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.
New Works in Legal History: Displays at the Detroit Meeting
New Works in Legal History: Many legal historians publish books with presses that are not represented at the conference book sale. In recognition of this fact, the ASLH will host a table to showcase this important new research at the Detroit book exhibit. If you published a book recently that will not otherwise be represented at the book sale, we invite you to bring a copy to the conference (or have a friend deliver one) as a donation to this effort. Please have your book on the table by Friday morning. It will be raffled off to a lucky winner on Saturday. The book should relate sufficiently to legal history and be published in 2024 or 2025. For the raffle, preference will be given to doctoral students, junior scholars (pre-tenure), independent scholars, and international scholars (scholars based outside of the US). Please contact Mitra Sharafi with any questions: president-elect@aslh.net
Projects & Proposals Funding Deadline Extended
The ASLH is pleased to announce the extension of the deadline for Projects and Proposals funding until 9/18. The goal of P&P is the “funding of new initiatives in the study, presentation, and production of legal historical scholarship and in the communication of legal history to all its possible publics and audiences. It is the mission of the committee to find ways to bring talented new voices into our field, to promote novel forms of scholarly interchange, to support pedagogical experiments in legal history, and to seed new forms and venues for public history.” The ASLH has in the past funded workshops, conferences, and exhibits, but is open to a broad array of new ideas. Those interested in submitting an application can do so from the form on the website; inquiries can be directed to Felicia Kornbluh, the chair of the committee.
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.
Virtual Working Group: Environment, History and Law Global Workshop Series (reading and writing group)
We are delighted to invite members of the ASLH community to attend the Environment, History and Law Global online workshop series. The triangle ‘environment – history – law’ suggests a wealth of opportunities for productive transdisciplinary scholarship: Historical analysis of environmental law, environmental histories of legal change, legal histories of the environment, etc. The workshop:
supports and strengthens the work of scholars working at the nexus of environment, law, and history;
exposes legal and environmental historians to the potential benefits of cross-fertilization between their fields;
introduces group members to a range of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies to enhance their work;
helps scholars identify collaborators for future projects; and
grows and encourages the development of the field.
Timing: Building on the rich papers shared with our community in 2024/2025, we will continue to run workshops approximately every 6 weeks, with a short hiatus from June to August. The workshops will be held online at different times to accommodate a range of time zones.
Format: At the workshop we will discuss pre-circulated draft papers. An expert in the area is invited to begin the discussion, followed by general comments and questions from all participants. The paper will not be distributed beyond the members of the group in attendance. Each workshop is 1 hour in length.
Participating in the Workshop: Membership in the group is open to scholars from all backgrounds and locations interested in the intersections between environment, history and law. Please contact either Dr David Schorr or Dr Susan Bartie to join our mailing list and receive zoom links and draft papers.
Submission Process for Papers: If you would like to present a paper in 2026, please email either Dr David Schorr or Dr Susan Bartie with a paragraph summary of your proposed draft paper and an indication of when (i.e. what months) you would be available to present. While we welcome proposals at any time, we encourage you to submit soon for places in the 2026 series.
Workshop Coordinator Bios:
Dr Susan Bartie is a legal historian at the Australian National University. She is a Senior Lecturer and Discovery Early Research Australian Research Council Fellow. Her current historical study of 50 years of Australian environmental lawyering (1970-2020) aims to develop and preserve an unprecedented data set of environmental lawyers over multiple generations. It is designed to create important new knowledge, challenging the common and limited treatment of lawyers as mere instruments of social causes and revealing a novel, and previously unexplored, layer of environmental governance. She is a member of the ASLH. Email: susan.bartie@anu.edu.au
Dr David Schorr is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of Tel Aviv University, where he teaches torts, environmental law, and legal history. He is a long-time member of the ASLH, and has organized panels on legal history and the environment at ASLH and other international conferences. His book, The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier (Yale University Press, 2012) as well as several subsequent publications (including the chapter “Historical Analysis in Environmental Law” in the Oxford Handbook of Legal History) have also explored the intersection of these fields. Email: dschorr@tauex.tau.ac.il
Virtual Working Group: Consent—A Global Legal History
This reading group will gather to discuss the global history of consent. Its focus is on historicizing liberal notions of consent and understanding other regimes of assent and refusal in the past. We encourage applications from all scholars, including graduate students, early career scholars, and internationally based scholars. Participants’ expertise might reside in a range of periods, regions, and legal historical subfields, including, but not limited to, the histories of sex; marriage; medicine; healing and the body; crime and punishment; religious conversion; and political participation.
