Tomas Gomez-Arostegui, Lewis & Clark Law School, has posted Patent-infringement Actions in the Eighteenth Century and the Right to a Jury Trial:This Article offers a wide-ranging reappraisal of patent-infringement litigation in the law courts of England in the 18th
Legal History Blog
Legal History Blog publishes content focused on the historical development of law and legal institutions, exploring topics such as constitutional history, legal pluralism, state formation, and the intersection of law with social and political movements. It features announcements of academic conferences, dissertation prizes, and special journal issues that highlight research on European and American legal history, international law, and marginalized groups' legal struggles. The blog also covers interdisciplinary approaches, including queer theory's application to private law and archival studies of legal evidence in conflict zones. It serves as a platform for scholarly discourse on the evolution of legal doctrines, legal actors, and the role of law in shaping political and social orders.
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Fede on an 1859 South Carolina Segregation Case
Andrew T. Fede has published An Antebellum Protest against Segregation and the Criminal Law Response: A Preview of Jim Crow Law and the Struggle for Civil Rights, open access, in Law and History Review:
Historians have documented resistance to…
10 Sources I discovered while writing my (second) book
During the 12+ years I spent
working on Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia, I came across some truly incredible primary sources.
In this 2nd guest post for August, I’d
…
Bellis-Phan on Distraint in Early Modern France
Nga Bellis-Phan has posted A Legal Remedy Against Rent Arrears: Landlords’ Privilege on Furniture in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France, which appeared in Early Modern Debts, 1550-1770 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020):
The frequent default in rents payments was a real challenge…
Reparations and Restitution
Moyn on John Fried, Hans Kelsen, and the Vietnam War
Samuel Moyn, Yale Law School, has posted A Letter to Hans Kelsen on the Use of Force:In the last days of 1966, John Fried wrote a letter to Hans Kelsen. American by emigration, Austro-Hungarian in their origins, and…
Kastenberg on Historians and Expert Witnesses in the Ford Libel Case
Joshua E. Kastenberg, University of New Mexico School of Law, has published “Ford is an Anarchist” and “History is Bunk”: William Archibald Dunning and Jesse Siddall Reeves as Precedent for the First Professional Historians Testifying as Expert Witnesses in…
Cohen's "Gangster of New York"
Andrew Wender Cohen, Syracuse University, has published Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
This is the story of Louis Bieral, a nineteenth-century gangster, politician, sportsman, and Civil War hero. Kidnapped…
Francois and Hershkopff on Pennoyer and Redemption
Aderson Francois, Georgetown University Law Center, and Helen Hershkoff, New York University School of Law, have posted Pennoyer, Due Process, and the End of Reconstruction, which is forthcoming in the forthcoming in the New York University …
CFP: ASLH Projects and Proposals Committee
[Via H-Law, we have the following from the ASLH. DRE]
The American Society for Legal History welcomes proposals for the funding of new initiatives in the study, presentation, and production of legal historical scholarship and in the communication of…
