions in American Social Policy"

The March 2016 issue of the Journal of American History is out. It includes the article "Unauthorized Welfare: The Origins of Immigrant Status Restrictions in American Social Policy," by Cybelle Fox (University of California, Berkeley). Here's a short description:

When the modern welfare state was established in 1935, no federal laws barred noncitizens, even unauthorized immigrants, from social assistance. During the 1970s, however, the federal government abruptly changed course, barring unauthorized immigrants from nearly all federal welfare programs. Cybelle Fox examines the origins and consequences of this little-known policy shift. Federal restriction exacerbated the consequences of illegality for unauthorized immigrants and threatened the rights of their U.S.-born children and those suspected of entering the country illegally. It also ushered in years of struggle between local, state, and federal officials over who was responsible for the social costs of unauthorized immigration.

Subscribers may access full content here.

Life & Law in Rural America Conference

As a co-organizer of this graduate student conference, I am particularly excited to announce the final program for the Princeton University American Studies Conference, "Life & Law in Rural America: Cows, Cars, and Criminals." More information on the panel can be found on the website.

The Reconstruction Amendments: An ICH/SCLC Workshop

[We have the following announcement of an Interdisciplinary Summer Workshop in Constitutional History , to be held  July 10-15, 2016, at Stanford, California.]

The Reconstruction Amendments: Freedom, Equality, and the American Constitution

Sponsored by the Institute for Constitutional History with the Stanford Constitutional Law Center

Constitutional scholars regard the Reconstruction Amendments--The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth--as constituting the American republic's third Constitution, the first being the failed Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), the document of 1787 as amended by the Bill of Rights the second.  Each was a constitutive moment, creating a new nation on a constitutional footing different from the preceding regime.  The Reconstruction Amendments potentially transformed the state-centered constitutional federal order of 1789-1861, resting as it did on slavery and dominated by slaveholding interests, into a national republic premised on universal freedom and the equality of all people.  They abolished slavery, added new securities for personal liberty, and empowered the national Congress to enforce those innovations, while securing the freedom, status, dignity, and rights of the freed people.  The ensuing century-and-a-half of constitutional development saw some of those aims partially achieved, but the promise of the Amendments remains unfulfilled today.  Our initial focus will be on the origins and creation of the Amendments, and their development through the first Reconstruction, the counterrevolutionary resistance that imposed White Supremacy, and the struggles of the long civil rights movement of the twentieth century to realize the promise of the Amendments.  But we will study the impact of the Amendments on non-racial matters as well.

Workshop Leaders:

James Oakes is Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent books are Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 and The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War.

William M. Wiecek, Congdon Professor of Public Law and Professor of History, Emeritus, Syracuse University College of Law and the Maxwell School of Syracuse University; currently visiting Professor of Law at the University of California Davis School of Law.  Professor Wiecek has taught in the History Department of the University of Missouri-Columbia and as a visiting Professor of Law at Arizona State University and the University of Kentucky.   He is a constitutional and legal historian whose work has centered on slavery, emancipation, race, and the United States Supreme Court.  He is the author, most recently of The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953 (vol. XII of the Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States).

Stipends and Support:  Participants will receive accommodation at the Munger Graduate Residence on the campus of Stanford Law School and a modest stipend for meals.  Participants will also receive a travel reimbursement up to $250.  Workshop participants are expected to attend all sessions and engage in all program activities. 

Eligibility and Application Procedure: The summer workshop is designed for university instructors who now teach or plan to teach courses in constitutional studies, including constitutional history, constitutional law, and related subjects.  Instructors who would like to devote a unit of a survey course to constitutional history are also welcome to apply.  All university-level instructors are encouraged to apply, including adjuncts and part-time faculty members, and post-doctoral fellows from any academic discipline associated with constitutional studies (history, political science, law, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, etc.).

To apply, please submit the following materials: a detailed résumé or curriculum vitae with contact information; syllabi from any undergraduate course(s) in constitutional studies you currently teach; a 500- word statement describing your interest in both constitutional studies and this workshop; and a letter of recommendation from your department chair or other professional reference (sent separately by e-mail or post). The application statement should address your professional background, any special perspectives or experiences you might bring to the workshop, and how the workshop will enhance your teaching in constitutional studies.

The deadline for applications is May 1, 2016.  Applications should be sent via electronic mail to MMarcus@nyhistory.org. Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter.

