Klerman, Dudziak honored for scholarship

Grants will support forthcoming publications

Two USC Gould School of Law professors have received awards from the USC Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative.

Dan Klerman, professor of law and history, and Mary Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science, received the grants to support forthcoming scholarly publications.

Klerman’s award of $16,500 is for his work on Jurisdictional Competition and the Evolution of the Common Law. The book argues that for much of English legal history, the law was designed to favor plaintiffs. Because judges collected fees on a per-case basis, they had an incentive to cater to plaintiffs in the hope that plaintiffs would return with new cases in the future. Competition among the courts – and the government’s constraints on that competition – influenced important features of current common law, including procedures and fees.

Klerman teaches civil procedure, intellectual property and English legal history.

Dudziak was awarded $25,000 for her work on How War Made America: A Twentieth Century History. The book will re-examine the history of the past century as a war story.

“Post-9/11, we still speak of wartime as a break, or an exception, to regular time, so that policies pursued during ‘wartimes’ are conceptualized as ephemeral, even though they have long-standing impacts,” Dudziak says. “This project will look instead at the persistent impact of war and national security on American democracy across the 20th century.”

Earlier this month, Dudziak also received grants for this work from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study (see the full story here). She is currently on leave to work on Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (Oxford University Press, 2008).

The Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative supports faculty scholarship that offers significant and innovative contributions to the relevant scholarly literature, according to the guidelines set forth by USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias when he kicked off the initiative last fall.