Weekend Roundup

• In the New Republic: Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz on the place where the meat industry meets anti-bestiality laws, past and present.

• Catch this virtual event with Ashley Rubin on her forthcoming book, The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829-1913: Jan.5 at 6-7pm EST. 

• The Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust, at the Sourasky Central Library, Tel Aviv University, has put some of its collections online, including prosecutions for distributing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Nazi Justice Collection, which "contains information on the judiciary in Nazi Germany and hundreds of trial transcripts."  N/t: JQB
  

• “The new feature documentary, My Native Air: Charles Evans Hughes and the Adirondacks, co-produced by MDT Publishing and Snarky Aardvark Films, is premiering on-demand in a limited run from January 15th to February 15th, 2021.”  H/t: JQB
  

• Brittany Nichole Adams, Special Collections, Digitization, and Archival Services Librarian, Northwestern University is profiled in the Bright Young Librarians series at FineBooks and Collections.
  

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Anya Jabour (University of Montana) on why "Referring to female PhDs as ‘Dr.’ promotes equal treatment and values women’s work," including a discussion of trailblazing law reformers (and PhD holders) Sophonisba Breckenridge and Edith Abbott.

• ICYMI:  University of Mississippi fires Garrett Felber, a tenure-track assistant professor in the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History, who has studied the American carceral state. (Mississippi Free Press).  Greg Melleuish on Constitutional History in Australia (Telos Press Podcast).

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

Anne Fleming Tributes

Several tributes to my Georgetown Law colleague Anne Fleming have been launched or otherwise transpired since her death on the eve of the present academic year.  I know of four.  The first is a joint effort of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) and the Business History Conference (BHC), the Anne Fleming Article Prize.  As the BHC explains:

The sudden and unexpected death of Anne Fleming in August 2020 was a tragic loss to academia. Anne's work was at the interface of legal and business history. The central concerns in Anne’s work related to poverty, economic justice, finance and banking, debt, consumer protection, bankruptcy, and other questions of financial equity.  

The prize is awarded every other year to the author or authors of the best article published in the previous two years in either Law and History Review or Enterprise and Society on the relation of law and business/economy in any region or historical period. It is awarded on the recommendation of the editors of the Law and History Review (the official journal of ASLH) and Enterprise and Society (the official journal of Business History Conference). No submission is necessary. The prize will be awarded in 2022, for work published in 2020 and 2021. The prize is for the amount of $250.

Second, at this year's virtual annual meeting of the ASLH, Laura Kalman, a past president of the Society, noted Professor Fleming's passing at a session devoted to Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars.  Professor Fleming was herself a Preyer Scholar, and she was serving on the selection committee when she died.  “She became the anchor of our committee,” Professor Kalman said.  “She would circulate spread sheets to organize us at the beginning of our deliberations, she was incisive, and she modeled good humor. . . . She combined excellence with humanity, and we join everyone who mourns her premature loss.”

The last two tributes involve Georgetown Law.  The editors and staff of the Georgetown Law Journal have dedicated Volume 109 to Professor Fleming's memory.  I contributed a tribute.  Finally, Dean William M. Treanor has announced that a set of four-year research professorships for recently tenured scholars has been renamed the Anne Fleming Research Professorships.

--Dan Ernst

Legal Histories and Historians in Socialist East Central Europe

Socialism and Legal History: The Histories and Historians of Law in Socialist East Central Europe, edited by Ville Erkkilä and Hans-Peter Haferkamp has been published in the series Routledge Research in Legal History:

This book focuses on the way in which legal historians and legal scientists used the past to legitimize, challenge, explain and familiarize the socialist legal orders, which were backed by dictatorial governments.  The volume studies legal historians and legal histories written in Eastern European countries during the socialist era after the Second World War. The book investigates whether there was a unified form of socialist legal historiography, and if so, what can be said of its common features. The individual chapters of this volume concentrate on the regimes that situate between the Russian, and later Soviet, legal culture and the area covered by the German Civil Code. Hence, the geographical focus of the book is on East Germany, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland and Hungary. The approach is transnational, focusing on the interaction and intertwinement of the then hegemonic communist ideology and the ideas of law and justice, as they appeared in the writings of legal historians of the socialist legal orders. Such an angle enables concentration on the dynamics between politics and law as well as identities and legal history.

Studying the socialist interpretations of legal history reveals the ways in which the 20th century legal scholars, situated between legal renewal and political guidance gave legitimacy to, struggled to come to terms with, and sketched the future of the socialist legal orders. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal History, Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law and European Studies.

