New Release: Risen, "The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act"

New from Bloomsbury Press: The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act, by Clay Risen. From the Press:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the single most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in American history. This one law so dramatically altered American society that, looking back, it seems preordained—as Everett Dirksen, the GOP leader in the Senate and a key supporter of the bill, said, “no force is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” But there was nothing predestined about the victory: a phalanx of powerful senators, pledging to “fight to the death” for segregation, launched the longest filibuster in American history to defeat it.

The bill's passage has often been credited to the political leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, or the moral force of Martin Luther King. Yet as Clay Risen shows, the battle for the Civil Rights Act was a story much bigger than those two men. It was a broad, epic struggle, a sweeping tale of unceasing grassroots activism, ringing speeches, backroom deal-making and finally, hand-to-hand legislative combat. The larger-than-life cast of characters ranges from Senate lions like Mike Mansfield and Strom Thurmond to NAACP lobbyist Charles Mitchell, called “the 101st senator” for his Capitol Hill clout, and industrialist J. Irwin Miller, who helped mobilize a powerful religious coalition for the bill. The "idea whose time had come" would never have arrived without pressure from the streets and shrewd leadership in Congress--all captured in Risen's vivid narrative.

This critical turning point in American history has never been thoroughly explored in a full-length account. Now, New York Times editor and acclaimed author Clay Risen delivers the full story, in all its complexity and drama.

A few blurbs:

“What a compelling story for our times! Clay Risen’s riveting account of the actual legislative history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reveals the infinite complexity of its passage, never certain until the end. And for us now, Bill of the Century explains the crucial roles played by many thousands inside and outside Washington, especially civil rights campaigners and religious believers: ordinary citizens galvanized into civic engagement. This book speaks to a broad readership at our own critical point in American history.” –  Nell Irvin Painter

“The Bill of the Century is edge-of-your-seat, as-it-happens history. It’s a thrill to read and an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the civil rights era. Clay Risen makes clear that the passage of the Civil Rights Act was not, as popular mythology would have it, a one- or two-man show; it took a movement in the truest sense. Risen renders that effort—and its unsung heroes—in vivid prose, and shows just how much they had to overcome, working together, in order to bend the arc of history toward justice.” –  Jeff Shesol

Much more information is available here, at the author's website.

Sunday Book Roundup

The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Floyd Abrams's Friends of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment (Yale University Press).

The New Republic reviews Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (Simon & Schuster).

New Books in History has an interview with Benjamin Elman, author of Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press).

H-Net adds a review of Lester Langley's America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (University of Georgia Press).

And the Times Literary Supplement reviews Rana Mitter's China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane) and Frank Dikotter's The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-57 (Bloomsbury).

Bancroft Winners Announced

In case you missed it, the Bancroft Prize winners were announced Thursday.  They are Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson (Liveright Publishing Corporation / W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) and A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek by Ari Kelman (Harvard University Press, 2013).  HUP kvells over Kelman's book here.

Reinvigorating Sociolegal Studies: A Workshop

[We have the following call for participants for a workshop on "reinvigorating sociolegal studies" with "approaches that involve undergraduates."]

The Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) invites interested scholars to participate in a workshop this July to refresh and reinforce sociolegal research, especially that involving undergraduates.

With support from the National Science Foundation, CULJP will be hosting a workshop to help identify and advance the next wave of research questions in four key subfields of sociolegal studies and to expand the involvement of undergraduates in this research. Those subfields include legal consciousness, legal mobilization, cause lawyering, and judicial decision making.

In addition to presentations and moderated discussion, participating scholars with shared interests will be paired with one another to provide suggestions, constructive criticism, and encouragement as they hone potential research projects. Time also will be set aside for participants to consider and begin planning possible future research experiences for undergraduates (REU) that, with additional organizing, might be submitted to the National Science Foundation for support.

The workshop, which will involve 30 sociolegal scholars, will take place July 21-22, 2014 at the offices of the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia. Participants’ travel expenses will be covered.

Interested faculty are invited to apply to participate. Scholars should send no more than a two-page summary describing their current research agenda, what larger issues they would like to tackle in future work, and how they believe they would benefit from participating in the workshop. Please submit this summary and a current CV to alorenz@ramapo.edu by April 18. Those selected will be notified by May 12.

Please direct any questions to gould@american.edu. The organizers are especially interested in reaching scholars at under-served sociolegal undergraduate programs,

Weekend Roundup

• This month, Cato Unbound, the online journal of the Cato Institute, is hosting a symposium on The Rule of the Clan, by the former Legal History Guest Blogger Mark Weiner.  Weiner’s lead essay, The Paradox of Modern Individualism, is already posted, as are several response essays.  John Fabian Witt's is due up on March 17.

• Another former guest blogger, Elizabeth Dale (University of Florida), is currently blogging over at the Faculty Lounge on the theme of "teaching legal history as applied legal history." Check out her first posts, here and here. She also weighs in, here, on the hot topic of skills training in legal education. [KMT]

• From bookforum: the hidden histories of war crimes trials.

• "In honor of Linda and Richard Kerber’s enduring support for scholarship in the history of women, the Iowa Women’s Archives (University of Iowa Libraries) announces a grant of $1000 to fund travel to Iowa City, Iowa, to conduct research in the Iowa Women’s Archives." More information on the Linda and Richard Kerber Fund here.

• Via the Legal Scholarship Blog: Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Law Schools announce the 15th session of the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, to be held at Stanford Law School on June 27-28, 2014. The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2014.

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

Transnational Legal Histories

For readers of this blog, the notion of placing a country’s legal history into a broader transnational perspective is, of course, not new.   After all, LHB founder Mary Dudziak has been a leading pioneer in the internationalization of American history.  And there are certainly many subfields of American legal history that have regularly viewed the United States as “a nation among nations,” to use Thomas Bender’s apt phrase.  The history of immigration law and colonial legal histories, not to mention the new literature in the history of  human rights, obviously take a more cosmopolitan view of the past.  Transnational histories of the fiscal state, however, appear to have lagged behind this growing trend.  Why?

