Recent Issues

IDAHO | Volume 32, Number 1

This issue is the culmination of a years’ long effort in partnership with our friends at the Idaho Legal History Society. It features writings on the great state of Idaho and includes pieces on its history with an emphasis on the legal and the judicial landscape.

Content:

• Applying History: A Historian’s Experiences in the Coeur d’Alene Water Cases | Thomas R. Cox
• Friendship Betrayed: Granville Stuart, Samuel T. Hauser, and the Seven Devils Mining Case | Clyde A. Milner II
• Idaho Scrapbook | Christian Winn
• Tumult to Order: The Federal Courts in North Idaho | Hon. Richard C. Tallman and Morgan D. Goodin
• Idaho Judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals | Hon. Ryan D. Nelson
• The First Women of Idaho’s Bench and Bar | Debora Grasham
• Idaho’s Courthouses: Past and Present | Robyn Lipsky and Katia Kiston
• A True “Western Lawyer”: The Extraordinary Legal Career of Milton J. Helmick —Last Judge of the U.S. Court for China | Tom Westphal

Book reviews included in this issue: 

• Cristina Violante reviews Byron Pearson’s Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth
• Professor Daniel Rogriguez reviews Rawn James, Jr.’s The Truman Court: Law and the Limits of Loyalty

BISBEE | Volume 31, Number 2

In the early morning hours of July 12, 1917, more than a thousand mine workers and their sympathizers were rounded up at gunpoint by a citizen posse in Bisbee, AZ, and ultimately marched several miles to waiting railroad cattle cars, which carried them into the New Mexico desert, where they were abandoned. This 100-year-old event, referred to as the Bisbee Deportation of 1917, and seminal to the history of Arizona, is the subject of this issue.

Content:

• The Bisbee Deportation: There Will Be Ore | Judge Michael D. Hawkins
• Governor Hunt, Labor and the Bisbee Deportation | Paul F. Eckstein and Timothy J. Eckstein
• Felix Frankfurther and the Bisbee Deportation | Jonathan D. Rosenblum
• Things I Can Never Forget | Alice Campbell Juliff

Book reviews included in this issue: 

• Honorable Thelton E. Henderson reviews  Judge William Alsup’s Won Over: Reflections of a Federal Judge on His Journey from Jim Crow Mississippi  
• Professor Gerald F. Uelmen reviews Wendell Bird’s Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798

FIRST | Volume 31, Number 1

Dedicated to the Hon. Paul G. Rosenblatt

This issue is simply labeled “First.” Each piece represents a first of its kind in its own way.

Content:

• My Life as a Law Clerk: Justice O’Connor’s First Term | Hon. Ruth McGregor
• Ernest W. McFarland and the G.I. Bill of Rights | Gary L. Stuart
• The San Mateo and Santa Clara Railroad Tax Cases (1882-1886) from the Trenches | John D. Gordan, III
• Remembering Annette Abbott Adams | Andrea Sheridan Ordin, Esq.
• Go East, Young Woman: Breaking the Supreme Court Clerk Gender Barrier | Hon. Robert S. Lasnik

THE WOMEN’S VOTE: HOW THE WEST LED THE WAY | Vol. 30, Number 1 & 2

This issue of Western Legal History addresses the right to vote, surely one of the most important underpinnings of democratic citizenship, but one that was denied to half of Americans in the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson’s towering words “all men are created equal” undoubtedly meant white men who owned property. It would remain that way for nearly 150 years, until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, in August 1920. There was, without doubt, a reluctance in many parts of the nation to extend the right to vote to women. But in a number of territories and states in the American West, from Wyoming Territory in 1869 to Nevada and Montana in 1914, the franchise was extended to women prior to the nationwide adoption of the right. This issue focuses on six of those states and two territories, all of which except Wyoming are within the current boundaries of the Ninth U.S. Judicial Circuit.

Content:

• How the Woman’s Vote Was Won in the West: An Overview | Dr. Rebecca J. Mead
• Breakin’ Through: Wyoming’s Trailblazing Path to Women’s Suffrage | Hon. M. Margaret McKeown
• Balancing Act: Idaho’s Campaign for Women’s Suffrage | Dr. Rebecca Scofield and Dr. Katherine G. Aiken
• Winning, Losing, and Regaining the Franchise: The Long Road to Voting Equality in Washington | Hon. Morgan Christen
• The Long Oregon Trail to Women’s Suffrage | Hon. Susan P. Graber
• Winning California: The 1911 Suffrage Victory | Dr. Gayle Gullett
• Arizona’s Woman Suffrage Movement | Heidi J. Osselaer
• Alaska Native Women’s Long Road to Suffrage | Hon. Morgan Christen
• Evolving Toward Equality: Montana’s Woman Suffrage Story | Dr. Mary Sheehy Moe
• Nevada’s Campaigns for Woman Suffrage | Dr. Joanne Goodwin

PASSION AND COMPASSION: THE LEGAL LIVES OF JUDGE JOHN T. NOONAN, JR. AND JUDGE HARRY PREGERSON | Volume 29, Number 2

This issue is devoted to the lives and legacies of two extraordinary individuals who were recently lost to us: Judges John Noonan and Harry Pregerson. Both were individuals of great faith—one a devout Roman Catholic, the other an equally devout Jew. Both were deeply devoted to their respective families. Both were judges for at least three decades and sent scores of law clerks into the world with a crystal-clear understanding of what was right and what was not. Importantly, both understood that the law could not be blind to the human circumstances of those who came in contact with our system of justice.