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Lowe's current research project is her dissertation. Here's a description, from the Princeton website:
[The dissertation] explores criminal law and republican law reform in Virginia after the American Revolution and demonstrates an enduring connection between early national state and local courts. Titled Murder in the Shenandoah: Commonwealth v. John Crane and Law in Federal Virginia, it focuses on a 1791 murder in Virginia’s lower Shenandoah Valley – in modern-day West Virginia – in which a young gentleman killed his neighbor’s harvest worker and later invoked a “lunacy” defense. The dissertation tells the story of the case as it wound its way through the various stages of Virginia's court system and de-centers traditional dichotomies that have characterized the history of the region – state and local, east and west, gentry and non-gentry – to reveal how the new nation's most politically and legally influential state was, in the critical era of the 1790s, a world in motion.Lowe also has a second project in the works: she traces the comparative hermeneutics of biblical and legal interpretation in the American South between 1776 and 1865, and uses it to write a history of Southern textualism. The project looks at the transition from the natural law arguments and evangelical anti-slavery of the Revolutionary era to the legal and biblical "strict construction" that dominated the South on the eve of the Civil War.
At UVA, she will be teaching courses in American legal history, constitutional history, the legal history of the South, criminal law, and the legal profession.
Congratulations to Jessica Lowe!
Update: the UVA press release is here.
