New Fellowship: ASLH Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowships

NEW!

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.

Submit Application and Recommendation to: global@aslh.net

Awards will be formally announced at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Detroit.

Questions? Please email Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu)

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.

Please direct Questions & Submissions to: Naama Maor, nmaor@tauex.tau.ac.il

Application Deadline: June 30, 2024

Early Career (Virtual) Legal History Workshop

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 Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0, (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/)

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.

Honorary Fellows 2024

James R. “Jim” Phillips, Professor on the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History

Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute

Peter Solomon, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Criminology and Law at the University of Toronto

The Honors Committee is pleased to recommend that Professor Peter Solomon, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Criminology and Law at the University of Toronto, be elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. Professor Solomon is recognized in Western scholarship as the foremost authority on Russian law, in both Soviet and post-Soviet variants.  He has been studying and publishing in this field for almost fifty years, and has encouraged, nurtured, and inspired several generations of scholars interested in the not obvious and nonetheless vitally important question of how Russia’s legal system works. Solomon’s books and articles repeatedly challenged conventional assumptions about Russian law; these studies transformed interpretations, approaches and sources, and became classic references for scholars working on Soviet legal history.

Professor Solomon has reached beyond the Russian setting in his comparative studies on authoritarian law. He was deeply engaged in Russian reforms begun in the 1990s and has assisted in international legal projects in post-Soviet states. Responding to Russia’s imperial aggression in the 21^st century, Peter Solomon has been a generous advisor and host to legal specialists and scholars in or displaced from post-Soviet countries.  Outstanding and innovative scholar, kind and inspiring teacher, engaged specialist on law in world history and politics, Peter Solomon is an ideal candidate to be named an honorary fellow of our society.

Peter Solomon graduated magna cum laude in history from Harvard College in 1964. He did graduate work at Columbia, where he received MA (1967) and PhD (1973) degrees in political science as well as a certificate from Columbia’s Russian Institute.  Critical to his life work was his selection as a Fulbright-Hays exchange scholar to spend the academic year 1968-1969 at the Law Faculty of Moscow State University. Participation in the highly competitive and politically sensitive exchange program meant life in a Soviet dormitory with a full dose of political surveillance and a unique opportunity to study Soviet law from within. Solomon returned to Russia many times thereafter. He was a frequent guest of the Institute of State and Law in Moscow both as a sponsored member of officially sanctioned exchanges with the Soviet Union and, after 1991, as a visiting scholar. These journeys put Solomon into contact with many of Russia’s legal specialists, among them lawyers, judges, and historians.  Outside the USSR, he was a researcher for the Soviet Interview Project from 1985-1987, responsible for interviews with jurists who had emigrated from the USSR.

Solomon lived and worked during dramatic and ongoing transformations of Russia’s politics and society: from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation, from communism to capitalism, from Gorbachev by way of Yeltsin to Putin, from cold war to cooperation to war again. These radical changes were far from what scholars thought the future would bring when Solomon started his academic career, but during six decades of turbulent transformations, he continued to do research on the Russian legal system, which, as he shows, has a tenacity and a culture central to the state’s operations and society’s possibilities.

The operations of Soviet law in what most thought to be the darkest years of Soviet repression was the subject of Solomon’s ground-breaking monograph, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Based on an enormous range and quantity of archival and published materials, the book introduced entirely new materials and offered provocative interpretations. Solomon argued that terror and the criminal law system coexisted under Stalin, who actively cultivated both means of rule. Stalin himself provided the Soviet criminal justice system with its most characteristic features – centralization of legal institutions, harshly punitive criminal sanctions, secrecy, the extensive use of administrative regulation, and a cadre of officials inclined to obey directives from their political superiors.  One of Solomon’s most provocative conclusions concerned the consequences of the attempt, begun in the 1930s and intensified in the postwar period, to professionalize the criminal justice system by centralizing legal supervision and enhancing the education of legal specialists.  According to Solomon, the fulfillment of these two objectives produced more compliant judges, less willing than their predecessors to risk their jobs, more willing to abide by party directives.  The book fundamentally revised conventional interpretations of Soviet law and convincingly demonstrated that Stalin personally shaped criminal justice as a system of control in the USSR. Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, considered a classic text in the west, was translated and published in Russian twice (1998 and 2008) and became widely referenced and praised there by legal historians.

Solomon produced many studies of Soviet and Russian legal systems over his career, by our count fifteen authored, co-authored and edited volumes, 68 articles and book chapters.  Let us note a few outstanding features of this influential opus.  One striking feature is Solomon’s focus, as suggested above, on the personnel of the legal system – their training, incentives, and personal goals.  Solomon argues that what Professor Eugene Huskey calls the “seemingly mundane features of the legal system” matter a great deal to how the law functions and what purposes it serves. Professor Kathryn Hendley offers an example of Solomon’s insight in her discussion of his 1987 article, “The Case of the Vanishing Acquital: Informal Norms and the Practice of Soviet Criminal Justice.”  The article addressed a reported phenomenon that seemed inexplicable: after Stalin’s death, the percentage of acquittals at Soviet courts fell, rather than increasing. The answer to this puzzle could be found in the system of evaluating judicial work: acquittals were treated as evidence of malfunctions in the investigatory and court system and could lead to the punishment of court personnel.  The “mundane” fact of routine inspection thus explained what is now commonly accepted as the “accusatorial bias” in the Russian criminal justice system.

A second thread that runs through Professor Solomon’s oeuvre is attention to the everyday uses of the law in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.  While western studies dealt primarily with high-profile trials, political repression, and harsh punishments, Professor Solomon’s work widened the lens on Russia’s judicial system, including the minor cases, civil and criminal, that outnumber by far those concerning political crime.  This human touch pervades Solomon’s work, and is a hallmark of his most recent study, co-authored with Kathryn Hendley, The Judicial System in Russia (Oxford University Press, 2024).  This volume, which extends back to the tsarist period and into Putin’s time, offers a comprehensive study of the court system.  Solomon and Hendley deal with the disparities between political and everyday justice by arguing for the “dual” nature of the court system, a structural feature of Russian law that has endured for centuries.

Professor Solomon’s engagement with Russian law is not confined to the past.  He has been an active scholar of Russia’s ongoing judicial reforms and has published numerous articles  on post-Soviet procedure, the criminal code, the organs of prosecution and investigation, policing, the training and behavior of judges, rights, constitutional changes, and the work of the law in an authoritarian regime.  In post-Soviet countries, Solomon’s work is of vital interest to both scholars and judicial reformers. His research on the Russian Federation dovetails with issues of interest to scholars in other regions as well. Professor Trochev of Nazabaev University notes that Solomon’s article, “Courts and Judges in Authoritarian Regimes,” published in World Politics in 2007 is a much cited reference for legal scholars and political scientists working on other world areas and on international legal projects.

Peter Solomon’s contributions to legal reform go well beyond scholarship.  Over the course of his career, he has served as a consultant to many international legal endeavors, among them the European Union and the Central and East European Law Institute of the American Bar Association. Since 1991, he has been active in projects designed to enhance the quality and purpose of legal regimes in post-Soviet states.  He worked with legal practitioners, judges, and officials to improve the quality of courts in Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, as well as in the Russian Federation itself.  Among other initiatives, he took a leading role in the Canada-Russia Judicial Partnership program (2000-2008), designed to assist local courts in three cities in the Russian Federation in improving court practices.  He was an active participant in judicial reform in Ukraine and contributed to the Kyiv Recommendations on Judicial Independence in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia.  These recommendations have served as a reference for human rights activists and judicial reformers from many countries.  In the aftermath of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Professor Solomon has worked to advise and host Ukrainian graduate students and legal scholars at the University of Toronto.

This activism in legal reform and this care for scholars in difficulty is part and parcel of Professor Solomon’s long-term engagement with students, younger scholars, foreign researchers and legal specialists. Generosity, kindness, and inclusivity – these are the words that come to mind when thinking of Peter Solomon.  Former students, scholars new to the legal history field, major figures in the Russian field, young and old and in between – all express their deep gratitude and affection for Professor Solomon’s consistent, thoughtful advice and gentle assistance.  His conferences and co-edited, co-authored studies have brought together people from widely different preparations and approaches to work collaboratively on the exasperating and fascinating topic of Russia law.  He has truly shaped both the life paths of legal historians across the huge Russian/post-Soviet space and the ideas, methods, and knowledge of the field of Russian legal history.

Let us honor Professor Peter Solomon, and his life time of scholarly innovation, of dedicated engagement with history and law, and of generous care for scholars from many countries, in good times and bad, with an honorary fellowship in the American Society for Legal History.

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 12^th century Europe to 18^th 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.

Applications will be accepted from November 1, 2024-January 15, 2025.

ASLH (Virtual) Book Club: New Member Page

We now have a new members-only page through which you can access Zoom links for live book club events, as well as available recordings of earlier events.

2023 Election Results

At the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA, ASLH President Michael Willrich announced the result of the Annual Election. Please join us in congratulating these newly elected members, and thanking them for their service!

President Elect: Mitra Sharafi (University of Wisconsin)

Nominating Committee Member: Susanna Blumenthal (University of Minnesota)

Board Members: Fahad Bishara (University of Virginia)
Daniel Ernst (Georgetown University)
Elizabeth Kamali (Harvard University)
Amalia Kessler (Stanford University)
Anne Twitty (Stanford University)

We also offer our thanks to the Nominating Committee (John Wertheimer, Co-chair; Lyndsay Campbell, Co-Chair; Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Sophia Lee, and Ada Maria Kuskowsk) for their hard work in nominating a remarkable slate of candidates.

Congratulations to the 2023 Book and Article Prize Winners!

Please join the ASLH in offering our congratulations to this year’s prize winners, in thanking the prize committees for their work, and in appreciating the generosity of the people and organizations who have generously funded them.

Cromwell Article Prize 

Emilie Connolly, “Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in Early America,” American Historical Review 127:1 (2022): 223-253.

Citation:

Emilie Connolly’s “Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in Early America” examines an oft-forgotten aspect of dispossession of Native lands: compensation.  Connolly explores the consequences of payments for Native lands, focusing not on violent force, but “subtler coercions and negotiations afforded by economic relationships (226).” Central to these economic relationships between sovereign Native nations and the U.S. federal government were annuities: yearly payments made to Native peoples in specie or goods in exchange for their land. Yet such funds “evolved,” Connolly deftly shows, into longstanding economic and fiscal relationships between “sovereignties of sharply unequal power.” Annuities served to increase federal control over Native lands by holding back payments to pry land out of Native hands and compel migration. In an innovative and compelling argument, Connolly shows that such polices amounted to a “fiduciary colonialism: a mode of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Native peoples’ wealth.” Importantly, therefore, fiduciary colonialism highlights the often forgotten two prong method of U.S. imperialism: indeed, Connolly demonstrates that the early United States operated not simply as a “settler colonial formation” (characterized by its deliberate attempts to erase and replace Native peoples and societies) but also as a “colonial formation” (characterized by the administration of Native people and federal trusteeship over their wealth, as well as grabbing their land). This article, the committee agreed, is a tour de force: lucid, well-sourced, and subtly argued. Her contribution to the scholarship on United States/Native relations is nothing short of remarkable. While scholars have most often focused on force and violence to explain dispossession, Connolly shows that, ultimately, annuities (and their manipulation, as money could both be promised and withheld) bolstered U.S. federal power. As such, controlling annuities became instead the preferred method of engineering legal/extralegal dispossessions, forcing removal treaties, and compelling expulsions.

Sutherland Prize 

Jake Stattel “Legal culture in the Danelaw: a study of III Aethelred,” Anglo/Saxon England, 48 (2022):163-203

Citation: In 997 AD King Aethelred announced two law codes: one for his English kingdoms (the Woodstock code) and one for the area known as the Danelaw (the Wantage Code). While broadly similar, the two codes also contain important differences. These differences are the subject of Stattel’s erudite and impressive essay.  Historians have usually understood these provisions as markers of the uneasy integration of Danish lands into the English kingdoms. Some see the differences as Athelred’s attempt to confirm English dominion over Danelaw territories; some see it as a necessary concession to the authority of Anglo-Scandinavian elites within the kingdom. Stattel provides a fresh approach. Reframing the question to explore what these codes reveal about legal culture rather than about the political reach of the Anglo-Saxons, Stattel sketches out some of the distinctive legal assumptions of society within the Danelaw regions. These differences, he shows us, were not minor matters of procedure but rather divergent ideas about best practice.

Focusing on collective liability, access to legal recourse, and methods of proof, Stattel makes visible the distinctiveness of Anglo-Scandinavian communities long after their submission to Anglo-Saxon monarchs. He uses an array of tools, textual and material, to trace a system in which the Danelaw was both a part of and apart from the dominant society. His sources range from language to archeology to scientific insights, from charters and chronicles to bones and isotopes. Stattel persuasively argues that the Danelaw is best understood within the context of Scandinavian traditions. In the Danelaw regions, smaller communities allowed for higher standards of mutual responsibility, more stringent requirements for invoking formal law, and a preference for fact-finding over oath-taking. These practices suggest the continued influence of the Anglo-Scandinavian elites upon the broader legal structures and in some cases, they offer early examples of what would become standard English processes.  Stattel’s arguments are clearly presented and thoughtfully constructed. Moreover, he shows us that for law as for other aspects of society, balancing written and material evidence rather than favoring one over the other pays off. This essay goes far beyond a close reading of one early law code; it has important implications for how we understand law’s ability both to reinforce power and to coopt diversity.

Surrency Prize 

Conference Resource Team for the 2023 Annual Meeting

The members of the resource team for Philadelphia 2023 are:

Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania (sbgordon@law.upenn.edu)
Zachary Herz, University of Colorado (zachary.herz@colorado.edu)
Catherine Fisk, University of California, Berkeley (cfisk@berkeley.edu)
Myisha S. Eatmon, Harvard University (myishaeatmon@fas.harvard.edu)
Jared Berkowitz, University of Chicago ( jsberkowitz@uchicago.edu)

2023 Preyer Award Winners

The ASLH is pleased to announce this year’s Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars. They are:

• Tamar Menashe (Emory), “A Person of the Imperial Supreme Court: Jewish Litigation in Speyer and the Struggle to Belong”
• Rebecca Horwitz-Willis (Harvard), “‘Educating a Class of Unfortunates:’ Crime Control, Child Protection, and the Compulsory School Movement, 1888 – 1903“

Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to early career legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two early career legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. The generosity of Professor Preyer’s friends and family has enabled the Society to offer a small honorarium to the Preyer Scholars and to reimburse, in some measure or entirely, their costs of attending the meeting. The competition for Preyer Scholars is organized by the Society’s Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee.

This year’s committee consisted of Juandrea Bates (Chair), Ari Schreiber, Binyamin Blum, Cornelia Dayton, Gautham Rao, and Gregory Ablavsky. The ASLH thanks the committee for their hard work, and offers congratulations to these two outstanding early career scholars!

Announcing the 2023 Hurst Fellows

The ASLH is proud to announce the recipients of the 2023 Hurst fellowships.

The Hurst fellows will attend the twelfth James Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History. A flagship program of the ASLH, the Hurst also enjoys generous support from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where Willard Hurst taught for many years. “The Hurst,” as it is affectionately called by many legal historians, is a biennial workshop devoted to in-depth discussion of the research of early career legal historians.

The Hurst has a storied history. The first Institute was held in 2001, with support from students and colleagues of James Willard Hurst and from his widow, Frances. An early fellow called it “legal history bootcamp,” and an entire generation of scholars are now alums of the Hurst. Risa Goluboff, dean of the University of Virginia Law School, called the Hurst a “priceless treasure,” because the program builds community and collegiality as well as fine scholarly insight and analysis.

In 2017, the ASLH began a campaign to place the Hurst on a permanent financial footing. Thanks to the fundraising mission articulated by Ray Solomon, Hurst alumni, as well as the friends, families, students, colleagues, and the universities of more than a dozen distinguished scholars in the field, made possible the creation of 15 named fellowships, of which 12 were awarded this year to early career scholars (the fellowships will be awarded on a rotating basis moving forward).

This year’s Hurst is fortunate to benefit from the campaign undertaken by the Society, as well as the invaluable support of the Society’s Hurst Committee, co-chaired by Bob Gordon and Sally Gordon, and the Hurst Selection Committee for 2023, chaired by Tom McSweeney. The Hurst will be held in Madison, Wisconsin from June 18 – 30, with convenors Michelle McKinley and Sally Gordon. They share the Stanley Katz Distinguished Convenors Fellowship.

Ray Solomon and David Tanenhaus have now distributed named fellowships to our 2023 Hurst fellows:

• Michael McGovern:  Mary Frances Berry Fellowship
• Doris Morgan Rueda: Hendrik Hartog/Princeton University Fellowship
• Saumyashree Ghosh:  Morton Horwitz Fellowship
• Dilyara Agisheva: Hurst Alumni Fellowship
• Linda Kinstler:  Charles McCurdy/UVA Law School Fellowship
• Evelyn Atkinson: Robert Gordon/Stanford Law School
• Yukako Otori:  Harry Scheiber Fellowship
• Jilene Chua: Rebecca Scott/University of Michigan Law School Fellowship
• Ari Schriber: William E. Nelson Fellowship
• Maham K. Theisen: Reva Seigel/Yale Law School Fellowship
• Charlotte Whatley: David Seipp Fellowship in English Legal History
• David Korostyshevsky: Lawrence Friedman/Stanford Law School Fellowship

To give just one example of how much these fellowships mean to the early career scholars who received them, we quote Michael McGovern who wrote to thank us for the 2023 Mary Frances Berry Fellowship: “Prof. Berry is one of the figures who is both a primary and secondary source in my dissertation, and taught one of my advisors legal history back in his grad school days at Penn. What an inspiration.”

The campaign to complete funding for the Hurst fellowships continues. In 2022, the ASLH began a parallel campaign to create endowed fellowships for the Student Research Colloquium (SRC). To contribute to the Hurst or SRC fellowships, go to ASLH Giving and select the named fellowship from the dropdown menu, or contact ASLH President Michael Willrich.

ASLH Projects and Proposals Grant Recipient: Boston-Area Legal History Colloquium

The Boston-Area Legal History Colloquium (BALHC) held their final meeting on April 15, 2023.  The colloquium, co-sponsored by the ASLH, provides the opportunity for graduate students within the Boston area to receive feedback on works-in-progress in a collegial and professional setting, while networking with a variety students and faculty in the field.

For more information on the BAHLC, please visit: https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/bcnews/campus-community/students/legal-history-colloquium.html

ASLH Virtual Book Club

Deadline for Applications: July 1, 2023

We are excited to announce a new virtual initiative: The ASLH Book Club, a monthly event series that will bring together ASLH members to engage virtually with authors about their recently published books.

The Book Club will provide ASLH members the opportunity to gather on a regular basis throughout the year and discuss recently published work.  In doing so, our hope is to sustain and enrich the existing legal history community as well as welcome new people, some of whom may be new to thinking of themselves as doing legal history.

Each Book Club will feature a conversation between an author and an interlocutor of their choosing, followed by Q&A.  We are happy to help in identifying interlocutors.  Book Club events will be 1 hour, on Zoom, hosted by the ASLH Digital Initiatives Working Group.  Events will be held monthly, typically on Wednesdays, 6-7 pm (central).

There is no expectation that audience members will have read the book; discussion will be structured accordingly.

Eligibility:  Books published since January 2021 (major articles will also be considered)

We encourage scholars at all career stages working in all geographic and chronological fields of legal history (or work expected to be of interest to legal historians) to apply. ASLH membership is not required to present at the Book Club. This call is for Book Club events from Sept. 2023-March 2024.  (There will be a second call for Book Club Events from April – Aug. 2024.)

Applications:  (max. 1 page)

•     Book Author, Title, Publisher and Publication date
•     Book Abstract (1 paragraph)
•     Author Bio (1 paragraph)
•     Interlocutor Bio (1 paragraph)

Please direct Questions & Submissions to:  Barbara Welke, welke004@umn.edu

Application Deadline:  July 1, 2023

Congratulations to our 2022 Honorary Fellows

This year we induct 3 new honorary members. Election as an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History is the highest honor the Society can confer. It recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others. Honorary Fellows are the scholars we admire, whom we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand. Please join us in congratulating these most distinguished colleagues!

Silvia Lara

Richard Roberts

Richard Roberts, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University, has done more than any other scholar to bring together the fields of African history and legal history. His many historical studies highlight the operations of law and legal institutions across a diverse continent, amidst shifting relations of power. A deeply appreciated mentor, Professor Roberts has trained more of the current generation of historians of Africa than anyone else active in the field.  His former students continue to enrich the field with their own significant contributions to legal history.

