Featured today in our Scholar Spotlight series is Amalia Kessler, Stanford University. In our earlier interviews, we noted that only three of the fifty contributors to the recently published Oxford Handbook of European Legal History were women. Like Women Also Know History, this Scholar Spotlight series aims to showcase female scholars and their work. Its special focus is scholars of European legal history.
Describe your career path. What led you to where you are today? I was
always fascinated by history—perhaps in part because of my Romanian-born grandmother’s
many stories about life in Europe before and during the Second World War. I ended up focusing on history in college—most
especially that of Old Regime France. But
as we studied the French Revolution, it became increasingly clear that, while
typically described in political terms, the revolution was at least as much about
law. Law was the language and
institutions through which power and politics were actually operationalized—and
I wanted to know more. So I pursued both
a doctoral degree in history and a law degree.
After completing my education, I clerked for a federal appellate judge
and spent a few years working as a trial lawyer in the U.S. Department of
Justice. I then began my academic career
at Stanford.
What projects are you currently working on? I am exploring the early twentieth-century
embrace of arbitration and conciliation, examining its institutional, rather
than just legislative roots. Challenging
the prevailing narrative which locates these developments in a turn to private
ordering, I emphasize the ways they were shaped by state action and
priorities. The New Deal state invested
enormously in funding—and even mandating the use of—ostensibly private
arbitration services. So too, some of
the main proponents of arbitration and conciliation were not private commercial
groups, but municipal-court reformers, interested in developing modes of
public, court-based ADR that would enable the court to serve as an alternative to the burgeoning administrative state.
Have your interests
evolved since finishing your studies? My
Ph.D. studies and first book—A Revolution
in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century
France—were focused on early-modern European (and in particular, Old Regime
French) history. But I recently
published a book on nineteenth-century U.S. history: Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial
Legal Culture, 1800-1877. This later
book emerged from my background in European legal history, which made me
attentive to features of U.S. procedure that were much more akin to European
practice than the standard adversarial account of U.S. procedure would suggest
possible. In trying to understand the
existence of seemingly European elements within U.S. procedure, I was led to
explore the history of equity courts and procedure, as well as now forgotten efforts
to adopt from continental Europe (and especially France) institutions known as
conciliation courts. The book explores
the links between these procedural developments and a range of contemporary,
nineteenth-century debates concerning such questions as the role of government
in regulating markets and promoting racial equality.
What’s the most fascinating thing you’ve ever found in your
primary sources? It’s hard to choose
just one! One surprising and fascinating
discovery in the archives that I made while researching A Revolution in Commerce was the extent to which Old Regime French
merchant courts called on local parish priests to assist in arbitrating
merchant disputes. Needless to say, priests
do not fit the standard account of the lex mercatoria as created by and for
merchants. In researching Inventing American Exceptionalism, I was
amazed to discover in my review of New York Chancery records that core
procedural changes that we associate with the enactment of the famous Field
Code of 1848 were anticipated decades earlier through bottom-up initiatives
pursued on a case-by-case basis by lawyers on the ground.
Amalia is a professor at Stanford University. She lives in Los Altos, California.
Alma maters: A.B. (History and Literature), Harvard College,
1994; M.A. (History), Stanford University, 1996; J.D., Yale Law School, 1999;
Ph.D. (History), Stanford University, 2001.
Fields of interest: history of commercial law, market culture,
and capitalism; history of civil procedure and alternative dispute resolution;
comparative legal history.
What do you like the most about where you live and work? The Mediterranean
climate, the access to great fruit and vegetables, the proximity to both urban
and natural landscapes, the cultural diversity, and the myriad intellectual
riches of Stanford itself.
Is there an article, book, film, website, etc. that you would
recommend to LHB readers? Please check
out the website of our new Stanford Center for Law and History (https://law.stanford.edu/stanford-center-for-law-and-history/),
where you can sign on to our mailing list and view a listing of all our
activities. So too, you can find listed on
the website a broad range of opportunities (not just at Stanford) for postdocs
and students in legal history, which we update regularly.
What have you found to be the most surprising thing about
academic life? The pleasures of
aging! More particularly, the
satisfaction that comes from building long-term relationships with students and
mentees.