Hansford on "Cause Judging"

Justin Hansford, Saint Louis University School of Law, has posted Cause Judging, which is forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 27 (2014).  Here is the abstract:

Judge Julian Mack (LC)

Building on the framework of “cause lawyering” scholarship, this Article explores the fact that, in the tradition of “cause lawyering”, law practice animated by dedication to a cause, “cause judging” exists as well. This insight has implications for judicial ethics norms. The hyper-partisan nature of modern American life has already cast doubt on the possibility that politically appointed judges can ever truly attain the “appearance of impartiality” demanded by judicial recusal standards. Instead, for the sake of fairness, accuracy, and public respect for the judiciary, judicial ethics norms should embrace the fact that judges have moral and political ideals that inform their rulings when they exercise judicial discretion, and some judges are cause judges. This acknowledgment would allow for an analysis of our judicial recusal regime that delineates between fair and unfair instances of cause judging. To illustrate, the case of United States v. Marcus Garvey and the Agent Orange case are juxtaposed. The comparison demonstrates that, in light of the reality of cause judging, an “appearance of fairness” standard would work better than the current regime. It would recognize that transparent cause judging adds value to the profession in the same way that cause lawyering does, while additionally improving public confidence in the judiciary and reinforcing a sense of fairness.

New Release: de Bolla on the Historical Formation of Human Rights

New from Fordham University Press: Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (Dec. 2013). The Press explains:

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed in the eighteenth century.

The first chapter outlines an innovative account of concepts as cultural entities. The second develops an original methodology for recovering the historical formation of the concept of human rights based on data extracted from digital archives. This enables us to track the construction of conceptual architectures over time.

Having established the architecture of the concept of human rights, the book then examines two key moments in its historical formation: the First Continental Congress in 1775 and the publication of Tom Paine's Rights of Man in 1792. Arguing that we have yet to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of the eighteenth-century invention of the concept "rights of man," the final chapter addresses our problematic contemporary attempts to leverage human rights as the most efficacious way of achieving universal equality.

Project Muse subscribers may access the full text here.

Ruskola on Legal Orientalism

Teemu Ruskola, Emory University School of Law, has posted The World According to Orientalism, which is the foreword to a special issue on “Legal Orientalism" in the Journal of Comparative Law 7 (2013). “The essay considers briefly the methodological status of Orientalism in the study of law.”

Policy History 2014

The preliminary program for the Policy History Conference, to be held in Columbus, Ohio, June 4-7, is here.  Two of your Legal History Bloggers are on it.  Karen is presenting “Administrative Constitutionalism and the Welfare State: An Historical Case Study,” and I am chairing the session “Building a Weak State: Public-Private Governance in Twentieth Century America,” with papers by Laura Phillips Sawyer, Sarah Milov, Quinn Mulroy, and Joanna Grisinger, and a comment by Edward Balleisen.

New Release: "Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays of Robert L. Benson"

New from the University of Notre Dame Press: Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays of Robert L. Benson, edited by Loren J. Weber in collaboration with Giles Constable and Richard H. Rouse. From the Press:

Robert L. Benson (1925–1996), professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, was one of the most learned and original medievalists of his generation. At his untimely death he left behind a considerable body of unpublished writings, many of which he had revised and refined and in some cases presented in lectures and at conferences over many years. The best and most significant of these previously unpublished writings are collected in this volume.

The essays in Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric span Benson’s entire career from 1955 to 1994. They comprise a rich collection covering a vast range of topics in political, intellectual, legal, and ecclesiastical history, rhetoric, and historiography. Art historians will find the three essays on medieval images of rulership and medieval art valuable, and literary scholars will be interested in the essays on, among others, Boncompagno da Signa. The volume concludes with several occasional, historiographical essays, including a spirited defense of Ernst Kantorowicz against Norman Cantor and an entertaining talk on “the medievalist as literary hero.” The volume begins with a brief biographical sketch and appreciation of Benson by Horst Fuhrmann.

An excerpt and the Table of Contents are available here.

Deadline Extended for Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

We've previously announced this year's Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition: The Competition Committee has decided to extend the deadline from March 17, 2014, to April 14, 2014. Here's the text of our previous announcement

The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Cohen’s scholarly work is in the fields of legal research, rare books, and historical bibliography. The purpose of the competition is to encourage scholarship in the areas of legal history, rare law books, and legal archives, and to acquaint students with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and law librarianship.

Students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, or related fields are eligible to enter the competition. Both full- and part-time students are eligible. Membership in AALL is not required.

Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives.
The winner will receive a $500.00 prize from Gale Cengage Learning and up to $1,000 for expenses associated with attendance at the AALL Annual Meeting.The runner-up will have the opportunity to publish the second-place essay in LH&RB’s online scholarly journal Unbound: An Annual Review of Legal History and Rare Books.

More information is available here.

New Release: Molina, "How Race Is Made in America"

New from the University of California Press: Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Nov. 2013). The Press describes the book as follows:

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.

Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups. 

A few blurbs:

"Molina provides a fresh, sophisticated analysis of the powerful racial 'scripts' generated in twentieth-century US political and legal culture, and of the Mexican population's unique vulnerability in the 1920s and after as eminently 'deportable.' This book's importance is sadly substantiated by twenty-first-century headlines about immigration policy, 'papers please' laws, and urban policing. A critical contribution." --Matthew Frye Jacobson

"A compelling, briskly written, deeply researched, and closely argued book that makes signal contributions on many fronts." --David Roediger

More information is available here.

Washington History Seminar, Spring 2014

Here are the remaining meetings of the Washington History Seminar for Spring 2014:

March 17: David Chappell, University of Oklahoma, U.S. Civil Rights Movement (tentative)

March 24: Nancy Beck Young, University of Houston on Why We Fight: The Politics of World War II.

March 31: Sergey Radchenko, former Wilson Center fellow, on his new book Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War.

