Honorary Fellows 2024

The Honors Committee is pleased to recommend that James R. Phillips, known universally as “Jim,” Professor on the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto and Editor-in- Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, be elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. Professor Phillips has shaped the field of Canadian legal history through his own scholarship and through the dozens of scholars whose books and monographs he has shepherded to publication.

Professor Phillips received Ph.D. in history from Dalhousie University in 1983 and earned an LL.B., also from Dalhousie, four years later. He first taught as an assistant professor history at Dalhousie from 1983-1987, after which he served as law clerk to Madam Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada. He joined the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto in 1988 and has remained there since. He is also cross-appointed to the Department of History and the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History since 2006.

Across four co-authored books, eight co-edited collections of essays, and over sixty book chapters and journal articles, Professor Phillips has deepened our understanding of a wide range of topics–criminal law, private law and the economy, judicial reform, the development of judicial independence, state relations with indigenous peoples, marriage and gender, trusts, the legal profession, prisons, and more. Professor Phillips’s earliest published work–several articles on eighteenth-century India and the East India Company–grew from his doctoral field in British imperial history. Law school, which he undertook while teaching, turned his attention to the legal history of Nova Scotia. In short order, his focus expanded to include the legal history of Canada as a whole, where, with one notable exception, his focus has remained.

That one exception is his first monograph, Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003), written with Rosemary Gartner, a sociologist. Murdering Holiness explores the story of the “Holy Roller” sect led by Franz Edmund Creffield in Corvallis, Oregon in the early years of the twentieth century. Creffield, a charismatic, self-styled messiah, taught his followers to forsake their families and worldly possessions and to seek salvation through him. As his teachings became more extreme, the local community reacted by tarring and feathering Creffield and incarcerating his followers in the state asylum. Creffield himself was later imprisoned for adultery. After his release, the brother of two women in the sect, George Mitchell, pursued Creffield to Seattle and killed him. The subsequent trial made headlines across North America. Mitchell was acquitted, only to be killed two days later by his eighteen-year-old sister, whom Creffield had selected from among his “Brides of Christ” and anointed “the new Mary.” Phillips plumbed court records and other archival sources to examine the trial and the media response to it, and to illuminate the rise of fringe religious belief in the Pacific Northwest, the justice system in Seattle, and the role of the press in influencing public opinion. Professor John McLaren of the University of Victoria (and an Honorary Fellow of the Society) describes Murdering Holiness as “riveting,” “brilliantly researched,” “a major contribution to cultural legal history,” and “among the very best works that examine the cultural and social assumptions that surround and sometimes pervert the application of the law and the operation of the justice system.”

As is evident in Murdering Holiness, Professor Phillips’s scholarship is marked, again in Professor McLaren’s words, by a “belief in the value of linking local, community and even family events that ended up in the courts, both criminal and civil, to broader issues of legal and social policy.” This belief animates what many consider his crowning accomplishment, the three-volume A History of Law in Canada, which he co-authored with Philip Girard and R. Blake Brown. Volume I (Beginnings to 1866) was published in 2018, Volume II (Law for a New Dominion, 1867-1914) in 2022, and Volume III (The Twentieth Century) is forthcoming in 2026. In the estimation of Professor Philip Girard of York University (also an Honorary Fellow of the Society), these volumes constitute Professor Phillips’s “most significant and lasting contributions to the field and upon which his scholarly reputation will long endure.” This accomplishment is particularly notable when one recalls, as Professor McLaren does, that “many scholars . . . doubted” that writing a history of law in Canada “would be possible, let alone manageable.” The two volumes published thus far are monumental in the breadth and depth of their coverage. No mere summary or synthesis of existing work, the volumes are full of new research and fresh insights on substantive law, legal institutions, legal actors, and legal culture and their relation to broader political, economic, social, cultural, and moral contexts across common law, civil law, and Indigenous law. Reviewers have particularly noted the care and sensitivity with which the volumes address Indigeneity and Indigenous law, colonialism, race, gender and the legal experiences of various minorities within Canadian law. So deeply embedded in Canadian history generally are the volumes that more than one reviewer judged them required reading for all historians of Canada.

