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.

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 »

McSweeney on Civil and Common Law in Medieval England

Thomas J. McSweeney, William & Mary Law School, has posted two articles.  The first is Property Before Property: Romanizing the English Law of Land, which appeared in the Buffalo Law Review 60 (2012):

We tend to treat the idea of property as if it is a neutral way to speak about the relationship between people and things. In comparative legal studies, it is easier to compare two different cultures’ approaches to people and things when we assume that both can usefully be spoken of in terms of property. But property has a history. Terms like proprietas and possessio, which give the modern common law a vocabulary for speaking about that relationship, arose in the context of the classical Roman law and were worked into a systematic language of property by medieval Roman law scholars. The early common law, however, did not use the language of property to describe the relationship between people and things.

Image Credit: BC Law Library

In this paper, I will examine the period when English justices first attempted to turn English norms and practices concerning landholding into a law of property. Between 1187 and 1258, several justices tried their hands at writing treatises in which they translated English court practices into a systematic property law on the Roman model. The justices of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, particularly the justices who wrote the treatise known as Bracton, were heavily invested in the idea that English law was part of the Romano-canonical ius commune. They realized, however, that the practices of the English courts and the landholding norms of the Anglo-Norman landed elite could not be made to fit neatly into a Roman law mold. The authors of Bracton embarked upon what we might consider an early exercise in comparative law scholarship. They created several complicated and contradictory schemes to try to express English landholding in Roman law terms, but ultimately failed in their attempts to create a coherent English law of property. Their failure is useful to us, however, in that it shows us very clearly that the language of property is not natural or essential and in that it helps us to understand a way of talking and thinking about landholding that is alien to us today. We can use the ways the Bracton authors creatively misunderstood the Roman law of property to help us to understand the cultures of landholding they came from: those of the English courts and the Anglo-Norman landed elite of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The second is English Judges and Roman Jurists: The Civilian Learning Behind England's First Case Law, which appeared in Temple Law Review 84 (2012):

This Article looks at a historical problem — the first use of case law by English royal justices in the thirteenth century — and makes it a starting point for thinking about the ways legal reasoning works in the modern common law. In the first Part of the Article, I show that, at its origin, the English justices’ use of decided cases as a source of law was inspired by the work civil and canon law scholars were doing with written authorities in the medieval universities. In an attempt to make the case that English law was on par with civil law and canon law, the justices and clerks of the royal courts began to treat cases as if they were the opinions of great jurists, to apply the same types of dialectical reasoning that were used in civil law discourse to those cases, and to work them into systems of authority. They used cases, as the modern common law does; but they used cases to create systems of the kind we usually associate with civil law. In the second Part of the Article, I turn to the modern common law and, using the methods of medieval case law as a mirror, show that the differences between civil law and common law reasoning are more perceived than real. American lawyers tend to view common law as flexible and creative, whereas they view civil law as ossified and hierarchical. This largely stems from the fact that common lawyers focus on the judicial opinion as the place where legal reasoning takes place. By integrating other texts, like the student outline and the restatement — which seek to create a harmonious system out of judicial opinions — into the picture of common law reasoning, I show that common law reasoning shares quite a bit in common with civil law reasoning.

Alexander on the Passing of the Obscenity Defense in Copyright

Here's an article we missed earlier this year: "Evil Angel Eulogy: Reflections on the Passing of the Obscenity Defense in Copyright," by James R. Alexander (University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown). The article appeared in Volume 20 of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law (2013). Here's the abstract:

This article traces the historical development of the Clean Hands Doctrine (CHD), and its ancillary accepted affirmative (obscenity) defense in copyright infringement, and its residual application to pornographic works. As an equitable doctrine, the CHD was an entirely reasonable judicial response to the earliest statutory provision of copyright protection in the early 18th century in England as applied to different forms of literary property and in particular those suspected of having seditious, blasphemous and immoral tendencies. With no statutory guidance regarding substantive (or content) restrictions on extending copyright protection to literary property and generally reticent to rule on a completely discretionary basis, the Chancery court relied on established equitable maxims or principles as ratio for individual rulings, in the process developing an ersatz structure of procedural precedent. In the process, it sequestered content as a procedural issue deferred to law prior to any equitable consideration, leaving unresolved the more substantive issue of whether all works of literary property were eligible for copyright protection, or differentially when and in what forms could literary works be accorded protection.