April 7: Sophia Rosenfeld, University of Virginia, on the history of choice

April 14: First night of Passover, no meeting

April 21: Hugh Wilford, California State University at Santa Barbara, on the history of the CIA (confirmed, checking funding)

April 28: James Graham Wilson, U.S. Department of State, on his new book, The Triumph of Improvisation, on who and what led to the end of the Cold War

May 5: Thomas Boghardt, U.S. Army Center of Military History, on U.S. intelligence operations in early Cold War Europe

May 12: Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania, “Bankrupt: Detroit and the Past and Future of Urban America”

Sponsored jointly by the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Washington History Seminar meets each week, January to May and September to December, on Monday afternoons at 4 o’clock at the Wilson Center. It aims to facilitate understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and all places and from a variety of perspectives.

New Release: Ackerman, "We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution"

New from Harvard University Press: the third volume of Bruce Ackerman's We the People. From the Press:

The Civil Rights Revolution carries Bruce Ackerman’s sweeping reinterpretation of constitutional history into the era beginning with Brown v. Board of Education. From Rosa Parks’s courageous defiance, to Martin Luther King’s resounding cadences in “I Have a Dream,” to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of Congress, to the Supreme Court’s decisions redefining the meaning of equality, the movement to end racial discrimination decisively changed our understanding of the Constitution.

Ackerman anchors his discussion in the landmark statutes of the 1960s: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Challenging conventional legal analysis and arguing instead that constitutional politics won the day, he describes the complex interactions among branches of government—and also between government and the ordinary people who participated in the struggle. He showcases leaders such as Everett Dirksen, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon who insisted on real change, not just formal equality, for blacks and other minorities.

The Civil Rights Revolution transformed the Constitution, but not through judicial activism or Article V amendments. The breakthrough was the passage of laws that ended the institutionalized humiliations of Jim Crow and ensured equal rights at work, in schools, and in the voting booth. This legislation gained congressional approval only because of the mobilized support of the American people—and their principles deserve a central place in the nation’s history. Ackerman’s arguments are especially important at a time when the Roberts Court is actively undermining major achievements of America’s Second Reconstruction.

A few blurbs:

“Bruce Ackerman has already transformed our understanding of the Constitution and constitutional interpretation. With this essential volume, he enables us to view the civil rights revolution in an entirely new way.”—Laura Kalman 

“The American people have reconstructed their constitutional system from time to time, but these ‘constitutional moments’ never roll out exactly the same way. The Civil Rights Revolution, the third volume of the Ackerman synthesis, sorts through the differences among these transformations, bringing to light the common principles and processes that impart foundational status to their institutional and normative commitments. Today, with the legacy of the civil rights revolution in doubt, Ackerman’s benchmarks are invaluable, both for assessing the constitutional commitments established in those years and for evaluating the legitimacy of efforts to upend them.”—Stephen Skowronek

More information is available here.

Konig on Thomas Jefferson, Antislavery Lawyer

On March 28, David Konig, Washington University, will present the paper “Thomas Jefferson, Antislavery Lawyer” to the Early American Seminar Series at the University of Maryland.  The respondent is Maryland’s Ashley Towle.  According to the Seminar:

Free and open to all, the Early American Seminar Series brings senior scholars, junior faculty, and advanced graduate students to College Park to discuss their work in progress. The seminar is composed of graduate students and faculty from the University of Maryland and a host of other area institutions and is convened by Professors Rick Bell, Holly Brewer, Clare Lyons, and Whit Ridgway.

The seminar meets at regular intervals throughout the academic year on Fridays at 5pm in Taliaferro Hall 2110.  Papers (typically 30-40 pages) are pre-circulated among seminar participants seven days in advance of each meeting. The ninety-minute workshop is followed by dinner with the presenter at a local restaurant.

To join the seminar email list or to apply to present a work in progress in future cycles, please contact Prof. Rick Bell (rjbell@umd.edu) or Prof. Holly Brewer (hbrewer@umd.edu).

Medieval Legal History: An ASLH "Preconference"

[We're moving this post up, as the deadline of April 1 is approaching.]

[Via H-Law, we have the following call for submissions for a preconference at next year's annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.]

The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) invites paper submissions for its second annual pre-conference workshop, which will be held immediately preceding the ASLH annual meeting in Denver on Nov. 6, 2014.  The ASLH Workshop is intended to promote scholarship in areas of legal history that have been traditionally underrepresented at ASLH meetings and in the Law and History Review.  This year's workshop topic is Medieval Legal History, with medieval broadly defined as between late antiquity and early modernity.  We are particularly interested in papers discussing Byzantine, Canon, Chinese, Islamic, or Jewish law, as well as other legal traditions or systems that operated in wide-ranging parts of the medieval world.  The workshop is being sponsored by the ASLH in order to promote innovative approaches to the study of medieval legal history across geographic boundaries and to create a community of legal historians who grapple with medieval legal texts and contexts.

The ASLH Legal History Workshop will bring together authors and noted scholars in the field in order to work collaboratively toward refining scholarly writing.  In order to keep the workshop size small, only three to four papers will be selected from among responses to this general call.  Each selected paper will be assigned one commentator who will prepare substantive feedback about the structure, organization, methodology, and theoretical approaches of the paper.  All papers will be pre-circulated to participants and to commentators in advance of the workshop and must be read prior to the workshop meeting.  Authors will not present their papers.  At the workshop, each commentator will be given half an hour to discuss his/her assigned paper, followed by an hour of general discussion in the larger group.  In this way, each individual author will receive feedback from all the participants of the workshop.  ASLH will provide limited funding for travel expenses and accommodations for authors of selected papers.  (Participation in the ASLH Legal History Workshop does not preclude individuals from presenting at the ASLH annual meeting.)

We invite submissions that engage any aspect of medieval legal history from scholars at any point in their academic careers.  Interested authors should submit their work-in-progress papers to aslh.workshop@gmail.com on or before April 1, 2014.  Papers should include complete contact information, word count, and an abstract (identifying the geographic and temporal scope of the article); papers should not exceed 15,000 words (including footnotes).  Submissions must not have already appeared in print or have been accepted for publication.  Authors of selected papers will be informed on or before June 15, 2014.  Please direct questions to the ASLH Workshop Coordinator: Lena Salaymeh, Robbins Postdoctoral Fellow (lenas@law.berkeley.edu).

