Cover Image: Brinsmead Piano Advertisement, Daily Graphic, Sept. 2, 1893, 11.
The Docket has returned from summer holidays with a double issue. The Docket 2.2-3 accompanies the Law and History Review’s recently-published symposium “Originalism and Legal History: Rethinking the Special Relationship.” As LHR Editor in Chief Gautham Rao writes, the relationship between historical scholarship and originalism as a theory and practice of law has been uneven, producing both insight and acrimony.
The authors featured in the LHR symposium seek to examine the history of the public meaning of constitutional law, but also to map the shifting points of connection among schools of historiography and legal theory, construct intellectual and institutional histories of originalism and its critics, and consider the prospects of more fruitful engagement. The Docket features articles by Lindsay Chervinsky, Aaron Hall, Michael Douma, Bernadette Meyler, Paul Baumgardner, and Logan Sawyer.
We are also happy to present interviews with LHR contributors Kaius Tuori (whose article “Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition After World War II” appeared in Law and History Review 37.2) and Anat Rosenberg (who evaluates the historically slippery distinction between “news” and “advertising” in her current LHR article “‘Amongst the Most Desirable Reading’: Advertising and the Fetters of the Newspaper Press in Britain, c. 1848-1914”). This issue also features an essay by LHR contributor David Kearns on the notorious English dissenter John Taylor, and an examination by Stephen Campbell of the role of credit instruments created and circulated by the Second Bank of the United States in the expansion of the slave trade.
Finally, The Docket is pleased to present a partnership with the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Coincident with Penn Law Review’s publication of papers presented at the October 2018 symposium on administrative constitutionalism, we are publishing a commentary on three of the papers by Reuel Schiller.