Lea VanderVelde

Lea VanderVelde writes in the fields of work law, property law, American legal history, and constitutional law. She is currently using digital research technologies to examine American national expansion in the critical years before the Civil War. As principal investigator for The Law of the Antebellum Frontier project at the Stanford Spatial History Lab, she is analyzing the legal and cultural mechanisms at work in developing states out of U.S. territories. Understanding the discourse about state-building sheds light upon how empires expand and how American expansion into the Ohio and Mississippi river basins shaped American identity and the Reconstruction amendments. More about the project can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id....

Professor VanderVelde has been actively engaged in the debate over the ALI’s recently promulgated Restatement of Employment Law. She organized and hosted the 2011 Experts Conference on the Restatement of Employment Law, held at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. Her recent books are Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (2009) and Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (2014), which tells 12 stories of enslaved families turning to the courts to establish their freedom based upon the discovery of almost 300 freedom suits brought by slaves in the St. Louis courts. She is at work on a monograph, entitled The Master Narrative of the 19th Century Law, which explores how master-servant law resisted the forces of modernization and continues to reinforce employee subordination.

She earned her undergraduate and law degree at the University of Wisconsin and has taught at Yale Law School and the University of Pennsylvania and the Juridicum of the University of Vienna. In 2011 she was the Guggenheim fellow in Constitutional Studies.