Friday, November 1, 2019

Welcome, Dirk Hartog!

We are delighted that our guest blogger in November 2019 is Prof. Hendrik Hartog, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty and Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University.

Hendrik Hartog
Hendrik "Dirk" Hartog has spent his scholarly life obsessed with the difficulties and opportunities that come with studying how broad political and cultural themes have been expressed in everyday legal conflicts. He has worked on everything from the history of marriage to old age to slavery. His books include Public Property and Private Power: the Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1983), Man and Wife in America: a History (2000), Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (2012), and The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North (2018). He has been awarded a variety of national fellowships and lectureships, and for a decade he co-edited Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History. In 2016, he was made an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History.  Before coming to Princeton, he taught at the University of Wisconsin Law School (1982-92) and at the Indiana University (Bloomington) School of Law (1977-82).

Currently, Prof. Hartog is beginning work on a history of property law as a teaching subject, focusing on the significance of the Cold War as an underlying presence.

Dirk Hartog has trained generations of legal historians of the US, the British empire, South Asia, and beyond. 

Welcome, Dirk!

--Mitra Sharafi