News & Announcements
November 16, 2020
2020 Annual Meeting Prize, Honors, and Fellowship Winners
The ASLH is delighted to announce our 2020 prize, honors, and fellowship winners!
Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize
Sean Fraga of the University of Southern California for “They Came on Waves of Ink: Pacific Northwest Maritime Trade at the Dawn of American Settlement, 1851-1861,” https://seanfraga.com/wavesofink/.
“They Came on Waves of Ink” makes wonderfully creative and compelling use of digital technologies to bring a dusty legal source—a nineteenth-century federal ledger from the Puget Sound Customs District—to life. As Fraga’s site explains, “But if the ledger is like a window onto the past, then its meticulous lines of data are like blinds, closed and shut tight. There is no plot here, no story; the characters float loose on a non-narrative sea. Digital analysis is a way of curling open the blinds—to see what lies on the other side.” By transcribing, analyzing, and visualizing thousands of scribbled ledger lines, Fraga enriches our understanding of the circuits of commerce and administrative power in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. His site should inspire legal historians to use digital tools to re-imagine their sources and to uncover elusive historical connections that lie on the other side.
Cromwell Article Prize
Maureen Brady of Harvard Law School for “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds,” The Yale Law Journal 128, no. 4 (2019): 872–1173.
The subject of “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds” would not seem promising—the long forgotten colonial method of town lot demarcation by metes and bounds. Though regarded by historians as a relic deserving only antiquarian interest, in Brady’s hands it commands our attention as a vital legal tool that enabled communities to use the law to craft a legal order for an uncharted terrain through the creation of property rights. It has long been a commonplace that recording boundaries and conferring title create something we call “property,” but Brady’s article expands our understanding of the social and economic role of property rights as they functioned in practice. Her mastery of seemingly arcane procedures and the legal rights they created reveals the many ways that the law of metes and bounds provided a supple and flexible means of securing the property rights that served the social and economic ordering necessary to foster communities bound together by law. The reliance on impermanent features of a local landscape–such as trees or heaps of stones–might seem to produce only confusion and discord; indeed, conventional economic theory treats it as impeding market transactions, thus slowing growth. To the contrary, Brady illustrates the capacity for legal history to destabilize commonly-held assumptions about the law’s effects on capital and markets. More specifically, she takes aim at the idea that standardization of property forms facilitates market transactions by lowering information costs. She shows that customization of property is not necessarily inefficient. Rather, it is a rational strategy to promote growth within local, closely-bound communities. Brady’s article illustrates the use of legal history to complicate the empirical claims of law and economics.
Cromwell Book Prize
Sam Erman of the University of Southern California for Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
For subtlety, nuance, and complexity of analysis by a junior scholar, this is the best book in a year in which many superb books were nominated. Erman makes important and ambitious claims about the evolving constitutional meaning of citizenship in the U.S. empire after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. The book vividly recounts and perceptively analyzes the debates between and among Puerto Rican and U.S. judges, lawyers, administration officials, and legislators over the denial of full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. Erman shows how post-Civil War conceptions of full citizenship, rights, and statehood gave way to a regime of constitutionally permissible racist imperial governance.
Cromwell Dissertation Prize
Sonia Tycko of Oxford University for “Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2019).
In an extraordinarily creative and imaginative dissertation, “Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America,” Sonia Tycko explores the repeated appearance of consent as part of the meaning of compulsory service in the early modern period. The appearance of language of consent in contracts by people who had no right to refuse was not a veneer disguising coercion or an understanding of labor as a communal resource. Instead, this “coerced consent” expressed practices and understandings associated with the origins of “freedom of contract.” As she innovatively argues, “consent was a tool for masters to discipline and appropriate the labor of the less powerful.” Her argument carefully explains how, as far back as the late sixteenth century, consent became a way to distinguish coerced labor from slavery with “an air of civility” while nonetheless still designed to reproduce inequalities rather than to create equality. By revealing this dynamic—sometimes seen as part of nineteenth or twentieth century labor history—in the early modern period, Tycko forces us to reconsider the very foundations of consent and contract and makes a signal contribution to the historiography on contract, labor, and freedom. Tycko also offers nuanced readings of an impressive array of primary sources and reveals the social realities against which a vocabulary about contract arose in particular labor relationships, from indentured servitude to military impressment to kidnapping. She mines documents that others might skim and brings to the surface the way in which the very words betray underlying power dynamics. The important transatlantic lens persuasively establishes her argument as part of larger seventeenth-century English assumptions, in Great Britain and the British colonies. This dissertation rewards the reader on every page—and, impressively, becomes even more interesting on rereading. Tycko’s dissertation serves as a model of the well-crafted and carefully executed dissertation in legal history.
