Weekend Roundup

• Virginia Law Weekly has published a report of “Originalism 101,” a conversation between Lawrence Solum and Charles Barzun on "the origins of originalism, its variations, its merits and flaws, and its impact on judicial decision-making."  
  

• The Harvard Crimson puts fifteen questions to former ASLH president Bruce Mann.

• Over at JOTWELL, Sara Mayeux (Vanderbilt Law) has posted an admiring review of Sean Vanatta's Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (2024).
  

• Deafness in the Divorce Court, a blog post from Northumbria University, is about the 1876 divorce case involving a "deaf and dumb" couple, the husband of which engaged in physical violence.
  

• Isabel Taylor, Head of Archival Core Functions at the University of Hamburg Archives, has a long post up on the blog of the UK Constitutional Law Association, entitled, Not So Arcane After All: Archives and the Battle for "Ancient Freedoms" in the Stuart Permanent State of Emergency.
  

• Harry F. Byrd's gift to America, Constitution Day, just keeps giving.  First up: Michael Waldman, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, will deliver The Supreme Court and American Democracy, the Constitution Day lecture in Room 101 of the Beverly Rogers Literature and Law Building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on September 17 from 4:30 pm to 6 pm.
  

• On September 17, the Lower Manhattan Historical Association, cultureNOW, and the United States District Court for the District of New York  will host an event in the Ceremonial Courtroom at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., with Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law; The Honorable Judge P. Kevin Castel, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York; Seth Kaller, Historical Documents & Legacy Collections; and James von Klemperer, FAIA, President Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.  RSVP here. 

• The Supreme Court Historical Society's Constitution Day lecture is a virtual event: At 12:00 PM (EST) on September 17, 2024, via Zoom, Judge Jon O. Newman and Professor Marin K. Levy speak on their new book, Written and Unwritten: The Rules, Internal Procedures and Customs of the United States Courts of Appeals.  You may register here.  A recording will be posted to YouTube after the event.
  

• Securities law gets in on the act on at Case Western Law when Adam C. Pritchard and Robert B. Thompson discuss their book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, on September 17 from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the School of Law’s Moot Courtroom (Room A59).
  
  
• Michael E. Woods, The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee, and Reeve Huston, Duke University, will discuss “The Election of 1824 and the History of Contested Presidential Elections,” as a Constitution Day commemoration at the Virginia Military Institute on Thursday, September 19, at 8 p.m. in Marshall Hall’s Gillis Theater (News-Gazette).
  

• 
   On October 9, the Supreme Court Historical Society will hold a virtual lecture Visiting the Supreme Court Building: A Discussion with the Court’s Curator, Matthew Hofstedt, and Deputy Curator, Nikki Peronace.  Before the discussion, Clare Cushman will introduce viewers to the Society’s newest publication, An Illustrated Guide to the Supreme Court.
  

• The Organization of American Historians is circulating the amicus brief it joined in United States v.  Skrmetti.  In the brief, "well-recognized scholarly historical organizations and academic scholars and historians whose many decades of study and research focus on the history of gender, sexuality, and medicine . . .  aim to provide the Court with accurate historical perspective as it considers the question of whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, prohibiting all medical treatments intended to allow 'a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex" or to treat 'purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.'” The amicus brief of William Eskridge, Jr., Steven Calabresi, Naomi Cahn, Alexander Volokh et al. is here; the "Yale philosopher’s" brief, here. 
  

• The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History, by Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls, was the sbject of an interview in the summer 2024 issue of The Historian, Issue 162 (Summer 2024),  In addition, former BBC Wales newsman Phil Parry interviewed Boyer about the Welsh aspects of the English law of treason (History Boys).
  

• A notice of Alison LaCroix's Interbellum Constitution  in the Cook Country Record.
  

• Penn's Omnia magazine has published a nice write-up on Sarah Gronningsater's The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom (2024).
  

•  Michael Hayes, a Kansas City lawyer with a Ph,D. in philosophy, reviews Aziz Rana's Constitutional Bind on Public Discourse, the blog of the John Witherspoon Institute. 
  

