CFP: A Research Handbook on Gender, History, and Law

[We have the folllowing CFP.  DRE]

Call for Contributions for Research Handbook on Gender, History, and Law (Edward Elgar)

As part of Edward Elgar's Research Handbooks in Gender and Law Series edited by Robin West and Alexander Maine, this volume on Gender, History, and Law aims to bring together critical and thought-provoking contributions on the most pressing topics, issues and approaches within legal and gender history. The collection aims to set the agenda in the field and serve as the most important and up-to-date point of reference for researchers as well as students, policy-makers, and lawmakers. 

We are aiming for about 30 essays of 8,000-10,000 words by scholars of legal and gender history on any topic that fits within the book's broad themes, including but not limited to gendered history within legal categories such as family, criminal law and international law, on particular historical periods, on specialist topics such as capitalism and labor, sexuality, race, identity, citizenship, the legal profession and courts, and on sources and methodology. 

The Research Handbook will be published in English, but we seek to provide a broad global perspective. To fulfill its aim of providing cross-cutting scholarship in law and history, each contribution should explore perspectives on what it means to do legal history in the chosen area in the context of the author's own approach.

Manuscripts must be original and not published elsewhere, and are due to the editors by July 1, 2025. Publication is anticipated to be in the summer of 2026.

Please submit abstracts by September 30, 2024. For questions and to submit abstracts, please feel free to reach out to any of us.

Rosemary Auchmuty (r.auchmuty@reading.ac.uk)

Caroline Derry (caroline.derry@open.ac.uk)

Danaya Wright (wrightdc@law.ufl.edu)

The History Behind Rahimi

[We have the following announcement from the National Association of Women Lawyers of the first of a two-part series of podcasts, The History Behind U.S. v. Rahimi.  DRE.]

Join NAWL Advocacy Committee Members, Siobhan Barco, Princeton PhD Candidate, and Nicolette Sullivan, Milbank LLP Associate, as they interview a distinguished panel of historians and advocates for freedom from gender-based violence, including, Laura Edwards, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty in the History Department at Princeton University, Sara Mayeux, Associate Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, and Margaret Drew, Associate Professor at UMass Law School. This episode kicks off a compelling two-part series exploring the historical context surrounding the Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Rahimi.

Please note that this episode was recorded before the Supreme Court decision was issued in this case. NAWL strongly supports the Supreme Court's decision in U.S. v. Rahimi, upholding federal restrictions preventing those under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. This ruling reaffirms critical protections against gun violence, particularly for individuals at heightened risk in domestic abuse situations. NAWL remains committed to advocating for policies against gender-based violence recognizing that gender equality cannot be achieved without freedom from gender-based violence.

CFP: Law, colonialism and gender in the Muslim world

[Via H-Law, we have the following CFP.  DRE]

Law, colonialism and gender in the Muslim world

This conference aims to bring together scholars working on the legal history of the Muslim world who focus on the colonial period and are interested in ‘gender-coded law’ (i.e. all legal domains that automatically invoke connotations of gender).

Several scholars have implied that imperialism did not affect gender relations in the Muslim world, since family law remained relatively untouched by the colonial powers (Anderson, Buskens, Peters). There are, however, several examples in colonial legal history that point to the influence of imperial powers on gender relations through law. The interdiction of homosexuality in British India (Radics) and the ban on interreligious marriage in the Dutch East-Indies (De Hart) are only two examples of the imperial footprint on gender laws. Moreover, nineteenth-century Western imperialism affected the thinking about gender in the Muslim world (Massad, Cuno, Khouloussy, Surkis). This suggests that contemporary gender-coded laws in Muslim-majority countries cannot be understood without studying the legislation issued by the imperial powers.

Academics who work in the field of legal history, gender history and/or social history (or a combination of these) are invited to share their research on the laws that were introduced in the Muslim territories during French, Dutch, British, Russian, or other colonial rule that touch upon gender. Proposals may concern various periods and topics, ranging from property law and land tenure to criminal law and family law.