Sunday Book Roundup

Justene Hill reviews The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism 1815-1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn (Yale University Press) for Common-Place.

"One of the most impressive aspects of Schermerhorn’s analysis is the way he incorporates slave smuggling into chapter three, “Sweet Dreams and Smuggling Schemes,” and chapter six, “Chains of Violence.” In these chapters, he delves into the economic and legal complications of slave smuggling for traders in the upper Atlantic, specifically in New Jersey and New York. In chapter 3, Schermerhorn examines the ways in which New York merchants-turned-slave traders John Marsh and William Stone took advantage of the growing demand in the 1810s and early 1820s for bonded workers on sugar plantations in Louisiana to coerce conditionally free African Americans in New Jersey to leave their homes for employment. In chapter 6, Schermerhorn deploys Solomon Northup’s narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, to investigate slave-abducting as a byproduct of slave traders’ avarice to fulfill demand for black slaves in the lower South."

New Books interviews Lori A. Flores about her book Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press).

The Washington Post has a review of The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanore Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott (Knopf).

H-Net has a review of The Forgotten Men: Serving a Life without Parole Sentence by Margaret E. Leigey (Rutgers University Press).

Annette Gordon-Reed reviews The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict by Austin Reed and Caleb Smith (Random House).

"Reed recalls his experience of prison life in the 19th century in a singular, clear voice. His was not a typical story of a black man living in pre-Civil War America. He was neither Southern nor enslaved. He was born and raised in upstate New York; his father, Burrell Reed, was a barber, which was considered a very prestigious position for a black man. His mother, Maria, was a literate woman from Massachusetts. For a time, Burrell and Maria Reed raised Austin, his three brothers and a sister amid “the close circle of middle-class people of color” in Rochester. The city, which also became the home of Frederick Douglass, was transforming into “one of North America’s great centers of black intellectual and political culture.” During Austin’s early childhood, the Reed family owned their home, and he and his siblings shared some of the privileges enjoyed by children of white middle-class families. Austin had his own bed in a two-story house, and he likely went to the local school for black children."

The New York Times reviews Adam Cohen's Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin).

The NYT also reviews Gillian Thomas's Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women's Lives at Work (St. Martin's Press).

"Thomas is a gifted storyteller, and the changing circumstances of these women’s lives as their cases drag on, along with the unpredictability of the courts, give her plenty to work with. She provides lots of head-shaking moments. Surely, you say to yourself, that couldn’t have been legal — such as when a city utility required women to contribute 15 percent more to their pension fund because they lived longer than men. (Never mind that survivorship provisions often meant that shorter-lived men would leave widows who continued to receive the benefits.)"

Weekend Roundup

• The Williamsburg Yorktown Daily reports that "the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s board of trustees recently elected historian and scholar Annette Gordon-Reed to the board." 

• For readers in the Washington, D.C. area: On March 16, the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice and the Hoover Institution will co-host an afternoon-long conference on "The Second Hoover Commission's 60th Anniversary." It will focus on the past, present, and future of regulatory reform. Participants include Joanna Grisinger (Northwestern University) and Nicholas Parrillo (Yale Law School).

• Barry Cushman, Notre Dame Law School, has posted Justice Brandeis and Substantive Due Process, a “brief essay . . . prepared for the Touro Law Center and Jewish Law Institute conference, ‘Louis D. Brandeis: An Interdisciplinary Retrospective.’” It also appears in 19 Green Bag 2d 145 (2016).

• According to a Georgetown Law press release, “Simon and Schuster today announced plans to publish the first collection of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s writings and speeches. Ginsburg will be assisted in this project by her authorized biographers, Georgetown Law Professor Emeritus Wendy W. Williams and Adjunct Professor Mary Hartnett.”

• “Prof. dr. J. Hallebeek (VU Amsterdam) announced the organisation of a summer course aiming at Advanced students of either History or Law; no previous knowledge of the other discipline is required on the subject Laws in Antiquity: Law and Legal Systems from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome and Byzantium. The course consists of 46 contact hours (3 ECTS) and comes with a fee of € 1 000.”  H/t: ESCLH

• ICYMI: H. W. Brands, on Politico, on the presidential debates, channeling Henry Adams.  (We know how he feels.)  John F. Duffy, UVA Law, on SCOTUSblog on Justice Scalia's hapless law clerk.

