News & Announcements
August 8, 2025
ASLH Election 2025: Candidate Bios
PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE
Michelle McKinley
I am a legal historian of slavery in the early modern Iberian empire, and the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School. I have been an active and committed member of the ASLH since I first attended the conference in Philadelphia in 2010. I have found the ASLH a congenial community of scholars with broad interests. My work has been published in legal history journals such as the Law & History Review, as well as history journals such as the William & Mary Quarterly and the Journal of Family History and in my field’s flagship publication, the Colonial Latin American Review. My book, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 was published in 2016 by the ASLH’s book series Studies in Legal History at Cambridge University Press. Fractional Freedoms received an honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst prize for the best work in sociolegal history from the Law and Society Association in 2017. My current project explores the transatlantic itineraries of Afro-Iberians who moved to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries. I have been working in archives across Andalucía, Peru and Colombia to recreate the lives of those who shaped the early centuries of Iberian emigration and a Black diaspora at the margins of the transatlantic slave trade. I am particularly interested in how law facilitated these transactions and movements of people (enslaved, indentured, and free), capital, and commodities, and hope to render a more complex and nuanced history of the people inextricably linked by the processes of conquest, slavery, and empire.
My work on behalf of the Society has been among the most fulfilling aspects of my career. I have co-convened the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute for Legal History, served on the Board and the Executive Committee, chaired the Jane Burbank Prize Committee, and co-chaired the Annual Meeting Committee. I have also been involved with the Student Research Colloquium and the Cromwell Article Prize, as well as the Membership and Publications Committees. This has given me a broad swath of interactions with the ASLH, and with lifelong and incoming members. The ASLH has welcomed scholars into the field who have contributed to its dynamism and exciting disciplinary interventions. That scholarly engagement is what makes our field so successful. As President, I will build on that scholarly ethos. I am especially interested in broadening our membership and connecting with scholarly societies in associated fields. Our commitment to a global perspective has already yielded impressive results, and I hope to build on and deepen our reach, especially for early career scholars and draw in comparative fields that will increase our scope and bring new insights into our conferences, publications, and online programs. I look forward to working with our members to ensure that ASLH remains intellectually challenging, expansive, and highly collegial.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Samy A. Ayoub
I am an Associate Professor of Law and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. My work sits at the intersection of Islamic legal history, comparative law, and the study of religion and empire. I am the author of Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Ḥanafī Jurisprudence (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores how Ottoman jurists reshaped Ḥanafī legal thought within the structures of imperial governance. My current research focuses on legal modernization, Ottoman nationality law, legal pluralism, and the afterlife of Islamic legal institutions in post-Ottoman contexts.
I am committed to advancing global and comparative legal history, with particular attention to the legal cultures of the Middle East and the Islamic world. I view legal history as a critical field for examining the interplay between law, empire, and governance across diverse historical settings. My work investigates how legal institutions and doctrines—especially within Islamic and Ottoman frameworks—both shaped and were shaped by broader structures of authority and religious legitimacy.
ASLH has long supported scholarship that pushes the boundaries of legal tradition, and I am eager to contribute to its efforts to expand the field’s geographic, linguistic, and methodological horizons. I currently serve as President of the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies. As a board member, I would support scholars working on Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Global South legal histories, and remain committed to making ASLH more accessible to emerging and underrepresented voices in the field.
Mary Sarah Bilder
I am a professor of law at Boston College, working on colonial and founding era constitutionalism broadly conceived. I have collaborated on digital humanities projects on Robert Morris (the early civil rights activist and lawyer) and Appeals to the Privy Council. My publications include award-winning university press books: Female Genius: George Washington and Eliza Harriot in the Dawn of the Constitution (2022), Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (2015), and The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (2004). I am currently working on a constitutional biography of Catharine Macaulay. I have been a member of the ASLH for thirty years, serving on the Cromwell Fellowships (currently), Dissertation Prize (2018-2020), and Article Prize (2010-2014) Committees; Board of Directors (1997-2000, 2010-2012); Documentary Preservation Committee (2012-2019); Publications Committee (2011-2012); Annual Meeting Program Committee (2001, 2007, 2010); Committee on the Future of the Society (2007-2010); and Willard Hurst Memorial Summer Institute Committee (2000-2003).
As a Board member, I would be particularly interested in (1) ensuring that the conference remain affordable for those without institutional support, including non-program attendees; (2) encouraging commitment, support, and access to archives, archival projects, and public history; (3) exploring access and support to fee-pay databases for ASLH members without R-1 institutional support; (4) continuing to expand the membership and participation at ASLH conferences nationally and internationally.
