Cromwell Book Prize

Criteria

Excellence in scholarship in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar.

Amount

$5,000

Deadline

June 1, 2024

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty not yet tenured. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. The prize is limited to a first book copyrighted no later than the tenth calendar year following the calendar year in which the author was awarded a PhD or other highest degree earned. Submission of a book by an author who has previously been awarded a Cromwell Foundation Prize for a dissertation or article must be accompanied by a showing that the book enhances, or differs in subject from, the previous work.

The author of the winning book receives a prize of $5,000. The Foundation awards the prize after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. The Committee shall consider a book in the year of its copyright date or of its actual publication. However, no book shall be considered for the prize more than once.

For the 2024 prize, the committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book published in 2023 or that bears a 2023 copyright date. To nominate a book, please send copies of it and the curriculum vitae of its author to John D. Gordan, III, Chair of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee, and to each member of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Committee with a postmark no later than June 1, 2024. Please note that some committee members have elected to receive both digital and paper copies.

Committee Members

  • John D. Gordan, III
    Secretary of the Cromwell Foundation
    1133 Park Avenue
    New York, NY 10128
    Hard copies only.

  • Cynthia Nicoletti, Chair
    University of Virginia School of Law
    580 Massie Road
    Charlottesville, VA 22903

    Hard copies and e-copies.

  • Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
    Van Hunnick History Department
    University of Southern California
    3502 Trousdale Parkway
    Los Angeles, CA 90089-0034
    perlrose@usc.edu
    Both hard copies and e-copies

  • Sara Mayeux
    c/o Vanderbilt Law School
    131 21st Ave. South
    Nashville, TN 37203-1181

    Hard copies only

  • David Rabban
    University of Texas Law School
    727 East Dean Keeton St.,
    Austin, TX 78705

    Hard copies only

  • Bill Novak
    University of Michigan

    University of Michigan Law School
    625 S. State St.
    Ann Arbor, MI  48109

    Hard copies only.

Past Recipients

2024

Michael Blaakman

Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic  University of Pennsylvania Press

2023

R. Isabela Morales

Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2022)

2022

Gregory Ablavsky

Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

2021

Christine Walker (Yale-NUS)

Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (Omohundro and University of North Carolina Press)

2020

Sam Erman (University of Southern California)

Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire (Cambridge University Press)

2019

Kimberly M. Welch (Vanderbilt University)

Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press)

2018

Cynthia Nicoletti (University of Virginia)

Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis (Cambridge University Press)

2017

Karen M. Tani (University of California, Berkeley)

States of Dependency: Welfare Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972 (Cambridge University Press)

2016

Kevin Butterfield (University of Oklahoma)

The Making of Tocqueville’s America – Law and Association in the Early United States (University of Chicago 2015)

2015

John W. Compton (Chapman University)

The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (Harvard University Press).

2014

Yvonne Pitts (Purdue University)

Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky (Cambridge University Press).

2013

Jonathan Levy (University of Chicago)

Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press).

2012

Daniel J. Sharfstein (Vanderbilt University)

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press).

2011

Mark Brilliant (University of California, Berkeley)

The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978 (Oxford University Press).

2010

Margot Canaday (Princeton University)

The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University 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

Roy Kreitner (Tel Aviv University)

Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford University Press).

2006

Holly Brewer (North Carolina State University)

By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (University of North Carolina Press).

2005

John Fabian Witt (Columbia University)

The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press).

2004

Michael Willrich (Brandeis)

City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge University Press).

Related Awards

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    The Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective will honor exceptional dissertations on topics in European legal history in global perspective and presented for PhD or JSD degrees awarded in the previous calendar year. Topics may include European legal interactions with people or places outside Europe, legal processes spanning Europe and other world regions, and developments in legal theory closely related to imperial, transnational, or trans-regional trends. View Award
  • Cromwell Article Prize
    The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize is awarded annually to the best article in American legal history published in the preceding calendar year by an early career scholar. Articles published in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. View Award
  • Cromwell Dissertation Prize
    The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. The author of the winning dissertation receives $5,000. View Award