Cromwell Article Prize to Brady

We have word that the William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, awarded by the trustees of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation on the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on the Cromwell Prizes of the American Society for Legal History, has gone to Maureen E. Brady, Harvard Law School, for “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds,” Yale Law Journal 128 (2020): 872-1173.   From the recommendation of the ASLH committee:

…The subject of the article would not seem promising. … Though regarded by historians as a relic deserving only antiquarian interest, in Brady’s hands it commands our attention as a vital legal tool that enabled communities to use the law to impose order on an uncharted terrain through the creation of property rights.  It has long been a commonplace that recording boundaries and conferring title create rights in property, but Brady’s article gives new meaning to the practice.  Her mastery of seemingly arcane procedures and the legal rights they created reveals the many ways that the law of metes and bounds provided a supple and flexible means of securing the property rights that served the social and economic ordering necessary to foster communities bound together by law.  …

The ability to focus on apparently strange or insignificant aspects of a lost world and use them to cast light and provide surprising insights is the mark of a more mature scholar, but it is readily evident in this article.  Brady’s compelling argument is based on an exacting and concentrated study of the documents generated by the process of determining and enforcing metes and bounds.  Her analysis original and her noteworthy.  More than the other articles, it shows a real historical flair in terms of both the research and the presentation.  It does more than just marshal the past to make a point in the present—although, of course, that is what we expect of law review articles.  Rather, [it] is great history, excavating a past that that was lying in plain sight, but that no one had really bothered to explore.  She walks us through that world and its logic, which does not appear very logical to us today; by scrupulously reconstructing the way that these documents were created and used, she brings to life communal practices and legal activity in a world that we have lost.  Hence the humor, which she deploys masterfully.  Then she shows why that history is important today, recasting basic assumptions and opening up new ways of thinking about contemporary problems.

–Dan Ernst

Cromwell Dissertation Prize to Tycko

We have word that the William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize, awarded by the trustees of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation on the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on the Cromwell Prizes of the American Society for Legal History, has gone to Dr. Sonia Tycko, Oxford University,  for “Captured Consent: Bound Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America.”  From the recommendation of the ASLH committee:

In an extraordinarily creative and imaginative dissertation, "Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America," Sonia Tycko explores the repeated appearance of consent as part of the meaning of compulsory service in the early modern period. … Tycko forces us to reconsider the very foundations of consent and contract and makes a signal contribution to the historiography on contract, labor, and freedom. Tycko also offers nuanced readings of an impressive array of primary sources and reveals the social realities against which a vocabulary about contract arose in particular labor relationships, from indentured servitude to military impressment to kidnapping. She mines documents that others might skim and brings to the surface the way in which the very words betray underlying power dynamics. The important transatlantic lens persuasively establishes her argument as part of larger seventeenth-century English assumptions, in Great Britain and the British colonies. This dissertation rewards the reader on every page-and, impressively, becomes even more interesting on rereading. Tycko's dissertation serves as a model of the well-crafted and carefully executed dissertation in legal history.

–Dan Ernst

Littleton-Griswold Prize to Seo for "Policing the Open Road"

The American Historical Association has just announced its annual prizes.  The winner of the AHA's Littleton-Griswold Prize "for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, broadly defined," is Sara Seo, Columbia Law School (and a former LHB Guest Blogger), for Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press).  Congratulations, Professor Seo!

--Dan Ernst

Selden Society Prizes to Papp-Kamali and Kennefick; Honorable Mention to McSweeney

[We have the following announcement from the Selden Society.  DRE] 

David Yale Prize

Instituted in 1998, this biennial prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales from scholars who have been engaged in research in the subject for not longer than about ten years.  Since 2017, separate prizes have been given for the best book and the best article published  in the preceding two years. The prize is named in honour of Mr David Yale, QC, FBA, then President of the Society and formerly Literary Director.

The 2019 David Yale Book prize was awarded to Elizabeth Papp Kamali for Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The prize committee said of this work:

Papp-Kamali’s Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England is a wide-ranging and deeply researched contribution to the history of criminal law. In seeking to understand what ‘felony’ meant in medieval England, Papp-Kamali takes on a question which Maitland considered unanswerable. This book changes our existing understanding, using a challenging methodology which uses a much wider range of sources than is often the case in legal history scholarship. In doing so she places legal history within the history of wider cultural norms and influences to produce perceptive and valuable conclusions.

The committee also recommended that an honourable mention be given to Thomas J. McSweeney for his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2019)

The 2019 David Yale article prize was awarded to Ciara Kennefick for ‘‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ in the Journal of Legal History 39 (2018), pp.  307-339. The prize committee said of this article:

Kennefick’s ‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ is a genuinely novel re-examination of an important part of English legal history, highlighting the interaction between questions of law about contractual fairness, and mathematics. Interest in legal questions drove interest in the study of probability, while developments in the mathematics of probability came to resolve legal questions. The article changes the way we look at the history of this area of law.