Sara Fieldston
Professor Robert Gordon
RACE AND GENDER IN AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY, RECONSTRUCTION-PRESENT
Surveys and Classics
1. Lawrence Friedman, A History of American Law 2d ed. (Part 3: American Law at the
Close of the Nineteenth Century) (1985)
2. Lawrence Friedman, American Law in the Twentieth Century (2002)
3. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of
Legal Orthodoxy (1992)
4. Grant Gilmore, Ages of American Law (1977)
5. Sandra Van Burkleo, “Belonging to the World”: Women’s Rights and American
Constitutional Culture (2001)
Methodology and Historiography
6. Robert W. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” 36 Stan. L. Rev. 57 (1984)
7. Robert W. Gordon, “J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American
Historiography,” 10 Law & Soc’y Rev. 9 (1975)
8. Barbara Y. Welke, “Willard Hurst and the Archipelago of American Legal
Historiography” Law and History Review 18.1 (Spring 2000)
9. Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” 1985 Wis. L. Rev. 899
10. Forbath, Hartog, and Minow, “Legal Histories from Below,” 1985 Wis. L. Rev. 759
Reconstruction
11. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in
the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998)
12. Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of
Reconstruction (1997)
13. Joseph A. Ranney, In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the
Reconstruction of Southern Law (2006)
Progressive Era to New Deal
14. Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (2003)
15. Anna R. Igra, Wives Without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York,
1900–1935 (2007)
16. Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and
Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (1978)
17. Ian Haney-Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New
York University Press, 1996)
18. Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New
York City (2005)
19. Joan G. Zimmerman, “The Jurisprudence of Equality: The Women’s Minimum Wage,
The First Equal Rights Amendment, and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 1905-1923,” The
Journal of American History 78, no 1 (June 1991): 188-225
20. Julie Novkov, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law, and Labor in the
Progressive Era and New Deal Years (2001)
21. Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Pubic Policy
(1998)
22. Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 18901935 (1994)
23. William E. Leuchtenberg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in
the Age of Roosevelt (1995)
24. Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional
Revolution (1998)
25. Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Transformations (Part 3, “Modernity”) (2000)
26. Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the
Struggle for Racial Equality (2004)
The Postwar Era
27. Lucas A. Powe, Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics (2000)
28. Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of
Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (2005)
29. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(2002)
30. John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in
America (1996)
31. Mark Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court,
1936-1961 (1994)
32. Serena Mayeri, “The Strange Career of Jane Crow: Sex Segregation and the
Transformation of Anti-Discrimination Discourse,” 18 Yale Journal of Law and the
Humanities 187
Reconsidering Brown v. Board of Education
33. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black
America’s Struggle for Equality (1975)
34. Mark Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950
(1987)
35. James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its
Troubled Legacy (2001)
36. Michael Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” 81
Journal of American History 81 (1994)
37. Risa Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007)
Family Law
38. Martha Minow, “ ‘Forming Underneath Everything that Grows’: Toward a History of
Family Law” Wisconsin Law Review 1985, no. 4 (1985): 2127-2211.
39. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (2001)
40. Lawrence Friedman, Private Lives: Families, Individuals, and the Law (2005)
41. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000)
42. Reva Siegel, “ ‘The Rule of Love’: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy” Yale Law
Journal, Vol. 105, 1996
43. Reva Siegel, “The Modernization of Marital Status Law: Adjudicating Wives’ Rights to
Earnings, 1860-1930,” Georgetown Law Journal 82 (1994): 2127-2211
Torts
44. Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the
Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (2001)
45. John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Working Men, Destitute Widows,
and the Remaking of American Law (2004)
Labor and Citizenship
46. Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of
Citizenship (1998)
47. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic
Citizenship in 20th-Century America (2001)
48. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in 20th Century America
(2009)
49. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American
Citizenship and Labor (2002)
50. Mai Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America (2004)
51. Reva Siegel, “She the People,” 115 Harv. L. Rev. 2001-2002
52. William E. Forbath, “Caste, Class, and Equal Citizenship,” Michigan Law Review 98
(October 1999)
Reproductive Rights
53. Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United
States, 1867-1973 (1997)
54. David Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v.
Wade (1994)