The kinds of questions we aim to address with a curated reading list include: What have been the different norms through which different social sectors across different societies have conceived of their willing or forced participation in historical processes? How do we, as legal historians, account for and identify their refusal to participate in the activities that generated the archive? What forms of legal personhood distinct from liberal individualism can we find historically, and how did they inform understandings of consent? How did consent itself become consolidated as a category within Euro-American practices and thought? How has liberal individualism has shaped key aspects of historical practice and narrative (e.g., categories such as “agency” or “voice” or “silences of the archive”)? And how might we change our historical practice once we identify the ways in which liberal notions of consent have infiltrated it?
Format:
We seek a diverse slate of 8 additional participants (for a total of 10 with organizers); the minimum number of participants, including organizers, will be 5 participants.
The organizers will collaborate with participants to establish the full reading list—to be comprised of short, published works that balance topics of interest– in advance of the first meeting in mid to late September. We may also consider including a small number of works authored or in progress by members of the group, if appropriate. The readings will not be heavy; we will not include entire published books, but rather, illustrative excerpts and articles (well under 75 pages per meeting) that will serve as a starting point for a vibrant exchange, which is the chief aim of the group.
Schedule:
We will meet virtually for 1-1.5 hours per session for six sessions throughout the academic year (Sept-May), roughly every six to eight weeks. Meetings are provisionally set to take place on Fridays (EST), but we will try to ensure the schedule suits participants’ availability.
A short statement explaining your interest in law, consent and refusal, and whether you have specific ideas for readings you’d like to discuss communally (150 words max)
Indication of your availability on Fridays (EST) and any other scheduling issues we should know about (we can be flexible)
Selection of participants will take place approximately one week after the application deadline and will be broadly inclusive, aiming to create a group of diverse ranks and varied expertise by region, period, topic, and approaches.
Workshop Coordinator Bios
Bianca Premois Distinguished University Professor of Latin American History at Florida International University in Miami. She has published on the history of childhood and legal history, and has devoted special attention to Indigenous, women and enslaved litigants in Peru, Mexico and Spain. Her books include Children of the Father King(UNC, 2005), The Enlightenment on Trial(Oxford 2017) and articles and book chapters on legal institutions and law, including one in The American Historical Review on Indigenous jurisdiction with Yanna Yannakakis which won the Jane Burbank Prize from the ASLH in 2020. Her current research on the history of child mothers in 20th– century Peru and the ethics of history has been supported by several fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has served on the ASLH’s Gonville Stein and Surrency prize committees. Premo is a member of the organization. Email: premob@fiu.edu.
Adriana Chira is, starting with September 1, the Winship Distinguished associate professor in the History Department at Emory University, where she has been teaching Atlantic world history since 2016. Across her different projects, her work addresses the role of debt, credit, and ownership in the lives of working people in Cuba, with an emphasis on people of African descent. Her first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge University Press, 2022), explored enslaved and free Afro-descendants’ efforts to own landed property and to attain free legal status through claims to ownership filed inside first instance and appellate courts in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The book traces the political implications of these processes arguing for a history of emancipation that pays attention to vernacular legalism and modes of claiming property. Patchwork Freedoms received the Gonville Stein prize from the ASLH in 2023. Parts of this project have also been published as articles in The Law and History Review and in The American Historical Review. In her next project, she will explore the impact of debt and credit on the urban popular economy and on legal personhood and enslavement in seventeenth-century Havana. Chira is a member of the organization. Email: achira@emory.edu.
