Weekend Roundup

• Rowan Williams on “Saving our Order: Thomas Becket, Henry II and the Law of Church and State,” 10 December 2020, 17:30 - 19:00.  H/t: LPK
  

• 
  The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation announces the webinar series, Black Inventors and Innovators: New Perspectives.  It is free and open to the public and will convene daily November 16–20, 2020 from 1:00-2:30pm ET. “This week-long program will draw renewed attention to historic and contemporary inventors of color and Black technology consumers, while discussing strategies for building a more equitable innovation ecosystem. Through presentations by an interdisciplinary group of thought leaders and engaged discussions with our online audience, this 'state of the field' workshop will identify critical questions, seek out new case studies, and articulate theories, concepts and themes to inform the next generation of research, archival collecting, museum exhibitions, and invention education initiatives.”  Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University, is on Thursday’s panel. 
  

• Lawbook Exchange has released its catalogue on Law and Literature.
  

• Ronald K. L. Collins reviews Hamilton and the Law: Reading Today’s Most Contentious Legal Issues Through the Hit Musical by Drexel University law professor Lisa A. Tucker (WaPo).

• Over at the Legal History Miscellany: Krista Kesselring on the hardships of 18th-century English law on wives

• And at Nursing Clio: Melissa E. Blair and Christopher Ferguson ask why so many scholarly fellowship programs are still residential.

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

A Symposium on Sullivan's "Church State Corporation"

The symposium Secularism, religion, and the public sphere has recently concluded over at The Immanent Frame, the blog of the Social Science Research Council.  It is devoted to Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (University of Chicago Press, 2020), by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Indian University-Bloomington.

First, here is the publisher’s copy and TOC for Professor Sullivan’s book:

Church and state: a simple phrase that reflects one of the most famous and fraught relationships in the history of the United States. But what exactly is “the church,” and how is it understood in US law today? In Church State Corporation, religion and law scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan uncovers the deeply ambiguous and often unacknowledged ways in which Christian theology remains alive and at work in the American legal imagination.

Through readings of the opinions of the US Supreme Court and other legal texts, Sullivan shows how “the church” as a religious collective is granted special privilege in US law. In-depth analyses of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby reveal that the law tends to honor the religious rights of the group—whether in the form of a church, as in Hosanna-Tabor, or in corporate form, as in Hobby Lobby—over the rights of the individual, offering corporate religious entities an autonomy denied to their respective members. In discussing the various communities that construct the “church-shaped space” in American law, Sullivan also delves into disputes over church property, the legal exploitation of the black church in the criminal justice system, and the recent case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Brimming with insight, Church State Corporation provocatively challenges our most basic beliefs about the ties between religion and law in ostensibly secular democracies.

Here’s the TOC:

Introduction. The Definite Article
Chapter 1. The Church Makes an Appearance: Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC
Chapter 2. “The Mother of Religion”: The Church Property Cases
Chapter 3. Hobby Lobby: The Church, the State, and the Corporation
Chapter 4. The Body of Christ in Blackface
Conclusion. The Church-in-law Otherwise
 
And here is the SSRC symposium:

Introduction:  Mona Oraby (Amherst)
Leora Batnitzky (Princeton):  An American Political Theology?
Samuel Moyn (Yale): Jurisdictions of the Church
Nandini Chatterjee (Univ. of Exeter):  Imagining Community
Linda Greenhouse (Yale and the New York Times):  Why Not Just Abolish the Religion Clauses?
Julian Rivers (Univ. of Bristol Law): "... by law established": A transatlantic dialogue

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: FK

Religious Normativity in Early Modern New Granada

[We have the following announcement from our friends at Max Planck.  DRE]

Religious Normativity in Early Modern New Granada

Ecclesiastical institutions and actors played key roles in the formation of normative orders in early modern  Ibero-America. Their legal historical importance is now discussed in case studies focusing on New Granada - a region which included today's Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador - from the 16th to the 19th century. This is the subject matter of the most recent volume of the series Global Perspectives on Legal History (GPLH), edited by Pilar Mejía, Otto Danwerth and Benedetta Albani (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History).

The nine chapters of this Spanish-language volume explore the relationship between different types of religious normativity as well as their local adaptations in the archdiocese of Santafé and peripheral dioceses. With respect to the colonial period, they deal, for example, with language policy and activities of various religious orders (Dominicans and Jesuits), conflicts between regular and secular clergy, the role of educational centres (colegios and conventos) as well as with financial aspects of parish administration. Further contributions are devoted to the 19th century: in addition to the role of oaths in legal proceedings, the state-church relationship during the processes leading to independence and in Republican times both in Colombia and Venezuela is examined afresh.

The present volume is the third in a four-book series exploring the contribution of ecclesiastic institutions to normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. The first two books examined the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, respectively. The final volume (2021) will focus on Portuguese America (Brazil) and thus provide comparative material to the studies of Hispano-America.

More information on the volume [here].