2023 ASLH Election
ASLH 2023 Election: President Elect, Nominating Committee, and Board of Directors
Candidate Statements
President-Elect
Mitra Sharafi: I am a legal historian of South Asia and Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law and Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with History affiliation. My first book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 appeared in the ASLH’s Studies in Legal History series and won the Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association (LSA). I am now completing a book manuscript called “Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia.” My next project will be a history of global legal education, exploring the non-European student experience at London’s Inns of Court, 1860s-1960s. I have published articles on forum shopping, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and abortion in journals like Law and History Review and Modern Asian Studies. I host the South Asian Legal History Resources website and am a former Legal History Blogger.
I have attended the ASLH almost every year since 2000, and have been faculty host of the Hurst Institute, Program Committee co-chair, Stein Book Award Committee chair, and Nominating Committee and Board member.
The ASLH has been an energizing and inspiring scholarly home for me. It will be a great honor to serve as president. I will work to continue building a diverse and globalized community of scholars and scholarship that supports members at multiple career stages while reaching larger publics and adapting to the shifting technological landscape. I bring to the table experience with the LSA and the Annual Conference on South Asia.
Board of Directors (vote for five of the following ten)
Fahad Ahmad Bishara: I am an Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and I work at the intersection of legal and economic history in the Indian Ocean and broader Islamic world. My book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (2017) won prizes from the American Society for Legal History, the Law and Society Association, and the World History Association. Though I work in transregional settings, I principally think of myself as a legal historian, and I consider the ASLH to be my primary professional home. I’ve served on the Hurst Funds Committee (2013); the Program Committee (member, 2019-21, and co-chair, 2021-22); and as a member of the editorial board for Law and History Review (2017-Present). I’ve also served on the J. Willard Hurst prize committee for Law and Society Association (2019).
I’ve worked to increase the visibility of work on South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and to make the conference more accessible to graduate students and junior scholars working on (and working from) those areas. As a board member, I would maintain my commitment to a more intellectually diverse field, in which the ASLH showcases scholarship outside of the Euro-American contexts in which its traditional strengths lie. Moreover, I would like to see the Society sustain its support for its graduate student members: the ASLH offers excellent graduate student support, and I want to see this dimension of the Society’s work reach new heights.
Deborah Dinner: I am a professor at Cornell Law School and a legal historian of gender, work, and the U.S. welfare regime. My book, titled The Sex Equality Dilemma: Work, Family, and Legal Change in Neoliberal America, is forthcoming in the Cambridge Studies in Legal History Series. I have also published numerous articles analyzing childcare policy and pregnancy discrimination, gender in public accommodations, masculinity and divorce law, and labor regulation. I am now working on a new project exploring historical debates about antidiscrimination and actuarial logics in insurance.
I am deeply grateful for the mentorship, friendships, and intellectual dialogues nurtured by the ASLH. I have also tried to give back to this community. I served as Chair of the Surrency Prize Selection Committee (2022-2023) and as a member of the Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize Selection Committee (2019-2021) and of the John Reid Book Prize Selection Committee (2014-2015). I also co-chaired the fundraising effort to endow the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History Fellowship in honor of Reva Siegel and co-edited the legal history section of JOTWELL for several years.
I would welcome the opportunity to serve on the ASLH Board of Directors. If elected, I would focus on advancing the Society’s efforts to broaden and to diversify its membership, via outreach across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. I would also work to strengthen further the already excellent programs supporting junior scholars. Last, I would consider ways to foster the Society’s rich scholarly conversations beyond existing forums.
Myisha S. Eatmon: I am an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at Harvard. I did my graduate work in History at Northwestern. My in-progress first book, Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture, White Violence, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies, explores how Black Americans used tort law to challenge white violence during Jim Crow, strengthening what I call “Black legal culture.” It also rethinks what “legal education” meant for Black lawyers at a time when formal opportunities were severely constrained.
Those who know me know that the ASLH is and has been my intellectual home since 2017. The ASLH has raised me as a legal historian. I was a 2017 SRC participant, 2018 Preyer Scholar, 2019 Hurst Fellow, 2021-2022 Wallace Johnson Fellow, and 2021 Cromwell Early Career Scholar. I am currently on the Standing Committee for the Annual Conference and the 2023 J. Willard Hurst Fellowship Selection Committee.
Since joining, I have made it my mission to serve the ASLH in any way possible (long-standing members who know me know this to be true) and to bring in as many diverse legal historians as possible. I want legal historians of color to find their homes in ASLH as I did six years ago. As a member of our Board, I would continue to advocate things that would attract more junior scholars, scholars of color, scholars with disabilities, and scholars from lesser-funded institutions. I would be honored to continue to serve the Society by serving on our Board.
