The Law School’s Conference on the Wickersham Commission

On October 4 and 5, 2012, the Law School held its Conference on America’s First National Crime Commission and the Federalization of Law Enforcement. The conference was the brain child of Dean Strang, a member of our adjunct faculty, who was assisted in its planning by Professor Michael O’Hear and me. Attracting large audiences of academics, lawyers, students, and the public, the conference featured lectures by historians, law professors, political scientists, and criminal justice experts.

The conference began with Professor Frank Zimring’s (Berkeley, Law) lecture, “The Accident Crime Commission: Its Legacies and Lessons,” which was delivered under the auspices of the Law School’s Barrock lecture in criminal law. Professor Zimring provided historical insight into the composition, work, and legacy of the so-called Wickersham Commission. His lecture is summarized here.

On October 5 the conference continued with three panels. The first panel provided additional historical perspective on the Wickersham Commission. Delivering papers were James Calder (Texas-San Antonio, Political Science), who placed the Commission’s work in a paradigm of “brain” and “state.” Samuel Walker (Nebraska-Omaha, Criminology) provided an overview of President Herbert Hoover’s life, emphasizing how his support for the Commission was fully consistent with his role as an early twentieth-century Progressive. John M. Cooper, Jr., (Wisconsin, History) commented on the papers while offering additional insights into President Hoover’s progressivism.

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2012 Annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law: The Accidental Crime Commission: Its Legacies and Lessons

On October 4, 2012 Professor Franklin E. Zimring delivered the Annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law to a large audience of interested public, law students, faculty, and members of the legal profession. Professor Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Distinguished Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

His subject was the origins and legacies of the so-called Wickersham Commission of 1929-1931. Since the Commission’s work is largely forgotten today, Professor Zimring assumed the burden of explaining how “this hopeless venture ended up being viewed as a precedent setting and positive contribution to the ways in which the national government learns about crime and criminal justice.” In this he succeeded, his remarks serving as a timely, thoughtful introduction to the Law School’s day-long conference on the Wickersham Commission that was held on October 5, 2012. (More on the conference in my next blog.)

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Eric Hobsbawm and Law on the Ground

Following David’s post last week, I thought I’d remark on another historian who recently passed away: Eric Hobsbawm, who died last Monday. (NY Times obituary.) Hobsbawm, like Genovese, was a Marxist historian who wrote in the 1960s and 1970s, but unlike Genovese, he never altered his view. Hobsbawm is most widely known for his masterful history of the “long nineteenth century,” a term he coined to describe the period from 1789 to 1914 (which has a lot going for it as a sensible periodization).

Hobsbawm was a formative influence on me, but not because of his three-volume masterwork on the Victorian era. In 1959, three years before “The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848,” Hobsbawm wrote a slim volume of essays that looked at bandits: Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The specific argument of the book was that bandits can in some circumstances be seen as proto-revolutionaries fighting against landed interests or capital. But the part that has stuck with me is a more general one: that actions outside of law, possibly even contrary to law, are part of a web of enforcement of the rules of a given society. Hobsbawm’s bandits were not simply rulebreakers; they were, in his telling, attempting to enforce different rules from the ones being imposed from the top down. And they had their own procedures — rituals — that they followed in doing so.

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