NYU School of Law School: The Legal History Colloquium

The oldest of NYU Law School's colloquia, now in its twenty-seventh year, is the Legal History Colloquium. Its mission is unique -- the training of young scholars rather than the testing of ideas of senior professors. The core of the Legal History Colloquium consists of the Samuel I. Golieb Fellows, a group of two or three fledgling academics each year from schools around the United States. Golieb Fellows, who either have completed or are completing their graduate work in legal history, have come to NYU from doctoral programs at Cambridge, Clermont, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Virginia, Yale, and other universities. Other participants in the Colloquium have included J.D. students and graduate students at NYU, Fulbright Scholars from Europe, and faculty from NYU Law School and other law schools in the metropolitan region.

Participants in the Legal History Colloquium are expected to be at work on scholarship intended for publication. Some focus on writing articles, but most turn their attention to books. As a result, a number of important books have been written at least in part while their authors have been working at NYU. Among them are George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940; Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America, Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale, 1927-1960; and Edward A. Purcell, Jr., Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958, John Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law, and Christian McMillen, Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory.

The Colloquium meets weekly throughout the academic year to discuss the work in progress of the Golieb Fellows, of the legal history graduate students, and of the Law School's faculty engaged in historical research. Some guest speakers, mainly former Golieb Fellows and occasionally faculty from other universities, are also invited to present papers.

Because of the Legal History Colloquium's emphasis on scholarship, nearly all the young scholars who have attended it during the two decades of its existence have become either professors of law or professors of history at universities throughout the United States. The schools at which Colloquium alumni are currently teaching include the University of California at Hastings, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, Chicago, Columbia, Connecticut, Dennison, Florida, Fordham, Georgetown, Harvard, Louisville, Minnesota, New York Law, Saint Louis, SUNY at Buffalo, Ohio State, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Washington and Lee, and Yale. One former member of the Colloquium is now Provost of Princeton University. One former Golieb Fellow served as law clerk to Chief Justice Rehnquist and is now Professor of National Security Law at the National War College in Washington, DC, another is Dean of Stanford Law School, while another is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Bowling Green State University. Yet another former Golieb Fellow is Chief Operating Officer of The Constitution Project at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C.

Although its emphasis has been on training young historians, the Legal History Colloquium also has proved invaluable to the NYU faculty. According to Professor William Nelson, a moderator of the Colloquium and one of its co-founders, no better forum exists anywhere in America at which to present historical ideas and work in progress. Nelson, in his words, "owes an unredeemable debt to the Golieb Fellows and other Colloquium participants who over the years have raised his work to a level far above that which he could have attained alone." In 2008-2009, Professors William E. Nelson and Daniel Hulsebosch will moderate the Colloquium.