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

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.] When Law Leaves the Lawbooks: Legal Diffusion and Normative Instability in Medieval Europe.  Rowan Dorin, Stanford University, April 23, 2024, 06:00 PM (Local Time Germany).  Contact: Benedetta Albani, albani@lhlt.mpg.de Like medieval jurists, modern scholars frequently rely on the authoritative, codified versions of legal norms when considering the relationship between legal developments and social change in the European Middle Ages. Too rarely have medievalists followed the lead of early modernists in emphasizing the multi-sited p ..read more

At the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Dylan Penningroth (UC Berkeley) came away with two big book awards: the Merle Curti Social History Award ("recognizing the best book in American social history") and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize ("recognizing the best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present").  His prize-winning book is Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright). From the Merle Curti Award Com ..read more

[We have the following announcement.  DRE] Max Planck–ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in Global Perspective Announcement and Deadline for Submissions:  June 1, 2024   The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) is delighted to announce a new dissertation prize: the Max Planck–ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in Global Perspective.   The prize will honor exceptional dissertations on topics in European legal history in global perspective and presented for PhD or JSD degrees awarded in the previous calendar year. Topics may include Europ ..read more

A forum, Doing History After Dobbs: Applications, Implications, and Critiques of Dobbs's Historical Methodology, which originated in a panel at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History last fall, is now out in the Yale Law Journal.  The contributions are: Making History Melissa Murray Lessons from Lawrence: How “History” Gave Us Dobbs—And How History Can Help Overrule It Aaron Tang The History of History and Tradition: The Roots of Dobbs's Method (and Originalism) in the Defense of Segregation Reva B. Siegel The History of Neutrality: Dobbs and the Social-Movement ..read more