William Novak

Bill Novak joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1991 after receiving his PhD in the History of American Civilization Program at Brandeis University. He is also a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and a founding member of the University's Human Rights Program and the Law, Letters, and Society Program.

Professor Novak works in the fields of United States legal, political, and intellectual history, with special emphasis on issues of liberalism, state-building, and public law. His first book, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Winner of the American Historical Association's 1997 Littleton-Griswold Prize) used nineteenth-century state court records to document the long history of governmental activism in the United States. Together with co-editors Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, he published a second volume of essays on the return of political history entitled The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History in 2003.

He is currently working on a new monographic project on the origins of modern governance entitled The Creation of the Modern American State. This book argues that between 1877 and 1932 early American traditions of self-government, local citizenship, and common-law regulation were replaced by a new model of law and statecraft. This legal and governmental revolution provided the institutional foundation for the rise of our contemporary administrative regulatory state.

He regularly teaches courses on American Legal History; the History of the State; Law and Social Theory; and Human Rights.

For more information about Professor Novak, please visit his page on the Department of History site.