News & Announcements
August 6, 2026
Virtual Working Group 2026-2027: “Law in the Making of Modern Capitalism”
Virtual Working Group 2026-2027: “Law in the Making of Modern Capitalism: Reading Group on Methodological Inquiries”
This reading group will bring together scholars working on the legal history of capitalism to examine the methodological choices, assumptions, and ambitions that shape research in this field. It will place historians based in history departments, historically trained scholars working in law schools, and legal scholars who use history in doctrinal, theoretical, or normative inquiry in conversation.
The group’s discussions will revolve around several overlapping clusters of questions. The first concerns explanation and causation. What kinds of explanation should legal-historical scholarship seek to provide? How can scholars explain relationships among law, economic organization, political conflict, and social hierarchy without reducing law to economic interest or treating doctrine as autonomous? A second cluster concerns sources, actors, and scale. What counts as a legal source when studying corporations, households, markets, labor relations, social movements, financial institutions, or administrative agencies? Who counts as a legal actor, and how can scholarship recover the agency of people whose encounters with law rarely appear in appellate decisions or official legal records? A third cluster concerns theory and contemporary relevance. What role should theories of capitalism play in legal-historical research, and how explicitly should scholars state their theoretical commitments? Should legal history speak to current legal and political debates, and what are the possibilities and risks of using historical research for doctrinal, theoretical, or normative purposes?
The purpose of the group is not to resolve these methodological and theoretical tensions into a single model of legal-historical scholarship. Rather, it is to make otherwise implicit choices visible and open them to productive examination.
Format:
We seek a diverse slate of 12-15 participants.
The organizers will collaborate with participants to establish the full reading list—to be comprised of short, published works that balance topics of interest– in advance of the first meeting in mid to late September. During the second half of the academic year, we may also consider including works authored or in progress by members of the group, if appropriate. The readings will not be heavy; we will not include entire published books, but rather, illustrative excerpts and articles that will serve as a starting point for a vibrant exchange, which is the chief aim of the group.
Membership in the group is open to scholars from all backgrounds (including early- and mid-career scholars) and from all geographical locations. We are hoping for a collective of scholars working in a range of fields and periods of history of law and capitalism. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with the organizers for questions or to join our mailing list and receive Zoom links and draft papers.
Schedule:
We will meet virtually for 1.5-hour sessions for eight sessions throughout the academic year (Sept-May), roughly every month excluding December. To accommodate participants, meetings are provisionally set to rotate between Tuesday and Friday at 12:30 EST.
To apply:
Please send the following dzukreifer@sjd.law.harvard.edu; and alonjasp@tauex.tau.ac.il by Aug. 31:
- A brief bio (150 words max)
- A short statement explaining your interest in history of law and capitalism, whether you have specific ideas for readings you’d like to discuss communally, or whether you would be interested in discussion your own work in progress (150 words max)
- Indication of your availability on Tuesday and Friday and any other scheduling issues we should know about (we can be flexible).
- Selection of participants will take place approximately one week after the application deadline and will be broadly inclusive, aiming to create a group of diverse ranks and varied expertise by region, period, topic, and approaches.
Workshop Coordinator Bios:
Alon Jasper is a Lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law. Alon’s research examines the legal history of infrastructure, regulation, and public power, with a particular focus on the ways legal institutions have shaped—and been shaped by—large-scale systems of transportation, communication, and economic coordination. His dissertation (TAU) explored the legal and political history of railroad governance in the nineteenth-century United States, tracing how railroads became a site for debates over public authority, private power, racial segregation, Indigenous sovereignty, common carriage, governmental ownership, and the emergence of modern regulatory thought. Alon also writes on the history and theory of public law, digital infrastructures and rights, the administrative state, and institutional aspects of courts. Alon can be reached at alonjasp@tauex.tau.ac.il.
Dana Zuk is a fourth-year S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School and a Law and Political Economy Graduate Student Fellow. She works at the intersection of legal history, labor history, and political economy. Her dissertation, currently titled “The Making and Unmaking of the Modern American Middle Class,” examines the 20th-century shift of class mobilization from the point of production to consumer markets. Her work has been presented at several conferences and workshops and won Harvard Law School’s Law and Political Economy Prize for best paper. Before beginning the S.J.D., she received an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. She also holds degrees in law and in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. Dana can be reached at dzukreifer@sjd.law.harvard.edu