[We have the following announcement. DRE]
October 15, 2024
New York, New York
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation announced today that its Legal History Article of the Year Prize for 2023 is awarded to W. Tanner Allread for “The Specter of Indian Removal,” and to Taisu Zhang and John D. Morley for “The Modern State and the Rise of the Business Corporation.”
In “The Specter of Indian Removal: The Persistence of State Supremacy Arguments in Federal Indian Law,” 123 Columbia Law Review 1533 (2023), Allread takes Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, as a point of departure for exhuming the 1820s and 1830s origins of contemporary defenses of state (as opposed to federal) power over Native nations. Allread shows that the era of Removal and genocide was accompanied by systematic efforts to assert state jurisdiction over Native sovereignty. He describes the legal bases asserted for those efforts. And he traces the persistence of these early nineteenth century developments into the modern era. For Allread, state power’s Removal roots are an ugly reminder of the past.
In “The Modern State and the Rise of the Business Corporation,” Morley and Zhang tackle a longstanding debate about the historical origins of the corporate form. Taking up a wide array of historical examples, ranging from late imperial China to the early United States, they show that pooling of strangers into a single enterprise requires the coercive powers of a state with the capacity to coerce the participants. Contrary to theorists who posit the corporation as a creature of private market actors’ self-interest, Morley and Zhang show the irreducible necessity of state regulation in its basic foundations.
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 that 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), and Alison LaCroix (University of Chicago Law School).
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.
