Matthew Axtell is Assistant Counsel for Historic Preservation & Ecosystem Restoration, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, focusing upon National Historic Preservation Act compliance during the planning and permitting of controversial infrastructure projects. A J.D. graduate of the University of Virginia, he also holds a B.A. from the U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. from Princeton. Prior to rejoining the Corps in 2016 (where he worked 2002-2006), he held research fellowships at the NYU School of Law and the Supreme Court of the United States. His work has appeared in the Columbia Journal of American Studies, the Environmental Law Reporter, the Journal of Law and Politics, Law and Social Inquiry, the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal, the Minnesota Review, and Ohio Valley History. Since 2017, Dr. Axtell has served as the Program Manager for his agency’s Civilian Honors Program, overseeing the recruitment of entry-level talent into the Corps’ worldwide legal enterprise.
Margot Canaday is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University and the author of The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in 20th Century America.
Jacob Katz Cogan is the Judge Joseph P. Kinneary Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale, he was an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of State before joining Cincinnati Law. His research focuses on the hidden assumptions, informal rules, and constitutive decisions and structures that form the operational international legal system. He also writes about the history of international law. An author of many articles and essays he is the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of International Organizations (Oxford University Press 2016) and Looking to the Future: Essays on International Law in Honor of W. Michael Reisman (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 2011).
Rohit De is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Yale University and works on histories of law and everyday life in South Asia and the British Empire. His book. A People’s Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic (Princeton: 2018) explores how the Indian constitution came to permeate everyday life and imagination in India during its transition from a colonial state to a democratic republic. His current project mapping an alternate history civil liberties lawyering that arise out of Asia and Africa, mediated by the transnational legal geographies of commerce, migration and diaspora., in the aftermath of the 2nd World War. He holds degrees from Princeton, Yale, and the National Law School of India University. He clerked at the Supreme Court of India with Chief Justice K. G. Balakrishnan and has worked with constitutional reform projects in Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Donna Dennis is Professor of Law and Justice Frederick W. Hall Scholar at Rutgers Law School, where she teaches courses on legal history and corporate law. She is the author of Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Laura F. Edwards is the Peabody Family Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University as well as an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation. She works on the nineteenth-century United States with a focus on law, gender, and race. Her most recent books are A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015) and The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). She has been awarded fellowships from the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, the NEH, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation. At Duke University, she has received the Howard D. Johnson award for distinguished undergraduate teaching and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring.
Christopher L. Eisgruber has served as Princeton University’s 20th president since July 2013. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values. Before becoming president, he served as Princeton’s provost from 2004-2013 and as director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs from 2001-2004. He is the author of The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process (Princeton 2007), Religious Freedom and the Constitution (co-authored with Lawrence G. Sager, Harvard 2007), and Constitutional Self-Government (Harvard 2001), as well as numerous articles in books and academic journals. Eisgruber received an A.B. magna cum laude in Physics from Princeton, an M. Litt. in Politics from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
Catherine Evans is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in History at Princeton in January 2016, and was Prize Fellow at the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard and the University of Cambridge from 2015 to 2017. Her dissertation, supervised by Dirk Hartog, won the 2017 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. Her book project, Unsound Empire: Guilt and Responsibility in British Imperial Law (under contract with Yale University Press), considers how lawyers, doctors, government officials and defendants in homicide cases tried across the empire debated the limits of criminal responsibility during a period of imperial consolidation and rapid scientific change. Current research interests include arson and fire investigation in the British empire, praedial crime in the post-Emancipation Caribbean, and police misconduct in nineteenth-century Ontario.
Catherine Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches Labor Law, Employment Law, Civil Procedure, and Legal Profession. Fisk is the author of two books of legal history: Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard University Press 2016), and Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (UNC Press 2009), which won the John Philip Reid Prize of the ASLH and the AHA’s Littleton-Griswold Prize. Fisk is currently engaged in archival research for her next book project, which will explore how mid-twentieth century labor lawyers and their progressive union clients grappled with prohibitions on picketing and boycotts, particularly as the civil rights movement succeeded in the direct action tactics that law prohibited for labor unions.
Maeve Glass is a legal historian of the United States. Her scholarship examines the development of constitutional law and its implications for today. She is currently completing her first book, These United States: The Fracturing of America. It is based on her Ph.D. dissertation, which won the American Society for Legal History’s best dissertation prize in 2017. Glass has also published articles in the University of Chicago Law Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.Before her appointment to the faculty in 2018, Glass was an Academic Fellow at the Law School. She has also held fellowships in legal history at Harvard Law School and NYU Law. A 2009 graduate of Columbia Law School, Glass was both a James Kent Scholar and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and received the E.B. Convers Prize for her work investigating federalism in the early Republic. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2016, where she served as a contributing writer to the Princeton and Slavery Project and taught students in the American Studies Department and as a fellow at the Writing Center. Her teaching interests include constitutional law and history, the legal history of American slavery, and property.
