Surrency Prize
The Surrency Prize, named in honor of Erwin Surrency, a founding member of the Society
and for many years the editor of its publication the American Journal of Legal History,
is awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Surrency Prize Committee, to the person or
persons who wrote the best article published in the Society's journal, the Law and History
Review, in the previous year.
The Surrency Prize for 2006 was awarded to Andrea McKenzie of the University of Victoria
(British Columbia, Canada) for "'This Death Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose':
The Practice of Peine Forte et Dure in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England" in LHR 23:2.
The citation read as follows: "Most historical accounts of punishment focus on those doing the
punishing: the state and its agents. In this insightful and original article, Andrea
McKenzie examines the meaning of the choices made by those enduring punishment. This account
of the use of peine forte et dure in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England argues
that courts interpreted the refusal of criminal defendants to answer charges against them as an
attack on their own authority and legitimacy. Often, in fact, some defendants intended exactly
that. In capital felony cases, judges subjected the uncooperative accused to the peine forte,
the most gruesome method of physical torture at their disposal. Famously employed against an
accused wizard in late seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, the peine forte usually killed
slowly and horribly. Those subjected to it either bore their fate stoically or quickly changed
their minds and agreed to plead. McKenzies account emphasizes the nature of legal and judicial
authority and, just as important, the motives of those who willingly chose the peine forte,
knowing it probably meant death. For some, the chance to invert the inherent power structure of
the criminal process was the opportunity to assert the ultimate moral authority in society.
Moreover, the display of manly courage and resolve in the face of torture could be read as a
rejection of the deferential, passive role thrust upon [such offenders] by the courts.
McKenzie employs an expressive literary style, in keeping with the pathos of her sources, while
unsentimentally exposing the power of the judicial process in the lives of ordinary people. This
piece contributes fresh insights to the history of capital punishment, the meaning of pain and
suffering, the interweaving of legal authority and religious faith, and the representation of
masculinity in the early modern period. Its skilful blending of cultural and legal history
provides a model for many other areas of inquiry."
The Committee also awarded an honorable mention to Sally H. Clarke for "Unmanageable Risks:
MacPherson v. Buick and the Emergence of a Mass Consumer Market" in LHR 23:1.
Sutherland Prize
The Sutherland Prize, named in honor of the late Donald W. Sutherland, a distinguished historian of
the law of medieval England and a mentor of many students, is awarded annually, on the recommendation
of the Sutherland Prize Committee, to the person or persons who wrote the best article on English legal
history published in the previous year.
The Sutherland Prize for 2006 was awarded to Andrea McKenzie of the University of Victoria
(British Columbia, Canada) for "'This Death Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose':
The Practice of Peine Forte et Dure in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England" in LHR 23:2.
(This was the first time in the history of these awards that the Surrency Prize and the Sutherland
Prize were awarded to the same person for the same article.)
The citation read as follows: "McKenzie's winning article is distinguished by both its
chronological range and its analytical reach. The practice of the peine, the pressing to death
with heavy weights of those accused criminals who impeded the normal course of justice by refusing to
plead to their indictments, stands as an anomaly both in the English legal tradition and in English
legal historiography. At odds alike with the English law's much-celebrated opposition to judicial
torture and to its vaunted reliance on jury trials to determine guilt and innocence, the peine has
hitherto puzzled legal historians, who have conventionally attributed defendants' willingness to
subject themselves to this horrific ordeal to the desire to transmit estates to heirs by avoiding
criminal conviction. McKenzie's article not only exposes the limits of this received interpretation
but also provides a convincing series of alternative explanations. Her interpretation illuminates
the history of the peine by situating legal practice within the context of the counter-theatre of the
law as well as a spectrum of popular attitudes and discourses that range from religious conceptions of
the martyr to plebeian conceptions of masculinity. The result is a compelling analysis that weaves
together first-rate legal, social and cultural history to provide a compelling resolution to the
conundrum of why early modern men and women chose to subject themselves to death by pressing rather
than appealing to the celebrated mercies of the English jury system."
J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History
The Society's J. Willard Hurst Memorial Committee is charged with task of appropriately remembering
the late J. Willard Hurst, who was for many years the dean of historians of American law. On the
Committee's recommendation, the Society, in conjunction with the Institute for Legal Studies at the
University of Wisconsin Law School has sponsored three biennial J. Willard Hurst Summer Institutes
in Legal History. The purpose of the Hurst Summer Institute is to advance the approach to legal
scholarship fostered by J. Willard Hurst in his teaching, mentoring, and scholarship. The
"Hurstian perspective" emphasizes the importance of understanding law in context; it
is less concerned with the characteristics of law as developed by formal legal institutions than with
the way in which positive law manifests itself as the "law in action." The Hurst Summer
Institute assists young scholars from law, history, and other disciplines in pursuing research in
legal history.