As field-defining as Professor Phillips’s scholarship has been, he has also built the field by encouraging and supporting the work of others. As Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History since 2006, he has overseen the publication of over sixty books, monographs, and essay collections. Its robust publications program aside, the Osgoode Society is not the Canadian equivalent of the American Society for Legal History. It is not an academic society as such, but rather a membership organization of lawyers, judges, and academics dedicated to advancing scholarship in Canadian legal history through its publications, by supporting emerging scholars through research grants, and by conferring prizes for scholarship in the field, all of which make the editor-in-chief’s role more critical. Under Professor Phillips’s guidance, the Osgoode Society has produced a wide range of works–measured both by topic and methodology–that engage not just academic scholars, but also lawyers, judges, and general audiences interested in history. As Professor Shaunnagh Dorsett of the University of Technology Sydney (and an Honorary Fellow of the Society) told us, “The importance of the Osgoode Society and . . . its publications for the encouragement and growth of legal history in Canada cannot be overstated. It provides a high quality publication destination for significant works by an array of both senior and emerging scholars in Canada. We only need compare publication possibilities in Canada with say Australia–where no such society exists–to see the effect that these publication possibilities can have. I consider the Osgoode Society (and Jim’s pivotal role) as key to the strength of the discipline in Canada.”

Professor Phillips has also encouraged the work of other scholars through a forum he created that is, perhaps, without equal in its reach, duration, and influence–the Legal History Workshop that he has led for some thirty-five years. The workshop meets biweekly during the academic year to discuss work in progress by scholars from graduate students to senior scholars. As Professor Girard noted, “[c]ountless scholars young and old have benefitted from the fulsome and informed feedback obtained during these sessions.” The workshop community went international when the pandemic forced meetings onto Zoom, where it has remained, drawing in a new audience across Canada and beyond.” Professor Dorsett told us that, “[o]n a personal note, this was a high point for me during the covid pandemic lockdowns; the ability to join from Australia online was a key way for me to feel connected to the legal history community during this time. These workshops provide a crucial support and growth mechanism for the discipline in Canada.”

The scholars we elect as Honorary Fellows are distinguished not simply by scholarship that has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others, but also by their commitment to building their fields and helping other, younger, scholars stand on their shoulders and carry the work forward. Professor Phillips is widely known as a collaborative, kind, and helpful colleague to every scholar working in the field, wherever they may be and whatever their seniority. As Professor Lori Chambers of Lakehead University, one of many scholars who benefited from Professor Phillips’s encouragement, wrote, “[h]e has made the field of legal history in Canada stronger and been an exemplary mentor to a whole generation of legal historians. In sum, we offer Professor McLaren’s assessment that Professor Phillips “is a towering strength in the world of Canadian legal history and legal history more generally. He and a small group of others have been and continue to be a crucial inspiration to the research and writing of and teaching and learning in Canadian legal history and its place within the broader firmament of comparative legal history.” The Committee believes that Professor Phillips amply merits election as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

The Honors Committee is pleased to recommend that Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute, be elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. An intellectually demanding scholar and teacher of the highest caliber, Professor Jones has delivered a forceful historical vision in sweeping revisionist accounts of race and law in the American past. Working in many communities and genres, she models an astonishing synthesis of clear-eyed purpose and uncompromised engagement. She has been a mentor for many and an inspiration for still more. Her energies and productivity are legendary, not only in scholarly research and fierce writing, but in teaching, editing, and curating. Professor Jones has innovated in public history through performance, creative nonfiction, exhibitions. She teaches in the classroom and in the world. She is, in short, a powerhouse.

