Holly Brewer is a legal historian of early America and early modern Britain. She focuses on early modern debates about justice, and how those impact laws and policies, including the common law, especially before and after England’s two revolutions in the seventeenth century and the American Revolution. She is interested as well in the impact of such laws and policies on real people, and in the consequent controversies over policies. Her research focuses on the intersection of political theory and legal practices, particularly on questions surrounding democracy and human rights as well as property law.
She is Burke Professor of American history and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. She has won many awards for her scholarship, including the Order of the Coif Book Prize from the Association of American Law Schools in 2008, for her first book: By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (2005) Her new book, for which she received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2014, entitled “the King’s Slaves: Creating America’s Plantation System,” is under contract with Princeton University Press. She has written and/or contributed to more than five amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme court, including an historians’ brief in U.S. v. Trump. She is project director for slaverylawpower.org. She is also deeply involved in faculty governance at UMD.