Sueann Caufield
I am Professor of History and Professor, Residential College at the University of Michigan (UM), where I currently serve as Associate Director of the Donia Human Rights Center and Co-director of the Global Feminisms Project, an online oral history and archive. Past administrative posts include Director of the UM Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center and Director of the Graduate Program in History. I specialize in the history of modern Latin America, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, human rights, and family law in nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil. My publications include In Defense of Honor: Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil and the co-edited volume Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin American History. I am currently working on a book manuscript that traces the history of family and law in Brazil from the perspective of paternity, legitimacy, and the rights of non-marital children, from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Since 2022, I have served on the ASLH Peter Gonville Stein Book Award Committee, the Preyer Scholars Selection Committee, and the inaugural ASLH Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowships Committee. In these capacities, I have contributed to the ASLH’s efforts to nurture graduate students and early career scholars and to recognize excellent scholarly work focused on diverse global regions. As a board member, I would continue to support efforts to expand the intellectual and geographical diversity of the ASLH membership; to make the Society’s meetings more accessible to younger scholars and those working outside the United States; and to build the Society’s public outreach.
Li Chen
I am Associate Professor of History, who holds a J.D./Ph.D and is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Law, at the University of Toronto, specializing in the intersection of law, culture, and politics in post-1500 Chinese and global history. My first book, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes (Columbia, 2016), received Honorable Mention for the Peter Gonville Stein Prize of ASLH and won the 2018 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. I have published two edited volumes and a Chinese-language book, Law, Knowledge, and Power in the Age of Empire (2024). My second English monograph, Invisible Power, Juridical Capital, and Technocratic Governance in Late Imperial China, is under review. I am writing two books on judicial archives and capital punishment in Chinese history.
I have served on the editorial board of Law and History Review since 2013 and on ASLH’s book prize and program committees. At Toronto, I have served as Program Director, Associate Chair, and Chair, with extensive leadership experience. As Founding President (2014–17) and current Board Director of the International Society for Chinese Law and History, I played a key role in helping build it into a leading global platform for Chinese legal history, now with nearly 200 members from 150 research institutions across multiple continents.
As an ASLH Board member, I will work to broaden the Society’s international reach, strengthen support for early-career scholars through inclusive programming and mentorship, expand digital and public-facing initiatives, and help attract field-defining publications to the ASLH book series through my global networks.
Brooke Depenbusch
I am an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, and my research examines the politics of economic inequality in the twentieth century United States. I am completing my first book manuscript, tentatively titled Profit and Poverty: Precarity, Politics, and the Struggle Over the Safety Net, 1932-1992, and my article, “The Long War on Welfare: Taxpayer Activists and the Politics of Backlash in Depression-era America,” is forthcoming in the Journal of American History. My projects have been developed through the engagement and mentorship of the ASLH community, and the Association has been my primary intellectual home since I began graduate school.
Over this time, I have had the opportunity to serve the Association in several capacities. Between 2016-2018 I served on the Graduate Student Outreach Committee, in 2017 I was graduate student coordinator for the Student Research Colloquium, in 2022 I chaired a session of the Summer Research Workshop, and since 2023 I have served as a member of the Projects & Proposals Committee.
There are several important initiatives that the Association has undertaken which, as a Board member, I would seek to maintain and grow. For example, I am committed to nurturing the digital initiatives that the Association has launched, continuing to make the Association accessible to and supportive of scholars from diverse backgrounds and with a global range of academic interests, and (at a time of uncertainty within the academy) maintaining the ASLH’s strength in supporting young scholars and the development of their scholarship.
H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.
I am a professor of law and history and the John Hope Franklin Research Scholar at Duke University. Before joining the Duke faculty, I was a professor of law at Indiana University–Bloomington. I have also held appointments as a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University and as a visiting professor of law at New York University, Duke, and the University of Virginia.
My research focuses on the legal history of the U.S. civil rights movement. I have published in journals, including the Law and History Review, American Journal of Legal History, Journal of American History, and Columbia Law Review. My forthcoming book, The World is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention examines how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the development of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
I have long been involved with ASLH, including service on the Program Committee, the Kathryn Preyer Memorial Prize Committee (including as Chair), the Wallace Johnson First Book Program Committee, and the Projects and Proposals Committee. I also co-hosted the ASLH co-sponsored “Globalization and the Law in Historical Perspective” Junior Scholars’ Conference.
I would be honored to serve on the Board and help advance ASLH’s mission during a time of expanding interest in legal history. I’m committed to building on ASLH’s strong foundation by supporting a diverse community of scholars and practitioners—across disciplines, professions, and career stages—share research, engage new ideas, and strengthen the field’s impact and reach.
Thomas J. McSweeney
I am a professor of law at William & Mary Law School, and my focus is on the early history of the English common law, particularly on the legal literature produced in the thirteenth century. My book, Priests of the Law (OUP 2019), was awarded an honorable mention for the Selden Society’s David Yale Book Prize.
