News & Announcements

August 9, 2026

2026 ASLH Elections – Candidate Statements

Nominees for Board of Directors

Adriana Chira:

I am the Winship Distinguished Professor of History and Associate Professor of Atlantic World History at Emory University, where my research focuses on race, slavery, and property ownership in Latin America. My first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge, 2022), explored how rural Afro-descendants’ claims to property coalesced into freedom demands and the political pursuit of independence for the island. It received four prizes, including the Peter Gonville Stein Prize from the ASLH. My next book examines Havana’s seventeenth-century popular economy, the role of credit, and enslaved people’s experiences of collateralization. I also collaborate with colleagues based in Cuba and am involved in a three-year NEH project on ideologies of value and early-modern Atlantic World economies.

I have served the ASLH as a member of the program committee and the Peter Gonville Stein Book Prize committee, and as co-organizer, with Prof. Bianca Premo, of a virtual working group on consent (2025–26). The ASLH was an essential space for building intellectual community in the formative years of my career, and it remains a place where I feel that I can ask big questions fearlessly. That kind of intellectual space grows ever more valuable as resources within our institutions shrink. As a member of the board, I would continue supporting the Society’s initiatives for emerging scholars while advocating for the development of more programs for mid-career and senior scholars, ensuring that the ASLH nurtures its members at every stage of their careers.

Deborah Dinner:

I am the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Law at Cornell University, where I am also a member of the graduate fields in History and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. I study the legal history of gender and capitalism, with particular attention to the relationship between law, social movements, and political economy. My book, Feminism Lost: Work, Care, and the Law, 1964-1996, is forthcoming in the Cambridge University Press Studies in Legal History series (Spring 2027). I am now pursuing projects on identity and the regulation of risk: one examining debates over sex discrimination in private insurance during the 1970s and 1980s, and another tracing the history of viatical settlements from the Progressive Era through the AIDS epidemic.

I have benefited enormously from the intellectual community, professional support, and collegiality of the ASLH, from graduate school through the mid-career stage. I have enjoyed contributing to the Society in a variety of roles, most recently as Co-Chair of the Program Committee for the 2025 Annual Meeting. I have also served on the Surrency Prize Committee (Chair and Member, 2020-22), the Cromwell Prize Committee (2019), the Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize (2019), the Reid Prize Committee (2014-15), and the Local Arrangements Committee (2012).

As a member of the Board of Directors, I would work to strengthen the Society by broadening representation across chronological and geographic periods as well as diverse institutions, championing the Society’s longstanding and deep commitment to junior scholars, and increasing member engagement between annual meetings.

Kellen Funk:

I am the Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, with affiliate faculty status in the Department of History at Columbia University. I principally study the history of American civil procedure and remedies, drawing on cultural and intellectual history as well as emerging methods in data science and digital legal history.

My first book is Law’s Machinery: Reforming the Craft of Lawyering in America’s Industrial Age (Oxford 2025). It accounts for the modernization of American legal practice in the hands of New York lawyers who inhabited a context of liberal Protestantism and merchant finance. My latest work takes up the history of bail bonding practice and bail reform from the Early Republic (“Bail at the Founding”) through the Gilded Age (“The Reconstruction of American Bail”).

ASLH has been an intellectual home since my earliest days in graduate school. I was a Hurst Fellow in 2015, and I sent so many drafts to the Preyer Committee they read nearly my whole dissertation. In 2016, I hosted a pre-conference on digital methods for the Society and am now pleased to serve on the Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize Committee with one of the scholars who was introduced to digital methods there. I have also had the pleasure of serving on the Publications Committee since 2022, when the Society’s contract with Cambridge was significantly revised to account for a more digital, open-access world.

I am honored to be considered for the Society’s Board of Directors.

Marie-Amélie George:

I am a professor of law at Wake Forest University and a scholar of LGBTQ+ legal history. My 2024 book, Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition, appeared in the ASLH’s Studies in Legal History series with Cambridge University Press. My current project is titled A Fierce Rage: AIDS and the Radical Reimagination of American Law.

The ASLH is a special organization: it brings together a diverse, deeply engaged, and genuinely friendly worldwide network of scholars. I discovered the Society in my second year of graduate school. Since then, I have regularly attended and presented at annual meetings, helped organize two pre-annual meeting symposia (2025, 2026), co-convened an ASLH virtual working group (2025-2026), and published in the Law & History Review and its online companion, the Docket.

The Society has generously supported my work through its intellectual exchanges, two Cromwell Fellowships (2016, 2020), and the Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors (2019). I have sought to give back, serving on the Cromwell Article Prize Committee (2024-2026, chair 2025-2026) and the Cromwell Fellowship Committee (2020-2023). I have also completed reviews for the Law & History Review and Cambridge University Press.