Virtual Working Group: Roundtable on Radical Legal Advocacy (a reading, writing, and discussion group)
We are gathering a group of historians, legal scholars, and practitioners to participate in an iterative process of discussion, collaboration, and research on the topic of the history of radical legal advocacy. The ultimate goal of these meetings is some form of collective/collected writing–likely a book, although possibly a special journal issue. We hope to draw in participants who have worked or are interested in working on the subject of legal advocacy in relation to social movements and radical politics across time periods, geography, and subject matter. Although radical politics is generally associated with the political left, we encourage those studying the right to join the conversation.
The format of the workshops will be exploratory. The group will meet virtually every other month, beginning in September 2025 and continuing through May 2026, with the expectation that participants will attend most/all of the meetings. Meeting dates/times will be set based on the group members’ availability. One of the roundtable’s primary aims is to gather people working in this area together so that we can define the outlines of the field of inquiry and begin to define some common questions and methodologies. To further that goal, we will spend the initial meeting(s) discussing the historical, historiographic, and methodological questions that are framing our research. Later, we will discuss shared readings and workshop works in progress.
To Apply: We invite those interested in joining the group to apply by sending a brief (one to two paragraph) explanation of your interest and description of your work to Marie-Amélie George (georgemp@wfu.edu) and Dan Farbman (farbman@bc.edu). To the extent you have any practice experience that is relevant to the field, please include that in your message. We will select participants based on level of interest and field of study, so as to gather a group that represents the broadest range of inquiry possible. Applications are due by August 22, 2025. We will notify selected participants by September 1, 2025.
We encourage graduate students, early career scholars, international scholars, and practitioners to apply and hope that you will share this call broadly to your networks. If you know of anyone who would be a good fit for the gathering, we also welcome emails with suggested names, so we can reach out to potential participants directly.
Convenor Biographies:
Marie-Amélie George is a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University, where she has taught since receiving her PhD in History from Yale University in 2018. George is the author of Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Cambridge University Press 2024). Her scholarship on queer legal history and contemporary LGBTQ+ rights has appeared in numerous law review articles, peer reviewed pieces, and op-eds. George is a three-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the country’s most influential sexual orientation and gender identity scholarship. In 2025, the AALS Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues recognized her with its Inclusive Excellence Award. She is currently writing an article on radical legal advocacy during the AIDS crisis, which she plans to expand to a book project on a legal history of AIDS. She is a lifetime member of the ASLH and can be reached at georgemp@wfu.edu.
Dan Farbman joined Boston College Law School in 2017. He teaches classes on constitutional law, local government law, movement lawyering, inequality, and legal realism. His research focuses on the legal history of radical reform movements in public law from both an institutional perspective and the perspective of the practice of cause lawyering. Farbman’s work has been published in the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Fordham Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. He is currently working on a collective history of abolitionist lawyers and lawyering in the United States between 1820-1865. Before earning his Ph.D. in American studies at Harvard University, he was a clerk for Judge Margaret Morrow on the Central District of California in Los Angeles and a Skadden Fellow at Advancement Project in Washington, D.C. In this role, he worked with community organizers around the country on grassroots efforts to fight racial injustice in public education, with a particular focus on the school to prison pipeline. Farbman is a lifetime member of the ASLH and his email is farbman@bc.edu.
New Fellowship: ASLH Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowships
This new initiative is intended to provide funding for early career scholars, publishing in English, who are working on projects in legal history relating to non-U. S. history topics. Non-U.S. history topics refers to research that does not qualify for the fellowships awarded by the Cromwell Foundation in coordination with the ASLH. Early career scholars includes those researching or writing a PhD dissertation (or equivalent project) and recent recipients of a graduate degree working on their first major monograph or research project. The Committee will make up to five awards.
Criteria: Early career scholars, publishing in English, researching in non-U. S. fields of legal history.
