DOJ Seeks Historian of Latin America to Investigate Human Rights Abuses

Malick W. Ghachem spotted the posting, by DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, on USAJOBS. Deadline: Thursday, January 7, 2016.

Update: The credit might go to Sally Hadden for spotting job and Professor Ghachem for retweeting.  Whoever it was, good on ya!

Sunday Book Roundup

Laura Weinrib reviews After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate by Mary Ziegler (Harvard University Press) for The New Rambler.

"Drawing on more than one hundred oral histories and a vast array of archival materials, Ziegler offers a more complete account of abortion rights advocacy in the decade after Roe.  She links social movement strategies to the broader political and cultural shifts of the 1970s and early 1980s, including the realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties, the rise of the Religious Right and the New Right, changing perceptions of population control and civil rights, and Ronald Reagan’s embrace of neoliberalism. The book is framed around a series of six “major historical questions that preoccupy commentators across the ideological spectrum” (xix).  Chapter by chapter, Ziegler identifies the “core scholarly conclusions” that have emerged in the literature (xii) and exposes each as an oversimplification or outright fiction."

The Federal Lawyer has a review of Damon Root's Overruled: The Long War for Control of the US Supreme Court (Palsgrave Macmillan).

Jennifer Mittelstadt is interviewed by New Books about her new book, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press).

Eric Foner reviews Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) for The Nation.

"Berman makes clear that, today, voter suppression is a national problem, not confined to the Old South, that affects numerous groups thought to favor the Democrats—not only blacks but also Hispanics, college students, and the poor more generally. Citing a nonexistent wave of voter fraud, a majority of the states, nearly all of them under Republican control, have passed laws in the past few years making it more difficult to vote."

The Guardian has collected "The best history books of 2015."

If you're looking for last minute gift recommendations, the Los Angeles Times has "31 nonfiction picks" with a healthy history section.

Mirow on Latin American Constitutions, Part 4

In past posts, I described how this book came about, summarized the portion of the work that deals with the Constitution of Cádiz in its peninsular and American contexts, and gave an example of the impact this Constitution had in Mexico during independence and the early republic. The Mexican example serves as a bridge to the second half of the book.

Various important themes raised by the Constitution of Cádiz are carried into the period following the 1820s. The politicization of constitutions is illustrated in the trajectories of various countries of the region during the nineteenth century. Independent nations used constitutions as tools in internal political squabbles and major political battles. Although it is difficult to construct uniform explanations of what happened in various national contexts, many countries during the nineteenth century developed new constitutional provisions to create and to protect constitutional rights. They all struggled with questions of sovereignty; electoral representation; the place and incorporation of various peoples within the Americas; limits on the executive branch’s exercise of power; the role of the church, religion, and the military in government and politics; the place of the judiciary; and how to effect lasting, meaningful, and entrenched constitutional regimes. These were all questions raised in one way or another in the debates concerning the Constitution of Cádiz.

The politicization of constitutions continued into the twentieth century when a regional pattern of constitutional intransigence and frequent constitutional turn-over became common. Frequent new constitutions produced a lack of entrenchment in legal and societal terms, and a culture of constitutional noncompliance was exacerbated by continued difficulties with effective enforcement mechanisms.

If the foundation of Latin American constitutionalism in the nineteenth century followed from the Constitution of Cádiz, then twentieth-century constitutionalism in the region was shaped by the Mexican Constitution of 1917. This Mexican Constitution was particularly important for its provisions related to property and labor. This Constitution was the first truly autochthonous constitutional product of Spanish America and was a pivotal point in constitutional development in the region. I imagine a great deal of academic work will be done on the Mexican Constitution of 1917 as we approach its centenary. In addition to exploring the Mexican Constitution, this portion of the work also looks at presidentialism, legislative decrees, the military, and constitutional regimes of exception.

The book ends with a discussion and analysis of the past three decades. Courts enforcing constitutions have uncovered and applied language found in new constitutions in the region. New constitutional tribunals have turned to European and international practices and methods of interpretation. Constitutional judges have established bold holdings directed towards the executive, legislative, and military branches. New forms of constitutional actions and constitutional rights arose in this period. Nonetheless, hindrances to effective constitutional regimes continue in the region.

Continued.

Weekend Roundup

• Oxford Journals announces that the backlist of the American Journal of Legal History is now available on its website.

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts has posted its recap of Chief Justice Roberts's lecture on Charles Evans Hughes, here. 

• Dane Kennedy's recap of the National History Center's congressional briefing on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is out in AHA Today.

• From the ASLH website: "The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) invites applications for the 2016 round of the Public Scholar Program, which is intended to support well-researched books in the humanities that have been conceived and written to reach a broad readership."  A legal historian was among the 2015 recipients: Linda Przybyszewski, University of Notre Dame, for "The Unexpected Origins of Modern Religious Liberty."

• The conference Grasping Water: Rivers and Human Systems in China, Africa, and North America, will be held June 13-17, 2016, University of Minnesota.

• A Legal Miscellanea: The Gazette of the Jacob Burns Law Library is now online.  “You will find a montage of news of Special Collections at The George Washington University Law Library, interviews, in-depth looks at recently-acquired rare books, book reviews, and other pieces on a variety of topics.”

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

Nystrom and Tannenhaus on Digital Research on Juvenile Justice Laws

Eric C. Nystrom, Arizona State University, and David S. Tanenhaus, William S. Boyd School of Law, UNLV, have posted The Future of Digital Legal History: No Magic, No Silver Bullets, which will appear in the inaugural issue of the relaunched American Journal of Legal History:

A deceptively simple question—how many juvenile justice laws did the 50 states enact during the 1990s?—was the genesis of our collaboration and this essay. Our attempt to answer this and related questions accurately and efficiently prompted us to consider the significance of digital computing for the field of American legal history. In this essay, we first analyze the challenges and opportunities in applying digital techniques to legal history that include the comparability of sources, completeness of source material, and how to make “data” out of unstructured text. We then sketch some organizing concepts that guided our approach, such as the value of large data sets, computational transparency, and an explicit grounding in the methods and concerns of the historical profession. We describe our particular tools and methods that include full text document search in a custom database, document similarity comparison and clustering at a variety of scales, and weighted term ranking. To conclude we assess what we learned from trying to answer empirical questions about juvenile justice lawmaking during the 1990s, and reflect on the implications of digital computing for legal historians.

