Documenting Our Past: Great Documents of New York Legal History

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Court Records, Early Legal History, New York Legal History, Public Events
This article was written by Dr. James D. Folts. Dr. Folts has been head of Researcher Services at the New York State Archives since 1992, and employed at the Archives since 1980. One of his early assignments was to arrange and describe the pre-1847 records of the New York Supreme Court of Judicature, transferred to the Archives by the Court of Appeals in 1982. That work resulted in a publication, “Duely & Constantly Kept”: A History of the New York Supreme Court and an Inventory of Its Records (New York State Archives and New York State Court of Appeals, 1991) which received the Society of American Archivists’ Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award for Archival Advocacy. In 2016-17, he worked with Geof Huth of the Office of Court Administration, New York State Unified Court System, to implement the transfer of pre-1847 Supreme Court and Chancery Court records from the New York County Clerk’s Office to the State Archives.
Image: Detail of the Flushing Remonstrance; Erie Canal Document. Courtesy of the New York State Archives.

 

The Historical Society of the New York Courts, in partnership with the New York State Archives, extends an open invitation to attend a public event titled Documenting Our Past: Great Documents of New York Legal History on Thursday, November 30th at 6:30 PM at the New York City Bar Association. The program highlights major themes in New York law and jurisprudence, featuring attorneys, historians and archivists. For more information about the event and to register, click here.

Important themes in New York legal history are illustrated by original records preserved at the New York State Archives. Examples are the right to petition the government (the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657); a continuous, durable court system that provides judicial remedies, protects rights, and helps ensure social stability despite changes in political party or even political regime (New York trial court records, 1691-1847); and the New York’s development and management of transportation infrastructure, facilitated by or resulting in important innovations in property and contract law (records of construction and operation of the Erie Canal, starting 1817).

Right of Petition

The right to petition the government for relief was a right exercised in colonial New Netherland and New York, and is available to New Yorkers today. The right of petition is guaranteed by the New York State Constitution, Article I, Section 9.1. Though many petitions from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were destroyed in the 1911 fire that consumed the State Library, many examples survive in the State Archives and will be illustrated at this event.

One of the oldest petitions in the New York State Archives is the 1657 “Flushing Remonstrance.” The mostly-English residents of Vlissingen, now Flushing, Borough of Queens, successfully petitioned the Director-General of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, Petrus Stuyvesant, to allow the Quakers of their community to worship in private, exempting them from the 1656 ordinance banning the public practice of religions other than the Dutch Reformed Church. Petitions to the Legislature in the mid-19th century sought voting rights for women. Modern New York governors frequently receive letters and petitions favoring or opposing legislative bills being considered for approval or veto.

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Celebrating Native American Heritage Month: Ely S. Parker (1828-1895)

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, New York Legal History

November is Native American Heritage Month, and the Society is celebrating with this biography of Ely S. Parker from our fourth Legal History by Era, Antebellum, Civil War, & Reconstruction New York: A New Court System & the Field Code, 1847-1869. Parker, a Seneca Native American, became an attorney, civil engineer, brigadier general in the Civil War, and interpreter for the Seneca people in their meetings with the federal government. He played an important role in securing land rights for the Seneca people. Due to his efforts, the Seneca people proclaimed Parker Sachem of the Six Nations. Parker is most well-known for his drafting the terms of surrender, which was signed by General Grant and General Lee and effectively ended the Civil War.

Photo: The room in the McLean House, at Appomattox C.H., in which Gen. Lee surrendered to Gen. Grant. Ely S. Parker is fifth from the right.

 

Ely S. Parker
Ely S. Parker

Ely S. Parker was born on the Seneca Reservation at Tonawanda in western New York in 1828. His parents raised him in the traditions of the League of the Haudenosaunee (also known as Six Nations or Iroquois), but also educated him at a Baptist Mission school. There, he took the first name of the school’s minister and called himself Ely Parker.

