About Professor

Professor Linda Przybyszewski, Ph.D. Associate Professor History Department: American Legal and Constitutional HistoryAmerican Cultural and Intellectual History University of Notre Dame

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Przybyszewski received her Ph.D. from Stanford University (1989) and her B.A. from Northwestern University (1984). Before coming to Notre Dame, she taught at the University of Cincinnati. She is interested in how people have justified their invocations of the power and authority of the state, in particular how racial, moral, and religious reasoning have affected legal reasoning, both professional and popular. Her first book, The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan (1999), explained how the only consistent defender of black civil rights on the United States Supreme Court in the 19th Century drew upon constitutional nationalism, racial paternalism, and religious orthodoxy to justify his famous dissents, such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Her interest in the role of gender in understanding historical hierarchies of power, led her to edit the memoirs of his wife, Malvina Shankin Harlan, Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854-1911 (2002). Przybyszewski became intrigued by the popular legal and religious writings of Justice David Brewer, a colleague of Harlan’s, who was perhaps the most-widely read jurist of his age. Her article on Brewer, “The Secularization of the Law and the Persistence of Religious Faith: The Case of Justice David J. Brewer” (Journal of American History, 2004) will become part of a new project considering the role of religious faith in the legal thought of ministers, doctors, and jurists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Professor Przybyszewski has held several national fellowships, most recently from the American Council of Learned Societies.

• Current Project
  Przybyszewski is working on a study of the Cincinnati Bible War, which began when city’s school board ended Bible reading in 1869, in order to examine how sectarian thought affected conceptions of religious liberty in the late 19th century.
• Teaching Interests
  Przybyszewski teaches courses on legal and cultural history, including crime, the problem of the gap between popular and academic history, and the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction.
• Publications
  “The Fuller Court (1888-1910): Property and Liberty,” in The Supreme Court of the United States: The Pursuit of Justice (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005): 147-168.
• “The Secularization of the Law and the Persistence of Religious Faith: The Case of Justice David J. Brewer,” Journal of American History, 91 (September 2004): 471-496.
• Editor, Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854-1911 by Malvina Shanklin Harlan (New York: Modern Library, 2002), preface by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
• “The Religion of a Jurist: Justice David Brewer and the Christian Nation,” Journal of Supreme Court History, 25 (Fall 2000): 228-242.
• The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).