LSA James Willard Hurst Book Prize to Mayeri for "Marital Privilege"

The Law & Society Association has announced its 2026 awards, including the winner of the James Willard Hurst Book Prize ("awarded annually (biennially prior to 2002) for the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year").

This year's Hurst award went to Serena Mayeri (Penn Carey Law), for Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Oxford University Press, 2025). The citation:

Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege shows how, beginning in the 1960s, marriage was dislodged from its supreme position across a range of legal domains and replaced with a regime of “marital privilege.” With poignant, empathetic detail drawn from archives and legal documents, Mayeri brings to life both well-known and not-so-famous cases, revealing the theories and evolving strategies animating a wide range of challengers to the regime of marital supremacy—from litigants to advocacy organizations to legal academics. Yet, even as their victories advanced the values of nondiscrimination and individual autonomy, Mayeri shows how the assumptions of the new regime of “marital privilege” obscured and deepened inequalities of wealth, power, and privilege in American law and society. Combining sweeping ambition, doctrinal acumen, and a keen sense of historical contingency, Marital Privilege provides a magisterial account of a crucial transformation of American law. 

Congratulations to Professor Mayeri!

-- Karen Tani 

Berger-Howe Fellowship to Reiss

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolf Howe Legal History Fellowship for 2026-2027 at Harvard Law School has been awarded to Jennifer Reiss.  A doctoral candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania, she received her B.A. from Penn and her law degree from Harvard, as well as two master’s degrees in law and history from the University of Cambridge.  Before graduate school, she practiced law in New York and London.  During her fellowship year she will revise her dissertation, “Undone Bodies: Women and Disability in Early America,” for publication and work on a new project on disability and abolitionism in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. 

OAH Binkley Stephenson Award to Lim

The Organization of American Historians has announced its 2026 award winners, and among them is Julian Lim (Johns Hopkins). Lim won the Binkley-Stephenson Award for her article "Plenary Powers: Chinese Immigration, Sovereignty Challenges, and the Making of Federal Immigration Power in the U.S. West," Journal of American History 112, no. 3 (2025). This award "is given annually . . .  for the best article that appeared in the Journal of American History during the preceding calendar year." 

-- Karen Tani 

OAH Merle Curti Award to Lew-Williams for "John Doe Chinaman"

The Organization of American Historians has announced its 2026 award winners, and among them is Beth Lew-Williams (Princeton University). She won the Merle Curti Award for John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, 2025). This award recognizes "the author of the best book in American social history."

-- Karen Tani  

OAH Ellis Hawley Prize to Shanahan for "Disparate Regimes"

The Organization of American Historians has announced its 2026 award winners, and among them is Brendan A. Shanahan (Yale University). He won the Ellis W. Hawley Prize for his book Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2025). This prize "is given annually by the . . . to the author of the best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present."

An Honorable Mention went to Beth Lew-Williams (Princeton University) for John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, 2025).

-- Karen Tani

OAH Award for Contributions to Public Policy to Cornell, Ziegler

The Organization of American Historians has announced its 2026 award winners. Among them are Saul Cornell (Fordham University) and Mary Ziegler (University of California, Davis). In the "Excellence in Service" category, they both won the Award for Contributions to Public Policy. The award "recognizes a scholar of any discipline who has made a significant contribution to U.S. public policy through historical research, of any length, published or unpublished." The award also "recognize[s] the historical profession’s contributions to and ongoing obligations in helping to create public policy that is more firmly grounded in sound history."  

-- Karen Tani 

AHA John K. Fairbank Prize to Sommer

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History ("offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800"). This year's award went to legal historian Matthew H. Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Matthew H. Sommer’s The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China is a landmark study that recovers the hidden lives of gender-nonconforming individuals through meticulous archival research. By combining legal, medical, and literary sources with a nuanced transgender framework, Sommer broadens the field of modern East Asian history, illuminating how embodiment, identity, and social practice shaped Qing society and redefining global conversations about gender and modernity.

Congratulations to Professor Sommer!

