ASLH Announces New Fellowship

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The American Society for Legal History has established the Herbert A. Johnson Fellowship, made possible by a generous gift from Jane and Harry Scheiber. The fellowship will be awarded to an early career scholar who works on the legal history of North America and is selected to attend the annual Student Research Colloquium. The new fellowship honors the prolific legal and constitutional historian Herbert Johnson, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina and past president of the ASLH from 1973 to 1975.

In noting the significance of the fellowship, ASLH President Lauren Benton explained, “The Student Research Colloquium has been a wonderful addition to our annual meeting, bringing eight early career scholars each year for a full day of scholarly interchange and collegial engagement. The fellowship helps to lay a permanent foundation for this vital resource for the newest members of our field.”

Benton went on to praise Jane and Harry Scheiber for their vision in establishing the fellowship. “The Scheibers’ generous support of early career scholars and their choice to honor Herb Johnson beautifully advance the ASLH mission of promoting the future of legal history while celebrating the contributions of our most distinguished scholars.”

The Herbert A. Johnson Fellowship will be awarded for the first time in 2021. The ASLH continues to work to create other named fellowships in order to fully endow the Student Research Colloquium, adding to a similar effort to endow named fellowships for the Hurst Summer Institute.

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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

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Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Tycko

We have word that the William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize, awarded by the trustees of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation on the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on the Cromwell Prizes of the American Society for Legal History, has gone to Dr. Sonia Tycko, Oxford University,  for “Captured Consent: Bound Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America.”  From the recommendation of the ASLH committee:

In an extraordinarily creative and imaginative dissertation, "Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America," Sonia Tycko explores the repeated appearance of consent as part of the meaning of compulsory service in the early modern period. … Tycko forces us to reconsider the very foundations of consent and contract and makes a signal contribution to the historiography on contract, labor, and freedom. Tycko also offers nuanced readings of an impressive array of primary sources and reveals the social realities against which a vocabulary about contract arose in particular labor relationships, from indentured servitude to military impressment to kidnapping. She mines documents that others might skim and brings to the surface the way in which the very words betray underlying power dynamics. The important transatlantic lens persuasively establishes her argument as part of larger seventeenth-century English assumptions, in Great Britain and the British colonies. This dissertation rewards the reader on every page-and, impressively, becomes even more interesting on rereading. Tycko's dissertation serves as a model of the well-crafted and carefully executed dissertation in legal history.

–Dan Ernst

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Cromwell Book Prize to Erman

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, acting on a recommendation of a committee of the American Society for Legal History, has voted to award its Book Prize to Sam Erman, University of Southern California, for Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire.  The ASLH Committee’s recommendation stated in part:

For subtlety, nuance, and complexity of analysis by a junior scholar, this is the best book in a year in which many superb books were nominated. Erman makes important and ambitious claims about the evolving constitutional meaning of citizenship in the U.S. empire after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. The book vividly recounts and perceptively analyzes the debates between and among Puerto Rican and U.S. judges, lawyers, administration officials, and legislators over the denial of full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. Erman shows how post-Civil War conceptions of full citizenship, rights, and statehood gave way to a regime of constitutionally permissible racist imperial governance.

Professor Erman’s book appeared in the Studies in Legal History, the ASLH-sponsored book series published by the Cambridge University Press.  Karen collects his posts on the book as an LHB Guest blogger here.

–Dan Ernst.  H/t: JDG3

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Surrency Prize to Tuori for "Narratives and Normativity"

We continue to recap the prizes and awards announced at this year's meeting of the American Society for Legal History. The Surrency Prize is "for the best article published in the Society’s journal, the Law and History Review, in the previous year." This year's prize went to Kaius Tuori (University of Helsinki) for “Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War II,” published in the May issue. The citation reads: 

Tuori’s article provides us with a fascinating account of the formation of the “European Idea” in the aftermath of World War Two, and its reliance on a claim to a shared European legal culture founded in Roman law – a particular feature of German scholarship. The centrality of law and legal institutions to European union has been a major theme of modern European legal history: Indeed, it was a major theme in the formation of our sister society, the European Society for Comparative Legal History. But in that identification of law and legal history with the European idea too little attention has been paid to narrative origins. Tuori remedies that gaping hole, and in the process shows how the postwar transition of scholars such as Franz Wieacker from active proponent of Nazi legal science to esteemed Europeanist and Roman law traditionalist resulted in a hybrid narrative of European legal history that incorporated elements of the Nazi narrative of Europe in the return to Roman law. The complicated process was nudged along too by German legal scholars in both geographical exile and “inner” exile who produced Roman law studies that served as counter-narratives to Nazi legal reformers’ efforts to replace the civil law tradition with national German law in the law curriculum and the law books. Tuori’s essay is not only a fine piece of research, it is compelling and important intellectual history.

