Angus Harwood Brown, University of Cambridge, has published open access The Pennsylvania Council of Censors and the Debate on the Guardian of the Constitution in the Early United States in the American Journal of Legal History: In 1776, Pennsylvania established an institution called the Council of Censors, which would be elected every seven years and was tasked with ensuring that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government had remained faithful to the constitution. None of the other thirteen colonies would create a similar institution, although Vermont would in 1777. Nor ha ..read more

Samuel Fury Childs Daly, University of Chicago, will present "Forward March: Time and Ideology in Africa’s Military Regimes, 1970-2000," in the EuroStorie research seminar series "Time and Identity" in Room 247, Unioninkatu 33, University of Helsinki, on Friday, May 3, 1:00pm-2:00pm (UTC+2).  You may also join via Zoom. Across Africa, independence was followed by a wave of military coups and martial revolutions. The men who staged them had utopian visions. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, military officers believed they could remake their countries in the image of an army. So ..read more

Hart has published The Legal History of the Church of England: From the Reformation to the Present, edited by Norman Doe and the Reverend Stephen Coleman, Cardiff University: The law has often been the site of major political and theological controversies, within and outside the church, including the Reformation itself, the English civil war, the Restoration and rise of religious toleration, the impact of the industrial revolution, the ritualist disputes of the 19th century, and the rise of secularisation in the twentieth. The book examines key statutes, canons, case-law, and other instrumen ..read more

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