-- Karen Tani 

AHA Littleton-Griswold Prize to LaCroix

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society ("an annual award for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, broadly defined"). This year's award went to Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago) for The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Gorgeously crafted and scrupulously researched, this original synthesis introduces the “interbellum constitution”: an era, stretching from 1815 to 1865, marked by ferment over the overlapping, unsettled boundaries of local, state, and federal power in the United States. Alison L. LaCroix is utterly persuasive in analyzing the competing “federalisms” that drove public debates over concurrent powers, the regulation of commerce, and states’ rights. Her book illuminates a constitutional maximalism more dynamic, peopled, and capacious than we knew.

Congratulations to Professor LaCroix!

-- Karen Tani 

AHA Lepage Center Award to Cornell

Various prizes and awards were announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association, including the Lepage Center Award for Historical Work in the Public Interest. This year's award went to Saul Cornell (Fordham University):

For decades, Saul Cornell has directly influenced precedent-setting Supreme Court cases on gun safety by entering rigorously researched amicus briefs and expert witness reports into the legal record. Taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s “history-focused tests” for constitutionality, he provides plaintiffs with historical backing to keep firearms from dangerous people, literally saving lives. Moreover, his historical gun laws database is a model of generosity and rigor, as are his how-to workshops, editorials, podcasts, and blogs.

Congratulations to Professor Cornell!

-- Karen Tani 

Cromwell Foundation Cromwell Article Prize to Funk & Mayson

Via the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, we have the following announcement:

The Cromwell Article Prize for best article in legal history published in the calendar year 2024 has been awarded to Kellen R. Funk (Columbia Law School) and Sandra D. Mayson (Penn Carey Law School) for their article Bail at the Founding, published in volume 137 of the Harvard Law Review.  Funk and Mayson do a deep dive into the law and practice of bail at the founding, finding that the liberty-protecting law on the books was belied in practice for many accused of crimes, for whom pretrial detention was a routine matter.  Through astonishing archival sleuthing, the authors uncover a world of pretrial detention and bail practice that turned not on cash but on reputation.  Sureties and unsecured pledges, they find, were the principal mechanisms for those let out of custody pending trial in the early republic. 

Bail at the Founding is an archival exploration of great value to the working out of the Constitution’s original public meaning for questions about pretrial detention.  It is also a challenge to that project, because it raises deep questions about whether and how the reputation-centered and cash-scarce world of the late eighteenth century can be translated into the cash- and credit-rich world of the twenty first.

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, established by William Nelson Cromwell in 1930, supports work in American legal history.  The Foundation’s prize for the legal history article of the year is intended to recognize the growing role of legal history and teaching and research in law schools. This year the prize was selected from articles published in leading student-edited law journals. The prize committee, chaired by Foundation trustee John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School), consisted of Foundation trustees Sarah Barringer Gordon (Penn Carey Law) and John Langbein (Yale Law School), along with Dan Ernst (Georgetown Law), Amalia Kessler (Stanford Law School), and Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago Law School).  

The Foundation makes grants to support important work in all facets of American legal history including archival preservation, scholarly study of original documents, original research in all areas of the law, and research and writing of biographies of major legal figures. Information on how to apply for a prize, fellowship or grant may be found on the Foundation’s website, cromwellfoundation.org.

Congratulations to Professor Funk and Professor Mayson! 

-- Karen Tani 

Berger-Howe Legal History Fellowship: Deadline Approaching

[We are moving this previously posted announcement up because the deadline of January 15 is approaching.  DRE.]

Harvard Law School invites applications for the Raoul Berger-Mark De Wolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship for the academic year 2026-2027.  Eligible applicants include those who have made substantial progress on their doctoral dissertations or who have recently been awarded a doctoral degree. A first law degree is preferred, but not required.

The purpose of the fellowship, which is awarded annually, is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined, as the fellow seeks to begin an academic career in legal history. There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period.  Previous fellows have gone on to pursue faculty appointments or other fellowships in American universities, primarily on law faculties.

The fellow is expected to spend the majority of their time on their own projects. The fellow will also participate in the Harvard Law School Legal History Workshop, a for-credit semester-long seminar, and assist with occasional other legal history sessions, both under the direction of Harvard faculty affiliated with the Program in Law and History.  The term of the fellowship is July 1 through June 30.  The fellow will be required to be in residence at the law school during the academic year (September through May).