The members of the Surrency Prize Committee were Cornelia Dayton (chair), Alison LaCroix, Kunal
Parker, Christopher Tomlins, and Laurie Wood. 

Congratulations to Kaius Tuori!

-- Karen Tani

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Stein Award to Wang for "Pirates and Publishers"

Another prize awarded annually by the ASLH is the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, for "the best book in non-US legal history written in English." The 2020 winner, announced at the recent annual meeting, is Fei-Hsien Wang (Indiana University, Bloomington), for Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). The citation reads:

This is a fascinating study of an important but underanalyzed topic– the contested and dynamic process of the emergence of “modern” copyright law in China from the 1890s through the 1950s. Highly innovative in its analysis and magisterially executed, the book offers a brilliant interdisciplinary history of how authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers negotiated with one another. Uncovering market practices in the “new knowledge” economy, Wang maps the everyday life of copyright and piracy in relation to the emerging modern state and "new knowledge." This exceedingly rigorous, subtle, and well-researched book has major implications for understanding the interplay among law, society, culture, and politics not only in modern China but also in many places with similarly complicated experiences with modernity.

An honorable mention went to Elizabeth Papp Kamali (Harvard Law School) for Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Members of this year's Stein Award committee were Li Chen (University of Toronto), Rohit De (Yale University), Jessica Marglin (University of Southern California), Richard Roberts (Stanford University), Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard University), and David V. Williams (University of Auckland), with Matthew C. Mirow (Florida International University) as chair.

Congratulations to Fei-Hsien Wang and Elizabeth Papp Kamali!

-- Karen Tani

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Reid Book Award to Kostal for "Laying Down the Law"

Here's word of another prize announced at this year's meeting of the American Society for Legal History: the John Phillip Reid Book Award, 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," went to Rande Kostal (Western Law), for Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). Here is the citation: 

R. W. Kostal’s Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Harvard University Press, 2019) depicts the staggering tasks of remaking the legal landscape of defeated Axis powers after World War II. This project envisioned replacing fascist legal orders with liberal ones committed to individual rights and the rule of law. On this foundation, it was supposed, democracy could be built. Working with the self-interested jurists and bureaucrats of the defeated nations, Americans often operated, especially in the case of Japan, with only the vaguest notions of the legal systems they set out to reconstruct. Kostal contributes to the history of American foreign policy and to the comparative history of the rule of law by showing the accomplishments, hubris, and limitations of laying down the law. Perhaps the largest contribution of his well-researched and thoughtful book is to explore how and why liberal nations after World War II came to think they had the right to reshape in their own image the legal orders of conquered countries.

Members of the John Phillip Reid Book Award Committee were Margot Canaday, Deborah Rosen, Steven Wilf, John Witt, and Richard Ross (chair). 

Congratulations to Rande Kostal!  

-- Karen Tani

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Preyer Awards to Padilla-Rodriguez, Ghosh

Earlier this summer we announced this year's ASLH Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars. Following the annual meeting, where both scholars presented their papers, we now have formal citations to share.

Ivon Padilla-Rodriguez, “Los Hijos Son La Riqueza Del Pobre:” Postwar Mexican Child Migration and the Making of Domestic (Im)migrant Exclusion, 1940-1965” 

Ivon Padilla-Rodriguez gives us a spellbinding sociolegal history of twentieth century child migrants at the borders outside and within the United States. Most scholars have focused on US officials’ concentration on single males after World War II. Padilla-Rodriguez employs overlooked sources to shine a spotlight on the many forms of rights violations Latinix children and their parents have endured between 1940 and 1965. She demonstrates the complicity of welfare and government officials in confining noncitizen children in detention center “cages” and in deporting them on “penal hell” ships. She shows, too, how those officials criminalized noncitizen and U.S. citizen children for their labor mobility and academic truancy and deprived them of access to a quality education. In Padilla-Rodriguez’s gifted hands, contemporary policies of immigration detention emerge as part of a long, sad history, rather than as a fresh departure.

