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:: AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS
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New for 2007: The Society announces
the first competition for the Cromwell Dissertation Prize. See below for
details.
The Society offers a wide range of awards, prizes and fellowships. See
below for information about the ones being offered this year and about the
winners in 2006. Past award winners
are listed on a separate page.
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Surrency Prize
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Sutherland Prize
§
J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute
§
Research Awards and Fellowships
§
Paul L.
Murphy Award
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Cromwell Fellowships
§
Cromwell Prizes
§
Cromwell
Book Prize
§
Cromwell
Dissertation Prize
§
Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars
§
John Philip Reid Book Award
Surrency Prize
The Surrency Prize, named in honor of
Erwin Surrency, a founding member of the Society and for many years the
editor of its publication the American Journal of Legal History,
is awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Surrency Prize Committee,
to the person or persons who wrote the best article published in the
Society's journal, the Law and History Review, in the previous
year.
The Surrency Prize for 2006 was awarded to Andrea McKenzie of the
University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) for "'This Death
Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose': The Practice of Peine Forte
et Dure in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England" in LHR 23:2.
The citation read as follows: "Most historical accounts of punishment
focus on those doing the punishing: the state and its agents. In this
insightful and original article, Andrea McKenzie examines the meaning of
the choices made by those enduring punishment. This account of the use of
peine forte et dure in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England argues
that courts interpreted the refusal of criminal defendants to answer
charges against them as an attack on their own authority and legitimacy.
Often, in fact, some defendants intended exactly that. In capital felony
cases, judges subjected the uncooperative accused to the peine forte, the
most gruesome method of physical torture at their disposal. Famously
employed against an accused wizard in late seventeenth-century Salem,
Massachusetts, the peine forte usually killed slowly and horribly. Those
subjected to it either bore their fate stoically or quickly changed their
minds and agreed to plead. McKenzies account emphasizes the nature of legal
and judicial authority and, just as important, the motives of those who
willingly chose the peine forte, knowing it probably meant death. For some,
the chance to invert the inherent power structure of the criminal process
was the opportunity to assert the ultimate moral authority in society.
Moreover, the display of manly courage and resolve in the face of torture
could be read as a rejection of the deferential, passive role thrust upon
[such offenders] by the courts. McKenzie employs an expressive literary
style, in keeping with the pathos of her sources, while unsentimentally
exposing the power of the judicial process in the lives of ordinary people.
This piece contributes fresh insights to the history of capital punishment,
the meaning of pain and suffering, the interweaving of legal authority and
religious faith, and the representation of masculinity in the early modern
period. Its skilful blending of cultural and legal history provides a model
for many other areas of inquiry."
The Committee also awarded an honorable mention to Sally H. Clarke for
"Unmanageable Risks: MacPherson v. Buick and the Emergence of a Mass
Consumer Market" in LHR 23:1.
The selection of the winner of the Surrency Prize for 2007 is under the
charge of the Society’s Committee on the Surrency Prize:
Lauren Benton, Chair, New York University <lauren.benton@nyu.edu>
Philip Girard, Dalhousie University <philip.girard@dal.ca>
Dylan C. Penningroth, Northwestern University <dcp@northwestern.edu>
Richard Ross, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) <rjross@law.uiuc.edu>,
<RRoss10688@aol.com>
Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation <vswoeste@abfn.org>
Sutherland Prize
The Sutherland Prize, named in
honor of the late Donald W. Sutherland, a distinguished historian of the
law of medieval England and a mentor of many students, is awarded annually,
on the recommendation of the Sutherland Prize Committee, to the person or
persons who wrote the best article on English legal history published in
the previous year.
The Sutherland Prize for 2006 was awarded to Andrea McKenzie of the
University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) for "'This Death
Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose': The Practice of Peine Forte
et Dure in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England" in LHR 23:2.
