* Caitlin Tully, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Princeton University, has published an essay in The Atlantic: "The Court has an Easy Answer on the Fed."   * From Time's "Made by History": Douglas Boin (Saint Louis University) on "How Patriarchy Undermined the Roman Republic."    * Malick W. Ghachem, MIT, discusses his book The Company and the Colony: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble with Gerald Horne on the “Freedom Now” program on KPFK radio. * Jill Hasday, Minnesota Law, discussed her book We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality with Kate Shaw on the Strict Scrutiny podcast. * Allen Boyer reviews Kathryn Schumaker's Tangled Fortunes (Mississippi Books Page).    * We've spotted an advertisement for a predoc university assistantship with Prof. Dr. Lena Foljanty, Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna.  * Lawbook Exchange's November 2025 catalogue on Scholarly Law and Legal History (Part 1; Part 2). * ICYMI:  A Very Short History of Freedom of Speech by Oliver Bramley (Constitution Society). How Germany's Nuremberg trial for Nazi crimes transformed international law (rfi). Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.  About the award: "The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty. 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." This year's award went to Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania) for The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). The citation: Elegantly rendered and beautifully constructed, Sarah Gronningsater’s  traces the experiences of a formative generation of New Yorkers – people born into the quasi-freedom granted by New York’s emancipation laws. By using a varied and creative source base, Gronningsater chronicles how their lives were shaped by gradual emancipation, and how their experiences and struggles within that legal regime translated into political activism in their later years. Gronningsater convincingly shows how legal consciousness gained early in life connected a generation of freedpeople who later used that knowledge to influence the larger national conversation about citizenship and racial equality in the United States. Congratulations to Professor Gronningsater! -- Karen Tani  

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the John Phillip Reid Book Award.  About the award: This prize is "awarded annually 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 prize is 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. When awarding this prize, preference is given to work that falls within Reid’s own interests in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-America and Native American law."   This year's award went to Kunal M. Parker (University of Miami School of Law) for The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024. The citation: Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process is a brilliant intellectual history of how social science thinkers in law, political science, and economics between 1870 and 1970 stopped emphasizing ostensibly knowable truths and focused instead on methods, techniques, and processes. Parker shows how this transformation was entwined with the rise of the administrative state. After documenting this major epistemological shift, he argues that during the Cold War, once-supple claims about the importance of process and method were narrowed and decontextualized, playing oppositional roles to democratization, civil rights, and managed capitalism. This highly effective, very creative book places law, as practice and as a field of inquiry, in a larger context and illuminates essential questions about the history of knowledge and intellectual authority. Congratulations to Professor Parker!  -- Karen Tani    

We are delighted to pass along news of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, starting with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award.  About the award: "The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award is awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history. To be eligible, a book must be published during the previous calendar year."  This year's award went to Matthew Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024). The citation: Looking back at a lifelong engagement with Chinese legal history in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with a special focus on gender and sexuality, Matthew Sommer breaks new ground in his most recent book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia, 2024), uncovering several cases with transpeople who have been hiding in plain sight in the source material. The core of the book is based on routine and palace memorials from the First Historical Archives in Beijing, but Sommer also supplements his deep source base with popular tales about “the strange,” treaty port journals and newspapers, case books, legal codes, and compendia of traditional Chinese medicine. In contrast to his previous two books, which theorized about gender and sexuality based on thousands of legal cases, this book presents a concise series of case studies that identify what Sommer calls “transgender paradigms” in Chinese legal and social history. Among the figures that appear in these microhistories, we encounter a diverse set of gender non-conforming individuals, including eccentric midwives, cross-dressing clergy, unconventional physicians, and fox spirit mediums. One of the most interesting findings of the book is that while magistrates who prosecuted cases against trans people tended to rely on legal provisions banning heterodoxy, they were often confronted with the fact that there were no appropriate statutes that could prosecute cases involving trans people. Instead, they had to resort to interpretations of law that reveal interesting assumptions about gender, the body, law, procreation, and the fear of the unknown. This compelling and generative book is both a deep dive into complex and dense sources as well as a refreshing intervention into several subfields of legal history. Honorable Mentions went to: Lauren Benton (Yale University) for The Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024) and to Samuel Fury Childs Daly (University of Chicago) for Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire (Duke University Press, 2024). Congratulations to all the honorees!  -- Karen Tani  

A symposium in Modern Asian Studies is devoted to an article by Mitra Sharafi, Wisconsin Law, who is the new President of the American Society for Legal History.  Professor Sharafi's  article was "Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947: A medico-legal history," published in Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021): 371–428.  The just-published symposium includes comments by Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University; Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University; and Philippa Levine, Emerita, University of Texas; with a response by Professor Sharafi. --Dan Ernst 

Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School, and Elliot Setzer, Yale University, have posted Cardozo's Living Constitutionalism in Comparative Context, which appeared in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities: Benjamin N. Cardozo (NYPL) Although he served as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1932-1938, the source of Benjamin Cardozo’s preeminence has generally been his contributions to common law jurisprudence and his theories of common law judging. This essay argues that several of Cardozo’s unpublished writings suggest he also developed a significant constitutional theory in dialogue with continental—and particularly French—legal thinkers. Despite not appearing prominently in Cardozo’s published constitutional opinions, this theory influenced Chief Justice Hughes’s majority opinion in the case of Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), a case that not only stripped the Contract Clause of much of its adjudicatory power but also paved the way for the Supreme Court to undo the laissez-faire vision of the Lochner era. Cardozo most clearly outlined his theory in an essay on “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power,” written shortly before his nomination to the Supreme Court, and in a draft concurrence in the Blaisdell case—one that he abandoned after Chief Justice Hughes modified his own opinion to incorporate several of Cardozo’s paragraphs. “De Tocqueville and the Judicial Power” develops Cardozo’s views of judicial authority in America as refracted not only through Tocqueville’s account but also through that of contemporary French jurists, including the comparative law scholar Édouard Lambert. Reading his Blaisdell concurrence against that backdrop both highlights the transatlantic conversations about judicial review ongoing during the 1930s and the potential for a French influence on Cardozo’s understanding of rights. --Dan Ernst 

The Duke Law Journal has published a Note of interest, on "The Second Amendment's Catholic Problem." It is by J.D. candidate Jared Danaher. Here's the abstract: After New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, history is the touchstone of Second Amendment analysis. Thus, this Note explores an understudied part of America’s long and complicated history with weapons: Catholic disarmament. By undertaking a detailed historical analysis of three Catholic disarmament measures in the late colonial United States, this Note attempts to determine what the history means for present day firearms law. It concludes that even though courts frequently cite America’s history of Catholic disarmament, they rarely use it in a historically accurate way. Modern courts use Catholic disarmament to justify weapons bans on people the state considers dangerous or disrespectful to its laws, but those uses are out of step with the history. The historical analysis in this Note demonstrates that Catholic disarmament laws were narrow measures that targeted a particularly suspect group during a time of national emergency. The history of Catholic disarmament can only justify modern laws based on similar principles of “immediate distrust” (a term this Note coins). But the journey toward this conclusion reveals as much as the conclusion itself. By faithfully applying the rules laid down in Bruen and United States v. Rahimi, this Note exposes the limits of their historically focused test. On the path to developing the “immediate distrust” principle, this Note exposes historically erroneous claims courts make, illuminates the difficulty of scouring the historical record, and explores the challenges raised by tying modern regulation to context-bound historical episodes.  Read on here. -- Karen Tani 

[We have the following CFP.  DRE] Call for Papers: Deadline December 30, 2025 On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the John Carter Brown Library and the John C. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics at Washington University invite proposals for participation in a major conference to be held in Providence, Rhode Island, June 4-6, 2026, on the broad topic of religions and freedom c. 1776.   There are many productive ways to investigate the histories, historical relationship, and legacies of religions and freedom across the breadth of early America. And religious freedom in America has a deep and important history, in which the conference location of Rhode Island itself plays a significant part. The conference aims to engage fresh scholarship and public interests in critical issues of religious freedom. Focused sessions will highlight new perspectives on classic questions, innovative methods, and new sources. We will host public events, including two evening keynotes, sessions for k-12 teachers, and programs dedicated to teacher professional development, in addition to panels dedicated to historical scholarship.  The program committee encourages proposals on historical topics that address religions and freedom in the Revolutionary era, as well as proposals for a more limited set of sessions to consider legacies and ramifications of the relationship of religions and freedom in contemporary life. Topics might include: teaching religions and freedom, k-16; Indigenous knowledge systems; Africana religious studies; the development of denominations and religious institutions; the interest of governments in marking boundaries of religious freedom; betrayal and conflict within and between religious communities; slavery and definitions of religious freedom and unfreedom; the First Amendment and its antecedents and legacies; churches and clergy; and sacralization and state-building in the early Republic. These are simply suggestive of the wide range of topics that might be fruitfully explored. Those submitting proposals are encouraged to be ambitious and creative as they consider the interplay of religions and freedom in the proximate period of the American Revolution. The organizers invite proposals for individual papers or full panels (the committee reserves the right, given needs and coverage, to make adjustments to the latter). For full panel proposals, we encourage a diverse representation of career stages, institutions, and perspectives. For both individual paper and panel proposals, please type into the linked form: the panel title and all paper titles, abstract for the panel and each paper not to exceed 250 words, name, affiliation, email and phone contact information for each participant. Please also attach to the form a one page cv (as a PDF) for each participant. For panel proposals, please identify the organizer and suggest a panel moderator and chair. The program committee will make decisions by mid-January so that the conference program can be settled and announced by early February. Questions may be directed to the conference organizers, Mark Valeri and Karin Wulf via jcb-director@brown.edu.