Petit on the Two Republican Traditions

Philip N. Pettit, Princeton University,  Department of Political Science, has posted Two Republication Traditions, which appears in Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law and Politics, ed.  Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 169-204:

The older traditional Republicanism goes back to the Roman Republic, involving figures like Polybius, Cicero, and Livy. This tradition, which continues in the Renaissance, the English Republic and the American War of Independence is built on three ideas: freedom as non-domination, a mixed constitution, and a contestatory citizenry. But that Republican tradition underwent a sea-change in the hands of Rousseau in the 18th Century and, to a lesser extent, Kant. In this tradition freedom remains conceptualized as non-domination but the ideas of the mixed constitution and the contestatory citizenry disappear.

Update: The broken link is now fixed.  H/t: Patrick S. O'Donnell

An Essay Collection on Supreme Court Justices and Their Law Clerks

The University of Virginia Press has just published  Of Courtiers And Kings: More Stories Of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices, ed. Todd C. Peppers and Clare Cushman (University of Virginia Press, 2015).

Supreme Court justices have long relied on law clerks to help process the work of the Court. Yet few outside the Court are privy to the behind-the-scenes bonds that form between justices and their clerks.

In Of Courtiers and Kings, Todd C. Peppers and Clare Cushman offer an intimate new look at the personal and professional relationships of law clerks with their justices. Going beyond the book’s widely acclaimed predecessor, In Chambers, the vignettes collected here range from reflections on how serving as clerks at the Supreme Court impacted the careers of such justices as Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, William Rehnquist, John G. Roberts Jr., and John Paul Stevens to personal recollections written by parents and children who have both served as Supreme Court clerks. While individual essays often focus on a single justice and his or her corps of clerks—including how that justice selected and utilized the clerks—taken as a whole the volume provides a macro-level view of the evolution of the role of the Supreme Court law clerk. Drawing on a rich repository of such anecdotes, insights, and experience, the volume relates in a clear and accessible style how the clerking function has changed over time and what it is like for law clerks to be witnesses to history.

Offering a rare glimpse into a normally unseen world, Of Courtiers and Kings reveals the Court’s increasing reliance on law clerks and raises important questions about the selection, utilization, and influence of law clerks.

One of the chapters is No College, No Prior Clerkship: How Jim Marsh Became Justice Jackson's Law Clerk, by John Q. Barrett, St. John's University School of Law:

In Justice Robert H. Jackson’s first four years on the Supreme Court of the United States (1941-1945), he employed, in sequence, three excellent young attorneys as his law clerks. They were, respectively, a former Harvard Law Review editor who then worked in the U.S. Department of Justice; a former Harvard Law Review president; and his successor in that law student high position. Jackson was happy with each law clerk’s work and fond of him personally.

Then, in 1947, Justice Jackson tried something different: he hired a Temple Law School graduate to be his next law clerk. This man had been a successful law student, but in a non-elite law school and, indeed, in its night school division. He had never attended college or clerked for another judge. He was “older” and married with children. His name was James Milton Marsh. This is the story of how he became, improbably, a Supreme Court law clerk.

Reich on Regime Change, Legal Change, and Mexico's Second Empire

Regime Change and Legal Change: The Legacy of Mexico's Second Empire, by Peter L Reich, Whittier Law School, is now available on the Oxford University Comparative Law Forum.  It commences:

Does regime change result in legal change? To answer that question, this study considers whether the Second Mexican Empire, the French-imposed reign of Emperor Maximilian von Habsburg from 1863 to 1867, left a lasting effect on the law of Mexico despite successor governments' disparagement of the foreign intervention. Previous scholars have already examined various aspects of Imperial legal history, including the impact of the Código Imperial (the Imperial Code) on the 1870 Código Civil (Civil Code), legislation, judicial power, religion, attitudes regarding law and the state, popular concepts of good government, and court administration.1 As well, there have been regional studies of Imperial justice in the states of Querétaro and Durango.2 But so far no historian has focused specifically on case law to gauge whether jurisprudence following the Empire's defeat upheld or rejected judicial decisions from Maximilian's era. As this study will show, courts sometimes overruled and sometimes sustained the Empire's decisions, depending on whether the prior cases were essentially political or merely dealt with quotidian matters of debt, contract, or public records. For purposes of comparison, a brief section will discuss regime change and its legal effects in other societies—ancient Roman provinces, formerly French Canada, and formerly Mexican California—which also reveal a range of responses influenced by local conditions.

Budnitz on the National Consumer Law Center, 1969-2013

Mark Elliott Budnitz, Professor Emeritus, Georgia State University College of Law, has posted The National Consumer Law Center From Its Birth to 2013:

The article describes, analyzes and evaluates the role played by the National Consumer Law Center, a public interest law firm dedicated to promoting the legal rights of low income consumers, in the development of consumer protection law. It does this by first providing a brief summary of the origins of federal funding of legal services through the Office of Economic Opportunity, an agency established by Congress to fight the “War on Poverty.” The article then describes the circumstances surrounding the initial funding of NCLC by OEO. Most of the paper consists of a detailed exposition of NCLC’s work product from 1969 to 2013. That work involved significant activities on both the federal and state levels. It included litigation, legislation and administrative agency advocacy. There were major victories as well as many setbacks. The paper highlights NCLC’s role in the development of the law under the Truth-in-Lending Act as well as NCLC’s efforts to ameliorate the disastrous effect of the Great Recession on low income home ownership. The paper provides details on NCLC’s joint projects with other consumer and civil rights organizations. The paper also notes the crucial role played by NCLC’s publications, training and conferences in establishing a national consumer lawyer bar. The article concludes with an examination of the challenges NCLC faces due to changes in the marketplace caused by technology.

In addition to relating NCLC’s substantive accomplishments, the paper discusses the significance of non-substantive developments. The article explores the political battle that resulted in the Legal Services Corporation’s termination of all future funding for NCLC and how NCLC successfully responded to that existential crisis by diversifying its funding sources. Having a satellite office in Washington, DC enabled NCLC to substantially increase its participation in the federal venue. Purchasing its own building in Boston provided it with a measure of stability.

