Cromwell Book Prize

Criteria

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

Amount

$5,000

Deadline

May 31, 2019

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, wholly or primarily written while the author was untenured. 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.

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 May 31, 2019.

Committee Members

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

  • Felice Batlan (chair)
    Professor of Law
    Chicago-Kent College of Law
    565 West Adams Street
    Chicago, Il, 60661

  • Sophia Z. Lee
    Professor of Law and History
    University of Pennsylvania Law School
    3501 Sansom St.
    Philadelphia, PA 19104

  • Jonathan Levy
    Professor of History
    1126 E. 59th Street
    Department of History
    University of Chicago
    Chicago, IL 60637

  • Thomas Mackey
    Professor of History
    101 Gottschalk Hall
    Department of History
    University of Louisville
    Louisville, KY 40292

Past Recipients

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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