(This was the first time in the history of these awards that the Surrency
Prize and the Sutherland Prize were awarded to the same person for the same
article.) The citation read as follows: "McKenzie's winning article is
distinguished by both its chronological range and its analytical reach. The
practice of the peine, the pressing to death with heavy weights of those accused
criminals who impeded the normal course of justice by refusing to plead to
their indictments, stands as an anomaly both in the English legal tradition
and in English legal historiography. At odds alike with the English law's
much-celebrated opposition to judicial torture and to its vaunted reliance
on jury trials to determine guilt and innocence, the peine has hitherto
puzzled legal historians, who have conventionally attributed defendants'
willingness to subject themselves to this horrific ordeal to the desire to
transmit estates to heirs by avoiding criminal conviction. McKenzie's
article not only exposes the limits of this received interpretation but
also provides a convincing series of alternative explanations. Her
interpretation illuminates the history of the peine by situating legal
practice within the context of the counter-theatre of the law as well as a
spectrum of popular attitudes and discourses that range from religious
conceptions of the martyr to plebeian conceptions of masculinity. The result
is a compelling analysis that weaves together first-rate legal, social and
cultural history to provide a compelling resolution to the conundrum of why
early modern men and women chose to subject themselves to death by pressing
rather than appealing to the celebrated mercies of the English jury
system."
The selection of the winner of the Sutherland Prize for 2007 is under the
charge of the Society’s Committee on the Sutherland Prize:
David Lemmings, Chair, University of Adelaide (Australia) <david.lemmings@newcastle.edu.au>
Joseph Biancalana, University of Cincinnati
<biancaj@ucmail.uc.edu>
David Sugarman, Lancaster University (UK)
<d.sugarman@lancaster.ac.uk>
J. Willard Hurst
Summer Institute in Legal History
The Society's J. Willard Hurst Memorial
Committee is charged with task of appropriately remembering the late J.
Willard Hurst, who was for many years the dean of historians of American
law. On the Committee's recommendation, the Society, in conjunction with
the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School
has sponsored three biennial J. Willard Hurst Summer Institutes in Legal History.
The purpose of the Hurst Summer Institute is to advance the approach to
legal scholarship fostered by J. Willard Hurst in his teaching, mentoring,
and scholarship. The "Hurstian perspective" emphasizes the
importance of understanding law in context; it is less concerned with the
characteristics of law as developed by formal legal institutions than with
the way in which positive law manifests itself as the "law in
action." The Hurst Summer Institute assists young scholars from law,
history, and other disciplines in pursuing research in legal history.
The fourth Hurst Summer Institute will be held this summer in Madison,
Wisconsin, with tentative dates from June 10 through June 22. Applications
are being accepted through January 15, 2007. Barbara Welke, Associate
Professor in History and Law at the University of Minnesota and an active
member of the Society, will lead the Institute. Guest scholars will include
Lawrence Friedman, Dirk Hartog, Holly Brewer, and Margot Canaday. The two
week program is structured but informal, and features discussions of core
readings in legal history and analysis of the work of the participants in
the Institute. The Hurst Memorial Committee of the Society is charged with
the responsiblity of selecting up to twelve fellows to participate in the
Institute. Further information is available at:
http://www.law.wisc.edu/ils/hurst_summer_institute/2007application.htm.
The members of the Committee are:
Rayman L.
Solomon, Chair, Rutgers University <raysol@camlaw.rutgers.edu>
Lawrence Friedman, Stanford University <lmf@stanford.edu>
Robert W. Gordon, Yale University <robert.w.gordon@yale.edu>
Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University <hartog@princeton.edu>
Laura Kalman, University of California, Santa Barbara <kalman@history.ucsb.edu>
Jonathan Lurie, Rutgers Newark <jlurie@andromeda.rutgers.edu>
Arthur J. McEvoy, University of Wisconsin (Madison) <amcevoy@facstaff.wisc.edu>
Chris Tomlins, American Bar Foundation <clt@abfn.org>
Aviam Soifer, University of Hawaii, <soifer@hawaii.edu>
Barbara Welke (ex officio) (Hurst
Institute Leader), University of Minnesota <welke004@tc.umn.edu>
Reasearch Awards
and Fellowships
Paul L. Murphy Award
The Murphy
Award, an annual research grant of $1,500, is intended to assist the
research and publication of scholars new to the field of U.S.
constitutional history or the history of American civil rights / civil
liberties. To be eligible for
the Murphy Award, an applicant must possess the following qualifications:
(1)
be engaged in significant research and writing on U.S.
constitutional history or the history of civil rights/civil liberties in
the United States, with preference accorded to applicants employing
multi-disciplinary research approaches;
(2)
hold, or be a candidate for, the Ph.D. in History or a
related discipline; and
(3)
not yet have published a book-length work in U.S.
constitutional history or the history of American civil rights/civil
liberties, and, if employed by an institution of higher learning, not yet
be tenured.
