Cromwell Fellowships Announced

At the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History the awarding of several fellowships by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation was announced. [The foundation's namesake, a great Wall Street lawyer, is pictured at right.] As a recent posting on H-Law explains, the fellowships are

intended to support research and writing in American legal history. The number of awards to be made, and their value, is at the discretion of the Foundation. In the past three years, three to five awards have been made annually by the trustees of the Foundation, in amounts up to $5,000. Preference is given to scholars at the early stages of their careers. The Society's Committee for Research Fellowships and Awards reviews the applications and makes recommendations to the Foundation.

At its Saturday luncheon, the society announced the 2008 Cromwell Fellowships:

Sophia Lee, who holds a law degree from Yale and is a Ph.D. candidate there as well, is writing about the continuing interactions of labor politics and civil rights law. Her work challenges recent writing that emphasizes the separation of civil rights and labor law by the time of Brown.

Leah Weinryb Grosghal, is at work on a Ph.D. at Emory University. She is engaged in a reexamination of the Jehovah's Witnesses cases of the 1930s and 1940s. She is in the process of conducting interviews with many "survivors" of the litigation.

Laura Weinrib holds a law degree from Harvard and is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton. She is completing a dissertation on the emergence of modern understandings of civil liberties in the interwar years. Her Cromwell award will allow her to explore the conflicts between "Boss" Hague of Jersey City [pictured at left] and the CIO.

Image credit. Hat tip: H-Law