Weekend Roundup

• Over at the New Republic: John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) reviews Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024). 
  

• In the Talking about Methods podcast series over at Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, Linda Mulcahy talks to Michael Lobban, All Souls College, Oxford, about working with archives as a legal historian.

• Writing for Justia: Rodger Citron (Touro University, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center) on "The Continuing Relevance of The Rosenberg Espionage Case—for Judge Aileen Cannon."
  

• The commentaries continue on the U.S. Supreme Court's use of history (and various reflections on the use of history in judicial decisionmaking) in the recently decided Second Amendment case United States v. Rahimi: Eric Segall at Dorf on Law; Mark Tushnet at Balkinization; Jennifer Tucker at CNN; Saul Cornell at Slate.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the law librarians of Congress): LGBTQ+ Legal History in the U.S. Reports Collection. 
  

• "Australia’s first civilian jury was entirely female. Here’s how ‘juries of matrons’ shaped our legal history," by Alice Neikirk, University of Newcastle (The Conversation).
  

• From Time's "Made by History": Supreme Court Opinions Don’t Have to Be the End of the Fight for Justice, by Robert Tsai.  A Mistake in the Early 1970s Still Haunts Supreme Court Ethics, by Michael Bobelian.  (Yup, it involved Abe Fortas.)
  

• Balkinization is hosting a symposium on Mark A. Graber's Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform after the Civil War (University of Kansas Press, 2023).  The first posts are by Anne Twitty, David S. Schwartz, and Evan D. Bernick.
  

• In “What’s Left of Originalism?” Andrew Koppelman reviews Jack M. Balkin’s Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  

• Queens University has noted the prizes won by two of its doctoral candidates.  Michael Borsk received two awards for his article, “Conveyance to Kin: Property, Preemption, and Indigenous Nations in North America, 1763-1822,” William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 1 (January 2023): 87-124.  They are the Peter Oliver Prize in Canadian Legal History from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, awarded to the best published work by a student, and the 2024 Jean-Marie Fecteau Prize by the Canadian Historical Association, awarded to the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal.  Margaret Ross won the best article prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality for her article, “‘Your Town Is Rotten’: Prostitution, Profit, and the Governing of Vice in Kingston, Ontario, 1860s–1920s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 32 (May 2023).
  

• Over at Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog: Otto Vervaart on Viewing Roman Slavery from Bonn.
  

• ICYMI:  Washington [State's] legal history, including West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, captured in murals for a Wenatchee courtroom (NCWLIFE). John A. Lupton on John Doe and Richard Roe.  Mark Tushnet thinks some more about originalism (after stopping trying to make sense of originalism) (X).  Blake Emerson puts Jarkesy in historical context (Marketplace).
  

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

Lessard and Plante on Animals and the Law in Québec

Let the Wild Rumpus Start! Michaël Lessard and Marie-Andrée Plante, Université de Sherbrooke, have posted Where the Wild Things Are (and Have Been): An Archeology of Legal Discourses on Animals in Québec, which is forthcoming in the Alberta Law Review:

Are animals mere things in the eyes of the law? Public discourse suggests so. However, the history of legal discourses about animals reveals another story. For better or for worse, animals have not been considered as mere things in law. It was long recognized that animals possess certain characteristics that are observable in beings, such as agency, sentience, and sociability. Together, agency, sentience, and sociability constitute a cluster of being-like characteristics sketching, through time, a portrait of the animal that is distanced from the image of a mere object of property. To support this conclusion, we ask where the “wild things” are and have been in our legal history. We relocate animals in the history of legal discourses surrounding them in the territory of Québec, beginning slightly before codification. As many individuals worldwide would like to see their own jurisdiction explicitly recognize that animals are not things but beings, Québec provides a fruitful case study for international readers on the impact that such a change may have on legal norms and discourses.

--Dan Ernst

Sunday Roundup

Some items arrived too late for our usual Weekend Roundup.

