About
Legal history has long been a curricular priority at UVA Law School and a strength of its faculty. The Law School’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 and seminars.
The Legal History Program is structured around two related components:
Combination Degree (J.D.-M.A.) in History
The heart of the program is the 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 combination-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
The Law School 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.
Latest Research
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Yun-chien Chang
Adam Chilton
Nuno Garoupa
...Although research suggests that countries' colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
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...
This paper describes the response of George Washington's administration to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to...
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...
Faculty Director(s)
Charles Barzun
Professor of Law
Joel B. Piassick Research Professor of Law
Director, Program on Legal and Constitutional History
Research
Yun-chien Chang
Adam Chilton
Nuno Garoupa
...Although research suggests that countries' colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
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...
This paper describes the response of George Washington's administration to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to...
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...
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...
In the period immediately preceding the Constitution’s adoption, New Yorkers engaged in a spirited debate over whether a proposed delegation from the...
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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...
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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...
Resident Faculty
Resident Faculty
Torts and insurance law
Evidence, torts, jurisprudence and legal history, constitutional law
Civil procedure, conflict of laws, evidence
Tax policy, retirement policy, executive compensation and federal Indian law
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
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
Other Faculty
Randi Flaherty
Head of Special Collections and Law School Historian
Linda Greenhouse
Senior Research Scholar in Law, Yale Law School
Distinguished Fellow, Karsh Center for Law and Democracy, University of Virginia School of Law
Timothy J. Heaphy
Lecturer
Mark Herring
Lecturer
Lisa Lorish
Lecturer
Jessica Lowe
Visiting Scholar
Andrew Oldham
Lecturer
Amul R. Thapar
Lecturer
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
Indrani Chatterjee, gender, religion and politics between the late 17th and 20th centuries
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
Andrew Kahrl, social, political and environmental history of land use, real estate and racial inequality in the 20th century
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
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
Professor Charles Barzun ’05 discusses UVA Law’s courses, programs and opportunities in legal history during an admitted students open house.
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.
News
December 13, 2024
The University of Virginia School of Law’s State and Local Policy Clinic is assisting a commission in making updates to Virginia law to reflect federal recognition of American Indian tribes
July 11, 2024
In the wake of a shifting U.S. Supreme Court, University of Virginia School of Law professor Saikrishna Prakash’s new paper with Cass Sunstein looks at how and why radical constitutional change occurs.
July 5, 2024
University of Virginia School of Law faculty discuss news-making rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court term that ended Monday.
May 21, 2024
Two professors look at why advocates are using the language of medicine to address civil rights concerns on the new episode of “Common Law,” a podcast of the University of Virginia School of Law.
April 17, 2024
University of Virginia law professor A. E. Dick Howard ’61, who is retiring as the longest-serving professor in the University’s history, helped reshape Virginia’s constitution and those from around the world.
April 9, 2024
Two professors at the University of Virginia School of Law join the “Common Law” podcast to discuss how their research into the past, from the Civil War era to the 1960s, helps us understand today’s legal landscape.
April 8, 2024
University of Virginia School of Law professor Kimberly Jenkins Robinson took her seminar students to the U.S. Supreme Court to meet her law school roommate, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
February 29, 2024
The University of Virginia School of Law’s Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition team has advanced to the international rounds, among other achievements and recognition for members of the Law School community.
December 7, 2023
As a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and an expert in comparative constitutionalism and the U.S. Supreme Court, A. E. Dick Howard ’61 has shaped constitutional law for 60 years — inside and outside the classroom. Not many living scholars can claim to have had a hand in drafting
October 5, 2023
Eleven judges will be teaching classes during the 2023-24 academic year at the University of Virginia School of Law.
September 13, 2023
The new Education Rights Institute at the University of Virginia School of Law aims to help eliminate racial and class disparities in K-12 education. The institute, led by Professor Kimberly Jenkins Robinson and supported by a $4.9 million gift, will mark its launch with an Oct. 16 event.
July 5, 2023
University of Virginia School of Law faculty discuss news-making rulings from the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court term.
June 22, 2023
Retired Virginia Supreme Court Justice John Charles Thomas, a 1975 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, spoke at his alma mater in January, reading from his new memoir and reflecting on his time as a trailblazer for Black students at UVA.
May 25, 2023
Members of the University of Virginia School of Law community have recently been singled out for excellence. Among the accolades, Professor Frederick Schauer has won the 2023 Scribes Book Award for “The Proof.”
May 24, 2023
University of Virginia School of Law professor Dan Ortiz, who is stepping down from leading the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, reflects on his 17 years at the helm.
April 24, 2023
On the eve of his retirement, University of Virginia School of Law professor Douglas Laycock, the foremost expert on religious civil liberties and the law of remedies, looks back on his 50-year career.
March 22, 2023
A new podcast, “Legal Knowledge,” produced by the Arthur J. Morris Law Library’s Special Collections department, will explore the history of the University of Virginia School of Law.
March 5, 2023
Dean Risa Goluboff of the University of Virginia School of Law has been appointed to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, which continues to publish the multivolume work documenting the history of the court.
February 13, 2023
A symposium at the University of Virginia School of Law will explore how a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has shaped clashes over equity in education, both past and present.
January 20, 2023
With two U.S. presidents now facing special counsel investigations and one facing legal jeopardy on a host of other matters, University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna B. Prakash explains the differing visions of presidential immunity.
University of Virginia School of Law professor Kimberly Jenkins Robinson took her seminar students to the U.S. Supreme Court to meet her law school roommate, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Judge Roger L. Gregory of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit gives a talk and participates in a Q&A to mark receiving the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law. Dean Risa Goluboff served as moderator for the event.