Applicants for the fellowship for 2026-2027 should submit their applications and supporting materials electronically to Professor Bruce H. Mann. 

Each interested applicant should submit: 

• a detailed (five pages maximum) description of a proposed project;
• a writing sample; 
• a comprehensive résumé or curriculum vitae that gives the applicant's educational background, publications, works in progress, and other relevant experience; 
• two academic letters of reference, which may be submitted electronically by the recommenders to Professor Mann at the above email address; and
• copies of official transcripts of all academic work done at the graduate level,  which may be sent electronically or by regular mail to Professor Mann at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

The deadline for applications is January 15, 2026.  Announcement of the award will be made by February 27, 2026.  The fellow selected will receive a stipend of $60,000.

ASLH Craig Joyce Medal to Bryen, Rao

For the past month, we have been posting notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at this fall's meeting of the American Society for Legal History. There is one more to cover, and it's a special one: the Craig Joyce Medal. About this award:

The Society depends on the volunteer labors of its members. It is fortunate in the number of its members who are willing to join in the business of the Society, which is to foster scholarship and teaching in the broad field of legal history. Each year well over a hundred names appear on this website on the lists of officers, directors, and committee members. Among that number, a few people contribute their time to the Society over many years in ways that are above and beyond the call of duty, even in an organization whose members have a strong sense of duty. The Craig Joyce Medal recognizes those individuals. It is awarded on an occasional basis to acknowledge and honor extraordinary and sustained volunteer service to the Society. The medal was first awarded, fittingly, to Craig Joyce, the Andrews Kurth Professor of Law at the University of Houston, in whose honor the ASLH Board of Directors created the award.

In 2025, there were two medal recipients: Ari Bryen (Vanderbilt University) and Gautham Rao (American University). Both recipients have long records of service to the Society. Most recently, Professor Bryen served a 4-year term as the ASLH's Secretary. Professor Rao has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ASLH-sponsored Law and History Review since 2017; in 2026, he will help transition the journal to new leadership.  

Congratulations to Professor Bryen and Professor Rao - and thank you to both of them for their extraordinary dedication to the Society and the field. 

-- Karen Tani  

Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize to Lilić, Quiroga-Villamarín

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective. About this award:

The Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in Global Perspective will honor exceptional dissertations on topics in European legal history in global perspective and presented for PhD or JSD degrees awarded in the previous calendar year. Topics may include European legal interactions with people or places outside Europe, legal processes spanning Europe and other world regions, and developments in legal theory closely related to imperial, transnational, or trans-regional trends. 

The 2025 award when to two scholars: Vladislav Lilić, for “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912.” (Vanderbilt University, 2024) and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, for “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919-1998),” (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2024).

The citation for Lilić’s "Empire of States":

Vladislav Lilić’s superb dissertation, “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912,” makes a strikingly original contribution to European and global legal history by supplanting familiar narratives of Balkan state formation. The dissertation traces how small Balkan states took shape not through the influence of surging nationalism but through conflicts conducted in the medium of imperial law. Lilić demonstrates that in Montenegro and Serbia varied sets of legal actors—from viziers and Ottoman officials to pastoralists and journeymen—engaged in legal disputes that gradually reset the coordinates of political belonging, property, and public order. As a result, provincial states emerged within the empire before featuring as states in the international order. The dissertation is elegantly structured and based on extensive research in multiple languages and archives, and it combines a deft narrative style with nuanced interventions in the literature on European sovereignty and legal pluralism in global perspective.

The citation for Quiroga-Villamarín's “‘Architects of the Better World’”:

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín’s outstanding dissertation, “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919–1998),” constitutes a seminal contribution to both the history of international law and global legal history. By tracing what he designates as the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s move to institutions in the short twentieth century (1919–1998), Quiroga-Villamarín reconstructs the formation of international parliaments from interwar Geneva to the conclusion of the Cold War. Attending to architectural and material templates originating in Europe and their subsequent translations across continents, the dissertation spatializes history and historicizes space, shifting the perspective from figurative “architectures” to tangible built environments. The conceptual framework proves particularly innovative, foregrounding how architecture simultaneously mirrored and enabled aspirations of global order. Drawing on extensive archival research in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, it situates its argument within a rigorous methodological apparatus and advances its findings in elegant and compelling prose.

