Faculty within the Department are in dialogue with a group of colleagues in the Law School, exploring shared and overlapping research and teaching interests in the area of Law and History. In addition to well-established large courses on legal history (one on Anglo-American legal history and one on Constitutional Interpretation), there are now several seminars that address law and history, including one on race and citizenship and another on slavery and the law in the United States and in Latin America. Recent small conferences organized on campus have focused on race, gender, and the law, and one of these has yielded a volume on gender, honor and the law in Latin America. The faculty in this cluster characteristically use judicial records in their research, and interpret those records both in the light of social history and of jurisprudence. This interest in exploring the interplay of doctrine and practice makes the crossing of the boundary between the History Department and the Law School particularly easy, and two of our faculty now hold joint appointments in the two units.