• Boston University Law's appreciation of (fellow Dubuquer) David Seipp as he goes emeritus.
  

• 
  Now available online, via CanLII: Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 by Constance Backhouse, which was originally published by University of Toronto Press in 1999.

• My Georgetown Law colleague Adam Levitin on the majority opinion in CFPB v. CFSA: "Supreme Court Justices aren't just historians, and when they foray into English constitutional history, in particular, they are in real danger of getting out over their skis" (Credit Slips).
  

• History of Law and Governance Centre, University of Nottingham, and the Northern Legal History Group thank Rebecca Probert, University of Exeter, for her lecture Bigamy in Nineteenth-century Nottinghamshire and Lancashire.
  

• That AI-generated "recording" of the argument in Brown. Laurence Tribe says that Chief Justice Warren's voice was more gravelly.  Also, Kenneth W. Mack talks to Jill Lepore on the 70th anniversary of Brown (The Last Archive).
  

• ICYMI: Talking to high school juniors about the history of the First Amendment (Williamsport Sun-Gazette).  The Day after Brown (NPS).  The Washington Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Jim Wallahee, wrongly prosecuted for hunting deer on traditional Yakama tribal grounds in 1924 (Chronicle).

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• "Mary Frances Berry: A Portrait." 
  

• 

  Stephen J. Pollak (credit)
  

  Stephen J. Pollak died a week ago.  He was Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division during Lyndon Johnson's administration, a long-time partner at the Washington law firm of Shea & Gardner, and an imaginative, dedicated, and extremely thoughtful President of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, the kind of lawyer a legal historian dreams of working with but rarely finds.  Here is the in memoriam page of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.  He gave an oral history to the Historical Society of the DC Circuit, which I've previously described here.  He gave another to the LBJ Library.  DRE
  

• From the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History: "Former Supreme Court of Canada judge Ian Binnie will talk to the Osgoode Society about four prominent litigators whose careers [spanned] Canadian legal history from Confederation to the present: Oliver Mowat, W.N. Tilley, J.J. Robinette, and Ian Scott."  May 1, 2024 - 5:30 pm at Zoom.  Register here.
  

• Writing for Ms. Magazine: Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) on "How Black Leaders Formed the Reproductive Justice Movement."

• From the Washington Post: "The antislavery giant at the center of the Trump disqualification case."
  

•  On February 20, the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota is hosting a webinar on "The Immigration Act of 1924: Rethinking its Origins & Impact 100 Years Later." Register here. 
  

• The Women’s and Gender Studies Institute and The Centre for the Study of the United States in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto has posted a notice for a Postdoctoral Fellow.  The co-taught course the fellow would teach may include “gender and the American legal system.”  More.  H/t: H-Law.

• In the New Yorker: "The Ghost of Bush v. Gore Haunts the Supreme Court’s Colorado Case."
  

• ICYMI:  "In today’s gun rights cases, historians are in hot demand" (OBP).   But "does racist history count"? (LA Times.)
  

• Update: An panelists at an HLS symposium dispute the history of universal injunctions (Harvard Law Today).
  

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

Keay, Inwood, & Long on Criminal Sentencing in BC, 1864-1913

Ian Keay, Queen's University, Kris Inwood, University of Guelph, and Blair Long, Cape Breton University, have posted Institutional Change and Criminal Sentencing on the Frontier: Evidence from British Columbia's Jails, 1864-1913:

BC Penitentiary 1877 (wiki)

In this paper we document the effect of transformative institutional change on criminal sentencing in a frontier environment. New historical evidence digitized from British Columbia’s (BC) prison admission ledgers allows us to track changes in sentencing distributions from 1864 to 1913. We find that as BC's criminal justice system moved from informal and locally independent colonial institutions, toward a set of institutions that closely resemble the system in place today, average sentences got longer and sentence dispersion fell. We isolate the increase in sentence length and decrease in sentence dispersion that can be attributed to changes in judicial decision-making by controlling for changes in the observable characteristics of the province's prison population. We also show that changes in the sentencing distribution were coincident with a reduction in judicial discretion, an increase in sentence predictability, and an expansion in the criminal justice system along the extensive margin. 