Congratulations to both winners!

-- Karen Tani

Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Borsk, Olmstead

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize, which is "awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference." 

The 2025 Cromwell Dissertation Prize went to two scholars: Michael Borsk, for “Measuring Ground: Surveyors and the Properties of States in the Great Lakes Region, 1783-1840.” (Queen’s University, 2024), and Shay R. Olmstead, “’Refuse to Run Away’: Transsexual Workers Fight for Civil Rights, 1969-1992.” (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2024). 

The citation for Borsk's "Measuring Ground": 

“Measuring Ground” is a comparative study of state formation through surveying techniques and paperwork in Upper Canada and Michigan Territory from the 1790s-1837. Borsk argues that the very processes of surveying and of building the archives asserted state power and authority. Surveying regulations structured the production of knowledge around boundaries, a process which depended upon indigenous participation and recognition for legitimacy. However, surveying also ultimately eroded indigenous claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty, as it converted surveyors into actors with legal authority. Turning their attention to surveyors’ papers, Borsk demonstrates how these documents and their associated archival processes produced knowledge, which in turn drove policy. The authority to determine boundaries and ownership migrated from surveyors’ offices to the courts, which applied their own standards of law and evidence.

This innovative study is based on deep archival research and makes provocative connections between the geographic and epistemological elements of the legal processes of colonization in the Upper Midwest. It expands and refines our understanding of how defining and securing individual property rights has related to state formation. Borsk also describes the way in which archival methods and processes interacted with legal rules and procedures to produce knowledge and authority, and ultimately to construct government. This work traces how indigenous knowledge and participation ironically played a key role in ultimately extinguishing indigenous claims to territory. This scholarship opens new lines of research and offers novel ways of conceptualizing the law itself.

The citation for Olmstead's "'Refuse to Run Away'" 

“'Refuse to Run Away'” is a history of thirty cases from the 1960s to the 1990s in which transsexuals (they use the contemporary term) challenged workplace
discrimination on the basis of sex or disability. Administrative agencies and courts rarely granted these plaintiffs favorable rulings. Even when they did, they did so by redefining “sex” under the law in ways that benefitted only normative, “respectable” claimants and ultimately harmed other sexual minorities. Moreover, variations in decisions among states and agencies led to the creation of multiple “cis states.” Victims of discrimination fared better when they brought claims under “disability,” because federal legislation was not written in a way that obviously excluded transsexuals from protection or defined “disability” in a way that was incompatible with transsexuality. However, in response to some scattered successful litigation, Republicans in Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude transsexuals, effectively closing that avenue for remedying discrimination.

Olmstead’s description of the shift from sex-based to disability-based discrimination claims is highly persuasive, and invites the reader to contemplate the liquidity of the category of “disability.” They present their analysis as evidence that legal campaigns alone are insufficient to bring about civil protections against discrimination in the workplace, and argue that political organizing must be part of the equation as well. Their discussion of rights protections is revelatory and potentially offers lessons for current campaigns to protect marginalized people.

Congratulations to both winners!

-- Karen Tani 

ASLH Dudziak Prize to "Petitioning for Freedom"

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to one that is close to our hearts: the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize. About this prize: 

The Dudziak Prize, named in honor of Mary L. Dudziak, a leading scholar of twentieth century U.S. legal history and international relations as well as a digital history pioneer, is awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project. These projects may take the form of either traditionally published peer reviewed scholarship or born-digital projects of equivalent depth and scope.

The 2025 Dudziak Prize winner was “Petitioning for Freedom,” directed by Katrina Jagodinsky and the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. The citation:

“Petitioning for Freedom,” developed by Katrina Jagodinsky and her team at the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, offers a deeply researched and carefully curated online database of over 2,000 habeas petitions filed across the American West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The database inventory continues to be updated monthly with a diverse array of petitions from those challenging slavery, peonage, removal and deportation, state custody over Indigenous wards, and abusive husbands’ custody over their dependents. The database offers a regularized schema of records whose handwritten originals are often buried under the haphazard organization and inconsistent recording practices of their rendering courts, and alongside this, the project site provides numerous essays and stories drawn from the habeas proceedings to help researchers at all levels understand the records and make informed interpretations about the deployment of legal power against and on behalf of the less empowered peoples of the American West.

