Weekend Roundup

• In the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) on "what Ruth Bader Ginsburg got wrong about pre-Roe abortion fights"; Ray Brescia (Albany Law School) argues that "cases this term will shape the Supreme Court far more than Biden’s commission."

• Historians of regulation and administration take note: the Bremer-Kovacs Collection: Historic Documents Related to the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 is now live at HeinOnline. Thanks to Emily Bremer (Notre Dame Law School) and Kathryn Kovacs (Rutgers Law School) for sharing their research!
  

• In the op-ed pages of the New York Times: Mary Ziegler (Florida State University College of Law) predicts that "The End of Roe Is Coming, and It Is Coming Soon
  

• Jessica A. Shoemaker, University of Nebraska College of Law, reviews Gregory Ablavsky’s Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford University Press, 2021), in the Michigan Law Review (and SSRN).
  

• A law student Bingo card, prepared for Matthew Steilen's seminar on Magna Carta at Buffalo Law.  C'mon folks, don't make Steve do all the work!
  

• Congratulations to Blake Emerson (UCLA Law), whose article "The Departmental Structure of Executive Power: Subordinate Checks from Madison to Mueller" was named co-winner of the AALS Administrative Law Section Emerging Scholar Award. The article appears in Volume 38 of the Yale Journal on Regulation. (h/t: Kathryn Kovacs)
  

• In the New York Review of Books: Sarah Seo (Columbia Law School) on "Reimagining the Public Defender," reviewing books by Jonathan Rapping (Gideon's Promise), Sara Mayeux (Free Justice), and Matthew Clair (Privilege and Punishment). (The article is free to read, but you have to register.)
  

• New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: The Portable Coup: The Jurisprudence of "Revolution" in Uganda and Nigeria, by Samuel Fury Childs Daly, and Religious Liberty Sacralized: The Persistence of Christian Dissenting Tradition and the Cincinnati Bible War, by Linda Przybyszewski .
  

• New online form the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Journals: Legal Ridicule in the Age of Advertisement: Puffery, Quackery, and the Mass Market, by Anat Rosenberg. 
  

• The New Jersey Council for the Humanities announces the launch of its Stanley N. Katz Prize for Excellence in Public Humanities a January 2022 kickoff event featuring a conversation with former ASLH president Stan Katz.
  

• The Heyburn Initiative strengthens the University of Kentucky Libraries’ mission to archive and digitize “collections from federal judges, justices, and other leaders related to the judiciary with connections to Kentucky" (UKnow).
  

• ICYMI:  Mark Tushnet's pet peeves about legal scholarship include originalism. (Balkinization).  A. Douglas Melamed interviews Herbert Hovenkamp, mostly about antitrust, but also about his historical training (SSRN) . George Boyer Vashon: New York’s First African American Attorney (Historical Society of the New York Courts). The Supreme Court of Georgia is set to kick off 175th anniversary celebration (Johnson City Press).
  

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

Weekend Roundup

•  Over at Jotwell, Deborah Dinner has a notice of Nate Holdren's  forthcoming Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press).

• “Katrina Jagodinsky will use a three-year, $460,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore how habeas corpus was used in the American West by various marginalized groups to claim freedom and establish their rights between 1812 and 1924.”  More.

• Now available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: “The Work of Some Irresponsible Women”: Jurors, Ghosts, and Embracery in the Irish Free State," by Mark Coen.  “This article examines a campaign of jury intimidation conducted by female Republicans in the Irish Free State from 1926 to 1934.”

• Ronald K.L. Collins has posted Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Fight for the Free Press: When Benjamin Franklin’s Grandson was Jailed for Critiquing His President (Part I), over at First Amendment Watch.

• Over at the blog of the Historical Society of the New York State Courts is a post summarizing John Oller’s article, forthcoming in Judicial Notice, entitled “George Wickersham: ‘The Scourge of Wall Street.’”  The video of the Society’s webinar, "Lessons Learned from the 1918 Flu Pandemic," is here; its video, "The Evolution of Slavery, Abolition in NY, and the NY Courts: The Lemmon Slave Case," is here.

• ICYMI: Lizabeth Cohen on The Lessons of the Great Depression (The Atlantic)  David Bernstein on administrative constitutionalism (Volokh Conspiracy).  Transcribing manuscripts as a productive escape from pandemic blues (WaPo).