About the editors: Ville Erkkilä is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for European Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Hans-Peter Haferkamp is Full Professor of Private Law and History of German Law. He is the Director of the Institute of Modern History of Private Law, German and Rhenish Legal History, University of Cologne.

TOC after the jump.

--Dan Ernst

 Introduction: Socialist interpretations of legal history
Ville Erkkilä

PART I Framing the socialist legal historiography

1 The transformations of some classical principles in socialist Hungarian civil law: The metamorphosis of ‘bona fides’ and ‘boni mores’ in the Hungarian Civil Code of 1959
András Földi

2 We few, we happy few? Legal history in the GDR
Martin Otto

3 Roman law studies in the USSR: An abiding debate on slaves, economy and the process of history
Anton Rudokvas and Ville Erkkilä

4 Strategies of covert resistance: Teaching and studying legal history at the University of Tartu in the Soviet era
Marju Luts-Sootak

5 The Western legal tradition and Soviet Russia: The genesis of H. J. Berman’s Law and Revolution
Adolfo Giuliani

PART II Legal historians of socialist regimes

6 Juliusz Bardach and the agenda of socialist history of law in Poland
Marta Bucholc

7 Valdemars Kalninš (1907–1981): The founder of Soviet legal history in Latvia
Sanita Osipova

8 Getaway into the Middle Ages?: On topics, methods and results of ‘socialist’ legal historiography at the University of Jena
Adrian Schmidt-Recla and Zara Luisa Gries

9 Roman law and socialism: Life and work of a Hungarian scholar, Elemér Pólay
Éva Jakab

Richard Polenberg (1937-2020)

Richard Polenberg, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University and the author of Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court and Free Speech and many other works, has died.   Here is Cornell's notice.

Gordon Named ASLH Honorary Fellow

Robert W. Gordon (SLS)

[The third and final posting of citations for the new Honorary Fellows of the American Society for Legal History is for Robert W. Gordon.  Amalia Kessler of the Honors Committee read Professor Gordon’s; we ought to have mentioned that Bruce Mann, a past president of the ASLH, read the citations for Professors Brand and Scott.  DRE]

It gives me enormous personal and professional pleasure to announce that my teacher and now colleague Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law at Stanford University and the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History (Emeritus) at Yale, is being named an Honorary Fellow of the ASLH.  Through his extraordinarily influential scholarship and his remarkable generosity as a mentor, Professor Gordon has had a profound, transformative, and enduring influence on the field of legal history.  

Gordon completed his law degree at Harvard in 1971.  Thereafter, he went on to assume professorships at a series of excellent universities-SUNY Buffalo, Wisconsin, Stanford, and Yale.  So too, he has held visiting professorships at top institutions around the globe, such as Harvard, Oxford, Toronto, and the European University Institute.  He has given on the order of two dozen named lectures at leading universities and been awarded a broad range of prestigious fellowships.  A deeply respected expert on legal ethics and the legal profession, he has served as a member of various task forces and advisory boards focused on such matters.  And his service to the field of legal history has been especially extensive.  Among many other activities in this arena, he served as a past president of the ASLH.
 
Professor Gordon has published more than 80 articles, essays, and book chapters.  He has also published a number of edited volumes and is working on two book manuscripts.  His writings have spanned a variety of topics, including the history of the legal profession and contracts.  But he is most widely known for his highly influential essays on legal history and historiography.
    
Perhaps first and foremost within this remarkable groups of essays is "Critical Legal Histories."  In an extraordinary survey of myriad past approaches to understanding the relationship between law and society through time, Professor Gordon highlights their otherwise neglected commonality-namely, a "functionalist" conception of law as emerging to address social "needs," which are naively (or cynically) imagined as somehow pre-existing and thus pre-political.  Demolishing such functionalism, Gordon calls instead for an approach to history that respects the many contingencies in legal-historical development and attends to the ways that law and society are mutually constitutive.  It is impossible to overstate the extraordinary influence of these ideas in shaping the legal history scholarship produced over the last forty or so years, and not only by scholars of U.S. legal history.  Indeed, even as efforts have been made to question the paradigm of context and contingency, it remains quite clearly the reigning paradigm-or as one colleague puts it, the nature of Professor Gordon's influence has been such that we all "operate in a Harold Bloomian anxiety of influence."
 
