The California Supreme Court Historical Society has announced the winners of its annual Selma Moidel Smith Law Student Writing Competition. (I’m on the Society’s board of directors.)
The winners will receive cash prizes and have their papers published in an upcoming edition of the Society’s journal California Legal History. The winners, their schools, and their award-winning papers (with commentary by competition judges Professors Laura Kalman (UCSB), Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania)) are:
First place: Keaton “Kit” Beyer, Yale. “Immigration and Invasion in the California Constitution, 1849- 1879.”
Beyer examines constitutional discourse in 19th-century California to shed light on a question of considerable current importance: When, if ever, can immigration constitute an “invasion”? He finds that in California’s constitutional convention of 1849, delegates used the word “invasion” to mean a sudden military attack by a foreign state, but that thirty years later, at the constitutional convention of 1878-79, pervasive prejudice against Chinese immigrants caused delegates to use the word in a broader sense, to include civilians entering the country peacefully and gradually. Beyer’s paper is both a skillful exploration of historical sources and a thoughtful discussion of the relationship between history and present-day law.
Second place: Ilani Nurick, Yale. “Unratified: California and the Forgotten Original Understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Ilani Nurick’s fine study of California’s ratification debates in the late 1860s over the Fourteenth Amendment helps explain how California became one of the last states to ratify, in 1959. First, concerns that the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Section 1 would enfranchise the state’s 50,000 Chinese Americans disturbed both Republicans and Democrats. Equally dreaded was that Section 2 could drastically reduce congressional representation for states that did not ratify, and that Section 3 could disenfranchise white voters. With all these nightmare scenarios, the vote against the amendment was overwhelming. None of these threats materialized but, as Nurick points out, “the assumption that the amendment was fundamentally addressed to political (rather than civil) rights, could have wide-ranging implications for voting rights cases today.”
Third place. AJ Stone Jonathan, Berkeley and San Jose State. “The Woman Witkin.”
This charming paper enables us to see the historian at work. By turning a gendered lens on legal giant Bernard Witkin, AJ Stone Jonathan reveals the equally formidable force of Alba Blanche Pichetto Kuchman Witkin. Witkin’s wife, and then his widow, ensured the maintenance of his legacy. As a publicist and philanthropist, she proved more effective than her talented but irascible husband. The paper is at once educational and enlightening.