• Sadly but not surprisingly, the Law Books course at Rare Books School, taught by Mike Widener (assisted by Ryan Greenwood) has been cancelled for summer 2020. 

• If you're not already zoomed out: Fridays at 6pm Eastern Time is Drinking with Historians, hosted by Matt Gabriele (Virginia Tech) and Varsha Venkatsubramanian (UC-Berkeley) and with a different guest each week. Registration is here.

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

Weekend Roundup

• Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University, will lecture at the U.S. Supreme Court on the history of women and the vote on December 3, 2020, under the auspices of the Supreme Court Historical Society and the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.  Details to follow.

John Jay (NYPL)

• A podcast posted over at the Historical Society of the New York Courts takes up “John Jay’s early years, and how they influenced his role as a Justice and statesman.”

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Marie-Amélie George (Wake Forest University School of Law) on how "the fight against AIDS has shaped how potential covid-19 drugs will reach patients"; Richard R. John (Columbia University) on the Founders' intentions for the U.S. Postal Service (they didn't include having it "be managed like a business"); and more.

• Earlier this year, Touro Law Center hosted an event commemorating the life and work of Charles Reich. Presenters included legal historians Sarah Seo (Iowa Law) and Karen Tani (Berkeley Law). Video recordings of the presentations are now available online. 

• The Federal Judicial Center is "live-tweeting" Luther v. Borden (1849). 

• Have you visited the new website of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit?

• Howard Lesnick, a leader in clinical education and public interest lawyering, has died.

• Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Bradley Hansen have won the week one Stanton Foundation's coronavirus op-ed contest for their Made by History piece in the Washington Post: Making it easier to declare bankruptcy could avert economic catastrophe. Lots of legal history here.

• Apologies for omitting a legal historian from last week's list of inductees into the American Academy of Arts and Science: Tomiko Brown-Nagin. (Harvard Law Today).  

• Newly elected members of the Society of American Historians include Lewis Bateman (a great editor of legal history monographs), Ariela Gross, and Mae Ngai.

• Renisa Mawani has won the Association for Asian American Studies' Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History for her book Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press). You can listen to the author's comments here.

• So who else is scheming to get their books on the shelves of celebrities or politicians likely to do televised Zoom interviews?  That second copy of Master of the Senate is taking up valuable real estate.

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

Weekend Roundup

• Advance alerts from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Originalism and the Academy in Exile, by Paul Baumgardner, and Trial without Jury in Guam, USA, by Katherine Unterman.

• New in the Juridical Review: Andrew Simpson, Men of Law in the Aberdeen Council Register? A Preliminary Study, Circa 1450-1460.

• Ellen M. Gilmer, E&E News, reports on that historical reargument of Chevron, sponsored by the the Historical Society of the DC Circuit.

• OUP and CUP would like to know what scholarly monographs mean to academic researchers, readers and authors.

• The Department of American Indian Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota invites applications for a full-time faculty position (open rank, tenured or tenure-track) beginning fall semester 2020.  The announcement is here.

• “Luisa M. Kaye, daughter of Judith S. Kaye, former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, discusses the autobiography she co-edited about her mother's life and career and reveals the personal moments that shaped her judicial philosophy.”  NYSBA.

• New From Edward Elgar: Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Comparative Analysis and Critique, ed. Helena Alviar García, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia, and Günter Frankenberg, Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.  “The contributions to this book analyse and submit to critique authoritarian constitutionalism as an important phenomenon in its own right, not merely as a deviant of liberal constitutionalism.”

• ICYMI: Princeton announces that Dirk Hartog has gone emeritus; HLS announces that Laura Weinrib is joining its faculty.   Four women, four lawyers: How a Fond du Lac family made law history before they could vote (Fond du Lac Reporter). More on legal historians as First Gentlemen (or whatever), here and here.

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

Happy Lochner Day!

Politico observes the 114th anniversary of Lochner v. New York.

Donald J. Trump, Harry S. Truman and the Dismissal of Cabinet Officers

John Q. Barrett tells the story of the dismissal of Attorney General Francis Biddle, over at the Jackson List.

Crowdsourcing an Early Mass Jurist

We do our part.  From a WBUR report, incorporated into a post on NPR:

Among what it calls its "extensive collection of historic paintings and photographs," the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has an oil painting of a justice who has remained unidentified, and it's launched a public campaign in the hopes that someone knows who he is.