Professor Gordon is also widely recognized as a, if not the, preeminent historian of the legal profession in the United States.  Among the many distinctive virtues of his work in this arena is his tracing of the interconnections between on-the-ground efforts to pursue professional reform, on the one hand, and high legal thought, on the other.  So too, it bears emphasis that his scholarship is widely admired not only for its substantive contributions, but also for its inimitable style.  As another colleague writes, Professor Gordon is "our field's greatest essayist," whose "vintage . . . aperçus . . . make one laugh aloud and nod one's head at Bob's wisdom.  No one is more fun to read.  No one is smarter."  

Professor Gordon's remarkable influence on the field of legal history, however, extends well beyond his scholarship.  He has played a key role in training an incredible number of people in this (virtual) room, amounting to two or even three generations of legal historians.  And they all both admire and adore him.  He is always open to new ideas and to new people-and while he might not always agree with the ideas, he is unstinting in his willingness (and eagerness) to engage with them, respectfully and thoroughly.  Indeed, as all in his wide orbit know, he spends untold hours on activities that do not earn a line on the CV but that mean everything in terms of creating and sustaining a vibrant and welcoming intellectual community.  He teaches numerous one-on-one directed reading and research classes, comments extensively on papers and dissertation chapters, and writes a near endless stream of recommendation letters.  And he does all of this in a way that combines his unique, Gordian mix of great generosity of spirit, on the one hand, and hard-headed, trenchant critique, on the other.  The end result is that the beneficiaries of his wisdom are always lifted up-and in all possible senses.

For lifting us all, and the field of legal history as a whole, we are thrilled to welcome Professor Gordon as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Scott Named ASLH Honorary Fellow

Joan Wallach Scott (IAS)

 [We continue our posting of the citations, prepared by the Honors Committee of the American Society for Legal History, for the three legal historians named Honorary Fellows of the ASLH at its November 2020 meeting.  Today’s honoree is Joan Wallach Scott.  DRE]

Our next Honorary Fellow is Joan Wallach Scott, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.  Professor Scott is a transformative scholar of French social and labor history, the history of gender and feminism, and the history of civil liberties in the United States and in France. 

Professor Scott received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1962 and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1969.  She began her teaching career at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and from there moved to Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Brown University, where she was the founding director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.  In 1985 she joined the Institute for Advanced Study, where she was Harry F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science.

Through a dozen monographs, another dozen edited volumes, and articles and book chapters too numerous to count, Professor Scott has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history.  Her challenges have repeatedly won recognition from her colleagues in the profession.  The American Historical Association alone has bestowed four awards on her, starting with the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in 1974 for her first book, The Glassworkers of Carmaux:  French Craftsmen and Political Action in a 19th-Century City; followed by the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in 1989 for her book, Gender and the Politics of History; the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 1995; and the Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2008.  She holds honorary degrees from universities in the United States and Europe, and in 1999 the Hans Sigrist Foundation at the University of Bern awarded her its prize for her groundbreaking work in gender history.  The influence of her work is truly international-her books and even some of her articles have been translated into multiple languages.

Professor Scott may not be a legal historian, but scholars who study the legal history of gender, feminist legal thought, or the legal history of secularism or of academic freedom-to take four core areas of modern legal historical scholarship-could not imagine their scholarship without her powerful and inescapable presence.  For many of us in legal history, she is best known as the author of a series of path-breaking articles on methodology in history, which have had immense impact on our field as well as on others.

Taking just the legal history of gender, her work has transformed the practices of nearly everyone who works in the field.  Her now-classic article, 'Gender:  A Useful Category of Historical Analysis"-in which she argued that studying gender explains not only women's history, but history generally-challenged the reigning conventions in women's history and continues to inspire innovative research.  Without question, engagement with her scholarship has deepened what legal historians do.

Professor Scott's survey of the history of French feminism opened up the history of feminism to legal historians.  Beginning with her book, Only Paradoxes to Offer:  French Feminists and the Rights of Man, she has explored the gendering of citizenship and rights in modern representative democracies.  Her demonstration that the concept of citizenship was from the start gendered as male and defined against a female "other" illuminated the dilemmas at the heart of rights claims, such as the paradox of women claiming "the rights of man."  In examining the continuing difficulties faced by feminists in their struggle for equality, her analysis has assisted scholars and activists focused on women, people with disabilities, and members of racial, ethnic, and sexual minority groups.

