Hendrik Hartog recently published “Four Fragments,” an attempt to address an old question—“What does it mean to know law as . . . existing in historical time?”[1] Surely, any answer given to this question is also given in an historical context, in a present of which there are many possible, only possibly linear, pasts. Which…
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Karen M. Tani–The Modern American State as a Democratic State: Questions Inspired by Novak’s New Democracy
Five years ago, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of William Novak’s first book, The People’s Welfare (1996), I remarked on the thousands of dissertations the book undoubtedly launched—my own included.[1] I found particularly generative the book’s conclusion, in which Novak moved beyond the older paradigm of governance that was the focus of The People’s…
Sophia Z. Lee: Evolution or Revolution in Novak’s “New Democracy”
[Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from remarks presented at the 2022 American Political History Conference; a version also appears in the Yale Journal on Regulation’s online companion, Notice & Comment.] Bill Novak’s New Democracy is a feast of a book and is a must read for anyone interested in administration and its history. The…
Joanna Grisinger–Novak’s A New Democracy: By and For Whom?
In Fall 1998, I enrolled in Bill Novak’s graduate seminar, and thus from the first moment of my graduate training in history I was encouraged to start thinking about the ideas about state capacity and state power so elegantly developed in New Democracy.[1] Bill encouraged us to flip through the pages of the Encyclopedia of…
Ajay K. Mehrotra: Continuity and Change from Novak’s People’s Welfare to New Democracy
In 1994, William J. Novak published, The People’s Welfare: Law & Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. The book was quickly hailed as a brilliant account of the many ways that American lawmakers—from common law judges to local legislators—regulated antebellum American economy and society. With his panoramic view of the myriad types of nineteenth-century government activity, Novak…
Editor’s Note: The Dobbs Special Issue
On May 2, 2022, the Washington, D.C.-based political news site Politico dropped a bombshell: a leaked draft of an opinion in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, purportedly written by United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, that overturned Roe v. Wade and would consequently end a woman’s right to choose to…
Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson: Roe v Wade and Feminism: The Limits of Public Memory
For those of us who study the history of reproduction, the leak in early May of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was disturbing but not necessarily surprising.[1] Written by Justice Alito, the language referring to the “domestic supply of babies” and his use of 13th century English case law looked eerily like some of…
“Abortion Was a Crime”? Three Medievalists respond to “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.”
Appealing to an ancient legal tradition to bolster one’s argument is a very medieval way of thinking about the law. Medieval jurists likewise scoured ancient legal texts seeking authority and insight. And like Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs, they sometimes read their ancient sources selectively and shorn of context.[1] Unlike Alito’s draft opinion, though, they…
Felicity Turner: A View of Dobbs from the 19th Century
In November 1818, Sarah Jeffreys of Caswell County, North Carolina, expelled something from her uterus. In a confession wrung from her after repeated denials, she testified that she “had lost something but she did not know what it was.”[1] She claimed she was alone when it happened, but that her mother, Fanny, and her friend, Betsy,…
Alison Lefkovitz: The Population Politics of Dobbs
Americans often think of Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the ability to use birth control via a right to privacy in 1965, as a gender equality case. But the Supreme Court granted the right to birth control before it established equal protection for gender and before Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, Title VII, the…