By participating in the workshop, authors agree to revise their papers thoroughly and to submit them for publication consideration (i.e. blind peer review) with Law & History Review on or before February 1, 2015.  (Submissions to Law & History Review should be not more than 12,000 words, including footnotes.)  Upon peer review approval, Law & History Review will publish the papers either together (in an issue dedicated to medieval legal history) or separately.  Authors participating in the Workshop consent to publishing in Law & History Review, even if publication delays occur.  However, participation in the ASLH Workshop is not a guarantee of publication in the Law & History Review.  (Also, the ASLH Workshop organizers and the Editor of Law & History Review cannot guarantee a specific publication date.)

Women's Legal History: A Reading List

In observance of Women's History Month, over at Gender and the Law Blog Tracy Thomas, Akron Law, has posted a reading list on women's legal history.

Walker on the Progressive Origins of Mass Incarceration

Anders Walker, Saint Louis University School of Law, has posted The New Jim Crow? Recovering the Progressive Origins of Mass Incarceration, which is forthcoming in the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.  Here is the abstract:

This article revisits the claim that mass incarceration constitutes a new form of racial segregation, or Jim Crow. Drawing from historical sources, it demonstrates that proponents of the analogy miss an important commonality between the two phenomena, namely the debt that each owe to progressive and/or liberal politics. Though generally associated with repression and discrimination, both Jim Crow and mass incarceration owe their existence in part to enlightened reforms aimed at promoting black interests; albeit with perverse results. Recognizing the aspirational origins of systematic discrimination marks an important facet of comprehending the persistence of racial inequality in the United States.

Sunday Book Roundup

This week the internet world of book reviews is light on legal history. But the Washington Post has an engaging review of Myra MacPherson's The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age (Twelve).

"Given how much scurrilous chatter surrounded the sisters, and how far they bent the truth to suit their ends, MacPherson is often tasked with choosing between rival tall tales. However, she resists the temptation to pick the most flattering story and cast the sisters simply as progressive heroines. Both were willing to use their femininity, as well as their feminism, to get what they wanted; Victoria especially could be self-centered and obsessed with her own persecution; and both sisters became conservative in later life, publicly repudiating most of their “sex radical” beliefs.
They left New York for London in 1877, in the wake of the Beecher trial, and “decided to use draconian measures to sanitize their image.” Like many of their most outlandish ruses, it worked — within a few years, both were married to wealthy Englishmen. By the early 20th century, they were recognized as suffrage pioneers, although to improve society they now prescribed religion and eugenics rather than female emancipation."

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a detailed review of The Death Penalty, Volume I: The Seminars of Jacques Derrida translated by Peggy Kamuf (University of Chicago Press).

"Jacques Derrida’s The Death Penalty (Volume I), the first half of a two-year seminar he gave from 1999 to 2001 in Paris and then again at American universities, offers a new perspective on the vexing, seemingly intractable debates that surround capital punishment in this country. The book’s appearance will undoubtedly be greeted with enthusiasm by those who have read and appreciated Derrida’s writings for some time (and there are many), but do its observations and arguments have the potential to reach a broader audience? During his lifetime, Derrida’s scholarly work exerted enormous influence on academic practices around the world, profoundly changing the ways people in numerous disciplines thought and wrote about thinking and writing. Like Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault, Derrida also came to enjoy considerable celebrity beyond the ivory tower. Profiled in news features and documentary films, he met with world leaders and figured in pop songs. His impact beyond the academy was registered in more subtle ways, as well. To this day, many who have never read a word of his work casually use the verb “to deconstruct.” For his part, Derrida expressed considerable unease about the “temptation” for intellectuals to “renounce the academic discipline normally required ‘inside’ the university and to try instead to exert pressure through the press and through public opinion, in order to acquire an influence or a semblance of authority that has no relation to their own work.”"

Common-Place reviews three books on emancipation in a piece titled, "The (Not So) Distant Kinship of Race, Family, and Law in the Struggle for Freedom." Books reviewed are Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard's Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press), Sydney Nathans's To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Harvard University Press), and Mark Auslander's The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of Georgia Press).


Two pieces this week, one in the Washington Post and a second in the New York Times, write about Peniel E. Joseph's Stokely, A Life (Basic).

"With “Stokely: A Life,” the historian Peniel E. Joseph says he set out to “recover” Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “black power” and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, a man whose diminished historical footprint, Mr. Joseph writes, “impoverishes our understanding of the most important movement in our national history.”"

New Books in History talks with Jose Angel Hernandez, author of Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of US-Mexico Borderlands (Cambridge).

"Americans talk a lot about the flow of Mexican immigrants across their southern border. To some that flow is seen as patently illegal and dangerous. To others it’s seen as unstoppable and essential for the functioning of the U.S. economy. Everyone agrees that something must be done about it though, in fact, little is ever done. It’s an American problem that seems to have no American solution. But, as José Angel Hernández points out in his pathbreaking book Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Cambridge University Press, 2012) , it’s not just an American problem: it’s also a Mexican one and always has been. "

On HNN, Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson's Struggle to Save the University that Changed America (University of Virginia Press) by journalists Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos is reviewed.

A Socio-Legal History of the Fiscal State

As I mentioned in the conclusion of my last post, I thought I would share with LHB readers how I came to write a socio-legal history of the modern fiscal state.

Like many first books by academics, Making the Modern American Fiscal State began as a dissertation.  After graduating from law school and working for a couple of years in the field of taxation and structured finance, I entered graduate school to study American intellectual and legal history.  I had intended to write a thesis exploring the economic ideas undergirding modern American law and political economy, a sort of cross between the work of Ed Purcell and Martin Sklar.

In fact, Purcell’s Crisis of Democratic Theory was an inspirational book for me.  It was an assigned text in college (in a survey course with David Hollinger), in law school (in a Jurisprudence class with Gary Peller), and in graduate school (in a seminar with Amy Stanley).  But while I came to grad school with a particular set of interests, a funny thing happened along the way.

Weekend Roundup

Philip Girard

• Philip Girard (Osgoode Hall Law School), a recently named honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History, is scheduled to give the plenary address at this year's annual meeting. (Hat tip: Canadian Legal History Blog)  

• Via In Custodia Legis: The Magna Carta is coming to the Library of Congress.