The conference will be held at the University of Amsterdam on December 19 and 20, 2024. It will be a small (max. 15 participants) research seminar/workshop. Applications for participation, including 250-word abstracts and a 100-word brief biography should be sent to m.voorhoeve@uva.nl by July 1, 2024. If selected, the conference organization provides for travel and accommodation. The conference will be held at the historical building of the Allard Pierson Museum in the city centre of Amsterdam, which is close to Central Station.

Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• The participation of colonial bureaucrats and local (religious) elites to the formation of colonial gender-coded law
  

• Debates on gender-coded law in the press and other sources such as colonial law magazines
  

• The circulation of law between the ‘homeland’ and the colonies as between various colonies and empires
  

• Crosspollination and circulation of ideas about law and gender within the Muslim world during the Age of Empire/Nahda period

Contact Information: dr. Maaike Voorhoeve, Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Morgan on "Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History"

Mudlark press has published The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History, by Kate Morgan (2024). A description from the press:

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.'

So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?

In this vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.

We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’.

Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.

An interview with Morgan is available here, at New Books Network. 

-- Karen Tani

JAH 110:4

[Journal of American History 110:4 (March 2024) is of unusual interest for legal historians.  (I expect to assign the first article when I teach Johnson v. McIntosh in my first-year Property course next spring.)  Below I reproduce summaries of the principal articles from an email to subscribers from the JAH's publisher, the Organization of American Historians.  DRE.]

Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building

The 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh drew from a 1775 negotiation between land speculators and Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw people) to subjugate Indigenous sovereignty to the powers of Congress. This negotiation is usually framed as a “purchase,” but Joshua A. McGonagle Althoff makes clear that Peeyankihšia people intended to negotiate the right to live within, rather than own, their homelands. Moving away from the idea of a “purchase” reveals how Peeyankihšiaki were preparing for prosperity, not declension.

The “Profane Margins” of the State: Florida Sheriff Walter R. Clark and the Local History of Crime, Policing, and Incarceration

Sheriff Walter R. Clark of Broward County, Florida, used his office to enforce white supremacy, procure labor for local businesses, bolster the illegal gambling industry, and line his own pockets for nearly two decades in the twentieth century. Like other sheriffs, he was also central to the local workings of the state: policing the county, administering the courthouse, and more. Considering Clark in a long historical context from the Jacksonian Era to the present, Cindy Hahamovitch makes the case for the importance of sheriffs and local government in American life.

The Origins of the Student Loan Industry in the United States: Richard Cornuelle, United Student Aid Funds, and the Creation of the Guaranteed Student Loan Program

Britain Hopkins contributes to understandings of the origins of the student loan industry and student loan indebtedness in the United States. The article highlights how private organizations and actors worked with the Johnson and Nixon administrations to establish student loans as a primary means of funding higher education. These private-federal partnerships increasingly sought to commodify student loans on financial markets, thereby tethering access to higher education to previously excluded groups to market incorporation.

Exposing the Masculinist Narrative in Federal Antislavery Law: A History of U.S. v. Tony Booker (1980)

American antislavery law long denied the problem of sexual assault in slavery. Karin Zipf extends the historiography of American slavery in an analysis of late twentieth-century farm worker slavery cases. Zipf examines the testimonies of male and female farm workers to expose the masculinist narrative in federal antislavery law. Zipf demonstrates the law’s gendered limitations in its masculinist meanings of migrant slavery violence, insensitivity to women’s fieldwork experiences, and subliminal endorsement of racist stereotypes of Black women.

Weekend Roundup

• Kellen Funk, Columbia Law School, presents in the the Berkeley Legal History Workshop on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, from 3:35 pm - 5:25 pm, on "Bail at the Founding."  His abstract and a Zoom link for those wishing to attend virtually are here.
  

• In conversation with Martha Minow, Randall Kennedy recently discussed his book, Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, & Culture.  Among other things, the book provides “a fresh perspective on historical topics such as the Nat Turner slave rebellion and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1854" (Harvard Law Today).
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society is hosting two upcoming events.  The second, at Noon EST on April 4, is The Legal Career of Future Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the 1970s.  The participants are the plaintiff and her lawyer in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), as well as Philippa Strum, Amanda Tyler, and the plaintiff in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), who was represented by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  

• 
  The second, a virtual lecture and conversation with Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, draws upon her forthcoming book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms and will take place at Noon (EST) on May 29.

