iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I would also be surprised if they had considered what a terrible, terrible Pandora’s Box they are opening by giving people material reasons to doubt the legitimacy of criminal convictions.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I had thought that one merit of the British Constitution was generally agreed to be its reluctance for certain drastic measures to be taken without careful deliberation by more than a mere handful of people. Lettres de cachet are very efficient—why not introduce them to clear the backlog?

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The phrase “criminals accused of relatively minor crimes” would seem to contain a rather significant presumption.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I am provisionally inclined to agree that the typical impact of additional time on timed, open-book exams (as opposed to timed, closed-book exams) is likely to differ materially in some ways. But it is a complex question, and obviously dependent on the format of the exam.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

(In the case of the latter, partly because it seems unlikely that such genuine panic attacks would be strictly limited to the exam setting. But then I am not a professional, and would have to defer to an individual assessment conducted by one.)

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

If the anxiety is very specifically connected with the time limited nature of the exam, then probably (I am not a doctor) the threshold is not met. But if there is a pattern of bona fide panic attacks, then probably yes, the threshold is met, I would conjecture.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I consider it as very doubtful that the extra time afforded to a student with GAD actually tends very much, if ever, to make them feel relaxed. 3/3

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

My understanding is that the rationale for a dispensation of extra time for a student with GAD would be that it would leave room for the exam to provide a more accurate picture of what the student knows, because the extra time accommodates the ruminative distractions & delays associated with GAD /2

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

But one premise of the question also doesn’t entirely strike me as correct either. 1/

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

But it’s very important to avoid the fallacy whereby some disorders, which are outsize versions of things that everyone experiences to a more moderate extent, are deemed not to be real disorders. Thus the importance of professional assessment to determine whether it crosses the clinical threshold.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Many people are frequently anxious, distracted, or depressed to some degree, and the range of what could, in the way of those, be considered part of a normal response to stressful circumstances expands in tandem with the magnitude of the stressors.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I think that what you are describing could perhaps be a presentation of a generalized anxiety disorder (not specific to law school context, but exacerbated by it). But like depressive disorders and ADHD, GAD is a disorder of degree, and requires professional assessment.

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Jonathan Gienapp @jgienapp.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

The issue is out! Once it’s available online (it’ll be open access for thirty days!), I’ll post about the forum on the Dickinson documents discovery that I was so excited to help organize.

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Jonathan Gienapp @jgienapp.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Happy 250th! For an interesting wrinkle to the whole thing, check out the exciting discovery below. 👇🏻

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

(I am not sure that my many Lexingtonian progenitors would approve of my liking this post!)

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

"Let's fix the sittings of the court according to a truly preposterous calendar, in order to ensure that historians shall be cross with us in the future!"

Note that the foure first dayes of thys terme be certain and vnchanged. The other are altered after the course of the yere, and sometime kept and somtime omitted. For if it so happen that one of those feastes fall on Wednesdaye commonly called Ashwednesday, after the day of S. Blase (so that the same law day after Ashwednesday cannot bee kept bycause the lawday of thother feast doth lyght on the same) then the seconde law day after Ashwednesday shall be kept, and the other omitted. And if the lawday after that wednesday be the next daye after the feast of s. Blase, then shall all & euery those court daies be obserued in order, as they may be kept conueniently. And marke although that Ashwednesday be put the seauenth in order, yet it hath

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

…are there really very many nineteenth-century English novels that don’t include a sentence of the form “I pray you will hasten at once to Twiddledon, for I fear that Xandra is liable soon to succumb to her Affliction altogether!!”

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

…what about the thousands and thousands and thousands of Protestant refugees received by England in the sixteenth century?

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Jonathan Gienapp @jgienapp.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Deeply saddened to learn of Gordon Wood's passing. Few have had an equal impact on the study of the American Founding, or on my own intellectual development. No book is more responsible for making me a historian of early constitutional history than Wood's *The Creation of the American Republic*.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

A Certain Much Adored Historian might quip, with his picture of More on a shelf behind him: “How fitting that bloodsuckers should look for sustenance in St German, only to perish! His was a mind of the second rate.”