* A book launch was recently held for Confluences of Law and History: Irish Legal History Society Discourses, 2011-2021, edited by Niamh Howlin and Felix Larkin and published by Four Courts Press.  The volume “brings together an eclectic mix of papers on aspects of Irish legal history from the early modern period to the 20th century.” (Irish Legal Times).   * An interesting notice of the St. Olaf College Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry team and its investigation of how, if at all, the 17th Amendment shifted the balance of power between rural and urban constituents. * Katie R. Eyer, Rutgers Law School, has posted Institutional Challenges in an Authoritarian Age, a review essay inspired by Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege. * Via Harvard Law Today: "Harvard Law School Library releases first complete set of digitized Nuremberg Trials records."  * If, like me, you are trying to rethink a course on the legal history of the administrative state and presidential power in light of DJT's second term, you might find Eric Schickler's "What Donald Trump Has Taught Us about American Political Institutions," published in Political Science Quarterly, as helpful as I did.  DRE.   * Jack Goldsmith's very interesting Constitution Day lecture at the American Enterprise Institute: Presidential Greatness and the Fragility of Judicial Supremacy.  * The links to the recordings of two recent talks sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society, John Fabian Witt on The Radical Fund and G. Edward White and Gerard Magliocca's books on Robert H. Jackson are new available.  Also, Professor White draws upon his book in a post on the blog of the Oxford University Press.   * Walter Stahr discusses his forthcoming biography of William Howard Taft (Executive Functions). * Seth Barrett Tillman has posted Chancellor James Kent on Hamilton's Federalist No. 77 and Modern Academic Commentary.  Also, this.  * The Brennan Center's Annotated Guide to Historians’ Amicus Briefs in the Slaughter and Cook Removal Cases. * ICYMI: Gordon S. Wood's remarks upon receiving the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute.  John O. McGinnis and Mike Rappaport object to what they consider Jill Lepore’s “particularly shabby” treatment of Justice Scalia’s ideas in her recent Atlantic article on originalism (Law & Liberty). Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Marcus Alexander Gadson, UNC Law, has published Sedition: How America's Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis (NYU Press):Since protestors ripped through the Capitol Building in 2021, the threat of constitutional crisis has loomed over our nation. The foundational tenets of American democracy seem to be endangered, and many citizens believe this danger is unprecedented in our history. But Americans have weathered many constitutional crises, often accompanied by the same violence and chaos experienced on January 6. However, these crises occurred on the state level. In Sedition, Marcus Alexander Gadson uncovers these episodes of civil unrest and examines how state governments handled them. Sedition takes readers through six instances of constitutional crisis: The Buckshot War, Dorr’s Rebellion, Bleeding Kansas, the Brooks-Baxter War, a successful terrorist campaign to overthrow South Carolina’s government during Reconstruction, and the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. He chronicles these turbulent periods of violent anti-government conflict on the state level, explaining what it was like to experience coup d’états, rival governments fighting in the streets, and disputed elections that gave way to violence. As he addresses constitutional breakdown, Gadson urges Americans to pay increased attention to the risk of constitutional instability in their home states. His sweeping historical analysis provides new insights on the fight to protect democracy today. As Americans mobilize to prevent future crises, Sedition reminds us that our constitutional order can fail, that democratic collapse is possible, and offers us advice on how to save our constitutional system --Dan Ernst

