2014 Election
American Society for Legal History
Candidates for the Board of Directors (10 candidates for five positions):
Andrew Wender Cohen is a Scruggs Scholar and Associate Professor of History at Syracuse
University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship. His research into the history of crime tries to
uncover the lives of ordinary Americans and their experiences with the law. His most recent
work, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century (W.W. Norton & Co.,
2015), explores how the government regulated exchange between residents and the world.
Cohen’s first book, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern
American Economy, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, 2004), examined the conflicts leading to the New
Deal and racketeering law. He has also published articles in the Journal of American History,
Labor, the Journal of Urban History, Syracuse Law Review, and Law and Social Inquiry. He
received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1999. Since 2005, Cohen has served on the
editorial board of Law and History Review. He sits on the Cromwell Prize committee. He also
edits a book series for Penn Press on the history of “Business, Politics, and Society.” Cohen has
won Syracuse’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize, as well as fellowships from the Radcliffe
Institute, the ACLS, the National Humanities Center, and the Newberry Library.
Cohen writes: “I feel that ASLH benefits from a mix of researchers from law schools,
humanities, and social science departments. In the past, I have asked scholars who did not see
themselves as legal historians to attend the annual meeting, some of them becoming regulars. If
elected, I will continue these efforts.”
Adrienne Davis is the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law and Vice Provost at Washington
University in St. Louis. She also holds courtesy appointments in History; Women, Gender &
Sexuality Studies; and African and African-American Studies. She researches in the fields of
slavery and sexuality; political history of reparations; and the histories and contemporary
regulatory challenges of what she calls “irregular intimacies,” including polygamy, sex work,
and, currently, gender segregation of public space. Her work has been published in the Stanford
Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and California Law Review, and she is currently working
on a monograph, Irregular Intimacies: The Sexual Politics of Democracy, and co-editing a
collection, Black Sexual Economies, that grows from her earlier work conceiving slavery as a
sexual political economy. Adrienne is also founder and co-director of the Law, Identity &
Culture Project at Washington University, a cross-disciplinary initiative that facilitates interdisciplinary exchanges about the intersection of legal, cultural, and political issues, and the Black
Sexual Economies Project, which facilitated interdisciplinary and inter-generational exchanges
between scholars working on race and sexuality. Adrienne started participating in the ASLH in
the early 1990s and, having watched it grow in size, stature, and diversity of fields and interests,
looks forward to bringing her strong administrative and institution-building experience to
facilitating the Association’s mission and goals for the next generation, including expanding
membership and providing mentoring opportunities. Adrienne earned her B.A. and J.D. from
Yale University where she served on the Executive Committee of the Yale Law Journal.
Alison LaCroix is Professor of Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Teaching Scholar at the
University of Chicago Law School, and an Associate Member of the University of Chicago
Department of History. LaCroix received her B.A. in history from Yale University in 1996 and
her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1999. She received her Ph.D. in history from Harvard
University in 2007. While in law school, LaCroix served as Essays Editor of the Yale Law
Journal and Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. From 1999 to 2001,
she practiced in the litigation department at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. Before joining
the University of Chicago faculty in 2006, she was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at
New York University School of Law. LaCroix is the author of The Ideological Origins of
American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010), and the co-editor, with Martha
Nussbaum, of Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel (Oxford University
Press, 2013). Her work has been published in the Law and History Review, Yale Law Journal,
Stanford Law Review, and Supreme Court Review, among others. LaCroix's teaching and
research interests include legal history, constitutional law, federalism, federal jurisdiction, civil
procedure, law and linguistics, and law and literature. She has served on the ASLH
Membership, Program, and Cromwell Dissertation Prize Committees. If elected to the Board,
she would work to continue to develop the society’s spatial, temporal, and methodological
breadth, and to continue the society’s great tradition of encouraging graduate students and
younger scholars.
Assaf Likhovski is the Director of the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History and
the Associate Dean for Research at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law. He is the author of Law
and Identity in Mandate Palestine (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), which was
awarded the Yonathan Shapiro Best Book Award in Israel Studies, as well as articles on Israeli,
American and English legal history. He is co-editor of a number of collections of articles on
legal history including "Histories of Legal Transplantations" Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 10
(2009) (with Ron Harris). He is currently working on a book on taxation, law and modernity in
British-ruled Palestine and Israel. He was visiting professor at Cardozo Law School,
distinguished visiting professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and visiting
professor at UCLA Law School and History Department. He is a graduate of Tel Aviv University
and Harvard Law School, where he was a Fulbright and Rothschild fellow. He was later a Golieb
fellow at the NYU School of Law, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem
and is currently an adjunct senior research fellow in the Department of Business Law and
Taxation, Monash University. He was co-founder of the Israeli Legal History Association,
established in 2005. A member of the ASLH since 1998, he has twice served on the Program
Committee. If elected to the Board of Directors, he would seek to expand the global reach of the
ASLH, and to increase the support the Association provides to young legal historians.
Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Associate Professor of Law at the University of
Oregon Law School. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law,
Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her articles appear in the Law and History
Review; Slavery & Abolition; Journal of Family History, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law &
Justice; Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power; Yale Journal of Law and the
Humanities, and Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left. She has received fellowships for
her research from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation,
National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry
Library. She was awarded the Surrency Prize in 2011 for her article, "Fractional Freedoms:
Legal Activism & Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700. In 2014, she will be in
fellow in residence at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs, where she will
complete a monograph on enslaved women in colonial Latin America using ecclesiastical and
civil courts to litigate their claims to liberty.
McKinley writes, “I would ideally like to see the ‘A’ in ASLH embrace ‘American’ Legal
History in its broadest cultural and geographical sense, extending its investigative reach into the
historical entanglements of Anglo-American Empire with colonial and republican Latin
America, and Iberia. Of particular interest to me is the way that law facilitated these transactions
and movements of people (enslaved, indentured, and free), capital, and commodities.
Ajay K. Mehrotra is Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at the Indiana
University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. He is also an Adjunct Professor of
History at Indiana University and an Affiliated Faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor
Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis. He received his BA in economics
from the University of Michigan, a law degree from Georgetown, and his Ph.D. in American
history from the University of Chicago. Ajay teaches legal history and taxation, and his research
focuses on the historical relationship between taxation and American state formation. He is the
author of Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive
Taxation, 1877-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and a co-editor (with
Monica Prasad and Isaac William Martin) of The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in
Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His
writings have also appeared in student-edited law reviews and several interdisciplinary journals
including Law & History Review. He has held grants and fellowships from the American
Academy of Arts & Sciences, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. He has been a
member of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) since the late 1990s, participating
frequently in the annual conference. He is particularly interested in continuing to make the
Society more inclusive by appealing to young historians and historically-minded social scientists
who are doing legal history, but don’t even know it.
Patricia Hagler Minter is Associate Professor of History at Western Kentucky University. She
received her BA from the University of Tennessee (1986) and her MA (1988) and Ph.D. in
History from the University of Virginia (1994). Minter studies American and British Legal
History, and her research focuses on the history of law, race, and civil rights. These interests are
on display in her recent book, Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History (University
of Georgia Press, 2013, with Sally E. Hadden). She has also published articles in several
journals, including Law and History Review. Minter has been a member of the ASLH since
1991 when she joined as a graduate student. She has served on the Program Committee for the
Annual Meeting (1994), as a member of the H-LAW Editorial Board (since 2011), and as a
member of the ad hoc Website Committee (2012). Most importantly, she currently serves as
Chair of the Membership Committee (since 2011) and as a member of the Graduate Student
Outreach Committee (since 2013). Her work on these committees reflects her strong
commitment both to the continued recruitment of graduate students to the organization and the
retention of existing members who make this such a vibrant intellectual community. If elected to
the Board of Directors, she would bring this same enthusiasm to the larger work of the Society
in order to continue the same welcoming and intellectually stimulating environment that have
helped her grow as a legal historian.
Polly J. Price is Professor of Law and Associated Faculty, Department of History, at Emory
University, where she teaches American Legal History, Latin American comparative law and
history, and citizenship and immigration law. She has also served as a visiting professor at
Vanderbilt Law School and as the Frances Hare Visiting Professor of Tort Law at the University
of Alabama. Price is the author of two books and a number of articles on American legal history,
citizenship, property rights, and the judiciary. Her most recent book, a biography of Judge
Richard S. Arnold, was featured on C-SPAN2’s Book TV in 2009. Previous ASLH service
includes the Membership Committee and co-chair of the Local Arrangements Committee for
Atlanta 2012. She is currently a member of the Standing Committee on Conferences and the
Annual Meeting. She writes, “Encouraging the participation of new members of our profession
is key. I also have an abiding interest in continuing to extend the ASLH’s global ties, particularly
with scholars in Latin America.”