Risa Goluboff is the 12th, and the first female, dean of the University of Virginia School of Law. She is a nationally renowned legal historian whose scholarship and teaching focuses on the historical development of American constitutional and civil rights law in the 20th century. She is the author of two award-winning books, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard, 2007), and Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Oxford, 2016). At UVA, she holds appointments in the Corcoran Department of History, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Miller Center. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute and has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Sally Gordon is a 1995 graduate of Princeton’s PhD program in history. She works primarily in the legal history of religion in the US and territories, ranging from the late 18th through 21st centuries. She is the author of two books, the first of which Dirk edited as it morphed from a dissertation supervised by Dan Rodgers – The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America(2002). The second The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) was edited by Joyce Selzer, whom Dirk wisely recommended. Sally is now at work on a third book, a study of separation of church and state, titled Freedom’s Holy Light: Disestablishment in America, 1776-1876 – following Dirk uh-gen, this time back to UNC Press and our friend and editor Chuck Grench.
Sally has been fortunate to be located at a comfortable distance from Princeton, and motors up to see friends and advisers on a regular basis. This ongoing connection to Princeton has been a great benefit, as Dirk’s insight and smarts have been invaluable guides across the decades. His creativity is without peer, and he is a brilliant mentor. It has been a joy to see his students prosper and become leaders in the field we both inhabit. It is a special honor now to be a co-editor of the book series that he so brilliantly steered.
Michael Grossberg is the Sally M. Reahard Professor of History and a Professor of Law at Indiana University. His research focuses on the relationship between law and social change, particularly the intersection of law and the family. He has written a number of books and articles on American legal and social history, been involved in several family policy research projects, and held numerous fellowships. He is currently working on a study of child protection in the United States. Grossberg also edited the American Historical Review from 1995 to 2005 and served as president of the American Society for Legal History from 2013 to 2015.
Stanley N. Katz, professor in the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University, is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, the national humanities organization in the United States. Mr. Katz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1955, and was trained in British and American history at Harvard (PhD, 1961), where he also attended Law School in 1969-70. He is the Editor in Chief of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, and the Editor Emeritus of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the United States Supreme Court. He also writes about higher education policy for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Katz is a specialist on American legal and constitutional history, and on philanthropy and non-profit institutions. He is currently the President of the Foundation of the Princeton Public Library. He also currently serves as Chair of the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council Working Group on Cuba. He received the National Humanities Medal (awarded by Pres. Obama) in 2011. He has honorary degrees from several universities and is a member of several organizations.
Felicia Kornbluh is Associate Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at University of Vermont. She is the author of The Battle for Welfare Rights: Poverty and Politics in Modern America (2007) and, with Gwendolyn Mink, Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (2018). She is at work on two books, How to Win a War on Women: My Mother, Her Neighbor, and the Fate of Reproductive Rights and Justice, and an essay collection titled Constant Craving: Identity Politics and Economic Justice. Her articles on history, law, culture, and politics have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Feminist Studies, Radical History Review, Labor, Law and Social Inquiry, and many other journals, as well as in such periodicals as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, In These Times, and the Women’s Review of Books. Kornbluh teaches on the history of law, on the U.S. since 1945, and on the history of poverty.
Kenneth W. Mack is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History. His 2012 book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard University Press), was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a National Book Festival Selection, was awarded honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Award by the Law and Society Association, and was a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Book Award. He is also the co-editor of The New Black: What Has Changed – And What Has Not – With Race in America (New Press, 2013). His work has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Journal of American History, Law and History Review and other scholarly journals. In 2010, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Public Service by Harrisburg University of Science and. Technology. In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. He began his professional career as an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories before turning to law, and history. More information available at: http://kennethwmack.com.
Maribel Morey, a twentieth-century U.S. historian and historian of U.S. philanthropy, analyzes dynamics between private philanthropic organizations, the politics of scientific knowledge on race, and public policymaking on minority groups in the United States. In this vein, her first book focuses on the institutional and intellectual roots of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), a central text of the U.S. civil rights movement that the U.S. Supreme Court famously cited in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Tentatively titled Born in Colonial Africa, Maribel’s account of An American Dilemma betrays the intentions of the Carnegie Corporation for commissioning and financing this study in the late 1930s and how Gunnar Myrdal related to these funders’ intentions. Her second book project explores when and why big philanthropy— Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations— became especially invested in the U.S. civil rights movement.
William E. Nelson is Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at New York University, where he has taught either Contracts, Property, Torts, or Professional Responsibility to first-year law students since joining the faculty in 1979. In the upper-year curriculum, Nelson has focused on training future law teachers, especially in his seminar on legal scholarship and legal history. Nelson has published eleven books and numerous articles in leading law reviews and history journals. During the past ten years, Nelson published a four-volume series The Common Law in Colonial America (Oxford University Press, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2018).
Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law. He is the author of Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790 – 1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600 – 2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. Before joining Berkeley Law in 2015, Penningroth was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Virginia (1999-2002), at Northwestern University (2002-2015), and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (2007-2015). He is currently working on a study of African Americans’ encounter with law from the Civil War to the modern civil rights movement. Combining legal and social history, the study explores the practical meaning of legal rights for black life. His next project is a study of the legacies of slavery in colonial Ghana.
Farah Peterson is an Associate Professor of Law at University of Virginia School of Law. Her scholarship focuses on the history of statutory interpretation. Peterson holds a Ph.D. in American history from Princeton University where she studied under Hendrik Hartog. She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School and received her bachelor’s in history from Yale as well. After law school, Peterson clerked for Associate Justice Stephen Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Guido Calabresi at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus teaches constitutional law and American legal history at Columbia Law School. She is the author of several articles on the constitutional history of U.S. imperialism and the extraterritorial application of the U.S. Constitution, and co-editor of Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Duke U. Press, 2001). She holds degrees from Princeton (A.B. 1990, Ph.D. 2010), Cambridge (M.Phil. 1995), and Yale (J.D. 1998). Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2007, she served as a law clerk to Judge José A. Cabranes on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice Stephen G. Breyer on the United States Supreme Court.
Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus, is an historian of American ideas and culture who served on the Princeton faculty from 1980 to 2012. He is the author of five books, among them Age of Fracture (2011), a co-winner of the Bancroft Prize, and As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, to be published in the fall of 2018. His articles run from the promises of transnational history, the career of ‘republicanism,’ languages of rights, to the multiple faces of “neoliberalism.” His undergraduate and graduate teaching were recognized by awards from the University of Wisconsin and Princeton University.
One of his joys as department chair was helping to bring Dirk Hartog to the Princeton faculty. Serving as Dirk’s “first reader” on well over a dozen exceptional Ph.D. theses, he has slowly soaked up a remarkable second education in the lived history of law.
Rebecca J. Scott studies slavery, law, and the emergence of citizenship in post-slavery societies in the Americas. She is Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, and former president of the American Society for Legal History. Her current book manuscript is titled “No Safe Harbor: Three Women between Freedom and Enslavement.” Her article “Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status: The Puzzle of Prescription,” appeared in the February 2017 issue of the Law and History Review. She is co-author with Jean M. Hébrard of Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012), winner of the Beveridge Prize and the Rawley Prize from the AHA. Freedom Papers has been published in Portuguese by Editora Unicamp in Brazil, in Spanish by ICANH/Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and Ediciones Unión in Havana. An expanded French edition is in preparation for publication in France by Gallimard.
Mitra Sharafi is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at the University for Wisconsin–Madison, where she is affiliated with History and the Center for South Asia. She holds degrees in history (BA McGill 1996, PhD Princeton 2006) and law (BA Cambridge 1998, BCL Oxford 1999). Her first book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 was awarded the LSA’s 2015 Hurst Prize. She is currently working on her second book project, “Fear of the False: Forensic Science in Colonial India” as a Davis Center fellow (fall 2018) and an ACLS Burkhardt fellow ’18. Her research has been recognized by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Sharafi hosts the South Asian Legal History Resources website and is a regular contributor to the Legal History Blog.
Clyde Spillinger is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches courses on American legal and constitutional history, civil procedure, and conflict of laws. He is the author of Principles of Conflict of Laws (2d ed. 2015). He is currently at work on a history of American law’s treatment of the problem of choice of law.
Amy Dru Stanley is a history professor at the University of Chicago, where she works on slavery and emancipation, law, political economy, human rights, and gender. She is especially interested in the relationship between the household and economic life, and the historical experience of moral problems. Her writing has appeared in academic journals, such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of the American History, as well as in The New York Times,The Nation, Slate, Dissent Magazine, and Jacobin. She is the author of the prize-winning From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. She is completing a book project The Antislavery Ethic and the Spirit of Commerce: An American History of Human Rights.
Keith Wailoo is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University where he teaches in the Department of History and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the former Vice Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and Is the current chair of the Department of History. He is an award-winning author on drugs and drug policy; race, science, and health; history of medicine; and health policy and medical affairs in the U.S. His three most recent books are: Pain: A Political History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); How Cancer Crossed the Color Line (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) — Recipient of the 2006 Association of American Publishers Book Award in the History of Science. Wailoo is currently working on two book-length projects, both intersecting with history and public policy: a study of the menthol cigarette, and a history of addiction.
Laura Weinrib is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and an Associate Member of the University of Chicago Department of History. A legal historian, her scholarship explores the intersection of constitutional law and labor law in the United States. She is the author of The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise (2016), which traces the emergence during the first half of the twentieth century of a constitutional and court-centered concept of civil liberties as a defining feature of American democracy.
Barbara Welke is Professor of History and Law and a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of two books: Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (2010), and Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (2001)(AHA Littleton-Griswold Prize). This year she is a Fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton.