Mary Sarah Bilder

professor

 

Mary Bilder

At a glance...
.
Professor
Law School

bilder@bc.edu

Office Location
Law School
LIB303

617.552.0648

 

    BACKGROUND

Professor Mary Sarah Bilder teaches in the areas of property, trusts and estates, 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 was given the Emil Slizewski Faculty Teaching Award in 2007 and was named Michael and Helen Lee Distinguished Scholar in 2009.

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. She recently co-edited Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Her articles appear in several important collected volumes of essays and a wide variety of journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, the George Washington Law Review, Law and History Review, Law Library Journal, and the Journal of Policy History.

She has received a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Grant, the Boston College Annual Prize for Scholarship, a Boston College Distinguished Research Award, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and was a Boston College Law School Fund Scholar. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Law and History Review, and The Journal of Legal Education, the Board of The New England Quarterly, and is a member of the American Law Institute, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. 

EDUCATION

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

RECENT PRESENTATIONS

George Washington University Law School, “How Bad were the Original Convention Records?” (November 2011)

Speaker, Magna Charta, McMullen Museum Opening, Boston College (September 2011)

Speaker, Rhode Island Charter Day, The John Clarke Society of Early American Democracy (July 2011)

University of Pennsylvania, Law and History Consortium "Madison's Hand" (February 2011)

University of Illinois, Colloquium on Constitutional Theory, History and Law, "Madison's Hand" (September 2010)

Brigham Young University Law School, "Madison's Hand" (December 2009)

George Washington University Law School "Rethinking Separation of Powers," Judicial Review: Historical Debate, Modern Perspectives, and Comparative Approaches (October 2009)

Boston College Law School Summer Workshop, "Madison's Hand" (June 2009)

University of Wisconsin Law School, "The Authenticity of Madison's Notes"
(April 2009)

University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Center for Law,
Culture and the Humanities, "The Authenticity of Madison's Notes" (March
2009)

WORKS IN PROGRESS

How Bad were the Original Records of the Federal Convention?, GEORGE WASHINGTON LAW REVIEW (forthcoming Fall 2012)

Madison's Hand (under contract with Harvard University Press)

ACTIVITIES

Serves on the boards of Law and History Review, the Journal of Legal Education, and the New England Quarterly. 

Teaching inaugural Eagle Scholarship Fellowship Program (2009. Co-convenor of the Boston College Legal History Roundtable.

OTHER

Michael and Helen Lee Distinguished Scholar (2009)

Emil Slizewski Faculty Teaching Award (2007).

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

COURSES

Fall 2011: Trusts/Estates 

Spring 2012: American Legal History; Constitutional History: The Philadelphia Convention

PUBLICATIONS   

"Appeals to the Privy Council before American Independence: An Annotated Digital Catalogue." (with Sharon H. O’Connor), Law Library Journal 104, no.1 (Winter 2012).
Full text: SSRN, NELLCO

"Expounding the Law: Law and Judicial Duty." The George Washington Law Review 78 (September 2010): 1129-1144.
Full text: SSRNNELLCO

"James Madison, Law Student and Demi-Lawyer." Law and History Review  28 (May 2010): 389-449. (© Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, NELLCO

Editor, with Maeva Marcus, R. Kent Newmyer. Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009.

"The Colonial Period: The Sources of Colonial Law." In The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, volume 6, Stanley N. Katz, editor in chief, 32-24.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

"Colonial Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law." In Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz, editors, Daniel W. Hamilton, Alfred L. Brophy, 28-57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law School, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009.
Full text: SSRN, NELLCO

"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.
Full Text: SSRN, NELLCO

"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.
Full Text: SSRN, NELLCO

"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: SSRNNELLCO

"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: SSRN, NELLCO

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