• Stop defending the humanities? Simon During makes the case. (Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily)

• Via H-Law: the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University has announced a call for short articles on the Election of 2004.

• If you're in New Haven, check out the Yale Law Library's new exhibit, "350 Years of Rebellious Lawyering." 

• Legal History Blogger Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Harvard Law School, is to deliver the Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lecture in Legal History at the University of Chicago Law School on May 8, 2014.  

• "A Constitutional History of the Long 1960s,”  Risa Goluboff’s lecture on November 12, 2013, marking her appointment as John Allan Love Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law is downloadable here.

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

Kennedy to Lecture on Thurgood Marshall at N-YHS

The New-York Historical Society is offering a limited number of free tickets to the latest lecture in the Barnard and Irene Schwartz Distinguished Speakers Series, Justice Thurgood Marshall, to be delivered by Randall Kennedy of the Harvard Law School.  According to the announcement:

As a powerful voice in the battle for Civil Rights and the first African American appointed to the nation's highest court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was among the scores of African Americans across the country who were conquering color barriers in government, sports, music, and culture. Randall Kennedy, former law clerk to Justice Marshall, offers an in-depth look at this monumental figure and his enduring legacy.

The lecture will take place at the Society on Tuesday, March 11, commencing at 6:30 PM.  To obtain a free ticket, “please use code HIST77 when ordering over the phone at (212) 485-9268 or in person at the Museum Admission desk.” The offer is not available online.

New Release: Martel on the History of Morals Regulation in Canada

Mary Stokes at the Canadian Legal History Blog encourages readers "interested in the history of norms and moral regulation, both legal and legal-pluralist," to check out a new release from Wilfrid Laurier University Press: Canada the Good: A Short History of Vice since 1500, by Marcel Martel (York University). Here's a description from the Press:

To invest in vice can be a sound financial decision, but despite the lure of healthy profits, individuals and mutual funds have been reluctant to invest in this type of stock. After all, who would take pride in supporting the tobacco industry, knowing it sells a deadly product? And what social responsibilities do investors bear with respect to compulsive gamblers who have lost so much money that suicide becomes an attractive option?

Canada the Good considers more than five hundred years of debates and regulation that have conditioned Canadians’ attitudes towards certain vices. Early European settlers implemented a Christian moral order that regulated sexual behaviour, gambling, and drinking. Later, some transgressions were diagnosed as health issues that required treatment. Those who refused the label of illness argued that behaviours formerly deemed as vices were within the range of normal human behaviour.

This historical synthesis demonstrates how moral regulation has changed over time, how it has shaped Canadians’ lives, why some debates have almost disappeared and others persist, and why some individuals and groups have felt empowered to tackle collective social issues. Against the background of the evolution of the state, the enlargement of the body politic, and mounting forays into court activism, the author illustrates the complexity over time of various forms of social regulation and the control of vice.

More information is available here.

Belt on Religion, Madness and Culpability

Rabia Belt, a Research Academic Fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center, has posted When God Demands Blood: Unusual Minds and the Troubled Juridical Ties of Religion, Madness, and Culpability.  Here is the abstract:

The deific decree doctrine allows criminal defendants who believe that God commanded them to kill to plead not guilty by reason of insanity to murder. The insanity defense has remained moored to its Judeo-Christian roots, which has artificially limited its bounds. While civil law has focused on individualism within religion, criminal law has imposed state-defined limits on what religion (or socially acceptable religion) is. This Article argues that the deific decree doctrine is too closely tied to artificial limits on insanity imposed by 19th century developments in the mental health profession and criminal law. The doctrine unacceptably privileges certain mentally ill criminal defendants whose delusions fit within an outdated model that is not psychiatrically valid. Moreover, it has disparate gender consequences that harm women with postpartum psychosis who kill their children while supporting men who kill their female partners. The Article concludes by calling for the end of the deific decree doctrine and expanding the insanity defense so it more accurately tracks psychiatric understanding of mental illness.

Progressive Taxation and Fiscal Citizenship

Thanks to Dan, Karen, and the rest of the folks at the Legal History Blog for inviting me to be a guest blogger this month.  I’ve been a long-time reader of LHB and other blogs, but I’m a first time blogger. I’m looking forward to the experience.

Bernard Hibbitts is a tough act to follow, and I doubt I’ll be nearly as prolific or as inspiring as he was in his posts, but I hope to use my time here to share some background on my research and teaching, and to revisit (perhaps later this month) some of the pressing issues facing legal historians and historians more generally during this tumultuous time in higher education.

Let me start, though, with a brief post about my recently published book, Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929.

New Release: Hull on International Law during the Great War

New from Cornell University Press: A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, by Isabel V. Hull (Cornell University). A description from the Press:

A century after the outbreak of the Great War, we have forgotten the central role that international law and the dramatically different interpretations of it played in the conflict’s origins and conduct. In A Scrap of Paper, Isabel V. Hull compares wartime decision making in Germany, Great Britain, and France, weighing the impact of legal considerations in each. Throughout, she emphasizes the profound tension between international law and military necessity in time of war, and demonstrates how differences in state structures and legal traditions shaped the way in which each of the three belligerents fought the war

Hull focuses on seven cases in which each government’s response was shaped by its understanding of and respect for the law: Belgian neutrality, the land war in the west, the occupation of enemy territory, the blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new weaponry (including poison gas and the zeppelin), and reprisals. Drawing on voluminous research in German, British, and French archives, the author reconstructs the debates over military decision making and clarifies the role played by law—where it constrained action, where it was manipulated to serve military need, where it was simply ignored, and how it developed in the crucible of combat. She concludes that Germany did not speak the same legal language as the two liberal democracies, with disastrous and far-reaching consequences. The first book on international law and the Great War published since 1920, A Scrap of Paper is a passionate defense of the role that the law must play to govern interstate relations in both peace and war.

