Since 2005, Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellows have gone on to amazing careers in the legal academy. Among the alumni and alumnae of the program are tenured professors at the top law schools in the United States. The following table provides detailed information about the current work of former fellows.
2022-23 Berger-Howe Fellow
JESSE JAMES
Jesse James is the Berger-Howe Fellow. He is a Classicist and legal historian whose research focuses on law and legal systems in the ancient Greek world. He is particularly interested in bringing modern research and theory to bear on our interpretation of history and historical texts, and in exploring the ways that social, ethical, and legal factors interact to affect individual and collective behavior from the local to the international scale. His dissertation, which he is currently converting into a book, interprets ancient Greek international law through a sociological lens, arguing that Greek states and individuals complied with and enforced international law in part because of social and ethical motivations conditioned by rich social networks that permeated the Greek international world. It also reveals that international law was more extensive, and more important to Greeks themselves and the course of Greek history, than historians have traditionally granted.
Jesse’s work is characterized by drawing connections between ancient and modern. An article forthcoming in the Journal of Hellenic Studies interprets Thucydides’ history in light of contemporary philosophy; elsewhere he describes limitations of new institutional economic analysis in the ancient Greek context. His newest project explores how certain aspects of ancient Greek legal practice were rediscovered in the Renaissance and incorporated into European and English practice in ways that can still be discerned in courtrooms today.
Jesse holds a PhD in Classics from Columbia University and a JD from U.C. Berkeley School of Law, where he was a member of the California Law Review. He also has degrees from the University of Virginia (MA, Classics) and Cornell University (BA, Classics). He practiced law for several years as a litigator in New York, has been a Fellow of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies.
| BERGER-HOWE FELLOW | FELLOWSHIP YEAR(S) | CURRENT POSITION |
| Jamie Grischkan | 2020-2021 | Associate Professor Arizona State University, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law |
| Lael Weinberger | 2019-2020 | Lawyer and Historian |
| William P. Sullivan | 2018-2019 | Drinan Research Fellow Boston College Law School |
| Marie-Amelie George | 2017-2018 | Associate Professor of Law Wake Forest School of Law |
| Nikolas Bowie | 2016-2017 | Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law Harvard Law School |
| Adam Lebovitz | 2015-2016 | Staff Fellow in History University of Cambridge |
| Maeve Glass | 2014-2015 | Associate Professor of Law Columbia Law School |
| Sara Mayeux | 2013-2014 | Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of History Vanderbilt Law School |
| Peter C. Pihos | 2012-2013 | Assistant Professor of History Western Washington University |
| Sam Erman | 2011-2012 | Professor of Law University of Michigan Law School |
| Jedidiah Kroncke | 2010-2011 | Associate Professor Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong |
| Deborah Dinner | 2009-2010 | Professor of Law Cornell Law School |
| Kara Swanson | 2008-2009 | Professor of Law Northeastern University School of Law |
| Cynthia Nicoletti | 2007-2008 | Professor of Law and Professor of History University of Virginia School of Law |
| R. Owen Williams | 2007-2008 | Author |
| Diana I. Williams | 2006-2007 | |
| Daniel I. Sharfstein | 2005-2006 | Dick and Martha Lansden Chair in Law and Professor of History Vanderbilt Law School |
Learn more about the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship