Legal History
The history department at Duke has an unusually strong cohort of scholars with expertise in the history of legal institutions, legal culture, and the relationship between law and society.Our greatest strength lies in American legal history. Duke historians focus on areas as various as the relationship between legal authority and social hierarchies in the post-revolutionary South (Edwards), legal regulation of business failure and commercial speech in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Balleisen), the legal history of the modern welfare state (Kornbluh), and early American property law (Hart). Outside of the United States , the department boasts numerous faculty whose research overlaps with this growing and dynamic field. Duke now has historians who grapple with legal development in early modern Germany (Robisheaux), the eighteenth-century Caribbean (Gaspar), nineteenth-century France (Reddy), and twentieth-century Brazil (French), as well as the impact of maritime law on modern warfare (Bonker). Although the interpretive concerns and methodological approaches of these scholars differ significantly, they all tend to focus on the interactions between legal institutions, doctrines, and values, on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural experience, on the other.
Duke offers a joint JD-MA degree to law students interested in simultaneously pursuing graduate work in history. We offer graduate seminars in legal history as part of our general doctoral curriculum, and a number of our Ph.D. students also pursue research in the field. In the past and present, our graduate students have tackled topics as various as the moral and legal meanings of violence amidst the English Civil War, criminal law in early British India, infanticide in the early American Republic, freedom suits by antebellum American slaves, and the dynamics of legal activism within the American Civil Rights Movement. Duke's libraries, in conjuction with those of other area universities, have impressive print and archival holdings in the history of law, with a particular strength in the legal history of the American South.
Our legal history community is also enriched by a large number of scholars who are based in other Duke departments and schools (especially the departments of cultural anthropology and political science, and the Law School), or at other area universities (North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and UNC-Chapel Hill). This broader group of historians meets several times a semester at the Triangle Legal History Seminar (TLHS), an interdisciplinary faculty-graduate student seminar that discusses pre-circulated work-in-progress by area and visiting scholars. Seminar topics range across all historical eras and every region of the world. Edward Balleisen also maintains a web portal to legal history, Legal History on the Web, which offers links to a wide array of online resources in legal history.
For more information, contact Laura Edwards (ledwards@duke.edu ) or Edward Balleisen (eballeis@duke.edu ).
Duke History Faculty
Edward Balleisen, Associate Professor (Law and Business, 19 th and 20 th Century U.S. ) Dirk Bonker, Assistant Professor (Modern Warfare)
Laura Edwards, Professor (19 th Century U. S. South, Society and Law)
John French, Associate Professor (Modern Latin America )
David Barry Gaspar, Professor ( Caribbean )
John Hart, Visiting Assistant Professor (Law, Colonial U. S.)
Felicia Kornbluh, Assistant Professor (Modern American Politics, Society and Law)
William Reddy, Professor (Early Modern France, History of Emotions)
Thomas Robisheaux, Associate Professor (Early Modern Germany )
Other Duke Faculty
Paul Carrington, Professor, Law School (History of Legal Profession)
Peter Fish, Professor, Political Science (American Constitutional History)
Catherine Fisk, Professor, Law Scool (History of Intellectual Property)
Paul Haagen, Professor, Law School (British and American Legal History)
H. Jefferson Powell, Professor, Law School (American Constitututional History)
Irene Silverblatt, Professor, Cultural Anthropology (Colonial Latin America , Law and Society/Culture)
Faculty at North Carolina State University
Matthew Booker, Assistant Professor, History (19 th Century American West, Environmental)
Holly Brewer, Associate Professor, History (Colonial U. S. , Law, Gender, Property, and Family)
David Gilmartin, Professor, History (Modern Indian History, Political and Legal Institutions)
Stephen Middleton, Professor, History (19 th Century U.S. , Constitutional History, Anti-slavery)
Gail O'Brien, Professor, History (20 th Century American South, Race, Law, and Politics)
Jonathan Ocko, Professor (Chinese History, Qing Dynasty, Law, Family, and Property)
Faculty at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Adrienne Davis, Professor, Law School (19 th Century American Law, Race, and Gender)
Thomas Gallanis, Visiting Professor, Law School (Early Modern Britain/Europe, Legal Process, Family)
Eric Muller, Professor, Law School (20 th America , Law, Race, and Politics)
John Orth, Professor, Law School (British and American Legal History, Labor and Constitutionalism)
John Semonche, Professor, History (American Constitutional History)
Faculty at North Carolina Central University
Percy Murray, Professor, History (Modern U.S. , Race, Politics, and Constitutional History)