The Legal History Podcast

In this episode Siobhan talks with Dylan C. Penningroth about his prize-winning book “Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights” (Liveright, 2023).

Dylan C. Penningroth is Alexander F. & May T. Morrison Professor of American History & Citizenship and Associate Dean for the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy and Legal Studies at UC Berkeley. He specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history.

In this episode Siobhan talks with Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai about their book "Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies."  (Edinburgh UP, 2023).

Robert Alpert is an Adjunct Instructor at Fordham University where he has taught courses on computers and robots in film, movies and the American experience, and media law. Merle Eisenberg is assistant professor of history at Oklahoma state university where he is a historian of late antiquity and the early middle ages. He also hosts the podcast Infectious Historians on the history of disease, pandemics, and medicine. Lee Mordechai is Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he is a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire. He also hosts the infectious historians podcast and leads the Plague in Late Antiquity: Gather the Uncertain Evidence Project at Princeton University.

In this episode Siobhan talks with Michael Willrich about his book American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Anarchists and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2023). It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Willrich is Leff Families Professor of History at Brandeis University where he teaches and researches in the areas of American political and legal history (from the colonial period to the present, crime and punishment in U.S. history, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the literature of American history. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Willrich’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Mandel Center for the Humanities.

In this episode Siobhan talks with Natasha Wheatley about her book The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton, 2023). It is listed among the best books of the year by the New Statesman and Just Security.

Wheatley is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University where she teaches and researches in the areas of modern European and international history, with a particular focus on intellectual and legal history. Her article “Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law” received the Surrency Prize from the American Society for Legal History in 2018 and her chapter “Legal Pluralism as Temporal Pluralism” was awarded the 2021 Scholarship Prize from the American Society of International Law’s International Legal Theory Group.

In this episode Siobhan talks with Kate Masur, Professor of History and Board of Visitors Professor at Northwestern University about her book, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021). Until Justice Be Done was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association, the John Phillip Reid Book Award from the American Society for Legal History, and the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History.

Masur teaches undergraduate courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the anti-slavery movement, Abraham Lincoln, and U.S. Women’s History. She recently coordinated a team that produced Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice. Part of the Colored Conventions Project, this online exhibit highlights early Black communities and Black activism in Illinois and includes biographical profiles of 25 individual people.  

In this episode Siobhan talks with Felicity Turner, Associate Professor of History and Honors Program Coordinator at Georgia Southern University about her book Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in the Nineteenth-Century United States (UNC Press, 2022).

Her teaching and research interests include legal history; history of medicine; women, gender, and sexuality; law and society; and nineteenth-century US history. She is the author of “The Contradictions of Reform: Prosecuting Infant Murder in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.” published in Law and History Review in May 2021 and “Rights and the Ambiguities of the Law: Infanticide in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South” published in the Journal of the Civil War Era in September 2014. The latter won the Coordinating Council for Women in History Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Award.

In this episode Siobhan talks with Professors Peter Grajzl and Peter Murrell about their June 2022 Law and History Review article “Using Topic-Modeling in Legal History, with an Application to Pre-Industrial English Case Law on Finance.”

Peter Grajzl is Professor of Economics at Washington & Lee University, where he teaches courses in introductory economics, microeconomic theory, comparative institutional economics, and mathematical methods. He has published on a range of topics pertaining to the emergence, the functioning, and the impact of different legal, political, and economic institutions and modes of governance, as well as cultural norms and ideas, in multiple parts of the world.

Peter Murrell is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, where he teaches courses in comparative economic institutions and thinking like an economist. His research interests have always been in comparative economic institutions, focusing first on the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and on the social democracies of post-war Western Europe, then on the institutional reforms in post-Soviet countries and China, and currently on the genesis of the first modern economic and political institutions, those of 17th century England.

Jonathan Gienapp is an assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of History. He is a scholar of Revolutionary and early republican America specializing in the period’s constitutionalism, political culture, legal history, and intellectual history. He is also interested in the method and practice of the history of ideas. His first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence. It investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning helped alter how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities, showing how these changes created a distinct kind of constitutional culture, the consequences of which endure to this day. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. He has written extensively on the relationship between history and constitutional originalism, including in two essays that appeared on Process: A Blog for American History, published by the Organization of American Historians. He is currently completing a book (under contract with Yale University Press) that presents a comprehensive historical critique of originalism a preview of which can be found in an article recently published in Law and History Review, "Written Constitutionalism, Past and Present." 

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. about his book North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020). Milteer is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His other publications include Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, 2021), the independently published Hertford County, North Carolina’s Free People of Color and Their Descendants (2016), as well as articles in the Journal of Social History and the North Carolina Historical Review. Milteer was the recipient of the Historical Society of North Carolina’s R. D. W. Connor Award in 2014 and 2016 for the best journal article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included.

North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever­-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Samantha Barbas about her book The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst: Free Speech Renegade (UCP, 2021). Barbas is Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law. She researches and teaches in the areas of legal history, First Amendment law, and mass communications law. Her work focuses on the intersection of law, culture, media and technology in United States history. Her recent research has explored the history of censorship, privacy and defamation.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of America’s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLU’s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread expansion of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet Ernst was also a man of stark contradictions, waging a personal battle against Communism, defending an autocrat, and aligning himself with J. Edgar Hoover’s inflammatory crusades.

Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas’s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst’s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ’40s and his later idiosyncratic zealotry. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever