Robert J. Cottrol

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Robert J. Cottrol

Professor

Race; Law


Contact:

Office Phone: (202) 994-5023
200 H St. NW Washington DC 20001

Robert Cottrol's writings on law and history have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, American Journal of Legal History, Law and Society Review, Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies and American Quarterly, among others. He has lectured on American law at the Federal Universities of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and the University of Buenos Aires and La Universidad del Museo Social in Argentina. His current research contrasts the role of law in the development of systems of slavery and racial hierarchy in the United States and Latin America. His most recent book, The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race and Law in the American Hemisphere, examines the impact of law on peoples of African descent in the Americas.

Complete C.V. (PDF)


Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law

  • Latin America
  • 20th-century United States
  • African American History

HIST 6312: The Law of Race and Slavery

HIST 6370: U.S. Legal History

The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race and Law in the American Hemisphere. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003. Co-authored with Raymond T. Diamond and Leland B. Ware. Awarded the Langum Project Prize for Historical Literature in 2003 and selected as the History Book Club's Book of the Month.

From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

Editor, Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment. New York: Garland Press, 1994. Selected as the History Book Club's Book of the Month.

The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. Selected by Choice as an outstanding academic book for 1983.

Ph.D., Yale University, 1978

J.D., Georgetown University, 1984