Professor Jones began her career in a fashion unorthodox for scholarly circles; for nearly a decade, she practiced law. After graduating from CUNY School of Law in 1987, Professor Jones practiced public interest law as, in her words, “an activist lawyer” at what was then MFY Legal Services, now Mobilization for Justice, a legendary provider of civil legal services for poor families and youth. Her cases combined direct service for impoverished New Yorkers with impact litigation in MFY’s renowned HIV Law Project.

In 1994, Jones won a fellowship at Columbia for her lawyering work. Inspired by scholars like Eric Foner and Manning Marable, Jones discovered that she was, as she likes to say, “an archive rat.” Jones stayed on at Columbia, completing her Ph.D. on “the woman question” in nineteenth-century African-American culture while lecturing at Barnard and the New School.

In 2001, the University of Michigan appointed Jones as an assistant professor in History and Afroamerican and African Studies. Michigan’s Law School gave Jones a third institutional home by appointing her Visiting Assistant Professor in 2004. For the next decade, she established a distinctive interdisciplinary synthesis with an ever-more cosmopolitan dimension. By 2016, she was the Presidential Bicentennial Professor at Michigan and a Visiting Professor of Law at its Law School, while serving regularly as Directrice d’Etudes Invitée at Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris and as instructor at the Gilder-Lehrman Institute’s Summer Teacher’s Institute in New York. Since 2017, Jones has held the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professorship at Johns Hopkins University, where she is also on the faculty of the SNF Agora Institute, an academic and public forum at Johns Hopkins that combines research, teaching, and practice to promote civic engagement and inclusive dialogue.

Professor Jones’s record of scholarly accomplishment is exemplary – and expanding even as we write these words. Three books (and two more in press) are joined by thirty scholarly articles and three edited volumes. Drawing on her dissertation, Jones’s first book, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (UNC Press, 2007), uncovered a world of Black women’s public engagement in the nineteenth-century United States. All Bound Up Together identified Black women in an array of political organizations, churches, mutual aid societies, and voluntary organizations. In the book’s deeply researched pages, Jones revealed the lives of previously overlooked characters like the formerly enslaved Hester Lane, who participated in antislavery work in the American Anti-Slavery Society only to find that principles of race equality would extend to Black men, and that principles of sex equality would apply to white women, but that she would be “beyond the reach of such principles” as a Black woman. Jones’s book stands nearly two decades later as one of the leading entries in the growing literature on the intersectionality of race and gender in legal history.

All Bound Up Together was centrally concerned with the ways in which Black women engaged the problem of citizenship in a legal system that was often hostile to the notion that it extended to them. In an influential article in the North Carolina Law Review published in 2013, Jones turned directly to focus on that system and Black people’s engagements with it. Jones showed the fruits of fusing legal scholarship with historical research, even as she continued to work deeply on African American women’s intellectual history. The article (“Hughes v. Jackson: Race and Rights Beyond Dred Scott”) recovered a world of Black people in Maryland litigating their civil rights to travel, bear arms, and make and enforce contracts. Even as Chief Justice Roger Taney denied that Black people held, at least at the time of the founding, any “rights which the white man was bound to respect,” Jones found that Black litigants in Taney’s home state made claims on a law that they insisted was open to them. The story she told there, she said, “opens a new chapter in the history of black citizenship before the Civil War.”

Jones’s 2018 Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, published by Cambridge, began with the germ of the North Carolina Law Review article’s “new chapter” and developed it into a landmark, prize-winning book. Birthright Citizens, which won the Society’s John Phillip Reid Book Award, the AHA’s Littleton-Griswold Prize, and the OAH’s Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, argues that Black people in America, not white jurists, were the central drivers in shaping the content and boundaries of the laws of citizenship. The book traces the development of a legal consciousness in Baltimore’s Black community in the early nineteenth century in “lawyers’ offices, ships at sea, and political conventions.” It recounts the processes by which Black people used the local courthouse to pursue their ends in disputes over debt, church property, asserting themselves as citizens bearing rights. In Jones’s story, the Dred Scott case becomes a late intervention into a long-contested space of rights-claiming by Black people, one that was soon rebuffed by the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Thirteenth Amendment.

