Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history, with a preference for work that falls within Reid’s own interests in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-America and Native American law. The award is given on the recommendation of the Society’s Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award. (First books, written wholly or primarily while the author was untenured, should be sent to the Cromwell Book Prize committee of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. The Reid Award and the Cromwell Book Prize are mutually exclusive.)

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Year Winner

2018 Amalia D. Kessler (Stanford University), Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).