An Honorable Mention went to Stephen Robertson's Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani

ASLH Burbank Article Prize to Fei

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize. About this prize: 

The Jane Burbank Article Prize in global legal history will be awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history published in the previous calendar year. Submissions may address any topic or period, and may focus on case studies in which the analysis relates to broader processes or comparisons. Articles on methodological or theoretical contributions are also welcome.

The 2025 Burbank Prize winner was Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for “Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections,” Past and Present 266:1 (2025): 40-74. The citation:

In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a collection of letters and documents which includes a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved people she owned, conducted in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels: the case summary itself and its process, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use.

An Honorable Mention went to Rui Hua (Boston University), for “The Cheese, the Worm, and the Law: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian Borderland, 1906-1927,” Modern Asian Studies 58:4 (2024): 1201-1221.

Congratulations!

-- Karen Tani 

 

ASLH Surrency Prize to Han & Xiangyi

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Surrency Prize. About this prize: 

The Surrency Prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the Society’s journal, the Law and History Review, in the previous year. The prize is named in honor of Erwin C. Surrency, a founding member and first president of the Society and for many years the editor of its former publication, the American Journal of Legal History. 

The 2025 Surrency Prize winners were Shumeng Han (University of California, San Diego) and Ren Xiangyi (University of Chicago) for their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Law and History Review 42:2 (2024): 319–42. The citation:

In their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Shumeng Han and Xiangyi Ren bring analytical clarity to a complex process of legal change. Through a sensitive and systematic reading of four decades of intergenerational property dispute cases in Jiangjin county, China, the authors illuminate a transformation of the fundamental Qing legal principle of filial piety. What began as a unified concept harmonizing individual filiality and morality with imperial loyalty and legitimacy, the authors explain, branched over time into multiple hybrid forms in Republican China. The article demonstrates how dual processes—changing legal rules and institutional nation-state building—coproduced forces within and without law that spun filial piety into different successor strands: individualist, nationalist, legal, and sentimental, each carrying forward a fragment of the original principle of filial piety. With precision, the article documents a Qing-Republican legal transition that is not a simple transplantation story of one order replacing another. Rather, as the authors conclude, “legal actors recreated and particularized the inherited conception [of filial piety] in their legal practice by drawing on sources from code, customs, and their specific historical context,” thus making and using diverse and even contradictory new strands. With this remarkable work of research and interpretation, “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality” shows how the meaning of legal concepts may be transformed amid wider societal and regime change—and how to study such transformation with nuance, rigor and imagination.

An Honorable Mention went to Kate Alba Reeve (Columbia University) for “Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations,” Law and History Review 42:3 (2024): 499–520.

Congratulations to all!

-- Karen Tani  

 

Cromwell Article Prize to Hall, Mallon

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, which is awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation "after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History." About this award:

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize is awarded annually to the best article in American legal history published in the preceding calendar year by an early career scholar. Articles published in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize. 

The 2025 Cromwell Article Prize went to two scholars: Aaron Hall (University of Minnesota) for “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” Journal of American History 111, no. 3 (2024): 469-96, and Grace E. Mallon (Oxford University), for “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2024): 687-720.

The citation for Hall's article:

Aaron Hall’s “Bad Roads” traces the making, significance, and effects of ordinary public ways that ran through the South in the age of slavery. This important article speaks to scholarship on legal history, state building, slavery, and the carceral state, and challenges existing ideas of public and private. In this piece, Hall draws upon an inchoate, rarely studied set of documents to explain how roads were a significant and singular site of governance in slave states. He shows how public power helped construct private planter authority, as well as gave rise to a unique carceral spatial regime. Hall’s article is beautifully written and works with complex archival materials in a way that makes truly intricate and difficult historical work feel effortless. “Bad Roads” ties together multiple topics in legal and political history, including the role of state power in road building, the mechanics of how roads enabled policing, and the way public roads structured and complicated slavery—much like, as he shows, public roads themselves both connected and bounded private property and enslaved people’s lives. This article has important implications for our understanding both of slavery and its development and the post-emancipation evolution of policing and turn toward mass incarceration. We know that slavery existed because state law sanctioned it, but Aaron gives us a chance to really see how in even the most quotidian ways, the state made slavery and slavery made the state.

