Thursday, November 15, 2012

Cromwell Article Prize to Engstrom

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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