Felice J Batlan

Florence Kelley and the Battle Against Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:22:53 PDT

The usual story of the demise of laissez-faire constitutionalism in the 1930’s features heroes such as Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and the great male legal progressives of the day who rose up from academia, the bench, and the bar, to put an end to what historians label "legal orthodoxy." In this essay, I seek to demonstrate that Florence Kelley was a crucially important legal progressive who was at the front lines of drafting and defending new legislation that courts were striking down as violating the Fourteenth Amendment and State constitutions. Looking at who was drafting and lobbying for path breaking progressive legislation and how such legislation was being defended accomplishes a number of things. It uncovers how male legal actors at times worked closely and collaborated with women reformers. Furthermore, thinking about women reformers as central legal actors demands that we examine our own categorical thinking. Placing progressive era women reformers in a non-porous women’s sphere, while imagining that elite male legal thinkers were sealed within an all-male world of academics, lawyers and jurists, distorts late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal culture and leads to what we might call "intellectual segregation." This essay is thus a work of bricolage that brings together the scholarship on women’s leading roles in progressive era reform with mainstream narratives of legal history.

The Gendered Lives of Legal Aid: Lay Lawyers, Social Workers, and the Bar, 1863-1960

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:18:58 PDT

The Gendered Life of Legal Aid, 1863-1960 (manuscript in process) will be the first monograph on the history of civil legal aid in the United States. By closely examining the history of legal aid in New York, Chicago, and Boston, it presents a number of arguments with wide-ranging implications and it is animated by a host of conflicts. These include the relationship between legal aid and citizenship, the changing status of domestic relations law, the interactions between lawyers and social workers and their different understandings of the role and nature of law, what services legal aid should provide, and even how the history of legal aid should be told. More specifically the work questions what it historically meant to “practice law” or “to be a lawyer” and argues that women practiced law before they were admitted to law school in large numbers or could be admitted to state bars. Thus it puts in historical context and collapses the categorical dichotomy of lawyer versus non-lawyer and argues that our understanding of women practicing law in the nineteenth century needs to account for women lay lawyers. It also demonstrates that the practice of law from the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century was more democratic, heterogeneous, and less elite than we currently appreciate.

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History

Felice J. Batlan — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:09:20 PDT

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

"If You Become His Second Wife, You Are a Fool": Shifting Paradigms of the Roles, Perceptions, and Working Conditions of Legal Secretaries in Large Law Firms

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:25:10 PDT

"If You Become His Second Wife, You Are a Fool": Shifting Paradigms of the Roles, Perceptions, and Working Conditions of Legal Secretaries in Large Law Firms, 52 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 169 (2010).

Legal Aid, Women Lay Lawyers, and the Rewriting of History, 1863-1930

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 20 May 2011 05:52:15 PDT

The Birth of Legal Aid: Gender Ideologies, Women, and the Bar in New York City, 1863-1910

Felice J. Batlan — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 08:01:01 PDT

The Imperial SEC? - Foreign Policy and the Internationalization of the Securities Markets, 1934-1990 (SEC Historical Society's Virtual Museum & Archive of the History of Financial Regulation, December 2008)

Felice J. Batlan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:53:58 PST

Not Our Mother's Law School?: A Third-Wave Feminist Study of Women's Experiences in Law School (with Kelly Hradsky, Kristen Jeschke, LaVonne Meyer & Jill Roberts)

Felice J. Batlan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:28:29 PDT

The Ladies' Health Protective Association: Lay Lawyers and Urban Cause Lawyering

Felice J. Batlan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:10:34 PDT

Gender and the Path of the Law: Public Bodies, State Power, and the Politics of Reform in Late-Nineteenth Century New York City

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:22:26 PST

The Institutional History of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (with L. Gordon)

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:21:55 PST

Classical Legal Thought: Revising the Revisionists and the Search for a Middle Ground, (reviewing William M. Wiecek, The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America 1886-1937 (1998))

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:20:18 PST

Till Death Do Us Part? (reviewing Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (2000); Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (1999))

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:19:43 PST

Divorce and the Meta-Narrative of History, (reviewing J. Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America (1997))

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:19:11 PST

Beneath the Private Mask: Marriage as a Public Institution (reviewing Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000))

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:18:25 PST

A Re-Evaluation of the New York Court of Appeals: The Home, the Market and Labor, 1885-1905

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:17:27 PST

A Journal of One's Own? Beginning the Project of Historicizing the Development of Women's Law Journals

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:14:53 PST

Engendering Legal History

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:14:17 PST

Law and the Fabric of the Everyday: Settlement Houses, Sociological Jurisprudence, and the Gendering of Urban Legal Culture

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:13:43 PST

Law in the Time of Cholera: Disease, State Power, and Quarantine Past and Future

Felice J. Batlan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:13:10 PST