In a statement, the court said the justice "may have sat on the bench between 1780 and 1820."

H/t: J. Grisinger.

Weekend Roundup

• Anne Fleming, Georgetown Law, published Federal regulation of payday loans is actually a win for states’ rights in the Washington Post’s “Made by History” series.  Her book City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance will be available soon from the Harvard University Press.

• Earlier this week, Susanna Blumenthal, Minnesota Law, presented the paper “Counterfeiting Confidence: The Problem of Trust in the Age of Contract” at Emory Law, and Rebecca Scott, University of Michigan, presented  “Luisa Coleta and the Capuchin Friar: Slavery, Salvation, and the Adjudication of Status (Havana, 1817)” to the American Studies Workshop at Princeton University.  H/t: Legal Scholarship Blog. 

• Congratulations to Michael Schoeppner, University of Maine, Farmington, for winning the 2017 Hines Prize awarded by the Carolina Lowlands and Atlantic World program of the College of Charleston for the best new scholarly publication by a first-time author relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World.  He received it for his manuscript “Regulating Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America."  H/t: UMF's press release.

• Simon Stern, Toronto Law, has posted Law and Narrative: A Bibliography of Recent Work, which “collects work focused specifically on law and narrative, published (approximately) over the last four years.”

• Legally Insane, a new podcast, apparently plays legal history for yuks. 

• The Commission on Legal Pluralism will hold its biennial conference in Ottawa, Aug.22-24, 2018, featuring the theme, "Citizenship, legal pluralism, and governance in the age of globalization." Beforehand (Aug.17-20), there will be a short course on legal pluralism. Details on how to apply are here (deadline: Nov.1, 2017).

• We hear from Ronald K. L. Collins that the court papers for Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten are now posted on the First Amendment Library. H/t: Concurring Opinions.

• Happy American Archives Month!  H/t: DCPL Special Collections.

• G. Edward White, Virginia Law, will deliver the 2017 William M. Acker Jr. Visiting Lecture at Birmingham-Southern College on Thursday, November 2, at 7 p.m.  His subject will be “The Marshall Court as a Premodern Institution.”  And on October 17, Hauke Brunkhorst, University of Feinsburg, will lecture on the Evolutionary Sociology of Constitutionalism at Boston College of Law in the Clough Distinguished Lectures in Jurisprudence series.

• ICYMI: Manohla Dargis’s review of “Marshall” in the New York Times.

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

Weekend Roundup

• It's more than a year away, but you should still put this down in the calendar: "Legal History and Empires, Perspectives from the colonized" will be hosted by the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados on July 11-13, 2018. This conference follows on the "Legal Histories of the British Empire" conference in Singapore in 2012. In between, a 2015 conference was planned for Accra, Ghana. Unfortunately, "Traditions, Borrowings, Innovations & Impositions: Law in the Post-Colony and in Empire" was cancelled due to Ebola in other parts of west Africa. Watch for the Caribbean conference's Call for Papers, coming later this year. 

• A recording of Federal Government Historians, the recent AHA panel, is here, courtesy of C-SPAN.  “Historians who work within the federal government talked about how their institutions document and influence policy making, while striving to remain objective in a political environment.  They spoke about their research projects, preservation initiatives, and how they help other historians access classified documents.” 

• Also available online is Helen Z.M. Rodgers: First Woman Graduate of Buffalo Law School, a lecture by Bernadette Gargano, Lecturer in Law, Legal Analysis, Writing and Research, SUNY Buffalo Law School.

• The TOC for the Journal of Supreme Court History 41:1 (March 2017) is here. 

• Today, at Princeton University: Beyond Stonewall: New Histories of Religion and Sexuality in America.

• Christopher Beauchamp, Brooklyn Law School, performs a valuable service for anyone who has yet to say goodbye to law reviews.  In the Green Bag, of course.

• On Thursday, March 30 at 3:30 PM, at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, Joanne Freeman, Yale University, delivers the lecture “A Shilly-Shally Thing:” The Constitution, the Presidency, and Alexander Hamilton.

• ICYMI: Bob Darcy, emeritus from Oklahoma State University, on Why constitutional history doesn't end in 1791, in the Tulsa World.

