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.

Nebraska's Summer Research Institute in U.S. Law and Race

[We have the following call for applicants.  DRE] 

Graduate Fellows Summer Research Institute in U.S. Law and Race, June 7-26, 2026 

Call for Applicants: Deadline February 15, 2026

Funded by the Mellon Foundation, this three-week residential fellowship program supports four (4) graduate students in Summer 2026 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's U.S. Law and Race Initiative with the Digital Legal Research Lab. We seek proposals addressing race and racialization in U.S. law and history broadly, aiming to understand racialized people's use of the law to advance personhood, citizenship, rights, and sovereignty throughout American history.

The Fellowship: Fellows will workshop their research and writing, receive training in digital methods to support data structuring and analysis, contribute to an Open Educational Resource, and enjoy seminar-style discussion of shared readings. The 3-week program features tailored mentoring with U.S. Law & Race affiliate faculty and staff, along with opportunities to meet and network with UNL's History & Digital Humanities communities. Faculty mentors include William G. Thomas III (History), Katrina Jagodinsky (History and Women’s and Gender Studies), Jeannette Eileen Jones (History and Ethnic Studies), Donna Doan Anderson (History), Genesis Agosto (Law), Eric Berger (Law), Danielle Jefferis (Law), Laura Muñoz (History and Ethnic Studies), Jessica Shoemaker (Law), and Catherine Wilson (Law).

Benefits: $4,000 stipend; all housing and meals provided; and all travel costs are covered.

Eligibility: We seek Graduate Fellows researching topics broadly related to U.S. law and race. We are not able to accept proposals that are solely quantitative social science research. Fellows must be from Ph.D. programs in History or relevant humanities or humanistic social science disciplines, including joint J.D./Ph.D. programs. We are especially interested in applications from scholars who engage directly with traditionally underrepresented groups or attend Minority Serving Institutions. The University of Nebraska does not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and/or political affiliation in its programs, activities, or employment.

How to Apply: To be considered for the Fellowship, you should send (1) a letter of interest describing your research project, the writing you propose to workshop and how your work promotes deep historical assessment of U.S. law and race; and (2) a CV, and 3.) a list of two references the committee may contact. Please send materials to uslawandrace@unl.edu with the subject line "Mellon Graduate Fellows" by midnight on February 15, 2026. 

The University of Nebraska is a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the traditional territories of the Oceti Sakowin, Omaha, Oto, Pawnee, and Ponca Tribes, and those held by the relocated Ho Chunk, Iowa, and Sac & Fox Tribes. The UNL Department of History offers graduate fellowships for research in Digital History, Nebraska and the Great Plains, and the North American West that are ideal for potential graduate students pursuing projects in histories of race, gender, sovereignty, and the law.

Call for Submissions: SCHS's Hughes-Gossett Award

 [We have the following announcement.  H/t: H-Law.  DRE.]

The Supreme Court Historical Society invites submissions for the Hughes-Gossett Award for the best student paper submitted to the Journal of Supreme Court History. The winner will be awarded a $500 cash prize and publication in the Journal.

The paper must be on some aspect of the Supreme Court’s history. Authors must have been enrolled as students at the time the paper was written. Past winners have been law school students or doctoral students in the departments of history, government, and political science.

Papers may be of any length and may be submitted on an ongoing basis to Helen Knowles-Gardner, Managing Editor, at: hknowles@supremecourthistory.org

Recent Past Winners

2023.  “FDR’s Court-packing and the Struggle for Civil Rights” by Zach Jonas

2021-22.  “Earl Warren’s Last Stand: Powell v. McCormack, Race, and the Political Question Doctrine” by Olivia O’Hea

2020.  “Rosenberger’s Unexplored History: Politics, the Press, and the University” by Rachael E. Jones

2018.  “Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: The Subtle Rapture of Postponed Power” by Adam H. Hines

Henry J. Abraham Early Career Research Grant

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

As of 2023, the Supreme Court Historical Society awards the Henry J. Abraham Early Career Research Grant for research on the history of the United States Supreme Court. The award is named for the distinguished scholar whose numerous works on constitutional law and the judicial process have had an enduring impact on the field of Supreme Court history.

