Rogers's "Workers against the City"

Donald W. Rogers, a lecturer in the Department of History at Central Connecticut State University, has published Workers against the City: The Fight for Free Speech in Hague v. CIO (University of Illinois Press, 2020):

The 1939 U.S. Supreme Court decision Hague v. CIO constitutionalized the fundamental right of Americans, including labor organizers, to assemble and speak in public places. Donald W. Rogers eschews the prevailing view of the case as simply a morality play pitting Jersey City, New Jersey, political boss Frank Hague against the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allied civil libertarians. Instead, he utilizes untapped archives and evidence to review Hague's story from street and media battles to district court and Supreme Court deliberations, illuminating trial proceedings from both worker and city perspectives for the first time. His analysis reveals how transformative New Deal-era developments in municipal governance, union organizing, labor politics and constitutional law dominated the conflict, and how assembly and speech rights changed according to judges' reaction to this historical situation.

Clear-eyed and comprehensive, Workers against the City revises the view of a milestone case that continues to affect Americans' constitutional rights today.

Here is an endorsement:

"Skillfully blending the histories of American civil liberties, organized labor, and urban politics, Rogers shows us how a complex set of forces has shaped and limited the rights of modern Americans to assemble and speak their minds in public."--James J. Connolly, author of An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America

–Dan Ernst

Lakier on Freedom of Speech beyond the First Amendment

Genevieve Lakier, University of Chicago Law School, has posted The Non-First Amendment Law of Freedom of Speech, which is forthcoming in volume 134 of the Harvard Law Review:

The First Amendment dominates popular and scholarly debate about freedom of speech in the United States. Yet it is not the only legal instrument that protects expressive freedom, the rights of the institutional press, or the democratic values that these rights facilitate. A rich body of local, state, and federal laws also does so, and does so in ways the First Amendment does not. This Article explores the history, and the present-day operation of what it calls the non-First Amendment law of freedom of speech. Doing so changes our understanding of both the past and the present of the American free speech tradition. It reveals that the nineteenth century was not a period in which there was little legal protection for freedom of speech, as scholars have long assumed. It also makes evident that the contemporary system of free expression is much more majoritarian, and much more pluralist in its conception of what freedom of speech means and requires than the we commonly assume. Recognizing as much is important not only as a descriptive matter but as a doctrinal one. This is because in few other areas of constitutional law does the Court look more to history to guide its interpretation of the meaning of the right. And yet, the Court’s view of the relevant regulatory history is impoverished. Missing from the Court’s understanding of freedom of speech is almost any recognition of the important non-constitutional mechanisms that legislators have traditionally used to promote it. The result is a deeply inconsistent body of First Amendment law that relies on a false view of both our regulatory present, and our regulatory past — and, as a result, is able to proclaim a commitment to laissez faire principles that, in reality, it has never been able to sustain.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Samantha Barbas, University at Buffalo Law, on her receipt of an NEH grant for a "sociolegal history of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan."  More.  

• New and ungated in Studies in American Political Development: “No Bodies to Kick or Souls to Damn”: The Political Origins of Corporate Criminal Liability, by Anthony Grasso, Rutgers University.

• As a faculty member at Georgetown University faculty, this one shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.  @dbqur

• In Nursing Clio's The Deathbed series: Julie Hardwick on abortion and infanticide in 17th-18th-c. France. 

• The CFP for the next conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, to be held in a hybrid format in Arlington, VA, June 17-20, 2021, is here.

• Constitution Day is around the corner.  (We never thought we'd say this, but, "Robert Byrd, would that you were with us in this hour!")  Boston College’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy is observing the date with The Equal Rights Amendment: A Constitution Day Conversation, with Julie Chi-hye Suk and Katharine Young.
  

•  The United States Capitol Historical Society announced that its 2020 National Heritage Lecture, delivered virtually on September 14, 2020, will be a discussion of “one of the most far-reaching accomplishments of mid-20th century American government: The comprehensive and strategic investment in our transportation infrastructure.”   The Supreme Court Historical Society and the White House Historical Association are also sponsors of the event.  More.
  

• ICYMI: A review of James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model (Concord Monitor).  Danielle Allen on The Flawed Genius of the Constitution (Atlantic)
  

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

JSCH 45:2

Journal of Supreme Court History 45:2 (2020) has been published.  Here’s the TOC:

Introduction
Melvin I. Urofsky

Fletcher, Whitney, and the Art of Disagreement
Mark R. Killenbeck

Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller and the Great Mustache Debate of 2444
Todd Peppers

The Politics of Disabled Supreme Court Justices
Judge Glock

Tension in the Unitary Executive: How Taft Constructed the Epochal Opinion of Myers v. United States
Robert Post

Kumezo Kawato and “Justice Court”
Charles J. Sheehan

--Dan Ernst