The article is a case study of how a non-profit legal services organization can endure and significantly influence the law despite major adversity. It did this by being flexible, adapting to changed circumstances and adopting an entrepreneurial spirit while remaining faithful to its mission.

CFP: 2017 Meeting of the Organization of American Historians

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) invites submissions for its 2017 meeting, to be held in New Orleans, April 6-9, 2017. Proposals will be accepted between December 7, 2015 and  January 23, 2016. Here's the call:

Circulation, the theme of the 2017 OAH Annual Meeting, is everywhere evident in the historical record. Ideas, goods, information, laborers, water, currency, disease, highways, and much more, circulate. Circulation suggests movement, but also connection between points and places. It suggests movement that gives definition. From the scale of the human body to the scale of the global, from the material to the ideological, circulation characterizes many of the subjects historians study, whether migrations, pilgrimages, economies, networks, ideas, culture, conflicts, plagues or demography. Circulations link, but also separate; they populate and depopulate; and they transport and return.

The program committee seeks proposals addressing the theme of circulation in history. We are eager to consider economic, intellectual, demographic, political, legal, technological, military, environmental, cultural, industrial and scientific modes and patterns of circulation and their roles in shaping people, societies, natural environments, institutions and polities. What are important patterns of circulation over time? How have they been reproduced and modified, or not? What enables and what constrains circulation? Are there currents of circulation that transcend local social and political formations? Conversely, are there specific modes of circulation called into being by the nation-state, capitalism, institutionalized racism, revolution, or industrialization? Did modernity produce new currents in circulation? What kinds of circulation have been critical inside American societies, cultures, institutions, environments and polities, and what kinds have created, destroyed or changed external connections and relationships?

We seek a program that embraces the full chronological sweep of the American past, from the pre-Columbian era to the twenty-first century, and the rich thematic diversity that has come to characterize contemporary history writing and teaching. The program aims to include those teaching at universities, colleges, community colleges, and secondary schools, public historians, curators, archeologists and independent scholars. We welcome teaching sessions, particularly those that involve the audience as active participants, or those that reflect collaborative partnerships among teachers, historians, and history educators at all levels. We urge presenters to continue the ongoing transition from simply reading papers to more actively "teaching" the topic of their sessions. We prefer to receive proposals for complete sessions, but will consider individual paper proposals as well.

The program will reflect the full diversity of the OAH membership in the United States and abroad. Wherever possible, proposals should include presenters of different genders and different racial and ethnic backgrounds. The program should also represent a variety of public and academic historians and history professionals, wherever they are employed and at varying levels of seniority in the profession. We encourage senior historians to present their own research. We welcome debate on challenging and controversial issues.

More information is available here.

CFP: ASLH 2016

[We have the following CFP from the ASLH website.]

The 2016 annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History will take place in Toronto, Canada, October 27 – October 30, 2016. The Program Committee invites proposals on any facet or period of legal history, anywhere in the world. We also strongly encourage thematic proposals that range across traditional chronological or geographical fields.

Travel grants (covering airfare and ground transportation only) will be available for presenters in need, who must first seek support from their home institution. These resources are limited, and will be given only to presenters traveling from abroad, graduate students, post-docs, and independent scholars.

The Program Committee welcomes proposals for both full panels and individual papers, though please note that individual papers are less likely to be accepted. The Committee encourages the submission of a variety of different types of panel proposals, including: traditional 3-paper panels (with a separate chair-commentator); incomplete panels lacking either one paper or a chair-commentator (whether 2-paper panels with a chair-commentator, or 3-paper panels without a chair-commentator), which the Committee will try to complete; author-meets-reader panels; and roundtable discussions.

All panel proposals should include the following:

• A single page listing the panel title, the titles of each paper, complete contact information for each presenter (including chair-commentator), and any special scheduling requests. (Note that we may not be able to accommodate all scheduling requests.)

• a 300-word description of the panel

• a c.v. for each presenter

• for paper-based panels only: a 300-word abstract of each paper

Individual paper proposals should include:

• a short (3 page) c.v. for each presenter (including complete contact information)

• a 300-word abstract of the paper

Please note that AV equipment/PowerPoint capabilities will not be available.

The deadline for submitting proposals is March 15, 2016. Proposals should be sent as email attachments to proposals@aslh.net.  Substantive questions should also be directed to the Program Committee co-chairs, Bethany Berger and Victor Uribe, at proposals@aslh.net.

Beauchamp on the First Patent Litigation Explosion

Christopher Beauchamp, Brooklyn Law School, has posted The First Patent Litigation Explosion, which is forthcoming next year in volume 125 of the Yale Law Journal:

The twenty-first century “patent litigation explosion” is not unprecedented. In fact, the nineteenth century saw an even bigger surge of patent cases. During that era, the most prolific patent enforcers brought hundreds or even thousands of suits, dwarfing the efforts of today’s leading “trolls.” In 1850, New York City and Philadelphia alone had ten times more patent litigation, per U.S. patent in force, than the entire United States in 2013. Even the absolute quantity of late-nineteenth-century patent cases bears comparison to the numbers filed in recent years: the Southern District of New York in 1880 would have ranked third on the list of districts with the most patent infringement suits filed in 2014 and would have headed the list as recently as 2010.

This Article reveals the forgotten history of the first patent litigation explosion. It first describes the rise of large-scale patent enforcement in the middle of the nineteenth century. It then draws on new data from the archives of two leading federal courts to trace the development of patent litigation from 1840 to 1910 and to outline the scale, composition, and leading causes of the litigation boom. Finally, the Article explores the consequences of this phenomenon for the law and politics of the patent system. The effects of the litigation explosion were profound. The rise of large-scale patent assertion provides a new explanation for patent law’s crucial shift from common law to equity decision making in the middle of the nineteenth century. And at its height, the litigation explosion produced a political backlash that threatened to sweep away the patent system as we know it. Recovering the history of patent law during this formative and turbulent era offers fresh perspectives on the patent reform debates of today.