Awarded on a competitive basis by a jury panel in June of each year, the $1,000 grant supports the research of those who are pursuing academic careers in legal history, including graduate students, law students, and those who are no more than five years from completion of either the Ph.D. or J.D. The award is given on the basis of the applicant's potential for producing publishable work in the field of Supreme Court history, and the grant recipient will be expected to produce an article for submission to the Journal of Supreme Court History.

A completed application consists of:

1. c.v.;
2. the name and contact information of a faculty reference; and
3. 750-1,000-word proposal (which should include a general description of the project and a plan for research)

Applicants should submit all materials to Clare Cushman, Executive Editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History, by May 1, 2025. The award winner will be notified by: June 1, 2025.

Past Henry J. Abraham Early Career Research Grant  Awardees: 

2023.  M. Henry Ishitani, JD Yale Law School 2023, completing his PhD with the Yale University Department of History.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at the New Republic: John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) reviews Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024). 
  

• In the Talking about Methods podcast series over at Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, Linda Mulcahy talks to Michael Lobban, All Souls College, Oxford, about working with archives as a legal historian.

• Writing for Justia: Rodger Citron (Touro University, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center) on "The Continuing Relevance of The Rosenberg Espionage Case—for Judge Aileen Cannon."
  

• The commentaries continue on the U.S. Supreme Court's use of history (and various reflections on the use of history in judicial decisionmaking) in the recently decided Second Amendment case United States v. Rahimi: Eric Segall at Dorf on Law; Mark Tushnet at Balkinization; Jennifer Tucker at CNN; Saul Cornell at Slate.
  

• From In Custodia Legis (the blog of the law librarians of Congress): LGBTQ+ Legal History in the U.S. Reports Collection. 
  

• "Australia’s first civilian jury was entirely female. Here’s how ‘juries of matrons’ shaped our legal history," by Alice Neikirk, University of Newcastle (The Conversation).
  

• From Time's "Made by History": Supreme Court Opinions Don’t Have to Be the End of the Fight for Justice, by Robert Tsai.  A Mistake in the Early 1970s Still Haunts Supreme Court Ethics, by Michael Bobelian.  (Yup, it involved Abe Fortas.)
  

• Balkinization is hosting a symposium on Mark A. Graber's Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform after the Civil War (University of Kansas Press, 2023).  The first posts are by Anne Twitty, David S. Schwartz, and Evan D. Bernick.
  

• In “What’s Left of Originalism?” Andrew Koppelman reviews Jack M. Balkin’s Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  

• Queens University has noted the prizes won by two of its doctoral candidates.  Michael Borsk received two awards for his article, “Conveyance to Kin: Property, Preemption, and Indigenous Nations in North America, 1763-1822,” William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 1 (January 2023): 87-124.  They are the Peter Oliver Prize in Canadian Legal History from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, awarded to the best published work by a student, and the 2024 Jean-Marie Fecteau Prize by the Canadian Historical Association, awarded to the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal.  Margaret Ross won the best article prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality for her article, “‘Your Town Is Rotten’: Prostitution, Profit, and the Governing of Vice in Kingston, Ontario, 1860s–1920s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 32 (May 2023).
  

• Over at Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog: Otto Vervaart on Viewing Roman Slavery from Bonn.
  

• ICYMI:  Washington [State's] legal history, including West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, captured in murals for a Wenatchee courtroom (NCWLIFE). John A. Lupton on John Doe and Richard Roe.  Mark Tushnet thinks some more about originalism (after stopping trying to make sense of originalism) (X).  Blake Emerson puts Jarkesy in historical context (Marketplace).
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

[We have the following announcement, from a press release from Notre Dame Law.  DRE.]

With the financial support of the American Society for Legal History, Notre Dame Law School and the University of Notre Dame Graduate School will host the ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium during the 2024-2025 academic year.

Dennis Wieboldt, a joint J.D./Ph.D. student in history, is spearheading the forum. Associate Dean Randy Kozel and Professor Christian Burset have worked with Wieboldt to launch the colloquium at Notre Dame next year.

The initiative is currently accepting applications from prospective presenters and commentators. Students and faculty members are encouraged to indicate their interest in presenting, commenting, or attending the colloquium here.

The convenings will be held on the Notre Dame Law School campuses in Chicago and South Bend in October and November of 2024, and then again in February, March, and April of 2025. Participants will also be able to join convenings of the colloquium virtually.