Goluboff on "Vagrant Nation" on PBS

[This Sunday many PBS stations will air the latest episode of the Miller Center for Public Affairs’ American Forum series, this one with Risa Goluboff on her new book, Vagrant Nation.  Go here to “view Goluboff on how vagrancy laws made it ‘a crime to be poor and idle’” and here  to “see Goluboff discuss “when hippies get arrested.’”]

On the Next American Forum: Taming Police Power and The Making of the 1960s

No domestic issue has been more dramatically at the center of American public discussion in recent years than the interplay between police practices, civil rights and racial unrest. At its heart is an age-old tension over just how much discretion the police should have over who they can stop for questioning, and under what circumstances citizens can be detained. Our guest in this American Forum is Risa Goluboff, a distinguished professor of Law and History and the next dean of the University of Virginia School of Law. Her most recent book probes a shadowy part of our past: How laws aimed at criminalizing hobos and beggars became an instrument for massive abuse of police power—and how those laws were quietly dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a legal history with deep implications for our current national debate. Her book is Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s.

Goluboff discusses the origins of vagrancy laws saying you could be “convicted for being a kind of person, which means you can be arrested on site at any moment…they come to be used for preventive policing…they come to be used against racial minorities, religious minorities, gay men and lesbians, beatniks and hippies, women and prostitutes, so anybody who seems at all out of place in any way becomes a target of vagrancy laws.”

On how social movements of the 1960s changed vagrancy laws, Goluboff says the nation began to, “lose consensus about how much is okay, about who it’s okay to beat up, about whether it’s okay to beat them up, about which groups pose real dangers.” She also notes that one of the "turning points in the vagrancy law challenge is when [white] hippies get arrested."

To comment on this episode or to join this conversation via Twitter use: @americanforumtv, @douglasblackmon, @UVALaw or visit us at the Miller Center's Facebook page.

American Forum broadcasts nationally on over 80% of Public Television stations (check local listings here). This episode will air on stations in Virginia on Sunday, March 13 at 10:30am or 1:00pm, and broadcast nationally on most PBS "WORLD Channel" stations at 7:30am and 1:30pm on Wednesday, March 16.

Call for Papers: Special courts in the colonial space

Via H-Law, we have the following call for papers:

specialized justices and justices except in the colonial space

(16th-20th centuries): Themis Overseas 2

Call for Papers - Symposium, December 9, 2016 

(Call for papers - Seminar - 2016-12-09)

Judicial systems are generally divided into two major categories of jurisdiction, which can also intermingle and obviously complement the one hand the so-called ordinary courts, skills extended to the whole of the common law, and specialized courts say or exception.

Modern and contemporary settlements are no exception to this institutional duality. The Old Colonial System knew, and to stick by the French example, regular judicial institutions, also modeled more or less on the metropolitan model (sovereign advice and senior Quebec, Louisiana and the Caribbean, royal justices of the Valley of the St. Lawrence, etc.), but also specialized justices, such as military or admiralty justices. The provinces under British rule after 1763 and into the 1860s also knew their "  Special short  " ( Courts Martial , Prerogative Courts for ecclesiastical justice, Court of Vice Admiralty, etc.). The Second French Empire also coexist, as in Algeria, in black Africa or Indochina, the trial courts, criminal courts, courts of appeal, courts of assizes, etc. - JPs can in turn be linked both to the ordinary courts at the specialized justice - to which we can aggregate the Muslim courts resolutely dedicated to native litigants between them and the Jewish courts. Perhaps we could expand and multiply examples for other European colonial spaces of the period.

However, the exceptional nature of justice in colonial lands can take different forms or be considered on another level because it works with strangers courts in France or experiencing specific situations properly Colonial: in French Louisiana, justice military supplied the largely ordinary royal justice, especially in the Upper Mississippi where the second existed only on paper; we know that in the neighboring American colonies, whether legal architecture was modeled on the metropolitan model, the organization and operation of real English colonial courts there were quite different; more striking still, criminal justice in French India 18th century was the work of the court Chauderie, singular instance. In British Canada, as we have already mentioned, existed foreign judicial institutions in Britain and the Militia Officers and the Trinity Houses specialized in processing small river and commercial offenses in the St. Lawrence Valley . During the Raj British coexisted almost two justices, one white, the other "coolie", the violence of the first acting on the second. German colonies, both in Africa and in the Pacific, experienced its own judicial administration, with little relation to that present in European part of the Reich . These are just a few of the recall.

