Perrone, "Rehearsals for Reparations"

New from Giuliana Perrone (UC Santa Barbara): "Rehearsals for Reparations," RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10 (June 2024). The abstract:

This article considers a subset of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers’ bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them, that there was a general agreement between enslaved and enslaver about the form reparations should take, and that there was a similar understanding that reparations should be generational. The article further suggests the promise of additional inquiry into historical testamentary records. Such a novel archive would add to contemporary arguments in favor of reparations by identifying an unacknowledged effort to provide compensation to formerly enslaved people.

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

•  The Balkinization symposium on Alison LaCroix's The Interbellum Constitution continued this week. Since our last Weekend Roundup, there have been contributions from John Mikhail, Connor M. Ewing, David S. Schwartz, and Christian G. Fritz.

• "The Bar Exam: Then and Now" -- via In Custodia Legis.
  

•  From Process (the blog of the Organization of American Historians): Cindy Hahamovitch on "The Peculiar World of American Sheriffs."

• Independent scholar Patrick S. O'Donnell has posted some thoughts on the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with a helpful roundup of relevant secondary sources. 

• Some JOTWELL items of interest: Ilya Somin reviews David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs; Scott Cummings reviews Ann Southworth's Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending (2023); Jedidiah Kroncke reviews J. Benton Heath's "Economic Sanctions as Legal Ordering," forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of International Law.
  

• ICYMI: Justin Simard on the Citing Slavery Project (Mississippi Free Press). James H. Coleman Jr., the first Black associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, has died (northjersey.com).
  

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

Miller on Ruffin and Roberts in Mann and Trump

Joseph Scott Miller, University of Georgia School of Law, has posted Perfecting Our Submission? Mann and Trump, Ruffin and Roberts:

Thomas Ruffin (wiki)

Presidential power is vast, both under law and in practice. Who holds presidents accountable, and by what means? Much turns on the answers we provide, as well as on the justifications we establish for those answers. The majority opinion in the new presidential immunity case, Trump v. U.S., is eerily resonant, rhetorically, with a notorious judgment enhancing one person’s power over others by shielding that power utterly from criminal-law accountability. That judgment, now nearly two centuries old, is Judge Thomas Ruffin’s infamous opinion for the North Carolina Supreme Court in State v. Mann. I juxtapose the two opinions, which share jarringly similar claims about the nature of power, rule, and accountability under law.

--Dan Ernst

Gronningsater, "The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom, by Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania). A description from the Press:

The Rising Generation chronicles the long history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a generation of black New Yorkers. Born into precarious freedom after the American Revolution and reaching adulthood in the lead-up to the Civil War, this remarkable generation ultimately played an outsized role in political and legal conflicts over slavery’s future, influencing both the nation’s path to the Civil War and changes to the US Constitution.

Through exhaustive research in archives across New York State, where the largest enslaved population in the North resided at the time of the American Revolution, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater begins by exploring how English colonial laws shaped late eighteenth-century gradual abolition acts that freed children born to enslaved mothers. The boys and girls affected by these laws were born into a quasi-free legal status. They were technically not enslaved but were nonetheless required to labor as servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of these “children of gradual abolition” found multiple ways to protect and nurture the boys and girls in their midst. They supported and founded schools, formed ties with white lawyers and abolitionists, petitioned local and state officials for better laws, guarded against kidnapping and cruelty, and shaped New York’s evolving identity as a free state. Black fathers used their votes during annual state elections in the early 1800s to influence legislative antislavery efforts. After many but not all black men in the state were disfranchised by a race-based property requirement in 1822, black citizens across New York organized to regain equal suffrage and to expand and protect other crucial, non-gendered features of state citizenship. Women and children were critical participants in these efforts.

Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into midcentury campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable common school education, and the expansion of freedom across the nation.