The Paul L. Murphy
Award was not made in 2006.
Cromwell Fellowships
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation* makes available of a number of
fellowships for 2007, intended to support research and writing in American
legal history. The number of awards to be made, and their value, is at the
discretion of the Foundation. In the past two years, three to five awards
have been made annually by the trustees of the Foundation, in amounts up to
$5,000. Preference will be given to scholars at the early stages of their
careers. The Society's Cromwell Fellowships Advisory Committee reviews the
applications and makes recommendations to the Foundation
In 2006, Cromwell fellowships were awarded to:
Christopher Beauchamp, Ph.D., University of Cambridge (UK), to begin
postdoctoral research in turning his dissertation on patent litigation in
the late nineteenth century into a book.
Kenneth W. Mack, J.D. Harvard Law School, Ph. D. Princeton University, a
member of the Harvard Law School faculty, for archival research in
connection with completing his book on African-American lawyers and their
legal practice during the first half of the twentieth century.
Kunal Parker, J.D. Harvard Law School, Ph.D. candidate at Princeton
University, a member of the faculty of the Cleveland-Marshall School of law
and a Golieb Fellow, New York University Law School, for support for his
dissertation research on changing understandings of history and of custom
in nineteenth century legal thought.
Nicholas Parrillo, a J.D./Ph.D candidate at the Yale Law School and a Golieb
Fellow, New York University Law School, to continue his doctoral
dissertation research on the legal history of governmental salaries and
pay.
Daniel J. Sharfstein, J.D., Yale Law School and Golieb Fellow, New York
University Law School, for archival research in connection with his
book-length study of families whose racial identities shifted from African
American to white from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
* The Cromwell Foundation was established in 1930 to
promote and encourage scholarship in legal history, particularly in the
colonial and early national periods of the United States. The Foundation
has supported the publication of legal records as well as historical
monographs.
Application Process for 2007
This year there will be a single application process
for both the Cromwell Fellowships and the Muphy Award. Applicants should submit a three to
five page description of their proposed project, a curriculum vitae, a
budget, a timeline, and two letters of recommendation from academic referees.
There is no application form.
Applications must be received no later than June 30, 2007. Successful
applicants will be notified in mid-November.
To apply, please send all materials to:
Professor Hendrik Hartog
Chair, Committee for Research Awards and Fellowships
History Department
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
In addition to Professor Hartog, the members of the Committee are:
Barbara A. Black, Columbia University <bab@law.columbia.edu>
Robert W. Gordon, Yale University
<robert.w.gordon@yale.edu>
Maeva Marcus (ex officio) (President-elect), George Washington University
<maevamarcus@verizon.net>
Christopher L. Tomlins, American Bar Foundation <clt@abfn.org>
Sandra VanBurkleo, Wayne State University <svanbur@comcast.net>
Cromwell Prizes
Cromwell Book Prize
The William Nelson
Cromwell Foundation* awards annually a
$5000 prize for excellence in scholarship in the field of American Legal
History by a junior scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote
new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral
fellows and faculty not yet tenured. The work may be in any area of
American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies,
but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive
some preference. The prize has been awarded in the past to "first
books," but substantial articles (such as sometimes appear in law
reviews) are also eligible. This year doctoral dissertations (and
student-written articles) have their own separate
competition.
The Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize
Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. The Committee
will consider books and articles published in the previous calendar year.
The Society will announce the award after the annual meeting of the
Cromwell Foundation, which normally takes place in the first week of
November. Details about this year's award process will be available on this
site shortly.
