About Our Editors
Reuel Schiller is The Honorable Roger J. Traynor Chair and Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where he teaches American legal history, administrative law, and labor and employment law. He has written extensively about the legal history of the American administrative state, and the historical development of labor law and employment discrimination law. He is the author of Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism(Cambridge University Press, 2015), as well as numerous articles on the history of American labor law and administrative law in the twentieth century. In 2008, he was awarded the American Bar Association, Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Award for Scholarship in Administrative Law. Forging Rivals was awarded the 2016 John Phillip Reid Book Award from the American Society for Legal History and received an honorable mention for the 2016 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. His current research focuses on the development of administrative law and the regulatory state after the collapse of the New Deal order.
Reuel is particularly (though not exclusively) interested in working with authors writing about subjects in nineteenth and twentieth-century American legal history related to state-building, the employment relationship, constitutional law, public law, and the interaction of race and class in the legal system. Though his own work sits at the juncture of legal, political, and intellectual history, he is delighted to work with authors across a wide range of methodologies and subjects.
Contact Information
schiller@uchastings.edu
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Lisa Ford, Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, specializes in ideas and practices of order in the post-1763 British Empire and the early national United States. Her interdisciplinary work spans socio-legal, comparative, constitutional, political and settler-colonial approaches to legal history, with particular focus on the articulation of big ideas like sovereignty, crown prerogative and jurisdiction in the messy practice of state and empire-building. Lisa is author of Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836(Harvard UP, 2010), which won the Littleton-Griswold Prize (AHA), the Thomas Wilson Prize (Harvard UP), and the New South Wales Premier’s history award. She is also co-author with Professor Lauren Benton of Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (Harvard UP, 2016), and author of The King’s Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard UP, 2021).
Lisa is interested in working with scholars on projects on American history to 1900, and empire and global history from the early modern period to the present. She shares the list’s commitment to helping new and emerging scholars to write field-changing books.
Contact information:
l.ford@unsw.edu.au
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Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law and History at Yale University, and a Global Faculty member at the Peking University Law School. He works primarily on comparative legal and economic history, and is the author of two books, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, Fall 2022), and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). These are the first two entries in a planned trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. The Laws and Economics of Confucianism received the 2018 Presidents Award from the Social Science History Association and the 2018 Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Beyond his historical writing, he has also published numerous articles and essays on private law theory and contemporary Chinese law and politics.
Taisu would be happy to work with authors on any aspect of Asian and Middle Eastern legal history, and would frankly be open to working on any book project that is primarily non-Western in historical orientation. He is particularly, but by no means exclusively, interested in projects that have either a comparative perspective or an inter-disciplinary methodology.
Contact information:
taisu.zhang@yale.edu
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Tom McSweeney is Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School. His research focuses on English law in the thirteenth century. His book, Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals(Oxford University Press 2019), was awarded an honorable mention for the Selden Society’s David Yale Prize for an “outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales.” His current research project examines the short legal tracts that proliferated in the second half of the thirteenth century, and what they can tell us about how the earliest generations of lawyers in England’s central courts learned their law.
Although his expertise is in medieval and early modern law, Tom is happy to work with authors writing about European law in any time period. Tom appreciates the way in which the ASLH has used the series as a mentoring tool for junior scholars, and is committed to the series’ charge to “give timely, detailed, supportive, and deeply scholarly feedback,” particularly to first-time authors.
Contact information:
tjmcsweeney@wm.edu
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Former Series Editors, recent
Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History at the University of Maryland, specializes in Early American history, cultural and intellectual history, legal history, and comparative history, primarily with Britain. She is the author of By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, which was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press (2005). It won the 2006 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association as well as the 2006 Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History, and the 2008 Biennial Book Prize of the Order of the Coif from the American Association of Law Schools. She also won three prizes for her article “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia” (1997).
She is interested in debates about justice in the early modern world. She would like to hear from scholars interested in any aspect of land and contract law, in the comparative law of slavery, and in domestic law, as well as other topics related to law and society in the early Modern Atlantic world. She is fascinated by questions surrounding the role of the law in shaping society and vice versa, and in complicating how we think about economic and social history by putting power and the law back into our narrative and analytic frameworks.
Contact Information:
hbrewer@umd.edu
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Sarah Barringer (Sally) Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, teaches in the areas of church and state, property, and legal history in the law school, and American religious and constitutional history in the history department. Sally is the author of a book in Studied in Legal History, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and The Spirit of the Law Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2010). As a former Series’ author herself, she is committed to continuing the intensive and supportive collaborations between editor and author that is its hallmark.
Sally is particularly interested in work in legal history across American national history, including (but not limited to) religion, race, equality, property, suffrage, labor and poverty, as well as on particular areas of legal development, including the common law, legal reform, migration and westward expansion, and families and family structure.
Contact Information:
sbgordon@law.upenn.edu
sbgordon@sas.upenn.edu
215.898.3069
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Michael Lobban, Professor of Legal History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, specializes in Contract Law, Legal History and Legal Theory. His research interests lie in the field of English legal history and the history of jurisprudence. He is one of the authors of The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vols XI-XIII (Oxford 2010), in which he covered the history of contract law, tort and commercial law for the period 1820-1914. He is also the author of A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Common Law World, 1600-1900 (Springer 2007). His earlier books include White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and The Common Law and English Jurisprudence, 1760-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), which was the joint winner of the Society of Public Teachers of Law’s prize for outstanding legal scholarship in 1992. He has written widely on aspects of private law and on law reform in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as co-editing a number books, including, Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth Century Law Literature and History (Palgrave MacMillan 2010, with Margot Finn and Jenny Bourne Taylor), Law and History (Oxford 2003, with Andrew Lewis) and Communities and courts in Britain, 1150-1900 (Hambledon Press, 1997, with Christopher W. Brooks.
Michael is particularly interested in working with scholars in British history, legal philosophy, as well as imperial and transnational legal history.
Contact Information:
m.j.lobban@lse.ac.uk
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