--Dan Ernst

Studies in the History of Tax Law

New from Hart Publishing: Studies in the History of Tax Law, Volume 11, edited by Peter Harris and Dominic de Cogan:

This book is a continuation of the prestigious series which is drawn from the papers of the biennial Cambridge Tax Law History Conference. The authors are a mix of academics and senior tax professionals from the judiciary and practice with representatives from 9 countries. The series continues to investigate current tax policy debates in an historical context. The papers fall within three basic categories:

1.  UK and Irish tax, looking at a variety of topics such as tax administration, cases and judges (Whitney, Singer, Viscount Radcliffe), the taxation of royal forests, the taxation of spirits, and income tax transition in the Irish Free State; 

2.  International taxation, with chapters on the role of international organisations (OECD, League of Nations) and on South Africa's early attempts to address double taxation (tax treaties); and 

3.  Non-UK tax systems, including chapters on the legacy of colonial influence (Dutch East Indies), early developments in China, New Zealand, and the USA, an influential Canadian report (Carter Commission), development of the GAAR in Scandanavia, and the receipt of Roman tax law in Europe.

--Dan Ernst.  Table of Contents after the jump.

Wallace on Canada's Power to Detain and Deport

Simon Wallace, York University Osgoode Hall Law School, has posted “Police Authority is Necessary”: The Canadian Origins of the Legal Powers to Detain and Deport, 1893-1902, which appears in the Queen’s Law Journal:

When and why did Canada develop the legal powers to detain and deport immigrants? At the beginning of the twentieth century, Canada did have legal powers authorizing deportations, but the laws lay as inactive dead letters. After a significant American diplomatic effort to establish a continental immigration exclusion program, initially resisted by Canadian corporate and state actors, Canada activated immigration police powers in the summer of 1900. After extensive archival research, this legal history shows that the government endorsed immigration police powers when it appeared that Canada was the destination for thousands of Jewish Roumanian refugees and that the Americans planned to set up extensive border controls along the Canadian-American frontier. From there, Canada quickly developed and enhanced its immigration policing powers and laws to forestall American economic sanctions. This article considers how government, corporate interests, international law, and American interest combined to eventually lead to the passage of a 1902 law that firmly established Canada’s right to arrest, detain, and deport undesirable immigrant.

--Dan Ernst

Telfer and Torrie on the Saskatchewan Moratorium Act

Thomas G. W. Telfer, Western University Faculty of Law, and Virginia Torrie, Affiliated Researcher, Desautels Centre for Private Enterprise and the Law, University of Manitoba Faculty of Law, have posted Debt Postponement, Debtor Protection, and Creditor Interests: The Role of the Saskatchewan Moratorium Act Reference Case in Reinforcing the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Power, which appears in the Saskatchewan Law Review (2023) 86.1 SLR 41-82:

Canada’s prairie provinces have long attempted to secure the economic fortunes of their residents by enacting legislation to restrict the enforcement of debt. Provincial efforts to restrict creditor collection actions date back to the Financial Crisis in 1914 and extended through the Dust Bowl and Great Depression of the 1930s, and into the early 1940s. Saskatchewan enacted its first such statute in 1914, but by 1929 it had followed Alberta’s lead and created a comprehensive scheme of debt relief with its Debt Adjustment Act. In 1941, Alberta’s Debt Adjustment Act was declared ultra vires by the Supreme Court of Canada. The ruling cast doubt on the validity Saskatchewan’s Act by implication. Saskatchewan responded by repealing its Debt Adjustment Act and enacting the Moratorium Act in 1943. However, the province’s constitutional problems did not end there. In 1955 it referred the validity of its newest Moratorium Act to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, and on appeal the Supreme Court of Canada declared that the statute ultra vires for trenching on the federal government’s jurisdiction over bankruptcy and insolvency. The decision continued the trend of expanding the bankruptcy power and was influential for clarifying the broad scope of this federal power, articulating clear definitions of bankruptcy and insolvency, and acknowledging the stigma of bankruptcy and the dual policy goals of social and economic rehabilitation. This paper argues that the Moratorium Act Reference case is a landmark decision, for affirming that debt adjustment legislation is exclusively within the scope of federal bankruptcy and insolvency law, and the enduring influence of Justice Rand’s judgment on the further development of the modern Canadian bankruptcy and insolvency system.

