About
Pamela Brandwein’s research interests include American constitutional politics; race and the politics of civil rights; and American political development. United by a focus on language and political institutions, her scholarship has appeared in numerous journals including the American Political Science Review, Law & Society Review, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.
A specialist in the law and politics of Reconstruction, she is the author of Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which revises conventional wisdom about the Supreme Court’s “state action” doctrine, commonly viewed as an abandonment of blacks to Southern home rule. Unveiling a lost jurisprudence of rights that provided protections for black physical safety and voting, even as public accommodation rights were dismissed, this law-and-politics treatment of the Reconstruction era combines new political history, discursive analysis, and the study of state-building. Her first book, Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth (Duke University Press, 1999), examines the mid-twentieth century production and institutional establishment of an error-ridden account of the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and the impact of that account on the politics of Warren Court rights expansions. Currently, she is working on a book project that newly examines the relationship between antislavery politics and capitalist development in the Atlantic World.
Her courses offer students an approach to the study of American politics that is attentive to political systems, power, the construction of meaning, and change over time. Drawing students from across the College, her courses on landmark Supreme Court cases; race and American political development; and law and gender provide an array of tools for thinking systematically about law, inequality, and governing institutions.
She has won numerous teaching awards and is the first two-time winner of the Tronstein Award, for outstanding undergraduate teaching in the Department of Political Science. She has also lectured in a wide variety of university, professional, and community settings, ranging from federal judicial conferences to the Interfaith Roundtable of Washtenaw County. She has twice been honored to deliver Leon Silverman lectures at the U.S. Supreme Court, having the privilege of being introduced by Justice Ginsburg (2015) and Justice Sotomayor (2019).
Courses Taught
Field(s) of Study
- Law, Courts, and Politics
- American Political Development
- Race, Ethnicity, and Politics
