Every year, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation announces a series of prizes awarded on the recommendation of subcommittees of the ASLH’s Advisory Committee on the Cromwell Prizes. At the Chicago meeting earlier this month, John D. Gordan III, who chairs the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the ASLH’s Advisory Committee on the Cromwell Prize, announced this year's winners. Today we will recap those announcements, starting with the Cromwell Foundation Book Prize, "awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar."
This year's winner is Gregory Ablavsky (Stanford Law School), for Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Here is the citation:
Federal Ground, an analysis of early territorial governance, is beautifully written, deeply researched, innovative, and sophisticated. Mining a wide variety of legal and governmental sources, Ablavsky makes original arguments of consequence to several fields in addition to legal history, including Native American history, settler colonialism, and early American state-building. What appears at first to be a narrative of a failed state turns, unexpectedly, into a curious story of limited state “success,” illuminating how the federal state earned legitimacy and practical power in the only regions where it was in charge. Ablavsky shows how both the Natives and white settlers/speculators used or lobbied inchoate federal institutions – at first, just a handful of officers and their ad hoc commissions – to shape the legal landscape in ways that furthered their interests and visions of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. These contestants constructed the state by demanding that it arbitrate disputes – and then taking its money. Ablavsky uses contests over property and federal responses to violence as his chief examples, pulling from diverse and scattered records to weave a complex yet coherent story of competing claims and their often-contingent resolution. He traces federal officials’ encounters with Indigenous law and with Native understandings of consent, efforts to monopolize the legitimate use of violence, and deployment of federal funds with nuance and sensitivity to his sources’ limitations even as he wrings insights from what must have been an unwieldy archive. In Ablavsky’s telling, the federal government emerged not because of an effective or even coherent federal plan of pacification, land-granting, or settlement, but literally from the ground up. His is a knotty tale of furious claims-making in which there are few heroes and that perhaps only in retrospect takes on the majesty of the tragic. The story is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive, yet told crisply and with wit and insight. Ablavsky unearths and interprets sources with the creativity and mastery of a much more senior scholar. Federal Ground is ambitious and illuminating, without overestimating historians’ ability to reconstruct a contested and thorny past. For years to come, this should be the authoritative history for understanding the earliest phase of American territorial, and thus imperial, history.
Congratulations to Professor Ablavsky! And thank you to the members of the book prize subcommittee, chaired by Serena Mayeri.
-- Karen Tani