A selection of advance praise:

"This book is an extraordinary accomplishment of research and writing. Sarah L. H. Gronningsater has immersed herself in countless local archives to give us an entirely new picture of northern black politics in its many forms. With clarity and empathy, The Rising Generation shows how black children, women, and men developed organizing savvy and legal acumen, supported fugitive slaves, demanded access to schools and the courts, and made their voices heard in national politics."—Kate Masur

"The Rising Generation is a book about hope. Meticulously researched and beautifully crafted, it recasts the history of emancipation by foregrounding the activism of ordinary people, particularly black Americans. That past has profound resonance now. By revealing what civic engagement accomplished in the past, this remarkable book also opens up new possibilities today."—Laura F. Edwards

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Montalvo's "Enslaved Archives"

Maria R. Montalvo, Emory University has published Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past:

It is extraordinarily difficult for historians to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved people. Records—where they exist—are often fragmentary, biased, or untrue. In Enslaved Archives, Maria R. Montalvo investigates the legal records, including contracts and court records, that American antebellum enslavers produced and preserved to illuminate enslavers' capitalistic motivations for shaping the histories of enslaved people. The documentary archive was not simply a by-product of the business of slavery, but also a necessary tool that enslavers used to exploit the people they enslaved.

Building on Montalvo's analysis of more than 18,000 sets of court records, Enslaved Archives is a close study of what we can and cannot learn about enslaved individuals from the written record. By examining five lawsuits in Louisiana, Montalvo deconstructs enslavers' cases—the legal arguments and rhetorical strategies they used to produce information and shape perceptions of enslaved people. Commodifying enslaved people was not simply a matter of effectively exploiting their labor. Enslavers also needed to control information about those people. Enslavers' narratives—carefully manipulated, prone to omissions, and sometimes false—often survive as the only account of an enslaved individual's life.

In working to historicize the people at the center of enslavers' manipulations, Montalvo outlines the possibilities and limits of the archive, providing a glimpse of the historical and contemporary consequences of commodification. Enslaved Archives makes a significant intervention in the history of enslaved people, legal history, and the history of slavery and capitalism by adding a qualitative dimension to the analysis of how enslavers created and maintained power.

 --Dan Ernst

Smith on Emancipation in Roman Law

Lionel Smith, Cambridge University, has posted From Mancipatio to Emancipation in Roman Law, which appears in Revue du Notariat 124 (2024): 347-60:

This text was produced as a contribution to a series of seminars entitled Emancip(ense): penser l’émancipation en droit privé (‘Thinking about emancipation in private law’), which took place in 2021-23 and which was co-organized by the Groupe de réflexion en droit privé and the Groupe de recherche sur les humanités juridiques. In the modern civilian tradition, "emancipation" refers to the acquisition of some or all of the incidents of full legal capacity by a person who has not reached the age of majority. This short text traces the development of emancipation in Roman law through the adaptation of an institution of property law, exploring in the process the links between family law and property law in ancient Rome. It argues that in the Roman understanding of one of the most ancient written texts of law, found in the XII Tables, we can see a feature that is in common with modern law, both in the common law and the civil law: when a person acquires a legal power for an other-regarding purpose, they do not hold that power as patrimonial wealth, but on the contrary the power can be taken away if it is misused.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Justin Simard, Michigan State University Law School, on the Citing Slavery Project (The Conversation).
  

• Giuliana Perrone, UC Santa Barbara, from Juneteenth to Reparations (The Current).
  

• Amy Hart, UC Davis, says historians have a difficult task in guiding Supreme Court justices because 2024 is not 1789 or 1866 (The Conversation).

• Congratulations to Professor John W. Cairns upon his receipt of an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow.
  

• The National Constitution Center honors the civil rights lawyer William T. Coleman, Jr., with a bronze bas-relief (WHYY).
  

• A historical marker for Emma Coger, refused a seat at a table of white women on the steamboat S.S. Merrill, despite her first-class ticket, in 1872 (Quincy, IL Herald-Whig).
  

