I am an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and an Assistant Professor of History by courtesy. In the law school I teach courses on property, rural law, local government, and legal history. My research focuses on the social history of the law and includes study of place, gender and sexuality, and race. 

​My book project, "The Heartland's Legal Landscapes & the Remaking of Modern Rural America, 1920-2020," grows from my dissertation “Cows, Cars, and Criminals: The Legal Landscape of the Rural Midwest, 1920-1975." I argue that the legal remaking of rural communities was a central feature of twentieth-century America. The project utilizes case studies to examine critical topics that historians and legal scholars have framed as quintessentially urban issues—land use and zoning, policing and prosecution, education equality, labor and economic opportunity, local community organizing and advocacy, and infrastructure and mobility—and reveals their manifestations in rural geographies, economies, and social norms. The result is a new legal history that tells not a story of rural decline but a story of the rural Midwest in a constant process of transformation along lines of class, race, and gender. Learn more about the book project here, and about other current research projects and articles here. 
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I received my BA in history and art history from Indiana University, a MSc in comparative social policy from Oxford, a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a MA and PhD in history at Princeton University. I also clerked for Judge David Hamilton on the Seventh Circuit. 

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Updated February 2022
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