Mirow on Latin American Constitutions, Part 3

In my last post, I discussed various aspects of the Constitution of Cádiz from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. These developments are found in the first four chapters of the book. Before describing the second half of the book, I would like to begin here by reaching into the last portion of Chapter 4 because it serves as bridge to the remaining portion of the work. The example I want to share today briefly concerns the early development of Mexican constitutionalism. The effects of the Constitution of Cádiz in Mexico are a well-known illustration of how the text and ideas of the Spanish Constitution blossomed and adapted to a new country in the Americas. There are some tremendously good studies of this process including Rafael Estrada Michel’s Monarquía y Nación entre Cádiz y Nueva España (Porrúa, México, 2006) and Ivana Frasquet’s Las Caras del Águila: Del Liberalismo Gaditano a la República Federal Mexicana (1820-1824) (Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, 2008).

Because of a powerful Viceroy appointed in 1810, Mexico's leadership was a reluctant and half-hearted participant in the changes that should have followed the promulgation of the Constitution in 1812. Greater enforcement of the Constitution was expected under a new viceroy appointed in 1813, but the Constitution of Cádiz was revoked throughout the empire in 1814. Mexico’s Constitution of 1814 was the product of this political uncertainty. José María Morelos took the title of Generalísimo in 1813 and called for a constituent congress to write a provisional and independent constitution. The resultant Constitution of Apatzingán reflected a variety of sources: the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution of Massachusetts of 1780, the Constitution of Pennsylvania of 1790; the French Constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795, and the Constitution of Cádiz. This mix of constitutional sources was common in the period. Morelos was captured and executed.

The re-imposition of the Constitution of Cádiz in Mexico in 1820 led to experiences of popular participation in constitutional government. Over 500 cities in Mexico reported the promulgation of the Constitution of Cádiz. The establishment and re-establishment of representative structures under the Constitution were particularly important in the political and constitutional development of the country. In 1821, Agustín Iturbide pressed for independence and sought a Mexican empire governed by the Spanish king, Fernando VII. By treaty, Iturbide was permitted to rule with hopes that the newly independent nation would be led by Fernando VII under the Constitution of Cádiz until a new constitution was drafted. Even in this uncertain world of Mexican independence, the Constitution of Cádiz served to provide rules of decision and constitutional guidance. When his generals rose against him, Iturbide abdicated and his oath to uphold the Constitution of Cádiz evaporated. Individual provinces of Mexico declared independence in 1823 but often under the Constitution of Cádiz. In November, 1823, a new Constituent Congress of Mexico was installed. Miguel Ramos Arizpe, who had considerable experience at the Cortes of Cádiz, was a driving force as the chair of the drafting committee for the new constitution, the federalist Mexican Constitution of 1824. Thus, the Constitution of Cádiz served as an important text in the drafting this early constitution for an independent Mexico.

The independence processes for each country of Latin America took their own, sometimes related, paths. Mexico serves as one important illustration and even in this very abbreviated description of events, I have taken a detour from my plan to describe the remainder of my book. I hope to fulfill my promise in the next post.

Continued.

This Spring in the Washington History Seminar

The Spring 2016 schedule for the Washington History Seminar is out, which much legal history thereon.  The seminar meets Mondays, 4:00pm-5:30pm, Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room, Ronald Reagan Building, Washington, DC.

January 18: No seminar (Martin Luther King Jr. Day)

January 25: Timothy Snyder (Yale University) on Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

February 1:  David E. Hoffman (Washington Post) on The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

February 8:  Elizabeth Borgwardt (Washington University in St. Louis) on The Nuremberg Idea: Crimes against Humanity in History, Laws & Politics

February 15: No seminar (Presidents’ Day)

February 22: Jonathan Schneer (Georgia Tech) on Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and the War Cabinet

February 29: Benny Morris (Ben Gurion University) on “A New Look at the 1948 Arab-Israeli War”

March 7:  Susan Pedersen (Columbia University) on The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

March 14: Joan Quigley (lawyer and journalist) on Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital

March 21: Meredith Oyen (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) on The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

March 28: Philip Nord (Princeton University) on France 1940: Defending the Republic

April 4: Elizabeth Schmidt (Loyola University Maryland) on Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror

April 11: Sam Lebovic (George Mason University) on Free Speech and Unfree News:  The Paradox of Press Freedom in America

April 18: Terry Lautz (Syracuse University) on John Birch: A Life

April 25: Ada Ferrer (New York University) on Freedom’s Mirror Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution

May 2:  Jeffrey Herf (University of Maryland) on Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989

May 9: Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers University) on The Rise of the Military Welfare State

May 16: Halbert Jones (St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford) on “‘Crimes Against the Security of the Nation’: World War II, the Cold War, and the Evolution of Mexico’s Anti-Sedition Laws, 1941-1970”.  The Seminar thanks St. Antony’s College for its sponsorship of this presentation.

Ma, "Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949"

New from Harvard University Press: Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949 (Sept. 2015), by Zhao Ma (Washington University St. Louis). A description from the Press:

From 1937 to 1949, Beijing was in a state of crisis. The combined forces of Japanese occupation, civil war, runaway inflation, and reformist campaigns and revolutionary efforts wreaked havoc on the city’s economy, upset the political order, and threatened the social and moral fabric as well. Women, especially lower-class women living in Beijing’s tenement neighborhoods, were among those most affected by these upheavals. Delving into testimonies from criminal case files, Zhao Ma explores intimate accounts of lower-class women’s struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife. By uncovering the set of everyday tactics that women devised and utilized in their personal efforts to cope with predatory policies and crushing poverty, this book reveals an urban underworld that was built on an informal economy and conducted primarily through neighborhood networks. Where necessary, women relied on customary practices, hierarchical patterns of household authority, illegitimate relationships, and criminal entrepreneurship to get by. Women’s survival tactics, embedded in and reproduced by their everyday experience, opened possibilities for them to modify the male-dominated city and, more importantly, allowed women to subtly deflect, subvert, and “escape without leaving” powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics during and beyond wartime Beijing.

More information is available here.

Some Contrarian Reflections from Stanley Fish

See you there? An author talk by Stanley Fish on Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education, with a focus on "Micro-aggressions, Safe Spaces, and Trigger Warnings: What's Happening on Campus?”  Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ, Tuesday, December 8, at 6:00 p.m.