Amount: $2,000
Deadline: June 30, 2025
Elements of Application:
Project Proposal (maximum 750 words including notes). The proposal should include (in this order): your name and contact information; name and contact information for the reference you have asked to write for you; and project title and description;
Budget & Timeline (1 page);
Curriculum Vitae (1 page). It should include your name, contact information, education and degree dates, current appointment (if any), publications and conference papers, and professional society affiliations; and
1 Letter of Recommendation.
Applicants should submit items 1-3 in a single pdf and arrange to have the letter of recommendation submitted directly. Both the application and reference must be received by the deadline of June 30, 2025. Only complete applications will be considered.
Applications should make clear the relevance of law to the project and how the research will tell us something new about law. Applications should engage with relevant scholarship in the field. Finally, applications should have a clear budget that is specific about how and where you plan to spend research funds.
Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series 2025
Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series
Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History
Deadline for Applications: June 30, 2025
The ASLH “Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series” is intended to foster conversation and connection beyond the Annual Meeting about exciting new work in the field of legal history or likely to be of interest to legal historians. The series is hosted by the ASLH Committee on Digital Programming. Series Events will be 1 hour, 6-7 pm (Central) Wednesday evenings on Zoom.
Event Structure: Each event opens with a brief introduction of the work by the author, followed by conversation between the author and an interlocutor of their choice, and closing with conversation with the audience. In panels featuring more than 1 book or article, we expect the authors to serve as interlocutors for each other. There is no expectation that audience members have read the featured work; the format is structured with this in mind.
Eligibility: Books, Articles, or Digital Legal Histories published January 2024-December 2025
We encourage scholars at all career stages, both within and outside the U. S., and working in all geographic and chronological fields to apply. We welcome applications for events featuring two books or articles in conversation, and events coordinated with another professional society. ASLH membership is encouraged, but not required to present. Books featured on a panel at the Annual Meeting are not eligible.
Applications: (max. 1 page; 12 pt font)
Book/Article/DLH Author, Title, Publisher (for articles: Journal title; for DLH: url) and Publication date
Book/Article/DLH Abstract (1 paragraph)
Author Bio (1 paragraph)(including email & ASLH membership status)
Interlocutor Bio (1 paragraph)(including email & ASLH membership status)
FAQ:
Does the same 1-page limit apply to applications for more than 1 book or multiple articles? Yes. We are especially interested in hearing how featuring the works together would make for an interesting conversation.
Do I have to find my own interlocutor? Yes. Only complete submissions, including those with an interlocutor, will be considered.
ASLH Early Career (Virtual) Legal History Workshop
Deadline for Applications: June 30, 2025
The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) Early Career (Virtual) Legal History Workshop is designed to provide support and intellectual community to early career scholars working in legal history, broadly defined.
Applications are invited from early career scholars, publishing in English, who have completed PhDs or JDs (those working toward a JD/PhD must have completed the PhD), and are working on their first major monograph or research project. We encourage applications from scholars with expertise in all chronological periods and geographical fields, both within and outside the United States, as well as from those who may not (yet) identify as legal historians.
The committee (the ASLH Committee on Digital Programming) will select seven (7) Fellows for the 2025-26 workshop. The workshop will be limited to the Fellows and Faculty Chairs and will meet once monthly via Zoom from September through April (no meeting in November because of the Annual Meeting) giving each fellow an opportunity to share work-in-progress with the group for discussion and feedback. The 2025-26 Early Career LHW will be chaired by Hendrik (Dirk) Hartog, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus; Professor of History, Emeritus, Princeton University, and Michelle McKinley, Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law, University of Oregon. The date and time of the monthly workshops will be established by the Faculty Chairs. Fellows must commit to participate for the full academic year.