--Dan Ernst

Tawfik, "For the Encouragement of Learning: The Origins of Canadian Copyright Law"

The University of Toronto Press has published For the Encouragement of Learning: The Origins of Canadian Copyright Law (2023), by Myra Tawfik (University of Windsor). A description from the Press:

For the Encouragement of Learning addresses the contested history of copyright law in Canada, where the economic and reputational interests of authors and the commercial interests of publishers often conflict with the public interest in access to knowledge. It chronicles Canada’s earliest copyright law to explain how pre-Confederation policy-makers understood copyright’s normative purpose.

Using government and private archives and copyright registration records, Myra Tawfik demonstrates that the nineteenth-century originators of copyright law intended to promote the advancement of learning in schools by encouraging the mass production of educational material. The book reveals that copyright laws were integral features of British North American education policy and highlights the important roles played by teachers, education reformers, and politicians in the emergence and development of the laws. It also explains how policy-makers began to consider the relationship between copyright and cultural identity formation once British interference into domestic copyright affairs increased, and as Canadian Confederation neared. Using methodologies at the intersection of legal history and book history, For the Encouragement of Learning embeds the copyright legal framework within the history of Canada’s book and print culture.

From reviewers:

"For the Encouragement of Learning is an essential text for fully understanding the origins and development of copyright law in Canada. By grounding her insights in deeply researched historical contexts – colonial and Anglo-American copyright, educational and cultural trends, resistance to British copyright laws, the reading needs of French Canadians, to name but a few – Myra Tawfik has given us a landmark study for assessing Canadian copyright law’s past, present, and future." -- Robert Spoo

"Painstakingly researched and meticulously written, Myra Tawfik’s book provides a sweeping picture of early Canadian copyright history while dropping delicious anecdotes. Vast amounts of information are put together and transformed for the reader to experience an easy storytelling of Canadian copyright law within general Canadian history. It is the pre-Confederation copyright history book that was missing in Canada." -- Ysolde Gendreau

More information is available here. An interview with Professor Tawfik is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Telfer and Torrie Discuss "Debt and Federalism"

[We have the following announcement of Four landmark cases in bankruptcy and insolvency law in Canada, an episode in Witness to Yesterday, the podcast series of the Champlain Society.  DRE.]

In this podcast episode, Nicole O’Byrne talks to Thomas Telfer and

Virginia Torrie about their co-authored book Debt and Federalism: Landmark Cases in Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law, 1894–1937 published as part of the Landmark Cases and Canadian Law Series by the University of British Columbia Press in 2021.

Despite having been enshrined in the constitution since confederation, Canadian bankruptcy law eludes straightforward interpretation. Debt and Federalism traces the shifting meanings of the bankruptcy power through four landmark cases in Canadian legal history: the Voluntary Assignments (1894), Royal Bank of Canada vs. Larue (1928), the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act Reference (1934), and the Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act Reference (1937). Drawing on archival and legal sources, Thomas Telfer and Virginia Torrie demonstrate how the legal changes introduced by these decisions formed the foundation of modern insolvency law in Canada.

