Faculty and Staff
Richard Ross
Professor of Law and History
Richard Ross specializes in U.S. and early modern English legal history and in the history of colonial British America. He is working on a book on the political and intellectual history of legal communications in early modern England and early America, entitled, The Commoning of the Common Law: The Relationship of the English People to their Law, 1500-1700. This project has yielded, "The Memorial Culture of Early Modern English Lawyers: Memory as Keyword, Shelter, and Identity, 1560-1640," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10 (1998), which received the honorable mention for the 1999 Sutherland Prize from the American Society for Legal History. Other interests include the impact of ethnic diversity on legal culture in early America, and the development of a historical perspective about the effect of communications practices on legal thought. Articles on these subjects have appeared in or are pending in the William and Mary Quarterly, Law and Social Inquiry, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Worlds of John Winthrop: England and New England, 1588-1649 (eds. Francis Bremer and Lynn Botelho). Ross' most recent essay is "Legal Communications and Imperial Governance in Colonial British and Spanish America," which will appear in the Cambridge History of Law in America (eds. Christopher Tomlins and Michael Grossberg). He is an associate editor of the Law and Society Review. He received his Ph.D. (1998) and J.D. (1989) from Yale University. Before coming to Illinois, he held a joint appointment in the Law School and History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.