Elements of Application
(1) Cover Letter (1 page) (the cover letter should address the following points: briefly describe your research and path to the project, note the intended result (book/article/other) and the stage of the project, explain your interest in being part of the 2025-26 workshop, and note your time zone (UTC) and range of flexibility for meeting. Though time zones present a challenge, one of the goals of the ASLH’s virtual initiatives is to increase opportunities for engagement between international and U. S. based scholars);
(2) Curriculum Vitae (1 page) (including education and degree dates, current appointment, publications and conference papers, and professional society affiliations);
(3) Title and Abstract for what you plan to share (draft article, book chapter, book proposal)(up to 100 words);
(4) 1 Letter of Recommendation (the letter should be from someone who knows you and your work well and who can comment on how you would benefit from and contribute to the workshop community).
Applicants should submit items 1-3 in a single pdf. And arrange to have the letter of recommendation submitted directly.
Please direct Questions & Submissions to: Jonathan Connolly, jsc1@uic.edu
Application Deadline: June 30, 2025. Only complete applications will be considered.
ASLH Dissertation Prize Winners 2024
William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize
Min Tae Cha, “Constitutional Religion: Presbyterians between the British and American Empires,” (Princeton University, 2023)
“Constitutional Religion” is an astonishingly ambitious project that seeks to refold religious ideas and practices into the history of Anglo-American constitutional thought. Following Presbyterians in the British Empire and the United States in the long nineteenth century, Cha reveals the extent to which debates within the Presbyterian Church over issues including disestablishment, constitution making, and empire, were not conducted in isolation. Rather, they were shaped by and in turn shaped broader political events. That Cha finds a mutually constitutive relationship between Church and State is not surprising. What commands our attention is Cha’s argument that intertwined religious and political developments — particularly disestablishment — led to the creation of a “fiscal-missionary” church in the long nineteenth century. In an age of revolutions, immigration, and imperial expansion, Presbyterians scrambled to win souls and organize increasingly far-flung congregations. One striking result of this was ecclesiastical constitution making, which existed in a dialectical relationship with more familiar forms of secular constitution making. Skillfully tracing this process through close readings of underutilized religious sources, Cha shows how Presbyterians deployed written constitutions in order to mobilize congregants across the globe in the face of sectarian conflict. From Scotland to the United States to the Antipodes, Presbyterian lay people and clergy searched for solutions to pressing institutional problems, often settling upon older religious ideas and practices. Indeed, Cha deftly places Presbyterian constitutionalism within a much longer tradition of religious constitutionalism, Catholic and Protestant alike, even as he elucidates how the unique pressures of modernity required creative adaptations. He likewise connects centuries-old religious thought and praxis to processes of globalization and colonization. Through painstaking archival work, he traces the movement of people, practices, and ideas across oceans, and thereby makes a case for the broader significance of Presbyterian constitutional thought.
ASLH Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective
Aden Knaap, “Judging the World: International Courts and the Origins of Global Governance, 1899–1971” (Harvard University, 2023)
The 2023 Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize is awarded to Aden Knaap for his dissertation “Judging the World: International Courts and the Origins of Global Governance, 1899–1971.” This deeply original, carefully researched study presents a sweeping history of world courts, from early initiatives in 1899 to the postwar origins of today’s international courts. The dissertation makes two key contributions. It emphasizes formative efforts to establish world courts in the first half of the twentieth century, an overlooked but important period, and places visions of world courts at the very center of the evolution of global governance. The dissertation reveals how plans for key international institutions, including the World Bank and the United Nations, imagined them initially as global courts. Knaap’s study is based on extensive research in multiple archives and is beautifully written. It brings together legal, diplomatic, and international history in exposing an understudied but important dimension of European and global legal history.
ASLH Article Prize Winners 2024
The William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize
Katie A. Moore, “To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere,” Early American Studies 2 (2023): 233-271
This article investigates how paper currency became a powerful site of meaning-making in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century America. Exploring the establishment of counterfeiting as a crime, it contends that colonial governments used these laws to legitimate paper money and produce state power. Moore’s study develops an innovative legal history of paper currency that several Advisory Committee members described as brilliant. Advisory Committee members felt that Moore’s interdisciplinary methods and careful attention to the materiality and social meanings of both specie and notes enrich legal history. The article not only deftly explores the legal regimes surrounding print money and counterfeiting, but also pushes readers to expand their understandings of what law is and how it operates through material artefacts and within a range of social milieus to produce state power.
