Phone: 217-244-7890
Email: rjross@law.uiuc.edu
B.A., J.D., Ph.D. Yale University
Courses
American Legal History
Legal Cultures of Early America
Rule of Law
Trusts and Estates
Vita
Publications
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Richard Ross holds a joint appointment in the College of Law and History Department at the University of Illinois (Urbana/Champaign) and is co-director of the Illinois Program in Legal History. He currently offers courses on Trusts and Estates, American Legal History, The Rule of Law in Historical Perspective, and Legal Cultures of Early America. Before coming to Illinois in 2004, he had a joint appointment in the Law School and History Department of the University of Wisconsin (Madison), where he helped set up the Legal Studies Program. His current research-being developed into a book-is on the intellectual history of legal communications in early modern England and early America. Thus far, this project has yielded several articles, including "The Memorial Culture of Early Modern English Lawyers: Memory as Keyword, Shelter, and Identity, 1560-1640," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (1998), which received the honorable mention for the 1999 Sutherland Prize from the American Society for Legal History. Other interests include the impact of ethnic diversity on legal culture in early America, the development of a historical perspective about the effect of communications regimes on legal thought and practice, the nature of Puritan jurisprudence, and the comparative analysis of how legal communications influenced imperial governance in the early modern English and Spanish empires. Articles on these subjects have appeared in or are pending in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Law and History Review, the William and Mary Quarterly, Law and Social Inquiry, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, The Worlds of John Winthrop: England and New England, 1588-1649 (eds. Francis Bremer and Lynn A. Botelho), and The Cambridge History of Law in America (eds. Christopher Tomlins and Michael Grossberg). His most recent essay is: "Puritan Godly Discipline in Comparative Perspective: Legal Pluralism and the Sources of ‘Intensity,'" American Historical Review 113 (in press, October 2008). Ross has earned three degrees from Yale University: a B.A. in History in 1984; J.D. in 1989 from Yale Law School, where he was Symposium Editor and Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal; and Ph.D. in History in 1998. He has received research fellowships from Yale Law School, Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies, the American Historical Association, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and the Spencer Foundation. In 1995-96, he was a visiting scholar at the Harvard History Department. In fall 2008, he will be a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Ross is the founder and director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, which meets under the auspices of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library (Chicago). The Symposium yearly presents a conference that gathers law professors, historians, and social scientists to explore a particular topic in comparative legal history in the early modern period, broadly defined (c.1492-1815).
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