Talking Legal History

Talking Legal History is a podcast hosted by Siobhan M. M. Barco, a former litigator and current doctoral student in history at Princeton University, whose work focuses on the space where law, gender, and print culture intersect.

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    Episode 32

    Kate Masur

    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.

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    Episode 31

    Felicity Turner

    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.

     

  • Grajzl and Murrell
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    Episode 30

    Peter Grajzl and Peter Murrell

    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.

    Peter Murrell is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, where he teaches courses in comparative economic institutions and thinking like an economist.

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    Episode 29

    Jonathan Gienapp

    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.” 

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    Episode 28

    Warren Milteer Jr.

    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.

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    Episode 27

    Samatha Barbas

    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. 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. 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.

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    Episode 26

    Samuel Fury Childs Daly

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Samuel Fury Childs Daly about his J. Willard Hurst Prize winning book A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Daly is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at Duke University. He is a historian of twentieth century Africa whose research combines legal, military, and social history to describe Africa’s history since independence.

    The Republic of Biafra lasted for less than three years, but the war over its secession would contort Nigeria for decades to come. Samuel Fury Childs Daly examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point – the courtroom. Wartime Biafra was glutted with firearms, wracked by famine, and administered by a government that buckled under the weight of the conflict. In these dangerous conditions, many people survived by engaging in fraud, extortion, and armed violence. When the fighting ended in 1970, these survival tactics endured, even though Biafra itself disappeared from the map. Based on research using an original archive of legal records and oral histories, Daly catalogues how people navigated conditions of extreme hardship on the war front, and shows how the conditions of the Nigerian Civil War paved the way for the country’s long experience of crime that was to follow.

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    Episode 25

    Nurfadzilah Yahaya

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Nurfadzilah Yahaya about her book Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020). She is Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore where she specializes in the history of the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, Islamic law, and mobilities. Her second book project will be on the history of land reclamation in the British Empire.

    This wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community’s ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. In Fluid Jurisdictions, Nurfadzilah Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests.

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    Episode 24

    Joseph David

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Joseph E. David about his book Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging (CUP, 2020). David is a Visiting Professor (Adjunct) of Law at Yale Law School and a Visiting Professor at the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University. He is an Associate Professor of Law at Sapir Academic College in Israel. His research focuses on Law and Religion, Legal History, Comparative Law, and Jurisprudence.

    Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. His book transports readers to crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging have been formed, transformed, or dismantled. The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies. With his thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging and forces us to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be.

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    Episode 23

    Charles Zelden

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Charles L. Zelden about the new expanded edition of his book, “Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Growing Crisis in American Democracy” (University Press of Kansas, 2020). Zelden is a professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Nova Southeastern University’s Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches courses in history, government and legal studies.

    In this third expanded edition Zelden offers a powerful history of voting rights and elections in America since 2000. Bush v. Gore exposes the growing crisis by detailing the numerous ways in which the unlearned and wrongly learned “lessons of 2000” have impacted American election law through the growth of voter suppression via legislation and administrative rulings, and, provides a clear warning of how unchecked partisanship arising out of Bush v. Gore threatens to undermine American democracy in general and the 2020 election in particular.

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    Episode 22

    Philip Thai

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, “The War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast” (Columbia University Press, 2018). Thai is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history.

    Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority.

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    Episode 21

    Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross about their book, “Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana” (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

    How did Africans become ‘blacks’ in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders’ efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies – Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana – Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom – not slavery – established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

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    Episode 20

    Paul Finkelman

    In this episode, Lesa Redmond talks with Paul Finkelman about his book “Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (Second Edition)” (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020). Finkelman is an American Legal Historian and President of Gratz College.

    Guest Host Lesa Redmond is a first year student in the Department of History at Duke University. Her research focuses on colleges and universities and their connections to slavery.

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    Episode 19

    Robert Chase

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University.

    In We Are Not Slaves Chase draws from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners to narrate the struggle to change prison from within. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.

    This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 18

    Maddalena Marinari

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Maddalena Marinari about her book, Unwanted Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Marinari is Assistant Professor in History; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; and Peace Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College.

    In Unwanted, Marinari examines how, from 1882 to 1965, Italian and Jewish reformers profoundly influenced the country’s immigration policy as they mobilized against the immigration laws that marked them as undesirable.

    This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 17

    Sophie White

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Sophie White about her book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). White is Associate Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Associate Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

    In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men–like the testimony of free colonists–was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.

    This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 16

    Greg Downs

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Gregory P. Downs about his book The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Downs is professor of history at the University of California, Davis where he studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

    This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 15

    Jane Hong

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Jane Hong about her book Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Hong is an assistant professor of history at Occidental College where she specializes in 20th-century U.S. immigration and engagement with the world, with a focus on Asia.

    This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 14

    Kimberly M. Welch

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Kimberly M. Welch about her book Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Kimberly Welch is Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. She is a scholar of race, slavery, and law in the early American South.

