:: Abstracts of Papers St. Louis, 2012 ::

These abstracts vary in length, and no effort was made normalize the formatting. They are hyperlinked to the panel title. They were submitted before the conference, though some of them have been, and more may be, changed to reflect more accurately what the panelist actually said. We post them here, however, because they allow one to get a quite good idea of what was said at the conference and far more quickly than was possible in the former system of publishing a summary by the chair in a newsletter that appeared, if at all, some months later.

Friday, Session A

Revolutions, Coups, Constitutions, and Religion in the Modern Middle East

  • Malika Zeghal, Harvard University, <email>,  “Constitution Drafting After the 2011 Tunisian ‘Revolution’: Old and New Debates about Islam and Sharia” [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • Ozan Varol, Lewis & Clark, <email>, “The Military: Turkey’s Fourth Branch of Government”
  • Kristen Stilt, Northwestern University, <email>, “Religion and the Making of the 1971 Egyptian Constitution” [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • Taxation in Modern America

  • Ajay Mehrotra, Indiana University, <email>, “Corporate Capitalism and the Changing Constitution”
  • Marjorie Kornhauser, Tulane University, <email>, “Taxing Bachelors in America: 1895-1939”
  • Carolyn Jones, University of Iowa, <email>, “Taxing to Reach the Kingdom of God”
  • Defining the Right to Choose

  • Sara Dubow, Williams College, <email>, “From Conscience Clauses to Conscience Wars: The Politics of Refusal, 1973-2011”
  • Dan Williams, University of West Georgia, <email>, “Creating the Right to Life”
  • Mary Ziegler, Saint Louis University, <email>, “The Making of a Woman’s Right”
  • Local Matters: The Legal Construction of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum St. Louis

  • Kelly Kennington, Auburn University, <email>, “Just as free as you are: Individual Lives, Local Communities, and the Establishment of Freedom in the Law”
  • Jesse Nasta, Northwestern University, <email>, “Becoming Free Through Enslavement: African American Familial Slaveholding and the Courts in a Border”
  • Anne Twitty, University of Mississippi, <email>,  “Learning Law, Making Law: The Construction of Legal Knowledge among Slaves in the American Confluence”

  • Legal Pluralism and European Overseas Empires, 1600-1830

  • Richard Ross, University of Illinois, <email>, and Philip Stern, Duke University, <email>, “Reconstructing Early Modern Notions of Legal Pluralism”
  • Helen Dewar, University of Toronto, <email>, “Litigating Empire: The Role of French Courts in Establishing Colonial Sovereignties”
  • Keith Mayes, University of Minnesota, <email>: "Of Deacons, Panthers, and Liberation Armies: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Second Amendment"
  • Lauren Benton, New York University, <email>, and Lisa Ford, University of New South Wales, <email>, “Magistrates in Empire: Convicts, Slaves, and the Remaking of Plural Legal Order in the British Empire”
  • Friday, Session B

    French Law in the Making (13th–16th Centuries)

  • Ada-Maria Kuskowski, New York University, <email>, “Writing lex non scripta: Law and Textualization in Late Medieval France”
  • Jolanta Komornicka, Boston University, <email>, “Iniquitous, Odious, and Unjust: The Use of Sovereign Power in the Legal Culture of the  Parlement of Paris”
  • Tyler Lange, University of California, Berkeley, <email>, “Excommunication for Debt in Reformation-era France and Beyond”
  • Immigration Law in the Americas

  • Katherine Unterman, Texas A&M University, <email>, “The Fugitive as Immigrant: Extradition Havens in Latin America”
  • Julian Lim, Washington University in St. Louis, <email>, “African Americans and the Construction of Immigration Law on the Border”
  • New Topics in the Legal History of Race, Slavery, and Civil Rights in the United States

  • Robert St. Martin Westley, Tulane University, <email>, “The ‘Conventional Exemption’ in Nineteenth Century Slavery Restitution Cases”
  • Stephen Middleton, Mississippi State University, <email>, “Racial Identity, Local People, and the Conceptualization of the One Drop Rule in 19th-Century America”
  • Wendy Greene, Samford University, <email>, “Race and the Railways: Homer Plessy and Jim Crow Challenges to Racial Separation, Racial Purity, and Racial Determination on Private Railcars”
  • Comparing the Slave Codes of Spain, France, Britain in the Seventeenth century: The Limits of Absolutism