The fourth Hurst Summer Institute will be held this summer in Madison, Wisconsin, with tentative dates from
June 10 through June 22. Applications are being accepted through January 15, 2007. Barbara Welke,
Associate Professor in History and Law at the University of Minnesota and an active member of the Society, will
lead the Institute. Guest scholars will include Lawrence Friedman, Dirk Hartog, Holly Brewer, and Margot Canaday.
The two week program is structured but informal, and features discussions of core readings in legal history and
analysis of the work of the participants in the Institute. The Hurst Memorial Committee of the Society is
charged with the responsiblity of selecting up to twelve fellows to participate in the Institute. Further
information and an application form is available at:
http://www.law.wisc.edu/ils/hurst_summer_institute/2007application.htm.
Cromwell Fellowships
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation* announces the availability of a number of fellowships for 2007,
intended to support research and writing in American legal history. The number of awards to be made, and their
value, is at the discretion of the Foundation. In the past two years, three to five awards have been made annually
by the trustees of the Foundation, in amounts up to $5,000. Preference will be given to scholars at the early
stages of their careers. The Society's Cromwell Fellowships Advisory Committee reviews the applications and makes
recommendations to the Foundation. Details about the application process will be available on this site shortly.
In 2006, Cromwell fellowships were awarded to:
Christopher Beauchamp, Ph.D., University of Cambridge (UK), to begin postdoctoral research in turning
his dissertation on patent litigation in the late nineteenth century into a book.
Kenneth W. Mack, J.D. Harvard Law School, Ph. D. Princeton University, a member of the Harvard Law School faculty,
for archival research in connection with completing his book on African-American lawyers and their legal practice
during the first half of the twentieth century.
Kunal Parker, J.D. Harvard Law School, Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, a member of the faculty of the
Cleveland-Marshall School of law and a Golieb Fellow, New York University Law School, for support for his dissertation
research on changing understandings of history and of custom in nineteenth century legal thought.
Nicholas Parrillo, a J.D./Ph.D candidate at the Yale Law School and a Golieb Fellow, New York University Law School,
to continue his doctoral dissertation research on the legal history of governmental salaries and pay.
Daniel J. Sharfstein, J.D., Yale Law School and Golieb Fellow, New York University Law School, for archival
research in connection with his book-length study of families whose racial identities shifted from African American
to white from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
* The Cromwell Foundation was established in 1930 to promote and encourage scholarship in legal history,
particularly in the colonial and early national periods of the United States. The Foundation has supported the
publication of legal records as well as historical monographs.
Cromwell Prize
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation* awards annually a $5000 prize for
excellence in scholarship in the field of American Legal History by a junior scholar. The prize is designed to
recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty
not yet tenured. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and
comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference.
The prize has been awarded in the past to "first books," but substantial articles (such as sometimes appear in law
reviews) are also eligible. This year doctoral dissertations (and student-written articles) have their own
separate competition.
The Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American
Society for Legal History. The Committee will consider books and articles published in
the previous calendar year. The Society will announce the award after the annual meeting of the Cromwell
Foundation, which normally takes place in the first week of November. Details about this year's award process
will be available on this site shortly.
The prize for 2006 was awarded to Professor Holly Brewer of North Carolina State University for her
book, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Published for the Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press). The
Committee's citation read: "Brewer's study places children and childhood at the center of a fundamental shift in the meaning of consent in seventeenth and eighteenth century Anglo-America. In taking seriously evidence from sixteenth century England that other scholars have ignored, seen as anomalous, or mistaken and then scrupulously following the changing evidence relating to children's consent in a whole range of relationships vis-à-vis church, God, nation and relations with others, including baptism, allegiance, military service, jury service, testimony, transfers of property, labor contracts, and marriage through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Brewer captures the shift from status (birth) to reason as the foundation of consent. In doing so, she breathes a new and deeper meaning into the fundamental social, cultural, and political transformation captured by well-worn phrases such as "from status to contract" and "the age of reason" and highlights the religious roots of this transformation that begins with the Reformation and sees its full flowering in the political ferment of the American Revolution. This is a book about the legal creation of modern childhood as much as a book about how the child became a metaphor in eighteenth century political theory for those without the capacity to reason. Brewer thus captures how in a moment in which the consent of the people became the foundation for political authority, children in fact lost both personal and political power. And in turn, she highlights the power of children as an example that could be and was applied to exclude others, including women and African Americans, on the grounds that they too lacked the capacity to reason required in a government based on reasoned consent. Brewer weaves her powerful argument with grace and erudition, taking her reader from the Reformation through the American Revolution, crafting an Anglo-American legal history and drawing with equal facility on religious texts, political theory, legal treatises, and legal cases."
