The Winner of the 2025 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History is John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, 2025), by Beth Lew-Williams
This fascinating and beautifully written book brilliantly demonstrates how American law constrained the lives of Chinese immigrants in the Pacific West from their arrival in the 1850s through the beginning of the 1920s. In AN EXTRAORDINARY feat of historical reconstruction and big data analytics, Lew-Williams has scoured court records in 33 archives and discovered more than 5000 laws regulating the conditions under which Chinese held jobs, operated businesses, owned property, testified in court, sought education, and formed families. Beyond the legal regime, she shows, racial etiquette and threats of violence and deportation also fostered conditional inclusion of the Chinese in cities, towns, and the countryside. *John Doe Chinaman* is all the more remarkable because as Lew-Williams movingly demonstrates, western states and towns stripped immigrants of their individuality. The spellbinding stories she nevertheless deftly pieces together spotlight how the Chinese accepted, circumvented, and resisted the racial regime. The result is a new legal history of the Chinese in the American West. Poignantly and superbly, it illuminates the intertwined nature of racism and nativism and forces us to reconsider what we think we know about American racial supremacy. – L.K.
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The Finalist of the 2025 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History is We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (Liveright Publishing Company, 2025), by Jill Lepore
No one has illuminated how we reached the point of an ossified Constitution as well, and as readably, as historian Jill LePore. LePore’s book deserves widespread attention, especially by those who believe today that our government is out of touch by ancient design. It was the genius of the framers to create a new government born out of revolution that nonetheless was designed to persist through changing times, without revolution. As LePore puts it, they sought the “sweet spot.” This book is an acknowledgement of visionaries who fought against all odds for over two centuries, and sometimes succeeded, to find that sweet spot and achieve a government of “We the People.” In addition, it illuminates a Supreme Court that, especially by the 20th century, took it upon itself to short-circuit the people’s direct involvement in change. But the book also serves as an encouragement to those considering whether to undertake similar battles in the 21st century, especially in an era of retrenchment on our highest court. – D.S.