Hi there! I’m writer, scholar, and occasional filmmaker, and a professor emeritus at Rutgers University (my faculty biography can be found here). I hold an A.B. in American Studies from Stanford University, a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
My first book, Black Trials: Citizenship From the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), received a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association for its impact on the public understanding of law. My second book, Americans without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship (NYU Press, 2006), received the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association. My third book, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals about the Future of Individual Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
My fourth and latest book, Law’s Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection, a co-authored and co-edited exhibition catalogue, with Michael Widener (Talbot Publishing, 2017), received the Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries. The book is the catalogue of our critically-acclaimed exhibition of 2017 at the Grolier Club in New York—which also was accompanied by five of my short films, including “A Philosophical Question” and “The Dialogue of Text and Image.” The films were produced under the auspices of Hidden Cabinet Films.
I have been a visiting professor at Cardozo School of Law and the University of Connecticut School of Law (read more about my teaching here). I’ve also taught quite a bit in Europe. In the fall of 2009, I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Akureyri, Iceland. In the spring of 2015, I was a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Legal Philosophy at the University of Salzburg, Austria. And in 2018-19, I was the the Fulbright Uppsala University Distinguished Chair in American Studies in Uppsala, Sweden (you can read a blog post about my work in Sweden here and watch a public lecture I gave in Uppsala here). I’ve likewise lectured and taught extensively about American constitutional law throughout Germany.
I live in Connecticut with my wife, a professor of nineteenth-century British literature at Wesleyan University. In our spare time, we enjoy hiking, biking, and watching women’s basketball, and I can spend endless hours fiddling with my stereo and doing home repair.
Worlds of Law 