• ICYMI: Queer Justice: 50 Years of Lambda Legal and LGBTQ+ Rights, a traveling exhibit debuted in Dallas at the Resource Center on September 6 (Dallas Observer).  The Robert H. Jackson Center has its first program director, Elizabeth Hosier (Post-Journal).  The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation recognizes the Honorable Peter Fox Cohalan for his contributions to the Historical Society of the New York Courts’ online County Legal History Project (TBR Newsmedia).
  

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

Bray and Keane on Ussher

Samuel L. Bray, Notre Dame Law School, and D. N. Keane, Georgia Southern University, have posted James Ussher (1581-1656):

James Ussher (wiki)

In the seventeenth century, James Ussher was the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of the Church of Ireland. Now remembered for his risible dating of creation, in his lifetime he was widely regarded as one of the most learned persons in the British Isles if not in Europe. This chapter explores Archbishop Ussher's ideas that have significance for law. In particular, it considers his commitment to absolute monarchy, even as the tide was flowing toward a more assertive Parliament; his proposal for "reduced episcopacy," a form of conciliar ecclesiastical government; and his insistence that each national church have its own canon law. This chapter takes the measure of these contributions and also of their contributor. Ussher was a Janus-like figure of contradictions—staggering in how much he knew, and now remembered mostly for what he did not know; widely renowned in his time for his moderation, yet repressive to Irish Catholics; a royalist bishop who was deeply admired by both King Charles I and the rebels who beheaded him.

--Dan Ernst

Steilen on Magna Carta and Legislative Power

Matthew J. Steilen, SUNY at Buffalo Law School, has posted Magna Carta and the Origins of Legislative Power:

This article argues that Magna Carta has a central place in the development of debate and deliberative politics in parliament. Its focus is chapter 12 of the Magna Carta of 1215, in which the king promised not to levy certain taxes “unless by the common counsel of our realm.” Conventionally these words are interpreted to require consent before levying a tax. Against this view, the article argues that “common counsel” meant public deliberation or debate. The source of these ideas was the cathedral schools, the forerunners of the first European universities. Evidence for this “school theory” of common counsel is presented in two parts. First is a study of the career of Stephen Langton, who taught theology in the cathedral schools of Paris. Langton came to England in 1213 to serve as archbishop of Canterbury, and period sources suggest he played a central role in encouraging dissident barons and negotiating Magna Carta. The article addresses scholarly questions about the reliability of these sources. The second part is a study of London, its government, and political culture. The article argues that London’s political traditions provided a fertile environment for Langton’s advice to the dissident barons about how to pursue their grievances against King John. Finally, the article presents an argument against the conventional interpretation of “common counsel” as a requirement of consent, addressing the meaning of the relevant Latin terms, usage in Magna Carta and related documents, law and practice relating to taxation, theories of kingship, and the meaning of “parliament.”

--Dan Ernst

Howlin on Female "Firsts" in the Legal Profession

Niamh Howlin, University College Dublin College of Business and Law, has posted Women as Both Insiders and Outsiders in the History of the Legal Profession:

The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 removed the legal barrier to women entering the legal professions. In November 1921, Frances Kyle and Averil Deverell were the first women to be called to the Irish bar. The experiences of these early women barristers have in recent years been documented and commemorated in exhibitions and portraiture, as well as through various conferences, other events, books, periodicals and poetry, particularly in the context of the centenary of the 1919 Act. These add to the growing body of literature examining the experiences of early women lawyers and judges in England and other jurisdictions.

Much recent focus has been on historic ‘firsts’ or ‘trailblazers’, but it is important not to let this obscure the broader story of how women experienced working in the legal professions. Indeed, this point was made twenty years ago by Bacik, Costello and Drew who observe, ‘[t]his phenomenon of the highly visible trailblazer woman should be understood not necessarily as an example of ‘advances’ made by women, but as a reminder of continuing male domination.’ Glazer and Slater identify strategies employed by early women professionals: superperformance, separatism, subordination and innovation. They add that while early women professionals did not consciously choose such strategies, ‘it quickly became clear to them that entrance into the elite world of professionalism would require special strategies for women.’ ‘Superperforming’ women were pioneers, and often achieved historic ‘firsts.’ Bacik, Costello and Drew refer to this as the ‘first woman to’ phenomenon, and caution that this ‘does not necessarily provide evidence of absence of discrimination, but rather often signals the continued and persistent exclusion of women – the exception that proves the rule.’

