::  2005 Board of Directors Meeting  ::
Cincinnati, Ohio
Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza Hotel

Board Minutes (pdf)

Committee Reports (pdf)

ASLH Election results...

New ASLH President, Secretary-Treasurer
This year Charles Donahue of Harvard Law School replaces Harry Scheiber as president of the American Society for Legal History.  Professor Donahue is Paul A. Freund Professor of Law, specializing in Roman Law, English legal history, and Continental legal history.  

Further, William LaPiana will take the place of Jack Pratt as ASLH Secretary-Treasurer.  After five years of dedicated and expert service, Pratt is relinquishing the position in order to take advantage of a forthcoming sabbatical leave.  ASLH welcomes LaPiana, the Rita and Joseph Solomon Professor of Wills, Trusts, and Estates and Director of the Estate Planning, Graduate Tax Program at New York Law School.

Elected to the Board of Directors:

• Michael Grossberg, Professor of History, University of Indiana
• Kenneth F. Ledford, Professor of History, Case Western Reserve University
• Linda Przybyszewski, Professor of History, University of Notre Dame
• David Sugarman, Professor of Law, Lancaster University (UK)
• Emily Zack Tabuteau, Professor of History, Michigan State University

In addition, Harry N. Scheiber, Professor of Law and History, University of California, Berkeley, will begin a constitutional two-year term on the board as immediate past president.

Elected to the Nominating Committee:

• Chris Tomlins, Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation

Endowment Campaign...

President Scheiber announced that the endowment campaign had exceeded its goal of $500,000 with pledges that were received at the annual meeting. This is a remarkable achievement, the work of many hands, but special thanks are owing to Sarah Barringer Gordon, who chaired the Committee on the Future of the Society, and Jane Scheiber, a professional fund-raiser for the University of California, who gave hours of volunteer time to the campaign. The campaign is, of course, not over. Experience suggests that not all those who pledge can fulfill their pledges, and additional gifts are needed to make up for inevitable short-fall. The Society is, however, well on the way to achieving its ambitious goal.

Prizes, Awards, Fellowships...

The 2005 Surrency Prize was awarded to Professor Amalia Kessler of the Stanford University School of Law for her article, "Enforcing Virtue: Social Norms and Self-Interest in an 18th century Merchant Court," which appeared in volume 22 of the Law and History Review (2004). The citation read: " Amalia Kessler uses a case study of the work of the Paris merchant court to explore theories about economic development and behaviour and the influence of religious norms on commercial law.  Her argument, securely anchored in extensive archival work, challenges the traditional narrative which lauds merchant courts as 'key to the emergence of modern commercial law because they provided a forum in which merchants could [avoid] the learned law so as to foster norms of capitalist self-interest.'  In Kessler's reading of the evidence, mercantile jurisprudence relied on the ideal of the virtuous merchant which 'drew no line between his standing as a merchant, citizen, and good Christian.'  In adding a religious dimension to the administration of early modern commercial law, Kessler's work is relevant to the history of law in many jurisdictions and at widely varying points in time."

The Sutherland Prize for 2005 was awarded to Professor Danya C. Wright of the University of Florida, Levin College of Law for her article "'Well-Behaved Women Don't Make History': Rethinking English Family Law," which appeared in volume 19 of the Wisconsin Women's Law Journal (2004). The Committee's citation read: "Professor Wright's offers not only a compelling analysis of the historical experience of law by women in nineteenth-century England , but an ambitious, philosophically complex assessment of the limits of family law as a guarantor of women's rights. The article's arguments rest upon an impressive base of primary research in The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office): Wright has used quantitative data on the operation of the Divorce Court in the 1850s and 1860s to examine legal outcomes with regard to issues such as separation and divorce, child custody and alimony. Her findings highlight the significance to legal outcomes of factors such as stage of marriage-which exerted a crucial impact upon rates of judicial separation relative to divorce and the success of custody orders. In themselves, these data add significant new dimensions to our understanding of the operation of the reformed court systems of the Victorian era. But the importance of Wright's article is far more broad than this, for her article provides a sustained and trenchant critique of the "liberalization narrative" of family law, the dominant tradition of interpretation that celebrates the nineteenth-century evolution of legal practices that recognize and protect women's special interests in the family, as opposed to the public sphere. By scrutinizing data from the first decade of the Divorce Court 's operation, Wright is able to mount a convincing attack on the liberalization narrative. Her data and analysis suggest that the legal reforms that gave rise to family law were ultimately destructive of women's legal and economic interests: by protecting women's special interests, the new family law tradition perpetuated their relegation to an inferior domestic sphere. This is a thought-provoking article that will doubtless provoke continued debate within legal history for years to come. It deserves a wide readership and amply merits the award."

In 2005 the Murphy Award was given to Jill Silos for her book-length project "Everybody Get Together: The Politics of the Counterculture" (an historical and legal analysis of the public events involving the1960s counterculture focusing on the political activities of selected groups and movements to exercise First Amendment liberties).

In 2005, Cromwell Fellowships were awarded to:

Ajay K. Mehrotra for his project "Sharing the Burden: Law, Politics and the Making of the Modern American Fiscal State" (a study of the political forces that led to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment).

Bernie D. Jones for her empirical study exploring "the language of law and the perceptions developed by those contesting the wills of elite white men of the antebellum South who had had natural children by slave women and free women of color."

Robert F. Castro for his study analyzing federal efforts to free Indian-Mestizo captive servants in New Mexico during the Reconstruction Era, comparing the liberation of these captives with the liberation of slaves in the South.

The Cromwell Prize for 2005 was awarded to Professor John Fabian Witt of the Columbia University Law School for his book, The Accidental Republic. Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004). The Committee's citation read: "Witt's study of the origins of the twentieth century's workmen's compensation regime for workplace accidents is superb history by any standard. Its title deftly integrates the notion of industrial accidents with the contingent nature of historical change to give dual meaning to the word "accidental." As Witt demonstrates in an elegantly written and exhaustively research empirical study, the shape of such a regime was not a foregone outcome of telic inevitability. Rather, it developed along one of many possible paths. As it did, a new regime of risk and insurance supplanted nineteenth-century free-labor ideology. Witt's book gains force - and what ultimately will be a wide and enthusiastic readership - by its ability to integrate his narrative and analysis within the broader trends in American legal and political history. Not only does it powerfully enhance our understanding of the common law tort regime, but it presents such figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Frederick Winslow Taylor in a context hitherto unappreciated by historians."

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URL: http://www.h-net.org/~law/ASLH/~law/ASLH/conferences/2005conference/aslh_2005_conference_report.htm
last modified:  11/25/06