  • Brett Rushforth, College of William and Mary, <email>, “Legal Pluralism, Private Law, and the Regulation of Slavery in the Early Modern French Atlantic”
  • Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon, <email>, “Standing on Shaky Ground: Claiming Ecclesiastical Immunity in Seventeenth-Century Lima: 1600-1699”
  • Holly Brewer, University of Maryland, <email>, "Property in People:  Creating a British Imperial Slave Code via the Common Law"
  • The Constitution of Aspiration: Twenty-Five Years After

  • Risa Goluboff, University of Virginia, <email>, “Vagrancy Law and Its Discontents: A New Approach to the Constitution in Everyday Life”
  • Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University, <email>, “Not another paper on Gibbons v. Ogden
  • Steven Wilf , University of Connecticut, <email>, “The Constitution of Trepidation”
  • Friday, Session C

    Crime and Punishment in the Early Modern World

  • Thomas Buoye, University of Tulsa, <email>,  "Principles and Praxis of Capital Punishment in 18th Century China"
  • Megan Reid, University of Southern California, <email>,  "Appropriate Justice and Appropriate Punishment in Late Medieval Islamic law" [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • Govind Sreenivasan, Brandeis University, <email>,  "Judging and Punishing Injuries in Early Modern Germany (c. 1550 - 1650) [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • The Administrative State and the Law in 20th-Century America

  • Joanna L. Grisinger, Northwestern University, <email>, “Civil Rights in the Administrative State”
  • Sophia Z. Lee, University of Pennsylvania, <email>, “‘A Little FEPC’?: Forging a Liberal Workplace Constitution in the Post-New Deal Administrative State”
  • Nicholas Parrillo, Yale University, <email>, “The Origins of American Distinctness in Statutory Interpretation: Administrative Agencies, Judges, and Legislative History, c. 1890-1945”
  • A Pastiche of Tongues: Speaking and Responding to the Languages of Anglo-Saxon and Later Medieval Law

  • Lisi Oliver, Louisiana State University, <email>, “Assessing Genital Injury in Medieval Law”
  • Trisha Olson, Independent Researcher, <email>, “Of Law-Worthiness and Outlawry in Guthlac A: The Poetic Nature of Anglo-Saxon Law”
  • Noga Morag-Levine, Michigan State University, <email>: "Formalism, Facts, and the Brandeis Brief: The Making of a Myth"
  • Andrew Rabin, University of Louisville, <email>, “Between Court and Cloister: Legal Literacy in Anglo-Saxon Nunneries”
  • Quasi-Legal Institutions in Modern Chinese History

  • Pengsheng Chiu, Chinese University of Hong Kong, <email>, “Revisiting Legal Pluralism in China: The Hidden Agenda of Protecting Merchant Interests behind Eighteenth-Century Legal Orderings in Lower Yangtze Cities” [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • Xiaoping Cong, University of Houston, <email>, “Ma Xiwu’s Way of Judging: Villages, Law, and Legal Modernity in Revolutionary China of the 1940s”
  • Glenn D. Tiffert, University of California, Berkeley, <email>, “Law and (Dis)order in Revolutionary Wuhan: The Ji Kaifu case (1949-52)”
  • Author Meets Readers: Keneth Mack, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer [Abstracts not provided.]

  • Kenneth Mack, Harvard University, <email>
  • Herbert Timothy Lovelace, Jr., Indiana University, <email>
  • Jane Dailey, University of Chicago, <email>
  • Robert W. Gordon, Stanford University, <email>
  • Saturday, Session A

    Roman Law In the Imperial Period

  • Kaius Tuori, New York University, <email>, “The Emperor of Small Things: Roman Imperial Adjudication during the Severan Period”
  • Emily Master, Princeton University, <email>, “Modes of Lawmaking in the Early Roman Empire”
  • Bruce Frier, University of Michigan, <email>,  “The Professionalization of Advocacy in the Late Roman Empire”
  • Publicity, Reputation, and Privacy in American Law

  • Kristin A. Olbertson, Alma College, <email>, “‘Making Fables Pass for Facts’: Criminal Prosecutions for False News and Rumor in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts”
  • Mark M. Carroll, University of Missouri, <email>, “Dished Dirt, Transgressive Women, and the Politics of Slander in Upper Louisiana and Missouri, 1804-1860”
  • Samantha Barbas, State University of New York, Buffalo, <email>, “Privacy in an Image Society”
  • Reconstruction in the Courts: The Adjudication of African Americans’ Rights in State and Federal Courts

