Jed Handelsman  Shugerman

Biography

Jed Handelsman Shugerman joined BU Law in 2023 after spending a year as a visiting professor. He received his BA, JD, and PhD (History) from Yale. His book, The People’s Courts (Harvard 2012), traces the rise of judicial elections, judicial review, and the influence of money and parties in American courts. It is based on his dissertation that won the 2009 Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History. 

He is currently working on two books on the history of executive power and prosecution in America. The first is tentatively titled “A Faithful President: The Founders v. Royalist Originalism,” questioning the Robert Court’s evidence for its theory of unchecked and unbalanced presidential power. This book draws on his articles “Vesting” (Stanford Law Review forthcoming Spring 2022), “Removal of Context” (Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 2022), a co-authored “Faithful Execution and Article II” (Harvard Law Review 2019 with Andrew Kent and Ethan Leib), “The Indecisions of 1789” (forthcoming Penn. Law Review Fall 2022), and “The Creation of the Department of Justice,” (Stanford Law Review 2014). The book offers a new explanation for why a general removal power was not a traditional executive power in early modern America, and it turns out to be a surprising twist (called the “venality of office”) that helped create the modern nation-state and the modern administrative state.

The next book project is “The Prosecutor Politicians: Race, War, and the Causes of Mass Incarceration,” focusing on California Governor Earl Warren, his presidential running mate Thomas Dewey, the Kennedys, World War II and the Cold War, the war on crime, the growth of prosecutorial power, and its emergence as a stepping stone to electoral power for ambitious politicians in the mid-twentieth century. One of the most significant causes of mass incarceration is that American prosecutors doubled their rates of turning arrests into prosecutions in the late twentieth century. This book explains how prosecutors transformed from low-prestige, marginal figures throughout most of American history into arguably the most powerful officers over Americans’ lives.

Each of these books was shaped by his experience with clinical death penalty defense work and prisoners’ rights litigation as a law student and a graduate student. He is also a co-author of amicus briefs on the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases. He wrote a series of op-eds and essays about Trump investigations and impeachments for the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Atlantic, Politico, Lawfare, and other media.

Shugerman writes about law, history, politics, and sometimes sports on Shugerblog.com. He is a fan of the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and the Alabama Crimson Tide.