• Sometimes alma mater does the right thing: Annette Gordon-Reed discusses On Juneteenth with the Dartmouth Book Club.
  

• As Vanderbilt Law’s George Barrett Social Justice Lecture, Sara Mayeux and Robert L. Tsai discuss Tsai's Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All (Norton 2024) (YouTube).
  

• Undergraduates can again research slavery cases this summer in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, led by Katrina Jagodinsky (Nebraska Today).

• The Lawbook Exchange's June 2024 catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History is here.
  

• ICYMI: ACB dissents from (some of the) Brethrens' originalism (CNN; New Republic; Newsweek; Politico; Bloomberg Law).  Trump’s dangerous attacks on rule of law have US historical precedents (Guardian).  Bruen and the Billy-Club Ban (Buckeye Firearms Association).  The history of lobbying (Atlantic).  Lynching in Iowa (Des Moines Register).

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

Weekend Roundup

• Madiba K. Dennie on her book “The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back,” on Marketplace and the Literary Hub. 
  

• Wisconsin Lawyer continues its series Women History Makers with a profile of Jo Deen Lowe, chief judge of the Ho-Chunk Nation Trial Court.

• Bradley Joondeph (Santa Clara University School of Law) has posted a short piece on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as "Bridge Builder." It is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review. 
  

• From Time's "Made by History": Tracy Slater, "Loving Day Is an Opportunity to Remember the Interracial Families Separated by the U.S."

• ICYMI: A Brief History of the Phrase No One is above the Law" (NYT).  Magna Carta: The Atlantic Crossing (History Today). New research shows how white women profited from slavery, too (The Conversation).

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

Sanctis de Brito's "Seeking Capture, Resisting Slavery"

A new book is out, open access, in the Global Perspectives on Legal History series of the Max-Planck-Institut for Legal History and Legal Theory: Adriane Sanctis de Brito's Seeking Capture, Resisting Seizure: An International Legal History of the Anglo-Brazilian Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade (1826–1845):

The treaties to suppress the slave trade were the subject of intense legal battles and debates in the first half of the 19th century. By delving into the legal disputes that took place within the context of the Anglo-Brazilian treaty, this book highlights the political importance of what might at first glance be perceived as little more than argumentative hurdles over the rules and proceedings regarding the search and capture of ships. Some of these legal battles were carried out in the correspondence between the Foreign Offices, sometimes between diplomatic representatives or within mixed commissions, while still others involved the process of interpretation and the resignification that took place over the course of years and involved a multiplicity of exchanges between various actors and institutions.

Britain constantly pushed to expand the legal use of force and possibilities of capture within the spaces outlined by the treaty regime. Brazil actively engaged in the legal interpretation, and in so doing created an argumentative onus that would later continue to transform British legal approaches and the very expectations about the content of the law the two parties were applying.

By constantly challenging the scope and limits of the treaty, Brazilian representatives slowed down the process of abolishing the slave trade, thus preserving the perverse practice, while at the same time protecting Brazil’s independence against the expansion of British interference. Whether reading the bilateral treaty clauses as analogous to or differently from prize law or general international law, the day-to-day interpretation forged anti-slave trade rules that kept ships, instead on enslaved people, protagonists of slave trade suppression mechanisms.

This history of the Anglo-Brazilian treaty provides more detail about the mechanisms created by international law to combat the slave trade. It also reveals the complex legal translations of state inequality, humanitarianism, violence, and the fine line between war and peace.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From In Custodia Legis: a guest post by historian Ryan Reft on "Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Black Book."
  

