We hear that there are still a few open seats for the Rare Book School course, "Law Books: History & Connoisseurship," which will be offered June 9-14 in the Yale Law School Library, New Haven, CT.  As we said in an earlier post, the instructors are Mike Widener (rare book advisor, retired curator), who has taught the class since 2010, and Kathryn James (rare book librarian, Yale Law Library), who has been the co-instructor since 2023. The class features extensive hands-on experience with the Yale Law Library's outstanding rare book collection. Details on the class, including comment ..read more

D.P. Waddilove, Notre Dame Law School, has posted Aspects of Equity in 1600: Wills, Forfeitures, and Trusts, which is forthcoming in Essays on the History of Equity, edited by David Foster and Charles Mitchel: The Court of Chancery in 1600 stood somewhere on the bridge between medieval dispenser of ad-hoc justice and sclerotically rigid Regency court of punctilio. Equity was in an uncertain state, no longer unpredictably free-form, but not yet driven to the regularity of fully precedential lawlikeness. At the time, the Great Seal was in the hands of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper from 1596 ..read more

Maximilian Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London, will present "Beyond Belief and Deeper than Argument: Character and Intellectual Historiography" in the Helsinki Legal History Series on Monday on April 29.  More. Holly Brewer, University of Maryland, on that historians' brief in the Trump immunity case (Maryland Today). The American Historical Association will conduct a Congressional Briefing “offering historical perspectives on federal safety regulations in transportation” on Thursday, May 9 at 9:00 a.m. ET in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075.  More. Carol Anderson ..read more

We have the following announcement.  If we taught contracts, we might be tempted to put this on our exam.  DRE] Whence “iudex non calculat”?  Research Competition 2024 in History of Language and Law Seventy-five years ago, US professor Curt Gruneberg described “an old Roman proverb” supposedly “indicating the general dislike of Roman jurists against determining amounts by way of mathematical processes.” This proverb was “Iudex non calculat” – “a judge does not calculate.”  Like other writers before and after 1949, Gruneberg failed to cite a source for this supposedly anci ..read more

The Historical Society of the New York Courts has announced an event, Celebrating the Enslaved Heroine of the Lemmon Slave Case: A High-water Mark for the New York Courts.  It will include the world premiere of "How Emeline Got Free: An Untold Story of History," which the Society describes as “a 30-minute audio drama that tells the story of the landmark Lemmon Slave Case from the perspective of Emeline Thompson, the eldest of the eight enslaved women and children whose freedom was at stake at this 1852 trial.”  The playing of the drama will be followed by followed by a discussion wit ..read more

Issue 16 of the journal Federal History is now out. Some highlights from the contents: Reciprocal Sovereignty: The Franco-American Consular Convention, 1778–1788, and the Meaning of American Independence – Simeon A. Simeonov Out of Sight and Out of Mind: The Early Consular Service and the Facilitative State, 1776–1856 – Lawrence A. Peskin Manifest Destiny’s Fortunes in the Western Pacific: The First and Last United States Consul to Guam, Samuel J. Masters, 1854–1856 – Chris Rasmussen A Rationale for Aid: Moral Language in the Debates over the Mutual Security Act, 1951–1961 – Lauren F. Ture ..read more

Nicholas Sinanis, Lecturer on the Faculty of Law at Monash University, has published open access Exemplary Damages Practice in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century England in the American Journal of Legal History: A longer perspective on the modern Anglo-American law of exemplary (or punitive) damages views it as having first begun to emerge after the cases of Huckle v Money and Wilkes v Wood were decided in 1763. This article seeks to further deepen and clarify this perspective. It does so by systematically tracing the evolution of the adjudicative practice according to which English ..read more

Ash Stanley-Ryan has posted Ka mua, ka Muri: He Whakaputanga, Concealed Indigenous Histories, and the Making of International Law, which is forthcoming in Law&History, the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Legal History Society: He Whakaputanga This article examines how our understanding of international law is harmed by the systematic erasure of indigenous experiences and histories. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatira o Nu Tireni is used as a case study. The article first considers several methodological considerations for legal historians. A theoretical approach is construct ..read more

Over at the blog of the LPE Project, a symposium is under way on Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document.  Professor Rana has started it off with Toward a New Constitutional Politics: Given the manifest flaws of the U.S. Constitution, how did Americans come to idolize this document? Aziz Rana kicks off a symposium on his new book, The Constitutional Bind, by reflecting on the path that led to our current political predicament, and how long-buried Left thinking about state and economy might help us find our way out of it. William E. Forbath has contin ..read more

A ..read more