Professor Roberts received his PhD in History from the University of Toronto in 1978.  He taught for over 40 years at Stanford University. He has written or edited 14 books, and he has never slowed down. His first book was published in 1987; his most recent came out this year. Professor Roberts did not set out to do legal history; he turned to the study of law as he worked on the analysis of political power and political economy in colonial Africa. Soon he was putting law at the center of his preoccupations, and for over 30 years he has produced monographs, edited collections, and articles that have defined the field within African history.  He is widely recognized as for his studies of law and legal institutions in Africa, including publications on slavery, slave emancipation, forced labor, commodity production, child trafficking, and forced marriages.

Professor Roberts’ first book, Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves:  The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1712-1914 (1987), explored the changing nature of power in a West African kingdom. Slave-owning warriors ruled this state and cemented their power through legal institutions in which particular forms of Islamic law were practiced. The imposition of colonial rule by France at the turn of the century overturned these power relations, introducing new legal jurisdictions and changing–but not ending–the Islamic courts and local legal practices.  Professor Roberts continued his multidimensional approach to political economy and law in his second monograph, Two Worlds of Cotton:  Colonialism and the Regional Economy in the French Soudan, 1800-1946 (1996).

Slavery was the focus of Professor Robertson’s first co-edited volume, The End of Slavery in Africa (1988), a collective volume that focused how colonization changed the nature of master-slave relations.  Professor Roberts has continued for many decades his research on slavery and other forms of coerced labor, carefully illuminating the ways in which legal interventions and local practices were intertwined and often in tension with one another. He underscored the gendered dimension of coercion in his co-edited books Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa:  Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2010), Trafficking in Women and Children in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (2012), and Marriage by Force?  Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (2016).

As Professor Roberts worked on slavery he uncovered the rich array of sources on trials, tribunals, and administrative procedures available in archives in Africa and France. These became the foundation of the now classic study, Law in Colonial Africa (1991, reprinted 1998), he co-edited with Kristin Mann. The breakthrough of this book was its reach beyond the purported dichotomy of codified and customary law toward an approach that unified legal and social history and focused on how people used the law, in relation to colonial authorities and in disputes with each other. Professor Roberts’ research took him more deeply into the courts themselves, the foundation of his third monograph, Litigants and Households:  African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895-1912 (2005).

The concept of the “intermediary” is central to Professor Roberts’ work in legal history. Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Modern Africa (2006), a book Roberts co-edited with two of his former students, focuses on people in the middle of the vertical relationship of colonial ruler to subject. The concept of intermediary is also critical to his most recent monograph, Conflicts of Colonialism:  The Rule of Law, French Soudan, and Faama Mademba Sèye (2022).  This study, published in both French and English, is based on Roberts’ indefatigable digging in African and French archives at a career stage when most scholars prefer less stressful methods of research. The book follows a man of modest origins who manipulated French officials into giving him the title of “king” of a region to which he had no natal connection. In this colonial setting, both administrators and Africans tried to mobilize multiple versions of the ‘rule of law’.

Professor Roberts has an outstanding record as a graduate adviser. His students hold positions at many distinguished universities and continue to produce innovative scholarship on legal history. Professor Roberts has been an editor of the Journal of African History, the field’s premier English-language journal, and of the Journal of Legal Pluralism. He is strongly committed to both African and legal studies and played a major role in arranging the symposium on African Legal History jointly sponsored by the ASLH and the African Studies Association when both societies met in Boston in 2019. He has mentored and collaborated with many African scholars and has institutional connections to the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar and the Senegalese National Archives.  Recognized for his innovative scholarship, inspiring teaching, and generous collegiality, Professor Roberts has received many awards for teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In accord with this record, and the heartfelt support of every historian of Africa whom we consulted, we honor Richard Roberts for his outstanding scholarship, his dedication to his students and colleagues, and his leadership and thought-provoking transformation of the study of African legal history both in the United States and internationally.

Ron Harris

Ron Harris is Kalman Lubowsky Professor of Law and History at Tel Aviv University. Harris is a highly creative and influential scholar working at the intersection of legal and economic history, who has pursued field-defining research on the evolution of forms of business organization across the globe. At the same time, he has played a pioneering role in creating the field of legal history within Israel, establishing the institutional structures and culture that has led to a flourishing of legal historical scholarship in the country.

After earning first degrees in both law and history from Tel Aviv University, Harris received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and thereafter began his academic career at Tel Aviv University Law School, working his way up the ranks. He has held key administrative positions in the institution, serving as both vice dean and dean. So too, he has been a visiting professor at leading universities around the globe and has received numerous prestigious fellowships, grants, and awards. His publication record includes three monographs, six edited books and journal symposia, and over fifty articles and book chapters.

Harris has conducted pathbreaking research on the interrelationship between legal and economic history, beginning early in his career with work focused on eighteenth and nineteenth-century England and thereafter expanding his focus to pursue a global and comparative frame, encompassing not only Europe, but also the Ottoman Empire, India, and China. He has published two major books addressing the history of business organization, as well as an array of important articles with leading economic historians that compare forms of business organization in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the reviewers we solicited emphasize, Harris’s research in this domain combines deep knowledge of legal rules and structures (across multiple time periods and locations) with careful attention to the social, political, religious, and economic context. He then deploys this erudition as a means of testing economic theories often developed in the absence of deep historical knowledge, enabling him to identify those frameworks that might transcend particular contingencies (as well as those that do not). In sum, as observed by one of the scholars whom we contacted, Harris has been “a true pioneer at the intersection of economic history and legal history.”

Not only has Harris published extensively on the comparative, transnational history of business organization, but so too, he has authored pioneering scholarship on the history of Israeli law—much of it in Hebrew. In addition to many articles and edited collections, he published a monograph, entitled The Formation of Israeli Law, 1948-1977. Drawing on almost twenty years of research, this book explores key structuring tensions in the foundation of Israeli law—including those between secular and religious law and between law and politics, as well as those between legal cultures, classes, nationalities, and ethnic groups. As described by scholars with whom we spoke, the book has become an absolutely foundational text in the field, such that “no legal treatment in Israel can ignore the analysis [Harris] presents.”

Beyond his extensive and path-breaking scholarship on the history of Israeli law, Harris has also been an extraordinary institutional citizen, playing a leading role in the development of legal history as a thriving and vital field of scholarly engagement in Israel. He served a key role in the 2005 establishment of the Israeli History and Law Organization and then in 2009 became the founding director of the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University Law School. These two institutions have fostered a remarkable flourishing of legal history in the country as measured by such metrics as the numbers of students and full-time faculty focused on the field, as well as the number of publications and conferences devoted to it.The end result has been to transform the field of legal history in Israel from one that was marginal and neglected to one that is now valued as part of the mainstream. Moreover, in line with Harris’s own research and scholarly values, legal history research and teaching in Israel today is both global and local, contributing to knowledge across multiple legal-historical domains.

For his pathbreaking contributions to scholarship, encompassing both the globe and Israel in particular, as well as for his vital institutional role in developing the field of legal history within Israel, the Honors Committee concluded that Ron Harris is eminently deserving of recognition. It is a great honor and pleasure to welcome him as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Congratulations to our 2022 Prize Winners!

The John Phillip Reid Book Award

Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2021). Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done uncovers the long arc of civil rights activism in the North, showing how it arose as distinct from antislavery activism and laid the intellectual and political foundations for the later emergence of the Fourteenth Amendment. Centered in the states, rather than the federal government, this First Civil Rights Movement, she shows, was championed by black activists, who were, in turn, supported, by a range of white allies. Together, they challenged the moral and constitutional illegitimacy of the black codes that were enacted throughout the country (including the North) and that were rooted not only in racism, but also in the widely accepted authority of the state to regulate the poor and others deemed to pose a threat to the social order. Combining insights and methods from political, socio-cultural and legal history, Masur’s clear-eyed account explores both the possibilities and the limits of legal reform, offering lessons that are deeply resonant with our own time.

The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award

John Christopoulos, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021). John Christopoulos’s Abortion in Early Modern Italy is a masterful interweaving of medical, religious, and legal perspectives on abortion in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing in part on records of trials in criminal and ecclesiastical courts, Christopoulos reveals the full complexity of how women and men from all parts of society thought about and experienced abortion. He demonstrates how large the gulf could be between prescription and practice. In its careful interrogation of a wide range of sources, and in its thoughtful discussion of an issue that the book shows to have been no less controversial in the early modern period than it is today, Abortion in Early Modern Italy is a model of historical scholarship.

Peter Gonville Stein Book Award: Honorable Mention

Jocelyn Hendrickson, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Harvard University Press, 2021).

The Sutherland Article Prize 

Holly Brewer, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” Law and History Review 39, no 4 (November 2021): 765-834. Holly Brewer’s “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” is a provocative, ambitious, and deeply researched article, which offers a fundamentally revisionist account of the origins and evolution of the way in which the English common law came to allow human beings to be owned as property. Far from absent at home and merely tolerated abroad, slavery was, Brewer argues, embedded in the English common law for at least a century before the 1772 Somerset decision. Beginning with the efforts of the common law courts under Charles II to support a struggling Royal African Company by contriving a legal fiction by which people could be considered as “things” and thus owned and traded as goods, the article traces the lasting impact of these efforts into the eighteenth century and beyond. Even as later common law judges from John Holt to the Earl of Mansfield attempted to undo the precedent, the damage had been done, having embedded itself through subsequent Parliamentary statute and colonial law across the Atlantic, including in the legal regimes of the new United States. Brewer thus not only locates a place for slavery in the common law—long assumed, not least thanks to Mansfield’s famous ruling, to have resisted it—but inverts our usual understanding of slavery’s path through the law, following it from England into the colonial world rather than vice versa. This process, this article argues, had profound effects, inadvertently producing a “blunt and clumsy instrument” that allowed for both less nuanced and harsher regimes of slavery than developed in other European empires. As if this were not enough, Brewer along the way also offers perspective on a range of other key questions in British legal history, asking readers to reflect on issues such as the role judges play as instruments of policy, how religion and race shape legal argument and precedent, and the need for more complex and multifarious approaches to understanding how the common law itself evolves over time.

Elizabeth Papp Kamali, “Tales of the Living Dead: Dealing with Doubt in Medieval English Law,” Speculum 96, no. 2 (April 2021): 367-417. Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s “Tales of the Living Dead: Dealing with Doubt in Medieval English Law,” is a remarkably erudite, creative, well-written, and original exploration of how medieval criminal and civil law dealt with the surprisingly complex problem of establishing proof of death in the absence of a body or corpse. Kamali takes what might seem at first glance to be a rather narrow concern and shows how the question raises an impressive range of thorny and profound issues about the nature of evidence and proof in the common and civil law. Kamali shows how this problem reached into a range of corners of the law, from homicide prosecutions to probate, along the way encountering conundrums such as how to deal with another kind of “living dead,” namely convicts who for one reason or another survived the gallows. The work not only engages felony law (criminal context) in common law but also similar quandaries in common law actions on property (private law context), Mort d’Ancestor and dower. Reading beyond the formation of substantive rules and norms, the article reveals rhetorical strategies in the law by mining scattered traces in the archival record, especially those of the Court of King’s Bench, alongside chronicles, ballads, and other “nonlegal” materials. Kamali’s work thus presents both a critical perspective on how medieval lawyers and litigants accommodated the absence of traditional evidence as well as a ready model for the tools and techniques legal historians might deploy when confronted with the very same problem.

The Surrency Article Prize

Jessica Marglin, “Extraterritoriality and Legal Belonging in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean,” Law and History Review 39:4 (2021): 679-706. Jessica Marglin’s “Extraterritoriality and Legal Belonging in the Nineteenth- Century Mediterranean” transforms historical understandings of international law, state membership, empire building, and modernity. The article upends a simple narrative that nationality law evolved wholly within national boundaries. Instead, Marglin shows that “the challenges and opportunities presented by extraterritoriality” – specifically, Middle Eastern states’ need to assert jurisdiction over their subjects and Western Empires’ desire to intervene in local affairs – shaped the evolution of legal membership that was fragmentary and differentiated among classes of people. This extraordinary article features rigorous research in multilingual archives, deep thought, careful analysis, and compelling stories. Marglin presents two case studies: the legislation of legal belonging in Tunisia, the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco and the evolution of belonging in colonial North Africa. She introduces readers to a widow living in Istanbul who sought the resolution of an estate under Greek law, Algerians living in Tripolitania and Algeria who appealed to French consular authority, and other creative legal entrepreneurs. Marglin excavates the legal entanglements of consular officers, foreign affairs ministers, and judges respecting the status of individuals living within the jurisdiction of one state while claiming the protection of another. Offering new insight into the nature and historical evolution of legal membership in the Middle East, Marglin demonstrates the exciting potential global legal history holds to illuminate trans-regional sources.

The Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize

Nathaniel Millett, “Law, Lineage, Gender and the Lives of Enslaved Indigenous People on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean.” William & Mary Quarterly 78:4 (October) 2021, pp.687-720. Nathaniel Millett uses a remarkable documentary record to examine the unraveling of slavery in nineteenth century Belize. Plaintiffs who were generations removed from the initial place of enslavement used prohibitions against indigenous slavery by incorporating genealogical memories, racial ambiguity, geographical mobility, and legal loopholes to argue for their freedom.

The Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize

Rowan Dorin, Corpus Synodalium https://corpus-synodalium.com/ Corpus Synodalium, created by Rowan Dorin, Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, is a database-in-progress that includes 90 percent (approximately 1,400 texts) of the extant local ecclesiastical legislation issued across Latin Christendom from ca. 1215 – ca. 1400. It includes a mapping tool that offers a first-of-its-kind method for tracing change over time across an ecclesiastical geography. As Professor Sara McDougall explains, this database “is a vital resource in seeking to understand local church law, the legislative activity of bishops, as iterated throughout medieval Europe. Previously. . . trying to get at what local church law was in any one place in Medieval Europe, let alone compare it to other places, or try to track changes over time, was quite impossible. This matters because it is so useful to know what was actually happening ‘on the ground’ all over Europe as opposed to focusing only on the decrees issued by the papacy, if we want to know anything about the spread and implementation of any of these ideas and what all that meant for people in practice.”  The committee applauds Dr. Dorin for the scholarly importance, creativity, and intellectual generosity of this marvelous digital legal history project.

The Anne Fleming Article Prize

Casey Marina Lurtz, “Codifying Credit: Everyday Contracting and the Spread of the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” Law and History Review 39, no. 1 (2021): 97-133.

Paolo Di Martino, Mark Latham, and Michelangelo Vasta, “Bankruptcy Laws around Europe (1850-2015): Institutional Change and Institutional Features,” Enterprise & Society 21, no. 4 (2020): 936-990.

William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize

Gregory Ablavsky, Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Federal Ground, an analysis of early territorial governance, is beautifully written, deeply researched, innovative, and sophisticated. Mining a wide variety of legal and governmental sources, Ablavsky makes original arguments of consequence to several fields in addition to legal history, including Native American history, settler colonialism, and early American state-building. What appears at first to be a narrative of a failed state turns, unexpectedly, into a curious story of limited state “success,” illuminating how the federal state earned legitimacy and practical power in the only regions where it was in charge. Ablavsky shows how both the Natives and white settlers/speculators used or lobbied inchoate federal institutions – at first, just a handful of officers and their ad hoc commissions – to shape the legal landscape in ways that furthered their interests and visions of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys.  These contestants constructed the state by demanding that it arbitrate disputes – and then taking its money. Ablavsky uses contests over property and federal responses to violence as his chief examples, pulling from diverse and scattered records to weave a complex yet coherent story of competing claims and their often-contingent resolution. He traces federal officials’ encounters with Indigenous law and with Native understandings of consent, efforts to monopolize the legitimate use of violence, and deployment of federal funds with nuance and sensitivity to his sources’ limitations even as he wrings insights from what must have been an unwieldy archive. In Ablavsky’s telling, the federal government emerged not because of an effective or even coherent federal plan of pacification, land-granting, or settlement, but literally from the ground up. His is a knotty tale of furious claims-making in which there are few heroes and that perhaps only in retrospect takes on the majesty of the tragic. The story is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive, yet told crisply and with wit and insight. Ablavsky unearths and interprets sources with the creativity and mastery of a much more senior scholar. Federal Ground is ambitious and illuminating, without overestimating historians’ ability to reconstruct a contested and thorny past. For years to come, this should be the authoritative history for understanding the earliest phase of American territorial, and thus imperial, history.

William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize

Christopher Clements, “‘There isn’t no trouble at all if the state law would keep out’:  Indigenous People and New York’s Carceral State,” Journal of American History 108 (September 2021):  296-319. In this deeply researched, gracefully written article, Christopher Clements explores the jurisdictional dynamics that resulted in the over-policing of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, located on the border between New York and Canada, in the twentieth century.  While the title suggests that the focus is Native people and the carcel state, the analysis has much broader implications for understanding the evolving balance of power in the federal system and changing conceptions of sovereignty.  Clements places Native people and their claims to sovereignty at the center of these issues, underscoring the continuing importance of federal Indian policies and Native assertions of sovereignty, while revealing the human cost of the transition from federal to state jurisdiction for the Akwesanse people.

William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize

Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, “Undocumented Youth: The Labor, Education, and Rights of Migrant Children in Twentieth Century America” (Columbia University). In a highly original and resonant sociolegal history dissertation, “Undocumented Youth: The Labor, Education, and Rights of Migrant Children in Twentieth Century America,” Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez illuminates the multiple sites of repression of child migrants from Latin America. She does so by combining institutional and social history, charting the rise of legal and quasi-legal international and domestic border controls that disproportionately hurt child migrants, while viscerally conveying the everyday experiences of children trying to make their way to and through the United States. She details the exclusions, restrictions, and removals these young people faced as they and their families sought economic stability and social opportunities through work and education. But Padilla-Rodríguez also widens the lens to examine the complex legal and cultural valences of childhood innocence and “adultification.” As she delves into the child migrants’ experiences of economic privation, near-constant movement, and racialization, Padilla-Rodríguez herself crosses borders to draw on archival sources both in Mexico and the United States. Through elegantly written and accessible storytelling and impressive archival research, Padilla-Rodríguez shows us a “hybrid system of restriction and removal” that operated across both state and national borders, in farms and in schools, in public and in private. Padilla-Rodríguez details how local activists’ responses to increased child labor trafficking and detention led to national reform and new statutory rights in the 1960s. Yet by emphasizing the innocence and vulnerability of children, these well-meaning activists unwittingly handed the state yet more means of repression, including new points of conflict over rights, growing child imprisonment, and additional rationales for deportation. In confronting the paradoxes of reform, Padilla-Rodríguez adds to a burgeoning body of literature by historians that highlights the unintended consequences of socio-legal change.

William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Fellowships

Jonah Estess is presently a PhD candidate in American History at American University. He is currently working on his dissertation entitled “Bank and State: Money, Law, and Moral Economy, 1775-1896.” Estess expects to receive his doctorate in 2024.  Estess’ dissertation explores how the federal government’s monetary system of paper currency and coins was long steeped in conflict. Conflicts regarding U.S. currency and monetary policy related to the developing national character of the U.S., its political economy, market morality, and ultimately the meaning of democracy. Struggles and debates included those between farmers, merchants, investors, and the state, each with their own demands, needs, and interests. Professor Gautham Rao is Estess’ dissertation advisor. Rao, as the Executive Editor of Law and History Review, reads many manuscripts and comments that Estess’ work is highly innovative in both its approach and methodology, combining the innovative use of primary sources with an intense understanding of the complex economic, political, and cultural role of money, its use, production and meaning. The dissertation will provide a significant intervention into the existing literature by combining a cultural understanding of money from the ground-up as well as a high-level analysis of monetary policy and the state. Connected to this is the way in which  Estess’ actors are both everyday people as well as a policy makers and state actors, functioning on a national and even international stage. This is a truly momentous and ambitious project.  Estess intends to use Cromwell funding to write a specific chapter in his dissertation that will examine federal monetary reforms and the creation of the national banking system in the decade after the American Civil War. Specifically, the funds will be used to underwrite visits to a number of archives that are crucial to Estess’ work.

Bobby Cervantes is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas. Cervantes’ dissertation is entitled “Las Colonias: The Housing of Poverty in Modern Americas.”  The dissertation examines the development of rural and impoverished Mexican-American communities in Texas in the Post World War II period. These unincorporated towns or colonias are largely composed of substandard housing and lack a variety of even basic municipal utilities, such as water or electricity. The dissertation analyzes how these entities developed as a consequence of U.S. immigration policy, local Texas ordinances regarding the incorporation of cities, municipal regulation, and property law. More specifically, such towns grew out of a need by landowners for Mexican agricultural workers. Such low paid workers needed housing which was largely controlled by landowners who also exerted significant political power. This process of development was hastened by the termination of the U.S. Bracero (or “guest worker”) program in the 1950s. Colonias thus continued to expand and these now permanent residents increasingly became the victims of a variety of predatory land, leasing, and lending contracts. The dissertation in part examines such contracts, eviction proceedings, and the defenses raised. Moreover, residents of colonias were not passive and at various times organized and asserted significant agency to demand better provisions of utilities and amenities. This is far from a linear story of progressive improvement as global conditions and international treaties such as NAFTA continually erased or slowed residents’ ongoing struggles for better housing and living conditions. Ultimately, the dissertation will provide an important intervention on a little-known subject while situating such colonias into a broader framework about racialized poverty, “rural urbanism,” immigration, and property law. Cervantes will use Cromwell Funds to travel to Texas to conduct research regarding local housing deeds and lending contracts, as well as other documents.

