Cromwell Book Prize to Erman

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, acting on a recommendation of a committee of the American Society for Legal History, has voted to award its Book Prize to Sam Erman, University of Southern California, for Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire.  The ASLH Committee’s recommendation stated in part:

For subtlety, nuance, and complexity of analysis by a junior scholar, this is the best book in a year in which many superb books were nominated. Erman makes important and ambitious claims about the evolving constitutional meaning of citizenship in the U.S. empire after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. The book vividly recounts and perceptively analyzes the debates between and among Puerto Rican and U.S. judges, lawyers, administration officials, and legislators over the denial of full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. Erman shows how post-Civil War conceptions of full citizenship, rights, and statehood gave way to a regime of constitutionally permissible racist imperial governance.

Professor Erman’s book appeared in the Studies in Legal History, the ASLH-sponsored book series published by the Cambridge University Press.  Karen collects his posts on the book as an LHB Guest blogger here.

–Dan Ernst.  H/t: JDG3

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.