Axtell on Riverine Governance in Antebellum America

Moonrise on the Ohio (LC)

Matthew Axtell, a doctoral candidate at Princeton and, in the year ahead, a Golieb Fellow at NYU Law, has posted Customs of the River: Governing the Commons within a Nineteenth-Century Steamboat Economy.  Here is the abstract:

This paper uncovers a lost world indigenous to the legal history of the United States, a place where law was "used" as an instrument not in a way familiar to readers of Willard Hurst, as a means to identify natural resources as private property to be allocated for exploitation by the highest bidder, but instead as a means to preserve landscapes as common property sustainably enjoyed by a multiplicity of actors for commercial ends. Focusing upon a single suit brought in 1854 to assign liability for a steamboat collision, where the issue became whether pilots followed the "customs of the river" at a particular bend in the Ohio River, the paper relates how through the "customs of the river" inquiry, Jacksonian judges in the 1830s and 1840s permitted a wild, unimproved river to speak at trial in order to keep American environments open to the "disorganized public" as a whole. By the 1850s, pressed by insurers seeking standardized commercial rules of the road, federal administrators promoted a more uniform, state-managed vision. To maintain the river’s status as a "common highway" with the "customs" inquiry now out of fashion, Humphrey Leavitt, the Jacksonian judge in this case, eventually developed new rules that shared the costs of navigation between private actors in a way that maintained the Ohio River as a privately-ordered common space.

Blumm and Wigington on the Oregon and California Forest Lands

Michael C. Blumm and Tim Wigington, Lewis & Clark Law School, have posted The Past as Prologue to the Present: Managing the Oregon and California Forest Lands, which is to appear in the Oregon State Bar Bulletin (July 2013).  Here is the abstract:

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This article is a brief review of the convoluted history of what are known as the Oregon and California forest lands, federal lands that were once the subject of a 19th century federal railroad grant, then became the focus of widespread land fraud and official corruption, which led to the Supreme Court halting land sales and Congress taking back the lands, situated in eighteen Oregon counties. Federal management of the lands in the 20th century emphasized timber harvesting, and this dominant use of the lands led to environmental lawsuits and the Endangered Species Act listing of the northern spotted owl in the early 1990s. Since 1994, the lands have been governed by the Northwest Forest Plan, which drastically limited federal timber harvests and associated local county revenues, which were based on those harvests. Several counties in southern Oregon now face public service crises, as their local tax base is insufficient to provide emergency services like fire and police.

In this short version of a larger study -- written for the local bar -- we propose a solution to the funding crisis in southern Oregon that does not involve scuttling the Northwest Forest Plan and returning the lands to dominant timber use. Increasing timber harvests to fund county governments is the subject of a bill co-sponsoring by several Oregon Congressmen, and we explain why this approach would be short-sighted and environmentally unsatisfactory.

Brinkley on FDR at the Roosevelt Library

[We have the following announcement.]

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is pleased to present "Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Renewal of America," a lecture and book signing with Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University, Historian for CBS News, and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.  The program will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 9, 2013 in the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home. Following the presentation, Dr. Brinkley will be available for a book signing and several of his books will be available for sale in the New Deal Store. Attendees can visit the Library's new permanent exhibition until 10:00 p.m. -- free of charge -- after the program. This event is free and open to the public.

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During the presentation, Dr. Brinkley will discuss Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal conservation, with an emphasis on FDR's creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). President Roosevelt personally devised the idea for the CCC, a program to put young men aged 17-24 -- many from urban areas -- to work on conservation projects in healthy rural environments. Within three months the Corps enlisted nearly 250,000 young men. They were assigned to CCC camps around the nation.

During its 9-year existence, the CCC employed nearly 3 million men. Eleanor Roosevelt championed the CCC and, with her strong backing, a much smaller program was also created for unemployed young women. The CCC planted more than two billion trees, fought forest fires, built trails, campgrounds, and reservoirs, and aided soil conservation programs. It became one of the New Deal's most popular and successful programs. Its legacy remains today in the facilities it constructed throughout America's national forests, parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges.

Freyfogle on Aldo Leopold's Last Talk

A Sand County Almanac was a big book for me as an adolescent, so I’m especially happy to note that Eric T. Freyfogle, University of Illinois College of Law, has posted Leopold's Last Talk, which appears in the Washington Journal of Environmental law and Politics 2 (2012); 236.  Here is the abstract:    

Aldo Leopold (credit)

During the last decade of his life, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) delivered more than 100 conservation talks to various popular, professional, and student audiences. In them, he set forth plainly the central elements of his conservation thought. By studying the extensive archival records of these talks one sees clearly the core elements of Leopold’s mature thinking, which centered not on specific land-use practices (good or bad), but instead on what he saw as deep flaws in American culture. Leopold’s sharp cultural criticism — more clear in these talks than in his lyrical, muted classic, A Sand County Almanac — called into question not just liberal individualism but central elements of Enlightenment-era thought. This essay distills the messages that Leopold repeatedly presented during his final years. It clarifies the messages by situating Leopold’s thought within long-running philosophic discussions on the nature of life, the limits on human knowledge, standards of truth, and the origins of value. For Leopold, conservation could succeed only if it challenged prevailing cultural understandings and pressed for specific, radical change. The now-stymied environmental movement has never taken that advice to heart.