Kimberly Beaudreau is a graduate student in American History at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She is currently working on her dissertation “Economic Migrants and the Decline of the American Refugee and Asylum System,1975-2000,” which examines the racialized development and genealogy of the category “economic migrant.” This is a crucial issue in U.S. immigration law as “economic migrants” as opposed to “political refugees” do not qualify for asylum in the U.S. Beaudreau will analyze how the Refugee Act of 1980 dramatically curtailed, rather than expanded, the granting of asylum during the last decades of the twentieth century. In part, the continuing contraction of ineligibility for asylum was accomplished through international treaties, congressional laws, and the rules and administrative action of various federal agencies. These measures disproportionately targeted poor, non-white border crossers from around the world and prevented most people from ever reaching US soil. Beaudreau’s project will make an especially important contribution in the field of immigration law and history by connecting the experiences of Southeast Asian, Haitian, and Central American refugees. Moreover, she puts into dialogue official state documents with oral histories of  migrants as well as documents from a variety of immigrant and human rights organizations. Beaudreau will use Cromwell funding to conduct archival research in Washington, DC, and Maryland, specifically at the US Coast Guard Historian’s Office and USCIS History Office and Library.

Jared Berkowitz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Brandeis University. His dissertation is entitled “Creature of Capitalism: A Legal History of Corporate Personhood in America, 1789-1890.” It explores the history of the complex development of corporate personhood and argues that corporate personhood at the turn of the nineteenth century was understood as endowing upon a corporation a certain limited type of artificial personhood rather than an actual legal person endowed with a variety of rights. More specifically, the project narrates how corporate personhood transformed in the 19^th century from a populist tactic designed to mitigate legislative corruption into a legal tool deployed against emerging government regulation. The dissertation will explore the contingent and often shifting meaning of corporate personhood in a range of legal, political, and social contexts including the establishment of the First National Bank, issues of personal jurisdiction, creditor rights, and a variety of tax cases. Following the Civil War, corporate personhood became increasingly concretized with courts endowing corporations with due process rights. Importantly for the project, Berkowitz uses a wide range of sources that have not been typically employed when examining the history of corporations or the history of capitalism. As one of his dissertation advisor’s states, Berkowitz’s dissertation has the potential to be enormously significant and offer the fullest and richest history of corporations to date. Berkowitz has completed his archival research and will use Cromwell funds to assist with living costs as he finishes writing his dissertation.

Donna Devlin is a PhD candidate in American History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her dissertation is entitled, “Women of the Great Plains and the “Disruption” of Neighborhoods: Challenging Sexual Violence and Coercion through Local Courts of Law in Kansas and Nebraska, 1870-1900, with a Segue to the Present.” Devlin is examining the role of rape and sexual violence in the context of the frontier societies of the Great Plain states. She argues that the tremendous difficulty in prosecuting such cases (when they are prosecuted at all) is one of continuity and provides a mechanism for creating and maintaining white male power while normalizing sexual violence. More specifically, the dissertation examines both law on the books as well as law on the ground. In doing so, she contextualizes sexual violence, political power, and women’s agency in bringing a variety of legal cases related to sexual violence. This is a highly innovative and creative project as studies about the history of sexual violence have concentrated either in the South or in urban areas. As such work is so new, Devlin’s primary sources include an intense scrutiny of local court records and other local material. This project will contribute significantly to women’s legal history as well as Western history. Cromwell funds will be used to travel to archives in Kansas and Nebraska.

ASLH and NACBS

This year, the ASLH Annual Meeting will coincide with the meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies, who will be meeting on the same premises. In the spirit of generosity, both organizations have agreed to allow reciprocity to scholars attending the other meeting. Thus, registered attendees at the ASLH will be welcome to attend any panel they like of the NACBS conference, and registered NACBS attendees are welcome to attend ASLH panels. Reciprocity does not extend to receptions or meals. More information on NACBS, including their draft conference program, is available here: https://www.nacbs.org/conference.

Court Cases and the Making of African Legal History

With support of the American Society for Legal History, researchers of the project ‘Global Legal History on the Ground’ (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) have published a video series and a bibliography on ‘Court Cases and the Writing of African History’. The videos are in Portuguese with English subtitles. Both bibliography and videos aim to draw the attention of researchers to the potential that court cases offer in the writing of African history. They also provide basic information on how to work with this type of primary source.

Conference Resource Team for the Chicago 2022 Annual Meeting

At its annual meeting, the ASLH makes available a Resource Team composed of three to five members to answer questions and assist members in understanding the ASLH’s policies and procedures, including policies and procedures regarding professional conduct. The Resource Team provides informal support and works with members to ensure that their concerns are heard in a safe and (when possible) confidential way. The Resource Team focuses on members’ well-being and does not investigate alleged violations or recommend actions in response. The members of the resource team for Chicago 2022 are:

Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania (sbgordon@law.upenn.edu)
Zachary Herz, University of Colorado (zachary.herz@colorado.edu)
Catherine Fisk, University of California, Berkeley (cfisk@berkeley.edu)
Myisha S. Eatmon, Harvard University (myishaeatmon@fas.harvard.edu)
Jared Berkowitz, Brandeis University (Graduate Student Representative, jsberkowitz@brandeis.edu)

ASLH Brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health

Read the brief here.

Children and the Law: A Conference in Honor of Michael Grossberg:

A Conference in Honor of Michael Grossberg

ASLH joins other organizations in condemning violations of the Presidential Records Act

Read more here.

Call for Applications: ASLH STUDENT RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM 2022

The American Society for Legal History will host the ninth annual Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, November 9, and Thursday, November 10, 2022, in Chicago, Illinois.  The SRC annually brings eight graduate students to the site of the ASLH annual meeting to discuss their in-progress dissertations or other research projects with each other and with ASLH-affiliated scholars.

Target applicants include early-post-coursework Ph.D. students and historically minded law students.  Students working in all chronological periods and all geographical fields are encouraged to apply.  Applicants who have not yet had an opportunity to interact with the ASLH are welcome, as are those who have never received any formal training in legal history.  A student may present a paper at the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

The ASLH will at least partially and, in many cases, fully reimburse students’ travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.

To apply, please submit the following three items to John Wertheimer at:  srcproposals@aslh.net:

• a cover letter that describes, among other things, how far along you are and approximately how many years remain in your present course of study;
• an up-to-date CV; and
• a two-page, single-spaced research statement that begins with a working title and proceeds to describe the in-progress research project that you would like to present at the colloquium.

Application deadline: June 1, 2022.

Call for Papers: 2022 ASLH Annual Meeting

The Program Committee of the ASLH invites proposals for complete panels and individual papers for the 2022 meeting to be held November 10-12 in Chicago. Panels and papers on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome.  We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography.

Limited financial assistance (covering airfare and ground transportation only) is available for presenters in need, with priority given to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and scholars from abroad.

Panel proposals should include the following: a c.v. with complete contact information for each person on the panel, including chairs and commentators; 300-word abstracts of individual papers; and a 300-word description of the panel. Guidance on developing panel proposals can be found here.

The Program Committee also welcomes other forms of structured presentation for a 90-minute slot, including lightning round (1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters for a few minutes each on projects in a related field at any stage of development), skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters), or roundtable format (1-2 chairs, 3-4 presenters). The Committee will also consider author-meets-reader panel proposals concerning books with a copyright date of 2021. We encourage panels that put two or three books in conversation, with up to three commentators total. Sufficient information following the general guidelines for panel proposals should be provided for the Committee to assess the merits of the presentation.

The Program Committee additionally seeks proposals for full-day or half-day pre-conference symposia crafted around related themes to augment traditional conference offerings. Please provide a program title, the intended length of program, a program description, a c.v. and contact information for each presenter, and any information technology requirements. The Program Committee is available to consult with organizers of such symposia as they develop their proposal. Pre-conference symposia must be self-funded. Organizers are encouraged but not required to host their symposia at the conference hotel. Please note that the deadline for these submissions is earlier than the deadline for main conference submissions so that organizers whose symposia are not selected have an opportunity to submit their panels to the main conference.

As a general matter, we will not be able to accommodate special scheduling requests, so prospective presenters, chairs, and commentators at the main conference should plan to be available on Friday, November 11, and Saturday, November 12.  The ASLH has a strict one-appearance policy (excluding appearances at pre-conference symposia). Prospective participants may submit proposals for multiple sessions, with the understanding that the panel chair will be responsible for promptly finding an appropriate substitute member for any session from which a participant has to withdraw.

The Program Committee encourages panels that include participants from groups historically under-represented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

The members of the Program Committee are Nora Bakarat, Nikolas Bowie, Sara Butler, Nandini Chatterjee, Adriana Chira, Samuel F. C. Daly, Catherine Evans, Rui Hua, Jessica Marglin, and Kyle Volk. The co-chairs of the Program Committee are Fahad Bishara (fab7b@virginia.edu) and Sophia Lee (slee@law.upenn.edu).

All program presenters must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. All proposals must be submitted through the ASLH website, available here. Please visit https://aslh.net for updates and additional information.

The deadline for Pre-Conference submissions is Friday February 18, 2022.

The deadline for all other submissions is Friday March 18, 2022.

2021 Annual Meeting Prize, Honors, and Fellowship Winners

The ASLH is delighted to announce our 2021 prize, honors, and fellowship winners!

Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize

Land-Grab Universities (https://www.landgrabu.org/) a remarkable project led by Dr. Robert Lee, Lecturer in American History and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge University who put together an interdisciplinary team that included a journalist (Tristan Ahtone), a data visualizer (George McGhee), a web designer (Cody Leff), a cartographer (Margaret Peace), and a photographer (Kalen Goodluck). The website’s powerful visualization of expropriated Indigenous land has garnered international attention and spurred historical investigations at many of the 52 universities, such as Cornell University, that were built on and with Indigenous land acquired as a result of The Morrill Act, which President Lincoln signed into law in 1862. The quality of the website, coupled with the project’s commitment to sharing its data and computational programs via a GitHub repository are the distinguishing features of this project, as is its mission to use historical investigation to spur educational change. The project seeks to increase the number of Indigenous students enrolled at the 52 universities that benefitted from this historical process of dispossession. Overall, Land-Grab Universities brilliantly combines original research, computational method, and sophisticated data visualization to make its scholarly and social impact.

Cromwell Article Prize

Gloria McCahon Whiting for “Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court,” William and Mary Quarterly, 77, no.3 (2020):405-440.

Gloria McCahon Whiting’s “Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court” is a creative, brave, and rigorous exemplar of legal history scholarship. Through an insightful, imaginative analysis of tens of thousands of probate court transactions in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, from 1639 to 1769, Whiting shows how historians can use legal archives to analyze both the structural contours of coercive institutions and the qualitative experiences of the individuals who strove to make lives within them.

Whiting’s use of legal archives makes an important intervention in slavery studies, where recent debates have questioned the reliance on such materials for their potential to repeat the violence that the law once rendered against enslaved persons. Using these archives can affirm the vision of those in power, dehumanizing the enslaved by representing them only through aggregation and abstraction. Whiting, however, shows the utility of these materials. In her hands, aggregation does justice to historical subjects by accurately rendering the systems of power they endured. With careful counting, she upends conventional assumptions about the practice of slavery in colonial New England, demonstrating that enslaved persons of African descent quickly replaced indentured European labor and that Native Americans were never a significant source of bound labor in the region. She also uses the records to reveal qualitative insights into enslaved persons’ efforts to shape their own lives: to form families, make claims on owners and their heirs, hold property, engage in commerce, and seek freedom. Whiting excavates the persuasive talents of a bondsman name Titus who convinced the heirs of a slave owner to draft manumission papers. She writes about a girl in bondage named Rose who learned to read, studied religion, and convinced an owner that his claims to property in her were illegitimate. She traces kin relationships and documents property holdings of enslaved persons. She asks readers to imagine the world map that hung above the bed of an enslaved man named Philip and to consider what he might have imagined and remembered as he gazed at it. This article, modest and measured in tone, is an understated, yet vitally important and courageous piece of scholarship that uses law to understand the dynamics of power and the humanity of the powerless.

Cromwell Book Prize

Christine Walker for Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (Omohundro and University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and built upon painstaking and wide-ranging archival research across Britain, Jamaica, and the United States, Jamaica Ladies struck the committee as a tour de force. Walker focuses on free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who inhabited this island in the first century after it came under English rule and offers a complex, multifaceted portrait of their activities as colonizers and slaveholders with the broader aim of exploring “the gendered dimensions of power” in the Anglo-Atlantic world. She examines Jamaica’s first century under English rule, as slavery expanding rapidly across the British Atlantic colonies, and her most compelling insights derive from a seemingly forgotten pile of testamentary devices housed in the Jamaican archives. It may be that Walker has analyzed every will penned by property-holding women in Jamaica during her period of study. The granularity of the lived experiences that Walker carefully pieces together from these terse and fragmentary legal records, as well as from a rich assortment of mercantile and personal correspondence, enables her to make a compelling case that these women were “handmaidens of empire.”

Walker thus challenges the conventional renderings of the British Caribbean as “a hypermasculine space,” and implicates its titular subjects in the building of Britain’s largest and wealthiest slaveholding colony. The activities of these Jamaica Ladies are surveyed in the first three intricately wrought chapters of the book, situated respectively in Port Royal, urban Kingston, and the plantations of the rural parishes. Transported to these colonial spaces, the reader finds free and freed women playing critical roles as proprietors and managers of plantations and businesses as well as households, forging links in imperial commercial networks and structuring everyday life in the colony’s ports and backcountry. In so doing, Walker makes indelibly clear, these propertied women both contributed to and profited from the exploitative extraction, brutal discipline, and deadly violence that marked this slave society.

The complicated interplay between gender, race, sex, and power is even more brilliantly illuminated in a second set of chapters which explore the socio-legal practices of inheritance bequests, nonmarital relationships, and manumission. Following the paper trails left behind by her historical subjects with an acute grasp of the legalities of colonial life, Walker vividly demonstrates the gendered nature of slaveholding – the distinctive dynamics, as well as the intimacies and animosities that developed between female enslavers and the men, women, and children they acquired as property and sometimes incorporated into their own families and wider kinship networks. The accumulated details of these everyday interactions between owners and captives add up to far more than the sum of their parts, persuasively illustrating how women’s possession of other people enhanced their own sovereignty, enabling them to command more wealth and independence than their counterparts in other parts of the British Empire. And yet the relatively autonomous actions of these female slaveholders did not always or only operate to strengthen the institution of slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world. They also exposed strains and contradictions in the gender and racial hierarchies that were supposed to govern colonial life, strategically “creating loopholes for a select few to escape bondage” that threatened to “collapse the boundaries between enslavement and liberty.” In this way, Walker’s careful analysis of the role of women property holders helps reduce the historiographical division between studies of the West Indies and the rest of British America. Indeed, Walker’s analysis offers a model for rethinking who used law to build the empire, how they did so, and to what ends.

In providing this provocative and persuasive account of the world these female slaveholders helped make, Walker makes a significant contribution to the field of American legal history. Though focused on a British colony that did not become part of the United States, her analysis of how women used wills and their management of property and households and the people in them sheds new light on the roles of law and gender in slaveholding society more generally. Skillfully tacking between legislative codes and surviving wills, inventories, deeds, and other documents that were not originally written for the benefit of historians, Walker exhibits a deep appreciation of what these paper records can and cannot tell us about the society within which they were created. The historical narrative she crafts from these materials is nothing short of revelatory, bringing to light the mixed motives, ideals, and interests that free and freed women brought to the work of building “a brave new world, one that hinged on relentless profit-seeking, coercive colonialism, and profound exploitation.” And because this is a past that is not even past, her book has much to teach us about the dilemmas of our own times.

Cromwell Dissertation Prize

Alyssa G. Penick, for “The Churches of Our Government: Parishes, Property, and Power in the Colonial and Early National Chesapeake,” PhD diss., (University of Michigan, 2020).

In a beautifully rendered and sweeping dissertation, “The Churches of Our Government: Parishes, Property, and Power in the Colonial and Early National Chesapeake,” Alyssa G. Penick tells a revisionist history of disestablishment—how “the legal concept of an establishment of religion evolved from dismantling the established church.” This ambitious dissertation covers a century spanning the late colonial period through the early republic while homing in on specific localities to reveal the myriad ways the Anglican church stood at the center of civic life. Employing an expansive understanding of religious influence, Penick demonstrates the role of statutory and common law in maintaining the church’s powers. Her insightful writing brings alive how the church engaged in everything from policing the public good, to meting out social welfare, to executing law. The manner of disestablishment determined the degree to which it would continue to do so. Disestablishment, Penick insists, was a fundamentally “material process.” Methodologically creative and deeply grounded in archival materials, the dissertation details the church’s substantial wealth, garnered not only through glebes but also through other types of real property, taxation, and enslaved persons. The key to maintaining this wealth, Penick contends, was a common law corporate status: “Vestrymen and church wardens came and went, but parishes existed in perpetuity as corporate entities.” Revolutionaries inverted the meaning of “establishment,” from enforcing orthodoxy, to a new sense of “using state power to protect religious freedom.” That new meaning, in turn, elicited different state-level responses, which Penick brilliantly teases out through a comparison of how Virginia and Maryland, neighbors with distinct patterns of church property-holding, translated the abstract idea of “disestablishment” into concrete legislation with real-world consequences. Disestablishment thus not only changed the structure of the church, it also rearranged the material landscape, loosening church control of white people’s moral conduct while tightening surveillance of the poor and free Black people and changing property relations and social welfare programs. By challenging common individual-rights narratives of religious freedom, this provocative and inventive dissertation gives us a new history of disestablishment but it also provides intellectual grist for our own times.

Sutherland Prize

Priyasha Saksena for “Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia” Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (May 2020), 409-457.

Priyasha Saksena’s erudite, thoughtful, and well-written article offers a provocative reevaluation of the role international law and especially debates over the nature of sovereignty in controversies over the legal status of princely states in post-1858 colonial India. Tracing competing arguments as they migrated from European treatises on international law to the Political Department of the Government of India as well as the nominally independent states of Baroda and Travancore, Saksena shows how British Indian policymakers adapted pluralist conceptions of divisible sovereign power to support expanding claims over nominally independent South Asian states, while advocates for the princely states responded with equally compelling legal and political arguments that defended their autonomy by privileging an understanding of sovereignty as singular and territorial. In so doing, this article challenges some longstanding and fundamental assumptions about the relationship between modern state sovereignty, discourses of “civilizational” difference, and colonial rule. It also makes a nuanced and powerful case for understanding leaders of princely states—and their legal advocates—not as “collaborators” with British rule but rather as engaged in active if sometimes subtle resistance to it. The article concludes by gesturing to how these conflicts in late nineteenth-century India traveled, serving as precedent for analogous, if distinct, colonial situations across the globe, especially Africa. Thus, in shedding light on the relatively understudied world of late nineteenth century princely states, Saksena presents readers with a compelling argument and method for bringing the exciting and growing fields of South Asian, imperial, and global and international legal histories into a single frame.

Sonia Tycko for “The Legality of Prisoner of War Labour in England, 1648-1655,” Past and Present 246 (Feb 2020), 35-68.

Bringing us back two centuries and across a hemisphere, Sonia Tycko’s meticulously researched and methodically argued article excavates the legal acrobatics that allowed for foreign, especially Dutch and Scottish, soldiers captured by English forces in the mid-seventeenth century to be forced to serve as labor on projects ranging from the drainage of the fens to Caribbean plantations. The Council of State and various private interests saw multiple opportunities in putting prisoners of war to work but were stymied by strictures in the laws of war and jus gentium on the rights of such prisoners, especially prohibitions on enslaving fellow Christians. A bizarrely effective solution was found in reimagining the legal status of such prisoners not as conscripts but rather as akin to convicts and vagrants, offering a precedent for in turn making them an offer they could not refuse to enter into contracts, effectively rendering them legally “free” rather than forced labor. In closely tracking this development, Tycko shows how a population largely consigned to an historiographical footnote in the general story of indentured labor was not only critical to understanding the malleable nature of legal status in the seventeenth-century but also profoundly troubling to our understandings of the critical legal concepts of contract and consent. The article also impressively traces how these arguments developed and were contested among various different actors and interests, offering a creative and original model for linking domestic, international, and Atlantic history—not to mention social, labor, colonial, military, and carceral histories—through the history of legal thought and practice.