Her interest in the ways in which difference poses problems for democratic practice continued in subsequent books-most notably Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism and The Politics of the Veil.  Her work on the veil enmeshed her as a willing and provocative combatant in legal controversies both in France and the United States about the meanings of secularism. Her careful analyses of the headscarf controversies in France became a model of how to explore such issues.  Writ large, her scholarship traces the limits of liberalism, whether among French feminists or the American historical profession.  Her work has made her an important voice for academic freedom.

Professor Joan Scott has also been an active and generous citizen of the profession.  The center she created at Brown became a site for exploring feminist theory by historians and others in the humanities and social sciences who until that point had been mostly hostile to social theory.  At the Institute for Advanced Study, she brought in generations of younger scholars, encouraged them, and guided them, as her work has guided so many others, legal historians included.  

Professor Scott has always been a challenging presence.  She has been described-admiringly-as spiky and uncompromising.  Her work has often been controversial, good both to argue over and engage and argue with.  Yet, it has always been essential.  She does not need our accolades, but we have needed her and are grateful for what she has taught us.  We are pleased and honored to welcome her as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Brand Named ASLH Honorary Fellow

 [This week, we will be posting the citations for the three legal historians named Honorary Fellows of the American Society for Legal History at its November 2020 meeting.  The first is Paul Brand.  DRE]

Our first Honorary Fellow is Paul Brand, emeritus Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford,

Paul Brand (ASLH)

and William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan.  Professor Brand is, in the estimation of his many admirers, the finest living historian of the constitution and law of medieval England.

Professor Brand took his B.A. and M.A. at Oxford and his D.Phil., also at Oxford, in 1974.  He was Assistant Keeper at what was then the Public Record Office in London from 1970 to 1976.  From 1976 to 1983 he was Lecturer in Law at University College, Dublin, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London from 1983 to 1993.  In 1997 he was appointed Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.  He is currently an emeritus Fellow of All Souls and, since 2013, William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan.  He has also held visiting positions at the law schools of Columbia University, Arizona State University, Emory University, and New York University, and at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.  He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in both the history and law sections in 1998 and of the Medieval Academy of America in 2012.  He has been a councillor of the Selden Society since 1990 and its vice-president since 2002.  He is an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple, London.

Professor Brand has been one of the leading and most prolific historians of English law for many decades.  In two monographs, eight volumes of edited original texts, and over eighty book chapters, articles, and essays, he has reshaped the field.  A scholar of remarkable range, he is as comfortable in the Anglo-Norman and Angevin periods as he is with the early Plantagenets.  He has also read deeply in the Anglo-Saxon and later medieval periods.  Within that span, it is the thirteenth-century-a period considered the most important formative period of English law-that he has made particularly his own.  Even his most distinguished colleagues in the field remark with no little awe at his total mastery of the sources.   He has used his vast knowledge to shape profoundly our knowledge of early legal literature, legal education, the emerging legal profession, the development of statute law, the relationship of developments in Ireland to the early common law, the relationship of Jews with the early common law, and the ways in which law shaped family relationships.

Professor Brand's monographs are fundamental reading on thirteenth-century English law.  His first, The Origins of the English Legal Profession, became the standard work on the subject, marked by its lucidity and deep learning.  His second, Kings, Barons and Justices:  The Making and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England, explores the interaction of law, society, and politics in the era of baronial reform under Henry III.

Professor Brand's four volumes of Earliest English Law Reports for the Selden Society are truly magisterial.  They include all the earliest surviving law reports from 1268 to 1290-from Westminster, the eyres and assizes, and the Exchequer of the Jews-as well as the plea roll enrollments for the cases when they can be identified.  With these volumes Professor Brand made accessible the very first discussions of many aspects of the common law and revealed the first known occurrences of much of our legal terminology.

Professor Brand's scholarship is impressive in its own right and amply merits electing him an Honorary Fellow of the Society.  He has been honored with not one, but two festschriften, which attest to the fact that his immense and generously shared learning is a vital resource for all others working in the field.  This latter quality-his generously shared learning-speaks to another qualification for election as Honorary Fellow.  Professor Brand builds fields of scholarship.  He is an inspiration and great support for scholars young and old.  His generosity in commenting on the work of others is legendary.  In fact, every colleague whose opinion the committee solicited commented with more than a little awe on Professor Brand's remarkable unselfishness in helping others with their work.  If Honorary Fellows of the Society are the scholars on whose shoulders we stand, Professor Brand has actively lifted scores of other scholars to his shoulders in pursuing new and invariably important questions in legal history.