  • Linda Tvrdy, Columbia University, <email>, “The Liberty to Be Unfree: Free Labor in Reconstruction North Carolina”
  • Jeremiah Bauer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, <email>, “Adjudicating Reconstruction: Blyew and the Logistical Limitations of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement”
  • Jonathan Lurie, Rutgers University, <email>, “The Enduring Racism of Justice Bradley: Blyew and Beyond”
  • Prosecutors, Politics, and Professionalism in the Nineteenth Century

  • Michael Ellis, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, <email>, “The Origins of the Elected Prosecutor”
  • Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Harvard University, <email>, “The Founding of the Department of Justice and the Failure of Civil Service Reform, 1865-1871”
  • Norman Spaudling, Stanford University, <email>, “Prosecutorial Discretion in the Civil Rights Context”
  • The Swedish Model – A Middle Way?

  • Mats Kumlien, Uppsala University, <email>, "What's the Difference? Abortion laws in Sweden and the USA"
  • Corel Granstrom, Umea University, <email>, "Back to Mediaval Times? Crime Victims in the Welfare State."
  • Marianne Dahlen, Uppsala University, marianne.dahle<email>, “In the Best Interest of the Child? Child Welfare Reform in 20th-Century Sweden”
  • Saturday, Session B

    Or Else: Contract Enforcement in Roman and Medieval Law

  • Agostino Inguscio, Yale University, <email>, "Witnesses as Enforcers in Twelfth-Century Genoese Trading Networks" [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • Jessica Goldberg , University of Pennsylvania, <email>, "Parsing Evidence for Enforcement Regimes in Geniza Documents" [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • David Ratzan, Columbia University, <email>, "Legal Threats and the Enforcement of Contract in the Roman Empire"
  • Law and the Modern American Warfare State

  • Clara Altman, Brandeis University, <email>,  "'The Difference between Political Revolution and the Crime of Robbery': Crime, War, and American Military Justice in the Philippines"
  • Jeremy Kessler, Yale University, <email>, “The Administration of Conscience in World War I”
  • Kate Epstein, Rutgers University-Camden, <email>,  “A New Angle on National Security Law: Intellectual Property Rights, Anti- Espionage Legislation, and Export Control before World War I”
  • Towards a New History of European Law

  • Anne Boerger, University of Alberta, <email>, “Negotiating the Foundations of European Law, 1950-1958. The Legal History of the Treaties of Paris and Rome”
  • Billy Davies, American University, <email>, “Pushing Back: What Happens When Member States Resist the ECJ. The Case of West Germany 1951-1978”

  • Morten Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen, <email>, “Establishing a Constitutional Practice of European Law. The History of the Legal Service of the European Executives, 1952-1965”
  • Katherine T. Preyer Prize Panel [Abstracts not provided.]

  • Sarah Levine-Gronnigsatar, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago, <email>.  “Poor Law, Slave Law, God’s Law: Quaker Antislavery and the Early Modern Origins of New York’s Gradual Emancipation”
  • Taisu Zhang, J.D. Candidate, Yale Law School, <email>, “Kinship Networks, Social Status and the Creation of Property Rights in Early Modern China and England”
  • Roundtable: Visual Sources for Legal History: Reflections on Representing Justice [Abstracts not provided, but the organizers did provide an outline of what they hoped to accomplish and Judith Resnick and Dennis Curtis provided an abstract after the conference, both of which are included here.]

  • Judith Resnik, Yale University, <email>
  • Dennis E. Curtis, Yale University, <email>
  • Robert A. Ferguson, Columbia University, <email>
  • John Gordan III, William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, <email>
  • Linda Mulcahy, London School of Economics, <email>
  • Saturday, Session C

    Early 20th Century Jewish Encounters with Foreign Law: From Zionist State-Building to Rabbinical International Law Scholarship

  • Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, Haifa University, <email>, “The Enduring Legal Legacy of the British Empire: The British, Indian and Pakistani Sources of the Israeli Absentee Property Act”
  • Avital Margalit, Sapir College, <email>, “Co-operative Societies in Mandatory Palestine: Legal and Cultural Transplantation”
  • Binyamin Blum, Hebrew University, <email>, “The CSI Effect in Mandate Palestine: Forensic Technology, Surveillance, and Empire”
  • Amos Israel-Vleeschhouwer , Tel-Aviv University, <email>, “Three Early Jewish Legal Responses to International Law: 1900-1940”
  • The Golden Laboratory: Legal Innovation in Twentieth-Century California

