Bio
Christopher Lawrence Tomlins is currently Chancellor's Professor of Law at the University of California Irvine School of Law, on leave from his position as a Research Professor with a full-time…
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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 most recent book, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (also available here) gathers together several related fields of inquiry - the history of colonizing; the historical relationship between migration, labor force creation and law; the history of the relation of master and servant (labor and employment law), and the history of the legal structure of the employment relationship; and the law of slavery and and of civic identity. The result is a book about the origins of modern America – a history of the mainland from the beginnings of English presence on the mainland until the Civil War - that according to the eminent historian of Early America, Jack P. Greene, "may well turn out to be the most important work published in American history over the past quarter century."
Freedom Bound is a history of migrants and migrations, of colonizers and colonized, of households and servitude and slavery, and of the freedom all craved and some found. Above all it is a history of the law that framed the entire process. Freedom Bound tells how colonies were planted in occupied territories, how they were populated with migrants – free and unfree – to do the work of colonizing, and how the newcomers secured possession. It tells of the new civic lives that seemed possible in new commonwealths, and of the constraints that kept many from enjoying them. It follows the story long past the end of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War, when – just for a moment – it seemed that freedom might finally be unbound.
Freedom Bound has been a major preoccupation of mine for a long time (since I published my last major book, Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic, in 1993), but it is not all that I have worked on while an ABF Research Professor. In another major project that finished in 2008 after ten years work, Michael Grossberg and I saw the Cambridge History of Law in America into publication. Apart from those books (and others detailed here) I have recently written essays addressing (1) the history of law’s interactions with social science disciplines in general and with the discipline of history in particular; (2) the history of legal education; and (3) the history of "republican law" during and after the American Revolution. I am also currently writing about the historiography of legal history; about the concept of government in American history; and about the legal philosophy and historical materialism of Walter Benjamin. Finally, I am beginning to plan research on the Southampton Slave Insurrection of 1831, in which I have long had an interest.