Legal History Colloquium
Professors Daniel Hulsebosch, William Nelson and John Phillip Reid
Fall 2008 and Spring 2009
Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Vanderbilt Hall - Room 202
L06.4515.001
2 credits per semester
The oldest of NYU Law School's colloquia, now in its twenty-seventh year, is the Legal History Colloquium. Its mission is unique--the training of young scholars rather than the testing of ideas of senior professors. The core of the Legal History Colloquium consists of the Samuel I. Golieb Fellows, a group of two or three fledgling academics each year from schools around the United States. Golieb Fellows, who either have completed or are currently completing their graduate work in legal history, have come to NYU from doctoral programs at Cambridge, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Virginia, Yale, and other universities. Other participants in the Colloquium have included J.D. students and graduate students at NYU, Fulbright Scholars from Europe, and faculty from NYU Law School and other law schools in the metropolitan region.
Participants in the Legal History Colloquium are expected to be at work on scholarship intended for publication. Some focus on writing articles, but most turn their attention to books. As a result, a number of important books have been written at least in part while their authors have been working at NYU. Among them are George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940; Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America; Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale, 1927-1960; Edward A. Purcell, Jr., Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958; John Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law, and Christian McMillen, Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory.
The Colloquium meets weekly throughout the academic year to discuss the work in progress of the Golieb Fellows, of the legal history graduate students, and of the Law School's faculty engaged in historical research. Some guest speakers, mainly former Golieb Fellows and occasionally faculty from other universities, are also invited to present papers.
Because of the Legal History Colloquium's emphasis on scholarship, nearly all the young scholars who have attended it during the two decades of its existence have become either professors of law or professors of history at universities throughout the United States. The schools at which Colloquium alumni are currently teaching include the University of California at Hastings, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, Chicago, Columbia, Connecticut, Dennison, Florida, Fordham, Georgetown, Harvard, Louisville, Minnesota, New York Law, Saint Louis, SUNY at Buffalo, Ohio State, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Washington and Lee, and Yale. One former member of the Colloquium is now Provost of Princeton University. One former Golieb Fellow served as law clerk to Chief Justice Rehnquist and is now Professor of National Security Law at the National War College in Washington, DC, another is Dean of Stanford Law School, while another is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Bowling Green State University. Yet another former Golieb Fellow is Chief Operating Officer of The Constitution Project at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C.
Although its emphasis has been on training young historians, the Legal History Colloquium also has proved invaluable to the NYU faculty. According to Professor William Nelson, a moderator of the Colloquium and one of its cofounders, no better forum exists anywhere in America at which to present historical ideas and work in progress. Nelson, in his words, "owes an unredeemable debt to the Golieb Fellows and other Colloquium participants who over the years have raised his work to a level far above that which he could have attained alone." In 2008-2009, Professors William E. Nelson and Daniel Hulsebosch will moderate the Colloquium.
Spring 2009 Schedule of Presenters
January 14, 2009
William E. Nelson, Weinfeld Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
"The Height of Sophistication: Law and Professionalism in the City-State of Charleston, South Carolina, 1670-1775"
January 21, 2009
Profs. David Golove and Daniel Hulsebosch, New York University School of Law
"On an Equal Footing: Constitution-Making and the Law of Nations in Early America"
January
January 28, 2009
Prof. Risa Goluboff, University of Virginia, Visiting Professor NYU School of Law
"Vagrancy Laws"
February 4, 2009
Prof. Jennifer Klein, Yale University, History Department
"The Bonds of Care: Domestic Labor and the Law in the U.S. Welfare State"
February 11, 2009
Prof. Felice Batlan, Chicago-Kent College of Law
"The Birth of Legal Aid: Knightly Attorneys and Damsels in Distress"
February 18, 2009
Prof. James Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale Law School
"Western Legal Imperialism: Thinking About the Deep Historical Roots"
February 25, 2009
Prof. Michael Klarman, Harvard Law School
"Backlash: The Occasionally Perverse Consequences of Court Decisions"
March 4, 2009
Jefferson Decker, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow, New York University School of Law
"Governing from the Right: The Conservative Litigation Movement and the Reagan Revolution"
March 11, 2009
Prof. Michael Willrich, Brandeis University, History Department
"The Law of the Lancet: Smallpox and the American State"
March 25, 2009
Prof. Sally Hadden, Florida State University, College of Law
"Lawyers' Libraries in Colonial America: Volume and Volumes"
April 1, 2009
R. Owen Williams, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow, New York University School of Law
"An Impartial Jury of the State"---A Flash of Nationalism in 1880
April 8, 2009
Deborah Dinner, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow, NYU School of Law
"Debating Protective Legislation: The Origins of a Legal Sex/Gender Distinction, 1964-1974"
April 15, 2009
David Tanenhaus, James E. Rogers Professor of History and Law, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
"Gerald's Story: Children, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice"
April 22, 2009
Prof. Ariela Dubler, Columbia Law School
Sexing Skinner: Marriage, Procreation and the Legal Family
Fall 2008 Schedule of Presenters
August 27, 2008
Prof. Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) College of Law and History Department
"Puritan Godly Discipline in Comparative Perspective: Legal Pluralism and the Sources of 'Intensity'"
September 10, 2008
Dr. Kaius Tuori, University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law
"Legal Realists and Indigenous Law: Llewellyn, Cohen, and Schiller"
September 17, 2008
Prof. Jed Shugerman, Harvard Law School
"The People's Courts: The Rise of Judicial Elections and Judicial Power, 1837-1860"
September 24, 2008
Prof. Christina Burnett, Columbia Law School
"A Clash of Constitutionalisms: The Conflict Over the Platt Amendment, 1900-1901"
October 1, 2008
James Oldham, St. Thomas More Professor of Law and Legal History, Georgetown University Law Center
"Under the Radar: Informal Law-Making by the Twelve Judges in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries"
October 8, 2008
Jefferson Decker, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow, NYU School of Law
"Rights and Regulation: The Conservative Litigation Movement and Liberal Government in the 1970s"
October 15, 2008
R. Owen Williams, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow, NYU School of Law
"Lincoln's Justices: Democratic Politicians in Republican Robes"
October 22, 2008
Bonnie Martin, Sassius Marcellus Clay Fellow, Yale University Department of History
"The Power of Human Collateral: Mortgaging Slaves in the Colonial and Antebellum South"
October 29, 2008
Prof. Norman Silber, Hofstra University School of Law
"Judicial Wisdom and Political Maturity: The Oral History of Judge Bernard S. Meyer"
November 5, 2008
Brian Z. Tamanaha, Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo Professor of Law, St. John's University
"Understanding Legal Realism"
November 12, 2008
Prof. Don Herzog, University of Michigan, School of Law
"Public Man, Private Woman?"
November 19, 2008
Deborah Dinner, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow, NYU School of Law
"Reproductive Work: From Social Rights to Individual Rights, 1966-1978"
December 3, 2008
William E. Nelson, Weinfeld Professor of Law, NYU School of Law
"Liberal Tradition of the Supreme Court Clerkship: Its Rise, Fall, and Reincarnation?"
December 10, 2008
David M. Oshinsky, Jack S. Blanton Chair in History, University of Texas
"The Furman Case"