Gregory Ablavsky, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law, received two 2022 prizes for his book, Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories. The Law and Society Association awarded him its J. Willard Hurst Book Prize for the best socio-legal history book and the American Society for Legal History awarded him the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize. Federal Ground explains the growth of federal authority in the first two U.S. federal territories—the Northwest and Southwest—and addresses the underlying questions of what federal power is and who its architects are. It also further identifies how the federal government can be studied—not as a monolith, but as the outcome of many different struggles playing out at the grassroots levels. Ablavsky was also chosen by a vote of the graduating class to receive the 2023 John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching, which honors a professor who “strives to make teaching an art.” SL