The forum will provide budding legal scholars and practitioners with feedback on works-in-progress—an important step in fine-tuning research to a point where it can be submitted for publication. “As the federal judiciary increasingly turns its attention to ‘history and tradition,’” Wieboldt noted, “it is crucial for future leaders in the legal profession to develop the skills necessary to employ historical methodologies and make historically informed claims about the meaning of legal texts.”

“Notre Dame is an excellent place to think seriously about the role of history in contemporary legal practice,” Wieboldt added. “I am excited to welcome students and faculty from other institutions to engage in conversation with members of the Notre Dame community.”

The ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium is open to master’s and doctoral students as well as law students. Students will have the opportunity to present works-in-progress at convenings of the colloquium, and each work-in-progress will have a designated faculty or peer commenter. All works in progress will be pre-circulated to prospective attendees to facilitate a robust discussion.

[And here is more from the registration form.]

Please note that all convenings of the Colloquium will occur on the Notre Dame Law School campuses in South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois, from 10 AM to 2 PM local time. All presenters, commenters, and attendees will receive complimentary lunch and refreshments. For those who are unable to attend convenings of the Colloquium in-person, virtual participation opportunities will be available.

The scheduling information provided in this form is subject to change to accommodate presenter and commenter schedules. The preferences you express will inform the Colloquium's final schedule, which will be made available during the summer. Once dates and locations are finalized, prospective presenters and commenters will have the opportunity to confirm their availability before the schedule is released publicly.

For further information about the Colloquium, please visit here.  If you have any questions, please contact Dennis Wieboldt at dwiebold@nd.edu.

The Julien Mezey Dissertation Award

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities is excited to announce that we are accepting submissions for the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.

The Association seeks the submission of outstanding work from a wide variety of perspectives, including but not limited to law and cultural studies, law and critical race studies, law and gender and sexuality, legal theory and environmentalism, law and literature, law and psychoanalysis, law and visual studies, legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence. Scholars completing humanities-oriented dissertations in SJD and related programs, as well as those earning PhDs, are encouraged to submit their work. Applicants eligible for the 2024 award must have defended their dissertations successfully between March 2023 and March 2024.

The Association will cover the Mezey Prize winner’s travel and lodging costs to our annual meeting.  Nominations for the 2024 award must be received on or before March 15, 2024.  For submission instructions, please see our website.

Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars

 [We have the following “Call for Participation.”  DRE]

Georgetown University Law Center, Stanford Law School, UCLA School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California Center for Law, History, and Culture invite submissions for the 23d meeting of the Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, to be held at the UCLA School of Law, on June 9-10, 2024.

About the Workshop.  The workshop is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and independent scholars working in law and the humanities. In addition to drawing from numerous humanistic fields, including Black and Indigenous studies, history, literature, political theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and philosophy, we welcome critical, qualitative work in the social sciences, including anthropology and sociology. While the scope of the Workshop is broad, we cannot consider proposals that are focused solely on quantitative social science research or that are limited to purely doctrinal legal research. We are especially interested in submissions from members of traditionally underrepresented groups and submissions touching on themes of anti-racism and anti-subordination. We welcome submissions from those working at regional and teaching-intensive institutions.

Based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, between six and eight papers will be chosen for presentation at the Workshop. At the Workshop, two senior scholars will comment on each paper. Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to subject and methodology. The selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation among all the participants that may include themes connecting all of the projects, as well as discussion of the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in interdisciplinary scholarship.

The selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network; there is no other publication commitment. (We will accommodate the wishes of chosen authors who prefer not to have their paper posted publicly with us because of publication commitments to other journals.) However, we will only accept Workshop participants whose papers are true works in progress; articles or chapters that are already in page proofs or are otherwise unable to be revised by the time of the Workshop are ineligible.

The Workshop will pay the domestic travel and hotel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation. For authors requiring airline travel from outside the United States, the Workshop will cover such travel expenses up to a maximum of $1250.

Submission Instructions.  Applications should include:

• a 1500-2000 word summary of the paper (including footnotes or endnotes),
  

• a 1-2 page bibliography,
  

• in Microsoft Word (not PDF) and, 
  

• if your paper is a chapter in a book or dissertation, an optional 1-page chapter outline of the larger project.
  

Applications are due on December 15, 2023.  If your application advances to the final stage of consideration, you will be asked to submit the full paper on February 1, 2024. Please do not apply if you will not have a full paper on February 1. The application is intended to be a summary of existing, ongoing work rather than a proposal for new or planned work.

