Witt Named Exemplary Legal Writer of 2007

 

Press Contact: Sonia von Gutfeld, 212-854-1453, [email protected]

 

May 27, 2008 (NEW YORK) – John Fabian Witt was honored for exemplary legal writing of 2007 by the Green Bag, a legal journal dedicated to publishing noteworthy scholarship about the law. Excerpts from Witt’s winning article, “Anglo-American Empire and the Crisis of the Legal Frame (Will The Real British Empire Please Stand Up?)” (120 Harv. L. Rev. 754) appear in the 2008 Green Bag Almanac & Reader.

 

Witt’s article is one of 20 selected by Green Bag’s board of advisers for the 2007 award. Among the other honorees are law professors, reporters and judges, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 for her dissenting opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

 

 “Anglo-American Empire and the Crisis of the Legal Frame,” chosen for Green Bag’s “Long Articles” category, reviews four books on the law of Anglo-American empire during the past three centuries. The full text of the article is available here.

 

Founded in 1997, Green Bag aims to publish “good writing” on the law in a range of formats that includes articles, court opinions, books, statutes and speeches. The journal was inspired by the original Green Bag, published between 1889 and 1914.

 

Witt, Professor of Law and History at Columbia Law School, is the author of Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard Press, 2007), which explores law and American nationalism at key moments in legal history since the Founding, and the prizewinning The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard Press, 2004). He received his B.A. (1994), J.D. (1999), and Ph.D. in history (2000) from Yale University.

 

Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School joins traditional strengths in international and comparative law, constitutional law, administrative law, business law and human rights law with pioneering work in the areas of intellectual property, digital technology, sexuality and gender, and criminal law.