Virginia Torrie is the Editor-in-Chief of the Banking and Finance Law Review. She is a former associate professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba where she taught bankruptcy and insolvency, and Canadian legal history. She is the author of Reinventing Bankruptcy Law: A History of the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act. Dr. Torrie holds JD and LLM degrees from Osgood Hall Law School, and a PhD from the University of Kent.

Thomas Telfer is a professor of law at Western University. His teaching and research interests include bankruptcy law, commercial law, and legal history. He is the author of Ruin and Redemption: The Struggle for a Canadian Bankruptcy Law, 1867-1919 and was the co-editor-in-chief of the Canadian Business Law Journal from 2018 to 2022. He was a teaching fellow at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Western, where he developed a course called Mindfulness and the Legal Profession, as well as developing other mental wellness initiatives for law students and lawyers.

Torrie on Depression-Era Canadian Farm Debt Relief

[I have previously copped to a poorly hidden imperialist motive in my interest in comparative history, my tendency to value of a nation’s history principally as an instructive contrast to the case of the United States.  Can you blame me for succumbing to it again when I learned of the following paper, just days before I teach John Fliter and Derek Hoff’s book on Blaisdell?]

Virginia Torrie, University of Manitoba, has posted Saving the Farm: A Comparative Analysis of the Farmers' Creditors Arrangement Act in Manitoba and Ontario, which is forthcoming in the Manitoba Law Journal:

The Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s caused great hardship for many Canadian farmers, especially in the prairie provinces. In response to falling prices and crop yields, as well as increasing debt levels, Parliament enacted the Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act (FCAA). The mandate of the bold, new statute was to keep farmers on the land by reducing and rescheduling debts to suit the productive value of the farmland and the capacity of the farmer to pay. There is little academic scholarship that examines the FCAA and how it functioned in practice. This article builds on an earlier pilot study of FCAA case files in two Manitoba counties, and widens the empirical lens to consider applications from several more Manitoba counties as well as two Ontario counties. It offers the first analysis of how the FCAA operated in Ontario, employing both quantitative and qualitative data to provide a rich commentary, using examples of actual farmers. The analysis reveals that the application of the FCAA was strongly influenced by local, county-level factors. Rather surprisingly, there were few factors that can be attributed to differences between the two provinces more generally, notwithstanding the fact that there are notable variations in farming practices, operations and conditions in Ontario, a non-prairie province, and Manitoba, a prairie province. A secondary finding is that, in general, the compromises formulated under the FCAA were highly tailored to the individual farmer’s circumstances. However, there were nevertheless pockets of case files where a fairly uniform approach was used to resolve the financial hardship of farmers who were, seemingly, all in quite similar circumstances. Accordingly, the picture that emerges is complex. FCAA practice evinces stark contrasts – generating compromises which could be either bespoke or boilerplate – and limiting the extent to which one can generalize based on the empirical data from individual counties or regions.

–Dan Ernst

Manucha's "Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups"

The Toronto lawyer Ryan Manucha has published Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade (McGill-Queen's University Press):

Gerard Comeau, a retiree living in rural New Brunswick, never thought his booze run would turn him into a Canadian hero. In 2012, after Comeau had driven to Quebec to purchase cheaper beer and crossed back into his home province, police officers participating in a low-stakes sting operation tailed and detained him, confiscated his haul, and levied a fine of less than $300.

Countries routinely engage in trade wars and erect barriers to protect domestic industries from foreign competition. Comeau, however, was detained by the full force of the law for engaging in commerce with a Canadian business on the other side of a domestic border. With Comeau’s story as its starting point, Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups tells the fascinating tale of Canadian interprovincial trade. Ryan Manucha examines the historical, political, and legal forces that gave rise to the regulation of interprovincial commerce in Canada, the trade-offs that come with liberalized domestic free trade, and Canada’s enduring pursuit of economic union.

The book is reviewed here.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The schedule for the Stanford Center for Law and History 2022-2023 Workshop is here.
  

