News & Announcements
November 29, 2025
ASLH Article Prize Winners 2025
The William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize
Aaron Hall, “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” Journal of American History 111, no. 3 (2024): 469-96.
Aaron Hall’s “Bad Roads” traces the making, significance, and effects of ordinary public ways that ran through the South in the age of slavery. This important article speaks to scholarship on legal history, state building, slavery, and the carceral state, and challenges existing ideas of public and private. In this piece, Hall draws upon an inchoate, rarely studied set of documents to explain how roads were a significant and singular site of governance in slave states. He shows how public power helped construct private planter authority, as well as gave rise to a unique carceral spatial regime. Hall’s article is beautifully written and works with complex archival materials in a way that makes truly intricate and difficult historical work feel effortless. “Bad Roads” ties together multiple topics in legal and political history, including the role of state power in road building, the mechanics of how roads enabled policing, and the way public roads structured and complicated slavery—much like, as he shows, public roads themselves both connected and bounded private property and enslaved people’s lives. This article has important implications for our understanding both of slavery and its development and the post-emancipation evolution of policing and turn toward mass incarceration. We know that slavery existed because state law sanctioned it, but Aaron gives us a chance to really see how in even the most quotidian ways, the state made slavery and slavery made the state.
Grace Mallon’s “Negotiated Federalism” examines the federal government’s efforts to enforce its new authority after the Founding. Federal officials quickly realized that they required the participation and consent of state governments, as federal laws could not take effect without the legislation, investment, and manpower of state governments. The piece showcases how Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test case for negotiated federalism, where the federal government sought to exercise power in spaces where states had already entrenched their authority. As early federal officials set up customs and lighthouse services, rebuilt coastal fortifications, and enforced regulations, they had to negotiate with states to determine “which powers each level of government could exercise.” As a result, federal power depended on a state’s willingness to negotiate its authority. The crisply written article tackles big questions of federalism through granular details of practical problems and personality conflicts. Based in impressive primary source research in state and federal official records and correspondence, Mallon brings multiple areas of scholarship together to describe how power was worked out ‘in the course of ordinary government administration instead of in high theory. “Negotiated Federalism” takes something that we feel is well-understood (federalism at the founding) and through a creative path through the archive mines new and provocative ways of seeing the past that help us see the present more clearly.
The Sutherland Prize
Michael Lobban, “The Travels of Treason,” The Modern Law Review 87, 1 (2024): 24-51.
Michael Lobban’s “The Travels of Treason,” traces the evolution of treason within English law and provides a remarkably comprehensive account of the development of this important area of law within its imperial contexts. With striking clarity, Lobban demonstrates the situational flexibility of the concept of treason, which might be narrowly cabined in the metropole and creatively expanded upon in the colonies and other imperial arenas. Key innovations included expanding the target of treasonous conduct from the royal person to government more broadly, permitting the prosecution of constructive forms of treason far beyond the categories envisioned in the 1351 legislation underpinning the English common law approach, and (in the South African context) allowing for an unprecedented expansion of the concept through the acceptance of elements of the Roman law of treason. While Lobban focuses primarily on the substantive law of treason, he also illuminates procedural flexibility in its prosecution, most notably in the denial of due process to those facing treason prosecutions outside the metropole. In these ways his article beautifully showcases how legal historians of the British world must attend not only to questions of reception, but also to differences in procedure, interpretation, and application. Finally, Lobban usefully highlights the ways in which the manipulation of treason outside the metropole ultimately came back home to roost, particularly when cases tried abroad were ultimately appealed to the Privy Council. This is an article of remarkable scope and ambition which provides a nuanced reading of the state of the law in a variety of legally distinctive jurisdictions and, at the same time, achieves an impressive intervention in the history of the law of treason.
The Surrency Prize
Shumeng Han and Ren Xiangyi, “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Law and History Review 42:2 (2024): 319–42.
In their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Shumeng Han and Xiangyi Ren bring analytical clarity to a complex process of legal change. Through a sensitive and systematic reading of four decades of intergenerational property dispute cases in Jiangjin county, China, the authors illuminate a transformation of the fundamental Qing legal principle of filial piety. What began as a unified concept harmonizing individual filiality and morality with imperial loyalty and legitimacy, the authors explain, branched over time into multiple hybrid forms in Republican China. The article demonstrates how dual processes—changing legal rules and institutional nation-state building—coproduced forces within and without law that spun filial piety into different successor strands: individualist, nationalist, legal, and sentimental, each carrying forward a fragment of the original principle of filial piety. With precision, the article documents a Qing-Republican legal transition that is not a simple transplantation story of one order replacing another. Rather, as the authors conclude, “legal actors recreated and particularized the inherited conception [of filial piety] in their legal practice by drawing on sources from code, customs, and their specific historical context,” thus making and using diverse and even contradictory new strands. With this remarkable work of research and interpretation, “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality” shows how the meaning of legal concepts may be transformed amid wider societal and regime change—and how to study such transformation with nuance, rigor and imagination.
Honorable Mention: Kate Alba Reeve, “Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations,” Law and History Review 42:3 (2024): 499–520.
Jane Burbank Global Legal History Prize
Du Fei, “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections,” Past and Present 266:1 (2025): 40-74.
In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a collection of letters and documents which includes a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved people she owned, conducted in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels: the case summary itself and its process, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use.
Honorable Mention: Rui Hua, “The Cheese, the Worm, and the Law: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian Borderland, 1906-1927,” Modern Asian Studies 58:4 (2024): 1201-1221.
The Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize
“Petitioning for Freedom,” directed by Katrina Jagodinsky and the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln (https://petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu/).
“Petitioning for Freedom,” developed by Katrina Jagodinsky and her team at the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, offers a deeply researched and carefully curated online database of over 2,000 habeas petitions filed across the American West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The database inventory continues to be updated monthly with a diverse array of petitions from those challenging slavery, peonage, removal and deportation, state custody over Indigenous wards, and abusive husbands’ custody over their dependents. The database offers a regularized schema of records whose handwritten originals are often buried under the haphazard organization and inconsistent recording practices of their rendering courts, and alongside this, the project site provides numerous essays and stories drawn from the habeas proceedings to help researchers at all levels understand the records and make informed interpretations about the deployment of legal power against and on behalf of the less empowered peoples of the American West.
Honorable Mention: Stephen Robertson, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024; https://harlemindisorder.org/).