Sally E. Hadden, 2023–24 | National Humanities Center

Sally E. Hadden (NHC Fellow, 2023–24)

Project Title

One Supreme Court

Western Michigan University

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Fellowship Work Summary, 2023–24

Sally E. Hadden drafted three and a half chapters of her book project, One Supreme Court, generating a narrative arc that covered judicial developments in England and early America from the mid-1500s to 1787. She completed final editing and proofreading of two essays: “London’s Middle Temple and Law Students from the New World,” published in English Law, the Legal Profession, and Colonialism: Histories, Parallels, and Influences, edited by Cerian Griffiths and Łukasz Korporowicz (Routledge, 2023) and “Lawyers and Their Book Collections: Notes from the Eighteenth Century,” appearing in The Learned and Lived Law: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, edited by Elizabeth Kamali, Saskia Lettmaier, and Nikitas Hatzimihail (Brill, forthcoming 2024). She also completed the final draft of “Friends, Colleagues, Competitors: The Birth, Life, and Death of Friendships among Young Lawyers in Colonial America,” to appear in Global Perspectives on Legal History, edited by Stephan Vogenauer (Max Planck Institute, forthcoming 2024). During the fellowship term, Hadden continued to supervise the seven-person team transcribing and indexing records of the Superior Court of Judicature, Massachusetts’s earliest supreme court. In the space of eight months, the team finished tandem reading two volumes comprising over 1,500 pages of single-spaced text. The volumes will appear online at the websites of the major underwriters of the project, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (where Hadden is editor of publications) and the Ames Foundation.