2020 Honorary Fellows
The Society was delighted to induct Paul Brand, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Joan W. Scott, Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School as honorary fellows on November 14, 2020. Read more about their contributions to the field of legal history in the citations crafted by our honors committee below.
Citation of Professor Paul Brand as an Honorary Fellow
Our first Honorary Fellow is Paul Brand, emeritus Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, and L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Professor Brand is, in the estimation of his many admirers, the finest living historian of the constitution and law of medieval England.
Professor Brand took his B.A. and M.A. at Oxford and his D.Phil., also at Oxford, in 1974. He was Assistant Keeper at what was then the Public Record Office in London from 1970 to 1976. From 1976 to 1983 he was Lecturer in Law at University College, Dublin, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London from 1983 to 1993. In 1997 he was appointed Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is currently an emeritus Fellow of All Souls and, since 2013, L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He has also held visiting positions at the law schools of Columbia University, Arizona State University, Emory University, and New York University, and at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in both the history and law sections in 1998 and of the Medieval Academy of America in 2012. He has been a councillor of the Selden Society since 1990 and its vice-president since 2002. He is an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple, London.
Professor Brand has been one of the leading and most prolific historians of English law for many decades. In two monographs, eight volumes of edited original texts, and over eighty book chapters, articles, and essays, he has reshaped the field. A scholar of remarkable range, he is as comfortable in the Anglo-Norman and Angevin periods as he is with the early Plantagenets. He has also read deeply in the Anglo-Saxon and later medieval periods. Within that span, it is the thirteenth-century–a period considered the most important formative period of English law–that he has made particularly his own. Even his most distinguished colleagues in the field remark with no little awe at his total mastery of the sources. He has used his vast knowledge to shape profoundly our knowledge of early legal literature, legal education, the emerging legal profession, the development of statute law, the relationship of developments in Ireland to the early common law, the relationship of Jews with the early common law, and the ways in which law shaped family relationships.
Professor Brand’s monographs are fundamental reading on thirteenth-century English law. His first, The Origins of the English Legal Profession, became the standard work on the subject, marked by its lucidity and deep learning. His second, Kings, Barons and Justices: The Making and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England, explores the interaction of law, society, and politics in the era of baronial reform under Henry III.
Professor Brand’s four volumes of Earliest English Law Reports for the Selden Society are truly magisterial. They include all the earliest surviving law reports from 1268 to 1290–from Westminster, the eyres and assizes, and the Exchequer of the Jews–as well as the plea roll enrollments for the cases when they can be identified. With these volumes Professor Brand made accessible the very first discussions of many aspects of the common law and revealed the first known occurrences of much of our legal terminology.
Professor Brand’s scholarship is impressive in its own right and amply merits electing him an Honorary Fellow of the Society. He has been honored with not one, but two festschriften, which attest to the fact that his immense and generously shared learning is a vital resource for all others working in the field. This latter quality–his generously shared learning–speaks to another qualification for election as Honorary Fellow. Professor Brand builds fields of scholarship. He is an inspiration and great support for scholars young and old. His generosity in commenting on the work of others is legendary. In fact, every colleague whose opinion the committee solicited commented with more than a little awe on Professor Brand’s remarkable unselfishness in helping others with their work. If Honorary Fellows of the Society are the scholars on whose shoulders we stand, Professor Brand has actively lifted scores of other scholars to his shoulders in pursuing new and invariably important questions in legal history.
In sum, Professor Brand has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others. Throughout his long career, he has modeled how historians should engage with the law–understanding and respecting its technical complexity, but constantly aware of the social and political contexts within which that technical complexity worked and which constantly shaped what it could achieve. He also models how historians should engage with their profession–publishing meticulous and path-breaking articles and books, editing and re-editing texts which allow others to expand the boundaries of the field, and engaging in collegial exchanges at gatherings large and small, with colleagues old and new, in a way which makes English legal history accessible and welcoming to all.
We are pleased and honored to welcome Professor Brand as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
Citation of Professor Joan Wallach Scott as an Honorary Fellow
Our next Honorary Fellow is Joan Wallach Scott, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Professor Scott is a transformative scholar of French social and labor history, the history of gender and feminism, and the history of civil liberties in the United States and in France.
Professor Scott received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1962 and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1969. She began her teaching career at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and from there moved to Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Brown University, where she was the founding director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. In 1985 she joined the Institute for Advanced Study, where she was Harry F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science.
Through a dozen monographs, another dozen edited volumes, and articles and book chapters too numerous to count, Professor Scott has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history. Her challenges have repeatedly won recognition from her colleagues in the profession. The American Historical Association alone has bestowed four awards on her, starting with the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in 1974 for her first book, The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a 19th-Century City; followed by the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in 1989 for her book, Gender and the Politics of History; the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 1995; and the Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2008. She holds honorary degrees from universities in the United States and Europe, and in 1999 the Hans Sigrist Foundation at the University of Bern awarded her its prize for her groundbreaking work in gender history. The influence of her work is truly international–her books and even some of her articles have been translated into multiple languages.
Professor Scott may not be a legal historian, but scholars who study the legal history of gender, feminist legal thought, or the legal history of secularism or of academic freedom–to take four core areas of modern legal historical scholarship–could not imagine their scholarship without her powerful and inescapable presence. For many of us in legal history, she is best known as the author of a series of path-breaking articles on methodology in history, which have had immense impact on our field as well as on others.
Taking just the legal history of gender, her work has transformed the practices of nearly everyone who works in the field. Her now-classic article, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”–in which she argued that studying gender explains not only women’s history, but history generally–challenged the reigning conventions in women’s history and continues to inspire innovative research. Without question, engagement with her scholarship has deepened what legal historians do.