In sum, Professor Brand has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others.  Throughout his long career, he has modeled how historians should engage with the law-understanding and respecting its technical complexity, but constantly aware of the social and political contexts within which that technical complexity worked and which constantly shaped what it could achieve.  He also models how historians should engage with their profession-publishing meticulous and path-breaking articles and books, editing and re-editing texts which allow others to expand the boundaries of the field, and engaging in collegial exchanges at gatherings large and small, with colleagues old and new, in a way which makes English legal history accessible and welcoming to all.

We are pleased and honored to welcome Professor Brand as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Julio Capó Jr. (Florida International University) and Melba Pearson (Florida International University’s Center for the Administration of Justice ) on Florida voter suppression as "Jim Crow Esq."; Ashley Farmer (University of Texas, Austin) on Black women running for Congress;
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has just launched The Supreme Court & the Presidential Election of 1876, "a documentary on the 15-member Electoral Commission (including 5 Supreme Court Justices) appointed to resolve the disputed election."
  

• New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Counterterrorism in American Civil Courts: The Role of Letelier v. Republic of Chile, by Alan McPherson.
  

• "Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and Social Justice," a discussion featuring Georgetown Law’s Brad Snyder, who is the author of House of Truth, and Jennifer Lowe, the Director of Programs and Strategic Planning of the Supreme Court Historical Society, will be conducted online on November 18, 2020 at 3 pm.  It is sponsored by the National Archives, the Supreme Court Historical Society, and the Capital Jewish Museum.  Register here.
  

• Street Law, with the help of the Supreme Court Historical Society, has revamped its site, Landmark Cases of the US Supreme Court. 

• A Call for an upcoming event at the Université de Neuchâtel on historical sources of Swiss law here (9-10 Sept. 2021).

• Update: a profile of Buffalo Law's Michael Boucai and his article "Before Loving" (UB Now).
  

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

Ohnesorge: A Hurstian View on Chinese Econonomic Development

John K.M. Ohnesorge, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted Development is Not a Dinner Party: A Hurstian Perspective on Law and Growth in China, which is forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review Forward:

Much has been written, and remains to be written, about the many roles law has played in China’s economic development since 1978. Without minimizing the value of what has been written so far, this essay seeks to broaden the discussion by applying to China’s recent history certain ideas of the great historian of 19th Century American law and economic development, James Willard Hurst. The essay proceeds by providing a brief introduction to Hurst and his work on law and economic growth in the United States, then explores how those ideas might be applied to assist our understanding of what has happened in China.

--Dan Ernst

Littleton-Griswold Prize to Seo for "Policing the Open Road"

The American Historical Association has just announced its annual prizes.  The winner of the AHA's Littleton-Griswold Prize "for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, broadly defined," is Sara Seo, Columbia Law School (and a former LHB Guest Blogger), for Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press).  Congratulations, Professor Seo!

--Dan Ernst

Zelden on Talking Legal History

 New on “Talking Legal History” with Siobhan M. M. Barco is her interview of Charles L. Zelden

"about the new expanded edition of his book, Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Growing Crisis in American Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2020). Zelden is a professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Nova Southeastern University’s Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches courses in history, government and legal studies.

"In this third expanded edition Zelden offers a powerful history of voting rights and elections in America since 2000. Bush v. Gore exposes the growing crisis by detailing the numerous ways in which the unlearned and wrongly learned “lessons of 2000” have impacted American election law through the growth of voter suppression via legislation and administrative rulings, and, provides a clear warning of how unchecked partisanship arising out of Bush v. Gore threatens to undermine American democracy in general and the 2020 election in particular."

–Dan Ernst

Kerber to Deliver Haskins Prize Lecture

[We are very please to note the following announcement from the American Council of Learned Societies.  DRE]

Linda K. Kerber to Deliver the 2020 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture

ACLS is pleased to announce that historian Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of History Emerita, Lecturer in Law at The University of Iowa, will deliver the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture virtually from the College of Law at The University of Iowa the afternoon of Wednesday, October 28, 2020, at 3 pm ET.  Register now for this virtual event.

Kerber received the AB from Barnard College and the PhD in history from Columbia University in 1968. In 2006 she was Harmsworth Professor of Amercan History at Oxford University.
 
Kerber is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She served as president of the American Studies Association in 1998, the Organization of American Historians in 1996-97, and  the American Historical Association in 2006-07.
 
