Education

PhD, University of California-Santa Barbara, 1968
 

Fields of Interest

United States Constitutional and legal history

Academic Profile

Professor Rogers’ research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Constitution and American legal history. His most recent book and a cluster of scholarly articles focused on the death penalty in Massachusetts. He is currently working on two projects: the contested intersection of faith healing and the First Amendment; and a history of the anti-vaccination movement from 1721 to 2009, for which he was awarded a New England Regional Consortium Fellowship. The undergraduate and graduate courses Rogers teaches parallel his research interests: “U.S. Constitutional History, I and II; “The U.S. Bill of Rights,” “The Death Penalty: USA and EU,” and “Church and State” (with Professor James O’Toole). Rogers is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
 

Representative Publications

• Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008)
• "State Constitutionalism and the Death Penalty," Journal of Policy History (2008)
• "The Death Penalty and Reversible Error in Massachusetts," Pierce Law Review (2008)
• Boston: City on a Hill (American Historical Press, 2007)
• The Boston Strangler (Commonwealth Editions, 2006)
• Murder on Trial, co-authored with Robert Asher and Lawrence Goodheart (SUNY Press, 2005)
• "Thieves, Rogues, and Judges in Early Republican Massachusetts," co-authored with Edward W. Hanson, Massachusetts Legal History (2003)
• "'A long train of hideous consequences': Boston, Capital Punishment and the Transformation of Republicanism, 1780-1805," in James O'Toole and David Quigley, eds., Boston's Histories (2003)
• "'Success — At Long Last': The Abolition of the Death Penalty in Massachusetts, 1928-1984," Boston College Third World Law Journal (2002)
• "Finish the fight: The Struggle for Women's Jury Service in Massachusetts," Massachusetts Historical Review (2000)
• "'An anchor to the windward': The Right of the Accused to an Impartial Jury in Massachusetts Capital Cases," Suffolk University Law Review (1999)
• "Chinese and the Campaign to Abolish Capital Punishment in Massachusetts, 1870-1914," Journal of American Ethnic History (1999)
• Discovering the Public Interest: A History of the Boston Bar Association, co-authored with Douglas Jones (1993)