Dr Grace Mallon, Clive Holmes Fellow in History, has been named a joint winner of the William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, awarded by the American Society for Legal History, which supports research and teaching in the field of legal history.
Dr Grace Mallon
Dr Mallon’s article, “Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789-1815,” published in the William and Mary Quarterly, examines the federal government’s efforts to enforce its new authority after the Founding. She shows how federal officials quickly realised that they required the participation and consent of state governments in order to enact federal laws. The article explores how Atlantic port cities became a crucial test case for negotiated federalism, as the federal government sought to operate in spaces where states had already established long-standing authority.
The prize committee said of Dr Mallon’s article: “Based in impressive primary source research in state and federal official records and correspondence, Mallon brings multiple areas of scholarship together to describe how power was worked out ‘in the course of ordinary government administration instead of in high theory. “Negotiated Federalism” takes something that we feel is well-understood (federalism at the founding) and through a creative path through the archive mines new and provocative ways of seeing the past that help us see the present more clearly.”
Dr Mallon joined LMH as the Clive Holmes Fellow in History in 2024, having previously served as the Kinder Junior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. Her research focuses on the constitutional history of the early American republic.
