[We have the following announcement. DRE.]
New York, New York
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation announced today that its inaugural Legal History Article of the Year Prize was awarded to Gregory Ablavsky of Stanford Law School for his article, “Getting Public Rights Wrong: The Lost History of the Private Land Claims,” 74 Stan. L. Rev. 277 (2022).
In “Getting Public Rights Wrong,” Ablavksy takes up the subject of “public rights,” a category the U.S. Supreme Court has used since 1856 to designate those rights susceptible to federal administrative adjudication rather than adjudication in the Article III courts. Ablavsky’s article recovers a “sprawling jurisprudence” from the nineteenth century involving private land claims by the inhabitants of territories ceded to the United States by foreign sovereigns. As Ablavsky ably shows, nineteenth-century courts treated the resolution of such private land claims as “the paradigmatic example of public rights that could be resolved by administrative adjudication.” “Getting Public Rights Wrong” establishes a fundamental point that has heretofore gone misunderstood in the historical literature, with serious consequences in the jurisprudence of the twenty-first-century administrative state. “Throughout the nineteenth century,” Ablavsky writes, “the administrative adjudication of at least one form of vested rights to private property was constitutionally permissible.”
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, established by William Nelson Cromwell in 1930, supports work in American legal history. The Foundation has long awarded Early Scholar prizes and fellowships to early career scholars in the field of American legal history. The Foundation’s new prize for the legal history article of the year, which includes a $10,000 award, is intended to recognize the growing role of legal history and teaching and research in law schools. The new annual prize is awarded for the best article in the field of legal history, written by a legal scholar, or published in a journal of legal scholarship. This is the first prize the Foundation has offered which is open to scholars of any level of seniority. The prize committee, chaired by Foundation trustee John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School), consisted of Foundation trustees Sarah Barringer Gordon (Penn Carey Law) and John Langbein (Yale Law School), along with Dan Ernst (Georgetown Law), Amalia Kessler (Stanford Law School), Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago Law School), and Dean Troy McKenzie (NYU School of Law).
The Foundation makes grants to support important work in all facets of American legal history including archival preservation, scholarly study of original documents, original research in all areas of the law, and research and writing of biographies of major legal figures. Information on how to apply for a prize, fellowship or grant may be found on the Foundation’s website.