All these specialized justices or exception, both from an institutional point of view as a practical reality, is worth investigating or updated. These justices have completed the regular system, or ensured the existence of a singular political justice and that is the double advantage of this conference to want to understand the colonial judicial system as a whole.

We will return to the title from the founder prospect raised by the first colonial empire. Thus in a judicial system that was originally based on a desire to colonies of simplification would soon lead to a proliferation of specific judicial institutions. It is necessary to analyze this phenomenon, identify institutions that aggregate at the initial organizational structure, to examine the reasons and check operation. A typology should be outlined including on the basis of a diptych: Additional justices / justices policies similar to the metropolitan phenomenon himself has been sensitive to the seventeenth century (with the practice of justices by committee).

Similarly we will seek to understand how the second colonial empire extended, but also exceeds, at least in scale, this phenomenon that goes through an overflow justices ordinary or common law. In a context where the nature of the judicial system is changing and the notion of justice becomes special, and the concept of political justice, metropolitan principles are cantilevered to the colonies. The design of "natural judges" is inadequate, the weight of the argument based on local characteristics is growing to challenge the implementation of inclination of regular judicial institutions or pervert.

This second study day will have a dual role: that of the institutional history (operation, competences and powers, justice personnel, etc.) and the legal history (justice practices, gender issues, such as specialized justices reflection of the colonial culture, etc.). The complexity of the issues deserves careful preparation. Here we rethink the prism of the colonial context the terms "special justices ',' exceptional justices," "political righteousness."

This symposium (in French and English) will be open to both legal historians, historians of justice and colonial historians of modern and contemporary periods.

Proposals for papers must be submitted by 30 June 2016 at eric.wenzel@univ-avignon.fr

Miller on the Influence of Native American Constitutions on the U.S. Constitution

Robert J. Miller, Arizona State University, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, has posted American Indian Constitutions and Their Influence on the United States Constitution which appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 159: 32-56:

This paper analyzes modern-day American Indian constitutionalism. It describes the development of written constitutions by Indian nations and primarily focuses on constitutions developed since 1934 under the auspices of the federal Indian Reorganization Act. This paper also briefly examines the evidence that American Indian political philosophies, and traditional tribal governmental structures and ideas, influenced many of the Founding Fathers and the drafting of the United States Constitution.

H/t: Legal Theory Blog

Pope on Law, Race, and the Sombart Question

James Gray Pope, Rutgers-Newark Law School, has posted his contribution to that symposium, forthcoming in the Texas Law Review, on The Constitution and Economic Inequality. Pope’s paper is Why is There No Socialism in the United States?  Law and the Racial Divide in the American Working Class:

The gap between rich and poor in the United States yawns wider than in any other first-wave industrialized country. Why? One influential explanation points to the historic failure of American workers to build a class-wide movement for economic redistribution and social welfare protections. This paper, written for a symposium on the Constitution and economic inequality, examines the role of law in dividing white workers from workers of color. As a causal explanation for racial divisions, law has a variety of competitors. The paper assumes that psycho-cultural racism, which was very much in evidence before the legal consolidation of race-based slavery, engendered polarization. It also assumes that certain groups of white workers, most importantly skilled craft workers, benefited economically from black subjugation – at least in the short run. These factors were not, however, sufficient to prevent American workers from overcoming racial divisions and joining in united action during critical periods. At those times, law could tilt the balance in favor of cross-class white racial solidarity. The paper suggests that law played an especially important role in two periods: one following Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, when law constituted white laborers as a control stratum over both enslaved and free blacks, and one during and after Reconstruction, when the Supreme Court immunized white supremacist paramilitary insurgency against federal and state law enforcement.

Criminal Justice Policy at UVA's Miller Center

The Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia announces After Ferguson and Baltimore: The Past, Present, and Future of Criminal Justice Policy in America, an event in its “Great Issues” series.  It will take place on Friday, March 25 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m. on Central Grounds in the Nau Hall Auditorium (Room 101):

From Ferguson to Baltimore, the reemergence of police brutality in American cities has sparked passionate debates on race and criminal justice. Excessive use of deadly force by police officers is under intense scrutiny from the national media, policymakers, and social activist groups across the country. The Miller Center's GREAT ISSUES program, in conjunction with the Black Student Research Network (BSRN), the Black Student Alliance (BSA), the Latino Student Alliance (LSA), the NAACP, and the University Democrats, will explore these issues through a panel discussion featuring Ronald Hampton and Elizabeth Hinton. The panel will discuss the history of policing in America and look forward to policy solutions of the future. Join us to engage with one of the our country’s most important issues and learn more about the changing dynamics of twenty-first century policing in America.

