About the Program
Legal history has long been a curricular priority at the Law School and a strength of its faculty. UVA’s curriculum places the development of the law in historical context so that students can better understand both the past and present legal landscape. With 20 scholars in the Law School and 15 scholars in the Corcoran Department of History all teaching or doing work in legal history, UVA offers an unparalleled variety of lecture courses, seminars and clinics in the field.
The Legal History Program is structured around two related components:
Dual Degree (J.D.-M.A.) in History
The heart of the program is the Dual-Degree (J.D.-M.A.) Program in History, which enables law students to earn an M.A. in history during the same three years they are earning their J.D. As part of the program, J.D.-M.A. candidates present drafts of their theses to faculty. Several veterans of the dual-degree program have gone on to successful careers in legal academia, and recent graduates have clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justices.
About the J.D.-M.A. in History
Global Legal History
UVA is an international leader in opening global legal history to serious study worldwide. The Law School’s Legal History Program is affiliated with GLH@UVA, a cross-disciplinary enterprise focusing on global legal history based in UVA’s Corcoran Department of History. GLH@UVA aims to broaden awareness of the history of legal life around the globe.
Program Committee
The program is run by an interdisciplinary Program Committee consisting of Charles Barzun, Fahad Bishara and Paul Halliday.
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...
offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...
More
The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only...
This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...
Faculty Director(s)
Charles Barzun
Professor of Law
Joel B. Piassick Research Professor of Law
Director, Program on Legal and Constitutional History
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...
offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...
More
The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only...
This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...
In the period immediately preceding the Constitution’s adoption, New Yorkers engaged in a spirited debate over whether a proposed delegation from the...
More
This Essay reports the first comprehensive network analysis of legal scholars connected through co-authorship. If legal scholarship was ever a...
The constitutional rules that govern how states engage with international law have profound implications for foreign affairs, yet we lack...
This article uses history to explore how prominent international lawyers explain seemingly transgressive state behavior. It begins with the Russian...
Jonathan Remy Nash
The history and development of Supreme Court review over state courts in the early Republic is well known. The equally important history and...
This essay, written for a symposium honoring John Henry Schlegel, is part intellectual history, part philosophical polemic. It first briefly compares...
One can ask two different questions about a given social, political, or legal practice. First, how, if at all, do the ideas embodied in that practice...
Because common-law doctrines have long served as targets for critical theorists, it would be easy to see the common law and critical theory as...
The conventional view of Rule 48(a) dismissals distinguishes between two types of motions to dismiss: (1) those where dismissal would benefit the...
In the aftermath of the Civil War, American intellectuals saw the war itself as a force of transcendent lawmaking. They viewed it as a historical...
In 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Spain ceded the colony of Cuba to the United States. In keeping with the law of state succession...
Joseph Blocher
In November, 1908, the international community tried to buy its way out of the century’s first recognized humanitarian crisis: King Leopold II’s...
A body of empirical research in finance has attempted to assess whether stocks associated with sinful behavior (companies selling alcohol, tobacco...
On August 11 and 12, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia — the home of the University of Virginia and this law journal — played unwitting host to two days...
The Constitution identifies three forms of supreme federal law — the Constitution, laws, and treaties — and specifies, to some extent, procedures for...
In recent years there has been much greater legal attention paid to aspects of dignity that previously have been ignored or treated with actual...
The essays in this symposium on the work of Dirk Hartog encompass meditations on legal positivism and the histories of slavery, civil rights, and...
This review of Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth Century Britain is part of a symposium in...
The most famous law review article of all time is Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s The Right to Privacy. An often overlooked fact is that the roots...
The following is the transcript of a 2016 Federalist Society panel entitled: Text Over Intent and the Demise of Legislative History. The panel...
More
Benjamin Cardozo's 1921 opinion for the Court of Appeals of New York in Wagner v. International Railway Co. has been called the "seminal case...
In my response to reviews by Christopher Agee, Christopher Schmidt, Karen Tani, and Laura Weinrib, I explain some of the challenges of writing Vagrant...
In the fall of 1912 — while one of the most consequential presidential campaigns in United States history raged around them — William Howard Taft...
This article, prepared for a symposium on Benjamin N. Cardozo: Judge, Justice, Scholar, examines Judge Cardozo’s opinion in Sun Printing &...
