Richman and Seo on Federalism and the FBI

Daniel C. Richman and Sarah Seo, Columbia Law School, have posted How Federalism Built the FBI, Sustained Local Police, and Left Out the States, which is forthcoming in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 17 (2021):

Diplomacy Ceremony, National Police Academy (LC)

This Article examines the endurance of police localism amid the improbable growth of the FBI in the early twentieth century when the prospect of a centralized law enforcement agency was anathema to the ideals of American democracy. It argues that doctrinal accounts of federalism do not explain these paradoxical developments. By analyzing how the Bureau made itself indispensable to local police departments rather than encroaching on their turf, the Article elucidates an operational, or collaborative, federalism that not only enlarged the Bureau’s capacity and authority but also strengthened local autonomy at the expense of the states. Collaborative federalism is crucial for understanding why the police have gone for so long without meaningful state or federal oversight, with consequences still confronting the country today. This history highlights how structural impediments to institutional accountability have been set over time and also identifies a path not taken, but one that can still be pursued, to expand the states’ supervisory role over local police.

--Dan Ernst

De and Evans in Legal Histories of Empire

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Legal Histories of Empire Symposium: Rohit De and Catherine Evans

Please join us for the first of several planned symposia in 2020 and 2021 for Legal Histories of Empire and for the celebration of a special birthday of the founder of the Legal Histories of Empire Conferences.

Our speakers:

Rohit De: "Brown Lawyers, Black Robes: Decolonization, Diasporic Lawyers and Minority Rights"

Rohit De is Associate Professor of History at Yale University and is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018). As a Carnegie Fellow, he is currently working on a book on a history of rebellious lawyering and decolonization

Catherine Evans: “Civilization as Sanity in the Victorian Empire”

Catherine L. Evans is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. Her first book, Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law, comes out next fall (Yale University Press, 2021).

Timezones:
New Haven/Toronto @ 4 pm on 30 October
Vancouver @ 1pm on 30 October
Sydney @ 7 am on 31 October
Auckland @ 9 am on 31October
London/Dublin @ 8 pm on 30 October
Singapore @ 4 am on 31 October

Registration: Free via Eventbrite [here].  Registration is required.  You will be emailed a Zoom link 36 hours before the event.

Selden Society Prizes to Papp-Kamali and Kennefick; Honorable Mention to McSweeney

[We have the following announcement from the Selden Society.  DRE] 

David Yale Prize

Instituted in 1998, this biennial prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales from scholars who have been engaged in research in the subject for not longer than about ten years.  Since 2017, separate prizes have been given for the best book and the best article published  in the preceding two years. The prize is named in honour of Mr David Yale, QC, FBA, then President of the Society and formerly Literary Director.

The 2019 David Yale Book prize was awarded to Elizabeth Papp Kamali for Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The prize committee said of this work:

Papp-Kamali’s Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England is a wide-ranging and deeply researched contribution to the history of criminal law. In seeking to understand what ‘felony’ meant in medieval England, Papp-Kamali takes on a question which Maitland considered unanswerable. This book changes our existing understanding, using a challenging methodology which uses a much wider range of sources than is often the case in legal history scholarship. In doing so she places legal history within the history of wider cultural norms and influences to produce perceptive and valuable conclusions.

The committee also recommended that an honourable mention be given to Thomas J. McSweeney for his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2019)

The 2019 David Yale article prize was awarded to Ciara Kennefick for ‘‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ in the Journal of Legal History 39 (2018), pp.  307-339. The prize committee said of this article:

Kennefick’s ‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ is a genuinely novel re-examination of an important part of English legal history, highlighting the interaction between questions of law about contractual fairness, and mathematics. Interest in legal questions drove interest in the study of probability, while developments in the mathematics of probability came to resolve legal questions. The article changes the way we look at the history of this area of law.

Abrams on the Mail Fraud Statutes

Norman Abrams, UCLA Law School, has posted Uncovered: The Legislative Histories of the Early Mail Fraud Statutes:

The federal crime of mail fraud is generally viewed as the original federal auxiliary jurisdiction crime—that is, not made a crime because it serves to protect direct federal interests against harm, but rather as an auxiliary to state crime enforcement. Mail fraud is also a crime that scholars, judges and lawyers have viewed as not having any significant legislative history linked to its original enactment in 1872, nor to its two early revisions in 1889 and 1909.

This paper uncovers and elaborates on legislative history details related to each of those three legislative enactments and, along the way, presents a more nuanced view of the status of mail fraud as the original federal auxiliary jurisdiction crime.

 --Dan Ernst