Martha S. Jones is a member of the Law School's Affiliated LS&A Faculty and associate professor of history and Afro American studies. She is codirector of the Michigan Law Program in Race, Law & History and the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project. Her scholarly interests include the history of race, citizenship, slavery, and the rights of women in the United States and the Atlantic world. She holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a JD from the CUNY School of Law. Prior to joining the Michigan faculty she was a public interest litigator for the HIV Law Project and MFY Legal Services where her work focused on the rights of people with disabilities. In 1994, she was awarded a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. Jones is a member of the publications committee of the American Society for Legal History and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. In 2008, she was appointed a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the National Constitution Center. In 2009, she was co-curator of an exhibition, "Reframing the Color Line: Race and the Visual Culture of the Atlantic World," at the William L. Clements Library. Prof. Jones is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (2007). Her current projects include two books: Overturning Dred Scott: Race, Rights, and Ritual in the Antebellum United States and Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: Slavery and Freedom in the Era of the Haitian Revolution. She is also curator of the 2012-2013 exhibition, "Proclaiming Emancipation," with the Clements Library.

Professor William J. Novak, an award-winning legal scholar and historian, joined the Law School faculty in fall 2009. Prof. Novak came from the University of Chicago, where he had been an associate professor of history, a founding member of the university's Human Rights Program and Law, Letters, and Society Program, and director of its Center for Comparative Legal History. Since 2000, Prof. Novak has been a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. In 1996, he published The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America, which won the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize and was named Best Book in the History of Law and Society. A specialist on the legal, political, and intellectual history of the United States, Prof. Novak earned his PhD in the history of American civilization from Brandeis University in 1991. He was a visiting faculty member at Michigan Law during fall 2007, when he taught courses in U.S. legal history and legislation. Prof. Novak is currently at work on The People's Government: Law and the Creation of the Modern American State, a study of the transformation in American liberal governance around the turn of the twentieth century.

Professor Rebecca J. Scott, the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law, has been named the University of Michigan's Henry Russel Lecturer for 2012. At the Law School, she teaches a course on civil rights and the boundaries of citizenship in historical perspective, as well as a seminar on the law in slavery and freedom. With Jean M. Hébrard from the École des Hautes Études in Paris, Prof. Scott is the author of Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012). Her previous book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2005), received the Frederick Douglass Prize and the John Hope Franklin Prize. Among Prof. Scott's recent articles are "Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution," Law and History Review (November 2011); the coauthored essay "Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution," (in Garrigus and Morris, Assumed Identities, 2010); "Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge," Michigan Law Review (2008); and "The Atlantic World and the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson," the Journal of American History (2007). Prof. Scott received an AB from Radcliffe College, an MPhil in economic history from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in history from Princeton University. She is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.