The citation for Mallon's article: 

Grace Mallon’s “Negotiated Federalism” examines the federal government’s efforts to enforce its new authority after the Founding. Federal officials quickly realized that they required the participation and consent of state governments, as federal laws could not take effect without the legislation, investment, and manpower of state governments. The piece showcases how Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test case for negotiated federalism, where the federal government sought to exercise power in spaces where states had already entrenched their authority. As early federal officials set up customs and lighthouse services, rebuilt coastal fortifications, and enforced regulations, they had to negotiate with states to determine “which powers each level of government could exercise.” As a result, federal power depended on a state’s willingness to negotiate its authority. The crisply written article tackles big questions of federalism through granular details of practical problems and personality conflicts. Based in impressive primary source research in state and federal official records and correspondence, Mallon brings multiple areas of scholarship together to describe how power was worked out ‘in the course of ordinary government administration instead of in high theory. “Negotiated Federalism” takes something that we feel is well-understood (federalism at the founding) and through a creative path through the archive mines new and provocative ways of seeing the past that help us see the present more clearly.

Congratulations to both awardees!

-- Karen Tani

Cromwell and ASLH Early Career Fellowships: 2025 Awardees

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the early career fellowships. 

The William Nelson Cromwell foundation has long awarded early career fellowships "to support research and writing in American legal history by early-career scholars." The ASLH has recently launched a complementary initiative, awarding funding to "early career scholars, publishing in English, who are working on projects in legal history relating to non-U. S. history topics." 

Via the ASLH, we have the following list of fellowship recipients, along with the titles of their projects:

Cromwell Early Career Fellowship Recipients

Thalia Chrysanthis, Unexpected Soldiers: Civil War Militaries and Gender Multiplicity in the Ranks 

Aaron Freedman, The Securities State: Washington and the Making of Modern Wall Street, 1979-1992 

Hannah Hicks, In Her Defense: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War U.S. South

Madison Ogletree, A Peculiar Freedom: Law, Free People of Color, and the Making of the Old South, 1790-1860

Alex Reiss-Sorokin, Trust in Search: Credibility and Doubt in Legal Research Technologies

Hannah Reynolds, Gendering Settler Property: Women, Families, and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Land Policy

Joseph Wrobleski, Wabanaki Legalities and the Making of Property on the Maritime Peninsula, 1620 – Present: Survivance, Sovereignty, and the Contest for Land

Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowship Recipients

Shachar Gannot, “Defending the Indefensible: Nazi Defense Attorneys in the Post-War Era,” Ph.D. History candidate Princeton (expected 2028).

Aden Knapp, “Judging Empires: International Court of Justice and Decolonization 1945-71,” Ph.D. History, Harvard, 2023, Postdoctoral Fellow Yale University (2024-26).

Stephanie Painter, “Women’s Defiance in Late Imperial China,” Ph.D. History University of Chicago, 2023, Assistant Professor of East Asian History, SUNY.

Ayse Polat, “Statelessness, Ottoman Empire 1850-1900,” Ph.D. History, University of Cambridge, 2023, Postdoctoral Fellow Cornell University (2024-26).

Alexander Williams, “Elite Corporate Lawyers’ Role in the Political Economy of Capitalism since the late 19th century in India,” Ph.D. History candidate, Yale (expected 2027).

Congratulations to all!

-- Karen Tani

ASLH Preyer Scholars Awards to Allread, Holub-Moorman

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars award. About this award:

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. 

The 2025 winners were Tanner Allread (University of California, Los Angeles), for “‘This Series of Strong Laws’: Choctaw Governance and the Rise of Indigenous Constitutionalism, 1826-1830,” and Will Holub-Moorman (Princeton University/Penn Carey Law), for “Policing Parenthood: Child Support Law and the Enforcement of Austerity in Late Twentieth-Century America.”

Congratulations to both!

-- Karen Tani