While recognizing the significance of the trailblazers and ‘famous firsts’, this paper seeks to go beyond commemoration, to consider the lived experiences of women at the Irish Bar in the twentieth century. It looks at the challenges they faced, the type of work they did and the strategies they adopted to succeed in a gendered environment. This paper draws on archival research as well as interviews conducted with men and women who were in practice at the Irish Bar from the 1950s until the late 1990s.

--Dan Ernst

Fortin's "The King Can Do No Wrong"

Marie-France Fortin, Université d'Ottawa, has published The King Can Do No Wrong: Constitutional Fundamentals, Common Law History, and Crown Liability (Oxford University Press):

"The king can do no wrong" remains one of the most fundamental yet misunderstood tenets of the common law tradition. Confusion over the phrase's historical origins and differing meanings has had serious consequences, making it easier for the state to escape liability for the harm caused to individuals by governmental officials or institutions.

In the first dedicated monograph on the topic, Marie France-Fortin traces the historical evolution of 'the king can do no wrong' in constitutional and public law to shed new light on our current understanding of crown liability. The different meanings conveyed by the phrase in the common law world are clarified; the contradictions between them revealed. Adopting a historical constitutional approach, the book delves deep into traditional legal sources to develop an intellectual history of this key legal idea. It explains the mutation from "the king can do no wrong" to "the crown can do no wrong" at the end of the nineteenth century, analyzing the resulting departure from core tenets of the constitutional arrangement of the seventeenth century. The study of the evolution of "the king can do no wrong" in English legal thinking, mirrored in Canada, is complemented by a comparative analysis of the idea in Australia, Ireland, and the United States, where its relationship with the concept of sovereign immunity is scrutinized.

Retracing the evolution of the king can do no wrong in legal thinking, this book enhances academics', students', practitioners', and judges' understanding of the law of governmental liability in the common law world.

--Dan Ernst

Saucedo's "Poulterers’ Case"

Victor Saucedo, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, has posted a book-length, thoroughly and extensively introduced edition of the testimony of a landmark case, entitled, The Poulterers’ Case (1611): A Landmark in the History of Criminal Conspiracy:

Every student of criminal law knows for a fact that the Poulterers' Case (1611) launched modern criminal conspiracy. This decision laid the first stone of the principle that an agreement to commit a crime is also a crime. However, besides what the law reports say, little is known about the facts of the case. This edition of the testimonies collected by the Star Chamber intends to fill this gap. Additionally, an introductory study will discuss how these facts shed new light on the reasons that were mustered in support of the decision. It will also argue that modern conspiracy was not a creation of the courts but rather of the nineteenth-century scholars who turned the Poulterers' Case into a landmark case.

Update: Saucedo has also posted a separate monograph, Conspiracy. A Conceptual Genealogy (Thirteenth to Early Eighteenth Century)

--Dan Ernst

Ward's "Reformation of the Constitution"

Ian Ward, Newcastle University, has published The Reformation of the Constitution: Law, Culture and Conflict in Jacobean England (Hart/Bloomsbury):

This book revisits one of the defining judicial engagements in English legal history.

It provides a fresh account of the years 1606 to 1616 which witnessed a series of increasingly volatile confrontations between, on the one side, King James I and his Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, and on the other, Sir Edward Coke, successively Chief Justice of Common Pleas and Lord Chief Justice.

At the heart of the dispute were differing opinions regarding the nature of kingship and the reach of prerogative in reformation England. Appreciating the longer context, in the summer of 1616 King James appealed for a reformation of law and constitution to complement the reformation of his Church.

Later historians would discern in these debates the seeding of a century of revolution, followed by another four centuries of reform. This book ventures the further thought that the arguments which echoed around Westminster Hall in the first years of the seventeenth century have lost little of their resonance half a millennium on. Breaks with Rome are little easier to "get done," the margins of executive governance little easier to draw.

If lawyers in common-law countries have an origin story for the Rule of Law, it is the very controversy Ward relates in the revealing context of the English Reformation.

