Since 2005, Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellows have established careers in the legal academy, primarily in the United States. Past fellows and their current positions are listed below.
2026-2027 Berger-Howe Fellow
JENNIFER (JENNY) REISS
Jennifer W. Reiss is the 2026-2027 Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellow in Legal History at Harvard Law School.
She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania, from which she also received a B.A. and M.A. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, as well as a LL.M. (on a Cogan Scholarship from HLS) and a M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge.
Jenny’s manuscript in progress, tentatively titled Undone Bodies: Gender and the Making of Disability in Early America, probes the mutually constitutive nature of womanhood, disability, and civic belonging in the long eighteenth century. Undone Bodies reimagines the social order of early America within a disability framework, tying together Anglo-American law, socioeconomics, labor, politics, and medicine. In so doing, and with a special focus on the condition of women in British North America and the early Republic, it provides a new, embodied perspective on the meaning of individual capacity in early American society.
Jenny’s scholarship has been supported by a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Fellowship from the American Society for Legal History, as well as fellowships from, among others, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, where she later served as Works-In-Progress Series Coordinator.
Before returning to academia, Jenny was a practicing attorney in both New York and London, including as an associate at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law, where she supervised students in NYU Law’s international human rights clinic. She has published law review articles on human rights law, European law, and intellectual property law, and has historical work published or forthcoming in Law & Literature, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the essay collection the Routledge History of Disability in America.
| BERGER-HOWE FELLOW | FELLOWSHIP YEAR(S) | CURRENT POSITION |
| Jelani Hayes | 2025-2026 | Ph.D. Candidate in History Harvard University |
| Rephael (Rafi) G. Stern | 2024-2025 | Associate Professor of Law Boston University School of Law |
| No Fellow | 2023-2024 | |
| Jesse James | 2022-2023 | Visiting Assistant Professor Grinnell College |
| No Fellow | 2021-2022 | |
| Jamie Grischkan | 2020-2021 | Associate Professor of Law Fordham School of Law |
| Lael Weinberger | 2019-2020 | Assistant Professor of Law George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School |
| William P. Sullivan | 2018-2019 | Senior Associate Three Crowns |
| Marie-Amélie George | 2017-2018 | 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 | Assistant Professor of Humanities University of Florida |
| Maeve Glass | 2014-2015 | Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law Columbia Law School |
| Sara Mayeux | 2013-2014 | Mildred Prescott Miller Chair in Law and Associate Professor of History Vanderbilt Law School |
| Peter C. Pihos | 2012-2013 | Dean of Fairhaven College and Associate 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 | Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Law Cornell Law School |
| Kara Swanson | 2008-2009 | Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History Northeastern University School of Law |
| Cynthia Nicoletti | 2007-2008 | Paul G. Mahoney Research Professor of Law and Professor of History University of Virginia School of Law |
| R. Owen Williams | 2007-2008 | Morehouse College Board of Trustees and 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