Surrency Prize

Kalyani Ramnath for “Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-World War II South Asia,” Law and History Review, 38, no. 1 (February 2020), 1-24.

“Intertwined Itineraries” charts a whole world of law in motion.  From the courts of Madras to the rice and rubber fields of Southeast Asia, and from there to the law libraries of the Netherlands and India, she traces the travels of a single dispute and its afterlives across several genres of legal writing.  She assembles a disparate cast of characters – a Tamil-Speaking Chettiar widow in Madras, a Polish scholar-in-exile, a Dutch scholar of international law in Utrecht – and threads her narrative needle through the most unlikely of places. The result is nothing less than a complete retelling of the histories of decolonization and international law in the Indian Ocean world, and of the many lost streams, disputes, and lives that poured into it. “Intertwined Itineraries” is an ambitious, bold, and breathtakingly creative piece of scholarship.

John Phillip Reid Book Award

Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Entering into a terrain of longstanding scholarly debate, Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross’s Becoming Free, Becoming Back (Cambridge University Press, 2020) traces the winding path from black slavery to black citizenship in Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia. It avoids traditional claims of moral superiority for Latin American systems of bondage. Instead, it shows how in all three societies race became a cornerstone for constructing the normative logic of slavery. With remarkable nuance, their book underscores the ways Iberian legal customs of manumission did make a difference by allowing for the creation of a free black population. Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and persuasively argued, it impressively deploys cultural history— emphasizing context and contingency—to undermine the seeming historical inevitability of citizenship becoming closely intertwined with whiteness. This is comparative history at its finest.

Peter Gonville Stein Book Award

Nandini Chatterjee for Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords Across Three Indian Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Negotiating Mughal Law is a wonderful combination of philology, imagination, archive sleuthing, and sharp intelligence. Based on a painstakingly collected set of documents in a few languages from a society that lacked a centralized legal archive, it is a micro-history of a family of landlords in central India over several centuries. Chatterjee provides a rich narrative of law as put into practice in the daily lives of a wide range of people. Her attention to methodology is a model of the care and self-criticism that underlies the very best historical research, and for this reason the book is of great value beyond its specific geographical and temporal context.

Honorable Mention:

Samuel Fury Childs Daly for A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Jane Burbank Article Prize

Kalyani Ramnath, for “Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-World War II South Asia,” Law and History Review, 38, no. 1 (February 2020), 1-24.

“Intertwined Itineraries” traces a routine case for debt recovery across jurisdictions in South Asia during the upheaval of decolonization and post war independence. In so doing, Ramnath weaves together histories of decolonization, legal pluralism, migration, jurisdiction, and professional legal networks in the making of international law. Beautifully written and well researched, Ramnath shows the reader how numerous and less well known partitions shaped the Indian sub-continent in 20th century South Asian political history.

Honorary Fellows

Shaunnagh Dorsett, Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, and Faculty Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington

Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, former Titular Regular Professor of the History of Argentine Law in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and Senior Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School

Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars

Naama Maor for In Search of the “Real Culprits”: The Adult Delinquent in a Progressive Era Juvenile Court

In her elegantly written and deeply researched paper, Naama Maor analyzes previously unexplored cases against adult defendants in the trailblazing Denver Juvenile Court between 1907 and 1927. Maor finds that the court’s reliance on a new, capacious, and ambiguous category of offenses – contributing to the delinquency of a child – facilitated enforcement that both reflected and shaped gendered ideas about age, consent, and criminal liability for the acts of another. In pursuing cases against adults through children, judges, probation officers, and district attorneys invested great power in the hands of the same children the law deemed inculpable due to their age. The paper persuasively shows that in their rush to try these cases, state officials inadvertently gave rise to a potent opposition to the court’s jurisdiction, which challenged the assertion that adults could receive a fair trial in a juvenile court.

Teal Arcadi for Concrete Leviathan: Interstate Highway Litigation and the Clash of Experts and  Citizens in Modern America

Teal Arcadi explores how the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways prompted protests and litigation that reformed administrative law and modern American governance from the 1960s onward. His paper explains that when interstate construction began in the late 1950s, it became synonymous with destruction of neighborhoods and parks bulldozed to make way for the “concrete monsters,” as some came to call the interstate highways. “Freeway revolts” erupted in the nation’s cities, with participants demanding altered construction practices that gave citizens and communities more say in the state building process underway. While cultural and urban historians have recounted these uprisings, their legal and governmental impact warrants further treatment, which Arcadi ably provides. Arcadi advances three important and compelling arguments. First, the freeway revolts have a broader governmental history that elucidates the long-simmering and cross-partisan tension between administrative authority and participatory democracy that boiled over after the New Deal. Second, the freeway revolts brought distinctive reforms to the practices of modern American state building, particularly in leading to the canonical Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe in 1971. Third, despite the reformist inclinations present in Overton Park, the case produced an uneven legal and physical landscape of state building. Ultimately, the paper identifies the emergence of a legal context that prioritized the protection of open spaces at the expense of poor and minority urban communities.

Cromwell Fellowships

Myisha S. Eatmon, Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina for Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture, White Violence, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies.
Benjamin Lyons, who received his PhD from the Department of History at Columbia University, for The Law of Nations & the Conduct of Early American Diplomacy.
Aden Knapp, PhD candidate in History at Harvard University, as well as a visiting scholar at the Lauterpracht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge and a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen’s iCourts project, for Judging the World: The United States and International Courts, 1898–1971.
Jessica Fletcher, PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University, for Before the Amistad: Cuba, Haiti, and Caribbean Political Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century US Freedom Suits.

Small Grants Award Winners

For the second year, in 2021 the ASLH awarded small grants of $1,000 each to support projects by ten graduate students and early career students.

Jared Berkowitz, PhD candidate, Brandeis University
Du Fei, PhD candidate, Cornell University
Idriss Fofana, JD, Yale, PhD candidate, Columbia University
Luke Haqq, JD, University of Minnesota
Peter Labuza, Lecturer, San Jose State (PhD 2020, USC)
Derek Litvak, PhD candidate, University of Maryland-College Park
Melody Shum, PhD candidate, Northwestern University
Caleb Smith, PhD candidate, Tulane University
Wallace Teska, PhD candidate, Stanford University
Grace Watkins, DPhil candidate, Oxford University

2021 Student Research Colloquium

Julia Bacchiega, Universidad de San Andrés
Serena Covkin, University of Chicago
Jelani Hayes, Yale Law School
Dipanjan Mazumder, Vanderbilt University
Rana Osman, University of London
Chao Ren, University of Michigan
Laura Savarese, Yale University (Herbert A. Johnson Fellow)
Magdalene Zier, Stanford University

Wallace Johnson First Book Program Participants

Brooke Depenbusch, Colgate University, In the Shadow of the Welfare State: General Relief and the Politics of Precarity from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan
Maeve Glass, Columbia University Law School, America’s Constitution: A New History
Timo McGregor, Postdoctoral Fellow Center for European Studies Yale University, Properties of Empire: Mobility and Vernacular Politics in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1648-1688
Myisha S. Eatmon, University of South Carolina, Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture, White Violence, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies
Raha Rafii, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Judges and Judging in the Islamic Near East: The Medieval Adab al-qadi Genre

J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History Participants

Lauren Catterson (Hendrik Hartog/Princeton University Fellow), PhD candidate, University of Toronto
Jon Connolly (Morton Horwitz Fellow), Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Chicago
Hardeep Dhillon (Harry Scheiber Fellow), ABF-NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality
Zachary Herz (Charles McCurdy/University of Virginia Law School Fellow), Assistant Professor, University of Colorado.
Naama Maor (Mary Frances Berry Fellow), Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
Ángela Pérez-Villa (Rebecca Scott Fellow), Assistant Professor, Western Michigan University
Sarath Pillai (Hurst Alumni Fellow), PhD candidate, University of Chicago
Jake Subryan Richards (David Seipp Fellow in English Legal History), Assistant Professor, London School of Economics
Geneva Smith (Robert Gordon Fellow), PhD candidate, Princeton University
Lila Teeters (William Nelson Fellow), PhD candidate, University of New Hampshire
Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Reva Siegel Fellow), lecturer, Perimeter College
Kent Weber (Barbara Welke Fellow), post-doctoral fellow, Dartmouth College

Recipients of the Society’s Projects and Proposals Committee Funds

The Wheatley Peters Project, proposed by Cornelia Dayton, is an excellent, well-conceived and ambitious project that has already garnered positive attention upon its initial preliminary launch. It aims not only to make important historical documents available to a wider public but also to showcase historians’ methods of using such research in their work. It will provide transcriptions, interpretations and interactive commentary on key archival material related to the lives of Phyllis Wheatley, her husband John Peters, and other Black Americans during the eighteenth century. ASLH funding will help establish the site as a model of digital engagement and may help attract additional resources to the project.

The Digital Legal Studies Forum, proposed by Katrina Jagodinsky, encourages excellence in digital history by bringing together established and junior scholars in a productive
and thoughtful way. As the proposal states, Forum organizers “aim to bring talented new voices into the field, promote novel forms of scholarly interchange, and to seed new forms and venues for public history.” The event, a project of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, will draw dozens of historians, archivists, and scholars from around the West and Midwest, putting them in productive conversation with their peers, while also engaging new work that uses digital legal projects to explore issues pertaining to slavery reparations and treaty reconciliation. ASLH funding will provide needed financial support to make the forum a success.

Craig Joyce Medal

Sarah Barringer Gordon, Past President, ASLH

New ASLH Fellowships

On November 6, the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) announced at its 51st annual meeting the creation of new fellowships honoring distinguished scholars who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of legal history.

Two fellowships are named for Stanford University Law School faculty. The Robert Gordon/Stanford Law School Fellowship and the Lawrence Friedman/Stanford Law School Fellowship will be awarded every other year to early career scholars selected as fellows of the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History.

Two fellowships are named for University of Michigan Law School faculty. The Rebecca Scott/University of Michigan Law School Fellowship will be awarded every other year to an early career scholar accepted in the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History. The William Novak/University of Michigan Law School Fellowship will be awarded each year to a graduate student selected to present research at the ASLH Student Research Colloquium.

One new fellowship is named for a member of the Davidson College faculty. The John Wertheimer/Davidson College Fellowship will be awarded each year to a graduate student selected to present research at the ASLH Student Research Colloquium.

And one new fellowship is named for a member of the Yale Law School faculty.  The James Whitman/Yale Law School Fellowship will be awarded each year to a graduate student selected to present research at the ASLH Student Research Colloquium.

ASLH 2021 Election Results Announced

At the Saturday luncheon of the 2021 annual meeting in New Orleans, President Lauren Benton announced the results of the elections for the Board of Directors and Nominating Committee. The president-elect will serve a two-year term, members of the board of directors and nominating committees serve three-year terms.

Barbara Welke, University of Minnesota, President Elect

Elected to the Board of Directors:
Laura Edwards, Princeton University
Maggie Blackhawk, New York University
Michael Lobban, London School of Economics
Lucy Salyer, University of New Hampshire
Dan Hulsebosch, New York University

Elected to the Nominating Committee:
John Wertheimer, Davidson College
Nurfadzilah Yahaya, National University of Singapore

Preyer Scholars

The ASLH is pleased to announce the 2021 Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars:

Teal Arcadi (PhD candidate, History, Princeton University).

Naama Maor (Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago).

Arcadi and Maor will present their papers on the Preyer panel at the 2021 ASLH conference in New Orleans.

2021 Hurst Institute

Changes to ASLH By-Laws

At the Board of Directors March 2021 Board Meeting, a number of changes were made to the Society’s By-Laws in order to ensure that the By-Laws reflect changes in ASLH policies and practices.

Here is a summary of the changes and their rationale:

1. The By-Laws did not indicate whether officers can vote on matters before the Board. The proposed changes clarify that the president is a voting member of the Board, but not the secretary, treasurer, or the president elect. The clarification will make it possible to determine when the Board is operating with a quorum and to count votes accurately.
2. The By-Laws recognize the practice (in place for several years) of holding a Board meeting each year in March and the practice of voting by email on some matters.
3. The changes reflect approval by the Board to have the chair of the Finance Committee serve as an ex-officio, non-voting member of the Executive Committee. 
4. The revised By-Laws reference the new Code of Conduct passed by the Board in November 2020.
5. Changes to the By-Laws reflect the practice (in place for many years) of having the president appoint three members of the Board of Directors to serve on the Executive Committee. 
6. Minor typos and points of clarification have been fixed or added.

To view these changes, please click here.

Call for Proposals: ASLH-Sponsored Panels at the AHA

Every year, the ASLH is invited to submit sponsored panel proposals for the American Historical Association’s annual meeting. The AHA’s next meeting, in 2022, will be held January 6-9 in New Orleans. If you would like to submit a panel for sponsorship by ASLH, please submit it by February 10 to affiliateproposals@aslh.net. If accepted, the panel proposal will be forwarded by ASLH to the AHA by February 15.

Questions? Use the email address listed above or visit the AHA’s affiliate annual meeting page.

Call for Applications: Student Research Colloquium

The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, November 3, and Thursday, November 4, 2021, in New Orleans, Louisiana.  The SRC annually brings eight graduate students to the site of the ASLH annual meeting to discuss their in-progress dissertations and articles, under the guidance of distinguished, ASLH-affiliated scholars.

Target applicants include early-post-coursework Ph.D. students and historically minded law students.  Students working in all chronological periods, including ancient, medieval, and early-modern history, and all geographical fields, including non-Western ones, are encouraged to apply.  Applicants who have not yet had an opportunity to interact with the ASLH are welcome, as are those who have not yet received any formal training in legal history.  A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group.  Led by faculty directors, the group will discuss these papers at the colloquium.

The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.

If you are interested, please electronically submit the following items to John Wertheimer at: srcproposals@aslh.net:

• a cover letter, describing, among other things, how far along you are and how many years remain in your course of study;
• an up-to-date CV; and
• a two-page, single-spaced research statement that begins with a title and proceeds to describe the in-progress research project that you propose to present at the colloquium.

Application deadline: June 1, 2021.

Call for Papers: ASLH 2021 Annual Meeting

The Program Committee of the ASLH invites proposals for complete panels and individual papers for the 2021 meeting to be held November 4-6 in New Orleans. Panels and papers on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome.  We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography.  Due to the cancellation of the Society’s 2020 in-person conference, some of the panel slots for the 2021 conference will be filled by previously accepted proposals. However, there is ample room on the program for new submissions and we look forward to developing a rich and diverse program for our meeting in New Orleans.

The Program Committee welcomes traditional panel proposals (1 chair, 1-2 commentators, 3-4 paper presentations), and other forms of structured presentation for a 90-minute slot, including lightning round (1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters for a few minutes each on projects in a related field at any stage of development), skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters), or roundtable format (1-2 chairs, 3-4 presenters). The Committee will also consider author-meets-reader panel proposals concerning books with a publication date of 2020. We encourage panels that put two or three books in conversation, with up to three commentators total. Requirements for proposals each type of session are outlined below.

Panel Type: Traditional
Format: 1 chair, 3-4 participants, 1-2 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, up to 300 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Lightening Round
Format: 1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Skills/Pedagogical Session
Format: 1 chair, 3-4 presenters
Session abstract/description: Yes, up to 300 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Roundtable
Format: 1-2 chairs, 2-3 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: Yes, up to 300 words
Panelist CVs: Yes

Panel Type: Author meets Readers
Format: 1-2 chairs, 2-3 commentators
Session abstract/description: Yes, 300-500 words
Individual abstract: No
Panelist CVs: Yes

As a general matter, we will not be able to accommodate special scheduling requests, so prospective presenters, chairs, and commentators at the main conference should plan to be available on Friday, November 5, and Saturday, November 6.  The ASLH has a strict one-appearance policy. Prospective participants may submit proposals for multiple sessions, with the understanding that the panel chair will be responsible for promptly finding an appropriate substitute member for any session from which a participant has to withdraw.

The Program Committee encourages panels that include participants from groups historically under-represented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

Limited financial assistance (covering airfare and ground transportation only) is available for presenters in need, with priority given to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and scholars from abroad.

The members of the Program Committee are Fahad Bishara, Eliga Gould, Sophia Lee, Tahirih Lee, Alison Lefkovitz, Cynthia Nicoletti, Bhavani Raman, Karl Shoemaker, Simon Stern, and Victor Uribe. The co-chairs of the Program Committee are professors Kristin Collins (collinsk@bu.edu) and Ari Bryen (ari.z.bryen@vanderbilt.edu).

All program presenters must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. All proposals must be submitted through the ASLH website, which will be available to take submissions shortly.

The submission portal will open on February 15, 2021 and will close on March 15, 2021.

New Program named for Rayman Solomon

Rutgers University has received an anonymous $3.5 million gift from a former faculty member to establish the Rayman L. Solomon Scholars Program at the Rutgers Law School in Camden. The program will assist the law school in recruiting students with demonstrated commitment to public service. Rayman Solomon is a former dean of Rutgers Law School and has served in numerous leadership roles in the American Society for Legal History. ASLH president Lauren Benton comments, “Ray exudes integrity and inspires collegiality in all that he does. What a wonderful – and utterly appropriate – honor for this important and beloved member of the legal history community.” Solomon Scholars will receive an annual stipend, summer funding to support public service work, and mentorship during their law school experience.

ASLH Announces New Fellowship

The ASLH has established the Herbert A. Johnson Fellowship, made possible by a generous gift from Jane and Harry Scheiber. The fellowship will be awarded to an early career scholar who works on the legal history of North America and is selected to attend the annual Student Research Colloquium. The new fellowship honors the prolific legal and constitutional historian Herbert Johnson, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina and past president of the ASLH from 1973 to 1975.

In noting the significance of the fellowship, ASLH President Lauren Benton explained, “The Student Research Colloquium has been a wonderful addition to our annual meeting, bringing eight early career scholars each year for a full day of scholarly interchange and collegial engagement. The fellowship helps to lay a permanent foundation for this vital resource for the newest members of our field.”

Benton went on to praise Jane and Harry Scheiber for their vision in establishing the fellowship. “The Scheibers’ generous support of early career scholars and their choice to honor Herb Johnson beautifully advance the ASLH mission of promoting the future of legal history while celebrating the contributions of our most distinguished scholars.”

The Herbert A. Johnson Fellowship will be awarded for the first time in 2021. The ASLH continues to work to create other named fellowships in order to fully endow the Student Research Colloquium, adding to a similar effort to endow named fellowships for the Hurst Summer Institute.

Cromwell Book Prize Winner

The ASLH announces the winner of the 2020 Cromwell Book Prize: Sam Erman (University of Southern California) for his book Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, published in the Legal History Series of Cambridge University Press.

The citation reads in part: “For subtlety, nuance, and complexity of analysis by a junior scholar, this is the best book in a year in which many superb books were nominated. Erman makes important and ambitious claims about the evolving constitutional meaning of citizenship in the U.S. empire after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. The book vividly recounts and perceptively analyzes the debates between and among Puerto Rican and U.S. judges, lawyers, administration officials, and legislators over the denial of full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. Erman shows how post-Civil War conceptions of full citizenship, rights, and statehood gave way to a regime of constitutionally permissible racist imperial governance.”

2020 Annual Meeting Prize, Honors, and Fellowship Winners

The ASLH is delighted to announce our 2020 prize, honors, and fellowship winners!

Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize

Sean Fraga of the University of Southern California for  “They Came on Waves of Ink: Pacific Northwest Maritime Trade at the Dawn of American Settlement, 1851-1861,” https://seanfraga.com/wavesofink/.

“They Came on Waves of Ink” makes wonderfully creative and compelling use of digital technologies to bring a dusty legal source—a nineteenth-century federal ledger from the Puget Sound Customs District—to life. As Fraga’s site explains, “But if the ledger is like a window onto the past, then its meticulous lines of data are like blinds, closed and shut tight. There is no plot here, no story; the characters float loose on a non-narrative sea. Digital analysis is a way of curling open the blinds—to see what lies on the other side.” By transcribing, analyzing, and visualizing thousands of scribbled ledger lines, Fraga enriches our understanding of the circuits of commerce and administrative power in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. His site should inspire legal historians to use digital tools to re-imagine their sources and to uncover elusive historical connections that lie on the other side.

Cromwell Article Prize

Maureen Brady of Harvard Law School for “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds,” The Yale Law Journal 128, no. 4 (2019): 872–1173.

