As the government seeks to erase the past injustices and achievements of marginalized groups, it is worth recalling how those gains were made. Parents, partners, students, and lawyers pursued a more…

This Essay considers the Supreme Court’s decision in <i>United States v. Skrmetti</i> alongside the Trump Administration’s recent actions. In <i>Skrmetti</i>, w

Vanderbilt Law School is very pleased to host the Eleventh Annual Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable on June 2-3, 2026. For the past ten years, the Roundtable has offered administrative law...

[We are moving this previously posted announcement up because the deadline of January 15 is approaching.  DRE.] Harvard Law School invites applications for the Raoul Berger-Mark De Wolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship for the academic year 2026-2027.  Eligible applicants include those who have made substantial progress on their doctoral dissertations or who have recently been awarded a doctoral degree. A first law degree is preferred, but not required. The purpose of the fellowship, which is awarded annually, is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined, as the fellow seeks to begin an academic career in legal history. There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period.  Previous fellows have gone on to pursue faculty appointments or other fellowships in American universities, primarily on law faculties. The fellow is expected to spend the majority of their time on their own projects. The fellow will also participate in the Harvard Law School Legal History Workshop, a for-credit semester-long seminar, and assist with occasional other legal history sessions, both under the direction of Harvard faculty affiliated with the Program in Law and History.  The term of the fellowship is July 1 through June 30.  The fellow will be required to be in residence at the law school during the academic year (September through May). Applicants for the fellowship for 2026-2027 should submit their applications and supporting materials electronically to Professor Bruce H. Mann.  Each interested applicant should submit:  * a detailed (five pages maximum) description of a proposed project; * a writing sample;  * a comprehensive résumé or curriculum vitae that gives the applicant's educational background, publications, works in progress, and other relevant experience;  * two academic letters of reference, which may be submitted electronically by the recommenders to Professor Mann at the above email address; and * copies of official transcripts of all academic work done at the graduate level,  which may be sent electronically or by regular mail to Professor Mann at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 The deadline for applications is January 15, 2026.  Announcement of the award will be made by February 27, 2026.  The fellow selected will receive a stipend of $60,000.

A provocative account of how empire and absolutism institutionalized slavery in America

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 Article Prize, which is awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation "after a review of the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History." About this award: The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize is awarded annually to the best article in American legal history published in the preceding calendar year by an early career scholar. Articles published in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize.  The 2025 Cromwell Article Prize went to two scholars: Aaron Hall (University of Minnesota) for “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” Journal of American History 111, no. 3 (2024): 469-96, and Grace E. Mallon (Oxford University), for “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2024): 687-720. The citation for Hall's article: Aaron Hall’s “Bad Roads” traces the making, significance, and effects of ordinary public ways that ran through the South in the age of slavery. This important article speaks to scholarship on legal history, state building, slavery, and the carceral state, and challenges existing ideas of public and private. In this piece, Hall draws upon an inchoate, rarely studied set of documents to explain how roads were a significant and singular site of governance in slave states. He shows how public power helped construct private planter authority, as well as gave rise to a unique carceral spatial regime. Hall’s article is beautifully written and works with complex archival materials in a way that makes truly intricate and difficult historical work feel effortless. “Bad Roads” ties together multiple topics in legal and political history, including the role of state power in road building, the mechanics of how roads enabled policing, and the way public roads structured and complicated slavery—much like, as he shows, public roads themselves both connected and bounded private property and enslaved people’s lives. This article has important implications for our understanding both of slavery and its development and the post-emancipation evolution of policing and turn toward mass incarceration. We know that slavery existed because state law sanctioned it, but Aaron gives us a chance to really see how in even the most quotidian ways, the state made slavery and slavery made the state. The citation for Mallon's article:  Grace Mallon’s “Negotiated Federalism” examines the federal government’s efforts to enforce its new authority after the Founding. Federal officials quickly realized that they required the participation and consent of state governments, as federal laws could not take effect without the legislation, investment, and manpower of state governments. The piece showcases how Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test case for negotiated federalism, where the federal government sought to exercise power in spaces where states had already entrenched their authority. As early federal officials set up customs and lighthouse services, rebuilt coastal fortifications, and enforced regulations, they had to negotiate with states to determine “which powers each level of government could exercise.” As a result, federal power depended on a state’s willingness to negotiate its authority. The crisply written article tackles big questions of federalism through granular details of practical problems and personality conflicts. Based in impressive primary source research in state and federal official records and correspondence, Mallon brings multiple areas of scholarship together to describe how power was worked out ‘in the course of ordinary government administration instead of in high theory. “Negotiated Federalism” takes something that we feel is well-understood (federalism at the founding) and through a creative path through the archive mines new and provocative ways of seeing the past that help us see the present more clearly. Congratulations to both awardees! -- Karen Tani  