• 

  Thomas G. Corcoran, 1935 (LC)
  

  A side note to the forgoing: At the start of his post, Dr. Reft reproduces a letter from Edward Holmes, the justice's nephew and executor, to Tom Corcoran, the justice's favorite legal secretary, in which the executor refers to "a question that intervenes between us."  Perhaps the question was the disposition of the Black Book.  In his often reliable memoir, Corcoran claimed that on the night the justice died, Edward Holmes said that the Black Book was "too personal" and should be destroyed, but that when the nephew's back was turned he "slipped it behind some other volumes on a shelf.  A little later I smuggled it out of the house under my shirt and sent it by courier the next day to the Harvard Law School."  Thomas G. Corcoran with Philip Kopper, “Rendezvous with Democracy: The Memoirs of ‘Tommy the Cork,’” Holmes, pp. 39-40, box 586, Corcoran MSS, Library of Congress.  I've never looked for corroborating evidence in the Edward J. Holmes Collection or other HLS records.  DRE.
  

• From Time's "Made by History" section: Janet Golden, "America Has Been Having the Same Debate About Child Labor for 100 Years"; Ray Brescia, "The 19th Century Case That Transformed the Legal System—And Holds a Lesson for the Trump Trials"; Aaron Coy Moulton, "The Long, Sordid History of Foreign Governments Courting Members of Congress."
  

• 
  
  The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has issued a call for applications for its Fellowship Program. The library "welcome[s] applications from scholars and graduate students locally and globally who utilize traditional methods of archival and bibliographic research as well as from individuals who wish to pursue creative, interdisciplinary, and non-traditional approaches to conducting research in the collections." 
  

• The New-York Historical Society has announced substantial postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships in Women's History.  Due date: June 30. 
  

• Alison LaCroix’s presentation of her just published book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, is now up on the Supreme Court Historical Society’s YouTube Channel.
  

• New on the Digging a Hole podcast: David C. Schleicher and Samuel Moyn interview Dylan C. Penningroth on his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.  And congratulations to Professor Penningroth for winning the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize of the Law and Society Association for Before the Movement!  Berkeley Law's notice of the awards the book has garnered is here.
  

• On the New Books in Intellectual History podcast,  Kunal M. Parker discusses The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970.
  

• On the New Books in African American Studies podcast, Robert K. D. Colby discusses An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South.
  

• There's some legal history in the latest issue of Law and Humanities, including Thomas Giddens's A Roman face on an English body: the typography of Plowden’s Commentaries.
  

• A CFP has just issued for a Law and Rurality Workshop  to be held at the University of Iowa Law School in November 2024.  H/t: ER.
  

• ICYMI: Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law, on the Trump Conviction and the History of Presidential Crimes (SLS Blogs).  The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act (Smithsonian; History Today).  Policy approaches to addressing a history of racial discrimination (Stanford IEPR).  Delaware marks 70th anniversary of its role in landmark Brown v. Board decision (WHYY).
  

• Update: We were pleased to learn that the University of Connecticut School of Law has established The Distinguished Alumni Professor Kent Newmyer Award in American Legal History "in honor of Kent Newmyer to recognize a student who demonstrates excellence in the study of American legal history."
  

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

Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions

Frederick Douglass (NYPL)

We recently noticed that the papers resulting from "Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery," the Thomas M. Jorde Symposium for 2022, have been published in the California Law Review.  Here is a recording of the symposium, and here are the papers:

Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery
David Blight

Comment on Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery
Annette Gordon-Reed

"A Fixed Principle of Honesty": Frederick Douglass, False Certainties, and Words without Memory
Christopher Tomlins

Response to Professor Blight's Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery
Martha S. Jones

Frederick Douglass's Constitution
James Oakes

--Dan Ernst

The Docket 7:1-2

Now online: issues 7:1-2 of The Docket, the online partner of Law and History Review:

Gautham Rao, Big Changes at Law and History Review

Barbara Lauriat, Robinson & Roberts v. Wheble (1771): A New “First” Trademark Case at Common Law

Lawrence Goldstone, Unreliable Narrator: The Federalist Essays

Bruce W. Dearstyne, A Judge and Presidential Candidate Searches for the Meaning of Due Process

Sohum Pal reviews Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind

Cameron Sauers reviews Giuliana Perrone, Nothing More Than Freedom

--Dan Ernst

Sunday Roundup

• The Dallas Bar Association will sponsor. with the J.L. Turner Legal Association, a conversation with Jose F. Anderson, University of Baltimore School of Law, on his book Genius for Justice: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Reform of American Law on Thursday, May 30, 2024, 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM, at Dallas’s Arts District Mansion.  Professor Anderson will highlight “cases litigated from Texas that were part of Houston's strategy to define the responsibility and privileges of citizenship under constitutional government.”  CLE credit is available.
  

