In June, HLS Professor Bruce H. Mann, was elected to the Council of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Va., for a three-year term. He is a legal historian who studies the relationship between law, economy and society in early America and also teaches Property and Trusts and Estates.
The Omohundro Institute is dedicated to promoting research, study and publication in early American history. Among other projects, it publishes the leading journal in the field, the William & Mary Quarterly. At the Institute’s upcoming 15th Annual Conference, held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Mann will chair a session on “Law and Rights in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic.”
His book “Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence” received the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic; the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association; and the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. His other publications include “Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut” and a volume of essays, co-edited with Christopher L. Tomlins, “The Many Legalities of Early America,” as well as articles and essays in various history journals and law reviews.
Mann is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. He is also a long-time member of the advisory council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, in Philadelphia, and of the Administrative Committee of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.