June 2013 Journal of American History

The June 2013 issue of the Journal of American History is out. Here's a preview of the content (full text is limited to subscribers):

The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Faubourg Tremé in New Orleans has been described as the oldest black neighborhood in America. In his article, Pierre Force uses as his starting point a dispute in 1813 over the payments for a house between a white man and a free man of color that took place in Tremé. Attempting to find out more about both parties to the case (won by the free man of color), Force reconstructs each man's family history and follows the archival track on a journey to Cuba, Haiti, France, Spain, and Senegal. What might have seemed at first sight like a random encounter between representatives of two different racial groups emerges as a story of shared ancestries and cultural references, as well as shifting allegiances and identities.

Status across Borders: Roger Taney, Black British Subjects, and a Diplomatic Antecedent to the Dred Scott Decision

Michael A. Schoeppner offers a fresh interpretation of the origins of then–attorney general Roger B. Taney’s 1832 opinion on the Negro Seamen Acts. Historians and legal scholars, many of them looking backward from the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, have cited that opinion as Taney's first official examination of the racial limits of American citizenship. As a rule, however, they have not examined the history of the opinion itself. Inspired by recent work in transnational history, Schoeppner lays out that history and suggests that Taney’s primary purpose in writing the opinion had very little to do with African Americans. Rather, he argues, Taney was more concerned with limiting the international legal force of British imperial racial policies, and his use of history as a way of limiting the meaning of citizenship and subjecthood was a tactical response to British racial progressivism.

“Punishment of Mere Political Advocacy”: The FBI, Teamsters Local 544, and the Origins of the 1941 Smith Act Case

Donna T. Haverty-Stacke explores how the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s fear of fifth column infiltration and sabotage of the nation’s wartime preparedness program, along with the efforts of a grassroots working-class anticommunist movement in Minneapolis, led to the 1941 prosecution of twenty-nine Trotskyist antiwar activists and union leaders for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. Her article probes the World War II–era compromise certain Americans were willing to make between First Amendment rights and national security, and considers the consequences for organized labor, political dissent, and free speech. In so doing, this study provides a historical perspective on similar bargains struck today as America finds itself in a state of perpetual war on terror.

This issue also includes a "State of the Field" forum on American Environmental History:

Since the Journal of American History last published a round table on the subject in 1990, American environmental history has seen explosive growth. Paul S. Sutter takes us on a selective tour of this expansive field, paying particular attention to questions of environmental causation and the ways environmental historians have replaced the once-firm categories of nature and culture with various approaches to environmental hybridity. That hybrid turn, Sutter suggests, has been analytically essential, yet it has also left the field at a moral crossroads. Following Sutter’s essay David Igler, Christof Mauch, Gregg Mitman, Linda Nash, Helen M. Rozwadowski, and Bron Taylor offer critical responses.

For more of the TOC, including exhibition and book reviews, follow the link.

Weekend Roundup

• On June 27, 2013, Morehead State University will host a Federalism Symposium featuring "academic presentations of research from scholars across the nation with expertise on federalism and intergovernmental relations." For information on how to submit a proposal, follow the link. (Hat tip: H-Law)

• The latest issue of the Journal of Legal Education contains several reviews of interest: Laurie L. Levenson (Loyola Law School, Los Angeles) reviews The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America, by Jed Handelsman Shugerman; Mónica Pinto (University of Buenos Aires Law School) reviews The Human Rights Culture: A Study in History and Context, by Lawrence M. Friedman; and Thomas E. Baker (Florida International University College of Law) reviews Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, by John Paul Stevens.

• Via the Historical Society: "The New York City Municipal Archives has put on-line more than 800,000 images." Check them out here.

• All you doctoral students working on immigration law and related topics: "The Immigration and Ethnic History Society announces its first annual award for an outstanding dissertation in the field of immigration and ethnic history." Follow the link for more. (Hat tip: H-Law)

• Marc Lender discusses his book on Gitlow v. New York in Kansas's Landmark Law and American Society series here.

•  From the new Environment, Law and History blog: a post on environmental history and capitalism in the Supreme Court's recent patent decision (Monsanto v. Bowman).

• "In a meadow on the banks of the Thames a King and his barons made peace on June 15th, 1215 through a great charter or "Magna Carta."  Little did they know that they were laying the foundation for future democracies through a simple but unbreakable idea that would endure for centuries: that no one, not even a King, is above the law of the land." Want more of the same?  Go to London this summer on Pepperdine Law's week-long study abroad program, English Legal History in the 800th Anniversary of the Magna Carta"

The Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Environment, Law and History

A hearty welcome to the blogosphere to Environment, Law, and History, run by Sarah Milov and David Schorr.  They explain:

The connections between the environment, law, and history are deep and pervasive. Many of us, from many disciplines – law, history, geography, and environmental studies to name a few – have been working at the intersections of these fields for some time, but have had no common forum for exchanging views and information. This blog aims to enable such exchanges, allowing us to share ideas and learn about scholarship, conferences, and opportunities for collaboration with colleagues around the world.

Just up is a post on law-related papers at the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History.