A chance meeting with the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan greatly influenced Ely’s life — Morgan sponsored him for admission to Morgan’s alma mater, the Cayuga Academy, an elite school in Aurora, Cayuga County, in western New York. Ely encountered difficulties at the school which he described in a letter to a friend:

“Once or twice I have been severely abused. But I returned blow for blow with savage ferocity. Whether I gained the upper hand of my antagonist I leave the public to decide. For mind you, these quarrels were public. Bad business, but it could not be helped.”

The academy provided an excellent education, and the curriculum included Latin, Greek and science. Ely participated in numerous school debates and became the Academy’s leading orator. His fluency in English enabled him to become the translator, scribe, and interpreter for the Seneca elders in their meetings and correspondence with the United States government.

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A Global Context: The New York State Constitutional Convention of 1938

Posted on Categories Blog, Constitutional Conventions in New York, New York Legal History, Uncategorized

Editor’s Note: Whether or not New York State should have a new constitutional convention is on the voting ballot this November. As such, the Historical Society took a look back on the history of the State’s Constitution with the April 18, 2017 program Constitutional Conventions in New York: Past, Present, and Future. In this article, Professor Peter J. Galie, who opened the program with his lecture “New York State Constitutional Conventions: Back to the Future,” and writing partner Christopher Bopst revisit the Constitutional Convention of 1938.

An expanded version of this article first appeared in New York Archives Magazine, Peter J. Galie and Christopher Bopst, Summer 2017, Volume 17, Number 1, pp. 24-27. New York State Archives: archives.nysed.gov | Archives Partnership Trust: nysarchivestrust.org | New York Archives Magazine: nysarchivestrust.org/magazine/archivesmag_about

Image: “He Wants It Short and Plain” by Jerry Costello. Archives: L0096-78 Newspaper clippings file 1938.

Secretary of State Edward Flynn called the convention to order on April 5, 1938, amid inauspicious economic and political developments. The country was in the midst of an economic downturn that had started in May 1937. Unemployment, which had declined significantly after 1933, had increased to around 20 percent. The number of democracies throughout the world had fallen to pre-World War I levels.

The previous debate over the call for a convention was notable for the absence of issues that might have provided an agenda. But Flynn’s opening remarks sounded the note that would provide the convention with a theme and purpose:

You are assembled during a most critical time in the world’s history, when new forms of government are being created throughout the world and democratic principles are being forgotten.

The constitutional convention held in New York State in 1938, the state’s ninth, was a “people’s convention.” The convention was called pursuant to the provision of the state constitution mandating that every twenty years citizens be asked whether they wish to convene a convention to revise and amend the constitution. It was a people’s convention in another sense: Neither major party addressed the question in their respective platforms.

Voters approved the convention by a margin of 1,413,604 to 1,190,275. Discouraging for those who valued the exercise in popular sovereignty provided by the automatic call provision was the startlingly large number of voters who ignored the proposition. The total vote on the convention question was three million less than that cast in the governor’s race on the same ballot.

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Changes Coming to the David A. Garfinkel Essay Scholarship

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Education, Garfinkel Essay Scholarship

The 2017-2018 cycle of the David A. Garfinkel Essay Scholarship has begun, and we’re bringing some changes to the competition! After 11 years, the Society has made the difficult decision to restructure elements of the Garfinkel Essay Scholarship, but keep some the same!

A Society Trustee developed the resources for the previous 10 cycles and decided to take a step back to let a new person manage the preparation of Scholarship materials. She has even written an article about the importance of the Scholarship for our blog. This led to the creation of the Historical Society of New York Courts Fellowship. The Fellow’s duties include developing the topic and questions, preparing materials for the Scholarship website, and conducting teacher and student workshops.

Luckily, we were able to find the perfect person for our first Society Fellow: Christine Mooney, Esq.! Christine is an attorney and Associate Professor in the CUNY Community College system. She has written for our blog before about the impact of the Scholarship on not only her students but also her professional work (Read more here). As someone deeply invested in the success of the Garfinkel Essay Scholarship, Professor Mooney developed this year’s topic: Stolen Art: From the Holocaust to the Present – Role of the Courts in Restoring Cultural Objects to Their Rightful Owners. Christine truly understands how to integrate the Scholarship into course curriculum and connect the Scholarship’s topic to a variety of disciplines while still relating to the rich legal history of New York State. All resources are now available on the Garfinkel Scholarship section of our website.

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Teachable Moments

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Education, Judith S. Kaye Fellow1 Comment on Teachable Moments

This article was written by Dr. Julia Rose Kraut. Dr. Kraut is the inaugural Judith S. Kaye Teaching Fellow and taught “Civil Rights, Civil Liberties, and the Empire State” on the BHSEC Queens campus in spring of 2017. She also taught an adapted version to eighth graders at George Jackson Academy. She is a legal historian living in New York City and earned her J.D. from American University Washington College of Law and her Ph.D. in History from New York University. Julia is currently writing a book on the history of ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States, which is under contract to Harvard University Press.

Photo: New York County Courthouse

In my last blog post, I recounted meeting Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye when I was an undergraduate student at Columbia University, and how this chance meeting inspired me to pursue my interest in law and history and become the inaugural Judith S. Kaye Teaching Fellow for the Historical Society of the New York Courts. I also discussed the course I developed for the Society, “Civil Rights, Civil Liberties, and the Empire State,” and teaching this course at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan in Spring 2016. In this blog post, I would like to describe my experiences teaching this same course to students at Bard High School Early College in Queens in Spring 2017.

The semester began the first week of February, shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, and it ended in early June. Those four and a half months proved to be an incredibly turbulent period for the nation, and one that presented many challenges, as well as many teachable moments that demonstrated the importance of studying law and history. At breakneck speed, each week appeared to bring many of the course’s themes to the forefront of the public’s attention. Newspapers, social media, and cable television news programs were filled with discussion and debate on the important function of each branch of government and the limits on the power exercised by each branch, the rule of law, federalism, immigration and nativism, freedom of speech and of the press, as well as the role of public protest, legislation, and the courts in civil rights and civil liberties history.

My class consisted of a great group of hard-working students who brought their questions, concerns, and personal experiences to the classroom. It was a small group, but a diverse one. The students all came from different backgrounds, economic statuses, races, sexual orientations, religions, ethnicities, and neighborhoods in New York City. Each student provided a unique perspective on the cases and controversies we discussed in class. All expressed a desire to learn more about civil rights and civil liberties legal history to better understand how this history had shaped their lives and led to political and social change.

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It’s Possible! Reflections from a Garfinkel Essay Scholarship Mentor

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Education, Garfinkel Essay Scholarship1 Comment on It’s Possible! Reflections from a Garfinkel Essay Scholarship Mentor

This article was written by Charles Scruggs, a professor of history at Genesee Community College who has mentored many Garfinkel Essay Scholarship participants. He is a 2015 recipient of a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

We have announced the topic for the 2018 Garfinkel Essay Scholarship, please click here to learn more.

Photo: Anna Lewis, accepting her 2nd SUNY Prize at the NY Court of Appeals Law Day Ceremony. Prof. Scruggs mentored all three SUNY winners. Image courtesy of Lisa Bohannon at NY Court of Appeals.

Sixty years ago, Twelve Angry Men appeared for the first time on the silver screen. Despite riveting performances by such titans as Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb, its commercial performance fell flat. Perhaps the dialogue-driven film was regarded as too quaint by a movie-going public with a taste for swamp creatures and rebels without a cause. Today, however, the film is rightfully accorded a place in the pantheon of American cinema. It has even been cited by Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor as a source of inspiration as she contemplated potential career paths.

For ninety minutes, we are transfixed by the interactions of twelve jurors whose predilections and prejudices are ingeniously revealed. At the end of the story, something else is made known to us: the names of Juror 8 and Juror 9 — Davis and McCardle. We never learn the names of the other ten jurors. The name of the young defendant accused of stabbing his father to death is likewise shrouded in mystery. I find the closing moments of Twelve Angry Men fitting and poignant. In that final, brief exchange, the larger than life protagonist is returned to the human scale as he bids adieu to his wise and wizened ally.  As the two men head off to destinations unknown, dwarfed by the city’s immense steel structures, we cannot help but feel a sense of nobility in the seemingly quotidian experience of jury duty.