A few blurbs:

"Over the last decade, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the laws of armed conflict have become matters of popular and public interest. Despite the growth of international humanitarian law, much of the law with which we still operate dates from the fifteen years just before the First World War and was applied within it. A Scrap of Paper is the first book to pay sustained attention to the subject of international law in the First World War since 1920. It is not only a timely book, it is an overdue one, and its impact on the study of the war will be important and game-changing. Isabel V. Hull has the linguistic range and scholarly tools to tackle the subject in the truly comparative fashion that its complexity demands."—Sir Hew Strachan 

"Isabel V. Hull's passionate narrative of the role of international law in the decision-making processes in Berlin and London during the First World War opens a strikingly original perspective on the consciousness of the wartime actors. This was a war waged also by legal arguments. In the end, the inability and unwillingness of Imperial Germany to defend its case in legal terms crucially undermined its war effort. This is not only superb history, but also the most powerful defense of the role of law in international crisis that I have read, and as such is of obvious contemporary relevance."—Martti Koskenniemi

More information is available here. 

Parent and Govern, "Florida and the Film Industry"

Mary Pergola Parent (University of Notre Dame, Dept. of Film, Television & Theatre) and
Kevin H. Govern (Ave Maria School of Law/California University of Pennsylvania/CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice) have posted "Florida and the Film Industry: An Epic Tale of Talent, Landscape, and the Law." The article appears in Volume 38 of the Nova Law Review (2013). Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

This article chronicles the development of the Florida film and entertainment industry, from its inception to the present day, as a product of environment, opportunity, economics, law, and policy. The film and entertainment industry is one of the most significant contributors to Florida’s local, regional, and global image, through depiction of its people, cities, industry, and nature. As an ever-growing contributor to the state’s economy through job creation, service industry revenues, and tax collections, Florida’s relationship with the film and entertainment industry has gone from an ad hoc approach to a carefully strategized, multi-year effort, fueled by the Florida Film and Entertainment Industry Financial Incentive Program, to encourage the use of the state as a location for all facets of digital, film, and television production.

This article will address in Part I the earliest history of film in Florida from the late nineteenth century birth and flourishing through the 1917 transfer to California and revitalization during World War II. Part II considers the state’s economic, political, and legal enticements for the film industry to grow in the state and to match the public relations campaign to draw tourism to the Sunshine State. Part III outlines the essence of 1950s blockbuster hits that gave impetus to rules and laws to solidify the state’s relationship with the film industry. As commented upon in Part IV, Florida’s compelling call to the industry reached New York City and beyond, bringing rare talent that would further expand the industry’s reach and hold in Florida. Worthy of Part V’s particular focus, mesmerizing Miami reached international recognition as a thriving hub for both television and film from the 1950s onward, and industry contractual practices there set the standard for the entire film and television industry thenceforth. Part VI summarizes the background, legislative authority, and practical efforts of the Governor’s Office of Film and Entertainment, followed by the tax incentives under state and federal law which caused the film and television industry efforts in Florida to expand exponentially in the twenty-first century onward in Part VII; specifically with some of the most notable progeny of this effort and their value to state, regional, and the national economies showcased in Part VIII. Part IX highlights how past is prologue for Florida film and television, why current state and federal initiatives will prevent major production efforts from becoming runaway boons to other states and countries, and the demonstrable economic benefits those laws and policies have already produced for Florida in particular, and the United States in general. In conclusion, Part X predicts how faithfulness and fidelity to the film and television industry will continue to reap benefits in a multi-billion dollar relationship continuing into its second century, with over 120 films and television shows to its credit and counting.

The full text is available here.

Cromwell and Reid Book Prizes Announced

This is a joint announcement of the Cromwell Book Prize of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the John Phillip Reid Book Award of the American Society for Legal History.

The Reid Award and the Cromwell Book Prize are mutually exclusive. The Cromwell Book Prize is awarded for first books, wholly or primarily written while the author was untenured. The Reid Award is for a first or subsequent book written by a mid-career or senior scholar. For advice in doubtful cases, please consult Jane Dailey, Chair of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Subcommittee, and Sophia Lee, chair of the ASLH Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award.

Cromwell Book Prize

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards annually a $5000 book prize for excellence in scholarship in the field of American Legal History by a junior scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty not yet tenured. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. The prize is limited to a first book, wholly or primarily written while the author was untenured. The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. The Committee will consider books bearing a copyright date of 2013.

To nominate a book, please send copies of it and the curriculum vitae of its author to John D, Gordan, III, Chair of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee, and to each member of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Committee with a postmark no later than June 15, 2014.

John D. Gordan, III
Secretary of the Cromwell Foundation
1133 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10128

Professor Jane Dailey
Chair, Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Subcommittee
600 N. Fairbanks Ct., #3702
Chicago, IL 60611
email: dailey@uchicago.edu

Professor Andrew Wender Cohen
Syracuse University
412 Salt Springs St.
Fayetteville, NY, 13066

Professor Thomas C. Mackey
101 Gottschalk Hall
Department of History
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292

Professor Laura F. Edwards
History Department
Box 90719
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708

John Phillip Reid Book Award

Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The award is given on the recommendation of the Society's Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award.

For the 2014 prize, the Reid Award Committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book that bears a copyright date in 2013. Nominations for the Reid Award should be submitted by June 15, 2014, by sending a curriculum vitae of the author and one copy of the book to each member of the committee:

Professor Sophia Lee
Chair, Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award
University of Pennsylvania Law School
3501 Sansom St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104
slee@law.upenn.edu

Professor Richard J. Ross
University of Illinois College of Law
504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign, IL 61820

Professor Laura Weinrib
University of Chicago Law School
1111 E. 60th St., Room 410
Chicago, IL 60637

Professor Steven Wilf
Law School
University of Connecticut
65 Elizabeth Street
Hartford, Connecticut 06105

Professor Nicholas Parrillo
Yale Law School
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520

LPBR Reviews Puddister, McGinnis & Rappoport, Hirabayashi, and More

The Law & Politics Book Review is out with a new batch of reviews. Items of interest include:

Kate Puddister (Department of Political Science, McGill University) reviews Grace Li Xiu Woo, GHOST DANCING WITH COLONIALISM: DECOLONIZATION AND INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AT THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA (UBC Press, 2011).

Whitley Kaufman (Departments of Philosophy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell) reviews John O. McGinnis & Michael B. Rappoport, ORIGINALISM AND THE GOOD CONSTITUTION (Harvard University Press, 2013).