The Sutherland Prize
Jonathan Connolly, “Reading Morant Bay: Protest, Inquiry and Colonial Rule,” Law and History Review 41 (2023): 193-216
Jonathan Connolly’s insightful, tightly-argued and compelling essay uncovers a new and deeper understanding of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. This uprising in post-emancipation Jamaica, and its violent suppression, have been widely interpreted as a “transformative crisis of empire” that simultaneously consolidated racist attitudes among imperial Britons and engendered seminal British debates about justice, sovereignty and the rule of law. By focusing on legal process, and debates over adherence to process, Connolly shows how law produced meaning in the aftermath of the rebellion. He traces the ways in which a royal commission of inquiry, swiftly assembled to investigate events in Jamaica, adopted a legalistic focus on the “proximate cause” of rebellion. This lawyerly focus, combined with the racialized bias that led commissioners to discount testimony provided by black Jamaicans, enabled them to narrowly limit the events to be investigated. While protesters in Jamaica had engaged in widespread and systematic critique of colonial misgovernment, Connolly argues, commissioners successfully reframed that scandal of misrule so that it was understood to be a scandal about the violent use of martial law by Jamaican Governor Edward John Eyre. This “process of discursive transformation” was completed in the subsequent prosecutions, and debates over those prosecutions, that made up the “Governor Eyre controversy.”
The Surrency Prize
Esther Sahle, “Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Quaker Court, 1682–1772,” Law and History Review 41:4 (2023): 653-681
Esther Sahle’s “Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Quaker Court, 1682–1772” combines an ingenious reading of archival records, an elegant analytical framework and a lucid, layered narrative. The result is an article of far-reaching insight. Examining the 284 disputes arbitrated over ninety years at Philadelphia’s monthly Quaker meetings, Sahle traces how—in procedure, subject matter and enforcement—the Quakers’ dispute resolution system functioned as a forum typical of contemporary Atlantic legal fori. This new understanding leads to others. Readers learn that the Quaker arbitration system, rather than a static practice explained by religious commitments, evolved in relation to the reliability of Pennsylvania’s public courts. Friends used their forum to enforce contracts, a community legal process that delivered commercial advantages amid political turbulence and state incapacity. Readers also learn how and why this community forum declined as official courts became more dependable, financial relationships with non-Quakers grew and the practicability of information-based enforcement declined. Friends increasingly took their business to the colonial state, strengthening it in the process. This story offers a novel view of the dynamics of legal pluralism, state-building, and economic change—notably, one arising not from official sources but rather from the activities of colonizing subjects in British North America. In its methods and analysis, Sahle’s article offers important lessons for legal historians working across geographies, empires and eras.
Jane Burbank Global Legal History Prize
Sarah Balakrishnan, “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65:2 (2023): 296-320
This stunningly original article challenges several dominant tendencies in the global history of prisons, particularly a persistent focus on male incarceration and an emphasis on penal practices of the colonial state. Through careful analysis of a wide range of sources, including testimony of female prisoners, Balakrishnan tells a radically new story. It centers on the incarceration of women in so-called native prisons in nineteenth-century colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana). The phrase “prison of the womb” describes a startling pattern: captive women were threatened with impregnation in efforts to urge dept repayment and tort settlement by kin groups. Palm oil merchants targeted women and utilized the punishment to enforce collection of payments on loans and amass capital. The committee was deeply impressed by the originality of the article, its deft combination and close interpretation of varied sources, and its broader significance for the regional and global history of carceral politics and practices.
Honorable Mention: Max Mishler, “‘Improper and Almost Rebellious Conduct’ Enslaved People’s Legal Politics and Abolition in the British Empire,” American Historical Review, 128:2 (2023): 648–684.
