Clark Legal History Series
2024 (Fall)
All talks are on Mondays, 10:40-12:40 am, in room 203, unless otherwise indicated.
September 19, 4:20-6:20 pm
Jill Lepore, Harvard History/Law
We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (excerpts) (forthcoming 2025)
September 23
Rory Van Loo, BU Law
The New Consumer Law (or: Digitally Intermediated Consumer Law)
September 30
Richard Re, University of Virginia Law
Legal Realignment (forthcoming U. Chicago L. Rev)
October 7
Martha Minow, Harvard Law
The Unraveling: What Dobbs May Mean for Contraception, Liberty, and Constitutionalism
October 15
Critical Legal Studies
(Just for students)
Either October 21 or 28
Jack Balkin, Yale Law
History and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation
November 4
Stephen Sachs, Harvard Law
The Twelfth Amendment and the ERA
November 11
Emmanuel Arnaud, Cardozo Law School
On the development of the local criminal legal systems in Puerto Rico & American Samoa
November 18
Shaun Ossei-Owusu, U. Penn. Law
The People’s Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press).
Or Renegade at Law: How Our Legal Industry Creates, Justifies, and Compounds Inequality
2024 (Spring)
Thursday, January 18
Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law, “The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789-1825”
Thursday, February 1
Ashraf Ahmed, Columbia Law, & Noah Rosenblum, NYU Law, “Building Presidential Administration”
Thursday, February 8
Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard Law, & Peter Onuf, UVA History
Thursday, February 15
Aziz Rana, BC Law, “The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them”
Thursday, February 29
Jilene Chua, BU History, “Birthright Citizenship in the Empire: Chinese-Filipino Intimacies and Race-making in US Colonial Philippines, 1912-1947.”
Thursday, March 7
Anna Lvovsky, Harvard Law, “Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle Over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall”
Thursday, March 21
Malick Ghachem, MIT History
Thursday, March 28, 4:20–5:20pm
Robert Tsai, BU Law, with guest and biography subject Steve Bright, Southern Center for Human Rights, “Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All”
Thursday, April 4
Ryan Williams, BC Law, “Historical Fact”
Thursday, April 11
Matthew Boutros, BU Law 3L, & Jed Shugerman, BU Law, on Federal War-Time Prosecutions Based on “Implied” presidential powers and “the law of nations” – without any federal statutes, 1790s
Tuesday, April 16, 5:00pm (special Tuesday history department lecture in the History Department, not the law school)
Reva Siegel, Yale Law School, on Rahimi, the Second Amendment, Domestic Violence, and “Originalism” After Bruen
Past Speakers
2018
- Ron Harris, Tel-Aviv University
- Rabia Belt, Stanford University School of Law
- Cynthia Nicoletti, University of Virginia School of Law
- Michael Klarman, Harvard University School of Law
- Cornelia Dayton, University of Connecticut
- Andrew Kahrl, University of Virginia
2017
- Clifford Ando, University of Chicago
- Samuel Moyn Harvard University
- Jo Guldi, Dedham College of Humanities and Sciences
- Amalia Kessler, Stanford University
- Nara Milanich, Barnard College
- Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford University Law School
2016
- Emma Teng, MIT School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences
- David Armitage, Harvard University
- Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago
- Gregory S. Alexander, Cornell University School of Law
- Saul Cornell, Fordham University
- Karen Tani, University of California-Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law
- Oren Bracha, University of Texas School of Law
2014
- William E. Forbath, University of Texas, Austin School of Law
- Josh Chafetz, Cornell University School of Law
- Chris L. Tomlins, University of California, Boalt Hall School of Law
- Tamar Herzog, Harvard University
- Lauren A. Benton, New York University
- James Q. Whitman, Yale Law School
2012
- Ariela Gross, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
- Jedediah Purdy, Duke Law School
- Jed Shugerman, Harvard Law School
- “Jews, Law, and Identity Politics,” William Forbath, The University of Texas at Austin School of Law
- Sara McDougall, John Jay College, CUNY, History Department
- Logan E. Sawyer, University of Georgia School of Law
2011
- “Exits: Forming International Rules on Expatriation,” Lucy Salyer, University of New Hampshire History Department
- “The Last Days of the Warren Court,” Laura Kalman, University of California Santa Barbara History Department
- “The Baseball Trust: Baseball’s First Antitrust Crisis, 1912-1916,” Stuart Banner, UCLA School of Law
- “Birth, Belief, and Blood: Allegiance during the American Civil War,” Michael Vorenberg, Brown University History Department
- “Reproductive Medicine in the Legal Shadows: Artificial Insemination, 1890-1945,” Kara Swanson, Northeastern University Law School
2010
- “The Enclosure of Justice: Courtroom Architecture, Due Process, and the Dead Metaphor of Trial,” Norman Spaulding, Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
- Selections from The People’s Courts: The Rise of Judicial elections and judicial Power in America, Jed Shugerman, Harvard Law School
- “Recasting the Canon of Family Law,” Jill Hasday, Univ. Minnesota Law School
- “The Bomb-Proof Power,” Michele Landis Dauber, Stanford Law School
- “Can ‘Necessitous Men’ Ever be Free? Exigency, Security, and the American Political Constitution,” Tommy Crocker, Univ. of South Carolina School of Law
More Information
For more information, please contact any of the following faculty members:
