CFP: Historical Perspectives on Lay Legal Education

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

Learning about the law: Historical perspectives on public legal education for laypersons and underprivileged groups.  20-21 May 2025, University of Helsinki

This conference focuses on public legal education in a historical perspective. It aims to discuss the various ways in which legal information has been disseminated to groups of laypersons or underprivileged people in order to enhance their legal literacy. Such groups can include e.g. women and children, workers, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees.
 
In the wake of industrialisation and the growth of the working class, many countries implemented legislation regarding workers' protection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This in turn caused the need to educate workers on their rights. The early 20th century also witnessed the growth of women's rights regarding e.g. education, occupation, property and marriage - all of which women needed information on. Throughout history, there have been waves of immigration around the world for various reasons. Those leaving their homes and moving to another country have also needed knowledge on their rights and the laws they need to follow. Moreover, besides underprivileged groups, educating laypersons in general on legal matters has also been part of building liberal, democratic nation states in which citizens are aware of the legal system and know how to navigate it. This kind of public legal education can take various forms. Legal knowledge has been distributed e.g. through handbooks, magazine articles, popular lectures and courses.
 
The conference aims to bring together historical research on the topic from different countries or regions to form a comparative understanding on the reasons for such activities, the forms they take and the consequences these practices had for each group of people and even society as a whole.
 
Papers could discuss e.g.:

• the motives for distributing legal knowledge to laypersons and underprivileged groups
• the different actors involved (providers and recipients of public legal education)
• whether the activities are initiated from within the specific group or from the outside
• what kind of legal information was seen as relevant for each group
• the role of professional lawyers in these activities
• the role of various interest groups in promoting these activities (associations, political parties etc.)
• the role of the state in these activities
• the different media used to disseminate legal education (courses, lectures, handbooks, magazines, radio and tv programmes etc.)
• the role of publishers or media outlets
• public legal education as part of developing a civil society
• how has the increasing legal awareness impacted each group
• the topic from a broader comparative perspective
• a longue durée view on the phenomenon

Keynote presentations will be given by: Dr. Kate Bradley (University of Kent); Dr. Elsa Trolle Önnerfors (Lund University); and Prof. Felice Batlan (Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology).
 
Deadline for paper proposals with abstracts (max. 400 words) and a short description of the presenter is 30 November 2024.  For further information, as well as sending paper proposals, please contact Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen (marianne.vasara-aaltonen@helsinki.fi), University Lecturer in Legal History at the University of Helsinki.

Weekend Roundup

• Gwen Seabourne and Joanna McCunn, the organizers of the 26th British Legal History Conference, which will be held in July 2024 at the University of Bristol Law School and the Centre for Law and History Research, discuss their preparations here.  

• On September 28, the U.S. Law and Race Initiative at the University of Nebraska will host a webinar featuring Ned Blackhawk (Yale) and Maggie Blackhawk (NYU). Ned Blackhawk will discuss The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, which was published recently by Yale University Press.

• 

  Credit

  Duke University and North Carolina Central University will host a symposium October 24-25 on John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University and co-editor of the current edition of  the book, will deliver the keynote address.
  

• In Episode 4 of the Max Planck Lawcast, Christopher Murphy talks with Alicia Haripershad about her preliminary findings on the role of missionaries as legal actors in the British colonies of South Africa and Zambia.  In Episode 3, he discusses the regulation of poverty in England and Wales in the early seventeenth century with Victoria Hooton, MPI-Frankfurt.
  

• Scott Douglas Gerber, Ohio Northern University, discusses his forthcoming book, Law and Religion in Colonial America: The Dissenting Colonies (Cambridge University Press, September 2023) over at Current.
  

• Over at the New Books Network, Kalyani Ramnath discusses her book Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962, with Kelvin Ng and Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi. 
  

• Also at New Books Network: Tomiko Brown Nagin discusses Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality.
  

