Program on Legal & Constitutional History
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 Prof. John Harrison discusses constitutional law and legal history (requires Windows Media Player) |
Virginia is the nation's leading center for the study of American legal and constitutional history. Six members of the law faculty hold doctoral degrees in history, and several others also regularly produce influential scholarship in the field. This enables the Law School to offer an unparalleled variety of lecture courses, seminars, and colloquia in English and American legal and constitutional history.
In cooperation with the University's Corcoran Department of History, the Law School's Program in Legal and Constitutional History includes a combined-degree opportunity that allows students to obtain a J.D. and an M.A. in history in three years. Several veterans of the combined-degree program have gone on to successful careers in legal academia, and three of its recent graduates have clerked for justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.
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Prof. Risa Goluboff discusses constitutional law and civil liberties courses (requires Windows Media Player) |
In addition, the Program on Legal and Constitutional History sponsors two types of events. The first is a monthly legal history luncheon workshop, to which members of the faculty from Virginia and elsewhere are invited to present works in progress. Advanced J.D./M.A. candidates not only attend those workshops, but are also offered the opportunity to present a draft of their M.A. theses to the workshop, an opportunity they have found exhilarating and constructive.
The second type of event is an afternoon session in which authors of recent important books are invited to engage in discussions of their work with students and faculty participating in the Colloquium in American Legal History. In recent years these authors have included Eric Foner, Philip Hamburger, and John Witt of Columbia University; Hendrik Hartog of Princeton University; Sarah Barringer Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania; Bruce Mann of Harvard University; Karl Jacoby of Brown University; Mary Dudziak of the University of Southern California; David Tanenhaus of UNLV; Barbara Welke of the University of Minnesota; and Lindsay Robertson of the University of Oklahoma.
Student organizations such as the American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society often host speakers on legal history or constitutional law, in the past including George Mason University professor Nelson Lund on the revival of the Second Amendment, Princeton University professor Keith Whittington on how theories of the original intent of the Constitution's framers are applied in contemporary politics, and Judge Morris Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, a specialist on legal regimes on the American frontier, on writing intercultural legal history.
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