Department of History
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Office: (773) 702-7938
Fax: (773) 702-7550
Email: nov9@uchicago.edu
On Leave: 2008-2009
FIELD SPECIALTIES
United States legal, political, and intellectual history, with special emphasis on issues of liberalism, state-building, and public law.
BIOGRAPHY
Bill Novak joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1991 after receiving his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization Program at Brandeis University. He is also a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and a founding member of the University’s Human Rights Program and the Law, Letters, and Society Program.
Professor Novak works in the fields of United States legal, political, and intellectual history, with special emphasis on issues of liberalism, state-building, and public law. His first book, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Winner of the American Historical Association's 1997 Littleton-Griswold Prize) used nineteenth-century state court records to document the long history of governmental activism in the United States. Together with co-editors Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, he published a second volume of essays on the return of political history entitled The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History in 2003.
He is currently working on a new monographic project on the origins of modern governance entitled The Creation of the Modern American State. This book argues that between 1877 and 1932 early American traditions of self-government, local citizenship, and common-law regulation were replaced by a new model of law and statecraft. This legal and governmental revolution provided the institutional foundation for the rise of our contemporary administrative regulatory state.
He regularly teaches courses on American Legal History, The History of the State, Law and Social Theory, and Human Rights.
PUBLICATIONS
The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, co-edited with Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
“The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008),752-772.
“A State of Legislatures,” Polity 40 (forthcoming, July 2008).
“Police Power and the Transformation of the American State,” in Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde, eds., Police and the Liberal State (forthcoming, Stanford University Press, 2008).
“Public-Private Governance: A History,” in Martha Minow and Jody Freeman, eds., Outsourcing the U.S. (forthcoming, Harvard University Press, 2008).
“The Not-So-Strange Birth of the Modern American State,” Law and History Review 24 (Spring 2006), 193-200.
“The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton University Press, 2003), 85-119.
“The Pluralist State: The Convergence of Public and Private Power in America,” in Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog, eds., American Public Life and the Historical Imagination (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 27-48.
"Private Wealth and Public Health: A Critique of Richard Epstein’s Defense of the ‘Old’ Public Health," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 46 (Summer, 2003 Supplement), S176-S198.
"The Legal Origins of the Modern American State," forthcoming in Bryant Garth, Robert Kagan, and Austin Sarat, eds., Looking Back at Law's Century (Cornell University Press, Fall 2001).
"The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society," Studies in American Political Development (Fall 2001).
"Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State: The Historical Sociology of James Willard Hurst," Law and History Review, 18 (2000), 97-145.