The Faculty Lounge

Defining Emeriti

I have always wondered about emeritus status on law faculties (or any faculties for that matter).  I've been at a number of different schools in different countries, and emeritus status has meant something different at each one.  At some schools it seems to be a really big deal and requires some kind of formal approval from a body higher than the law school (eg university, board of trustees, the Almighty, etc), and at others it seems to be an honorific informally awarded from within the law school on achieving retirement status.  At my current school, at least since I've been here, most everyone who has retired has been given an emeritus title, but that wasn't the case at the last school I was at.  Is there any common understanding of emeritus status nationally or globally?  Or is it horses for courses?

Hiring Announcement: John Marshall (Atlanta)

From an email that I received this week:

ATLANTA’S JOHN MARSHALL LAW SCHOOL invites applications for tenure track faculty appointments to begin August 1, 2012. John Marshall is seeking applicants to fill positions in all doctrinal areas and legal skills.  Applicants must meet high standards of professional accomplishment and superior academic performance, as reflected by achievements such as class standing, law review positions, Order of the Coif, judicial clerkships, published legal articles, and significant practice history.  

John Marshall seeks applications from those who would be excellent classroom teachers, strong role models of professionalism and ethics, and who demonstrate exceptional promise as legal scholars.  The Law School is committed to its historic mission, including diversity and service to traditionally underserved communities.   

REQUIREMENTS:  Please email (no hard-copies please) your CV and letter of interest no later than October 3, 2011.  Specifically address your teaching interests and potential as a legal scholar.  Send information to: Associate Professor Suparna Malempati, Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, smalempati@johnmarshall.edu.  If you have any questions, please contact Associate Professor Malempati via email.  For additional information, please visit www.johnmarshall.edu.

Appalachian Law Seeks Dean Candidates

From the school's job posting:

The Appalachian School of Law invites nominations, applications and inquiries for the position of Dean and Chief Operating Officer. Applications are invited from legal educators, scholars and administrators and from experienced lawyers and jurists with a demonstrated interest in legal education. The position will be available July 1, 2012, but the starting date may be adjusted to accommodate prior commitments. Confidential review of nominations and applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. To ensure consideration, nominations and applications should be submitted by September 30, 2011. For more information, please visit our dean search website at www.asl.edu/jobs/deansearch. Candidates are asked to submit a curriculum vitae, a list of at least three professional references, and a letter describing the candidate’s qualifications for the position with specific reference to the responsibilities and attributes described in the Position Description available on the website.

Applications should be submitted electronically (Adobe PDF or MS Word format) to deansearch@asl.edu. Applications, nominations and inquiries will be kept strictly confidential.  Nominations or inquiries may be sent to: Judge Keary Williams Chair, Dean Search Committee Appalachian School of Law 1169 Edgewater Drive P.O. Box 2825 Grundy, VA.

Heart Mountain: A Virtual Visit

A little over a week ago, the new Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center opened outside of Cody, Wyoming.

Kevin J. Miyazaki, a very talented photographer, was on hand.  He took some pictures that captured the spirit of the event.  Here are a few.

This is the exterior of the museum.  It is designed to capture the feel of the barracks that once stood at the site.

This is the largest gallery.  It presents exhibits on various aspects of life behind barbed wire.

A highlight of the Grand Opening was a joint presentation by retired Wyoming Senator Alan K. Simpson (right) and former U.S. Commerce and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (left).  The two met as boy scouts when Mineta and his family were confined at Heart Mountain.  Simpson lived in neighboring Cody.

This display recreates a Heart Mountain barrack room as a family would have found it on the day they arrived in the fall of 1942.

It was very moving to see former Heart Mountain internees return to the site.  Here a group of former internees visit an exhibit showing a barrack room as a resourceful family might have outfitted it in order to make it livable.

The last spot on the visit is the Hoshizaki Reflection Area, where visitors can sit and absorb what they've seen.  That's Heart Mountain off in the distance.

