News & Announcements
November 24, 2025
Honorary Fellows 2025
Constance Backhouse, Distinguished University Professor, University of Ottawa
The Society is pleased to welcome as Honorary Fellow Constance Backhouse, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa.
Professor Backhouse received her undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba before earning her first law degree at Osgoode Hall and her LL.M. at Harvard. She taught at the University of Western Ontario before moving to the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa in 2000, where she is now Distinguished University Professor and University Research Chair. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004, a member of the Order of Canada in 2008, and a member of the Order of Ontario in 2010. Her many other honors include the Killam Prize in Social Sciences, the David W. Mundell Medal, the Gold Medal from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Molson Prize in Social Sciences, multiple book prizes, and honorary doctorates from four universities, as well as from the Law Society of Upper Canada. She has written ten books, co-edited six more, and published upwards of seventy-five articles.
Professor Backhouse’s scholarly interests are broad, but it is her contributions to feminist legal history and the legal history of gender and race discrimination that stand out. Her impact on these fields began with her first book, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada, which launched the “new” feminist legal histories in Canada. Her use of narrative and her attention to diversity among the women challenging patriarchal structures became hallmarks of her subsequent work. The book remains “canonical reading in Canadian legal and women’s history courses.”
With her second book, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950, Professor Backhouse turned her gaze toward race and racial discrimination. It, too, became a classic and remains an anchor for scholarship in the field.
With each additional major work, Professor Backhouse has continued to break new ground. Although time precludes mentioning all of them, they are all, at their core, books that address access to justice and the struggle for social justice, through which she has informed and transformed both academic and professional understandings of the importance of law. These qualities are fully evident in her most recent book, Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case.
Throughout her career, Professor Backhouse has built communities. She has worked tirelessly to build the field of legal history–and specifically feminist legal history–in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, notably Australia and New Zealand. She has done this not only through her scholarship, but also through her teaching, mentoring, conference organizing, and generally prodding members of the legal history community to work in more creative ways. She co-founded the Feminist History Society and is a founding member and long-time President of the Women’s Education and Research Foundation of Ontario, Inc. Her work as a scholar has always been intimately intertwined with work outside the academy. For example, she served for many years as a mediator and adjudicator of human rights complaints, including compensation claims arising from the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of former students at Indian residential schools and of other groups whose members experienced sexual violence. She brings this lived experience to her scholarship.
The scholars we elect as Honorary Fellows are distinguished not simply by scholarship that has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others, but also by their commitment to building their fields and helping other, younger, scholars stand on their shoulders and carry the work forward. This has been Professor Backhouse’s life. She has made the field of legal history in Canada stronger and been an exemplary mentor to generations of legal historians. We celebrate her election as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
Lauren Benton, Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law, Yale University
This Honorary Fellow is someone very well known to our membership, a leader in our field for many years as a scholar, a teacher, and a mentor. I am thrilled to present an Honorary Fellowship to the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University, Lauren Benton.
Lauren Benton is “the most influential legal historian in the world right now,” who almost singlehandedly created the field of global legal history and transformed our understanding of empires, and of the law across and beyond national borders. In addition to her world-shaping research, her mentorship, teaching, and institution-building, in the ASLH elsewhere, have helped to transform the legal history field. Her work is foundational, her influence global, and her commitment to the profession exemplary.
Lauren Benton received her undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard and completed her Ph.D. in anthropology and history at Johns Hopkins Her interdisciplinary training has deeply informed her scholarship, which bridges history, law, anthropology, and global studies. Her origins as an ethnographer are still evident in the fine-grained thick description she manages to achieve even in the midst of histories that sweep across space and time.
Professor Benton has held faculty positions at Rutgers, NYU, Vanderbilt, and now Yale, as well as deanships at NYU and Vanderbilt. In recognition of her extraordinary scholarly career, she received the Toynbee Prize for significant contributions to global history in 2019, and has multiple prestigious fellowships, including most recently, her appointments as International Fellow of the British Academy, Honorary Fellow of the Foreign Policy Society, Berlin Prize Fellow, and Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.
Professor Benton’s scholarship explores the articulation of jurisdiction and sovereignty in the context of European imperial expansion from 1400 to 1900. She has pioneered the study of legal pluralism, jurisdictional politics, and the spatial dimensions of law in empire. Her work challenges traditional narratives of legal centralization and uniformity, instead emphasizing the improvisational, negotiated, and often contested nature of legal authority in imperial contexts. Her conceptual contributions—such as “legal posturing,” “vernacular constitutionalism,” “interpolity law,” and “big law”—have become essential tools for scholars across disciplines. In Benton’s work, law is not created only from above, and not only from the metropole; to understand the workings of law across empires, one must reckon with many lawmakers, many overlapping jurisdictions, and the many intersections among law, religion, politics, and cultures. As one reviewer wrote, “empire is everywhere. Therefore Lauren Benton is everywhere.”
Lauren Benton has written, co-authored, or edited nine books, 41 articles, and many book chapters, but four of her books have truly been field-shaping. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 redefined the legal history of empire by foregrounding “jurisdictional politics”—the struggles over who had the authority to adjudicate disputes and where. Drawing on her immense knowledge of empires from the early modern Iberian empire to 19th-century New South Wales, Benton demonstrated that colonial legal regimes were not mere extensions of metropolitan law but were shaped by the coexistence of multiple legal orders. The book won more prizes than I can name here.
