In Memoriam
Laurie Marie Wood
Laurie Wood (1985-2023) was a historian of law in the French colonial world, with interests that spanned the globe in the early modern period. Dr. Wood grew up in Texas. She did her BA at Texas Tech University and her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (2013) with advisor Dr. Julie Hardwick. She was a fellow of the Hurst Institute (2013) and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School (2013-14). Laurie Wood then joined the faculty at Florida State University where she taught and was granted tenure in the History department (2014-23). During this time, she was also a Davis Center fellow at Princeton (2017-18). Laurie Wood passed away at the age of 38 after a two-year struggle with breast cancer.
Prof. Wood’s scholarship made original contributions to the field of legal history: her innovative work brought together the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, normally studied separately, to show the bi-oceanic nature of law in the early modern French empire. Within this, she explored law and the family in imperial settings. In a move that was unusual among legal historians, she did not approach the family through the study of marriage or divorce. Instead, she revealed the world of legal professional families—“themistocrats”—whose networks connected colonial courts (what Wood called legal entrepôts) across the first French empire.
Her prize-winning book, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (Yale University Press, 2020) and edited volume chapter, “The Martinican Model: Colonial Magistrates and the Origins of a Global Judicial Elite” (2018) revealed how these personal and intellectual configurations created a rich and global legal culture that grew over generations. Wood’s work was not only comparative in nature, but it integrated the legal worlds of the Antilles and the Mascarenes in ways few historians have attempted. The geographic reach of French families of legal officials extended first across the French Antilles like Martinique and Guadeloupe, where slave-based sugar plantations dominated. Later, it linked the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean zones, particularly the Mascarenes like Île-de-France and Île Bourbon (now Mauritius and Réunion). The legal infrastructure controlled by these families, which complemented their own involvement in local commerce and included the imperial metropole, enabled them to carry out complex legal business on a global scale, and connected far-flung locales through similar legal procedures. In Dr. Wood’s work, we met the Barbé de Marbois family, whose members were court officials in Saint Domingue and Île-de-France, and François Millon, who was a judge in Saint Domingue and later attorney general (procureur général) in Île Bourbon. Archipelago of Justice is an exceptionally ambitious book, spanning two disparate geographies and fields of scholarship connected through courts and legal officials. But even in such a sprawling project, Wood’s book made room for individual people and their experiences, whether it was bickering French officials fighting over prestige or the enslaved people caught in the cruel grasp of the colonial project.
Laurie Wood approached colonialism, law, and families from another angle that was equally original. Her article, “Recovering the Debris of Fortunes between France and its Colonies in the 18th Century” (2018), revealed a system for resolving vacant estates (successions) in the empire, 1760-90. When a property holder died, especially unexpectedly, the French state worked to find heirs through intermediaries called succession trustees. In the absence of heirs, the Crown absorbed the estate. Vacant colonial estates were not unusual, given hazards like piracy, storms, shipwreck, and disease. Women, including widows, daughters, and sisters, often claimed these estates. Wood structured her second book project around the role of women, risk, and property claims in the colonies. Her conceptualization of this planned book brought together the study of the environment, gender, and financial disaster. A book proposal for “Flickering Fortunes: Women, Catastrophe & Capacity” was under consideration by Yale University Press at the time of her death.
Dr. Wood also contributed to the history of prisons and carcerality from the perspective of spatio-legal history and material culture. In a Law & History Review special issue and online contribution to The Docket (2023), she explored the case of Jean Clavier, an admiralty court bailiff in 1740s Saint-Domingue who became a prisoner himself and escapee when the building collapsed. Prof. Wood used this “zigzagging trajectory” to stress the “permeability of material legal boundaries in practice and imagination.”
Laurie Wood continued her methodological explorations with a co-authored project, with Professor Meghan Roberts of Bowdoin College, concluded shortly before her passing. It explores the biography and social networks of an eighteenth-century botanist, a free woman of color named Charlotte Dugée. When published, this work will offer exciting methodological and theoretical innovations by positioning Dugée at the center of intersecting narratives about the Enlightenment, science, empire, race, and knowledge production.
As the breadth and scope of her scholarship demonstrates, Laurie Wood was a brilliant, curious, and ambitious thinker. A devoted and original teacher and mentor to her students at FSU and younger scholars in her fields, she was also an exceptionally generous colleague. She was an enthusiastic member of the ASLH. She gave freely of her time and attention, being elected to the Board of Directors and serving on many ASLH committees between 2017 and 2021. These included the Surrency Prize, Small Grants, and Hurst Institute selection committees. She was also co-faculty director of the Student Research Colloquium and was deeply valued by the graduate students during her tenure. To collaborate with Dr. Wood in any capacity meant being reminded what a joy and privilege it is to be a historian, a writer, and a teacher—so deeply felt and expressed was her own joy in the work and dedication to it, to her last days.
“Having spent so much time in the archives of past courtrooms, I tend to hear written words,” Laurie Wood wrote (H-France Forum, Vol. 17.2). We and future generations of legal historians will continue to hear her through her written words.
Danna Agmon, Edward J. Kolla, Ada Kuskowski, and Mitra Sharafi