David Freeman Engstrom, JD ’02, associate professor of law, was honored in 2012 by the American Society of Legal History with its William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Cromwell Article Prize for “The Lost Origins of American Fair Employment Law: Regulatory Choice and the Making of Modern Civil Rights, 1943-1972,” which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 2011 (vol. 63).

Engstrom’s scholarship focuses on the design of public institutions, particularly regarding civil rights, as well as topics in administrative law, employment law, complex litigation, constitutional federalism, and law and education. His article was praised for its deep exploration of strategies employed by various civil rights groups to craft fair employment law, along with his intensive archival work across a wide range of sources to tell a new story about how civil rights emerged not just from statutes and from judicial interpretation but from the administrative 
state as well.