Intisar A. Rabb is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a director of its Islamic Legal
Studies Program. She also holds an appointment as a Professor of History at Harvard University
and as a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study. She previously served as a member of the faculties at NYU and at Boston College, and as
a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third
Circuit. She teaches and conducts research in Islamic law and legal history, criminal law and
comparative law, and legislation and statutory interpretation. She was named a 2010 Carnegie
Scholar for research on issues of Islamic law, for which she is researching the role of legal
history in discourse on contemporary criminal law reform in Iran. She has published research on
Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, including an edited volume, Law and Tradition in
Classical Islamic Thought (with Michael Cook et al., Palgrave 2013), and numerous articles on
the history of Islamic law and society. She has a forthcoming book on the concept of reasonable
doubt in Islamic legal history, Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation,
and Islamic Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and is currently working on a
book on the early history of courts and judicial procedure in the 7th to 11th-century Muslim
world, Qāḍī Justice: Early Courts and the Administration of Justice in Islamic Law (Cambridge
University Press, under contract). She received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from
Yale Law School, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. Active in ASLH since 2004,
she co-chaired the Program Committee in 2013. She is especially interested in supporting ASLH
initiatives engaging medieval and comparative legal histories, and in supporting Society
programs designed to provide space for early-career scholars.
Karl Shoemaker is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is
currently a Romnes Faculty Fellow. He holds appointments in the History Department, the Legal
Studies Program, and the Law School. He was also a Visiting Assistant Professor at the
University of Miami Law School in 2007. He has served as Director of UW-Madison’s Medieval
Studies Program since 2011. He specializes in medieval legal history, working in both English
common law and continental sources. He is currently researching the devil’s medieval legal
career. He authored Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500 (Fordham, 2011), and
has published legal history articles in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte,
Speculum, and Revue de l’histoire des religion. He has been awarded fellowships from the North
American Conference on British Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was
an NEH Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He graduated with a J.D. from
Samford University, Cumberland School of Law in 1996 and with a Ph.D. from the University of
California, Berkeley in 2001. He is an advisor to the American Bar Association, and also serves
as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Law, Culture, and Humanities.
Shoemaker has participated several times in the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute for Legal
History hosted in Madison, and in 2013 was co-chair of the ASLH Program Committee (Miami).
He hopes to continue the ASLH’s expanding outreach to scholars working outside North
America and outside the common law tradition.
Candidates for the Nominating Committee (2 candidates for 1 position):
Martha Jones is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, where she is a
faculty member in the Departments of History and Afroamerican Studies and the Law School.
She is a co-director of the Program in Race, Law & History at Michigan Law. Her work
examines the history of race, rights, and citizenship in the nineteenth century United States. Her
first book, the All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Culture, 18301900, explores black American debates about the rights of women. Her current project –
Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America – is study of race and
citizenship in the antebellum United States that centers on the status of free African Americans.
She is co-editor of Toward and Intellectual History of Black Women, forthcoming from UNC
Press in 2015. Her work has appeared in Law and History Review, North Carolina Law Review,
The Journal of the Civil War Era, and The Journal of Women’s History. She holds a Ph.D. from
Columbia University (2001) and a J.D. from CUNY School of Law (1987.) Her prior service to
the ASLH includes the Board of Directors (2009-11) and the Publications Committee (20112014.) She is also a member of the Legal History Consortium (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan,
Minnesota, and Penn,) which has been hosting emerging scholars' conferences since 2010, with
ASLH support. She says: “Through my work with ASLH, I hope to encourage diversity in our
field and to support the work of emerging, cutting-edge scholars.”
Miranda Spieler is Associate Professor of History at the American University of Paris and was
Associate Professor at the University of Arizona until July 2014. She received an A.B. from
Harvard College (1994) and a Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University (2005). Her
book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard, 2012) was awarded the J.
Russell Major Prize and the George L. Mosse Prize by the American Historical Association in
2013. Her articles on French imperial law and colonial slavery include “The Legal Structure of
Colonial Rule During the French Revolution,” William & Mary Quarterly (2009) and “The
Destruction of Liberty in French Guiana: law, identity, and the meaning of legal space,” Social
History (2011). She has received research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the
George Lurcy Trust, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and was a Laurance Rockefeller
Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values for the 2007-8 academic year. She
is currently at work on two book projects. The first explores the lives of slaves imprisoned in
eighteenth-century Paris to understand the effect of colonial slavery on metropolitan legal norms
and practices. The second investigates the relationship between law and identity during the
Revolutionary era (1750-1850) by examining legal problems relating to proper names including
the names of Jews, authors, slaves, freedmen, women, nobles, and natural children (with some
overlap between these categories). She teaches courses on legal theory, human rights, Atlantic
history, the French Revolution, and comparative slavery.