Professor, U-M Law School
About
Emily Prifogle is professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, and professor of history by courtesy. Her primary fields of interest are in twentieth-century legal history and include the study of place, local governance, gender, sexuality, and race, and her scholarship incorporates the methods of legal, social, and political history.
Prifogle’s book, Rural: A Modern American History (2027), focuses on legal and political conflicts in the twentieth-century Midwest. In it, she explains the remaking of modern rural America by weaving together multiple historical perspectives on rural change. Always rooted in individual rural communities, she investigates issues of rural education, migrant farm labor, rural infrastructure, access to justice, Native community resilience, and rural land use. The result is a new legal history that tells not an unchanging story of decline but many stories of a diverse rural Midwest in constant transformation.
Prifogle also is a co-director of the Program in Race, Law, and History. Through her appointment in the history department, she advises undergraduate and graduate history students on topics of legal history, and also advises students on rural studies in other departments including English and Sociology.
You can learn more about Professor Prifogle’s scholarship at www.emilyprifogle.com.
Selected Publications:
“Rural Social Safety Nets for Migrant Farmworkers in Michigan, 1942-1971,” Law & Social Inquiry, 46, no. 4, (November 2021): 1022 – 1061.
“Winks, Whispers, and Prosecutorial Discretion in Rural Iowa, 1925-1928,” Annals of Iowa 79, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 247-83.
“Law and Laundry: White Laundresses, Chinese Laundrymen, and Hours Restrictions in Muller v. Oregon,” Studies in Law, Policy & Society 83 (2020): 23-56.
“Law and Local Activism: Uncovering the Civil Rights History of Chambers v. Mississippi,” California Law Review (2013): 445-519.