Even more influential was her 2010 book, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, which challenged the assumption that empires sought uniform territorial sovereignty. Instead, Professor Benton argued that imperial legal authority was exercised through “anomalous legal zones,” “corridors,” and “enclaves.” Her analysis of legal geography revealed sovereignty to be partial, layered, and spatially uneven. Benton showed the real differences geography could make in the maritime world, from upriver settlements to island chains, to landlocked quasi-colonies. This book has had a profound impact on studies of maritime empires, frontier zones, and the legal history of geography.
Benton’s 2016 volume co-authored with Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850, explored how Britain’s efforts to impose legal order in the post-Napoleonic world helped shape modern international law. Benton and Ford argued that imperial legal reform was a global project that blurred the boundaries between domestic and international law, highlighting the way local actors—indigenous leaders, traders, enslaved persons—engaged with and reshaped imperial legal systems.
Finally, Benton’s most recent and perhaps most radical work, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (2024), examines how empires used legal language to normalize violence as peace. Through case studies spanning West Africa, Southeast Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, she shows how legal frameworks enabled and legitimized conquest, massacre, and forced resettlement. It is difficult to call to mind a historian working in any field who is so brilliantly able to marry micro-history to broad conceptual innovations. The book has been hailed as a “breathtaking reinterpretation,” and received many recognitions.
Beyond her magisterial scholarly contribution, Benton has been a transformative mentor and leader. She has guided numerous graduate students and junior scholars, encouraging intellectual independence while offering rigorous support. She has also played a central role in building interdisciplinary communities at NYU, Vanderbilt, and Yale, and has organized workshops and conferences that bridge geographic and disciplinary divides.
As president and president-elect of the ASLH from 2019 to 2023, Benton led the Society through a challenging period, expanding its global reach and supporting junior scholars. Laurie Benton’s leadership has helped make the ASLH a more vibrant, open, and globally engaged organization. It is with the greatest pleasure that we announce Lauren Benton an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History.
Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, Columbia University
The Society and its Honors Committee is pleased to introduce Mae Ngai, the Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, as an Honorary Fellow. For a quarter century, Professor Ngai has forcefully remade the intellectual landscape of American immigration history. In her scholarship, she has shown the ways in which the history of the law can illuminate entire worlds of social experience. In her teaching and mentorship, she has launched a new generation of scholars. In her service to communities, she has modeled how an engaged historian can be a public-regarding citizen of the world.
Professor Ngai’s seismic impact began with her first book, based in her prescient Columbia dissertation, where she was a student of Eric Foner. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, published by Princeton Press in 2004, was an “instant classic,” setting a new “gold standard for historical inquiry” in the field. The book is a far-seeing reevaluation of American immigration history and immigration law in the once under-studied middle period of American immigration law, from the restrictive immigration act of 1924 to its ostensible liberalization in 1965, described by insiders as “the most important book on U.S. immigration history and law since John Higham’s Strangers in the Land.” Among other things, Ngai’s Impossible Subjects turned the field toward the phenomenon of undocumented immigration. She introduced concepts like the “alien citizen,” which foregrounded the fragility of U.S. citizenship and illuminated the legal production of immigrant, national, and citizenship status.
The book was awarded no fewer than six leading prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the OAH and the Littleton-Griswold Prize in law and society from the AHA.
Since Impossible Subjects changed the field, Professor Ngai has written two books and numerous articles and book chapters. The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2010, is the micro-history of a Chinese-American family in San Francisco, who served as culture brokers and interpreters for the Chinese communities of California.
The Chinese Question: Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics, published by Norton in 2021, panned out to a macro scale to describe the world of Chinese migrant labor in California, Australia, and South Africa during the worldwide, pell-mell race for gold in the second half of the nineteenth century. Based in prodigious research that took place on five continents, Ngai’s The Chinese Question delivered on the promise of the transnational migration and labor history made visible by Impossible Subjects. Described as “lucid and elegant” in the Wall Street Journal and “meticulous” and “timely” by the New York Times, The Chinese Question has a global reach that liberates the study of Chinese migrations from collusion in the United States’s Chinese exclusion regime. It is no wonder that The Chinese Question won the 2022 Bancroft Prize and was selected as a finalist for the Cundill History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Professor Ngai has been an inspiring teacher for a generation of students. Stories from her undergraduate teaching at University of Chicago and at Columbia are legion. As a graduate student mentor, Professor Ngai’s efforts have been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Ngai’s students report that she says “students are forever”—and that she means it. Decades of students talk of job talks retooled, fellowship applications rescued, and book manuscripts resurrected. But always so much more: couches turn into impromptu bedrooms for visiting students, Christmas gifts appear for students’ children, clothes materialize for professional presentations and interviews.
By a reasonable count, Ngai has been the primary advisor to fifteen Ph.D. students. Dozens of others count themselves among those she has served as a secondary or informal advisor.
As if all this were not enough, Professor Ngai regularly finds time to contribute her wisdom to national and international communities in some of the most important controversies of our time.
Mae Ngai’s advisees have a name for themselves. To the cognoscenti, they are the “Maefia,” a sign of their abiding respect, love, and loyalty, and an indication (in the words of one Maefia capo) of the “scholarly community that she has nurtured.” The historian whom our committee’s correspondents described as “the leading immigration and Asian American historian of her generation” has been the creator of whole worlds of meaning, in writing and in the collective experience of the communities blessed by her astonishing gifts.
Mae Ngai’s election as an Honorary Fellow of the Society is a fitting exclamation mark to a career that has rewritten the pages of law’s history.