The ASLH has been my primary scholarly home for a long time now. I benefited greatly from the Hurst Institute as a junior scholar and have since served on the fellows selection committee three times (in 2021, 2023, 2025), twice as chair. Since 2021, I have served as one of the editors for the society’s book series, Studies in Legal History, and in that capacity I serve on the society’s publications committee. I also served on the committee for the Cromwell Fellowships from 2019 to 2022 and the program committee for the annual meetings in 2014 and 2016.
When the ASLH asks me to do something, I have trouble saying no, and with good reason. As a junior scholar, I was impressed by the society’s commitment to mentoring. I brag about this to scholars in other fields. Post-tenure, I looked for ways that I could help with that mission. I agreed to take on the editorial role with Studies in Legal History largely because of the series’ commitment to working with junior scholars on their first books. My focus would be on ensuring that the ASLH continues to support graduate students and junior faculty.
Noah Rosenblum
I am an Associate Professor of Law and faculty affiliate of the Department of History at New York University, where I work on the legal history of the administrative state. I am currently working on my first book, tentatively entitled “Democracy’s Machinery: The Presidential Reconstruction of the American State, 1877-1939,” about the emergence of a presidency-centered federal government between the end of Reconstruction and the eve of WWII. I mostly publish in law reviews, although I have written for peer-reviewed journals in law and history, and currently serve on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Journal of American Constitutional History.
ASLH has been my primary intellectual home since I started attending meetings while still a graduate student. I have served the Society as a member of the Program Committee for 2025 and a co-organizer of this year’s pre-conference on American Imperial Administration. I have some understanding of the responsibilities that come with serving on the Board of Directors from my service as a Trustee of Deep Springs College and a member of the board of the Open Books Foundation.
As a Board Member, I would focus on: (1) continuing ASLH’s incredible record of welcoming and supporting junior scholars (which I have benefitted from myself as a Wallace Johnson fellow); (2) building bridges between law schools and the rest of the academy; (3) creating more opportunities for public engagement; and (4) helping ensure the long-term future of the Society and, through the Society, the continued flourishing of free inquiry.
Graduate Student Nominees for Board of Directors
Christen Hammock Jones
I am running to be a graduate student representative on the ASLH Board of Directors. I am a PhD student in History at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on legal history and, especially, the history of reproductive rights and politics. My scholarly work, which examines reproductive rights litigation in the United States after Roe v. Wade, draws on my practice experience as a litigator at the National Women’s Law Center. At the 2024 meeting, I especially enjoyed hearing from legal historians engaged in contemporary legal battles, and am eager to serve in a leadership role at a time when legal historical work has taken on such importance outside of the academy.
As a brand new legal historian, ASLH has done so much for me, including providing a generous intellectual home to work out my ideas in multiple venues (the annual meeting, the Summer Research Workshop, and the collaboration with Notre Dame), and introducing me to a warm, collegial community. I hope I can give back a fraction of what ASLH has given me, by serving as a board member and paying it forward to future graduate students.
Geneva Smith
I am a PhD candidate in History at Princeton University and a JD candidate at Yale Law School. My dissertation analyzes slave courts, created in 1661, to regulate the crimes of enslaved Africans and provide financial reimbursement when enslaved defendants were executed. Working in both Caribbean and American archives, I have located and preserved documents previously considered lost to rethink the relationship between race in the archives and the definition of legal records.
ASLH has been my scholarly home for the past six years. I benefitted from the collegial rigor of the Student Research Colloquium (2019) and the Hurst Institute (2021) as well as the financial support of the Cromwell Prize (2018). While serving on the Standing Committee (2021-Present), I have learned about the financial and social considerations necessary for a successful conference.
Having welcomed numerous junior scholars to their first conferences, I seek to continue this work as a board member in multiple ways: (1) furthering the intellectually rigorous environment of ASLH through connecting interdisciplinary and transregional members; (2) ensuring a diverse intellectual community by addressing the needs of international members and others who may feel unable to attend our conferences due to current political restraints; (3) continuing ALSH’s legacy of uplifting junior scholars through offering structured opportunities for graduate students, faculty, and lawyers to build connections; and (4) utilizing my background working in law firms to support the financial longevity of ASLH and think creatively about how firms and other organizations could support legal intellectuals.
NOMINATING COMMITTEE
Samuel Fury Childs Daly
I am an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, where I specialize in the history of law in modern Africa. My research interests have included the history of fraud, the connection between warfare and armed crime, and, most recently, the origins of military administrative law and its application as martial law. My first book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge 2020) won the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom’s Fage and Oliver Prize, and honorable mention for the ASLH’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. My second book, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire, was published in 2024 by Duke University Press. I am currently working on a book about imposter soldiers in world history.
