BIO

Lea VanderVelde is a Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies, a Primary Investigator for the Stanford Spatial History Lab, and the Josephine R. Witte Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law where she researches, teaches courses, and write actively in the fields of work law, constitutional law, property law, and legal history. She draws her inspiration from history, cross-cultural observation, and legal realism, and her pursuit of new technology and teaching methods has allowed her to push the boundaries of what was before possible in legal history and instruction.

After playing a role in discovering almost 300 freedom suits brought by slaves in the St. Louis courts, she began writing her pending publication, Redemption Songs: Freedom Suits in Frontier Courtrooms, (under contract to Oxford University Press). Here, the antebellum frontier, slavery, and national expansion are the overriding issues presented for examination, further exploring the trials and triumphs of these black Americans who boldly sued for their freedom during a time of great social unrest.

Her recent book, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (Oxford University Press, 2009), chronicles the life of Harriet Scott on the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier, to slavery-era St. Louis, and it reveals her pivotal role in American legal history through her involvement in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. IN 1996, she co-authored a conceptual piece with the same title, in addition to numerous articles on topics including the Thirteenth Amendment and free labor.

Among her articles on work and gender are:  The Legal Ways of Seduction,  48 Stanford Law Review 817,  The Gendered Origins of the Lumley Doctrine, 101 Yale L. J. 775;  The Labor Vision of the Thirteenth Amendment, 138 U.Pa. L. Rev. 437; A Singular Conscience: In Re Summers, 14 Employee Rights & Employment Policy Journal, Walmart AS A Phenomenon in the Legal World: Matters of Scale, Scale Matters.

In addition to her scholarly research and writing, she has been a primary advocate for employee protection in the ALI’s proposed Restatement of Employment Law.

She has also visited at the American Bar Foundation, Yale Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the Juridicum of the University of Vienna in Austria.

Professor VanderVelde’s current project, in association with the Spatial History Lab at Stanford where she is a principal investigator, is to create several detailed maps of the expansion of U.S. sovereignty in the antebellum frontier.



 

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