More on HLS, YLS and the Blue Book

We noted that SSRN paper by Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami revising the history of the Blue Book.  So did Adam Liptak in today's New York Times: Yale Finds Error in Legal Stylebook: Harvard Did Not Create It.  H/t: John Henry Schlegel.

Update: Professor Schlegel writes us that Karl Llewellyn was “nuts but not natively anal."  Llewellyn's one-page proto-Blue Book, which Shapiro and Krishnaswami's reprint, would seem to bear out at least the latter half of his assessment.

FDR's Master Speech File Now Online

FDR, 1938 (credit)

[We have the following press release from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.]

On Monday, December 7, 2015 -- in commemoration of Pearl Harbor Day -- the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, with support from AT&T, Marist College and the Roosevelt Institute, formally launched online one of the Library's most in-demand archival collections -- FDR's Master Speech File. The Master Speech File contains over 46,000 pages of drafts, reading copies, and transcripts created throughout FDR's political career. Presented alongside the Speech File will be the Library's complete collection of Recorded Speeches of FDR, also newly digitized. [More.]

Conde and Greve on the Foundational Yakus v. US

James R. Conde and Michael Greve, George Mason University School of Law, have posted Yakus and the Administrative State.

In Yakus v. United States (1944), the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the conviction of a Boston meat dealer accused of violations of the Emergency Price Control Act and of price regulations issued by the federal Office of Price Administration (OPA) — without affording the accused an opportunity to challenge the validity of the rules under which he was convicted. The case is now mostly forgotten; in Supreme Court opinions and scholarly treatises, it appears (if at all) as a wartime embarrassment or a marginal case about the exhaustion of administrative procedures. At the time, though, Yakus was viewed by combatants on all sides as a case that would define the contours of constitutional government and of the emerging administrative state. Prominent textbooks of the post-War era afford prominent status to Yakus as a foundational case for Administrative Law.

This article tells the story of Yakus v. United States. Close examination of the litigation and its context, we argue, shows that Yakus was not an awkward wartime case that is easily cabined in technical exhaustion doctrines: it is in fact foundational to the modern administrative state. The Yakus lessons that we have forgotten are the ones that we want to forget.

Hubbard, ed., "Lincoln, the Law, and Presidential Leadership"

New from Southern Illinois University Press: Lincoln, the Law, and Presidential Leadership (Nov. 2015), edited by Charles M. Hubbard (Lincoln Memorial University). A description from the Press:

From his early years as a small-town lawyer through his rise to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln respected the rule of law. Secession and the Civil War, however, led him to expand presidential power in ways that, over time, transformed American society. In this incisive essay collection, recognized scholars from a variety of academic disciplines—including history, political science, legal studies, and journalism—explore Lincoln’s actions as president and identify within his decision-making process his commitment to law and the principles of the Constitution. In so doing, they demonstrate how wartime pressures and problems required that Lincoln confront the constitutional limitations imposed on the chief executive, and they expose the difficulty and ambiguity associated with the protection of civil rights during the Civil War.

The volume’s contributors not only address specific situations and issues that assisted in Lincoln’s development of a new understanding of law and its application but also show Lincoln’s remarkable presidential leadership. Among the topics covered are civil liberties during wartime; presidential pardons; the law and Lincoln’s decision-making process; Lincoln’s political ideology and its influence on his approach to citizenship; Lincoln’s defense of the Constitution, the Union, and popular government; constitutional restraints on Lincoln as he dealt with slavery and emancipation; the Lieber codes, which set forth how the military should deal with civilians and with prisoners of war; the loyalty (or treason) of government employees, including Lincoln’s domestic staff; and how Lincoln’s image has been used in presidential rhetoric. Although varied in their strategies and methodologies, these essays expand the understanding of Lincoln’s vision for a united nation grounded in the Constitution.

Lincoln, the Law, and Presidential Leadership shows how the sixteenth president’s handling of complicated legal issues during the Civil War, which often put him at odds with the Supreme Court and Congress, brought the nation through the war intact and led to a transformation of the executive branch and American society.

Subscribers to Project Muse may access full content here.

Ricci Reviews McMahon's "Nixon's Court"

[In lieu of a Sunday Book Roundup, we have a book review.   Emil A. Ricci, Department of History, Villanova University, has sent us his review of Nixon's Court: His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences (University of Chicago Press, 2011) , by Kevin J. McMahon. Here is Professor Ricci’s review.]

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon pledged that if elected president, he would appoint “law and order” justices to the Supreme Court of the United States. Nixon was reacting to the social unrest which plagued American society during the 1960s. He and many conservatives attributed the pervasive riots and violence, especially in the cities, to the liberal constitutional decisions of the Warren Court on criminal law and procedure. Thus, after he was elected, Nixon fulfilled his campaign promise by appointing conservative justices whom he believed would halt judicial liberalism and restore social order. But as Kevin J. McMahon argues in this informative study, Nixon’s nominees did not carry out a “counterrevolution” in constitutional law radically changing Warren Court doctrine. Instead, Nixon devised a judicial policy aimed at creating a new Republican majority in American politics, a policy designed to bring together white southern conservatives and working-class whites in the urban north.

In this thoroughly researched and well-documented book, Professor McMahon shows how President Nixon used the Supreme Court to build an electoral coalition of southern whites and urban white ethnic voters in the north. Nixon wanted strict constructionists, preferably southern judges on the Supreme Court, who would check the expansion of constitutional protections for criminal suspects, while taking a moderate course on school desegregation. For the President, these two social issues, crime and school desegregation, were vital to creating a new Republican majority. But crafting a judicial policy designed to appeal to southern and white ethnic voters in northern cities, was not easy.

Barrett on the Opening of the Nuremberg Trial

Nuremberg Trial, Palace of Justice (credit)

John Q. Barrett, St. John's University School of Law, has posted his remarks at an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Opening the Nuremberg Trial: The Moment of November 20, 1945:

On November 20, 1945, the International Military Tribunal (IMT), created by the victorious World War II Allied powers, began criminal trial proceedings in Nuremberg in the Allied-occupied former Germany. This first and only international Nuremberg trial involved twenty-one individual defendants and six organizations that had been leading parts of Nazi Germany’s government and war-waging.