Signing Off - Two Spring Symposia

My thanks to Dan and the other Faculty Lounge bloggers for inviting me to guest this month. I had a great time. I leave with a final plug for the law reviews' spring symposia.

First, the Charleston Law Review is co-sponsoring the fourth annual Law & Society Symposium. This year's topic is "The Role of Government." Panel topics include the impact of Citizens United, a discussion on the role of government in regulating same-sex marriage, and a look at the states' ability to regulate immigration issues, among other topics. The 2012 Law & Society Symposium will be held February 9-10, 2012, in Charleston.

Second, the Federal Courts Law Review is sponsoring a symposium on "Mass Torts in the Federal Courts" on February 24, 2012 in Charleston. Ken Feinberg will be giving the keynote address.

Registration is not yet open, but if you would like additional information about either conference, do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Dale on Criminal Law in the Long Nineteenth Century

Well, it's fall (or at least the fall semester's begun here).  And though the leaves have not yet started to turn -- in fact, the butterfly bush in our front yard is still in bloom -- another sign of fall has arrived.  The books from the fall university press catalogs are starting to roll off the presses.  There's a lot to anticipate this fall -- Mark Auslander's The Accidental Slaveowner is one.  

And Elizabeth Dale's Criminal Justice in the United States, 1789-1939 has just appeared from Cambridge University Press.  I had the pleasure of reading this in proof a few weeks back; it's an extraordinary work in terms of the breadth of coverage -- everything you want to know from social history to doctrine is in there.

And as long as I'm thinking on Elizabeth's scholarship, I want to mention her charming Chicago Trunk Murder: Law and Justice at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, which is a rivetting story of a case of a man who was murdered and then stuffed in a trunk and sent to Pittsburg.  It's combines the suspense of true crime with keen insight into how the investigation and prosecution functioned and what that tells us about immigration and law in Chicago around the turn of the twentieth century.  It's about to appear as well.

I'm, of course, impressed -- as always -- with Elizabeth's extraordinary productivity.  Two books from major university presses in one month?!

Hiring Announcement: Texas Tech

Paraphrasing an email that I received this week:

Texas Tech University School of Law has an opening in commercial and/or banking law.  Applications are welcome from both entry-level and lateral candidates.  Please contact Assistant Professor Elizabeth Kronk [elizabeth.kronk@ttu.edu] for additional information.

Ten Worst Things for a Law Prof Put on a CV

Over at the Chronicle Forums (here), readers are chiming in with the "Ten Worst Things to Put on Your CV," inspired by a similar general-business post over here at Yahoo Finance.  Here are some of my favorites from the Chron:

• Eagle scout
• MENSA Membership
• Photos
• Hobbies
• Job talks
• Marital status and names of kids
• Placement in recent athletic competitions
• Postings to fan-fiction sites
• List of grants applied for but denied or unfunded.

So what are some of the worst things for a law prof to put on a CV?  I'll incorporate by reference all of the above and add a few more:

• Pre-collegiate employment or volunteer activity
• Pre-collegiate anything, really
• Lists of blog postings
• Religious affiliation or membership.

Additions? Modifications? Clarifications?  How about American Bar Foundation Fellowship?  Service as an outside tenure reviewer?  What's on your list of "don'ts" for a law prof's CV?

Does More Practice Experience Make Better Lawyers? Does It Make Better Law Profs?

Commenting on Roger's recent post on a no-frills law school, Jason Mazzone offered an interesting and provocative claim:

In thinking about what practitioners can and cannot add to legal education, we should also keep in mind the diminishing returns of practical experience. Beyond a quickly-attained point, more experience in practice doesn't correlate with stronger legal skills to impart to students. The reality is that legal practice isn't that hard (and in any event much of what lawyers do is repetitive). There are things to be learned to become a skilled lawyer but there is no great mystery about any of it. Once one has taken one deposition, the second isn't difficult. Law is thus radically different from medicine (the field that is often invoked by those who think that only experienced lawyers should be teaching). If I'm having a surgical procedure there really are good reasons for me to pick the surgeon who has done the procedure 100 times over the surgeon who has done it five times. But a lawyer who has written five wills is perfectly adequate to prepare mine as his sixth. As with anything, more time doing something allows one to capture some additional benefits: better judgment, greater speed, a network of colleagues. But those aren't things that can be taught to law students anyway. The "highly talented experienced practitioners" that the N-F Law School seeks to recruit could thus easily be lawyers with two or three years experience. 

