We are delighted to welcome Professor Gautham Rao to the blog for the month of September! LHB readers are likely familiar with Rao, either from his long-running stint as the editor of the Law & History Review or from his tremendous scholarship on American law and governance in the early national period. Cribbing from his American University bio, here is a fuller introduction:
Gautham Rao is a legal historian of early America and the United States. He joined the Department of History at American University in 2012 after previously teaching at Rutgers/NJIT and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Rao was also a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow of Legal History at the New York University School of Law and a Hurst Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Rao’s latest book, White Power: Policing American Slavery was published in May, 2026 by Hodding Carter III Books. His first book, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.Rao's service to the field is too robust to capture in full. It includes not only his work for the Law & History Review (which won him the Craig Joyce Medal from the American Society for Legal History in 2025), but also service to the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the American Historical Association, and the Brennan Center for Justice’s Historians’ Council on the Constitution. More here.
Rao is currently working on a book about the historical importance of the television show The West Wing. He is also beginning work on a new legal and constitutional history of the Confederate States of America.
At American University, Rao teaches a wide range of courses, from “The West Wing as History” to General Education courses "Why Big Government?", "Hannah Arendt, Ethics, and Citizenship," "Law and America's Racial Crisis," "American Encounters" and "Social Forces that Shaped America." He also teaches graduate courses such as Colloquium in U.S. History 1, Graduate Research Seminar, and The Historian's Craft. In 2016-2017,The Center for Teaching and Learning named him a Partner in Teaching Fellow.
Rao will be blogging about his most recent book, White Power: Policing American Slavery (Hodding Carter III Books, University of North Carolina Press) (previously mentioned on the blog here).
For even more on Rao, check out his personal website. A nice touch is the rotating series of quotes at the bottom of the home page, where you will see one "RateMyProfessors.com" reviewer describe him (accurately) as "funny as hell."
-- Karen Tani
