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).

New Release: "Between Court and Confessional: The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors"

New from Cambridge University Press: Between Court and Confessional: The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors, by Kimberly Lynn. A description from the Press:

Between Court and Confessional explores the lives of Spanish inquisitors, closely examining the careers and writings of five sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors. Kimberly Lynn considers what shaped particular inquisitors, what kinds of official experience each accumulated, and to what ends each directed his acquired knowledge and experience. The case studies examine the complex interplay of careerism and ideological commitments evident in inquisitorial activities. Whereas many studies of the Spanish Inquisition tend to depict inquisitors as faceless and interchangeable, Lynn probes the lives of individual inquisitors to show how inquisitors' operations in their social, political, religious, and intellectual worlds set the Inquisition in motion. By focusing on specific individuals, this study explains how the theory and regulations of the Inquisition were rooted in local conditions, particular disputes, and individual experiences.

A few blurbs:

"The Inquisitor is a figure engulfed in myth, yet about whom very little is actually known. Kimberly Lynn sets the record straight in this thoroughly researched and well-written book. Showcasing individual portraits of five inquisitors from different parts of the early modern Hispanic empire, she offers a lively and convincing composite biography of a unique - and uniquely complex - figure poised between medieval theocracy and modern bureaucracy." -- James S. Amelang, Universidad Autónoma, Madrid

"This outstanding piece of scholarship demonstrates how little the Spanish inquisitors fit the conventional view of them as insular men in single-minded pursuit of heresy. In a series of exacting and illuminating portraits, Kimberly Lynn reveals them in the full range of their activities, engaged in turf battles, jostling for position at court, moving from post to post, suffering career setbacks and disappointments, and seeking patronage and bestowing patronage - that is, negotiating the complex power structures of early modern Spain like other members of the power elite." -- Miriam Bodian, the University of Texas at Austin 

Sunday Book Roundup

Jotwell has posted a review of Eliga H. Gould's Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard Univ. Press). In it Christina Duffy Ponsa writes "the book makes you feel like you’re looking at history through a 360-degree lens. A legal, diplomatic, and intellectual history spanning from the mid-18th century to the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the book situates the Revolution in the context of the evolving law of nations in a strikingly rich and detailed account. Everything, it seems, is in there."

The September issue of The Federal Lawyer is out and has reviewed several books of note: The Law of Armed Conflict: An Operational Approach (Wolters Kluwer Law & Business) by Geoffrey Corn, Victor Hansen, Chris Jenks, Richard Hackson, Eric Talbot Jenson, and Hames Schoettler Jr; Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America's First Women Lawyers (NYU Press) by Jill Norgren; Out of Order: Stores from the History of the Supreme Court (Random House) by Sandra Day O'Connor; as well as David O. Stewart's The Lincoln Deception (Kensington). Of the last book, reviewer JoAnn Baca provides an intriguing introduction:

"Lawyer and award-winning author David O. Stewart has written three nonfiction books—on Aaron Burr, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, and the men who drafted the Constitution. But what happens when a historian comes across a story that cannot be proven by any fact he can uncover, yet it sparks his imagination? For Stewart, the answer is to leave his comfort zone and write a novel, allowing him to theorize and extrapolate, far from established facts, about a part of our history that fascinates many as much today as it did in 1865: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln Deception is the result of Stewart’s need to explore to his own satisfaction a vague suggestion of duplicity as yet undiscovered in the assassination of the President."

H-Net has added many reviews of interest to this week's roundup readers including several books that extend beyond the American context, such as David Lemmings's Crime, Courtrooms, and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700-1850 (Ashgate) here; and a review of two books including Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash's Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (Oxford University Press) and Sean Scalmer's Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest (Cambridge University Press). Elizabeth F. Thompson's Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Harvard University Press) is also reviewed. Seth Offenbach writes of Thompson's work:

"In the nearly three years since the Arab uprisings began, the expertise of Middle East historians has been in demand like almost never before, as observers attempt to understand the historical roots underlying the seemingly sudden popular challenges to long-standing authoritarian regimes. The result has been a surge in publications that are broad in their scope and appeal but limited in the depth of their analysis and historical insight. A strong exception to this trend is the recent work of historian Elizabeth F. Thompson, whose study on the rise of constitutionalism in the Middle East swiftly dispenses with the facile explanations of the Arab uprisings, instead offering readers a comprehensive yet nuanced look at the lasting impact of efforts to enshrine and institutionalize the language of justice across the region during the last two centuries. While the study is bookended by a discussion of the implications that these developments hold for the contemporary calls for universal rights, its substantive chapters provide a perceptive and deeply contextualized look at the common thread underlying a struggle that dates back to the premodern era."