• 
  Cameron Sauers, a doctoral candidate at Pennsylvania State University, reviews Giuliana Perrone's Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (2023) in The Docket.
  

• Christine Kexel Chabot, Marquette Law, has posted Saving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (and the Constitution) from the Courts, a critique of the Supreme Court's use of history in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association.  The Brennan Center also weighs in.
  

• We've previously noted the passing of Stephen J. Pollak.  Here are Attorney General Merrick Garland's remarks at a memorial event for Mr. Pollak.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Saul Cornell’s contribution to the Slate series, “How Originalism Ate the Law,” is Why the Right Dominates When It Comes to Legal “History.”  (His answer?  “They’re invested in legal education, creating an originalist industrial complex with outsize influence.”)  Also, Thomas Wolf explains the Brennan Center's efforts to mobilize historians to counter the Supreme Court's historical claims.
  

• 
  For Members of the American Society for Legal History:  A reminder that the ASLH  has announce "a new virtual initiative – the Early Career (Virtual) Legal History Workshop – designed to provide support and intellectual community to early career scholars working in legal history, broadly defined.  Applications are invited from early career, pre-tenure scholars, publishing in English, who have completed PhDs or JDs (those working toward a JD/PhD must have completed the PhD)."  Deadline for Applications: June 30, 2024.  More.
  

• "History and the Law," a panel conversation "on important moments in American legal history, applying history education to the study and practice of the law, and more," presented as an introduction to the History Pre-Law Concentration at Villanova University (YouTube).

• Ariela Gross, UCLA School of Law, will lecture on  “Erasing Slavery – How Stories of Slavery and Freedom (in Natchez) Shape Battles Over the Constitution” at the Tuesday, May 28 meeting of the Natchez Historical Society (Natchez Democrat).
  

• LHB Founder Mary Dudziak, Emory Law, on the legacy of Korean War at the recent TCU Conference on the Korean War (YouTube).
  

• More on that recent conference on the political history of the New Deal at Vanderbilt University.
  

• Erika Rappaport, University of California, Santa Barbara, reviews The Rise of Mass Advertising, Law, Enchantment and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity, by Anat Rosenberg in the English Historical Review. Christopher Tomlins, Berkeley Law, reviews Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy in the Journal of Law and Political Economy.  And Ajay K. Mehrotra, Northwestern Law, reviews Andrew Koppelman's Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, also in JLPE.
  

• ICYMI: How America Tried and Failed to Stay White (WaPo). No, Congressman, TJ did not sign the Constitution (Mediatite).  Early Medieval England and Its Neighbors encounters some Anglo-Saxon attitudes.
  

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

JACH (Spring 2024)

The Spring 2024 issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History has now been published.

Ida B. Wells’s Train Ride in Memphis and the Dawn of Jim Crow
Lee Harris

Most Americans know the story of Rosa Parks; fewer know the story of Ida B. Wells, who contested the nascent Jim Crow laws on the Tennessee railways more than 70 years before Rosa Parks’ famous bus ride. This article profiles Wells’ journey from small-town schoolteacher, to legal challenger in the fight against racial segregation.

Racism, Black Voices, Emancipation, and Constitution-Making in Massachusetts, 1778
David Waldstreicher

Black voices—even disembodied, anonymous, speculative Black voices—were part of the constitutional conversation in Massachusetts in 1777-78. If that isn’t being present at the creation of the American republic, then terms like “founding” and “creation” lose most of their meaning.

