Bill Novak, the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law, is an award-winning legal scholar and historian. He joined the Law School faculty in fall 2009 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 (The University of North Carolina Press), 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 20th century.