• Columbia University's "Incite" project reimagines oral hist with its Oral History of the Obama Presidency, undertaken in partnership with the Obama Foundation.  "The result of this collaboration is a comprehensive, enduring record of the decisions, actions and impacts of this historic presidency."
  

• Thank you, Kurt X. Metzmeier, University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, for making the "case for the historical importance of early state administrative codes and urg[ing] that law libraries preserve them for future researchers of state administrative law and policy." 
  

• Kevin Frazier, St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law, “Rediscovering and Realizing the Anti-Power-Concentrating Principle” (Notice & Comment).
  

• ICYMI: Justice Sotomayer is "annoyed" by the role of history in the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions (Law 360).  Simon Lazarus on liberal originalism (New Republic). The Endgame in the Battle Over Abortion by Mary Ziegler (Politico).

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

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.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Legal History Miscellany, Krista J. Kesselring, on Elizabethan England’s First Witches.

• The National Fellowship Program in US Politics at UVA’s Jefferson Scholars Foundation has extended its application deadline to February 1. More info here. 
  

• Mary Sarah Bilder, Founders Professor of Law at Boston College Law School,interviewed on her book Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (The Heights).
  

• A notice of "Miranda’s Victim," a film directed by Michelle Danner on Patricia Weir’s violent sexual assault by Ernesto Miranda in 1963 (Cineaholic).
  

• The Honorable Mark C. Dillon, New York Supreme Court, will deliver a virtual lecture,sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society, drawn from his book, The First Chief Justice: John Jay and the Making of a New Nation, at 12:00 PM (EST) on February 21, 2024, via Zoom.  Register here.
  

• "Unearthing Injustice: Carlisle Indian Industrial School and The Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska’s Fight for NAGPRA Repatriation," a blog post of the Native American Rights Fund.
  

• Hidetka Hirota on The true origins of American immigration policy from Afterthoughts, a spin-off of the Berkley Voices podcast.
  

• Ronald Collins will discuss his new book, Tragedy on Trial: The Story of the Infamous Emmett Till Murder Trial at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, on March 17.
  

• Lawbook Exchange's January 2024 catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History.
  

• ICYMI: A review of Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (Liveright, 2022) (New York Alamanck).  The National Law Journal explains How to Effectively Leverage Your Firm History in Your Law Firm Marketing Materials.
  

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

Legal History in the "The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States"

Oxford University Press has published The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States, edited by Deborah Brake (University of Pittsburgh School of Law), Martha Chamallas (Moritz College of Law - the Ohio State University), and Verna Williams (University of Cincinnati College of Law). A number of the chapters may interest readers of the blog. Here's an overview from the Press:

Combining analyses of feminist legal theory, legal doctrine, and feminist social movements, The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States offers a comprehensive overview of U.S. legal feminism. Contributions by leading feminist thinkers trace the impacts of legal feminism on legal claims and defenses and demonstrate how feminism has altered and transformed understandings of basic legal concepts, from sexual harassment and gender equity in sports to new conceptions of consent and motherhood. Its chapters connect legal feminism to adjacent intellectual discourses, such as masculinities theory and queer theory, and scrutinize criticisms and backlash to feminism from all sides of the political spectrum. Its examination of the prominent brands of feminist legal theory shows the links and divergences among feminist scholars, highlighting the continued relevance of established theories (liberal, dominance, and relational feminism) and the increased importance of new intersectional, sex-positive, and postmodern approaches. Unique in its triple focus on theory, doctrine, and social movements, the Handbook recounts the history of activist struggles to pass the Equal Right Amendment, the Anti-Rape and Battered Movements of the 1970s, the contemporary movements for reproductive justice and against campus sexual assault, as well as the #MeToo movement. The emphasis on theory and feminist practice animates discussions of feminist legal pedagogy and feminist influences on judges and judicial decision making. Chapters on emerging areas of law ripe for feminist analysis explore foundational subjects such as contracts, tax, and tort law, and imagine feminist and social justice approaches to digital privacy and intellectual property law, environmental law, and immigration law. The Handbook provides a broad picture of the intellectual landscape and allows both new and established scholars to gain an in-depth understanding of the full range of feminist influence on U.S. law.

A selection of chapters of possible interest:

Tracy A Thomas, "The Long History of Feminist Legal Theory"

Julie Suk, "The Equal Rights Amendment, Then and Now" 

Leigh Goodmark, "The Anti-Rape and Battered Women’s Movements of the 1970s and 1980s"

Mary Ziegler, "From Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice: Abortion in Constitutional Law and Politics" 

Deborah Widiss, "Pregnancy and Work: 50 Years of Legal Theory, Litigation, and Legislation"

Melissa Murray and Hilarie Meyers, "Constitutionalizing Reproductive Rights (and Justice)" 

h/t Legal Theory Blog

-- Karen Tani

Public Workers in Service of America

Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader, edited by Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin, has been published in The Working Class in American History series of the University of Illinois Press:

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and the early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself.

The contributors are Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni.

--Dan Ernst

Selden's Sister Celebrate Celebrating Women in Legal History

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Selden's Sister presents the symposium “Celebrating Women in Legal History: The Lives and Legacies of Early Women Legal Historians” at the School of Law and Social Justice Building, The University of Liverpool on September 1, 2023.  

Selden’s Sister are a collaborative body of legal historians across multiple UKHE institutions. We seek to champion the work of contemporary female legal historians, and highlight past contributions of women to legal history. This SLS-funded, one-day hybrid symposium aims to celebrate the contributions of women to early legal historical scholarship, to commemorate the achievements of under-appreciated figures in legal history, and to assess their contributions in light of present understandings of the discipline.

Programme:

11:00-11:15 Opening Remarks: Dr Lorren Eldridge

11:15-12:30 Panel One: Pathbreakers in Legal History

Dr Fleur Stolker (University of Oxford):  Dame CV Wedgwood and the trial of Charles I

Christine George (New York University Law Library): Missing Mildred Miles

Dr Anne Logan (University of Kent): Rights and Duties of Englishwomen: the life and work of Erna Reiss (1888-1974?)

Cheryl Warden (University of Stirling) and Anna Pavicic (University of Stirling)

Chair: Professor Gwen Seaborne

12:30-13:15 Lunch

13:15-14:30 Panel Two: Women Working Together

Dr Jennifer Aston (Northumbria University) and Prof. Olive Anderson (deceased, Westfield College):  For Wives Alone: Economic Divorce in mid-nineteenth century England and Wales

Dr Sharon Thompson (University of Cardiff):  Family Law Reformists as Feminist Legal Historians: The Married Women’s Association

Taylor Starr (Yorke University, Canada): Epistemological Acquiescence: Women and Feminist Legal Theory in Canadian Law Faculties, 1961-1994

Associate Professor Valentina Cvetkovic Ðordevic and Assistant Professor Nina Kršljanin (University of Belgrade): Women scholars in legal history at the university of Belgrade faculty of law

Chair: Rihannon Ogden Jones

14:30-14:45 Tea/ Coffee Break

14:45-16:00 Panel Three: Stair’s Sister: Celebrating Women in Law in Scotland

Professor Maria Fletcher (University of Glasgow):  The ‘Women in Law’ Project and Dialogues about the Past, Present and Future: Feminist Theory and Method in Practice.

Dr Charlie Peevers (University of Glasgow):  Alternative Visions of International Law, War and Peace: Women, Scotland and Global Order in the early 20th century

Dr Rebecca Mason (Scottish Parliament): Shadow economies of Scottish women’s legal work

Lisa Cowan (University of Edinburgh):  Aere perennius: The Life and Legacy of Professor Olivia Robinson

Chair: Dr Sarah White

16:00-16:15 Tea/ Coffee Break

16:15-17:30 Roundtable Discussion: Women in Legal History Now

Professor Chantal Stebbings (University of Exeter)

Professor Catherine Macmillan (King’s College London)

Professor Rebecca Probert (University of Exeter)

Chair: Dr Joanna McCunn

17:30-17:45 Closing Remarks: Dr Emily Ireland

17:45-18:45 Drinks Reception 

Siegel on How Dobbs Weaponized Brown

Reva Siegel, Yale Law School, has posted How Dobbs Weaponizes Brown: The Roots of Dobbs’s History-and-Tradition Method in the Defense of Segregation, which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal:

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Roberts Court claimed authority for its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by comparing itself to the Warren Court in Brown v. Board of Education overturning Plessy v. Ferguson. This Essay challenges the claim that Dobbs is like Brown by recovering history the Court omitted in Dobbs—omissions that enabled the Court to weaponize Brown as authority for overturning Roe.

Dobbs interpreted the Constitution’s liberty guarantee by counting state laws that banned abortion at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification. In doing so, Dobbs employed a method of interpreting the Amendment popularized by those who opposed Brown. They defended Plessy as properly interpreting the Constitution’s equality guarantee by counting states whose laws segregated education in 1868. Brown repudiated this tradition-entrenching method of interpreting the Amendment and called upon the nation to align its practices with its constitutional ideals.

Examining the history Dobbs omitted helps us think critically about the justifications Dobbs offered for its method of interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment. Dobbs argued that its use of state counting in 1868 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty guarantee provided an objective standard that prevented interpreters from reasoning from their values and so protected democracy in the states. The history this Essay examines refutes each of these claims. Counting states that segregated education (or banned abortion) in 1868 was not a neutral or objective measure of the Constitution’s meaning; it expressed the interpreters’ values by perpetuating exclusions of the past into the future. The democracy it supported was a thin majoritarianism, democracy without rights that would protect the participation of those historically excluded from the democratic process. Race and gender conflicts over the abortion bans Dobbs authorized in Mississippi show how the liberty and democracy Dobbs protects perpetuate and entrench inequalities of 1868.

By reconstructing the lineage of arguments that state laws in 1868 are proxies for the original understanding, we can see how early forms of originalism and Dobbs’s history-and-tradition method grew out of resistance to Brown and backlash to the Warren and Burger Courts. Debate over Brown posed core questions about fidelity to the Constitution. We renew and sustain that debate on Brown’s seventieth anniversary as we ask how claims on the constitutional memory of Brown relate to its constitutional history.

--Dan Ernst

Owens on "Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture"

Georgetown University Press has published "My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole": Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture (2022), by Robin L. Owens (Mount Saint Mary’s University). A description from the Press:

US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Richard Nixon’s 1974 impeachment hearings. However, before she developed faith in the Constitution, Jordan had faith in Christianity. In “My Faith in the Constitution is Whole”: Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture, Robin L. Owens shows how Jordan turned her religious faith and her faith in the Constitution into a powerful civil religious expression of her social activism.

Owens begins by examining the lives and work of the nineteenth-century Black female orator-activists Maria W. Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper. Stewart and Cooper fought for emancipation and women’s rights by “scripturalizing,” or using religious scriptures to engage in political debate. Owens then demonstrates how Jordan built upon this tradition by treating the Constitution as an American “scripture” to advocate for racial justice and gender equality. Case studies of key speeches throughout Jordan’s career show how she quoted the Constitution and other founding documents as sacred texts, used them as sociolinguistic resources, and employed a discursive rhetorical strategy of indirection known as “signifying on scriptures.”

Jordan’s particular use of the Constitution—deeply connected with her background and religious, racial, and gender identity—represents the agency and power reflected in her speeches. Jordan’s strategies also illustrate a broader phenomenon of scripturalization outside of institutional religion and its rhetorical and interpretive possibilities.

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

-- Karen Tani

Tilley on the 1st Amendment and the Women of the ACLU

Cristina Tilley, University of Iowa College of Law, has posted The First Amendment and the Second Sex, which is forthcoming in the Arizona Law Review:

Crystal Eastman (NYPL)

Modern American law describes speech in stereotypically masculine terms: it is a “marketplace” where participants “joust” for dominance. Predictably, today’s speech jurisprudence can be hostile to the female voice, implicitly condoning gendered death threats, rape threats, doxing, and trolling as the necessary price of a vibrant national discourse. Unpredictably, the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) and its leading women drafted the blueprint for this modern speech edifice. The First Amendment and the Second Sex traces the ACLU campaign to dismantle a nineteenth-century speech regime that silenced some men while protecting many women. And it suggests that ACLU feminists—intent on securing full legal and cultural equality with men—were complicit in this effort because they scoffed at the domesticated version of womanhood shielded by protective speech torts like slander.

This Article begins by surfacing the deep architecture of nineteenth-century life and law, with its bright boundaries between public and private. When speech regulation was commonplace and the First Amendment slept, public law was free to punish government criticism in the public sphere—a distinctly anti-democratic phenomenon. At the same time though, women in the private sphere targeted by domestic gossip had generous remedies in private law—a distinctly empowering phenomenon. It then shows how, throughout the twentieth century, the ACLU urged the Supreme Court to treat all law as public law and all life as public life. Across this new public terrain, the group argued, speech regulation should be replaced with self-help in the form of muscular counterspeech. ACLU luminaries on the distaff side joined this campaign, convinced that women were on the cusp of full public citizenship. Because this cultural turn would give women status to counterspeak, they were certain the protection of remedial speech torts would grow obsolete.

Today it appears that the women of the ACLU fatally miscalculated. American law has adopted the premise that all can navigate the deregulated marketplace of ideas by marshaling ideas and intellect. But American culture clings to the preference for private womanhood, producing gendered consequences for female speech. Modern women who bring their ideas into the public sphere are just as likely to be refuted with attacks on their domestic status or sexuality as they are with intellectual rejoinders. Stripped of the private law that used to repel such threats, these women are left either to counterspeak in ways that aggravate their personal peril or to withdraw from the speech arena altogether. The Article contends the time has come to acknowledge the tax that speech law extracts from women, and to ask whether today’s expressive marketplace is fair or foul.

--Dan Ernst

Derry on Woods and Pirie v Cumming Gordon in the Watson Seminar

Caroline Derry, a senior lecturer in law at the Open University, gives the Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History at the Edinburgh Law School on Monday, February 13, 2023, 17:00 - 19:00 (GMT).  Her topic: Networks of influence, gender, class and lesbianism in Woods and Pirie v Cumming Gordon (1810-12):

The Court of Session defamation case Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie v Dame Helen Cumming Gordon lasted several years and its records extend over many hundreds of pages. The alleged defamation was an allegation that the pursuers, two schoolmistresses, were in a sexual relationship. The main sources of the allegation were identified as a half-Scots, half-Indian teenage pupil and a ‘malign domestic’. It was through the pupil’s grandmother Dame Helen that the accusations spread among parents and guardians, resulting in the school’s closure within days. The court hearings were conducted behind closed doors, and its mainly female witnesses described aspects of their private worlds usually unspoken in public.

The case is therefore a rich source of for histories of law, gender, race, empire and class and has attracted scholarly attention particularly from historians of sexuality. This talk will focus upon a slightly different aspect: the networks which emerge through the evidence. They show much about women’s agency and the complex webs of influence in Edinburgh society based upon class, age and gender. After considering the social networks of higher-class women, servants and pupils revealed by the case, the talk will consider the ways in which lesbianism was understood by, and posed a threat to, those networks.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Talking Legal History has posted a new podcast: host Siobhan M. M. Barco talks with Felicity Turner, Georgia Southern University, about her book Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in the Nineteenth-Century United States (UNC Press, 2022).
  

• Felicia Kornbluh University of Vermont, in conversation with her sister, Ambassador Karen Kornbluh will discuss her book A Woman's Life Is a Human Life at Politics and Prose (and, virtually, here) on January 16 at 7:00 PM. 
  

• In the Journal of Christian Legal Thought, Craig A. Stern, Regent University School of Law, “describes, as remarkable works of Christian Imagination, Henry II’s assize of novel disseisin, Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis, and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.”
  

• New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963-86 by Kate Redburn.
  

• The ACLU senior staff attorney, Gillian Thomas, is in conversation with Dahlia Lithwick about the latter’s book, Lady Justice, in the ACLU’s podcast series, At Liberty.
  