The Democracy Effects of Legal Polarization: Movement Lawyering at the Dawn of the Unitary Executive
Deborah Pearlstein

In the 1980s, a conservative legal movement began to advance a unitary executive theory of constitutional power inside the Executive Branch; these efforts functioned to kneecap a suite of post-Watergate ethics reforms designed to guard against corruption or other misconduct by government lawyers, which, over time, has led to an increasingly polarized system in which career advancement, not punishment, awaits lawyers willing to place partisan loyalty above professional obligation. This serves as a troubling case study of the range of harms legal polarization poses to constitutional democracy inside court and out.

Executive Power, the Royal Prerogative, and the Founders’ Presidency
Andrew Kent
[Forthcoming.] 

--Dan Ernst

Visions and Realities of Black Freedom in the Nineteenth Century

[We have the following announcement from the Kluge Center via the American Historical Association.  DRE]

Visions and Realities of Black Freedom in the Nineteenth Century.  Wednesday, May 15, 4 p.m. ET

Join the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress for an online event exploring how the United States grappled with the post-emancipation future for Black Americans. In the years preceding and during the American Civil War, antislavery reformers began to imagine what a world without slavery might look like—what shape a post-emancipation society might take. As such ideas clashed with realities in the wake of wartime emancipation, activists came to understand how the struggles for Black freedom and justice would be ongoing. This discussion will be chaired and moderated by Corey Brooks (York Coll. of Pennsylvania), and panelists include Frank Cirillo (Univ. of Michigan), Myisha Eatmon (Harvard Univ.), and Sarah Gronningsater (Univ. of Pennsylvania).

This online event is free and open to the public; registration is required. There is no in-person component for this event. A recording will be available at here in the weeks following the event.

Meyn on Convict Leasing

Ion Meyn, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted White-on-Black Crime: Revisiting the Convict Leasing Narrative, which is forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review:

Between 1880 and 1915, the Southern criminal legal system enslaved and re-enslaved legally emancipated Black persons. Under the conventional account of this period, the law facilitated and legitimatized these practices, however odious and racially discriminatory. This view—one that critiques as it accepts the legality of the system—provides an explanation for a significant number of cases in which a Black person was convicted and sent to forced labor.

And yet, there is growing evidence that many convictions were not facilitated by law but rather the result of criminal conspiracies to traffic Black victims. County-level arrest data indicates “convictions” occurred in lockstep with the labor demands of businesses that contracted with local state actors. Numerous personal accounts from victims and their families indicate that arrests occurred in the absence of any criminal suspicion. This empirical data suggests many Black “convicts” were instead victims of human trafficking. Because completing these White-on-Black crimes required coordination among multiple parties, a criminal conspiracy was formed that implicated White participants in kidnapping, false imprisonment, perjury, peonage, reckless endangerment, and reckless homicide.

This Essay examines archival evidence that suggests the criminal trafficking of Black men was a common, if not widespread, practice between 1880 to 1915. Under this alternative view the term “convict leasing” is over-inclusive and mislabels these victims of human trafficking. Under the alternative view the historical Black crime rate is not only inflated but fabricated; conversely, the historical White crime rate omits a significant amount of criminal activity. This alternative view centers the criminal conduct of White beneficiaries, inviting a close accounting of their crimes and ill-gotten gains.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• From Time's "Made by History" section: Hardeep Dhillon (University of Pennsylvania), "What Was Revealed When British Officials Calculated How Much a Colonial Subject’s Life Was Worth."

• NPR quotes Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) in assessing "What's at stake as the Supreme Court hears Idaho case about abortion in emergencies."  And Professor Ziegler's op-ed on the case in the NYT is here.
  

• Holly Brewer, University of Maryland, discusses the Trump immunity case on the Law Dork podcast.  Nancy Isenberg, Louisiana State University, does so as well, here.  And Donald Nieman, University of Binghamton does here.
  