Smita Ghosh, “Policing the ‘Police State’: Detention, Supervision, and Deportation During the Cold War” 

Smita Ghosh offers a fascinating account of the fight against the detention, supervision, and deportation of “red,” or communist, aliens. Her imaginative archival research shows how the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and its lawyers seized on the language of the Cold War to depict the McCarran Internal Security Act as a threat to the American “way of life” that would encourage “Gestapo-type” tactics and promote a “police state.” They also capitalized on the whiteness and assimilability of Eastern European aliens in the United States; their undeportable status because other countries refused to accept them; and the growing corpus of administrative law. The American Committee and its lawyers won the release of detained immigrants and limited the most draconian efforts to supervise nondeportable non-citizens. “Policing the ‘Police State’” provides a rare “success story” for “undesirable” aliens during the Cold War era and an extraordinarily illuminating prism on the expansion of state power.

The members of this year's Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars selection committee were Elizabeth Katz, Will Smiley, Anders Walker, Laura Kalman (Chair), Gautham Rao (ex officio), and the late Anne Fleming.

-- Karen Tani

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Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize to Fraga for "They Came on Waves of Ink"

Here at LHB, the Mary Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize holds a special place in our hearts. The ASLH awards it annually to "an outstanding digital legal history project." This year's winner was Sean Fraga (University of Southern California) for “They Come on Waves of Ink.” In the words of the committee:

his project makes wonderfully creative and compelling use of digital technologies to bring a dusty legal source—a nineteenth-century federal ledger from the Puget Sound Customs District—to life. As his site explains, “But if the ledger is like a window onto the past, then its meticulous lines of data are like blinds, closed and shut tight. There is no plot here, no story; the characters float loose on a non-narrative sea. Digital analysis is a way of curling open the blinds—to see what lies on the other side.” By transcribing, analyzing, and visualizing thousands of scribbled ledger lines, Fraga enriches our understanding of the circuits of commerce and administrative power in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. His site should inspire legal historians to use digital tools to re-imagine their sources and to uncover elusive historical connections that lie on the other side. 

Members of the selection committee were David S. Tanenhaus, chair (University of Nevada, Las Vegas); Deborah Dinner (Emory University School of Law); Kellen Funk (Columbia Law School); and Michael Willrich (ex officio, President-Elect).

Congratulations to Sean Fraga!

-- Karen Tani

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Jane Burbank Article Prize to Premo & Yannakakis for "A Court of Sticks and Branches"

This year marked the first occasion on which the American Society for Legal History awarded the Jane Burbank Article Prize in global legal history. It is for "the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history" published the previous year. The award went to Bianca Premo (Florida International University) and Yanna Yannakakis (Emory University) for “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” American Historical Review, Vol. 124, No.1 (February 2019), pp. 28-55. Here's the formal citation:

“A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond” studies how jurisdiction was understood and produced by Mixtec actors in southern Mexico. Premo and Yannakakis’s case study of a land dispute between two rivaling villages show how communities adapted and translated imperial law and Iberian judicial practices into local understandings of jurisdiction, thereby inserting jurisdiction into the legal repertoires available to native peoples. The authors focus on a routine community dispute case that was never submitted to the jurisdiction of higher imperial authorities in Madrid or Rome, or even in the venerated General Indian Court of Mexico City. Rather, this dispute emerged in the outskirts of empire, and their study illuminates how people molded jurisdiction and litigiousness to their own cultural norms. Carefully researched and clearly written, readers see that jurisdiction at the edges of empire was much broader than indigenous people’s use of courts and recourse to the law. As the authors note, global legal orders may be studied through notarial documents and imperial codes, however "native subjects" built those orders—literally with "sticks and branches” on the muddy fields of a makeshift court in Teposcolula, Mexico.

The members of the Burbank Article Prize committee were Shaunnagh Dorsett, Michelle McKinley (Chair), Miranda Spieler, and Taisu Zhang.

Congratulations to Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis!

-- Karen Tani

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ASLH 2020

[We're moving this up, because ASLH 2020 has begun!  DRE.]

REGISTER FOR OUR ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Dear ASLH members,

We invite you to register here for the 2020 ASLH annual conference, to be held November 13-14.  The online program features a carefully curated selection of exciting panels on the legal history of colonialism, slavery and abolition, immigration, and other topics. On Friday afternoon a group of editors and other experts will discuss book publishing in the Covid era. To wrap things up on Saturday afternoon, President Lauren Benton will deliver her Presidential Address and announce ASLH prize winners. You can find the full program here.

Registration is free for all ASLH members, and you must be a member to attend. The ASLH warmly welcomes students, who can become members for as little as $10.

