Congratulations to
John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School): The Law & Society Association has named
Lincoln's Code (the Free Press) the winner of this year's
J. Willard Hurst award ("given to the best work (in English) in socio-legal history published in the previous year"). Here's the citation:
John Witt's Lincoln's Code is a tour de force of
legal history. Its sweeping narrative of the origins of the modern
law of war carries us from the battlefields of the American Revolution,
through Indian Removal, to the carnage of Sherman's march and
Gettysburg. At the center of the narrative is a legal code, the set of
rules for wartime commissioned by Abraham Lincoln and written by
Francis Lieber, that is still the basis for the laws of war. Witt
demonstrates the way statesmen, soldiers, and lawyers struggled with
the competing aims of humanitarianism and justice, and the way Lieber's
code constrained some aspects of inhumanity in battle, yet allowed
mass destruction in the name of a just cause. And he shows how slavery
shaped the laws of war: the protection of slave property had been
seen as a chief humanitarian accomplishment during the Revolution, but
during the Civil War, the military imperative of emancipation helped to
establish the primacy of justice over humanitarianism in Lieber's
code. In doing so, it gave the U.S. Civil War a global significance it
otherwise might not have had.
Weaving together deep archival research,
compelling biography, incisive legal analysis, and entertaining
storytelling, Lincoln's Code is a groundbreaking, original history with
enduring significance for our times. John Witt has pushed the
boundaries of traditional sociolegal history and given us a new way to
think about the history of war, with law at its troubled center. It
will endure as a touchstone in the field, both for its nimble
navigation of source material and its sheer interpretive force.
Lincoln’s Code is a model of scholarly work that is both firmly
grounded in historical analysis and profoundly relevant to the
contemporary world.
Honorable mentions went to
Ken Mack (Harvard Law School) for
Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard University Press) and
Michele Landis Dauber (Stanford Law School) for
The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University Of Chicago Press).