On November 20, 2015, the 70th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trial, the city of Nuremberg hosted in the trial site, Palace of Justice Courtroom 600, a discussion among three men who worked there during 1945-46. Dr. Yves Beigbeder served as an assistant to French judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres. Father Moritz Fuchs was the bodyguard of United States Chief of Counsel Robert H. Jackson. Dr. George Sakheim was an interpreter and translator in the Interrogation Division, U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel.

These introductory remarks preceded the panel discussion. I describe some of the dimensions, including military power, political decision making, legal concepts, personalities and logistics, that led the Allies to the Nuremberg courtroom in November 1945.

Weekend Roundup

• HNN’s recent roundup, Racist Symbols: Latest Development.

• Jeanne Theoharis, Brooklyn College, posted Looking Back on the Bus Boycott on the Library of Congress Blog 

Constance Baker Motley, 1964 (credit)

• On Thursday, LHB Blogger Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Harvard Law, presented "The Honor and Burden of Being First: Constance Baker Motley and Three Extraordinary Generations of American Activism" in the University of Michigan's Legal History Workshop.  H/t: Legal Scholarship Blog.

• Over at Columbia Law School's legal history workshop, meanwhile, Aziz Rana (Cornell Law School) presented portions of his new book manuscript, titled The Rise of the Constitution.   

• Southern Illinois University Press has posted the introduction to Christian Samito’s Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment (2015), as December is the 150th anniversary of the amendment’s ratification.

• On SCOTUSBlog, a conversation between Ronald Collins and Wilmington College political science professor Paul Moke about Moke’s Earl Warren and the Struggle for Justice (Lexington Books, 2015).

• Via ReadMedia, the New York State Bar Association's press release on today's “Boot Camp for Reporters” on the vote in 2017 to authorize a state constitutional convention.  The vote in 1937 ultimately led to the (unsuccessful) proposal of an "anti-bureaucracy clause" in 1938.

 

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

Edited Collection on the Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada

New from McGill-Queen's University Press: Keeping Promises: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada (Nov. 2015), edited by Terry Fenge and Jim Aldridge (independent scholars). A description from the Press:

In 1763 King George III of Great Britain, victorious in the Seven Years War with France, issued a proclamation to organize the governance of territory newly acquired by the Crown in North America and the Caribbean. The proclamation reserved land west of the Appalachian Mountains for Indians, and required the Crown to purchase Indian land through treaties, negotiated without coercion and in public, before issuing rights to newcomers to use and settle on the land. Marking its 250th anniversary Keeping Promises shows how central the application of the Proclamation is to the many treaties that followed it and the settlement and development of Canada.

Promises have been made to Aboriginal peoples in historic treaties from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in Ontario, the Prairies, and the Mackenzie Valley, and in modern treaties from the 1970s onward, primarily in the North. In this collection, essays by historians, lawyers, treaty negotiators, and Aboriginal leaders explore how and how well these treaties are executed. Addresses by the governor general of Canada and the federal minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development are also included.

In 2003 Aboriginal leaders formed the Land Claims Agreements Coalition to make sure that treaties - building blocks of Canada - are fully implemented. Unique in breadth and scope, Keeping Promises is a testament to the research, advocacy, solidarity, and accomplishments of this coalition and those holding the Crown to its commitments

More information is available here.

Mirow on Latin American Constitutions, Part 2

My approach to this book was the same as my book on Latin American private law, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America. Before attempting a chronologically sweeping coverage of legal development in a large region, I asked a number of friends and colleagues about how I should go about such a project. The best advice I got was not to think about including everything but rather to ask myself what had to be included to do a responsible job. This advice kept me sane. I didn’t make lists of essential topics or themes. I did, however, use this test as I wrote about various periods, moments, or individuals. When thinking about private law in the region, I knew there were key topics or people I had to cover one way or another: derecho indiano (Spanish colonial law and not, although it is a part of derecho indiano, the law related to indigenous peoples in the Spanish Empire), Juan Solórzano Pereira, slavery, Andrés Bello, independence and codification, and agrarian or land reform, for example.

For Latin American Constitutions, I focused on the Constitution of Cádiz as a founding moment for constitutionalism in the region. The origin and influence of this document were major themes that would pull me through much of the work. There were, of course, other topics or people that had to be included using this test. These included, for example, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Simón Bolívar, the place of the church in constitutional development, amparos (actions to protect constitutional rights), the Mexican Constitution of 1917, and recent constitutional language related to indigenous populations and knowledge. The first four chapters, about half of the book, deal with various aspects of the Constitution of Cádiz as it relates to the Americas. The first chapter places the Constitution of Cádiz in the context of American developments. The French occupation of Spain led to political instability not only on the peninsula but also throughout the Spanish Empire. Some regions of the Americas clumsily stumbled into independence as they asserted direct loyalty to an exiled king. Others haphazardly swore allegiance to the peninsular institutions representing the monarchy. This latter group of regions wound up participating in the Constitution of Cádiz. Chapter 2 looks at the events of 1808 to 1812 from the peninsular side where Spanish representatives from around the empire, and many from the Americas, met in the southern Spanish city of Cádiz to debate, draft, and promulgate this unique document of Spanish constitutional monarchy. The following chapter, Chapter 3, focuses on what the Americans brought to the debate and the text of the Constitution. Different models of representation led to questions of citizenship, race, and the inclusion or exclusion of indigenous people and people of African descent, free and enslaved, in the uncharted world of an imperial constitution. The abolition of slavery was heatedly debated. The final chapter dealing mainly with the Constitution of Cádiz, Chapter 4, examines how the text played out on the peninsula and specifically in the Americas. It looks at how the Constitution and the institutions it created led, in many instances, to independence. I will tell you a bit about the other chapters in my next post.

Continued.