Dan Ernst: I am the Carmack Waterhouse Professor Legal History at the Georgetown University Law Center, where I have taught since 1988, after joining the ASLH a few years earlier. I am the author of Lawyers against Labor (1995), for which I received the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize, and Tocqueville’s Nightmare (2014), and I am at work on a book on New Deal lawyers. I was a co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the Society’s book series, from 2002-2010. Currently, with Karen Tani, I co-moderate Legal History Blog.
ASLH has been my disciplinary home throughout my career. I would bring to the Board of Directors experience from my service to the Society, including my current position as co-chair, with Catherine Fisk, of the Publications Committee and my previous chairing of the Local Arrangements Committee, the Program Committee, the Nominating Committee and the Book Prize Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee to the Cromwell Foundation. I would also bring an awareness that some of the insights my experience might suggest were inapt because of the greater diversity in the identities and interests of the Society’s members since I last served on the Board of Directors (1999-2002).
Elizabeth Papp Kamali: I am a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. My first book, Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (2019), which appeared in the ASLH’s Studies in Legal History series, explored the role of mens rea in felony cases during the first two centuries of the English criminal jury. I have articles forthcoming on the role of consent in marriage formation and in criminal activity implicating spouses and on the relationship between “intentionalism” in the literary context and in medieval English felony adjudication. Continuing in this interdisciplinary vein, my current research includes a study of insanity and intoxication in medieval English law as well as various projects exploring confluences between English and continental European law after the abolition of trial by ordeal.
A member since 2001, I presented my first conference paper at an ASLH meeting and have ever since considered the ASLH an academic home. I have been an Associate Editor for Law and History Review since 2017 and served on the Nominating Committee from 2020 to 2023 (co-chairing it two years) and on the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2019 ASLH meeting in Boston. The Society has long demonstrated its commitment to building a vibrant community of legal historians working on a broad geographic and temporal range of scholarship, and to furthering the success of junior scholars during their graduate studies, on the teaching market, and in their crucial first teaching years. As a Board member, I would be honored to amplify such goals.
Amalia Kessler: A professor of law and (by courtesy) history at Stanford University and the Director of the Stanford Center for Law and History, I study law, markets and dispute resolution in France and the United States—with a particular focus on the forces that have shaped modern capitalism and the inequalities that it generates. My publications include A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (Yale, 2007) (J. Russell Major Prize) and Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 (Yale, 2017) (John Phillip Reid Book Award). My current book project is Arbitration and the Quest for Modern American Democracy: Struggles over Industrialization, Immigration, and State-Building, 1900-1950 (under contract, Yale).
I am deeply devoted to the ASLH and have served the society in various capacities—as a member (2006; 2010; 2017) and chair (2011) of the Program Committee; as a member (2008-2010; 2016-18) and chair of the Nominating Committee (2017); as a member of the Honors Committee (2019-22); as a member (2021) and chair (2022-23) of the John Phillip Reid Book Prize Committee; as a member of LHR’s Editorial Board (2017-), and as an LHR book-review editor (2007-12). I also served once on the Board of Directors (2011-14). If I were elected to the board, I would advance the society’s efforts to expand its geographic, chronological, and topical reach; to diversity its membership, including through greater transnational engagement; to foster the development of early-career scholars; to champion its superb publications; and to strengthen its finances.
Adam Kosto: I am Professor of History at Columbia University and, somewhat improbably, co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. My research and teaching focus on the institutional history of medieval Europe, with particular interests in legal and documentary cultures. My publications include Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000-1200 (Cambridge, 2001), Hostages in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2012), and (as co-editor) Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2012); I am currently co-editing a volume for the Cambridge History of International Law. I have been elected as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and a Member of the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique. A longtime member of the ASLH, I have served a previous term on the Board of Directors (2007–10), as well as on the Nominating, Membership, and Program Committees. I look back with pleasure at the way the ASLH has, over the past quarter century, expanded its geographical and methodological horizons, shaken up the conference model, developed activities beyond the annual conference, and continued to find exciting new ways to support early-career scholars (long its greatest strength as a learned society). In addition to continuing to encourage those initiatives, I would like to see the ASLH develop programs in public-facing history and explore partnerships with similar organizations worldwide.
Anne Twitty: My work focuses on American legal and constitutional development, slavery, and public history. My first book, Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857 (Cambridge, 2016), uses a collection of 300 freedom suits from the St. Louis circuit court to show how ordinary people developed a sophisticated knowledge of formal law. My current project explores the strange career of ratification in state constitution-making in the early United States.
As the Society’s past secretary, I would bring a demonstrated record of service to and deep institutional knowledge of ASLH to the board. During my term (2018-2021), we built a new website, established an email account, began managing elections and membership services in-house, added six new prizes and fellowships, and made several by-laws changes. I played a key role in facilitating, implementing, and troubleshooting these changes and, in the process, developed a keen understanding of the Society’s inner-workings and history.
