Clara Altman

Courtroom Colonialism: Philippine Law and U.S. Rule, 1898-1935
Her dissertation, “Courtroom Colonialism: Philippine Law and U.S. Rule, 1898-1935,” is a historical account of the development of the Philippine legal system under U.S. rule between the occupation of the islands and the start of the Philippine Commonwealth. The project was based in archival research in English and Spanish language sources in the Philippines and the United States and was supported by grants from the American Historical Association, Bentley Library at the University of Michigan, and the Mellon Foundation, in addition to the Miller Center. Altman has also written on the state of the field of legal history. In her chapter, “The International Context: An Imperial Perspective on American Legal History,” in “A Companion to American Legal History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Altman proposes a new, global framework for the field, emanating from three categories of analysis: the constitutional order, the international order, and what some scholars have called “legal borderlands.”