The Legal Geography of the Civil War Era and Its Lasting Legacy,” with Dr. Laura F. Edwards.

Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University.  She is prize-winning author who focuses on the legal history of the nineteenth-century United States, with an emphasis on federalism, the history of legal institutions, and people’s interactions with the law.  Her most recent book, Only the Clothes on Her Back:  Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States, combines legal history with material culture to reconstruct the parts of the legal system that allowed property ownership to those without property rights.  She is also author of four other books, include, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015) and The People and Their Peace:  Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009).  She has received fellowships from the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, the NEH, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Additional details forthcoming.

• Thursday, October 23, 5:30 pm: “Layers of Law:  New Republic’s Unwritten Legal Terrain”
• Friday, October 24, 5:30 pm:  “Law in the Books:  Writing New Maps”
• Saturday, October 25, 11:30 am: “The Limits of Law:  Unforeseen Destinations, New Texts”