Welcome, Gautham Rao!

We are delighted to announce that Gautham Rao will be joining us as a guest blogger over the next month.

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Rao is an Assistant Professor of History at American University and a prolific scholar of U.S. law and governance in the early national period. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held the prestigious Samuel I. Golieb legal history fellowship at New York University School of Law.

He is the author, most recently, of National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which we hope he'll tell us much more about this month. His article, "The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America," received the Erwin Surrency Award from the American Society for Legal History, and the James Madison Prize from the Society for the History of the Federal Government. His work has also appeared in Law & Social Inquiry and Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (edited by William Novak, Jim Sparrow, and Stephen Sawyer).

Professor Rao is an active member of the American Society for Legal History (he has chaired the Kathryn T. Preyer award committee in recent years) and currently serves on the editorial board of Law and History Review.

Welcome, Gautham Rao!