I think that on one level, Jason has a point: law students are learning Stage 1 lawyering skills and a practitioner with a few years of experience can probably impart many of those skills.  But a couple of his comments are worth a little more consideration.

1.  Once one has taken one depostion, the second isn't difficult. 

I suppose that I'm not in a position to judge this.  I was primarily a criminal lawyer and my civil experience included defending one deposition, and second-chairing the taking of another.  But I second-chaired the deposition after very extensive trial experience and watching this experienced practitioner suggested to me that there is a wide degree of quality difference between a poor deposition, a good deposition, and an excellent deposition.  For example, people just learning deposition skills are happy just to get the questions out.   But the taking of depositions is not a mechanical task; different lawyers generate different answers - both to the same questions and the additional (or nuanced) questions that the better lawyer knew to ask.  

2.  If I'm having a surgical procedure there really are good reasons for me to pick the surgeon who has done the procedure 100 times over the surgeon who has done it five times. But a lawyer who has written five wills is perfectly adequate to prepare mine as his sixth. As with anything, more time doing something allows one to capture some additional benefits: better judgment, greater speed, a network of colleagues.

From the point of view of criminal lawyering,  extensive practice absolutely improves quality.  For example, Philadelphia courts use preliminary hearings to establish prima facie cases.  The first job for a new defense attorney is to conduct cross in these hearnings - and it takes  scores of these hearings to substantially improve a lawyer's technical skill set.  But the best preliminary hearings are conducted by lawyers with a lot of trial experience who understand the relationship between initial testimony, case theories, jury instructions, and closing arguments.   And experience is essential for developing strategic skills - both at trial itself and in navigating a case toward trial.  More experienced lawyers get better settlements and better verdicts - not every time, just as not every surgery requires an exprienced surgeon, but often enough that a skittish consumer (with money) would prefer an experienced attorney.  That doesn't mean that all experience lawyers become excellent; it's just that few lawyers become excellent without experience.  

Perhaps transactions, or as Jason suggests, estate law,  is different.  Maybe a person who has written five wills is as good as one who has written a thousand.  But I doubt it.   As Jason notes, judgment is a product of experience - and one that I think most clients would do well to pay for.  But there's more.  For example,  there is that matter of knowing the law.  

It turns out that most lawyers learn law - and particularly, legal pitfalls - through experience.  Wills and divorces slam right into arcane areas of  tax law, evidence law, and civil procedure - but this may not be evident to the junior practitioner.  It's only with the hundredth divorce settlement that some lawyers discover a particuarly vexing part of the federal income tax code, for example.  As anyone who has practiced in the area of secured transactions probably realizes, BARBRI coverage  - might we call that the equivalent of five cases of experience? - does not prepare a business lawyer for a life of practice.   It seems to me that this difference in legal knowledge is relevant to whether a person is an excellent professor.  

And what about the human component of lawyering - understanding and managing clients, colleagues and adversaries?  This is much more than mere judgment.  Experienced lawyers have concrete people skills - borne of multiple failures and successes.  And precisely because this knowledge is learned almost entirely inductively - through repeated experiences - it is extremely difficult to pack into a two year practice arc.

I'm curious whether other readers think that there are dramatic skill differences between lawyers with a couple of years of practice and those with substantially more.  If so, are those differences best understood as being about judgment, speed and a network of colleagues - or something more? Are law students far enough along to benefit from distinctions between the more and less experienced lawyer?  And finally, do adjunct faculty fulfill the needs of students in this respect -or is there added value in having highly experienced lawyers on the full-time faculty?

