Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to one that is close to our hearts: the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize. About this prize:
The Dudziak Prize, named in honor of Mary L. Dudziak, a leading scholar of twentieth century U.S. legal history and international relations as well as a digital history pioneer, is awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project. These projects may take the form of either traditionally published peer reviewed scholarship or born-digital projects of equivalent depth and scope.
The 2025 Dudziak Prize winner was “Petitioning for Freedom,” directed by Katrina Jagodinsky and the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. The citation:
“Petitioning for Freedom,” developed by Katrina Jagodinsky and her team at the Digital Legal Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, offers a deeply researched and carefully curated online database of over 2,000 habeas petitions filed across the American West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The database inventory continues to be updated monthly with a diverse array of petitions from those challenging slavery, peonage, removal and deportation, state custody over Indigenous wards, and abusive husbands’ custody over their dependents. The database offers a regularized schema of records whose handwritten originals are often buried under the haphazard organization and inconsistent recording practices of their rendering courts, and alongside this, the project site provides numerous essays and stories drawn from the habeas proceedings to help researchers at all levels understand the records and make informed interpretations about the deployment of legal power against and on behalf of the less empowered peoples of the American West.
An Honorable Mention went to Stephen Robertson's Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Congratulations!
-- Karen Tani
