We are continuing our recap of the prizes awarded at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History. This post is dedicated to the William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize ("awarded annually to the best article in American legal history published
in the preceding calendar year by an early career scholar"). The 2024 winner is Katie A. Moore (UC Santa Barbara), for “To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere,” Early American Studies 2 (2023): 233-271. The citation:
This article investigates how paper currency became a powerful site of meaning-making in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century America. Exploring the establishment of counterfeiting as a crime, it contends that colonial governments used these laws to legitimate paper money and produce state power. Moore’s study develops an innovative legal history of paper currency that several Advisory Committee members described as brilliant. Advisory Committee members felt that Moore’s interdisciplinary methods and careful attention to the materiality and social meanings of both specie and notes enrich legal history. The article not only deftly explores the legal regimes surrounding print money and counterfeiting, but also pushes readers to expand their understandings of what law is and how it operates through material artefacts and within a range of social milieus to produce state power.
Congratulations to Professor Moore!
-- Karen Tani