Anne Fleming Article Prize
Gerardo Con Díaz, “Patent Law and the Materiality of Inventions in the California Oil Industry: The Story of Halliburton v. Walker, 1935–1946,” Economy & Society 24.1 (2023): 174-96
Professor Diaz’s paper starts in 1941, when an independent engineer and inventor named Cranford Perry Walker decided to Mile a suit against Halliburton – not then the company it was to become – for patent infringement with regard to an instrument that Walker had devised and patented, christened the “Depthograph.” The Depthograph was designed to measure pressure and obstructions inside oil pipes and wells, providing vital knowledge to the booming oil industry. Walker was determined to defend his place in the market from the much larger competitor. Eventually the case went all the way to the Supreme court, where Waker was decisively defeated. From these seemingly obscure beginnings, Professor Diaz expertly unfolds a story with far-reaching implications for how intellectual property is understood and adjudicated in the US down to this day. We were unanimous in our decision. Deeply researched, beautifully crafted, and crisply written, this is an exemplary piece of scholarship in the art of bridging disciplinary divides between business and legal history.
Honorable Mention: Nora Slonimsky, “‘To Save the Benefit of the Act of Parliamt’: Mapping an Early American Copyright,” Law and History Review 40.4 (2022): 625-54
The Committee unanimously selected The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0, (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/). Project Directors Tim Hitchcock, Professor Emeritus of Digital History, University of Sussex, and Robert Shoemaker, Professor Emeritus of Eighteenth-Century British History, University of Sheffield, submitted this nomination on behalf of the project team, which also included Jamie McLaughlin (software engineer), Sharon Howard (data manager), and Nick Phipps (web designer). First launched in 2003, the site hosts hand-corrected transcript accounts of around 200,000 criminal trials conducted at London’s Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913. While the underlying records, known as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, had been consulted sporadically by social historians in the twentieth century, the digitization and search apparatus provided by the Old Bailey Online has become a definitive landmark in English legal history.
The Committee is awarding the Dudziak Prize to the newest iteration of this project, Version 9.0 This major upgrade, which was launched in 2023, is significant for three reasons. First, it makes the site more accessible and sustainable. Second, the site now allows for more user interaction and manipulation of data through Elasticsearch and in response to feedback from scholars making use of their dataset. These enhanced searching features include the presentation of results in a macroscope format as well as more categories to allow for more advanced statistical modeling. Third, the curators have added new background pages that address the historiographical developments since the site was originally created twenty years ago.
ASLH Book Prize Winners – 2024
The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award
Yanna Yannakakis, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke, 2023)
Yanna Yannakakis’ Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico is a magistral work in global legal history. Yannakakis offers an innovative account of how the concept and significance of custom developed through interactions among multiple legal cultures spread over two continents. The book seamlessly shifts registers as it moves across vast expanses of time and space — from 12th century Europe to 18th century Mexico – and multiple levels of analysis. The stunning scope of Yannakakis’ examination of law and legal theory is matched by her fascinating analysis of how Spanish colonizers and their colonial subjects navigated plural legal traditions to strategically define indigenous custom. Drawing from a diverse array of European and indigenous primary documents, including a large collection of indigenous codices and legal petitions and disputes, Time Immemorial weaves together multiple sources of European and indigenous law with a rich microhistorical analysis of legal practice. The result is a compelling story of how indigenous subjects of diverse social rank participated in the history of Atlantic legal culture.
The John Phillip Reid Book Award
Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Livewright, 2023)
Grounded in extensive and painstaking research in local court records, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement brings to life ordinary African Americans’ multiple interactions with law and the legal system in the century that preceded the Civil Rights Movement. In making visible African Americans’ legal tenacity and sophistication when it came to everyday disputes over property, contract, and church governance, Penningroth shows not only that African Americans used the law for purposes that cannot be reduced to their struggles against racial oppression, but also how such uses of the law laid the groundwork for those struggles. As such, Before the Movement profoundly reshapes our understanding of the history of American civil rights.
