DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Thematic Field(s):  Legal and Criminal History

Principal Research Interest(s):  American Legal History

Biography

Joanna Grisinger (J.D. University of Chicago Law School 1998; Ph.D., History, University of Chicago, 2005) is Associate Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University, where she teaches a variety of undergraduate courses including Legal and Constitutional History of the United States, Constitutional Law, Gender and the Law, Law and Society, and Law & the Civil Rights Movement. She received her J.D. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago; her research focuses on the modern administrative state in twentieth-century U.S. legal and political history. Her first book, The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2012), offers a political history of administrative law reform. Her current research explores public interest participation in administrative decision making; she is currently working on a book manuscript that examines airline regulation as a site for mobilization around issues of race and apartheid, disability, consumer rights, and the environment.

Prof. Grisinger is a co-founder and co-organizer (with Kimberly Welch, Kathryn Schumaker, and Logan Sawyer) of the Law & History Collaborative Research Network (established 2013) within the Law and Society Association, co-edits (with Deborah Dinner) the Legal History section of Jotwell.com, and is the advisory editor on Law and Criminology for the American National Biography Online. She is a member of the American Society for Legal History’s board of directors and is chair of the ASLH Standing Committee on the Annual Meeting.

JOANNA GRISINGER'S OFFICE HOURS ZOOM LINK (open 2:00pm to 4:00pm)

Affiliated Programs

• Legal Studies Program

Publications

• “‘South Africa is the Mississippi of the world’: Anti-Apartheid Activism through Domestic Civil Rights Law,” Law and History Review (forthcoming, 2020).
• “Writing a Court-Centered History of Administrative Governance” in Approaches to Federal Judicial History, eds. Gautham Rao, Winston Bowman, and Clara Altman (Washington: Federal Judicial Center, 2020).
• “Municipal Administrative Constitutionalism: The New York City Commission on Human Rights, Foreign Policy, and the First Amendment,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 167 (2019): 1669-97.
• “The (Long) Administrative Century: Progressive Models of Governance,” in The Progressives' Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State, eds. Stephen Skowronek, Stephen M. Engel, and Bruce Ackerman (Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 360-81.
• “The Administrative Procedure Act and the Hearing Examiners,” Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary 34, no. 1 (2014): 1-46. 
• “Law and the Administrative State,” in Sally Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy, eds., A Companion to American Legal History (in the Blackwell Companions to American History series) (2013).
• The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• “Law in Action: The Attorney General’s Committee on Administrative Procedure,” Journal of Policy History 20, no. 3 (2008): 379-418.

Recent Reviews

• “Did Public Interest Lawyers Undermine the New Deal Order?,” Article review of Paul Sabin, “Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order,” Law & History Review 33 (2015): 965, Jotwell.com (April 2016).  
• “The World War II Roots of the Modern American Administrative State,” Article review of Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, “Administrative War,” George Washington Law Review 82 (2014): 1343–1445, Jotwell.com (Nov. 2015). 
• “Bringing History into the Law School Classroom,” Book review of Robert M. Jarvis, ed., Teaching Legal History: Comparative Perspectives (London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2014) Jotwell.com (Nov. 2014).

Teaching Interests  

• Teaching interests include American legal history; American constitutional law; and race, gender, and the law.

Courses

• Legal_St 101 Law & the Civil Rights Movement
• Legal_St/Hist 318-1,2 Legal and Constitutional History of the United States – to 1850/since 1850
• Legal St/Hist 320 The Fourteenth Amendment (co-taught with Prof. Kate Masur)
• Legal_St/Poli_Sci 332/333 Constitutional Law I & II
• Legal_St 340 Gender and the Law
• Legal_St 376 Legal History of the Colonies and Constitution
• Legal_St 398-1,2 Advanced Research Seminar

Recent Awards and Honors

• Associated Student Government Faculty & Administrator Honor Roll, 2012-13 and 2014-15.