In her writing and teaching Kerber has emphasized the history of  citizenship, gender, and authority.  Her teaching has been recognized by the University of Iowa Graduate College Special Recognition/ Outstanding Mentor Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts.   She is the author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998) for which she was awarded the Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in U.S. legal history and the Joan Kelley Prize for the best book in women’s history (both awarded by the American Historical Association).  Her other books include Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997), Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980), and Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (1970).  She is co-editor of the widely used anthology, Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (9th edition, 2020).
 
“The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other: A View from the United States,” appeared in the American Historical Review, February 2007 and is the foundation of her current research and writing.  She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, based in the Netherlands and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statelessness and Inclusion, based in Melbourne, Australia. Following her interest in strengthening academic exchange between the United States and Japan, she served for five years as a member of the Japan-U,S. Friendship Commission/CULCON, a federal agency.  She recently completed a term on the Permanent Committee of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, to which she was appointed by President Barack Obama.

Named for the first chairman of ACLS (1920-26), the Haskins Prize Lecture series is entitled “A Life of Learning” and celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance. The lectures are published in the ACLS Occasional Paper series and made available on the ACLS website (see Haskins Prize Lectures).

Edwards to Princeton

The Princeton University Department of History has announced the appointment of Laura Edwards to the faculty. From the announcement:

Credit

Laura Edwards specializes in legal history. She comes to Princeton this winter from Duke University, where she was hired as an associate professor in 2001 and appointed to full professor in 2005. Edwards previously was on the faculty of the University of California-Los Angeles from 1997-2001, and the University of South Florida from 1993-97.

Edwards is the author of four books on the legal history of the American South, including The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009), which received the Charles Sydnor Prize, awarded by the Southern Historical Association for the best book on Southern history, and the Littleton-Griswold Prize, awarded by the American Historical Association for the best book on the history of American law and society.

She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. from Northwestern University.

Congratulations to Princeton and to Professor Edwards!

-- Karen Tani

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.

Weekend Roundup

• Anne C. Fleming is remembered, especially by other former Climenko Fellows, in Harvard Law Today. 

• The Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History, to be held virtually on December 5, 2020 has been announced.  Fergus Smith will present Civil Litigants in Nineteenth-Century Sheriff Courts.

•  New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Turning a Blind Eye: Infanticide and Missing Babies in Seventeenth-Century Geneva, by Sara Beam

• Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943, by Richard F. Hamm, University of Albany at SUNY, has been published online in the American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic.

• Over at Notches: Ishita Pande, Queen's University, on her new book, Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937.

• Over at Legal History Miscellany:  Sara M. Butler on Law Enforcement Officials and the Limits of Violence in Medieval England.

• Ryan Greenwood at the Riesenfeld Rare Books Blog: the University of Minnesota Law Library has an upcoming exhibit on the 1935 Commission on the Harlem Riot, Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

• “The Bangor Historical Society is presenting a virtual exhibit that will focus on the connection between fashion and women’s freedoms. ‘Interwoven: Women’s Fashion and Empowerment’ focuses on the history of women’s rights, including social, economic, legal and voting, while relating milestones and benchmarks with fashion trends by decade" (Bangor Daily News).  And the National Constitution Center also has a new exhibit on the 19th Amendment (Philly Voice).

• Lawbook Exchange has issued a catalogue of forty-one noteworthy titles on The Laws of War and Peace.

•  ICYMI: A review of Matthew Van Meter’s Deep Delta Justice (WaPo).  Mary Ziegler on What's Next for Abortion Law? (Boston Review).  UVA Law's first female students.

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

Anne Fleming: Balleisen Tribute/"Borrower's Tale" Ungated

Edward Ballesien's memorial of Anne Fleming is up on the Exchange, the blog of the Business History Conference.  In addition, Cambridge University Press has kindly made her article "The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City," Law and History Review 30, no. 4 (2012), 1053-1098, free to access for the remainder of the year.

--Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: A Canadian Business Law Tribute

Anne Fleming was to present a paper based on her research on Birmingham, Alabama’s innovative bankruptcy court at 100 Years of Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law, a conference that was to be held last May and now is to be held next May.  The conference papers are to be published in a special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal, edited by the two conference organizers, Thomas G.W. Telfer and Alfonso Nocilla.  The two have announced that they have decided to dedicate the volume to Anne Fleming and have added the following to its foreword.

We would like to acknowledge that one of our conference panelists, Professor Anne Fleming of Georgetown University Law Center, passed away earlier this year. Anne was scheduled to present "The Origins of the American Consumer Bankruptcy System" during our first panel on Historical Perspectives on Insolvency Law. At the time of her passing Anne was engaged in a new book project: Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960. Her preliminary findings can be found on her website: The Bankruptcy Capital of the World: Debt Relief in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s.  We dedicate this special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal to Anne Fleming.

--Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: Business Historians Remember

[We have been speaking of Anne Fleming as a legal historian, but her grasp of the small-sum loan industry in City of Debtors was so impressive that business historians claimed her, too.  Here is the message Neil Rollings, President of the Business History Conference, acting on behalf of the BHC Trustees and Executive Committee, sent to members BHC members.]

It is with a sense of utmost shock and deep sadness that I write to inform you all that Anne Fleming passed away on Tuesday 25th August due to an embolism. I am sure that you will be as stunned by this awful news as I am. Anne has been an extremely willing and able servant to the BHC, currently as trustee and chair of the Electronic Media Oversight Committee. She also played a leading role in helping to revise the BHC bylaws. Recently, she had agreed to be a member of the BHC’s new anti-racism committee. In the short period of time I had worked with Anne, her selfless willingness to help, her legal eye for detail and her capacity to contribute efficiently and effectively shone through.

Her intellectual contributions to business history were outstanding, as she received the 2016 Herman E. Kroos Prize for the best dissertation in business history and followed this up by winning the 2019 Ralph Gomory Prize for her book City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, 2018). Her current research projects promised to confirm and enhance her academic reputation.

But perhaps her most lasting contribution will be her warmth, generosity and interest in others. She will leave a large hole in the business history community and had already made a lasting contribution to it. It is tragic that such a blossoming career has ended so early and so abruptly.

Here is a link to a legal history blog In memorium of Anne. Our thoughts are with all who knew her and our deepest condolences go to her family and friends at this time.

Anne Fleming: Georgetown Law Remembers

Georgetown Law’s memorial notice for Anne Fleming, with remembrances from faculty, students and staff, is now online.  (A few other faculty members and students had earlier shared their memories on social media, including here and here.)  I’d like to provide some context for my quote in the notice, a sentiment I stammered out during an online convening of the Georgetown law faculty on Thursday.

I have attended quite a few panels at quite a few annual meetings of the American Society for Legal History, but I can remember only two in which I teared up.  One was “The Surprising Effects of Sympathy,” a memorial discussion of the work of Elizabeth B. Clark at the 1998 meeting in Seattle.  The other was a Kathryn T. Preyer Award panel in November 2011.  Named for a great mentor of legal historians, the Preyer Award is an annual prize contest for graduate students.  That year Mary Bilder chaired, with comments by two senior legal historians whose work I had admired since my own early days in the field, William Wiecek and Charles McCurdy.   I remember Chuck McCurdy’s comment in particular.  As Karen reported in a post, Chuck said, “Kitty would have loved these papers,” explained why, and concluded that, with new entrants like these, the field of legal history was certain to thrive for years to come.  A similar thought had occurred to me as I listened to the papers, and to hear Chuck articulate it, connecting a departed generation represented by Kitty Preyer through him and Bill Wiecek to an entering generation, was very moving.  Two of the award winners that year were Kevin Arlyck and Michael Schoeppner.  The third was Anne Fleming, for “The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City,” which she subsequently published in Law and History Review and as a chapter in City of Debtors.

In the brief time Anne Fleming wrote legal history, she more than delivered on the promise that was so evident in 2011.  As I told my Georgetown colleagues, she was the kind of person who, when you looked around and realized she was engaged in the same enterprise you were, made you think the activity must be worthwhile if someone that good was also committed to it.   Now when legal historians look around and realize Anne’s not there, we’ll feel diminished by her absence but also grateful for all she did when she was with us.

--Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: In Memoriam

Anne C. Fleming, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, died suddenly Tuesday night from natural causes.  We at the blog were fortunate to know her and we join her colleagues, students, friends, and family in mourning her passing. This post will not do justice to her life, but it is a first attempt to recognize the many ways in which she enriched our field.  We know that more remembrances will follow; when they do, we will post them here.

Anne was an honors graduate of Yale College and the Harvard Law School. Amidst her studies, she also found time to work at the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.  After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York and then with the Honorable Marjorie O. Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Third Circuit.  From there, she went to the Foreclosure Prevention Project in South Brooklyn Legal Services, where she served as a Staff Attorney from 2007 to 2009.