Teleman on Originalism as "Inescapable and Doomed"

D. A. Jeremy Telman, Valparaiso University Law School, has posted Originalism: A Thing Worth Doing . . ., which is forthcoming in volume 42 of the Ohio North University Law Review:

Originalism in constitutional interpretation continues to grow in its reach, its sophistication, its practical applicability and its popular support. Originally conceived as a doctrine of judicial modesty, originalist judges are now far more confident in their ability to discern the Constitution's original meaning and to strike down legislative enactments inconsistent with that meaning. Two aphorisms by the leading practitioners of originalism sum up originalism's journey. Justice Scalia, writing in the 1980s, conceded that originalism was merely "the lesser evil" and consoled himself with the Chestertonian dictum that "a thing worth doing is worth doing badly." Justice Thomas places fewer limitations on his own belief in originalist method and adopts as his motto "anything worth doing is worth doing right." The challenge for contemporary originalism is that it is not the sort of thing that G.K. Chesterton thought was worth doing badly, but it also may be the sort of thing that is very difficult to do right.

Shapiro and Krishnaswami on HLS, YLS and the Bluebook

Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, Yale Law School, have posted The Secret History of the Bluebook, which is forthcoming in volume 100 of the Minnesota Law Review:

Erwin N. Griswold, HLS 1928 (credit)

The Bluebook, or Uniform System of Citation as it was formerly titled, has long been a significant component of American legal culture. The standard account of the origins of the Bluebook, deriving directly from statements made by longtime Harvard Law School Dean and later Solicitor General of the United States Erwin N. Griswold [right], maintains that the citation manual originated at the Harvard Law Review in the 1920s and was created or adapted by Dean Griswold himself. This account is wildly erroneous, as proven by intensive research we conducted in the archives of Harvard and Yale. In fact, the Bluebook grew out of precursor manuals at Yale Law School, apparently inspired by a legal scholar even more important than Griswold, namely Karl N. Llewellyn. The "uniform citations" movement that began at Yale was actually at first opposed by Harvard.

Joan G. Wexler, YLS 1974 (credit)

In his most extreme misstatement, Griswold asserted that a collaborative decision was made in the 1920s by Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review to share the revenues from publishing the Bluebook (eventually amounting to millions of dollars) among the four journals. There is indeed now four-way revenue-sharing, but it did not commence until the 1970s, and then only after a revolt of the three "junior partners" against Harvard Law Review's complete monopolization of Bluebook income for half a century, a revolt initiated by Joan Wexler [above left] of the Yale Law Journal.

Some readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale. Our response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.

Joseph Webb McKnight, 1925-2015

We have received sad news: Joseph Webb McKnight, Professor Emeritus of Law and Larry and Jane Harlan Faculty Fellow Emeritus at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, passed away on November 30, 2015. SMU has released the following:

credit

Professor McKnight inspired many through his historic contributions to the development of family and matrimonial property law in Texas, as well as his scholarship on legal history.  He was a prolific scholar, authoring over 100 articles and several books.  He held leadership positions in a number of legal and historical organizations, directed the Texas Family Code project, and was a principal drafter of several important Texas laws addressing matrimonial property matters, including the property rights of married women in Texas.  In the words of one colleague, Joe McKnight is legal history.

“We lost our patron saint, our living link to the very beginning of modern family law in Texas,” said Brian L. Webb, adjunct professor at SMU Dedman School of Law and attorney with Webb Family Law Firm, P.C. “He was a great friend to all and proud to be a family lawyer.”

After a short stint practicing law with Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York City, he joined the faculty of the SMU School of Law in 1955, where he taught for the following 59 years.  While a dedicated scholar and advocate for legal reform, his true love was for teaching and law students, with many of the latter remaining life-long colleagues and friends.  Professor McKnight and his wife, Mildred Payne McKnight, were known to entertain a tremendous number of law students, faculty, scholars and friends in their Dallas home and, during many summers, in their house in Oxford.

During the past six decades, Professor McKnight established an invaluable collection of more than 6,000 rare legal history books at SMU Dedman Law – one of the largest of its kind in the nation with the oldest book in the collection printed in 1481. He studied bookbinding and book conservation at the Dallas Craft Guild for more than twenty years, so he could restore his cherished antiquarian volumes to the best possible condition. In December 2011, he donated his extraordinary collection to the law school, which is prominently housed in SMU Dedman law’s Underwood Law Library.

“Joe McKnight was a truly remarkable teacher and scholar and a wonderfully kind and generous colleague,” said Jennifer M. Collins, Judge James Noel Dean and Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law.  “Throughout his distinguished academic career, he was an inspiration to all who knew him.  He will be greatly missed.”

He was born on February 17, 1925 in San Angelo, Texas, where he was raised during some of the most severe years of the Great Depression.  Notwithstanding the tough times, he loved San Angelo and he and his four siblings returned there often and spoke proudly of their West Texas roots.

He excelled academically at an early age and graduated at the top of his high school class at the age of 16.  After completing several years at the University of Texas, where he was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity, he enlisted in the Navy and served during and in the aftermath of World War II.  After returning to his studies at the University of Texas, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and in 1947 entered Magdalen College at Oxford University.  His Oxford years were formative, and he earned the degrees of Bachelor of Arts in Jurisprudence, a Bachelor of Civil Law, and a Master of Arts.  He also received an LL.M. from Columbia University.

The Professor was preceded in death by his parents and siblings, as well as his first wife, Julia Ann Dyer McKnight.   He is survived by his second wife, Mildred Payne McKnight, his sons John B. McKnight and J. Adair McKnight, his step-children, Sawnie R. Aldredge III and Amy P. Aldredge, and numerous grandchildren.

A mass of Christian burial will be held at the Church of The Holy Cross Dallas, 4052 Herschel Avenue (at Douglas) at 10:00 am on Friday, December 4, 2015.  In lieu of flowers, donations are requested in Professor McKnight’s honor either to the Joseph P. McKnight Memorial Scholarship Fund (named in honor of Professor McKnight's Great Grandfather) at the SMU Dedman School of Law, or to the Church of The Holy Cross Dallas.

We expect that there are more tributes and remembrances to come. We will update you accordingly.

Zelizer and Burton to Brief Congress on the History of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

[We have the following announcement from the National History Center.]

Congressional Briefing: History of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

The National History Center of the American Historical Association is pleased to announce our upcoming Congressional briefing. Julian Zelizer of Princeton University and Vernon Burton of Clemson University will discuss the history of the Voting Rights Act in commemoration of its 50th anniversary. Professor Dane Kennedy, Director of the National History Center, will moderate the discussion.

