It's my pleasure to announce that my good friend Dan Hamilton of the University of Illinois Law School is stepping into the faculty lounge to sit with us for a spell. Dan works on a couple of areas very close to my heart — he is a property professor who writes about nineteenth century legal history. You may already know his important book, The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War, which the University of Chicago Press published in 2006. Dan was the lead co-editor (with another legal historian, wink) of two festschrift volumes for Morton Horwitz. And a few years back he organized a symposium on Larry Kramer's The People Themselves, which appeared in the Chicago-Kent Law Review. These days Dan is spending a lot of his time serving as book reviews editor for the Americas for Law and History Review.
I hope Dan will be talking a lot about his current work, on retroactivity in the wake of Civil War, as well as a lot of other things, like property pedagogy. And perhaps even some recent books that are crossing his desk.