* For a brief description of the Foundation, see above Cromwell Fellowships .
Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars
Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her
generosity to young legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at
the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two younger legal historians designated Kathryn T.
Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. (Whether there is a Kathryn T.
Preyer Memorial Panel at the meeting, as there was this year, or whether the Preyer Scholars present their papers
as part of other panel depends on the subject-matter of the winning papers and on what is on the rest of the program.)
The generosity of Professor Preyer's friends and family has enabled the Society to offer a small honorarium to the Preyer Scholars and to reimburse, in some measure or entirely,
their costs of attending the meeting.
The competition for Preyer Scholars is organized by the Society's Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee.
Details about this year's award process will be available on this site shortly.
The first two Preyer Scholars were chosen this year. They are Sophia Z. Lee, a J.D./Ph.D. student at Yale University,
for her paper, "Hotspots in a Cold War: The NAACP's Postwar Labor Constitutionalism, 1948-1964" and Karen M. Tani,
a J.D./Ph.D. student at the University for Pennsylvania, for her paper, "Fleming v. Nestor: Anticommunism, The
Welfare State and the Making of 'New Property.'" The first Preyer Panel featured the work of both. The
panel was well-attended. The Society's president was in the chair. Comments were provided by Dan Ernst and Laura Kalman.
John Phillip Reid Book Award
Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible
by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award
for the best book
published in English in any of the fields broadly defined as Anglo-American legal history.
The award is given on the recommendation of the Society's John Philip Reid Prize Committee. Details about this year's
award process will be available on this site shortly.
This year's Reid Prize was awarded to Daniel J. Hulsebosch, for Constituting Empire: New York and the
Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (University of North Carolina Press). The
Committee's citation read: "Daniel Hulsebosch's book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of early American
constitutional history that takes the reader from the imperial constitution of Lord Coke to the constitutional
imperialism of Chancellor Kent. The heart of the analysis reassesses the meaning of the American Revolution as a
constitutional event. Bringing original sources to light, using canonical sources in new ways, and building on the
work of John Reid that has forced historians to take the legal grievances of the eighteenth century seriously,
Hulsebosch demonstrates that the state and federal constitutions were shaped by North America's imperial past.
He shows how the raw material of the English constitution got remade by colonists and imperial agents on the ground,
as well as by the British American lawyers who are now called Founding Fathers. He also illuminates the process by
which legal practices were abstracted into formal ideas and how this formalization was a means to an end: first to
unite a transatlantic empire, then to forge a more perfect Union. Constituting Empire does not pretend to
have the last word on the American founding. But it may well have pioneered a new line of scholarship exploring the
social politics of constitutionalism."
The Committee also announced that Stuart Banner was the runner-up for the prize for How the Indians Lost their
Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Harvard University Press).
Cromwell Dissertation Prize
As mentioned above in connection with the Cromwell Book Prize, that prize (even without the name "book" in it)
has had a tendency to go to "first books." Although dissertations and student-written articles (e.g., in law
reviews) were eligible for the prize, two successive committees felt that such works did not stand much of chance of
winning the prize when faced with the competition of a substantial monograph. The William Nelson Cromwell
Foundation* agreed, and this year has generously offered to fund another prize for dissertations
accepted or student articles written in the previous year (i.e., 2006) in the general field of American legal history
(broadly conceived), with some preference for those in the area of early America or the colonial period.
Further definition of the award is in the hands of the Society's Cromwell Dissertation Prize Advisory Committee,
which will make recommendations to the Foundation. Details about
this year's award process will be available on this site shortly.
* For a brief description of the Foundation, see above Cromwell Fellowships.
Paul L. Murphy Award
The Paul L. Murphy Award was not made in 2006. Further definition of the award is in the hands of the Society's
Paul L. Murphy Award Committee. Details about
this year's award process will be available on this site shortly.
