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 the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize, which is "awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference."
The 2025 Cromwell Dissertation Prize went to two scholars: Michael Borsk, for “Measuring Ground: Surveyors and the Properties of States in the Great Lakes Region, 1783-1840.” (Queen’s University, 2024), and Shay R. Olmstead, “’Refuse to Run Away’: Transsexual Workers Fight for Civil Rights, 1969-1992.” (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2024).
The citation for Borsk's "Measuring Ground":
“Measuring Ground” is a comparative study of state formation through surveying techniques and paperwork in Upper Canada and Michigan Territory from the 1790s-1837. Borsk argues that the very processes of surveying and of building the archives asserted state power and authority. Surveying regulations structured the production of knowledge around boundaries, a process which depended upon indigenous participation and recognition for legitimacy. However, surveying also ultimately eroded indigenous claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty, as it converted surveyors into actors with legal authority. Turning their attention to surveyors’ papers, Borsk demonstrates how these documents and their associated archival processes produced knowledge, which in turn drove policy. The authority to determine boundaries and ownership migrated from surveyors’ offices to the courts, which applied their own standards of law and evidence.
This innovative study is based on deep archival research and makes provocative connections between the geographic and epistemological elements of the legal processes of colonization in the Upper Midwest. It expands and refines our understanding of how defining and securing individual property rights has related to state formation. Borsk also describes the way in which archival methods and processes interacted with legal rules and procedures to produce knowledge and authority, and ultimately to construct government. This work traces how indigenous knowledge and participation ironically played a key role in ultimately extinguishing indigenous claims to territory. This scholarship opens new lines of research and offers novel ways of conceptualizing the law itself.
The citation for Olmstead's "'Refuse to Run Away'"
“'Refuse to Run Away'” is a history of thirty cases from the 1960s to the 1990s in which transsexuals (they use the contemporary term) challenged workplace
discrimination on the basis of sex or disability. Administrative agencies and courts rarely granted these plaintiffs favorable rulings. Even when they did, they did so by redefining “sex” under the law in ways that benefitted only normative, “respectable” claimants and ultimately harmed other sexual minorities. Moreover, variations in decisions among states and agencies led to the creation of multiple “cis states.” Victims of discrimination fared better when they brought claims under “disability,” because federal legislation was not written in a way that obviously excluded transsexuals from protection or defined “disability” in a way that was incompatible with transsexuality. However, in response to some scattered successful litigation, Republicans in Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude transsexuals, effectively closing that avenue for remedying discrimination.Olmstead’s description of the shift from sex-based to disability-based discrimination claims is highly persuasive, and invites the reader to contemplate the liquidity of the category of “disability.” They present their analysis as evidence that legal campaigns alone are insufficient to bring about civil protections against discrimination in the workplace, and argue that political organizing must be part of the equation as well. Their discussion of rights protections is revelatory and potentially offers lessons for current campaigns to protect marginalized people.
Congratulations to both winners!
-- Karen Tani