Final paper submissions must be works-in-progress that do not exceed 10,000 words in length (including footnotes/ endnotes). A dissertation chapter may be submitted, but we strongly suggest that it be edited so as to stand alone as a piece of work with its own integrity. A paper that has been submitted for publication is eligible for selection so long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time of the Workshop; it is important that authors still be in a position at the time of the Workshop to consider comments they receive there and to incorporate them as they think appropriate in their revisions.

We ask that those submitting applications be careful to omit or redact any information in the paper summary or the body of the paper that might serve to identify them, as we adhere to an anonymous or "blind" selection process.

Applications (in Microsoft Word-no pdf files, please) will be accepted until December 15, 2023, and should be sent by e-mail to: Lawandhumanitiesworkshop@gmail.com. Please be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), and phone and email contact information in your covering email, not in the paper itself.

For more information, please send an email inquiry to Lawandhumanitiesworkshop@gmail.com or visit our new website

Program Committee, 2024 Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars
Simon Stern, University of Toronto, Law & English, Chair
Martha Jones, Johns Hopkins University, History
Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University, Law
Riaz Tejani, University of Redlands, School of Business & Society
Nomi Stolzenberg, Law, University of Southern California
Martha Umphrey, Amherst College, Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought

The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars is committed to anti-racism both inside and outside the academy.

Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition

[We have the following announcement of the Twelfth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition.  DRE.]

The Legal History and Rare Books (LH&RB) Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), in cooperation with Gale, a Cengage company, announces the Twelfth Annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition. The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, late Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.

The competition is designed to encourage scholarship and to acquaint students with the AALL and law librarianship, and is open to students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, and related fields. Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives. The winner will receive a $500.00 prize from Gale, a Cengage company, and will be invited to present their paper to AALL members via webinar.

Winning and runner-up entries will be invited to submit their entries to UNBOUND: A Review of Legal History and Rare Books, the official journal of LH&RB. Past winning essays have gone on to be accepted by journals such as N.Y.U. Law Review, American Journal of Legal History, University of South Florida Law Review, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and French Historical Review.

The entry form and instructions are available at the LH&RB website. Entries must be submitted by 11:59 p.m., May 16, 2022 (EDT).

Creating a Successful Conference Proposal

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Program Committee of the American Society for Legal History has prepared a tip sheet, Creating a Successful Conference Proposal, designed to help people who wish to propose panels for the group’s 2022 annual meeting.  The submission deadline for proposals is March 18, as described in the call for papers.

University of Bordeaux-TAU Student Legal History Virtual Workshop

We have an announcement of the University of Bordeaux-TAU Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Students Legal History Virtual Workshop, to be held Thursday, June 24.  Details here.

 --Dan Ernst

Creating Context: Sociality vs Bad Feelings, part I.

I wrote in my last post about the writing process I used as I worked my way out of a nasty bout of writers’ block. Those individual techniques were very helpful to me, but equally important was the collective setting in which I did the work. In this post, I talk a little about the writing groups I was in, and the mutual writing support I was part of, with friends and colleagues while in graduate school. I then talk about some of the challenges I've had in maintaining a writing practice after finishing graduate school.

I wrote a great deal of my dissertation next to or across a table from several friends and people who I became friends with because we worked near each other that way. I can’t remember exactly how and when it started but I remember clearly asking another grad student friend something like “uhhhh are you working this week and if so can I come and work in your vicinity while you work, please?” By that point I was already part of a private workshop group with some other friends, and there were a lot of other workshops offering opportunities to get feedback on work and to read others’ work. I enjoyed the workshopping and got a great deal out of it, in terms of my own work. (For instance: at one point, my friend and colleague Joe Haker said to me something like “you often reference the part of Rediker’s Slave Ship book where he talks about the violence of abstraction and that’s because you think there are real social practices of abstraction that happen and which are violent.” It shaped my dissertation immensely and my book too.) I also benefited immensely from reading others’ work. I eventually figured out, though, that I lacked something in my writing life that I very much needed: some kind of writing support. I didn’t know what that lack was, I just felt scared and was procrastinating a lot and needed help to even start typing. That help was upstream, so to speak, from intellectual engagement with the content of my writing. I wasn’t sure what that help would look like but I hoped that maybe with another person nearby I would feel merely afraid, instead of feeling an immobilizing terror. It turns out I was right. Working near someone else turned the volume knob on my negative writing emotions down to a level where I could work.

