News & Announcements
November 27, 2019
2019 Annual Meeting Prize, Honors, and Fellowship Winners
The ASLH is delighted to announce our 2019 prize, honors, and fellowship winners!
Cromwell Dissertation Prize
Winner: Jonathan Lande, “Disciplining Freedom: U.S. Army Slave Rebels and Emancipation During the Civil War”
At least since William Cooper Nell penned The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855, historians have linked African-American military service with manhood and citizenship. Black regiments in the Civil War have received considerable attention. Black service has rightly been deemed central to the North’s victory and an important step for both African-Americans’ assertion of sacrifice for and citizenship in the post-Civil War world. In his pathbreaking dissertation “Disciplining Freedom: U.S. Army Slave Rebels and Emancipation in the Civil War,” Jonathan Lande boldly argues that the conventional account is incomplete. Centering on the records of the courts martial and contextualizing them with administrative and personal sources, Lande uncovers deep northern anxiety about arming the formerly enslaved. Despite free labor ideological commitments, northern officers carried with them the albatross of slavery and white supremacy into courts martial proceedings against black soldiers. The courts martial produced minimalistic records, seemingly straightforward, and therefore deceptively equitable in their treatment of all soldiers, regardless of color. Lande’s textured reading of the records reveals them as sites of conflict. Far from being “schools” about the value of equal justice for the freedmen, these courts martial proceedings were means to discipline the formerly enslaved. For their part, freedmen continued on in their old traditions of resistance against oppression. Their experience of freedom and understanding of civic membership, Lande argues, was, in important ways, born of this struggle.
Cromwell Article Prize
Maggie Blackhawk, “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State,” 127 Yale Law Journal 1538 (2018)
“Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State,” by Maggie McKinley–now Blackhawk–of the Penn Law School in the Yale Law Journal, makes a robust and compelling case that finds the constitutional basis of the administrative state in core republican ideals grounded in the First Amendment’s protection of the right to petition Congress for relief. The article combines exhaustive archival and empirical research with a deft handling of administrative law and judicial process to offer provocative interventions into much of our received wisdom in those fields.
This article, which runs to a hundred pages, is an ambitious and impressive undertaking whose impact can be best appreciated as two skillfully combined articles. The first is an empirical study grounded in the “North America Petitions Project,” an original dataset compiled by a group of which Blackhawk was a co-principal investigator. The project assembled a database of some 500,000 petitions submitted to Congress from the 1790s through 1950, offering “an extended longitudinal view of the petition process.” Second, the article is also a robust intervention into several ongoing historical and legal debates. Above all, it rejects criticisms of the modern administrative state as a violation of constitutional separation of powers and a usurpation of authority – even as unconstitutional – and challenges Chadha’s holding the legislative veto to be unconstitutional. A citation such as this cannot do justice to the many virtues of this article, which ranges over more than two centuries of American legal history while engaging areas of several lively constitutional dispute. It is a worthy choice for such an important award.
Cromwell Book Prize
Winner: Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
Black Litigants is a tour de force of meticulous and arduous archival work, and the slow piecing together of documents to construct a nuanced, sophisticated and rich narrative. The work produces new historical knowledge regarding how free and enslaved black litigants in the antebellum South used local courts to make civil claims regarding debt, property, and contracts. Adding to this archival feat is how Welch writes with a strong and confident voice exploring what these cases tell us about law, race, and the slaveholding South.
Using local court documents from two parishes in Louisiana and two counties in Mississippi, Welsh constructs a detailed narrative of how some black people used courts to sue white people in local courts. The work incorporates and is in dialogue with other excellent scholarship on enslaved people who brought freedom suits. Yet where freedom suits had such significant consequences, Welch locates and analyzes more mundane and everyday claims. In fact, one of Welch’s central arguments is the very fact that such cases were unexceptional and that black plaintiffs won suits against whites on a regular basis. Welch carefully analyzes why this might be the case simultaneously recognizing the agency of black litigants, how law propped up and structured white supremacy, and how law was not hegemonic. Rather Black Litigants illustrates that judges, lawyers, and white people more generally had multiple competing interests and that, at least at times, ideas of property won out over, or at least co-existed with, ideas of white supremacy and slaveholding.