• Updates: Looking to join a panel for this year's annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History?  Check out the recent posts to the H-Law listserv.  Also: “The Pope is not Lord of the World," a reading course on Francisco de Vitoria's Erste Relectio über die kirchliche Gewalt, at Max Planck this summer.
  
  Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

A Carnival of Animals at the YLS Rare Book Room

(We’re not sure you’re in the mood for whimsy right now, but here goes.)  From former LHB guest blogger Mark S. Weiner we learn of the opening today of an exhibit at the Rare Book Room of the Yale Law Library, “Woof, Moo, Grr: A Carnival of Animals in Law Books.”  From the exhibit:

In late 2016, a group of over twenty animals—speaking through their chosen representative, Judge Mouse Marshall—approached a frequent visitor to the Rare Book Room at the Yale Law Library to express a gnawing concern. Tapping the visitor politely on the shoulder, Judge Marshall explained that many animals had long ago taken up residence in the rare book “vault,” but that they sadly had few opportunities to meet people out in the library. “Students, professors, visitors,” said Marshall with a squeak, “they don’t seem to realize we’re here. By the way, I think I smell something in your backpack. Is that a cheese sandwich?”

This exhibit grew from that initial conversation. Over a series of meetings, it was decided that the mouse and his colleagues would tell their stories in their own words, for human animals of all ages. They also were asked to share their names, which until now have been largely unknown—except those of Abby Smith’s cows and Judge Wise the owl, which are matters of public record. Unfortunately, only brief excerpts from their remarks can be shared here.

You may be surprised that so many animals live in the Rare Book Room. But law books with illustrations are one of the specialties of this library, and many illustrated law books have provided animals with especially welcome habitats. What different roles do animals play in these books? This exhibit explores that question, in the process quietly meditating on the relationship not only between animals and the law, but also between law and the imagination. Come with us and explore. And stop by the Rare Book Room, where many more animals are sleeping on the shelves, waiting to say hello.

The Birth of the Blog

On November 27, 2006, at a kitchen table in Sharon, Massachusetts, the Legal History Blog was born. The first post was a simple hello, announcing the blog to come.

The next posts appeared with the sort of fare LHB readers have come to expect: posts about new SSRN papers, a call for papers, news about a new book and an honor bestowed on legal historian Morty Horwitz. The very first person to comment on the blog was legal historian Al Brophy, who is also a blogger. Readership began with a handful of visitors, and then built steadily as more of you came along.

In honor of LHB’s 10th anniversary, I thought I would tell you the story of LHB’s early days when I created the blog at my kitchen table. It is a story about how social media can enhance a field, and it is also a personal story about the way the blog mattered to my life as a scholar.

I began the Legal History Blog on my own after a couple of legal historians I’d asked to join me were too busy. Going it alone was a little terrifying, but had some advantages. I could give the blog the sort of tone and content that I thought it needed, and I hoped this would help LHB establish a readership. One important model for the blog was Lawrence Solum’s Legal Theory Blog devoted solely to posts about scholarship. Another model was History News Network and similar sites with news of the field and occasional opinion pieces. This sort of blogging was sustainable because it didn’t rely on a steady stream of original essays.

LHB was warmly welcomed into the law and history blogospheres. But sometimes fellow legal historians seemed surprised that I would devote time to blogging and wondered why on earth I did it. I started the blog because I felt that the field of legal history needed a more dynamic online presence. Scholars in other fields often had an outdated and narrow understanding of what legal historians did. I wanted to show that we weren’t antiquarians of formal law, and to illustrate the ways legal historians draw upon all the rich methodologies employed by others. Legal historians have long focused on social and intellectual history. I wanted to create a space that also emphasized transnational and comparative legal history and the sort of work that now falls within the field of the United States and the World. I hoped the blog would help scholars connect with each other and would bring new readers for the works posted about.

Although I created the blog because I thought legal history needed it, LHB also turned out to be very good for me. I was on leave in the fall of 2006 with a fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies to complete my book on Thurgood Marshall’s work in Africa. I found a creative way to “top off” that fellowship: my daughter and I moved in with my then-boyfriend (hence the blog’s Sharon, MA birthplace). We all long for those stretches of time for writing that come only with a leave, and the isolation of Sharon – way out in the Boston suburbs – helped me protect my writing time. But writing is not always exhilarating. Sometimes I would get to the end of the day with little more than a paragraph – and then I would delete it. On days when the writing made me feel worthless, the blog was something of a savior. There were visitors! People from around the country and the world were reading my posts. Social media can be a distraction, but especially in the blog’s first year, LHB was sustenance. It made me feel connected to a broader world of readers. That audience kept me going.