Henderson on Slave Property and Policing in the American South

Taja-Nia Y. Henderson, Rutgers-Newark Law, has posted Property, Penality, and (Racial) Profiling, which appears in Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties 12 (2016): 177-211    

This Article historicizes societal associations of “blackness” with criminality through an examination of the peculiar property security role of criminal law enforcement mechanisms (and spaces) in the service of slavery in the early American South. Drawing on archival and other historical source material to illuminate previously understudied functions and functionaries of law in a slave society, the Article demonstrates how the "mass incarceration" of slave property in penal facilities for matters falling entirely outside the dictates of the criminal law — whether for discipline, “safekeeping,” or sale — was a central element of the everyday law of slavery in early America. These practices not only shaped law enforcement in this period, but also helped to cement the cultural entwinement of race and criminal suspicion in the region.

World Legal History Blog Launch

[From H-Law we have the following announcement.]

The ​World Legal History Blog was launched three weeks ago ​on H-Law,​ and can be found here.

The blog's description is as follows:

The World Legal History Blog aims to explore the many facets of legal history throughout the world by focusing on themes such as legal pluralism, classification, jurisdiction, sovereignty, and territoriality. We will explore the challenges of conducting historical research in multiple languages in several archives throughout the world.  We will also discuss the challenges of crafting a historical narrative out of legal sources. Each week, we will have two blog posts by legal historians - ideally one focusing on a theme, and the other on a historical source of any kind. Suggestions for themes are always welcome. There are thousands of subscribers to H-Law  ​including   academics and legal professionals. Each blog post is sent out as a separate email on H-Law, and it also exists as a ​ standalone​ blog at the link above.​

​​ Guidelines for the blog:

Blog contributors are encouraged to write posts which are 500 - 800 words long.  As a collaborative effort, the blog will foster discussion amongst legal scholars who would otherwise not meet due to their respective geographic specializations. Contributors could also call attention to a particular archive and/or corpus of sources that would be useful to others. Contributors could also review books and articles on world legal history, and invite authors to respond. Contributors could start or engage in ongoing debates to be moderated by the editor. All queries and contributions should be emailed to the editor, Fadzilah Yahaya at wlhblawg@gmail.com. The blog's twitter account could be found here. Follow us to get blog updates.

Research Grants at the State Historical Society of Iowa

(Some of the) State Archives of Iowa (credit)

[We have the following announcement of the State Historical Society of Iowa’s program of research grants for 2016-17.]

The State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) announces a grant program for the 2016/2017 academic year. SHSI will award up to ten stipends of $1,000 each to support original research and interpretive writing related to the history of Iowa or Iowa and the Midwest. Preference will be given to applicants proposing to pursue previously neglected topics or new approaches to or interpretations of previously treated topics. SHSI invites applicants from a variety of backgrounds, including academic and public historians, graduate students, and independent researchers and writers. Applications will be judged on the basis of their potential for producing work appropriate for publication in The Annals of Iowa. Grant recipients will be expected to produce an annotated manuscript targeted for The Annals of Iowa, SHSI’s scholarly journal.

Applications for the 2016/2017 awards must be postmarked by April 15, 2016. Download application guidelines from our website or request guidelines or further information from Research Grants, State Historical Society of Iowa, 402 Iowa Avenue, Iowa City  IA  52240-1806.

Quigley to Speak on Mary Church Terrell and Racial Justice in DC

Joan Quigley, an attorney and journalist, will present Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital in the Washington History Seminar om Monday, March 14, 2016, 4:00pm - 5:30pm in the 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom, of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC:

In January 1950, Mary Church Terrell, an 86-year-old charter member of the NAACP, was refused service at a cafeteria a few blocks from the White House. Three years later, on June 8, 1953, she won a unanimous decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc., that invalidated segregated Washington restaurants and paved the way to the landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education a year later. Ms. Quigley argues for the seminal role of Thompson and Mary Church Terrell in civil rights history, which typically begins with Brown.

CFP: A Journal of Legal History at Swinburne Law

[We have the following all for papers for Legal History, a relaunched journal of, well, legal history, at the Swinburne Law School in Melbourne, Australia.]