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]  The Stanford Center for Law and History invites paper submissions from graduate students for its eighth annual conference, "Legal History in Times of Crisis." This one-day conference will be held on Friday, May 15, 2026 at Stanford Law School.  We would be grateful if faculty forwarded this message to their graduate students and encouraged them to apply. Our contemporary world is in crisis—on this much, there is widespread agreement. But the nature, scope, and causes of our present crisis—indeed, crises—are subject to fierce debate, whether they be crises of democracy, technology, the rule of law, capitalism, public information and knowledge, local ecology, or global climate. Crisis is, at its roots, a historical concept, deriving from the Greek krisis: a turning point. The conference will bring together scholars of law and history to examine crises of the past across time periods and geographies, focusing in particular on political, economic, and environmental turning points. A non-exhaustive list of possible topics spanning these three modes of crisis include:     Turbulent transitions and periods of marked violence, instability, and/or uncertainty     Inequalities in the social distribution of crisis     Perceptions of crisis     Systems and institutions prone to crisis     Typologies of crisis, e.g. acute versus prolonged, discrete versus overlapping     Seedbeds for future crises     Generative possibilities of crisis     The utility of history in times of crisis, i.e. what good is history during a crisis? Application Information.  The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the recipient of the paper prize. The winner will present on one of the three conference panels. Funding for travel and accommodations will be provided.  Application Requirements: CV and Paper abstract (500 words or less).  Submissions will be accepted via our website. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 1, 2026.  Please direct any questions to sclh@law.stanford.edu.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in two cases challenging the removal of independent agency heads, several historians and legal scholars have filed friend-of-the-court briefs focused on...

As the Trump administration attempts to suppress critical inquiry and operate outside of conventional legal boundaries, the work of LPE scholars, organizers, and practitioners has never been more…

Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued...

A public memorial and celebration of Isenberg’s life will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 6, at the University Chapel.

Christine Kexel Chabot, Marquette University Law School, has posted the The Interstitial Executive: A View from the Founding: The Supreme Court appears poised to recognize a unitary executive President with power to override statutory removal restrictions for almost all principal officers in the executive branch. The core unitary claim is that Article II vests “the executive power in a President of the United States,” and that the President therefore has exclusive control over all exercises of executive power by subordinate officers. The Court and unitary scholars have further grounded their claims in originalism and contended that the unitary executive’s primary mechanism of control is an indefeasible power to remove all subordinate officers at will. This Article debunks originalist unitary claims by introducing new historical evidence to show that the Washington, Adams, and Jefferson Administrations failed to practice what unitary scholars preach. It introduces a critical body of previously unexamined archival evidence of the terms of office and removal specified in over 200 commissions that Presidents issued to their appointees. These records recover a representative and more comprehensive view of the distinct terms of office that Presidents specified for all of their appointees including officers who exercised executive power both with and without statutory tenure protections. Unlike the Supreme Court, early Presidents recognized removal during pleasure only for officers whose tenures were not specified by statute and respected statutory and constitutional removal restrictions for other officers.  While unitary scholars claim that Article II empowered early Presidents to remove officers notwithstanding statutory restrictions, the officer commissions introduced by this Article show that executive practice instead turned on congressional discretion under Article I’s Necessary and Proper Clause. The Washington, Adams, and Jefferson Administrations asserted service “during pleasure” for officers ranging from the Secretary of State to the Librarian of Congress, but only when governing statutes left terms of office unaddressed. Presidents departed from this practice when they issued commissions to officers who enjoyed statutory or constitutional tenure protections, such as independent commissioners to settle accounts between the United States and individual states, Chief Justices who served on the Sinking Fund Commission, and Justices of the Peace who served for five-year terms set by statute. Commissions which the Presidents and Secretaries of State prepared for these officers repeatedly omitted references to removal “during pleasure” and indicated that these tenure-protected officials served during “good behavior” or for fixed terms. Early Presidents therefore asserted a power of removal during pleasure when Congress left terms of office unregulated but abided by statutory restrictions on removal applicable to other offices. The extended historical record shows that Presidents’ exercise of removal power operated within the law, not above it, and that Presidents respected the statutory terms of office which Congress established pursuant to the Necessary and Proper Clause. --Dan Ernst.  Professor Kexel Chabot's appendices are here