• Although the announcement leaves us uncertain as to whether the event is open to the public, NYU will host a discussion of The Eight: The Lemmon Slave Case and the Fight for Freedom (SUNY Press) with author Judge Albert M. Rosenblatt, Judicial Fellow, NYU School of Law, Chief Judge Rowan D. Wilson of the New York Court of Appeals, and Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.  Dean Troy McKenzie, Cecilia Goetz Professor of Law at NYU Law, will provide welcome remarks.  The event will take place on Wednesday, September 20, 2023, from 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM, at NYU Law, 40 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012.  H/T: RD.

• The National Historical Publications & Records Commission offers various grants for projects involving public engagement with historical records. Follow the link for more information and to read about previous grantees.
  

• ICYMI: The first and only Texan on the U.S. Supreme Court (Weatherford Democrat). Mark Joseph Stern on The Volunteer Moms Poring Over Archives to Prove Clarence Thomas Wrong (Slate). The hosts of Strict Scrutiny recently spoke with Ari Berman about "the rise and fall of the Voting Rights Act." David Beito on that 14th Amendment, Section 3 Argument and the Debs precedent (The Hill).
  

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

Brady on Cottages as Public Nuisances

Maureen E. Brady, Harvard Law School, has posted  Cottages as Public Nuisances: The Long History of Land Use Regulation of the Poor, which is forthcoming in the DePaul Law Review:

Cottage Homes of England (NYPL)

In the Fourth Book of his Commentaries on the Law of England, in a chapter entitled “Offenses Against the Public Health, and the Public Police or Oeconomy,” William Blackstone sited his discussion of “common nuisances.” Although many things on this list of what we now call public nuisances are familiar—blockages of public roads, disorderly saloons, trades emitting offensive smells or sounds—one stands out. Blackstone described as a typical nuisance the erection of “cottages,” going on to discuss and even criticize the situation of these dwellings alongside uses like fireworks and the keeping of hogs in close quarters.

The aim of this Essay is to examine Blackstone’s discussion of cottages in context, endeavoring to use it toward two ends. The first is to better understand the concept of public nuisance and its limits. As others have chronicled, there has been a renaissance in interest in the tort in recent years, spurred on by multimillion dollar litigation invoking it in contexts ranging from the opioid epidemic to climate change. Here, I engage in a close reading of Blackstone’s passage and its citations, examining why cottages were regulated as public nuisances in the first instance and how that history connects to broader developments in English (and later American) law and society. As it turns out, cottages bore a closer relationship in many ways to public nuisance “classics,” like road blockages and certain public health risks, than it might at first appear.

Second, the story of the cottage illustrates the uneasy—and often, ineffective—ways that the state has deployed land use regulation to manage the poor. The story of the cottage evokes the old adage: “everything old is new again.” Cottages became targets because many sprung up informally on common property in an era in which the state was formalizing private title—not so different from the pressures on, and persistence of, informal settlements in some parts of the world today. Regulators sought to proscribe cottages to control the movement of labor while simultaneously limiting the accumulation of the poor, for a mix of seemingly legitimate and illegitimate reasons (compare the public health and safety risks of crowding to the notion that poverty and cohabitation leads to idleness). Centuries later, regulators and the citizens voting for them put forth a similar mix of motives to justify regulating apartment buildings and other forms of multifamily housing. The inclusion of cottages in Blackstone’s list illustrates the enduring appeal of land use law in all its forms—the tort law of nuisance, contract law, and regulation—as a means of defining and managing real and perceived social harms.

--Dan Ernst

Raffield's "Shakespeare's Strangers and English Law"

Paul Raffield, University of Warwick, has published Shakespeare's Strangers and English Law (Hart/Bloomsbury):

Through analysis of 5 plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield examines what it meant to be a 'stranger' to English law in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. The numbers of strangers increased dramatically in the late sixteenth century, as refugees fled religious persecution in continental Europe and sought sanctuary in Protestant England.

In the context of this book, strangers are not only persons ethnically or racially different from their English counterparts, be they immigrants, refugees, or visitors. The term also includes those who transgress or are simply excluded by their status from established legal norms by virtue of their faith, sexuality, or mode of employment.