James C. Foster (Political Science, Oregon State University-Cascades) reviews Gordon K. Hirabayashi with James A. Hirabayashi and Lane Rio Hirabayashi, A PRINCIPLED STAND: THE STORY OF HIRABAYASHI v. UNITED STATES (University of Washington Press, 2013).

Jeffrey Sanders (Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Montana State University-Billings) reviews Shelley A.M. Gavigan, HUNGER, HORSES, AND GOVERNMENT MEN: CRIMINAL LAW ON THE ABORIGINAL PLAINS, 1870-1905 (UBC Press. 2012).

Aaron J. Ley (Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Dakota) reviews Alexander Wohl, FATHER, SON, AND CONSTITUTION: HOW JUSTICE TOM CLARK AND ATTORNEY GENERAL RAMSEY CLARK SHAPED AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (University Press of Kansas, 2013).

Staci L. Beavers (Department of Political Science, California State University San Marcos) reviews Yasuhide Kawashima, THE TOKYO ROSE CASE: TREASON ON TRIAL (University Press of Kansas, 2013).

Fernandez on Braverman, "Zooland"

JOTWELL's legal history section has posted some new material: Angela Fernandez (University of Toronto) writes about her appreciation for Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford University Press, 2012). Here's an excerpt from the beginning of Fernandez's short essay:

Irus Braverman’s recent book Zooland is a wonderful read on a topic that is of both historical and current interest—zoos. How should we view zoos given the frank admission by all, including zoo advocates, that zoo animals are captives, forced to forgo what would otherwise be a superior existence in order to serve the pedagogical and conservationist agenda that zoos have cultivated as justifications for their existence? . . . 

Legal historians will be interested in the shift Braverman describes from zoos as sites of entertainment, a variation on the old menagerie style collection of animals, preferably exotic, that would then perform various colonialist and empire-building functions, to the (arguably) more laudable conservationist rationale and its accompanying practices often targeted at educating adults and children about species and habitat decline and destruction. . . .

Read on here.

New Books in Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education occasionally rounds up new books in higher education. Here are some items of interest from the most recent roundup:

Jerry A. Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2013). The Press explains:

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity is illusory and that critiques of established disciplines are often overstated and misplaced.

Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.

Robin L. West, Teaching Law: Justice, Politics, and the Demands of Professionalism  (Cambridge University Press, 2013). From the Press:

Teaching Law reimagines law-school teaching and scholarship by going beyond crises now besetting the legal academy and examining deeper and longer-lasting challenges. The book argues that the legal academy has long neglected the needs to focus teaching and scholarship on the ideals of justice that law fitfully serves, the political origins of law, and the development of a respectful but critical relationship with the legal profession. This book suggests reforms to improve the quality of legal education and responds to concerns that law schools eschew the study of justice, rendering students amoralist; that law schools slight the political sources of law, particularly in legislative action; and that law schools have ignored the profession entirely. These areas of neglect have impoverished legal teaching and scholarship as the academy is refashioned in response to current financial exigencies, and addressing them is long overdue.

Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2013). The Press describes the book as follows:

The Value of the Humanities provides a critical account of the principal arguments used to defend the value of the Humanities. The claims considered are: that the Humanities study the meaning-making practices of culture, and bring to their work a distinctive understanding of what constitutes knowledge and understanding; that, though useful to society in many ways, they remain laudably at odds with, or at a remove from, instrumental use value; that they contribute to human happiness; that they are a force for democracy; and that they are a good in themselves, to be valued 'for their own sake'. Engaging closely with contemporary literary and philosophical work in the field from the UK and US, Helen Small distinguishes between arguments that retain strong Victorian roots (Mill on happiness; Arnold on use value) and those that have developed or been substantially altered since. Unlike many works in this field, The Value of the Humanities is not a polemic or a manifesto. Its purpose is to explore the grounds for each argument, and to test its validity for the present day. Tough-minded, alert to changing historical conditions for argument and changing styles of rhetoric, it promises to sharpen the terms of the public debate. 

Fleming to Georgetown Law

Anne Fleming will be joining the law faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center this summer. A magna cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School, Fleming is currently a Climenko Fellow at HLS and completing a Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania.  She has practiced as a staff attorney for South Brooklyn Legal Services, representing low-income homeowners facing foreclosure. Her dissertation in progress is “City of Debtors: Law, Loan Sharks, and the Shadow Economy of Urban Poverty, 1900-1970,” which traces the history of small-sum lending and consumer credit regulation in New York City from the Progressive Era through the War on Poverty.  She received the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Award of the American Society for Legal History for her paper The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City, which she later published in the Law and History Review in 2012.  Forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal is The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the "Law of the Poor."

CFP: Green Capitalism

Legal Scholarship Blog has alerted us to the call for the conference Green Capitalism? Exploring the Crossroads of Environmental and Business History, to be held October 30-31, 2014, at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, DE.  The conference is sponsored by the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society and the German Historical Institute.

This conference hopes to point to fresh opportunities for joining the insights of environmental and business history. We are especially interested in providing historical perspectives on a question of obvious relevance today: Can capitalism be green - or at least greener? Our title - "Green Capitalism?" - is admittedly drawn from contemporary discourse. But we are convinced that history can provide invaluable insights into the complex and changing relationship between business and the environment.

We invite papers that consider in specific historical contexts the extent to which the business enterprises that are central to capitalism operated in an environmentally sound or detrimental manner by the way they dealt with their refuse, by managing their use of resources, and mitigating or ignoring any harmful impact on those who handled their products or are affected by their waste. Though business activities have had many deleterious environmental consequences, businesses sometimes have acted to protect the environment, reduce their direct and indirect environmental impact, and promote environmental reform in society. That is true now, but it also was sometimes the case long before the rise of modern environmentalism.

Papers can take many forms. We expect that many papers will focus on the history of particular firms. Others may analyze historical controversies about the use of resources or the cultural, political, and environmental factors that have shaped how business treats the environment. Given the global nature of business activity and environmental concerns, we encourage papers that take a transnational perspective on these issues. The papers may address any area of the world in the industrial era, roughly after 1800.

