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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 FELLOWFELLOWSHIP YEAR(S)CURRENT POSITION
Jamie Grischkan2020-2021Associate Professor
Arizona State University, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
Lael Weinberger2019-2020Lawyer and Historian
William P. Sullivan2018-2019Associate
Three Crowns
Marie-Amelie George2017-2018Associate Professor of Law
Wake Forest School of Law
Nikolas Bowie2016-2017Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law
Harvard Law School
Adam Lebovitz2015-2016Staff Fellow in History
University of Cambridge
Maeve Glass2014-2015Associate Professor of Law
Columbia Law School
Sara Mayeux2013-2014Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of History
Vanderbilt Law School
Peter C. Pihos2012-2013Assistant Professor of History
Western Washington University
Sam Erman2011-2012Professor of Law
University of Michigan Law School
Jedidiah Kroncke2010-2011Associate Professor
Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Deborah Dinner2009-2010Professor of Law
Cornell Law School
Kara Swanson2008-2009Professor of Law
Northeastern University School of Law
Cynthia Nicoletti2007-2008Professor of Law and Professor of History
University of Virginia School of Law
R. Owen Williams2007-2008Author
Diana I. Williams2006-2007
Daniel I. Sharfstein2005-2006Dick 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