Each chapter investigates a particular category of 'stranger'. Topics include the treatment of actors in late Elizabethan England and the punishment of 'counterfeits' (Measure for Measure); the standing of refugees under English law and the reception of these people by the indigenous population (The Comedy of Errors); the establishment of 'Troynovant' as an international trading centre on the banks of the Thames (Troilus and Cressida); the role of law and the state in determining the rights of citizens and aliens (The Merchant of Venice); and the disenfranchised, estranged position of the citizen in a dysfunctional society and an acephalous realm (King Lear).

--Dan Ernst

Malz on Rodriguez and Contingency in Constitutional Law

Earl M. Maltz, Rutgers Law School, has posted The Road to Rodriguez: Presidential Politics, Judicial Appointments, and the Contingent Nature of Constitutional Law, which is also to appear on Virginia Law Review Online:

San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez was by any standard one of the most consequential decisions of the early Burger era. Not surprisingly, the doctrinal arguments that underlay the Court’s analysis in Rodriguez have been dissected in detail by many academic commentators. By contrast, this essay, which was prepared for a symposium commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the decision, focuses on the institutional context in which the decision was rendered. The essay argues that the outcome of the case was in fact prefigured by a series of events that took place almost five years before the decision was handed down and led to the creation of a Court where a majority of the justices were hostile to the claims of the plaintiffs. Thus, Rodriguez provides a classic illustration of what might aptly be described as the contingent nature of constitutional law.

--Dan Ernst

The Antislavery Moment: Capitalism, Democracy, and Abolition

Abolitionist Coins (NYPL)

 [We have the following announcement. DRE.]

The Antislavery Moment: Capitalism, Democracy, and Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Princeton University

This conference will feature prominent scholars who work on abolition, anti-slavery politics, capitalism, and slavery, and will attempt to revisit the classic questions about the relationship between the marketplace and abolition in light of the new historiographical trends.

This conference is organized by Professor Matthew Karp, Professor Peter Wrizbicki and the Center for Collaboration History at Princeton University.

Friday, October 7
1:30 – 3:15 p.m.

    Introductory Remarks; Peter Wirzbicki, Princeton University

    Keynote “Conversation”
        James Oakes, The Graduate Center, CUNY
        Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut
        Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago
        Moderator: Sean Wilentz, Princeton University

3:30 – 5:15 p.m. | Panel 1 | The Antislavery Struggle
    Chris Bonner, University of Maryland | “Moses Grandy’s Pursuits of Freedom”
    Sean Griffin, Manhattan College | “Antislavery Struggle, Labor Struggle: Recovering Lost Connections and Missed Opportunities in the Labor-Abolitionist Coalition”
    Kate Masur, Northwestern University | “Poor Laws and Black Codes: Problems of Race, Class, and Mobility in the 19th Century United States”
    Comment: Matthew Karp, Princeton University

Saturday, October 8
9 – 10:45 a.m. | Panel 2 | Antislavery & Democracy
    Sarah Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania | “Gradual Abolition in Practice: Law, Experience, and the Local Archive”
    Ariel Ron, Southern Methodist University | “The Republicans’ Grassroots Leviathan”
    Alex Gourevitch, Brown University | “Servitude and Self-Emancipation After Slavery”
    Comment: Anton Jäger, KU Leuven

11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. | Panel 3 | Antislavery & Capitalism
    Yesenia Barragan, Rutgers University | “Free Womb Captives and Slavery’s Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Colombia and Spanish South America”
    John Clegg, Harvard University | “The Real Wages of Whiteness: Fear of Slave Competition in the Abolitionist Imagination”
    Comment: Wendy Warren, Princeton University

1:15 – 2:30 p.m. | Panel 4 | Antislavery & Violence
    Kellie Carter Jackson, Wellesley College | “Forcing Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence”
    Isadora Moura Mota, Princeton University | “Radicalizing Atlantic Antislavery: Insurgent Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
    Comment: Corinna Zeltsman, Princeton University

2:45 – 4 p.m. | Panel 5 | Antislavery & Revolution
    Lenora Warren, Cornell University | “Insurrection and the Oceanic Imaginary”
    Angela Zimmerman, George Washington University | “Conjure and Colonization: Fighting the Empire of ‘Lincoln and them other big emancipator men’”
    Comment: Reena Goldthree, Princeton University

