Christopher L. Tomlins
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 University School of Law. Before joining the American Bar Foundation in 1992, he was Reader in Legal Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne (Australia). He has a Ph.D. in History (Johns Hopkins) and a fine collection of Masters’ Degrees – in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (Oxford), in American Studies (University of Sussex), and in History (Johns Hopkins).
Chris Tomlins is well known as a legal historian whose interests and research are cast very broadly – from sixteenth century England to twentieth century America; from the legal culture of work and labor to the interrelations of law and literature; from the jurisprudence of Francisco de Vitoria of Salamanca to the revolutionary Marxism of Walter Benjamin. Since first gaining productive academic employment in 1980, Tomlins has written or edited six books, including most recently the multi-volume Cambridge History of Law in America (published in April 2008, co-edited with Michael Grossberg of Indiana University). He has also published more than a hundred chapters, articles, working papers and other bits and pieces. From 1995 until 2004, he was editor of the Law and History Review. Since 2005 he has been first co-editor (with Jack Heinz) then sole editor of Law & Social Inquiry. He also edits the Cambridge University Press book series Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society. His publications have been awarded the Surrency prize of the American Society for Legal History, the Littleton-Griswold prize of the American Historical Association and the J. Willard Hurst prize of the Law and Society Association.
Current research addresses (a) the legal culture of colonization and work in early Anglo-America, on which he is slowly completing a long book; (b) the history of modalities of sovereignty and governance, notably police, in the fields of Anglo-American and Anglo-colonial constitutional law; and (c) Walter Benjamin’s jurisprudence of revolution.
In his spare time he likes to sleep.