–Dan Ernst

A 17th-Century Grand Jury Exhortation

Just out, open access, in Law and History Review: A Grand Jury Exhortation, edited and introduced by Benjamin Keener, a JD candidate at Penn Law:

This essay brings to light a rare feature of the Stewart legal system. Grand jury charges remain understudied, partly for want of primary source materials. The brief historical and biographical sketches of the essay are appended by a unique and relevant artifact of the time: a preamble or exhortation to a grand jury charge, ostensibly delivered by a Justice of the King's Bench, John Dodderidge.

--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

Craig's "English Administrative Law from 1550"

Paul Craig, Emeritus Professor of English Law, St. John's College, Oxford, has published English Administrative Law from 1550: Continuity and Change in the series Oxford Legal History:

The commonly held view about English administrative law is that it is of recent origin, with some dating it from the mid-20th century and some venturing back to the late 19th century. English Administrative Law from 1550: Continuity and Change upends this conventional thinking, charting its development from the mid-16th century with an in-depth examination of administrative law doctrine based on primary legal materials, statute, and case law.

This book is divided into four parts. Part I sets out the book's principal thesis, contrasting standard perceptions concerning the existence of English administrative law with the reality of its emergence from the mid-16th century. Part II is concerned with Regulation and Administration from the mid-16th century to the end of the 19th century. There is detailed analysis of the regulatory and administrative state, which includes chapters on the way in which administrative policy was developed through individual decision-making and rulemaking, and the role played by contract in service delivery. Part III deals with Courts and Doctrine. It begins with discussion of foundational precepts followed by chapters on natural justice; review of law and fact; rights; delegation, fettering and purpose; reasonableness; proportionability; prerogative; and third and fourth source power. Part IV of the book covers Remedies and Review, with chapters on invalidity; standing; the prerogative writs; injunction, declaration, quo warranto and habeas corpus; and damages and restitutionary liability.

With thought-provoking and original insights, English Administrative Law from 1550 systematically elaborates and contextualizes the origins of administrative law features while linking them to their modern-day equivalents.

–Dan Ernst

Papp Kamali's Chair Lecture on Veronica and the Jury

Saints Peter, Paul and Veronica (NYPL)

[Here’s a full report of Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s chair lecture at HLS.  DRE]

What do an iconic first century Christian saint, a 13th century medieval pope, and the twelve women and men currently sitting in judgment of the former United States president in a New York courtroom have in common?

While most observers would surely assume the answer is ‘not much,’ Harvard Law School’s Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 might beg to differ. An expert in medieval English law, Kamali argued during a recent lecture that while the origins of the modern jury trial can be traced to a momentous judicial reform enacted by a church council in 1215, England’s broader approach to fact-finding might be better understood by exploring Pope Innocent III’s personal devotion to the saga of Saint Veronica.

Kamali’s comments came during a Harvard Law School event on April 9 celebrating her appointment as the Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law. The author, among other works, of the award-winning book, “Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England,” Kamali teaches criminal law and English legal history.  More.

PhD Fellowship on the Court of Chancery during the English Civil War

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

University College London and The National Archives are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from 1st October 2024, under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme.

The PhD project will investigate the records of the Court of Chancery during the English Civil War and Interregnum (c. 1640-1660). The key aims of this project are to better understand how the Court of Chancery was being used by litigants between 1640 and 1660, and to unlock the records of this court through original research and cataloguing. The project has intentionally broad research aims to allow the student to develop their own research questions and answers based on discoveries in these collections. Their initial investigation of these records will provide them with case studies, which can be approached in a variety of ways depending on the student’s interests.

The richness of the records, the high stakes of the litigation, and the political uncertainty of the period promise to make this project an insightful and important archival study which will serve as a benchmark for future studies.

The key research questions of the project are:

• How did the Court of Chancery function during this tumultuous period?
• How and for what reason did litigants use this court?

Applicants should ideally have or expect to receive a relevant Masters-level qualification or be able to demonstrate equivalent experience in a setting involving knowledge of and critical reflection on relevant topics, such as Legal History, Constitutional History, and Political History. Suitable disciplines are flexible but might include Law or History.

As a collaborative award, students will be expected to spend time at both the University and The National Archives.

