Richard F. Hamm

My research interests are focused on the interaction of law and society in the American past, especially the 19th and 20th centuries. How ideas, individuals, and structures have combined to shape law and how law has determined the courses the government officials, reformers, and ordinary people have been the primary foci of my, and my students’, work.

I just published the civil libertarian Arthur Garfield Hays’s work against racial discrimination from the 1920s into the 1940s,Arthur Garfield Hays and the Fight for Equality, 1925-1954. https://sunypress.edu/Books/C/Confronting-Racism I am to submit a piece on an election dispute in 1947 Rockland County New York, where local officials denied the vote to students living in federal housing under the GI Bill. I am also beginning new work on articles detailing the work law firms undertook in the wake of the development of the national restrictive immigration policies of the 1920s. And I still keep my hand on the topic prohibition.