“Legislation, Regulation, and Administration in the American Founding,” 4/25 KICD Colloquium with University of Michigan Clyne Professor of Law Bill Novak

After leading a workshop of Kinder Institute Postdoc Lauren Feldman’s manuscript project earlier in the day, University of Michigan Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law Bill Novak will deliver the final Colloquium Series presentation of the spring semester, pushing back against conventional understandings of the early American state to reveal robust regulatory practices that began with the dawn of the Revolution. The talk will be held on April 25 at 3:30pm in Jesse 410.

Abstract

“Legislation, Regulation, and Administration in the Founding” is Prof. Novak’s first venture into 18th century history. After completing two monographs on the nature of regulation in the early 19th and the early 20th centuries, respectively, he turns back to the period of the American Founding—the revolutionary and constitutional eras—in a continuing investigation into early American vernacular traditions of legislation and administration. Contra myths of early American state weakness, limited government, and/or the primacy of individual interests and private rights, this paper uncovers robust traditions of American regulatory practice commencing from the very first days of the Revolution and the establishment of distinctively American forms of government.

Bill Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He teaches in the fields of legal history, legislation, and regulation, and his research interests focus on the history of the modern American regulatory state. Novak previously was a professor of history at the University of Chicago and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. In 1996, he published The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press), which won the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize for Best Book in the History of Law and Society. In 2023, he published a sequel, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, which again won the AHA’s Littleton-Griswold Prize as well as the Morgan Prize for best book on the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

In addition to some 50 articles, he has also co-edited four additional books: The Democratic Experiment (Princeton University Press, 2003) with Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer; The State in U.S. History (University of Chicago Press, 2015) with Jim Sparrow and Steve Sawyer; The Corporation and American Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2017) with Naomi Lamoreaux and The Tobin Project; and Antimonopoly and American Democracy with Dan Crane and The Tobin Project. He is currently at work on a new legal history of the American Founding from the perspective of law, regulation, administration, and statecraft.