The briefing will examine the intended and unintended historical consequences of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  [It] will be held on Friday, December 4th, at 1 PM in the Cannon House Office Building Room 121.

Irwin on "Catastrophic Diplomacy"

Next up in the Washington History Seminar is Catastrophic Diplomacy: The History of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, by Julia Irwin, University of South Florida, on Monday, December 7, 2015, from 4:00pm-5:30pm, in the 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Since the turn of the 20th century, and particularly since 1945, the United States has been one of the world’s leading providers of bilateral disaster assistance. Julia Irwin, a prominent historian of U.S. international relations, will trace the history of U.S. governmental, military, and private responses to foreign catastrophes caused by tropical storms, earthquakes, floods, and other natural hazards. She will also analyze the diplomatic, strategic, and cultural significance of this global disaster assistance.

Professor Irwin is the author of Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Walch on the Import Drugs Act of 1848

Angela Walch, St. Mary's University School of Law, has posted A Spurious Solution to a Genuine Problem: An In-Depth Look at the Import Drugs Act of 1848, which she wrote while a student at the Harvard Law School under the direction of the great food-and-drug lawyer Peter Barton Hutt.

The Import Drugs Act has been relatively ignored by the academic community, and is most often relegated to a passing reference in a footnote. Yet the Act represents an important step in our nation's creation of a safe supply of drugs, and thus deserves some attention. In this paper, I give the Act that attention, and seek to place it in an historical context. In Chapter 1, I describe how Congressional action was prompted by medical conditions during the Mexican War and the belief that American soldiers were being given adulterated drugs. Chapter 2 describes the involvement of the professional health organizations in the fight against adulterated drugs, and suggests reasons why drug adulteration posed such a problem to doctors and pharmacists. In Chapter 3, I look at the legislative history of the Act, through an analysis of the House Report and the Congressional debates on the matter. Finally, in Chapter 4, I look at the mechanics of how the Act was implemented by the Customs Service, and describe its short term effects on the problem of adulterated drugs.

Last Call (for Papers): Policy History 2016

[Note that the deadline for submissions in this CFP is Friday, December 4.]

The Institute for Political History, the Journal of Policy History, the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, and the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University are hosting the ninth biennial Conference on Policy History at the Loews® Vanderbilt Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee from Wednesday, June 1 to Saturday, June 4, 2016.

We are currently accepting panel and paper proposals on all topics regarding American political and policy history, political development, and comparative historical analysis. Complete sessions, including two or three presenters with chair/commentator(s), and individual paper proposals are welcome. Participants may only appear once as a presenter in the program.

The deadline for submission is December 4, 2015. Proposals for panels and papers must be submitted online at the links  below, and must include the following:

1. Name(s)
2. Institutional Affiliation(s)
3. Status (i.e. ABD, Doctoral Student, Assistant/Associate/Full Professor)
4. Email address(es).
5. Mailing Address(es).
6. Panel and paper title(s).
7. One (1) 150 word abstract of panel and papers in Microsoft Word or PDF format.
8. 75 word description of each presenter or panel participant including educational background, major publications, awards or fellowships, also in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

Submit paper proposals here.  Submit panel proposals here

The 2016 Policy History Conference will also feature two outstanding plenary sessions.  Organized by conference co-chairs Christopher Loss of Vanderbilt University and Bartholomew Sparrow of the University of Texas at Austin, these panels are not only timely in their nature but will examine the changing role of authority and ideology in American political culture.

Liberalism in America

Andrew Rehfeld, Washington University in St. Louis
William Rorabaugh, University of Washington
Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania
Jeffrey Tulis, The University of Texas at Austin


Technology and the State

Angus Burgin, The Johns Hopkins University
Sarah Igo, Vanderbilt University
Margaret O'Mara, University of Washington
John Skrentny, University of California - San Diego

Mirow on Latin American Constitutions, Part 1

Thank you for the warm welcome, Dan and Legal History Blog.  I am delighted to spend this month as a guest and, as requested, to tell you about my book Latin American Constitutions.

This is a photo of the Constitution Monument in St. Augustine, Florida, I took a couple of years ago.  The monument is in some ways responsible for the book.  It seemed so odd to me that in this small town in northern Florida there would be a relatively large obelisk dedicated to the Spanish Constitution of 1812, often called the Constitution of Cádiz, or, by its nickname, La Pepa. (It was promulgated on March 19, 1812, the Feast of San José.  Pepe is the nickname for José, and Pepa is the feminine form. Constitutions are feminine in Spanish.)  I could go on about the monument, but I won’t here because I have a piece coming out next year on it and its place in constitutional iconography.  Interested folks should take a look at the essays in Hensel, Bock, Dircksen and Thamer’s Constitutional Cultures: On the Concept and Representation of Constitutions in the Atlantic World (2012), Goodrich’s Legal Emblems and the Art of Law (2014), and Narváez’s Cultura Jurídica: Ideas e Imágenes (2010).   
 

The monument and the bicentennial of the Constitution led me to think first about the constitution itself and then what it was doing in Florida.  Alain Wijffels was instrumental in pointing me in this direction, and I explored these ideas during my 2009 sabbatical in Chile after my colleague Stanley Fish helped me define the topic and the direction it should take.  Because I had written a history of private law in Latin America, I wanted to see what I could do to explain the development of constitutional law in the region.  In 2010, when Austin Sarat asked me to contribute to a symposium on history and law, I made my first stab at understanding the Constitution in Visions of Cádiz.  This was followed by an article in 2012 on the promulgation of the Constitution in colonial Spanish Florida in 1812 and again in 1820, The Constitution of Cádiz in Florida.

While working on the Visions contribution in 2010, I sent a letter to Cambridge University Press to see if there was any interest in the project.  I haven’t looked at the letter in over five years, but this opportunity prompted me to see what I said.  I wrote then, “This book does two things.  First, it provides a general historical introduction to the major themes and issues in Latin American constitutionalism from just before independence to the present day.  Second, it uses the Constitution of Cádiz (1812) as the lens through which important issues and changes in Latin American constitutionalism are viewed.”  I am glad to see that this is about right, at least in my understanding of what I have written.  I look forward to sharing more about the book over the next few weeks.

Continued