Continued below the fold.

Chicago Law and the "Tradition of Restraint"

Here’s a brief note, mostly for my fellow University of Chicago law alumni, that draws upon a few fugitive hours I spent recently in the Laird Bell papers. It is based on correspondence, as 1940 turned into 1941, between Laird Bell, a masterful lawyer and graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, and its then-dean Wilbur Katz  “I was admitted with some other lawyers into the presence of the Assistant Attorney General [Thurman] Arnold the other day in Washington,” Bell reported to Katz, “in a room suggestive of Mussolini’s famous office.  Arnold led off by saying that we had a great law school, that the boys were much more alert in their questioning than the students at Yale or Harvard, and that he was delighted with the atmosphere of the institution.”  In acknowledging Bell’s note, Katz asked whether Arnold had also said, as he had on other occasions, that the Chicago boys were “not as personable” as Yale or Harvard graduates.  “Less polished,” Bell replied.  Arnold “apparently felt that there was a tradition of restraint in the eastern institutions not so prevalent on the Midway.”

Weekend Roundup

• John Q. Barrett on the Jackson List on New Month, Quiet; Full Court, Ready (August 1941): (the USSC seventy-five years ago this month). 

• Via H-Law, we learn that the second installment of H-Law Podcasts, conducted by Siobhan Barco, is with former LHB Guest Blogger Samantha Barbas, SUNY Buffalo Law School, on her book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America.

•  The Peter A. Allard School of Law of the University of British Columbia has posted a notice of W. Wesley Pue’s Lawyers’ Empire: Legal Professions and Cultural Authority (2016).

• The National Constitution Center has posted a three-part podcast with Sidney Blumenthal, William Forbath, and Sean Wilentz on political parties and the Constitution: an introduction plus constitutional histories of the Republican and Democratic Parties.

• Yesterday, Dylan Penningroth and associates and fellows of the American Bar Foundation presented Civil Rights Advocacy: Past, Present and Future as one of several ABF events during the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

• The Call for Panels is now out for the Commission on Legal Pluralism's conference, "Citizenship, Legal Pluralism and Governance in the Age of Globalization" in a year's time (Aug.9-11, 2017) in Syracuse, NY. The deadline is Sept. 30, 2016. 

• Proclaiming Emancipation, an exhibit drawn from the William L. Clements Library, “with select items from collaborating institutions,” is now open at the University of Michigan’s Detroit Center.

• The 8th Conference of the European network on Gender Differences in the History of European Legal Cultures will meet at the University of Rouen Normandie, Nov.17-18, 2016. Submit your abstract for "North vs. South? Gender, law and economy in Early Modern and Modern Europe (15th -19th centuries)" in English or French (max. 3000 characters) by Sept.1, 2016 to anna.bellavitis@univ-rouen.fr and beatrice.zucca@gmail.com

• Via Environment, Law, and History: word that the Land Use Prof Blog is running a multi-part series on the history of zoning, to commemorate the practice's 100th anniversary.

•  ICYMI: Sarah Vowell shows yet again why she is the favorite of connoisseurs of deadpan humor everywhere.  Also, James E. Goodman, author of Stories of Scottsboro, Blackout, and But Where Is the Lamb? on sacrifices biblical and political.

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

Weekend Roundup

• Two posts of interest from Notches: (1) "History from the Witness Stand": Rachel Hope Cleves (University of Victoria) interviews George Chauncey (Yale University). (2) "More Than Loving": blogger Jennifer Dominique Jones (University of Alabama) writes about "Race, Sexuality and Public Memory in the Movement for Marriage Equality."

• From Environment, Law, and History: word that the Environmental Law Institute "recently uploaded interviews with 24 people involved in creating the legal framework for modern environmental law in the US."

• DailyHistory.org brings us its American Legal History Top Ten Booklist. The list deliberately omits titles by Lawrence Friedman and Morton Horwitz, who already dominate most lists of classics.

• Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard Law School, will deliver the keynote address at the ninth annual S-USIH Conference, to be held in Dallas October 26-29, 2017.  The conference’s theme is “Histories of Memory, Memories of History.”  H/t: L. D. Burnett

• Tracey Meares, Yale Law School, will will deliver the Chautauqua Institution’s twelth annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States, on Monday, July 11, 2016, at 4:00 p.m. in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy.