I would be honored to serve on the ASLH’s board of directors, where I would seek to advance the Society’s efforts to support emerging scholars and emerging fields alike. It would be a privilege to help make the ASLH as welcoming a home for the next generation of scholars as it has been for me.

Jonathan Gienapp:

I am Professor of History and Law at Stanford University who focuses on the constitutional and legal history of the early United States.

My latest book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale UP, 2024), explores the intersection between law and history by critiquing how originalism, the controversial and now-ascendant theory of U.S. constitutional interpretation, engages with the American constitutional past. I am also the author of The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard UP Belknap, 2018), which explores how the U.S. Constitution was debated in the decade after it was ratified. I am currently at work on a book on the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

I have long been an active member of ASLH, regularly attending the annual meeting since graduate school. From the beginning, I have been struck by the collegiality and rigor of the organization and have come to regard it as one of my primary intellectual homes. I have appreciated contributing to the organization by serving on the Graduate Student Outreach Committee (2019-21), which afforded a meaningful opportunity to expand opportunities for junior scholars, and, more recently, the John Phillip Reid Book Award Committee (2026-28).

I would be honored to serve on the Board of Directors and help continue ASLH’s longstanding commitment to legal historians of all ranks.

Will Hanley:

I am an associate professor in the history department at Florida State University. I study the socio-legal history of the modern Middle East. My first book was Identifying with Nationality: Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (2017). My current project is a Cairo centered study of international law between 1870 and 1940. I have a keen interest in computational methods, and I have posted various open data sets on Zenodo, github, and elsewhere.

I was a fellow at the Hurst Summer Institute in 2011, a beneficiary of the ASLH’s remarkable and deliberate embrace of global legal history, a long-standing effort animated by intellectual curiosity and generosity on the part of a sophisticated discipline that chose to expand its horizons. This expansion infused a distinctly American approach to legal history into global history in ways that have substantially improved global history itself. I was Law and History Review Associate Editor (Book Reviews, Non-Americas) from 2012 to 2017, and I’m currently on the Jane Burbank Global Legal History Prize committee.

I would be honored to serve on the Board of Directors of this high-functioning, supportive professional association. I think that it’s in the interest of our field to continue to expand its digital infrastructure, including improving the core data for LLM/AI renditions of legal history. I teach at a public institution in a state where academic speech is under considerable pressure and would seek to represent that concern.

Mary X. Mitchell:

I am an assistant professor in the federated department of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University – Newark. A lawyer by prior training, my research focuses on the intersections between law, science, technology, and environment. My first book, Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October of 2026. It uses legal wrangling over atmospheric nuclear weapons detonations and contamination in the Marshall Islands as a window onto the ways in which sovereignty shifted shape in an era of decolonization marked by mass-scale technologies and wide-ranging technogenic pollution.

My introduction to the Society was through the very first Student Research Colloquium in 2014. I later benefitted tremendously from the Society’s other programs for emerging scholars. Since then, I have been an active participant in the meeting and the Society. I served on the Cromwell Article Prize Committee from 2022-2024, taking a turn as chair in 2024. I also served on the Program Committee for the upcoming meeting in Banff.

I am honored to be considered for a position on the Board of Directors. If elected, I would seek to continue the Society’s efforts to welcome scholars from sister subdisciplines, to support junior scholars from a wide range of institutions, and to ensure that all of the Society’s programs showcase fantastic research covering the many time periods, subjects, and geographies in which legal historians work.

Bhavani Raman:
I am Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, concerned with empire, administration, and law. My monograph Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial South India (Chicago, 2012), re-examined the relationship between law, evidence and the materiality of paperwork through a focus on British colonial archives and non-English (Tamil) recordkeeping traditions. My second book project re-reads the colonial history of security laws as the jurisprudence of rebellion. It focuses on how this jurisprudence accrued from the legal challenges faced by the British East India Company, leading it to assemble the architecture of the security state from multiple resources, including and beyond the prerogative, into novel laws on state offences, martial law, preventive detention, and sedition. My other interests include legal histories of littoral environments and oceanic mobility.

I have found an intellectual home in the ASLH for more than a decade. I deeply appreciate its vibrant community and commitments to making legal history a hospitable space for global research, early-career scholars, and students. It has been a delight to contribute to this vision through my service on the Program Committee (2020, 2021), as faculty co-director of the Graduate Student Research Colloquium (2022, 2023), and Early Career (Virtual) Legal History Workshop(2024).

