loading . . . Cromwell Article Prize to Hall, Mallon Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, which is awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation "after a review of the recommendation of
the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal
History." About this award:
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize is awarded annually
to the best article in American legal history published in the
preceding calendar year by an early career scholar. Articles published
in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be
considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early
National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize.
The 2025 Cromwell Article Prize went to two scholars: Aaron Hall (University of Minnesota) for “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” Journal of American History 111, no. 3 (2024): 469-96, and Grace E. Mallon (Oxford University), for “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2024): 687-720.
The citation for Hall's article:
Aaron Hall’s “Bad Roads” traces the making, significance, and effects
of ordinary public ways that ran through the South in the age of
slavery. This important article speaks to scholarship on legal history,
state building, slavery, and the carceral state, and challenges existing
ideas of public and private. In this piece, Hall draws upon an
inchoate, rarely studied set of documents to explain how roads were a
significant and singular site of governance in slave states. He shows
how public power helped construct private planter authority, as well as
gave rise to a unique carceral spatial regime. Hall’s article is
beautifully written and works with complex archival materials in a way
that makes truly intricate and difficult historical work feel
effortless. “Bad Roads” ties together multiple topics in legal and
political history, including the role of state power in road building,
the mechanics of how roads enabled policing, and the way public roads
structured and complicated slavery—much like, as he shows, public roads
themselves both connected and bounded private property and enslaved
people’s lives. This article has important implications for our
understanding both of slavery and its development and the
post-emancipation evolution of policing and turn toward mass
incarceration. We know that slavery existed because state law sanctioned
it, but Aaron gives us a chance to really see how in even the most
quotidian ways, the state made slavery and slavery made the state.
The citation for Mallon's article:
Grace Mallon’s “Negotiated Federalism” examines the federal
government’s efforts to enforce its new authority after the Founding.
Federal officials quickly realized that they required the participation
and consent of state governments, as federal laws could not take effect
without the legislation, investment, and manpower of state governments.
The piece showcases how Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test
case for negotiated federalism, where the federal government sought to
exercise power in spaces where states had already entrenched their
authority. As early federal officials set up customs and lighthouse
services, rebuilt coastal fortifications, and enforced regulations, they
had to negotiate with states to determine “which powers each level of
government could exercise.” As a result, federal power depended on a
state’s willingness to negotiate its authority. The crisply written
article tackles big questions of federalism through granular details of
practical problems and personality conflicts. Based in impressive
primary source research in state and federal official records and
correspondence, Mallon brings multiple areas of scholarship together to
describe how power was worked out ‘in the course of ordinary government
administration instead of in high theory. “Negotiated Federalism” takes
something that we feel is well-understood (federalism at the founding)
and through a creative path through the archive mines new and
provocative ways of seeing the past that help us see the present more
clearly.
Congratulations to both awardees!
-- Karen Tani http://dlvr.it/TPlKXK
