[We have the following announcement from the ASLH's Advisory Committee on the Cromwell Prizes.]
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation has generously funded a prize of $2500 for dissertations accepted in the previous calendar year. The Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. The Society announces the award after the annual meeting of the Cromwell Foundation, which normally takes place early in November.
The Cromwell Dissertation Prize for 2010 was awarded to Anna Leah Fidelis T. Castañeda for "Creating Exceptional Empire: American Liberal Constitutionalism and the Construction of the Constitutional Order of the Philippine Islands, 1898-1935"—a dissertation submitted for the SJD degree at Harvard University in 2009. The Committee's citation read as follows:
"This dissertation is a groundbreaking study of the foundational period of the modern Philippine state. Drawing on an extraordinary range of American and Philippine sources, Castañeda shows how the introduction of liberal and progressive constitutional institutions to a colonial context – separated powers, expanded administrative discretion, even democratic principles of governance – actually facilitated authoritarian rule, reinforcing local patterns of class domination while also smoothing the path for powerful foreign economic interests to control development. Imagined and executed on a large scale, this study makes an original and extraordinary contribution both to Filipino legal history and to the study of the legal machinery of colonialism and empire more generally.”
Update: The members of the Dissertation Subcommittee are:
Maeva Marcus, Chair
Director
Institute for Constitutional History
The New-York Historical society and
The George Washington University Law School
2000 H Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20052
mmarcus@law.gwu.edu
Risa Goluboff
Caddell & Chapman Professor of Law
Professor of History
University of Virginia School of Law
580 Massie Road
Charlottesville, VA 22903
rlg3t@virginia.edu
Professor Claire Priest
Yale Law School
127 Wall St.
New Haven, CT 06520
claire.priest@yale.edu
Michael Ross
Associate Professor
2115 Francis Scott Key
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
maross@umd.edu