• The latest issue of the Newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit notes the passing of Judge Laurence Silberman and U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert.  
  

• From the Washington Post's Made by History section: Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez on Title 42 and immigration policy since the Sixties. 
  

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

Hoeflich and Sheppard's "Lucy and the Judge"

M.H. Hoeflich and Stephen Sheppard have published Lucy and the Judge: Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (Talbot Publishing):

With this fun collection, Mike Hoeflich and Steve Sheppard invite readers to explore the story behind an iconic American contract law case, Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon. In addition to personal reflections from the authors on the case and its legacy, it includes a brief summary of existing scholarship about the case and the parties, a reprint of the contract and Judge Cardozo's opinion, and selections from Sears's catalogue featuring Lady Duff-Gordon's designs.

--Dan Ernst

Book Event: Strum's "On Account of Sex"

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Please join [the American Historical Association and Woodrow Wilson Center] for a Washington History Seminar Panel with Philippa Strum on On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law, Monday, November 21 at 4:00 pm ET.  Click here to register for the webinar, which will be recorded and the video will be posted on the Washington History Seminar YouTube Channel.  Commenting is Deborah Archer, the president of the ACLU, a tenured professor of clinical law and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, and co-faculty director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU Law.

Long before she was “Notorious,” RBG was an attorney arguing and winning gender equality cases before the Supreme Court. Dr. Strum contends that RBG’s greatest contribution came not as a jurist but in persuading the Justices of the 1970s, whom RBG described as needing a grade school-level education about sex discrimination, to rethink stereotypes about the proper roles for men and women and declare sex discrimination to be unconstitutional. Her pathbreaking approach to the law could not be more relevant today.

SCLH Grad Student Conference: Legal Histories of the Body and the State

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Stanford Center for Law and History will invite paper submissions from graduate students for its fifth annual conference, “Legal Histories of the Body and the State: Dobbs and the Legacies of Regulating Gender and Sex.” This conference seeks to bring together scholars who examine the intersectional legal histories of regulating and policing sex, gender, and reproduction. As attacks on gender and sexual equality are on the rise, advocates point towards history as justification for state-enforced heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. This conference addresses the court’s claim to diagnose Roe’s “faulty historical analysis” and invites attendees to examine the interwoven legal histories of gender, race, class, and sexuality that have shaped today’s sociolegal and political landscape. As women, migrants, LGBTQIA, and many more are left trying to navigate a post-Dobbs present, this conference aims to give us a better understanding of how past communities have challenged the law to guarantee greater equality for all.  This one-day conference will be held on Friday, May 5th, 2023, at Stanford and is cosponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. This conference will include three panels and a book talk focused on Felicia Kornbluh’s forthcoming book, A Woman’s Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice. It will conclude with a keynote session featuring Professor Mary Zeigler of UC Davis Law who will present, “Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the Remaking of Constitutional Politics.”

Areas of possible, but certainly not exhaustive, legal-historical interest for the conference include:

    Reproductive Rights and Race
    Race, Gender,  and Access to Medical Care/Medical Decisions
    Reproductive Rights and Disability
    Rhetoric around Reproductive Rights
    Race, Law, and Gender
    Barriers to Reproductive Autonomy
    Race and Eugenics
    Law and Contraception

More.
 

Diversity, Dilemmas and Discoveries: Legal History in the Curriculum

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Diversity, dilemmas and discoveries: Legal history in the curriculum

15 December 2022, The Open University Law School, Legal History Research Cluster

What is the place and purpose of legal history in the wider law school curriculum? Research in the field increasingly engages with socio-legal approaches, histories of oppression and discrimination, and critical perspectives on the role of law. As law schools seek to diversify, liberate and decolonise the curriculum, legal history can and should play a vital role.

This online conference will explore how legal history contributes to the curriculum of the modern law school. We invite proposals for 15-minute papers on any aspect, and particularly welcome those which address the central theme of diversity, dilemmas and discoveries.

Abstracts (not exceeding 300 words) should be submitted by email to OULS-legalhistory@open.ac.uk by Friday 11 November 2022.