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 E. Mallon, “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2024): 687-720.

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/).

ASLH Book Prize Winners – 2025

The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award

Matthew Sommer, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024)

Looking back at a lifelong engagement with Chinese legal history in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with a special focus on gender and sexuality, Matthew Sommer breaks new ground in his most recent book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia, 2024), uncovering several cases with transpeople who have been hiding in plain sight in the source material. The core of the book is based on routine and palace memorials from the First Historical Archives in Beijing, but Sommer also supplements his deep source base with popular tales about “the strange,” treaty port journals and newspapers, case books, legal codes, and compendia of traditional Chinese medicine. In contrast to his previous two books, which theorized about gender and sexuality based on thousands of legal cases, this book presents a concise series of case studies that identify what Sommer calls “transgender paradigms” in Chinese legal and social history. Among the figures that appear in these microhistories, we encounter a diverse set of gender non-conforming individuals, including eccentric midwives, cross-dressing clergy, unconventional physicians, and fox spirit mediums. One of the most interesting findings of the book is that while magistrates who prosecuted cases against trans people tended to rely on legal provisions banning heterodoxy, they were often confronted with the fact that there were no appropriate statutes that could prosecute cases involving trans people. Instead, they had to resort to interpretations of law that reveal interesting assumptions about gender, the body, law, procreation, and the fear of the unknown. This compelling and generative book is both a deep dive into complex and dense sources as well as a refreshing intervention into several subfields of legal history.

Honorable Mentions:
Laura Benton, The Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire (Duke University Press, 2024)

The John Phillip Reid Book Award

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

Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process is a brilliant intellectual history of how social science thinkers in law, political science, and economics between 1870 and 1970 stopped emphasizing ostensibly knowable truths and focused instead on methods, techniques, and processes. Parker shows how this transformation was entwined with the rise of the administrative state. After documenting this major epistemological shift, he argues that during the Cold War, once-supple claims about the importance of process and method were narrowed and decontextualized, playing oppositional roles to democratization, civil rights, and managed capitalism. This highly effective, very creative book places law, as practice and as a field of inquiry, in a larger context and illuminates essential questions about the history of knowledge and intellectual authority.

The William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Elegantly rendered and beautifully constructed, Sarah Gronningsater’s  traces the experiences of a formative generation of New Yorkers – people born into the quasi-freedom granted by New York’s emancipation laws. By using a varied and creative source base, Gronningsater chronicles how their lives were shaped by gradual emancipation, and how their experiences and struggles within that legal regime translated into political activism in their later years. Gronningsater convincingly shows how legal consciousness gained early in life connected a generation of freedpeople who later used that knowledge to influence the larger national conversation about citizenship and racial equality in the United States.

ASLH Dissertation Prize Winners 2025

William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize 

Michael Borsk, “Measuring Ground: Surveyors and the Properties of States in the Great Lakes Region, 1783-1840.” (Queen’s University, 2024)

“Measuring Ground” is a comparative study of state formation through surveying techniques and paperwork in Upper Canada and Michigan Territory from the 1790s-1837. Borsk argues that the very processes of surveying and of building the archives asserted state power and authority. Surveying regulations structured the production of knowledge around boundaries, a process which depended upon indigenous participation and recognition for legitimacy. However, surveying also ultimately eroded indigenous claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty, as it converted surveyors into actors with legal authority. Turning their attention to surveyors’ papers, Borsk demonstrates how these documents and their associated archival processes produced knowledge, which in turn drove policy. The authority to determine boundaries and ownership migrated from surveyors’ offices to the courts, which applied their own standards of law and evidence.

This innovative study is based on deep archival research and makes provocative connections between the geographic and epistemological elements of the legal processes of colonization in the Upper Midwest. It expands and refines our understanding of how defining and securing individual property rights has related to state formation. Borsk also describes the way in which archival methods and processes interacted with legal rules and procedures to produce knowledge and authority, and ultimately to construct government. This work traces how indigenous knowledge and participation ironically played a key role in ultimately extinguishing indigenous claims to territory. This scholarship opens new lines of research and offers novel ways of conceptualizing the law itself.

Shay R. Olmstead, “’Refuse to Run Away’: Transsexual Workers Fight for Civil Rights, 1969-1992.” (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2024)

“’Refuse to Run Away’” is a history of thirty cases from the 1960s to the 1990s in which transsexuals (they use the contemporary term) challenged workplace
discrimination on the basis of sex or disability. Administrative agencies and courts rarely granted these plaintiffs favorable rulings. Even when they did, they did so by redefining “sex” under the law in ways that benefitted only normative, “respectable” claimants and ultimately harmed other sexual minorities. Moreover, variations in decisions among states and agencies led to the creation of multiple “cis states.” Victims of discrimination fared better when they brought claims under “disability,” because federal legislation was not written in a way that obviously excluded transsexuals from protection or defined “disability” in a way that was incompatible with transsexuality. However, in response to some scattered successful litigation, Republicans in Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude transsexuals, effectively closing that avenue for remedying discrimination.

Olmstead’s description of the shift from sex-based to disability-based discrimination claims is highly persuasive, and invites the reader to contemplate the liquidity of the category of “disability.” They present their analysis as evidence that legal campaigns alone are insufficient to bring about civil protections against discrimination in the workplace, and argue that political organizing must be part of the equation as well. Their discussion of rights protections is revelatory and potentially offers lessons for current campaigns to protect marginalized people.

ASLH Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective

Vladislav Lilić, “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912.” (Vanderbilt University, 2024)

Vladislav Lilić’s superb dissertation, “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912,” makes a strikingly original contribution to European and global legal history by supplanting familiar narratives of Balkan state formation. The dissertation traces how small Balkan states took shape not through the influence of surging nationalism but through conflicts conducted in the medium of imperial law. Lilić demonstrates that in Montenegro and Serbia varied sets of legal actors—from viziers and Ottoman officials to pastoralists and journeymen—engaged in legal disputes that gradually reset the coordinates of political belonging, property, and public order. As a result, provincial states emerged within the empire before featuring as states in the international order. The dissertation is elegantly structured and based on extensive research in multiple languages and archives, and it combines a deft narrative style with nuanced interventions in the literature on European sovereignty and legal pluralism in global perspective.

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919-1998),” (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2024)

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín’s outstanding dissertation, “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919–1998),” constitutes a seminal contribution to both the history of international law and global legal history. By tracing what he designates as the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s move to institutions in the short twentieth century (1919–1998), Quiroga-Villamarín reconstructs the formation of international parliaments from interwar Geneva to the conclusion of the Cold War. Attending to architectural and material templates originating in Europe and their subsequent translations across continents, the dissertation spatializes history and historicizes space, shifting the perspective from figurative “architectures” to tangible built environments. The conceptual framework proves particularly innovative, foregrounding how architecture simultaneously mirrored and enabled aspirations of global order. Drawing on extensive archival research in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, it situates its argument within a rigorous methodological apparatus and advances its findings in elegant and compelling prose.