Joshua Getzler is professor of law and legal history at the University of Oxford, and a fellow in law at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He trained in law and history in Australia, and then wrote a doctorate in legal and economic history at Oxford, resulting in his monograph A History of Water Rights at Common Law which was awarded the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2005.
Joshua works on the historical evolution of legal institutions of property, trust, fiduciaries, corporations, and charities, especially religious and welfare forms. He also studies the history of native title, and the jurisdiction and accountability of colonial, settler and imperial governments, principally in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Joshua has taught and researched at universities in Australia, USA and Israel. He serves on the council of the Selden Society for English legal history, the editorial boards of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Equity, and is co-editor of the OUP monograph series Oxford Legal History.
Yvonne Pitts is an associate professor of history at Purdue University - West Lafayette specializing in the legal histories of sexual regulation, disability, property, and legal culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. She is the author of Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth Century Kentucky, which was awarded the American Society of Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize in 2014. Her current research explores the U.S. military's system of licensing prostitutes and regulating sex work in Nashville, Tennessee during the American Civil War. She traces how regulatory practices around sexual danger, race relations, contagion, and the proper subjects of surveillance and legal discipline evolved in the context of a wartime military occupation. She is also working on a project examining the constitutional and legal understandings of the material texts and evidentiary practices in nineteenth century obscenity trials.
Joshua writes: "Under the vigorous editorial leadership of Alfred Brophy, Stefan Vogenauer, and Felice Batlan, the American Journal of Legal History stands out as a compelling publication, with every issue filled with erudition, originality, and thought-provoking discoveries. Stefan has described very well the growth of the journal to its current commanding form. The journal attracts great attention across North America, Britain, Europe, and the wider world. In a globalized society full of contention over justice and authority, livelihoods and identities, tradition and innovation, we need a vigorous and independent-minded legal history practice more than ever, to explore the shape of the past and its impact on the present. I am excited by the opportunity to carry forward and develop the mission of the AJLH, working closely with my co-editor Yvonne Pitts, the distinguished editorial board, the associate and review editors, and our OUP partners. We will strive to serve the legal-historical community by providing the best possible forum for scholarly work covering all periods and places."
Yvonne writes: "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to the field of legal history and work with diverse and international legal scholars as the co-editor of the American Journal of Legal History. The AJLH has a long tradition as a forum for highly respected, innovative legal historical scholarship across broad geographical, thematic, and temporal subfields. Under the able leadership of past editors Felice Batlan and Stephen Vogenauer, the AJLH has produced trenchant, influential research from early career and established scholars. I look forward to working with my co-editor Joshua Getzler to build on the AJLH's commitment to emerging questions and traditional themes in legal and constitutional history in local, national, and transnational contexts."
Oxford University Press would like to thank the outgoing editors, Prof. Stefan Vogenauer and Prof. Felice Batlan, for their skilled and dedicated work on AJLH. The AJLH was first published in 1957 and was the first English-language periodical in the field of legal history.
