An NEH grant helped Norgren research Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President—the book led to further work on the history of women and the law, public appearances and interviews, and a growing public interest in Lockwood, herself. Image courtesy of New York University Press.
Jill Norgren received her first NEH grant in 1985 to attend a summer seminar for college teachers in Madison, Wisconsin. The seminar was followed by further NEH support for her publications on Native Americans, women, and the law. Through this series of grants, the NEH has fostered Norgren’s long career interpreting and documenting American legal history resulting in lasting impacts on generations of students who have used her textbooks and on the broader understanding of women’s legal history.
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Project Timeline (scroll for more)
1985
Norgren attends an NEH summer seminar for college teachers.
1986
Norgren receives NEH funding to travel to collections.
1990
Norgren receives an NEH summer stipend for work on nineteenth-century American Indian litigation.
1991
Norgren publishes Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law in a Liberal-Constitutional System with Petra T. Shattuck.
1996
Norgren publishes The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics.
1998
Norgren receives a summer stipend to research Belva Lockwood’s life.
Norgren publishes American Cultural Pluralism and Law with Serena Nanda.
1999
Norgren receives an NEH fellowship to write a biography of Belva Lockwood.
2007
Norgren publishes Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President.
2013
Norgren publishes Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers.
2016
Belva Lockwood is featured in the Swarthmore College exhibition, Her Hat Was in the Ring. Norgren loans items associated with Lockwood to the exhibition.
Roosevelt House features Belva Lockwood in an exhibition, Women Take the Lead: From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Eleanor Roosevelt, Suffrage to Human Rights.
2018
Norgren publishes Stories From Trailblazing Women Lawyers: Lives in the Law.
American Cultural Pluralism and Law (1998), which Norgren co-wrote with Serena Nanda, is now in its third edition and is still in use in political science, anthropology, and law classrooms throughout the United States. Also in the 1990s, NEH support helped Norgren work on a longstanding project on the relationship between the federal government and Native American peoples. This research led to two more books: Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law in a Liberal-Constitutional System (1991), with Petra T. Shattuck, and The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics (1996), which explore the Cherokee Landmark Supreme Court Decisions. Norgren also wrote articles for public audiences, laying out her work for lay readers.
Attending an NEH summer seminar in 1985 encouraged Norgren to write, American Cultural Pluralism and Law, which is now in its third edition. Image courtesy of Greenwood Publishing Group.
An NEH research grant supported Norgren’s work on Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law. Image courtesy of Berg Publishers.
NEH research funding supported Norgren’s work on The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics.
Most recently, NEH support helped Norgren research and write Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (2007), which traces the life of the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court and female presidential candidate. The biography has drawn broad public interest, with Norgren delivering talks at libraries, universities, and bar associations, among them the City Bar of New York and the Gerald Ford Museum. Norgren has been interviewed for Law and Disorder Radio and two of her talks were broadcast by C-SPAN. She delivered a lecture at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., as part of a moot court exercise on a contemporary case involving discrimination against women. Norgren’s research contributed to exhibitions on women who ran for elective office before 1920 at Swarthmore College and at Roosevelt House in New York City. And the project spawned two further books, Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers (2013) and Stories From Trailblazing Women Lawyers: Lives in the Law (2018), which was written at the invitation of the American Bar Association.