Leading scholars offer unstinting praise for Jones’s accomplishment in Birthright Citizenship. In his letter to our committee, Alejandro de la Fuente of Harvard, for example, observes that in contrast to a previous generation of scholars who conceived slavery and citizenship as discrete, fixed, and clearly discernible polar statuses–Frank Tannenbaum’s influential Slave and Citizen (1946) comes to mind–Jones argues that it is better to approach these statuses as claims rather than facts. Jones, as de la Fuente observes, adopts a jurisprudential method in her history. Law, she says, comes from contestation rather than what she calls “textual certitudes.”

William Novak at the University of Michigan adds that “Birthright Citizens is thus something of a rarity in socio-legal history – a history that truly brings together the local, social, everyday experience of ordinary people reflected in difficult-to-access local legal materials with major and obvious implications for our more general national constitutional narrative concerning the all-important and urgent subject of race and rights.” The book, Ariela Gross at UCLA continues, is [a] landmark work on African Americans and citizenship in Baltimore before the Civil War. This book overturns conventional wisdom, not only about the Dred Scott case, but also about the status of free people of color, their relationships to “the law,” and even more generally, the way ordinary people’s interactions with legal institutions could shape politics and culture in the antebellum era. It is now the definitive work on free people of color and the law in the United States.

In a field (the law of citizenship) where he has done much of the leading work, Novak puts it in the way that matters most of all: “Martha Jones’s work basically changed my mind. . . . Professor Jones has convinced me that there is much richer, on-going debate about the citizenship question on the ground than I previously presumed and that that debate does ultimately have national constitutional consequences.”

Kunal Parker, another scholar with deep engagement in the law of nineteenth-century citizenship characterizes Jones’s contribution this way: “Martha Jones’ scholarship on the African American quest for birthright citizenship and the franchise has shown, through detailed archival research, how many ordinary African American men and women were able to imagine and then bring into being a kind of citizenship that exceeded the terms of the status they were assigned in the United States’ political and social hierarchies.” “The significance of Jones’ work,” Parker concludes, “lies in its showing in the most concrete way the contribution of African Americans to the creation of a more robust and inclusive American citizenship.”

Of particular note here is Jones’s exceptional trans-Atlantic and hemispheric reach. De la Fuente observes that Jones’s work puts her in the “select group of prominent scholars of the African American experience whose work transcends the traditional boundaries of American historiography.” Two of her articles, in particular, draw out this dimension of her work, one published in Law & History Review in 2011 (“Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery”), the other as a chapter in The American South and the Atlantic World , which came out in 2013. In such work, Jones traces the sophisticated ways in which families negotiated the law of race and slavery in their movements around the Atlantic world.

Jones’s most recent book sets new standards for the reach and depth of the social history of the law of citizenship. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted in Equality for All, published by Basic Books in 2019, came out to reviews in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more. It won the Los Angeles Times history prize and appeared on Time Magazine’s list of the best books of the year, among other noteworthy recognitions. In Vanguard, Jones extends her first two books to carry her compelling story of the lost worlds of Black women’s political engagement from early America to the twentieth century. In Jones’s powerful rendering, people like the brilliant lawyer and minister Pauli Murray becomes the new Hester Lanes, simultaneously marginalized by multiple overlapping social formations, even as they make claims of their own. Jean Baker, writing in Foreign Affairs, says that “Vanguard is unique: there is nothing like it in the historical literature.”

It is no wonder that Professor Jones’s historical work reaches such a broad audience. Novak observed to your committee that Jones is “constantly, actively, actually teaching.” Jones, he continues, “seems to teach everyone and anyone at any time or place. . . . Her ultimate goal is to teach” and “to teach any and all of us,” often in what, as Novak marvels, prove to be “ingenious ways.”