    Black Litigants has won numerous awards, including the 2018 James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, the 2019 J. Willard Hurst Prize, the 2018 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, and the 2019 Vanderbilt University Chancellor’s Award for Research.

    This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 13

    Will Hustwit

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College.

    Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision in Alexander v. Holmes (1969), Integration Now explores how studying Alexander enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation.

    This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 12

    Hendrik Hartog

    In this podcast, Siobhan talks with Hendrik Hartog about his book The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2018). Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus at Princeton University.

    This episode is the first in a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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    Episode 11

    Paul Finkelman

    In this podcast, Siobhan talks with Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz College, about his book Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. Finkelman is a specialist on the history of slavery and the law. He is also the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books on a broad range of topics including American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and legal issues surrounding baseball.

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    Episode 10

    Martha Jones

    In this podcast, Siobhan talks with Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, about her book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (CUP, 2018). Professor Jones is a legal and cultural historian whose interests include the study of race, law, citizenship, slavery, and the rights of women. Birthright Citizens explores how African Americans in antebellum Baltimore constituted their right to citizenship in legal venues.

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    Episode 9

    Holly Brewer

    In this podcast, Siobhan talks with Holly Brewer, Burke Chair of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, about her October 2017 article in the American Historical Review“Slavery, Sovereignty and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery.” She is a specialist in early American history and the early British Empire. The article is part of a larger book project that will situate the origins of American slavery in the ideas and legal practices associated with the divine rights of kings, tentatively entitled “Inheritable Blood: Slavery & Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire.”

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    Episode 8

    Fahad Ahmad Bishara

    In this episode, Siobhan meets with Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, about his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. Bishara discusses his sophisticated work that explores the intricate legal and economic regimes that traversed the Western Indian Ocean for generations. He also talks about how he effectively mined legal documents to craft this narrative.

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    Episode 7

    Daniel Sharfstein

    In this episode, Siobhan interviews Daniel J. Sharfstein, professor of law and history and co-directs the George Barrett Social Justice Program at Vanderbilt University, about his book Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce WarSharfstein’s scholarship focuses on the legal history of race in the United States. In this discussion, he explores ideas of law, society, and politics through his compelling narrative about the Nez Perce War.

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    Episode 6

    Eric Foner

    In this episode, Siobhan discusses law in the Reconstruction era with Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. Foner, the author of seminal work Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, has dedicated much of the last year to public outreach about Reconstruction to mark its 150th anniversary.

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    Episode 5

    William Domnarski

    In this episode, Siobhan interviews attorney and author William Domnarski about his new biography of Richard Posner, an influential judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and great force behind the law and economics movement. Domnarski candidly sets forth the factors which underlie an individual who is arguably the most influential legal mind of the past half-century. With the full cooperation of his subject, Domnarski had access to Posner’s letters and to many individuals who may have been unwilling to speak without the approval of Posner himself.  Domnarski explores important themes within law and the judiciary while also keeping the reader invested in a very human story.

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    Episode 4

    Al Brophy

    In this episode, Siobhan meets with University, Court and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War author Alfred L. Brophy, the Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. In his new book, Brophy brings to life the dynamic interplay between law and culture by mapping out the crisscrossing intellectual paths between southern courts and universities in the mid-nineteenth century. Brophy discusses the pro-slavery polemics that were delivered by southern lawyers, judges, and politicians to university students. At the same time, he shows  how pro-slavery ideas fomented in the academy heavily influenced judicial reasoning in southern courtrooms and exposes some of the horrors endured by enslaved people living on university campuses.

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    Episode 3

    Sara L. Crosby

    In this episode, Siobhan talks with Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University at Marion, Sara L. Crosby, about her new book, Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America. Crosby discusses how the trope of the female poisoner permeated popular literature in the mid-nineteenth century. In her analysis of the 1840 murder trial of Hannah Kinney, we see how the partisan press used the accused as a vessel through which to fight-out central political battles of the day. We then see how jury decisions may serve as a metric for determining which metaphors and cultural frames are prevailing at a point in time. Following a popular metaphor enables Crosby to track the cultural tides influencing law and politics in Jacksonian America.

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    Episode 2

    Samantha Barbas

    In this podcast, Siobhan interviews Samantha Barbas, Professor of Law at University of Buffalo School of Law, about her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America, which provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. Barbas approaches this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultural historian, tracking the correlation between a growing American image consciousness and the rise of laws, such as the tort of invasion of privacy and damages for emotional distress, which enabled individuals to control and defend their public persona.

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    Episode 1

    Mary Ziegler

    In this podcast, Siobhan talks with Mary Ziegler, Stearns Weaver Miller Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law, about her book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Ziegler’s work uses the landmark American abortion rights case, Roe vs. Wade to explore litigation as a vessel for social change and the role the court plays in democracy. In addition to traditional archival research, Ziegler recorded over one hundred oral histories of people in the pro-life and pro-choice camps, allowing her to move beyond caricatures and delve more precisely into the  catalysts for these individual’s points of view.

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