More on Academic Attrition

In a comment on Berman on Enrollment Management, Prof. Berman (Ohio State) asked where an academic attrition rate of 10% would fall.  In A Tale of Two Law Schools:  Academic Attrition, I gave discussed the distribution of first-year academic attrition for the Fall 2008 entering classes.

The following charts look at average first-year academic attrition for the Fall 2006 through Fall 2009 entering classes at ABA-approved law schools in the continental United States. As shown in the scatter-plot below, while academic attrition rates vary widely, they generally rise as law-school LSAT 75th percentiles fall.

Southeastern Law Scholars Conference

I am delighted to be involved again organizing the Southeastern Law Scholars Conference. We had a great experience hosting this conference last year, and hope to build it into an annual event. Details are below:

The Charleston School of Law is pleased to host the second Southeastern Law Scholars Conference on October 28-29, 2011. This regional conference brings together junior law school faculty to present published papers or works-in-progress across all disciplines within the law. The conference is open to alll junior law faculty (one to seven years teaching experience) at law schools in the southeastern United States. To ensure an atmosphere conducive to feedback, space is limited to twenty participants.

The conference will begin with dinner for all participants on Friday, October 28, 2011. On Saturday, October 29, 2011, conference participants will present either a completed paper or work-in-progress,  and comment on the papers and ideas presented by others. As the host school, the Charleston School of Law will provide dinner on Friday, October 28, as well as breakfast and lunch on Saturday, October 29. There is no registration fee. Participants, however, are responsible for their own travel expenses.

To participate in the conference, please email me at sscheuerman@charlestonlaw.edu by Friday, September 29, 2011. Please note whether you will be attending dinner on Friday, October 28, in your email. In addition, please include the title of your presentation topic. A short abstract would also be helpful.

Call For Papers: Columbia Journal Of Race And Law

The Columbia Journal of Race and Law has announced a symposium and call for papers entitled:  Show Me the Money: Race, the Debt Crisis, and the Growing Wealth Gap.   Here are the details - and the deadline (for an abstract, at least, is soon.)

     The Columbia Journal of Race and Law (CJRL) will host its annual symposium, entitled “Show Me the Money: Race, the Debt Crisis, and the Growing Wealth Gap,” tentatively planned for November 4, 2011.  Last year, eleven student groups cosponsored our symposium on Arizona's immigration law S.B. 1070, providing the basis for substantial scholarship in our inaugural issue.  This year, we plan to repeat that success.  Our upcoming issue and symposium aim to showcase scholarly works that explore a broad array of relevant issues, including the trajectory of modern politics, the shrinking middle class, and the recession as it relates to race.  We invite the submission of abstracts or statements of interest by September 3, 2011.

     It is no secret that we live in perilous and unpredictable times.  Buried beneath the headlines, however, are devastating racial setbacks that have ensued from our recent economic turmoil.  In particular, the Great Recession has now doubled the wealth gap.  According to a Pew analysis of the 2010 Census data, the median white household has a whopping 20 times the wealth of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.  To make matters worse, America’s shifting political landscape threatens to magnify the turmoil.  Sweeping entitlement cuts appear inevitable.  A dismantling of the social safety net is no longer inconceivable.  The overarching question is inescapable: how can we best advance racial justice in an environment increasingly unreceptive to the work and role of government?

     Of particular interest to CJRL are papers that address the racial setbacks of today and how to rebound from them.  Analysis of the recent census data is also encouraged.  Papers may address any critical aspect of race and the law, however.   We ask that proposals include a 300-word abstract or one-page statement of interest and a short C.V., and be submitted by September 3 to the Journal at cjrl@law.columbia.edu.  Those selected to present will be notified in early September; and final papers of at least 6,500 words will be due by October 18, 2011.  All papers will be distributed to symposium participants prior to the event.  For participants that do not reside in New York City, support for travel and lodging will be available upon request.  