The Supreme Court during the Chief Justiceship of John Marshall is associated with endorsement of broad regulatory powers in Congress and broad...
Under the original understanding of the Constitution, customary international law features in the U.S. legal system as general law. It is not law of...
Many popular and academic commentators identify deregulation as a cause of the 2007-08 financial crisis. Some argue that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act...
Disputes, disagreement, ambiguity, and ambivalence have marked the law of affirmative action since it came to prominence in the Civil Rights Era...
This article, presented at a symposium occasioned by the publication of A.J. Bellia’ and Bradford Clark’s The Law of Nations and the United States...
Everyone agrees that American tort law expanded significantly in the late nineteenth century. But the story of that change, as usually told, is...
Judicial deference to executive statutory interpretation - a doctrine now commonly associated with the Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron v...
Jerome Frank and Lon Fuller are not frequently classed together in discussions of twentieth-century legal thought. Although they both wrote...
The practical disappearance of the jury trial ranks among the most widely examined topics in American criminal justice. But, by focusing on trial...
Long before I finished writing Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, my new book about the rapid downfall...
This paper, prepared for a symposium on administrative law hosted by the University of Missouri School of Law, analyzes the relationship between Chief...
This short essay is my contribution to a conference on “opportunities for law’s intellectual history,” which took place at SUNY Buffalo Law School...
The abstention doctrines that developed in the 1940s and 50s, as scholars have noted, reflected certain strands of Progressive and New Deal Legal...
Of the many audiences for Richard Brooks and Carol Rose’s Saving the Neighborhood, the one I will talk about today, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the...
In Hughes v. Fetter (1951), the Supreme Court ruled that state courts are ordinarily required — as a matter of the Full Faith and Credit Clause — to...
Benedikt Goderis
Constitutions are commonly regarded as uniquely national products, shaped by domestic ideals and politics. This paper develops and empirically tests a...
This essay in an exercise in responding to the question “how did we get here” with respect to a contest contemporary issue in First Amendment...
This article makes three contributions. First, it represents the first effort to identify and trace the origins of the legal category of civil rights...
An abiding challenge to historians of the Supreme Court of the United States is fashioning a methodology that adequately captures the significant...
In a thoughtful and provocative essay, Richard Fallon criticizes law professors for lightly signing onto 'scholars’ briefs,' that is, amicus briefs...
This Article focuses on the rhetorical strategies employed by William L. Prosser in presenting overviews of tort law doctrines in his celebrated...
It is not always easy to identify a new field or a new paradigm for an old field. It can creep up on you - a book here or an article there. But there...
The set of teaching materials known as The Legal Process continue to exert tremendous influence over mainstream public-law scholarship. Developed by...
Scholars have ignored the most important question in one of the most famous constitutional law cases, obscuring the machinations that spawned the...
The President seems tailor-made for emergencies. He alone is capable of responding to a crisis with the necessary energy, decision, and force, all the...
Benedikt Goderis
Constitutions are commonly regarded as uniquely national products, shaped by domestic ideals and politics. This paper develops and empirically tests a...
This essay was presented at a conference recognizing the centennial of the publication of Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the...
For the past eighty years, the entrapment doctrine has provided a legal defense for those facing federal prosecution, but only for those defendants...
Two reform movements transformed American criminal law in the four decades that began in the late 1960s. Their origins and effects were starkly...
In the 1789 Judiciary Act, the first Congress limited the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction over state court judgments to questions of federal...
For many years West Coast Hotel v. Parrish has been part of one of the central narratives of twentieth-century American constitutional history. In...
Economists have documented pervasive correlations between legal origins, modern regulation, and economic outcomes around the world. Where legal origin...
Many contemporary practitioners of analytic jurisprudence take their understanding of legal positivism largely from Hart, and the debates about legal...
This Essay, written for a symposium commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Employment Division v. Smith, examines the politics of free exercise as...
This paper, a chapter in a forthcoming book on International Law and the Supreme Court, examines the treaty decisions of the Court during the postwar...
Although the government of the Confederate States of America has been formally treated as a legal nullity since 1878, from February, 1861 to April...
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education held that separate education facilitates were “inherently unequal.” After tolerating...
