Hendrik Hartog

Hendrik Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus, at Princeton University and a former director of the university's program in American studies. Before coming to Princeton he taught in the law schools of the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University. Hartog has spent his scholarly and teaching life working in the social history of American law, studying how broad political and cultural themes have been expressed in ordinary legal and constitutional conflicts. He has worked in a variety of areas of American legal history as it affects city life, constitutional rights claims, marriage, and inheritance and old age, slavery and emancipation, the history of childhood, as well as the historiography of legal change. He is the author of Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (1983), Man and Wife in America: A History (2000)—cited in the majority opinion in Obergefeld v. Hodges, where the U.S. Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right—and Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (2012). Most recently, he is the author of a study of gradual emancipation in New Jersey, The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North (2018), and Nobody's Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys' Brotherhood Republic (2024).