Maeve Glass ’09 is a legal historian who focuses on the formation of constitutional law in early America. Her work investigating the foundations of America’s constitutional order has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and The University of Chicago Law Review, among other publications. Her scholarship has received the Kathryn T. Preyer Prize and the William Cromwell Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History.

At Columbia Law School, Glass teaches two foundation first-year courses: Constitutional Law and Property. In addition, she teaches upper-level courses in American Constitutional History and a seminar on the history of race, law, and slavery. Glass was recognized for her law teaching in 2021 as the recipient of the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Glass holds a Ph.D. in American history from Princeton University, with minor fields in the histories of Native America and Latin America. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her bachelor’s degree in history from Yale. 

Where in the vast archives of the past should we look for the constitutional beginnings of America? For generations, constitutional historians have focused on the land and its quilt of towns and isolated colonies nestled at the periphery of an imperial center. This talk broadens this conventional map and looks instead to the water ground: a trading corridor that flanked the North Atlantic coast and its islands. First imagined by merchants in 1631 who envisioned replicating the ancient grain corridor connecting Rome to Sicily, the water ground quickly became a crucial maritime highway that linked the trading houses of America into a defined economic space. By excavating the royal commissions, treaties, judicial opinions, statutes, and customary norms that merchants relied upon to keep their ships in motion, this talk allows us to see how familiar methods of legal history and theory can enrich our understanding of early America’s constitutional order.