 

Restraints against alienation ... of enslaved people

Because today is the first day of trusts and estates I thought I'd talk some about my recent research on the nineteenth century history of wills.  And because of the controversy The Help has stirred about the relationship of white employers and African American maids during the era of Jim Crow, I thought that I'd reach back a little further and talk some about slaveowners whose wills distributed slaves.  I have read hundreds, probably at this point thousands, of wills over the years of slaves who were willed to family members -- this is no surprise.  Enslaved humans were a huge source of wealth in the old South.  Often times the enslaved humans are treated as fungible property -- there were wills, for instance, that gave instructions on what to do with the profits made off of renting out slaves (like use it to educate a favorite nephew), or to sell real property and invest the proceeds in human beings, or continue to operate the plantation and divide the proceeds among family members.  Or just flat out divide the humans among several family members.

But every once in a while there are instructions regarding a particularly important person.  Taking a couple of examples from Stephen Davis and my recent paper on probate in Greene County, Alabama: one of my most haunting ones involves the slave child Alfred, who had predeceased his owner (who was also perhaps, indeed probably, his father).  Alfred was to be exhumed and buried at his former owner's feet.  That will also freed Alfred's mother and sister and any other children born to her within nine months of the testator's demise.

Then there is the case where a brother freed a slave at the request of his sister -- shades of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, perhaps?  A few others  gave away enslaved humans but put restraints on the sale of them.  Take, for instance, Mary Cashaden's will from Greene County, Alabama.  She instructed that one of her slaves was not to be sold, but was to be taken care of for his life.

So there are some wills out that that have restraints on alienation of some slaves -- and, of course, some that emancipate many human beings.  But what I have never seen until this summer was a will that put a restraint on sale of all of a testor's enslaved humans for an extended period.  Consider, then, the will of John Robinson of Rockbridge County, Virginia, who left instructions that none of his enslaved humans (or their progeny) could be sold for fifty years.

The image is of the monument to Robinson on the Washington and Lee campus.

Hiring Announcement: Boston College

From an email forwarded to me:

BOSTON COLLEGE LAW SCHOOL seeks applicants for two entry-level openings on its faculty.  Applications from highly qualified individuals are encouraged regardless of subject matter interest.  In particular, the law school invites applications from those with interests in contracts and family law.  These positions will be tenure-track appointments to the faculty.

Boston College is a leading national Jesuit Catholic university. Women, members of minority groups, and others whose background will contribute to the diversity of the faculty are especially encouraged to apply.  Please submit letters of interest and resumes to: 

Appointments Committee 

c/o Pat Parlon

Dean’s Office

Boston College Law School

885 Centre Street

Newton Centre, MA 02459.  

Electronic submissions may be sent to:  lawappts@bc.edu

Preference will be given to applications received before September 23, 2011.

Religious Leaders Claim Alabama's Immigration Law is Unconstitutional

    Alabama has enacted a sweeping measure designed to deal with the problem of the large number of persons unlawfully present in the United States and residing in Alabama.  Among its provisions are sanctions directed toward those who harbor, aid, or assist such persons.  There may be a number of grounds upon which a constitutional attack could be directed to this law, but one of the least likely is the suit brought by four Alabama clerics who assert that the law infringes freedom of religious exercise, the right to assembly, free speech, equal protection, and the contracts clause.  Here is a copy of the complaint.  Here is a New York Times news article about the case, and here is the Times's editorial on this topic. 

    First, the free exercise claim is a non-starter because the law is of general application -- it does not single out religious exercise for disadvantageous treatment, nor does it require individual application.  Employment Division v. Smith.   Second, the right of assembly is incidentally affected.  Third, religious speakers remain free to say whatever they want -- the law governs non-expressive conduct.  The argument that helping people who are unlawfully present in the US is a form of symbolic expression is weak.  As the Court said in FAIR v. Rumsfeld, it's not symbolic expression if you have to tell people what your act means, and in this case there is no way to distinguish between charitable aid to citizens and lawful residents and the same aid to unlawful residents.  Fourth, classifying people by their residence status is presumptively valid.  The factors that made the Court apply some form of enhanced scrutiny in Plyler v. Doe are almost entirely absent in this case.   Finally, the contracts clause claim is almost risible.  The law has only an incidental impact on any contracts to which the religious plaintiffs may be a party.  Exxon v. Eagerton. 