Sutherland Prize
Simon Newman of the University of Glasgow for “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780,” The English Historical Review 134, no. 570 (December 21, 2019): 1136–68.
Simon P. Newman’s ‘Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780’ explores the experience of enslaved Africans who were brought to Britain in the eighteenth century from North America. It demonstrates that in a society where the legal status of slaves was unsettled – even after landmark cases such as Somerset v. Stewart – the lives of Africans brought to England remained precarious. Using newspaper accounts, legal records and visual sources, it shows how familiar the British were with the buying and selling of slaves or the use of the press to offer rewards for the return of those who had run away. In so doing, this pathbreaking article sheds important new light on the experience of slave lives in England and Scotland, and how the very ambiguity of English law allowed owners to continue to treat as their enslaved servants as property.
Honorable Mention: Emily Kadens of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law for “Cheating Pays,” Columbia Law Review 119 (2019): 527-589.
Surrency Prize
Kaius Tuori of the University of Helsinki for “Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War II,” Law and History Review 37, no. 2 (May 2019): 605–38.
We are delighted to announce that the prize for the best article published in Volume 37 (2019) of the Law and History Review goes to Kaius Tuori for his exceptionally important article, “Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War II,” published in the May issue. Tuori’s article provides us with a fascinating account of the formation of the “European Idea” in the aftermath of World War Two, and its reliance on a claim to a shared European legal culture founded in Roman law – a particular feature of German scholarship. The centrality of law and legal institutions to European union has been a major theme of modern European legal history: Indeed, it was a major theme in the formation of our sister society, the European Society for Comparative Legal History. But in that identification of law and legal history with the European idea too little attention has been paid to narrative origins. Tuori remedies that gaping hole, and in the process shows how the postwar transition of scholars such as Franz Wieacker from active proponent of Nazi legal science to esteemed Europeanist and Roman law traditionalist resulted in a hybrid narrative of European legal history that incorporated elements of the Nazi narrative of Europe in the return to Roman law. The complicated process was nudged along too by German legal scholars in both geographical exile and “inner” exile who produced Roman law studies that served as counter-narratives to Nazi legal reformers’ efforts to replace the civil law tradition with national German law in the law curriculum and the law books. Tuori’s essay is not only a fine piece of research, it is compelling and important intellectual history.
John Phillip Reid Book Award
Rande W. Kostal of Western Law School for Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Harvard University Press, 2019).
R. W. Kostal’s Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Harvard University Press, 2019) depicts the staggering tasks of remaking the legal landscape of defeated Axis powers after World War II. This project envisioned replacing fascist legal orders with liberal ones committed to individual rights and the rule of law. On this foundation, it was supposed, democracy could be built. Working with the self-interested jurists and bureaucrats of the defeated nations, Americans often operated, especially in the case of Japan, with only the vaguest notions of the legal systems they set out to reconstruct. Kostal contributes to the history of American foreign policy and to the comparative history of the rule of law by showing the accomplishments, hubris, and limitations of laying down the law. Perhaps the largest contribution of his well-researched and thoughtful book is to explore how and why liberal nations after World War II came to think they had the right to reshape in their own image the legal orders of conquered countries.
Peter Gonville Stein Book Award
Fei-Hsien Wang of Indiana University for Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2019)
This is a fascinating study of an important but underanalyzed topic – the contested and dynamic process of the emergence of “modern” copyright law in China from the 1890s through the 1950s. Highly innovative in its analysis and magisterially executed, the book offers a brilliant interdisciplinary history of how authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers negotiated with one another. Uncovering market practices in the “new knowledge” economy, Wang maps the everyday life of copyright and piracy in relation to the emerging modern state and “new knowledge.” This exceedingly rigorous, subtle, and well-researched book has major implications for understanding the interplay among law, society, culture, and politics not only in modern China but also in many places with similarly complicated experiences with modernity.
Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Papp Kamali of Harvard Law School for Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Jane Burbank Article Prize
Bianca Premo of Florida International University and Yanna Yannakakis of Emory University for “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (February 1, 2019): 28–55.
“A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond” studies how jurisdiction was understood and produced by Mixtec actors in southern Mexico. Premo and Yannakakis’s case study of a land dispute between two rivaling villages show how communities adapted and translated imperial law and Iberian judicial practices into local understandings of jurisdiction, thereby inserting jurisdiction into the legal repertoires available to native peoples. The authors focus on a routine community dispute case that was never submitted to the jurisdiction of higher imperial authorities in Madrid or Rome, or even in the venerated General Indian Court of Mexico City. Rather, this dispute emerged in the outskirts of empire, and their study illuminates how people molded jurisdiction and litigiousness to their own cultural norms. Carefully researched and clearly written, readers see that jurisdiction at the edges of empire was much broader than indigenous people’s use of courts and recourse to the law. As the authors note, global legal orders may be studied through notarial documents and imperial codes, however “native subjects” built those orders—literally with “sticks and branches” on the muddy fields of a makeshift court in Teposcolula, Mexico
Honorary Fellows
Paul Brand, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Joan W. Scott, Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study
Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.
You can read more about these scholars’ tremendous achievements here.
Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars
Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University, for her paper, “‘Los Hijos Son La Riqueza Del Probre:’ Postwar Mexican Child Migration and the Making of Domestic (Im)migrant Exclusion, 1940-1965.”
Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez gives us a spellbinding sociolegal history of twentieth century child migrants at the borders outside and within the United States. Most scholars have focused on US officials’ concentration on single males after World War II. Padilla-Rodríguez employs overlooked sources to shine a spotlight on the many forms of rights violations Latinx children and their parents have endured between 1940 and 1965. She demonstrates the complicity of welfare and government officials in confining non-citizen children in detention center “cages” and in deporting them on “penal hell” ships. She shows, too, how those officials criminalized non-citizen and U.S. citizen children for their labor mobility and academic truancy and deprived them of access to a quality education. In Padilla-Rodriguez’s gifted hands, contemporary policies of immigration detention emerge as part of a long, sad history, rather than as a fresh departure.
Smita Ghosh, a graduate of Penn Law School and a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania, for her paper, “Policing the ‘Police State’: Detention, Supervision, and Deportation During the Cold War.”
Smita Ghosh offers a fascinating account of the fight against the detention, supervision, and deportation of “red,” or communist, aliens. Her imaginative archival research shows how the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and its lawyers seized on the language of the Cold War to depict the McCarran Internal Security Act as a threat to the American “way of life” that would encourage “Gestapo-type” tactics and promote a “police state.” They also capitalized on the whiteness and assimilability of Eastern European aliens in the United States; their undeportable status because other countries refused to accept them; and the growing corpus of administrative law. The American Committee and its lawyers won the release of detained immigrants and limited the most draconian efforts to supervise non-deportable non-citizens. “Policing the ‘Police State’” provides a rare “success story” for “undesirable” aliens during the Cold War era and an extraordinarily illuminating prism on the expansion of state power.
Cromwell Fellowships
Giuliana Perrone is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is in the process of turning her dissertation into a book entitled, The Problem of Emancipation in the Age of Slavery: Law and Abolition after the U.S. Civil War. Perrone’s work argues that although slave emancipation occurred after the Civil War, slavery itself persisted, enacted through mechanisms of private law doctrine, including contract, property, and debt relations. The work further explores how Southern judges continued to apply pre-war private law doctrine which served to quickly close the possibility of real freedom for former slaves.