The subject of “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds” would not seem promising—the long forgotten colonial method of town lot demarcation by metes and bounds. Though regarded by historians as a relic deserving only antiquarian interest, in Brady’s hands it commands our attention as a vital legal tool that enabled communities to use the law to craft a legal order for an uncharted terrain through the creation of property rights. It has long been a commonplace that recording boundaries and conferring title create something we call “property,” but Brady’s article expands our understanding of the social and economic role of property rights as they functioned in practice. Her mastery of seemingly arcane procedures and the legal rights they created reveals the many ways that the law of metes and bounds provided a supple and flexible means of securing the property rights that served the social and economic ordering necessary to foster communities bound together by law. The reliance on impermanent features of a local landscape–such as trees or heaps of stones–might seem to produce only confusion and discord; indeed, conventional economic theory treats it as impeding market transactions, thus slowing growth. To the contrary, Brady illustrates the capacity for legal history to destabilize commonly-held assumptions about the law’s effects on capital and markets. More specifically, she takes aim at the idea that standardization of property forms facilitates market transactions by lowering information costs. She shows that customization of property is not necessarily inefficient. Rather, it is a rational strategy to promote growth within local, closely-bound communities. Brady’s article illustrates the use of legal history to complicate the empirical claims of law and economics.

Cromwell Book Prize

Sam Erman of the University of Southern California for Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

For subtlety, nuance, and complexity of analysis by a junior scholar, this is the best book in a year in which many superb books were nominated. Erman makes important and ambitious claims about the evolving constitutional meaning of citizenship in the U.S. empire after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. The book vividly recounts and perceptively analyzes the debates between and among Puerto Rican and U.S. judges, lawyers, administration officials, and legislators over the denial of full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. Erman shows how post-Civil War conceptions of full citizenship, rights, and statehood gave way to a regime of constitutionally permissible racist imperial governance.

Cromwell Dissertation Prize

Sonia Tycko of Oxford University for “Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2019).

In an extraordinarily creative and imaginative dissertation, “Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America,” Sonia Tycko explores the repeated appearance of consent as part of the meaning of compulsory service in the early modern period. The appearance of language of consent in contracts by people who had no right to refuse was not a veneer disguising coercion or an understanding of labor as a communal resource. Instead, this “coerced consent” expressed practices and understandings associated with the origins of “freedom of contract.” As she innovatively argues, “consent was a tool for masters to discipline and appropriate the labor of the less powerful.” Her argument carefully explains how, as far back as the late sixteenth century, consent became a way to distinguish coerced labor from slavery with “an air of civility” while nonetheless still designed to reproduce inequalities rather than to create equality. By revealing this dynamic—sometimes seen as part of nineteenth or twentieth century labor history—in the early modern period, Tycko forces us to reconsider the very foundations of consent and contract and makes a signal contribution to the historiography on contract, labor, and freedom. Tycko also offers nuanced readings of an impressive array of primary sources and reveals the social realities against which a vocabulary about contract arose in particular labor relationships, from indentured servitude to military impressment to kidnapping. She mines documents that others might skim and brings to the surface the way in which the very words betray underlying power dynamics. The important transatlantic lens persuasively establishes her argument as part of larger seventeenth-century English assumptions, in Great Britain and the British colonies. This dissertation rewards the reader on every page—and, impressively, becomes even more interesting on rereading. Tycko’s dissertation serves as a model of the well-crafted and carefully executed dissertation in legal history.

Sutherland Prize

Simon Newman of the University of Glasgow  for “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780,” The English Historical Review 134, no. 570 (December 21, 2019): 1136–68.

Simon P. Newman’s ‘Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780’ explores the experience of enslaved Africans who were brought to Britain in the eighteenth century from North America. It demonstrates that in a society where the legal status of slaves was unsettled – even after landmark cases such as Somerset v. Stewart – the lives of Africans brought to England remained precarious. Using newspaper accounts, legal records and visual sources, it shows how familiar the British were with the buying and selling of slaves or the use of the press to offer rewards for the return of those who had run away. In so doing, this pathbreaking article sheds important new light on the experience of slave lives in England and Scotland, and how the very ambiguity of English law allowed owners to continue to treat as their enslaved servants as property.

Honorable Mention: Emily Kadens of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law for “Cheating Pays,” Columbia Law Review 119 (2019): 527-589.

Surrency Prize

Kaius Tuori of the University of Helsinki for “Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War II,” Law and History Review 37, no. 2 (May 2019): 605–38.

We are delighted to announce that the prize for the best article published in Volume 37 (2019) of the Law and History Review goes to Kaius Tuori for his exceptionally important article, “Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War  II,” published in the May issue.  Tuori’s article provides us with a fascinating account of the formation of the “European Idea” in the aftermath of World War Two, and its reliance on a claim to a shared European legal culture founded in Roman law – a particular feature of German scholarship.  The centrality of law and legal institutions to European union has been a major theme of modern European legal history: Indeed, it was a major theme in the formation of our sister society, the European Society for Comparative Legal History.  But in that identification of law and legal history with the European idea too little attention has been paid to narrative origins.  Tuori remedies that gaping hole, and in the process shows how the postwar transition of scholars such as Franz Wieacker from active proponent of Nazi legal science to esteemed Europeanist and Roman law traditionalist resulted in a hybrid narrative of European legal history that incorporated elements of the Nazi narrative of Europe in the return to Roman law.  The complicated process was nudged along too by German legal scholars in both geographical exile and “inner” exile who produced Roman law studies that served as counter-narratives to Nazi legal reformers’ efforts to replace the civil law tradition with national German law in the law curriculum and the law books.  Tuori’s essay is not only a fine piece of research, it is compelling and important intellectual history.

John Phillip Reid Book Award

Rande W. Kostal of Western Law School for Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Harvard University Press, 2019).

R. W. Kostal’s Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Harvard University Press, 2019) depicts the staggering tasks of remaking the legal landscape of defeated Axis powers after World War II. This project envisioned replacing fascist legal orders with liberal ones committed to individual rights and the rule of law. On this foundation, it was supposed, democracy could be built. Working with the self-interested jurists and bureaucrats of the defeated nations, Americans often operated, especially in the case of Japan, with only the vaguest notions of the legal systems they set out to reconstruct. Kostal contributes to the history of American foreign policy and to the comparative history of the rule of law by showing the accomplishments, hubris, and limitations of laying down the law. Perhaps the largest contribution of his well-researched and thoughtful book is to explore how and why liberal nations after World War II came to think they had the right to reshape in their own image the legal orders of conquered countries.

Peter Gonville Stein Book Award

Fei-Hsien Wang of Indiana University for Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2019)

This is a fascinating study of an important but underanalyzed topic – the contested and dynamic process of the emergence of “modern” copyright law in China from the 1890s through the 1950s. Highly innovative in its analysis and magisterially executed, the book offers a brilliant interdisciplinary history of how authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers negotiated with one another. Uncovering market practices in the “new knowledge” economy, Wang maps the everyday life of copyright and piracy in relation to the emerging modern state and “new knowledge.”  This exceedingly rigorous, subtle, and well-researched book has major implications for understanding the interplay among law, society, culture, and politics not only in modern China but also in many places with similarly complicated experiences with modernity.

Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Papp Kamali of Harvard Law School for Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Jane Burbank Article Prize

Bianca Premo of Florida International University and Yanna Yannakakis of Emory University for “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (February 1, 2019): 28–55.

“A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond” studies how jurisdiction was understood and produced by Mixtec actors in southern Mexico. Premo and Yannakakis’s case study of a land dispute between two rivaling villages show how communities adapted and translated imperial law and Iberian judicial practices into local understandings of jurisdiction, thereby inserting jurisdiction into the legal repertoires available to native peoples. The authors focus on a routine community dispute case that was never submitted to the jurisdiction of higher imperial authorities in Madrid or Rome, or even in the venerated General Indian Court of Mexico City. Rather, this dispute emerged in the outskirts of empire, and their study illuminates how people molded jurisdiction and litigiousness to their own cultural norms. Carefully researched and clearly written, readers see that jurisdiction at the edges of empire was much broader than indigenous people’s use of courts and recourse to the law. As the authors note, global legal orders may be studied through notarial documents and imperial codes, however “native subjects” built those orders—literally with “sticks and branches” on the muddy fields of a makeshift court in Teposcolula, Mexico

Honorary Fellows

Paul Brand, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

Joan W. Scott, Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study

Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

You can read more about these scholars’ tremendous achievements here.

Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars

Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University, for her paper, “‘Los Hijos Son La Riqueza Del Probre:’ Postwar Mexican Child Migration and the Making of Domestic (Im)migrant Exclusion, 1940-1965.”

Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez gives us a spellbinding sociolegal history of twentieth century child migrants at the borders outside and within the United States. Most scholars have focused on US officials’ concentration on single males after World War II. Padilla-Rodríguez employs overlooked sources to shine a spotlight on the many forms of rights violations Latinx children and their parents have endured between 1940 and 1965. She demonstrates the complicity of welfare and government officials in confining non-citizen children in detention center “cages” and in deporting them on “penal hell” ships. She shows, too, how those officials criminalized non-citizen and U.S. citizen children for their labor mobility and academic truancy and deprived them of access to a quality education. In Padilla-Rodriguez’s gifted hands, contemporary policies of immigration detention emerge as part of a long, sad history, rather than as a fresh departure.

Smita Ghosh, a graduate of Penn Law School and a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania, for her paper, “Policing the ‘Police State’: Detention, Supervision, and Deportation During the Cold War.”

Smita Ghosh offers a fascinating account of the fight against the detention, supervision, and deportation of “red,” or communist, aliens. Her imaginative archival research shows how the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and its lawyers seized on the language of the Cold War to depict the McCarran Internal Security Act as a threat to the American “way of life” that would encourage “Gestapo-type” tactics and promote a “police state.” They also capitalized on the whiteness and assimilability of Eastern European aliens in the United States; their undeportable status because other countries refused to accept them; and the growing corpus of administrative law. The American Committee and its lawyers won the release of detained immigrants and limited the most draconian efforts to supervise non-deportable non-citizens. “Policing the ‘Police State’” provides a rare “success story” for “undesirable” aliens during the Cold War era and an extraordinarily illuminating prism on the expansion of state power.

Cromwell Fellowships

Giuliana Perrone is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is in the process of turning her dissertation into a book entitled, The Problem of Emancipation in the Age of Slavery: Law and Abolition after the U.S. Civil War. Perrone’s work argues that although slave emancipation occurred after the Civil War, slavery itself persisted, enacted through mechanisms of private law doctrine, including contract, property, and debt relations. The work further explores how Southern judges continued to apply pre-war private law doctrine which served to quickly close the possibility of real freedom for former slaves.

Marie-Amélie George is an Assistant Professor at Lake Forest Law School. She is in the process of revising her dissertation into a book entitled, Attaining Equality: How American Law Came to Protect Gays and Lesbians. The book examines how gay and lesbian rights became recognized in such a short period of time in the late twentieth century. Instead of examining high court opinions she argues that much of the work was done at the state and local levels, via shifts in family and criminal law, as these are the legal fields that regulate the daily life. Such everyday law consequently shaped conceptions of gays and lesbians as community members. The work makes this argument by exploring debates between criminologists, social workers, school boards deciding on curriculum, and everyday custody decisions made in family court. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, the very conception of what it meant to be gay or lesbian had shifted from a harmful deviation to a benign difference.

Paul M. B. Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, and currently a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Law at the University of California Berkeley. He is in the process of revising his dissertation into a book, entitled, Colonizing through Contract: The Settler Colonial Entanglements of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Gutierrez’s research centers on the history of the corporation as an agent of colonization and state formation in early America. More specifically, his research addresses the post-Revolutionary reception of the corporate and colonial charters that for two hundred years had been the primary means by which the English Crown commissioned modes of government and enterprise for transoceanic commerce and settlement. His work further explores the place of the corporation in the legal history of American settler-colonialism, situating the Marshall Court’s jurisprudence and the theory of the corporation alongside decisions regarding contracts clause and land claim cases arising from the rapid development and speculation in lands occupied by Indian tribes.

Jilene Chua is a PhD candidate in History at John Hopkins University who is writing her dissertation on U.S. imperial rule in the Philippines and how law shaped this colonial relationship. Its working title is Chinese Encounters in the Philippines Under U.S. Legal Colonialism. The dissertation identifies how particularly tense relations between the Chinese community and the native Filipino population, erupted and waned at certain moments and how U.S. rule and law stoked such tensions through property rights, citizenship, and particular racialized and gendered concepts of the juridical being. More specifically, she examines a long series of legal cases brought by Chinese litigants in the Philippines, which ranged from co-wives vying for the property of their deceased Chinese husband to commercial cases where Chinese merchants challenged the legitimacy of laws that outlawed Mandarin-language record keeping. Whereas legal historians have produced excellent work on U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, there has been little scholarship on the how law worked in Philippines under U.S. colonialism.

Michael McGovern is a PhD candidate at Princeton who is working on his dissertation entitled Just in Numbers? Statistics and Civil Rights in the Postwar United States. The dissertation explores debates over statistical proof in two core areas of late twentieth century constitutional jurisprudence – death penalty cases and employment discrimination cases. He examines how litigants and other legal actors mobilized statistics for instrumental purposes and the changing ways that statistics were both produced, understood, and deployed. In the process, he unpacks the rhetorical moves by advocates and statisticians as they sought to stake a particular position for particular purposes. The dissertation stands at the important intersection of legal history and the history of science.

Small Grants Award Winners

A special offering in 2020 for graduate students conducting digital research. Funded by gifts from ASLH members.

Alexander M. Cors of Emory University, whose project is entitled, “Colonialism on the Move: Land and Legal Disputes in the Mississippi Valley, 1760-1810.”

Amanda Faulkner of Columbia University, whose project is entitled, “Making Identity in the Early Modern Dutch World.”

Elsa Hardy of Harvard University, whose project is entitled, “A Visit to the Red House: Conjugal Visitation on Parchman Farm, 1918-2016.”

Miriam F. Lipton of Oregon State University, whose project is entitled, “Bacteriophages and Antibiotics: How the Soviets and Americans Dealt with a Public Health Crisis when Faced with New Tools.”

Chao Ren of the University of Michigan, whose project is entitled, “Oily Arguments: Institutional Disputes and Native Property Rights in Colonial Burma.”

Doris Morgan Rueda of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose project is entitled, “Saving The Bad Kids, Caging Los Chicos Malos: Juvenile Justice and Racialized Surveillance in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1900-1970.”

2020 Student Research Colloquium

Nicole Breault (University of Connecticut)

Marjorie Carvalho de Souza (University of Naples)

Hannah Hicks (Vanderbilt University)

Aden Knaap (Harvard University)

Michael McGovern (Princeton University)

Katherine Sinclair (Rutgers University)

Heather Walser (Penn State University)

Grace Watkins (Oxford University)

Zoom Links & Virtual Publisher Exhibit for 2020 Annual Conference

Zoom links and information on how to attend sessions of the 2020 ASLH annual conference are now available to ASLH members on this page.

Links to specially discounted legal history offerings from several publishers are also available on the same page.

The online program for the 2020 conference features a carefully curated selection of exciting panels on the legal history of colonialism, slavery and abolition, immigration, and other topics. On Friday afternoon a group of editors and other experts will discuss book publishing in the Covid era. To wrap things up on Saturday afternoon, President Lauren Benton will deliver her Presidential Address and announce ASLH prize winners. You can find the full program by clicking here.

You must be a member to attend, and you can join or renew your ASLH membership by clicking here. The ASLH warmly welcomes students, who can become members for as little as $10.

Registration Open for 2020 ASLH Annual Conference

Dear ASLH members,

We invite you to register here for the 2020 ASLH annual conference, to be held November 13-14.

The online program features a carefully curated selection of exciting panels on the legal history of colonialism, slavery and abolition, immigration, and other topics. On Friday afternoon a group of editors and other experts will discuss book publishing in the Covid era. To wrap things up on Saturday afternoon, President Lauren Benton will deliver her Presidential Address and announce ASLH prize winners. You can find the full program here.

Registration is free for all ASLH members, and you must be a member to attend. The ASLH warmly welcomes students, who can become members for as little as $10.

Join or renew your ASLH membership here.

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a fantastic – if unusual – gathering of the ASLH!

Sincerely,

Lauren Benton, ASLH President
Anne Twitty, ASLH Secretary
Kristin Collins, ASLH Program Co-chair
Ari Bryen, ASLH Program Co-chair

New Timeline for Hurst Summer Institute Applications

Applications for the eleventh Hurst Summer Institute will be accepted between December 1 and January 15, 2021. The 2021 Institute will take place June 13 – 26 and will be chaired by Lauren Benton, Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University, and Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Applicants should be aware that it is possible that the 2021 session may be held remotely. For more information on the Hurst Summer Institute and the application procedure, please see the call for applications or visit the Institute’s application portal.

ASLH Statement on White House Conference on American History

Statement from ASLH President Lauren Benton, on behalf of the ASLH Executive Committee.

President Trump delivered a speech at the National Archives on September 17, 2020, in which he characterized “the crusade against American history” as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” The speech capped the “White House Conference on American History,” an event planned hastily and without the participation of historical associations. The “conference” and Trump’s comments denigrated scholarship and work in public history focusing on the historical analysis of race, slavery, and institutional racism.

We condemn these words and actions, and we reject President Trump’s politicization of history as a field of inquiry and teaching. The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) joins other historical associations, including the AHA and OAH, in recognizing Trump’s words and actions as an attempt to distort history in service to a politically driven agenda. As legal historians, we affirm that the study of race, class, ethnicity, and gender, and the analysis of slavery, inequality, and conflict remain central to understandings of the constitutional and legal history of the United States, and to documenting the lived experiences, past and present, of all people connected to and affected by that history. The ASLH will continue to work to protect the highest professional standards for evaluating and presenting historical evidence and argument and to foster open, inclusive, and evidence-based debates about all aspects of American history.

Lauren Benton

President, ASLH

On behalf of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

New York Historical Society’s Institute for Constitutional History Seminar

The Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History (ICH) seminar, which is produced twice per year, is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar. This fall, we will be presenting the seminar virtually:

Topic: “Constitutional Norms, Constitutional Conflict, and Informal Constitutional Change”
Virtual Meeting Dates & Time: Fridays, October 9 and 23, November 6 and 20, 2020 | 2-5 PM Eastern Time
Instructors: Josh Chafetz, professor of law at Georgetown University, and David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School

More information about the seminar and how to apply can be found here.

Funding Now Available from the Projects and Proposals Committee

The ASLH welcomes applications to the Projects and Proposal Committee to fund 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.

This year’s applications will be due September 14, 2020. You can find full information about the application process here.

Call for Papers: 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Comparative Law

The ASLH invites members to consider applying to present at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Comparative Law, which will take place online October 15-16, 2020. The topic of the Annual Meeting is “Comparative Legal History.”

Please find the call for concurrent panel proposals for the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Comparative Law here.

Small Grants for Digital Legal History Research

In recognition of the challenges to graduate students who are conducting legal history research when travel and funding are restricted and when many archives closed, the ASLH is offering a limited number of small grants to help support remote research.

The application is open to graduate students at any stage who are ASLH members. Each successful applicant will receive $1,000, to be used to obtain digital materials or to cover other expenses incurred while conducting summer research. The deadline is June 15, 2020. Apply here.

Please help ASLH expand this initiative. Anonymous donors have pledged a total of $3,000 to fund three graduate student grants. You can make a gift of any size to help us do more. To give, choose “Small Grants for Digital Legal History” from the dropdown menu on our “Donate” page.

Submission Deadline Extended for Chicago 2020

We know that many in our community are experiencing significant disruptions due to the coronavirus outbreak.

As a result, the submission deadline for the 2020 meeting of the American Society for Legal History has been extended to March 27, 2020.

For information about the upcoming conference, or to submit a proposal, please click here.

Call for Proposals: Pre-Conference Workshops or Events

The ASLH sponsors or cosponsors a limited number of part-day or full-day workshops or events in the days before the opening of the Society’s annual conference. The Program Committee welcomes proposals for Chicago 2020, with a deadline for submission of March 27, 2020.

Proposals of 1-2 pages should:

• • explain the intellectual or professional goals of the pre-conference workshop;
  • describe proposed themes and list likely participants; and
  • include information about proposed venue, cost, and other societies or institutions serving as cosponsors, if any

Pre-conference workshops sponsored or cosponsored by the ASLH may be held at other venues or at the conference hotel, space permitting. The Society has a small amount of funding available to assist with costs. We encourage organizers to seek or propose cosponsorship to cover all or most costs.

We especially encourage proposals for pre-conference workshops that will involve scholars in emerging fields or in fields previously underrepresented at ASLH conferences and/or that will promote early career scholarly development.

Pre-conference proposals should be emailed to Program Committee Co-Chairs, professors Ari Bryen (ari.z.bryen@vanderbilt.edu) and Kristin Collins (collinsk@bu.edu).

Call for Papers: Chicago 2020 Conference

The Program Committee of the ASLH invites proposals for complete panels and individual papers for the 2020 meeting to be held November 11-14 in Chicago. Panels and papers on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome.  We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography.

Limited financial assistance (covering airfare and ground transportation only) is available for presenters in need, with priority given to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and scholars from abroad.