     As I said, there are other grounds on which the law can be challenged.  Immigration is a vexed issue -- it needs to be comprehensively addressed at the federal level, but until then the federal government needs to enforce the law that currently exists.  It's no surprise that states step into that vacuum.

Law School Innovation Is Back!

After a seven month hiatus, the folks blogging at Law School Innovation - Doug Berman, Anupam Chander, and Mark Osler - felt the time was right, and they've re-ignited the blog here.  

Higher Education and Equality: Diminishing Marginal returns?

Richard Vedder has an interesting piece, Universities and Income Inequality:  New Evidence and Conjectures on the Chronicle of Higher Education website.  He suggests that increasing the "degree attainment" of the public will decrease income equality, but only up to a certain point.  Beyond that point, it increases income inequality:

* * * I suspect the law of diminishing returns is at work yet again. When college attendance/graduation is relatively rare, expanding it does bring in a number of able students who graduate and become productive members of the labor force, significantly increasing incomes of persons otherwise not likely to earn as much. But when the proportion of adults gets large and there is a growing disconnect between the pool of graduates and the pool of high paying technical, managerial, and professional jobs, the incremental graduates do not fare as well economically. More of the incremental students are also more ordinary, less able, less bright. (Emphasis added)

Vedder also traces part of growing income inequality, despite degree attainment, to the difference between the "Uber College Graduate[s]" of elite educational institutions and graduates of other institutions:

Today, a degree from a middling quality state school is not typically a ticket to a top or even moderately high-paying job. Yet that is NOT the case for graduates of elite top schools, who have the characteristics more generally found in the earlier era—bright, motivated, disciplined—good potential employees. Thus applications for admission are soaring at the Harvards, Stanfords, Northwesterns and Williams of the world, but typically showing little growth at the non-competitive state schools.

Over the years, I have seen jobs that, 30 or 40 years ago, only required a high-school diploma, now require a Bachelor's degree.

Whether you agree or disagree, it's certainly food for thought, especially for those of us in the legal academy.

The Latest on the Tulsa Riot

In a few days Lee Roy Chapman's major article on Tate Brady, a leading figure in the growth of Tulsa in the early twentieth century, will be published in the September issue of This Land Press, a progressive monthly magazine (named -- of course for Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie's song "This Land is Your Land.")  Chapman's interested in Brady's role in the violence that led up to the riot and in the riot and its aftermath, too.

Tate Brady played almost no role in my story of the Tulsa riot (and the aftermath); I was interested in the African American side of the story in the years leading into the riot and how the ideas of equality and opposition to lynching led Tulsa's African American citizens to take action to protect themselves and stop a lynching.  That, tragically, met with the ideas of white supremacy on the other side of the railroad tracks that separate the black and white sections of Tulsa.  Most of Chapman's article, "The Nightmare of the Dreamland," which I had the pleasure of reading a month or so back, was new to me and I think it will be the starting point for a lot of rethinking of Tulsa's history in the 1910s and 1920s.

You can see a brief trailer for the story here.

Also, here's a link to an article I published a decade ago in the Oklahoma Law Review that uses William Redfearn's brief in his case against the American Central Insurance Company to help reconstruct the riot (and here's the brief itself).  And here's a link to testimony in the suit that JB Stradford filed in Chicago against his insurance company.

