Susanna Blumenthal

William Prosser Professor of Law and Professor of History
Susanna Blumenthal

Contact Information

Professor Susanna Blumenthal is a scholar of American legal history whose research and writing focus on the historical relationship between law and the human sciences. She is the author of Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) as well as numerous essays and law review articles, appearing in Harvard Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Law and History Review. Her current book project, The Apprehension of Fraud, explores the role of law in policing the ambiguous borderland between capitalism and crime in nineteenth-century America. Professor Blumenthal received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to support her research and was a Sargent-Faull Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2003-2004) as well as a Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University (2009-2010). She co-directs the Program in Law and History at the University of Minnesota, where she was appointed the John K. & Elsie Lampert Fesler Fellow (2007-2008) and is a member of the faculty in both the Law School and the History Department.

Professor Blumenthal is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard College and she holds a PhD in history from Yale University, where her dissertation was awarded the George Washington Egleston Prize. Her doctoral work was also supported by a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History from New York University School of Law. Before entering the academy, she served as law clerk to Judge Kimba M. Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.