Marie-Amélie George is an Assistant Professor at Lake Forest Law School. She is in the process of revising her dissertation into a book entitled, Attaining Equality: How American Law Came to Protect Gays and Lesbians. The book examines how gay and lesbian rights became recognized in such a short period of time in the late twentieth century. Instead of examining high court opinions she argues that much of the work was done at the state and local levels, via shifts in family and criminal law, as these are the legal fields that regulate the daily life. Such everyday law consequently shaped conceptions of gays and lesbians as community members. The work makes this argument by exploring debates between criminologists, social workers, school boards deciding on curriculum, and everyday custody decisions made in family court. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, the very conception of what it meant to be gay or lesbian had shifted from a harmful deviation to a benign difference.
Paul M. B. Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, and currently a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Law at the University of California Berkeley. He is in the process of revising his dissertation into a book, entitled, Colonizing through Contract: The Settler Colonial Entanglements of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Gutierrez’s research centers on the history of the corporation as an agent of colonization and state formation in early America. More specifically, his research addresses the post-Revolutionary reception of the corporate and colonial charters that for two hundred years had been the primary means by which the English Crown commissioned modes of government and enterprise for transoceanic commerce and settlement. His work further explores the place of the corporation in the legal history of American settler-colonialism, situating the Marshall Court’s jurisprudence and the theory of the corporation alongside decisions regarding contracts clause and land claim cases arising from the rapid development and speculation in lands occupied by Indian tribes.
Jilene Chua is a PhD candidate in History at John Hopkins University who is writing her dissertation on U.S. imperial rule in the Philippines and how law shaped this colonial relationship. Its working title is Chinese Encounters in the Philippines Under U.S. Legal Colonialism. The dissertation identifies how particularly tense relations between the Chinese community and the native Filipino population, erupted and waned at certain moments and how U.S. rule and law stoked such tensions through property rights, citizenship, and particular racialized and gendered concepts of the juridical being. More specifically, she examines a long series of legal cases brought by Chinese litigants in the Philippines, which ranged from co-wives vying for the property of their deceased Chinese husband to commercial cases where Chinese merchants challenged the legitimacy of laws that outlawed Mandarin-language record keeping. Whereas legal historians have produced excellent work on U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, there has been little scholarship on the how law worked in Philippines under U.S. colonialism.
Michael McGovern is a PhD candidate at Princeton who is working on his dissertation entitled Just in Numbers? Statistics and Civil Rights in the Postwar United States. The dissertation explores debates over statistical proof in two core areas of late twentieth century constitutional jurisprudence – death penalty cases and employment discrimination cases. He examines how litigants and other legal actors mobilized statistics for instrumental purposes and the changing ways that statistics were both produced, understood, and deployed. In the process, he unpacks the rhetorical moves by advocates and statisticians as they sought to stake a particular position for particular purposes. The dissertation stands at the important intersection of legal history and the history of science.
Small Grants Award Winners
A special offering in 2020 for graduate students conducting digital research. Funded by gifts from ASLH members.
Alexander M. Cors of Emory University, whose project is entitled, “Colonialism on the Move: Land and Legal Disputes in the Mississippi Valley, 1760-1810.”
Amanda Faulkner of Columbia University, whose project is entitled, “Making Identity in the Early Modern Dutch World.”
Elsa Hardy of Harvard University, whose project is entitled, “A Visit to the Red House: Conjugal Visitation on Parchman Farm, 1918-2016.”
Miriam F. Lipton of Oregon State University, whose project is entitled, “Bacteriophages and Antibiotics: How the Soviets and Americans Dealt with a Public Health Crisis when Faced with New Tools.”
Chao Ren of the University of Michigan, whose project is entitled, “Oily Arguments: Institutional Disputes and Native Property Rights in Colonial Burma.”
Doris Morgan Rueda of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose project is entitled, “Saving The Bad Kids, Caging Los Chicos Malos: Juvenile Justice and Racialized Surveillance in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1900-1970.”
2020 Student Research Colloquium
Nicole Breault (University of Connecticut)
Marjorie Carvalho de Souza (University of Naples)
Hannah Hicks (Vanderbilt University)
Aden Knaap (Harvard University)
Michael McGovern (Princeton University)
Katherine Sinclair (Rutgers University)
Heather Walser (Penn State University)
Grace Watkins (Oxford University)