This year's
William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Cromwell Article Prize ("for an excellent article in American legal history published by an early career scholar") was awarded to
David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford University) for “The Lost Origins of American Fair
Employment Law: Regulatory Choice and the Making of Modern Civil Rights,
1943-1972.” The article appeared in volume 63 of the
Stanford Law Review (2011). Here's the citation:
During deliberations Committee members praised Engstrom’s deep look at
the strategies employed by various civil rights groups to craft fair
employment law, along with his intensive archival work across a wide
range of sources, to tell a new story about how civil rights emerged not
just from statutes and from judicial interpretation, but from the
administrative state as well. Recent monographs have begun to open up
the story of civil rights in the post-War period by showing that civil
rights action activism emerged in many places, not just on southern
streets in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, and not just in
education and in public accommodations. Engstrom, an assistant
professor at Stanford Law School, extends that analysis to the
employment setting. In telling this new story, he extensively mined the
federal archives. This is an important and neglected story that
stretches across decades as our nation moved from the Second World War
through the Civil Rights movement and then its ending. It is also an
extraordinary work of research, which invites us to see how
administrative law functions and is central to our legal history.
Hat tip: H-Law
