Traditionally, the history of law and constitutional history have been considered separate fields of study. My research bridges that divide by looking at when and how people have influenced systems of formal law.

I have just published a book-length digital project with the LibraryPress@UF. The book, Fight for Rights: The Chicago 1919 Riots and the Struggle for Black Justice, is a history of the fight for rights undertaken by Chicago’s Black citizens across that city’s first century. Covering the period from the 1830s to 1930s, this book traces their successes and the forces that arose—in the streets, in city government, in the courts, and on the police force—to limit their extent. Along the way, it looks at how, and why, individuals and institutions attempted to justify those limits over time.

This coming year (2022-2023) I will be on leave on an NEH Fellowship to work on a new book that will explore the relationship between policing, punishment, and disability in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.

My first book, Debating—and Creating—Authority, was recently republished by Routledge. That book considered how popular forces in seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay used a series of legal events to contest claims of religious authority, provoking debates that ultimately altered the constitutional order within the colony and in Britain’s Atlantic empire.

I have published four other books. In three,The Rule of Justice: The People of Chicago Versus Zephyr Davis (2001), Criminal Justice in the United States, 1789-1939 (2011), The Chicago Trunk Murder (2011).I considered how popular forces influenced criminal justice in the United States. In the third, Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871-1971 (2016), I drew on a murder trial from the late 1930s to consider the role of the third degree and other coercive police methods on criminal justice.