More
This Essay explores the implications for constitutional history of several documents I found in the archives of Supreme Court Justices William O...
The Emancipation Proclamation leads many Americans to regard Abraham Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator.” Others are not so laudatory, doubting whether...
In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis proposed a privacy tort and seventy years later, William Prosser conceived it as four wrongs. In both eras...
"Odious debts" have been the subject of debate in academic, activist, and policy circles in recent years. The term refers to the debts of a nation...
Goluboff’s essay describes the critical role played by individuals bringing cases through organizations like the NAACP or other avenues to the state...
In her compelling and important new book, Nancy MacLean describes a fundamental transformation of postwar American society from a “culture of...
There are at least two different historical approaches to constitutional interpretation. The first is what constitutional scholars most readily...
Given the existence of contract, property, fraud, and company law, what is the purpose of securities laws? Broadly speaking, they can serve either of...
When the ideas of the founding period of the American republic have been studied by legal scholars, they have tended to approach that inquiry from a...
The 1958 debate in the pages of the Harvard Law Review between Lon Fuller and H.L.A. Hart is one of the landmarks of modern jurisprudence. And...
This paper considers Justice Breyer's dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller - in which the Court established an individual right to bear arms - as...
Since 1996, the Supreme Court of the United States has signaled that the jurisprudence of the writ of habeas corpus, and its possible suspension...
When modern American courts assess the constitutionality of a statute, they often investigate the possibility that the enacting legislature had hidden...
Recent Presidents have claimed a power to disregard statutes that they deem unconstitutional, prompting critics to make an array of arguments against...
Scholars and politicians insist that declarations of war are relics of the past. As proof, they note that in over two centuries the United States has...
Absent from war-powers scholarship is an account of when war and military powers separate and when they overlap. Making arguments sounding in text...
Can Congress pass under one of its powers a statute that conflicts with the language of another Congressional power? This unsettled question has...
In 1940, in the inaugural issue of its Bill of Rights Review, the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee expressed its conviction "that...
The Article elucidates the Intellectual Property Clause by studying the neglected record from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 pertaining to it...
In the Constitution’s earliest days, before there were any federal judges, members of the House engaged in the young nation’s first constitutional...
During World War II, the lawyers of the NAACP considered the problem of discrimination in employment as one of the two most pressing problems (along...
Daniel M. Klerman
This paper assesses the impact of judicial independence on equity markets. North and Weingast (1989) argue that judicial independence and other...
The rapid expansion of chain stores during the 1920s and 30s, especially the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), excited significant popular...
Michael D. Ramsey
This article addresses leading objections to the theory that the President enjoys a residual foreign affairs power by virtue of Article II, Section 1...
The shift during the 1940s from American public concern with class to concern with race has become a commonplace in American historiography...
In the Michigan affirmative action cases, the Supreme Court not only reaffirmed the result of the 1978 decision in Board of Regents of the University...
Between 1911 and 1931, 47 of the 48 states adopted state securities, or "blue sky," laws. This paper employs an event history analysis to analyze...
Larry Alexander
The nondelegation doctrine has roots that extend as far back as three centuries, or so most of us suppose. In The Second Treatise of Government, John...
The draft article attempts to reconstruct the essential meaning of executive power by recounting the way political theorists and others used the...
John Yoo
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Marbury v. Madison, the case which is often taught in law schools as establishing judicial review. Despite...
The article examines the nature of marriage and the expectations of husbands and wives in nineteenth century America by analyzing trial reports of...
The central contention of this paper is that the Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence can best be understood from a political perspective. The...
Recent finance scholarship finds that countries with legal systems based on the common law provide better investor protections and have more developed...
Jean C. Murphy
In this article we sketch an overview of the increasing federal involvement in the child-support area. Because the federal role has grown so...