• Via Balkinization: "Linguists at Brigham Young University are launching a 100 million word corpus of general Founding-era English." Lawrence Solan (Brooklyn Law School) offers some thoughts on the project. 

• An interview with Harvard’s Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of A Midwife's Tale.

• Itching to do some research in the archives of a Dutch castle? Look no further than Otto Vervaart's tour of manors, towers, and castles on Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog (scroll down to "A note on Dutch archival collections").

•  “On Thursday, June 30, 2016 ...  the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and AT&T will formally announce [the digital transferal of] ten of FDR’s most important speeches from the original film stock to new state-of-the-art HD and 4K Ultra HD video. “ More.

• ICYMI: the Live Law New Orleans podcast is now up on Life of the Law.  And, over at H-Law, Nurfadzilah Yahaya posted on A Sixteenth-Century Fatwa Collection: Islamic Law in “Periphery."

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

Life of the Law

The Law and Society Association meeting this past weekend in New Orleans had a richer legal history crop than ever, thanks in part to the Law & History CRN and its 15 sponsored panels. Something else made this conference especially good: the Life of the Law. I haven't seen anything like it at any other conference. The Life of the Law is a podcast run by a group of NPR-trained investigative journalists, editors, and producers. Their work is characterized by the intellectual curiosity and thoughtfulness that is the hallmark of all your favorite NPR radio shows.  It is about the lived experience of law, and its makers look to us--scholars!--for their stories. The LSA is a sponsor. The thing to realize is that Life of the Law offers unusual opportunities for law-and-society scholars, but also for legal historians who may not regularly attend the LSA. I went to a couple of the group's events at the LSA. Here are the highlights (after the jump):

Weekend Roundup

Victoria Saker Woeste(ABF)

• Congratulations to the legal historian (and LHB Guest Blogger)  Victoria Saker Woeste (right) for winning the Democratic nomination for Indiana House District 26 Tuesday night, with 58 percent of the vote.  Although this story takes a while to get around to acknowledging that Democrats had a primary too, both victors appear in the embedded video.

• Advice and Dissent: Why Can't the Senate Confirm Judges and Justices Anymore?  A brown bag talk by Sarah Binder, Professor of Political Science, George Washington University, and Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution, Tuesday, May 10, 2016, 12:00-1:00 p.m, American Political Science Association, 1527 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036

•  The National History Center of the American Historical Association holds “a Congressional briefing on American drug policy and drug addiction epidemics in historical perspective” on Monday, May 9, 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, Cannon House Office Building, Room 121, Washington, DC.  The presenters are David Courtwright, University of North Florida, and Keith Wailoo, Princeton University. Alan Kraut, American University, moderates. 

• The SS Daisy Legal History Committee of the Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador will be hosting an official book launch at Masonic Temple on 24 May 2016 at 5:00 pm for its new edition of D. W. Prowse’s Manual of Magistrates in Newfoundland (1877), ed. Christopher Curran and Melvin Baker.  The publication “makes available to the Bar and to the public one of the ‘classics’ of Newfoundland’s 19th century legal literature,” which only had a print run of 100 and is now quite rare.  The editors provide an introductory essay and many illustrations.

• Another reason why I love New Zealand.  DRE

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

Ms. Peppercorn and Prof. Peregrina Present a Puzzle for Legal Historians to Ponder: Moving On from First Loves (aka the Curse of the Second Book Project)

Alas! The holiday weekend has come to an end; the fall semester is upon us. But cheer up! We aim to lift your spirits and facilitate your continued productivity with a new installment of our occasional advice column, "Ms. Peppercorn Considers."* Enjoy!

This post began with a prompt from an author who has just finished a (superb) book manuscript (now out for review at an eminent press). It occurred to Ms. Peppercorn that legal historians, like other mortals, may find themselves wrestling with basic questions about the meaning of life, such as “how the hell will I ever come up with a second book project?” Such nagging questions try our souls. There are so many excuses NOT to do a second book, and so much other work that lands on the shoulders of the newly published.

