The ASLH's Kathryn T. Preyer Award recognizes excellent scholarship by junior scholars:
Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to early career legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two early career legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society.
This year's awardees are Naama Maor (University of Chicago) and Teal Arcadi (Princeton University). The citations:
Naama Maor for In Search of the “Real Culprits”: The Adult Delinquent in a Progressive Era Juvenile Court
In her elegantly written and deeply researched paper, Naama Maor analyzes previously unexplored cases against adult defendants in the trailblazing Denver Juvenile Court between 1907 and 1927. Maor finds that the court’s reliance on a new, capacious, and ambiguous category of offenses – contributing to the delinquency of a child – facilitated enforcement that both reflected and shaped gendered ideas about age, consent, and criminal liability for the acts of another. In pursuing cases against adults through children, judges, probation officers, and district attorneys invested great power in the hands of the same children the law deemed inculpable due to their age. The paper persuasively shows that in their rush to try these cases, state officials inadvertently gave rise to a potent opposition to the court’s jurisdiction, which challenged the assertion that adults could receive a fair trial in a juvenile court.
Teal Arcadi for Concrete Leviathan: Interstate Highway Litigation and the Clash of Experts and Citizens in Modern America
Teal Arcadi explores how the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways prompted protests and litigation that reformed administrative law and modern American governance from the 1960s onward. His paper explains that when interstate construction began in the late 1950s, it became synonymous with destruction of neighborhoods and parks bulldozed to make way for the “concrete monsters,” as some came to call the interstate highways. “Freeway revolts” erupted in the nation’s cities, with participants demanding altered construction practices that gave citizens and communities more say in the state building process underway. While cultural and urban historians have recounted these uprisings, their legal and governmental impact warrants further treatment, which Arcadi ably provides. Arcadi advances three important and compelling arguments. First, the freeway revolts have a broader governmental history that elucidates the long-simmering and cross-partisan tension between administrative authority and participatory democracy that boiled over after the New Deal. Second, the freeway revolts brought distinctive reforms to the practices of modern American state building, particularly in leading to the canonical Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe in 1971. Third, despite the reformist inclinations present in Overton Park, the case produced an uneven legal and physical landscape of state building. Ultimately, the paper identifies the emergence of a legal context that prioritized the protection of open spaces at the expense of poor and minority urban communities.
Congratulations to Naama Maor and Teal Arcadi!
-- Karen Tani