[We have the following CFP from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI) for its next annual conference, American Revolution International.  DRE] The American Revolution was an international event. Its causes, origins, consequences, and trajectory all had roots in places beyond the thirteen colonies, from neighboring Indigenous nations to Asian cities thousands of miles away. Over the last few decades, there has been increasing scholarly attention to the United States in the world and an enlarged geography for early America. Yet, beyond works specifically on international diplomacy and war, the American Revolution has been largely resistant to such treatment, remaining sturdily provincial especially in popular understandings. This conference will consider the challenges and advantages of making the American Revolution international in ways that move beyond simply European high politics and diplomacy. The Revolution was at the center of a number of global processes, from colonialism to Enlightenment. The interplay of these dynamics and the specific American trajectory furnishes an excellent avenue of approach to re-invigorate and widen perspectives on older stories about colonial resistance, unity, and war. This EMSI Annual Conference, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, will take place at the Huntington Library on November 6-7, 2026; publication of a special issue may follow. Travel and accommodation for participants will be covered by EMSI. The conference will include a range of panels devoted to various aspects of the American Revolution International. Themes include but are not limited to: * The relations between the international and the national (international systems and processes and their effects on local contexts, and vice-versa); * Slavery, diaspora, and rebellion; * Anti-colonial movements, imperialism, and Indigenous resistances; * Atlantic and global networks (including commercial, communication, and ecological); * Gender, family, and household authority; * Sovereignty and independence; and * The challenges of war and peace The conference will include both shorter presentations and pre-circulated longer pieces (~5000 words). We solicit expressions of interest by January 10, 2026. Please email a short proposal (no more than 500 words) and brief CV to amrevinternational@gmail.com. Organizing committee: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (USC) Christopher L. Brown (Columbia) Brian DeLay (UC Berkeley) Elizabeth Ellis (Princeton) Sarah Pearsall (Johns Hopkins)

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.] Intellectual property: Historical perspectives.  Special Issue of Revista Chilena de Historia del Derecho The Revista Chilena de Historia del Derecho, a fully electronic journal, invites original, unpublished contributions for a special issue on the histories of intellectual property. Since the 15th century and the invention of printing in Europe, intellectual property has gradually developed into a legal institution, marked by the meeting of the logics of creation, economics and law. Its history and dissemination evidence the changing relationship between the author, inventor, creator, or breeder, society and the State. The aim of this special issue is to examine this institution over the long term and beyond European borders. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the historical conditions that led to the emergence of the various forms of intellectual property from the 18th century onwards (literary and artistic property, copyright, patents, etc.). Contributions may focus on, but are not limited to, the following areas: * History of copyright and related rights * History of pharmaceutical patent and drug law * Brand history and trade mark registration * History of scientific property (inventions, discoveries) * History of corporate law and its relationship with employees' skill and knowledge * History of the legal professionalisation of intellectual property rights (specialised lawyers, agents and courts) * History of the protection of plant varieties and living organisms * The historical challenges of protecting intangible heritage. Contributions may also address specific methodological or theoretical issues, provided they have a historical dimension. Proposals for articles (title, an abstract between 300 and 500 words, accompanied by a 5-line bio-bibliographical note) should be sent to the coordinators of this special issue (J.A.Bellido@kent.ac.uk and gabriel.galvez-behar@univ-lille.fr), with a copy to the editorial board of the Revista Chilena de Historia del Derecho at the following address: aargouse@derecho.uchile.cl Provisional timetable Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2025 Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2026 Closing date: August 31, 2026 Publication date: December 2026 Articles, written in French, Spanish or English, must be between 7000 and 9000 words (approx.), and comply with the magazine's editorial standards (available [here]).

Noah Smith-Drelich, Chicago-Kent College of Law, has posted The Forgotten Fundamental Right to Free Movement, which appears in the Northwestern University Law Review:There is a powerful fundamental right hiding in plain sight: the fundamental right to free movement. This right goes beyond the consistently acknowledged—though infrequently applied—fundamental right to interstate travel. The true scope of the Constitution's protection of movement through substantive due process safeguards local, interstate, and international travel. Though overlooked today, the fundamental right to free movement has deep roots in history and tradition, and in the decisions of numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.  This Article is the first to examine freedom of movement using the history and tradition test for unenumerated fundamental rights. This Article begins by tracing the right to free movement from the Magna Carta, through Blackstone's Commentaries, colonial America, early state constitutions, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. As this analysis shows, repressive governments have routinely sought to limit movement across and within boundaries. But the English and U.S. legal traditions are marked by repeated affirmations of the right—there is strong and persistent historical support for a fundamental right to free movement.  This Article then turns to judicial discussions of movement rights, both historical and contemporary. Drawing on several previously unconnected lines of decision, this examination surfaces a vibrant picture of the fundamental right to free movement recognized by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.  --Dan Ernst 

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.] The Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable has announced their schedule for the upcoming spring 2026 semester. Please see the schedule below for details. BC Law's legal history group–Mary Sarah Bilder, Felipe Cole, Daniel Farbman, Aziz Rana, Adnan Zulfiqar, Marco Basile, Daniel R. Coquillette, and Frank R. Herrmann, S.J.–welcome anyone in the Boston area to join us. The Roundtable meets and discusses a pre-circulated paper in an informal, collegial atmosphere of informed discussion. We meet in the Boston College Law Library, Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room. More information can be found on the website or by contacting Chris Fitzgerald (fitzgefk@bc.edu). Thursday, January 22, 4:30 p.m. Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Harvard Radcliffe Institute & Harvard Law School Thursday, February 26, 4:30 p.m. Jelani Hayes, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Harvard University