4 – 5 p.m. | Closing Remarks & Conversation
Moderated by Matthew Karp and Peter Wirzbicki

JSCH 47:2

[Journal of Supreme Court History 47:2 has been published.  DRE]

Introduction

Timothy S. Huebner

Articles

"So Forcibly Presented by His Counsel, Who Are of His Race": Cornelius Jones, Forgotten Black Supreme Court Advocate and Fighter for Civil Rights in the Plessy Era
James A. Feldman

Influence Without Impeachment: How the Impeach Earl Warren Movement Began, Faltered But Avoided Irrelevance
Brett Bethune

Goldberg v. Kelly: The Case, the Clerk, and the Justice
Michael Nelson

Northern Schools and Lemon's Forgotten Segregation Claim
Catherine Ward

Justice Thurgood Marshall's Last Stand
Daniel Kiel

Book Reviews

The Yankee from Olympus Redivivus by Melvin I. Urofsky

Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas 

Catherine Pierce Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to an Unknown God

Michael H. Hoeflich, Ross E. Davies, eds., The Black Book of Justice Holmes: Text Transcript and Commentary

Jeon on Women-Led, Non-Lawyer Legal Aid in Boston

Kelsea A. Jeon, the holder of an M.Phil in Socio-Legal Research from the University of Oxford, has published Legal Aid Without Lawyers: How Boston’s Nonlawyers Delivered and Shaped Justice for the Poor, 1879–1921 in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy:

Women nonlawyers were some of the first actors to provide organized legal aid to America’s poor. Yet, today, unauthorized practice of law statutes bar nonlawyers from providing legal help, citing concerns about malpractice and public harm. This Article uses a historical case study to challenge conceptions that nonlawyers cannot provide effective legal services to the people. The study focuses on the development of legal aid in Boston via two organizations, the nonlawyer-led Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and the lawyer-centric Boston Legal Aid Society. Although organized legal aid in Boston began with the nonlawyers at the Union, they were eventually overtaken by the lawyer-centric Legal Aid Society. This paper examines this transition in legal aid practitioners, emphasizing how nonlawyers provided effective legal help. In doing so, it challenges the modern-day conception that access to justice requires access to an attorney and serves as a powerful counter to claims that nonlawyer practitioners endanger the public.

Her undergraduate thesis at Yale was This 'Order' Must Be Annihilated: How Benjamin Austin's Call to Abolish Lawyers Shaped Early Understandings of Access to Justice, 1786-1819.

 --Dan Ernst

Kornbluh and Tani on Polier, Wickenden and Reich's Poverty Law

Felicia Kornbluh, University of Vermont, and Karen Tani, University of Pennsylvania, have posted The Poverty Law Education of Charles Reich, which appeared in the Touro Law Review 36 (2020): 807-821:

This essay, written for a symposium on the life and legacy of Charles Reich, explores how Reich came to be interested in the field of poverty law and, specifically, the constitutional rights of welfare recipients. The essay emphasizes the influence of two older women in Reich’s life: Justine Wise Polier, the famous New York City family court judge and the mother of one of Reich’s childhood friends, and Elizabeth Wickenden, a contemporary of Polier’s who was a prominent voice in social welfare policymaking and a confidante of high-level federal social welfare administrators. Together, Polier and Wickenden helped educate Reich about the facts on the ground, including potential constitutional violations, and encouraged him to write about these issues. Subsequently, they used their powerful networks to circulate Reich’s writings and amplify his arguments. This history showcases Reich’s deep connections to left-liberal reformers who came of age during the New Deal: although he famously critiqued some of their handiwork, he relied heavily on their ideas, expertise, and good will.

--Dan Ernst

Steedman on history and the law

 Carolyn Steedman (University of Warwick) published History and the Law: A Love Story with Cambridge University Press in 2020.

From the publisher: 

Focusing on everyday legal experiences, from that of magistrates, novelists and political philosophers, to maidservants, pauper men and women, down-at-heel attorneys and middling-sort wives in their coverture, History and the Law reveals how people thought about, used, manipulated and resisted the law between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Supported by clear, engaging examples taken from the historical record, and from the writing of historians including Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and E. P. Thompson, who each had troubled love affairs with the law, Carolyn Steedman puts the emphasis on English poor laws, copyright law, and laws regarding women. Evocatively written and highly original, History and the Law accounts for historians' strange ambivalent love affair with the law and with legal records that appear to promise access to so many lives in the past.

Praise for the book:

 "Steedman writes the sort of book we have come to expect - stunningly original, steeped in local archives and literature, distinctive in its methods and voice. History and the Law concerns the everyday legal encounters of ordinary people, and the attraction of the law for historians keen to understand hearts and minds in the past." - James Epstein

"The always engaging and reflective Carolyn Steedman here chronicles her own and others' struggles to understand and make use of eighteenth-century law - others from that time and others from our time. Taken together, these essays sketch an important agenda for historical enquiry, as well as providing insights into the historian's craft." - Joanna Innes

"Steedman cleverly recounts the history of everyday experiences of the law in modern Britain. Beautifully written and drawing on a wealth of sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it will appeal to historians as well as literary and legal scholars alike." - Julia Moses

"A distinctively approachable, eclectic and stimulating series of reflections on law and history's interactions, both in theory and practice, over the past four centuries, from a leading exponent of modern British cultural and social history." - Wilfrid Prest

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Fleming on the Public Interest in the Private Law of the Poor

Anne Fleming, Georgetown University Law Center, has posted The Public Interest in the Private Law of the Poor, which appeared in the Harvard Law & Policy Review 14 (2019): 159-203:

This Article begins to explore the uncharted connections between private law and poverty law, revealing a striking pattern that is only visible when these two bodies of law are viewed in the same frame. Many poverty law scholars have focused on the rules that regulate government assistance to the poor. They have left largely left unexamined the private law of the poor — meaning, laws that govern the private economic relationships of those living in poverty or in danger of falling into destitution. At the same time, the study of private law is flourishing among scholars who seek to understand the law’s vision of justice in relations between private individuals. But these scholars often seek that vision within the law’s doctrinal structures, which betray little overt concern with poverty.

Revealing the connections between the two fields, this Article shows how concerns about public spending on poor relief have shaped debates over the private law of the poor for over a century. It traces the recurrence of one rationale for regulation, the prevention of “pauperism,” that explicitly linked private law rules with poverty alleviation. Proponents of the anti-pauperism argument claimed that private law, if properly structured, could help prevent dependence on poor relief and thereby reduce the burden on the public fist of caring for poor households. Thus, they imagined the private law of the poor as one component of a larger system of rules designed to keep families self-supporting and off the poor relief rolls.

Drawing on original research across a range of source materials, this Article traces the history of the anti-pauperism argument and offers several explanations for its enduring appeal. It then describes the implications of this history for law and economics scholars, for present-day fights against economic inequality and in favor of regulatory reform, and for breaking down the silos between private law and poverty law.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Poverty in America: Past, Present, and Future

[We have the following CFP.]

Poverty in America: The Past, Present, and Future, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 10-11 May 2019

2019 marks fifty-five years since President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "unconditional War on Poverty" in the United States and one year since President Donald J. Trump's Council of Economic Advisers declared the War on Poverty "largely over and a success". While most would agree America's War on Poverty is "over", few - from either side of politics - would agree that it was won. According to the US Census Bureau, 39.7 million Americans, or 12.3% of the total population, currently live in poverty. More than half of America's children qualify as either "poor or low income". Over 40 million Americans rely on food stamps to provide their meals. 

To understand why America is still plagued by the "paradox of poverty amidst plenty" a two-day interdisciplinary conference is being convened at the Rothermere American Institute of the University of Oxford.

We are looking for papers and panels which address America's historical and contemporary relationship with poverty, and why the politics of poverty have proved so intractable. We are particularly interested in papers from the fields of history, politics, and public policy, including practitioners.

Topics may include, but are not limited to reasons for the failure of Johnson's War on Poverty;
how and why poverty disproportionately affects women and people of colour; what new policy approaches could positively impact those living in poverty; the past and future of anti-poverty programs such as Food Stamps, Social Security, and Medicaid; depictions of poverty in the media; whether America's political institutions are capable of effectively reducing poverty; and
why poverty has failed to be a larger issue in American political discourse in recent decades.  The keynote address will be delivered by Professor Alice O'Connor (UC Santa Barbara)

Proposals of no more than 250 words per paper, accompanied by a 1-page CV, should be sent to the organisers (Alex Coccia and Mitch Roberson - povertyinamericaconference@gmail.com) no later than 1 March 2019. Proposals for individual papers or full panels are welcome.

Thanks to the generosity of the BAAS/US Embassy Small Grants Programme we will be able to offer some travel bursaries for this event.

Gordon on Lawyers and Access to Justice in the United States

The Winter 2019 issue of Dædalus is devoted to Access to Justice.  One of its (open access) contributions is Lawyers, the Legal Profession & Access to Justice in the United States: A Brief History, by Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School:

Ideally, justice is a universal good: the law protects equally the rights of the rich and powerful, the poor and marginal. In reality, the major share of legal services goes to business entities and wealthy people and the prestige and prosperity to the lawyers who serve them. This essay deals with the history of access to justice – chiefly civil justice – and with the role of lawyers and organized legal professions in promoting and restricting that access. In the last century, legal professionals and others have taken small steps to provide access to legal processes and legal advice to people who could not otherwise afford them. By doing so, they have inched closer to the ideals of universal justice. Though the organized bar has repeatedly served its own interests before those of the public, and has restricted access to justice for the poor, it has been a relatively constructive force.

H/t: Harvard Law Today

O'Brassill-Kulfan, "Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic"

New from NYU Press: Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (Jan. 2019), by Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan (Rutgers University). A description from the Press:

Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations.

Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.

A few blurbs:

"Americans in the early republic believed that their ability to move—geographically, socially, economically—was the essence of their freedom. They trusted that capitalism offered upward mobility and that an expansive republic would prove an empire for liberty in which law would protect property rights. Vagrants and Vagabonds offers an important corrective to these ideas. Capitalist transformation forced poor Americans to move often and in ways they did not necessarily choose. Vagrancy law limited their movements and curtailed their freedom. O’Brassill-Kulfan's important book reminds us that mobility helped to entrench inequality in the United States as much as it enabled American dreams." —Brian Luskey

"Kristin OBrassill-Kulfan’s study of the mobility of poor and otherwise unwanted members of society, and the efforts of authorities to dictate and control their movement, tells us much about the life of multiple subaltern groups in the antebellum U.S. in a way that is especially relevant today. She addresses forced migration, incarceration, and exclusion, bringing all of these issues of mobility together in a multifaceted study that should be required reading for anyone interested in early U.S. history, the carceral state, and poverty in the U.S. Her important book adds much to the historiography of a number of fields, including early U.S. history, labor history, racial and ethnic history, and poverty studies. It is essential reading for policy makers and political scientists today who want to understand the history of race- and class-based exclusion in the U.S." —Beverly Tomek

More information is available here.

Kornbluh & Mink on Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (Nov. 2018), by Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) and Gwendolyn Mink (Independent Scholar). A description from the Press:

In Ensuring Poverty, Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink assess the gendered history of welfare reform. They foreground arguments advanced by feminists for a welfare policy that would respect single mothers' rights while advancing their opportunities and assuring economic security for their families. Kornbluh and Mink consider welfare policy in the broad intersectional context of gender, race, poverty, and inequality. They argue that the subject of welfare reform always has been single mothers, the animus always has been race, and the currency always has been inequality. Yet public conversations about poverty and welfare, even today, rarely acknowledge the nexus between racialized gender inequality and the economic vulnerability of single-mother families.

Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) by a Republican Congress and the Clinton administration, the gendered dimensions of antipoverty policy have receded from debate. Mink and Kornbluh explore the narrowing of discussion that has occurred in recent decades and the path charted by social justice feminists in the 1990s and early 2000s, a course rejected by policy makers. They advocate a return to the social justice approach built on the equality of mothers, especially mothers of color, in policies aimed at poor families.