I have long been a beneficiary of the ASLH’s programming, and I would be an enthusiastic member of the Nominating Committee. I have participated in the ASLH in various ways since graduate school, most recently as a member of the Program Committee in 2022. As a historian of Africa, I am especially committed to continuing the ASLH’s work to expand legal historical inquiry beyond the United States. I also strongly support the organization’s longstanding commitment to promoting the study of US legal history, including its public-facing activities. The ASLH has a track record of providing extraordinary support to graduate students and junior scholars, which I would work to continue and expand.
Rowan Dorin
I am currently an associate professor of History at Stanford University. My research focuses on the intersection of law, religion, and economics in medieval Europe, as exemplified by my recent book, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (2023), which won prizes from the American Academy for Jewish Research, the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch, the Canadian Historical Association, and the Canadian Society of Medievalists. I was also awarded the ASLH’s Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize in 2022 for Corpus Synodalium, an ongoing digital project that seeks to make medieval legal sources widely available to students and scholars.
I first encountered the ASLH as a graduate student in 2014, when I applied to participate in a pre-conference workshop. At the time, I wasn’t sure whether I was really a legal historian, but that initial experience was so welcoming and inspiring that I jumped enthusiastically into the field–and into the ASLH community. Throughout my subsequent involvement with the ASLH (including co-chairing the Program Committee for last year’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco and launching the annual digital legal history poster sessions), I’ve sought to ensure that other young scholars whose interests brush up against legal-historical themes are similarly welcomed and inspired. I have also worked to sustain the expansive chronological and geographical reach of the ASLH’s intellectual community, and I would be excited to continue that work as a member of the Nominating Committee.
Intisar A. Rabb
I am a professor of law and history at Harvard University, interested in the history and operation of interpretation and courts in Islamic law in comparison to American law (with focus on criminal law and property law). I also lead the Program in Islamic Law and its SHARIAsource Lab, which joins the study of Islamic law/legal history with digital texts and AI tools. My first book, Doubt in Islamic Law, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, and traces standards of reasonable doubt in Islamic criminal law. Two forthcoming books, Courts and Canons in Islamic Law and Islamic Common Law, examine the emergence of legal canons in Islamic courts (which receive little attention in Islamic law) and show the persistence of legal canons as a type of interpretive precedent in Islamic property law (in ways diametrically opposed to the weak version of it in American law), respectively. I previously served as an associate professor at NYU, and an assistant professor at Boston College Law School.
I have been involved in ASLH ever since I was a graduate student at Princeton University and Yale Law School—regularly presenting papers, commenting on sessions, and chairing other sessions in addition to excitedly attending other session of mentors, colleagues, and emerging scholars. I have served in several leadership roles at the Society: I led the 2013 ASLH Program Committee as co-Chair (together with Karl Shoemaker); served on the Board of Directors; became a member of the selection committee for two 2-year round of the Wallace Johnson First Book; and I currently served on the Editorial Board for the Law and History Review.
ASLH is my favorite conference community because it is dedicated to legal historians, whether at law schools or universities, and is the only place that gathers them in a serious way, both with vibrant intellectual exchanges and the ability to provide and gain the type of mentorship from which I have benefitted and enjoy paying forward. I would be honored to serve on the Nominating Committee and, if elected, would contribute to further bringing together and representing legal historians interested in ever broader areas of geographically-rich, comparative, and possibly AI-related histories and methods.
Laura Weinrib
I am a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard History Department. My scholarship has focused on civil liberties, labor, and the constitutional and legal history of the twentieth-century United States. My book The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise (Harvard, 2016) received the NCA’s Franklyn S. Haiman Award, the Society’s Paul L. Murphy Award, and, in dissertation form, the Cromwell Dissertation Prize. I am currently at work on a history of unions, corporations, and money in politics in postwar America.
ASLH has been my core intellectual and professional home since I was a graduate student. I benefited tremendously from the Society’s early-career programs, including the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholarship and the Hurst Summer Institute. It has been my privilege to give back through service on the Reid Book Award Committee (2011-2014), Cromwell Prize Committee (2017-2019), Projects and Proposals Committee (2017-2020, chair 2018-2020), Board of Directors (2017-2020), and Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee (2023-present).
If elected to the Nominating Committee, I would work to identify candidates who will sustain the strong emphasis on mentorship that has long defined our Society. I would also support the Society’s efforts to foster a vibrant and inclusive intellectual community—one that advances the field through chronologically, geographically, and methodologically diverse scholarship and, in a moment when the value of academic work is increasingly contested, affirms the importance of legal history as both a scholarly pursuit and a vital public resource.