Weiwei Luo, Grinnell College, has published Beyond State/Market: Usury Law in Late-Ming China in Law and History Review:This article examines the interdependent relationship between the state, law, and market in early modern China. Focusing on usury statutes, it analyzes how the Chinese state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed its legal framework to regulate a burgeoning money economy. The study underscores the critical role of law as an instrument of statecraft, essential for sustaining market functionality and social stability. Law’s multifaceted nature—encompassing legislation, specialist interpretations, adjudication, legal education, professional manuals, and popular knowledge—challenges the simplistic view of Confucian values as inherently anti-commerce. Instead, it shows how these values supported the uniformity and practicality of legal interpretations and judicial decisions. Moreover, the Chinese case points to a broader analytical framework with cross-cultural relevance: economic justice and market efficiency are not inherently opposed but can be mutually reinforcing when grounded in a shared set of values and legal regulations. --Dan Ernst 

*  Joseph Thorndike’s "Three Compelling Historical Arguments Against the Trump Tariffs" (Forbes).  * The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation has released "the 'Michigan Constitutional Archive,' an online resource that gives Michigan residents full and easy access to the state’s founding documents. The archive compiles and organizes every proposed amendment, the 1961 convention debates, and other key documents related to Michigan’s constitutional history." * "The Constitution Society invites applications for a Research Fellowship dedicated to promoting the life and constitutional contributions of Richard Haldane (1856-1928)."  More.  * John Fabian Witt discusses The Radical Fund on The Nation's podcast.    * Paul Moreno on G. Edward White's Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment (Law and Liberty).  * Jane Manners's We note the filing of two historian's amicus briefs in  Trump v. Slaughter:  one for the Brennan Center for Justice by Jane Manners, Fordham Law; the other by Noah Rosenblum and Nathaniel Donahue, NYU Law.  * Rebecca Ciota on researching the University of Colorado Law School's early Black graduates (The Conversation). * Q&A with Camille Robcis, the new chair of Columbia University's history department (Columbia News).  * Times's "Made by History": The Fight Over Birthright Citizenship Has Always Been Political, Not Just Legal, by Philip Yaure.  Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

The Fall 2025 issue of Journal of American Constitutional History is now online: Of Guilty Property and Civil/Remedial Punishment: The Implications and Perils of “History” for the Excessive Fines Clause and Beyond by Beth A. Colgan Contrary to the Supreme Court’s historically based determination that in rem forfeitures are nonpunitive, substantial historical evidence—including the Court’s own early opinions—show that in rem forfeitures were understood to constitute punishment. The Birth of the Dead Constitution: Arthur Machen Jr.’s Early Twentieth-Century Originalism by Austin Steelman Arthur Machen Jr.’s 1900 Harvard Law Review article “The Elasticity of the Constitution” influenced the long rise of originalism—revealing many of originalism’s now essential features--and helped give birth to a dead Constitution that proved ironically vital and ever-evolving. Dialogue Madisonian Liquidation Unliquidated by Jack Rakove William Baude’s provocative essay on “Constitutional Liquidation,” published five years ago, is the best treatment of the subject. Whether the liquidation of constitutional indeterminacies, to Madison’s way of thinking, is equivalent to the fixation of constitutional meaning, is another matter entirely. Liquidation, Then and Now by William Baude If it is true that liquidation did not “deeply engage Madison’s interest,” as Rakove writes, James Madison’s “interest”-level is not something that binds constitutional lawyers. Our historical accounts should be accurate, but our reasons for caring about historical accounts are reasons of our own. Symposium: Tenth Anniversary of Obergefell—Queer Constitutional History Queer as U.S. Constitutional History by Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George Most of queer constitutional history is loss, as well as consolation and survival in the face of devastation. This is a fairly easy conclusion after two decades of the Roberts Court, in the wake of Skrmetti, and amid ongoing efforts to repeal Obergefell. The Tenth Anniversary of Marriage Equality: How Traditional Marriage Law Led to Constitutional Protection for Same-Sex Marriage by Joanna L. Grossman Had the history of marriage law been more uneven, it might not have been so relevant to this analysis. But the federal government’s longstanding deference to states in determinations of marital status made clear that this was a case of anti-gay exceptionalism. The Missing History of Romer v. Evans by Marie-Amélie George Although the outcome of Romer is well-known, as is its reasoning, the events that produced the jurisprudential turn have largely been forgotten. Uncovering this missing history helps explain how and why the Supreme Court inaugurated a new era in queer rights jurisprudence. Good Plaintiffs: The Women of Marriage Equality by Zoe M. Savitsky The early women who sought marriage equality did not look like “perfect plaintiffs.” Neither did many of the successful female plaintiffs in this study. There are, clearly, limits to the current perfect plaintiff tale if we have failed to see these women, intersectionally and multidimensionally. A Queer Constitutional History of Loss: Mayes v. Texas (1974), Privacy, and the Struggle for the Right to Be Trans in Public in the 1970s by Scott De Orio The history of privacy and substantive due process rights is usually narrated from the perspective of those cases the Supreme Court decided and that advocates for gender and sexual rights won. But it is also crucial to pay attention to losses, and even cases the Court turned down and to which it declined to grant cert. “I’m Not Sleazy and I Don’t Frequent Bars”: Respectability as a Legal Strategy in Transsexual Employment Discrimination Lawsuits, 1971-1995 by Shay Ryan Olmstead Transgender workers did more than simply assert their own normativity—they also actively distanced themselves from other gender crossers.