A few blurbs:

"Placing feminist analysis front and center in the ongoing public debate about welfare policy, Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink offer a much-needed corrective to the standard historical narrative about welfare reform that normalizes the most gendered and retrograde provisions of the welfare 'ending' Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act."—Alice O'Connor 

"Ensuring Poverty is an important and overdue assessment of welfare reform's impact on women. Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink not only revive feminist criticism of the system's failure to value women's care work but also use new data to explain why welfare reform remains a critical aspect of politics today."—Dorothy Roberts

More information is available here. If you order from the Penn Press website, you can receive a 20 percent discount using this promo code: PJ55.

Weekend Roundup

• Aditi Bagchi, Fordham Law, reviews Anne Fleming’s City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance, on Jotwell.  “Fleming ably guides us through the vicissitudes of regulating the small loan industry,” Professor Bagchi writes.  “We do not emerge with any clear sense of a regulatory solution. Instead, we learn the limits of bettering a transaction by way of contractual limitations.” 

• Also on JOTWELL, Reuel Schiller (UC Hastings) recommends Kim Phillips-Fein's Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017). "Fear City is not only a page-turning political history of the fiscal crisis," Schiller writes. "Phillips-Fein has also written an exceptional piece of legal history. Indeed, law courses through the veins of this book. Be it bankruptcy law, the law of municipal finance and taxation, or constitutional law, legal concepts are the armature upon which the story of the fiscal crisis hangs."

• The new-look Perspectives on History of the American Historical Association includes the feature “From the National History Center: Perspectives Daily.”  Just out in it is Fishing for Loan Sharks: Small-Sum Lending Reform over Time, by the aforementioned Anne Fleming, Georgetown Law.

• This news report made us think that Sam Erman’s Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, heralded on the Studies in Legal History’s website, can’t get here soon enough.

• On Monday, July 30, 6:30 pm at Shaw Library in Washington, DC, "Mara Cherkasky and Sarah Schoenfeld of Prologue DC will explore the long history of displacement, race, and real estate in D.C. Learn about the demands of black home seekers, civil rights attorneys, and fair housing advocates, and the legacy of their efforts."  H/t: DC Public Libraries.

• Via Seth Barrett Tillman, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, here is an updated list of all the major filings in the various foreign emoluments clause cases. 

•  ICYMI: Sam Bray, Notre Dame Law, on two notes by Sir John Baker, on the Volokh Conspiracy.  Newspaper cartoonists on the Kavanaugh nomination. Adam M. Sowards on lynching in the American West for the High Country News.

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

Thank You, Anne Fleming

We wanted to thank Anne Fleming, Georgetown Law, for guestblogging on LHB this month and to collect her interesting and thought-provoking posts on the challenges of writing City of Debtors.  In addition to our welcome, the posts were:

The Challenge of Writing for Two Audiences
One Way to Write for Two Audiences
Balancing Narrative and Analysis
The Meanings of Presentism
Policy-Relevant History

Trubek on the Wisconsin Center for Public Representation

Louise G. Trubek, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted Social Justice Advocacy and Innovation: The Wisconsin Center for Public Representation 1974-Present, which is forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy 25 (2018): 221-255:

Social justice practice is undergoing a revival. In a period of renewed energy we often look forward. But careful study of the existing structure and paths taken in the past is essential for successful initiatives. The history of the Center for Public Representation (CPR), a mid-western public interest law firm founded in 1974, contributes to the study. The CPR experience offers numerous lessons for those who seek to reinvent social justice lawyering: the importance of experimentation, the need for coordination of the local and national, and recognition of the potential law schools can play in the revival. The 40-year history was driven by a mixture of local politics and legal culture, individual passion and energy, and national movements and resources. There is continuity but it is possible to show three distinct periods in the life of the firm. The founding moment took place from 1974-84. The founders chose a non-profit tax-exempt format that was a hybrid of a free-standing public interest law firm and a University of Wisconsin law school clinic. With long-term funding unavailable, CPR developed innovative funding strategies and explored multiple arenas and modalities. The second moment embraces the late 1980s and 90s. CPR paid more attention to poverty and opened a community law office while the school added a course on poverty law. The state of Wisconsin privatized some health and welfare services forcing the lawyers and students to develop new ways to voice the concerns of the affected people. The CPR hybrid was under stress as support for clinics grew and for public interest law waned. In the third moment, 2002-present, CPR reinvented itself as the Economic Justice Center (EJC). The redesign was prompted by financial difficulties, shifts in legal and political atmosphere, and the success of clinical teaching. The free-standing public interest law firm was cut back. The history highlights the choices facing today's practitioners; how to develop long-term strategies, initiate networks and scale up practices, utilize law school resources, and exploit available technology.