Professor Scott’s survey of the history of French feminism opened up the history of feminism to legal historians. Beginning with her book, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, she has explored the gendering of citizenship and rights in modern representative democracies. Her demonstration that the concept of citizenship was from the start gendered as male and defined against a female “other” illuminated the dilemmas at the heart of rights claims, such as the paradox of women claiming “the rights of man.” In examining the continuing difficulties faced by feminists in their struggle for equality, her analysis has assisted scholars and activists focused on women, people with disabilities, and members of racial, ethnic, and sexual minority groups.
Her interest in the ways in which difference poses problems for democratic practice continued in subsequent books–most notably Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism and The Politics of the Veil. Her work on the veil enmeshed her as a willing and provocative combatant in legal controversies both in France and the United States about the meanings of secularism. Her careful analyses of the headscarf controversies in France became a model of how to explore such issues. Writ large, her scholarship traces the limits of liberalism, whether among French feminists or the American historical profession. Her work has made her an important voice for academic freedom.
Professor Joan Scott has also been an active and generous citizen of the profession. The center she created at Brown became a site for exploring feminist theory by historians and others in the humanities and social sciences who until that point had been mostly hostile to social theory. At the Institute for Advanced Study, she brought in generations of younger scholars, encouraged them, and guided them, as her work has guided so many others, legal historians included.
Professor Scott has always been a challenging presence. She has been described–admiringly–as spiky and uncompromising. Her work has often been controversial, good both to argue over and engage and argue with. Yet, it has always been essential. She does not need our accolades, but we have needed her and are grateful for what she has taught us. We are pleased and honored to welcome her as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
Citation of Professor Robert W. Gordon as an Honorary Fellow
It gives me enormous personal and professional pleasure to announce that my teacher and now colleague Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law at Stanford University and the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History (Emeritus) at Yale, is being named an Honorary Fellow of the ASLH. Through his extraordinarily influential scholarship and his remarkable generosity as a mentor, Professor Gordon has had a profound, transformative, and enduring influence on the field of legal history.
Gordon completed his law degree at Harvard in 1971. Thereafter, he went on to assume professorships at a series of excellent universities—SUNY Buffalo, Wisconsin, Stanford, and Yale. So too, he has held visiting professorships at top institutions around the globe, such as Harvard, Oxford, Toronto, and the European University Institute. He has given on the order of two dozen named lectures at leading universities and been awarded a broad range of prestigious fellowships. A deeply respected expert on legal ethics and the legal profession, he has served as a member of various task forces and advisory boards focused on such matters. And his service to the field of legal history has been especially extensive. Among many other activities in this arena, he served as a past president of the ASLH.
Professor Gordon has published more than 80 articles, essays, and book chapters. He has also published a number of edited volumes and is working on two book manuscripts. His writings have spanned a variety of topics, including the history of the legal profession and contracts. But he is most widely known for his highly influential essays on legal history and historiography.
Perhaps first and foremost within this remarkable groups of essays is “Critical Legal Histories.” In an extraordinary survey of myriad past approaches to understanding the relationship between law and society through time, Professor Gordon highlights their otherwise neglected commonality—namely, a “functionalist” conception of law as emerging to address social “needs,” which are naively (or cynically) imagined as somehow pre-existing and thus pre-political. Demolishing such functionalism, Gordon calls instead for an approach to history that respects the many contingencies in legal-historical development and attends to the ways that law and society are mutually constitutive. It is impossible to overstate the extraordinary influence of these ideas in shaping the legal history scholarship produced over the last forty or so years, and not only by scholars of U.S. legal history. Indeed, even as efforts have been made to question the paradigm of context and contingency, it remains quite clearly the reigning paradigm—or as one colleague puts it, the nature of Professor Gordon’s influence has been such that we all “operate in a Harold Bloomian anxiety of influence.”
Professor Gordon is also widely recognized as a, if not the, preeminent historian of the legal profession in the United States. Among the many distinctive virtues of his work in this arena is his tracing of the interconnections between on-the-ground efforts to pursue professional reform, on the one hand, and high legal thought, on the other. So too, it bears emphasis that his scholarship is widely admired not only for its substantive contributions, but also for its inimitable style. As another colleague writes, Professor Gordon is “our field’s greatest essayist,” whose “vintage . . . aperçus . . . make one laugh aloud and nod one’s head at Bob’s wisdom. No one is more fun to read. No one is smarter.”
Professor Gordon’s remarkable influence on the field of legal history, however, extends well beyond his scholarship. He has played a key role in training an incredible number of people in this (virtual) room, amounting to two or even three generations of legal historians. And they all both admire and adore him. He is always open to new ideas and to new people—and while he might not always agree with the ideas, he is unstinting in his willingness (and eagerness) to engage with them, respectfully and thoroughly. Indeed, as all in his wide orbit know, he spends untold hours on activities that do not earn a line on the CV but that mean everything in terms of creating and sustaining a vibrant and welcoming intellectual community. He teaches numerous one-on-one directed reading and research classes, comments extensively on papers and dissertation chapters, and writes a near endless stream of recommendation letters. And he does all of this in a way that combines his unique, Gordian mix of great generosity of spirit, on the one hand, and hard-headed, trenchant critique, on the other. The end result is that the beneficiaries of his wisdom are always lifted up—and in all possible senses.
For lifting us all, and the field of legal history as a whole, we are thrilled to welcome Professor Gordon as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.