Jeffery A. Jenkins & Justin Peck, Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918

Jeffery Jenkins and Justin Peck kindly agreed to discuss their new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), with The Docket. They had previously published a major article in Law & History Review entitled, “Building Toward Major Policy Change: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1941-1950” (vol. 31,…

Linda Przybyszewski: Rethinking the “Secularization” of Law

What do we mean when we say the secularization of law? What exactly becomes secular?  I puzzled over this question while researching the Bible War which began in Ohio in 1869 when Cincinnati’s public school board voted to end opening the school day with Bible reading. The board was trying to entice into the schools…

Ryan Reft and Connie Cartledge: Researching Watergate at the Library of Congress

In the 2008 film, Frost/Nixon, James Reston, played by Sam Rockwell, looks into the camera and says of President Richard M. Nixon, “His most lasting legacy is that today any political wrongdoing is immediately given the suffix ‘-gate.’” Whether apocryphal or not, the quote is both incisive and superficial.[1] On the one hand, Reston was…