  • Mark Brilliant, University of California, Berkeley, <email>, “From Integrating Young Scholars to Redistributing Property Tax Dollars: How and Why School Finance Reform Eclipsed School Desegregation as The Educational Civil Rights Issue Beginning in the 1970s”
  • Deborah Kang, California State University, San Marcos, <email>, “Making Immigration Policy Local: The Immigration and Naturalization Service in California, Arizona, and Texas”
  • Felicia Kornbluh, University of Vermont, <email>, “Substantive Rights, Japanese American Civil Rights, and ‘The Equal Protection of the Laws’: Jacobus tenBroek and the California Roots of a New Equal Protection Jurisprudence After World War II”
  • Fissures in the Hegemon: Opportunities for Freedom in the Law and Administration of Southern Slavery

  • Kirt von Daacke, University of Virginia, <email>, “’I’ll Show You What a Free Negro Is’: Interracial Violence and the County-Level Workings of the Law in Virginia”
  • Ted Maris-Wolf, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, <email>, “Black Clients, White Attorneys: Life, Liberty, and Law in Virginia Communities”
  • Gautham Rao, American University, <email>, “Administering Slavery and Freedom: Customhouses and the Federal Regulation of Slavery”
  • Reconsidering Popular Constitutionalism

  • Laura Phillips, Brown University, <email>, “The Fair Trade Experiment in California: Popular Constitutionalism, Federalism, and Antitrust, 1929-1937”
  • Christopher Schmidt, Chicago-Kent College of Law,  <email>, “Popular Constitutionalism on the Right” [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • Brad Snyder, University of Wisconsin, <email>, “The Real Progressive Constitutionalist” [An abstract of this paper was not received.]
  • The Life, Work, and Influence of A. W. Brian Simpson

  • Rande Kostal, Western University (Ontario), <email>, “Historicizing the Common Law: Brian Simpson and the Limits of Influence”
  • Robert W. Gordon, Stanford University, <email>, “Brian Simpson as Storyteller and Satirist”
  • David Sugarman, Lancaster University, <email>, “A.W.B. Simpson in Context: The Life of Brian”
  • Saturday, Session D

    The “Indian Problem” and Federal Power in American Legal History

  • Gregory Ablavsky, University of Pennsylvania, <email>, “The Indians’ Constitution: Rethinking Native American Influence on The Framing”
  • Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Illinois College, <email>, “Crooked Paths through the Peace Policy: Repressed Alternatives and Ely Parker’s Career in Indian Affairs”
  • Karen Tani, University of California, Berkeley, <email>, “Citizens of the Welfare State? The “Indian Problem” in the Age of New Federalism”
  • Property and Liberty in the Long Nineteenth Century

  • Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania, <email>, “American Mountain: Limitations on Religious Property in Antebellum America”
  • Dylan Penningroth, Northwestern University, <email>, “Black Inheritance: Rights and Genealogies after Slavery”
  • Allison Brownell Tirres, DePaul University, <email>, “Non-Citizen Property Rights and State Constitutional Reform”

    Media, Crime, and the Law: Assessing the Role of the Media in Framing Crime and the Anglo-American Legal Process

  • Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan University, <email>, “Facing Facts: The Tichborne Cause Célèbre and Victorian Public Opinion”
  • Carolyn Ramsey, University of Colorado, <email>, “Journalists and Gendered Violence: Newspaper Coverage of Intimate-Partner Abuse”
  • Renee Romano, Oberlin College, <email>, “Making Cold Cases Hot: Journalists and the Re-opening of Civil Rights Era Murder Cases”
  • Transforming American Advocacy: Race, Gender, and Local Courts in the 20th Century

  • Cecily McDaniel, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, <email>, “’Women Lawyers Must Balk Both Color and Sex Bias’: Black Women Lawyers and Their Contributions to Black Feminist Thought”
  • Cheryl Nelson Butler, Southern Methodist University, <email>, “Blackness as Delinquency”
  • Felice Batlan, Chicago-Kent College of Law, <email>, “The Gendered Lives of Legal Aid: Jewish Women Lawyers and the Immigrant Experience, 1890-1910”
  • Author Meets Readers: James Q. Whitman, Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War

  • James Q. Whitman, Yale University, <email>
  • Peter Hunt, University of Colorado, <email>
  • David Bell, Princeton University, <email>
  • Cynthia Nicoletti, Mississippi College School of Law, <email>
  •  


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