Maeve Glass

An award-winning legal historian who joined the faculty in 2018, Maeve Glass ’09 focuses on the legal and conceptual foundations for the U.S. Constitution and the implications for today. Her Ph.D. dissertation on the subject, “These United States: A History of the Fracturing of America,” received the American Society for Legal History’s best dissertation prize in 2017 and is the basis for her forthcoming book on the origins and evolution of the U.S. Constitution.

As a lawyer and a historian trained in Latin American and Native American history, Glass brings an interdisciplinary approach to her seminar, The Legal History of American Slavery, which examines the “law of slavery” from a wide range of perspectives, including critical race theory, gender studies, economics, and social history. In her property class, Glass takes a long view to examine how doctrines have evolved over centuries and remained relatively stable.

As an academic fellow at the Law School, Glass conceived the idea for “Law and Its History: A Workshop on Methods,” which brought together graduate students and professors from across Columbia University. She has held legal history fellowships at Harvard Law School and New York University School of Law, where she completed her archival and doctoral work. She developed her individualized approach to teaching while she pursued her Ph.D. in history at Princeton University.