• 
  Legal history was well represented when the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era met for its annual luncheon at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.  Laura Edwards, Princeton University, gave the Distinguished Historian Address, “No Account: Rethinking the Narrative of Women and Property in the Late Nineteenth Century.”  Michael Willrich, Brandeis University, won the President’s Book Prize for American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the U.S. Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2023).  Elizabeth D. Katz, University of Florida, received Honorable Mention for the Fishel-Calhoun Prize, an article prize for new scholars, for “Sex, Suffrage, and State Constitutional Law: Women’s Legal Right to Hold Public Office,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (2022).  And Mazie Hough, University of Maine, won the 2024 JGAPE Best Article Prize for “‘There is Nothing So Sacred as Human Life:’ Infanticide and the State of Maine, 1877-1917.” (SHGAPE Blog).   
  

• Day 1 of Slavery in New Netherland and the Dutch Atlantic World, a two-day conference sponsorted by the Hew-Tork Historical Society on May 3-4, apparently is sold out, but Day 2 isn't.
  

• ICYMI: Throckmorton's Case continues to fascinate decades after we first encountered it in John Langbein's DLI  (The Leaflet).  Ronald G. Shafer on Justice Joseph P. Bradley and the Hayes-Tilden Commission (WaPo Retropolis). A notice of Michael Hoeflich’s Legal Feasts (KU News).
  

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

Booth on Policing in Atlanta after Slavery

Jonathon Booth,  University of Colorado Law School, has posted Policing after Slavery: Race, Crime, and Resistance in Atlanta, which is forthcoming in the University of Colorado Law Review:

This Article places the birth and growth of the Atlanta police in context by exploring the full scope of Atlanta’s criminal legal system in the four decades after the end of slavery. To do so, it analyzes the connections Atlantans made between race and crime, the adjudication and punishment of minor offenses, and the variety of Black protest against the criminal legal system. This Article is based in part on a variety of archival sources, including decades of arrest and prosecution data that, for the first time, allow for a quantitative assessment of the impact of the new system of policing on Atlanta’s residents.

This Article breaks new ground in four ways. First, demonstrates that Southern police forces responded to the challenges of freedom: Atlanta’s police force was designed to maintain white supremacy in an urban space in which residents, theoretically, had equal rights. Second, it shows that white citizens’ beliefs about the causes of crime and the connections between race and crime, which I call “lay criminology,” influenced policing strategies. Third, it adds a new layer to our understanding of the history of order maintenance policing by showing that mass criminalization for minor offenses such as disorderly conduct began soon after emancipation. This type of policing caused a variety of harms to the city’s Black residents, leading thousands each year to be forced to pay fines or labor for weeks on the chain gang. Fourth, it shows that the complaints of biased and brutal policing that animate contemporary police reform activists have been present for a century and a half. Atlanta’s Black residents, across class lines, protested the racist criminal legal system and police abuses while envisioning a more equitable city where improved social conditions would reduce crime.

--Dan Ernst

The Lemmon Slave Case: The Audio Drama

The Historical Society of the New York Courts has announced an event, Celebrating the Enslaved Heroine of the Lemmon Slave Case: A High-water Mark for the New York Courts.  It will include the world premiere of "How Emeline Got Free: An Untold Story of History," which the Society describes as “a 30-minute audio drama that tells the story of the landmark Lemmon Slave Case from the perspective of Emeline Thompson, the eldest of the eight enslaved women and children whose freedom was at stake at this 1852 trial.”  The playing of the drama will be followed by followed by a discussion with the director Mustapha Khan, author of The Eight: The Lemmon Slave Case and The Fight for Freedom, the Hon. Albert M. Rosenblatt, and the actors, moderated by Hon. Dianne T. Renwick, Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, First Department.
                        
The event will take place on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. From 6:00 - 8:00 PM, livestreamed and in person at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (135th St and Malcolm X Blvd) New York, NY.  Register here.

--Dan Ernst