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In Memory of Alan Rodger: Conference on Roman Law and Legal History

News and Events

Friends and  colleagues of Alan Rodger will meet in his memory at the University of Glasgow, on 7-8 September 2012, for a conference on legal history and Roman law.

Alan Rodger, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, wrote on legal history and Roman law for more than forty years. He was a student of David Daube at the University of Oxford, and remained an active and engaged scholar even as he pursued a career as an advocate and in government, eventually serving as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

There will be presentations on the Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, as well as a reception and dinner on the Friday evening.  The conference is being organised by Ernest Metzger, Douglas Professor of Civil Law in the University of Glasgow, and David Johnston QC, Axiom Advocates, Edinburgh.

The organisers will keep you informed of arrangements: please send a note to rodgermemorial@iuscivile.com if you are considering attending. In due course those who wish to attend the conference, with or without the reception and dinner, will be able to register from the conference site (see below).

The speakers will include:

Tiziana J. Chiusi (Professor of Civil Law, Roman Law and Comparative Law, University of Saarland); Michael Crawford FBA (Emeritus Professor, History, University College London); Robin Evans-Jones (Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Aberdeen); Joshua S. Getzler (Professor of Law and Legal History, University of Oxford); Kenneth Reid CBE, FBA, FRSE (Professor of Scots Law, University of Edinburgh); John Richardson FRSE (Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Edinburgh); Boudewijn Sirks (Regius Professor of Civil Law, University of Oxford).

See http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/law/research/legalhistory/aconferenceinmemoryofalanrodger/.

A list of tributes to Alan Rodger, with a bibliography of his works, may be found at:

http://www.iuscivile.com/people/earlsferry/

Legal History Book Prizes: John Philip Reid Book Award and the Cromwell Book Prize

Legal History

Nominations are sought for the John Phillip Reid Book Award of the American Society for Legal History and for the Cromwell Book Prize of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. The Reid Award and the Cromwell Book Prize are mutually exclusive. The Reid Award is for a book by a mid-career or senior scholar, and the Cromwell Book Prize is for a 'first book' by a junior scholar. For advice where the distinction is doubtful, please consult Philip Girard, chair of the ASLH Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award, and Daniel Ernst, Chair of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Subcommittee.

John Phillip Reid Book Award

Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The award is given on the recommendation of the Society's John Phillip Reid Prize Committee.

For the 2012 prize, the Reid Award Committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book that bears a copyright date in 2011. Nominations for the Reid Award should be submitted by 25 May 2012, by sending a curriculum vitae of the author and one copy of the book to each member of the committee:

Philip Girard, Chair
James Lewtas Visiting Professor
Osgoode Hall Law School
York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON
Canada
M3J 1P3

Catharine Macmillan
Reader in Legal History
Department of Law
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
United Kingdom

Sophia Z. Lee
Assistant Professor
University of Pennsylvania Law School
3400 Chestnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Steven Wilf
Joel Barlow Professor of Law
Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development
Law School
University of Connecticut
65 Elizabeth Street
Hartford, Connecticut 06105

Laura Weinrib
Assistant Professor
University of Chicago Law School
1111 E. 60th St., Room 410
Chicago, IL 60637

Cromwell Book Prize

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards annually a $5000 book prize for excellence in scholarship in the field of American Legal History by a junior scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty not yet tenured. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. The prize is limited to 'first books', i.e., works by a junior scholar that constitute his or her first major undertaking.

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. The Committee will consider books published in 2011. The Society will announce the award after the annual meeting of the Cromwell Foundation, which normally takes place early in November.

To nominate a book, please send copies of it and the curriculum vitae of its author to John D, Gordan, III, Chair of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee, and to each member of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Subcommittee with a postmark no later than 31 May 2012.

John D. Gordan, III
Chair, Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee
1133 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10128

Daniel R. Ernst
Chair, Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Subcommittee
Visiting Professor of Law (2011-12)
411B Vanderbilt Hall
New York University School of Law
40 Washington Sq. South
New York, NY 10012
ernst@law.georgetown.edu

Laura F. Edwards
Professor of History
History Department
Box 90719
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708

Robert W. Gordon
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford CA 94305

Professor Laura Kalman
Department of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410

From H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences

Legal History Ph.D.: opportunities in Exeter

Opportunities

Our colleagues, at Exeter, Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebbings, inform us that Exeter is prioritising legal history for the award of internal Ph.D. Scholarships this year. This is an excellent opportunity for those wishing to pursue doctoral studies in the field to gain funding and have the benefit of supervision from an excellent team of distinguished scholars. Exeter has hosted the British Legal History Conference twice, and is an agreeable city in a part of Britain with an agreeable climate, with many strong associations for English legal historians. In 2009, as this Blog reported (http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/elhblog/blogentry.aspx?blogentryref=8244), the University instituted the Bracton Centre for Legal History, demonstrating a commitment to the discipline see http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/law/research/clhr/

Musson and Steebings have just published an important collection with CUP on Making Legal History: Approaches and Methodologies, deriving from the recent BLHC they hosted.

