Tinker Talks!

Arabella Mansfield (credit)

River to River, a program of Iowa Public Radio devoted to the state’s “news, issues and events,” recently devoted a broadcast to Iowa Legal History.  The broadcast included an interview with Mary Beth Tinker, who, as a thirteen-year-old in 1965, “arrived at her Des Moines junior high wearing a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.”  The host, Ben Kieffer, discusses other “legal milestones,” including Arabella Mansfield (right), “the first female lawyer in the U.S.,” and In re the Matter of Ralph, “the very first case decided by the Iowa Supreme Court concerning a former slave who was captured by bounty hunters.”  Listen here.

July 2013 Issue of Journal of Supreme Court History

A new issue of the Journal of Supreme Court History is out. Here's the table of contents:

Introduction
Melvin I. Urofsky 

Slouching Towards Roth: Obscenity and the Supreme Court, 1945-1957
Whitney Strub

Tom Clark under Fire:  The Consequences of Congressional Investigations of Supreme Court Justices
Craig Alan Smith

Tom Clark’s Transition from Attorney General to Supreme Court Justice
Alexander Wohl

October Term 1963: “The Second American Constitutional Convention”
L.A. Powe, Jr.

Inventing Democratic Courts: A New and Iconic Supreme Court
Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis

Addenda to “Fair Labor:  The Remarkable Life and Legal Career of Bessie Margolin”:  A Discussion of Methodology on Tallying Margolin’s Supreme Court Argument Record as Well as Those of Other Pioneer Female Advocates Mabel W. Willebrandt, Helen R. Carloss and Beatrice Rosenberg
Marlene Trestman

The Judicial Bookshelf
Donald Grier Stephenson Jr.

Hat tip: H-Law

Knapp on "James Wilson and the Birth of American Jurisprudence"

Via the Legal Theory Blog, we have word of an article of interest: "Law's Revolutionary: James Wilson and the Birth of American Jurisprudence," by Aaron T. Knapp (Boston University). It is scheduled to appear in Volume 29 of the Journal of Law and Politics (Fall 2013). Here's the abstract:

This intellectual history of oft-forgotten founder James Wilson contends that as an outgrowth of his peculiar anti-Publian constitutionalism, Wilson’s post-ratification jurisprudence endeavored conceptually to reconcile American Law with the American Revolution in ways that even his ablest commentators have failed to appreciate but which boast a significance in the history of American legal thought that should command the attention of legal and constitutional historians alike. Spanning the period from 1774 to 1798, the Article’s historical analysis of Wilson’s ideas over time complicates prevailing literature on popular sovereignty’s origins and influence in post-Revolutionary America, revises influential scholarship interpreting pre-Marshallian Federalist jurisprudence in the 1790s, and sheds new light on the role of civic virtue in early American constitutional culture.

The full article is available here, at SSRN.

Freyer and Morris on the Making of Cayman

Tony A. Freyer and Andrew P. Morriss, University of Alabama School of Law, have posted Creating Cayman as an Offshore Financial Center: Structure & Strategy Since 1960, whih is forthcoming in the Arizona State Law Journal.  Here is the abstract:    

The Cayman Islands are one of the world’s leading offshore financial centers (OFCs). Their development from a barter economy in 1960 to a leading OFC for the location of hedge funds, captive insurance companies, yacht registrations, special purpose vehicles, and international banking today was the result of a collaborative policy making process that involved local leaders, expatriate professionals, and British officials. Over several decades, Cayman created a political system that enabled it to successfully compete in world financial markets for transactions, participate in major international efforts to control financial crimes, and avoid the political, economic, racial, and social problems that plague many of its Caribbean neighbors. Using archival sources, participant interviews, and a wide range of other materials, this Article describes how the collaborative policy making process developed over time and discusses the implications of Cayman’s success for financial reform efforts today.

Thank You, Sally Gordon! And Welcome, . . . Ms. Peppercorn?

We at LHB are so grateful to Sarah Barringer Gordon for joining us as a guest blogger these past weeks. She has responded to common queries about legal historical publishing, opened up a conversation about the entry-level hiring market, reminded us of the joys of reading outside of our subject areas, and much more!

credit

Readers have responded so enthusiastically to her posts that we have invited her to stay on as a sort of advice columnist in residence -- someone to respond to questions about everything from applying to graduate school to publishing a third or fourth book.

She is doing this for nothing -- a peppercorn consideration, as they say in contract law -- and offers her advice with the proverbial grain of salt. With a nod to advice columnists past ("Dear Abby," "Dorothy Dix"), we will title these occasional posts "Ms. Peppercorn Considers."

If you have a question that you'd like to see addressed on the blog, send a message to the blog email address.

Dennis on "Blacks Informing during Slavery"

Andrea Dennis, University of Georgia Law School, has posted A Snitch in Time: An Historical Sketch of Black Informing During Slavery, which is forthcoming in the Marquette Law Review,  97 (2014).  Here is the abstract:    

This article sketches the socio-legal creation, use, and regulation of informants in the Black community during slavery and the Black community’s response at that time. Despite potentially creating benefits such as crime control and sentence reduction, some Blacks today are convinced that cooperation with government investigations and prosecutions should be avoided. One factor contributing to this perspective is America’s reliance on Black informants to police and socially control Blacks during slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs. Notwithstanding this historical justification for non-cooperation, only a few informant law and policy scholars have examined closely the Black community’s relationship with informing. Furthermore, even among this small group of works, noticeably absent are historical explorations of Black America’s experience with informing during slavery. Drawn using a variety of primary and secondary historical and legal sources, this article develops a snapshot of the past revealing many similarities between the Black experience with informing both while enslaved and in contemporary times. Consideration of these resemblances during present debate on the topic may help to facilitate nuanced conversation as to whether and how the modern Black community and government should approach using informants in current times.

Custom Now: A Symposium

I've recently learned of an interesting symposium on custom published in volume 48 of the Texas International Law Journal, which is  available on line:

 Introduction, by Emily Kadens

In the Name of Custom, Culture, and the Constitution: Korean Customary Law in Flux, by Marie Seong-Hak Kim

Legal Autonomy Versus Regulatory Law: Customary Law in Eastern Scandinavia, by Kjell Å. Modéer

Western Scandinavia: Exit “Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch” — The Resurrection of Customary Laws, by Peter Ørebech

False Jurisdictions? A Revisionist Take on Customary (Religious) Law in Germany, by Pascale Fournier & Pascal McDougall

The Law and Economics of Norms, by Juliet P. Kostritsky

Custom in American Property Law: A Vanishing Act, by Henry E. Smith

The Jurisprudence of Custom, by Frederick Schauer

An excerpt from the introduction by Emily Kadens, Northwestern Law, after the jump.

Read more »