For the Washington Post Johnathan Yardley reviews Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder. Also in the Post is a review of Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life (University of Michigan) by James Cannon.

The Guardian reviews Churchill's Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race (Faber & Faber) by Graham Farmelo.

Maya Jasanoff reviews River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press) by Walter Johnson in the New York Review of Books. She finds:

"The artistry of River of Dark Dreams lies in the close-up—in Johnson’s mesmerizing attention to the “material” in historical-geographical materialism. In the pointillist style so dexterously displayed in his reconstruction of the New Orleans slave market, Soul by Soul, Johnson zooms in on the “nested set of abstractions” that made the Cotton Kingdom run: money, markets, maps, labor. “If you looked more closely,” he observes, “you would see that each abstraction stood at odds with the physical properties of the object it sought to represent.”River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write “history from the bottom up”: from the soil tangy and pungent with manure, and the Petit Gulf cotton plants rooted into it, and the calloused fingers plucking its blooming, sharp-edged bolls. This is a history of how wilderness became plantations that became states, nations, and empires—of how an overseer’s lashes sliced into a slave’s back turned “into labor into bales into dollars” into visions of America’s future in the world."

This week readers can also listen to the New Books in History Podcast for a discussion with Tevi Troy, author of What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House (Regnery History).

On HNN, reviewer Bernard von Bothmer finds that American Umpire (Harvard University Press) by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman "offers a sweeping, wide-ranging, and remarkably in-depth overview of the history of American foreign relations." HNN also reviews Thurston Clarke's JFK's Last Hundred Days (Penguin).

Salon has published an excerpt from Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (Hill and Wang) by Michael Stewart Foley.

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.

Novick on Holmes and the New Originalists

Sheldon Novick, Vermont Law School, has posted a new preface, entitled Honorable Justice at Twenty-Five, to his biography Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1989).  Here is the abstract:

There have been three print editions since 1989 of Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Sheldon Novick: the first hardcover edition from Little Brown, a trade paperback edition from Dell Publishing, and a collectible leather-bound edition from Legal Classics Library. The text of successive print editions was unchanged. A new ebook edition from Plunkett Lake Press has been revised and corrected, redesigned for digital readers, and a new preface has been added bringing the book up to date. This article includes the text of the preface.

In summary: Interest in Justice Holmes continues, especially with regard to his First Amendment jurisprudence. He has also become a major figure in debates over originalism. As portrayed in this biography, Holmes was a champion of the common law, particularly as common-law privileges were the basis of the Bill of Rights. He viewed the Supreme Court as a common-law court bound by its precedents, and engaged in the process of defining the principles "transplanted from foreign soil" found in those precedents The New Originalists argue that the original understanding of the text of the Constitution is authoritative in cases arising under the Constitution, and that fidelity to the original understanding trumps any precedents that depart from it. Holmes, the champion of an evolving common law, accordingly has become the target of originalist criticism, criticism that the author of this preface claims he stoutly withstands.

New Release: Enayat, "Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran"

Palgrave Macmillan has released Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran: Constitutionalism, Autocracy, and Legal Reform, 1906-1941, by Hadi Enayat. The publisher describes the book as follows:

Incorporating history, sociology, and rule of law studies, this book sheds light on an understudied but fascinating dimension of modernization in Iran, namely the emergence of a new legal system between the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the end of Reza Shah's rule in 1941. While Iranian constitutionalism can be seen as part of a global trend of constitutional revolutions at the turn of the twentieth century, in Iran, an unusual institutional and historical background shaped a path to legal reform that was in many ways unique. Among other factors, the scholastic legalism of the Shi'i ulama and the considerable autonomy they enjoyed in administering the civil law in the nineteenth century made legal reform a particularly contested, difficult, and politically charged aspect of state building.

A few blurbs:

"Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran offers a perceptive examination of the impact of legal reforms on the process of state building and modernization in the first half of twentieth century in Iran. Its use of a wide range of primary source material will be particularly welcomed by historians of the period, and its broad analytical approach should make it indispensable for comparative studies of legal reforms in the wider context of the Middle East and current debates on constitutional development." -- Ali Gheissari

"Legal transformations of codes, institutions, and procedures constituted a crucial motor in the formation of political modernity and the modern state in Iran. This book contains lucid and original accounts and analyses of the events and processes in these transformations, rich in the details of political struggles and ideological contests, not only between the entrenched clerical hierarchy and the modernizing constitutionalists but also within and across both camps. This is key to understanding the subsequent fractured evolution of Iranian state, society, and revolution." -- Sami Zubaida

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.