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

…only now realizing that I am the Johnsonian parody… (“therefore I shall tell you that Britain can, by my care, boast of a snail that has crawled upon the wall of China…the tooth of an elephant which carried the queen of Siam…sand scraped from the coffin of king Richard…a tobacco-pipe of Raleigh…”)

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Tamara Atkin @tamarajatkin.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Pretty niche question for you rare book cataloguers: can you point me to examples of flies or other insects either caught in early printed books, or trapped in ink during production?

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I also have a mosquito in an early c. 17 edition of Doctor and Student!

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

In my (defective) copy of ESTC S112894!

Insect leg stuck in a copy of ESTC S112894.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I have a sixteenth-century English book with an insect leg caught in a piece of paper!

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Daniel F Gosling @thegozfather.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Not long now until the 2026 British Legal History Conference at the University of Nottingham. I'll be there speaking about estreats of fines for the Court of Star Chamber, a great resource that helps us piece together Star Chamber process.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

that ys not trewe but that ys trewe but that ys not trewe

dialogue in untidy early Elizabethan secretary hand

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

p: why syr in obeying god I do not dysobey my prynce b: but in dysobeyinge your prynce in thys, you dysobey both god and the prynce

dialogue written in untidy mid-sixteenth century English secretary hand

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

One is so grateful for the survival of Elizabethan sentences given in Delegates!

Parchment membranes on which are written sentences of the so-called High Court of Delegates.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

MIT was, in fact, once home to Dard Hunter’s paper museum, devoted to that very subject! But it was not adequately appreciated, and is now at Georgia Tech.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

I add here an obligatory reference:

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Or thread, or ribbons, or strips of parchment rolled up into quasi-thread...

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I concede that neither the secondary literature nor the primary sources are unequivocally clear on this point.

Cat footprints in an ecclesiastical legal formulary.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Surely the cat is the archive's more natural friend!

Excerpt from "Walking by Itself: The Singular History of the Chinese Cat", by Barrett and Strange.

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Daniel F Gosling @thegozfather.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Very few sign-ups for the in-person document sessions on 16 and 17 June. Please circulate with PhD students etc who use legal records in their research (or I won't be able to run the sessions this year). I can promise witchcraft, treason, and all that good stuff (if it runs). Details via the thread.

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Harry Spillane @harryspillane.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW: 'Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible' - £25 A study of how the English Bible became a bestseller, charting the innovations, errors, rivalries and bankruptcies behind the 'book of books' Coming September 2026 tinyurl.com/2p3cdmwp

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

This is great! (I, too, keep a file on document storage —but in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries! It is always so gratifying to actually see the mode of storage with one’s own eyes.)

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I find I’ve lately come around on the Pipe Rolls. E 372 certainly isn’t the most wieldy PRO class, but sometimes it’s very useful, even at a late date!

A photograph of a manifoldly membranaceous pipe roll, in the map room of the Public Record Office of the United Kingdom at Kew.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Needless to say that many Britons of the eighteenth century perceived it as an event of some significance:

thus was completed for us that noble structure of freedom, which the Revolution established. It was planned in wisdom, and founded in justice; and it was erected on the ruins of a royal house—a glorious and awful monument, to tell mankind—THERE IS NO GREATNESS OR DOMINION ON EARTH SO SACRED, BUT IT MUST FALL BEFORE THE LIBERTIES OF THE PEOPLE.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

(Complex as one’s feelings this year may be of course.)

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

And it will be especially appropriate this year to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States in the study of “the free system of English laws”.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

It’s always hard to experience so much excitement and delight and then wait two whole years for the next occasion.

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Adam B. Forsyth @adambforsyth.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

People could also come to the British Legal History Conference in Nottingham, 1-4 July 2026! Registration is open until 20 April…

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