Resident Faculty
Resident Faculty
Torts and insurance law
Evidence, torts, jurisprudence and legal history, constitutional law
Civil procedure, conflict of laws, evidence
Tax policy, legislative process and legal ethics
Criminal law, civil rights, race
Energy law, environmental law, administrative law
Civil rights, constitutional history and constitutional law
Global legal history, especially England and the British Empire
Administrative law, constitutional law and history
Constitutional law and history, Supreme Court
First Amendment, constitutional law and torts
Corporate law and securities, industrial and intellectual property, economic regulation and history
Constitutional and legal history; criminal law
Property, corporations and land conservation, nonprofit organizations
Civil rights, constitutional law, legal history, law and inequality
Constitutional law and civil procedure; federal courts
Constitutionalism, federalism, Civil War legal history
Separation of powers, presidential powers, constitutional law
Employment discrimination, civil rights and admiralty, civil procedure and international civil litigation
Separation of church and state, property, local government and land use
International law, including international environmental law and counterfactual diplomatic history
Legal theory, constitutional theory, procedure, philosophy of law
Legal history, constitutional law, torts
UVA History Faculty
Fahad Bishara, economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world
Emily Burrill, 20th-century West African history, history of gender and sexuality in the French empire
Christa Dierksheide, early American history, with an emphasis on empire, race and slavery
Paul D. Halliday (joint appointment with Law School), global legal history, especially England and the British Empire
Justene Hill Edwards, African American history, American economic history, history of American slavery
S. Deborah Kang, history of U.S. immigration
Christian W. McMillen, history of pandemics
Elizabeth A. Meyer, Greek and Roman political and social history
Sarah Milov, 20th-century American history
Neeti Nair, 18th-20th century South Asian history
Brian P. Owensby, 19th- and 20th-century Brazil, legal/imperial history of 17th-century Mexico
Bradly W. Reed, late imperial and modern China
Jeffrey Rossman, Russia, modern Europe
Joshua M. White, early modern Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean social, legal and diplomatic history
Professor Cynthia Nicoletti, a legal historian and professor of law at the University of Virginia, has been named a recipient of the UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award.
UVA Law professors Cynthia Nicoletti and Joy Milligan join host Risa Goluboff for a discussion on how divergent approaches to digging into the past can reveal some surprising truths about law and history.
Curriculum
The following is a list of courses offered during 2021-24. Numbers in parentheses indicate which academic year(s) the courses were offered, i.e., 2021-22 is coded (22), 2022-23 is coded (23) and 2023-24 is coded (24). (SC) stands for short course and (YR) stands for yearlong.
Legal History
American Legal History Seminar (23)
An American Half-Century (22,23,24)
Barbarian Law (22)
Civil War and the Constitution (22,24)
English Legal History to 1776 (22)
Federalism (SC) (22,23,24)
Founders and Foes (SC) (22,23)
Global Legal History (22,23)
History of American Federalism (23)
Law and Inequality Colloquium (23,24)
Law and Riots (23,24)
Law in American History: Twentieth Century (22,23,24)
Monetary Constitution Seminar (22,23,24)
Race and Slavery on UVA’s North Grounds (23,24)
State Attorneys General (24)
The Great Writ (SC) (24)
The Institutional Supreme Court (SC) (22,24)
Virginia and the Constitution (SC) (22)
World War I (22)
An American Half-Century (22,23,24)
Barbarian Law (22)
Civil War and the Constitution (22,24)
English Legal History to 1776 (22)
Federalism (SC) (22,23,24)
Founders and Foes (SC) (22,23)
Global Legal History (22,23)
History of American Federalism (23)
Law and Inequality Colloquium (23,24)
Law and Riots (23,24)
Law in American History: Twentieth Century (22,23,24)
Monetary Constitution Seminar (22,23,24)
Race and Slavery on UVA’s North Grounds (23,24)
State Attorneys General (24)
The Great Writ (SC) (24)
The Institutional Supreme Court (SC) (22,24)
Virginia and the Constitution (SC) (22)
World War I (22)
A professor of law, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate and a law firm partner are just three of the successful University of Virginia School of Law alumni who gained a richer legal education from the J.D.-M.A. Program in History . "The J.D.-M.A. program was where I first learned what it meant to be a legal
Dual Degree (J.D.-M.A.) in History
The Dual-Degree (J.D.-M.A.) Program in History enables law students to earn an M.A. in history during the same three years they are earning their J.D. As part of the program, J.D.-M.A. candidates present drafts of their theses to faculty. Several veterans of the dual-degree program have gone on to successful careers in legal academia, and recent graduates have clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Katharine Janes ’21, a dual-degree candidate who graduates May 23 from the University of Virginia School of Law, has pursued her budding interest in history while also being of service to her peers.