Panel proposals should include the following: a c.v. with complete contact information for each person on the panel, including chairs and commentators; 300-word abstracts of individual papers; and a 300-word description of the panel.

The Program Committee also welcomes other forms of structured presentation for a 90-minute slot, including lightning round (1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters for a few minutes each on projects in a related field at any stage of development), skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters), or roundtable format (1-2 chairs, 3-4 presenters). The Committee will also consider author-meets-reader panel proposals concerning books with a publication date of 2019. We encourage panels that put two or three books in conversation, with up to three commentators total. Sufficient information following the general guidelines for panel proposals should be provided for the Committee to assess the merits of the presentation.

Individual paper submissions should consist of an abstract, a draft paper (where possible), and a c.v. Given the number and high quality of panel and other complete sessions submitted, individual papers are much less likely than full sessions to be accepted.  Would-be individual paper submitters are encouraged to connect with other scholars to coordinate the submission of complete session proposals.

The Program Committee additionally seeks proposals for full-day or half-day pre-conference symposia crafted around related themes to augment traditional conference offerings. Please provide a program title, the intended length of program, a program description, a c.v. and contact information for each presenter, and any information technology requirements. The Program Committee is available to consult with organizers of such symposia as they develop their proposal.

As a general matter, we will not be able to accommodate special scheduling requests, so prospective presenters, chairs, and commentators at the main conference should plan to be available on Friday, November 13, and Saturday, November 14.  The ASLH has a strict one-appearance policy. Prospective participants may submit proposals for multiple sessions, with the understanding that the panel chair will be responsible for promptly finding an appropriate substitute member for any session from which a participant has to withdraw.

The Program Committee encourages panels that include participants from groups historically under-represented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

The members of the Program Committee are Fahad Bishara, Eliga Gould, Sophia Lee, Tahirih Lee, Alison Lefkovitz, Cynthia Nicoletti, Bhavani Raman, Karl Shoemaker, Simon Stern, and Victor Uribe. The co-chairs of the Program Committee are professors Kristin Collins (collinsk@bu.edu) and Ari Bryen (ari.z.bryen@vanderbilt.edu).

All program presenters must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. All proposals must be submitted through the ASLH website, which will be available to take submissions shortly. When available, the submission portal will be available here.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, March 27, 2020.

Call for Applications: Student Research Colloquium

The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) will host its seventh annual Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, Nov. 11, and Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020, in Chicago, Illinois. The SRC annually invites eight graduate students to the site of the ASLH’s annual meeting to discuss their in-progress dissertations and articles, under the guidance of distinguished, ASLH-affiliated scholars.

Target applicants include early-post-coursework Ph.D. students and historically minded law students.  Students working in all chronological periods, including ancient and medieval history, and all geographical fields, including Nonwestern ones, are encouraged to apply, as are students who have not yet received any formal training in legal history. The SRC seeks to introduce participating students to legal history, to each other and to the legal-historical scholarly community. Applicants who have not yet had an opportunity to present their work to the ASLH are particularly encouraged to apply.  A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group.  The group will discuss these papers at the colloquium, under the guidance of ASLH-affiliated faculty directors.

The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.

If you are interested, please electronically submit the following items to John Wertheimer at: srcproposals@aslh.net:

• • a cover letter describing, among other things, how far along you are and how many years remain in your course of study;
  • a CV;
  • a two-page, single-spaced “research statement” that begins with a title and proceeds to describe the in-progress research project that you propose to present at the colloquium; and
  • a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from the other materials.

The application deadline is June 15, 2020. Applicants will be notified by Aug. 1, 2020.

Looking to spread the word about this announcement? Find a PDF you can share with others here!

Legal History Panels at the Upcoming AHA Conference

The upcoming American Historical Association (AHA) annual meeting, which will take place in New York City between January 3-6, 2020 has at least 28 sessions relating to legal history of interest to ASLH members. You can see the full array of legal history-related programming at the AHA by viewing their “guide book” here–use the arrow in the upper right corner to see the complete list.

To learn more about this conference, including details on registration, the full program, and shockingly reasonable (for New York) hotel rates, head over to the AHA’s site.

2019 Annual Meeting Recap

Famously nicknamed “the hub of the solar system” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston has served over the centuries as a center of legal events and controversies that have shaped American legal history. The ASLH was delighted to return to Boston for its 2019 annual meeting, which was held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel from November 21, 2019 to November 23, 2019.

Program committee chairs Daniel Sharfstein and Michelle McKinley organized 48 panel sessions and 12 author-meets-reader sessions in addition to a number of pre-conference workshops. We were joined by 441 registered participants.

The meeting was sponsored by Harvard Law School and Boston University Law School, and the Plenary Lecture was delivered by Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard Law School.

As always, the ASLH was delighted to recognize exceptional scholarship in legal history and service to the Society by awarding a number of prizes, honors, and fellowships at our annual luncheon. Read more about our wonderful prize and fellowship winners here. And check out photographs of the proceedings below!

New Talking Legal History Podcast: Will Hustwit

In this episode, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision in Alexander v. Holmes (1969), Integration Now explores how studying Alexander enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation.

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

ASLH By-Laws Changes

The ASLH Board has voted to approve two revisions to our by-laws.

First, in March and October, the by-laws were amended in Article I Section IV to explicitly describe a new membership cycle that the Society has adopted. The old membership cycle followed the calendar year, but this new membership cycle will more closely resemble the Society’s actual calendar. By shifting to this new membership cycle, we hope to have membership terms make more sense both to our members and our officers. Currently, members who join in the fall are prohibited by our calendar from participating in Society elections. This change to the by-laws will eliminate that problem.

Second, in October, the by-laws were amended in Article II Section V to provide for the creation of new officer position, the outreach director. The Director of Outreach position will unify several growing and increasingly important dimensions of the Society’s efforts in service to the field. We have a fully redesigned website, and the Director of Outreach would ensure that the new website accurately reflects our message, including by listing up-to-date, high quality information about Society events and trends in the field. The Outreach Director would utilize the website, and possibly other media, to communicate about newsworthy programs and awards, including but not limited to the Hurst Institute, the Wallace Johnson First Book Program, our many pre-conference workshops, our journal and book series, and our members’ notable achievements.

To view these changes, please click here.

Call for Papers: Law and Society Annual Conference

The Law and Society Association is now accepting proposals for its upcoming annual conference, which will be held May 28-31, 2020 in Denver. Full information about the conference is available on their website.

Polls Now Open in Annual ASLH Elections

Voting is underway in the annual ASLH elections and will continue until September 22 at 5PM EST. These elections allow members to choose their representatives for President-Elect, Board of Directors, Graduate Student representative, and Nominating Committee.

Instructions about how to vote were sent to members via the email addresses on file with Cambridge University Press. If you believe you should have received an invitation to vote, but have not been able to locate your invitation, please contact ASLH Secretary Anne Twitty at atwitty@olemiss.edu.

Call for Applications: Harvard University Seeks Faculty

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University seeks to appoint up to four professors who study race, ethnicity and/or migration with focus on Asian American, Latinx, and/or Islam in America Studies. We seek candidates who work in one or more of these areas or who do comparative work across them. These positions may be offered at either the rank of tenured full professor or as tenure-track positions, and will be located in appropriate FAS departments and programs in the humanities and social sciences. Appointed faculty will teach and advise at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The appointments are expected to begin on July 1, 2020.

Tenure-track applicants should apply at http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/9186

Tenured-level applicants should apply at http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/9187

Basic Qualifications:

Doctoral degree

Additional Qualifications:

(Tenure-track) Demonstrated strong commitment to teaching and research; and experience working with and teaching diverse students.

(Tenured-level) Intellectual leadership in the field; potential for significant contributions to the Faculty, University, and wider scholarly community; demonstrated excellence in teaching and mentoring; and experience working with and teaching diverse students.

Special Instructions

Please submit the following materials through the ARIES portal at http://academicpositions.harvard.edu. Candidates are encouraged to apply by October 1, 2019; applications will be reviewed until the position is filled.

1. Cover letter

2. Curriculum vitae

3. List of courses recently taught

4. Research statement

5. Teaching and mentorship statement

6. A statement describing efforts to encourage diversity, inclusion, and belonging, including past, current, and anticipated future contributions in the areas of teaching and research.

7. (Tenure-track applicants only) Names and contact information of three referees, who will be asked by a system-generated email to upload a letter of recommendation once the candidate’s application has been submitted. Three letters of recommendation are required, and the application is considered complete only when at least three letters have been received.

Draft Program for the 2019 Annual Meeting Now Available

Program Committee chairs Daniel Sharfstein and Michelle McKinley have been hard at work generating the program for our upcoming 2019 annual conference, which will take place November 21-24 in Boston, Massachusetts. You can now view a draft of this program.

For additional details about the 2019 annual conference, including information about registration and pre-conference workshops as well as a terrific travel guide prepared by out Local Arrangements Committee, please click here. See you in Boston!

Call for Papers: Edited Volume on the Impact of Law’s History

Marcus Harmes of the University of Southern Queensland’s Open Access College, Jeremy Patrick of the University of Southern Queensland School of Law and Justice, and Sarah McKibbin of the University of Southern Queensland’s School of Law and Justice are developing an edited volume on legal history and seeking contributors.

See the call for papers for full details and submission information.

New Talking Legal History Podcast: Hendrik Hartog

Did you know ASLH has a podcast? It’s true! Talking Legal History is hosted by Siobhan M. M. Barco, a former litigator and current doctoral student in history at Duke University, whose work focuses on the space where law, gender, and print culture intersect.

In her most recent episode, she interviews Hendrik Hartog about his book The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2018). The Trouble with Minna is also used as a vessel to explore some of the topics discussed in Law and Social Inquiry’s May 2019 “Review Symposium: Retrospective on the Work of Hendrik Hartog.” Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus at Princeton University.

This episode is the first in a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

Want to catch up on past episodes? Check out the full back catalog on the Talking Legal History page on our site.

New Talking Legal History Podcast: Paul Finkelman

Did you know ASLH has a podcast? It’s true! Talking Legal History is hosted by Siobhan M. M. Barco, a former litigator and current doctoral student in history at Duke University, whose work focuses on the space where law, gender, and print culture intersect.

In her most recent episode, she interviews Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz College, about his book Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. Finkelman is a specialist on the history of slavery and the law. He is also the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books on a broad range of topics including American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and legal issues surrounding baseball.

Want to catch up on past episodes? Check out the full back catalog on the Talking Legal History page on our site.

Call for Proposals: New initiatives in Legal History

The Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History invites proposals for 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.

We welcome a broad range of proposals. We will consider providing support for conferences (including the costs of bringing together participants who could not otherwise afford to attend), scholarly publications, museum exhibits, pedagogical experiments, or any number of other collective pursuits. We encourage projects that seek to internationalize legal history by widening the study of legal history or by bringing a global array of scholars and students of legal history into conversation with one another. We also invite projects that promise to bring a younger generation of scholars and students into the field.

Most of the grants we have awarded have been less than 5000 dollars. Ordinarily, we would expect that projects would have other institutional collaborators and/or cosponsors (including home universities). Proposals may come from educational institutions or from informal groups or networks of individuals. In most cases, someone involved in the proposal will be a member of the Society, and we especially encourage proposals from members pursuing new endeavors or outreach in the field. Please note that we are not a funding source for ongoing and recurrent activities of the field or of the Society and will not recommend for funding projects that have already been funded at the recommendation of the committee three times. We do not support individual research projects.

The deadline for receiving applications is September 16, 2019. The committee will then review the proposals and recommend a list to the Board of Directors of the Society in preparation for its meeting in November 2019.

The application form is available here.

Please direct any questions, as well as completed application forms, to Laura Weinrib, Chair, at proposals@aslh.net.

Membership and By-Laws Updates

The ASLH Board and Executive Committee recently made a variety of decisions regarding membership policies and our by-laws upon recommendations made by our Membership Committee. These changes are designed to increase the Society’s control over and improve members’ experience with the renewal process, increase participation in our annual elections, and ensure the Law & History Review reaches our members in a timely, cost-effective manner. We are delighted to share them with the broader ASLH community.

First, the Board and Executive Committee recently voted to begin the process of managing membership for the Society ourselves–instead of relying on Cambridge University Press–through our new website. This change, which will become effective January 1, 2020, will permit the ASLH to create web portals for members to submit conference papers and grants, as well as member profiles, which will help identify book reviewers for the Law & History Review and facilitate voter turnout in our annual elections.

Second, the Board and Executive Committee also recently voted to create electronic memberships–through which members would receive digital access to the Law and History Review instead of hard copies of the journal. These electronic memberships will be discounted by $15.

Finally, the Board and Executive Committee also recently voted to change our membership cycle. The ASLH membership cycle had run for the calendar year, which meant that individuals who generally renewed their membership late in the year, just before our annual meeting, only became members for a few months before their membership expired on December 31. Because our annual elections take place in the late summer, those who followed this schedule were ineligible to vote and received Law & History Review irregularly. To address these issues, the Board and Executive Committee voted to move the ASLH membership cycle forward, such that our membership cycle will now run from October 1 through September 30.

This new policy necessitated a change in Article I, Section 4 of the Society’s by-laws, which have previously stated:

The dues of all categories of dues-paying members shall be fixed by the directors and officers. All annual dues are payable on the first day of the calendar year. Only those members who have paid their dues are entitled to rights and privileges.

The Membership Committee recommended amending Article I, Section 4 of the Society’s by-laws as follows:

The dues of all categories of dues-paying members shall be fixed by the directors and officers. All annual dues are payable on the first day of the calendar year. Only those members who have paid their dues are entitled to rights and privileges.

A resolution to amend the Society’s by-laws as recommended was subsequently unanimously approved by the Executive Committee.

To carry current members into this new membership cycle, the Board and the Executive Committee also voted to impose a one time adjustment fee of $25 for the additional nine months of membership in 2019-2020, but only on faculty members who pay annually, not on graduate students. Life members, for obvious reasons, are excluded from this adjustment fee.

Approaching Deadline: Cromwell Research Fellowship Applications

In 2019, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation will make available a number of $5,000 fellowship awards to support research and writing in American legal history by early-career scholars. Early career generally 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 number of awards made is at the discretion of the Foundation. In the past several years, the trustees of the Foundation have made between five and ten awards. Scholars who are not at the early stages of their careers may seek research grants directly from the Foundation. For more information, see the Grants page on the Cromwell Foundation’s website.

Application Process for 2019
The Committee for Research Fellowships and Awards of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) reviews the applications and makes recommendations to the Foundation. (The Cromwell Foundation was established in 1930 to promote and encourage scholarship in legal history, particularly in the colonial and early national periods of the United States. The Foundation has supported the publication of legal records as well as historical monographs.)

To apply, please use this link.

After filling out an application form, applicants will be prompted to upload a description of their proposed project (double-spaced, maximum 6 pages including notes; please include a working title), a budget, a timeline, a short c.v. (no longer than 3 pages), and the names and contact information of two academic referees from whom the applicant has requested letters of recommendation.

Recommenders may upload their letters at this link.

Applications must be completed and recommendations received no later than midnight on July 1, 2019.

• Your application should make clear the relevance of law to your project. The most successful applicants demonstrate how law (broadly construed) is at the center of their projects, and how their research will tell us something new about law.
• Your proposal should engage with relevant scholarship in the field. While this discussion can be brief, the most successful applicants explain how their projects tell us something new.
• Your application should have a clear budget that is specific about how and where you plan to spend research funds.
• You will receive a confirmation email within a few days of submitting your application; if you do not receive such an email, please follow up.
• Please direct any questions to the committee at smayeri@law.upenn.edu and include “Cromwell” in the subject line.

During the pendency of their application, candidates for Fellowships should keep the Committee apprised of any change of address. Successful applicants will be notified by early November. An announcement of the awards will also be made at the annual meeting of the American Society of Legal History.

Committee Members
Serena Mayeri (2016), Chair
University of Pennsylvania

Kenneth Mack (2016)
Harvard University

Thomas J. McSweeney (2018)
College of William & Mary

Yvonne Pitts (2018)
Purdue University

Tracy Steffes (2017)
Brown University

Katherine Turk (2016)
University of North Carolina

Call For Proposals: Wallace Johnson First Book Program

The Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors, sponsored by the American Society for Legal History (ASLH), is designed to provide advice and support to scholars working toward the publication of first books in legal history, broadly defined. In conversation with peers and with the advice of senior scholars, participants will learn about approaching and working with publishers, and will develop and revise a book proposal and one to two sample chapters.

Applications for Johnson Fellows are invited from early career, pre-tenure scholars, publishing in English, who have completed PhDs or JDs and are working on first books in legal history. The deadline for applications is June 30, 2019.

Scholars with expertise in all chronological periods and geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are scholars who may not (yet) identify as legal historians.

The program includes the following elements:

• • Fall 2019 (Nov. 21, 2019): one-day, pre-conference workshop at the ASLH Annual Meeting (Boston, MA), introduction to book publishing and proposal writing;
  • Spring 2020 (date TBD): remote meeting, feedback from program leader and peers on draft book proposal;
  • Summer 2020 (last week of July): two-day workshop on draft chapters, University of Pennsylvania Law School; and
  • Fall 2020 (November 11-14, 2020): Wallace Johnson Fellows Roundtable at the ASLH Annual Meeting (Chicago, IL).

The 2019-20 Johnson Program will be led by Professor Reuel Schiller, with the participation of other senior legal historians. Participants must commit to participation in all elements of the program.

Up to 5 Fellows will be selected. Each will receive substantial funding for travel and accommodation related to the program, with a small supplement to participants who have no institutional support for travel and research.

The application deadline is June 30, 2019. Applicants should submit items 1-3 as a single .pdf document, Times New Roman, 12 point font, with your full name in a header on each page:

1. Applicant Information Sheet (in lieu of cover letter):

• • Personal Information: first name; last name; current mailing address; phone; email address; current institution; current position; institutional affiliation for 2020-2021;
  • Education: month and year of graduate degree, institution, and field: Ph.D.; J. D.; Other
  • Funding: We are committed to enabling fellows from a range of institutional positions to participate in the program. Your answer here will have no effect on your candidacy, but will enable us to provide small supplements to participants without institutional support. If selected for the Wallace Johnson program, would you have access to university or other institutional funds to help cover the costs of attending the program? Yes, No, Don’t Know. Comments or relevant details.

2. Project Description (single spaced; not exceeding 1,000 words) organized with the following sections and addressing these questions. We are looking for candid self-reflection. You should think of this document as the first step in the revision, rethinking process.

• • Author Bio: Tell us about yourself, including your position and commitments for the fellowship year (remember, we’ll have your cv);
  • Dissertation: What was your dissertation about? What was its argument? What was its arc? What were its original contributions?
  • Book: What changes are you imagining for the book in terms of conceptualization, structure, narrative, or arc? Are you planning additional research and/or new chapters? How are you imagining the book’s audience?

3. Abridged Curriculum Vitae (limited to 2 pages);

4. Two letters of recommendation submitted separately. Please ask two scholars who know your work well to write a letter of recommendation. We recommend that at least one letter come from a faculty member who was a major advisor of the dissertation. Letters should be sent by email directly to Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu) and received no later than June 30, 2019.

All materials should be submitted to Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu), Chair, University of Minnesota by June 30, 2019.

The 2018 Johnson Program for First Book Authors Committee:
Barbara Young Welke, Chair, University of Minnesota
Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University
Sam Erman, USC
Kurt Graham, NARA
Tim Lovelace, Indiana University
Intisar Rabb, Harvard University
Matthew Sommer, Stanford University

Call for Nominations: Cromwell Article Prize

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article prize is awarded annually for the best article in American legal history published by an early career scholar. Articles published in 2018 in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early national periods. Articles in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize.

The author of the winning article receives a prize of $5,000. The Foundation awards the prize after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

The Cromwell Foundation makes the final award, in consultation with a subcommittee from the American Society for Legal History. This subcommittee invites nominations for the article prize. Authors are invited to nominate themselves or others may nominate works meeting the criteria that they have read and enjoyed. Please send a brief letter of nomination, no longer than a page, along with an electronic copy (or URL of the publication site) of the article, by May 31, 2019, to the subcommittee chair, Prof. David Konig, at cromwellarticleprize@gmail.com.

Photos from the 2018 Annual Meeting

In 2018, the ASLH returned for the first time since 1995 to Houston, the most ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the United States. The meeting, which was held at the Hilton-Américas from November 8, 2018 to November 11, 2018, showcased a population center expected to become the nation’s third-largest city by 2025 and advanced ASLH’s further internationalization by providing a first-class opening for the discussion of legal history scholarship concerning Mexico and Latin America generally.

The meeting was sponsored by the University of Houston Law Center and the University of Houston.

The Plenary Lecture was delivered by Ariela Gross of the University of Southern California Law School and Alejandro de la Fuente of Harvard Law School.