The prize for 2006 was awarded to
Professor Holly Brewer of North Carolina State University for her book, By
Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in
Authority (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press). The Committee's
citation read: "Brewer's study places children and childhood at the
center of a fundamental shift in the meaning of consent in seventeenth and
eighteenth century Anglo-America. In taking seriously evidence from
sixteenth century England that other scholars have ignored, seen as
anomalous, or mistaken and then scrupulously following the changing
evidence relating to children's consent in a whole range of relationships
vis-à-vis church, God, nation and relations with others, including baptism,
allegiance, military service, jury service, testimony, transfers of
property, labor contracts, and marriage through the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Brewer captures the shift from status (birth) to
reason as the foundation of consent. In doing so, she breathes a new and
deeper meaning into the fundamental social, cultural, and political
transformation captured by well-worn phrases such as "from status to
contract" and "the age of reason" and highlights the
religious roots of this transformation that begins with the Reformation and
sees its full flowering in the political ferment of the American
Revolution. This is a book about the legal creation of modern childhood as
much as a book about how the child became a metaphor in eighteenth century
political theory for those without the capacity to reason. Brewer thus
captures how in a moment in which the consent of the people became the
foundation for political authority, children in fact lost both personal and
political power. And in turn, she highlights the power of children as an
example that could be and was applied to exclude others, including women
and African Americans, on the grounds that they too lacked the capacity to
reason required in a government based on reasoned consent. Brewer weaves
her powerful argument with grace and erudition, taking her reader from the
Reformation through the American Revolution, crafting an Anglo-American
legal history and drawing with equal facility on religious texts, political
theory, legal treatises, and legal cases."
* For a brief description of the Foundation, see above Cromwell Fellowships .
Cromwell Dissertation
Prize
As mentioned above in connection with the
Cromwell Book Prize, that prize (even without the name "book" in
it) has had a tendency to go to "first books." Although
dissertations and student-written articles (e.g., in law reviews) were eligible
for the prize, two successive committees felt that such works did not stand
much of chance of winning the prize when faced with the competition of a
substantial monograph. The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation*
agreed, and this year has generously offered to fund another prize for
dissertations accepted or student articles written in the previous year
(i.e., 2006) in the general field of American legal history (broadly
conceived), with some preference for those in the area of early America or the
colonial period.
* For a brief description of the Foundation, see above Cromwell Fellowships.
Nomination Process for 2007
Anyone may nominate works for the prizes. The Committee
will accept nominations from authors, dissertation advisors, presses, or
anyone else. Nominations for this year’s prizes should include a curriculum vitae of the author and
be accompanied by a hard copy version of the work (no electronic
submissions, please) sent to each member of the committee and postmarked no
later than July 15, 2007:
Professor Tony Freyer, Chair
University Research Professor of History and Law
306 Law Center
University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0382
Professor Barbara Aronstein Black
George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History
Columbia Law School
435 West 116th St.
New York, New York 10027-7297
Professor Holly Brewer
History Department, North Carolina State University
350 Withers Hall, Campus Box 8108
Raleigh, NC 27695-8108
Professor Cornelia H. Dayton
Associate Professor History
University of Connecticut
241 Glenbrook Road
Storrs, CT 06269-2103
Professor Philip Hamburger
Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law
Columbia Law School
435 West 116th St.
New York, New York 10027-7297
Professor Charles W. McCurdy
Professor of History and Law
Randall Hall, P.O. Box 400180
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904
Professor Richard Ross
Professor of Law and History
University of Illinois College of Law
504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign, IL 61820
Kathryn T. Preyer
Scholars
Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished
historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to young
legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to
help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual
meeting of the Society two younger legal historians designated Kathryn T.
Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to
the Society. (Whether there is a Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Panel at the
meeting, as there was this year, or whether the Preyer Scholars present
their papers as part of other panel depends on the subject-matter of the
winning papers and on what is on the rest of the program.) The generosity
of Professor Preyer's friends and family has enabled the Society to offer a
small honorarium to the Preyer Scholars and to reimburse, in some measure
or entirely, their costs of attending the meeting.
The competition for Preyer Scholars is organized by the Society's Kathryn
T. Preyer Memorial Committee. Details about this year's award process will
be available on this site shortly.
The first two Preyer Scholars were chosen this year. They are Sophia Z.
Lee, a J.D./Ph.D. student at Yale University, for her paper, "Hotspots
in a Cold War: The NAACP's Postwar Labor Constitutionalism, 1948-1964"
and Karen M. Tani, a J.D./Ph.D. student at the University for Pennsylvania,
for her paper, "Fleming v. Nestor: Anticommunism, The Welfare
State and the Making of 'New Property.'" The first Preyer Panel
featured the work of both. The panel was well-attended. The Society's
president was in the chair. Comments were provided by Dan Ernst and Laura Kalman.