Hurricane Aftermath in Lower Manhattan

image (c) Getty Images; source here

Hurricane Irene has come and gone from New York City.  In Lower Manhattan, where I live, damage seems to be minimal.  Both the Hudson and the East Rivers broke their banks, but receded relatively quickly. Before the storm, sanitation crews had been active all over Lower Manhattan clearing drains.  Those efforts no doubt helped street drains absorb excess water.  (The drain in front of my building that usually backs up with even a minor rainstorm was running freely yesterday; thanks DSNY!) 

The evacuation order for Zone A has been lifted.  There are people out on the streets, but other than the corner market in my neighborhood, the only other place open was a bar (and it was beautiful!).  Public transportation is still shut, with no word on when subways will be up and running.  Taxis and cars are out in abundance.

The morning commute likely will be a mess, warns Mayor Bloomberg (here).  Because of the city's anticipated public transportation challenges, New York Law School has cancelled classes tomorrow. Cardozo and Pace will make the call later tonight.  Touro and Fordham will be open.  I couldn't quickly find any news on Columbia, St. John's or NYU.

 

The Help and Legal History

I finally had the chance to see The Help.  I actually enjoyed it and wasn't nearly as bothered as some by the movie.

Couple of quick thoughts here.  First off, I was surprised to hear the main white character's name was Eugenia Phelan -- because that's the last name of an Alabama Supreme Court justice I used to be interested in.  

Moving now to more substantive pieces of the movie.  There are two pieces of property and trusts and estates that come up in it, which sort of surprised me. First: the ordinance that would require African American servants to use separate bathrooms from their white employers.  I have never heard of such an ordinance, though I guess nothing along these lines should surprise me.  Though this reminds me of a topic of interest to me, the influence of Jim Crow on architecture.  One little vignette here -- when my favorite librarian and I were house-hunting in Tuscaloosa (now many years ago), we looked at an absolutely beautiful and charming but modest house in an older neighborhood in Tuscaloosa.  (Tragically, I think the house was blown away in the tornado last spring.)  We went down in the basement and were surprised to see a windowless room with a fireplace and a tiny adjoining bathroom.  There was a separate entrance and it eventually dawned on us that it must have been the servants' quarters.  Sort of surprising that a modest home like that would have had servants' quarters -- though I suppose that helps explain the tenacity with which people clung to Jim Crow.  There was an awful lot of privilege that was being lost.

Twice I believe the movie referenced a servant who had been "willed" to a family member (or left in a will or some such language).  Mind you, this was in the era of Jim Crow, not slavery.  The trusts and estates professor in me was mightily interested in this.  I have a filing draw filled with examples of pre-Civil War wills that devise human beings to family members.  Heck, that's a major subject of my research these days.  (Along those lines, here's a pdf of Gabriel Long's will from Greene County, Alabama that distributed Long's enslaved human beings to various members of his family -- including with restraints on sale of them, a topic that I plan to return to later this week.)  But what I have not seen -- or even heard about -- are wills devising employees to family members.  Now this is merely expressive, of course -- but what a statement it makes about family relationships and relationships between employers and employees.  I'd love -- love -- to see one of those wills from the era of Jim Crow.  Maybe next summer I'll spend in the Jackson, Mississippi, courthouse looking for such things.

Also, I thought I'd include one of the wills from one of my recent research projects -- on a contract between an African American woman and a white family where the woman promised to take care of the family until they passed away in exchange for some property.  This is from the Rockbridge County probate records; I'll be talking a lot more about Rockbridge County and enslaved human beings and probate in the next couple of weeks.

Finally -- and drawing on Mark Auslander's wonderful op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution from last Sunday -- I'd like to conclude with an image of the monument to Harry, a "faithful" slave who's buried in the Marion Cemetery in Alabama.  Harry was owned by Howard College's president and when a fire broke out in the dormitory at Howard College, he helped get students out, though he perished from injuries sustained in the fire.  (Or so the story is told to us by the obelisk marking his grave.)  The Help raises a similar theme of African Americans who sacrificed their lives for the well-being of white children.  Perhaps in the process of recalling those sacrifices we can see humanity sometimes treated as though it was invisible.