Organizing Myself: Process vs Bad Feelings, part 2

In my last post I wrote about getting writer’s block while in graduate school, after having written a rough draft of the dissertation. This post is the second half of the story, in which I discuss beginning to work again. First I talk about how I dealt with writer’s block specifically, then I turn to how I set about doing the actual revisions on my dissertation. That revision process also involved some aspects of emotional self-regulation that helped me not fall back into writer's block.

Amid my dissertation malaise I really turned a corner when I finally admitted writing felt impossible - I truly did not believe I could finish the dissertation - and that I hated doing it. This was a hard thing to say out loud. Quitting was not an option, I was the only income and source of insurance for my family, and I’d gone to grad school in part to escape years of employment insecurity, so the thought of trying to figure out how to do anything else was terrifying as well. (As I type this I am aware that I was naive about the state of the academic job market when I went to grad school in 2005 or so. I am also aware that the market is even worse now than it was when I finally graduated in 2014. Graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty have been massively failed in multiple ways by a lot of powerful people and institutions.)

Having admitted that writing the dissertation felt impossible but that I still had to write it somehow, my job became figuring out how to spend my time doing something I hated and that I didn’t believe I could succeed at. In effect I had to find a way to make my putting in the time to do the work not contingent upon how I felt about doing the work. I still didn’t believe I could finish the dissertation, but I knew that the only shot I had at finishing was to spend a lot of time writing.

Organizing Myself: Writing Process vs Bad Feelings (part 1 of 2)

One email, six excruciating months. “Dear Nate, We were excited to read the draft of your dissertation. What a great project! We’ve attached a copy with comments from both of us and look forward to seeing where it goes from here.” My co-advisors sent me that around July 2013. (Full transparency: this is a recreation on my part, I don’t remember the exact words and I am no longer able to locate that email. On the details my memory is foggy - an effect, I am sure, inflicted by the job market, multiple moves, having multiple young kids, and the demands of the job - but I recall the heart of the experience keenly.)

Padilla-Rodriguez and Ghosh Named Preyer Scholars

Congratulations to Ivon Padilla-Rodriguez, Columbia University, and former LHB Associate Blogger Smita Ghosh, University of Pennsylvania, who is currently a Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, on being named Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars by the American Society for Legal History for 2020!

--Dan Ernst

ASLH Graduate Student Funding Initiative

[Lauren Benton, President of the American Society for Legal History, has announced the following initiative.  Please note that eligibility is limited only to graduate students who are ASLH members.  DRE]

In recognition of the challenges to graduate students who are conducting legal history research when travel and funding are restricted and when many archives closed, the ASLH is offering a limited number of small grants to help support remote research.

The application is open to graduate students at any stage who are ASLH members. Each successful applicant will receive $1,000, to be used to obtain digital materials or to cover other expenses incurred while conducting summer research. The deadline is June 15, 2020. Apply here.

Please help ASLH expand this initiative. Anonymous donors have pledged a total of $3,000 to fund three graduate student grants. You can make a gift of any size to help us do more. To give, choose “Small Grants for Digital Legal History” from the dropdown menu on our "Donate" page.

[And, while we're at it: note that the June 1 deadline for various ASLH prizes and awards will soon be upon us.]

Cromwell Dissertation Prize Deadline Approaching

[We have the following announcement from the Cromwell Dissertation Prize Committee of the American Society for Legal History.  DRE]

The Cromwell Dissertation Prize Committee welcomes submissions as the June 1 submission deadline approaches, and encourages members to forward this announcement to any graduate student or dissertation director who may be interested. To apply, one need only submit a copy of the completed dissertation and a CV. Click here for full submission details.