I have occasion to share these thoughts with you not because a cherished film is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary, but rather because a cherished essay scholarship is celebrating its tenth. I can still picture Karen Wicka, an attorney turned criminal justice instructor, pleading her case as she distributed a promotional flyer at the end of an interminably long faculty meeting. We all did our due diligence, solemnly nodding our heads and scribbling down due dates. I was just praying that the Dean would not ask me to deliver an improptu dissertation on the legal aspects of the Erie Canal’s construction — the theme of the essay contest. It would not have been an outlandish request. After all, I did teach college-level history, political science, and geography courses in western New York. In truth, it’s more likely that my colleagues were doing the praying. The hour was getting late, and I couldn’t be trusted to take the Fifth.

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Education Projects at the Historical Society

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Bard High School Early College, Education, Judith S. Kaye Fellow, New York Legal History
Photo: Students from Bard High School Early College on a courthouse tour.

In the early 2010s, the Society partnered with Bard High School Early College (BHSEC), a public school with campuses in Manhattan and Queens which is operated with Bard College, to prepare curricula for both middle school students at Bard Early College Academy (BECA) and high school students at BHSEC. The curricula aim to teach students about the role of the courts in society, the importance of both state and federal constitutions, and how the courts, judges, and lawyers contribute to the administration of justice.

The initial partnership between the Society and BHSEC blossomed and grew to feature a variety of courses within a central theme of bringing concepts of justice and the law into the classroom. We currently have nine courses and counting! Each instructor prepares syllabi, lesson plans, and/or course materials which we then share on our website to help other educators get ideas and concrete ways to incorporate legal history into their lessons.

In 2015, the Society and BHSEC took the partnership a step further with the establishment of the Judith S. Kaye Teaching Fellowship, honoring the founder of the Historical Society. The Fellowship provides for the hiring of a faculty member or visiting scholar who will develop and teach a semester-long elective on the themes that include justice and the courts, legal history in New York State, New York State constitutional law, or a topic that relates more broadly to the role of the courts in establishing and maintaining democracy in New York State and the United States.

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A Return to the Great Hall at Cooper Union: Abraham Lincoln, Harold Holzer, and the Power to Transform “a New Birth of Freedom”

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Public Events

This article was written by our friends at the New York State Archives Partnership Trust. For more information, go to www.nysarchivestrust.org.

Celebrating 2017 Empire State Archives & History Award Honoree

Harold Holzer

Hosted by Tony Award-nominated actor Stephen Lang

Wednesday, September 6th at 7:00 PM

“Only at the Great Hall of Cooper Union can audiences so easily inhale Lincoln’s presence too — there to imagine not the dying but the living man, not the bearded icon of myth but the clean-shaven, fresh-voiced political original who conquered all New York here on the way to the White House and immortality.” —Harold Holzer

Photo of Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union, February 27, 1860. From NYS Archives Series A3045-78.
Photo of Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union, February 27, 1860. From NYS Archives Series A3045-78.

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln addressed a New York audience at The Cooper Union, delivering what is often considered to be the most important speech of his 1860 presidential campaign. Historians credit this speech with Lincoln securing the Republican Party nomination and his victory in the 1860 election.

“Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgement and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling — that sentiment — by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it.” —Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860.

It is only fitting that nationally prominent Lincoln Scholar Harold Holzer, 2017 Empire State Archives & History Award honoree, takes the stage in the Great Hall with actor and friend Stephen Lang to explore Mr. Holzer’s decorated career as one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. With over 50 published books and countless articles and awards — including the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize — this evening of conversation and friendship promises to be informative and engaging.