Any questions should be directed to UCL’s Faculty of Laws PhD team at phd-law@ucl.ac.uk

Applications will be considered following the 24th June application deadline, initially to be short-listed for interview.  Interviews will take place online, via Zoom, in July 2024.

[Tuition fees up to the full-time home rate for PhD degrees. The UKRI Indicative Fee Level for 2024/25 is £4,786 for full-time home students, plus an annual maintenance stipend which will be £21,237 in academic year 2024/25.  Closing date: June 29, 2024.]

The Legal History of the Church of England

Hart has published The Legal History of the Church of England: From the Reformation to the Present, edited by Norman Doe and the Reverend Stephen Coleman, Cardiff University:

The law has often been the site of major political and theological controversies, within and outside the church, including the Reformation itself, the English civil war, the Restoration and rise of religious toleration, the impact of the industrial revolution, the ritualist disputes of the 19th century, and the rise of secularisation in the twentieth. The book examines key statutes, canons, case-law, and other instruments in fields such as church governance and ministry, doctrine and liturgy, rites of passage (from baptism to burial) and church property.

Each chapter studies a broadly 50-year period, analysing it in terms of continuity and change, explaining the laws by reference to politics and theology, and evaluating the significance of the legal landmarks for the development of church law and its place in wider English society.

For the discount price of £80 (20% off), order online at www.bloomsbury.com and use the code GLR AT5.

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

Waddilove on Equity in 1600

D.P. Waddilove, Notre Dame Law School, has posted Aspects of Equity in 1600: Wills, Forfeitures, and Trusts, which is forthcoming in Essays on the History of Equity, edited by David Foster and Charles Mitchel:

The Court of Chancery in 1600 stood somewhere on the bridge between medieval dispenser of ad-hoc justice and sclerotically rigid Regency court of punctilio. Equity was in an uncertain state, no longer unpredictably free-form, but not yet driven to the regularity of fully precedential lawlikeness.

At the time, the Great Seal was in the hands of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper from 1596 to 1603, and Lord Chancellor (as Lord Ellesmere) from 1603 to his death in 1617. Although recognized in his own day and immediately afterward as particularly significant for the development of equity, legal history has tended to disregard him thanks to overreliance upon printed reports, which begin to cover the court meaningfully only after his tenure.

This paper, based on a comprehensive review of the daily record of the court, the Chancery Register, for the legal year beginning 1600 (9 October 1600 - 8 October 1601), considers aspects of equity to assess their state of development and shed light on Egerton's influence. Supplemented with the manuscript Chancery reports first printed by Professor Hamilton Bryson in Selden Society volumes of 2000-2001, it considers three major areas of equitable jurisdiction. Two of these, securities (such as bonds and mortgages) and trusts, are often considered the main jurisdictions of Chancery. The third, disputes over testamentary matters and decedents’ estates, became stereotypically associated with Chancery in Dickens's Bleak House, and also formed a major aspect of equitable jurisdiction. This paper thus sheds light on the nature of equitable development in these major areas in an under-studied period.

--Dan Ernst

Sinanis on Exemplary Damages in 18th- and 19th-Century England

Nicholas Sinanis, Lecturer on the Faculty of Law at Monash University, has published open access Exemplary Damages Practice in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century England in the American Journal of Legal History:

A longer perspective on the modern Anglo-American law of exemplary (or punitive) damages views it as having first begun to emerge after the cases of Huckle v Money and Wilkes v Wood were decided in 1763. This article seeks to further deepen and clarify this perspective. It does so by systematically tracing the evolution of the adjudicative practice according to which English civil juries awarded ‘exemplary damages’ from the period circa 1764 to the early nineteenth century. It shows that this practice scarcely ‘hardened into law’ in the aftermath of the Huckle and Wilkes decisions. In fact, as had been the case long before 1763, for a long time after it, jury determinations as to exemplary damages in common law tort actions remained entirely outside the control of any formal legal doctrine which either of these decisions were taken to have authoritatively recognized.

