Professor Mary Sarah Bilder teaches in the areas of property and American legal and constitutional history at Boston College Law School. She received her B.A. and the Dean’s Prize from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, her J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School, and her A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of American Civilization. She was a law clerk to the Hon. Francis Murnaghan, Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. She writes primarily in the area of constitutionalism and colonial American legal culture. She was the Lucy G. Moses Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School in 2001 and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the spring of 2008.

She is the author of The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Harvard University Press, 2004), awarded the Littleton-Griswold Award from the American Historical Association. Her articles appear in The Many Legalities of Early America, The Cambridge History of Law in America, and law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and the Hastings Law Journal. She has received the Boston College Annual Prize for Scholarship, a Boston College Distinguished Research Award, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and is a Boston College Law School Fund Scholar. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Law and History Review, the Council of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Board of Overseers of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Historical Society, and is a member of the American Law Institute.

She has two stepdaughters, Dana and Lizzie, and two daughters, Eleanor and Lucy.  She was given the Emil Slizewski Faculty Teaching Award in 2007.

EDUCATION

B.A., University of Wisconsin at Madison; J.D., A.M., Ph.D., Harvard University.

PRESENTATIONS

“James Madison, Law Student,” Harvard Law School Faculty Workshop (March 2008).

“James Madison, Demi-Lawyer,” Suffolk Law School Colloquium (September 2007).

“Colonial Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law,” Cornell Law School and the American Society for Legal History (Nov. 2007, March 2007).

“The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review,” Harvard Legal History Colloquium, Harvard Law School, in September 2006.

“English Governance and Local Settlement,” Massachusetts Historical Society, in April 2006.

“The Misunderstood Origins of Judicial Review: Constitutionalism and the Colonial Period,” Boston University/University of Cambridge Seminar on the “Constitution and Public Policy in American History,” Boston University Institute for American Political History, in March 2006.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

"Colonial Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law." In The Transformation of American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz.  Editors: Alfred Brophy and Daniel Hamilton (forthcoming 2008)

Blackstone in America: The Works of Kathryn Preyer. Editors: Mary Sarah Bilder, R. Kent Newmyer, and Maeva Marcus. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2009)

"United States Law: The Colonial Period: The Sources of Colonial Law." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

Book Review, American Journal of Legal History (review of Brendan McConville, The King's Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776. Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 2006) (forthcoming 2008)

ACTIVITIES

American Association of Law Schools, Journal of Legal Education Board (2008).

Participated in the Students of Color Retreat at BC Law.

OTHER

Emil Slizewski Faculty Teaching Award (2007).

Co-leader, "Constitutionalism" (Summer Research Seminar), Center for Constitutional Studies, George Washington University Law School (June 2007).

Recipient of the inaugural 2006 BC Law Annual Prize for Scholarly Excellence.

Fall '07: Property
Spring '08: Visiting at Harvard Law School (Property and The Philadelphia Convention)

PUBLICATIONS

"English Settlement and Local Governance." In The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol.1: Early America, 1580-1815, edited by Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, 63-103.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

"Idea or Practice: A Brief Historiography of Judicial Review."  Journal of Policy History, 20: no.1 (2008): 6-25.
Full text: SSRN, NELLCO

"Why We Have Judicial Review." Yale Law Journal Pocket Part  116 (2007): 215.

"The Origins of Judicial Review." BC Law Magazine 15: no.1 (Winter 2006): 30, 53-54.

"The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review." Yale Law Journal  116, no.3 (December 2006): 502-566.
Full text: SSRN, NELLCO

The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Excerpt: SSRN, NELLCO
Book review: William & Mary Quarterly

"Salamanders and Sons of God: The Culture of Appeal in Early New England." In The Many Legalities of Early America, edited by Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, 47-77. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

"The Lost Lawyers: Early American Legal Literates and Transatlantic Legal Culture." Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 11(Winter 1999): 47-117.
Full text: SSRN,  NELLCO

"The Origin of the Appeal in America." Hastings Law Journal 48 (July 1997): 913-968.
Full text:  SSRN,  NELLCO

"The Struggle Over Immigration: Indentured Servants, Slaves, and Articles of Commerce." Missouri Law Review 61 (Fall 1996): 743-824.
Full text: NELLCO

"The Shrinking Back: The Law of Biography." Stanford Law Review 43 (January 1991): 299-360.
Full text:  SSRN,  NELLCO