Application Process for 2007
The competition for this year’s Preyer Scholars will be
organized by the Society’s Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee. Submissions are welcome on any
legal, institutional and/or constitutional aspect of American history. Graduate students, law students,
and other early-career scholars who have presented no more than two papers
at a national conference are eligible to apply. Papers already submitted to the ASLH Program Committee,
whether or not accepted for an existing panel, and papers never submitted
are all equally eligible for the competition.
Submissions should include a curriculum vitae of the author, contact
information, and a complete draft of the paper to be presented. The draft may be longer than could
be presented in the time available at the meeting (twenty minutes) and
should contain supporting documentation, but one of the criteria for
selection will be the suitability of the paper for reduction to a
twenty-minute oral presentation.
Each Preyer Scholar chosen will receive an award of $250 and up to
$750 to reimburse expenses for attendance at the annual meeting.
The deadline for submission is June 15, 2007. The Preyer Scholars will be named by August 1. Electronic submissions(preferably
in Word) are strongly encouraged and should be sent to the members of the
Preyer Committee:
Laura Kalman, Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara (kalman@history.ucsb.edu)
Lyndsay Campbell, University of California, Berkeley (lyndsay@iii.ca)
Christine Desan, Harvard University (desan@law.harvard.edu)
Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania (sgordon@law.upenn.edu)
David Konig, Washington University in St. Louis (dtkonig@artsci.wustl.edu).
John Phillip Reid
Book Award
Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific
legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by
the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip
Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best book published in English in
the previous year in any of the fields broadly defined as Anglo-American
legal history.
The award is given on the recommendation of the Society's John Philip Reid
Prize Committee. Details about this year's award process will be available
on this site shortly.
This year's Reid Prize was awarded to Daniel J. Hulsebosch, for Constituting
Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the
Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (University of North Carolina Press). The
Committee's citation read: "Daniel Hulsebosch's book offers a sweeping
reinterpretation of early American constitutional history that takes the
reader from the imperial constitution of Lord Coke to the constitutional
imperialism of Chancellor Kent. The heart of the analysis reassesses the
meaning of the American Revolution as a constitutional event. Bringing
original sources to light, using canonical sources in new ways, and
building on the work of John Reid that has forced historians to take the
legal grievances of the eighteenth century seriously, Hulsebosch
demonstrates that the state and federal constitutions were shaped by North
America's imperial past. He shows how the raw material of the English
constitution got remade by colonists and imperial agents on the ground, as
well as by the British American lawyers who are now called Founding
Fathers. He also illuminates the process by which legal practices were
abstracted into formal ideas and how this formalization was a means to an
end: first to unite a transatlantic empire, then to forge a more perfect
Union. Constituting Empire does not pretend to have the last word
on the American founding. But it may well have pioneered a new line of
scholarship exploring the social politics of constitutionalism."
The Committee also announced that Stuart Banner was the runner-up for the
prize for How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the
Frontier (Harvard University Press).
Nomination Process for 2007
For this year’s prize, the Committee will accept
nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else. Nominations for this year’s
prize should include a curriculum
vitae of the author. Nominations should be
submitted by May 31, 2007, via e-mail, to the secretary-treasurer of the
American Society for Legal History, Professor William P. LaPiana <wlapiana@nyls.edu>, New
York Law School, 57 Worth Street, New York, New York 10013
(212-431-2883). In addition, a
copy of the book should be mailed to each of the members of the committee.
William Nelson, Chair
New York University School of Law
40 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
<nelsonw@juris.law.nyu.edu>
Christian G. Fritz
University of New Mexico, School of Law
1117 Stanford Drive, N.E.
MSC11 6070
Albuquerque, NM 87131–0001
<fritz@law.unm.edu>
Richard Helmholz
University of Chicago, School of Law
1111 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
<dick_helmholz@law.uchicago.edu>
Annette Gordon-Reed
New York Law School
57 Worth Street
New York, NY 10013
<agordon@nyls.edu>
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