The William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize
Michael Blaakman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
Michael Blaakman’s Speculation Nation makes a compelling case for placing land speculation at the very center of our understanding of the American project. Blaakman demonstrates how the public domain was constructed – and how legislators actively created a secondary market for futures and speculative rights to land on the frontier. These land grants, contingent though they were, often predated and essentially presaged the dispossession of Native Americans. Lucid, deeply researched, and beautifully rendered, Speculation Nation shows, in exquisite detail, how this process unfolded in the aftermath of the American Revolution.
Hurst Summer Institute 2025
The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) and the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School are pleased to invite applications for the 13th biennial Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History. The two-week program features presentations by guest scholars, discussions of core readings in legal history and analysis of the work of the participants in the Institute. The Hurst Institute is not primarily intended to provide time to write or work on a research project, but instead to present your work and discuss the craft of writing legal history.
The 2025 Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History will take place June 15-27, 2025. The Institute will be chaired by John Fabian Witt, Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 professor of law at Yale Law School, and Michelle McKinley, the Bernard B. Kliks professor of law at the University of Oregon School of Law.
Scholars in law, history and other disciplines pursuing research on legal history of any part of the world and all time periods are eligible to apply. The seminar and written materials are conducted in English, and we cannot consider non-anglophone applications. Applicants with no formal training in legal history are encouraged to apply.
Traditionally, the selection committee has sought to create a cohort of fellows with varying degrees of familiarity with the field, and welcome applications from scholars at an early stage of their career (beginning faculty members, doctoral students who have completed or almost completed their dissertations and J.D. graduates).
The ASLH Hurst Selection Committee will select 12 Fellows to participate in this event.
Aaron Hall, “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” Journal of American History 111, no. 3 (2024): 469-96.
Grace E. Mallon, “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2024): 687-720.
Michael Lobban, “The Travels of Treason,” The Modern Law Review 87, 1 (2024): 24-51.
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.
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.
“Petitioning for Freedom,” directed by Katrina Jagodinsky and the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln (https://petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu/).
Laura Benton, The Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024)
Yanna Yannakakis’ Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico is a magistral work in global legal history. Yannakakis offers an innovative account of how the concept and significance of custom developed through interactions among multiple legal cultures spread over two continents. The book seamlessly shifts registers as it moves across vast expanses of time and space — from 12th century Europe to 18th century Mexico – and multiple levels of analysis. The stunning scope of Yannakakis’ examination of law and legal theory is matched by her fascinating analysis of how Spanish colonizers and their colonial subjects navigated plural legal traditions to strategically define indigenous custom. Drawing from a diverse array of European and indigenous primary documents, including a large collection of indigenous codices and legal petitions and disputes, Time Immemorial weaves together multiple sources of European and indigenous law with a rich microhistorical analysis of legal practice. The result is a compelling story of how indigenous subjects of diverse social rank participated in the history of Atlantic legal culture.
Grounded in extensive and painstaking research in local court records, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement brings to life ordinary African Americans’ multiple interactions with law and the legal system in the century that preceded the Civil Rights Movement. In making visible African Americans’ legal tenacity and sophistication when it came to everyday disputes over property, contract, and church governance, Penningroth shows not only that African Americans used the law for purposes that cannot be reduced to their struggles against racial oppression, but also how such uses of the law laid the groundwork for those struggles. As such, Before the Movement profoundly reshapes our understanding of the history of American civil rights.
Michael Blaakman’s Speculation Nation makes a compelling case for placing land speculation at the very center of our understanding of the American project. Blaakman demonstrates how the public domain was constructed – and how legislators actively created a secondary market for futures and speculative rights to land on the frontier. These land grants, contingent though they were, often predated and essentially presaged the dispossession of Native Americans. Lucid, deeply researched, and beautifully rendered, Speculation Nation shows, in exquisite detail, how this process unfolded in the aftermath of the American Revolution.