For further information, see  http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/funding/

Legal History Fellowship: Harvard

Opportunities

For young legal historians a period to turn their doctoral or other work into a book or other publications can be invaluable. It is therefore important to bring to the attention of readers of this Blog the advertisement for the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship at Harvard.

As well as working on their research (in any field of legal history), they will acquire other skills and experience through involvement in organising the Harvard Law School Legal History Colloquium. The Harvard website states: "The purpose of the fellowship is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined. There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period." This said, past recipients listed have all been working on a relatively modern field of US history, with the concerns of contemporary US legal historians obviously to the fore, which is fair enough.

The deadline for applications is 15 February 2012.

See http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/fellowships/raoul-berger-mark-dewolfe-howe-legal-history-fello.html

 

Interesting Gifts

Legal History

At the beginning of a New Year it is worth reflecting on one of the more curious events in Edinburgh in the past year, and bringing it to the attention of the wider legal historical community, particularly since law is a discipline of words. Edinburgh is a Unesco City of Literature. Conan Doyle was brought up and educated here; Sherlock Holmes is obviously in part inspired by one of his teachers at the Medical School. Walter Scott studied arts and law at the University, and gave great praise to his teacher Baron David Hume. Robert Louis Stevenson also studied law in the University and once even considered seeking one of the chairs in law. Among contemporary writers one need only mention Ian Rankin, Sandy McCall Smith, once a professor in the Law School, and J. K. Rowling, who studied in the now Faculty of Education, and has become a great University Benefactor.

Through the year, at various important cultural institutions, including the Poetry Library, the National Library, the Film House, the City Library, and the National Museum of Scotland, charming paper sculptures appeared with notes in support of the significance of literature. The sculptures were always appropriate for the institution: a tyrannosaurus rex bursting through a book at the Museum, for example. It is interesting to note there were quite a number of links to Ian Rankin, an Edinburgh graduate, who set out to study the novels of Muriel Spark for his doctorate. In all ten were found, finally with a farewell note that indicated the artist to be a woman.

The sculptures are exquisite. Edinburgh photographer Chris Scott has documented them. Internet searches will turn up any number of websites relating too them, but a good place to start is the blog: http://thisiscentralstation.com/featured/mysterious-paper-sculptures/

 

Vacancy – legal history/policy

Opportunities

Source: Legal history blog

http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/job-announcement-rutgers-newarknjit.html

The Federated Department of History at Rutgers University-Newark and New Jersey Institute of Technology invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of assistant professor, based at NJIT, to begin September 2012. Applicants should be able to present evidence of scholarly accomplishment and effective teaching and should have a Ph.D. with a primary research field that focuses on legal history/policy. They should also have an aptitude for program administration, as the holder of this position will serve as associate director of the department’s growing new degree program in Law, Technology and Culture. Time period and geographical area of scholarly expertise are open, but preference will be given to applicants who can contribute to the department’s M.A. concentration in the history of technology, environment, and medicine/health. NJIT and the Newark campus of Rutgers University are located across the street from each other in the University Heights section of Newark, with easy access to the entire metropolitan New York-New Jersey area.

    Send letter of application, C.V., writing sample, sample syllabi, and three letters of recommendation as directed at njit.jobs, posting # 0600782. Review of applications will begin in January 2012 and will continue until the position is filled. NJIT is an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/H/V.

Sir John Baker: Neill Lecture Oxford

News and Events

For many years now Sir John Baker has been the doyen of English legal history. If one takes into account his slightly older colleagues, Brian Simpson, Toby Milsom, and, in ecclesiastical law, Dick Helmholz, and his younger colleagues such as John Hudson, Michael Lobban and Robert Palmer (without slighting others) the past few decades have been a rich and fertile period in English legal history. It is no wonder that it has proved a ripe time to produce the multi-volume Oxford History of the Laws of England, harvesting the wealth of recent scholarship and experience.
Sir John has now retired from the Downing Chair at Cambridge. But his energy is not being dissipated. It is worth noting that on 24 February 2012 he will give the Neill Lecture at All Souls College, Oxford, on the intriguing topic of "The Legal History Nobody Knows". It promises to be a great event. It is an interesting title for a man who turned the “dark age” of English legal history into glorious light.

See http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/event=11413

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66th session of the SIHDA conference (Oxford 2012)

Legal History

Source: mailing list of the European Society for Comparative Legal History 

 

First circular
Oxford
14 December 2011

Dear colleages,

I am very pleased to invite you to the 66th Session of the Société Internationale ‘Fernand de Visscher’ pour l’Histoire des Droits de l’Antiquité (SIHDA), which will take place from 18 to 21 September 2012 in Oxford. In accordance with the decision taken by the last General Assembly, the theme of the congress will be Reception of Law.

In this First Circular I shall provide you with general information regarding the congress. In the course of January you will receive a Second Circular with information on how to registration.

The congress will start in the afternoon of Tuesday 18 September and end on Friday 21 September with the General Assembly. A Banquet dinner is foreseen for that Friday night, and excursions are planned for Saturday 22 September.

