John Phillip Reid Book Award

Criteria

Best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in Anglo-American legal history.

Amount

$2,500

Deadline

June 1, 2026

The John Phillip Reid Book Award is awarded annually for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The prize is named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues. When awarding this prize, preference is given to work that falls within Reid’s own interests in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-America and Native American law.

The award is given on the recommendation of the Society’s Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award. (First books, written wholly or primarily while the author was untenured, should be sent to the Cromwell Book Prize committee of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. The Reid Award and the Cromwell Book Prize are mutually exclusive.)

The Reid Award Committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book that bears a copyright date of the previous calendar year as it appears in the printed version of the book. Nominations for the Reid Award may be made by sending a curriculum vitae of the author and one copy of the book to each member of the committee. Please note that some members of the committee may elect to receive both electronic and hard copies.

Committee Members

Cornelia Dayton (chair)
University of Connecticut

447 Zaicek Road
Ashford, CT 06278-1045

Both hard copies and e-copies to cornelia.dayton@uconn.edu.
Jonathan Gienapp
Stanford University

450 Jane Stanford Way, Bldg. 200-228
Stanford, CA 94305

Both hard copies and e-copies to jgienapp@stanford.edu.
Christopher Capozzola
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT History Office E51-255
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge MA 02139-4307 USA

Hard copies only.
Daniel Hulsebosch
New York University

NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South 503
New York, NY 10012

Both hard copies and e-copies to daniel.hulsebosch@nyu.edu.
Laura Edwards
Princeton University

Department of History
136 Dickinson Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1174

Hard copies only.

Past Recipients

2025

Kunal M. Parker

The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

2024

Dylan C. Penningroth

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights Livewright

2023

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022)

2022

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

2021

Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross

Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

2020

Rande W. Kostal (Western University)

Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

2019

Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins University)

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

2018

Amalia D. Kessler (Stanford University)

Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

2017

Risa Goluboff (University of Virginia)

Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Oxford University Press).

2016

Reuel Schiller (UC Hastings)

Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (Cambridge University Press).

2015

Max M. Edling (King's College, London)

A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867 (University of Chicago Press).

2014

Michele Landis Dauber (Stanford University)

The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University of Chicago Press).

2013

John Fabian Witt (Yale University)

Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (Free Press).

2012

Tomiko Brown-Nagin (Harvard University)

Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press).

2011

Christopher Tomlins (University of California, Irvine)

Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Cambridge University Press).

2010

Catherine L. Fisk (University of California, Irvine)

Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press).

2009

Rebecca M. McLennan (University of California, Berkeley)

The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (Cambridge University Press).

2008

Christian W. McMillen (University of Virginia)

Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory (Yale University Press).

2007

William M. Wiecek (Syracuse University)

The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953 (volume 12 of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States) (Cambridge University Press).

2006

Daniel J. Hulsebosch (New York University)

Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (University of North Carolina Press).

2006

Honorable Mention: Stuart Banner (University of California, Los Angeles)

How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Harvard University Press).