Chris Tomlins returns from fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies
August 8, 2008, ABF news
The American Bar Foundation’s Christopher Tomlins recently returned from a visiting fellowship as part of a Collaborative Research Group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. The Institute’s Research Groups convene Israeli and international experts to focus on a shared a topic and offer their particular area of expertise in small group settings.
While at the Institute, Tomlins and other top scholars focused on the issue of “Common-Law Legal Transplants: A Comparative Historical Analysis”. The group met regularly to share their diverse work dealing with common-law transplantation, held weekly seminars, and hosted an international conference of prominent legal scholars entitled “Histories of Legal Transplantations”. The American Bar Foundation’s William J. Novak contributed the comment on Morton J, Horwitz’s (Harvard) paper, “Constitutional Transplants”, at the conference.
Over the semester the collaborative group explored a wide range of concepts and applications of legal transplantation. For his part, Tomlins expanded his ongoing research on the creation of an Anglo-American law of slavery. On August 5, Tomlins reported on his experience in Jerusalem during an informal seminar at the ABF, and among other ideas, shared with his ABF colleagues his consideration of the idea of “transplantation” versus the notion of “reception” as a way to think about the transfer of law in colonial America.
« Return to ABF news