Nonetheless, we persevere. And some people out there recognize how hard it is to overcome commitment anxiety, fear of a whole new subject (or of just duplicating the first book), or even the notion that one should quit while ahead. For example, the William and Mary Quarterly and the Early Modern Studies Institute together sponsor an annual workshop geared toward mid-career scholars who work in early modern history. Last year’s conference, on legal history, saw fine work from a variety of perspectives (although it was notable that none of the papers was written by a scholar based in a law school).

And yet one hopes there’s more to be said than “Put your nose to the grindstone” and “grab lifelines where you find them.” To generate other ideas, we turned the tables on the author whose predicament prompted these musings and asked, ‘How does it feel to be without the ball and chain that filled your time for the past several years? And how are you thinking about whether and when to put on the yoke again?’ Read on for our conversation with the (pseudonymous) Professor Peregrina.

Weekend Roundup

• Of course, legal historians know all about Law for the Elephant--but an elephant for the law? 

• The schedule for Fall 2015 for the Washington History seminar is out.  Sessions include Adam Rothman on Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery and Philippa Strum on Speaking Freely: Whitney v. California and American Speech Law.

• A report on that recent congressional briefing on tax history and policy appears on the AHA's blog.

• From Balkinization: Jack Balkin talks with David Sehat (Georgia State) about his new book, The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (Simon & Schuster, 2015). 

•  The National History Center's updated guide to researching in the National Archives is here.

• Over at New Books in History, it's Princeton week: Julian E. Zelizer on The Fierce Urgency of Now and Kevin M. Kruse, on One Nation Under God.

• The US Senate on its retiring historian, Donald Ritchie on HNN.

• Over at the Faculty Lounge: The Making of a Lawyer, 1878 Version.

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

Weekend Roundup

• This is apropos of nothing, but I ran across it while noodling over a student's paper on Paul Porter's tenure as chairman of the FCC, and it's too strange and wonderful not to note here. TV is the Thing This Year!

• Michelle A. McKinley, University of Oregon Law School, and one of this year’s LAPA Fellows at Princeton, will present  To Have and to Hold Onto: Domestic Slaveholding, Race, and Intimacy in Colonial Lima to the LAPA Seminar on April 13, 2015.  

• Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation, on Huffington Post on the legal expertise Indiana’s Republicans relied upon when passing the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Credit: Law Times

• From the Law Times: "For decades, a massive portrait of Sir James Gowan [right] hung in relative obscurity glancing a wary eye over what local lawyers affectionately call “settlement corner” at the Barrie [Ontario] courthouse.  Now, after a concerted effort by the community to restore the painting, the 147-year-old portrait of Simcoe County’s first judge will gain more prominence at the local courthouse.”  More.

• Words-to Live-By Department. John Hope Franklin to Mary Frances Berry: “He said, 'you already know more about this than anybody, why don’t you just write it?'"

• For many years when someone--say, trade unionists--wanted to characterize some measure--say, the labor provision of the Clayton Act--as a fundamental check on power, the metaphor they used was "Magna Carta."  Since the early years of Rights Revolution, however, the first choice has usually been "Bill of Rights."  Is Magna Carta making a comeback, thanks to all the recent anniversary hoopla?  A Digital Magna Carta: Internet Governance and a New Social Contract.

• There's no fighting 3560 SSRN downloads (and counting), so I give up: Orin S. Kerr, George Washington University Law School, The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria.  And I'm told we should all go see The Originalist at Washington, DC's Arena Stage theater for fictional representations not only of Justice Scalia but of my beloved law school classmates at the University of Chicago in the 1980s.

• From the Norwich [Connecticut] Bulletin: "Central Connecticut State University history professor Matthew Warshauer and student Kristin Steeves will lead a discussion on the life and politics of Lafayette Foster, who as president of the U.S Senate served as the second-highest ranking official in the nation under President Andrew Johnson from April 15, 1865 through March 2, 1867.  'Lafayette Foster: A Principled Stand Against the Slave Power' takes place at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Slater Auditorium on the campus of Norwich Free Academy."

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

Barbarous Terms, Ill Explained

Edmund Burke (credit)

From Edmund Burke, who entered Middle Temple in 1749, via David Bromwich, Alan Ryan and the New York Review of Books, here is a challenge to all would-be authors of legal treatises:

The study of our jurisprudence presented to the liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best Authors, hardly any thing but barbarous terms ill explained. . . .  Young men were sent away with an incurable, and if we regard the manner of handling rather than the substance, a very well-founded disgust.