More

Oakes on "the Scorpion's Sting"

James Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will deliver the Elmer Louis Kayser Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 at 5:00pm, at George Washington University, 1957 E St. NW  Room 113.  His topic is "The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War.”  For more information, write arnesen@gwu.edu

Ward on Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England

Goodness: a 20 percent discount for LHB readers!

First: the author and his book.  Ian Ward, a Professor of Law at Newcastle University and the author of a number of books on law, literature and history, has published Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England with Hart Publishing Co.  Here is the press's summary:

The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.

The TOC and the Introduction are available here.

And here's the bit about the discount:

Order Online in the US
If you would like to place an order you can do so through the Hart Publishing website. To receive the discount please mention ref: ‘LEGALHISTORYBLOG’ in the special instructions field. Please note that the discount will not be shown on your order but will be applied when your order is processed.

Order Online in the UK, EU and ROW
If you would like to place an order you can do so through the Hart Publishing website. To receive the discount please type the reference ‘LEGALHISTORYBLOG’ in the voucher code field and click ‘apply’.

Sunday Book Roundup

Common-Place has a lengthy review of Nicholas P. Miller's The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State (Oxford University Press). The reviewer calls the book

"an important contribution to the growing literature on religious freedom and separation of church and state in the colonial era and early republic. Miller argues that previous studies of the rise of these concepts have overemphasized the secular influences on their development. He states his own "quite simple" thesis straightforwardly at the beginning of the book: "Protestant commitments, at least as maintained by some dissenting Protestants, to the right of private judgment in matters of biblical interpretation … led to a respect for individual conscience that propelled ideas of religious liberty and disestablishment in the early modern West. These religious commitments … were a central influence in the official disestablishment of religion in America during the colonial period and the early republic"."

This week, David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Knopf) is reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

"David Brion Davis has spent a lifetime contemplating the worst of humanity and the best of humanity—the terrible cruelty and injustice of slavery, perpetuated over centuries and across borders and oceans, overturned at last because of ideas and ideals given substance through human action and human agency. He concludes his trilogy by contemplating whether the abolition of slavery might serve as precedent or model for other acts of moral grandeur. His optimism is guarded. “Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate.” Davis does, after all, describe the narrative of emancipation to which he has devoted his professional life as “astonishing.” But even in his amazement, he has written an inspiring story of possibility. “An astonishing historical achievement really matters.” And so does its history."

Two trials are revisited this week in book reviews. Kate Colquhoun's Did She Kill Him? A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery & Arsenic (Little) about Florence Maybrick's 1889 trial for poisoning her husband is reviewed in The Guardian. If you're interested in a true crime novel with more recent subject matter, The Washington Post reviews Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery and a Masquerade (Liveright) by Walter Kirn.

H-Net reviews The American South and the Atlantic World (University Press of Florida) edited by Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A. Link. Included in the compilation is a piece by Martha Jones.

"The complicated nature of post-Revolutionary freedom and slavery also lie at the heart of legal historian Martha S. Jones’s illuminating look at the case of Jean Baptiste. Baptiste was an eight-year-old black refugee of the Haitian Revolution eventually settled in Baltimore. Treated as a slave dependent, Baptiste learned that French proclamations in effect during his time in Haiti in the 1790s would have made him a free man. Two decades after his arrival on U.S. shores under threats of removal to southwestern slave markets, he initiated a freedom suit. Baltimore jurists had to contemplate and contest the legal meaning of freedom not primarily based on Maryland law, but on French colonial law and their own reading of overly reified and racialized English accounts of the Haitian Revolution."

Another edited volume is The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (University of Toronto Press) edited by Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan (reviewed here on H-Net).

"However, over the last decade the growing number of studies about loyalism in the Revolutionary Atlantic world has revealed the importance of loyalists and royalism to a clear understanding of the era. In The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era, editors Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan explore how loyalism became an influential movement in the British Empire, arguing that it fundamentally shaped the British Atlantic and that the true consequences of colonization and the American Revolution cannot be fully understood without first understanding loyalism in the Atlantic world. " 

Also on H-Net is a review of Victoria Vantoch's Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon (University of Pennsylvania Press).

The Los Angeles Times discusses The Daphne awards for the best books published in 1963. Those on the non-fiction shortlist include The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter.

Welcome, Ajay Mehrotra!

Joining us this month as Guest Blogger is Ajay K. Mehrotra, Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Research, and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow and the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Indiana-Bloomington’s History Department.  A scholar of taxation and of American legal history, Professor Mehrtotra has, with ASLH President Michael Grossberg, co-directed the Indiana University Center for Law, Society & Culture.  He has also been a member of a national, interdisciplinary network of scholars that created the field of "new fiscal sociology."

I invited Professor Mehrotra to discuss his recently published book, Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), as well as anything else that interests him.  Over at Jotwell, Christopher Schmidt called Making the Modern American Fiscal State “a truly impressive work of legal historical scholarship—thoroughly researched, well written, and powerfully argued. Mehrotra also offers a masterful demonstration of scholarly synthesis, artfully weaving together an intricate tapestry of economics, politics, law, and social history.”  I teach its chapter on Treasury Department lawyers during World War II, originally published in Law and History Review, every year in my American Legal History course.  Welcome, Ajay!

Weekend Roundup

• "Solano County [California] Superior Court officials are seeking historic items related to the Old Solano Courthouse or items related to the legal history of Solano County for display."  Hat tip.

• From Biddle Blog (the blog of the University of Pennsylvania Law School library): some highlights from the papers of William Ephraim Mikell (1868-1944).

• Congratulations to former LHB Guest Blogger Mark S. Weiner, upon being awarded a Fulbright to Salzburg Austria in 2014-15.  His earlier Fulbright to Iceland yielded some fascinating posts on LHB and a chapter in his Rule of the Clan.  In Salzburg, he will be teaching a course on U.S. constitutional law and a class on law in American film.  He intends to make documentary videos about Austrian and European conceptions of law, including one about Hans Kelsen.  His earlier documentary videos about law and legal history are here.

• Some intriguing images, going as much to the history of NYC as NYU, appear in a post on NYU Law's website.

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