AHA Award Recipients

Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society

In 1960, the Littleton-Griswold Fund Committee discussed the initiation of a prize worth $500 to be awarded biennially for the best article on legal history. A year later the Committee created the Littleton-Griswold Prize for studies in the legal history of the American colonies and of the United States prior to 1900. The prize was not awarded, however, until 1966, and was abolished the following year. In 1985, Council revived the prize as an annual award of $1,000 for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society. The revived prize is administered by a joint committee of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History.

2007

Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of Americam Legal Pluralism, Cornell Univ. Press, 2006

2006

Daniel J. Hulsebosch, New York University School of Law, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830, (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

2005

Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Harvard University Press, 2004)

2004

Mae M. Ngai, University of Chicago, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2003)

2003

Bruce H. Mann, University of Pennsylvania, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of Amercian Independence (Harvard University Press, 2003)

2002

Barbara Young Welke, University of Minnesota, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

2001

Karl Jacoby, Brown University, Crimes Against Nature:  Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (U. of California Press, 2001)

2000

Gail Williams O'Brien, North Carolina State Univ., The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post–World War II South (U. of North Carolina Press, 1999)

1999

Linda K. Kerber, U. of Iowa, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (Hill and Wang, 1998)

1998

Barry Cushman (University of Virginia) for Rethinking the New Deal Court. The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1998).

1997

William J. Novak, U. of Chicago, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (U. of North Carolina Press, 1996)

1996

Daniel R. Ernst, Georgetown U. Law Center, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (U. of Illinois Press, 1995)

1995

Morton Keller, Brandeis U., Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America 1900–1933 (Harvard U. Press, 1994)

1994

G. Edward White, U. of Virginia, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (Oxford Univ. Press, 1993)

1993

Christopher L. Tomlins, American Bar Foundation, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge U. Press, 1993)

1992

Herbert Hovenkamp, U. of Iowa, Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937 (Harvard U. Press, 1991)

1991

Laura Kalman, U. of California at Santa Barbara, Abe Fortas (Yale U. Press)

1990

Allen Steinberg, Bowdoin College, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (U. of North Carolina Press)

1989

William E. Nelson, New York U., The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Rhetoric to Judicial Doctrine (Harvard U. Press)

1988

Arthur F. McEvoy, Northwestern U., The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and the Law in California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press)

1987

Mark Tushnet, Univ. of Southern California Law Center, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press)

1986

Michael Grossberg, Case Western Reserve U., Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth Century America (U. of North Carolina Press)

1985

R. Kent Newmyer, U. of Connecticut, Storrs, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (U. of North Carolina Press)

1966

L. Kinpin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., The Legal Papers of John Adams (Belknap Press of Harvard U.P.)

Last Updated: January 11, 2008 2:48 PM