Join or renew your ASLH membership here.

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a fantastic – if unusual – gathering of the ASLH!

Sincerely,

Lauren Benton, ASLH President
Anne Twitty, ASLH Secretary
Kristin Collins, ASLH Program Co-chair
Ari Bryen, ASLH Program Co-chair

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Call for Applications: J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History

 Via the American Society for Legal History, we have the following call for applications:

The J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History is a biennial event sponsored by ASLH and traditionally held in June in Madison, Wisconsin, with support from the Institute for Legal Studies of the University of Wisconsin, where the late Professor James Willard Hurst was a founding member of the modern field of legal history. Each Hurst Institute is organized and chaired by a well-known legal historian and includes visiting senior scholars who lead specialized sessions. An ASLH committee reviews applications and selects 12 early career scholars from around the world as Institute Fellows. The Fellows participate in seminars, meet other legal historians, and present their own work. The program is structured but informal, and features discussions of core readings in legal history and analysis of the work of the participants in the Institute. Fellowships are supported by dedicated funds donated in honor of leading mentors in the field, the alumni of past Hurst fellows, and for other worthy ASLH goals that reflect its commitment to supporting early career scholars.

Scholars in law, history and other disciplines pursuing research on legal history of any part of the world and all time periods are eligible to apply. The seminar and written materials are conducted in English, and we cannot consider non-anglophone applications. Applicants with no formal training in legal history are encouraged to apply. Traditionally, the selection committee has sought to create a cohort of fellows with varying degrees of familiarity with the field, and welcome applications from scholars at an early stage of their career (beginning faculty members, doctoral students who have completed or almost completed their dissertations, and J.D. graduates).

Applications for the eleventh Hurst Summer Institute, which will take place June 13 – 26, 2021, will be accepted until January 15, 2021. Applicants should be aware that it is possible that the 2021 session may be held remotely. This would, of course, be a significant change in the program, but we are committed both to supporting early career scholars and to ensuring the safe conduct of the Institute. While a virtual program would be different from an in-person one, we will do everything possible to build community that will be of lasting value to fellows. A decision will likely be made by the end of March in consultation with the ASLH Hurst Committee and accepted Fellows, in light of conditions at the time. 

Applications must include a cover letter, CV, and research agenda (of no more than 2,500 words) as a single PDF document. Submit your application any time between December 1, 2020 and January 15, 2021. Additionally, two letters of recommendation should be submitted on each applicant’s behalf by the January 15 deadline. Questions on the application process can be directed to hurst@law.wisc.edu. It is the responsibility of the applicant to ensure that we receive a complete application packet by the deadline. Please note that incomplete applications will not be accepted. Applicants will be notified of a decision no later than March 1, 2021.

The 2021 Institute will be chaired by Lauren Benton, Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University, and Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Previous Hurst Institute sessions were led by distinguished legal history scholars, Lawrence Friedman (Stanford University), Robert W. Gordon(Yale and Stanford), Barbara Young Welke (University of Minnesota), Hendrik Hartog(Princeton University), and Mitra Sharafi (University of Wisconsin).

I think all the LHB Bloggers would attest to the high quality of the Hurst Institute and the terrific opportunity it presents to emerging scholars. Please spread the word!

-- Karen Tani

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ASLH Statement on White House Conference on American History

 [We have the following announcement from the American Society for Legal History.  DRE]

ASLH Statement on White House Conference on American History

Statement from ASLH President Lauren Benton, on behalf of the ASLH Executive Committee.

President Trump delivered a speech at the National Archives on September 17, 2020, in which he characterized “the crusade against American history” as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” The speech capped the “White House Conference on American History,” an event planned hastily and without the participation of historical associations. The “conference” and Trump’s comments denigrated scholarship and work in public history focusing on the historical analysis of race, slavery, and institutional racism.

We condemn these words and actions, and we reject President Trump’s politicization of history as a field of inquiry and teaching. The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) joins other historical associations, including the AHA and OAH, in recognizing Trump’s words and actions as an attempt to distort history in service to a politically driven agenda. As legal historians, we affirm that the study of race, class, ethnicity, and gender, and the analysis of slavery, inequality, and conflict remain central to understandings of the constitutional and legal history of the United States, and to documenting the lived experiences, past and present, of all people connected to and affected by that history. The ASLH will continue to work to protect the highest professional standards for evaluating and presenting historical evidence and argument and to foster open, inclusive, and evidence-based debates about all aspects of American history.

Lauren Benton

President, ASLH
On behalf of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

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