My experiences teaching and researching at public institutions would also be central to my board service. Although I earned my PhD at Princeton University and will shortly begin a position as Associate Professor (Teaching) at Stanford University, I’ve spent a dozen years working at state schools, most recently at the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy and, before that, the University of Mississippi. As such, I know firsthand the challenges facing scholars at public institutions, including limited access to research funding, materials, and leave, low pay, and state interference and censorship of our work.
Victoria Saker Woeste: I am a legal historian with a wide range of research interests. My books are The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust: Law and Cooperation in Agricultural America, 1865-1945 (Studies in Legal History Series, J. Willard Hurst Prize) and Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech. Current projects include the antisemitic roots of “fake news” propaganda, the antecedents of contemporary antisemitism in American politics since the 1930s, and the relationship between democracy, the state, and the family farm since 1945. Since retiring from the American Bar Foundation in 2019, I have been teaching at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.
The ASLH has been my intellectual home since I was a graduate student. I’m glad to have had a small role in helping the Society transform into a diverse group of scholars featuring exciting programs that encourage young historians interested in “law and.” It’s been my privilege to serve the Society on the Board of Directors (twice); Committee on Research Fellowships and Awards; Craig Joyce Award Committee; Cromwell Prize Committee; Cromwell Dissertation Prize Committee (chair 2023); H-Law Board of Editors; Hurst Institute Fundraising Committee; Local Arrangements Committee (chair 2001); Membership Committee; Nominating Committee; Program Committee (chair 2004); Surrency Prize Committee (chair 2008). If elected again, I want to work on the only issue that matters to young historians—the crisis in the job market—by addressing the needs of academics in non-traditional career paths.
Taisu Zhang: I am a Professor of Law at Yale, with a secondary appointment in the History Department. I have published two books, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation (Cambridge 2023), and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism (Cambridge 2017). Laws and Economics received the 2018 Presidents Award from the Social Science History Association and the 2018 Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the Yale MacMillan Center. In dissertation form, one of its chapters received the Preyer Scholar Award from ASLH. These are the first two entries in a trilogy on the legal and cultural origins of early modern Sino-Western economic divergence. The final book is currently in progress.
ASLH has been my primary professional home since 2010, shaping my scholarly development in innumerable ways. I have tried to give back to the Society as much as possible, although my debts remain considerable. Since 2021, I have been one of the editors of the Society’s book series, Studies in Legal History. This follows previous service on the Burbank Article Prize Committee, the Stein Book Award Committee, and the Program Committee for the 2017 Annual Meeting.
In these various posts, I have focused on expanding the Society’s intellectual reach beyond the familiar confines of Euro-American history. By incorporating larger doses of the Global South (and East) into its publications, prizes, conferences, and institutional connections, the Society has begun to serve as a truly global nexus for legal historical discourse and research. I would be honored to build upon this progress as a board member.
Nominating Committee (vote for one of the following two)
Greg Ablavsky: I am a professor of law at Stanford Law School and of history (by courtesy) at Stanford University. I am a legal historian of early America, focusing on early national governance, property, and the law of U.S. relations with Native nations. My book Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford University Press, 2021) received the society’s William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. My prior work was awarded the society’s Cromwell Article Prize.
I have been involved with ASLH since I was a student earning my J.D./Ph.D at the University of Pennsylvania, when I served as the graduate student representative on the Board of Directors. More recently, I served on ASLH’s Publications Committee and am currently serving on the Preyer Committee. I am also a regular attendee of the ASLH conference and have come to every annual meeting since 2010.
I have greatly benefitted from the support and community I have found through the ASLH, and am excited to potentially pay some of that forward by serving on the Nominating Committee. I have found mentoring and advising graduate students and junior scholars especially rewarding, and hope to nominate candidates who will continue to make that work a priority for the Society.
Susanna Blumenthal: I am a professor of law and history at the University of Minnesota, broadly concerned with the historical relationship between law and the human sciences. My book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard UP, 2016), was awarded the Merle Curti Prize and the Cheiron Book Prize. My current book project, titled The Apprehension of Fraud in Modern America, explores the role of law in policing the ambiguous borderland between capitalism and crime. Longer term research centers on violence and its regulation in carceral institutions in U.S. history.
From graduate school forward, I have been an active member of ASLH, which has become my intellectual home. I have benefitted immeasurably from the critical engagement and lively camaraderie of the Society and its abiding commitment to the support of junior scholars. I have appreciated opportunities to contribute to the life of ASLH through service on the Reid Prize Committee (2009-2011); Program Committee (2011); Board of Directors (2013-2016); and Cromwell Prize Committee (2019-22, chair 2021). These experiences have informed and inspired my ongoing work as Co-Director of Program in Law & History at Minnesota and on the Organizing Committee of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (2018-2023).
I would be honored to be a member of the Nominating Committee and would seek to advance the Society’s efforts to bring together and represent legal historians in an expanding range of chronological, geographical, topical areas and work settings, ensuring the continued growth and vitality of the field.