Saturday, July 18, 2020

Seo to Columbia Law

Columbia Law School has announced the hiring of a new legal historian: Sarah Seo, formerly of Iowa Law. Here's the start of the announcement:

Credit
Legal historian Sarah Seo ’07 compares her research to an hourglass. Her initial curiosity about a big topic narrows to a specific question and then broadens again as she finds answers to that question and explores its ramifications. 

That’s how Seo’s curiosity about law enforcement and the war on drugs led to a focus on Fourth Amendment search cases and then to the confluence of two quintessentially American phenomena: the ubiquity of cars and the perniciousness of racial discrimination. 

Seo, who joins the Columbia Law faculty July 1, examined the legal history of automobiles and driving in Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, published in 2019. The award-winning book was noted in The New Yorker and named one of the year’s 10 best history books by Smithsonian Magazine.

Read on here.

Congratulations to Professor Seo and to Columbia Law!

-- Karen Tani