On Thursday, November 20, from 18:00 to 19:30, Ian Williams, St. John’s College, Oxford University, will speak on "Precedent and Sovereignty in Early-Modern Equity: The View from the Star Chamber" as the annual History of Law and Governance Centre lecture at the University of Nottingham in Room B55 Law & Social Sciences Building.  Here is Dr. Williams’s abstract:In this lecture I shall investigate the history of precedent in early-modern equity. Precedent played a central role in equity changing from its origin as exceptional discretionary justice to its more familiar form as a body of law within the English legal system. However, the sources for examining the role of precedent in equity are very limited, if we constrain ourselves to the major private law equity courts of Chancery and Exchequer. Using the reports of cases in the criminal equity court of Star Chamber provides a much larger body of sources. Star Chamber material also enables us to consider an early-modern theorisation of equity as an emanation of sovereignty, in which deciding cases could be understood as an aspect of sovereignty and precedent as a form of legislation, and see this legislative activity in operation. The lecture will draw upon Dr. Williams's ongoing research on the court of Star Chamber, including his editing of a volume of seventeenth century law reports and a study of the court as a provider of criminal equity. --Dan Ernst 

Million Dollar Courtroom (LC) [Because the shutdown of the federal government may not be ended in time, the tour of the Detroit federal courthouse, previously announced in the post below, is cancelled.  DRE] [We have word of an excursion on Thursday, November 13, that might interest attendees of the upcoming annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, a tour at 3:00 pm of the "Million Dollar Courtroom" of the Theodore Levin Federal Courthouse, which is located just a block or so away from the conference hotel in Detroit.  It is not an ASLH-sponsored event but has been arranged Victoria Saker Woeste, an ASLH member who sent us the following.  DRE] Anyone attending the ASLH meeting in November is welcome to take a tour of the famous “Million Dollar Courtroom” on the 7th floor of the Theodore Levin Federal Courthouse, 231 W. Lafayette Blvd., less than a five-minute walk from the conference hotel. The tour is free and open to ASLH members and guests. We will get an architectural tour of the space, originally (and lavishly) constructed in 1896 and then lovingly preserved and reinstalled in the current courthouse which was completed in 1935. The room was renovated again in 2015. Our docent will be Barbara Radke of the Michigan Federal Court Historical Society, and she will give a detailed presentation on the decoration and furnishings in the room, which remains an active courtroom today. We will also learn about important trials held in the space both before and after the relocation. Meet me in the lobby of the hotel at the front doors (at the Washington Blvd. entrance) and we will walk to the courthouse at 2:45 pm rain or shine. You’re also welcome to meet us at the courthouse. You won’t need to register ahead of time but courthouse rules prohibit phones inside the courtrooms, so, unless you are a lawyer with a bar registration card in your possession, prepare to leave your phone in your hotel room or store it in a secure cubby on the first floor of the Levin building. Courthouse security will show us where that is located. I look forward to showing off this beautiful space. This is not an official ASLH event, so please direct any questions to me at vswoeste@icloud.com.