Call for Applications: Cromwell Research Fellowships

In 2019, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation will make available a number of $5,000 fellowship awards to support research and writing in American legal history by early-career scholars. Early career generally 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 number of awards made is at the discretion of the Foundation. In the past several years, the trustees of the Foundation have made between five and ten awards. Scholars who are not at the early stages of their careers may seek research grants directly from the Foundation. For more information, see the Grants page on the Cromwell Foundation’s website.

Application Process for 2019
The Committee for Research Fellowships and Awards of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) reviews the applications and makes recommendations to the Foundation. (The Cromwell Foundation was established in 1930 to promote and encourage scholarship in legal history, particularly in the colonial and early national periods of the United States. The Foundation has supported the publication of legal records as well as historical monographs.)

To apply, please use this link.

After filling out an application form, applicants will be prompted to upload a description of their proposed project (double-spaced, maximum 6 pages including notes; please include a working title), a budget, a timeline, a short c.v. (no longer than 3 pages), and the names and contact information of two academic referees from whom the applicant has requested letters of recommendation.

Recommenders may upload their letters at this link.

Applications must be completed and recommendations received no later than midnight on July 1, 2019.

• Your application should make clear the relevance of law to your project. The most successful applicants demonstrate how law (broadly construed) is at the center of their projects, and how their research will tell us something new about law.
• Your proposal should engage with relevant scholarship in the field. While this discussion can be brief, the most successful applicants explain how their projects tell us something new.
• Your application should have a clear budget that is specific about how and where you plan to spend research funds.
• You will receive a confirmation email within a few days of submitting your application; if you do not receive such an email, please follow up.
• Please direct any questions to the committee at smayeri@law.upenn.edu and include “Cromwell” in the subject line.

During the pendency of their application, candidates for Fellowships should keep the Committee apprised of any change of address. Successful applicants will be notified by early November. An announcement of the awards will also be made at the annual meeting of the American Society of Legal History.

Committee Members
Serena Mayeri (2016), Chair
University of Pennsylvania

Kenneth Mack (2016)
Harvard University

Thomas J. McSweeney (2018)
College of William & Mary

Yvonne Pitts (2018)
Purdue University

Tracy Steffes (2017)
Brown University

Katherine Turk (2016)
University of North Carolina

Call for Applications: Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars

At the annual ASLH conference, two early career legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. While papers simultaneously submitted to the ASLH Program committee are eligible, Preyer Scholars must present their paper as part of the Preyer panel and will be removed from any other panel. Submissions are welcome on any topic in legal, institutional and/or constitutional history. Early career scholars, including those pursuing graduate or law degrees, those who have completed their terminal degree within the previous year, and those independent scholars at a comparable stage, are eligible to apply.

Submissions should be a single MS Word document consisting of a complete curriculum vitae, contact information, and a complete draft of the paper to be presented. Papers should not exceed 50 pages (12 point font, double-spaced) and must contain supporting documentation. In past competitions, the Committee has given preference to draft articles and essays, though the Committee will also consider shorter conference papers, as one of the criteria for selection will be the suitability of the paper for reduction to a twenty-minute oral presentation.

The deadline for submission is March 15, 2019. 

The two Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will receive a $500 cash award and reimbursement of expenses up to $750 for travel, hotels, and meals. Each will present the paper that s/he submitted to the competition at the Society’s annual meeting. The Society’s journal, Law and History Review, has published several past winners of the Preyer competition, though it is under no obligation to do so.

Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to early career legal historians, the program is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. The competition for Preyer Scholars is organized by the Society’s Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee.

Please send submissions by March 15, 2019 to Laura Kalman, Chair, Preyer Award Committee, University of California, Santa Barbara, kalman@history.ucsb.edu.  She will forward them to other committee members.

Call for Applications: Student Research Colloquium

The American Society for Legal History will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, November 20, and Thursday, November 21, 2019, immediately preceding the ASLH’s annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.  The SRC annually enables eight Ph.D. students and law students to discuss their in-progress dissertations and articles with distinguished ASLH-affiliated scholars.

The SRC’s target audience includes early-post-coursework graduate students and historically minded law students.  The colloquium seeks to introduce such students to legal history, to each other, and to the legal-historical scholarly community.  Students working in all chronological periods, including ancient and medieval history, and all geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are students who have not yet received any formal training in legal history.  Applicants who have not yet had an opportunity to present their work to the ASLH are particularly encouraged to apply.  A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group. The group will discuss these papers at the colloquium, under the guidance of two faculty directors.

The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs. This year, one SRC participant will be awarded the Herbert Johnson Fellowship, named for a distinguished legal historian and past-president of the ASLH.

The application deadline is July 15, 2019.  Applicants should electronically submit:

• a cover letter describing, among other things, how far along you are and how many years remain in your course of study;
• a CV;
• a two-page, single-spaced “research statement” that begins with a title and proceeds to describe the in-progress research project that you propose to present at the colloquium; and
• a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from, or together with, the other materials.

Organizers will notify all applicants of their decisions by August 15, 2019.  Please direct questions and applications to John Wertheimer at: srcproposals@aslh.net.

Call for Papers: Australian Historical Association 2019 Conference

The Australian Historical Association invites proposals for its 2019 Conference, “Local Communities, Global Networks,” which will take place July 8-12, 2019 at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba.

In particular, the program committee is interested in proposals that address the following questions: How have the local and the global intersected, inspired and transformed experiences within and from Australia’s history? How do the histories of Indigenous, imperial, migrant and the myriad of other communities and networks inform, contest and shape knowledge about Australia today? The conference theme speaks to the centrality of History for engaging with community and family networks. Constructing livelihoods within an empire and a nation that have had a global reach, local communities have responded in diverse ways. The varieties of historical enquiry into this past enrich our understanding of Australian and world history.

They also welcome paper and panel proposals on any geographical area, time period, or field of history, on the conference theme “Local Communities, Global Networks.”

Proposals are due February, 28, 2019.

For additional information, visit their website.

Call for Applications: Law and Society Association 2019 Junior Scholars Workshop

The Law and Society Association is pleased to accept applications for the 2019 Junior Scholar Workshop. The workshop will begin mid-day on Tuesday, May 28, and continue through the day on Wednesday, May 29, 2019. The workshop immediately precedes the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Washington DC.

We invite applications from junior scholars in any field whose scholarly interests involve socio-legal studies. Specifically, we welcome applications from graduate students (including advanced law students), post-doctoral fellows, and assistant professors (or other pre-tenure faculty). The program will consist of panel presentations on professional development topics, breakout sessions to discuss participant’s research in small groups, and informal discussions over shared meals.

For those not reimbursed by their home institution for airfare and lodging expenses, LSA will offer up to $300 for participants from the US and up to $650 for international participants toward the costs of attending the workshop.

Although membership in LSA is not required, members will be given priority. Registration for the annual meeting is required.

For more information, see their application site.

Call for Papers: 2019 ASLH Annual Meeting

The Program Committee of the ASLH invites proposals for complete panels and individual papers for the 2019 meeting to be held November 21-24 in Boston. Panels and papers on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome.  We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography.

Limited financial assistance (covering airfare and ground transportation only) is available for presenters in need, with priority given to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and scholars from abroad.

 Panel proposals should include the following: a c.v. with complete contact information for each person on the panel, including chairs and commentators; 300-word abstracts of individual papers; and a 300-word description of the panel.

The Program Committee also welcomes other forms of structured presentation for a 90-minute slot, including author-meets-reader (up to 2 book authors, with 2-3 commentators), lightning round (1-2 chairs, 8-12 presenters for a few minutes each on projects in a related field at any stage of development), skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters), or roundtable format (1-2 chairs, 3-4 presenters). Sufficient information following the general guidelines for panel proposals should be provided for the Committee to assess the merits of the presentation.

Individual paper submissions should consist of an abstract, a draft paper (where possible), and a c.v. Given the number and high quality of panel and other complete sessions submitted, individual papers are much less likely than full sessions to be accepted.  Would-be individual paper submitters are encouraged to connect with other scholars to coordinate the submission of complete session proposals. A post on the legal history blog has been set up specifically for this purpose, and scholars are also encouraged to use H-Law and other listservs.

The Program Committee additionally seeks proposals for full-day or half-day pre-conference symposia crafted around related themes to augment traditional conference offerings. Please provide a program title, the intended length of program, a program description, a c.v. and contact information for each presenter, and any information technology requirements. The Program Committee is available to consult with organizers of such symposia as they develop their proposal.

As a general matter, we will not be able to accommodate special scheduling requests, so prospective presenters, chairs, and commentators at the main conference should plan to be available on Friday, November 22, and Saturday, November 23.  Prospective participants may submit proposals for multiple sessions, with the understanding that, absent exceptional circumstances, no individual may appear more than once on the final program in any capacity. The Program Committee strives to include as many participants as possible and will work with session organizers to identify suitable replacements for any sessions from which a participant has to withdraw.

The Program Committee encourages panels that include participants from groups historically under-represented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

The members of the Program Committee are Ari Bryen, Lyndsay Campbell, Li Chen, Kristin Collins, Hendrik Hartog, Kenneth Mack, Renisa Mawani, Sara McDougall, Richard Ross, and Michael Willrich. The co-chairs of the Program Committee are Professors Michelle McKinley (michelle@uoregon.edu) and Daniel J. Sharfstein (daniel.sharfstein@vanderbilt.edu).

All program presenters must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. All proposals must be submitted through the ASLH website, which will be available to take submissions shortly. Please visit https://aslh.net for updates and additional information.

The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2019.

Fellowship Competition for Humanities Research in Egypt

The American Research Center in Egypt will be announcing its annual fellowship competition on November 1. Its fellowships are open to humanities and social science scholars for research in Egypt on a diverse array of disciplines spanning all periods of Egypt’s history.

ARCE invites applications to conduct independent humanities research during the 2019-2020 academic year in Egypt. Doctoral, postdoctoral, early career and senior humanities scholars are eligible to apply. Most awards require American citizenship. Researchers make use of national libraries and archives, private collections, museums, archaeological and cultural heritage sites. Fellowships are available from 3-12 months and are funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Application period: November 1, 2018 – January 15, 2019. For additional information visit: www.arce.org/fellows

Fields of Study: Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Art, Art History, Comparative Literature, Coptic Studies, Economics, Egyptology, Ethnomusicology, Gender Studies, History, Humanistic Social Sciences, Islamic Studies, Literature, Music, Political Science, and Religious Studies.

ACLS Digital Extension Grant Program

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded ACLS a grant of $3 million in renewed support of the ACLS Digital Extension Grant program. The Foundation’s award enables ACLS to offer three additional annual competitions for the grants.

Launched in 2015, the Digital Extension Grant program supports digitally-based research in all disciplines of the humanities and related social sciences with grants of up to $150,000. The program aims to advance established digital research projects by extending their reach to new communities of users and encouraging more scholars from a broader range of institutions in higher education to participate in digital humanities work.

“ACLS developed the Digital Extension Grant program to promote broader access to the resources and scholarly networks that make high-quality digital humanities scholarship possible and sustainable,” said John Paul Christy, director of public programs at ACLS. “We are grateful for the Mellon Foundation’s continued partnership with ACLS as we seek to amplify digital projects that combine pragmatism, innovation, and a commitment to inclusive academic excellence.”

In addition to renewing the program for three competitions, the Foundation’s award provides funding to convene ACLS grantees and other humanities scholars to participate in workshops and discuss issues of shared concern in the digital arena.

The 2018-19 ACLS Digital Extension Grant competition is now open and we are accepting applications through our online fellowship and grant administration system (ofa.acls.org). All applications must be submitted online by January 16, 2019, 9 PM ET.

More information about the program is available at: www.acls.org/programs/digitalextension/

Contact: fellowships@acls.org.

Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Program

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is now accepting applications for the new Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society program, which offers opportunities for faculty who teach and advise doctoral students to pursue humanities scholarship beyond the academy and to deepen their support for doctoral curricular innovation on their campuses.

The Scholars & Society program supports tenured humanities faculty in PhD-granting programs or departments as they pursue research projects in residence at US-based cultural, media, government, policy, or community organizations of their choice. Fellows and their host organization colleagues are expected to create a mutually beneficial partnership in which they collaborate, interact, and learn about each other’s work, motivating questions, methods, and practices.

The goal of the fellowship year should be to conduct a major research project in the humanities or humanistic social sciences that treats a significant issue or grand challenge in society—such as democratic governance; technological change; racism and inequality; climate change; economic exclusion; or migration and immigration, to name a few possibilities. The program supports projects at all stages of development, and applicants may propose projects that originate from their own research interests and agendas as well as those that are created in collaboration with, or in service of, their chosen host organizations. The program also offers two workshops over the course of the fellowship year to help fellows refine their projects, build connections with individuals and institutions engaged in public scholarship, and plan future programming related to doctoral program innovation on their campuses.

Scholars & Society Fellowships are tenable in the 2019-20 academic year and provide:

• A $75,000 stipend
• Up to $6,000 for research, related project costs, and travel/relocation costs as necessary
• $10,000 in support for the fellow’s host organization
• Sponsored attendance at the program’s fall and spring workshops
• Additional funding to sponsor on-campus and off-campus programming in the year following the fellowship.

Proposals must be submitted through ACLS’s online application system. Further information about the program and application process is available online at http://www.acls.org/programs/scholars-society/. The application deadline is 9pm EDT on October 24, 2018.

Questions? Visit the program FAQ page or contact fellowships@acls.org.

ASLH Election Closes September 22, 2018

A reminder to all members: the ASLH election will end at 11:59 PM, September 22, 2018. ASLH members should have received an email asking them to vote (each email contained a voting token which is individualized). Please follow the email instructions and cast your ballot before the deadline.

Call for Applications: Hurst Institute, June 2019

Call for Applications
Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History: June 9-22, 2019
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Application Deadline: December 3, 2018

The American Society for Legal History and the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School are pleased to invite applications for the tenth biennial Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History. The purpose of the Hurst Institute is to advance the approach to legal scholarship fostered by J. Willard Hurst in his teaching, mentoring, and scholarship. The Hurst Institute assists scholars from law, history, and other disciplines in pursuing research on the legal history of any part of the world.

The 2019 Hurst Institute will be led by Mitra Sharafi, Professor of Law and Legal Studies (with History affiliation) at University of Wisconsin–Madison. 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 ASLH Hurst Selection Committee will select twelve Fellows to participate in this event.

Applicant Qualifications
Scholars in law, history and other disciplines pursuing research on legal history of any part of the world are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to 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 with appropriate backgrounds).

Fellowship Requirements
Fellows are expected to be in residence for the entire two‑week term of the Institute, to participate in all program activities of the Institute, and to give an informal works‑in‑progress presentation in the second week of the Institute. Fellows are expected to engage with scholars from other fields and to foster an atmosphere of collegiality.

Fellowship Terms
The Institute for Legal Studies will pay for approved travel expenses and will provide a private room for each fellow at a hotel located on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Most meals will be provided.

Application Process
(1) Submit the following materials in a single pdf file starting with your last name to ils@law.wisc.edu. Multiple attachments will not be accepted.

· Curriculum Vitae with your complete contact information.

· Statement of Purpose (maximum 500 words) describing your current work, specific research interests, and the broader perspectives on legal history that inform your work.

(2) Arrange to have two letters of recommendation sent electronically as a pdf files (these must be on institutional letterhead and signed) to ils@law.wisc.edu by the deadline.

Please note that late or incomplete applications will not be accepted.

Additional Information: http://www.law.wisc.edu/ils/hurst_institute.htm

Questions: Contact ils@law.wisc.edu

2018 ASLH Annual Meeting Preliminary Draft Program Now Available

The American Society for Legal History will be having its 48th annual meeting in Houston, Texas from November 8 -11, 2018. The preliminary draft program is now available at 2018 ASLH Annual Meeting Program (Draft).

Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, October 26, 2018

Arguing for the Rule of Law: Using the Hebrew Bible and Caricatures of Foreigners in British and Spanish America
Date: Friday, October 26, 2018
Location: Newberry Library, Chicago
Organized by: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas, Austin) and Richard Ross (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

How did settlers, imperial officials, indigenous peoples, and Africans in the New World seek to demonstrate, or disprove, that a polity respected the rule of law? (The phrase “rule of law” is modern; but the core of the idea is not). Colonial rule invited accusations of arbitrary government and systematic lawlessness. This conference will focus on two common techniques used to assess whether a polity respected the supremacy of law. First, controversialists asked whether governance accorded with God’s expectations of justice as laid out in Scripture, particularly the Hebrew Bible. Second, caricatures of other societies could be held up to make one’s own appear lawful and just, or the reverse. British American settlers applauded the civility of their law by reference to the presumed barbarism of the Irish and Amerindians. They saw liberty in their exploitive legal order by opposing it to the supposed absolutism of the Spanish and French empires. Spanish settlers justified their rule and derecho by contrasting them to the law of indigenous polities and of their New World rivals. The conference will bring together historians, law professors, and social scientists to think about the complex debates about the rule of law in the English and Iberian Atlantic.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas, Austin) and Richard Ross (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) organized “Arguing for the Rule of Law: Using the Hebrew Bible and Caricatures of Foreigners in British and Spanish America.” The conference is an offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, which gathers every other year at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to explore a particular topic in the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the period c.1492-1815. Funding has been provided by the University of Illinois College of Law.

Attendance at the Symposium is free and open to the public. Those who wish to attend should preregister by sending an email to Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu. Papers will be circulated electronically to all registrants several weeks before the conference.

For information about the conference, please consult our website at https://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/specialty-programs/legal-history/ or contact Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu or at 217-244-7890.

Pre-Conference Workshop on Medieval Legal History, November 8, 2018

On Thursday November 8, immediately before the main conference begins, the American Society for Legal History (with the support of Vanderbilt University) is hosting a workshop on medieval legal history, broadly defined both chronologically and geographically. The workshop will consist of a range of paper presentations and discussions, as shown on the program below. Lunch will be made available to those attending.

The workshop will take place in the Conference Hotel and some of the papers will be pre-circulated, to facilitate discussion. Any one registered for the main conference is welcome to register the workshop, but space is limited to forty attendees. If you would like to register to attend, please register here.

12:00-1:00 pm – Daniel Smail (Harvard), “The Legal Ecology of Debt Collection”

1:00-1:15 Break

1:15-2:30 Paper-workshop session:

• Ari Z. Bryen (Vanderbilt University), “The Judgment of the Provinces: Law, Culture, and Empire in the Roman East”
• Geoffrey Koziol (Berkeley), “Learning to legislate: from the Carolingians to the Peace of God and beyond”
• Comment: Caroline Humfress (St Andrews), William Caferro (Vanderbilt University)

2:30 – 2:45 break

2:45- 3:45 Alice Taylor (King’s College, London): “What does Scotland’s earliest legal tractate actually say (and what does it mean)?”

3:45-4:00 break

4:00- 5:45 Early-Career Scholar Panel

• Jesse Abelman (Yeshiva University), ‘Violence and Jewish Courts in High Medieval Northern Europe’
• Sara Ludin (Berkeley), ‘Protest, Veridiction, and Legal Speech Acts in Early German Reformation Litigation, 1529-1555’
• Dana Lee (Princeton), ‘Early Debates on Excuses in Islamic Legal History: The Case of the Stolen Veil in Seventh Century Tāʾif’
• Charlotte Whatley (University of Wisconsin-Madison), ‘Kingship and Collusion: Extra-Legal Negotiation and Legal Fictions in the Age of Edward III’
• Comment: Lena Salaymeh (Tel Aviv University).

5:45-5:50 Closing Remarks

ASLH Elections Underway Now

ASLH Elections are underway now through September 22. If you are a member of the society, you should receive today or tomorrow (August 21 or 22) a ballot for the election from VoteNow, the organization that conducts our elections. If you have not received it, please check your spam folder first. If your ballot is not present, you may not have been a member as of the July 10 membership list that was furnished to us by Cambridge University Press–meaning, your membership has lapsed. Fear not! Contact CUP and renew your membership, then send Sally Hadden (sally.hadden@wmich.edu) a copy of your membership renewal email from CUP. She can add you to the election and get you a ballot all the way until September 21. Remember, voting closes on September 22 at midnight.

Pre-conference Workshop on Teaching Legal History

We invite 30 ASLH attendees to register for our pre-conference workshop on teaching legal history from 11-4 on Thursday, November 8 in the conference hotel. Participants will have an opportunity to share their own challenges and successes in dialogue with workshop facilitators on topics ranging from digital and creative pedagogies, to co-convened JD/graduate seminars, and undergraduate legal history curriculum building. Lunch is provided to all pre-registered participants through the generous sponsorship of University of Nebraska Lincoln’s College of Arts & Sciences Instructional Improvement Fund.