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A Tale of Two Foundings: New York’s First Constitution 1777 and the Arab Spring 2011

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Constitutional Conventions in New York, New York Legal History

Editor’s Note: Whether or not New York State should have a new constitutional convention is on the voting ballot this November. As such, the Historical Society took a look back on the history of the State’s Constitution with the April 18, 2017 program Constitutional Conventions in New York: Past, Present, and Future. To start this series of posts about the history of New York’s Constitutional Conventions, Professor Peter J. Galie, who opened the program with his lecture New York State Constitutional Conventions: Back to the Future, compares and contrasts the successes and failures of two foundings.

Peter J. Galie, author of this article, is Professor Emeritus at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of numerous articles in the area of state constitutional law and three books: Ordered Liberty: A Constitutional History of New York (Fordham University Press, 1996); The New York Constitution: A Commentary, with Christopher Bopst, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2012); and co-editor with Christopher Bopst and Gerald Benjamin, New York’s Broken Constitution: The Crisis in State Government and the Path to Renewed Greatness (SUNY Press, 2016). He is currently serving on a Task Force on the Judiciary Article of the State Constitution formed by Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, Janet DiFiore.

Photo: “Announcing the Founding,” Secretary of the 1777 Convention, Robert Benson, mounted a barrel in front of the courthouse and read the document to assembled citizens. 

When establishing and gaining consent for a new regime, “a new order of the ages,” you need to have a people who are already committed to the principles the regime espouses or are amenable to persuasion and commitment. This is the paradox of founding. Plato, Rousseau, Machiavelli, and the authors of Federalist grappled with this conundrum. Is it possible to begin democratically when there is no tradition of democracy? Is it possible to found a regime on principles the regime wishes to establish?

We think of the national Constitution as the first constitutional republic founded on the consent of the people and embodying principles and values that trace their origins to the Magna Carta in 1215.

But it was not the first. The first fruits of the American Revolution were the state constitutions adopted between 1776 and 1780. The founding of independent constitutional republics began in 1776, not in 1787. New York adopted its first constitution on April 20, 1777. The Provincial Congress that brought forth this founding renamed itself “The Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York.”

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Calendar Feature: July 2017 — Dame Agatha Christie (1890–1976)

Posted on Categories Uncategorized, Blog, Society Calendar

After the Fourth of July weekend, we’re getting back into the swing of things at the Historical Society. Calendar production for 2018 has just begun, so please enjoy the July feature from this year’s edition. Who knew Agatha Christie was involved in a case in the New York Courts? Read below for more about Hicks v. Casablanca Records.

Dame Agatha Christie, one of the best-selling novelists of all time with works translated into over 100 languages, made her appearance in New York law in Hicks v. Casablanca Records:

In the winter of 1977, defendants in the movie case began the filming of a movie entitled, “Agatha” which, like the book in the related case, presents a fictionalized account of a true incident which occurred during the life of Mrs. Christie…

It appears that on or about December 4, 1926, Mrs. Christie, then married to Colonel Archibald Christie, disappeared from her home in England. This disappearance was widely-publicized and, although a major effort was launched to find her, everyone was at a loss to explain her disappearance. However, eleven days after she was reported missing, Mrs. Christie reappeared, but her true whereabouts and the reasons for her disappearance are, to this day, a mystery.

In view of the death of Mrs. Christie, the public may never know the facts surrounding this incident, but should the defendants prevail herein, the public will have a fictionalized account of this disappearance as set forth in the movie… In each instance, Mrs. Christie is portrayed as an emotionally unstable woman, who, during her eleven-day disappearance, engages in a sinister plot to murder her husband’s mistress, in an attempt to regain the alienated affections of her husband. Given this portrayal of their decedent and assignor, plaintiffs, mindful of the personal nature of defamation and privacy actions, bring the instant actions [for injunctive relief] alleging unfair competition and infringement of the right of publicity.[1]

The court denied the motion for a preliminary injunction, finding no right of privacy “where a fictionalized account of an event in the life of a public figure is depicted in a novel or a movie, and in such novel or movie it is evident to the public that the events so depicted are fictitious.”

Her disappearance remains a mystery, but some have speculated…

[1] 464 F. Supp. 426, 429 (S.D.N.Y. 1978)
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