• "As [first-year law students at the University of Alberta] walk on a floor covered with blankets at the old powwow grounds of Maskêkosihk (Enoch Cree Nation) — while facilitators recount the Canadian government’s progressive seizure of Indigenous land over hundreds of years — the blankets are randomly removed.”  More.  
  

• The Museum of Durham History has honored John Hope Franklin by naming a grove in a Durham's Central park in his honor. (Duke Today). 
  

• Charlie Savage writes on the OLC war powers memos that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.  “They open a window into how executive branch lawyers can expand White House power, allowing presidents to feel free to act in ways Congress sought to constrain” (NYT).
  

• Berkeley mourns David Lieberman is here.  A memorial padlet is here.
  

•  Law & Society Association has issued its CFP for its next annual meeting, June 1-4, 2023, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
  

• 
  UC Hastings law professor  Joel Richard Paul has written a new book, INDIVISIBLE: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism. More.
  

• ICYMI: Civil rights history in Salem, Oregon (Salem Reporter).  An essay on the history for the Fifteenth Amendment (History).  Confronting history, Congress studies addition of lynching sites to national park system (Florida Phoenix).  Vikram David Amar and Jason Mazzone respond to Erwin Chemerinsky on originalism (Verdict). "The Arkansas Tech University Department of History and Political Science will host a Constitution Day observance as part of ATU’s football pre-game tailgating activities on Saturday, Sept. 17" (ATU).  
  

• Update: Scott Gerber on Bruen's "footnote six" (The Hill).  At noon on Monday, Keith Whittington will speak on “Freedom of Thought and the Struggle to End Slavery” at noon at Adrian College (Daily Telegram)

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

Weekend Roundup

• James Oakes's review in the New York Review of Books of Noah Feldman's The Broken Constitution has brought a reply from Feldman, a response from Oakes--both here--and a comment from John Fabian Witt (Balkinization).
  

• Congratulations to Thomas J. McSweeney upon his receipt of the 2022 Alumni Fellowship Award of the William & Mary Alumni Association.

• ICYMI, Justice Alito Edition:  Leslie J. Reagan on What Alito Gets Wrong About the History of Abortion in America (Politico).  Anthony Tang on What Justice Alito Can Learn From a 114-Year-Old Sex Abuse Scandal (Slate).  Same-sex marriages should be considered "newer than cell phones," JSTOR observes in this pointer to "What, Another Female Husband?": The Prehistory of Same-Sex Marriage in America, by Rachel Hope Cleves, in the Journal of American History 101 (March 2015): 1055-1081.
  

• ICYMI: Tim Naftali on The Death of Nonpartisan Presidential History (The Atlantic). Suzanne McGee on 5 Historic Supreme Court Rulings Based on the 14th Amendment (History Channel).  Claire Potter on what Emma Goldman's 1919 deportation hearing teaches about censorship embedded in other laws (Political Junkie). Garrett Epps on The Supreme Court and the Originalist Fallacy (Washington Monthly).
  

• Update: Supreme Court Justice Russell Brown on the legal history of Medicine Hat (Medicine Hat News).
  

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

Campbell on "Truth and Justice"

The latest podcast of The Champlain Society is an interview by the Society's Greg Marchildon of Lyndsay Campbell about her book, Truth and Privilege: Libel Law in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1820-1840.

Published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, this is the first book ever to be co-sponsored by the American Society for Legal History and the Osgood Society for Canadian Legal History. A transnational history, Truth and Privilege illustrates the power of applying the comparative method to legal history. Lyndsay Campbell is an Associate Professor in Law and History as well as the Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary. She has previously published work comparing Canadian and American approaches to law and 19th century constitutionalism.

As the publisher, Cambridge University Press, explains:

Truth and Privilege is a comparative study that brings together legal, constitutional and social history to explore the common law's diverging paths in two kindred places committed to freedom of expression but separated by the American Revolution. Comparing Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, Lyndsay Campbell examines the development of libel law, the defences of truth and privilege, and the place of courts as fora for disputes. She contrasts courts' centrality in struggles over expression and the interpretation of individual rights in Massachusetts with concerns about defining protective boundaries for the press and individuals through institutional design in Nova Scotia. Campbell's rich analysis acts as a lens through which to understand the role of law in shaping societal change in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the essential question we still grapple with today: what should law's role be in regulating expression we perceive as harmful?

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has announced the winners of two awards.  David W. Levy, Professor Emeritus of the Department of History of the University of Oklahoma, is the recipient of the 2020 Hughes-Gossett Award for the best article published in the Journal of Supreme Court History for "Twenty-One Months of Hell and the Supreme Court to the Rescue in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents”  The winner of the 2020 Hughes-Gossett Award for best student paper is Rachael E. Jones for “Rosenberger’s Unexplored History,” on a 1995 case holding that the University of Virginia violated the First Amendment rights of its Christian
  magazine staff by denying them the funding provided secular student-run magazines.
  

• "Buried in 5,000 cubic feet of court records, the New York State Archives has uncovered the 1828 documents thought lost to history detailing how Sojourner Truth became the first Black woman to successfully sue white men to get her son released from slavery" (Times-Union).
  

• Barrington Walker, Wilfrid Laurier University, will deliver the 13th Annual DeLloyd J. Guth Visiting Lecture in Legal History at the University of Manitoba on Thursday, February 10 at 12:00 p.m. (CT).  His talk is entitiled “Inchoate Citizens: Black Canadians, Law and the Racial State” (More).
  

• Daniel A. Farber on The Misuse of History to Undercut the Modern Regulatory State (Regulatory Review).
  

• Jed Handelsman Shugerman reviews David M. Driesen's The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power (Stanford University Press, 2021) (Lawfare).
  

• Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath discuss their book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy on the Digging a Hole podcast.  Benjamin Morse reviews the book in Jacobin (How the Left Lost the Constitution).
  

• Noah Feldman on his book The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America (Harvard Law Bulletin).
  

• Obituaries of Note: Yale Kamisar (Detroit News) and Jason Epstein, a founder of Anchor Books, the Library of America and the New York Review of Books, by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (NYT).
  

• ICYMI: "Frank Chuman, who was among the Japanese American students forced to leave [the University of Southern California] in 1942 and live in a detention facility, has received an expedited honorary degree (USC Today).  Wendell Pritchett will serve as Interim President of the University of Pennsylvania, effective at such time as Amy Gutmann may be confirmed and resign to serve as Ambassador to Germany and until M. Elizabeth Magill starts as President this summer (Penn Today).
  

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

Telfer and Torrie's "Debt and Federalism"

Thomas G.W. Telfer, Western University, and Virginia Torrie, University of Manitoba, have published Debt and Federalism: Landmark Cases in Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law, 1894-1937. It appears in UBC Press’s series Landmark Cases in Canadian Law:

The legal meaning of bankruptcy and insolvency law has often remained elusive, even to practitioners and scholars in the field, despite having been enshrined in Canada’s Constitution since Confederation. Federal power in this area must be measured against provincial jurisdiction over property, civil rights, and other aspects of provincial power.

Debt and Federalism traces changing conceptions of the federal bankruptcy and insolvency power through four landmark cases that together form the constitutional foundation of the Canadian bankruptcy system: the Voluntary Assignments case in 1894, Royal Bank of Canada v Larue in 1928, the 1934 Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act Reference, and the 1937 Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act Reference. At times when federal and provincial views appeared seemingly irreconcilable, each decision incrementally laid the groundwork for the next constitutional challenge, ultimately producing the bedrock for modern understandings of bankruptcy and insolvency law.

Thomas G.W. Telfer and Virginia Torrie draw on a wide array of archival and legal sources to analyze the four decisions from a historical and doctrinal perspective, and to situate them within the appropriate social, economic, and political contexts. This astute book demonstrates that together, the specific legal changes brought about by these landmark cases underpin contemporary bankruptcy and insolvency law and scholarship.

Scholars and students of bankruptcy and insolvency, debtor-creditor relations, constitutional law, and federalism will find this work invaluable, as will lawyers and judges who practise in these areas.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Annette Gordon-Reed on her receipt of Mass Humanities’s Governor’s Award in the Humanities!  (HLT)
  

• UC Irvine’s notice of Elizabeth Allen’s Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
  

• It’s only an abstract, but it’s an interesting one: Marginal Citizens: Interracial Intimacies and the Incarceration of Japanese Canadians, 1942–1949, forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society by Mary Anne Vallianatos, Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law.
  

• ICYMI: The "Groveland Four" were wrongly accused in 1949, prosecutor says in motion to clear their names (ABAJ).  Lawsuit Against Harvard May Decide Who Owns Images of Enslaved People, by Valentina Di Liscia (Hyperallergic).  The Hastings College of the Law naming controversy (ABAJ).  Name the Marble Palace after the first Justice John Marshall Harlan?  (Politico).  Daniel Farber on the Four Myths of Presidential Power (HNN).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

• "Federal Trials and Great Debates in U.S. History: Judicial Independence is part of the [Federal Judicial Center and American Bar Association's] joint programming promoting the teaching and public understanding of judicial history. This series discusses the history of judicial independence and examines three key cases: Marbury v. Madison (1803), Ex parte McCardle (1869), and City of Boerne v. Flores (1997).
  

• 
   In Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation (W.W. Norton), Martha C. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, argues that “three areas of employment—the federal judiciary, performing arts, and college sports—created ‘sweet spots’ for abuse by elevating and protecting powerful men.” In addition to case studies, the book provides an account of “the applicable legal history, including criminal legal reforms at the state level and the impact of Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”  (More.)
  

• Now available: The Impeachments of Donald Trump: An Introduction to Constitutional Interpretation (West Academic), by Victoria F. Nourse, Georgetown Law.
  

• Congratulations, Virginia Torrie (Manitoba).  RIP, Stephen L Wasby (University of Albany-SUNY).

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Anya Jabour (University of Montana), "Claims of protecting sex workers have long been used to punish them"; Ehren Foley (University of South Carolina Press), "The historical preservation law that obscures history"; and Robin Feldman on our "broken" patent system.

• ICYMI: Ashton Merck on Richard Nixon, Robert H. Dick, and the Federal Tea-Tasting Commission (Contingent).  HLS faculty who testified before the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court (Harvard Law Today).
  

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

Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop

 [Here is the lineup for the Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop for Fall Term 2021.  DRE.]

Wednesday September 15 – Jeff McNairn, Queen’s University, ‘Inviolate and Subservient to the Public Welfare: Private Property and Expropriation for Public Use in Upper Canada’

Wednesday September 29 – Mélanie Méthot, University of Alberta: ‘How “l'Affaire Delpit” Failed to Become a Cause Célèbre.’

Wednesday October 13 - Chris Monaghan, University of Worcester, UK: 'Impeachment Reimagined: Drawing upon history to empower the UK House of Commons'.

Wednesday October 27 – Lara Tessaro, University of Kent: ‘Constitutionally Cosmetic: Federalism and Lipstick Perform an Ontological Turn in Canadian  Food and Drugs Law, 1945-47’.

Wednesday November 10 – Alex Martinborough, Queen’s University: ‘Writing Empire and Making Nations: Law, Constitutions and History-Writing in British Settler Colonies, 1860-1935.’

Wednesday November 24 - Daniel Murchison, York University: ‘Alice Payette's Piano and Fur Coat: Views of Métis Life from the Manitoba Surrogate Court, 1870 to 1930".

Wednesday December 1 – Wayne Sumner, University of Toronto: ‘Cognitive Deficiency and the Insanity Defence: The Case of Mike Hack.’