Griffin Black has recently published Reconstruction State Constitutional Conventions and the Rebirth of American Schooling as a student note in the Yale Law Journal: A rebirth of American education occurred in the state constitutional conventions of the Reconstruction South. At a moment of national constitutional reformation, biracial coalitions of delegates constitutionalized universal public-school systems, viewing them as a core component of remaking their states in the image of the U.S. Constitution. These delegates succeeded in keeping their constitutions free from the language of segregated schooling. This ill-understood history severely troubles the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the schoolhouse. This Note fills gaps in the ongoing conversation emanating from the Court about the relationship between our nation’s history and its current educational landscape. --Dan Ernst 

Cambridge University Press has published Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS, by Aziza Ahmed (Boston University School of Law). A description from the Press: How did women come to be seen as 'at-risk' for HIV? In the early years of the AIDS crisis, scientific and public health experts questioned whether women were likely to contract HIV in significant numbers and rolled out a response that effectively excluded women. Against a linear narrative of scientific discovery and progress, Risk and Resistance shows that it was the work of feminist lawyers and activists who altered the legal and public health response to the AIDS epidemic. Feminist AIDS activists and their allies took to the streets, legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts to demand the recognition of women in the HIV response. Risk and Resistance recovers a key story in feminist legal history – one of strategy, struggle, and competing feminist visions for a just and healthy society. It offers a clear and compelling vision of how social movements have the capacity to transform science in the service of legal change.  Praise from reviewers: "Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS is a moving and meticulous study about the grass-roots activists who made visible women’s plight during a time when AIDS treatment and funding were entirely focused on men. The initial definition of AIDS as ‘a gay men’s disease’ led to long-term distributional injustices: the exclusion of women from clinical trials, from disability benefits, and even from being counted in the statistics of its devastation. Aziza Ahmed has crafted a magnificent genealogy of specific organizational strategies that linked individual women into powerful communities of patients, medical researchers, service providers, and litigators. Their advocacy reframed not merely responses to the AIDS crisis but to all subsequent epidemics including COVID. This book is the chronicle of hard-fought interventions that redirected the course of legal and medical history and that transformed social outcomes to the betterment of all." -- Patricia Williams  "Risk and Resistance is a tour de force. It is the book that was missing from the catalogue about HIV/AIDS and the catastrophic health, legal, and political crises in its wake. In beautiful prose and rich story-telling, Aziza Ahmed corrects the historical record, rewriting women and crucial, feminist activism into the folds of a devastating era in global history. With this book, Professor Ahmed has penned a pathbreaking contribution to law and feminist theory." -- Michele Bratcher Goodwin More information is available here. -- Karen Tani  

*  A Q&A with Jane Manners, who joined Fordham's law faculty this fall (Fordham Law News). * The death of former Vice President Dick Cheney has prompted reflections on his significance for U.S. legal history, including this one at the Conversation and this one at the New York Times.  * Marlene Trestman has updated her database of 817 women who have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court (through May 15, 2025).  It is now live on the Supreme Court Historical Society's website. * The Law & Economics Center at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School will host the symposium, The Un-Forgotten Founder: A Celebration of George Mason's Legacy on the Occasion of His 300th Birthday, on December 8, 2025.  The panelists include Akhil Reed Amar, Yale Law School; Michael S. Greve, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School; The Honorable Edith Hollan Jones, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; and The Honorable William C. Mims, Senior Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia. * Mitchell Del Bianco, who graduated this year from UVA Law's famed JD-MA program, has won the Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition for his paper, “What Is a House? An Exhibit Investigating Common Law Origins of the Open Fields Doctrine.” He wrote it for Professor Paul Halliday’s legal history class. (UVA Law).     * Speaking of UVA Law, new courses taught in the January term and Spring 2026 semester include "Citizenship: The Law, History and Politics of U.S. Citizenship," co-taught by Karsh fellow Anja Bossow and Professor Amanda Frost; "Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence," co-taught by Charles Barzun and David Plunkett, visiting from Dartmouth's philosophy department; and "Roman Law of Family, Property and Succession," taught by Michael Doran. * Cultural Critique Online has published a roundtable on The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America's Universities (Duke University Press, 2023), by Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (Whitman College). It features responses by Joshua Barkan (Georgia), Michael Banerjee (UC Berkeley), and Adam Sitze (Amherst), along with a reply by Kaufman-Osborn.   * Julian Zelizer interviews John Fabian Witt on his book The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America. * Miloš Vec, University of Vienna, will deliver the lecture After 1919 and after 1945: How Two World Wars Shaped German Thinking on International Law, at Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana on November 14, 2025, at 3:00 pm.  More.   * If you don't know who Sam Thorne was, consult this, which, for reasons known only to the algorithm, found its way to us this week. * Lawbook Exchange's November catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History.  * ICYMI: More Lepore (Harvard Crimson). Kenya's new judiciary museum (Eastleigh Voice).  An essay on Abortion, the 1966 book by the journalist Larry Nadler and the birth of the reproductive rights movement (Public Books).  The history of China's legal exam (World of Chinese). Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Law and History Review 43:1 is now available online.  Here is the TOC: Articles Context Matters: Understanding Why Medieval Legislators Chose to Regulate Women's Pregnant Bodies Sara M. Butler Kenya's Emergency Powers: Legal Continuities in the Post-Colonial State, 1959–1969 Kyle J. Melles Properties of Empire: Contests over the Commons on Newfoundland's French Shore, 1763–83 Arianne Sedef Urus Absence of Talion and Tort Law in Early Imperial China (221BCE-9 CE): How Body Politic Cancelled Corrective Justice Liang Cai From the Poor Law to the Adoption of Children Act 1926: Another Punishment for Being Poor Rachel Elizabeth Pimm-Smith Carsun Chang's Jefferson: A Lost Era of Transnational Sino-American Constitutional Imagination Jedidiah Joseph Kroncke and Haimo Li “Up with the Brave”: Gender, Transgression and Judges’ Use of Catholic Convents in England and Ireland, 1930–1959 Máiréad Enright Forum: Willrich’s American Anarchy Saboteurs as State Builders Sarah E. Igo The Politics of Political Economy in the Industrial Age Kyle G. Volk Reading American Anarchy as a Legal History of Immigrants Daniel J. Sharfstein Response Michael Willrich Book Reviews Ada Maria Kuskowski, Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 412. $125 hardcover (ISBN 978-1-009-21789-7). Anne E. Lester Philip Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023. Pp. 408. $35 hardcover (ISBN 9780674988125). Mircea Raianu Margot Canaday, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. 312. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780691205953).  Marie-Amélie George

The Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) has issued the following call for applications: CAC invites applications for its 2026-2027 Scholar-in-Residence program.  CAC’s Scholar-in-Residence will work independently on research and writing on a topic of mutual interest, for one year, while participating in the life of CAC’s ongoing work in joint scholarship, litigation, communications, and collaboration with progressive movement partners.  During this year, the Scholar-in-Residence may work remotely, but would also be expected to come to CAC’s office in Washington, DC monthly  throughout the residency.  Constitutional scholarship is the foundation of CAC’s work.  Our scholarship shows that across a broad range of key issues, the Constitution’s text and history command progressive results.  CAC’s scholarly work provides the deep historical support that makes our legal arguments stand out, and builds a comprehensive narrative of the Constitution that is necessary to achieve lasting victories. This scholar-in-residence program will provide the selected candidate an unprecedented opportunity to work on a project in an area that is congruent with the focus of CAC’s mission, including (but not limited to) Constitutional and Legal Studies, History, Political Science, African-American Studies, and the humanities more generally.  Potential projects could focus on such subjects as lifting up often neglected voices in the constitutional story (for example, Black, Native American, and immigrant activists who helped shape the Constitution); the ways that structural reforms might better align our institutions toward democratic values and genuine inclusion; or the exploration of broader Constitutional understandings in conjunction with the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, among others. Responsibilities will include, but not be limited to, the following: * Conduct research and scholarship in a field of inquiry that intersects with CAC’s mission; * Produce written products that could include, but are not limited to, law review articles or other scholarly essays, and articles in popular media such as The New York Times and The Atlantic; * Brief CAC staff on research progress, and help inform the direction of CAC’s existing scholarship; * Give two public presentations at (in person or virtual) events to educate the public and organizational partners about research progress and findings. The Scholar-in-Residence will work in collaboration with CAC’s Director of Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship, within the CAC Think Tank.    Read on here. -- Karen Tani  

Katherine Sanders, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, has posted “The King in all his cabinets”: Crown and Empire in Te Heuheu Tukino v Aotea District Maori Land Board: The report of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Te Heuheu Tukino v Aotea District Maori Land Board [1941] NZLR 590 is today well-known for the finding that rights under the Treaty of Waitangi have no effect in New Zealand law, save where they are incorporated by legislation. This article asks what Te Heuheu and his supporters hoped to achieve in the litigation, and considers ideas of Crown and empire underpinning that strategy. It argues that debates about the legal and constitutional status of the Treaty were framed by the politics of the 1940 centennial of its signing. The article concludes by characterising “The Memorial of the Maori People of New Zealand to the Privy Council”, He Pukapuka Whakamaharatanga, as a means of marking the history of the Treaty and its breach at the Centennial. It argues that the Memorial served both to highlight injustice, and to reassert a vision of a political order in which the promises of the Treaty would be fulfilled. --Dan Ernst