Welch provides a rich social history of local southern courts while also conveying a subtle and nuanced understanding of what law even is. She theorizes that law is a highly stylized language of claim making, a discourse, a way of shaping and telling stories that courts, lawyers, and others could recognize. Indeed, Welch herself provides us with new and significant stories that enhance our understanding of how local on-the-ground law operates and the spaces in which black litigants could assert their personhood, even citizenship, and partake in the public legal sphere.
Dudziak Prize
Co-winner: O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C. Law and Family (http://earlywashingtondc.org/) and its Anna Film (http://annwilliamsfilm.com/)
Co-winner: The Scottish Court of Sessions Digital Archive (http://scos.law.virginia.edu/)
The O Say Can You See Project merited the Dudziak Prize because it does more than merely put content online that could be digested in print form. Rather, it uses the internet platform to enable others to access 509 D.C. Circuit Court, Maryland state, and U.S. Supreme Court petitions for freedom. The creators have also modeled more than 55,000 relationships between the participants in these cases. They also included engaging essays by legal historians about these sources and the broader historical context. And, in 2018, the creators unveiled an 11-minute animated film, Anna, which has been widely used in secondary schools to teach students about the history of slavery and freedom. Overall, we were impressed by how this project harnessed the power of new media to excite the imaginations of current and future legal historians.
The Scottish Court of Sessions Digital Archive merited the Dudziak Prize because it is an ambitious multi-institutional effort to digitize Scottish sessions papers from the 1750s to 1840s, which are held by the University of Virginia Law Library and the Library of Congress. The project, which went public in 2018, consists of high-quality scans of approximately 10,000 documents, all expertly tagged using open source and exportable programming. These documents are especially valuable sources because they contain rich narratives of underrepresented groups in the British Atlantic world during the era of the American Revolution. This new archive should help facilitate research on women, enslaved persons, and laborers. Overall, we were impressed by the scholarly significance of this digital archive for the field of British Atlantic studies.
Honorary Fellows
Sally Falk Moore, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Harvard University and Affiliated Professor of International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School
Rebecca Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan
David Sugarman, Emeritus Professor of Law at the Law School of Lancaster University and Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London
Craig Joyce Medal Recipient
Rayman Solomon, University Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus, Rutgers-Camden
John Phillip Reid Book Prize
Winner: Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Deeply researched, beautifully crafted, and elegantly written, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America upends traditional narratives of the development of citizenship. Martha Jones shows how African Americans used legal and political strategies to claim rights, connect them to citizenship, and solidify their status as Americans. The book is an exemplary recovery of bottom-up constitutional advocacy pursued not only through litigation and social movements, but also through the aspirations and practices of ordinary people. As Jones reminds us, the law of the United States has been shaped as much by its people as its legal professionals and elected officials.
Peter Gonville Stein Book Award
Winner: Khaled Fahmy, In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2018)
Exploring the intersection of law and medicine, In Quest of Justice masterfully rewrites the legal history of nineteenth-century Egypt. The book persuasively argues that legal reform in the modern Middle East was tied to the centralization of state power rather than efforts to adopt Western legal norms. Fahmy’s focus on the siyasa courts and their neglected documents corrects a historiographical bias towards privileging the history of shari‘a courts. While important, shari‘a courts were just one of many legal orders that existed in the Middle East in this period. Fahmy demonstrates that the siyasa courts are vital for our understanding of the legal transformations of the nineteenth century. The book moves seamlessly through background information, historiography, case studies, and new findings that revise the field.
Honorable Mention: Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018)
Surrency Article Prize
Catherine L. Evans, “Heart of Ice: Indigenous Defendants and Colonial Law in the Canadian North-West,” LHR 36: 2 (May 2018): 199-234
Catherine L. Evans’ essay offers a compelling account of a deeply eerie incident in the late nineteenth-century Canadian Northwest Territory, the killing of an older woman believed to be a wendigo (malevolent spirit) by three Cree men who were acting in accordance with Cree law, their subsequent criminal trial, and the balance struck between Cree and colonial law by colonial officials in mitigation. The article offers an extremely subtle assessment of legal pluralism on a colonial frontier by arguing that the trial of the wendigo killers must be incorporated with the better-known corpus of trials held in the aftermath of Louis Riel’s contemporaneous territorial “rebellion,” which displayed a completely different face of the colonial state. This memorable essay avoids easy answers without dismissing prior scholarship, exhibits excellent research, and demands that the reader consider deeply both the brutalities and the cracks in colonial law.
