This issue of The Docket offers original research articles, interviews and commentaries. We want to thank Jack Del Nunzio, a remarkable MA student in Public History at American University, for his help in commissioning and editing the great majority of this issue. Thanks also goes to Professor Eric Lohr and Dean Max Paul Friedman of American University for making it possible for Jack to work with us.
We begin with interviews with the two winners of the American Society for Legal History’s annual Kathryn T. Preyer Prize for outstanding essays by junior scholars. This year’s two winners, Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez and Smita Ghosh, walk us through their research and preview their larger projects. Professor Laura Kalman of the University of California-Santa Barbara, who chaired the Preyer Prize Committee this year, lavished praise on both. According to Kalman, “Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez fascinating sociolegal history of twentieth-century child migrants at the borders within and outside of the United States shines a spotlight on the many forms of rights violations migrant Latinx children and their parents have endured.” Likewise, Kalman explained that Ghosh’s essay turns the spellbinding story of the fight against the detention, deportation and supervisory parole of “red aliens” into a prism on the expansion of state power over immigrants during the Cold War era.” Professor Kalman and the Preyer Prize panelists look forward to this year’s online Preyer Prize panel on Friday, November 13, 2020, featuring presentations by Padilla-Rodríguez and Ghosh, as well as comments by Professor Barbara Welke of the University of Minnesota, and Professor Lucy Salyer of the University of New Hampshire.
Next, Gustavo Silveira Siqueira takes a deep dive into the unlikely friendship of Roscoe Pound and Hans Kelsen in a time of global crisis. Pound, who was the Dean of Harvard Law School would befriend Kelsen, who fled Nazi Germany. Siqueira demonstrates how the friendship between these two leading legal minds of the twentieth-century influenced their legal thought.
In this centennial anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment of the United States Constitution, we are pleased to bring you Cathleen Cahill’s review of the collection of essays edited by Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow, Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics Since 1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). Cahill finds much to praise in this volume and believes it “points the way forward to the next century of women’s activism.”
Next, Jonathan White discusses his rich experience as an intern and employee at the Federal Judicial Center, in Washington, D.C. White was able to spend extended periods of time studying the papers of United States Supreme Court justices. White details some of his favorite finds and discusses a recent publication, “The Politics of Judging: The Civil War Letters of William D. Shipman,” which appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of the Connecticut History Review.
Susan Bartie’s review essay, “William Twining, Harry Arthurs, and Histories of Academic Lawyers,” explores the autobiographies of William Twining and Harry Arthurs, two immensely important jurists of the past several decades. Bartie uses the opportunity to reflect more broadly on writing the history of lawyers and the legal profession. An extended version of Bartie’s essay will appear in Law and History Review in 2021.
Finally, we feature an interview with Julia Rose Kraut about her new book, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2020). Kraut discusses how she came to this project while exploring the main lines of the book’s argument.