Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship

Harvard Law School is seeking fellows who have a J.D. degree, who have completed the required coursework for their doctorate degree, or who have recently been awarded the doctorate degree.  A JD is preferred, but not required.  We will also consider applicants who are beginning a teaching career in either law or history.   The purpose of the fellowship is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined.  There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period.  

Fellows are expected to spend the majority of their time on their own research. They are also asked to help coordinate the Harvard Law School Legal History Colloquium, which meets five or six times each semester. Fellows are invited to present their own work. Fellows will be required to be in residence at law school during the academic year (September through May).

Applicants for the fellowship for 2012-13 should address a letter to Professor Bruce H. Mann at the Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA 02318.

Applications should outline briefly the fellow's proposed project (no more than five typewritten pages) and should contain a writing sample and a curriculum vitae that gives the applicant's educational background, publications, works in progress, and other relevant experience, accompanied by official transcripts of all academic work done in college or at the graduate level.  The applicant should arrange for two academic references to be sent .  Applications by e-mail are preferred (the transcripts may be sent by regular mail):  criley@law.harvard.edu

The deadline for applications is February 15, 2012, and announcement of the award will be made by March 15, 2012.

The fellow selected will be awarded a stipend of $32,000.

The Berger Fellow for the 2011-12 academic year is Sam Erman.  After graduating from Harvard University with an A.B. in English, he earned a J.D. in 2007 and a Ph.D. in American Civilization in 2010, both from the University of Michigan.  He clerked for Judge Merrick P. Garland of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court.  During his fellowship year, he is working on a book manuscript, “Puerto Rico and the United States Constitution: Struggles around Status and Governance in a New Empire, 1898-1922.”

The Berger Fellow for 2010-2011 academic year was Jedidiah Kroncke.  He earned a J.D. from Yale in 2005 and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2008. His current manuscript, "The Modern Origins of American Legal Exceptionalism: Amidst Missionaries, China and the New Legal Science" explores the gradual 20th century erosion of American legal cosmopolitanism as intertwined with developments in religious and legal institutions and thought.  Concurrent with the rise of international American influence and a deep desire to develop an alternative to colonialism, these developments were both reflected and constructed through the early 20th century American fascination with the religious then legal transformation of China, becoming an enduring ideal type of American interventions abroad while reifying many contested legal developments as essentially American. Jedidiah came to Harvard after serving as a Golieb Fellow at NYU Law School and and Ruebhausen Fellow at Yale Law School.

The Berger Fellow for 2009-2010 is Deborah Dinner.  She has a B.A. and J.D. from Yale, and she is completing her PhD at Yale, as well.  Her dissertation is titled, “Pregnancy at Work: Feminism, Maternalism, and the Shaping of Sex Equality Law, 1966-91.”  The project examines the twists and turns of political ideology and legal strategy made by business executives, union leaders, judges, attorneys, physicians, conservative activists, and feminists, as they negotiated the meaning of pregnancy for women's citizenship. Dinner served as a law clerk to Judge Karen Nelson Moore on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and she was a Golieb Fellow at N.Y.U. Law School in 2008-09.  She is currently an associate professor of law at Washington University, St. Louis.  

Kara Swanson, the 2008-09 fellow, completed her Ph.D. in the History of science at Harvard University, entitled “Banking on the Body:  Milk Banks, Blood Banks, and Sperm Banks, 1910-1980.”  She examines the commodification of the human body through the institution of a “bank,” in a linked history of law, technology, science, and medicine.  Before beginning work on her doctorate, Kara earned a B.S. cum laude in molecular biophysics from Yale University, and a M.A. in biochemistry and J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.  She clerked for Judge William H. Orrick, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and for Judge Cecil F. Poole of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  She is a registered patent attorney and practiced law with Dechert LLP.  Her publications based on her on-going research project into the history of the United States patent system include “Biotech in Court:  A Legal Lesson on the Unity of Science,” Social Studies of Science (2007) 37:  357-384 (http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/3/357) and “Authoring an Invention:  Nineteenth-Century American Law and Patent Authorship,” in Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee, eds., Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property:  Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 2011. (http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo11103013.html).  She is currently an associate professor of law at Northeastern University.  

The Berger Fellows for the academic year 2007-2008 were Cynthia Nicoletti and Owen Williams.

Cynthia Nicoletti received her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and in 2003 her J.D. from Harvard Law School.  Her dissertation is entitled “The Great Question of the War:  The Legal Status of Secession in the Aftermath of the Civil War, 1865-1869.”  She is currently a member of the faculty of the Mississippi College School of Law.

Owen Williams got his AB from Dartmouth College in 1974 and a MA in philosophy from Cambridge University in 1976. After spending twenty-four years on Wall Street, at Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs, Owen returned to the academy receiving his MA and MPhil in history at Yale University and a MSL at Yale Law School. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 for his dissertation, "Unequal Justice Under Law: The Supreme Court and the First Civil Rights Movement, 1857-1883."  He is now the President of Transylvania University. 

The Berger Fellow for 2006-07 was Diana I. Williams, who received her A.B. in history, M.A. in English, and Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard and an M.A. in history from Berkeley.  She is revising her dissertation, “They Call It Marriage:  The Interracial Louisiana Family and the Making of American Legitimacy.”  During the fellowship year she was in residence at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research.  After a year as assistant professor of history at Wellesley College, she is now assistant professor of history and law at the University of Southern California.

The inaugural Berger Fellow for 2005-06 was Daniel J. Sharfstein, who received his A.B. in American history and literature and African-American studies from Harvard in 1994 and his J.D. from Yale in 2000.  During his fellowship year, he worked on the manuscript that became his book, The Invisible Line:  Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin, 2011).  He is now associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University.