Sutherland Article Prize
Winner: Patrick Weil and Nicholas Handler, “Revocation of Citizenship and Rule of Law: How Judicial Review Defeated Britain’s First Denaturalization Regime,” LHR 36: 2 (May 2018): 295-354
Denaturalization, a policy which deprives subjects of their citizenship, originated in the United States (1906). Adopted by Britain via the Nationality and Status of Aliens Acts of 1914 and 1918, it fell out of use after the Second World War but remained on the statute books. While the power to revoke citizenship was not used at all between 1973 and 2000, in the past decade the Home Office has demonstrated a new willingness to apply the law, revoking the citizenship of ‘at least 373 individuals’ in that period. Weil and Handler’s article explores the history of denaturalization, considering both its decline and recent resurgence. They argue that a provision of the BNSA Act of 1918 created a system of judicial review for decisions made within the Home Office that limited and eventually extinguished the powers of that office where denaturalization was concerned. Legislative changes in 2002 replaced the committee-based review, which had served to protect individual rights, with a ‘significantly more deferential’ and often secretive form of oversight. Original in terms of both its primary sources and argument, Weil and Handler’s article also offers an intriguing take on the broader issue of national belonging which has garnered so much attention in recent years in Anglo-American scholarship.
Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Papp Kamali, “Trial by Ordeal by Jury in Medieval England, or Saints and Sinners in Literature and Law,” in Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller (Leiden: Brill, 2018)
Cromwell Fellowships
Cromwell Fellowships were awarded to the following recipients:
Michelle Bezark, PhD Candidate, Northwestern University: “’A Bill for Better Babies’: The Sheppard-Towner Act and Building a Modern Welfare State”
Hardeep Dhillon, PhD Candidate, History, Harvard University: “Indians on the Move: Law, Borders, and Freedoms at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”
Signe Fourmy, PhD Candidate, History, University of Texas at Austin: “They Chose Death Over Slavery: Enslaved Women and Infanticide in the Antebellum South”
Jose Argueta Funes, JD, Yale Law School, PhD Candidate, Princeton University: “Past as Authority: Law, Property, and Reform in Hawai’i, 1840-1920”
Jamie Grischkan, JD, University of Michigan Law School; PhD Candidate, History, Boston University: “Banking, Law, and American Liberalism: The Rise and Regulation of Bank Holding Companies in the Twentieth Century”
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, PhD Candidate, Art History, Cornell University: “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement: Origins and Afterlives in Art and Law”
Amanda Kleintop, PhD, History, Northwestern University: “The Balance of Freedom: Abolishing Property Rights in Slaves after the US Civil War”
David Korostyshevsky, PhD Candidate, History, University of Minnesota: “’Incapable of Managing His Estate’: Habitual Drunkenness and Guardianship Law in Nineteenth-Century America”
Naama Maor, PhD Candidate, History, University of Chicago: “Delinquent Parents: Power and Responsibility in Progressive-Era Juvenile Justice”
Bharath Palle, S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School: “Wesley Hohfeld and the Struggle for a Legal Science”
Natalie Shibley, PhD, History and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania: “Race, Homosexuality, and Military Justice, 1941-1993”
Lila Teeters, PhD Candidate, History, University of New Hampshire: “Native Citizens: The Contest over U.S. Indigenous Citizenship, 1880-1924”
Lael Weinberger, JD/PhD Candidate, History, University of Chicago: “The Politics of International Law in the United States, 1912-1954”
Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars
Ofra Bloch, J.S.D. Candidate, Yale, “The Untold History of Israel’s Affirmative Action for Arab Citizens, 1946-1968”
Brianna Lane Nofil, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia, “‘Chinese Jails’ and the Birth of Immigration Detention for Profit, 1900-1905”