Anne Fleming (credit)

In 2009, Anne enrolled in the doctoral program of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, immediately impressing fellow students with her clear-eyed sense of purpose, her maturity, and her generosity of spirit.  She wrote her dissertation under the direction of Sarah Barringer Gordon, but had many other fans and supporters on the faculty, including dissertation committee members Thomas Sugrue and Michael Katz. 

She also earned recognition outside of Penn. As a graduate student, she was a fellow in the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute of the American Society for Legal History, a prestigious training ground for scholars entering the field of legal history. (Follow the link for some photos from the Hurst Institute class of 2013.) Two different learned societies awarded her their graduate paper prizes: the ASLH, for “The Borrower’s Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City” (subsequently published in the Law and History Review) and the Business History Conference, for “The ‘Very Fibre of Personal Finance’: Changing Beliefs about the Regulation and the Small Sum Lending Industry in New York, 1900-1940."  Her dissertation, completed in 2014, was similarly well received, winning the BHC’s annual dissertation prize.

In 2012, Anne returned to the Harvard Law School as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law. She taught legal writing and thrived as a scholar, drawing on the methodological diversity of her fellowship class to widen her own scholarly range. But she remained devoted to the research questions that had grown out of her public interest legal work and animated her history training. She was "just so committed to the truth," recalls a colleague from her time there. 

 

Anne joined Georgetown’s law faculty in 2014.  In that year she also published “The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the ‘Law of the Poor,’” which placed Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company in the context of a statutory transformation of consumer protection law.  The article remains revered by contracts law teachers for the way it reframes a canonical case.

Anne’s book, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, 2018), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the annual book prize of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers and the Ralph Gomory Book Prize of the Business History Conference, whose prize committee described it well:

In this deeply-researched, well-crafted, and timely book, Anne Fleming offers a rich history of the small loan industry, across most of the twentieth century.  Drawing on evidence from hundreds of court cases, among other sources, Fleming skilfully reconstructs the changing experiences and strategies of borrowers and lenders, as they navigated changing local and national regulatory regimes.  Using crisp prose, Fleming provides a clear discussion of a long and complex story about business and regulation, while highlighting the struggles of individual human characters.  City of Debtors is a detailed, scholarly study, but one that never loses sight of bigger, enduring problems and questions, including, as Fleming puts it, questions about the “meaning of justice within capitalism.”

She discussed the book in a series of posts on LHB. In characteristic fashion, Anne wrote about her work in a way that was the opposite of self-aggrandizing, studding her posts with words of wisdom for other writers.  She also discussed the book with the director of the American Bankruptcy Institute in the ABI’s podcast series.

At her untimely death, Anne had entered a new and ambitious phase of her scholarly career. For example, her 2019 article "The Public Interest in the Private Law of the Poor" explored "uncharted connections between private law and poverty law," showing "how concerns about public spending on poor relief have shaped debates over the private law of the poor for over a century." The article was aimed not only at legal historians and scholars of poverty law, but also at scholars of law and economics and policymakers concerned with contemporary economic inequality. 

Anne was also fully embarked on an enormously exciting book project, “Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960.” Anne planned to describe “how working-class households, both black and white, organized their financial lives and navigated the shifting matrix of legal rules and institutions that governed credit relationships and debt forgiveness in the first half of the twentieth century.”  Although she had conducted research on Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and expected to sample bankruptcy files in other cities, her research centered on Birmingham, Alabama, where, for over five years in the 1930s, an innovative “Debtors Court” adjudicated the filings of 10,000 wage earners seeking debt adjustment or forgiveness.  The court inspired Chapter 13 of the federal bankruptcy law, which extended its system of court-supervised repayment to the entire nation.  Further, its docket and case files, when linked to the census and city directories and geocoded, made possible a rich portrait of the financial lives of the working class and show how race shaped access to credit and debt relief.  She captured her preliminary findings in a website, The Bankruptcy Capital of the World: Debt Relief in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s, which she was still revising at her death.  We link to it with permission.

Her colleagues, students, and fellow historians all remember her warmth, generosity, utter lack of pretension, and above all her kindness.  A colleague at South Brooklyn Legal Services recalled her as “fiercely dedicated to her clients, a brilliant and selfless advocate.”  Tom Sugrue, one of her dissertation advisors, writes that she was “quietly brilliant and deeply humane.” “Losing a good scholar is bad enough,” writes Bruce Mann, who advised her when she was a Climenko,  “but losing such a good person is far worse.”

We at the blog will miss her dearly and treasure her memory.  

-- Dan Ernst, Mitra Sharafi, and Karen Tani