I would be honored to serve on the Board of Directors. I will seek to advance the Society’s efforts to bring together legal historians across diverse topical and geographical areas, while supporting its innovative work to grow our community and the field.

John Fabian Witt:

I am the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale, where I hold a secondary appointment in the History Department.  I have published six books in the history of American law, beginning with The Accidental Republic (Harvard UP 2004), and including The Radical Fund (Simon & Schuster, 2025), American Contagions (Yale UP, 2020), Lincoln’s Code (Free Press, 2012), and Patriots and Cosmopolitans (Harvard UP, 2007). I review books in our field for outlets like The New Republic and The Nation and author articles in torts and legal history.

I was brought into the field as a graduate student at the Society’s Toronto meeting in 1999. The intellectual curiosity of the Society’s membership and its commitment to scholarship and teaching have been sustaining values for me ever since. I co-directed the Society’s Hurst Summer Institute in Madison in 2025 and expect to do the same in 2027. I have served on the Honors Committee (2022-2025), the Reid Prize Committee (2019-2022), the Publications Committee (2004-2007), and the Program Committee (2003 and 2005 meetings and as chair for the 2006 meeting). I have been awarded the Society’s Cromwell and Reid book prizes, as well as the Bancroft Prize and the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award. I am a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and I serve as Trustee of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation.

It would be an honor to serve on the Society’s Board of Directors and to help carry forward the Society’s projects.

Nurfadzilah Yahaya:

I am Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, where I work on the legal and environmental history of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world across the British and Dutch empires. My first book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), followed the Arab diaspora in the Indian Ocean through courtrooms, showing how a mobile minority helped shape the legal infrastructure of two empires. I have completed two further books: Overflow, a history of land reclamation across the British Empire, and Oil Capture, a legal history of petroleum in colonial Indonesia. The ASLH has been my intellectual home since my first annual meeting as a graduate student in Philadelphia in 2010; the Hurst Summer Institute followed in 2013, and I have returned regularly, most recently to San Francisco and Detroit. I have served on the Program Committee (2014-15), the H-Law board (2016-19), the Publications Committee (2020-21), the Nominating Committee (2021-24), and the Hurst Institute Selection Committee (2017, 2019, 2023), a particular pleasure as a former Hurst fellow. I would be honored to serve on the Board of Directors, and would bring sustained editorial experience, on the boards of the Journal of Global History, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. I would work to deepen the Society’s ties to legal historians in Asia and beyond, widen the regions, legal traditions, and periods represented at its meetings, and sustain its commitment to graduate students and early-career scholars.

Nominees for Nominating Committee:

Christopher W. Schmidt:

I am a Professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and from 2013 to 2024 I served as Editor of Law & Social Inquiry.

I have written two books, The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Civil Rights in America: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and I am now writing a history of the U.S. Supreme Court and its evolving relationship with the American people. In 2016, I received the ASLH’s Surrency Prize.

ASLH has been at the center of my intellectual and professional development since graduate school. As my career progressed, I have been committed to giving back to the Society as much as I can. I have served on numerous committees, including the Preyer Memorial Committee, the Cromwell Dissertation Prize Committee, and the Hurst Institute Selection Committee. I was a member of the Board of Directors (2016–2019) and co-chair of the 2022 Local Arrangements Committee. Much of my recent work has been in support of junior scholars. I twice served as a faculty leader for the Student Research Colloquium, and since 2023 I have been the faculty coordinator of the Johnson Program for First Book Authors.

If given the opportunity to serve on the Nominating Committee, I would use my role to continue the Society’s efforts to draw more scholars into the fold of legal history and to support the careers of junior scholars.

Karl Shoemaker:

I am the Robert and Sylvia Wagner Professor of History and Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I study medieval legal history, and I am interested in the history of criminal law.

My book, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500 (Fordham University Press, 2011), was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Book Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. I am also the editor or co-editor of Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject (with Austin Sarat, UMass Amherst Press, 2011) and A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age (Bloomsbury, 2023). My current book project, which examines the legal history of the devil, will appear with Cambridge University Press. I have been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and my research has been supported by several NEH awards.

I have been a regular attendee at ASLH annual meetings for over two decades and I value the intellectual community cultivated there. I co-chaired the Program Committee in 2013 (Miami). I served on the ASLH Board of Directors from 2014-2017. I have served on multiple selection committees for the Hurst Institute, and I am chair of ASLH’s Stein Book Prize Committee.

I would be honored to serve on the Nominating Committee, and to use that position to foster the growth and vitality of our field. If selected, I would advance the Society’s efforts to bring together and represent legal historians in an expanding range of chronological, geographical, and topical areas.