Walker's "Most of 14th Street Is Gone"

Just out from OUP is Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968, by J. Samuel Walker:

“Left behind were hundreds of burned-out buildings, whole blocks that looked as though they had been bombed into oblivion.” These words, written by the Washington Post's Leonard Downie Jr., do not describe a war zone but rather the nation's capital reeling in the wake of the riots of April 1968. In the devastating aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination, a community already plagued by poor living conditions, unfair policing, and segregation broke into chaos.

These riots brought well-documented tragedy and heartbreak--not only among the families of those who lost their lives but also among those who lost their homes, possessions, jobs, and businesses. There was anger, fear, and anxiety throughout the city of Washington, DC, from the White House to the residential neighborhoods of the capital. There was an excruciating dilemma for President Lyndon Johnson. He was outraged by the violence in the streets, but he also keenly aware that African American citizens who joined the riots had legitimate grievances that his civil rights initiatives did little to address.

J. Samuel Walker's Most of 14th Street is Gone takes an in-depth look at the causes and consequences of the Washington, DC riots of 1968. It shows the conditions that existed in Washington, DC's low-income neighborhoods, setting the stage for the disorders that began after King's murder. It also traces the growing fears produced by the outbreaks of serious riots in many cities during the mid-1960s. The centerpiece of the book is a detailed account of the riots that raged in Washington, DC from the perspectives of rioters, victims, law enforcement officials, soldiers, and government leaders. The destruction was so extensive that parts of the city were described as “smoldering ruins block after block.” Walker analyzes the reasons for the riots and the lessons that authorities drew from them. He also provides an overview of the struggle that the city of Washington, DC faced in recovering from the effects of the 1968 disorders. Finally, he considers why serious riots have been so rare in Washington, DC and other cities since 1968. Walker’s timely and sensitive examination of a community, a city, and a country rocked by racial tension, violence, and frustration speaks not only to this nation’s past but to its present.

Wilkinson-Ryan on Fleming, "The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the ‘Law of the Poor’"

Also at JOTWELL, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan (University of Pennsylvania) spotlights "The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the ‘Law of the Poor’," by Anne Fleming (Georgetown University Law Center). The article appeared in Volume 102 of the Georgetown Law Journal (2014). Here is a taste:

Who is best suited to police unfair terms—the market, the judiciary, or the legislature? Williams vs. Walker-Thomas Furniture has long been offered as a cautionary tale, but in her 2014 article, legal historian Anne Fleming takes on the standard narrative of judicial overreach and recasts the relationships among institutional actors in a reform movement. 

In 1965, Judge Skelly Wright ruled that Ora Lee Williams’s contract to pay for furniture on a pro rata installment plan was subject to review for unconscionability—a moment of judicial activism that was later blamed for the decline and stagnation of the doctrine of unconscionability. Fleming pushes back against the standard narrative that Williams created a backlash against Wright’s ‘law of the poor’ – according to that simplistic story, “Judges ended up hurting the very people they were trying to help. In the face of incisive criticism, judicial enthusiasm for the doctrine of unconscionability quickly faded.” (Pp. 1387-1388.) Fleming’s argument reframes the Williams decision within a broader context of judicial, legislative, and popular pressure, tracing the revival of unconscionability back to the Uniform Commercial Code, enacted in Washington, D.C. in 1963.

Read on here.