The CHD, and more specifically the obscenity defense, was adopted wholesale and with little consideration into American jurisprudence in the 19th century, on occasion nuanced by historical debate over the meaning and intent of the Copyright Clause. Subsequent American statutory delineations for copyright protection, after a few nascent efforts to restrict eligibility to only those works that were original and informative, retreated to a marked absence of discussion of content, throwing judicial consideration of copyright protection almost entirely onto procedural issues, such as registration. By the latter part of the century, courts began to sporadically differentiate between the substantive and procedural elements of the CHD, the former spawning a transforming debate over doctrinal acceptance of the 1868 Hicklin test of obscene tendency and the latter focusing more narrowly the discretionary authority to the Register of Copyrights to reject works of certain content. I argue that this differentiation, and the subsequent obfuscation of obscenity standards resulting from a range of cases leading to and built upon Roth v. U.S. (1957), inevitably led to the appellate ruling in Mitchell Brothers v. Cinema Adult Theater (1979), now generally considered accepted doctrine, that the CHD does not support a substantive exclusion of selected content from copyright protection.

The full article is available here, at SSRN.

Hartog's Mitchell Lecture

Hendrik Hartog’s James McCormick Mitchell Lecture at the University at Buffalo Law School in 2012, entitled, Two Stories about Two Currencies of Care, is available on-line from the Buffalo Law Review.  It is based on his book, Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (2012).

Weekend Roundup

• The September issue of Historically Speaking is out.

• NYC-area readers: On Monday, September 23, Cardozo Law School will host a discussion of Thomas Healey's new book, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind – and Changed the History of Free Speech in America. Details are availablehere.

•  From noncuratlex: How to Plead a Criminal Conversation, Debauchery, or Seduction Tort, Circa 1878.

• We've blogged before about the remarkable lawyer Bessie Margolin, drawing in part on Marlene Trestman's Journal of Supreme Court History article "Fair Labor: The Remarkable Life and Legal Career of Bessie Margolin (1909–1996)." In an effort to "set the record straight" about the number of cases Margolin argued before the Supreme Court, Trestman has published this addenda to her article.

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

Cushman on "Court-Packing and Compromise"

Senate Judiciary Committee Considers the Court-Packing Bill (Credit: LC)

Barry Cushman, Notre Dame Law School, has posted Court-Packing and Compromise, which appears in Constitutional Commentary 26 (2013).  Here is the abstract:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 Court-packing bill would have permitted him to appoint six additional justices to the Supreme Court, thereby expanding its membership to fifteen immediately. Throughout the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to enact the measure, Roosevelt was presented with numerous opportunities to compromise for a measure authorizing the appointment of fewer additional justices. The President rejected each of these proposals, and his refusal to compromise often has been attributed to stubbornness, overconfidence, or hubris. Yet an examination of the papers of Attorney General Homer S. Cummings reveals why FDR and his advisors believed that he required no fewer than six additional appointments in order to secure a liberal working majority on the Court. Those sources also help to clarify why the substitute Court bill introduced by Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson in July of 1937 took the form that it did, and why Robinson’s untimely death that month not only made passage of the bill impossible, but also made it unnecessary. Though Roosevelt’s refusal to compromise can be seen as more rational than is commonly thought, in retrospect one can see that his Court-packing proposal was an entirely unnecessary misadventure through which the President ultimately lost far more than he gained.

Update
I can't resist the temptation to chime in with something I've just read in the archives.  On November 4, 1936, Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., wrote his mother from the Solicitor General's office: “I do not like the size of the Roosevelt vote.  With a man of the President’s temperament such an endorsement may prove an irresistible temptation."  DRE.

Friedman's Introduction to "Law and the Modern Condition"

Lawrence Friedman, New England Law, has posted the Introduction to Law and the Modern Condition: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Friedman (Talbot Publishers, 2013).  Here is the abstract:

Using fiction as a lens through which to view particular developments in the law, each of the essays in the new book, Law and the Modern Condition: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Talbot Publishing, 2013), discusses a work of literary fiction — some classical (the tale of Ruth in the Bible, the fiction of Franz Kafka and Herman Melville, the plays of William Shakespeare) some modern (the post-September 11 fiction of William Gibson, Ken Kalfus, Claire Messud, Ian McEwan and Helen Schulman) — that concerns, directly or indirectly, the historical development of the law. This exploration of legal history through fiction pays particular attention to its relevance to our present circumstances and our growing concerns about terrorism and civil liberties. Each essay considers the legal lessons about the fictional event or events at its core, lessons that tell us something worth remembering as we continue to chart law’s evolution. These lessons, like those that may be found in all great literature, necessarily extend beyond the historical confines of the characters and plot and background of each story to embrace the modern condition — which, as these great stories suggest, is and always has been the only condition.