Legal History Colloquium
Professor William E. Nelson
Fall 2009 and Spring 2010
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-eighth 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 Fall 2009 Professor William E. Nelson will moderate. In Spring 2010, Professors Daniel Hulsebosch, Annette Gordon-Reed, and John Reid will moderate the Colloquium.
Fall 2009 -- Schedule of Presenters
August 26, 2009
William E. Nelson, Weinfeld Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
"Politicizing the Courts and Destroying the Law: A Legal History of Colonial North Carolina, 1660-1775" pdf
September 2, 2009
William E. Nelson, Weinfeld Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
"Legal Chaos in a Factious Colony: New York, 1626-1776" pdf
September 16, 2009
Prof. David Bernstein, George Mason University School of Law
"Rehabilitating Lochner - Part 1"
September 23, 2009
Prof. David Bernstein, George Mason University School of Law
"Rehabilitating Lochner - Part 2"
September 30, 2009
Laura Weinrib, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow 2009-2010, NYU School of Law
"Lawyers, Libertines and the Reinvention of Free Speech, 1920-1933" pdf
October 7, 2009
Sara McDougall, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow 2009-2010, NYU School of Law
"Bigamy: A Male Crime in Medieval Europe?" pdf
October 14, 2009
Maribel Morey, Princeton University, History Department
"The Making of 'An American Dilemma' (1944): The Carnegie Corporation and The Negro, 1911-1944"
October 21, 2009
Prof. Daniel J. Sharfstein, Vanderbilt University School of Law
"Sun & Shade: Three American Families Journey from Black to White"
October 28, 2009
Prof. Robert Kaczorowski, Fordham University School of Law
"A History of Fordham Law School" pdf
November 4, 2009
Prof. Liam O'Melinn, Ohio Northern University College of Law
"Our Discrete and Insular Founders: American 'Degeneracy' and the Birth of Constitutional Equality" pdf
November 11, 2009
Prof. Troy McKenzie, New York University School of Law
"Revisiting the Supreme Court's Personal Jurisdiction Cases: 1977-1990" pdf
November 18, 2009
Jedidiah Kroncke, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow 2009-2010, NYU School of Law
Introduction and Chapters from "Taming Imagined Dragons: China, Missionaries and Modern U.S. Legal Exceptionalism" pdf
November 25, 2009
Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman, Asst. Professor, Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University
"Legal Norms in the Jewish Courts of Medieval Egypt" pdf
December 2, 2009
Christopher Beauchamp, Sharswood Fellow in Law and History, University of Pennsylvania Law School
"Cases and Controversies in the Formation of American Patent Law" pdf