Bio
Christopher Lawrence Tomlins is a Research Professor with a full-time appointment on the research faculty of the American Bar Foundation. He is also adjunct professor of law at Northwestern…
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Research focus
My research has focused on topics in Anglo-American legal history across a broad front, from the “early modern” era (the beginning of the sixteenth century) into the later twentieth century. My current work gathers together several related fields of inquiry - the history of the relation of master and servant (labor and employment law) from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries; the history of the legal structure of the employment relationship; the historical relationship between migration, labor force creation and law; and the law of slavery and and of civic identity - in a book on the colonization of mainland North America through the end of the eighteenth century that examines in particular the mobilization of law both as a general discourse justifying pan-European colonizing activities and as a means (a technique) to implement specific colonizing practices. Other current interests include the history of law’s interactions with social science disciplines in general and with the discipline of history in particular, the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the history of the concept of police and police power in Anglo-American and European law and politics. I am developing the latter into a new project on the history of sovereignty and its relationship to American constitutional law. I also have plans to expand current work on the relationship of legal history to the conceptual structure of historical materialism.