The Art of the Review - Episode 31 Introducing H-Law's Legal History Podcast

Yelena Kalinsky Contribution
Audio file

In this special summer episode, we take a step back from reviewing to introduce listeners to H-Law's new legal history podcast. Robert interviews H-Law's podcast producer and host Siobhan Barco and we run in full her first episode, an interview with legal scholar Mary Ziegler, author of After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard University Press, 2015). From Siobhan's description of the episode:

Ziegler’s work uses the landmark American abortion rights case, Roe vs. Wade to explore litigation as a vessel for social change and the role the court plays in democracy. In addition to traditional archival research, Ziegler recorded over one hundred oral histories of people in the pro-life and pro-choice camps, allowing her to move beyond caricatures and delve more precisely into the  catalysts for these individual’s points of view.

Topics we discuss include:

(1)Whether Roe is overstated as a cautionary tale for judicial intervention

(2)How the bright line divide between the pro-life and pro-choice movements had not yet coalesced in the 1970s.

(3)Roe as a canvas onto which activists could project different strategic aims

 

Credits:

The Art of the Review is produced by Robert Cassanello and Yelena Kalinsky, and sponsored by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online and the University of Central Florida's Center for Humanities & Digital Research. The episode of H-Law's legal history podcast was produced by Siobhan Barco for the H-Law network. The intro music used in this episode is by Stephan Siebert.