Making Connections: New Works in Legal History
Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series
Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History
The ASLH Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series aims to foster conversations and connections beyond the Annual Meeting about exciting new work in the field of legal history or publications likely to be of interest to legal historians. The series is hosted by the ASLH Committee on Digital Initiatives.
Schedule: Most of the series events will be held on Zoom at 6-7 pm Central on Wednesdays. In addition, the committee plans to hold events outside of the regular schedule to accommodate for presentors and interlocutors living in different time zones.
Event Structure: Each event opens with a brief introduction of the work by the author, followed by conversation between the author and an interlocutor of their choice, and closing with conversation with the audience. In panels featuring more than 1 book or article, we expect the authors to serve as interlocutors for each other. There is no expectation that audience members have read the work.
(The most recent Call for Proposals can be found here.)
Making Connections 2026-2027 Line Up TBA
Each event is recorded and available to members here.
Past Making Connections Events
2025-26
September 17, 2025 – Esther Liberman Cuenca, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Sara M. Butler
October 22, 2025 – Sonia Gomez, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (NYU Press, 2024) & Kathryn Schumaker, Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South (Basic Books, 2025)
December 10, 2025 – Marla A. Ramírez, Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Kevin R. Johnson
January 21, 2026 – Omar Youssef Cheta, How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Nurfadzilah Yahaya
February 25, 2026 – Tadashi Ishikawa, Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Jisoo M. Kim
March 25, 2026 – Serena Mayeri, Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Yale University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Margot Canaday
April 15, 2026 – Kevin Arlyck, The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789–1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) with interlocutor Alison LaCroix
2024-2025
September 18th
Hendrik Hartog, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2024) with interlocutor Susanna Blumenthal
November 20th
Giuliana Perrone, Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023)(Studies in Legal History) with interlocutor Cynthia Nicoletti
December 11th
Chloë Kennedy, Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2024) with interlocutor Catherine Evans
January 22nd
Gender & History, Special Issue, Engendering Carcerality (July 2024)
Authors in Conversation:
- Rachel Klein, “Surviving Domestic and State Violence: Women’s Prison Organizing and the Gendered Politics of Solidarity”
- Anne Gray Fischer, “Bad, Mad or Both: A Legal History of Battered Woman Syndrome”
- April Haynes, “The Other Women’s Rights Movement: ‘Streetwalkers’, Habeas Corpus and Anti-Carceral Activism in New York City, 1830-1860”
February 26th
Allison Powers, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford University Press 2024) with interlocutor Sam Erman
March 26th
Joint event with the Immigration & Ethnic History Society
Brianna Nofil, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Migrant Incarceration (Princeton University Press, 2024) with interlocutor Lucy Salyer
April 16th
Joint event with the Business History Conference
Xaq Frohlich, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (University of California Press, 2023) &
Sean Vanatta, Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale University Press, 2024)
2023-24
Sept. 20 Rowan Dorin, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton Univ. Press 2023) with Karl Shoemaker
October No Book Club. Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Oct. 26-28
Nov. 15 Margot Canaday, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America (Princeton Univ. Press 2023) with Karen Tani
Dec. 13 Christian R. Burset, An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale Univ. Press 2023) and Lisa Ford, The King’s Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard Univ. Press 2021)
Jan. 17 Lyndsay Campbell, Truth and Privilege: Libel Law in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1820-1840(Cambridge Univ. Press 2022) and Kristin A. Olbertson, The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690-1776 (Cambridge Univ. Press 2022)
Feb. 21 Saumya Saxena, Divorce and Democracy: A History of Personal Law in Post-Independence India(Cambridge Univ. Press 2022) with Alastair McClure
Mar. 13 John Wertheimer, Race and Law in South Carolina: From Slavery to Jim Crow (Amherst College Press 2023) with Myisha Eatmon
April 10 Ada Kuskowski, Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), with Adam Kosto
May 8: Kevin Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2023), with Karla McKanders