The theme is ‘Reception of Law’. It is a wide theme, which covers, e.g., the reception of Assyrian law by the Mesopotamians, Greek law by Egyptians, Roman law by the Greeks in the 4th and 5th century, by the Gallic population in the 6th century, but also, as the name of our association implies (‘Histoire des droits de l’Antiquité’), the reception of Roman law after 1100, and I welcome particularly contributions concerning the reception of Roman law after 1100 in Europe, the ‘Civil Law’. Yet, as is the custom of our association, papers on other themes than the proposed are of course always welcome and appreciated, in one of the five accepted languages (French, English, German, Italian and Spanish).

Oxford as a city is well known and needs no further recommendation. Its colleges, of which those in the centre are centuries old, are a major tourist attraction, as is the Radcliffe Camera, the Sheldonian Theatre and the Ashmolean Museum. And of course it is always interesting to combine the congress with a visit or short stay at London. London itself has several airports, of which Heathrow and Gatwick have a regular and direct bus connection with Oxford. Likewise the train connection is very good with the Eurostar going straight from Paris to London-St Pancras through the Channel Tunnel; and a taxi or underground will take you from there to Paddington Station for a good train connection to Oxford.

The congress will be held in St Catherine’s College. It is a college, built in 1962 in splendid Sixties style after the design of Arne Jacobsen and it is excellently suited for a congress of the size of SIHDA. Actually, it is, of all the colleges in Oxford, the only one with sufficient conference accommodation for us; all its rooms have a private shower and toilet. You will receive with the Second Circular the possibility to book an arrangement for the congress in the college.

I hope I have provided you with enough information for the moment. If there are any questions, I am happy to answer these, but otherwise I would like to ask you to wait till the Second Circular when more information will be provided. All further communications will be done through email. If you happen to know of somebody who is or might be interested but has not received this circular, please let me have their email address and I shall take care that he or she is included in the address list and will receive this and further notifications. Likewise I would appreciate it greatly to know of changes in email addresses.

All that remains for me now is to wish you a good Christmas holidays and an auspicious New Year,

Best wishes,

Boudewijn Sirks
Regius Professor of Civil Law
University of Oxford

Exciting Legal History PhD Opportunity, Queen Mary London: The Court of Chancery and its Records, 1820-1888

Opportunities

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Queen Mary London has an excellent programme in legal history at both LLM and PhD level, for which one of your Blogger's former Edinburgh undergraduate students, who studied there,  has had nothing but praise. Ably led my Michael Lobban, one of the most talented historians of English law in the period 1760-1900, there are also such outstanding scholars involved as Catharine MacMillan. Lobban was a major contributor to the recently published (2010) three volumes of the Oxford History of English Law covering 1820-1914, while MacMillan's Mistakes in Contract Law (2010) is an excellent work. She is currently writing a biography of Judah Benajamin, a man of considerable interest to this Blog.

At Queen Mary there is now an exciting opportunity for a scholar to pursue research for a PhD for three years with a full scholarship in the Department of Law. The aim is to study the Court of Chancery and its Records in the era of nineteenth century reform in collaboration with the National Archive. The aim of the project, which will be jointly supervised by Professor Michael Lobban in the Department of Law and Dr Amanda Bevan at The National Archives, is to explore the structure, working and business of the court in the era in which Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House. The student will be given in-depth training in the court records at The National Archives, as well as general academic supervision at Queen Mary. Applicants who hold, or are currently taking, a postgraduate degree in law or history are welcome to apply, but must meet the School of Law's PhD programme academic entrance criteria (in terms of the required grades/marks). Any informal enquiries about the studentship can be directed to Michael Lobban by email on m.j.lobban@qmul.ac.uk.

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Philips van Leiden Society: 50th Anniversary, 16th December 2011

News and Events

This blogger remembers well the meeting in Edinburgh from 29th October – 2nd November 1987 of the Edinburgh Roman Law Group along with the Philips van Leiden Society and the Forum Romanum of Amsterdam. It was organised by the late and indefatigable Professor Peter Birks along with the excellent and efficient Secretary of the regretted Department of Civil Law, Mrs Lisa White. The theme was the Roman Law of Property, and many of the papers were subsequently published in New Perspectives in the Roman Law of Property, offered as a Festschrift to the late Barry Nicholas. As well as a scholarly programme there was an excellent social programme, including a notably successful visit to the Glenturret Distillery. One may note that, as well as Peter Birks, the only speaker we have since lost is Lord Rodger, who also gave a paper;  all other speakers are happily still with us. It was a memorable event at which your blogger met many eminent Dutch legal historians for the very first time. He is still proud of his Philips van Leiden tie.

The Philips van Leiden Society is now celebrating its 50th anniversary with a conference on Law and Equity: Approaches in Roman Law and Common law: see: http://law.leidenuniv.nl/org/metajuridica/nieuws-metajuridica/concgres-law-and-equity.html The leaflet promoting the conference has a wonderful Pompeian wall painting of citizens studying the edict of the praetor: http://www.phvl.nl/Law_and_Equity/Programme_files/folder.pdf.

It is a good theme, recalling an interesting essay of the late Professor Pringsheim. Both the Dutch and the English are represented by a number of eminent scholars. It promises to be a worthwhile event.

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