At Michigan, Jones fused her legal and historical skills in teaching a seminar with former Society president Rebecca Scott called “The Law in Slavery and Freedom,” along with an innovative and successful lecture course “History of Law and Social Justice,” which she teaches now at Hopkins.

There is no better example of Jones’s unabating commitment to teaching students, colleagues, and communities alike than her “Hard Histories” project at Johns Hopkins. Beginning with a research project and Special Report of Preliminary Findings authored by Jones in December 2020 on Johns Hopkins and slavery, Hard Histories has convened members Hopkins community to study the school’s past and its significance for the school’s present and future. “Through the lessons of hard histories,” the project promises, “we will chart a way forward.” Serving as the project’s Director, Jones has convened and presided over workshops, public conversations, art installations, and more, all designed to find new ways to unearth, confront, and work through “the role that racism and discrimination have played at Johns Hopkins.” In words that capture a core dimension of what Jones’s work as a whole aims to do, Hard Histories bills itself as “a frank and informed exploration of how racism has been produced and permitted to persist as part of our structure and practice.”

The Hard Histories project is illustrative of the extraordinary legacy of service and institution-building Jones has developed in her career. At Michigan, she founded the university’s Program in Race, Law & History, which continues today as a vital collaboration between the History Department and the Law School, one that has been closely linked from the beginning to our Society. Her institutional energies for building and sustaining the study of legal history are simply unsurpassed. Indeed, the sheer extent of Jones’s service to the profession is hard to convey.

Jones has served on the Board of Directors of our Society, as well as the Nominations Committee, the Program Committee (which she chaired in 2014), and the Publications Committee. She has served on the Executive Committee of the Organization of American Historians, as co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and on the board of directors at her alma mater, CUNY Law School. She delivers wisdom on advisory boards at the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, and the National Women’s History Museum. She serves as a jury member for Columbia’s Bancroft Prize, the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times History Book Prize. And she sits on the editorial board of a half-dozen of the scholarly journals that sustain our field.

In her universities, she has co-directed workshop series and been a leader in multiple departments. In the field, her leadership has helped support institutions that develop the work of young scholars. A decade of service as co-convenor of the Law and Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholar Workshop, where she currently serves as vice president, has helped make the Workshop a key site for building the next generation of law-and-history scholarship. Jones spearheaded and leads the Celia Project, a research collaboratory of history and literature scholars that has taken a lead role in the field’s fundamental rethinking of the significance of sexual violence in American slavery.

Given the sheer number of Jones’s institutional engagements and leadership roles, scholars in the field marvel about what one of her colleagues calls Jones’s “impossibly active presence” in the communities in which she is a part. She “genuinely enriches,” this colleague continues, “each community with which she comes in contact.”

Jones’s engagement in her many communities demands of them that they live up to their professed ideals. As a tough but always engaging voice in public discourse – a “public historian” as she puts it — Jones has fundamentally altered conversations around race and the law. Jones has, for example, done as much as anyone in the world to reshape the meaning of the Nineteenth Amendment’s legacy, rigorously focusing attention in the scholarly literature and in the world at large on its limits in establishing voting rights for Black women. She has emerged as a powerful voice in the public discourse on race, identity, and the law, redeeming the oft- abused role of public intellectual in our time. And she has innovated in ways to engage with communities of students, scholars, and many others. Alongside influential scholarly writing, Jones curates museum exhibits, composes luminous video shorts of words and images, and collaborates on theater productions

All of these accomplishments have yielded an exceptional list of honors bestowed upon her already, not much more than two decades since earning her Ph.D. President Joseph Biden appointed Jones a member of the Permanent Committee on the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin named her a fellow in 2023. The Library of Congress has appointed her as Distinguished Scholar. She has won the Columbia’s Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement and has an honorary degree at CUNY Law.

Professor Martha S. Jones’s combination of unyielding high standards and unsurpassed energies for engagement have produced a breathtaking body of work – and made us all better students of the law and its history. For Jones, all the world is a classroom, and we are all the wiser for it.