--Dan Ernst

Book Launch: Arbitration and Mediation in 19th-Century England

We have word of a book launch for Arbitration and Mediation in Nineteenth-Century England by Francis Calvert Boorman and Rhiannon Markless:

Arbitration and Mediation In Nineteenth-Century England rounds off Derek Roebuck’s series on the history of English arbitration, and is written by his collaborators on the previous volume, English Arbitration and Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century, Francis Calvert Boorman and Rhiannon Markless. Arbitration remained a vital institution in nineteenth-century England and we investigate how the settlement of disputes changed from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the Arbitration Act 1889. This was a period of upheaval in the demographics, society and economy of England. The booming population, coupled with urbanisation and the spread of factory production, created newly enriched industrialists, a burgeoning working class and squalid urban conditions. The spread of new technologies such as the railways increased mobility and brought new business organisations and opportunities. England’s production and international trade flourished, along with its imperial ambitions. All of these changes led to new forms of dispute to go with the age-old differences over land and debts, and within families. We explain how arbitration continued to be used and was adapted to suit novel and diverse challenges, including an overloaded legal system, the rise of anonymous credit transactions and an increasingly organised labour movement. We chart the relationship of arbitration to the legal profession and the commercial community, with their differing visions of how arbitration should be structured and regulated. We also describe the expanding use of arbitration as a tool of governance, increasingly included in statutes with both a local and national focus. Finally, we take an international perspective, considering how arbitration was touted as a method to bring peace between nations, but was also deployed in various aspects of the slave trade. Most importantly, we seek to elucidate the varied experiences of both parties, from aristocratic mine-owners to widowed businesswomen, and arbitrators. We show how these arbitrations differed by region and were affected by the gender and class of participants.

The book launch will take place at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London at Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5DR, on Thursday, 9 May 2024, from 6pm.  The authors will introduce and discuss the book in a session chaired by Karyl Nairn KC and including time for questions from the audience.  “A drinks reception will follow.”  Direct questions to development@london.ac.uk.  Reserve your place here.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• A symposium on Natasha Wheatley’s The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty has been published in the journal History of European Ideas. 
  

• 
  On May 1, at the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court Historical Society and  George Washington’s Mount Vernon will sponsor a lecture by Gerard Magliocca on his book, Washington's Heir: The Life of Bushrod Washington.  (The second lecture in this series will occur on October 8 in Mount Vernon when Lindsay M. Chervinsky speaks on her book Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged a Republic.  Register here.
  

• The latest episode of the American Law Institute’s podcast is Exploring ALI's History and Influence.  Andrew Gold, an editor of the recently published centennial history of the ALI, joins Deborah A. DeMott (Reporter for Restatement of the Law Third, Agency), John C.P. Goldberg (Associate Reporter for Restatement the Law Fourth, Property), and Erin E. Murphy (Associate Reporter for Model Penal Code: Sexual Assault and Related Offenses).

• From the New York Times: Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) appeared on the Ezra Klein Show.
  

• Partisan Legal Traditions in the Age of Camden and Mansfield, by T. T. Arvind, York Law School, and Christian R. Burset, Notre Dame Law School, which we noted earlier when it went up on SSRN, has now been published open-access in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. 
  

• Miami Law notes Kunal Parker’s appearance on a panel at on the Civil War and Immigration at HistoryMiami Museum and in a seminar of “Deported Americans” at the Massachusetts Historical Society.  
  

• From In Custodia Legis: Federal Holidays and Observances, Part I and Part II.  

• ICYMI: New York courts have a long progressive history, says Bruce W. Dearstyne (Times Union). Sumita Mukherje on Race, Empire and Women’s Suffrage (History Today).
  

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

Boyer and Nicholls's "Rise and Fall of Treason in English History"

Allen Boyer, formerly senior appellate counsel at the New York Stock Exchange Enforcement Division and the author of Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age (Stanford University Press) and Mark Nicholls, a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, have published The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History (Routledge):

This book explores the development and application of the law of treason in England across more than a thousand years, placing this legal history within a broader historical context.

Describing many high-profile prosecutions and trials, the book focuses on the statutes, ordinances and customs that have at various times governed, limited and shaped this worst of crimes. It explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book. This book also considers why treason as both a word and a concept remains so potent in wider modern culture, investigating prevalent current misconceptions about what is and what is not treason. It concludes by suggesting that the abolition or 'death' of treason in the near future, while a logical next step, is by no means a foregone conclusion.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History is a thorough academic introduction for scholars and history students, as well as general readers with an interest in British political and legal history.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Now on YouTube: the National Constitution Center’s panel on “the history of the African American fight for freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods”  Edda Fields-Black and James Oakes were panelists.  Thomas Donnelly of the NCC moderated.
  