Legal History is being relaunched with a new series in 2016 with its new academic host, Swinburne Law School. Dr Amanda Scardamaglia and Dr Jessica Lake have been announced as joint editors, with two issues planned for 2016.

We are calling for papers for the new series on any subject relating to legal history in Australia, the Asia-Pacific region or other common law countries. Although the focus is generally on Australia, the new series will also extend its interests from South Asia to North America.  Papers should be between 3,000-10,000 words. Shorter pieces are encouraged, including memoirs. Book reviews (of no more than 1,000 words) are also welcome. Full papers are required by 14 March 2016 and will be subject to a peer review process. Successful papers will be published later this year. All papers should subscribe to the Australian Guide to Legal Citation.

Papers must include an abstract of approximately 200 words and a short author biography Papers should be submitted in Word format to legalhistory@swin.edu.au with the subject line CFP: Legal History.

The editors are also calling for expressions of interest from those interested in being involved in an advisory capacity and as reviewers for the journal.

Legal History is an Australian scholarly journal devoted to the history of the law and legal institutions in Australia, the region, and more broadly of the common law world. The journal promotes legal history as being vital to understanding the context and meaning of law today and to informing future directions. We encourage submissions from all jurisdictions and welcome contributions of an interdisciplinary, transnational or comparative character. Legal History is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing.

Swinburne Law School was officially launched in February 2015, with Professor Dan Hunter appointed as Foundational Dean. The Swinburne LLB has a focus on commercial law with an emphasis on intellectual property, technology and creativity. Swinburne Law School offers an innovative degree that will enable its students to work in the new knowledge economy.

Giocoli on the Smithian Slaughterhouse Dissents

Nicola Giocoli, University of Pisa, has posted The Classical Limits to Police Power: Adam Smith and the Economic Foundations of the Slaughterhouse Dissents:

John A. Campbell, J. (LC)

The paper examines the influence of classical economics on an important episode in the American 19th-century jurisprudence on business regulation, the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873. Law historians know well that the dissents penned in that occasion by Supreme Court Justices Field and Bradley lay down the fundamental doctrines of the later Lochner era of laissez faire constitutionalism. The paper argues that these dissents were inspired by Adam Smith’s system of natural liberty and, in particular, by his views about the regulation of negative externalities and the undesirability of government-granted monopolies. The Smithian influence emerges even more clearly when the outstanding briefs presented by counsel for the plaintiffs John A. Campbell are also taken into account.

PHC 2016

The program for the Policy History Conference to be held in Nashville, June 1-4 is here.  The prize for best title goes to  "That '70s Panel," which includes a paper by W. Elliot Brownlee, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Taxation in the United States since 1945: Was there a 'Neo-liberal' Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s?"

We encourage you to browse the entire program, as it includes too much of interest to legal historians list here.  That said, we were pleased to see papers by Anne Fleming, Georgetown University Law Center (“Expertise without Activism: The Russell Sage Foundation and Consumer Lending”) and Smita Ghosh, University of Pennsylvania (“Managing Borders in the Post-Civil Rights Era”) as well as the following panels:

Policymaking in the Human Rights Context, with Clara Altman, Federal History Office, chairing and commenting on papers from Tim Lovelace, Indiana University Maurer School of Law; Joanna Grisinger, Northwestern University; and Ronald Williams II.

Making Markets: Rethinking the Late-Twentieth-Century Regulatory State, chaired by Quinn Mulroy, Northwestern University, with a comment from Edward Balleisen, Duke University, on papers by Charles Halvorson, Columbia University; David Reinecke, Princeton University; Jefferson Decker, Rutgers University; and Rebecca Shimoni Stoil, Johns Hopkins University.

Race, Courts and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, with papers by Alphonso Gwendoline, Fairfield University; Kevin Arlyck, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP; Jeffrey Jenkins, University of Virginia; and Michael Brown, University of California, Santa Cruz.

People's Welfare at 20: A Roundtable on William J. Novak's Pioneering History of the Early American State, with remarks from Kate Masur, Northwestern University; Gautham Rao, American University; Karen Tani, University of California-Berkeley, School of Law; Kyle Volk, University of Montana; and a response from William Novak, University of Michigan Law School.

Patterns in Twentieth-Century Legal Thought, with Jefferson Decker, Rutgers University, chairing and commenting on papers by Logan Sawyer, University of Georgia School of Law; Sarah Seo, Princeton University; and Erik Erlandson, University of Virginia. 

Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion in the American Context, with a comment by Brett Flehinger, Harvard University on papers by Amy Wallhermfechtel, Saint Louis University (on state Right-to-Work campaigns); Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation (on agricultural regulation); and Sean Seyer, University of Kansas (on international standards and domestic aviation).

Information about reserving a hotel room and registering for the conference is here. Note especially that April 17, 2016 is the deadline for hotel reservations at the conference rate and that April 30, 2016 is the deadline for conference registration at the early-bird rate.  March 15, 2016 is the deadline to apply for the Hugh Davis Graham Award.

Update: Links fixed!

Thomas's "Because of Sex"

Gillian Thomas, a Senior Staff Attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. has published Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women's Lives at Work (Macmillan).  An excerpt, on Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989), is here.

Best known as a monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act also revolutionized the lives of America’s working women. Title VII of the law made it illegal to discriminate “because of sex.” But that simple phrase didn’t mean much until ordinary women began using the law to get justice on the job—and some took their fights all the way to the Supreme Court. Among them were Ida Phillips, denied an assembly line job because she had a preschool-age child; Kim Rawlinson, who fought to become a prison guard—a “man’s job”; Mechelle Vinson, who brought a lawsuit for sexual abuse before “sexual harassment” even had a name; Ann Hopkins, denied partnership at a Big Eight accounting firm because the men in charge thought she needed "a course at charm school”; and most recently, Peggy Young, UPS truck driver, forced to take an unpaid leave while pregnant because she asked for a temporary reprieve from heavy lifting.

These unsung heroines’ victories, and those of the other women profiled in Gillian Thomas' Because of Sex, dismantled a “Mad Men” world where women could only hope to play supporting roles; where sexual harassment was “just the way things are”; and where pregnancy meant getting a pink slip.

Through first-person accounts and vivid narrative, Because of Sex tells the story of how one law, our highest court, and a few tenacious women changed the American workplace forever.

ASLH 2016: Electronic Submission for Proposals, Extended Deadline

We have the following announcement:

The American Society for Legal History is happy to announce a new electronic submission system for proposals for the 2016 Annual Conference in Toronto. You can access the system here: https://aslh.confex.com/aslh/2016aslh/cfp.cgi. All proposals should be submitted through this site, rather than to proposals@aslh.net. Those who have already submitted via email will be contacted and asked to resubmit via the electronic submission system. To account for any transition glitches, the deadline for submissions is extended to April 1, 2016.

The system is quite user friendly, and the materials are the same as under the old system: a short abstract for the proposal, individual abstracts for paper panels, and cvs for all presenters. One individual (not necessarily a presenter, and likely the person submitting the proposal) will have to be designated the “organizer” of the session. Please note that individuals may serve in more than one capacity: a chair may also be a commentator, for example, or an organizer may also be a presenter.

Technical questions may be submitted through the site. For other questions, please contact Program Committee Co-Chairs Victor Uribe, uribev@fiu.edu, and Bethany Berger, bethany.berger@uconn.edu.

van Dongen and Verdam on Contributory Negligence in England

Emanuel G.D. van Dongen and Henriëtte P. Verdam, Utrecht University ‘s Molengraaff Institute for Private Law, have posted The Development of the Concept of Contributory Negligence in English Common Law, which appears in the Utrecht Law Review 12 (2016):. 61-74:   

The injured party’s own conduct which has contributed to the damage that he has suffered has been a bar to the recovery of damages for centuries in the common law tradition. This article describes and analyses the historical development, from the early modern period until the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act of 1945, of the way in which English common law dealt with cases in which the behaviour of the injured party contributed to the occurrence of his damage – nowadays called ‘contributory negligence’. Historically, contributory conduct was linked to the (broader) question of causation. The way in which cases involving contributory negligence were dealt with slowly developed from a very strict rule, depriving the injured party of his action even in the presence of the slightest degree of negligence on his part (leading to a so-called all-or-nothing approach), into a more lenient approach, in which attempts aimed at doing justice to the degree to which both parties contributed to the accident were made during the 19th century. Furthermore, juries regularly mitigated the damages they awarded, rather than applying the all-or-nothing rule. The idea of a partition of damages seems to have emerged in English common law around the end of the 19th century. In 1945, the possibility of a reduction, based on the respective degrees of the responsibility of the parties, was officially introduced with the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act, which is still in force today.