The agenda is as follows:

11-12: Ari Bryen & Kimberly Welch, Building an Undergraduate Legal History Program

12-1: Lunch & Open Discussion on Teaching Experiences, Concerns, & Strategies

1-2: Katrina Jagodinsky, Digital Pedagogies for Legal History

2-3: Sally Hadden, Teaching American Legal History: Digital Resources and Teaching Opportunities

3-4: Martha S Jones & Karen Tani, Teaching Legal History Seminars w/ Graduate and JD Students

Pre-Register for the workshop here.

Membership Renewal and Voting in the ASLH Election

On behalf of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH), we invite all legal historians, practitioners, graduate and law students, and interested parties to join the ASLH or renew their memberships.

The American Society for Legal History is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to fostering scholarship, teaching, and study concerning the law and institutions of all legal systems, both Anglo-American and those that do not operate in the Anglo-American tradition. Founded in 1956, the Society sponsors the Law and History Review and Studies in Legal History.

Membership in the ASLH offers numerous benefits for scholars of legal history. The Society holds annual conferences to foster intellectual development in legal history worldwide. While the organization is based primarily in the United States, its membership and its scope are international.

With membership comes:
-fellowship and intellectual stimulation of your peers
-networking opportunities with scholars across legal history
-subscription to Law and History Review
-reduced rates for the ASLH 2018 Annual Meeting in Houston,
held November 8-11

Join or renew by July 31 to insure that you may vote in the upcoming ASLH election. Join today at www.cambridge.org/ASLH

Please contact Dr. Patricia Minter, Membership Committee Chair, for further information (Patricia.minter@wku.edu)

Announcing the Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowships

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), of which the ASLH is a member, is pleased to announce a new initiative to advance publicly engaged scholarship in the humanities. The Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society program, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will support humanities scholars who seek to partner with nonacademic organizations in their research and encourage innovation in doctoral education at their universities.

The Scholars & Society program will encourage faculty to explore connections between humanities research and broader society while in residence at a US-based cultural, media, government, policy, or community organization of their choice. The fellowships also provide resources and training that will enable fellows to incorporate best practices of public scholarship into doctoral education on their campuses. ACLS developed the program in consultation with academic and nonprofit leaders with extensive experience in the realm of publicly engaged scholarship.

The fellowships are open to faculty who hold tenured positions in PhD-granting departments or programs at universities in the United States. In the pilot year of the program, ACLS will award 12 fellowships for the 2019-20 academic year. Each fellowship carries a stipend of $75,000, plus funds for research, travel, and related project and hosting costs.

The goal of the fellowship year should be a major research project in the humanities or humanistic social sciences that treats a significant issue in society, such as democratic governance; technological change; racism and inequality; environmental change; economic exclusion; or migration and immigration, to name just a few possibilities. Fellows will select host organizations based on their capacity to advance their research.

Fellows will participate in two workshops over the course of the fellowship year. These workshops will encourage collaboration between scholars and organizations engaged in public scholarship and will support institution-building efforts to train humanities faculty and doctoral students who are interested in developing research agendas that have purchase both inside and outside of the academy.

Proposals must be submitted through ACLS’s online application system, which will begin accepting applications in late July. Further information about the program, including eligibility criteria and FAQ, is available online here. The application deadline is October 24, 2018.

Projects and Proposals invites submissions

The Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History exists to encourage 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. We would consider subventions of scholarly publications or of museum exhibits or pedagogical experiments or of any number of other collective pursuits. We do not support individual research projects. Most of the projects we have supported have been in the 4000 to 6000 dollar range.

We issue a yearly call for proposals. That call will be sent to all members of the American Society for Legal History later in July 2018. Our deadline for receiving applications will be September 17, 2018. The committee will then review the proposals, with the goal of recommending a list to the Board of Directors of the Society in preparation for their meeting in November 2018. For more information, consult the Projects and Proposals webpage.

Extended deadline for Cromwell Dissertation Prize

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation has generously funded a dissertation prize of $5,000. The winning dissertation may focus on any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies; topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. Anyone who received a Ph.D. in 2017 will be eligible for this year’s prize. The Foundation awards the prize after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

To be considered for this year’s prize, please send one hard-copy of the dissertation and the curriculum vitae of its author to John D. Gordan, III, Chair of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee, and each member of the Cromwell Dissertation Prize Advisory Subcommittee with a postmark no later than June 29, 2018.

Conference on Legal History of the European Union, June 21-22, 2018

The annual conference of the research field “Legal History of the European Union” will take place at the Frankfurt Max Planck Institute for European Legal History on June 21-22, 2018. The particular focus of this year’s meeting will be “Key Biographies in the Legal History of European Union, 1950-1993.”

The conference programme (including an outline of the conference aims and objectives), as well as a registration form can be found here. There is no conference fee. We would be delighted to welcome you at the Institute for this event.

Johnson Program for First Book Authors

Johnson Program for First Book Authors
Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History
Deadline for Applications: June 30, 2018
The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) announces a new program designed to provide advice and support to scholars working toward the publication of first books in legal history, broadly defined. In conversation with peers and with the advice of senior scholars, participants will develop and revise book proposals and sample chapters, and they will meet with guest editors to learn about approaching and working with publishers.
Applications for Johnson Fellows are invited from early career, pre-tenure scholars, publishing in English, who have completed PhDs or JDs and are working on first books in legal history. Scholars with expertise in all chronological periods and geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are students who may not (yet) identify as legal historians.
The Johnson Program will begin in November, 2018 at the ASLH Annual Meeting in Houston and will include two in-person workshops and one remote consultation on work-in-progress:
November 8, 2018: One-day workshop at the ASLH Annual Meeting (Houston, TX), introduction to book publishing and prospectus writing;
Spring 2019 (date TBD): Remote meeting, peer and senior scholar feedback on draft prospectus; and
Summer 2019 (July 26-27): Two-day workshop on draft chapters, University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The 2018-19 Johnson Program will be led by Professor Reuel Schiller, with the participation of other senior legal historians. Participants must commit to participation in all three meetings.
The program will include up to 5 Fellows and will provide substantial funding for travel and accommodation.

The application deadline is June 30, 2018. Applicants should submit (as a single document Times New Roman, 12 point font):
cover letter (single spaced, not exceeding two pages) describing the applicant’s professional trajectory to date and reasons for interest in the Johnson Program;
curriculum vitae (including contact information);
project abstract (single spaced; up to 100 words)
project description (single spaced; not exceeding 750 words) organized with the following sections and headings: Introduction, Significance, Design and Methodology, Chapter Outline, Plans for Revision and Progress to Date.
two letters of recommendation from faculty members, at least one of whom should have been a major advisor of the project (sent separately from the other materials).

All materials should be submitted to Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu), Chair, University of Minnesota by June 30, 2018.
The 2018 Johnson Program for First Book Authors Committee
Barbara Young Welke, Chair, University of Minnesota, welke004@umn.edu
Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University, lauren.benton@vanderbilt.edu
Sam Erman, USC Gould School of Law, serman@law.usc.edu
Kurt Graham, NARA, kurt.graham@nara.gov
Reuel Schiller, UC Hastings College of Law, schiller@uchastings.edu
Rayman Solomon, University of Rutgers-Camden School of Law, raysol@camlaw.rutgers.edu
Matthew Sommer, Stanford University, msommer@stanford.edu

Applicants will be notified by July 30, 2018. Please direct any questions to Barbara Welke.

Revisions to Society By-Laws

At a meeting held on Sunday March 25, 2018, the Board of Directors voted to make changes in the Society by-laws. The main changes adopted alter the length of committee service for Hurst Institute and Finance committee members (Article II, sections 7a and 9) and list the monograph series Studies in Legal History as an official mode of Society publication (Article V, section 2). A copy of the changes adopted are posted here to give notice formally to the membership about this vote. By-laws, proposed amendments for 2018, show All Markup

Post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University

Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies invites applications from outstanding candidates for a full-time, two-year, non-renewable teaching and research post-doctoral fellowship beginning fall 2018. The purpose of the fellowship is to recognize and support original interdisciplinary research and teaching in the study of law and inequality in race, crime, policing, mass incarceration, civil rights, and related subject areas.

Eligible candidates will hold a PhD in sociology, political science, history, psychology, economics or related disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields by the start of the appointment (August 15, 2018) and have a record of excellence in teaching and research in law and racial inequality.

The fellowship will be held in residence in Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies for two academic years (2018-19 & 2019-20). Fellows will teach two (2) undergraduate courses per year of the fellowship (4 total) and participate in the intellectual life of the Center including attending speaker events, workshops and reading groups in interdisciplinary legal studies.

Application info here: http://www.legalstudies.northwestern.edu/people/LIPostDoc2018.html

Call For Papers: Legal and Institutional Translation Policies

Leuven University (Belgium) is organizing a conference on the use of translation in public legal and administrative institutions, in the past and present. They would like to attract researchers from a variety of fields, including legal history, and are encouraging legal historians to consider applying to participate. The deadline for abstracts is February 1 2018. Registration to attend is currently open. More details may be found here: https://kuleuvencongres.be/litp2018

From the conference website: “Firstly, [the conference organizers wish] to document the state of affairs of the expanding and interdisciplinary field of legal and institutional translation, by approaching the latter through the lens of ‘translation policy’. This umbrella concept, as derived from Spolsky’s view on language policy (Gonzalez Nuñez 2016), embraces many features of translational communication: rules, agency, practices and values. In addition, it enables framing of translation across the separate disciplines’ realm, and so becomes a binding factor between the study of forms and techniques, multilingual and transnational translation forms, issues of governance and linguistic justice. Taking stock of translation policy as applied to legal and institutional translation needs accounting for historical (Wolf 2015; Schreiber & D’hulst 2017) as well as contemporary ones, theoretical as well as applied approaches (Gonzalez Nuñez & Meylaerts 2017). Historical insight gained by case studies should offer a basis for comparison, and advance the understanding of the embedding contexts and societal impact of translation policies past and present (Lannoy & Van Gucht 2006). It further needs the investigation of policies construed not only in Europe and the Americas but also in the much less studied areas of Asia and Africa, and the generally overlooked eras before the 20th century (Beukes 2007; Baxter 2013).

Secondly, this conference aims at the development of interdisciplinary policies engaging translation studies, legal and institutional studies, and political philosophy. Present-day challenges such as the exponential spread of multilingualism going hand in hand with plural or hybrid forms of citizenship, or the political and societal integration of allophone minorities and immigrants in particular indeed raise new questions. How should one ensure better linguistic integration of minorities in national public spaces and beyond, safeguard equal access to institutions as well as to public and private goods and services, create an inclusive society with due respect for diversity?”

Call for Participants: 2018 Student Research Colloquium

The American Society for Legal History will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, Nov. 7, and Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018, immediately preceding the ASLH’s annual meeting in Houston, Texas. The SRC annually enables eight Ph.D. students and law students to discuss their in-progress dissertations and articles with distinguished ASLH-affiliated scholars. This year, the Department of History at Rice University will host the event.

The SRC’s target audience includes early-post-coursework graduate students and historically minded law students. The colloquium seeks to introduce such students to legal history, to each other, and to the legal-historical scholarly community. Students working in all chronological periods, including ancient and medieval history, and all geographical fields, including non-U.S. history, are encouraged to apply, as are students who have not yet received any formal training in legal history. Applicants who have not had an opportunity to present their work to the ASLH are particularly encouraged to apply. A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group. The group will discuss these papers at the colloquium, under the guidance of faculty directors. The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.

The application deadline is July 15, 2018. Applicants should submit:
• a cover letter describing, among other things, how far along you are and how many years remain in your course of study;
• a CV;
• a two-page, single-spaced “research statement” that begins with a title and proceeds to describe the in-progress research project that you propose to present at the colloquium; and
• a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from, or together with, the other materials.

Organizers will notify all applicants of their decisions by August 15, 2018. Please direct questions and applications to John Wertheimer at: srcproposals@aslh.net.

Call for Submissions: Peter Gonville Stein book prize

The American Society for Legal History announces the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, to be presented annually for the best book in legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all non-US regions, as well as global and international history. To be eligible, a book must sit outside of the field of US legal history and be published during the previous calendar year. Announced at the annual meeting of the ASLH, this honor includes a citation on the contributions of the work to the broader field of legal history. A book may only be considered for the Stein Award, the Reid Award, or the Cromwell Book Prize. It may not be nominated for more than one of these three prizes.

The Stein Award is named in memory of Peter Gonville Stein, BA, LLB (Cantab); PhD (Aberdeen); QC; FBA; Honorary Fellow, ASLH, and eminent scholar of Roman law at the University of Cambridge, and made possible by a generous contribution from an anonymous donor.

For the 2018 prize, the Stein Award Committee will accept nominations of any book (not including textbooks, critical editions, and collections of essays) that bears a copyright date of 2017 as it appears on the printed version of the book. Translations into English may be nominated, provided they are published within two years of the publication date of the original version.

Nominations for the Stein Award (including self-nominations) should be submitted by March 15, 2018. Please send an e-mail to the Committee at steinaward@aslh.net and include: (1) a curriculum vitae of the author (including the author’s e-mail address); and (2) the name, mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number of the contact person at the press who will provide the committee with two copies of the book. This person will be contacted shortly after the deadline. (If a title is short-listed, six further copies will be requested from the publisher.)

Please contact the committee chair, Mitra Sharafi, with any questions: mitra.sharafi@wisc.edu

Institute for Constitutional History Seminar on William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes

The Institute for Constitutional History is pleased to announce another seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty:

William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes; the Travails and Contradictions of Progressivism within the Law: 1908-1941

Instructors:

Daniel R. Ernst is Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he has taught since 1988.  He is the author of Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (University of Illinois Press, 1995), which received the Littleton-Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association, and Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2014).  He received the American Society for Legal History’s Surrency Prize in 2009 and was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand in 1996, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 2003-04, and a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University in 2015-16.

Jonathan Lurie is a professor of history emeritus and formerly an Academic Integrity Officer at Rutgers University in Newark. He had been a member of the History Department there since 1969.   His books include: The Chicago Board of Trade, Law and The Nation, Arming Military Justice, Pursuing Military Justice, The Slaughterhouse Cases [co-authored with Ronald Labbe], Military Justice in America, and The Chase Court.  Lurie’s fields of interest comprise legal history, military justice, constitutional law and history, and eras of the Civil War and Reconstruction.  The book on the Slaughterhouse cases received the Scribes award in 2003 as the best book written on law for that year.  In 2005, he served as a Fulbright Lecturer at Uppsala University law School in Sweden.  Lurie was the Visiting Professor of Law at West Point in 1994-1995.  He has lectured on several occasions at the United States Supreme Court. His biography of William Howard Taft was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.   Lurie’s book on the Supreme Court and Military Justice was published late in 2013 by Sage/ CQ Publishers. He has just completed a manuscript for the University of South Carolina Press on the Taft Court (1921-1930).

Program Content:

Between them, Taft and Hughes served as Governor (H), Governor General (T); Circuit Court Judge (T), Secretary of War (T), President (T), Supreme Court Justice (H), Nominee for the Presidency (H), Secretary of State (H), Chief Justice (T), Chief Justice (H), and this list is not complete.  It indicates, however, the impressive scope of their accomplishments.  In 1916, Taft had called himself a “progressive Conservative,” while in 1935, the Taft’s biographer noted of his successor that as Chief Justice, Hughes had “ruled against capital, against labor, against the farmer and for the farmer, against Congress and for Congress, against the president and for him.”  Hughes’ biographer described him as “an old fashioned progressive.”  Alpheus Thomas Mason wrote that “Hughes’s mind was singularly devoid of ideological content or commitment.”  How had progressivism been transformed during their careers?  To what extent were both jurists “independent of rigid ideology?”  This seminar seeks to explore these questions through books, articles, and discussion.

Logistics:

The dates the seminar will meet are: February 9 and 23, and March 9 and 23; Friday afternoons from 2-5 p.m. The seminar will be held at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York City.

Application Process:

The seminar is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines.  All participants will be expected to complete the assigned readings and participate in seminar discussions.  Although the Institute cannot offer academic credit directly for the seminar, students may be able to earn graduate credit through their home departments by completing an independent research project in conjunction with the seminar.  Please consult with your advisor and/or director of graduate studies about these possibilities.  Space is limited, so applicants should send a copy of their c.v. and a short statement on how this seminar will be useful to them in their research, teaching, or professional development.  Materials will be accepted only by email at MMarcus@nyhistory.org until December 30, 2017. Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter.  For further information, please contact Maeva Marcus at (202) 994-6562 or send an email to MMarcus@nyhistory.org.

Additional Information:

There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own.

About ICH:

The Institute for Constitutional History (ICH) is the nation’s premier institute dedicated to ensuring that future generations of Americans understand the substance and historical development of the U.S. Constitution. Located at the New York Historical Society and the George Washington University Law School, the Institute is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association, the

Organization of American Historians, and the American Political Science Association.  The Association of American Law Schools is a cooperating entity. ICH prepares junior scholars and college instructors to convey to their readers and students the important role the Constitution has played in shaping American society.  ICH also provides a national forum for the preparation and dissemination of humanistic, interdisciplinary scholarship on American constitutional history.

Support for this seminar of the Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is provided in honor of Eric J. Wallach. The Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is supported, in part, by the Saunders Endowment for Constitutional History and a “We the People” challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Call For Papers: ESCLH Conference, June 28-20, 2018

Laws Across Codes and Laws Decoded

28 June – 30 June 2018 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris)

The Organising Committee of the 5th Biennal Conference and the Executive Council of the European Society for Comparative Legal History are pleased to call for papers for the upcoming conference to be held. The main theme picks up threads of thought from the earlier ESCLH conferences in Valencia (2010), Amsterdam (2012), Macerata (2014) and Gdansk (2016) to explore what codes and codification have meant and continue to mean for legal systems with codes, and for those without. Papers should be submitted, as set out below, by 15 November 2017.

The conference will focus on the issue of codes or alternatives to codes as instruments of transforming laws in Europe and in the world. While codes, and the process of codification, are at least familiar if not always completely understood, this conference challenges us to look deeper at what a code meant for the legal systems affected by it. The conference seeks to understand the whole process of codification, from political aspects to its conception, agreement and roll-out, through to technical matters of drafting and implementation and even to linguistic matters of expression and deeper meanings. Challenging the importance for legal rules to be inserted within or outside a code, the conference proposes to examine all sorts of codes, and not only the most known civil codes: general codes as special (such as penal, commercial, labour, family, military) codes, officious codes as official codes. The conference seeks also to study the effects the codified structure of the norms could have on their content and on the way law functions, notably through case law and law writing. All the historical situations in which law reform took place outside of codification and outside of codes can be questioned could be relevant in helping us to understand law reform through codes or its alternatives.

Papers should be novel, properly researched and referenced. They should address the conference theme, exploring doctrinal, theoretical, cultural or methodological aspects of comparative legal history. They must also be comparative, addressing more than one system of laws. The organisers particularly welcome addressing multiple legal systems or cultures. This includes where a similar legal system functions in different cultural circles.

Practical details:

1. To offer a paper, please send the title of their paper, a short abstract (of 200-400 word, absolutely no more and a short CV (no more than 1 page) by 15 November 2017 to the organizing committee, c/o jean-louis.halperin@ens.fr.

2. The presentations should be in English.

3. It is also possible to submit a complete proposal for one or more panels (3 papers normally).

4. The list of accepted papers will be announced by 8 December 2017.

Shortly, a conference website will be launched with fuller details of the conference. For the moment, some transport and accommodation information follows.

Paris offers many accommodation possibilities ranging from five-star hotels, through smaller hotels in the Quartier latin and private rooms to beds in youth and student hostels. For some postgraduates the Ecole Normale Supérieure

could offer cheaper accommodation in student dormitories.

Call For Papers: “Many 14th Amendments” Conference

The University of Miami will be hosting a wide-ranging symposium entitled “The Many Fourteenth Amendments” to mark the sesquicentennial. The symposium will be held on March 1-3, 2018 in Miami (Coral Gables more specifically). The announcement with more details may be found here. Paper proposals are currently being solicited and the deadline is September 15.

2017 ACLS Fellowship Recipients from the American Society for Legal History

We are very pleased to announce the 2017 cohort of ACLS fellowship recipients from among the members of the ASLH.

Chazkel, Amy – ACLS Fellowship Program Associate Professor, History, City University of New York, Queens College

Urban Chiaroscuro: Rio de Janeiro and the Politics of Nightfall

Gross, Ariela J. – ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship Professor, Law and History, University of Southern California

Comparing Law, Slavery, Race and Freedom in the Americas: Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia, 1500-1868

Nolan, Rachel – Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship Doctoral Candidate, History, New York University

“Children for Export”: A History of International Adoption from Guatemala

Schmitt, Casey – Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship Doctoral Candidate, History, College of William & Mary

Bound among Nations: Labor Coercion in the Early Seventeenth-Century Caribbean