• The Union County Board of County Commissioners is hosting Gibbons v. Ogden: Its Continuing Importance 200 Years Later with Edward Hartnett, Seaton Hall, on Tuesday, March 4th from 12:30 p.m. until 1:30 p.m. "at the Courtroom of Honorable Lisa Miralles Walsh (A.J.S.C.) on the 1st Floor Tower of the Union County Courthouse, located at 2 Broad Street, Elizabeth." 
  

• Last semester, in the  course titled “Research Methods in Judicial History,” Yale students "had the opportunity to delve into the working papers of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ’37 LAW ’41 (Yale Daily News).

• Jake Kobrick, Associate Historian at the Federal Judicial Center, has a nice post on Eighth Amendment Prison Litigation on the FJC website. 
  

• A symposium on Robert Post's Holmes Devise history of the Taft Court is at Balkinization.  We've spotted contributions by Laura Kalman, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Brad Snyder.
  

• A note in the Harvard Law Review: Compulsory Voting’s American History. 
  

• From In Custodia Legis: The History of the U.S. Bar Exam, Part I and Part II. Also: "Philadelphia’s Gilded Age Medievalist: Henry Charles Lea."

• This season in the Institute for Justice's podcast series Bound by Justice is devoted to property cases, including "a tour of the house at issue in Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon" and three pods on the history of zoning."

• Over at JOTWELL, Richard Murphy has posted an admiring review of Andrea Scoseria Katz and Noah A. Rosenblum's, Becoming the Administrator-in-Chief: Myers and the Progressive Presidency, 123 Colum. L. Rev. 2135 (2023).

• ICYMI: "Of Course Presidents Are Officers of the United States," says Mark Graber (The Atlantic).  Mug commemorating real-life crime 1823 style flies to 10 times estimate (Antiques Trades Gazette).  John Q. Barrett on Cardozo's quip (SSRN). How a 1924 Immigration Act Laid the Groundwork for Japanese American Incarceration: An Interview with Mae Ngai (Smithsonian).

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

Literary–Legal Imagining: An Early Modern Workshop

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Literary–Legal Imagining: An Early Modern Workshop. 11 March 2024. 10.30am – 6.00pm.  New College, Oxford & St John’s College, Oxford.

Literary-Legal Imagining is a one–day workshop, hosted by New College and St John’s College, and supported by [the Centre for Early Modern Studies] and the English Faculty. This workshop will explore the kinds of research questions that arise from the pervasive overlapping of the legal and the literary in early modern life and texts.

Current doctoral students and recently doctored ECRs will present examples from their work-in-progress, stimulating discussion of how early modernists might approach the legal–literary interface. It will showcase the vibrancy of current work in the law and literature movement and highlight new directions for research in the interstices between these two disciplines.

Speakers: Alex Laar (Oxford); Jonathan Powell (Leiden); Dan Haywood (Oxford); Herin Han (Oxford); and Jake Wiseman (UCL). A keynote will be given by Lotte Fikkers (Leiden), with Lorna Hutson (Oxford) acting as a respondent.

The workshop will be in two parts. In the morning session, Alex Laar will give a paper on ‘Sir Thomas Smith’s Legal Annotations’ at New College Library. At this session, there will be an opportunity to examine annotations made in sixteenth–century lawbooks in New College’s Special Collections.

After lunch at St John’s, there will be two panels and a keynote, with breaks between and time for Q & A at each. The first panel, on ‘Gender, Scripture and Legal Imagining’ will feature papers by Jake Wiseman and Herin Han. The second, on ‘Common Law and Literary Genre’ will feature papers by Dan Haywood and Jonathan Powell. Finally, Lotte Fikkers will give a keynote paper on early modern women’s life-writing in law and literature, with a response from Lorna Hutson and a round-up discussion.

The workshop will conclude with a drinks reception at St John’s.

Registration is free but essential for catering purposes. If you would like to attend, please contact daniel.haywood@sjc.ox.ac.uk to register by 28 February 2024.

Timetable and key information [after the jump]: