About

Emily Prifogle

Emily A. Prifogle (it’s PRY-foh-gull) is professor of law and professor of history at the University of Michigan, where she teaches classes on property law, family law, rural studies, and legal history. She is also the co-director of the Program in Race, Law, and History and Secretary of the American Society for Legal History.

She is a legal historian whose research primarily focuses on the social and political history of rural people and spaces, and includes the study of law, gender, race, and place-making more broadly. Her first book, Rural: A Modern American History, explores legal and political conflict in the Midwest.

Prifogle received her masters in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford, her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD in history from Princeton University. She clerked for Judge David Hamilton on the Seventh Circuit.