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize 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 author of the winning dissertation receives $5,000. Anyone who received a Ph.D. in 2019 will be eligible for this year’s prize, which is awarded by the Foundation after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

ASLH Student Research Colloquium and Graduate Student Survey

[We have two announcements from the American Society for Legal History for M.A. students, Ph.D. students, and law students whose interests include legal history.  DRE]

Student Research Colloquium:  The ASLH invites graduate students to apply to the Student Research Colloquium (SRC), currently scheduled (fingers crossed) for Nov. 11-12, in Chicago, Illinois, immediately prior to the ASLH annual meeting there.  At this pre-conference, funded workshop, eight graduate students will discuss their in-progress research projects with each other and with distinguished legal historians.  Target applicants include early-post-coursework Ph.D. students and historically minded law students.  To apply, electronically submit the following four items to John Wertheimer at: srcproposals@aslh.net: a CV; a cover letter describing, among other things, how many years remain in your course of graduate study; a two-page, single-spaced Research Statement that begins with a title and describes the in-progress project that you propose to present to the colloquium; and a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from the other materials.  The application deadline is June 15, 2020.  For more information, click this link. 

Graduate Student Survey:  The ASLH regards graduate students as an important part of our legal history community.  We are proud of our efforts to date to make the ASLH a hospitable home for early-stage scholars.  But we want to do better.  Among other things, we want to enhance the presence of international graduate students in the organization.  Accordingly, we are gathering information that will help us to make the society an even more inclusive place for early-stage legal historians.  If you are a graduate student or a historically minded law student, please click this link to take a short survey in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, as you choose.  We appreciate your time and hope to see you at the annual meeting in Chicago!

Weekend Roundup

• The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History invites doctoral students and young researchers to participate in study sessions on “the basic tools for beginning research in the archives of the Holy See and of other Roman ecclesiastical institutions as well as to provide elements for a critical interpretation of the sources and their contextualization through the most current literature.”  More. 

• Congratulations to Emory Law's Deborah Dinner and the other Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University for 2020-2021! 

• Robert Pigott on Elihu Root and New York City real estate in Judicial Notice, the journal of the Historical Society of the New York Courts.

• Over at Talking Legal History, Maddalena Marinari, Assistant Professor in History; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; and Peace Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, speaks to Siobhan M. M. Barco about her book Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

• The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America. 

• Law in Times of Crisis at the University of Minnesota Law Library's Riesenfeld Rare Books Center 

• Have you checked out Annenberg Classroom's videos and other materials on the Constitution, including Supreme Court landmarks, including Miranda v. Arizona and New York Times v. Sullivan, as well as The Story of the Bill of Rights.

• ICYMI: A notice and query on the female lawyer Mary Anderson Matthews (1878-1948) of  Palmyra, Mo.  The quarrel over originalism within the right (National Review).  Charly B. Gay and Nancy Phillips on Constance Baker Motley in The Gramblinite.

• Update: WHYY and the Philadelphia Tribune on that Ken Burns series on the Constitution in Times of Crisis at the National Constitution Center.  Also: TR descendants heard from, here and here.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

ABF Fellowships: Deadline Extended

[We're moving up this announcement from the American Bar Foundation because the deadline for all fellowships (except the ABF/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Scholars) has been extended to February 15.  DRE]

Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunities at the American Bar Foundation

As one of the world’s leading research institutes for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law, the American Bar Foundation (ABF) is committed to fostering the next generation of sociolegal scholars.  The ABF is inviting applications for the following opportunities:

Postdoctoral

1.    The ABF/Access Lex Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Legal & Higher Education

2.    Postdoctoral Scholar in The ABF/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Scholars Program   

Doctoral

1.    The ABF/Access Lex Institute Doctoral Fellowship Program in Legal & Higher Education

2.    The ABF Doctoral Fellowship Program in Law & Inequality

3.    ABF/Northwestern Univeristy Doctoral Fellowship Program in Law and Social Science

These fellowships are designed to encourage original and significant research. Fellows become immersed in an exciting and diverse intellectual community and gain access to a professional network of innovative scholars. Because the ABF’s sole focus is research, there is no teaching component to these fellowships.

In addition to working on their own research, Fellows receive mentoring from a community of leading socio-legal scholars throughout the length of the fellowship. They will participate in a series of weekly in-house seminars to get acquainted with the many facets of sociolegal research and working groups to promote professional development, such writing workshops and mock job talks.

All Fellows will work at the ABF’s office in Chicago on a full-time basis from September 2020 to August 2022 and will receive an annual stipend of $35,000 for the Doctoral and $65,000 for the Postdoctoral fellowship.

Flyers can be downloaded at the links [above.] Please share this information with members of your academic community.

The fellowships programs are featured in our recent Researching Law issue as well. For further information, please email fellowships@abfn.org or visit our website.